The Objects of Her Affection (6 page)

“So one of them broke when Wilder shipped them home,” Sophie said, knowing that if this were true, Brian would be acting a good deal less jolly.

“That’s the thing. He didn’t ship it. I found the insurance records.” Brian drummed his armrests a little faster. “I figured maybe he kept it in his Paris apartment, so I wrote to his granddaughter, Eleanor. She lived there for years and eventually sold the place, along with all the art he’d been hoarding there.” He snatched a piece of stationery from a pile on his desk and held it up. “I just heard back from her.”

“And?”

“She says the candlestick wasn’t in the apartment.”

“So…it broke before she was born.”

“Maybe. But it’s the way she wrote it.” He scanned the letter. “‘The candlestick was never displayed in the apartment, and the family is not aware of its whereabouts.’ That’s basically all she says about it. It’s not the world’s friendliest letter.”

“But she’s acknowledging that there was one.”

“Right? That’s how it sounds to me. It also sounds kind of like, ‘Mind your own business.’”

“Which you have no intention of doing.”

Brian gave a happy little shrug. Sophie had noticed that it was the pursuit of objects that excited him even more than the acquisition. Was this a man thing?

“Well!” she said, trying to sound encouraging. From her vantage point at home, amid the crumpled laundry and spilled Cheerios and nonringing phone, it was easy to cultivate shameful pockets of jealousy. But now, seeing Brian in his element, practically trembling with excitement, a bit of hair taking its leave from the carefully gelled ranks, she chided herself for being so selfish. Brian had worked hard for his success. He deserved it. If she worked a little harder, she could surely expect, some day, to enjoy the same level of contentment.

Brian took a deep breath through his nose. “So what’s up, anyway?”

“Oh, just, some issues with—um, some mortgage papers that came in the mail.” Sophie wound the strap of her bag around her hand.

“I hope this isn’t going to involve math.” He slid Eleanor’s letter back into its envelope and started rummaging through a pile of folders.

“No, well, sort of. It’s just that we got this thing called an option ARM—”

“What’s that?”

“Well, you have the option of paying just the minimum payment, or the whole interest payment, depending on how things are going, and to be honest—”

Marjorie appeared in the doorway. “Excuse me.” Brian swiveled to look at her. “Brian, maintenance needs to move a case, and there aren’t any art handlers…”

“I scheduled them two weeks ago.” He held out his hands; Marjorie just stood there. He let his hands fall to his lap. “Jesus. Sophie, I’m just going to run to the gallery for a minute; it shouldn’t take long. I want to hear the rest of this; can you hang out?”

“All right,” she said brightly, letting the strap unwind from her hand. It left welts in the fleshy part next to her thumb.

After Brian hurried out she set her bag on the floor and moved into his chair, surveying his desk. She could never understand how he managed to get anything done amid such chaos. Books and CDs were layered into the slippery strata of papers and file folders. One pile was anchored with a large tape measure, another with a dirty coffee mug. The sight irritated her. She started straightening one of the stacks, putting books and CDs into separate piles. Behind a drift of manila envelopes, she found a picture frame lying on its back. It held a photograph of Lucy holding Elliot in her arms, her face lit up by a combination of sisterly pride and the camera’s flash. Elliot was looking up at her with wonderment, his lips parted, eyes wide. The picture had been taken during his chubby phase, when his skin had seemed to rise and puff like bread dough around his joints and under his chin. Sophie couldn’t believe how much he had lengthened and thinned out since then. They were turning into real people before her eyes: Lucy, with her strong opinions and keen ear, had already discovered the pleasure of making people laugh—a benign addiction that would probably be with her the rest of her life. Elliot was fearless and determined, yet mild-mannered. He’d always seemed to take after Brian, but now Sophie wondered if there was a little bit of Maeve in there too. She cleared a space and stood the photograph back up.

The kids were growing up; even Brian was maturing, coming into his own. Sophie realized that she was the only one who was stuck, who hadn’t grown into her new life, hadn’t learned how to handle things properly, like an adult. She could almost hear Maeve’s exasperated voice: “You’re more responsible than this. What were you thinking?”

