by Anne Calhoun
“You’ve been to my shop?”
“Walked past,” Sheba said. “The windows are works of art in themselves.”
“Penny, my designer, does them.” The current displays were of hot air balloons created out of thin papier-mâché, spilling cards into the updrafts to soar with hawks and ravens and other birds of prey over a replica of the city. Penny had a gift Tilda admired but didn’t hope to replicate.
“I gathered as much. You’re also a work of art, child, but you didn’t create those windows. You’ve got an eye, though, if you hired her.”
“Thank you, I think,” she said, amused, and sorted through the top layer of pages on the table. Sheba didn’t try to sell her on the work, or dissuade Tilda. She simply waited while Tilda made up her mind. She decided what to offer based on two broad categories: things people expected in a couture stationery shop, and things they didn’t expect but would want once they saw them. It was the second ability that caught Colin’s eye. People would want these. Tilda might not understand them, but when she thought about someone else selling them, her stomach sank. “Let’s give this a trial run. How many do you have ready to sell?”
In response Sheba walked over to a double door and swung it open. Inside were stacks and stacks of pages in a twisting spiral of edges and angles, all different sizes, all unmounted.
“Excellent,” Tilda said. “In cases like this we would work on consignment. I supply the space and display the product; in return I take a percentage of the selling price.”
“That’s fine, child,” Sheba said.
“They need to be mounted. A friend of mine runs a gallery in the West Village. I suggest she mount them. I’d also like to ask her opinion on pricing them, and possibly about having a show of the larger pieces. A two-pronged approach, double the exposure, that sort of thing.”
“All right,” she said. “We’ll see how they do. Just put them out for sale and see what happens. I’m done with them.”
With an eye toward the space on her walls, Tilda selected ten larger pieces and twenty smaller ones. Sheba wrapped them in tissue and slid them into a brown carrier bag. Back down the five flights of stairs, to the SoHo street that now felt crowded and far too noisy. She walked back to the shop, picking up a container of miso soup along the way.
“What did you get?” Penny asked, eyeing the bags. “Miso soup in that one.”
Tilda set the soup on her desk and drew out the pieces she’d taken on consignment. “These. Tell me what you think. In this you have rather more experience than I.”
The soup had cooled on the walk back. Tilda slid her thumb under the lid’s lip until it came free, then dropped it in the trash. She drank her soup while Penny respectfully unwrapped pages.
“I did some research on Bathsheba Clark while you were gone. She was big in the late sixties and early seventies, then fell out of favor when the times changed and she didn’t. And, I think she had a child out of wedlock, which was still rather sketchy in those days. Are these . . . ?” She looked at Tilda. “Are these sketches from Bathsheba Clark’s journals?”
Tilda nodded.
“Oh my God. This sketch looks like her architectural phase from the early eighties. It looks like . . . is this an early draft of her cathedrals series?”
“Possibly,” Tilda said. “She’s curating her history, she said. Is this unusual?”
“Of course it’s unusual! Her journals? Her history, the foundation of her career as an artist, the growth, the shifts, the transitions? Most people can’t bear to do something like that, destroy the thing that charts their progression as an artist.”
“Are these something we should have in the shop?”
“Of course they’re something we should have in the shop!” Penny flipped to a second page, and stroked the tips of her fingers over the rough edges. “I’m holding Bathsheba Clark’s thoughts in my hands. She made this, and I can touch it. How much? I want all of them. How much?”
That was exactly the visceral reaction Tilda hoped for in a customer, from viewing to wanting in under ten seconds. “I need to talk to Edith about pricing them.”
“More than I can afford,” Penny said. “A friend just casually mentioned her at a party, and you find these? You and your introductions.”
“I didn’t meet her before today. My friend just said I might be interested in her work. I don’t understand them,” she said, eyeing the palimpsests. “They’re rough and uneven and somewhat bizarre.”
Penny was staring at her, incredulous amusement in her eyes. “So why take them?”
“I hated the thought of anyone else selling them. It’s a gut reaction I’ve learned to respect.”
It was inexplicable, really, this mixture of possessiveness and wary vigilance, as if the works had some power she didn’t recognize and she’d just let that into her shop. Her life. She felt the same way about Daniel Logan. She didn’t understand him, with his logical, methodical approach to life as a series of puzzles to be solved. He used columns and rows and the law to make things plain, while she used paper and ink to hide what she didn’t want anyone to see. But the thought of him with anyone else left her shaky, cold.
Tilda finished the soup and dropped the container in the trash. “Run them over to Edith to see about getting them mounted and framed. We’ll take them in stages, hang them as she’s got them ready,” she said, then picked up the phone to call Edith.
– EIGHT –
Late November
Daniel pushed open the front door to Fifteen Perry Street, then locked it behind him before taking the stairs two at a time to the third floor, past the black-and-white pictures of the Eiffel Tower, the Brooklyn Bridge, the kind of art you could buy from any street vendor. Tilda had pictures of recognizable landmarks from all over the world—Oxford’s dreaming spires, Tokyo’s endless neon—but none of her family.
