The suffocating numbness that had settled over me since I fled the gallery with Jonathan receded slightly on Monday morning, when I rounded the final hill on Route 2 that led into North Adams, where my museum was, and I saw the town with all its graceful steeples nestled against the mountains. Relief flooded me because, as I so often did when I saw that sight, I thought, Yes. Yes, this had been the right thing, the right place. The green ridges of the hills rose against swollen purple clouds that threatened rain, and the jumble of old factory buildings that made up the museum, all ruddy brick and huge creaky windows, sprawled along the Hoosic River where it ran through town. The steel letters of the museum’s name that jutted from the roofline filled me with pride, every time. I loved parking my car and knowing that, within an hour, the lot would start to fill as visitors arrived—to view exhibits I had developed, artwork I had helped to showcase. Since starting at MASS MoCA, I’d busted my ass to earn a reputation as a committed and incisive curator, and my confidence in my skill sustained me. And, better still, my work made sense. My work, I could trust.
My artistic talent was modest. I knew it, had never not known it; even as a sixth grader I could tell that the drawings that my mother stuck to our fridge were nowhere near as good as those of my classmate Heisuke. Maybe I might have been second-best, but Heisuke was special. His work had life. With three quick twitches of his fingers, Heisuke could give you a bird, weightless on the wind; meanwhile, I could sketch for twenty minutes and produce a passable rendition of a pigeon in heart failure plunging from the sky.
Predictably, Heisuke was admitted to the fine art program at LaGuardia High School, and, equally predictably, I was not. It frustrated me at first—that I should love artwork so much, yet remain mediocre at it despite diligent efforts at improvement. What changed everything was the day my ninth-grade class had a tour of MoMA led by a curator in a glamorously chunky turquoise necklace, and I realized that I could make a career out of loving art. Analyzing it, researching it, writing about it, but ultimately just loving it. So I took English classes at Stuyvesant instead of art classes, including the AP literature course where I met Adam. I got an art history degree from Williams, because it was the best program at a small college. PhD from Columbia, because Adam wanted to be back in New York. It had all made perfect sense, and it had all led me here.
•
On my way into the museum, I passed Natalie Jeremijenko’s Tree Logic installation in the front courtyard: six young trees suspended upside down in the air, planters and all, from a framework of cables and posts. A few of their trunks had started to curve upward over time, as if to say, Wait a minute, something isn’t right here, but even so, they leafed and turned color and thrived.
I was lucky to have my very own office, with an eight-foot-high window set into a brick wall still mottled with eighty-year-old paint. My view looked past the small fork of the Hoosic that ran beneath my window, toward the hills that hemmed the town in to the north. Usually I loved to look out of that window, but I’d spent far too much time lately sinking into my thoughts; today I was grateful for the distraction of work.
I met with the director of our children’s galleries, Kidspace, about a new idea she was developing for an interactive sculpture exhibit, and then I dove into some overdue updates to my master spreadsheet for my upcoming surrealist photography exhibit. I know it’s an anomaly to be a creative person who enjoys working with spreadsheets, but the delicious concreteness of a list or a chart just soothes my soul. As the day flooded past, I got swirled up into activity and almost, almost forgot that my marriage was in smithereens.
“Caroline?” The museum’s director of development (“fundraising” if you like your words straightforward), Neil, was leaning through the open door of my office, one hand hooked around the doorframe. “Do you have a minute?”
“Sure.” I beckoned to the pair of bony aluminum chairs I had lifted from the equipment inventory after an event last year. It’s not technically stealing if the items don’t leave company property. “Make yourself comfortable.”
One eyebrow quirked as he draped his long frame onto a chair, one ankle resting on the other knee. The chair creaked loudly as he settled. “I wanted to talk to you about fundraising opportunities with Crush,” he said, and I gave a mental groan. Crush was a start-up founded by a fellow Williams alum and known for its eponymous, and wildly successful, family of dating apps. In fact, so successful was this start-up that it had recently gone public—to the great excitement of investors everywhere, and to the even greater excitement of every donor-funded arts organization in northwest Massachusetts. “If I’m not mistaken,” said Neil, “you went to college with Diana Ramirez.”
