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.”