by Anne Calhoun
“Not necessary. You feel very real to me.”
There was a simmering silence that smelled of cumin and cayenne in doses intense enough to make his eyes water.
“As long as we’re asking the why questions, why the FBI?”
“I started with the NYPD, but went over to the FBI. Better stories,” he said.
“Hmm,” she said. “Explain. You studied English at school.”
She’d remembered. “I have a double major in English and accounting,” he said. “My mother said reading books was great but almost no one got paid to do it, and I should be employable. The way I see it, numbers tell stories, too.”
“The current story?” she asked, toying with the wineglass.
“The usual sordid attempts to circumvent laws and make more money than any one person or family needs.”
Her smile broadened. “Insider trading?”
“It’s always happening,” he said equably. Tilda knew everyone. She probably sold stationery to the crooks they were trying to catch who partied like the one percent. “We’re always two steps behind,” he said. “Convincing legislatures to close loopholes takes years, and as fast as we get them closed, really smart guys with MBAs from Ivy League universities find another one to exploit. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t catch them.”
“So you like stories, and you like numbers.”
“I like stories in any form. Numbers tell stories,” he said.
Her smile widened.
“I get the feeling that, until now, you didn’t think I was that interesting.”
“Oh, I thought you were very interesting,” she said. “You ask good questions. You listen. You’re patient. Persistent. You spend months putting together cases against white-collar criminals, and you run marathons. How many?”
“Twelve,” he said. “I’m stepping up to ultramarathons next year.”
“Ultra?”
“Fifty miles or more. I’m starting with fifty. We’ll see how that goes.”
“You are a very interesting person, Daniel Logan.”
Her attention felt like a searchlight sliding over his skin, and he understood why people went to Tilda Davies to ask for their most secret desires. She looked at you like you mattered, like she saw who you were and judged not at all. He wasn’t about to deny that the attention was addictive. Every time he got a bit of her, he wanted more, more, more.
“Who connects you?” he asked. The question seemed like a non sequitur, but it wasn’t. He’d been puzzling over this since the night he met Tilda Davies. In a city like New York, or London, people lived literally one on top of the other. A certain level of intimacy was unavoidable. He overheard conversations, watched dramatic breakups and reunions all take place on the subway in rush hour traffic, and yet despite all that intimacy, everyone was looking for that elusive thing: a meaningful connection.
Everyone except Tilda Davies.
“Sorry?”
“Louise says you’re the woman to see if you want an introduction. For any reason. Who does that for you?”
She rested her chin on her fist and smiled at him. “I’m the woman who knows everyone. I don’t need introductions. People come to me.”
“Everyone needs something,” he said.
“I have everything I want.”
The thought saddened him a little. She was so young and so alone, and yet she thought she had everything she wanted. The statement also sent up a red flag, because people who had everything they wanted did not sit on ledges twenty-two stories above the street. But for tonight he simply smiled and topped off her glass of wine.
They walked home from the restaurant through a fine mist. Tilda kept her umbrella furled, and her curls coiled in the damp air. Standing on her front steps, he shoved his hands into his pockets to keep from touching her. “Good night, Tilda,” he said.
“You don’t want to come in for a nightcap?”
“I have to be on a train to Long Island early tomorrow for my niece’s birthday party,” he said, because there had to be a limit to how this happened. Suddenly dry-mouthed, he bent to kiss her cheek, his hands fisted in his pocket linings. “Go inside and lock up.”
She opened the half door, then turned back to face him. “Thank you for a lovely day, Daniel,” she said, and closed it behind her.
– SEVEN –
October
“Are you keeping your name?”
Tilda sat at the maple table in front of West Village Stationery’s front window across from Marin Bryant, a professional dancer and one of her former introductions. She sifted through the personal notecard samples and withdrew one, nudging it forward for Marin to take a second look.
