17. “Cobalt Blue”
“COBALT BLUE”
Atlas woke me at six.
He was already dressed. Sitting on the edge of the bed in yesterday’s shirt with his glasses on, holding my phone in one hand and a fresh cup of coffee in the other.
“Read this,” he said.
I sat up. The sheet slipped. He handed me the coffee first, which was the kind of small attention I had not yet stopped noticing about him. Then the phone.
I read the message twice.
“Vivienne Ardent.”
“Yes.”
“At eight.”
“Yes.”
I set the phone down. I put both hands around the coffee cup. The loft was still dark. The first gray of the river hadn’t started showing yet at the edge of the windows.
“What did you decide while I was asleep,” I said.
He didn’t ask me how I knew. He never asked me how I knew. Atlas had figured out very early that I read his face the way other people read the news.
“I decided I’m not going with you.”
“Atlas.”
“Hear me. If I go, this becomes the meeting she wants. She wants me there. She wants a photograph of you and me walking into a hotel together. She wants me reactive. She wants me angry. If you go alone she does not know what she has.”
“And if she has something.”
“Then you walk out, and you call me, and Foster and I deal with it in the next twelve hours. But you do not walk in on her arm in arm with me. You walk in as the senator’s daughter who happens to know a lot of lawyers.
Your father’s daughter. Not yet anything she can put on paper. Are you all right with that.”
“I am all right with that.”
“Are you sure.”
“Atlas. I have been my father’s daughter in a hotel restaurant since I was seven. I know how to do this.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Then he leaned in and he kissed my hairline the way he kissed me when he didn’t trust his voice.
“Wear the navy,” he said. “She will be wearing color. You wear navy.”
I wore the navy.
A long-sleeved knit, a wool skirt, my mother’s pearl earrings. Flat shoes because I needed to be able to walk out fast if I wanted to. I left my hair down because down looked younger and younger was the version of me Senator Ardent was going to underestimate.
I took a cab to Park Avenue.
The hotel was the one my father always took meetings at when he didn’t want to be on the Hill. I had grown up in its lobby. I knew the doormen by name. I knew the maitre d’ at the breakfast restaurant.
That worked in my favor.
I walked in at seven fifty-eight.
Senator Ardent was already at the table.
Window two. Same table my father always asked for. She was sitting with her back to the room because she had picked the seat that meant she wanted to see who came in.
She was sixty-something. White hair cut short and aggressive. A cobalt-blue blazer with a cream shell underneath. An opal pin at the lapel. The opal was big enough to read at ten feet. It was the kind of opal you wore when you wanted to be remembered in a photograph.
She didn’t stand up.
She didn’t pretend to.
“Eden,” she said. “Sit.”
I sat.
The waiter came. I ordered coffee and asked for a fruit plate I wasn’t going to eat. She had already ordered eggs.
She watched me through the whole exchange. She did not pretend not to.
“You came alone,” she said.
“You asked for me alone.”
“I asked for you. I did not specify alone. Most women your age would have brought somebody.”
“I am not most women.”
She smiled. It was the smile of a woman who had been told that line a thousand times and was making a small private note about how I had delivered it.
“No,” she said. “You are not. Your mother was not either. I knew her. We served on a committee together. Did you know that.”
“I knew.”
“I liked her. I should say that first. Whatever else I am about to do this morning, I want you to know that I liked your mother.”
She said it the way you say a thing you have rehearsed in front of a mirror. The way you set down a piece on a board because you have already calculated the next four moves.
I did not respond.
I drank my coffee.
The light through the window was pale gold and falling on her opal at exactly the angle she had picked her seat for. She was a photograph waiting for somebody to take her picture. She had been one for forty years.
“Senator,” I said. “Do you have something to show me.”
She did.
A leather portfolio. She unzipped it slowly. She slid a stack of eight by tens across the table to me, one at a time, like she was dealing cards.
The first photograph was Atlas.
Atlas in a black suit, coming out of a brownstone in the West Village. A woman beside him. Tall. Blonde. Both of them laughing. The woman had her hand on his arm.
I knew the woman.
The next photograph was the same morning. The two of them at a cafe. The woman across the table, her hand on his hand. His head bent slightly. Talking.
The next was a hotel lobby. Atlas at a check-in desk. The woman behind him with a small overnight bag.
Senator Ardent slid each one across the table with the careful patience of a woman who had been preparing for this moment for some time. The waiter came back with the eggs. She thanked him by name. She did not pause until he had gone.
I looked at all of them.
I did not pick them up.
I drank my coffee.
“Senator,” I said. “Where did you get these.”
“That is the question. Most women would have asked the other question first.”
“What other question.”
“Who the woman is.”
“The woman is Helena Cain. Atlas’s ex-wife. They were married for nine years. He divorced her ten years ago.”
She blinked.
It was a small blink. Most people would not have caught it. But I had been raised by Charles Whitlock and my entire childhood had been an education in catching small blinks across hotel tables.
“Helena Cain,” she repeated. Slowly. As if rolling the name to feel for cracks.
“Yes. Shall I tell you when these were taken.”
“Please.”
I picked up the photographs then. I held them up to the window light, one at a time.
The trick of recognizing dates from photographs is that you have to know what to look for.
My mother had taught me that. My mother had been on three boards with arts foundations and knew every photographer in New York with a long-lens habit.
She used to walk me through the society pages on Sunday mornings and point out which photos were freshly taken and which had been pulled from an agency archive and re-captioned.
