The Virgin Society Collection

21. Tiger

21

TIGER

Harlow

A banner sprawls across the glass window of the gallery. Reread, it says. That’s the name of this exhibition of confessions of love from some of history’s greatest writers. The photographs of the correspondence are paired alongside stunning black-and-white images that capture the theme of each letter’s romance.

It’s surreal to walk up to an art gallery with the man who just kissed me in his town car.

For a few heady seconds, I play pretend, imagining this is us. This is how we do New York. We attend exhibits together. Maybe we go to the theater, check out quiet bookshops. Together, we’d imbibe art and culture, devouring stories, being dazzled by a show.

After, we’d walk around the city. We’d talk and we’d understand each other implicitly.

Right now, I have to fight the urge to look at Bridger with all these expectations in my eyes.

Because we’re not that couple.

We’re not a couple at all.

I let the daydreams die as we cross the threshold into the gallery.

Servers in black slacks and crisp, white shirts circulate with trays held high, while art lovers in plaid shirts and Converse, in motorcycle boots and Manolo Blahniks, admire the letters and the photos.

We’re here for business, but when I catch a glimpse of Bridger adjusting his cuffs, my heart squeezes.

I make a move to touch his wrist in reassurance, but then I clasp my hands together instead. I can’t do that. Here or anywhere.

He stops fidgeting, and his eyes scan the crowd with speedy efficiency. He’s a man on a mission. He’s not here to mingle.

“I don’t see him yet,” I whisper.

“I don’t either.”

“He’ll be here,” I reassure him. I hope—I really hope—I’m not wrong about Fontaine being here to support his wife.

Except…there has to be an easier way to get to the man. “Does he not take your calls?” I ask.

Bridger scratches his jaw, a little pensively. “He has in the past, but recently, no. I’ve been trying to get an intro, but he’s old school. An in-person type of guy. So…” Then Bridger leans the slightest bit closer to me, not inappropriate, not too much, but just enough for me to catch a hint of his cedar scent.

Different from when I ran into him at MoMA in December. It’s subtler now. There are new notes of faded soap and rain. My stomach zings.

“I’ve been working on some concepts that I think might impress him,” Bridger says.

I’m eager to hear them. I love it when he lets me into his world, his mind, his thoughts. “Can you tell me what they are? Or are they secret?”

His deep blue eyes twinkle. “I trust you,” he says, low and barely audible. Just for me.

They mean even more after our talk in the car. “Good. You should,” I say.

“I read every single one of his humor columns from years ago. He used to write for the New York Press before the paper was shut down. I want him to do something with those. He never has, but I can see a path through them. A story he was trying to tell in his witty observation.”

“Oh nice,” I say, then my gaze catches on the silver fox I spotted at the MoMA sculpture garden in December. It’s Fontaine, and once again, his arm is wrapped around his wife. Once again, they’re laughing, but like it’s a private joke between just them. “There they are. He really seems to make her laugh,” I whisper encouragingly. “Go get ’em, tiger.”

“Tiger,” he repeats, lifting a brow in appreciation. He likes the nickname. “Wish me luck.”

I want to rise up on my tiptoes and kiss him. Instead I say softly, “Good luck, tiger.”

He heads straight for David, cutting through the press of people with purpose, ambition, and a plan.

God, that’s so fucking hot, the way he goes after what he wants. In this case, David’s ideas. I want him to win David.

Badly.

Once Bridger reaches the man, Allison cuts away, joining another group.

I let out a satisfied sigh.

I did that.

I engineered that meeting.

Bridger didn’t need Carlos Mondez.

He only needed me.

I can’t stop a private grin, and I don’t have to because I have a few minutes to myself. And I use them to do one of my favorite things—admire all the pretty things.

As I head toward the first installment of letters, my mind wanders briefly to the ones my mother wrote me when I was a girl.

Like the last one where she wrote about our day together in the Village.

Dear Harlow,

Can I tell you a secret?

When we went to that ice cream shop in the West Village tonight, I remembered how I felt the first time I moved to New York, long ago, before you were born. It was just Cassie and me. My sister and I had come from Florida after wanting to make it to New York for so long.

