Chapter 6 – Cassian #2
“We’ll check your doors. We’ll watch the alley. We’ll run the route from your studio to the gallery tomorrow morning before you leave for the call. We’ll be where you don’t have to look.”
“You are in my studio now aren’t you?”
I glance at the monitor. “We’re on a camera,” I say. “You can cover it. You can have it taken down tomorrow. I put it in for one reason. It isn’t the one you’re accusing me of.”
“What reason?”
“So when a man who isn’t me decides ‘anonymous’ means entitlement, I can stop him before you have to prove to yourself again that your voice won’t save you.
So when a rumor turns into a car waiting outside, I get there first. So when the foundation wants to call your work partnership, I can call them first. So when the critic who wants a map decides to follow you home, he ends up writing about a different room the next day. ”
“I didn’t ask you to build a net,” she mumbles.
“You’re right,” I say. “You didn’t. You built a show and a set of rules. My work intersects your work. That’s it.”
“You want thanks,” she says.
“No.”
“You want credit?”
“No.”
“You want obedience.”
I let the word sit there because denying it makes it worse. She wants to see if I flinch when she names the thing that keeps men barking at women after they say no. I don’t bark. I move things out of the way. The movement looks like obedience to people who think they deserve compliance.
“I want you alive,” I say. “On your terms.”
“And the rooms you built,” she says. “You want them off the map.”
“Yes.”
“And me on the end of this line,” she says.
“Now that you’re here,” I say, “yes.”
She exhales. It’s not relief. It’s recalibration.
On the feed, she sits. She puts the card flat on the table and sets her phone next to it on speaker.
The lamp makes a halo out of paper and black ink.
Her hands go still. The tremor is gone. When she speaks again, her voice is as even as mine was at the beginning.
“If I keep you on the phone, you do what I say,” she says.
“No men in my studio while I’m not here.
No hands on my tools. No cameras at the gallery tomorrow except what my curator approves.
No press language that implies partnership.
No donors without names in back rooms. You want to keep doing your job, you do it in a way that doesn’t rewrite mine. ”
“Agreed,” I say. I expected to negotiate. She made a list instead. I prefer lists.
“And you answer questions I ask,”
“Ask.”
“How did you get inside my studio?” she pauses. “No lies.”
“Permit during a building repair,” I say.
“Beam work. We installed a small device in the seam. It is not aimed at your bed. It does not record audio. It does not go live unless motion triggers it. It doesn’t upload to a cloud.
If you want it gone tomorrow, I’ll send a contractor at eight and have it out by eight-thirty. ”
“Who put the card in the bathroom?”
“A woman on my payroll,” I answer.
“What do you have on me?” she asks. “Files? Lists? I’m not na?ve.”
“Press notes. Interview schedule. The same public material the gallery has. The things I remember from watching you work: your brushes, the way you mark your palette, so you don’t scoop from the wrong pile, your habit of checking locks twice, the exact shade you mix when you correct a lip that went too red under fluorescent lights.
I don’t keep a diary of your shoulders.”
“Bullshit,” she says, but there isn’t heat in it. “You keep everything.”
“I keep outcomes,” I say. “Not souvenirs.”
She’s quiet for another moment.. The rain gets louder in the microphones outside. The ocean knocks something on the rocks below and it thuds once like a warning. I let the sound sit in the room. It keeps me from filling silence with talking that will make both of us regret the night.
“Are you enjoying this?” she asks. “This part.”
The question is a knife angled at a tendon. The wrong answer makes the hand useless. The right answer, if there is one, is not pretty.
“I enjoy solving problems,” I say. “I enjoy closing doors. I enjoy seeing a woman stand in a room and not have to step back because a man leaned too close. I enjoy that you didn’t hang up. I don’t enjoy that someone put a heel mark by your door.”
“That heel mark is yours,” she accuses.
“No,” I say. “It’s not.”
It isn’t. I didn’t go in. I sent a man I trust to check a latch.
He messed with a brush he shouldn’t have.
He walked out. Whoever else put pressure on that door didn’t leave anything I could use except the oval the rain made when it hit their shoe and dried wrong.
I don’t like that there’s a second set of unknowns in a room I am already in charge of containing.
I will fix that. Tonight, I’ll keep her on the line long enough to keep her from writing this conversation into something I can’t use.
“You knew about the card,” she says.
“I wrote the sentence,” I say.
“For your safety,” she quotes flatly. “Possessive.”
“Economical,” I say. “Space was limited.”
She laughs once and it is sharp enough to cut and small enough to hold.
The first unscripted sound between us. The monitors don’t catch it; my ear does.
It lands in me next to the list of paints she used on the mouth and the exact way she holds a brush when she’s got the line she wants and doesn’t want to ruin it by reaching for a second one.
“I’m going to cover your camera,” she says. “Tonight.”
“That’s your choice,” I say.
“I don’t want to be prey,” she says quietly. It’s the same line she said in the bathroom and in the car and in the dark at the table. It isn’t a plea. It’s a standard.
“Then don’t be,” I say. “I’m not asking you to be.”
“You left a card that makes me feel like I am.”
“I left a card so when you decide to do something about it you don’t have to waste time figuring out who to call.”
“You,” she says, and the word is both answer and accusation.
“Me,” I reply.
“Tomorrow,” she says again, as if that word is a test for both of us. “You keep your promises. I keep mine. If you break yours, I pull the plug.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” I say. “You never will.”
“That’s not true,” she says. “You’ll make sure it isn’t.”
Silence again. Then, “Goodnight, Ward.”
“Goodnight, Aurora.”