She didn’t know what to do with this thinking; it seemed so rueful and wrong, a big game. Even when Kathleen and Frank separated two years ago, it felt like something achieved along a row of lockers opposite the office, and now her play with Stewart at the museum was exactly stolen kisses behind a closed door, one eye open. Behind his office door she had stood and taken him in her hand and pushed him to stillness with a long kiss, the clenched hand still and still until she felt him shudder. There was adrenaline in it, in every new sentence in the high school story, but Marci felt something else too. Was it a game? Was she just out for sport? Craig had hauled the drum kit out to the Brands, and Larry now was practicing guitar when he wasn’t being lord of his life, an omniscient agent in their house, sometime traveler. This season wouldn’t last. High school. She could think that far and then no further. She was married to someone she had met in study hall when she was fifteen; they had a new house, and it was fall again. There’d be new babies in town and a fall after that, grandchildren on the football team, as strange as life gets. Or normal. She knew all about it, outside herself again, and even Kathleen would point at her over coffee and say it: “You are so together,” when in fact it was Kathleen for whatever reason who had become the adult.
The Oakpine Museum still smelled new. Three years ago they had finished refurbishing the old train station: they’d knocked out some walls and scoured all the original brick and block walls and carpeted the two galleries. As a last touch, Craig had come out with a ladder scaffold and enameled all the wrought-iron scrollwork in the eight arches engine black. The first show had been the “The Age of Aquarius.” Stewart, the curator, had gotten two large but minor Peter Max paintings and some original album art from Cream and Big Brother and the Holding Company, as well as a mongrel assortment of psychedelic art from San Francisco and New York. That show had been Marci’s first assignment there, writing copy for the poster art, and she’d won the day by noting that “the museum had hung this crazy show, but it would be off the wall.” They had piped in elevator versions of acid rock, and the retrospective, parts of it, received campy reviews all around the country. Stewart, who was from Milwaukee, lost a little of his big-city mystique with his overenthusiastic response to Marci’s program puns.
There was such an edge in all of this for her. There had been a part-time slot, and it became a full-time administrative assistant, her new job. It gave her a jolt, having an office and a big window looking across to the high school and the hospital and the rooftops beyond. She guessed it was pride when she tried to tell her mother about her work, her mother who had lived forever ten blocks from the museum. The expectation was museum equals oil paintings of red flowers in a blue bowl. That was the way Stewart had put it. And that was finally all Marci would give her mother on the phone: it’s not all red flowers in a blue bowl, which would send Mrs. Engle over the edge. She’d say back to her daughter, “Marci, you need to give me a little credit here.” Marci would invoke Stewart, the curator, and talk about how all he was trying to do for Oakpine was introduce their old town to such new ideas. “Marci,” her mother would say, “We’ve taken Time magazine for forty years, and I’d love to see a new idea.”
Regardless, Marci found the pressure of hanging a new show a puzzle, assessing the aesthetic and trying to describe and explain the thing in a way that would draw people to the show. She was on the inside here, a member of the steering committee, and with Larry in high school, she gave it all of her attention. This new “Terrain” display would get written up in Cheyenne if not in Denver.
It also rushed her that Stewart wanted her to go to Chicago after Thanksgiving, on museum business, for the National Museum Society. They’d be in the same hotel. That was the way he had said what he said: We’ll be in the same hotel. December first loomed for her, drew her forward through the fall. In the meantime, she closed the museum every Tuesday night, and he was often there. She watched him make work to stay around, always there to give her a look, pat her hand, put his arm around her waist, sweet and sort of fun, and sometimes both arms, a quick embrace stolen in the hall, mock dramatic, pretending to pin her against the wall and then pinning her against the wall. It was high school certainly, but she liked the feel of his suits, and she liked how angular he was, so utterly different from Craig. But mainly she liked his smell, so dry and sweet, and how smooth his face was. It was nice to feel sought. She played it that way. She loved the moment after she’d turned off the lights in the display areas and turned on the security lights, when he’d come out of his office and meet her in the hall. It was the meeting that started her heart, his taking her, the kiss, the way he put her against the wall. There was a rush in this, but also a limit. She’d dressed for all of this so far, but also she’d dressed to keep him out: layers. Now, however, she was going in a few weeks on business to Chicago.