City of Strangers (15 page)

Small birds, winter scavengers, twist above the river. His coat whips around jauntily; the wind gains strength and the fragile puddles nearby respond with ecstatic little vibrations. Clouds converge on the sun and around him the light melts away. He is cold and slightly shaking, and he wants to get out of the aim of their prayer. He looks up and around at the high, imperious faces of office buildings. This particular block is secluded in its madness: the man chasing him, the demonstration, the massive collective prayer. The rest of the city is right now like the people in these buildings, locked away in dry aquariums behind clean glass surfaces. There is another pause in the imam's speech. The congregation rises as suddenly as it fell. The entire episode has a frequency to which all but Paul are attuned, a pious choreography. More words follow; but this chapter of speech is brief, and once again they fall with spectacular calm.

He starts to move away. A hiccup in the concrete snags his shoe and he stumbles, as if missing a square in hopscotch. Paul looks up. It feels like an agnostic insult, this startled jerky motion he has made, but they are concentrating on God, not him. No one gives any sign of noticing – no one except the solitary figure on the opposite side of the crowd. He stands there, watching Paul, and smiles faintly.

Once more the crowd rises; Terence disappears behind it. Paul doesn't wait. He makes a hard diagonal across the plaza, back toward Second Avenue, where he presses into the flow of people, close quarters that lock him into a fast walk. Paul fights against the tidal push of the avenue. Gone are the calm, contemplative expressions of people at prayer; wherever he looks now, the faces are proud, preoccupied, shatterproof. Dozens of bodies occupy a single frame of vision, some paused, some in motion, some alone, some in groups: metropolitan density is too much for the human eyeball to sort. A single block of New York City is an immense concentration of detail and circumstance, and Paul's brain, like his muscles, isn't trained to work in this reactive mode. A quick surveillance finds no sign of Terence, which means he either fell behind or has concealed himself once again. Paul walks north, looking up the narrowing avenue to where it finally vanishes altogether.

Fresh crowds pack the sidewalk. In the distance he can still hear the speaker, his words like the solitary tolling of a church bell on the other side of a hill. Paul turns around, then turns again. Up and down the avenue – in doorways, under awnings, behind piles of garbage – Terence is nowhere to be seen. Coats flap in the wind. A plastic bag scuttles through legs and feet like a crab.

He waits. Nothing happens. He walks back to the subway in a blind daze, looking around once or twice. It is almost one o'clock, which means that Claire left for work long ago.

In the station he jostles a round woman loaded down with shopping bags, who shoots him a dirty look. He doesn't care. A train must have just left: there is no one else waiting. Paul walks to the end of the platform, past the last bench, and stands by a black, sulking garbage can. In his peripheral vision he is aware of the platform filling. He finally hears the train and senses that first slipping of the station's air. At last there's a light. The tracks begin to glow. Air piles against the side of Paul's face as the train hurtles into the station. The doors open, he enters, and they close again with a sigh. He takes a grip of the handlebar and closes his eyes, exhausted. On his back the cool sweat starts to dry.

But the train doesn't move. Seconds accumulate. Paul opens his eyes and immediately sees the reason. Three fingers with rough, pitted nails have stuck themselves in the door, between the lips of black rubber, and on the other side Terence hovers like a figure in a nightmare.

The doors stutter; Paul holds his breath. They are inches apart, separated only by the sheath of bad glass in the door: in the pressure chamber of their silent exchange the seconds slow: they do not move. The fineness of Terence's face surprises him, as white as the inside of a halved apple; with the pale hair it burns glossily against the scum and spit of the station wall, the dun, bony tiles. At his throat, under the black leather jacket, is a triangle of yellowish white. His eyes make terse, tiny adjustments: they are assessing Paul, gathering and storing information. A hard bulge distends the skin under his ear and throbs like a baby heart – he's chewing gum. Paul takes a step back as a shudder runs through the metal doors. He considers making an effort to pry out the fingers, but Terence spares him the trouble. He snatches away his hand; the doors proudly snap shut. At last the train pulls away, but Paul can't take his eyes from Terence, whose lips are peeled back from his teeth in a grin.

