The List

by Anne Calhoun

  Sheba tilted her head to the left, and smiled a slow, sweet, sad smile. “He’s utterly enamored with you,” she said, then turned back to the page in front of her. “What does he do?”

  “He’s with the FBI.”

  “He dresses like a teacher.”

  Tilda remembered the slight scratch of Daniel’s wool vest, the rasp of the tweed against her sensitive skin. “He says he does it to fool criminals into thinking he’s an easy mark.”

  “Does it work?” Sheba picked up the plates and nodded at the champagne glasses.

  “Probably,” Tilda said with a smile as they sat at the small table beside the windows. “Were you married?”

  “No,” Sheba said. There wasn’t a hint of regret or explanation in her voice. Just a simple statement of fact. ”Some people say that I gave up my art career in order to be with my son, but I never gave up art. It was just the two of us, and we took care of each other. He won a scholarship to a ballet school when he was sixteen and moved away from home. It was hard for me because I loved him, but it was what he wanted.”

  “It’s a long way away.”

  “Based on your accent, you’re a long way from your people, too.”

  “I am,” Tilda said. “Tell me what you thought of the opening.”

  Sheba’s conversation rambled through chats with people she’d known back in the seventies and eighties and touched on new connections made with students who knew only digital work, and carried them through the meal. For an outsider in the art world, she harbored very few resentments, not wasting her time with crowing over her staggering financial success or the critics’ accolades. She simply reveled in being back in the thick of things. All in all, it was a very satisfying connection made, Tilda thought.

  Sheba dusted cookie crumbs from her fingers, then crumpled her napkin to the center of her plate. “Let me show you the pieces I have ready,” she said, tilting her head at an uneven stack in the corner under the window.

  Tilda left her purse by the table, lifted the pile of pages, and set them on the worktable. She carefully looked at each one before setting it aside, once again struck by the seemingly random placement of objects, text, and color. While she studied the new material, she watched Sheba select a large sheet of thick paper from the random pile. Materials were fixed to the page, stiffening it, a pastel of a cherry tree in full blossom at the top. Sheba selected a knife from a haphazard stash and scraped away the neat edges of the pastel, turning clean edges jagged, revealing a midnight blue underneath. White text appeared as the edge spread. A Broadway show, Tilda thought. The font was popular in the seventies.

  “The question I was asked most frequently was why you were doing this.”

  A smile danced across Sheba’s face. “Students started showing up, wanting to do research papers on my work, wondering what happened to the great Bathsheba Clark. Their words, not mine. Like I’d died already, because no one wanted my art anymore. I didn’t want people like that brooding over my paintings and sketchbooks and journals, trying to make sense of my life. My life! I’ve seen too many friends die and lose control of their estate, their history, afterward. I lived through the AIDS epidemic in the eighties, when it ravaged the artistic community. I’ve thought a great deal about what I want left behind when I die. I’m taking it apart, on my terms. Leaving nothing but the mystery.”

  Tilda again felt like she’d stumbled into the very antithesis of who she was and what she did. No clean lines or order here, just a purposeful deconstruction of an artistic life. “We should talk about prices. After that opening, we’ll be able to add a zero to most items.”

  Sheba batted her hand dismissively. “You work that out with the gallery owner. I’m tempted to give them away in the park.”

  “How very Banksy of you. He charged sixty dollars a canvas.”

  “Seems about right to me,” Sheba said.

  She could add several zeroes to that price and still not run off buyers. “I’ll take the lot,” Tilda replied. “I’ll talk to Edith; we’ll divide the pages between her gallery and my shop while she works on the frames. Let me help you clean up.” They washed the dishes together, then Tilda wiped down the counters and swept the floor. “Do you have someone who looks in on you?” she asked, eyeing the state of the kitchen.

  “More in the last few days than ever before.”

  “I meant someone who helps you,” she said gently. “Someone who cleans and keeps you in food so you can work.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Sheba said.

