Still As Death (5 page)

“Very pleased to meet you, sir,” Tad said pleasantly, shaking the man’s outstretched hand. He was good at this kind of thing. “Anything else, Willem?”

“No, thanks very much.” Tad closed the door behind him, leaving them alone.

“It will be safe, won’t it? Until the exhibit’s built?” Hutchinson asked, worry again creasing his forehead. His country house in Connecticut had been burgled a couple of years ago, and the burglars had made off with a Chagall and some important jewelry. He was a bit obsessive on the subject of security.

“Don’t you worry. We’ll have it locked up and alarmed and everything. The insurance company wouldn’t have it any other way.” Willem smiled reassuringly, though he knew it would be hard to get the necessary work done in the time before the opening.

“Excellent.” Hutchinson finished his bourbon and put his glass down on the desk. “I should be going, Willem. I have to catch my
train.” The more time Willem spent with spectacularly wealthy men like Cyrus Hutchinson, the more he came to enjoy their range of funny affectations, such as Hutchinson’s habit of taking the train everywhere. Of course, he’d agreed to be driven up yesterday because he was bringing the canopic chest. But he’d dismissed the driver, an employee of some secret security firm that catered to the rich, so he could take the train home today.

“Absolutely,” Willem said. “And again, thank you so much.” His eyes darted to the chest and he forced himself to level his gaze at Hutchinson’s eyes.
Hang on
, he told himself.
Only a few more minutes and you can be alone with it
. “I’ll be sending you an invitation to the opening. I think you’ll enjoy it. A number of pieces from our Egyptian collection will be on display. With your formidable knowledge of antiquity, I know you’ll be interested to see funerary art from other periods.”

He’d gone too far. Hutchinson gave him a suspicious look.

Cursing himself, Willem waited a beat and went on. “Oh, and we just need to get your John Hancock on these,” he said lightly, reaching for the transfer papers. “For the lawyers, I guess.”

He showed Hutchinson where to sign and tried not to sigh when the other man put the pen down and said, “Thank you. Take good care of my prize.” Hutchinson raised his eyebrows impishly, and for a moment Willem had the sense that he knew what turmoil he was in.
Don’t show your hand, Willem. Casual, just be casual
.

He showed Hutchinson out to the elevator, then hurried back to his office, telling Tad that he wasn’t to be disturbed. He had an hour before they would put the chest into the museum’s vault for safekeeping.

He shut his door and forced himself to finish his bourbon before he crossed the room to the chest. The alabaster was cold to the touch but smooth as human skin. He lifted one of the stoppers, feeling its unexpected weight, cupping his hands around the young king’s almost feminine face.

And then, nearly at the point of tears, he replaced the stopper and kneeled down to embrace the chest. He was able to lift it without too much effort, his arms encircling its cold, hard weight.

It was absolutely beautiful. And it was all his.

“DINNER IN TEN, HON,” Lacey called out from the kitchen. “I’m putting the pasta in.”

“Okay,” Fred Kauffman called back. “I’m just cleaning up in here and I’ll be right in.” He took another sip from his glass of chilled Pinot Gris and continued stacking bills in the basket Lacey had bought for the purpose a couple of months ago when they’d decided to try to get control of the mail on their dining room table. The resolution for neatness had been prompted by a visit home from their twenty-year-old daughter. As they’d sat having breakfast, she’d looked around the house and proclaimed them slobs, regaling them with tales of visits to the homes of her college friends where, apparently the mail was always sorted and nobody ever got cat hair on their pants when they sat on the couch.

The amazing thing, Fred decided, was that it had affected them so deeply, or at least deeply enough that Lacey had bought the basket and he had started the little routine of sorting the mail when he got home every evening. But then both of them had always been a little afraid of Kyra. Even as a baby she’d had a way of looking at them and making them feel they were doing exactly the wrong thing.

As he looked around the dining room, though, he felt suddenly
annoyed at his youngest child. This was her home. It was where they had raised her and her brother, and while he had to admit that it
was
usually cluttered to the point of messiness, it also had a comfortable charm that he’d wished for growing up in his parents’ immaculately decorated Manhattan apartment. The downstairs rooms were dominated by his and Lacey’s interests: framed black-and-white and color photographs hung on every wall, crammed together so that they almost looked like collages. Where there weren’t photographs, there were textiles Lacey had bought in Japan or Latin America, as well as large pieces she had knit or woven herself. Fred looked up at a huge sea green panel made of distressed wool and scraps of fabric that hung over the sideboard. It had always reminded him of a fisherman’s net, the pieces of fabric unlucky fish.

