A lot of people would think a vacation alone with nothing to do is heaven.
I am not one of those people.
I do not go to movies by myself. If I walk in Central Park, it’s usually in the company of Finn or Rodney. If I travel for work, and stay overnight at a hotel, I will always choose room service over eating alone at a restaurant.
The idea of being by yourself on a desert island has a romantic cachet to it, but the reality is less attractive. I find myself looking forward to my
mornings on the beach, because Beatriz meets me there almost every day, and then follows me home to collect my daily postcard to Finn. I find
reasons to hover around the front door of Abuela’s place, so that we can
have our odd conversation made of charades, and because it almost always ends in a dinner invitation. I engage Gabriel in discussions about when the island might reopen, when the ferry will return to take me back to the mainland.
Twice I’ve found enough of a cell signal to call Finn, but he hasn’t answered. Once, a flood of texts and emails came through, but they were garbled, symbols and gibberish instead of sentences. When I can, I send
responses back into the void. I shouldn’t have gone. I miss you. I love you. Here, too, I might as well be shouting into a canyon, and hearing only an echo.
There are some days when I don’t speak a single word out loud, and I restlessly move from the apartment to the beach or go for a run just to stop myself from having to think about Finn, about how long it’s been since I heard his voice, about my job, about my future. With every passing hour, all of that feels hazier, as if the pandemic is a fog that’s rolled in from nowhere and nothing looks quite the way it used to.
When I have no alternative, I sit by myself and wonder how far I’ve been blown off course.
Dear Finn,
I’ve been thinking about how I left things at work. If the situation is really bad in the city, then maybe Kitomi was right to hold off on the
private auction. But then again, if it’s really bad there, Sotheby’s is going to need that sale more than ever.
By the time I get back, I may not even have a job.
Which is … strange. For so long I’ve known what I want to do and who I want to be when I grow up—I can’t imagine not being an art specialist. It’s not like I’ve always secretly dreamed of being an
astronaut and now this is my big opportunity to strike out in a new direction. I liked the direction I was headed.
I will say this, though—sometimes I look at the neon-orange Sally Lightfoot crabs polka-dotting black lava, or the pattern of spots on the back of a ray underwater, and I think: art is everywhere, if you know to look for it.
I miss you, goddammit.
Love, Diana
I didn’t expect to like Kitomi Ito.
Like the rest of the world, I saw her as she’d been cast: the villain in the story of the Nightjars, the quiet psychologist-turned-siren who’d ensorcelled Sam Pride and led to the breakup of arguably the best band in
the history of rock and roll. Whatever she’d done with her life since then— which included opening an ashram and writing three bestsellers about expanding one’s consciousness—paled in comparison to how she had affected Sam Pride. There were die-hard Nightjars fans who blamed her for his murder, because she was the reason Sam relocated from the UK to New York City.
To be fair, I also didn’t expect my boss to take me to Kitomi Ito’s apartment when she was trying to get Kitomi to commit to an auction at Sotheby’s. But Eva had been hinting for a while that since I was now an
associate specialist in Imp Mod, I should be getting more responsibility. She started dragging me to meet with art collectors and their collection managers—not because she enjoyed the pleasure of my company, but to groom me for a more senior position.
I was flattered, and I was stoked. If I could be promoted to specialist— becoming an assistant vice president before I turned thirty—I would be
ahead of my own ideal career schedule.
For several weeks now, Eva had been courting Kitomi as a potential client, taking her to lunch at Jean-Georges and The Modern. Given what Kitomi was floating for potential auction—a Toulouse-Lautrec original with an unparalleled history—I wondered if she ever had to make herself a meal, period. I was sure Phillips and Christie’s were wining and dining her as well; it was all part of the process of building a relationship with a seller— in the hope that the first piece they consigned for sale might not be the last. It was called the long game, and everyone in the business played it.
Just the fact that Eva commanded me to tag along, however, did not mean that she had developed any sudden affection for me. She was still the same frighteningly efficient, untouchable boss that (who was I kidding) I wanted to be one day. Like Eva, I wanted to walk down the hall at Sotheby’s and hear interns whisper. I wanted my name inextricably tangled with works of great art. I wanted to make the Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list.
“When we get there,” Eva instructed, as we sat in the back of the car that was taking us to the Ansonia, “you are effectively mute. Understand?”
“Got it.”
“Not even a hello, Diana. Just nod.” “What if she—”
“She won’t,” Eva says.
The Ansonia settled across the entirety of a block, a grande dame at a ball surveying the frenzy she would never deign to take part in. Kitomi Ito’s apartment was the penthouse, and to my surprise, when the elevator doors opened she was waiting for us herself. Eva shook her hand and smiled.
“This is Diana O’Toole,” she said. “She’s an associate specialist on our team.”
Kitomi was so much smaller than I had anticipated, just a hair above five feet tall. She wore a floor-length embroidered robe over jeans and a white T-shirt, and her purple glasses. “Nice to meet you,” she said, with a slight accent, and I realized in that instant that in all the photographs and grainy video clips where I’d seen her with Sam Pride and the Nightjars, I had never actually heard her voice. She was part of a music legend, but she had no sound of her own.
I opened my mouth to say hello, and then snapped it shut and smiled. Kitomi had a traditional Japanese tea set out in her living room—
handleless cups and squat teapots wreathed with delicate painted flowers.
