“Fantastic. Well, and he was dead himself the next January. So that must give you a time frame, no?” She looked pleased with herself. “Modi had studied at Colarossi, and he would come back to strut around. He looked like an opera villain, and he was already famous. Terrible breath, terrible teeth, but when I saw him I was starstruck. He was in the hallway with our instructor, and I found some excuse to ask a question. He was the first to ask me to model.
“The thing is, I wanted to be a muse. It had to do with my own art, the way it wasn’t expressing the losses I felt. And if I couldn’t paint it all myself, maybe someone could paint my soul. It was a stab at immortality, of course.”
Yale had a million questions, one of which was whether being a muse involved sex, but what he asked was, “So this was spring? Summer?”
He tried to imagine someone, sixty years from now, pinning him down on the minute details of his life: Which happened first, the test or the hand job? Who died first, Nico or Terrence? Where did Jonathan Bird live when he got sick? When did Charlie die, exactly? Where were you when you heard? When did Julian die? What about Teddy? Richard Campo? When did you first feel sick? He’d be the world’s luckiest man to stand there at the end of it all, to be the one left, trying to remember. The unluckiest too.
And then Roman screamed. It was shrill and it came in pieces, a rapid machine-gun scream that didn’t stop. Yale understood as soon as Roman’s legs were off the floor and he was kneeling up on the couch. Debra must have understood, too, because she was down the stairs with a broom already in her hand. “Where’d it go?” she said, and Roman waved his arm in a general way toward the wall, the shelf, the dining room.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I hate mice.” Yale did, too, but Roman’s overreaction was allowing him to underreact, to ask calmly if he could help. As Debra looked around, hit the broom handle against the record shelf to see if anything would scamper out, Roman said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I didn’t sleep last night.”
“Just let the poor thing go, dear,” Nora said to Debra.
But now that Roman said he was fairly certain he’d seen it run behind the hutch in the dining room, Debra enlisted Yale’s help in moving the hutch away from the wall.
He was dizzy when he stood, the hangover still grabbing at him. He wanted to be home sleeping. Well, somewhere sleeping.
“Get your fingers under the ledge,” Debra said. The hutch was tall and enormously heavy, and he couldn’t manage a decent grip.
He’d read in a magazine that hangovers exacerbated feelings of shame—that you’d feel worst about whatever you did the night before when you were still hung over. He hoped it was true, because the thought of going back to the B&B tonight, of sleeping in the same building as Roman, was bringing a wave of nausea. Or maybe that was the heavy lifting. They walked the hutch a foot forward, one end at a time. There was a lot of dust back there but no mouse, no nest. In the living room, Roman had calmed down; he and Nora were talking in what sounded like normal voices.
“Just leave it,” Debra said. “I should vacuum.” She redid her ponytail, which had come loose. “I guess it’s good we don’t have the art here. It’s a pigsty.”
Yale needed a glass of water. He needed the bathroom. He said, “Ha. Yeah, the dust bunnies wouldn’t hurt, but you don’t want mice around two million dollars of art.”
Debra’s hands stopped in her hair. “Excuse me?”
He was so out of it, so distracted, that he thought he’d offended her by bringing up the very mouse she’d been chasing.
She said, “Did you say two million dollars?”
“Oh. I just—” He tried to say something about that simply being the amount Chuck Donovan had brought up, but he couldn’t think fast enough to form a coherent sentence, besides which he had no excuse for lying to her. He said, “Yeah, more or less.”
Debra’s face grew so red, so pinched, that he thought she might spit at him. She whispered, which was worse than if she’d shouted. “I was on your side. For like half a minute, you had me on your fucking side.”
“We are on the same side,” Yale said, ridiculously.
“I defended you to my dad. Does she know? Does my grandmother know how much she gave away? I thought we were talking about hundreds of thousands. That was bad enough. You lied to me.”
There was a slick side of Yale that sometimes emerged, magic and unbidden, in tricky professional moments, and he waited for it now, hoped something placating would come out of his mouth.
“You need to leave,” she said. “This house belongs to my father. I was willing to keep this visit from him, but you’re going now.” She folded her arms across her stomach, a gray X of sweater.
“Sure,” Yale said, although his voice barely came out.
Nora and Roman didn’t seem to have heard a thing. “We were talking about those poor astronauts,” Nora said when Yale came back to the doorway.
“They’re going to leave,” Debra said, “and let you rest.”
“Oh! But they’ll come back tomorrow?”
“You have the doctor tomorrow.” Debra was already holding their coats. “They’re going back to Chicago.”
Yale didn’t look at Debra. He wanted to swear, to yell at himself, to hit his head against the wall. He said, “We’ll get right back up here.”
He couldn’t imagine that was true. But they’d work something out, maybe just phone conversations.
Nora stood and slowly joined them near the front door. She said, “I fear I haven’t gotten it across at all. If only we had a time machine, I could take you on the most wonderful tour!”
Yale said, as he fumbled with his coat buttons, “I was just thinking about time travel on the way here.”
She laughed. “Time travel is so easy! It’s devastatingly easy! All you have to do is live long enough!”
Roman stopped with his arm halfway down his sleeve.
“Listen,” she said. “When I was born, the streets weren’t paved.”
Yale was still thinking about that when Roman said, “But Ranko. We never heard the end.”
Debra opened the door, let the freezing air in. “He showed back up, and his hand didn’t work right, and he killed himself,” she said. “That’s the end of the story.”
Yale and Roman said “Oh” at the same time, Roman an octave higher.
Nora said, “Right in front of me, I’m afraid.”
Debra opened her mouth, and before she could make things worse, before she could announce what an enormous mistake Yale had made, he walked out the door, made sure Roman was following.