We were overwhelmed. At first, the city was daunting, from the subways to the skyscrapers, from the smells to the speed. But New York doesn’t hold your hand, so I had no choice but to learn my new home.

Today, as I watched you walking down Christopher Street with a certain ownership in your step, I thought, that’s my city girl.

She doesn’t need New York to hold her hand. She owns this city.

As my throat tightens, I finger the I on my necklace, breathe in, breathe out, and let the memory lap over the shore of my mind. Then, like a wave, it’s pulled back out to the endless sea.

It fades away, and the knot of emotions loosens.

I reconnect to time and place, here in Petra Gallery, in this sliver of the West Village that I once visited with her. I stop at a letter from Diego Rivera to Frida Kahlo, reading their correspondence. It’s desperate, deep, and laced with lust and words like Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes .

I gaze at the photo next to it, a black-and-white close-up of a pair of eyes. Probably not hers or his. It’s impossible to know who they belong to. But even in black and white, I can somehow believe those are Frida’s green-gold eyes. I stare a little longer, my mind drifting into the image, into its beauty, its shapes.

When I take a step toward the next installment, a feminine voice floats past my ear. “So if a sculpture is just a sculpture, is a letter just a letter?”

It’s Allison Tanaka-Fontaine, looking sharp in a pantsuit, her hair styled in a twist. And she remembers our conversation from MoMA when she said sometimes a sculpture is just a sculpture . “It hardly seems so, reading this letter. But I suppose letters are a different type of art.”

“Fair point. They’re written art. At least I think these are,” she says with a touch of pride. Understandable.

“They definitely are. Can you imagine writing one like this today? We just send selfies and texts instead. But these letters are sort of pure and primal in a way we don’t see anymore. They’re like a raw look at how people were. A window into the past. Into the ways we don’t communicate these days.”

“Exactly.” She says it like she’s been desperately wanting someone to make that observation all night. “By the way, thanks for coming. I saw your name on the VIP list and remembered our brief conversation at MoMA. I thought of it when I was curating our part of the exhibit.”

“You did?” I can’t quite believe I made that much of an impression on her.

“I wanted an installment that attendees would experience . I wanted them to see the letters, read the letters, but also feel them. That’s why I sometimes say a sculpture is a sculpture and art is art. Because it’s about a feeling art elicits more than anything.”

I’m the same way, and I feel bubbly, a little excited over our shared connection. “That’s so nouveau. So formalist,” I tease.

She faux gasps. “I’ve got a formalist in me,” she says. “Don’t tell a soul.”

Then I latch back onto what she just said. “You said your part of the exhibit. Is there more to this?”

“Yes. We’re partnering with two other galleries. Bettencourt tomorrow night. Ashanti the night after. They both have letters. Each one hits a different theme.”

“Like a pub crawl for art. And your theme is longing?” I ask.

Her bright brown eyes spark with awareness. “It is,” she says, then nods toward her husband and Bridger. “He’s trying to woo my husband, isn’t he?”

For a split second, I’m tempted to say how would I know ?

But that’s a defensive stance. She’s not asking if we’re having a thing—are we? Are we having a thing? God, I hope so—so I swallow the reaction.

Then I consider her question carefully before I ask, “Don’t most people in the entertainment business want to woo your husband?”

“That is true.” She sighs, a little resigned. “Most fail.”

“I hope Bridger doesn’t,” I say, since that’s a reasonable thing for me to want as a Lucky 21 intern.

“I suspected that since you came with him,” she says.

“We work together,” I add, not quickly, not defensively. Just proving my point. We are nothing in public. “At Lucky 21.”

“What do you think he has to offer my husband then?”

I definitely didn’t think she’d be quizzing me about Bridger, but the answer rolls easily off my tongue. “He’s tireless. He’s driven. He’s passionate. And he understands what your husband wants to accomplish with his stories. He wants to make people laugh.” Then, what the hell. I go for it. “And he wants to surprise them with an unexpected love story,” I add, taking a little liberty there, but I’m pretty sure I’m right based on how David dotes on his wife.

