Station Eleven

Station Eleven Page 67

“It’s brilliant,” Arthur says. “I mean that. Someday she’ll show it to the world and we’ll all say we knew her when.”

“When will it be finished?”

“Soon,” Miranda says. It’s true, it won’t be so long now. She has felt for months that she’s nearing the end of something, even though the story has spun off in a dozen directions and feels most days like a mess of hanging threads. She tries to meet Arthur’s gaze, but he’s looking at Elizabeth.

“What do you plan to do with it once it’s done?” Tesch asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Surely you’ll try to publish it?”

“Miranda has complicated feelings on the topic,” Arthur says. Is it Miranda’s imagination, or is he going out of his way to avoid looking at her directly?

“Oh?” Tesch smiles and arches an eyebrow.

“It’s the work itself that’s important to me.” Miranda is aware of how pretentious this sounds, but is it still pretentious if it’s true? “Not whether I publish it or not.”

“I think that’s so great,” Elizabeth says. “It’s like, the point is that it exists in the world, right?”

“What’s the point of doing all that work,” Tesch asks, “if no one sees it?”

“It makes me happy. It’s peaceful, spending hours working on it. It doesn’t really matter to me if anyone else sees it.”

“Ah,” Tesch says. “Very admirable of you. You know, it reminds me of a documentary I saw last month, a little Czech film about an outsider artist who refused to show her work during her lifetime. She lived in Praha, and—”

“Oh,” Clark says, “I believe when you’re speaking English, you’re allowed to refer to it as Prague.”

Tesch appears to have lost the power of speech.

“It’s a beautiful city, isn’t it?” Elizabeth has the kind of smile that makes everyone around her smile too, unconsciously.

“Ah, you’ve been there?” Clark asks.

“I took a couple of art history classes at UCLA a few years back. I went to Prague at the end of the semester to see a few of the paintings I’d read about. There’s such a weight of history in that place, isn’t there? I wanted to move there.”

“For the history?”

“I grew up in the exurbs of Indianapolis,” Elizabeth says. “I live in a neighborhood where the oldest building is fifty or sixty years old. There’s something appealing about the thought of living in a place with some history to it, don’t you think?”

“So tonight,” Heller says, “if I’m not mistaken, is tonight the actual wedding anniversary?”

“It certainly is,” Arthur says, and glasses are raised. “Three years.” He’s smiling past Miranda’s left ear. She glances over her shoulder, and when she looks back he’s shifted his gaze somewhere else.

“How did you two meet?” Heller’s wife asks. The thing about Hollywood, Miranda realized early on, is that almost everyone is Thea, her former colleague at Neptune Logistics, which is to say that almost everyone has the right clothes, the right haircut, the right everything, while Miranda flails after them in the wrong outfit with her hair sticking up.

“Oh, it’s not the most exciting how-we-met story in the world, I’m afraid.” A slight strain in Arthur’s voice.

“I think how-we-met stories are always exciting,” Elizabeth says.

“You’re much more patient than I am,” Clark says.

“I don’t know if exciting is the word I’d use,” Heller’s wife says. “But there’s certainly a sweetness about them, about those stories I mean.”

“No, it’s just, if everything happens for a reason,” Elizabeth persists, “as personally, I believe that it does, then when I hear a story of how two people came together, it’s like a piece of the plan is being revealed.”

In the silence that follows this pronouncement, a caterer refills Miranda’s wine.

“We’re from the same island,” Miranda says.

“Oh, that island you told us about,” a woman from the studio says, to Arthur. “With the ferns!”

“So you’re from the same island, and? And?” Heller now, looking at Arthur. Not everyone is listening. There are pools and eddies of conversation around the table. Heller’s tan is orange. There are rumors that he doesn’t sleep at night. On the other side of the glass doors, Luli shifts position to gain a better view of the dropped strawberry.