The Cloisters(13)

I imagined that when museum visitors saw the two of us together—as we almost always were that summer—they pitied me, her effortlessness rubbing up against my desperation. How could they not? Rachel two steps ahead, Rachel confidently redirecting people who had lost their way, Rachel whose movements were silent, while the cheapness of my slacks made chafing sounds every time we walked through the galleries. And if the sound was loud to me, I couldn’t help but wonder if others noticed it, too.

It didn’t help that I usually arrived at work already sweating through my shirt and sometimes even my pants, my hair working to escape my simple efforts at containment. My commute wasn’t long—Patrick was right, it was faster than going all the way to Fifth Avenue—but by the time I had walked the streets of Morningside Heights on my way to the A train, stopping only for a coffee at the corner bodega, and then up the winding paths of Fort Tryon Park, to one of the highest points in Manhattan, the humidity had done its damage. My body, unused to a heat so cloying, reacted violently, profusely, almost in apology.

At the end of my first week, Moira had looked me up and down upon arrival and told me that I could always take the shuttle that ran every fifteen minutes from the station to the museum. Also, it was air-conditioned. As grateful as I was for the tip, the way Moira had taken a step back when she saw me, flushed and sweating, my hair growing increasingly wild, did not go unnoticed. Rachel, of course, emerged untroubled from an unobtrusive town car that deposited her at the top of the upper driveway, in front of the metal gate, every morning at nine.

But even if the humidity was overwhelming—particularly for me, a girl whose skin was used to the arid fields of eastern Washington—the museum itself was full of cool breezes that made their way off the Hudson River, and ruffled the canopies of elm trees, like a giant carpet being snapped in the air. It felt more like working on a private estate than in a public institution. One that Patrick oversaw from the privacy of the library.

“It was his first job,” Rachel told me at the end of that second week, “right out of grad school. Not that he needed one. A job, of course.

“Patrick’s grandfather was involved in quarrying upstate,” Rachel continued. “The stones they used to build the ramparts and fill in the gaps at The Cloisters were all quarried by his grandfather’s company. It was the largest private quarry operation in New York. Until the 1960s, when Cargill bought it. Patrick still lives in the family home, in Tarrytown. He drives in every morning.”

I tried to imagine a young Patrick at his grandfather’s quarry, his glowing tan a stark contrast to the damp and darkly terraced hillsides. Sometimes a child’s resistance to the legacy of their family was almost molecular, as if their body became allergic to the landscapes and environs of home; other times they settled in, sinking back into the fabric, the familiar warp and weft of tradition. I had always been the former, and perhaps Patrick was too.

Rachel interrupted my reverie. “Should we get a coffee, then?”

I had been packing lunches and not eating them after I noticed that Rachel rarely took lunch, but rather, only took two cigarettes and caffeine. It surprised me how quickly my hunger passed, and how much money I saved as a result.

“They’re my vice,” she had said once when I caught her at the edge of the garden, a thin tendril of smoke rising from the cigarette in her hand. “Well, one of them, anyway.”

We left the library behind and took two seats at the café nestled alongside the columns at the edge of the Trie Cloister, which was overrun with blooming wildflowers, between which bees buzzed like drunken men, almost colliding into one another. The afternoon so warm and full of the gentle sounds of nature’s humming that I believed, for a moment, I was the poor relation in an Edith Wharton novel, ushered into luxury for the first time, already terrified of the day it might fade but desperate to experience it to the fullest while I could.

Rachel let her arm lie on the low stone wall that ringed the garden and pulled off her sunglasses, a sandal dangling from her foot. Although we’d been spending almost all our time together, there had been little casual conversation. Mostly we’d had our heads diligently bent over texts, searching for mentions of people—witches, shamans, saints—who might have told the future in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Often, without much success. Weathering the silence, I studied the sculptures that were set in niches around the walls of the cloister. Rachel watched the garden with the kind of idleness enjoyed by only the most confident—those who refuse to bring their phone or a book to dinner alone.

Our cappuccinos arrived, each with rough cubes of sugar. When the waiter had gone, Rachel pulled a short brown biscotto out of her pocket. It was the type they had for sale at the cash register, the type I hadn’t seen her pay for when we ordered.

“Here.” She broke it in half and offered me some.

“Did you steal that?”

She shrugged. “You don’t want it? They’re really good.”

I looked around. “What if someone notices?”

“What if they do?” She bit into the cookie and pushed the other half at me a second time. I took it from her and held it in my hand. “Go on, try it.”

I took a bite and left the rest sitting on my saucer. She was right, it was delicious.

“Well, was I wrong?”

I shook my head. “No. Not at all.”