The Drowning Tree (21 page)

“But I don’t see why Christine would have committed suicide now. She seemed like she was getting her life back together. She almost had her degree …”

“You know she’d switched concentrations again.”

“I know she switched from medieval art to nineteenth-century painting last year.”

“She’d just switched again—to early-twentieth-century decorative arts. She said it was because of researching the Penrose window.”

“But that would have set her back at least another year.”

“It’s not that unusual. People take decades to get their doctorates. But there was something so intense in Christine when she was focused on something that it was unsettling when she switched gears so abruptly—”

I knew what he was talking about. Neil had been like that, too. One
minute you’d have his complete attention, and the next he had disappeared, gone to work on a painting.

“—her thesis adviser confessed that he was worried about her. She’d missed appointments with him over the last few months and she wasn’t keeping up with her teaching responsibilities. He said she was in danger of losing her scholarship money if she didn’t get her act together.”

“He said that to Christine?”

Nathan nods, his gaze on the river and the hills in the distance. “Just last week.”

“Damn. It probably sounded to Christine like one of her mother’s threats.
‘If you don’t shape up you’ll end up uphill.’ ”

“Maybe that’s what she thought her choices were.”

“What?”

Nathan lifts his chin toward the sprawling brick building just like I did a moment ago to indicate Neil’s abode. “Look at the two things she grew up with that had any beauty—a psychiatric hospital—” He turns his head toward the river. “—and the river. Maybe she decided to choose the river because she thought that otherwise she might end up in the hospital.”

O
N OUR WALK BACK DOWN THE BRIDLE PATH
N
ATHAN AND
I
LAPSE INTO SILENCE
. I
T
feels appropriate after the conversation we’ve just had about Christine as a way of honoring her in the chapel-like stillness of the woods. At least I hope that’s what Nathan’s doing. I, regrettably, have gone back to thinking about Neil.

The reason the glimpse of the shadow behind the windows at Cooke’s made me think of him, I’ve realized, is that it’s so much like the first glimpse I ever had of him.

I usually tell people that I met Neil the spring semester of my junior year in Professor Da Silva’s Dante class, but that isn’t precisely true. I met him—or perhaps I should say, caught my first sight of him—during
Christmas break that year at the Cloisters museum in Manhattan. Christine had called me the first week of the new year and begged me to meet her on the southbound train on what turned out to be the coldest day of the year.

We got off at the Marble Hill station and walked across the 225th Street bridge and down Broadway toward Fort Tryon Park. It was a good two-mile hike through icy city streets, and it began to snow as we entered the park. I’d been to the Cloisters once before on a school field trip on a muggy day in June but I’d found it hard to lose myself in the feeling of being in a medieval monastery. There’d been too many high school kids making lewd jokes about the grotesque demons and beasts carved into the column capitals. But on that day with Christine, trudging across the snow-covered terrain of Fort Tryon Park on cold, tired feet, I could imagine, when I caught sight of the stone towers, that Christine and I were two of Chaucer’s pilgrims looking for sanctuary at the monastery.

We had the place pretty much to ourselves. Christine was disappointed that the Cuxa Cloister—the largest cloister at the center of the museum—had been glassed off against the cold weather, but I loved the way the sun came in through the glass panes, warming the mottled pink Carrara marble. While Christine paced around the square, I settled against a column in the northwest corner of the arcade and took out my sketchbook. While I drew she kept up a running commentary on the figures carved into the marble capitals, pointing out particularly grotesque demons.

“Have you ever wondered,” she asked from the far end of the arcade, “why the most religious people are most fascinated with hell?”

I shrugged. It didn’t seem like the kind of conversation to shout across a public space, even though we appeared to be alone in the cloister.

“I’d like to ask Professor Da Silva that when we take Dante this semester. Why does Dante have to go down into hell to find his way again—just because he lost his way in the middle of his life? Do you think that means that when you’re at your lowest you have to go lower? To face your demons?”

I looked up from my drawing. Christine was standing in the north arcade, hands buried in the pockets of her hooded Penrose sweatshirt,
gazing up at the leering face of a monkey-demon. Even though she was wearing the same college sweatshirt as I was the effect on her was medieval. Her hair, loose under the sweatshirt, fell in smooth loops on either side of her face. She could have been an abbess, a dethroned queen in monastic exile, Guinevere pacing the stone arcades of Almesbury. I flipped a page in my notebook and started to draw her, lengthening her sweatshirt into monastic robes and turning the casual disarray of her hair into a medieval coiffure. When I came to filling in the background of columns in the east arcade I noticed that the protective glass panes on that side had frosted over so that the columns looked blurry. I imagined a painting of Guinevere, looking out into her cloistered garden and seeing figures from her past rising out of the mist, Arthur, Lancelot … and then I noticed that there was, indeed, a figure in the mist. Someone was sitting in the archway directly across from me, leaning against a column, a sketchpad resting on bent knees. For a moment I thought I was looking at my own reflection, but then the figure rose and walked south along the east arcade.

“What is it?” Christine asked.

I put a finger to my lips and waved her over with my other hand. When she was closer to me I pointed to the figure walking past the pink columns on the other side of the cloister. Just as I did the figure passed behind the last column and vanished. Christine and I looked at each other and then, when we looked back, he reappeared two arches back.

“How …?”

“He must have crept back under the stone bench,” I whispered. “He knows we’re watching him.”

By now the figure—he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt much like ours so all we could tell was that he was tall and slim—had passed out of sight into the southeast corner of the cloister.

“Let’s follow him,” Christine said. “He must have gone into the Unicorn Tapestries room.”

