Michel was about to yell for Eleanor when his office door whipped open and banged against the wall. The silhouette of a tall, stark-naked woman appeared. There were no accessories for this candidate save the fur-lined high-heeled shoes she wore. A stunning classical profile was framed by the short, slick waves of her hair.
“What department are you from?” Michel asked, eager to get this one started. She was the only Muse he had spoken to since Miss Morse.
“Photographs,” she replied with a French accent he guessed was Swiss. “Meret Oppenheim. The so-called Muse to the Surrealists?” She uttered this last statement disparagingly, hinting at her resentment of the title and suggesting that perhaps Michel was too uninformed to know who she was.
Her skin was matte, a glowing white surface that you could almost crack and peel like a hard-boiled egg. She was not quite of this earth, but instead had a luminescence interrupted only by the tuft of dark hair between her legs.
Magnetic and bold, she sat on the conference table and used two chairs to support her feet, one for each shoe. Then she opened her knees and revealed herself to him, leaning forward in the pose of an athlete in the locker room at half-time.
“A Muse, huh?” she laughed lightly, implying that this was a child’s game. Unlike others, she could distinguish between Michel and his constructed façade.
“The fur teacup,” Michel said urgently, citing her most famous work of art, as if he were being quizzed. “Le Déjeuner en fourrure.”
“Exactement.” The object defined her. She had grown to loathe the iconic tea cup, the product of a whimsical café conversation with Picasso.
Michel enjoyed her power and its intimidation. How her bright moon eclipsed his sun. The sense that in her presence, it was her role to do the work, to be in charge, maybe even frighten him a little. He didn’t need a Muse. He didn’t need inspiration. He didn’t need to toy with a fashion designer’s farce. He needed her searing force to replace his slow, simmering fatigue. He needed the comfort of someone else’s strength.
Finally, he thought, leaning back in his chair. “Ravishing,” he sighed. “Ravishing.”
* * *
—
Eleanor instinctively knew that the chore was complete and instructed Daphne to send any lingering Muses back to their various galleries and storerooms. She then picked up the phone to call Moody Russell, her favorite lamper. The bulb in Michel’s special spotlight was beginning to flicker.
MEATS & CHEESES
Oh, hurrah! You’ve arrived.” The bald man behind a wide desk held up his hands and clapped them once in satisfaction. The accent was patrician, but friendly. “You must be here for the meat.”
“The what?” I asked. I looked back at the dark ramp I had just ascended from within the museum to the sun-drenched room where I now stood.
As my eyes adjusted to the brightness, I could see through the window behind the bald man. A colonnade led to an expanse of blistering desert, an infinite sweep of sand that burned its harsh radiance into my eyes.
“Right. Jolly-ho,” the man continued, ignoring my question. “Shut the door behind you, dear,” he said with a flick of his hand in the air. “Helen!” he yelled to the next room, “A girl’s here for the meat!”
I closed the blue door as he fumbled with stacks of papers spread across the broad oak desktop. I noticed his high-waisted khaki trousers and pale bow tie, both smudged with dirt, rough but elegant.
Hats of all kinds hung from hooks along the white stucco wall: pith helmets, straw boaters, woven bonnets neatly wrapped with pale ribbons. All bore the tired cast of long wear and frequent use. A faded World War I campaign hat, broad-brimmed and pinched symmetrically at its four corners, was stenciled with the name WINLOCK.
“Oh, bubbly boo…it was right here. Hellll-en!!” the man yelled again.
From behind a curtained doorway emerged an old-fashioned looking woman in a loose dress, the white cotton marred with smudges similar to those on the man’s pants. Her hair was pinned close to her head in neat waves. Sand crunched beneath her laced-up shoes as she walked.
“What is it, Hebe? Why are you making such a racket?” she said.
They both spoke with the clipped speed of another era.
“Oh, hullo,” she said, looking at me, “You must be here for the meat. Lovely.”
