“How do you like it?” Jeremy said when it was delivered and opened.
I took a sip. “I like that it’s a little cinnamon-y, and it’s not tart at the end.”
“Yeah, I don’t like an acidic finish, either.” Jeremy swirled his wine and sniffed it, then took a sip. “Did you catch that other flavor in there?”
I took another taste and tried to pay attention to what remained in my mouth. “It’s something familiar, but I don’t know what it is.”
“Is it chocolate?”
I took another sip. “Yes!” I noticed it now. “Chocolate and berries.”
“Exactly.”
We were seated at a rough-hewn wood table, a flickering candle between us.
I mentioned what he’d said before. “You don’t like knowing the genesis of a work of art?” I asked, gesturing to the goat painting.
He looked at it. “Usually I do. But it was my Fex who got me into art, and she said—”
“Sorry, I have to stop you,” I said. “Did you say ‘Fex’? Like sex with an f?”
“Hmm, that’s interesting when you put it that way....” Jeremy looked up, as if considering something. “I hadn’t thought about that before. But yeah. I’m talking about my soon-to-be ex-wife. She’s my Future Ex. So I call her the Fex.”
I wasn’t sure if the nickname was intended as an insult or not. But as our conversation pleasantly meandered, he mentioned his Fex a few times and it always seemed with respect.
The restaurant featured small plates and I happily let Jeremy order some of his favorites—fried peppers and parmesan, fennel rice cakes with butternut squash, chickpea fritters.
He was so easy to talk with. Our discussion led us through our childhoods and all the important facts—the colleges we’d attended, the reasons we were in Chicago, our jobs. I glossed over the details of my “job” at the gallery, and instead focused on asking Jeremy questions. He was from Boston, met his wife in college, and she was the reason they’d started their family in the Chicago area.
“Okay, let me ask you this,” he said at one point, leaning toward me, the flickering candle highlighting his cheekbones, the strong jaw. “What’s your favorite place? Like if you could go anywhere tomorrow and stay for a few weeks, where would you go?”
I thought about it. “I was in Rome last summer and I didn’t have the time to really see everything.” I halted, deciding that a first date wasn’t the time to introduce the topic of the father I once thought was dead and how I’d gone to Italy to find him. “So that’s where I’d go.”
“I love Italy,” Jeremy said.
“Where would you head off to?”
“I’ve traveled a lot. When I want to get out of town, I actually just go to Door County. The Fex and I have had a house there for years.”
“Who gets the house in the divorce? Or is that too touchy a question?”
“No, not at all. We’re sharing it. We both love it so much, and the kids do, too. We’re going to split time.”
“That sounds civilized,” I said. “Good for you. How old are your children?”
“They’re nine and six,” he said.
More plates were delivered then—scallops, ravioli and mussels. Our conversation kept rolling, and it felt then as if we were on a minivacation, someplace warm, in the middle of a cold winter.
When the waitress delivered the dessert menu, Jeremy excused himself to the bathroom.
“Great guy, isn’t he?” the waitress asked congenially. She had long, curly hair like mine, but hers was dark and pulled back in a wide orange headband.
“Yeah, he seems cool.”
“He is,” she said. “And he tips good. Everyone around here loves him.”
“I just met him recently.”
“Ah, so you’ve managed to avoid the divorce? Nice luck.”
I frowned. “It sounds like it’s going well. Their breakup.”
She raised her eyebrows, shook her head. She looked over her shoulder than back at me. “I’ve heard it’s nasty.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I had never been a waiter but it didn’t seem as if she should be gossiping about a good client. Or maybe she was doing so because she had a crush on Jeremy and was trying to wave me off?
Jeremy returned then. He and the waitress chatted about a bartender they both knew who had recently moved. The waitress left.
And I remained slightly jarred.
But any suspicions that arose during my chat with the waitress didn’t stop me from returning his kiss. His kiss, in the car, in front of my condo building.
15
Jeremy put his warm hands lightly on my cheeks and drew me to him, kissed me once, pausing to look at me before putting his surprisingly soft lips back on mine.
I can’t say how long this went on. I’d been transported. When we finally broke apart, I was nearly breathless.
He looked a bit shaken himself. “Well,” he said, “that was…”
“…good,” I said.
“Great,” he said.
“I’ll up you again,” I said. “That was amazing.”
“That kiss—” he leaned closer to me “—was fan-fucking-tastic.” He gave me the most adorable smile. “Do you mind if I swear?”
I squeezed my eyes shut, giddy. Although I was, as I’d told Madeline, trying to quit swearing, the truth was, I loved swearing. But in a classic double-standard, I often found it crass when other people did. However, Jeremy sounded so good. Crass from that gorgeous face and that gorgeous mouth was just fine.
I opened my eyes. “No, I don’t mind.”
That started another round of kissing. Things were getting a little heated. Eventually, it dawned on me that now would be the time when I could ask him up to my condo. If I was going to ask him to come up.
But…what was that odd feeling? It was awkwardness, I realized. My place was where I’d spent a lot of time with Sam. The place where Theo had lived with me rather recently. And the fact was, my place was sacred to me. The fact that it had been broken into last year only made it more so.
