Cecily said something then, but Yale was busy wondering if this was the governing factor of his life: the fear of getting his heart broken. Or rather, the need to protect the remaining scraps of his heart, the ones torn smaller by every breakup, every failure, every funeral, every day on earth. Was this why a shrink would say he was with Charlie, out of all the men in Chicago? Yale might break Charlie’s heart—he did it almost every day—but Charlie, for all his possessiveness, would never break Yale’s.
The rain was trying to tear the whole house apart.
Stanley said, “Let’s assume everything checks out. Can you guarantee these pieces will be displayed prominently? You wouldn’t turn around and sell them?”
Yale assured him the works would be in regular rotation. That if the space expanded, they could be on permanent display.
“Now,” Nora said, and she leaned in to look straight at Yale as if what she had to say next was the most important thing. “I wouldn’t want you to play favorites. I want the whole collection displayed.”
“That’s not really up—”
“There are a couple of unknowns in there, and one in particular, Ranko Novak, I’ve hung onto his work for sentimental reasons. It’s good, don’t think it’s some dreadful thing, but he’s not a name. I don’t want you displaying the Soutine and consigning Ranko to a closet.” She pointed a finger at him. “Do you know Foujita?”
Yale was able to nod honestly. He did know a lot more about art than the average money guy, a huge asset. He had a joke now, a practiced line, about how he could have told his dad either that he was gay or that he was majoring in art, and he’d picked gay because it seemed like less trouble. In reality, during the whole ride home for sophomore winter break, Yale had silently rehearsed the news that he was switching from finance to art history—and then that night, his boyfriend had called and mistaken Yale’s father’s voice for Yale’s (“I miss you, baby,” he’d said, and Yale’s father had said, “How’s that?” and Marc, as was his wont, had elaborated), and so the rest of vacation had been devoted to that bombshell, to their mutual avoidance, their silent eating of leftover spaghetti. Yale had planned to tell his father about the professor he could do an independent study with next fall—about how he wasn’t in love the same way with finance, about how with this degree, he could teach or write books or restore paintings or even work at an auction house. He’d planned to explain that it was Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome that had sent vibrations down his arms, made the rest of the world fall away—Caravaggio’s light, oddly, and not his famous shadows. But Marc’s call ruined it; Yale would have been too humiliated to say that all now. Not just gay, but a gay art major. He went back to school in January and lied to his adviser, told her he’d had a change of heart. But between finance classes, he audited course after course, sitting in the backs of lecture halls illuminated only by slides of Manet or Goya or Joaquin Sorolla.
Nora said, “I’m thrilled you know him, because Stanley and Debra haven’t the slightest clue. The instant Fiona mentioned you, I knew this was meant to be. I used to go visit Nico, you know. I saw that neighborhood, and those boys, and I can’t tell you how much it reminded me—all my friends in Paris, we were foreigners. Flotsam and jetsam.”
Yale wondered if Cecily had understood. He kept his hands still, didn’t look her way.
“I’m not calling Nico’s neighborhood Paris, don’t get me wrong, but all those boys landing there from every direction, it was the same! We never knew it was a movement when I was young, but now they speak of it as the École de Paris, and what they really mean is all the riffraff that washed up there at the same time. Everyone born in some godforsaken shtetl, and then there they were in heaven.”
Yale took the end of her sentence as a chance to change the subject. “I’d love to see the pieces,” he said.
“Oh—” Here Nora gave a theatrical sigh. “Now, this is Debra’s fault, isn’t it? We were planning to go to the bank with her Polaroid, but it was missing something.”
Debra said, “This is what happens when the gift shops all close for winter. I had film but no flash bar.”
“I could find you one in Sturgeon Bay,” Stanley said, and Debra didn’t look pleased.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” Nora said. “I’ll send you some Polaroid shots in the mail. I know you can’t tell much from a photo, but you’ll have an idea.”
Because the possibility of their all heading to the bank in the rain hadn’t been raised, Yale didn’t mention it himself. He didn’t want Debra and Stanley to feel he was being too aggressive, didn’t want them counseling Nora against him. His job was to win her trust, not finger the art. Yale said, “I’ll send you photos of the gallery in exchange. And let me give you my address again, so the package will come straight to me.” He glanced at Cecily, but she’d long since checked out. He handed a card to Nora and one to Stanley. “My private line is on there.”
They left Stanley with the sheets of sample language for in-kind donations and general bequests and headed out the door umbrellaless. Cecily held her file folder over her head as they ran for the car; she didn’t seem to care if it got soaked. Debra, who had seen them out, watched without waving.
“She was certainly enamored of you,” Cecily said. She was trying to figure out the windshield wipers.
“We can work with that.” He didn’t want to explain about Nico, explain that the way Nora had taken to him had nothing to do with the gallery.
“What a disaster.” The wipers blasted on, sending cascades of water down each side of the windshield.
“It was?”
“Tell me you were just humoring her.”
“I’m not sure.”
“Something about that woman and that house made you think her Modigliani is real?”
“I mean—actually, yes. I’ve come around. I think there’s a decent chance.”
“Well. Good luck to you. If you can get past that granddaughter. And the son, for that matter. When they make their wills this late, it’s always contested. ‘Oh, she was senile! The lawyer took advantage!’ But good luck to you.”
Cecily, he realized as she peeled out onto County Road ZZ, was a sore loser. It was probably what made her so good at her job—she was consumed by ambition the same way Charlie was. And he admired that in a person. Nico was the one who’d first introduced him to Charlie, and when Charlie had turned his back to greet someone who’d just arrived at the bar, Nico had whispered, “He’s gonna be the first gay mayor. Twenty years.” And the reason Charlie was so good at organizing people, lighting fires under them, getting his paper read, was that he took loss extremely hard. He absorbed failure by staying up till five in the morning, calling people and scribbling in notebooks until he had a new plan of action. It was hard to live with, but Yale couldn’t imagine his own life anymore without the whirring clock of Charlie at its center.