She led us right by it, down a little hallway, to where the painting was hanging. I couldn’t tear my eyes from it, and I got the same flutter in my stomach I always got when I first saw a piece of art that was legendary. The smudges of color at the edges of the frame became crisper in the middle,
where the lovers were depicted. Clearest of all were their eyes, riveted on each other. Suddenly I was there, in the way that art can make you time- travel: I could imagine the painter, mixing his palette; could smell the attar of roses on the bedsheets; could hear the thumps of the prostitutes entertaining their clients in the rooms on either side.
Part of my job surrounding this acquisition had meant learning as much as possible about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and his work, so that I could assess how it fit into the impressionist canon. Over the past few weeks I’d done research at the office, at NYPL, at Columbia and NYU. Born in
France to a comte and comtesse who were first cousins, Toulouse-Lautrec had a skeletal dysplasia that left him only five feet tall with an adult-size torso, child-size legs—and, allegedly, oversize genitals. His father was embarrassed by his choice to become an artist; his mother was concerned for the company he kept. He had a reputation as a ladies’ man. His first liaison was with Marie Charlet, a seventeen-year-old model. Another lover, Suzanne Valadon, tried to kill herself when their relationship ended. The redheaded model Rosa la Rouge, a prostitute, was likely the one who gave him the syphilis that led to his death.
Like other artists, he was intrigued by Montmartre—the bohemian part of Paris, jammed with cabarets and prostitutes. The Moulin Rouge commissioned him to create posters and saved a seat for him always. For
weeks at a time, he would move into brothels, painting the reality of the
lives of s*x workers—from boredom to health checks to the relationships they had that were not commercial transactions. He was much more interested in the difference between how a person acts in a certain environment and how they do when they’re alone—the space between the showman and the self; the gap between the private and the professional.
His work was described as painterly, relying on long, unblended brushstrokes. His art was more a blur than a snapshot, like scanning a crowd and having your gaze snag on something—the green, looming face of a woman, the bright red tights of a dancer. He was much more interested in individuals than in their surroundings, so there was usually a certain
feature that he felt was distinctive and he accentuated that, letting the rest of
the field float away. His gaze was not romanticized, but practical and dispassionate.
Around 1890, he painted a series—Le Lit—that featured prostitutes in bed in quiet moments of intimacy. The women were pastel, because they used to powder themselves to look whiter and younger and healthy, but the surroundings were comparatively brighter, to contrast between where they were and who they were. What you see, Toulouse-Lautrec seemed to say, is not what you’re really getting.
There was no question that Kitomi Ito’s painting fit into thisseries, with one startling departure: here, Toulouse-Lautrec had painted himself into the frame.
Beside me, I heard Eva draw in her breath, and I remembered that this was the first time she’d seen the piece in person, too.
She cleared her throat, and I shook myself out of my reverie. I had work to do. It was my responsibility to assess the condition of the painting: Was
the paint peeling? Was the frame sound? And the signature—did it look like his other signatures: T-Lautrec, the T and dash almost forming an F, the sharp acute angle of the L, the tiny loop of the t at its cross mark. While I
was doing this, Eva had her own job: convincing Kitomi Ito that Sotheby’s was the right auction house to sell the piece.
We knew that in the past, Kitomi had sold through Christie’s. But for this painting, she had invited other auction houses to make their pitches. “It’s
breathtaking,” Eva said, and when she did, I didn’t look at the artwork but at Kitomi Ito’s face. She looked like a mother who had made the decision to give a baby up for adoption, only to realize that it was harder than she thought to let him go.
“Sam used to say,” she said, “that when he turned eighty, he’d never do another interview. Never sit in front of another camera. He wanted to go to Montana and raise sheep.”
“Really?” Eva asked.
Kitomi shrugged. “We’ll never know, I suppose.”
Because thirty-five years ago, her husband had been murdered. She turned, leading us down the hallway again to the table for tea.
“Is there a particular reason you decided to sell the painting?” Eva asked. Kitomi looked up at her. “I’m moving.”
I could see Eva doing calculations. If Kitomi was going to leave New York City, there would be other things in the apartment she might want to
sell.
The tea steamed in front of me. It smelled like green grass. “It’s sencha,” Kitomi said. “And there’s Scottish shortbread, too. Sam was the one who got me addicted to that.”
I sat with my hands folded in my lap, listening with half an ear to Eva’s pointed questioning: Have you had the painting appraised? Has the piece been moved? Has there been any restoration done on it? What other players do you work with in the art field—does someone manage your collection?
What do you hope to achieve through auction?
“What I want,” Kitomi said, “is for this painting to close one chapter, so I can open the next one.”
Her words sounded like the break of a bone, sharp and irrevocable.
Eva began to pitch the marketing campaign she and other senior
associates had been fine-tuning since the first call from Kitomi. The plan was to wrap Sam Pride’s name all over the auction, because value is added for a celebrity—part of the reason the Vanderbilt estate had sold as well as it did years ago was simply the name Vanderbilt in the descriptions. “At Sotheby’s, we know art. So naturally, we would write up the history of the time of Toulouse-Lautrec’s life and pitch it to the top five Imp Mod
collectors in the world, and we would give the painting the cover of the catalog. But we also know this is special. This piece is like nothing we have ever auctioned, because it is a link between two icons of their times. It’s not just Toulouse-Lautrec who should be spotlighted, but Sam Pride. At the auction, we would lean into the moment at which this painting intersected with Sam’s life.”
Kitomi’s face was unreadable.
“Nineteen eighty-two,” Eva continued, “when the album came out with this visible in the cover photo. We would also reunite the surviving
Nightjars as a precursor to the auction—art begetting art.”
Eva reached into a leather folio to present the formal write-up of the pitch to Kitomi: the multimillion-dollar estimate of the painting’s value that would be presented to the public, what we thought the market value actually was, and the reserve—the secret amount Sotheby’s would keep as the price below which we would not sell.