The rest of the mail was easy to sort. He pitched a couple of credit card offers, then piled the four or five remaining envelopes in the center of the dining room table and sat down, taking another long sip of his wine.

He’d had a long day, and a tough one, and coming home to the smell of frying onions and Lacey’s tomato sauce simmering on the stove had been just what he’d needed.

He turned around and craned his neck so he could see her in the kitchen, standing at the stove, hoping that he’d feel a familiar rush of desire and affection. But all he felt was the same dull sadness he’d been feeling for weeks now. It had nothing to do with Lacey, of course, at least he didn’t think it did, but Lacey was the barometer of how far he’d sunk. For most of their twenty-four-year marriage, the mere sight of Lacey had caused him to nearly overflow with gratitude. They had met at a friend’s dinner party twenty-five years ago. Fred had been a graduate student then, working on his Ph.D. thesis on Potter Jennings and acting as a T.A. at the university.

He’d felt like chopped liver at the dinner party, everyone more accomplished, richer, better-looking than him. When the man to his right had asked him what he did and he said that he was a graduate student working on a thesis on Potter Jennings, the man had said,
“Gosh, old Potter! How is he? Still taking drugs?” and Fred remembered feeling so angry at the man’s easy condemnation of the man he’d come to love for his complicated impulses and brilliant eye that he’d almost gotten up and left the party.

But Lacey, who had been sitting across the table, had saved him. “I love Potter Jennings,” she’d said in her Quebecois-accented English. “I have a print of that famous photograph of the Colorado Rockies. It must be such a privilege to know intimately the work of such a man.”

He’d been charmed by her strange syntax and by her long reddish braid that she kept hanging over one shoulder like a scarf. She had been dressed in what he later learned were garments of her own creation, a woven knee-length dress and a tissue-thin sweater the color of new grass, and she’d looked utterly foreign to him. He’d fallen in love with her that night. Everything he’d achieved, he’d achieved for her, in a way.

Now, after twenty-five years, his book on Potter Jennings was finally going to be published. They’d sent him the jacket a few days ago, with the wonderful blurbs on the back, and a note from his editor telling him how excited she was. It was the book that could make his reputation. So why did he feel as though the world was ending?

He turned to the stack of personal letters. There was one addressed to both of them from Lacey’s brother in Montreal. He’d let her open that. And there was one from some good friends in Sonoma, just a little thank-you note for a weekend they’d spent recently in Cambridge.

Then he opened the last one, a long, thin white envelope with a Boston postmark. He unfolded the expensive writing paper and felt his heart seize when he read the name at the bottom. Something clanged in the kitchen and he started, snatching up the letter and pushing it under one of the handwoven place mats he and Lacey had brought back from last year’s trip to Ecuador.

He took another sip of the wine, his heart pounding, and forced himself to turn slowly around. Lacey was still in front of the stove,
and even though he knew there was no way she could see him from the kitchen, he turned so that his body blocked her view and took the letter out again. He had known what it was, of course. It was the letter he’d been expecting all these years, worded almost exactly the way it had been worded in his nightmares.

He sat back and thought about what to do. It wasn’t the first time he’d thought about it, of course. If he was honest with himself, he’d always known that someday he would get this letter. He’d thought about coming forward, about offering some kind of deal. But it had all been theoretical. He hadn’t actually
had
to do anything about it until now.

“Hon?”

He jumped up, covering the letter with a magazine and clutching the envelope to his leg. Lacey was standing behind him, holding the half-empty bottle of Pinot Gris.

“Yes? Dinner?” He tried to pretend he was just straightening up the catalogs on the table.

“I just drained the pasta.” She topped off his glass, but in his nervousness he reached for it too quickly and knocked it over, sending white wine across the table and soaking the place mats and mail. “Are you okay?”

“Fine,” he said, grabbing a dish towel that was sitting on the sideboard and mopping up the wine. “Fine. Sorry about that. I was just reading an article and you surprised me.”

