A hand snakes out of a doorway I am passing and grabs my shoulder, pulling me into a little side room. “Jesus,” I say, nearly falling into Rodney—my best friend here at Sotheby’s. Like me, he started as a college intern. Unlike me, he did not wind up going into the business side of the auction house. Instead, he designs and helps create the spaces where the art is showcased for auction.
“Is it true?” Rodney asks. “Did you lose the Nightjars’ painting?”
“First, it’s not the Nightjars’ painting. It’s Kitomi Ito’s. Second, how the hell did you find out so fast?”
“Honey, rumor is the lifeblood of this entire industry,” Rodney says. “And it spreads through these halls faster than the flu.” He hesitates. “Or coronavirus, as it may be.”
“Well, I didn’t lose the Toulouse-Lautrec. Kitomi just wants things to settle down first.”
Rodney folds his arms. “You think that’s happening anytime soon? The mayor declared a state of emergency yesterday.”
“Finn said there are only nineteen cases in the city,” I tell him.
Rodney looks at me like I’ve just said I still believe in Santa, with a mixture of disbelief and pity. “You can have one of my rolls of toilet paper,” he says.
For the first time, I look behind him. There are six different shades of gold paint rolled onto the walls. “Which do you like?” he asks.
I point to one stripe in the middle. “Really?” he says, squinting.
“What’s it for?”
“A display of medieval manuscripts. Private sale.”
“Then that one,” I say, nodding at the stripe beside it. Which looks exactly the same. “Come up to Sant Ambroeus with me,” I beg. It’s the café at the top of Sotheby’s, and there is a prosciutto and mozzarella sandwich there that might erase the look on Eva’s face from my mind.
“Can’t. It’s popcorn for me today.”
The break room has free microwave popcorn, and on busy days, that’s lunch. “Rodney,” I hear myself say, “I’m screwed.”
He settles his hands on my shoulders, spinning me and walking me toward the opposite wall, where a mirrored panel is left over from the previous installation. “What do you see?”
I look at my hair, which has always been too red for my taste, and my eyes, steel blue. My lipstick has worn off. My skin is a ghostly winter white. And there’s a weird stain on the collar of my blouse. “I see someone who can kiss her promotion goodbye.”
“Funny,” Rodney says, “because I see someone who is going on vacation tomorrow and who should have zero fucks left to give about Kitomi Ito or Eva St. Clerck or Sotheby’s. Think about tropical drinks and paradise and playing doctor with your boyfriend—”
“Real doctors don’t do that—”
“—and snorkeling with Gila monsters—”
“Marine iguanas.”
“Whatever.” Rodney squeezes me from behind, meeting my gaze in the mirror. “Diana, by the time you get back here in two weeks, everyone will have moved on to another scandal.” He smirks at me. “Now go buy some SPF 50 and get out of here.”
I laugh as Rodney picks up a paint roller and smoothly covers all the gold stripes with the one I picked. Once, he told me that an auction house wall can have a foot of paint on it, because they are repainted constantly.
As I close the door behind me, I wonder what color this room first was, and if anyone here even remembers.
To get to Hastings-on-Hudson, a commuter town north of the city, you can take Metro-North from Grand Central. So for the second time today, I head to Midtown.
This time, though, I visit the main concourse of the building and position myself directly underneath the piece of sky I painted with my father, letting my gaze run over the backward zodiac and the freckles of stars that blush across the arch of the ceiling. Craning my neck back, I stare until I’m dizzy, until I can almost hear my father’s voice again.
It’s been four years since he died, and the only way I can garner the courage to visit my mother is to come here first, as if his memory gives me protective immunity.
I am not entirely sure why I’m going to see her. It’s not like she asked for me. And it’s not like this is part of any routine. I haven’t been to visit in three months, actually.
Maybe that’s why I’m going.
The Greens is an assisted living facility walkable from the train station in Hastings-on-Hudson—which is one of the reasons I picked it, when my mother reappeared out of the blue after years of radio silence. And, naturally, she didn’t show up oozing maternal warmth. She was a problem that needed to be solved.