The Cloisters(9)

I could feel Rachel watching me take it in. It was impossible to affect the nonchalance she had shown throughout the whole tour, as if all of this—the rib vaults and leather—were simply normal. De rigueur. I pulled out a chair and set down my bag.

“Don’t you want to see the collection?” she asked. “This”—she waved her hand at the library—“is just the workroom.”

She didn’t wait for me to say yes—maybe the answer was already plain on my face—but opened the library’s main doors, where I was instantly blinded by the sunlight.

“This is the Trie Cloister,” she said.

The garden was anchored by a stone crucifix at the center and surrounded by a profusion of wildflowers, some so small and unassuming that they had found their way into the creases between the brick walkway that circled it.

“It was planted to resemble the carpet of flowers you’ll see on the fifteenth-century unicorn tapestries,” she explained. “And there’s a café at the far end. They’ll open for lunch in a few hours. Excellent coffee and salads.”

“Do we get a discount?” I asked, immediately regretting it.

Rachel looked at me as we headed toward another door. “Of course.”

I let myself exhale, realizing that I’d been afraid to breathe since arriving at The Cloisters, worried that if I took up too much space, they might change their minds.

“Patrick told me what happened with Michelle,” Rachel said, lowering her voice as we walked into a room whose soaring ceilings revealed an entire medieval chapel in miniature. The red stained glass windows cast pink illuminations on the sand-colored floor. “I can’t believe she did that. Brought you all the way out here, from where was it? Portland?”

“Washington,” I said, hoping I wasn’t flushing with the embarrassment I felt correcting her. Something about Rachel made me desperate for her approval; if I could have made myself from Portland in that moment, I would have. Maybe it was the way she carried herself, always pushing forward. Even when one of the restorers had told us we couldn’t come in, Rachel just shrugged, holding the door open so I could see it all—the gallon-size bottles of turpentine and linseed oil.

“I had a friend from Spence who went to Reed. Sasha Zakharov?”

“I don’t know anyone from Reed. It’s pretty far from Whitman,” I said.

“Oh.”

Rachel didn’t seem embarrassed by her mistake, and I wondered how it must feel to be so secure in a position that it didn’t matter if you listened to your colleague’s corrections. We had stopped in front of two stone caskets, nestled into niches in the wall.

“I want you to know,” I said, perhaps a little too breathlessly, “even though I came to work in the Renaissance department, I have a lot of background in medieval. And anything I don’t know, I can set aside the time to learn.”

I didn’t know why I was desperate to get this out. Rachel hadn’t asked what I studied, nor had she expressed any doubt in my skill set.

Rachel dismissed my concerns. “I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

I didn’t say anything, hoping she would continue.

“Patrick doesn’t take on just anyone.” She looked at me, for the first time, assessing what she saw, registering my shoes, my clothes, my freckles. “He must have known you would work out for us.”

We were standing in front of the tombs while visitors milled around, inspecting wall labels.

“Is it your first time in New York?” Rachel asked, her eyes meeting mine.

“Yes.” Although I wished in that moment it weren’t true.

“Really?” she said, arms crossed. “Any initial opinions?”

“I don’t know that I’ve seen enough to have opinions. I’ve only been here for three days.”

I had spent the first day unpacking my bag and washing a sticky substance off all the dishes and pans in my sublet. The next day, I learned the commute I would never again use—taking the subway from uptown to the Eighty-First Street Station, and walking across Central Park. Despite the fact that Manhattan was known for its soaring concrete and glass skyscrapers, I had spent most of my time in lush parks.

“You must have had opinions before you arrived, though?”

“Well, yes—” My mother’s concerns replayed silently through my head—the bigness of the city, the impersonality of it, my inability to handle it.

“And is it living up to those?”

“To be honest, it’s totally different.”

“That’s the city. Both everything you imagine it to be and nothing at all what you expected. It can give you the world or take it away in an instant.” She smiled at me, glancing down at my shoes, which had been squeaking on the floors since we arrived, before making her way to the next room and motioning me to follow.

“What do you think of the city?” I said, trying to keep the conversation going and trailing in her wake.

“I grew up here.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize.”

“That’s okay. Spence? I thought you would put two and two together.”

“I don’t know what Spence is.”

“That’s probably for the best,” she said with a laugh. “We all have complicated relationships with our hometowns.”