“Professionally,” Marin said. She smiled a little, secret smile, and tucked her straight blond hair behind her ear as she considered the card, bronze and port ink on ecru two-ply cotton paper. “I’ll still dance and choreograph as Marin Bryant, for as long as people want to see me on stage. Personally, I’ll be Marin Bryant-Fleming.”
Tilda offered another sample of card stock, this time from an up-and-coming designer out of Rouen. Marin and her husband, Cole, were one of her most successful connections. Marin, with her demanding, intense life as a dancer in service to art and beauty, needed a situation in which she was in complete control. Cole, the son of an old New York family and Marine turned trader, wanted the risk of the ultimate surrender. Both demanded absolute secrecy, and therefore arranged their encounters through Tilda, until the requests stopped abruptly the previous year. Tilda had noted their end without surprise, given the hothouse, intense nature of their relationship. In her experience things like that burned too brightly to last.
Marin appearing at her shop to order personalized stationery shocked her. She’d bowed to her mother-in-law’s request to order the wedding invitations from Mrs. John L. Strong, a choice Tilda would never begrudge her. Tilda knew all about tradition, and expectations, but sincerely appreciated Marin buying her notecards from West Village Stationery. Marin represented her target market, the younger generation accustomed to texting and email, who wanted something less iconic and more personal.
“Those,” Marin said decisively. “The pear logo. Is gold too pretentious? It feels pretentious, but—”
Tilda shook her head wordlessly, and smiled. She felt a deep connection with Marin, one based on growing up poor and suddenly finding oneself in a world where money was no object in the pursuit of luxury and quality. She was very good at recognizing the Imposter Syndrome in other people, because it was carved so deeply into her bones after years of attending boarding school with girls who went by their last names but in the outside world had titles in front of their proper names.
“No? Then gold. How many should I order?”
“One hundred cards with envelopes,” Tilda said, and noted the order in her iPad. “That’s one of her standard dies but each card is made by hand, so the order will take six weeks or so. You can order more via our website. Just sign in to your account and we’ll take care of the rest.”
Marin smiled at her. An absolutely stupendous diamond glittered on her ring finger, constantly slipping to one side or the other from the weight of the stone. Invited but unable to attend due to travel, Tilda had read about the wedding in the New York Times Weddings section’s full-page description. That kind of fairy tale wasn’t in her future, and she knew it, no matter how easy it was to lie with Daniel on the chaise lounge in her office and spin stories out of her past.
It was a mistake, relaxed, warm, watching rivulets of rain trickle down the greenhouse glass that comprised the back wall and ceiling of her home office. She’d let down her guard. Let him in, dangerously quickly, surrendering to impulses she’d learned the hard way were untrustworthy.
“Thank you,” Marin said.
“It was my pleasure,” Tilda replied automatically.
“I mean
t for introducing us,” Marin said, her voice soft. “I had no idea he was out there. Without you, our paths never would have crossed.”
“Oh, you might have met,” Tilda said lightly. “He might have come to see you dance. You might have made an appearance at a fundraiser, and caught his eye. You were clearly meant to be.”
“But we wouldn’t have known what we know about each other,” Marin said. “Meeting like we did, in the dark, in secret, let us be who we were. You made that possible.”
“It was my pleasure,” Tilda said again. “I’m very happy for you both. I’ll call you when the order arrives and make arrangements to drop it off.”
“That’s not necessary. I now have people who pick things up for me. My dry cleaning, my groceries, anything I buy now appears in my drawers or closets like magic. The one percent lives in a completely different world. Rather like this one,” she said, looking around the shop. “I guess it’s my world, now. I’m a long way from sharing a sixth-floor walkup with three other dancers and an incontinent, eighteen-year-old cat whose hair fell out when it got stressed.”
“Enjoy it,” Tilda said gently as she followed Marin’s gaze around the shop, the clean, shining maple floors, the white walls, the shelves spotlit by individual lights. Most card and stationery shops overflowed with merchandise, greeting cards, packaged thank-you or sympathy notes, journals, day planners, calendars, desk accessories. Tilda opted for a simple message: I sell only what’s worth buying.