I rose from my seat, about to ask for a restroom when I remembered I wasn’t supposed to speak. Kitomi looked up, her eyes black buttons. “It’s down the hall,” she said. “Left at the end.”
I nodded and slipped away. But instead of going to the bathroom, I found myself standing in front of the painting.
A lot of Toulouse-Lautrec’s work was about movement. His earliest art captured horses, then he focused on dancers and the circus and bicycle racing. But even later paintings felt like they were kinetic. At the Moulin Rouge, The Dance—one of his most famous paintings—showcases a tilted perspective on the floor to make the viewer feel off-kilter and a little drunk
—while the eye is drawn to the red of the dancer’s stockings and to the pink of a fine lady’s dress and then to the gentleman she is watching and then to the flurry of another dancer’s petticoat behind him—all these angles make you feel like you are spinning, like you are in this loud room moving about, as small details catch your eye.
Kitomi Ito’s painting, on the other hand, was all about stillness.
It was the moment after intimacy, when you weren’t joined to your lover anymore, but still felt him beating like blood inside you.
It was the moment where you had to remember how to breathe again. It was the moment where nothing mattered more than the moment ago.
The model had red hair, and it was one of the only splashes of color on the background, which was tan, like cardboard. The field was white with
bits of pastel in it. The woman—Rosa la Rouge—sat up half-nude. Behind her was a mirror, reflecting the direct gaze of the man who faced her from the bottom right of the painting: Lautrec himself, turned to the side, so you saw his bared shoulder and his profile, his beard and the wire edge of his glasses. The artist’s shoulder—a pallid green—was the only other bleed of
color in the painting. I wondered if it was meant to flag illness, like his bent legs under the covers; or jealousy over this woman who would ultimately
be the end of him.
Or maybe it was a flash of the hidden heart of a man most often described as aloof.
I shook myself away from the painting and continued down the hall to
the bathroom, passing an open doorway. The room was familiar to anyone who had ever seen the Nightjars’ final album, with Kitomi and Sam Pride in that very bed. The only thing missing, of course, was the painting that, for
the album cover, had been hung behind Kitomi.
But there were things in the room now that were not part of that photo.
On one side of the bed was a nightstand with a stack of books, a glass half- full of water, a pair of purple reading glasses, some hand cream. On the
other was a nightstand with only one item on it: a man’s wedding ring. Neatly aligned on the floor was a battered pair of men’s leather slippers.
I backed away, feeling even more voyeuristic now than I ever had seeing Kitomi half-naked on an album cover, and went to the bathroom. When I emerged, Kitomi herself was standing in front of the painting.
“His cousin was a medical student,” she said. “He let Henri scrub in and do paintings of surgery.” She turned, a smile in her eyes. “I’ve always thought of him by his first name, not Toulouse-Lautrec,” she said. “He was hanging over my bed for years, after all.”
I took a few steps toward her. I wondered if I should tell her that I knew all that. But Eva had warned me to stay silent.
“He was placed in a sanitorium because of alcoholism and syphilis, and to prove to doctors he was sane enough to leave, he painted images of the circus from his memory. But he still died at thirty-six.” Kitomi’s mouth twisted. “Some people burn too bright to last long.”
Her voice was so soft I had to strain to hear it. “Auctioning it off feels
like an amputation. But it doesn’t seem right to have it in Montana, either.” Montana.
I thought of Kitomi saying she wanted to turn the page.
This was not, I realized, a woman who wanted a clean break, a new life. This was a woman who was so tied to her dead husband she was going to live out the dream he didn’t.
I thought: Eva is going to kill me. But I turned and said, “I have an idea.”
On the way to El Muro de las Lágrimas, or Wall of Tears, Beatriz and I detour past the remains of a mermaid. Yesterday, she stretched at the edge of the beach where the dry sand met the wet. Scales of shells mounded her tail; her hair was a tangle of seaweed. But today, our sand art has been all but swallowed by the sea.
“I bet it’s totally gone by curfew,” Beatriz says.
“Tibetan monks spend months making sand mandalas and then they brush them away and throw them into a river.”
She turns, pained. “Why?”
“Because it’s not permanent and that’s the point.”
Beatriz looks at the ruins of our sculpture. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she says, and she picks up her water bottle and starts walking. “Are you coming, or what?”
Today she is taking me to a site that is part of a former penal colony. It’s a two-hour hike through parched terrain, past scrub and cacti and, yes, poison apples. Even though we have left early, the sun is strong enough to make my shirt stick to my back with sweat, and I can feel my scalp burning where my hair is parted.
Beatriz is still cagey with me, but there are moments when she lets down her guard. Once or twice I’ve made her laugh. It may be foolish to think that she’s any less sad in my company, but at least I have eyes on her. And as far as I can tell, there aren’t any fresh cuts on her arms.
“I thought art was supposed to be something you left behind so everyone would remember you,” Beatriz says.
“Something doesn’t have to be finished and hanging on a wall for you to remember who made it,” I say. “You ever heard of Banksy? He’s a British street artist and activist. One of his paintings—Girl with Balloon—was auctioned off by my company in 2018. Someone bought it for $1.4 million
… and as soon as the gavel came down, the canvas started to slip out of the frame, in shreds. On Instagram, he posted Going, going, gone, and said he’d built a shredder into the frame intentionally, in case the work ever sold at
auction.”
“Were you there?”
“No, it happened in England.” “What a waste of money.”
