The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘But you’re showing me.’

  She leaned forward, and then back again. ‘It’s all over now,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to have this … stuff anymore.’

  ‘But why are you giving this to me – why didn’t you give it back to Grey?’

  She almost snorted. ‘You don’t need to ask me that. You can figure that out for yourself.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look – I don’t know. I don’t want to give it to Gil – if you want to give it to him, fine, it’s all probably his somehow. But if you do, don’t tell him it came from me.’

  ‘I’m not giving it to him.’

  ‘I’m serious.’ Her voice was stern now. ‘Seriously. I don’t want him to know it came from me. When you take it away, as far as I’m concerned I didn’t have it and it was something you found in Ingrid’s office. Julia, I mean it.’

  ‘I’m not going to give it to him.’ ‘OK.’

  She breathed sharply.

  ‘You’re afraid of him,’ I said.

  She looked hard at a corner of the ceiling. I thought of Grey’s cool demeanour, the sense of rigid self-control he presented and seemed to want to hide. I wondered for a crazy moment if he might be one of Trinh’s clients. Or a client on the other side of the business, the one who paid to hold a whip. That seemed to fit better. It was still unlikely, and I knew that Trinh would never tell me if it was true.

  ‘Trinh – ‘

  Julia.’ She interrupted me. ‘I’ve met him, and I wasn’t blind about how things were for Ingrid. He’s a scary guy. But whatever was going on between them – like I told you, it was private. If Ingrid had wanted me to know she would have told me. But why would she have told me?’

  ‘Why did she give this to you?’

  She considered the question. It probably wasn’t one she could completely answer.

  ‘She knew I didn’t ask questions and that I was good at keeping things quiet. That might not be the answer to your question but it’s true all the same.’

  ‘Did Grey ever ask you if you had this?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Alright – did he ever ask you if you had anything that belonged to Ingrid?’

  ‘I gave him everything that we knew we had from her office – I told you, the box I gave you was something we found after all that, and I wasn’t in the mood for more catching up with him.’

  I persisted. ‘Did he know Ingrid had this? Was he looking for it?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that. I mean, I don’t know.’

  ‘Why are you giving this to me?’

  ‘I already told you – I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want anything to do with it. You do what you want with it. If I were you, I’d burn it up.’

  ‘You could have done that.’

  ‘Well, you’re saving me the trouble, aren’t you?’ She smiled.

  The paper in my hand was brittle with dried paint, as though it could crumble under any force at all. I felt a terrible sense of sadness and constriction.

  ‘Listen, Julia,’ Trinh said quietly. ‘Think carefully about what you want to do with this. I mean it when I say it would be the best idea to put it away, get rid of it, whatever. I like you. I liked Ingrid too. I’m sorry about what happened to her.’

  ‘She was so unhappy, wasn’t she?’ It wasn’t really a question.

  ‘She was unhappy, like everybody else.’ Trinh sighed, irritation in her voice. ‘But to Ingrid, unhappiness seemed like the world’s biggest injustice.’ She shook her head. ‘Like I told you, I liked her. No-one deserved to be that unhappy. She was really miserable towards the end there – I thought so anyway. She seemed to have so much.’ She hesitated. ‘Potential? In the beginning. It was appealing. She seemed more shocked than anyone else at how it all turned out.’

  I wondered how much Trinh had really seen and intuited – probably everything, if she had wanted to, but I wasn’t sure that she had. Her arms were folded and it looked like she was finished talking for the night. I pushed the papers together, the drawings, the paintings, the photographs, and tapped the edges on the table so they were sitting evenly, and put them back into the envelope. It just fitted into my shoulder bag.

  ‘Please think about it, Trinh,’ I said.

  She looked at me. ‘About what?’

  ‘Telling me. Whatever it is you aren’t telling me.’ I waited.

  ‘Look, I’m trusting you here,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t tell Grey it came from you,’ I said. ‘I promise.’

  ‘OK. Good.’

  She saw me to the door.

  ‘It’s up to you. But I think you’d be fucking out of your mind to go to Gil with this. Do whatever you want to gather up her stuff, put it all to rest, but leave him alone.’

  She lifted her arm to the door, a tracery of black lines. For the first time I wondered if the tattoo had hurt – of course it had – the soft skin of the underneath of her forearms looked taut and thin.

  ‘Let’s get a drink soon,’ she said. ‘You know where to find me. If you can agree to not talk about this.’ She moved one bare foot so that it was on top of the other one, resting it lightly there. ‘I’d like to catch up,’ she said.

  I was halfway out the door. It smelled as though someone in the building was cooking bread.

  ‘OK. That would be great.’

  ‘Take care.’

  I didn’t hear the door close until I was all the way down the stairs.

  The subway was crowded almost to standing room even this late in the evening and I stood and held on to the strap swinging from the high rail, feeling more and more confused about the contents of my bag. When I arrived at the apartment building there was a light in Mrs Bee’s window and I thought about knocking but changed my mind. Her door was closed. The apartment upstairs was dark and I switched on the light and set my bag down just inside the door. I thought about calling Richard. I thought about getting something to eat and forgetting about the envelope in my bag. The kitchen smelled like stale coffee and there was a stack of glasses in the sink. The buzzer sounded.

