by Sonya Cobb
She also resented that when Brian asked her about work she was forced to be evasive and dishonest. If her field were not so impatient, so sexist, she wouldn’t be in this position. “How is that New York project going?” he would ask. And she would answer that it was the perfect client, they were totally understanding of her schedule, and they were keeping her busy with a steady stream of revisions and additions. “That’s fantastic,” he would say, genuinely pleased and probably grateful that she hadn’t gone into a lengthy explanation of the project’s back-end dynamics.
Brian may have been a detective at work—searching for clues and following leads—but at home he seemed blithely content to accept whatever Sophie told him. He failed to notice that she never got client phone calls, never had to work at night or on the weekends. Nor did he notice that even though their bank balance kept dipping close to zero, they always had enough for groceries, and that there were always twenties in Sophie’s wallet when he needed them. Brian was happily absorbed in his own career, whose skyward trajectory seemed limitless. His journal article had been well received; the Milan vase got a small mention in the Times; he’d secured a place for the museum in the will of an elderly collector of majolica.
Above all, Brian was caught up in his quest for the missing Saint-Porchaire candlestick. He’d come back from his visit to Madame Viellefond practically trembling with excitement: apparently Wilder’s lover, Sandrine, had passed down several works of art to her family. Madame Viellefond showed him a small Dutch painting that he felt certain was important, although he wasn’t planning to put the Paintings curator on its trail just yet. Sophie knew he was waiting until he’d finished his own plunder of the family treasures; no need to send them scurrying to the appraisers just yet. Madame Viellefond had given him a list of Sandrine’s progeny and he’d written to them all, presumably asking, in the most casual way possible when writing letters in French, whether any of them had seen a fancy candlestick lying around.
Sophie, too, was spending a lot of time thinking about museum-quality antiques. Harry had not been thrilled by the Irish setter. “Nineteenth century?” had been his exasperated response. He’d paid her reluctantly, grumbling that he’d never be able to sell it, but Sophie didn’t really care. Her real payment was the small thrill that trembled in her throat every time she imagined the rest of the objects waiting in the storage room, or recalled those silent, terrifying moments in the dark. She could still taste the strange, exciting rush of fear that felt like the mirror image of desire.
During their usual gin-soaked lunch at the tavern, Harry had an idea. “Let’s pop over to the Met,” he said. “I’ll take you around, show you the good stuff. Yeah?”
“I don’t know, Harry, I need to relieve the sitter.”
“Just give me an hour. I want to show you some of my favorite things, give you a little brushup on sixteenth century versus, say, nineteenth. So the next time you see something at a sidewalk sale, or your grandmother’s china cabinet or whatever, you’ll know what you’re looking at.” Harry laced his fingers together and turned his hands inside out, cracking all ten knuckles.
Sophie stared at him for a moment, turning things over in her mind. “All right,” she said slowly. “To the Met.”
Once they were inside the museum, it became clear that Harry was well acquainted with the labyrinthine floor plan. He led her quickly through the throngs of people crowding the Great Hall and into the moody, churchlike Medieval galleries, eventually emerging into a tapestry-lined gallery of Renaissance art. “Augsburg and Nuremberg,” he said briskly, pulling her toward some display cases filled with gleaming objects made of gold, silver, glass, and shell. “All of this was made for the courts of Northern Europe; the German silversmiths were like the Lagerfelds and Louboutins of their time.” He showed her a drinking vessel in the shape of a stag; a tankard swirling with vines and flowers and topped with a naked putto; a footed cup engraved with pastoral scenes. He drew her eye to the imaginative wit of the decoration, and the natural attitudes of the miniature creatures that sprouted from handles and lids. He pointed out the feats of perspective in the tiny, intricate scenes, and explained repoussé, damascening, fire gilding. For a brief time Harry slipped from behind his droll facade, and surprised Sophie with a level of earnestness she hadn’t thought him capable of.
“You should be a docent!” she teased him.
“Maybe I will someday. As penance for my sins.” He drew her into an English period room lined with dark oak paneling, and pointed out a pair of silver ginger jars in a small case. “See those?” he said. “Seventeenth century, English, cast and chased.” He cracked the knuckle of his forefinger. “Just gorgeous.” He turned to the label. “They belong to someone I know.”
“One of your wanker clients?” Sophie asked. The label read, “Anonymous Loan.”
“One of my dad’s clients. Someone with great taste, but terrible manners.” Harry shook his head.
“Why did he loan these out?”
“With something like this, impeccable provenance, bought at auction for a ridiculous sum, the insurance is ruinous,” Harry said. “But if you loan it to a museum, they pick up the insurance. Of course, some people also do it for the bragging rights, but my man’s a bit more discreet than that. He keeps his best stuff hidden away where no one will ever see it.”
“Who is he?”
“Also, these are English. Normally he’s got more continental taste. But I think he couldn’t resist the workmanship on these.”
“Is he French?”
“You know what we should look at?” Harry brightened. “Storage!”
