“You don’t want your friends to know about us.”
“I don’t want myemployeesto know about us.”
He leaned into me, suggestive. “They’re going to figure it out. And then you’re going to have to admit that you like me. And then maybe you’ll realize that’s not such a bad thing. Boy band and all. I want this. I’m going to buy it.”
He pulled away from me, stepping to the middle of the room for perspective, while I pondered what he’d said.
“They’ll ship it to London?”
“They will.”
“Do you like it?”
“I do.”
“Do you love it?”
“I like it a lot.”
“Is there anything here that you love?”
I nodded. “In the front room, in Gallery 1.”
“Show me.”
He followed me to the Cho piece that I most coveted. An image so blown out it appeared almost translucent. Sunlight in a garden, and the vague silhouette of a woman, nude, her features blurred and indeterminate, lying in the grass, bleeding into the atmosphere behind her. A faded anemone, the one certainty in the foreground.Unclose Me, it was titled.
“This…” he said, tugging on his lip, pensive. “This is what you love?”
“This is what I love.”
He nodded, slow. “What do you feel when you look at it?”
“Everything.”
His eyes caught mine then, and he held my gaze and smiled. “Yeah.”
He did not stay for long. He had meetings starting at twelve and scheduled throughout the afternoon, and that evening he boarded a plane to London. I would not see him for a few more weeks. And each day was agony.
the hamptons
Visiting Day at Isabelle’s camp was the last weekend of July. In the early years, Daniel and I would go together, a forced show of solidarity. But eventually that ended. And now I handled drop-off and Parents’ Weekend, and he did the pickup. The arrangement seemed to work best for all parties.
My parents made the trip with me in Daniel’s absence. We’d drive up together from Cambridge and stay in a quaint B&B not more than an hour from the camp, each time exploring some hitherto unchartered territory. Strolling in Ogunquit, scouting small galleries in Portland. It was the one time I felt most like a daughter,when all the other labels and the weight of them seemed to fade. I welcomed it.
On that Saturday, we spent a leisurely afternoon in Boothbay Harbor. Following a fish-and-chips lunch, we popped into a very local gallery and just as quickly popped out.
“Beh,” my father grunted in that very French way of his. “Blown glass and lighthouses.”
After thirty-six years in Harvard’s art history department, my dad was almost as much of an institution as the department itself. He had opinions on such things. He’d met my mother when they were both students at the École du Louvre in Paris, the two sharing an intense love of art. He: European modern and contemporary. She: American. In the late sixties they’d arrived in New York, where he earned his Ph.D. at Columbia before they eventually settled in Cambridge. There was much they embraced about the U.S., but they were never going tonotbe French.
“We’re in a tiny little seaside town, Dad. What were you hoping to find?” I asked. “Koons?”
“What I am always hoping to find,” he said, stroking his once-roguish beard. “Someone who goes against the grain. Who doesn’t seem to care what everyone else thinks.”
“Ha!” I said. This from the man who did not speak to me for a week when I chose Brown over Harvard. Who cried actual tears when I moved to the West Coast. And who, in the three years since the end of my marriage, had to repeatedly stop himself from saying “I told you so.”
“He thinks you are beautiful and he thinks you are smart,” he’d surmised about Daniel, that first weekend I’d brought him to Boston, when we had been dating for seven months. “But he has no real appreciation for what you are passionate about, who you are on the inside.”