She was a long way from a three-room farmhouse in Cornwall. The trip had cost her dearly, and she intended to get her blood’s worth of it, including the improbable, hard-to-define relationship with Daniel Logan. There would be no happy ending for them. Cole and Marin may have found a way to burn without consuming, but so far that particular skill had eluded Tilda.
She escorted Marin to the door, then walked over to Penny, standing behind the glass display case that served as a counter. “I’m going out for a bit,” she said to Penny. “I’ve an appointment with an artist with the improbable name of Bathsheba Clark. Have you heard of her?”
Penny tucked her hair behind her ear and frowned. “From the seventies, maybe? I have a vague memory of a few pictures in a textbook in an art history class.”
“Someone I met at a party said her work might be suitable for the shop.”
“You’re expanding into art?” Penny said, her eyes widening slightly.
“Perhaps,” Tilda said. “When I spoke to Ms. Clark she said she was working on palimpsests.”
“A manuscript that has been reused. A work in progress, repurposed,” Penny intoned. “Graffiti and bumper stickers layered on street signs comprise a palimpsest. It’s an interesting field at the moment, and wildly divergent from your current selection. I have some ideas, if you’re interested in that market.”
Tilda slid her bag to the crook of her elbow. “I’ll let you know when I return.”
Outside her front door was a gorgeous New York fall day. The air when she walked to work held just a bit of a chill, but the sun warmed it pleasantly. She made her way through the Village to the busier streets of SoHo, slowing her pace to cross the brick-paved streets. She’d been waiting out the sensible three to five days before contacting Colin when he called and took her out for burgers at the Broome Street Bar. After the requisite small talk covered the weather and traffic, he moved straight into the business portion of the lunch. It was a high step for a girl from Cornwall, but she’d spent her three days preparing a pitch that shot for the stars, settling for nothing less than retail space for West Village Stationery in upscale malls and airports around the world. She’d not planned to make the pitch at SoHo’s famous dive bar, but she was a Davies. She made do with what she had, and kept her eyes on the prize.
A global brand by thirty. That’s what she wanted, to be internationally renowned, not just memorable, but unforgettable. Quality would expect not just the unique but the truly sublime, objets d’art, and palimpsests were as good a place to start as any. She needed to position herself as exceptional in her current field, with an eye able to see the extraordinary in other disciplines. Colin took her proposal back to the management team, and promised to be in touch. When she’d described the meeting in her letter to Nan, she was so excited her handwriting lacked its usual swoops and curls. Nan would know exactly what this meant to her.
“Eighteen, sixteen, fourteen,” she said to herself, then stopped and rang the buzzer for 5B.
She heard a click, but no welcome. “Hello?”
“Who is it?”
“It’s Matilda Davies. We had an—”
The buzzer rang out, cutting her off. She pushed through the door into a foyer that hadn’t been cleaned since the building went up, and began climbing stairs. Two doors faced the top of the fifth-floor landing. She knocked on the one that wasn’t labeled A.
The door cracked open.
“Lady Matilda?” Her drawl was from the American South.
The woman standing in front of her was Tilda’s height in her heels, which meant she had five inches on Tilda in flat feet. Her face was the color of good coffee, lined but in that ageless space between forty and seventy. Her hair was shorn to her scalp, leaving only a tight crop of iron gray. Her face was free of makeup, and she wore a man’s Oxford shirt, loose pants, and Birkenstock sandals so old dirt molecules from Woodstock were likely embedded in the cork.
“It’s just Tilda,” she said.
The woman opened the door. Tilda walked into the kind of space most New Yorkers dreamed about. The flat occupied one-half of the fifth floor, and featured sparkling-clean floor-to-ceiling windows facing east, south, and west. The light was stupendous, sunshine pouring into the vast, cluttered atelier, the space so airy Tilda had the odd sensation of sitting on Louise’s ledge again. She shook it off and looked around.
