The Resident's Things

The keys were in an envelope under the ficus on the top floor landing, which was exactly the kind of thing Chantal would do, because Chantal never did anything as straightforward as leaving a key under a mat. I was thirty-four years old, I had been an assistant curator at the Merrick Museum of Decorative Arts for six years, and I was standing in a warehouse stairwell in the arts district holding my rival's house keys like they were a live grenade. The review board met in eleven days. If my proposal for the Renwick bequest exhibition went well, I would be running my own wing by spring, and if it went badly I would still be the person who fetched things and wrote small labels. So there was a lot riding on the next two weeks, and instead of sitting quietly in my own apartment with my notes I had agreed to water the plants of the one woman in the field who could make me feel like an unpaid intern with a single raised eyebrow.

Chantal was thirty-six, on sabbatical from the Halvorsen Collection, and we had been circling each other at conferences and symposiums for the better part of four years. She had once described my catalogue essay on provincial mirrors as "admirably tidy," which from her was a knife wrapped in a napkin. I had once suggested at a panel that her acquisition strategy relied on charm rather than rigor, and she had bought me a drink afterward and told me it was the nicest thing anyone had said about her all year. That was the kind of relationship we had. It was exhausting and I loved it a little, in the way you love a sore tooth.

I climbed the shuddering old staircase on foot to the top, counting the steps the way I count everything when I am nervous, and by the time I reached the heavy black door my heart was doing a slow, unpleasant drumming that had nothing to do with the climb. The key turned with a heavy clunk and the door swung inward onto a space that smelled faintly of beeswax and old paper, and I stopped on the threshold because the apartment was nothing like I had imagined.

I had imagined severe. I had imagined white walls and a single Eames chair and a rack of monographs arranged by height. What I got instead was a top floor full of light and clutter, a genuinely curated clutter, the kind you cannot fake, where a brass telescope stood next to a stack of art magazines next to a chipped blue teapot that looked like it had been in service since the eighties. There were plants everywhere, hanging and climbing and sitting in mismatched pots, and along the far wall ran shelves of vinyl records in faded sleeves, hundreds of them, sorted in a way that made no sense to me until I saw the little handwritten labels on the shelf edges, things like "rainy Tuesday" and "argument winners" and "Sunday regret."

"Well," I said out loud, to nobody, because the apartment was empty and Chantal was somewhere in Portugal or Spain or one of those countries she treated like a second office.

I hung my coat on a hook by the door and did the responsible thing first, which was to find the plants and give them water according to the little map she had left on the kitchen counter, a hand-drawn floor plan with arrows and instructions in her slanted handwriting, one line of which simply said, "the fern is dramatic, ignore it, it lies." I laughed at that, alone in a stranger's kitchen, and then I felt strange about laughing, so I made tea in my own travel mug and sat at her long wooden table and opened my notebook and stared at my exhibition notes for forty minutes without absorbing a word.

The trouble was the apartment. It kept pulling my attention off the page. There were pressed flowers in mismatched antique frames on the wall above the record shelf, maybe fifteen of them, each one labeled in pencil on the backing paper with a date and a place, and I caught myself reading them from across the room like they were a story. June, Lisbon. March, her grandmother's garden, which was just written as "home, the good one." A sprig of something with tiny purple blooms labeled with a single word, "Argued about," and no other explanation. I got up four separate times to refill my tea and each time I ended up standing in front of those frames longer than a person stands in front of flowers, and each time I told myself that a professional does not snoop, and each time I took one more step closer anyway.

The records were worse. I knelt down and went through the labels she had written, and there were hundreds, little jokes and arguments with herself, and near the end of the second shelf there was a whole run of them from a single year, three years back, marked with things like "the bad month" and "recovery, slow" and one sleeve with no record in it at all, just the paper sleeve and a note that said "lost in Lisbon, still bitter." I sat back on my heels and thought about what I was doing, which was archaeology, technically, my actual trained skill set, being applied to the private life of a woman who would absolutely destroy me with it if she ever found out.

* * *

My phone buzzed on the table at a quarter past nine, and I lunged for it like it was evidence.

"Have you snooped yet, or are you still performing integrity for an audience of houseplants?"

I stared at the message for a good ten seconds. Then, because I have never once in my life taken the high road when a low road was this well paved, I typed back.

"I would never snoop. I am sitting here with my notes and a great deal of professional respect."

"Professional respect. Is that what we are calling kneeling in front of my records."