The forest of champagne flutes on the long white table, occupying an entire side of the museum's main hall, makes Claire think of all the ways they could shatter. Members of the catering staff, clothed in starched black shirts, flock and flow nearby as they make the last preparations, gathering heaps of ice in metal buckets and setting out soldierly rows of bottles. Tonight the museum hosts the reception for the mounting of its newest acquisition. Belonging to an after-hours crowd gives Claire an enjoyable, almost mischievous feeling, like those evenings as a teenager when for one reason or another she found herself back inside her high school. Buildings have distinct personalities, connected to their purposes and hours of use, and to inhabit one at an off-time – to denude the museum of its serious attire and fill it with liquor and the insistent roar of a dinner party – stirs up the exhilaration of trespass. Perhaps this is enough to account for her peculiar mood, her speculation about the ways the night could fail, beginning with the destruction of a thousand glasses of good champagne. The most spectacular version she can devise involves the highly improbable toppling of the twenty-four-foot sculpture in steel that looms darkly in the center of the atrium.

The guests have yet to arrive. In the past months Claire has been a quick study, memorizing the identity and importance of hundreds of people whose capital animates the ecosystem of the New York art world. Working in galleries, she came into contact with many of their ilk, but it's an entirely different tribe that inhabits the rarefied atmosphere of museum endowment. And they will, very many of them, be here tonight. As planned,
Century
now hangs in its new home, the south wall of the atrium, framed by an enormous white expanse. A short article ran today in the Arts section of the
Times
; everyone was thrilled. Later, Bernard will make a brief toast, less in celebration of the art than as a testament to the donors who made its purchase possible; he will stress the lasting value of their investment, the pride of place that
Century
will hold in the museum's permanent collection when, after its tenure in the atrium, it's moved to the fourth floor among the other postwar giants.

Paul's failure to appear this morning distracts her only a little. Sunday night is already abstract and distant, an historical event; today she waited at the apartment as long as she could. Frankly, she was relieved when he didn't come, as cruel as that makes her feel.

Someone squeezes her arm from behind. The sensation is sudden and unwelcome, and it immediately sets her on edge, but she relaxes upon turning to find Bernard's pink old face, its wispy white hair and soft patrician jowl. For a man of his importance and longevity, he's surprisingly easy to be around, his attention always safely avuncular. Others cluck at his habit of tediously expatiating, in his light British accent, one of education and casual privilege, on this or that matter – and at his ability to bring any subject around to himself, the grand narrative of his first-rate life. He's met everyone, seen everything, been everywhere. Just the same, Claire is fond of Bernard and, at his better moments, finds him fiercely charming.

'Have you girded yourself for the advancing army, my dear?'

She smiles, waits for him to go on.

'Each of them will take the usual three minutes to stare at the painting and then wander off, glass of champagne in hand – my God, you would think they hadn't ever had champagne before, the way they slurp it up! Then off to find the plaques in the museum that hold their names. Or, in the case of many, their mothers' names.'

At six they appear. Bernard brings around one or two notables and makes the introductions. Claire has a glass of champagne, surprised by how quickly it takes her; champagne, more than any other drink, gives her a wonderful lightness, like compressed air under the soles of her feet. New faces appear by the minute. David's isn't one of them. She will do fine with or without him, even if it must be said that he has a talent for this sort of event, the sport of socializing; she always feels somewhat ill at ease in this company, somewhat unlike herself. Champagne helps. She shouldn't have much more: the party technically counts as work. The men climbing the stairs from the lobby all seem to be much older, and reliably they have younger wives on equivalent arms. The women of their age who come are often widows. She and David have spoken once since Wednesday, by phone – a short, almost businesslike conversation; he hasn't stopped by her office.

Discreetly, Claire looks down at herself. She wears a black dress, elegant and simple, one that divulges distinctly more of her breasts and hips than she normally does at work. Did she choose it to impress David? Truthfully, he didn't enter her mind when she was putting on clothes; she considered only the importance of the event, yet perhaps the thought swam underneath. The feints and submerged gestures of dating do not yet feel natural; years of marriage allowed her to forget how easily new affairs start and stop, how an untested romance can dissolve quietly and without explanation. She dislikes the thought of playing this game again, and in tonight's circumstances it seems especially unpleasant. This is hardly the time to sort through her feelings for David. They are both adults. When he arrives they'll act the part.