She felt the fog of exhaustion rolling over her once again, threatening to condense into tears. She turned away from the confusion of Brian’s desk and picked up a mirror that was sitting on one of the rolling carts. She wiped away a smudge of mascara. She stared at her red eyes, which were sunk in deep shadows. She could not remember how it felt not to be tired.

The mirror was heavy in her hand. The oval glass was set in a rectangular metal frame whose raised decorations were bluish-black with age. She ran her finger over the chubby putti flanking the glass; four women dressed in flowing garments sat in the corners of the frame. She wiped her dusty finger on her jeans, a little guiltily. She knew she wasn’t supposed to touch anything without gloves on. Still, she didn’t put the mirror down. She was drawn to the frame’s endlessly retreating detail, the mysterious array of globes and cubes and strange devices that danced around the figures in an almost random arrangement that, when she stretched out her arm, coalesced into soothing symmetry.

Her fingers tingled. She let the mirror rest in her lap. Brian wasn’t coming back; it was a mistake to try to talk to him at the museum, anyway. He was too absorbed in his work, too busy with important matters. Besides, Sophie was filled with new determination to fix things and move forward—to do what Maeve had always exhorted her to do: grow up! She needed to find her own purpose in life, rather than waiting around for others to take care of her and give her life meaning. She decided to ask Marjorie to escort her out.

She put the mirror back on the cart, but it wouldn’t lie flat between the wide, spreading foot of a candelabra on one side and a bulbous coffeepot on the other. Several dozen souvenir spoons cluttered the bottom of the tray. Had the mirror been propped on something? She leaned it against an inkstand, but it tipped sideways toward the edge of the cart. She shifted the candelabra to one side, lining it up with a pair of saltcellars, then tried to move the coffeepot the other way. Its handle hooked a bronze figure of a milkmaid, making it teeter, but Sophie caught it before it fell. There were too many pieces on this cart. She tucked the saltcellars into one corner, shoved some spoons aside, and slid the candelabra further to the left. The mirror still wouldn’t lie flat. She felt despair begin to tread heavily on her brittle nerves. The mirror was heavy; it was about the size of a sheet of printer paper. She turned it one way, then another, but it was impossible to find a place for it among the neglected disorder of the cart.

She picked up the coffeepot, feeling her face flush; what if someone walked in and saw her juggling the objects like this? She remembered the look on the face of the art handler in the hallway, when she’d caught Sophie holding that silver candlestick. That was embarrassing enough; now, here she was with a mirror in one ungloved hand and a coffeepot in the other. Out in the hallway, she heard Brian giving Marjorie instructions; it sounded like they were headed toward his office. Sophie tried, once again, to fit the coffeepot and the mirror together on the cart, but nothing was working. She felt a sudden flash of anger, as sharp and unexpected as a leg cramp in the middle of the night. Why did
she
always have to be the responsible one? What if she didn’t
feel
like
being the grown-up all the time? And why the
fuck
wouldn’t this mirror fit into the goddamned cart?

Brian and Marjorie were just outside the door. Swiftly, Sophie set the coffeepot on the cart. Then she put the mirror in the only place she could think of…a place where it fit quite neatly, where it wouldn’t be jostled or forgotten: the inner pocket of her bag, right between Elliot’s diapers.

Lucy had decided to drop out of preschool. She had loved the first few months, which were filled with the excitement of new toys, the box of dress-up clothes, and the child-size sink where she was allowed to serve herself water. Now, having reached the advanced age of three and a half, she could not face another early-morning stroll through Center City, had no interest in another round of “The Wheels on the Bus,” and was bored to tears by her cubby, which was decorated with her name, a yellow heart, and a hook where she had once proudly hung up her coat all by herself.

