In the night room Page 0,34
between two old friends, to try to dissuade her from getting married.
Monet’s views of haystacks and Rouen cathedral, once sources of almost infinite pleasure, today seemed merely pictorial. It was predictable that Tom should have turned against Mitchell, she thought. Not only did they have nothing in common, Tom’s political views automatically made anyone who worked for outfits like the Baltic Group a dupe or a villain. What had Mitchell said, at their first meeting? From time to time, they call me in to make murky issues even murkier. She had thought he was telling her he was a kind of corporate lawyer. (It was, she realized, the first and last time she had heard Mitchell say anything that sounded witty.)
Willy found herself before a painting by Corot. She had always loved this painting. About the size of a window, it depicted the onset of a storm in a rural landscape. The air was a luminous gray and, like everything else in the painting, hummed with anticipation. Beneath a great tree on the banks of a river, a cowherd huddled beside his charge. Overshadowing the cow, its attendant, and the riverbank, claiming center stage, the enormous tree—a linden, Willy thought—threw up its arms in the gathering wind. Its hands shook, and the leaves were blown backward on their stems. That was the painting’s center, its heart. The undersides of the leaves gleamed gray-green, beautiful to behold. Undoubtedly they rattled as they shook. Something sacred, an inhuman force deep within and beneath the rind of the physical world, spoke from the flipped-over, gleaming, vibrant leaves. They had been seen, those leaves, and in the midst of her turmoil Willy was able to think, I, too, have seen you, leaves, and feel the onset of the storm.
Later, she thought the painting had driven her from the museum. The storm it promised to the French countryside had arrived in New York City, and Willy’s body had known it before she reached the top of the immense staircase and looked down to the tide of wet jackets and umbrellas streaming in past the guards. The Dellray men scrambling across the roof, the Santolinis and their concerns about the oak tree . . . it seemed wrong to keep Giles Coverley from his job, and she nearly decided to cancel her drinks date with Tom Hartland. But if any problems came up, Roman Richard had only to use his cell phone for a consultation; and she found herself unwilling to give up her hour with Tom.
The interval between the Met and the St. Regis seemed to pass in an instant, and when Willy, who had arrived in advance of her friend, took her seat on the banquette and waved away the hovering waiter, it was with literally no memory of how this period had been spent. Two and a half hours had gone by, leaving not even the memory of rain bouncing off the windshield of Giles Coverley’s car. She could, just, remember leaving the car and moving toward the hotel’s marquee under the shelter of a uniformed doorman’s immense black umbrella. Even that had the slightly dreamy, black-and-white quality of something remembered from an old movie.
It was true, she was going crazy. How could all that time have disappeared? The missing hours felt as though they had been carved from her body like Shylock’s pound of flesh. Looking back to what remained in her memory from the museum, Willy came across another inexplicable lapse. She retained a clear picture of three paintings only: a Monet haystack, a Monet rendering of the Rouen cathedral, and the Corot. On either side of all three of these pictures hung fuzzy daubs like paintings seen through a layer of Vaseline—this gauzy stuff had filled whole galleries. The only real paintings in the Met had been the ones she had paused to look at.
A familiar voice inquired why Willy was looking so incredibly grim, and she looked up to see handsome, kind Tom Hartland bending down toward her. As her heart surprised her by knocking in her chest, Willy resolved to keep these indications of mental chaos to herself. Instead, she blurted, Oh, Tom, please don’t tell me you wanted me to come here so you could say terrible things about Mitchell. Then she apologized for this outburst; then tears flew from her eyes, and an ugly sound of distress escaped her lips. The nearest patrons of the King Cole Bar slid a few inches away on the banquette.
Tom