“Well,” I say, “actually, it went up in value when it was torn into ribbons.
Because the real art wasn’t the painting—it was the act of destroying it.” Beatriz glances at me. “When did you know you wanted to sell art?” “In college,” I admit. “Before that I thought I’d be an actual artist.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. My father was a conservator. He restored paintings and frescoes that needed fixing.”
“Like the Banksy?”
“I guess, although that wasn’t glued back together. Conservationists usually focus on really old art that’s literally crumbling to pieces. He’d bring me to his sites, when I was little, and let me paint over a tiny bit that wouldn’t mess anything up. I’m sure he didn’t tell his bosses. The best days of my life were the ones where I got to go to work with him, and he’d ask me things as if my answers really mattered: What do you think, Diana,
should we use the violet or the indigo? Can you make out how many claws are on that hoof?”
I feel the same black shadow that always comes on the heels of a memory of my father: the acrid smoke of unfairness, the knowledge that the parent I wish was still here is gone.
“Does he still let you do it? Paint with him?”
“He died,” I say. “He’s been gone about four years now.” She looks at me. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“I am, too.”
We walk a little further in silence. Then Beatriz says, “Why don’t you paint anymore?”
“I don’t have time,” I reply, although that’s not true. I haven’t made time, because I haven’t wanted to.
I remember the exact day I put away my painting supplies, the shoebox with its arthritic tubes of acrylics and the palette with layer after layer of dried moments of inspiration, like rings on a tree. It was after the student exhibition at Williams, when my father said my painting reminded him of my mother’s work. But I somehow couldn’t bring myself to throw away the tools of the trade. When I moved to New York, the shoebox came with me, still unopened. I set it on the highest shelf of my closet, behind sweatshirts from college I no longer wore but couldn’t bear to donate to Goodwill, and the winter hiking boots I bought but never used, and a box of old tax records.
Beatriz is looking at me with sympathy. “Is it because you weren’t good at it?” she asks. “That you stopped painting?”
I laugh. “You could argue that any time someone intentionally leaves a mark behind, it’s art. Even if it’s not pretty.”
She tugs her sleeves down over her wrists. Even in this heat, she has chosen to hike in a sweatshirt, rather than show me the scars on her arms. “Not every time,” she murmurs.
I stop walking. “Beatriz …”
“Sometimes I can’t remember her. My mother.” “I’m sure your father could—”
“I don’t want to remember her. But then I think …” Her voice trails off. “Then I think maybe I’m just easy to forget.”
I reach for her arm and push her sleeve up gently. We both stare at the ladder of scars, some silver with age, and some still an angry red. “Is that
why you cut?” I ask quietly.
At first I think she is going to pull away, but then she starts speaking, fast and low. “The first time I did it, I guess. And then … I stopped for a while. At school, it was easier to distract myself. But then, right before I came back here …” She shakes her head, swallows. “How come the people who don’t even notice you exist are the ones you can’t stop thinking about?”
“My mother was never home when I was a kid. In fact, I used to think she looked for reasons to travel so she could get away from me.”
The words come out in a rush of air, a popped balloon of anger. I don’t think I’ve ever said it out loud before to anyone. Not even Finn.
Beatriz stares at me as if all my features have rearranged. “Did she run off with a photographer from a Nat Geo ship?” she asks drily.
“No. She just decided that everything in the world—literally—was more important than I was. And now she has dementia and has no idea who I
am.”
“That … sucks.”
I shrug. “It is what it is,” I tell her. “The point is, if someone abandons you, it may be less about you and more about them.”
I stop speaking as we come upon a wall that rises from the scorched earth. It’s made of volcanic rock and towers over us a good sixty feet, stretching further than my eye can see. It does not, I realize, enclose anything. “The inmates built it in the forties and fifties,” Beatriz says. “It wasn’t for any real purpose, except to create work for punishment. Tons of prisoners died while they were building it.”
“That’s grim,” I mutter.
There are two ways of looking at walls. Either they are built to keep people you fear out or they are built to keep people you love in.
Either way, you create a divide.
“They only got one ship full of cargo a year—the prisoners and the
guards were all starving. To stay alive, they hunted down land tortoises to eat. There’s rumors that the place is full of ghosts, and you can hear them crying at night,” Beatriz says. “It’s creepy as fuck.”
I step closer, walking the length of the wall. Some of the stones are etched with symbols, letters, dates, patterns, hatch marks to count time.
If you define art as something made by the hands of men, something that makes us remember them long after they’re gone, then this wall qualifies.
The fact that it is unfinished or broken doesn’t make it any less striking.
When my phone starts buzzing in my pocket, I jump. It has been so long.
I pull it out with a cry of surprise and see Finn’s name. “Oh my God,” I say. “It’s you. It’s really you!”
“Diana! I can’t believe I got through.” His voice is scratchy and pocked by static and so, so dear. Tears spring to my eyes as I struggle to hear him: “Tell me … and every … you … it’s been.”
I’m missing half of what he says, so I curl myself around the phone and experimentally move along the wall hoping for a stronger signal. “Can you hear me?” I say. “Finn?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he responds, and I can hear the relief in his words. “Christ, it’s good to talk to you.”
“I got your emails—”
“I didn’t know if they were going through—”
“The service here is terrible,” I tell him. “I wrote you postcards.”
“Well, nothing’s been delivered yet. I can’t believe there’s no internet there.”
“I know,” I say, but that’s not what I want to talk about, and I don’t know how long this magical, elusive signal will last. “How are you? It sounds—”
“I don’t even have words for it, Di,” he says. “It’s … endless.” “But you’re safe,” I state, as if there is no alternative.
