The Legacy

by Kirsten Tranter

  He leafed through the paper.

  ‘I’m sorry about last night,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said quickly, and his voice was warm. ‘That’s alright.’ He looked up at me.

  ‘So, the Promenade,’ he said, conciliatory. ‘It’s a nice day for it.’ The sky outside was blue. ‘OK.’

  He looked pleased.

  ‘Let me go and run an errand first. I won’t be long.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll be here.’

  The copy shop was several blocks away; I’d passed it on the way to Richard’s building from the subway the previous evening. A row of Xerox machines stood against the glass wall in front. It was empty when I walked in apart from what looked like a college student making multiple copies of pages from her spiral-bound notebook. Her face was pale under the bright lights except for her cheeks, an apricot cosmetic flush made brighter by the glare.

  I chose the machine furthest away from her and fed coins into it, fished out the photograph of Maeve in the studio and placed it on the glass. The buttons on the machine were grimy. I pressed ‘Enlarge’. The original photograph was finegrained. The enlargement that came out of the copier was grainier, but showed more detail. It was still too small. I put the enlarged copy on the glass and pressed the button again. After repeating this process one more time the paintings in the background and on the easel had almost dissolved into pixelated dots, but I was pretty sure that I could read a signature at the bottom of two of them – the tree and one of the crosshatched ones that looked like the purple and white painting of Fleur’s that I’d seen hanging in the Whitney. The corner of the one with the triangle was obscured.

  MW. Two letters down at the bottom right corner, reversed mirror images of one another. Maeve Wheeler. Or perhaps she called herself something different back in those days, whenever those days were. I wondered where this studio was, where the light came from that filtered through the thin curtains at the window. Eve had told me that Maeve came from somewhere in the Midwest – ‘Somewhere surprising,’ she had said, with a look of concern. I had imagined Idaho or Nebraska, one of those big, square, flat states where the wind could rush for miles with nothing much to stand in its way.

  Someone coughed, startling me. It was only the guy behind the counter. He ignored me. There was a small pile of pages by then on top of the machine, copies of these pieces of the photograph. It felt wrong to leave them in the waste basket. I folded them into a messy bundle. There was one colour copy machine in the place. I opened its lid and saw that the glass was covered with some kind of stain, like spilt coffee that had dried. The guy behind the counter spoke to me without looking up. ‘No idea what that is. It won’t come off.’

  I returned to my original machine and pulled out the photograph of Ingrid. The copy of it that slid out was a contrasty translation of the original, all the gentle blue and yellow turned into black and white. It looked as rough as the enlarged enlargements of the other image, a small rectangle placed high up on the white page. The distant buildings behind Ingrid receded into a faint tracery of grey. It wasn’t the same thing at all. I knew the time would come when I would have to return the photo to Fleur. This was a poor replacement.

  ‘There’s a Kinko’s a few blocks away,’ the guy offered as I was putting everything away. He was still staring at the screen of his computer. ‘They might have a colour machine.’ ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ he asked, glancing up finally. Was it an accent thing, or was it just weird to have responded to his comment? I didn’t know.

  ‘Forget it. Thanks.’

  26.

  In the end I couldn’t think of what to say on the phone or in an email, so I just showed up at Grey’s place a few days later. It was the same time of morning as the first time I had visited there, similar kind of cold sunlight chasing away traces of fog, different seasonal angle. I announced myself again with the same doorman behind the massive granite desk in the foyer. As he was calling up to the apartment, I wondered what I would do if Grey said he wouldn’t see me – but then, I told myself, there would be no reason for him to do that. The conversation that gave me entrance was very short and I went to the lifts and straight on up.

  Julia. This is an unexpected pleasure.’ Grey was dressed in a dark grey suit, black tie pulled loose. ‘Come in, please.’

  The apartment was quiet. The lid on the piano keys was shut; had it been open the other time?