  “Of course, but . . .” She stopped, trying not to think about Nan, alone and growing old in her tiny cottage in Cornwall. “May I stop by anyway?”

  “I’d like that,” Sheba said. “You’re a good listener. You pay attention. You study people. Why?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Most people can’t be bothered with other folks. They want to talk about themselves, and you make it easy for them to do that. People want to tell you things. They think you can help them.”

  Tilda blinked at this dead to rights assessment of who she was and what she did. “I like hearing their stories. Sometimes, I can help them.”

  “Who hears your stories?”

  Oddly enough, Daniel had asked her the very same thing, but in a different way. Tilda busied herself wrapping the palimpsests in several layers of plastic for the trip back to West Village Stationery. “There’s not much to tell, not compared to your beautiful work.”

  “Everyone has a story,” Sheba said.

  Tilda looked up from the Bubble Wrap.

  “Not everyone has the tools to tell it,” Sheba added.

  “I write letters,” she said, surprising herself. “As long as you keep telling yours, we’ll both be happy,” Tilda said. “I’ll see you in a few days, and I’ll call before I come to see if you need anything in particular.”

  —

  She took a cab back to the shop, where Penny was waiting with a giant golf umbrella. She covered the precious bag, not Tilda, on the dash to the shop’s front door.

  “I’m soaked,” Tilda complained. She hadn’t bothered to open her own umbrella.

  “You’ll dry out,” Penny said unsympathetically. She left the umbrella in the stand by the door, dried her hands on her skirt, then began unwrapping the palimpsests. She made a noise somewhere between a gasp and a squeal, her hands flapping as she looked at the stash.

  “You remind me of a dragon hyperventilating over his gold,” Tilda said.

  “If I could put these in a cave—a climate-controlled cave—and brood over them, I would. Oh my God. That’s the corner of Houston and Avenue A. That’s the Lower East Side series. I can’t believe . . . What’s this underneath? Is that a canvas? Poppies? She never did poppies. Is this unfinished work or—?” She ran her hands over her hair, visibly calming herself. “I would breathe fire at anyone who came in their vicinity. I would slay dragons to protect these.”

  “Sheba feels precisely the opposite,” Tilda said, and leaned back against the desk.

  “She does?”

  “She started making these when art students wanted to talk to the formerly famous Bathsheba Clark.”

  “Formerly famous and currently the darling of the New York art scene,” Penny said. “Famous for her most private work, her journals, a place to make mistakes and explore ideas where no one else sees them. She’s making them public, but controlling the medium, and the message. She’s pollinating the next generation of artists and opening herself up for everyone to see. Mistakes, miscues, wrong turns, the inspiration, they’d all be in those journals, but she controls how they appear. It’s incredibly brave, and incredibly obstructive at the same time. She’s revealing herself to the world, and yet hiding everything.”

  “Why is it so interesting to you?”

  Penny thought about it for a minute. “It’s not so much the art. It
’s her life. That’s what I covet about these books, that’s what I want. How does she see the world, and how does it become what she paints?”

  “You want to know how to live a life.”

  “I guess so. A life like hers. Or yours.”

  “Mine?” Tilda said in disbelief.

  “Yours.” She looked around the shop, and in her expression Tilda knew Penny’s deepest fear, her deepest longing. It was a very familiar one, the kid outside the candy shop, the loner outside the clique, the person who thought she couldn’t have the things other people have. It was Sheba in the art world that rejected her, the powerful man with a very unique set of sexual desires fulfilled by a dancer he could break in two with one hand, Penny inside Tilda’s gleaming hardwood and steel and glass shop stocked with the finest paper goods on the market.

  Oh yes, she knew it well, living on the outside, looking for acceptance, belonging, being something so brilliant it couldn’t be ignored, or forgotten, or left behind. That’s why she did what she did. No one should ever be excluded. Everyone belonged on the inside.