She’d texted him an hour ago: Meet me at Perry Street. He was used to her commands, but earlier in the week an average-looking guy in a bespoke suit had walked in off the street, and asked to talk to someone about an ongoing fraud. Daniel was the guy not on a call or in a meeting, so he sat across from an I-banker in a conference room who told him a story of greed, fraud, and deception that, if it panned out through to indictments, would make headlines around the world. A couple of days to check out his story, and Daniel went from routine duties to a career-making case. He hadn’t talked to Tilda since he’d picked her up at the airport after a trip to London, and frankly, he could use a quickie over lunch. He was uncharacteristically jacked, his brain dumping adrenaline into his system every time he thought about what this could mean for investors, for the department, for his career.
“You’ve got to stop leaving the front door unlocked like that,” he said as he swung into her office, expecting to find her at her desk. No Tilda. He walked into her bedroom, and found it empty as well. The bathroom door was closed.
“Tilda?” he said as he knocked.
Silence. He could hear her breathing behind the door. He squared up on the balls of his feet, put his hands on his hips, and stared at the locked door. Any number of possibilities had crossed his mind when he saw her text—Tilda in lingerie, Tilda naked, Tilda with lunch because he was hungry, too—but Tilda locked in the bathroom wasn’t on the list.
“Are you trapped in there?” he asked, trying to figure out if he had to call the FDNY or if he could jimmy open the lock with a credit card or a screwdriver.
“No.”
“So open the door.”
No movement, just a shaky inhale.
“Tilda.”
Silence.
His brain spun up an increasingly wild range of scenarios: being held hostage, a sudden psychotic break on her part, a sudden psychotic break on his part. He checked his phone. Yes, she’d texted him. He leaned against the doorframe, and tried to figure out where to start. “What’s wrong?�
�
“I’m late.”
“Well,” he said with a laugh, “you’re going to be even more late if you don’t come out of the bathroom.”
“Not that kind of late, Daniel.”
His grin disappeared so fast his jaw muscles tensed in protest. Emotion careened through him, shock, with a primitive possessiveness hard on its heels when the image of Tilda, pregnant with his baby, bloomed in his brain. He cleared his throat. “How late?”
“I’m not sure. My cycle has been off lately, with the travel.”
“How can you be sure you’re late, then?”
“I am. I have other symptoms, too.”
“Such as?”
The silence crackled with irritation. Tilda, She Who Sat On Ledges, didn’t talk about personal things. Finally, “My breasts are tender, and I’m bloated.”
“Those are PMS signs, too, right?”
“Yes. This is different. I feel sick.”
“It’s the adrenaline rush. Five days isn’t that late,” he tried.
“Five days is a generous estimate from the latest likely time for my period to start. If I’m counting precisely, I’m two weeks late.”
Oh, fuck.
He leaned his head against the bathroom door. Now her voice was steady, as always, giving nothing away. He shrugged out of his jacket and loosened his tie as he automatically started a mental list, recording date, time, weather. Twelve forty-seven, November twentieth, gray, cold, windy day. Then he made a list of the range of emotions she’d ricocheted through since he knocked on the door. Flat, irritated, precise.
“Do you have a pregnancy test?
“Yes.”
“Have you taken the pregnancy test?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’m afraid to.” Testy. A hint of shaky nerves in her voice.
Involuntarily, he smiled. “Tilda, sweetheart, open the package and take the test. It’s not going to change anything. It’s just going to tell you what’s already real.”
He heard cardboard tearing, then the fan clicked on, obscuring any other sounds. He wasn’t so stressed he couldn’t find her reticence amusing. After everything they’d done together, she wouldn’t let him hear her peeing. Water ran, the slick sound of soap lathering, rinsing, drying, all while he waited outside.
“Tilda. Let me in.”
She unlocked the door. He saw the pregnancy test stick sitting on the counter. Tilda perched on the edge of the bathtub, legs crossed, arms folded protectively over her abdomen, the side of her ring finger in her mouth.
He’d never seen her bite her nails, much less her cuticles. “Hey,” he said quietly. “It’s okay.”
She cut him a glance through her lashes. Pissed off. Tilda would not be patronized.
“A couple of minutes, right?”
“How do you know that? Don’t touch it! It has to be level.”
Hysterical. This was like watching a kaleidoscope made of razor blades spin. Trying to remember his suicidal jumper training, he eased to the floor with his back to the cabinet, avoiding the stick with its purple cap on the end. “Remember that conversation we had about first times? This isn’t my first time sitting in a bathroom with a panicked woman, waiting to see if a line appears.”
“It’s my first time sitting in a bathroom, panicked, waiting to see if a line appears.”
“You’ve never had a pregnancy scare?”
“The point of taking the pill and using condoms is to prevent pregnancy scares.” Pedantic.
“Did you miss a day?”
“No.”
“So, we’re probably fine.”
“You say we—”
“Because we are we. Especially in this.”
She peeked at the stick. Let her breath out in a shudder and went back to biting her cuticle. Stopped. Smoothed her skirt down. Nervous. Nervous about being left alone, or nervous about being forever tied to a man because she accidentally got knocked up?