  He was so light on his feet – those delicate hands, never a sharp movement, all smoothness and considered motion – it was impossible to reconcile the person in front of me with the Polaroid in Richard’s filing cabinet. The heavy brutality of the bruise, the dark substance of it. Watching him move around the kitchen from the other side of the room I found myself drifting fast into doubt. Ingrid had said that she’d fallen; what if Richard was wrong about everything? With Grey right there it felt like an offence to hospitality to imagine him in any act of physical violence. The thought made me flinch and I buried it.

  Grey didn’t ask why I was there or seem to care; it was as though, like the last time, he had been expecting me. Without asking he poured me a glass of sparkling water from a blue bottle in the fridge. It tasted salty, the bubbles tiny and harsh. We sat in the living room in the same position as last time. He checked his watch with an incline of his head.

  ‘I’m due at the museum for a meeting early this afternoon. But not for a little while.’ He looked down at the arm of his chair. ‘Julia, I was so sorry to hear about your aunt.’ His eyes met mine, and the look of compassion in his face was surprising. He gave a small smile. ‘And glad to hear that she’s doing OK now. My own mother died when I was about the age you are now. It was a devastating event.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And so soon after …’ His voice trailed off.

  The words I hadn’t been able to think of ahead of time or rehearse came easily now. ‘I suppose it brought it all back, in a way.’ And it was true. I tried to find Ingrid again in the bloodless room. It seemed darker than it had been last time. She wasn’t there.

  Grey looked at me, but not with the sickening pity that had made me avoid Mark’s neighbours after September 11. It was a form of sympathy that I found I could handle. No ‘you must feel …’; instead, surprisingly, an alertness to what I did feel, but one so remote it was almost cold. For the first time I felt something in common with him, and envied the way he was so practised at guarding his own feelings that the action was close to invisible.

  ‘I was on my way to the museum. To the Met.’ This was what I had prepared to say, vaguely, if he asked what I was doing there.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Ingrid left some money there, it turns out.’

  For a moment his words conjured an image of Ingrid’s purse lying abandoned on a bench to the side of one of those numberless rooms, bills and coins falling out of it.

  ‘A bequest to the antiquities department,’ he said.

  ‘Do they have curse scrolls there?’ I asked. But then all I could think of was the statue of the figure spearing the stag, the helpless animal, the way the whitening light had fallen that day on Jones’s hair when he had taken out his black book. I blinked.

  Grey’s eyes had met mine very sharply and it was a few seconds before he spoke. ‘It’s a general bequest to the department.’ He paused. ‘I didn’t realise you were so intimate with her research. I suppose I should have known.’

  ‘I did talk with some people in the department at Columbia – who had been students with her. Teachers.’

  He nodded. ‘It’s a wonderful department. Such a loss for them.’ He didn’t ask who it was I’d been speaking to.

  ‘I know it’s a strange request and I don’t want to intrude, I’m sorry – I was just wondering – Ingrid’s room – would you mind – could I see it again?’

  His face was expressionless as he rose. ‘Of course.’

  ‘It’s been hard to
. let go.’

  I stood, awkwardly. It was true, again, but everything was a lie, an affront to hospitality and sympathy. Guilt slowed me. He waited at the foot of the stairs, one hand on the railings.

  ‘Of course,’ he said again. I was there, about to take the first step. ‘It’s so sad, I’ve always thought, that the two of you weren’t closer after we married.’

  I stilled.

  ‘It’s sad, but inevitable, isn’t it, how such a great distance necessarily …’ – he searched for a word – ‘erodes relationships.’ He smiled kindly, with a maddening, faultless sincerity. His eyes were as cold and sharp as they had ever been. ‘We don’t think of these things at the time – so hard to foresee. But I know you meant a great deal to Ingrid.’

  It was the challenge I had feared and faced only in my imagination until then. I took the stairs slowly, eyes down. They seemed to go on forever, sharp-edged and white as before. Chiselled bone. Easy to slip and break a wrist, crack a rib. I didn’t look back at Grey; I heard him walking quietly towards his study once I had reached the landing.

