The Fabric of Desire — excerpt from novel

The first chapter of The Fabric of Desire
completed novel
80,000 words

.
.
.
.
.

Chapter i

To steal a minaret you must first dig a well.

– Arab proverb
.
.

“We met at Versailles,” Tia stated later, afterwards, when I knew enough not to believe one in one hundred of the stories she shared about Sebastian.  He worked as a reverse touchstone for her; speaking of him or holding one of even his smallest of possessions only spun her further and further through the atmosphere.  That afternoon I could fairly see her eyeballs bulging as she lost pressure, fell away from gravity.

Or maybe it was just the drugs.  

One of the grad students at the service had supplied a bit of morphine, a touch of tranquilizer. This I accepted on Tia’s behalf, knowing it was I who would need something, and soon.

“Ashes to ashes,” the deacon had intoned, hastily summoned to recite words of comfort and soothing grace to a roomful of strangers.  “Dust to dust.”

On my right Tia had sniffed, carefully blotting a dewy bit of moisture that had collected under one eye.

I will admit that there had been a time when I would have pushed Tia Carvallo down the stairs before I welcomed her into my apartment.  At one point in my life I would have listened with a jealous passion to her stories about Sebastian, her sparely spun tales that invariably disintegrated into travelogues before spiraling into bedroom scenes, told expressly to wound the heart of an ex-lover.  

That time was dead and buried.

Besides, this was one story I needn’t listen to.  Sebastian had told me that they met after a small objects d’art auction in Chicago.  It had been raining and several dealers and their wives had shared a taxi with him on their way to dinner.  

Tia had been one of the wives.

Tia paused, mid story.  She was sitting in my living room on my couch, balancing a glass of whiskey on her rather thin knees.  

“You were saying?” I asked, poised to wash one of the grad student’s pills down my throat with vodka from the freezer.

“I’m just remembering how warm it was.  Everything about that day was perfect.  Versailles is something you can’t possibly appreciate until you’ve been there with someone you love.”

That was one of the things I had grown to like about Tia over those days prior to Sebastian’s death – those sweeping, grandiose statements that made up such a large portion of her spoken thoughts.  Saying such stupid things made it that much easier for me to pay almost no attention to her at all.

That afternoon, after we had said goodbye to Sebastian, she sat on my couch and her tears made deep salt tracks down newly emerged gullies worn in her face.

The pill, going down, wasn’t as bitter as I had thought it would be.

****************************

It all started with The Ascension.

I had worked in the textile department of the Minneapolis Museum of Art for six years when that tapestry came into our lives.  I had long ago learned that departmental rumors were a daily hazard, and the thrill of attending meetings had dissipated long ago.  That afternoon’s staff meeting held no charm for me.  

“Hey Sandy,” Donna whispered, laughing, as I took the seat next to her, “maybe they’ve bought you the Ardebil carpet at last.” 

The Victoria and Albert museum in London, home to the Ardebil court carpet, was the pinnacle of my professional ambitions.  I’d made the mistake of letting my co-workers know that I had applied for a position there and, in the spirit of true friendship, they teased me about it constantly.

My head was aching but I laughed, too, just to prove that her tiny jab didn’t hurt.  I knew it was too late to break away to the staff kitchen for a quick aspirin.  I was trapped with fifteen women in an overheated basement room of the museum, grouped together under bad fluorescent lighting.  The Wednesday textile department meeting had begun.

Dr. Miller stepped into the room.   Reg Miller, the director of the museum.  Beside him was Dr. Bernice Roberts, the head of the textile department, her hair coiled tightly around her head and held by innumerable pins.  Both of them wore an air of efficiency that tasted vaguely British.  

Dr. Miller was flushed, as if he had walked too quickly from the administrative offices of the museum to get to our meeting on time.  Dressed in a dark suit, he carried at his side a fashionably scuffed tan leather briefcase.  He seldom attended our meetings but each time I saw him I was struck by the idea that he had come to sell us something.

“Ladies,” Dr. Miller said, “I’m here to confirm the rumors about an addition to our textile collection.   Yes, yes,” he smiled, “I’ve heard the rumblings.”  

“We’re being given an incredible opportunity,” said Dr. Roberts, casting a cold eye over us.  “Sandy, you’re going to be kept especially busy with this.”

A foot nudged mine under the table.  Donna whispered, “Maybe someone has donated their dining room rug.”  Teasing me.

“A press conference is scheduled for Friday,” said Dr. Miller.  “All of you are welcome to attend.”

Any bets that it’s moth-eaten? Leann, who sat to my left, wrote in her notebook.

I took her pencil from her.   Any bets that it’s ugly? I wrote, and pushed the notebook down the table to Donna.

Any bets that it’s a ‘semi-antique’? she wrote, in big block letters,  with a heavy underscoring for emphasis.  Donna loathed that term.  

“The Westview bequest,” Dr. Miller was saying, “has certainly grown over the years.”  He handed Dr. Roberts a flat piece of metal just a bit bigger than a recipe card.  “Without the money that’s been held in trust we wouldn’t be adding this piece to the collection.”

Dr. Roberts read the inscription and gave it to Jenny Lin, who had to hold it at arm’s length because her reading glasses were in her workbag. 

The bit of metal was the plaque that would be fastened to the wall next to the exhibit, engraved with the name of the piece, date of weaving, as well as the name of the donor.  I crowded around Jenny with the others and strained to read the inscription.