“Exactly,” Hebe replied, still moving things from place to place. He swung his head back to me as he leaned over the table and gestured with his chin toward a wooden chair. “Have a seat, why don’t you. This won’t take but a minute. The meat is here somewhere. How you lose a four-thousand-year-old leg of lamb I’m not sure…we have it, we must…we do…well, somewhere.”
“Hebe, wasn’t it in an envelope in the library?” Helen asked.
“Was it?” he responded, still flipping through folders and books, the sound of the sand’s grit scratching beneath his feet. “I thought I had it right here last week?”
The prospect of ancient meat held little allure, but these people and their flickering presence were riveting, like watching an old black-and-white film. I took a seat on the chair in the corner and listened to the trill of their banter, not sure what I had come upon. Just minutes before, I had been in the tunnels of the Met—the grim bowels below the basement where storage cages made with woven-metal fencing held retired art and cartons of old paperwork. A blue door had brought me to a room at the edge of the desert and to a time that was definitely not 1995.
* * *
—
I was an assistant in the Met’s Development Office, which I both belonged to and observed, like a natural wonder staged for remote viewing. Within this fundraising habitat I ranked as the lowest species: a phone-answering, errand-running assistant. When not traversing the museum, I sat on a stool.
I had only worked at the Met for a year, but its strange cocktail of confident superiority and tolerated eccentricity had introduced me to a promised land. A position to deploy my quick, organized mind in the service of a place that left me both exhilarated and soothed.
I wore my grandmother’s old suits, the skirts lopped off to make sense on my young frame, and bought one pair of good shoes that I only wore inside the museum.
From my stool, I watched, listened, and learned. Ideas were “run up the flagpole,” letters signed with “kind regards,” satisfied requests described as “deposits in the favor bank.” The language and routines of the museum’s staff fascinated me, and I collected their habits like so many butterflies.
These were my people, and I wanted in.
Our office had one telephone line connected to thirty-five phones, so when anyone called, it collectively rang at thirty-five desks. Everyone called: donors, curators, caterers, the White House. All day. My colleagues and I responded with unflappable spirit, taking diligent messages on small sheets of blue paper that documented each call, daily field notes on scribbled rectangles.
I escaped this clamoring switchboard when I was asked to deliver “cheeses,” yellow envelopes with holes in them that were used for the Met’s interoffice mail. I charged through the museum—quick and nimble, my arms and legs as skinny as bare branches—carrying the yellow envelopes to intimidating men and women, then waiting for their signature to mark their approval of the documents inside.
It was a typical Tuesday when I was asked to shepherd a cheese to the most daunting recipient of them all.
“Dick Trachner’s Office,” Susan answered the phone, with a level of cheer greatly at odds with the man she represented.
“Susan, it’s Kate. I need to get Mr. Trachner’s sign-off on the title-wall design for the China exhibition,” I said, already anxious.
“Sure! Just cheese it to me,” she squeaked.
“I’d better not. If I bring it over in a cheese, can you get him to sign it while I wait?”
“Of course! You can bring it to him yourself!”
Susan maintained a helpful stance, but I suspected that underneath all her sunshine lay a cruel streak, a woman who enjoyed watching young assistants interact with her boss’s frightening intensity. A small group of outsized figures like Trachner ran the Metropolitan and intrigued us all. Each employed a seasoned gatekeeper who deftly maintained power with a persona that skewed both warm and ominous.
“Go on in!” Susan said when I arrived, barely containing her feline amusement.
“Right now?” I asked.
“Well, you said you needed it signed…,” she purred.
“Right. OK.”
I entered the legendary office where Dick Trachner sat—rigid, scrutinizing, impenetrable—as if he had been watching the door for my arrival all morning.
I had heard about the office: as spare as a monk’s cell, but with a more sinister quality to it. No papers, no decorations. Instead, the Senior Vice President for Operations sat behind a large gray desk that supported only a phone and an enormous red ashtray.