Now she was like a cat being taken for a walk on a leash, flattened on the ground, hissing. When Sophie tried to put shoes on her feet, she balled them into fists. She ate her breakfast in tiny bites, chewing in slow motion. When it was time to walk out the door, she would become engrossed in highly urgent tasks, such as reuniting every single Magic Marker lid with every single long-dried-out Magic Marker. Any attempt to interrupt this project would cause her to fling the markers across the room, throw herself to the ground, and pound the floor.

The morning after Sophie’s visit to the museum, Lucy put on an elaborate performance as The Child Who Is Too Gravely Ill to Attend School. Her stomach hurt, her throat burned, she couldn’t hear, her nose was running, she felt like throwing up, she had cavities. She began to hack like an old woman with emphysema.

“Let me see your throat,” Sophie said. Lucy opened her mouth as wide as it would go, and Sophie peered solemnly inside, wondering why three-year-olds never had morning breath.

“All right. Let me feel your forehead.” Lucy watched her mother carefully as she gauged her temperature. “Let’s have a look in your ears now.”

“Am I sick, Mommy?” she asked softly.

“I’m still checking.” Sophie held a tissue to her nose. “Blow.” Lucy blew as hard as she could. Nothing came out.

“I’m going to feel your tummy now.” She pressed lightly on her stomach. “Okay…”

“Maybe I should take some of the grape medicine,” Lucy suggested.

Sophie sat back. “In your condition,” she said, “medicine will only make things worse.”

“My kudishan?”

“It looks like antipreschoolitis. It’s very important to dress warmly, and eat a good breakfast.”

For the rest of the morning she played along with Lucy’s delusions of illness, murmuring sympathetically and giving her warm milk. Once Lucy had cheerfully finished her cereal and Brian was dressed and waiting by the front door, Sophie took Lucy in her arms, felt her forehead again, and looked in her ears and her throat.

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“What, Mommy?”

“You’re cured! It’s a miracle.”

She quickly transferred Lucy into Brian’s arms, along with her lunch box, then opened the door and waved good-bye. Lucy’s eyes were narrowed, but by the time she stiffened her legs and gathered breath for a scream, the front door had swung shut with a thud.

Once Elliot was dressed and installed on the living room floor with a pile of Tupperware, Sophie sat on the couch and reached into her bag for her laptop. As she pulled it out, the front of the bag slumped against her hand, heavy with the contents of its inner pocket. She pulled her hand back and pressed it against her belly, becoming still. She sat like that for a few moments, huddled inside her secret, insulated from everything around her, including Elliot, who was absorbed in his own private world of plastic towers.

She remembered now how she had told Brian she was late for a conference call, then asked Marjorie to escort her out of the offices. After emerging on the second floor balcony, she’d hurried past the monumental baroque tapestries lining the walls and quickly descended the wide, dizzying staircase in the center of the Great Hall. Striding toward the entrance, her mind already flying through the heavy doors, past the columns and down the steps, her breath snapped back into her throat at the sight of two figures silhouetted against the glass. A museum guard in ill-fitting blue polyester, his rear resting on a tall stool, was craning his neck over a dark shape, which was held out by a woman in a short dress and flat shoes. The shape, Sophie saw as she drew closer, was a purse. The woman was holding it open for the guard. He was peering inside.

Sophie had not slowed, had not hesitated; she’d merely jerked her eyes away and continued on her trajectory, giving the door a businesslike shove and trotting down the steps like someone in a great hurry to do important things.

Now, moving much less deliberately, she pulled the mirror out of her bag and laid it flat on the palm of one hand. The glass was almost absurdly small in proportion to the wide frame, which was edged in black wood. A bit of silver filigree protruded from the top edge, with a ring for hanging the mirror on a nail. She admired the casually lifelike poses of the women seated in each corner, the graceful arrangement of their muscled arms and legs, the draping of their robes. A welter of finely drawn detail—from oddly mechanical-looking scrolls to a staccato line of beads and notches forming a delicately textured border—constrained the design in a formal, balanced composition. Sophie couldn’t believe the amount of effort that had gone into such a mundane object. So much labor for a simple mirror frame—those were the days!

