Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, referred to throughout the novel simply as the Met, is the setting for one of the novel's most intimate and consequential scenes: the planning of an adulterous escape by Thomas Pemberton, an Episcopal priest, and Moira, a married woman he has just met. It is also the site of a remembered moment of longing and faith, and it anchors the novel's meditation on art, desire, and the sacred.

The Museum as a Site of Secret Planning

The Met is where Thomas Pemberton and Moira make their plans to be together. Standing in front of one of the big blue-green paintings of water lilies, they arrange a future meeting: she will meet him for lunch up near the museum, and then they will look at the Monets. The plan is contingent on her schedule, as she has two young children and a nanny, but everything is so scheduled that the affair must be carefully timed. The scene is marked by a striking physical restraint: they have not touched, and still do not as they come out of the Met and walk down the steps, where Pemberton hails a cab for her. Her glance at him is charged with the unspoken promise of what is to come.

The Museum and the Memory of Faith

The Met also holds a memory of faith for Pemberton. He recalls standing at Astor Place in the shadow of the great mansarded brownstone of Cooper Union, with birds flying up from the square, a memory that seems to connect the museum and its environs to a broader spiritual geography. More directly, the museum is linked to a moment of profound longing: Pemberton remembers the scene in the hospital, where good and righteous folk prayed at the bedside of their minister, their humility and faith glowing like light around them, and he felt a deep longing to share their trustfulness. This memory, which he considers opening a sermon with, is a counterpoint to the secret planning at the Met, contrasting the open faith of the congregation with the hidden desire of the priest.

The Museum in the Context of Art and Desire

The Met is also part of the novel's broader reflection on art. Pemberton's encounter with Moira at the water lilies is set against his later observations of the contemporary art world, such as a gallery on lower Broadway where an artist has put down a model railroad track with a train going round and round, the engine welded to the visored headpiece of a suit of medieval armor. The contrast between the classical beauty of the Met's collection and the quirky, insouciant installations of the contemporary scene underscores the novel's interest in the nature of art and its capacity to hold meaning. The museum, with its water lilies and Monets, represents a kind of art that is both beautiful and emotionally resonant, a space where desire and aesthetics converge, even as the priest's own life is about to be upended by the very longings that the art seems to mirror.