Clutching my sketchpad to my chest I followed Christine south along the west arcade into the Nine Heroes Tapestry room and from there into the room that housed the museum’s most famous exhibit—the sixteenth-century tapestries depicting the hunt and capture of the
unicorn. The room was empty except for the hunters in their plumed hats and their fine-boned greyhounds wandering through a heavily flowered wood.

“There he is,” Christine said, pointing toward the windows facing out into the cloister. I glanced out the leaded glass windows and saw the hooded figure walking west along the south arcade. “Come on.”

Christine headed back out into the Cuxa Cloister, but I lingered a moment in front of the last unicorn tapestry, the one that shows him collared and trapped beneath a pomegranate tree. The image had always disturbed me, even after our medieval art teacher assured us that the red stains on the unicorn’s milky white skin were pomegranate juice, not blood. What bothered me the most, I suppose, is that I’d admired the image for years—my mother had hung a framed print of it in my room when I first showed an interest in unicorns—without knowing I was looking at a dead creature.

When I came out into the covered walkway Christine was standing at the entrance to the Early Gothic Hall on the west side of the cloister waving to me. When I followed her in I expected to find our mystery man cornered there but instead Christine was standing by one of the unglazed lancet windows overlooking the Gothic chapel, leaning so far over I was afraid she might fall and break her neck on the stone floor below, joining the entombed nobility whose stone coffins lined the chapel floor. When I joined her there I saw what she was pointing at. Someone had propped a sheet of cardboard on the folded hands of a tomb effigy and drawn a red arrow pointing east.

“He’s pretty sure of himself,” I said. I expected that Christine would suggest we call off the chase, but she seemed intrigued.

“I wanted to see the exhibit down there anyway,” she said, heading down the stairs to the lower level of the museum.

We passed through the Gothic chapel (Christine retrieved the arrow placard from the tomb of the medieval knight) and into the Glass Gallery, which was empty except for a guard at the end of the hall.

“We could ask the guard if he saw anyone come through here,” I suggested to Christine. But Christine shrugged and wandered over to a display of ivory diptychs. “I guess we’ll find him when he wants to be found.”

While Christine looked at the display cases, I walked along the wall of windows. Set into the leaded glass were roundels of silver-stained glass. If he’d given me a chance, I thought, I could have impressed that boy by explaining how the yellow color was produced by applying a solution of silver nitrate to the clear glass and that the process was discovered in the fourteenth century. Instead I was left admiring the way the patches of yellow stood out against the bleak white and gray of the winter sky outside like the first daffodils coming up through the snow. I loved the way the yellow was the only color in the muted grisaille panels and stopped to get a closer look at the intricate painting that had been done on the glass when I saw another patch of yellow. A shock of sun-bright hair in the courtyard outside the window. The boy was sitting on the far side of the little Bonnefont Cloister, his back to the George Washington Bridge in the distance. He was smoking a cigarette. When he saw my face pressed up against the window he lifted a hand and waved.

I turned back to tell Christine that I’d spotted him, but she was at the far end of the gallery talking to the guard so instead I went in the opposite direction to the door that led outside. I was sure he’d still be there but when I stepped outside I was alone in the cloister. A cold wind rattled the dry leaves of the espaliered pear trees, and I could still smell the smoke from his cigarette, but he was gone. I walked through to the Trie Cloister and then back into the glass gallery just in time to see the bottom of his sneakered feet disappearing up the stairwell. Christine was still talking to the guard, but when she saw me head up the stairs she followed me.

“Did you see him again?” she asked as we arrived on the main level.

I shook my head, not because I meant that I hadn’t seen him, but because I was so befuddled by the chase, but she took it as a negative. We went into the Campin room at the head of the stairs and Christine walked over to a fifteenth-century triptych of the annunciation.

“What a tease!” she said, looking at the virgin but meaning, I suppose, the boy.

As usual I gravitated toward the windows—even though these were clear hexagonal leaded glass and not stained—and sat down on a stone ledge beneath them. I felt tired and disappointed and hungry and cold. Like a pilgrim who’d come looking for sanctuary but been turned away at
the monastery gate. Outside through the falling snow the blond-haired boy was loping down the steep cobblestoned driveway with nothing but his hooded sweatshirt to protect him against the snow. I breathed onto the glass and drew my initials in the steam from my breath. That’s when I noticed the folded paper wedged in the wood frame of the window. Prying it out I unfolded the paper and found that it was a sketch of a woman seated beneath a columned arch. She wore a long medieval robe, her face half hidden in the folds of its hood. As in my sketch of Christine he’d turned the prosaic college sweatshirt into a romantic garment, but this picture was of me, not Christine. He’d turned me into Guinevere pining for Arthur and Lancelot in the convent of Almesbury.

In the lower right-hand corner of the picture there was a tiny drawing of a tree. I didn’t know then that it was a symbol Neil used to sign his paintings—a beech tree because his name meant beech forest in German.
Or book forest
, he told me later,
only that wouldn’t make any sense
.

I turned the drawing over and was disappointed to see that he hadn’t signed his name or written his phone number. I assumed I’d never see him again, but I was wrong. On the first day of spring semester I walked into Dante class and found our Cloisters Phantom (as Christine and I had taken to calling him) sitting in the back row. Later he told me that he’d heard Christine and me talking about the class in the Cuxa Cloister, figured out where we went to college from our sweatshirts, and applied to spend his junior spring semester as an exchange student at Penrose and then signed up for the Dante class. I’d spent that day at the Cloisters feeling like the pursuer, but in the end it was Neil who’d hunted me down. I’d never felt as wanted before—nor have I since.