Which days, exactly, she couldn’t really say. It was pretty old—she could see that in the tarnish of the silver and the mottled look of the glass. But she had no way of knowing if it was late Renaissance or late Reagan administration. If she had to guess, she would’ve said it was a twentieth-century reproduction of something from an earlier, grander time.

She shook her head, trying to clear her thoughts. What did it matter how old it was? It wasn’t supposed to be here, lying on her now-sweaty hand. It was supposed to be in a museum, on a storage cart, being readied for its journey to a faraway warehouse.

Of course she would take it back. It was just a harmless prank. She was like that guy in the news who had decided to test airport security by planting a gun in the airplane bathroom. She’d just sneak the mirror back into Brian’s office, and if she got caught she’d explain that she was making a point about careless storage practices.

Which would get Brian fired. It would probably be better to say it had been a mistake. She thought it was her mirror. Or, she had dumped out her bag and accidentally gathered up the mirror with the rest of her things.

She lay her head back on the couch. Lying to a three-year-old was one thing; it would be far too embarrassing to tell one of these fantastical stories to Brian’s boss. She took the mirror into the kitchen and wrapped it in several plastic grocery bags. She slipped it into the back of a cupboard, between some cookie sheets that nobody was likely to use for another decade or so. She needed time to think.

The babysitter wouldn’t be coming for another hour, so she strapped Elliot into the stroller and went for a walk around the neighborhood, ambling pensively through allées of ginkgos and decorative pears waving their freshly unfurled leaves. She needed to think things through logically. Working backward from her desired outcome, she should be able to find a stream of clear, rational steps that would solve her problem with elegance and efficiency.

Option A: Return to the scene of the crime and hope that Brian would leave her alone in his office. She could try to go when he wasn’t at work, but she would still need an escort to get to his office—and anyone who did that would be unlikely to leave her there by herself. Even assuming they did, what if the cart was gone? She couldn’t just stash the mirror in the midst of Brian’s mess—that would get him in as much trouble as stealing it.

Option B: Confess to Brian, and let him return the mirror.

Option C: Throw the mirror away, bury it in the backyard, toss it into the Schuylkill River. It sounded like no one would miss it. Some old lady had probably bequeathed her silver to the museum, and some overworked curator had just stuck it all in a storage closet until he had time to assign accession numbers and object cards. If the mirror was worth anything, someone would have taken better care of it.

Her mind followed each scheme to the end of its path, analyzing its logic and contemplating alternate sequencing. It was a process that, in her work, usually delivered her to a point of gratifying clarity. But this time she found herself getting more and more lost in forks, loops, and branches, unable to manage dynamic interactions, fogged in by confusion. She turned onto the avenue for the second time, nodded a greeting—again—to the grocer pushing his broom. Elliot squirmed in his seat; she looked at her watch. It was time to go back.

***

The red jersey dress, Sophie decided, was too unforgiving. At least the black one was covered in sequins, which served to create some visual confusion around the more plush areas of her waist. She wasn’t sure if sequins were appropriate for the museum party they were going to—she would probably be the youngest person there, and definitely the sparkliest. But she didn’t have a lot of other options. She tugged on her “foundation garment.” Constructed of thick, industrial-strength elastic, the beige underthing flattened her belly into a smooth, taut drum. The waistband, which actually stopped just below her bra, was a wide strip of rubber that gripped her skin and left a red welt. The leg bands were made the same way, preventing the underwear from creeping northward. Wearing it made her feel like a tightly swaddled baby.

During the four years that she spent either pregnant or breast-feeding, Sophie’s body had expanded, contracted, bulged, and cracked more often than a Philadelphia sidewalk. Both babies were large; Elliot had caused her old stretch marks to splinter into new ones—purple zebra stripes that later faded and sank, creating silvery crevices across her belly. During both pregnancies her breasts had ballooned, swollen and tender; upon weaning they collapsed, exhausted, onto her rib cage.