“Who knows,” he says. “I read Guayaquil’s getting slammed. That they’re stacking bodies on the streets.”
At this, my stomach turns. “I haven’t seen anyone sick here,” I tell him. “Everyone wears masks and there’s a curfew.”
“I wish I could say that.” Finn sighs. “All day long it feels like I’m sandbagging against a wave and then I walk outside and realize that it’s a fucking tsunami and we don’t stand a chance.” His voice hitches.
I look around at the curl of clouds in the sky, the sun glittering on the ocean in the distance. A picture postcard. Just a few hundred miles away
this virus is killing people so fast that they don’t have room for bodies, but you would never know it from where I stand. I think of the empty shelves of the grocery mart, the people like Gabriel growing their own food in the highlands, the fishermen that have to carry the mail to the mainland, the tourism that dried up overnight. The curse of being on an island is inaccessibility, but maybe that is also its blessing.
Finn’s voice wavers, cutting in and out again. “Pregnant women … labor alone … ICU, the only time family is allowed … gonna die in the next
hour.”
“You’re breaking up—Finn—” “Nothing changes and …”
“Finn?”
“… all dead,” he says, those words suddenly clear and crisp. “Every time I finally get to come home and you aren’t there, it feels like another slap in the face. You don’t know how hard it is being alone right now.”
But I do. “You’re the one who told me to go,” I say quietly.
There is a silence. “Yeah,” Finn answers. “I guess I just assumed … you wouldn’t actually listen.”
Then you shouldn’t have said it, I think uncharitably, but my eyes are burning with guilt and frustration and anger. I can’t read your mind.
Which suddenly feels like a much bigger problem, a seed of doubt that sprouts the very moment it’s planted.
“Di—a?” I hear. “Are … still …?”
Although I have not budged, I’ve somehow lost the connection. The line goes dead in my hand. I slip the phone into my pocket and trudge back toward the wall to find Beatriz sitting in its shadow, scraping the edge of
one pointed piece of basalt against the smooth belly of another. “Was that your boyfriend?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
“Does he miss you?”
I sit down beside her. “Yes,” I say. I watch her create a hashtag on a rock, and color in each alternate square like a chessboard. “What are you doing?”
She slants her gaze my way. “Art,” she says.
I lean my back against the sharp stones of the wall. There are endless ways to leave your mark on the world—cutting, carving, art. Maybe all of them do require payment in the form of a piece of yourself—your flesh, your strength, your soul.
I reach for a rock. I start to carve my name into another loose stone.
When I’m finished, I write BEATRIZ on another. Then I stand up and pick at some of the pebbles and sand in the surface of the wall, making space to wedge the name rocks into it. “What are you doing?” Beatriz asks.
I dust my hands off on my thighs. “Art,” I reply.
She scrambles to her feet, following me as I step a distance away. The rocks I’ve carved are pale gray, completely different from the bulk of the
dark wall. They are, from back here, unnoticeable. But when you walk closer, you cannot miss them. You just have to take those few steps.
The first time I saw impressionist art, I was with my father at the Brooklyn Museum. He covered my eyes with his hands and guided me up close to Monet’s Houses of Parliament. What do you see? he asked, removing his hands when I was inches from the canvas.
I saw blobs. Pink and purple blobs and brushstrokes.
He covered my eyes again and drew me further away. Abracadabra, he whispered, and he let me look again.
There were buildings, and smog, and twilight. There was a city. It had been there all along, I’d just been too close to see it.
Squinting at the lighter shards in the wall that have our names on them, I think that art goes both ways. Sometimes you have to have the perspective of distance. And sometimes, you cannot tell what you’re looking at until it’s right under your nose.
I turn to find Beatriz with her face tipped up to the sky. Her eyes are closed, her throat stretched like a sacrifice. “This would be,” she says, “a good place to die.”
Dear Finn,
By the time you get this postcard, you probably won’t even
remember what you said when we finally actually got to speak to each other, even if it was only for a minute.
I never chose to go anywhere without you.
If you didn’t really want me to go to the Galápagos by myself, why did you say it?
I can’t help but wonder what else you’ve said that you didn’t really mean.
Diana
Toulouse-Lautrec rarely painted himself, and when he did, he hid the flaws of his lower body. In At the Moulin Rouge, he put himself in the background next to his much taller cousin, but hid his deformed legs behind a group of people at a table. In a self-portrait, he depicted himself from the waist up. There is a famous photograph of him dressed as a little clown, as if to underscore that people who focused on his disabilities formed an
inaccurate impression of him.
All of this made Kitomi Ito’s painting even rarer. This was the only work of Toulouse-Lautrec’s where he was literally and figuratively baring himself, as if to say that love renders you naked and vulnerable. There were other differences, too. Unlike most of his work, which had been exhibited after his death in Albi, his birthplace, at a museum funded by his mother,
this one disappeared from the public eye until 1908. Until then, it had been stashed away with a friend of Toulouse-Lautrec’s, an art dealer named
Maurice Joyant. With the painting had come the express directive of the artist: sell this only to someone who is willing to give up everything for love.
The first owner of the painting was Coco Chanel, who received it as a gift from Boy Capel, a rich aristocrat who bought it to lure her away from her first lover, Étienne Balsan. Chanel fell madly for Capel, who financed her foray into clothing design and her boutiques in Biarritz and Deauville. Their relationship was intense and sizzling, even though Capel was never faithful to her and married an aristocrat and kept another mistress. When he died at Christmas 1919, Chanel draped her windows with black crepe and put black sheets on her bed. I lost everything when I lost Capel, she once said. He left a void in me the years have not filled.
