Yale glimpsed Bill standing a few yards ahead of him in the gallery, and Bill, when he noticed Yale, looked terrified. He spun toward the woman he’d just said goodbye to, asked her something, led her quickly in the other direction. Bill didn’t look sick. Cecily had told him as much, updated him every few months almost apologetically, as if Yale would want Bill to have it.
One thing about being in the chair: From behind people, Yale couldn’t see anything yet. He recognized a corner of the Hébuterne bedroom.
He’d imagined, once upon a time, wheeling Nora in here to see the show. He’d imagined pushing her in front of the crowds.
Here were the Sharps, weaving their way to him. Esmé reached down to envelop him awkwardly in her thin arms. Esmé and Allen had been saints, kept calling to ask if he had everything he needed. For his first long hospital stay, Esmé had brought him a stack of novels. They would never be close friends, would never gossip over brunch, but they’d volunteered themselves to form a safety net below him.
“Shall we take you around?” Esmé said.
So while Fiona was shanghaied by a man who wanted to explain to her in great detail how he’d known Nora’s husband, Cecily and the Sharps took him around, asked people to let him through.
The exhibit was set up on a small labyrinth of walls, with the pieces hung artist by artist in rough chronological order, and Cecily proposed starting at the end of the circuit. There was a great deal of written explanation for each grouping. Framed letters and notes surrounded the write-up on Foujita. Here, against the snowy field of the gallery wall, was his ink drawing of Nora in the green dress.
In the years since Yale had seen the pieces, they’d taken on the aura of famous works of art. Important because you’d seen them before, and your brain already had a slot for them. An old friend met years later on the street corner. Your high school history textbook found again and, through its distant familiarity, made holy.
Esmé wheeled him by a group that included Fiona’s parents, who didn’t glance his way, and Debra, who did. She looked at him with utter blankness, though, and Yale wondered if she recognized him. She looked different herself—rounder, a little brighter. According to Fiona, she was dating an investment banker in Green Bay. Not the life of wild adventure Yale would have wished for her, but it was something.
Warner Bates from ARTnews was above him suddenly, blocking his view, introducing him to an elderly couple who looked at Yale with undisguised horror. He didn’t hold out his hand to shake; he wouldn’t do that to them. Warner said, “This is a triumph, Yale! You should feel very happy!”
“I do. I can’t believe it’s really up.”
“This is all your doing, you know.” Warner turned to the couple. “This is the guy who made it happen.”
They wound their way to the start of the exhibit. There was Ranko’s section, at last: the two paintings, the three cow sketches. Fiona, who had rejoined them, squeezed his hand, and Esmé said, “Well, there it is.”
He wished it were more spectacular to look at, but things had been nicely framed and the informational plaques on Ranko distracted nicely from the blandness of the cows. The painting of Nora as a sad little girl had been brightened up by restoration, and her dress was now a much more interesting shade of blue than Yale had remembered.
And finally, there was Ranko in the argyle vest. Yale hadn’t seen it in person since he learned it was Ranko, since he learned Nora had held the brush herself. It was labeled Self-Portrait; Yale had passed along that much information, at least. It really did look like the same artist’s hand, at least to Yale, but maybe, now that he really looked, there was something more hesitant in the lines; it was the work of someone desperate to get something right. This one, too, was crisper after its restoration. He hadn’t realized what bad shape the paintings originally must have been in. Yale noticed a spark of silver in Ranko’s nest of curly hair. He wheeled himself closer, which didn’t work, and so he wheeled himself back instead.
He wasn’t crazy: It was a paper clip. Not the first thing you’d notice, but now that he was looking, yes, and there was another, too, closer to his brow. The shapes were distinct, and she’d accomplished something very much like a glint of light off each. Had they been her idea, or Ranko’s? Had he worn his crown again that day, as he posed? Had she added them after he died? How odd, how inexplicably devastating: paper clips.
He wanted to laugh, to shout it to the gallery, to explain—but he could only ever tell Fiona. To Esmé he just said, “That one’s my favorite.”
A man beside Yale’s chair said to his wife, “I heard they had to include everything, it was part of the lady’s will.” But here it hung, and it was an artifact of love. Well—of a hopeless, doomed, selfish, ridiculous love, but what other kind had ever existed?
* * *
—
It had been an hour and five minutes, and Cecily ran out to start her car. Esmé wheeled Yale backward to the exit, and he had one last chance to look down the gallery. The people in their beautiful clothes, the edges and corners of paintings and sketches.
Esmé said, “Oh, tar, it’s snowed!”
There was a good half inch on the ground; Cecily’s shoes had made soft prints on their way to her car.
Yale hugged Fiona goodbye, told her to look closely at Ranko’s self-portrait. He said to Allen Sharp, “If her parents come near her, pretend you’re having a seizure or something.”
Allen ran ahead, scraping the snow out of the wheelchair’s path with his dress shoes.
Allen and Esmé lifted him together into the passenger seat, got the oxygen tank between his legs. Cecily said, “It’s a quarter after. Yale, I hate this.”
It was already dark out. Cecily drove up Sheridan Road far too fast, illuminated snowflakes shooting past them. “Slow down,” he said. “It’s not worth a crash.”
“If we crash,” she said, “they’ll take us where we’re going anyway. And faster.”
“We’ll be fine,” Yale said. “It was worth it.”
“Was it? Are you happy?” She checked his face. “I liked Ranko’s stuff. I really did.”
“She loved him,” Yale said instead of contradicting her, instead of saying it was okay if she hadn’t liked it at all. “Even if she shouldn’t have. I think it was one of those things where you can’t let go of how you first saw the person.”
“We never let go of that,” Cecily said. “I mean, even for parents—that’s never not your baby, you know?”
“I think you’re right.” As he got sicker, it was more and more often how he thought of people—of Charlie, certainly, and of everyone else here or gone: not as the sum of all the disappointments, but as every beginning they’d ever represented, every promise.