  I pressed the button and spoke. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello.’ It was Jones.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Well, ask me up and I’ll tell you.’

  He was upstairs quickly and before I knew it we were on the stripped mattress, the front door barely closed, and on the floor.

  ‘So what are you doing here?’ I asked afterwards.

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

  ‘I mean, how did you know I was back?’

  ‘Talked to Trinh just now,’ he said. ‘And I was in the neighbourhood. Passing by. Good timing.’

  ‘Good timing,’ I repeated.

  ‘It’s a bit. spartan, isn’t it?’ he asked, looking at the bed.

  My back was getting stiff from lying on the floor. I sat up. ‘I just got here,’ I said.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.

  ‘You know me too well.’

  He pulled on some clothes and left the room. I thought about my bag inside the front door and the cardboard box under the dresser. I wondered what Trinh had told him, and waited for him to ask me about the envelope. He didn’t.

  We ate Chinese food that he took out of takeaway containers when it arrived and put onto plates, and he left. I took the envelope from my bag and put it into the second drawer of the dresser, and then started unpacking my suitcase, putting clothes on top of it. Underwear, shirts, jeans. I made the bed with the sheets from Matt’s laundry basket and lay down. The sheets smelled like rain and paint and reminded me of the Paris hotel.

  The envelope was still there in the morning. I’d half-expected it to be gone, half-hoping it was a dream, but it was there, blank and yellow at the bottom of the drawer.

  I spent the next few days going out for coffee, walking to the bookshop down the avenue, buying a novel or a magazine, reading it on the couch, going out for more food, reading, sleeping, letting the thoughts about the envelope tick away in
a part of my mind that I pushed back from consciousness. Peter called with news of Jenny – no news at all really, just to tell me that she was improving as expected. Matt dropped in and out quickly, always rushed.

  ‘More snail trouble?’ I asked him one night when he came inside looking harried, grabbed something from his room and made to leave again.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I wish. Fucking artists.’

  I wasn’t sure if he was sleeping at the apartment or not.

  Jones was back again at around the same time the next night, and the night after that, and that time we went out for a drink later, down to the Lilac.

  ‘Are you keeping an eye on me?’ I asked him as we walked downtown.

  He gave me a questioning, critical stare. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Oh, forget it.’ I pulled my coat tighter. ‘Where’s your wife anyway?’ The only thing I knew about her, from Trinh, was that she travelled a lot for work.

  ‘Berlin,’ he said briefly, without looking at me.

  We came to a traffic light and stopped. We didn’t talk the rest of the way there, and when we arrived he pulled me by the wrist into the one of the bathrooms and shut the door.

  I looked at the lock, which he hadn’t turned, but he just stood and leaned his back against the door and kept his grip on me.

  ‘Don’t worry. And don’t talk.’

  I stayed standing, looking into his eyes for a moment, challenging. He lost patience and broke the gaze, an irritated smile on his face before he moved one hand to my shoulder, pushing me down. I was addicted by now to that sense of surrender he inspired in me, even as a faint worry about it floated beside and past me at these moments. The floor was cold and hard against my knees, bringing me completely into my body. We had perfected this particular tableau and we both played it well that night, conditioned by touches of tenderness where I wouldn’t have expected them and a shared, mournful sense that it would soon be over.

  Trinh was there at the bar when we came out a few minutes later, and she smiled at me as I straightened my skirt. We all sat at the bar together, and more people arrived that she knew, and I drank my drinks and forgot about the envelope. Trinh was at her most charming and introduced me to her friends. Jones was soon surrounded by three women who hung on his words. ‘New students,’ Trinh whispered in my ear, and raised her eyebrows. I caught something from their conversation about diplomacy in the Roman empire that made it sound like an elaborate sexual game.

  ‘He never actually sleeps with them, you know,’ she said. ‘It’s all foreplay.’

  I must have looked sceptical.

  ‘It’s some twisted ethical thing he has.’ She sucked the last of her drink through the thin straw so that it made a slurping sound. ‘No students.’ She rolled her eyes. Just hope you get to avoid the lecture on the subject. Very unoriginal.’

  It was hard to imagine him feeling the need to give me that particular lecture. But it did clarify the sense I had that his relationship with Ingrid had not involved sex; it had been intense in its own teacher-student way, but not like that. Somehow the thought of her there in his office, talking over her work, discussing her next brilliant project, was just as hard to bear in the intimacy it implied as it would have been to think of her half-dressed on his desk. I remembered the strand of long, gold hair caught in the carpet on the floor that morning and blinked it away.

  ‘How’s work for you?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, fine, you know,’ she said. ‘Down to a couple of shifts a week. Less.’ Her gaze wandered around the room. ‘I’m getting really bored to tell you the truth. So.’ Her eyes met mine. ‘No news?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to talk about it,’ I said.

  ‘Just checking in.’

  ‘No news.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Did you send Jones to keep an eye on me?’

  She looked exasperated and sorry for me. ‘Your paranoia really is kind of charming, up to a point,’ she said. ‘It’s neurotic in a cute way. But don’t let it get out of hand.’