Reluctantly, I moved back from the gentle pull of Jeremy’s lips. “I should go. I have an early morning tomorrow.”
“It’s Saturday tomorrow.”
“I know but I still need to get to work…” I let my words die away. I was about to say that I needed to do some work at the law firm, since I’d spent time at the gallery this week. But then I remembered Jeremy didn’t know Izzy McNeil, the lawyer. He only knew Izzy Smith, the art assistant.
I wondered how that made me seem to Jeremy. What did my position in the art world do to shape Jeremy’s impression of me? Did that concept make me seem creative and artistic and maybe a little wild? Would he like me more if he knew I was a lawyer? Would that make me seem smarter? What about a criminal defense lawyer? He began kissing me again, and my questions quickly fell to the wayside.
After a minute, he stopped. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll let you go.” He leaned his forehead on mine. “But only if you agree to go out with me again.”
“Sold,” I said.
I kissed him once more and got out of the car.
16
Every Friday night, Madeline met with other Japanese women. They were the only Japanese people she knew. Like she’d told Izzy, she had been adopted by Americans when she was an infant. Her desire to know more about women from Japan—and therefore herself—was how she’d found herself involved in this Japanese dyeing and weaving class.
Solace. That’s what she sought there, from people who were inherently like her. And after what she’d received just before she got here, she desperately needed solace.
You will never be forgiven for what you did.
She could probably call her family for support, but she simply wouldn’t turn to them for something like this. She didn’t dislike her adoptive parents. She had always respected them, appreciated them most years (except for in high school, when she’d hated them in the requisite teenage way that she still felt guilty abou
t). And yet she’d always felt detached from them, from the corn and cow farms in Wisconsin, from others in their town (although everyone had been kind and still were, when she went home, infrequently, to visit). Mostly, her parents visited her so they could take in Chicago, so they could show relief that she’d ended up here, somewhat close to them, and not in New York.
New York. Madeline had fled there when she was eighteen, deliriously happy to have been accepted to a city college. In Manhattan, she’d found herself immersed in the melting pot of everything that was the city. She’d stumbled into the art world by mistake, then dove into that world with fierce determination and ambition. She did well. But not as well as she wanted. It was so very tough to make it in the New York art scene.
That was when she got her inheritance—from a trust fund in Japan. Or at least “trust fund” was what she understood. Her parents had hired an attorney, who learned that the gift had been made by one of her birth parents or a family member, and that they wanted to remain anonymous.
Her adoptive parents were great about it. They had asked if she wanted help managing the trust—it was a lot of money. But they also wanted to know how it made her feel, this gesture coming from Japan, from her biological family. They worried that she would be emotionally wounded somehow.
But the inheritance had beguiled her with the opposite effect—she felt comforted; she felt taken care of. She had never really felt Japanese, but the gift helped tremendously.
Of course, there had been many legal hurdles to go through. Her attorneys had explained this was not uncommon with an inheritance that size. But after everything was settled, even with monstrous legal bills, she had more money than she would ever need.
Enough so that, soon after, when she heard from a friend that Chicago was a different kind of art city and in some ways much friendlier and more open-hearted, she knew it was time to leave New York. To spread her wings, with the lift that was now beneath her, both financially and emotionally.
And now, decades later, here she was with these other Japanese women from Chicago, all of them leaning in over another kind of stewing pot. A real one—a vat full of what would soon be indigo. The vat sometimes reminded Madeline of a witches’ cauldron, steam billowing from the top.
“It’s only supposed to take half an hour,” one woman said. It was Amaya, the woman she’d seen outside the club with Isabel.
Amaya had joined the group at the same time as Madeline. She even bought two sculptures from Madeline after she learned of the gallery. But Amaya tended toward pessimism, and although Madeline wasn’t particularly superstitious, the weaving process was so organic, so filled with spirit that she irrationally feared that Amaya’s bad attitude could sour the process.
Weaving was Madeline’s one consistent connection to her Japanese heritage. Evenings such as these, the process of dyeing and weaving, were how she escaped. And after the email, she needed escape.
This was the moment in the dyeing process that she liked the most—when the contents of the pot turned into something different entirely and then from their depths something floated to the surface and then…
“It’ll come,” Madeline said to Amaya. It has to come, she thought.
“Maybe not,” Amaya said. She spoke in a soft, sing-song voice and looked right at Madeline. The words sounded like a taunt.
Madeline glared at her. As she’d told Isabel, she and Amaya seemed to have struck up some kind of unspoken dislike for one another.
After last week’s group, Madeline had looked up the name Amaya, and found that it meant “night rain,” which seemed just about right. Amaya’s personality tended toward dark and inky.
“There it is!” one of the woman said excitedly, pointing.
They all peered closer as a copper-green film rose to the surface, slowly, as if it were stalking them.
The thought of that—stalking—made Madeline shiver. Her art, for one, was being stalked. Somehow, someway—she couldn’t get her head around it—those art works were being stolen from her and replaced with forgeries. She’d sold forged art. The thought of that caused intense shame, in addition to many other emotions. And now that email…
“Are you all right, Madeline?” one of the women asked.
