“How do you say? What’s the word? For the scratch-the-sky?” So that you would say, “Oh, skyscraper,” and she would show off the breathy giggle that Parisian women tittered so effortlessly. Elm spoke college French, but her accent was atrocious and the only vocabulary she remembered anymore was for eighteenth-century painting and drawing techniques. Colette also spoke too much in meetings. She was only a step above an administrative assistant, and yet because she had an art conservation and dealership degree from some fancy French université that only the top 5 percent of students qualified for, she felt as though she made up for her inexperience with credentials. Everyone else had an art history degree; only she was qualified in the business of art, at the age of all of thirty, if that. She stuck her nose in every department—offering suggestions to Eastern antiques, medieval painting, display ideas. Be quiet and listen, Elm wanted to tell her.
“Oh, you are just the person with whom I wanted to speak,” Colette said. She made herself as comfortable as possible in her pencil skirt on the edge of Elm’s desk. Elm noticed Colette’s shoes had small bows that matched the trim on her suit. Colette cleared her throat and stared straight at Elm, her eyes narrowed and focused, somehow too shiny in the fluorescent light. Had she done something cosmetically to make them sparkle?
Elm was acutely conscious of being watched. A familiar feeling of worthlessness and exhaustion overtook her. She was sick of people’s disapproval. She turned away from Colette’s gaze and let herself look at Ronan’s picture on her desk. Sometimes looking at him gave her peace, quelled the nameless feeling that wasn’t as acute as grief or as chronic as depression.
He was, as he would remain forever, a little boy, eight years old. This was the last picture she had taken of him, one of the few from that vacation where he was alone in the frame, not clowning with Colin or fighting with his sister. He had the Tinsley avian nose, but Colin’s coloring, his gray eyes and blond hair. He was a beautiful child, Elm thought. Was he beautiful to outsiders too? she wondered. She didn’t know; she’d spent so much time staring at that face that it ceased to be a whole. Each part of him was a memory—the ancestral nose, the ears that stuck out just a little too much, the way Colin’s did. His cheeks, ruddy after soccer in the cold; the hair that once got gum stuck in it which he had tried to hide with a hat for three days; the hairless torso, puffed with childhood; the mauve swimming trunks she’d bought him that he wanted to wear all the time, pockets turned out. In this picture, he was standing with his profile to the camera, his gaze out to sea. Elm resisted the temptation to see the wise forehead of the seer, tried not to imagine that he knew the water would swallow him. It was impossible. He was looking out to sea because there were diving boats heading in from the morning’s expedition, and he couldn’t wait to turn twelve so he could dive too. He knew nothing of the water’s plans. No one did.
Colette said, “I have something for you.”
“Oh?” Elm tried not to sound too interested.
“Yes,” she said. “I have made a very interesting acquaintance.” Colette studied her hand.
Two women: a portrait of nonchalance, Elm thought, captioning the moment. They could cut to the chase or they’d be here all afternoon, apathetically making small talk until dinner.
“Yes?” she prodded.
“A dealer.”
“And …” Elm encouraged her.
“He has procured interesting pieces.”
“Why are you telling me?”
Colette smiled sweetly, as innocently as she could. Her eyes opened wide as if to say, Why would I not want to share good news with you? She had curled the pieces of hair that escaped her bun into tightly obedient ringlets.
“Some of it is minor, but the sheer volume … pof!” She didn’t so much exclaim as let breath leave her lips in that slightly aroused Gallic expression. “Vertu, Hogarth, Moreau … Good condition, slight mold but completely restorable.”
“You’ve seen them?”
“Why, yes,” Colette said. “I saw them and I said to myself, How exquisite, I must rush to tell Elmira.”
“So I’m supposed to commission them for the auction.”
“If you have half the eye they say you do, you can do nothing but.”
“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but I feel like there’s a catch.” She clarified: “Something