Years later, Chanel had an affair with the Duke of Westminster, who took her aboard his yacht, the Flying Cloud. Long after that, the duke offered up his yacht for a friend who needed a place for a tryst—Edward VIII, briefly the king of England, who was obsessed with the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. Although they didn’t wind up using that yacht, they did have an affair—one that led him to give up the throne. Months later, in 1937, Edward VIII bought the Toulouse-Lautrec painting for Wallis Simpson, negotiating with Chanel through their mutual friend the duke. Chanel wanted it out of the house, she said, because it broke her heart.
In 1956, Wallis Simpson was said to be jealous of Marilyn Monroe
because Marilyn had pushed her off the front pages of the newspapers. She invited her nemesis for tea, choosing to keep her enemies close. While at Simpson’s home, Monroe was left breathless by the Toulouse-Lautrec painting. In 1962, when Joe DiMaggio was trying to get Monroe to remarry him, he convinced Simpson to sell him the painting. He presented it to Marilyn three days before she died.
No one knows how Sam Pride and Joe DiMaggio crossed paths, but in 1972, Pride bought the painting from DiMaggio, and gave it to Kitomi Ito
as a wedding present. It hung over their bed until he was killed, and then she moved it into the hallway of their apartment.
There is a small matte smudge on the frame of the painting, from where Kitomi Ito touches it as she passes, drawing her like a lodestone, or a statue you rub for good luck.
Provenance, in art, is a fancy word for the origins of a work. It’s the paper trail, the chain of evidence, the connection between then and now. It’s the unbroken link between the artist and the present art collector. The
provenance of Kitomi Ito’s painting is devotion so fierce, it scorches the earth with tragedy and lays waste to those who experience it. Starting, of course, with the man who’d caught syphilis from his paramour … but who stared at her from the corner of the painting with single-minded focus, as if to say, For you, love, I would do it all again.
To: [email protected] From: [email protected]
Six of my patients died today.
Their families were allowed to come in here and say goodbye the hour before they died—and that’s an improvement over what it was last week, when they had to do it over FaceTime.
This last patient was on ECMO. Everyone’s talking about vents and how we’re running out of them but no one is talking about ECMO—which is when your lungs are so bad, even the vent doesn’t work anymore. So you get a giant-ass cannula in your neck and one in your groin and the blood gets pumped through a machine that acts like your heart and lungs. You get a Foley catheter and a rectal tube and a nasal gastric tube for nutrition—we are literally outsourcing their bodies.
This woman was twenty years old. TWENTY. All that bullshit about how the virus is killing old people? Whoever’s saying that isn’t working in an ICU. Of my six patients who died, none were over 35. Two were Hispanic women in their twenties who developed Covid bowel necrosis, which required surgical resection—they made it through surgery but died from complications. One was an overweight man, 28— overweight, but not obese. One, a paramedic, bled into her lungs. One guy I thought was gonna make it, until his pupils blew out—the heparin we gave him so the ECMO could do its work without clotting gave him a brain bleed.
Why am I telling you all this? Because I need to tell someone. And because it’s easier than what I should be saying.
Which is: I’m sorry for what I said to you. I know I’m the reason you’re where you are now. It’s just that nothing’s the way it is supposed to be, goddammit.
Sometimes I sit and listen to the whir of the ECMO machine, and I think, This person’s heart is outside his body, and I understand completely.
Because so is mine.
The night before my two-week anniversary on Isabela, Abuela throws me a goodbye dinner. Gabriel comes with Beatriz, who clings to me when I leave
to go down to my apartment. I’ve given her my cellphone number, but also my address, to stay in touch. Gabriel walks me to my door that night. “What will you do back home?” he asks.
I shrug. “Get on with my life,” I tell him. But I am not quite sure what that is anymore. I don’t know if I’ll have a job, and I am nervous about seeing Finn again, after our weird phone conversation.
“Well,” he says, “I hope it’s a good one, then. Your life.” “That’s the plan,” I say, and we say good night.
It does not take long for me to pack—after all, I have nearly nothing— but I clean the kitchen countertops and fold the towels I’ve washed and fall asleep dreaming of my reunion with Finn. Normally, I would have checked on my flight home, but without internet, I have to just hope for the best.
The next morning when I open the sliding door, my tote stuffed and settled on my shoulder for the walk into town to the ferry dock, Gabriel and Beatriz are waiting. Beatriz looks happier than I have ever seen her look.
She throws her arms around me. “You have to stay,” she says.
I look over her head at her father, and then hold her at arm’s length. “Beatriz,” I tell her, “you know I can’t. But I promise to—”
“She’s right,” Gabriel states, and something deep in my chest vibrates like a tuning fork.
I glance at my watch. “I don’t want to miss the ferry—”
“There is no ferry,” Gabriel interrupts. “The island isn’t opening.” “What?” I blink. “For how long?”
“I don’t know,” he admits. “But there aren’t any flights out of Santa Cruz
… or even Guayaquil, for that matter. The government isn’t letting any incoming planes land, either.”
I let my tote slip from my shoulder to my elbow. “So I can’t get home,” I say. The words feel like they’re being torn from my throat.
“You can’t get home right now,” Gabriel corrects.
“This isn’t happening,” I murmur. “There has to be a way.” “Not unless you swim,” Beatriz says, sunny.
“I have to get back to New York,” I say. “What am I supposed to do about work? And Finn. Oh my God, I can’t even tell him what’s going on.”