The first photo. Atlas was wearing a coat I had not seen him in for years. He had given it to a charity drive at our church when I was sixteen. I remembered because Mrs. Harris had sent me to deliver the bag and the coat had been on top.
That photo was a minimum of ten years old.
Probably eleven.
The second photo. The cafe. The cafe had gone out of business in 2016. I knew because my college roommate had cried about it for an entire weekend and we had taken a pilgrimage there in our junior year to mourn it.
That photo was nine years old at the youngest.
The third photo. The hotel. I knew the lobby. I knew the check-in desk. I knew the timestamp because the lobby had been redone in 2018 and the photograph showed the old wallpaper.
That photo was at least eight years old.
But the part that mattered was the photographer.
In the second photograph, in the bottom right corner, you could see the reflection of a man across the street with a long lens.
I knew the man.
His name had been Patrick Halloran. He had worked for a small celebrity-photo agency that had folded in 2015.
He had also been a friend of my mother’s.
He had taken our family Christmas card photos every year from when I was four to when I was fourteen.
He had died of a heart attack the same fall my mother got her diagnosis. October 2017. Nine years ago.
My mother had been at his funeral.
I had been at his funeral.
The photograph in front of me had been taken before he died.
These were all old photographs. Old, contextless, rearranged to look like a recent affair. Pulled out of an archive somebody had bought when Patrick Halloran’s agency folded.
I set them all down on the table in a stack.
I drank my coffee.
“Senator,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I am about to tell you something. I want you to listen carefully because I am only going to say it once.”
She set her own coffee down.
“My mother taught me to recognize a piece of work in a navy blazer when I see one. You are wearing cobalt, which is a step above. I appreciate the upgrade. I do not appreciate the rest. These photographs are a minimum of eight years old. I know because I recognize the photographer. Patrick Halloran has been dead for nine years. He was a friend of my mother’s.
He took our family Christmas cards. I know the wallpaper in the third photograph.
I know the cafe in the second. I know the coat in the first. I will not ask you who you bought these from because I do not need to.
I will tell you what is going to happen next instead. ”
She did not move.
“You are going to leave this hotel. You are going to forget that you sent that text to my phone at three a.m. You are not going to contact me again. You are not going to contact my father. You are not going to contact Atlas. If a single one of these photographs appears in any publication, anywhere, my father will know that you knew they were old, that you sent them anyway, and that you tried to manipulate his daughter the morning after the press leak about her relationship. I do not have to tell you what my father is when he is protecting one of his daughters. You have served with him for sixteen years. You know.”
I stood up.
I picked up my coffee cup. I set it down again.
“Have a good morning, Senator.”
I walked out of the restaurant.
I made it to the lobby before my hands started shaking.
I made it to the curb before I let them.
The doorman flagged a cab. He looked at my face and he did not say anything.
He held the door for me. He shut it after me.
He nodded once, the small nod of a man who had been at this hotel since I was nine years old and knew that the senator’s eldest daughter had just walked out of a meeting that mattered.
I gave the driver an address.
Not Atlas’s apartment. Not my loft. The address of the firm. Atlas would be at the firm by now. Atlas had been at the firm since seven, probably, on the phone with Foster, waiting.
I needed to be in his office and not in a cab when I let myself feel any of what I had just done.
The cab pulled into Park Avenue traffic.
I leaned my head against the window. The buildings slid past. The autumn light was thin and gold.
I closed my eyes.
I thought about my mother.
My mother who had raised three daughters in rooms full of men with leverage, who had taught all three of us to read a photograph for what was actually in it, who had taken me to Patrick Halloran’s funeral in a black coat that had a small velvet collar that I had played with through the entire service because I was eighteen and my mother was already sick and I could not look at the casket.
I thought: thank you.
I thought: I would not have known about the wallpaper without you.
I thought: I would not have known what I was looking at.
The cab pushed south. The numbers on the buildings rolled down.
Sixty-fifth. Sixty-second. Fifty-ninth and the trees of the park beginning to turn at their edges.
It was Sunday morning and the city was still in the slow, quieter version of itself, the version that belonged to the people who lived here rather than the ones who came to look.
I did the breathing my mother had taught me. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Twice as long out as in. She had taught me that the year before she died, on the day I had a panic attack at a graduation rehearsal because the choral teacher had asked me to sing a solo.
She had said: when somebody puts a thing in your hand that you don’t want to hold, you put it down. You don’t throw it. You don’t apologize. You put it down on the table and you walk away.
I had put it down on the table.
I had walked away.
The cab stopped at a red light at 71st and Park.
I opened my eyes.
Across the street, on the opposite corner, a man was standing in a long brown coat with a camera around his neck.
He was photographing my cab.
I knew the man.
I knew the brown coat. I knew the camera.
I had seen him at the Hartwell Foundation board meeting last spring, where he had been introduced to me as a development consultant for one of the foundation’s grant cycles.
My father had introduced him. My father had said the man’s name was Marcus Ellery and that he had worked for one of my father’s PACs years ago.
Marcus Ellery.
He was photographing me.
He saw me see him.
He did not look away.
He raised the camera again and he took another shot, deliberate, the lens pointed straight into the back seat where I was sitting.
The light turned green.
The cab pulled away.
I turned around in the seat and I watched him watch me go. He was still standing on the corner. Still holding the camera. He did not move until my cab was three blocks gone.
I pulled out my phone.
I texted Atlas.
Three words.
I typed them. I read them once. I sent them.
He photographed a woman who was no longer running.
He just did not know it yet.