  The room was different. The dresser was gone and there was no sign at first glance of the objects that had stood on it. The desk was still there against the window, but a different pile of notebooks and textbooks sat on it now, and a pile of magazines. The little amphora was there, leaning on its side, and a cobalt blue porcelain ashtray. The room smelled faintly of cigarettes. I pulled up the shade. The chaise longue was there at a slightly different angle, its green linen covered with a patched, beautiful Indian textile in maroons and purples, tiny mirrors shining here and there on the surface. Ingrid’s books were still there on the bookshelf, from what I could remember, and on the first shelf down near the floor were the papers that had been on her desk before. The diary was there, sandwiched between some folders. I kneeled, quickly pulled it out and pushed it to the bottom of my shoulder bag under a book, my gloves and wallet.

  Richard had wanted me to bring a replacement, a book the same style and colour that would match the diary and so mask the fact that it had been taken. ‘You could probably buy a similar model,’ he’d said, ‘it sounds just like a Filofax or one of those things.’

  It seemed like a good idea – I knew how important it was to leave the scene looking like it had before – but I didn’t want to have to take it back and switch them again. ‘What if they do notice it’s gone, that it’s not the same book?’ I had asked. ‘Wouldn’t it look worse to find a decoy, a fake book? If it’s just not there, it could be lost. But an empty diary – that would prove it had been taken.’ He agreed in the end.

  The shelf didn’t look so different without the diary. I had counted on the fact that Grey didn’t go into the room, thinking of his hesitancy to enter last time, but now it seemed like a strong possibility that the room was being used by Fleur. I sat at the desk and looked out the window and waited for a few minutes before leaving.

  Grey heard me coming downstairs and came out of his study to meet me.

  ‘Is Fleur using the room now?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh, yes. I forgot to mention.’ He raised his hands to his hips, pushing his jacket aside. ‘I wasn’t sure what to do with the room.’ He grimaced faintly. ‘It seemed odd to leave it there like that – it couldn’t stay that way forever. And Fleur said she’d like to use it as a study room. It seemed like a good idea.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Not that much studying is happening, from what I can see. A lot of talking on the phone. That never seems to end.’

  His smile was graceful and self-deprecating, the smile I remembered from that first dinner when he’d talked about Fleur. Proud, exasperated, adoring. It could have all been an act, or it could have existed alongside the rest of it: the exploitation and expert opportunism. He could have imagined that the fame and reputation he and Maeve had created for her was an invaluable gift, an act of love.

  If he had once looked at me with real warmth, I might have fallen for the charm of his good manners and nice looks. In a way I wanted to, to put a real stop to Richard’s suspicions, to go along with the version that Ingrid had tried to pass off. She was clumsy indoors, after all, for all her athleticism and strength once she started throwing a tennis ball around outside; any place with stairs was a potential danger zone to her. But his gaze stayed cool and his hands, resting there on his hips, filled me with dread when I thought about the uses to which they might have been put.

  ‘Thanks, Gil.’ It was not the first time I had said his first name, but it still felt wrong.

  ‘I’ll see you again, I hope.’

  Before we reached the front door I asked him, ‘How’s Maeve?’

  ‘She’s well.’ He paused. ‘It’s been terribly hard on her.

  Ingrid was like a daughter to her …’ He hesitated, perhaps seeing the oddness in his wife being like a daughter to his friend and contemporary. ‘Or a sister,’ he continued, ‘or a niece – you would know that. I think she’s, well, finding some kind of closure now. I’m sure she’d love to see you.’

  He opened the door for me. ‘Goodbye, then. I hope you enjoy your visit to the museum. It’s a lovely walk across the park.’

  The fear and anxiety that I had managed to keep at bay in Ingrid’s room came flooding in, a wave of sweat, as soon as I stepped into the lift. Someone had sucked all the oxygen out of the box. The floors ticked by and air entered again when the doors opened.