She’d lost all of her pregnancy weight while breast-feeding Lucy, but gained it back the minute she got pregnant with Elliot—a huge baby who’d sprawled all over her lower abdomen and seemed, toward the end, as uncomfortable with the arrangement as she was. After he was born she wore her smaller maternity clothes for a few weeks, but then, as he nursed more and more voraciously, her body had melted away like a stick of butter in the microwave.

Now that Elliot was weaned she was going back to her old weight, but her body was like a borrowed dress that had been returned all stretched out and wrinkled. She lifted her soft, empty breasts into a push-up bra, then pulled on the black dress and stepped into some strappy heels. She eyed herself in the mirror—from the side, from behind. Despite the undergarment’s best efforts, her belly still swayed forward, an echo of her pregnant self. She sucked it in, mashing it with her hands. The elastic made her stomach feel oddly anaesthetized.

She rummaged among her purses and pulled out a black leather bag that was too large and casual for her dress. She frowned at herself in the mirror one more time, then headed downstairs.

“You can call me any time tonight,” she said to the babysitter, who was feeding the kids their dinner. “We’re right around the corner, so…” She went into the kitchen and rummaged through a cabinet, blurting instructions over her shoulder.

“Keep Elliot’s monitor on after you put him to bed—he might decide to climb out. And be sure you dry Lucy’s face really well. She’s getting chapped.”

She kissed the children’s heads and placed conciliatory cookies on their plates. “Mommy, don’t go. Why don’t you stay?” whined Lucy. Sophie blew her one more kiss, ignored the question, and pushed through the front door into the humid night air.

Brian was waiting outside the museum’s west entrance, scanning the crowd of valets and patrons milling outside. Sophie felt a nervous flutter as she approached, in the moments before he caught sight of her. When he did, his body became still and his eyebrows lifted. She felt blood gather in the tips of her ears.

“Wow,” he said, lacing his fingers with hers. “You’re beautiful.” Sophie searched his face for hints of flattery, but she didn’t need to: Brian was the most resolutely sincere person she’d ever known. She ran her fingers along the lapel of his tuxedo jacket, feeling the cautious gratitude that comes with too much luck. Brian turned and led her inside, gallantly preceding her through the heavy revolving door. As they crossed the polished stone floor Sophie walked on her toes, not trusting her wine-stem heels.

“Help me keep an eye out for Howard from Prints and Drawings,” Brian said. “He promised to introduce me to this woman Mrs. Weber—she was best friends with Fifi Belmont, Wilder’s other granddaughter.”

“Wilder’s the guy—”

“Who had the Saint-Porchaire candlestick. I’m hoping I can get Mrs. Weber to tell me some stories about the family, maybe introduce me to some of Wilder’s descendants. I realize how far-fetched it all is, but I have to try.” Sophie marveled at the way Brian’s work filled every moment of his life, every crevice of his mind. He never stopped thinking about it. She remembered feeling that way, just out of college, when she’d been obsessed with the three-dimensional galaxies of hypertext; and later, when writing code began turning into something of an art form. But then, when she started freelancing, the work had gradually become less about exploration and creativity, and more about paying the bills. She wondered when, if ever, she might rediscover the joy in it.

They emerged into the soaring central hall, which echoed with laughter and jazz. Redwood-size columns rose to the roof and dwarfed the partygoers below; a trumpet solo bounced brassily against the stone. At the top of the grand staircase a towering statue of Diana alighted, weightlessly balanced on the toes of one long foot, her strong fist punching her bow forward, the other hand a knot of knuckles pulling the string taut. She was lightness and strength and beauty and danger, the museum’s guardian huntress overseeing every opening and cocktail party.

Sophie and Brian wove through the gathering crowd toward the bar, where they met Brian’s boss, Ted. Tall and thin, with long ears and sagging eyes, Ted had worked at the museum for decades, and, it seemed, would be there forever, pacing its corridors long after taking his last shaky breath. Now he was thrusting glasses of wine into Brian’s and Sophie’s hands, his eyes darting over their heads and into the crowd.