  She looked me over. ‘Anyway. It’s pretty obvious that Jones doesn’t need to be asked.’

  He didn’t show up the next night. When it got past 9 pm I went downstairs and knocked on Mrs Bee’s door.

  She answered right away.

  ‘There you are,’ she said, and showed me in. She was wearing layers of dark green clothes, the colour of ivy and pine needles.

  I told her a bit about the hospital, the time in Sydney. I wasn’t sure what to say about the photographs I’d seen on the plane, or my visit to Fleur, the envelope upstairs in my room, any of it. Part of me thought that she guessed everything in her psychic way; part of me wanted to keep it from her just because of that.

  ‘Let me know when you want to read the cards,’ she said just before I left.

  ‘I forgot you did cards.’

  She shrugged. ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Tarot cards.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Maybe next time. But I’m a sceptic, remember?’

  ‘Just let me know. I’ll see you for tea tomorrow.’

  ‘See you then.’

  I went down the next afternoon. I had just finished my fourth novel since I had arrived, an Agatha Christie.

  She looked at my cup and tilted it around for a while.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s a complicated situation.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’ She put the cup down.

  She saw me eyeing a Scrabble box on the bookshelf against the wall. ‘Do you play?’ she asked. I said that I used to play. She took it out and we played a game. Art. Part. Apart. Apartment. Lie. Lied. Applied.

  ‘Don’t use any psychic cheating on me,’ I said. ‘Can you tell what letters I have?’

  She laughed and didn’t say. I won.

  ‘You’d better get back up,’ she said as I cleared the letters off the board. ‘He’ll be around soon.’

  I poured the letters from my hand into their little velvet sack. ‘I hate it when you do that.’

  I thought about the bed; Jones liked it unmade now, stripped the sheets off and twisted them into coiled ropes on the floor. The mattress was making graze marks on my skin.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. She paused and her eyes refocused. ‘It’s not who you think I mean.’

  The letter pieces clinked together. Fear fell through me. The envelope, still there in the drawer, seemed like a bright, dangerous beacon in the apartment. For a moment it occurred to me to leave it with Mrs Bee but I dropped the thought.

  Upstairs, I rummaged it out of the drawer and sat down on the bed, spilling the contents next to me. The paintings and drawings were unsigned. They were similar, but not identical, to the images behind Maeve in the photograph. She looked like the artist in this picture, paint stains on her sleeve, but it wasn’t clear whether it was her studio or not, whether these were her paintings or not. Grey seemed to be an equal candidate for frustrated or failed artist, and there he was in the window, arms and legs elegantly crossed. I put the images back into the envelope and put it into my bag. The photograph I had taken from Fleur was inside its book on top of the dresser, the book I had been reading on the plane that time and had never finished. That went into the bag as well. By the time I left I was rushing, dropping my keys as I went to lock the door, waiting impatiently for the lift to arrive.

  The afternoon was already freezing and the street seemed less crowded than usual. Only a couple of people passed me on the walk to the subway. I wanted to get off the street, out of sight. Everyone on the train was reading a newspaper or a book, except for one couple locked in a slow-moving embrace in the middle seat.

  The sides of the cars were lined with posters. The one that faced me was a picture taken from inside a room with a window looking out, someone’s living room perhaps. Two green shrubs in pots had been clipped and shaped into tall rectangles and placed in the window frame so they f
illed the view, taking the place of the Twin Towers. One was slightly taller than the other so they created a perspective effect, the towers seen from an angle, from a distance. The writing at the bottom advertised an art school.

  On the other side of the doors was another poster, an enlarged image of a handwritten note. It was signed by a woman, Maria, 36, Queens. The note briefly described her depression after September 11 and how she had recovered with the help of her friends and family. The poster provided a telephone counselling number at the bottom. There was a similar one further down the car, this one in Spanish, signed by Johnny, 24, Brooklyn.

  Maria’s writing had a sharp slant, narrow loops on her letter ‘G’. I found myself wondering if she might be left-handed. My conversation about handwriting with Richard Evans must have had more impact that it seemed at the time. I told myself to stop it, straightened up, moved my hand to a new grip on the pole. The train rattled around a corner. I turned away from Maria’s note and the topiary towers, but now Johnny’s round and even numerals and letters looked back at me. Information, telephone numbers, the MTA logo were printed at the bottom of the poster in type, and my eyes pulled down to that, absorbing the shape of the machine-made words. The type had a personality of its own, the friendly roundness of the official MTA lettering; the imperious serifs and thin stalks of the ad above it, advertising expensive beer, or cider, something. But handwriting was different from this. It held traces of the person who’d made it. To the eyes of someone like Richard it could reveal secrets. I wondered what he would make of Maria and her possibly left-handed slant.

  The train pulled into the station and I stepped out through the sliding doors as the speakers mumbled the station’s name. It was one stop too soon but the walk wasn’t long. I was walking uptown, but it felt as though the sunset-lit sky behind me would still be showing the hole. Once night fell it always seemed to diminish in intensity, swallowed up into the emptiness of the dark sky.