  The park was lovely to walk through, just as Grey had said, transitioning to winter grey, the grass losing its green and the trees showing their half-bare branches. It wasn’t until I saw the back of the Metropolitan Museum that I stopped and thought about where I was actually going. I turned and walked back west, not ready for a wander through Antiquities or Arms and Armor. Richard was at the New York Public Library that day, something to do with the translation he was working on, consulting some editions. We had a plan to meet at his apartment later, but seeing him was the only thing I could think of to do.

  At 42nd Street, the library station, I walked from the platform to the exit through a tunnel decorated with a recent mosaic. Tree roots reached down the white walls in fragments of gold and bronze tile, like an unfurled tendril from a Klimt painting. Shining green leaves trailed down across the other side. A thin slab of granite grey was etched with a line from Ovid, and it was Ingrid’s voice I heard intoning the words: gutta cavat lapidem: dripping water hollows out stone. All the tiles looked impossibly clean next to the concrete pathway littered with paper and plastic.

  The library’s stone and marble bulk stretched the whole block from 41st to 42nd Street on Fifth Avenue. Shallow puddles were drying in patches on the stairs leading up to the doors: water hollowing out stone. I was inside the main hall before I remembered that it was a big library and Richard hadn’t said where he would be, in which one of the many rooms and restricted collections. I went upstairs, long flights of shallow stone steps, and through to the Rose Reading Room. It seemed like the best place to start, or to look at least, and if he wasn’t there I could go and find some coffee and sit in Bryant Park.

  The echoing space of the reading room opened up through the wooden entranceway, rows of desks and gleaming lamps, oak and gold. Around me people stood or sat, all watching the digital screen of numbers at the front of the room that would announce when their requested book had arrived from the stacks below. The industry of thinking and reading and waiting was soothing. I walked slowly down the middle aisle, looking for Richard’s dark head among the numbers of readers seated at the long desks. The Chrysler Building was framed by one enormous, arched window, a piece of it with its points and curves like a broken crown. I was looking at it, having forgotten about the stolen diary in my bag, when I heard a familiar voice at my side.

  It was Jones. His hand touched my elbow for a second, and I wasn’t sure if it was the touch or the voice that told me it was him. We stood looking at each other.

  ‘Well,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s nice of you to come by a
nd see me here.’

  I frowned at him.

  He looked at the clock on the far wall. ‘Let’s eat. Are you hungry? Just give me a minute.’ He was holding a large volume with worn leather binding that looked too old to be out of a protective box. ‘Returning this.’

  He picked up his black case from a place at the desk a few rows down, leaving a pile of notes and books and pens, and came back to me. I looked around quickly for Richard. He didn’t seem to be there. I imagined him in some smaller, darkened room down the hall – where they fetched the books using ladders that ran along the floor on wheels, and possibly provided gloves – reading at a desk with five different editions in front of him.

  Jones had put on a woollen coat over his light-coloured suit. He saw me looking at it. Fawn was the colour. A deer’s pale underside. ‘What are you looking at?’ he asked. I shook my head.

  The baroque ceiling recessed forever, lined with naked golden women holding banners high, empty of words. Cupid, blank-eyed under a satyr’s face. We walked the length of the aisle and out through the doors, past the readers at their desks, our way lit by chandeliers and the painted sky above our heads blazing.

  We ate at a small café a block away from the library, huddled around a little table in the crowd. He was charming all through lunch and insisted at the end on ordering a large piece of chocolate cake, refusing to share it. Instead he watched me eat it with openly erotic fascination. It was rich and dark and not sweet enough.

  ‘You’re awfully quiet,’ he said when we were outside on the street, and he lit a cigarette. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye and started walking back towards the library. I went with him. ‘I hope everything is alright.’

  I nodded. I seemed to have made it through an entire forty minutes in his company without saying anything much at all. It was oddly calming. Speech felt as though it was waiting somewhere just adjacent to where I was, holding its breath ever since that suffocating lift ride down from Grey’s apartment.