“Hi,” he said breathily, his teeth fully exposed as he clamped on the word. He spoke as if addressing a toddler.
“Good morning,” I replied, pulling the design for the title wall from its cheese and pointing to where it needed to be signed.
Standing over him, I confronted the reality of his bald head, its polymer-like surface populated by baby-fine spikes of hair, enduring weeds in an otherwise barren field. I squinted in revulsion at his scalp’s pockmarks and flaking skin.
“Well, all-righty then…,” he said. He looked at the design as he tortured me with the leisurely uncapping of his pen. “There you go. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”
“Thank you, Mr. Trachner,” I replied while stepping out of the room.
“Kate,” he said in a low voice he knew I would still hear.
I shuddered at the fact that Dick Trachner knew my name and re-entered his office as if I were checking on a basement noise in a horror film.
“I need you to do me a favor. After you drop off those designs, tell Libby that you have to pick something up in the tunnels. Susan will tell you where it is.”
“Tell Libby” seemed like an ambitious directive. Libby was my boss, and I had never seen anyone of my rank “tell Libby” anything. Libby told you what to do and when to do it—period. As for the tunnels, I knew they existed, but had never been in them.
Trachner’s instructions hung in the air, spare and intentionally vague, waiting for my response. The request would annoy Libby, but I was pretty sure that no one said no to Dick Trachner. Staff-Cafeteria lore claimed him as both CIA and FBI.
Smoke curled around his head as he waited for my response.
“Will do, Mr. Trachner,” I answered with a strange gesture that came close to a thumbs-up. I embarrassingly realized the position of my hand, and slowly deflated the thumb.
“Thank you,” he said with false sincerity, enjoying my lack of knowledge and obvious discomfort.
In my snappy suits and high heels, Trachner understood that I was dressed for a part that I didn’t play. A straight-A nerd with style and speed, I had something to prove, but didn’t know what it was. He could smell my overeagerness and would enjoy testing it.
And I was delighted to be in the game.
Susan drew the directions on a notepad with a Sharpie and handed the map to me with a knowing smile. “Look for the blue door,” she said, purring again. “Good luck.”
I returned the signed title-wall design to the Development Office and was relieved to see Libby’s door closed for a meeting. I left quickly and took the Wing K elevators down past the ground floor.
* * *
—
Unlike the hive of the museum’s basement, the tunnels are lifeless. They stretch and curl in unpredictable patterns under arched brick ceilings that run the length of the museum, lined with pipes and electrical wiring. I didn’t see another soul when I was down there. I only heard the buzzing of the fluorescent lights above me. An occasional fan whirred with a dull drone.
I crawled along the path outlined on Susan’s paper map, passing demoted statuary lurking below the angled ducts and curving architecture. Other statues looked upward as if longing to return to the galleries, light raking across their faces to emphasize their yearning. In the swelling gray gloom, I shared their desire as I sank deeper into the cluttered passage-ways—at once constricting and vast.
I passed a marble sculpture of a woman, buoyant as an apparition, striding toward the tunnel wall in flowing robes. I half expected her to travel through the brick. Beyond her, a group of tall medieval figures shrouded in thick plastic glinted abstract shapes out of the shadows. More ghosts.
In the cage for the Greek and Roman Department, I saw shelves of retired pieces of antique sculpture—noses, feet, hands—bits once used a century ago to replace a statue’s missing parts. The tunnels’ dusty quiet settled around me, and I thought about the Met as a keeper of the past, in all its forms. A cupboard for both the world’s history and its own.
I approached the ramp drawn on my map. It led to a smaller tunnel with a much lower ceiling. Overhead, a yellowed sign said simply LUXOR in an archaic script. Twenty feet farther on, the narrow tunnel ended, walled off to frame a blue door. I went through it, not knowing I would wind up in Egypt.
