It's Still Life

The Alcove

The Heist (episode 1)

Chris, aka La Raconteuse, opens her laptop, a fork stands flag-pole-straight in our shared slice of Mimi’s Chocolate Cake for Challenging Days — she types so hard the keys chatter as she chases through New York landmarks records, Madison Avenue plans, façades, floor layouts, and every architectural scrap the city has carelessly left where a curious red-headed woman can find it.

“We’re only borrowing the book,” I insist, though in my mind Arader Rare Books has already become a library  (forms signed, hands washed, gloves refused because clean skin is kinder to old paper),  and I want nothing from Le Grand Herbier en Françoys except the impossible hour of holding it.

For years I’ve carried this wanting quietly, but now hope has entered the room like weather before a storm, changing the pressure of everything; even Nick, the Gatekeeper, watches me with the look of a man who knows desire can make sensible people foolish.

“Drink your milk, Marilyn,” he says, nodding towards my Guinness-etched glass, as if calcium might restore judgement where five centuries of forbidden knowledge have failed.

Chris suddenly stops, one finger suspended above the keyboard, and for a moment even the alcove holds its breath.

“I think I’ve found it,” Chris says, and the cake, the milk, the chatter of the café all recede before the terrible little brightness of possibility.