“I went to England two weeks ago. Perhaps jet lag threw off my cycle.”
“We didn’t have sex while you were in England,” he pointed out.
“We did when I returned.”
Against the door, if he remembered correctly. Her skirt at her hips, his trousers undone just enough to release his cock. She’d rubbed him to hardness on the way home from JFK. An hour on the LIE with Tilda’s hand gripping his cock, blood thumping in his veins. She’d relayed details of her business meetings, a party attended by several well-known actors, which a friend of a friend invited her to that lasted until dawn, a contact she made with an investor who liked what he’d heard about West Village Stationery, reestablishing herself in a world she’d left behind a decade earlier, all the while subtly jacking him. He’d parked illegally, thrown his badge onto the dash, and all but dragged her into the house. It was their first time without a condom, and when he emerged to park the car like a law-abiding citizen of the city of New York, his entire nervous system was lit up like Times Square.
“We’ll deal with it together,” he said quietly. “We have options. It’s not a terrible thing.”
She said nothing. “The point of taking the pill is that it won’t happen.”
“Nothing’s foolproof except abstinence.”
He meant it as a joke. The look she slid him had an edge that cycled back through pissed off.
“Quality Group kicked my proposal up a level to talk about bringing me into their premier brands division, which means I’m going to spend the next six months flying all over the world. You work sixty hours a week on a good week. Morning sickness and nappies and nursing aren’t in my business plan. Who else?”
Now wasn’t the time to tell her he’d be lucky to work eighty hours a week for the foreseeable future. Wait, jealousy? “Lindy, my college girlfriend. A one-night stand texted a month later, but she got her period a couple of days after the first text.”
“Texting does seem to mean trouble for you.”
One corner of her mouth lifted as she spoke. A fragment of humor. He ran his hands over his scalp and blew out his breath. “Neither of those things were trouble. They just were. Life happens, Tilda. You don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing until later.”
“I’m not in the mood for a philosophical discussion, Daniel.”
Her voice was strained. He took a chance and shifted up to sit on the edge of the tub with her. “Hey,” he said. “Hey. It’ll be fine. We’ve got this. We’ll get married.”
A silence he couldn’t describe. Did he say what he thought he’d just said?
“We’ll get married?” Incredulous.
“Uh,” he said.
“Did you just ask me to marry you whilst sitting on the loo floor, waiting for a pregnancy test result?” Really incredulous. Was it that crazy?
“Well, technically, I didn’t ask. I just presumed.”
“Because it’s the right thing to do? People don’t get married because they turn up pregnant. This is not the seventeenth century, or even the nineteen seventies.”
She was laughing, or maybe about to cry. It was hard to tell, because Tilda not quite in control of her emotions wasn’t something he’d seen, ever. “Yeah, because it’s the right thing to do, but because I want to marry you.”
“You don’t want to marry me.” Point-blank certain.
“I do,” he said, relieved to hear he sounded pretty certain himself. Irresistible force, meet immovable object.
She skimmed her hair back from her face. “You really don’t. You really, really don’t. You’re saying this because you’ve got a savior complex and I might be in trouble.”
“I’ve been through enough psychological testing to know I don’t have a savior complex, I have obsessive tendencies. I’m saying this because I love you, and whether or not you’re pregnant, I wan
t to marry you.”
“You love me.”
“Yeah,” he said, more defensively than he should. “I love you.”
“Oh, Daniel,” she murmured.
Remorse. Nothing else. He waited, as the seconds ticked by, waited for the test to hand them an answer about their future, waited for her to say something. Anything. Instead, she turned to him, fisted her hands in his shirt and leaned her head onto his shoulder. Resigned, he wrapped his arms around her narrow back, and felt her relax into him, bit by bit.
He checked his watch surreptitiously. Four minutes. More than enough time. He straightened his spine and reached for the stick.
“No line,” he said.
“That’s a line,” she said, pointing at the stick.
“That’s the control line to show the test is working. Did you read the directions?”
“No,” she said. “No line?” Relief.
“No line,” he repeated. “Chalk it up to a body clock out of whack from travel.”
She took the stick from him, looked at it, looked at the instructions, then back at the stick. “What if it’s not accurate?”
“If you’re a week late, that’s plenty of time for the test to come up positive.”
“Daniel, really, your knowledge of pregnancy tests is rather—” Manic relief.
“My sister Angie had trouble getting pregnant, so I know all about cervical fluid and luteal cycles and HCG, plus just about every man I know has gone through this at one time or another. It’s not complicated. Five days to two weeks late and four minutes of waiting is plenty for a definitive answer.” He got to his feet and held out his hand to help her up. “You’re not pregnant.”
She slid the stick back into the wrapper, dropped it in the trash can under the sink, then went up on her tiptoes and kissed him gently. “Thank you for coming over,” she said quietly.
“You’re welcome.” He tried to keep from sounding royally pissed off, and failed.
“Do you have to go back to work right away, or can you stay for lunch?”