Allison smiles, impressed. “Good to know,” she says as the curator from MoMA arrives by her side, this time with her braids curled at the ends.

“We meet again,” Amelie says to me, playfully, in French.

“We sure do,” I say, answering in the same language.

“And what do you think of the exhibit? Does it have enough theory for you?” There’s a wink in her tone. A reference to our past conversation in the sculpture gardens.

“Or perhaps never enough,” I volley back, then with a nod toward the black-and-white shot of a woman on a bridge, I say, “Black-and-white is a clever choice. It’s like the photographic complement for the letters.”

The curve in her lips says she’s pleased with that observation. “Yes, a perfect pair. Wine and fruit.”

“Olives and cheese,” I toss back, then the three of us chat for another minute about the installation until a man strides up behind Amelie, dressed in black, and he whispers in her ear.

“Of course, Serge,” she says to him, then to me, “There’s someone I need to talk to. Allison, come with me.”

We say goodbye and they take off, two power women in the art world, making deals perhaps presiding over feelings . As I make my way to check out more letters, I spot Bridger shaking David’s hand. David flashes a small smile at him, then spins around, smiling bigger when he sees his wife. He beelines for her. Bridger strides across the gallery to me.

“Thank you,” he says, soft, just for me.

“I don’t think I did anything.”

He shakes his head adamantly. “You did everything. You unlocked the door. Hell, you kicked it open with a steel-toed boot.”

Well, I won’t turn down the compliment. “And, tiger?”

Bridger dips his face, then raises it, like he’s trying valiantly to erase the evidence of how tiger makes him feel.

Pretty damn good, by the looks of it.

I glow.

“I made some inroads,” he says. “He likes the idea of the columns and how I suggested structuring them in a story. But there’s something getting in the way for him. I don’t know what. But I can sense something stopping him from a yes.”

“Any idea what it is?”

“No. But I told him I’d do everything to make our show the biggest hit in the world.”

I tingle from his confidence. I love that he went for it. That he put himself out there for Fontaine.

I glance around at the press of people, the noise and the buzz, the chatter and the music. Bridger doesn’t like this many people. They make him uncomfortable. They bring him back to a place that hurt him when he was younger. “Do you need to go?”

“I bet you’d like to look at the exhibit,” he says, letting me know he’ll stay for me, he wants me to enjoy myself.

I love the gesture and so, I take it. “I would.”

He lifts a hand, as if to put it on the small of my back. Then he must think the better of it, since he lowers his arm. I miss that hand terribly, but I file away the impulse, tucking it into a folder of moves he’s made toward me.

We circulate, wandering past other letters, stopping at the original of one Zelda Fitzgerald wrote to her husband, F. Scott Fitzgerald, tell him there’s nothing in all the world she wants but him and she’ll do anything to keep his heart for her own.

When I finish the letter, my chest twinges for the sender, then I say, “It’s a beautiful letter, don’t you think?”

“It is, even though they had a complicated relationship.”

I want to ask: But do we? But now’s not the time nor place—not when I’m still cultivating an us . Instead, I ask, “Do you think these letters are all lies?”

“No. I just think we see what we want to see. People show what they want to show. But every letter has some other story behind it.”

Story.

That word reverberates.

It echoes in my bones.

Maybe in Bridger’s, too, since he adds, almost reverently, “And backstory.”

Then, I swear I can see ideas flicker in his blue eyes. A puzzle solved. “Harlow,” he says, like he’s found buried treasure. “That’s what we were saying is missing from Afternoon Delight .”

“Right, yes.” Where is he going with this?

He glances around. We’re surrounded by people. Too many ears. Then he tips his forehead to the door.

I follow him, spilling out into the New York night, away from the crowded gallery, then he calls his driver, motions for me to join him—like I’d go anywhere else. I’m breathless with anticipation. When the car pulls over, he asks the driver to head all the way up to Central Park.

Oh, yes.

That gives us plenty of time alone together.