The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  The black curtain across the entrance to the back room had fallen closed, and Maeve emerged from behind it. She came straight to me with silent steps through the long, narrow space of the room, in that gliding way she had. She was the same, regal and elegant; she was even wearing the same pelt-like dress I’d first seen her in, or so I thought. When she got closer I could see that it was different, a lighter colour, a newer cut. She kissed me on the cheek and gripped my shoulder briefly with her hand. ‘Oh, Julia,’ she said, expressively. Her eyes were heavily made-up but the pale concealer underneath didn’t disguise the dark shadows there. The longer I looked at her the older she seemed.

  ‘Tell me how Ralph is doing. Eve says he’s very fragile.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Seeing Maeve here, in this place of hers, it was hard not to remember that it was Maeve’s connections with them both that had helped to cement the relationship between Grey and Ingrid. I wondered if she ever regretted it.

  ‘It’s so wonderful that you could make it. Let’s catch up later. You’re staying at Robert’s? Eve told me,’ she explained.

  She drifted away to greet some people who were just arriving. It was her element, her space. The artist was the real focus of attention, the star of the show – a calm-looking guy in the other corner, younger than I expected him to be – but Maeve was a force of gravity with a deeper kind of power. Many of the guests showed a kind of a deference or wariness towards her and she moved among them gracefully, an attentive host.

  Grey was standing across the room now, talking to a man and a woman, shaking hands and moving away as they went to look at the paintings. A young man with dark hair and black-framed glasses was standing nearby, alone, and they almost collided as Grey backed into him. They appeared to know each other and spoke briefly. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. The noise in the room had grown louder, voices bouncing off the concrete walls. They seemed to be arguing. For a moment I saw Ralph at Ingrid and Grey’s Sydney wedding party, Grey’s hand on Ralph’s chest. Now Grey lifted his hand, but didn’t touch the other man, who seemed to stand expectantly, waiting for the push or strike that didn’t come. Grey lowered his hand and turned away. It looked a lot like he had told the other guy to fuck off. The dark-haired guy had a drink in his hand, red wine in a plastic cup, and he drained it. He looked in my direction and met my eye as he lowered the cup. I looked away. Trinh turned up then. I had invited her a few days before with all the nervousness of asking someone out on a first date, but hadn’t been sure if she would actually show up. She was holding a real glass with white wine in it.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, those plastic cups are awful,’ she laughed.

  She stepped over and caught the arm of the guy with glasses. I cursed the elegant way she had of avoiding questions.

  ‘Richard,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m just about to leave,’ he said.

  She was still for a second and then reached her arm around behind me, as if presenting me to him.

  ‘Have you met Julia?’

  ‘No.’

  We shook hands. He put his back in his pockets, nervously.

  Julia’s an old friend of Ingrid’s.’

  He swallowed.

  ‘Did you know her?’ I asked.

  ‘Richard was in the program, in Ingrid’s year,’ Trinh said, before he could speak.

  He nodded and pushed his glasses back with one finger. Light reflected off the lenses so that I couldn’t see his eyes well, and then he moved a little to the side, and his eyes were dark blue.

  He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  Trinh spoke to him softly. ‘How are you, Richard?’

  ‘Good, good.’

  They talked briefly. Richard knew the artist from college. That’s what he was doing here. They both thought the show was stronger than the last one. His eyes strayed towards the door.

  ‘Well, if you have to go …’ Trinh said, obviously not anxious for him to stay. ‘Let’s get together soon. I know Julia would love to chat to you more. Right, Julia?’

  He took a small step back, as though I might be carrying something contagious. Then he paused and pulled out a wallet from the back pocket of his jeans, and took a card from it and handed it to me. ‘Call me if you like,’ he said, and didn’t look at me, and grasped Trinh’s arm for a moment. He left. Trinh watched him sadly.

  ‘It’s been hard on Richard,’ she said.

  I nodded. I could see Grey watching Richard from the corner of his eye, looking away as he moved out through the door.