Oh yes. Indeed I had gone to college with Diana, and what a delightful experience that had been. “You’re not mistaken, but I have no idea how you know that.”
“Good memory,” he said. “I’ve been looking at her for a while as a potential donor, but until the IPO I wasn’t sure if she’d be worth pursuing. Fifty million shares later, she is officially worth it. So, I wanted to see if you’d be up to reaching out to her. Work the old alumni angle.”
This could not possibly be happening. Not today. “Neil, I barely knew her. We certainly weren’t friends. And besides, everybody’s going to be chasing her. Every alum in the country has got to be crawling up her butt already, and—”
He snorted.
“Sorry. But you know what I mean.”
“I do. They’re going to be in there with headlamps,” he said, and I did one of those big, loud, involuntary “HA!” laughs. “But,” he continued, unperturbed, “that means we should be, too. I read a piece on her last week where she talked about how much she loves the Berkshires; she just bought a weekend place down near Stockbridge. So, if you’re counting, that makes you an alumna of the same college, who—like her—loves the area so much that you moved back, and you work for a leading arts organization with deep ties to both the college and the Berkshire region.” He flipped his palms up, like, case closed.
And also, the woman can’t stand me, I thought. But I hated the thought of spilling tired freshman-year gossip to my co-worker; better to support my avoidance from a different angle. I leaned forward on my desk, forearms crossed. “I know. I read the same piece. The thing is, though, I’m a curator. I do my art thing and you do your fundraising thing, and I don’t ever do your thing. I don’t know how to do your thing. I’m not a schmoozer.”
“No, you’re not. Because ‘schmoozer’ sounds like some kind of fancy poodle mix.”
I almost sprained my face trying not to laugh. I had to get him to leave me alone about this. “Seriously. I do not have the first clue how to tackle this.”
“Well, you can start by putting together what you know about her, and then do some research to fill in what you’re missing. Where is she from originally? What is she interested in? What are her social causes, what charities does she give to?”
“Her personally, or Crush?”
“Both. And once you’ve got a good picture, you can use that to create a custom-tailored menu of potential gifts. Donors want to know their money will have tangible results. So, put together a list so appealing she can’t stand the thought of missing out.”
Isn’t this your job? I thought, but no sooner had my brain formed the words than he continued.
“I’ll help you if you’re not sure how to put it together. But I can’t overstate the importance of a personal connection here, which is why I’m asking you to help get the relationship started. Just try it out. See what you can do. I know you don’t have a lot of experience with this, but it’s a great opportunity and we’d be fools not to throw everything we’ve got at it.”
In the abstract, everything he said had excellent logic to it. Neil was young to be heading up a development office, but we’d lured him from the Gardner in Boston two years ago by offering him the directorship, and he’d made good on the trustees’ enthusiasm in spectacular fashion ever since. If he thou
ght I was our museum’s best shot at Diana Ramirez, then he was probably right. In the abstract.
There was also the fact that his entire demeanor conveyed a serene but unbudging stubbornness. He was not going to let me out of this. “Okay,” I sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”
The chair squealed again as he got to his feet, and he patted it bracingly. Then he stopped in my doorway, tapped the casing as if remembering something, and pivoted back to face me. “Oh, hey, how was the Patrick Timothy show? Didn’t you go this weekend?”
Hearing the name was like having my face slapped. It took me several seconds too long to recover. “Oh. Yes. I did. It was great. Stunning, actually. The kid is the real deal.”
Funny how, although I was pretty sure no one was handing out cosmic gold stars for “Be the bigger person” moments such as praising your husband’s co-conspirator in cheating, I couldn’t quite bury my admiration for Patrick’s talent under my loathing of his greed. Even though I was certain that talent was one of the things that had made him so compelling to Adam. Like Adam, Patrick was a creator, while all I did was work with other people’s creations. Was that why Adam had found him superior?