  “I could have taken an art designer job for Bergdorf or Nordstrom,” Penny said. “I came to work with you because I think you’re going to do amazing things, and I want to be a part of something from the ground up.”

  “Thank you,” Tilda said, genuinely touched. “But I don’t know how I do it. I meet people who introduce me to other people. For every party I go to where someone says, ‘You should talk to Bathsheba Clark,’ I go to dozens that are just a swirl of faces and names.”

  Or Daniel. She’d met Daniel at a party, months earlier, when the only way to escape the forge of her past was to sit on a ledge and imagine flying.

  “Well, I still want to watch. While I’m waiting to see what you do next, I’ll brood over these,” she said, spreading the six-by-eight-inch pages on the glass case under the bright lights.

  “Brood quickly. I’m calling Edith at Bleecker Street Gallery to determine which ones we keep and which ones we hang.”

  “You got some mail.”

  Tilda flipped through it, her hands automatically plucking the finest stationery from the pack. The card from Colin was on paper she’d sold him.

  Forgive me. —C

  Simple and to the point. Given that they’d be working closely together if all the financiers came through for the deal, she had only one option. She tucked the card in a pocket, and texted him.

  There’s nothing to forgive. xx T

  Edith couldn’t come until tomorrow. When another customer opened the front door, Tilda gathered the palimpsests and took them into her office. The door closed, she spread them out again, and tried to work out why she couldn’t stop staring at them.

  – EIGHTEEN –

  April

  Two separate but distinct sensations brought Daniel out of sleep to float just under the surface of alertness. The first sensation was at the corner of his mouth, where Tilda’s soft, sleep-full lips brushed against his. The second was at the top of his thigh, a hand covering the edge of his boxers, palm and fingers warm as they curved around to gently stroke the sensitive, hidden skin. The fact that the motion registered against his balls was no accident. He knew she knew exactly what she was doing—Tilda never did anything she didn’t want to do—so his cock pulsed from morning wood to awake and aware with intention.

  “Morning,” he rasped.

  “I believe so,” she murmured against his cheek.

  He heard the smile in her voice, and was absurdly grateful for it. “Wha’ time’s it?”

  “Time for a blow job,” she whispered in his ear.

  Every hair stood up as a shiver crested along his nape. He worked a hand under her shoulders and pulled her across his body so she straddled him. He hated to lose the teasing pressure of her fingers, but the sense of loss disappeared when he rocked up against the sweet heat of her sex, only to return when she wriggled free from his grip on her hips. He groaned, a sound that hitched into a richer register when she started kissing her way down his body. She flicked her tongue against each nipple as she worked his boxers down to the tops of his thighs, then kissed the bottom of his sternum, his belly button. She stopped a mere breath from the head, then trailed her tongue from the flared head to the base, and back up again.

  “Don’t tease,” he warned, and wove his fingers through her hair.

  “But you’re so much fun to tease,” she murmured, her lips brushing his cock as they shaped the words.

  Her hand wrapped around the shaft just below the head, she restricted herself to the tip, varying the suction, never taking him deep, her speed just slow enough to be maddening. Finally, she slid her hand down to the middle of his shaft and she took him deeper, the sound so slick and dirty in the early morning silence that it was almost enough to get him off.

  Any blow job was a good blow job, sure, but a really good one could light up his spine and every nerve in his body, wipe his memory clean for a few moments. No past, and no future right now. Tilda loved it, and wasn’t afraid to give him that hint of teeth, the rougher strokes. He wondered who’d taught her how to make it mind-blowing.

  He kicked off his boxers, shifted into the center of the bed, and spread his legs. Dislodged by his movements, she gave a low, rough laugh but kept jacking him slowly. He slid his hands back into her hair and guided her down again, then settled in to have his vocabulary reduced to fuck and yes, and from there to wordless groans. He cupped her jaw and slid his thumb into her open mouth. She closed her lips around it and sucked, gaze locked on his. With her mouth closed the words became muted whimpers he could feel in the tips of his fingers resting on her throat.