“How—”
“Follow me.” Harry strode through several small galleries, then led her to a glass elevator that deposited them on a mezzanine in the American wing. “Visible storage!” he announced grandly, as he swept through a pair of doors. “This is just the American stuff—some of it, anyway. You’ve never been in here?”
“Never,” Sophie breathed, her eyes struggling to take in the sight. As far as she could see, acres of simple glass cases were filled with shelf after shelf of tightly packed objects, furniture, and paintings. Along one aisle, Tiffany glass was stacked on stepped shelves like crayons in a box. Down another aisle, ranks of grandfather clocks stood as humorless as palace guards. Paintings were hung in jumbled rows, ornate gilded frames butting up against bare canvas. In another case, empty frames gaped strangely, displaying the utilitarian lattice on which they were hung.
“Museums are like icebergs,” Harry said, standing in front of a floor-to-ceiling pile of chairs. “You only see the top five or ten percent. But some museums are starting to show the work in storage like this—no labels, no precious arrangement. Look over here.” He led her around a corner to a row of cases thickly stocked with hundreds of silver tumblers, creamers, chafing dishes, and flatware. Arranged by type—dozens of identical coffeepots followed by dozens of identical saltcellars—the effect was of an assembly line, or a shelf at Target.
Sophie walked slowly down the aisle, struck by the depreciation of the objects once they were placed in this dizzying, hall-of-mirrors display of accumulation. What could be more anonymous than fifty monogrammed tumblers? Did anyone care where these endless tallies of spoons came from; whose mouths had they been inside?
“It all becomes sort of meaningless, doesn’t it?” she said. “When you see it like this.”
Harry shrugged. “If you collect pie servers, it’s nirvana. You can see every kind of American pie server ever made. But yeah—for the average person, it all sort of bleeds together, doesn’t it?”
“Mmm.” For a moment Sophie had a strange, floating feeling, as if the floor had dropped away, and everything—the silver, the glass, the paintings, herself and Harry—had become mere molecules bobbing about in an invisible and immeasurable puff of air.
***
Sophie became aware of someone looking at
her from across the café. She was sitting on a flabby, coffee-stained sofa, waiting for her new friend, a real estate agent named Janice she’d met at a dinner party. But now she found herself locking eyes with Carly, who gave her a small smile and a half wave. Sophie frowned into her mug. She didn’t want her pleasant afternoon interrupted by some kind of confrontation. But now Carly was standing in front of her, and after an awkward moment, she helped herself to the spot Sophie had been saving for Janice.
“Hey,” said Carly. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“No, really—what is going on?”
Sophie had once enjoyed Carly’s bold, entitled directness. Now she found it obnoxious. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, why the cold shoulder?”
“You know why.”
“What did you hear? Or see?”
“What do you think?”
Carly pushed air through her nose in exasperation. “If you’re talking about me and Keith, it’s long over. Things got weird really fast…”
“Things got weird the minute you decided to ignore my wishes.” Sophie instantly regretted the phrase “my wishes.”
“Look, I’m sorry about that. But it wasn’t about you.”
Sophie looked into Carly’s face for the first time, surprised by the anger she found there.
“It had nothing to do with you,” Carly continued. “It was between two consenting adults.”
“I don’t think Amy and I were consenting.”
“Why do you keep trying to insert yourself into this situation? You’re not Keith’s wife.”
“But I asked you not to! I was clear! I didn’t want you fucking with our friends!”
“And what about me? Aren’t I your friend? What if this was something I needed?”
Sophie let out a short, hard laugh. “You don’t need that. You don’t need anything. You have everything already. You took someone’s husband, just for kicks, and that’s wrong.”
“Excuse me? How do I have everything?” Carly crossed her arms and leaned her head to one side, apparently expecting an answer.
“You’re kidding me.”
“No, really. How can you, with your husband and your children—these people who belong to you, who are part of you—tell me I have everything.”
“That’s not—you have everything else. Oh, please, don’t pretend to be jealous of me.”
Carly narrowed her eyes.
“Anyway,” Sophie continued, flustered, “that’s beside the point. You took Amy’s husband.”
“Come off it. It’s just sex, for Christ’s sake, and I didn’t ‘take’ anyone’s husband. She still has her husband. Nobody got hurt.”
“I did.”
Carly grimaced in confusion. “How?”
“You basically made it clear you don’t give a shit about my feelings.”
Carly rested her forehead on her fingertips, eyes skyward. “Sorry.”
Sophie said nothing.
“Anyway,” Carly continued, more softly, “we all have stuff to resolve.”
“What’s this ‘we’ business?”
Carly snorted.
“No, really. What?” Sophie’s breath shrank in her chest. Heat gathered in her head.
Carly straightened. “Nobody’s perfect, all right? I’ve got issues, you’ve got issues…”
“Excuse me? What issues do I have?”
“I don’t know, let’s start with control freak?” Carly pressed her lips together and let her words settle for a moment. “You want to control everyone around you, you want to control me, you want to control yourself—especially yourself. I mean, my God. You’ve got everything locked up behind this big, black iron fence, and you won’t let anyone in. Just, you know, as an example.”
Things were sizzling, now, in Sophie’s ears. How dare she? “How dare you?”