  ‘I haven’t seen him around. I think he’s taking a year off. Anyway.’ She smiled firmly in a way that suggested a change of subject, and I put away my questions about how well Richard had known Ingrid. ‘Here you are. Let’s look at these paintings. Do you think anyone else is?’ She linked her arm into mine. With her high heels on she almost made it to my height.

  We looked at all the paintings, one by one. When we reached the last one on the walls and found ourselves in the corner, furthest from the door, we stood there for a minute and watched the crowd. The room was full by now. Trinh turned to me with a resigned, apologetic face.

  ‘Look, sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s none of my business.’

  I waited. ‘What?’ I asked, eventually.

  ‘Jones,’ she said, and focused her eyes on the painting next to us, a woman in profile, collarbones showing, in a red, sleeveless dress. ‘He doesn’t often mention that he’s married.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ I said. Somehow I’d already known.

  ‘She’s away a lot,’ Trinh admitted, as if that explained everything.

  ‘Why do you call him that?’ I asked, looking for a way to change the subject, not sure how. I’d seen the spines of his books on the shelf in his office, the ones he’d authored and edited, but they didn’t show a first name or initial.

  ‘Call him what?’

  Jones. What’s his name? His other name.’

  ‘Philip,’ she told me, her eyes serious. ‘Don’t mention it to him. He hates it.’

  When I got home it was late, probably too late to call, but I got Richard’s card out from my pocket anyway. It was a plain white card with his name in capitals and a 212 phone number. Richard Evans. I dialled it, thinking of that moment between him and Grey at the gallery when Grey’s hand had risen. My curiosity grew, and I held my breath, waiting for his voice. A machine answered.

  By the time a week had passed I’d left two messages with Richard Evans and hung up on his machine once. That step back he had taken before he had given me his card rankled with me somehow, and intrigued me. The shape of his eyes, the way they disappeared and shone behind his glasses, was very sharp in my mind and I wanted to see them again.

  I stood by the phone, thinking about calling him again, when the yellow phone book caught my eye, sitting in the shelves under the phone. There were a lot of Richard Evanses but with his phone number I was able to find his address. I wrote it on the back of his card. Uptown. The phone book flapped shut. It was mid-morning. I rinsed out my coffee cup and left.

  The front door of Richard Evans’s building was not in great shape; it looked as though someone had taken a small axe to the lock. It had once been a nice door, stained wood with a recessed glass panel. There was no answer when I pressed the black button next to 14B. The battered door swung open with a push and I climbed the four flights of stairs to his apartment. I wrote a note, crumpled it up, wrote another one and pushed it under the door. By then it was getting towards afternoon. I went downstairs and called Jones at his office from the payphone at the end of the street. He answered right away.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s me. Do you want to get lunch?’

  He paused. ‘No.’ ‘OK.’

  ‘I don’t have time. But I’ll see you tonight.’

  ‘I’m busy.’

  I hung up.

  I called Richard again the nex
t day, deciding that it would be my last attempt. It was early. He answered after only two rings.

  ‘You’re persistent,’ he said when he heard my name. It didn’t sound like a compliment.

  We arranged to have coffee. He sounded reluctant. I remembered my missed meeting with Trinh.

  ‘If you don’t show up, I know where you live,’ I told him.

  He sighed. ‘Apparently so.’

  Riding up there on the subway I thought about my conversation with Fleur at her studio, sitting on the beanbags with bottles of beer in our hands. Her asking me to sit had seemed like the prelude to a sharing of confidences, but it hadn’t really worked out that way. She had started out telling me about what it had been like to meet Ingrid in Venice, and how she had hoped from the first that her father would like her. ‘I’d never met anyone from Australia before,’ she said. Her nose wrinkled. ‘Except for artists there at the Biennale. But Ingrid was a real person.’ Something of her opinion of other artists came through in this reflection.