She opened her eyes, realizing that she’d closed them against the shame, the fear, the vague but piercing feeling of betrayal.
What she saw jarred her. She had accidentally leaned too close to the pot and the green scum seemed to loom into her entire field of vision, as if it were lurching toward her.
She pulled herself back and fell onto a wooden chair behind her.
The women turned to her with questions of concern. All except Amaya, Madeline noticed, who stayed peering into the vat. Madeline assured the others she was fine, reminded them that they had the indigo to tend to. After a few more questions, they turned back to the vat.
But Madeline could not seem to find her breath, felt her heart pattering fast, as if she were in a corner, panting.
“Stop.” She said the word under her breath to whoever was doing this to her. And then, although she’d never begged anyone for anything in her life, not once, she sent a beseeching prayer in her mind to the person, the thing that felt like a force. Please stop doing this to me.
17
When I woke Saturday morning, I immediately thought of Jeremy and smiled. Then I peeked out my bedroom curtains and saw snow falling on the city. At the sight, I got a quickening—an excited feeling like the one a child gets when they realize the universe is shaking up their snow globe and the day is uncharted territory.
Since I didn’t have to dress for the gallery, had no clients to see on a Saturday and no court to attend to, I happily threw on jeans and pushed my feet into fur-lined, brown suede boots with gold tassels. I topped the outfit with a brown cashmere sweater, tied my red hair in a scarf and was off to Bristol & Associates to catch up on things I’d missed that week.
I expected to find the place empty, but when I arrived, Maggie was there. She wasn’t as cheerful and focused as she usually was on weekday mornings. I could tell because I stood in her doorway for at least ten seconds before she realized I was there, and even then she had to blink a few times as if to clear her brain.
“Oh,” she said. “Hi…” Her voice died away, a confused look on her face, as if she’d forgotten my name.
“Izzy McNeil?” I said. “Your best friend?”
She shook her head. “Sorry.”
I laughed. “Pregnancy brain?” That was what Maggie had been attributing everything to lately—losing a file on the way to court, arriving in court unable to remember what kind of continuance we wanted, picking up the phone to call a state’s attorney she’d known for years and forgetting his phone number.
I couldn’t hold the question in any longer. “Verdict?” I asked hesitantly. I’d waited for Maggie for six hours, hoping for a verdict on behalf of the Cortadero family before the judge excused the jury for the night.
The question about what verdict had been rendered was always a difficult question to ask. Even the most revered trial lawyers received guilty verdicts and the toughest defense lawyers lost what were assumed to be slam-dunk cases.
“NG,” Maggie said. Not guilty.
I let out a whoop and stepped to her desk, giving her a high-five. “Congrats!”
Maggie and I grinned at each other. My phone rang then. Madeline Saga, the display read.
I answered.
“Izzy.”
“Hey, Madeline. How are you?”
“Well…” Silence. “Izzy, where are you?”
“I’m at the law office, sitting here with my pregnant friend.”
“Oh, that sounds lovely.” Madeline’s voice sounded delicate somehow. “Izzy, is there any way you could come in to the gallery? I’d like to show you something.” A pause. “Rather I…I need to show you something.”
I realized Madeline’s voice not only sounded delicate, but fearful.
“I’ll be the
re in a half hour.”
Outside the snow was slowing. Plows and trucks criss-crossed the city and spewed salt in fast streams that looked like smoke, but not much else was moving. I had to walk four blocks before I scored a cab.
As I took the taxi to the gallery, I opened the window, despite the cold. Somehow, over the past few days or so—since I’d met Madeline, I guess—I’d become more aware of the sounds of Chicago. When we were out the other night, Madeline had said something about using all her senses as a gallery owner and an art collector. And later, she had said that anything could be art—most art simply showed a different way of looking at life. The ideas were fascinating and questions had been growing in my mind since then. Could sounds be art? Could scents—something you had to smell to experience?
For the last few days, I had paid attention to sounds. I found such an exercise eerie, in a way, because once I tuned in it struck me that those sounds had been there all my life, just waiting for me to turn up the volume.
Now, through the cab window, I listened to the distant chug of the El, the screech of a snowplow’s brakes, a siren in the distance, a lonely sound that waxed and waned. All these things made me realize how many lives—each one its own form of artwork—existed in the city.
By the time I reached the gallery, the snow had stopped and the sun was shining, making Michigan Avenue look like a star in daylight.
The fluffy white snow reflecting the light would soon turn slushy gray. But not now. People were rousing themselves from homes and businesses, stepping out to check the now-friendly weather. A buoyancy played in the air. It was Saturday, it was sunny, it had snowed and it had stopped—the perfect recipe for Chicago city-wide happiness.
I wondered what Madeline wanted me to see.
18
I found Madeline in her office, which was tucked in a corner at the back of the building. I’d never really been in there before, and I looked around. It was tiny but fanciful. On one wall, blue curtains were pulled back to show a painting of a window overlooking the Caribbean sea, with islands in the distance.
False Impressions Page 6