“Okay. Let’s eat. I have some work to do after dinner.” She kissed his forehead, and he could smell the fresh, spicy floral scent of her soap. Carnation, he thought, letting the familiar aroma fill him with calm.

He watched her as she disappeared into the kitchen. Lacey. Lacey. It was the most beautiful name in the world. Suddenly the dull, listless sense of plodding was gone. His limbs felt alive again. He loved her so much. She couldn’t find out about the letter. He would do anything to make sure she didn’t.

JEANNE ORTIZ HIT YOU like a tropical storm, sudden and lush, generating energy as she went. When Sweeney ran into her on the stairs to the third-floor galleries the next morning, she had the sense that she’d been overtaken by something as inescapable and overbearing as the weather.

“Sweeney, I was looking for you. I have a favor to ask.” In Sweeney’s experience, Jeanne always had a favor to ask, or a favor she thought she could do for you but that always ended up being more like a favor for her. She had been teaching at the university for only a couple of years, though she seemed to know everybody and everybody seemed to know her. She was officially a member of the Women’s Studies Department, but she was always forming partnerships and “creating opportunities for communication across the disciplines,” as she liked to say. The show she was in the initial stages of planning was the result of just such a partnership among the History of Art Department, the museum, and Jeanne. How Willem had been convinced to allow the show was beyond Sweeney. She assumed it was the result of some kind of political tit for tat that would make sense only years down the line when it became apparent what Willem was getting out of the deal. In the
meantime, though, Jeanne was doing everything she could to drive him crazy.

Sweeney, however, actually quite liked Jeanne. She was a bit of a study in contradictions and Sweeney found she was always surprised by her. Ortiz, for example, was the surname of one of her ex-husbands, and Jeanne herself was a Norwegian-American farm girl from northern Minnesota. She had bright blond, extremely curly hair that gave her round face a look of eternal youth. And she had huge breasts, which she refused to contain in a bra and which bounced almost independently of her body underneath the thin fabric of her Guatemalan embroidered dresses or too-young printed T-shirts. She loved wine and traveled once a year to the Loire Valley or Tuscany or Emilia-Romagna or southeastern Australia or somewhere to tour vineyards. But she was not as particular about her food and often ate Cheetos or pasta out of a can for lunch. Above all, she was a dedicated teacher and a serious scholar, and though Sweeney found her brand of feminism a little overbearing, she agreed with her on pretty much everything. Now she was looking expectantly at Sweeney, as though she might agree to the favor without having to be told what it was.

“A favor? Well, do you think we could talk about it later? I’m in kind of a rush. I think Willem wants to see what I’ve—”

“Willem!” Jeanne snorted. “You just tell him that you’re the curator and you’re offended by his paternalism. If you were a man, he wouldn’t be looking over your shoulder all the time, wanting to know how things are going. He’d let the exhibit speak for itself.”

“You think so? Well, I’d better get going. But e-mail me and we’ll figure out a time to—”

Jeanne cut her off again. “Do you know, he tried to cancel my exhibition after he found out I was including examples of pornography? If you asked someone on the street whether there was academic freedom at the university, they would tell you there was. But there isn’t! You know there isn’t, and you can help me stand up to him.” She pushed a few blond corkscrews behind her ear. “We’ll get
together a group of women faculty members to protest his treatment of us. Then he won’t dare cancel the show and he won’t dare ask for oversight of your exhibit. Imagine!”

“Well, he didn’t exactly ask for oversight,” Sweeney said. “I think he just wants to know how things are going.”

“Oh, there’s Tad. I have to talk to him,” Jeanne shouted out, her voice echoing through the third floor. Sweeney looked down to see Tad Moran hurrying across the courtyard in his scared rodent way, his dark head bent to the floor. The poor guy, he was probably trying to stay out of Jeanne’s path.

Sweeney thought she’d escaped when Jeanne said, “Oh, and about the favor. The WAWAs need a faculty adviser. I was thinking you’d be perfect. They need someone young, you know. They think I’m an old fogey, out of another era. I make them feel like feminism isn’t relevant anymore. But someone young, well, I think you could really get them excited again about all the work we have to do on this campus.” Jeanne was walking backward down the stairs as she talked in an increasingly loud voice. Sweeney held her breath, afraid she was going to fall.