  Ingrid was probably closer to Fleur’s age than to Grey’s, but when they first met Fleur would have been barely a teenager and Ingrid a grown woman – a huge gap. But thinking about it, looking at Fleur, it was hard to imagine her ever really being a child. Her way of holding herself – sitting there on the beanbag, knees together, long shins splayed out, sneakered feet pointed in – declared how young she was, but the look in her eyes every now and again – watchful, unsmiling, calculating, intelligent – made me wonder if the teenage act was mostly just a useful mask.

  ‘I was glad they got married,’ she said with a shrug.

  ‘How did Ingrid like it here, in New York?’ I asked.

  She stared at the floor without seeming to see it, and a smile played around her mouth. ‘She helped me find this place,’ she said, happily. ‘Well, she was with me when I came to look at it the first time. It was that summer she was here, when her and Dad got engaged. She would always bring me croissants from Balthazar when she came to visit. The chocolate ones.’ She was talking about a restaurant and pastry shop not too far away from the studio. Ingrid had always loved sweet things.

  ‘I suppose you’d say that we were good friends,’ she continued. ‘My friends – some of them have stepmothers who are real bitches, you know? Ingrid wasn’t like that. She never tried to be my mother. She never told me what to do, what to wear, all that crap.’

  This was the most Fleur said about what her relationship with Ingrid was like, and she wouldn’t be drawn out about how Ingrid had really liked living here, in the city, with her, with her father. I wanted to know about the rest of it, the triangle of Fleur and Maeve and Grey and how Ingrid had reshaped it, but there was no asking those questions. There was a subtly guarded aspect to the way Fleur talked, and held back some things and offered others in their place. She didn’t ask me about my own friendship with Ingrid. I was glad of it.

  ‘I miss her,’ she said at the end, quietly, resignedly, and I knew that the conversation was over.

  As she opened the front door for me, I took a look back around the studio. There was a small room sectioned off right towards the back of the space. The door was half-open, and offered a glimpse of a futon bed, low off the ground, covered in a rumpled Indian cotton bedspread. Seeing the bed there made me wonder if she actually lived here, or spent more time here than she did at home uptown. I was suddenly curious. ‘Who has the lease on this place?’ I asked. Fleur must have been not even fourteen when she took it.

  The usual wariness wasn’t there in Fleur’s face as she looked at me. ‘Maeve,’ she said, simply, as though she were surprised I needed to ask. ‘Maeve has the lease. Jointly.’

  Heavy rain clouds had massed low over the sky so that it looked almost like evening when I left the building. Thunder sounded, far away. Or a truck rumbling. Up ahead, a long, vertical sign on the side of a building glowed bright red against the grey of the sky and street. Parking the letters formed with little light bulbs, one blinking on the ‘P’. The wide entranceway to the garage smelled like grease and smoke.

  The train had stalled in its tunnel as I was thinking about this, and the overhead lights flickered. Most of the passengers stared ahead, some glanced nervously from side to side. The gears ground into action and we moved again.

  Richard had agreed to meet me at a coffee shop not far from his house. When I arrived he was already there, a coffee and an open book sitting in front of him, forehead resting in his hand, elbow on the table. He poured sugar into his cup from a glass dispenser and stirred it while he read.

  He rose to stand when he saw me, and sat down again. I ordered coffee and a slice of cherry pie.

  ‘I’m sorry for stalking you,’ I said.

  He gave me a hard stare. ‘You’re a friend of Ingrid’s? You were a friend of hers?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He looked down at his coffee. The surface of it was flat as a mirror. The pie came with two forks. I offered him one and he looked embarrassed and refused. He shifted in his seat uncomfortably. The pie was good.

  ‘Look, I probably shouldn’t have given you my card,’ he said. ‘If it’s OK with you – I’m dealing with this in my own time. I’m really not ready to have a big conversation about Ingrid.’

  His tense face, the tightness in his voice around the sound of her name – wanting to say it, not wanting to say it – reminded me to always begin with the assumption that any man who knew her had probably been in love with her.