“What?”
“You think you know anything about what I have quote-unquote locked up? What’s with this psychoanalysis bullshit? You’re the one we’re talking about. You’re the one with an addiction to stealing people’s husbands.” She must have been getting loud. People were turning their heads and laughing nervously. “Because no one ever gets hurt. Because it’s a victimless crime.” Sophie drew out the phrase, furiously finger-quoting. “Such bullshit. There are victims all around you.”
“Sorry I’m late!” Janice had breezed in, oblivious to the room’s crushing barometric pressure. “My buyers wanted to see the place a third time. I told them I’m going to have to start charging them rent.”
Sophie laughed loudly. “Hey, Janice. No problem. This is Carly. She was just on her way out.” She landed hard on the last word.
Carly stood and silently walked back to her table. Janice raised her eyebrows, but Sophie just shook her head and patted the couch beside her. “How are you? How’s Tim?”
From the corner of her eye, she saw Carly gather her coat and bag and walk out the door, leaving behind an uneaten bagel.
***
A few days later, much to her surprise, Sophie received a letter from MortgageOne. The unsigned, fuzzily photocopied note invited her to apply for a loan modification; application forms could be downloaded from the MortgageOne website. Sophie searched the site, but there were no loan modification forms to be found. Once again, she called the 800-number and spoke with a woman who took such long pauses during their conversation, Sophie wondered if she were conducting simultaneous conversations with other customers on other lines.
“You’ll need to get those forms…
“…from the bank that owns your loan.”
“I don’t know who that is,” Sophie said. “I wrote you a letter to find out, and you sent back a letter telling me to get the forms from your website. And there aren’t any forms on your website.”
“We’re the loan servicer…
“We need authorization from the investor…
“…to modify your loan.”
“Fine. Tell me who that is.”
Long pause.
“Dayton Loan Services.”
“No! Listen! They sold my loan to New Century Mortgage, and New Century Mortgage, as I have mentioned many, many times, can’t find any record of it. They sent me back to you.” The phone felt hot in her hand. “But hey—since my mortgage has been lost, why don’t I just stop paying? Nobody would notice, right? How would you even know?”
Long pause.
“Hello?”
“Nonpayment of your loan will result in foreclosure.”
“Then tell me what to do.”
“Why don’t I send you…
“… the loan modification forms…
“…in the mail.”
“Thirty seconds ago you were saying that wasn’t possible.”
“Would you like the forms?”
“Hey, you know, I’m going to go with ‘yes.’ Is that the right answer? Because I don’t even know anymore. But sure. Knock yourself out.”
What the hell? Wasn’t property ownership supposed to be the most reliable way to anchor a life? You entered a three-decade-long relationship with a bank, you sent them a check every month, you filled your shelves with photo albums. Nobody had ever mentioned this tangled world of brokers, servicers, and investors, or the emperor’s-new-clothes nature of a loan. Why didn’t she just stop sending checks? It certainly seemed as though her name and address had long ceased to exist in their files. But the representative’s robotic voice echoed in her head: “Nonpayment of your loan will result in foreclosure.”
Sophie let herself take a quick peek inside the locked room where that word lived, where her darkest fears made their plans. She slammed the door quickly, but the chill lingered. There was enough in the bank to make ends meet for a few more months, but their day-care and preschool costs had gone up, and
Sophie could see the graph in her head: savings trending downward, expenses trending upward, neither showing any sign of stopping.
Eleven
Brian liked his sandwiches the way they were made in France: a split baguette with butter, a few tissue-thin slices of ham, and those tiny pickles whose price, Sophie had noticed, was in inverse proportion to their size. Sophie packed two of these sandwiches into a mini cooler with two bottles of Perrier and a bag of sweet-potato chips. She walked to the museum and called him from outside. The museum was closed to visitors on Mondays, so there were no guards on duty, and the entrances were locked.
When Brian poked his head out of the door, Sophie held up the cooler with a smile. “I made food!” she announced. “Your favorite sandwich.”
His answering smile was more of a wince. “Oh, God. You’re so sweet.”
“I brought one for me, too,” she said, pushing past him into the museum. “Picnic in your office!”
“It’s kind of a crazy day,” he said as he followed her toward the elevator. “And technically we’re not supposed to have food in the offices—”
Sophie waved her hand. “Please. You eat at your desk all the time.”
She could tell immediately, when they got upstairs, that something had changed in Brian’s department. Instead of the usual hush, the hallway was filled with loud voices. Marjorie scurried out of the storage room without acknowledging Sophie and disappeared into Ted’s office, shutting the door.
“…fucking ridiculous,” she heard from the storage room. “It’s like a fucking flea market. Get—what is this? I mean, are you fucking kidding me?”
“Michael’s back,” said Brian.
“Oh.” Sophie slowed as they passed the storage room, looking in to see Michael amid the carts, his chest heaving. Ted was busily sorting through a pile of object cards, head lowered. “Hi, Michael,” said Sophie with a little wave.
Michael stared at her, blinking. He was like a young incarnation of Ben Franklin, all chin and dome, with round wire-frame glasses.