“Should we be looking at trying to exhibit him here?”
With an effort, I dragged my thoughts back to the conversation. “I heard the Whitney’s all over him,” I said. I had heard absolutely no such thing.
“Really?” said Neil. “Didn’t think he was big enough yet for them to be interested.”
“I guess he is.” (He was absolutely not.) “Also, though, the images are incredible, but some of them are kinda racy,” I said. “So that’s a factor, too.”
“Hmm,” said Neil. “I saw a few in the Times write-up. They weren’t that bad.”
“You’re saying that because you’re an art guy who’s not threatened by images of naked human bodies. I bet you’re teaching your kids the proper anatomy words, too, not stuff like ‘wee-wee’ and ‘special place.’ ”
He grinned, teeth flashing white against his light brown skin. “Guilty. But, still. You know who I heard likes photography? Diana Ramirez.” He rapped his knuckles against my doorframe again—chop-chop—and then he was gone.
•
For three days, I’d resisted reading Adam’s letter. I hadn’t wanted to give him the time and attention he craved, though the mystery of the letter’s contents tormented me like a paper cut I couldn’t stop touching. But my sickening revelation about Patrick’s potential superiority sent me diving into my discarded overnight bag for the letter as soon as I got home from work that day. I had to know what Adam had written, why he had done what he had. And I had to know what he felt about Patrick.
I sat at the kitchen counter and opened the folded page. At the sight of my husband’s familiar handwriting, memory poured down on me, as soaking heavy as rain. Letters used to be our sacred thing.
When we were in school, separated by a couple hundred miles and all the usual collegiate distractions, we would email every day, but we saved everything special for letters. Adam, of course, had started it—he hated the banality of email, preferring the old-fashioned romance of a written letter, like the missives written by Browning and Keats. And his letters were masterpieces, full of funny stories and thoughtful observations as well as romantic declarations. He narrated so beautifully that every time I read one, I could hear his voice in my ears, rolling and curving with his sentences. I’d saved every precious one of them, and he’d saved all of mine; they were nestled together in an archival storage box in the attic right at that very minute. This thing I held in my hand was, to those letters, like a mutated gene is to a pure one—related, and almost identical in many ways, yet full of dysfunction that corrupted the healthy processes of the organism.
Love—my love—
Well, having started, I can’t seem to move this pen beyond that. Probably because this little brain of mine cannot seem to move its neurons beyond that. I’m all just love, love, love, like a heartbeat. You are my heartbeat.
I know you must be hungry for answers, and I wish more than anything that I could give them, but I quite simply can’t. I don’t even understand yet why I did what I did, so I cannot hope to explain it to you. All I can do is tell you how sorry I am. I don’t recognize the person who would do this thing to his beloved, his wife, his Caroline. I had never imagined what it could be like to despise myself this much; it’s corrosive and foul, a film of dirty oil on the pure water that is my love for you. And I will do whatever you need to flush that water clean again.
But until you know what that is and you’re ready for me to do it, I am just thinking about the love. I need you to understand that it has never faded, or grown fallow like soil that’s been leached of its nutrients. It is as rich as ever, filling me up. It sustains me now, even though you can’t bear the sight of me. My love is made of everything between us, every moment of every precious year, and it is still growing. It is still growing.
All my heart,
Adam
The letter made a soft whiff as it dropped to the counter. Well. So. That was all he had to say for himself. He loved me—but declared himself incapable of illuminating his reasons for betraying the love I’d given him for more than half our lifetime. Mainly, he wanted to remind me that he loved me. Which meant he really just wanted me to forgive him.