“The trustees and I met last week and we’re in agreement,” Dr. Miller said, as proud as any new father announcing a safe and successful delivery.  “The Westview trust money will be used to buy The Ascension.”

For once we were all silent.  The room was so quiet that I could hear the ‘click’ of the thermostat when the heat came on.

Leann, who specialized in costume cleaning and repair, who had read every scrap of English and American history available from the Minneapolis library’s main branch, was the one to finally speak.  

“Look at the date,” she said, taking the plaque into her hands and tracing the writing lightly with her finger.  “Woven when King Henry the Eighth was still married to his first wife.”

I slipped into the hallway and headed for the staff kitchen.  It was time for that aspirin.

Tapestries, like fine paintings, are catalogued, studied, and tracked through the world as though they are members of a dying species.  They are thoroughbreds.  They have pedigrees, histories, bloodlines.  Often woven in sets and series depicting biblical or classical stories, tapestries were once the prizes of kings, the glories of cathedrals.  

The Ascension was the ninth panel in a ten panel series titled The Redemption of Man.  It was the only piece in the series that wasn’t yet owned by a museum in the United States.  There was a weaving of it at the Kasteel de Haar, in the Netherlands, and a second in Palencia, Spain.  

Like myself, the Spanish panel of The Ascension had once spent a summer in Paris enrolled in a ten-week course under the auspices of the Musee de Cluny.  

“A tapestry.  Who would have thought?” asked Donna, after the meeting had broken up.  We were in my tiny office.  I leaned back in my chair and waited for the aspirin to take effect.  

“It sounds damn expensive,” she continued.  “How big was that bequest, anyway?”

“Have you heard of it before, Sandy?” asked Leann, who stood in the corner by my filing cabinet.  Leann, tall and lean, had given the only other chair in the room to Donna, who carried more weight and suffered from varicose veins.

Heard of it?  Yes, I had.  I had seen, touched, and studied one of the weavings of it in Paris several years previously.  

“I have.  I don’t know anything about this specific panel.”  

Now I understood Dr. Roberts’ behavior toward me at the meeting.  I would be in charge of the cleaning and any repairs the tapestry required.  It wasn’t my ability to handle a group of damaged, semi-antique carpets that was about to be tested.

I knew the composition, and could guess at the probable quality of the weaving.  Our copy of The Ascension would be considered a coup by any museum that was serious about their holdings.

It bothered me just a bit that not a whisper of a privately owned panel of The Ascension had reached my ears, let alone the fact that one might be for sale.

“So tell us,” said Donna. 

“Tell you what?” I asked, fingering a waxy green leaf of my one potted plant.  My windowless space in the basement of the museum didn’t inspire me to keep more than one plant alive at a time.  They invariably died, but I kept trying.  

“If this hasn’t changed your mind about leaving the museum.  You know Leann and I joke with you about the Victoria and Albert only because we don’t want you to go,” she said.  “We’re just being selfish.  Revise your resume a few more times and you’ll hear back from them.”

“I don’t mind the jokes, Donna, honest.  I need you two to laugh at me once and a while.”

“Then what?  Is this tapestry cursed or something?”  She leaned forward.  “How much do you think it cost?”

“Oodles,” I said.  “And then some.  Thank you, Donna, for checking on me.  I’m sort of shocked, that’s all.  I had no idea the trustees were considering buying a tapestry.  Certainly not an important one like The Ascension.”

“Is it important?”

“It could be.  It depends on what set it belonged to, and who might have owned it.  We’ll know a lot about it just by the weaver’s marks or the lack of weaver’s marks.  The size and type of the borders.  How much gold and silk thread was used.”

“Details,” said Leann, brushing the topic aside.  “Work details, too.  What I really want to know,” she said, with a quick look at the open door to the office, “is if you’re ever going to agree to have lunch with my sister-in-law’s nephew.”

I smiled at her.  “It’s barely been a year since my divorce.”

“Not that what you do in your free time is our business,” she added.  “Some of us just think you need a nudge in the right direction.”  She pointed to the doorway and I understood what she meant.  The nameplate on the wall outside still read “Alissandra McNeil”; the surname of my ex fit me as well as a wrong-sized shoe.   

They were concerned that I was still brooding over Dan.  Make one mistake, endure one seven-month marriage, and look what it gets you.

“I never ever think about that,” I lied.  I spent plenty of time beating myself up for having married him.  Or for having divorced him.  Either way, I was never short of a reason to feel bad when I wanted to.

“When you’re ready, you know, several of us have single friends, relatives, and acquaintances and we’d be happy to set you up,” Donna said.

“What a fabulous offer,” I said, waving them both away.  “I’ll give it lots of thought.”

On my small bookshelf I had a book that contained photos of the entire Redemption of Man series.  I could have opened it up and stared at The Ascension, at the figure of Jesus rising to the heavens, leaving the Virgin Mary and the Apostles behind him.  I could have noted once again the folds of their robes, cascading onto the flowers at their feet, the faded blues and greens a type of poetry themselves, a hymn in wool and silk.  

Without even touching the book I could recall with clinical detail the two footprints of Christ, the focal point of the composition, the crown on his head as he floated above all earthly considerations, angels on either side trumpeting the blessed news of His Ascension to Heaven.  

I could have gotten to work, researching how best to wash it, how it might be hung.   

I could have, but I found that thinking about The Ascension only made me remember those ten weeks of study in Paris. It was the only city in the world where I could have fallen for Sebastian.

Paris and Sebastian and The Ascension. Not the Holy Trinity, but the city and the tapestry had reasons enough to be worshipped.