Chapter 6
Cleo called at seven-fifteen, which meant she'd been awake since six and had already decided something.
"Get dressed," she said. "Not houseboat dressed. Dressed dressed."
Iris looked down at the paint-stiffened T-shirt she'd slept in.
She'd been up since five herself, working.
Not working exactly — sketching, which was what she'd been calling it so she wouldn't have to take it seriously if it turned out to be nothing.
Three days of sketching now, filling Constance's old Moleskines with charcoal studies of the view through the north-facing window.
The lake at dawn. The lake at dusk. The particular quality of light that came through at midday when the clouds thinned just enough to make shadows without committing to sun.
"Where are we going?"
"I'm picking you up at nine-thirty. Wear the navy blazer. The one that makes you look like you own things."
"I do own things."
"I know. That's why it works."
Cleo hung up before Iris could ask again.
She showered in the houseboat's narrow stall, the water pressure barely adequate, and dried off with one of Constance's thin towels.
She found the navy blazer folded in her suitcase — she'd packed it on instinct that first night at the Fairmont, the way you pack a passport even when you're not leaving the country.
Underneath it was a silk blouse the color of fog.
She put both on with dark jeans and the only pair of heels she'd brought, then stood in front of the bathroom mirror, which was small and spotted with age.
She looked like herself. Not Gavin Rogers's wife, not the woman in the Fairmont suite with mascara tracks on her face. Just Iris. Thirty-four, dark circles she hadn't bothered to conceal, jaw set in a way that had become habitual.
She put on lipstick. Took it off. Put it on again.
By nine-fifteen she was sitting on the dock with her portfolio case — the leather one she hadn't opened in four years, dug out of the houseboat's storage locker at two in the morning.
She'd spent an hour going through it, pulling out prints and transparencies of her installation work from before the marriage.
The suspended textile pieces she'd shown at a group exhibition in Pioneer Square.
The mixed-media wall panels that had gotten a paragraph in Art in America — a single paragraph, but she'd read it forty times.
The large-scale fiber sculpture that had been her MFA thesis at Cornish, which her advisor had called "architecturally ambitious and emotionally precise," two words she'd carried like talismans until she stopped needing talismans because she stopped making art.
She hadn't looked at this work since moving into the Eastside house.
It was better than she remembered. That was the thing that had kept her up.
Not that it was good — she'd always known it was good, in the private way you know things about yourself that you can't say out loud without sounding either arrogant or desperate.
But that it was hers. Every piece in the portfolio existed because she'd made it with her hands, in studios she'd paid for with teaching assistantships and barista tips, and no one had given her permission or funding or a lake house to do it in.
Cleo's silver Audi pulled up at the curb at nine-twenty-eight.
"You look excellent," Cleo said, appraising her through the passenger window. "You look like a woman who makes things."
"Where are we going, Cleo?"
"The Seattle Art Museum. Specifically, to meet Diana Sung, who curates the new contemporary wing, and who happens to be looking for a large-scale mixed-media installation for the atrium entrance.
And who happens to be my cousin's college roommate, which is how I know she hasn't filled the commission yet. "
Iris stared at her. "You could have told me this last night."
"If I'd told you last night, you would have spent eight hours convincing yourself you weren't ready." Cleo shifted into drive. "Get in."
#
The Seattle Art Museum sat on First Avenue like a sentence that knew its own weight — limestone and glass, the Hammering Man sculpture working its slow mechanical arm outside the entrance.
Iris had been here dozens of times. Fundraiser galas with Gavin, mostly, evenings where she'd stood beside him in something borrowed from a designer and smiled at people who called her "Gavin's wife" and sometimes, when they were feeling generous, "the artistic one.
" She'd never walked through the staff entrance. She'd never carried her own portfolio.
Diana Sung met them in a second-floor conference room that smelled of fresh paint and industrial carpet.
She was in her mid-forties, compact, with cropped silver hair and round tortoiseshell glasses that she pushed up her nose three times in the first five minutes.
She wore no jewelry except a watch with a leather band.