“Your boss can’t be mad at you if there’s no way for you to get back,”
Beatriz reasons. “And you can call your boyfriend from Abuela’s landline.” Abuela has a landline? And they’re just telling me now?
My life has been a series of telephone poles one after the other,
benchmarks of progress. Without a road map of the steps that come next, I am floundering. I do not belong here, and I cannot shake the feeling that at home, the world is moving on without me. If I can’t get back soon, I might never catch up.
I’ve been on an island for two weeks, but this is the first time I’ve really ever felt completely at sea.
Gabriel looks at my face, and says something to Beatriz in Spanish. She takes the tote from my arm and carries it into the apartment while he leads me upstairs to Abuela’s. She is sitting on her couch watching a telenovela
when we come in. Gabriel explains to her why I’m here, again in language I don’t understand.
Oh, God. I’m stuck in a country where I can’t even communicate.
He bustles me into the bedroom, where there is a phone on the nightstand. I stare at it. “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know how to call home,” I admit.
Gabriel picks up the receiver and punches a few buttons. “What’s his number?”
I tell him and he hands the phone to me. Three rings. This is Finn; you know the drill.
When I glance up, Gabriel is shutting the door behind himself.
“Hi,” I say out loud. “It’s me. My flight’s been canceled. Actually, every flight’s been canceled. I can’t get home now, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.” A sob rises like a vine through my sentences. “You were right. I shouldn’t have left.”
I am so mad. At Finn, for telling me to go. At myself, for not telling Finn to go fuck himself when he said it. So what if we would have forfeited money on a vacation? In the grand scheme of things, losing dollars is nothing compared to losing time.
I know I’m not thinking rationally—that Finn isn’t the only one to blame.
I could have told him that if things were going to be worse, I would rather have shouldered them by his side than been somewhere less risky without
him. I could even have been smart enough to get right back on the ferry that was dropping me off on Isabela as soon as I learned that the island was about to close.
What I’m truly angry about is that when Finn told me to go, he meant the opposite. When I said I’d leave, I wanted to stay. And even though we’d
been together for years, neither one of us read between the lines.
There’s really nothing else I have to say, which surprises me, because it’s been so long since we have truly talked. But Finn is drowning in reality and I’m in a holding pattern in paradise. Be careful what you wish for, I think.
When you’re stuck in heaven, it can feel like hell.
“As soon as I find out more, I’ll tell you. Not that I know how,” I mutter. “This whole situation is just insane. I’ll keep sending postcards. Anyway. I thought you’d want to know.” I stare at the receiver for another moment and then hang it up and afterward realize I hadn’t said I love you.
When I step into Abuela’s living room, Gabriel is sitting next to her on the couch. He stands when he sees me. “All good?”
“Voicemail,” I say.
“You’ll stay in the apartment, obviously,” he says, as if he’s trying to make up for his reaction when he first found me here.
“I don’t have any money—” That jogs a new worry in my mind—as sick as I am of eating pasta, I don’t even have enough cash to feed myself.
“And we’ll make sure you have food,” Gabriel says, reading my thoughts. He bends down and kisses Abuela on the cheek. “I don’t want to leave Beatriz too long.”
I follow him out the front door, onto the porch. When he jogs down the steps, headed toward my apartment in the rear, I call his name. He turns, looking up at me, impatient.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask. “Doing what?”
“Being nice to me.”
He grins, a streak of lightning. “I’ll try to be more of a cabrón,” he says, and when I blink, he translates. “Asshole.”
“For real, though,” I press.
Gabriel shrugs. “Before, you were a tourist,” he says simply. “Now, you’re one of us.”
What I want to do: crawl underneath the covers of my bed, and pretend that when I wake up, I’ll realize this was all just a nightmare. I will breeze down to the dock, board a ferry, and begin the first leg of my journey back to New York City.
What I do instead: accompany Gabriel and Beatriz to a swimming hole inland. Beatriz says that if I’m all by myself I will just wallow in my
misery, and I cannot contradict her because it’s the rationale for every outing I’ve dragged her on this past week—when she was the one who needed distraction. She is carrying a snorkel and mask looped onto her arm, and it bounces against her hip as we hike. “Where are we going?” I ask.
“We could tell you,” Beatriz says, “but then we’d have to kill you.” “She’s not entirely wrong,” Gabriel adds. “Most of the island is closed
because of the pandemic. If the park rangers find you, they’ll fine you.” “Or take away your tour guide license,” Beatriz tosses over her shoulder.
Gabriel’s shoulders tense, then relax again. “Which I am not using anyway.”
She turns on a heel, walking backward. “Are we or are we not going to a secret place you used to take clients?”
“We are going to a secret place I used to go to as a boy,” he corrects.
We finally reach a brackish pond with water that is the color of rust and bordered by brush and thickets of fallen, twisted branches. As Isabela goes, it is far from the prettiest of landscapes. Beatriz begins to strip down to her bathing suit and long-sleeved rash guard, leaving the rest of her clothes in a pile. She fits her snorkel and mask to her face, then dives into the muddy lagoon.
“Maybe I’ll just wait here,” I say.
Gabriel turns in the act of pulling his shirt over his head and smiles. “Now who is judging a book by its cover?”
He kicks off his shoes and splashes into the water, and reluctantly I peel down to my bathing suit and wade in. The bottom drops away sharply, unexpectedly, and I find myself swallowed up by the water. Before I can even panic, a strong hand grabs my arm, holding me up as I sputter.
“Okay?” Gabriel asks.
I nod, still choking a little. My fingers flex on his shoulder. This close, I realize that he has a freckle on his left earlobe. I look at the spikes of his eyelashes.
