Copyright © 2017 Lucy Ives. monday The day Paul Coral vanished, it snowed. It being week one of April, the sky supplied a slush of frozen gobs, pea-size hail. I make it sound worse than it was, but in fact it was shitty. Emergency signage diverted me from the ground-f loor staff entry up the museum''s palatial front steps, for once not because of the perennial construction, but on account of a strike by security guards. It was a Monday, and this was the Central Museum''s way of keeping costs down with whichever firm was temping. Limited permeability, etc. Probably unrelated, but no one had thought to put out any salt.

The guards had a fierce and litigious union. Their strike was of the French variety and likely to meet with results. They had stayed point- edly home, but other dissenters were present. A couple of diehards swaddled in tarps still protested WANSEE''s plans for the Nevada aqui- fer. At week five, their foam board was deteriorating, but the gist was the shame of privatizing a natural good. I hiked by with a nod. WANSEE was a Belgian corporation poised, if my Facebook feed was not entirely alarmist, to control a significant portion of the planet''s ground­ water. WANSEE was also supplying CeMArt with vital special exhibitions funding, a fact that would probably have kept me up at night had I not long ago abandoned all hope of an oligarch-free cultural landscape.

As matters stood, I was indifferent to sleep, though for more personal reasons. Above billowed a claret banner three stories high advertising the newest show bolstered by the Belgians'' largesse, "Land of the Limner," with WANSEE''S sponsorship tagged in nice italics along the bottom. Stabilizing poles clanked like mad. I breached the neoclassical facade and had my totes searched. I wore my museum ID at my collar for optimum motility, re: hands, burdens. A scab shined her penlight into my eyes. I am not tall. In fact I am short, with highly regular features.

I despise makeup, though I wear lipstick, and, to further frustrate my appearance, I smoke. The security worker switched her light off and waved me through. I stepped into the cavernous atrium, enjoying the familiar rush of silence that meets Monday''s ears and, more particularly, a whiff of senescent freesia, as stems were methodically plucked from a moribund display by a man in a yellow smock. I would have just made my way to the department, but Marco Jensen, who worked the central desk, was already present, stocking pamphlets, from which labor he recused himself in order to wave me vividly over. I swerved obediently, arranging my face into a pattern of delight. Marco was like, "I want you to remain calm:'' This was a signal. I did a discreet sweep of as much of the cathedral as possible. Marco appeared to do likewise, for that area which was be­ hind my head.

I leaned in. Marco was vibrating in place, actually. "What?'''' Marco is at least eight years younger than me. He is from Malibu by way of Yale and is very easy to look at. "You know Paul?" Everyone in the museum knows Paul, but this was beside the point. "So, like, apparently"-Marco nudged the words out with care, in the process presenting me with multiple views of his meticulously razed chin-"he''s missing." "What?" "Yup. Since late last week.

Didn''t show up for a certain meeting and isn''t returning calls. Forget email." "That''s bizarre." Marco smoothed back an errant slice of hair. "I take it you haven''t heard from him?" "Hey," I was saying, "I have to run:'' I paused. "I feel like we should really talk, I mean, that''s so intense:'' "Completely:'' Marco was nonplussed. "OK," I said. "Ciao:'' I HAVE MODES OF BEING that are less than elegant, and I have frequently used these to my advantage.

On this particular morning, I assumed the demeanor of a roach on its way back to its nest through a lighted kitchen. By this I mean I kept my head down and shot up the main stairs, affecting I could perceive nothing that was not placed directly in front of my face. You cannot help respecting a person who looks busy as fuck; at least, as long as you don''t talk to them, you can''t help respecting them. Being as extremely-relatively speaking, I mean, to most adults-petite as I am, I have found that others need little persuading that they either can­ not see me or that I am not worth the effort. At any rate, I did not encounter anyone before I gained the department''s rear door, which is built into the wall paneling of one of the minor European galleries and looks more like another decorative aspect of the molding than it does actual ingress. Paul Coral was almost a friend. Except I couldn''t quite say that. He had worked at the museum for something like thirty years as the registrar of American Objects, and we had recently become kind of cordial or trusting or what have you.