She shook Iris's hand with a grip that meant business.
"Cleo tells me you work in mixed media," Diana said. "Large scale."
"I did. I do." Iris caught the tense shift and let it stand. "I took a few years off."
Diana didn't ask why. She gestured at the portfolio case. "Show me."
So Iris showed her.
She laid out the prints on the conference table, and it felt like undressing — not the sexual kind, the kind where you remove every layer of protection and stand there hoping that what's underneath is enough.
The suspended textile series first: panels of hand-dyed silk and raw linen, hung at varying heights so that viewers walked through them like moving through weather.
Then the wall panels, which combined encaustic wax with embedded wire and torn paper, textures that changed depending on the light.
Then the thesis piece — a twelve-foot fiber sculpture that had taken seven months and given her tendinitis in both wrists.
Diana picked up each print. Held it at arm's length. Set it down. Picked up the next.
Cleo, who knew when to talk and when to shut up, shut up.
"This was your MFA thesis?" Diana tapped the fiber sculpture.
"At Cornish. 2016."
"I remember this show." Diana looked up.
"I was still at the Henry then. I remember thinking the artist understood how fabric holds memory.
That's not a common instinct." She set the print down carefully.
"The atrium commission is twenty-two feet of vertical wall space.
The budget is seventy-five thousand for materials and installation.
I need a proposal by August fifteenth and the piece installed by November for the winter opening. Can you do that?"
Iris's hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against the table.
"Yes," she said.
"Good. I'll have contracts sent to — do you have a studio?"
"I have a studio." The houseboat's upper level, with its north-facing window and Constance's constellation ceiling. It wasn't a professional space. It would need to become one. "On Lake Union."
"Charming." Diana stood and shook her hand again. "I look forward to the proposal, Iris. Cleo, tell your cousin she still owes me a dinner."
In the elevator going down, Iris gripped the portfolio case with both hands and breathed through her mouth. The fluorescent light hummed. The doors opened onto the lobby's pale stone floor.
"You're shaking," Cleo observed.
"I'm aware."
"You just landed a museum commission on a ten-year-old portfolio."
"I'm aware of that too."
Cleo put her arm through Iris's and steered her toward the exit. "We're celebrating. I'm buying you lunch, and then we're going to Capitol Hill, and you're going to remember who you were before you became someone's wife."
#
Capitol Hill in early afternoon had a particular energy — unhurried but alert, like a city that had just woken up and was deciding what to care about.
They walked up Pike, past coffee shops and bookstores and the kind of restaurants that put their menus on chalkboards.
Cleo had made reservations at a place on Olive Way with exposed brick and small plates, where the server called them both "ladies" and didn't glance at Iris's ring finger, which was bare.
She'd stopped wearing the wedding ring three days ago.
Slid it off in the houseboat bathroom and set it in the ceramic dish where Constance had kept her own rings — three of them, from three different marriages, none of which had lasted longer than seven years.
Iris hadn't told anyone. She hadn't needed to.
The absence of it was private, a conversation between her hand and the air.
Over lunch, Cleo mapped out the afternoon. "Kessler-Ahn is showing a new fiber artist — you'll want to see the technique. There's a collective on Fifteenth that's doing interesting things with found materials. And Marcus Webb just opened his own space on Pine."
"Marcus Webb from Cornish?"
"Marcus Webb from Cornish. He graduated the year after you. He's been showing emerging artists, mostly textiles and ceramics. He'd want to know you're working again."
Iris pushed a piece of grilled halloumi around her plate. "I'm not sure I'm working again. I sketched some things. I just agreed to a commission I haven't started."
"That's called working, Iris."
"That's called panic agreeing to something because a very intimidating curator asked me to."
"Diana Sung doesn't ask people she's not serious about. She saw that portfolio and she didn't hesitate. I watched her face." Cleo leaned forward. "You're allowed to be good at something that has nothing to do with him."
The sentence landed in a place Iris didn't want to examine. She ate her halloumi.
#
They spent the afternoon in galleries.