Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 106001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 530(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 353(@300wpm)
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.”