It was the same pattern he enacted anytime I was upset with him—poignant apology, followed by heartfelt declarations of love, with a strong implication that I shouldn’t let my resentment impede our return to peace and harmony. Because in love, it wasn’t worth holding a grudge over a slight. When it was something like booking plans in the city when I wanted him to attend one of my work events, I was inclined to agree with him. But infidelity?
I walked down the hall to his office, switched on the paper shredder, and fed the letter through. The growling crunch of the teeth as they ripped their way through Adam’s words was very satisfying indeed.
•
I was ensconced in my favorite rocking chair on my back deck, watching a coral and gold sunset drain from the sky with two big glasses of Adam’s prized vintage dry Riesling inside me, when my sister, Ruby, called. Because of course she would call right now. Even under the best of circumstances, I was never fully prepared for the mental energy required by interaction with Ruby, and she had a knack for timing her infrequent calls and visits to coincide with my moments of weakness and fatigue. But I’d seen a few texts from her when I reluctantly turned on my phone this morning after my Adam-induced technology blackout, so I supposed I’d have to stop hiding.
I took a deep breath and answered the call.
“Oh my god, Care. Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to get ahold of you since the weekend. We were supposed to get brunch yesterday, but you never texted me back.”
It was odd to realize that, as far as Ruby knew, I’d had a perfectly normal weekend, with no justifiable reason for ignoring her. Even if I’d seen the texts, what would I have said? Sorry, can’t make brunch; too busy trying to keep my organs from squirting out of this gaping wound in my chest. “Oh, damn. I’m sorry about that.”
“Did you forget? Or drop your phone in the toilet, or what?”
“I forgot. And, uh, I forgot my charger, so my phone died and I didn’t see your texts. I’m sorry,” I said, pronouncing each word like I was setting a bone china teacup in its saucer. She couldn’t notice I’d been drinking or she’d know for sure something was wrong.
“Wow. That’s something I would do, that you’d scold me for. Nice going, big sis,” she said, but her voice was teasing. “So anyway, we were thinking of leaving the city at two on Friday, which should put us up there around six, with traffic. Is there anything good on the roster?”
I pitched forward in my chair, my feet landing on the porch with a hard thump that yanked my rocking to a stop. Damn it—I had squelched so deep into my personal swamp that I’d completely forgotten my parents and sister were supposed to be visi
ting this weekend. It was their annual ritual since Adam and I moved up here: visit for opening night of one of the Williamstown Theatre Festival plays. Be squired from show to party to after-party by their playwright brother-/son-in-law. Adam loved it as much as they did, showing off his connections for my goggle-eyed family. They were arriving in four days and they had no idea Adam and I weren’t speaking.
“Oh, Ruby, I meant to tell you,” I said. “I think we have to cancel for this weekend. Adam—” What was the lie going to be? “Adam had to go to a thing.”
“A thing?”
Work, brain. “A conference. Of some sort.”
“On this short notice? In the middle of the festival?”
“No, he, ah, he forgot he had scheduled it. Stupid. But so, he’s not here.”
“Geez, a lot of forgetting going on with you two lately. You must have the tickets, though, so why can’t we still come?”
Why, indeed? “I just don’t see the point. With him not here, and all.”
“Whatever. We’re coming.”
“No. Seriously. Do not come. It is not a good time.”
A pause. Then: “Care, is everything okay?”
Oh, there was so much in it, that little sentence of Ruby’s. Genuine concern. Worry. But there was this very, very, very faint note of—almost—hope? Hope that, for the first time in my well-ordered, smoothly executed life, something might not be going exactly right.
Of course, my sister would never actually wish any pain on me. But I wouldn’t put it past her to feel at least a little bit glad that, for once, I had a problem. And, as it happened, the lady was in luck.
“Adam and I are having some issues,” I said finally. It was a sentence I had preselected on the long drive back to Massachusetts, for the inevitable moment when I would have to tell someone.
“Oh shit, Care. I’m so sorry to hear that.”
And she clearly genuinely was. A tactful person would let it rest at that, and allow me to volunteer any further detail I might wish to disclose.
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