With a strong kick I free myself, and start swimming in the direction Beatriz went.
Gabriel overtakes me quickly; he is a stronger swimmer. He’s headed straight for a wall of tangled mangrove roots, or so it seems, near which Beatriz’s snorkel bobs. She lifts her face when we get closer, her eyes huge behind the plastic of the mask. The snorkel falls from her mouth as she
scrambles up a makeshift ladder of roots and disappears into a fold in the
brush. After a moment, her head sticks back out again. “Well?” she says. “Come on.”
I try to follow, but my foot keeps slipping on the branches below the water. Gabriel’s hands land square on my ass and he shoves, and I whip around fast with shock. He raises his brows, all innocence. “What?” he says. “It worked, yes?”
He’s right; I have cleared the surface. I bang my knee and feel a scrape on the bare skin of my thigh but after a moment, I find myself on the other side of the mangrove thicket, staring at a twin lagoon. In this one, the water is almost magenta, and in the center a sandbar rises like an oasis. On it, a dozen flamingos stand folded like origami as they dip their heads into the pool to feed.
“This,” Gabriel says from behind me, “is what I wanted you to see.” “It’s amazing,” I say. “I’ve never seen water this color.”
“Artemia salina,” Beatriz says. “It’s a crustacean, a little shrimp, and it’s what the flamingos eat that makes them pink. The concentration in the water makes it look so rosy. I learned that in class.” At the mention of her studies, her face changes. The buoyancy of her shoulders seems to evaporate.
If I can’t get off this island to go home, she also can’t get off it to return to school.
She curls her fingers around the edges of her rash guard sleeves, pulling them more firmly down over her arms.
As if the mood is contagious, Gabriel’s face shutters, too. “Mijita,” he says quietly.
Beatriz ignores him. She snaps on her snorkel, dives into the pink pool, and kicks as far away from us as she can, surfacing on the other side of the oasis.
“Don’t take it personally,” I say.
Gabriel sighs and rubs a hand through his wet hair. “I never know the right thing to say.”
“I don’t know if there’s a right thing,” I admit.
“Well, there’s definitely a wrong thing,” Gabriel replies, “and it’s usually what comes out of my mouth.”
“I haven’t seen any new cuts,” I tell him.
“I know she talks to you,” he says, “and those conversations are for you to keep.”
I nod, thinking of what Beatriz told me about her mother, and how that doesn’t feel like a confidence I should break.
Gabriel takes a deep breath, as if he is gathering courage. “But will you tell me if she brings up suicide?”
“Oh my God, of course,” I say in a rush. “But … I don’t think that’s why she cuts. I think for her … it’s the exact opposite of being suicidal. It’s to remind her that she’s here.”
He looks at me as if he is puzzling through my English. Then he tilts his head. “I’m glad you’re staying,” Gabriel says softly, “even if it is selfish of me.”
I know he is speaking of whatever fragile thread I’ve spun between me and Beatriz, who clearly needs a confidante. But there is more to those words, a shadow crossing my senses. I feel my cheeks heating, and I quickly avert my face toward the flamingos. “What are those?” I ask, pointing to the small gray-and-white mottled birds that hop on the sand between the legs of the flamingos. “Finches?”
If Gabriel notices me trying to change the conversation with the finesse of a wrecking ball, he doesn’t comment. “That’s a mockingbird.”
“Oh. And here I was, feeling Darwinian.” I smile, trying for a joke.
Galápagos is, of course, famous for its finches—and for Charles Darwin. I’d read about him in every tour guide that was packed in my lost suitcase.
In 1835, he came to the islands on the HMS Beagle, while just twenty-six and—surprisingly—a creationist who believed that all species were designed by God. Yet in the Galápagos, Darwin began to rethink how life had appeared here, on a spit of volcanic rocks. He’d assumed that the
creatures had swum from South America. But then he began to realize that each island was vastly different geographically from the next, that
conditions were largely inhospitable, and that new species popped up on different islands. By studying the variations in finches he developed his theory of natural selection: that species change to adapt to their circumstances—and that the adaptations which make life easier are the ones that stick.
“Everyone thinks Darwin based his work on the finches,” Gabriel says, “but everyone’s wrong.”
I turn. “Don’t tell my AP Bio teacher that.” “Your what?”
I wave my hand. “It’s an American thing. Anyway, I was taught that
finches look different on different islands. You know, like one has a long beak because on one island the grubs are deep inside a tree; and on another island, their wings are stronger because they have to fly to find food …”
“You’re right about all that,” he says. “But Darwin was a pretty shitty naturalist. He collected finches, but he didn’t tag them all properly.
However—likely by accident—he did tag all the mockingbirds correctly.” He tosses a pebble, and a mockingbird takes to the air. “There are four different types of los sinsontes on Galápagos. Darwin collected them and measured their beaks and their sizes. When he got back to England, an ornithologist noticed that the mockingbirds were significantly diverse from island to island. The modifications that helped them adjust to the climate or terrain on a given island had been replicated, because the mockingbirds that had them were the ones who lived long enough to reproduce.”
“Survival of the fittest,” I confirm. We are sitting now on the edge of the sand oasis, watching flamingos tightrope-walk along the water. Beatriz is at the far end of the lagoon, diving and surfacing, over and over. Gabriel’s lips move in silence, and I realize that he is counting the seconds she stays beneath the water.
“Do you ever wonder what animals we’ll never know about?” I ask. “The ones that didn’t make it?”
Gabriel’s eyes stay on the surface of the water, until Beatriz appears again. “History is written by the winners,” he says.
