What the Sphinx Knows

Elena sat on the museum floor eating cold spinach from a plastic container, watching the lightning fracture the skylight above. The sphinx replica stared back at her, its stone eyes knowing everything she'd spent thirty years trying to forget.

'You missed a spot,' said David, standing in the doorway. He adjusted his fedora—a hat he'd started wearing after his wife left him, as if costume change could remake a man.

'The exhibit opens tomorrow,' Elena said, not standing up. 'The donors want their pyramid photo op. They don't care about the sphinx's chipped ear.'

David walked toward her, his footsteps echoing in the empty hall. 'They care about what we tell them to care about. That's the job.' He crouched beside her. 'Still seeing him?'

'Who?'

'The architect.' David's voice was careful. 'The one designing the new wing.'

Elena set down her spinach. 'Marcus and I are just colleagues.'

'David.' She looked at him then—at the lines around his eyes, at how his hand trembled slightly where it rested on his knee. 'Your wife left because you wouldn't choose. Not between her and the job. Between her and yourself.'

The lightning flashed again, illuminating the sphinx's riddle-smile. Elena had been David's protégée once, his colleague, almost something more during the Cairo expedition, before she understood that David would never make himself available to be hurt. Now she was the curator, and he was the director who visited her exhibits at closing time to pretend they might have been different together.

'I could choose differently,' he said. 'Now.'

'The sphinx asks a riddle,' Elena said, 'but the real question is whether you want to know the answer.' She stood up, brushing dust from her skirt. 'I met Marcus when he came to measure for the new wing. He asked me what I wanted from the renovation. I told him I wanted the artifacts to finally have a home that honors them. He asked about me.' She paused. 'I didn't know how to answer.'

David stood slowly. 'And now?'

'Now I think the answer is that I want to stop living in museums. Real ones, and the ones I've built in my head.' Elena walked to the sphinx, touching its weathered stone face. 'This thing has survived thousands of years by not needing anyone to complete it.'

She turned to David. 'Marcus asked me to dinner. To talk about the exhibit, he said. But we both know it's not about the exhibit.'

'So you'll go.'

'I think I will.' Elena picked up her spinach container. 'And David? Take off the hat. It doesn't suit you anyway.'

She walked toward the exit, leaving him alone with the sphinx and the storm, and for the first time in twenty years, she didn't look back.