Paintings, framed and unframed, were stacked against the north wall. A table that had to be six feet by ten feet stood nearest the east windows, and on that table lay a number of implements and tools Tilda didn’t recognize. But she recognized the ubiquitous artist’s companion, the Moleskine sketchbook, stacked ten high and three deep in the middle of the table. Loose, large sheets of one hundred percent cotton drawing paper lay scattered on the table like a giant’s game of Fifty-Two-Card Pickup.
Without conscious thought, Tilda drew closer to the enormous table, which held works in varying states of completion, some containing elements seemingly torn from the notebooks, layered watercolors or ink drawings, and handwritten notes. The mature trees of Central Park overlaid a series of poppies, another of the Brooklyn Bridge, yet another of bodegas along Broadway.
The process was completely foreign to Tilda, so she started with what she could sincerely compliment. “The light is amazing.” Unless she was in her third-floor office, she didn’t get this kind of light in her town house. “The whole space is brilliant.”
“Rent control,” Ms. Clark said with immense satisfaction. “They’ll have to carry me out of this apartment in a body bag. Can I get you some tea?”
Indeed, this was not a situation where one got straight down to business. “I’d love some,” she said.
She made the effort to look at the canvases on the easels around the large room, but by the time the tea had steeped and Ms. Clark poured two cups, Tilda was back at the table, all but clasping her hands to prevent herself from touching the pages.
“Thank you,” she said and wrapped her hands around the cup, holding it carefully to avoid spilling tea on the . . . “Ms. Clark, what, exactly, are these?”
“Call me Sheba.” Tilda felt like she’d been given an immense privilege. “I’ve got fifty-five years of journals, sketchbooks, finished canvases, unfinished canvases. Good old-fashioned experiments. It was time to start doing something with them. Look back at my history, see where I’d been, where I might be going with what’s left of the time God’s give
n me.”
Tilda hadn’t felt so off-balance in years, except, perhaps, with Daniel, who in one afternoon knew more about Tilda than any other single person alive except Nan. With a fine disregard for the materials on the table, Sheba set her mug down and pulled forward three pages bound. “Take a look. Stop worrying about the tea, child. If you spill it, the color would just become part of the page.”
Tilda lifted one of the canvases. Sheba had scraped the painting of the Sheep Meadow in Central Park down to smears of paint on canvas, layered the text from what appeared to be a treatise on botany over it, then somehow erased the text to near invisibility and added several rough sketches and watercolors of the same spot to the canvas.
The palimpsests both intrigued and confused—or perhaps annoyed—her. Any attempt to make sense of the words and sketches was thwarted by the seemingly random placement, or the juxtaposition of colors, materials, and jumps through time. On the surface, it had no place whatsoever in West Village Stationery.
Tilda set it down. Picked up her mug of tea, now cool enough to drink. Sipped it. Waited in the silence and sunshine. Picked up a different page in progress, for the moment mostly sky and the Brooklyn Bridge. They made her uncomfortable, with their jumbled images, blended colors, not certain where to rest her eye.
She couldn’t stop looking at them, and the paper. Thick, sturdy, textured, the edges torn to expose the fibers. She trailed her fingers along one edge, then couldn’t stop touching them.
“I’m not sure these are right for my shop,” she said finally.
“I understand,” Sheba said.
“I’m not sure they’re wrong for my shop,” Tilda said.
“I understand,” Sheba said again.
What she was sure of is that she had to have them. Couldn’t place why, but the feeling was unmistakable, both discomfiting and commanding. Rather like Daniel, in fact. “Why not use a gallery to sell these? They’d certainly get a more discriminating buyer, have the connections.”
“Galleries left me behind decades ago,” Sheba said, but her voice wasn’t angry, simply stating a fact. “I don’t see any need to go crawling back to them now. And I like your shop.”