There was a pause while my face did something complicated, and then the three dots appeared again.

"The fern is lying to you, by the way. It is fully watered. It just likes attention."

"How did you know I was here already," I wrote, and then deleted it, because it was a stupid question, she obviously knew her own watering schedule and the envelope had been opened and resealed. I sent instead: "Your labels are a filing system only you could love."

"You wound me. I have been told my labels are legendary. Amuse me, Gabrielle, what have you deduced so far, and be honest, I will know if you are performing."

I looked around the apartment, at the flowers and the records and the teapot and the telescope, and I typed the truth, which felt like handing her ammunition.

"That you are softer than you want anyone at a conference to know."

The reply took long enough that I made more tea. When it came it was a single line.

"Careful. That almost sounded like a compliment."

"I take it back. The apartment is a mess and your fern is manipulative."

"That's more like it. There's a spare room at the end of the hall, bed is made, towels in the cupboard. Do not touch the locked drawer in the writing desk, I mean it, it is boring and it is mine."

"Which only makes it interesting," I wrote.

"Goodnight, Gabrielle. Drink water. Compliment yourself in the mirror, you need the practice before your review."

I put the phone face down and sat there in the warm light of her kitchen, feeling oddly seen by a woman I believed to be four time zones away, and eventually I wandered down the short hall and found the spare room, which was less spare than advertised, full of a daybed and a loom with a half-finished piece on it and more plants, and I set my bag down and lay on the bed with my notebook on my chest and did not look at my notes at all. The writing desk was in the main room. I had walked past it twice. The locked drawer sat in it like it was a held breath, and I lay there in the dark of the spare room telling myself that I was an adult, a professional, a person with eleven days until the most important review of her career, and that none of that mattered even slightly, because I already knew I was going to open that drawer, I just hadn't decided how to feel about myself afterward.

I got up at some point past ten, because apparently my curiosity has always outranked my dignity, and I went down the hall in my socks with the specific gait of a woman trying not to wake a house that had nobody in it. The writing desk sat against the wall under the window, a good piece, walnut, probably 1890s, and I did the thing professionals do which is date furniture instead of feeling feelings about it. The drawer had a small brass lock, and I could claim I picked it with a hairpin like in a movie, but the truth is the key was sitting on top of the desk under a coaster, which either meant Chantal trusted me or wanted me to look, and I chose not to decide which.

The drawer held a stack of postcards, a spare roll of film, a tin of pencils, and a notebook, black cloth cover, no label, the kind you buy at stationery shops and never fill. I took it to the couch and turned on the little lamp and opened it with the care I would use on an uncatalogued folio, because habits are habits.

The first half was sketches. Not masterpieces, working sketches, the kind curators do in margins, but they were all women. Hands, mostly, and the lines of collars and shoulders, a woman reading, a woman laughing with her head tipped back, and in the corner of one page a pair of glasses drawn over and over in different angles, like she was trying to get a face right and kept stopping at the frames. I turned the pages slower. There were grocery lists, a half-written argument about a donor, a phone number with no name. And then, three quarters of the way through, an entry that stopped my breath in a way I did not appreciate.

It was dated last spring, the conference in Chicago, and it was one paragraph. It said, in her small sideways hand, that she had watched me defend my panel for forty minutes against a man who had read half my paper, and that I had done it without raising my voice, and that she had gone back to her hotel room annoyed at herself for how much she had wanted to buy me the drink she bought me, and that the drink had been a mistake and she would do it again. It ended with my name, just Gabrielle, underlined once.

I sat there with the notebook in my lap and the lamp making a small warm circle and I thought about four years of circling each other at conferences, the admiringly tidy, the charm rather than rigor, the drink, and I realized I had never once considered that the circling might be mutual, because I am slow about certain things and fast about others. My phone buzzed. I ignored it. It buzzed again, and then, unbelievably, there was the sound of a key in the front door.

* * *

Chantal came in at a quarter past eleven, her body clock still somewhere over the Atlantic, dropping a bag in the hall and stopping dead when she saw me on her couch with her notebook open on my knees and my face doing everything a face can do.

"So," she said, unwinding her scarf with terrible calm, "the drawer."

"The key was right there," I said, which was somehow the only defense I had prepared in the half second available.

"On purpose," she said, and came and sat on the opposite end of the couch, close enough that I could smell cold airport air on her coat, and held out her hand, and I gave her the notebook like handing over a weapon, and she closed it and set