A rain shower rolled into Boston, so they took things indoors, to the Museum of Fine Arts. They dashed through a downpour from their taxi, past a group of guerilla artists on the sidewalk with political works on display. One was a lovely, if unimaginative, acrylic painting of a greedy pig in a top hat and tails, smoking a cigar. It caught Rook’s eye, though, and as he ran by, he almost tripped over a sculpture of a three-foot-tall gold leaf fist clenched around a wad of cash. “What a way to go,” he said to Nikki once they got in the lobby. “KO’d by the ‘Fist of Capitalism.’”
Just by entering the museum, he sensed Nikki had become temporarily released from her cares. She grew animated, telling him the MFA had been a weekly pilgrimage when she went to college at Northeastern. She hooked his arm and took him to see all of her favorites in the collection, including the Gilbert Stuart oils of Washington and Adams and The Dory by Winslow Homer. Transfixed, Rook said with reverence, “You know, his water is the wettest you’ll ever see in a painting.” The John Singer Sargents triggered warm memories of the print of Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose Rook had given her when they first started seeing each other. Heat and Rook kissed under The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, a masterpiece from the period when the artist made a living painting American expatriates in Paris. The four daughters didn’t seem to mind the PDA.
Another Sargent, on loan from a private collector, hung to the side by itself. Also painted in Paris, it was the artist’s portrait of a Madame Ramon Subercaseaux.
“I’ve never seen this one,” said Rook. “Isn’t it amazing?” But a shadow fell over her demeanor again. All Nikki did was grunt a cursory “uh-huh” as she moved on to the next gallery. He lagged behind to take in the portrait. It captured an elegant young woman with dark hair seated at an upright piano. Mme. Subercaseaux was posed turning away from the instrument. Her melancholy eyes stared out, meeting the viewer’s, and one hand rested behind her on the keyboard. The painting evoked the feeling of a pianist, interrupted.
Rook followed after Nikki, understanding her discomfort with it.
The showers had cleared out, and Heat asked him how much he would hate getting dragged along on a nostalgia tour of her alma mater, just across the street. “On an RTWOTC Saturday?” he asked. “First, I’d love to.”
“And second?”
“If I said no, I’d be kissing off any chance of hotel sex.”
“Damn straight.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” he said.
Frankly, the notion of a tour didn’t excite him, but he didn’t regret a bit of it, simply because he could see how the visit energized her. Rook watched Nikki’s cares shed at each point of interest and every old hang she showed him. She snuck him in the backstage entrance to Blackman Auditorium to see where, as a freshman, she played Ophelia in Hamlet and Cathleen, the summer maid, in Long Day’s Journey into Night. At Churchill Hall, where Heat studied Criminal Justice, they found the doors locked but she pointed to the fifth floor so he could see the window of her Criminology lecture hall. Looking up at it, he said, “Fascinating, the actual window,” then turned to her, adding, “That hotel sex better be mighty raucous.” He paid for that crack by having to endure small talk with her freshman Medieval Lit professor, whom she stumbled upon in the campus Starbucks grading Beowulf term papers. Crossing the quad took them to the bronze statue of Cy Young. Relishing her role as tour guide, Nikki proudly informed him it stood on the exact location of the mound where Young had pitched the first-ever perfect game when the site had been the old Huntington ballpark.
“Photo op,” he said, handing her his iPhone.
Nikki laughed. “You’re such a boy.”
“I wish. This is so I can pretend I know something about baseball. When you grow up without a dad, raised by a Broadway star, there are gaps. Swear to God, until this moment I thought Cy Young was the composer who wrote ‘Big Spender.’”
She snapped one of him aping the legendary pitcher, reading signs from the catcher. “Let me get a close-up.” She zoomed in on his face and, in the viewfinder, saw him looking past her, frowning.
Nikki turned to see what Rook was reacting to and said, “Oh, my God … Petar?”