The odd thing about him, I should say, was that in all his time at CeMArt he seemed not to have done anything, by which I mean that it was extremely difficult to ascertain what exactly it was that he did. Most of his work, or the work that would have fallen to him by dint of his title, was accomplished by a parade of part-time min­ ions and interns, with whom I had the dubious privilege of interacting by email. Paul''s level of awareness of the work they did was difficult to gauge. He floated in and (mostly) out of his office, appearing to spend the lion''s share of his working hours meditatively wandering the visible storage gallery and period rooms. One had the sense that he spent a great deal of purposeless time in the museum''s American sector. Perhaps he even slept there. I wondered, not very charitably, if anyone had checked the Dutch box-bed. Anyway, I was feeling unnerved that I had lately begun to cultivate a modestly trusting relationship with this now "missing" person as I made my way to the study room, up the ramp that was at one point added to connect two poorly aligned but proximate floors, an error produced in hasty renovation, and then up the spiral stair, an improvement, legend has it, re­ quested by a 1950s department head who resented any member of his staff''s having to leave the warren in order to move between levels.

I am currently unique among my colleagues in American Objects in that I am unable to slam my forehead against the upper treads, lacking requisite height. It was now 8:05. This was a full seven minutes later than it should have been, for not only am I unfailingly punctual, I really do not like to make a big deal out of it, since I feel that this is not very comely in someone who holds what is for all intents and purposes an entry-level position, despite her doctorate, but this is simply the way things are at present, until the boomers disperse and perish, etc. I like to be early, is what I am saying. The lights in the study room were on. I thought an expletive. "And there she is!" My arrival was heralded by a senior colleague, Bonnie Mangold, herself atypically on time. Bonnie was, in addition, the current "Miss Jean Brodie'''' of my existence, as my mother would have put it.

I cringed, advanced. I HAVE, AS PEOPLE TEND to do, known my mother all my life. How­ ever, my supposedly loving rapport with this parent rather too closely resembles my working relationship with Bonnie, in that it demands Herculean affective labor and produces Sisyphean rewards. My mother''s maiden name, which is also the name that she uses to conduct her day-to-day business, is Carolyn Wedgewood Basset. Her marriage to my father (who is deeply Polish and whose Philadelphian origins linger) is ongoing. I have his last name, Krakus, along with, what is less to be celebrated, his face. I say this not because my father''s face is so bad, but because my mother''s face happens to be so unrelentingly good. She was born in the late 1940s but the face is still going strong.

There is almost nothing about her that you can separate from the face. Its great success is also hers. I have seen pictures of her when she was in her early twenties, when she and my father first met, which seems, at any rate, like the historical moment at which the life of Caro, as she is commonly known to colleagues and other acquaintances (such as next of kin), begins. In these vintage images she is a fawn, a human Bambi. She is carrying a lunch tray in one splendid candid snap, and as she turns to the light both her eyes and mouth drop open. The face is heart shaped, the perfect mouth outlined in some lighter-than-natural mod lipstick, the eyes like two drawings of eyes and eyelashes, the balance between dark and milky white disturbing, exquisite. The corners of several accidentally bared teeth shine like Chiclets. As a child, reared in the neurotic northern reaches of Manhattan''s Upper East Side, I stared into an array of pictures like this one.

These tokens of my mother''s power were carelessly archived in a folder in a drawer, along with old invitations, postcards, pieces of wire and ribbon, washers, orphaned keys, and miscellaneous receipts related to maintenance of the household, which endeavor seemed to hinge mainly on furniture repair, dry cleaning of formal attire, and photo processing. My mother has not assiduously memorialized her astonishing youth. She is not so vain. At least, she isn''t so vain in a predictable way, as someone with a face of this kind could probably be forgiven for being. But my mother is a practitioner of a s.