Bernard rescues her from her thoughts. 'This way,' he says. 'I want you to meet these ones. Big donors, of course, but none of the usual foolishness. I think they're more to your liking.' Claire smiles and submits to the urgent tug at her elbow, falling into step with Bernard, and across the room she spots their quarry: a man about Bernard's age with a woman who could be a year or two younger than Claire. She smiles inwardly. Men remain a constant source of amusement. She cannot believe how a man of such age, something north of sixty, can appear in public with a woman – a girl! – so young. She would have thought men of that age would be more ill at ease about their bodies, the shrinking and withering, the wrinkles and the spots. How could he take off his clothes, and she hers, and he remain standing there with even a drop of dignity left in his heart?

Before they quite have reached the couple, Bernard leans in to whisper: 'David Kim isn't going to make it. He's caught a bug, it seems.' Claire looks quickly into his face, worried that he knows about her and David – would it matter if he did? – but the expression there reassures her that he intends only an innocent report on a colleague's whereabouts. Gossip about subordinates mercifully isn't one of Bernard's interests.

Introductions are made, after which Bernard, in his way, manages to slip off inconspicuously. He's a valuable commodity, and part of the reason he's offered up Claire is surely that he himself cannot be pinned down to one spot.

'It's a stunning piece,' says the man. His eyebrows jump like squirrels as he points to it with his glass.

Claire agrees. Sometimes the donors want commentary from her, a taste of the culture that she possesses and they must purchase in discrete lumps; others want not to be lectured, but listened to.

'Are you familiar with his other work?'

'Not all of it,' he says earnestly. 'I do like what I've seen. I've been thinking for some time of getting one of his myself, but nothing's come on the market I quite love. Of course Jenny has other opinions. She finds him too masculine.'

The girl says nothing, but the pause hangs there longer than it should, and Claire sees that she has stepped into one of the private eddies of their relationship, a surfacing difficulty. She interrupts it with a joke: 'If you're interested, I think we could part with this one for around thirty-one million.'

They laugh gently. He says, 'You must have your own thoughts about it.'

The usual phrases clutter her mind. She could close her eyes and recite a publishable paragraph of commentary. But to give the appearance of deliberation she stares at the painting, as if seeing it for the first time. They are standing too far from the piece to discuss its finer details, and the man shows no interest in moving closer. Even across a room, though, it exerts a certain gravity. Its quality is beyond dispute.

But she has her doubts. For one thing, she worries about durability. Its title,
Century
, is both a promise and an expiration date. Caravaggio and Michelangelo still shake us, hundreds of years after their deaths, and even the cave paintings have a raw, lasting power. In five hundred years what will this piece look like? Art that lasts must leverage the power of symbols, the deep grammar of line and color installed in humans at birth; the images of
Century
, a mulch of the twentieth century, may, after worse and bloodier centuries have come and gone, pale next to more entrenched, enduring icons.

Claire ties off this reckless mental unspooling. The man and his girlfriend continue to wait for a response; he scans the room a little impatiently, searching for a graceful exit. She considers telling them what she's been thinking, just to see their reaction, but because it is easier she says what she could have said without ever opening her eyes.

They drift away. Immediately, she loses sight of them in the atrium, now full of people, people pushed even to its outermost edges. Its high white walls, and the vertiginous feeling they inspire, have always made her think of a cathedral, a building reaching without apology toward heaven. Chatter floats up to the rafters, soaring more than one hundred feet above them. She spots an art dealer she knows – they have met once or twice – but as she takes a step toward him she lands badly on her left foot and the four-inch heel under it turns awkwardly, wrenching her ankle. Cartilage and tissue throb angrily. No one has noticed. But the man she meant to speak to has fallen into conversation with three people she doesn't recognize. Keeping a careful grip on her drink, Claire slips off to the side, where there is a bench, and she sits and rubs the ball of her ankle as if cleaning a piece of glass. She finishes her drink. When she stands and tests her ankle it feels only a little sore, but she finds that she cannot bear the thought of making small talk for another hour. One of the waiters walks by and she snatches a canapé. Chewing the mouthful of dough and salty meat, and wishing she weren't, she decides that she can safely leave. She swallows. Halfheartedly, she looks for Bernard to tell him, and considers pleading illness until she remembers that David did the same thing. It doesn't matter, she decides. Bernard is, anyway, already off somewhere putting his thoughts in order before he speaks.