Free City of Strangers by Ian Mackenzie

why she did what she did. He ambushed her, appeared at her door, but she didn't have to allow his obvious emotional need to overwhelm her. For whom was she feeling sorry when she invited him up? Her decision had the impetuous recklessness of sex during college, when it mattered to have sex but mattered less whom you had it with, when its very casualness gave a little thrill to the ego. Might she simply have wanted proof that she could still have him? She isn't lonely. She wouldn't have gone out of her way to seduce her ex-husband. She was careful, from the moment their clothes came off, not to kiss him on the mouth.
    Now she moves briskly through the museum's lower galleries, half filled with the sluggish weekday crowds, mostly tourists, who drift from painting to painting with the indolence of mosquitoes. Invariably, they collect in front of the pieces everyone knows. They stare because they know they are supposed to. Few of the tourists have any interest in what currently hangs on the west wall of the atrium, a sequence of four linked, abstract paintings by Cy Twombly. Each depicts one of the seasons, and her favorite, since seeing them for the first time years ago in London, has always been Inverno – winter – in which a giant black sun seems to sink through the bottom of the frame. She could use a moment with these paintings to take her mind off Paul, but there isn't time now, and, in any case, standing in the presence of a painting should really be a private act. Claire's professional life, of course, demands that she spend much of her day looking at art in the company of others, but she has worked diligently to preserve a separate province within herself.
    In her office the soft, pungent odor of fresh print fills the air. Her assistant has left a new round of reports on her desk. They detail a roster of paintings up for sale and the slate of artists who will soon have new groups of works the museum may like. It's a busy season. Miami was disappointing this year, but in the coming months a number of interesting young artists will hold solo exhibitions around the city. March brings the Armory show. So much to keep an eye on. That's why she's here: to discover innovation and uproot its best examples, to evangelize for the art she believes in. And if she does her job well, the museum can avoid paying an outrageous sum forty years from now for a painting they could have had cheap. Such is the case with the recent purchase, made available to the museum when its artist was a younger man, not yet a commodity; the offer was declined. She tries not to consider the money as a material weight: rows of houses, bushels of grain, crates of medicine. At the end of the week the painting will hang here. But how can anyone look at it without thinking of the money? Who at this point can truly see it?
    There's a knock on the door. Splits open in the seams of her reverie. Sitting, she takes some documents and scatters them on the desk, then calls, 'Come in.'
    The man who enters is David Kim. Under his arm is a fat stack of papers. He's always busy with something, a restless engine of efficiency. It's hard to imagine him daydreaming.
    'I've got the final plans for the April show,' he says, running a thumb along the edge of her desk.
    David's supreme sense of confidence both unsettles and impresses her. He's the head curator of the architecture department and, as far as she can tell, doesn't doubt the decisions he makes, not beforehand and certainly not afterward. His parents were both diplomats – Korean father, Canadian mother – and, as he explained to her once, his childhood was accordingly disjointed. Rather than damage him, it was a gift: spending his early years in several countries seems to have made him at home wherever he is, whomever he's with.
    'You can drop it there.' She indicates one of the few spaces on her desk.
    'You're busy?' He shifts his weight, and for a moment she feels mischievously proud: she has made David Kim