* * *
—
I know where it is!” Hebe barked as he raced out of the room. Helen’s eyes followed him with a sideward glance as she sat down in a wicker chair. A stream of desert light made her incandescent.
My dark, modern clothes poked vividly into the diffuse atmosphere and sand-colored palette. I felt like a fly on a projection screen: too dark, too saturated.
“Last week we went down the Nile and visited this temple,” Helen said, making polite conversation in her singsong voice. “Hebe!” she yelled to the other room, “What was that temple called?”
“Dendur.”
“Dendur, yes Dendur. That’s it. Roman period. Built under Augustus. Ten BC, I think. Anyway, my brother, Bobby, was visiting, and he carved a name on the temple like some Grand Tour graffiti. Hebe was furious! ‘Leonardo,’ Bobby wrote. For fun he added 1820 instead of 1920! Such a hoot!”
She threw up her hands and rolled her eyes to the ceiling—a gesture of genuine hoot confirmation.
“You’ll take the aqueducts back?” she said, abruptly changing the subject.
“The what?” They were only the third and fourth words I had uttered since arriving.
“The aqueducts,” she said, “The tunnels below the museum where the water used to travel from the old Croton Reservoir down on 42nd Street.”
“Right. Yes. That’s how I got here,” I replied. “I think. Susan in Mr. Trachner’s office gave me a map and told me to look for the blue door. Somehow, I wound up here, in the desert. You said it’s 1920 here?”
“Yes, this is Metropolitan House in Luxor; the site of the ancient city of Thebes. It can be confusing the first time, but the direct link with the ‘home office’ makes everything easier.”
Helen waited for a sign that I was following her, but then just moved on. “This is the main base for the Met’s Egyptian Expedition. Glorious, isn’t it?! We come every dig season, October through June. It’s been going since J. P. Morgan first sponsored us in ’06. Hebe runs things and I’m part of the Graphic Section, mainly documenting everything in watercolor.”
I knew the Met’s Egyptian Expedition went on for thirty years, lasting until 1936, but I didn’t know they kept it in the basement. Trachner had sent me to a pocket of space and time lost to the world, but preserved by the Met.
Again, I watched and listened.
Helen looked around and smiled, paused, and shifted abruptly again. “Good!” She clapped her hands on her knees and stood up. “Well, we’re just delighted you came. It’s a real plum of a favor!” she warbled.
“Here you go,” he said to me as he gave me what rested in his palm. “A four-thousand-year-old leg of lamb! Belongs to the Offering Bearer we found in the Tomb of Meketre. She’s holding a whole basket full of meat. Somehow this leg got left behind.”
In my right hand I held a nine-inch piece of painted wood, carved into the form of a sinuous animal leg, terminating in a pointed hoof that looked as elegant as a ballet dancer’s foot. The painted leg was worn and chipped like an old, beloved toy, but the crimson color was still saturated and fresh, a simplified rendering of raw flesh. Above the hoof, a patch of white with black spots spread upward like a sock, a graphic glimpse of the animal’s pre-butchered state.
I realized in that moment that Hebe and I were relay racers, passing a baton across time: 2000 BC, 1920, 1995.
“Didn’t we find out that it’s actually too long to be a leg of lamb?” Helen chimed in.
She turned to me and added, “We went to the butcher on market day and showed it to him. He said it was antelope or deer—or some sort of venison.”
“Oh, I know, I know.” Hebe muttered, “But leg of lamb is just better shorthand. No one says ‘leg of antelope,’ do they?” He looked at me as if expecting an answer, then kept going. “Ah that Meketre sure lived the good life. He had tremendous power in the Middle Kingdom. Known in inscriptions simply as ‘Sealer.’ Who wouldn’t want to be a ‘Sealer,’ huh?”
I thought of Dick Trachner, perhaps the modern-day version of a “Sealer” with his discreet manipulation.
Metropolitan Stories Page 3