“I’ll never apologize.”
“We shall see.” She leaned over her sketchbook to press her raw lips against mine. “How old are you again?”
“Same age as you.”
Hiromi pulled away, regarding me. “So you keep saying. But sometimes I think you’re barely out of high school. Other times…you seem a thousand years old.”
“It’s somewhere in between,” I said.
31
Over the next few weeks, Hiromi and I saw a lot of each other.
We rowed a boat together on a lake in Central Park. She marveled at my strength, our pulsing speed. But when we ate lunch by the reservoir afterward, my palms were blistered. Hiromi’s, callused from working metal and stone, weren’t even pink.
Her art, written on her hands.
In conversation with her friends, I was still out of my depth. Not about art history, which I studied diligently, but in general cluelessness—thinking that Lucille Ball was a sculptor, Oscar Wilde a murderer.
Hiromi just smiled when I talked like an alien. As Garrett had said, inscrutability was part of the Morton mystique.
She taught me the city’s museums and galleries. Gravitating toward the darkest, emptiest rooms, we touched each other in silence, every breath echoing from marble floors.
“When you were little,” she asked one day in the Met, ancient weapons all around us, “did you ever see art in person?”
“No museums in Upper Falls.”
“What about trips to the city?”
My eyes followed the curved blade of a sixteenth-century yataghan. “I came down twice, with cousins. We walked around.”
“Jessica. Your family owns a gallery.”
“It’s mostly a tax write-off.”
“That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard,” she sighed. “Especially since it’s my gallery.”
Whenever I was open about my family, it brought us closer. Hiromi saw me as a refugee from a cult, in need of saving.
“Growing up on the estate, we had a lot of chores,” I said. “Art was optional.”
She shook her head. “Art hasn’t been optional for forty thousand years.”
I had to search later to find out what she meant. Staring at the ochre cave paintings of Sulawesi, something unsettling occurred to me.
Art was older than the Mortons.
Eventually Hiromi askedto see my work. She went through the photos slowly, giving each piece a long, expressionless look.
“You always use the same bones,” she said.
“They’re all I have.”
“They’re beautiful. The variations in the wings, from small to large, crooked to straight. Like a cabinet of curiosities.” She looked up from my phone. “Maybe the collection itself is the work, more than how you put them together.”
“Peter collected them.” His art, not mine. Like Uncle Orrin’s scrapbook of magazine photos—ordinaries with big smiles: politicians, eager salesmen, astronauts’ wives. Or Aunt Beatrice’s collection of broken peelers and hand-cranked mixers she refused to repair. Grandpa Dwight’s DNA samples from serial killers.
My family’s art was strange collections.