  He teetered on the edge between pleasure and release, his brain a whirling cloud of images and desires. Making up his mind, he tugged at her hair and growled, “Stop, no, not yet.”

  She kissed him, her mouth wet with saliva, her tongue rubbing against his before she pulled back to nip none-too-gently at his lips. “What do you want?”

  He tugged her nightshirt over her head, then braced himself on his elbows, the better to watch. “Make it last,” he commanded.

  She gripped his cock and drew it toward her mouth, then paused.

  He growled.

  “Of course, sir,” she purred, amused and aroused, with just a hint of subservience in her tone.

  As he watched the carnal picture of his shaft disappearing into her mouth, his pulse pounded in his cheeks and throat. The sensation of hot, slick pressure engulfing his shaft slipped down to pool in his balls.

  “Satisfactory?”

  There was something so ridiculously hot about the way her mouth shaped that single word and infused it with a very British desire to please, overlaid with arrogance. She walked that edge like she owned it, sent heat sparking along his nerves. He loved that edge, too, and when he was this turned on, his brain responded to it.

  “Keep going,” he said. “I need more data.”

  She lowered her gaze in an attitude that would have been demure and humble if her eyelashes hadn’t flickered just so. “God,” he said. “You’re so hot. I’m right there.”

  Her palm smoothed down his abdomen to cup his balls, warm pressure that sent him over the edge. His release pounded through him, big beats of pleasure that slowly subsided to pulses, then his racing heartbeat. He collapsed on his back, breathing hard, waiting for all the tremors and flashes to work their way out of his muscles and nerves. He pressed a kiss into her cheek, then the corner of her mouth. “Good morning.”

  “A very satisfactory morning,” she said.

  He chuckled, then looked at the clock. “We better get moving. Jessie’s game starts at eleven.”

  Underneath him, her body tensed. “About that.”

  He lifted his head. “What about that?”

  “I can’t go. I’m going to England tonight for a quick round of meetings wi
th Quality. I need to prepare.”

  “Tonight?” He swung his legs over the bed and sat up. “When did this come up?”

  “Yesterday,” she said, looking him right in the eye. “You got home late.”

  She’d been asleep, in bed for a change. He’d all but tiptoed around the room to avoid waking her. “Prepare on the train. Or the plane.”

  “Sheba also wants to talk,” she said, and pushed off the bed.

  He snagged her wrist as she walked past him, heading for the shower. “Sheba isn’t your family. Jessie is.”

  “She’s in the middle of the biggest creative production process she’s had in twenty years. She’s back at the top of the New York art scene. She needs a bit of reassurance, and she has no one else. Jessie has parents, siblings, grandparents, you.”

  The hand resting on his hip nudged, hinting at him to move, a hint he ignored. “These things with your family are all-day affairs. I need reliable Internet access and several hours to focus. You know how important this is to me.”

  At her request, he’d looked over the contract and proposal last week. “I have some concerns about the deal,” he said quietly.

  Her eyes narrowed. “It’s a generous offer. They absorb all the risk,” she said.

  “For the vast majority of the reward, plus your involvement for five years.”

  “It will take that much time to build the brand,” she said. “After that we negotiate based on results and the business direction.”

  “Tilda, you have no idea where you’ll be in five years. It’s a big commitment at a time in your life when—” He cut himself off. Based on her reaction to a pregnancy scare, telling her that locking herself into a global commitment when they might want to start a family was a bad idea.

  “I don’t have the cash to put into a project this large,” she said from the bathroom. “What I have is myself. They have money, but they don’t have a clear—” She reappeared in the bathroom door, her gray eyes as wary as a suspect held at knifepoint. “What time of life?”

  “Five years is a long time, Tilda. If you’re this busy, traveling this much, for the next five years, you’ll be thirty-three, and I’ll be thirty-seven before we start a family.”