  ‘Well, OK then,’ I said. ‘You could have said that on the phone.’

  He tilted his head in a gesture that wasn’t a nod or a shake. He had a nice face and I wanted to see that lovesick look go away from it. There was a shadow on his jaw, as though he hadn’t shaved that day, but he appeared like the kind of person who usually did. He was wearing a buttoned shirt that looked as though it should have a tie worn with it but there was no tie.

  ‘So, what do you want to talk about?’ I asked.

  He didn’t say anything. I remembered the way he and Grey had stood there at the gallery in their little stand-off, and I liked him, probably because Grey obviously didn’t.

  ‘Do you want to tell me about that fight you were having with Grey at the gallery that night?’

  His eyes were dark with anger when he met mine, and he shook his head.

  ‘Some other time then.’

  His look softened.

  ‘Tell me about you,’ I said. ‘Are you still a student there at Columbia? What are you working on?’

  ‘No, no,’ he replied. ‘I’m taking a year off. I was working on Greek inscriptions.’

  ‘So what are you doing now?’

  He drank his coffee. ‘Do you always ask this many questions?’

  I laughed.

  ‘Are you like a professional sleuth?’ he asked.

  ‘That sounds very glamorous. No. It’s nothing like that. I work in a bookstore, or I did – I still do – and I’m going to law school. It’s all very boring. I was at university with Ingrid.’

  He gave a little flinch when I said her name.

  ‘OK, sorry. No talking about her.’

  ‘I’m a graphologist,’ he offered. ‘And I do some translation work. From French and German.’

  I didn’t know what being a graphologist meant. He explained that it had to do with the analysis of handwriting. It was some kind of ‘consulting work’ he said, for a couple of companies.

  ‘When they’re hiring people, or sometimes when they’re promoting someone, they bring me in to look over the materials of their job candidates. Forms they’ve filled in. It’s a kind of human resources thing.’

  ‘So you analyse the writing of people applying for jobs.’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was still confusing.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you. Write something.’ He pushed a paper napkin towards me. ‘Do you have a pen?’ There was one in my bag.

  ‘What should I write?’ I asked.

  ‘
Anything.’

  Cherry Pie, I wrote. Caffe Latte.

  He almost smiled. ‘Write your name. Your address,’ he said.

  I wrote it down.

  ‘You have my phone number already,’ I said. He flushed slightly.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I meant – it’s for the numbers. How you write numbers. Never mind.’

  He took my paper napkin and pen and dissected my handwriting for me.

  ‘First we look at the overall shape of the writing,’ he said. ‘Does it sit on a straight line – are the letters big, small, evenly shaped, formed consistently or not, and so on.’ His hand hovered over the writing, holding the pen. ‘The baseline is mostly straight, writing has a strong slant. Hmm. Passionate.’ He gave a little smirk. ‘Your writing is slow – you might be stubborn. But maybe it’s the surface you’re working with.’ The pen had snagged on the thin surface of the napkin. ‘Interesting arcade connection in this one place … so much space between words. You keep people at a distance. But there’s a possessive streak too.’ He pointed to a loop in my letter ‘S’.

  ‘You can tell that from my writing?’

  ‘It’s not one hundred per cent reliable. But there’s a lot of information there.’

  ‘Do you actually believe in it?’

  He took his time thinking about it. ‘It started out as just a curiosity for me. Something else to learn. I liked the idea of it at the time. Sometimes I see things that make me think it has some interpretive power. Other times it’s just an exercise. I don’t know.’

  ‘I guess you must be good at it.’

  He shrugged. ‘I was well trained. I work fast.’

  ‘How do these people feel about baring their soul to you in their job applications?’

  ‘Oh, they never know about it,’ he said, studying the formation of my capital letters. ‘It’s all very discreet. I get paid a lot because it’s all pretty hush-hush. Graphology – well, it’s not exactly regarded as being scientific these days. It’s not something that these companies want to advertise that they do.’