And Sons (20 page)

“So I’m looking for a Heather Topol type,” Doug clarified one final time.

“Standing in front of whatever she’s standing in front of.”

“Got it. I’m hitting Greece.”

Doug broke left, toward Greek and Roman, while Andy flashed his membership card and bounded up the central staircase toward European Paintings, Tiepolo’s
The Triumph of Marius
greeting him on the second floor, Andy pushing straight through the glass doors, excuse me and sorry to a bundle of Asian women, into the first gallery of nineteenth-century French (David, Ingres, Delacroix), Andy paying no attention to the paintings, only to the crowds around the paintings,
The Death of Socrates
getting the most eyeballs, but no Jeanie among the mourners, so on to the next gallery, more French (Boucher, Greuze, Fragonard) and a fruitless search for a gauzy portrait of a twenty-four-year-old brunette with a crooked smile, titled
You Find Me, You Fuck Me
, so Andy continued on, speed essential, though this time he was presented with a choice of staying straight or turning right and Andy chose straight (Clouet, La Tour) but no further female illumination here, only more galleries, more possibilities, straight, left, right, the galleries opening up onto a maze of human-made beauty, but no Jeanie, no hot-breath hello, and the enormity of the situation, as well as the THC streaming through his blood, panicked him, there’s no way, just no way, this place is too huge, as he tripped into sixteenth-century Florentine and Bronzino’s
Portrait of a Young Man
, which drew a swell of high school girls, Catholic judging by their uniform, who watched Andy scurry past and giggled in his wake like he was a boy in need of the nearest bathroom, Andy landing among eighteenth-century British (Reynolds, Gainsborough) and then backpedaling into seventeenth-century Flemish (Rubens, van Dyck), then more French, and Spanish, with Goya and some hopes for
Don Manuel Osorio Manrique
, with that bird and the three cats, surely a potential favorite, but only a few grandmother types gathered around as if descendants of those de Zuñiga felines, and Andy kept moving, his stomach churning excitement into dread, as Vermeer delivered no other girl interrupted and Rembrandt’s Aristotle seemed to sigh as if Homer had nothing on this poor kid’s plight, and now Andy was almost running, stumbling back on Bronzino’s
Young Man
again and muttering “fuck” loud enough for a guard to notice, Andy fast-walking into the Italian Renaissance, with
its altarpieces and annunciations and lamentations, spotting three galleries away, rather incongruously, Sargent’s
Madame X
, another good chance, he thought, but no
Mademoiselle S
, and hope started to lose meaning as Andy turned left (Watteau), then right (Raphael), and found himself, once again, in front of Bronzino’s
Young Man
, who mocked him like he was as die-hard a virgin as that Virgin of virgins who hung on the wall opposite.

Andy’s phone went Hallelujah.

It was Doug.

“You have to come and see this bronze of a veiled dancer, Greek, like third century
B.C.
, a boatload of time ago and they were doing this kind of shit.”

“Is there a Heather Topol–like girl standing in front of it?” Andy asked.

“No, but she should because this is profound.”

“Doug, keep looking.”

“Nothing in the Impressionists?”

“I’m lost in the Old Masters.”

“Every door is like a wormhole in here.”

“Doug.”

“Yeah?”

“Stay focused.”

“I’m on the move.”

After a roomful of El Grecos, Andy wandered into a large central arcade packed with oversized genre pictures, and he was relieved to be free of Old Masters. It was around here that he noticed the crowds more, despite their Jeanieless nature, the tour groups and the school groups and the senior groups regrouping in this area before entering the late nineteenth century, by far the most popular section in the museum, the galleries within bustling, two rows thick in front of some paintings, and Andy stared at these people and his distraction grew until it gained the power of unexpected thought, of these strangers here admiring paintings he had known since he was a young boy, these Manets and Monets and van Goghs, their familiarity breeding a certain kind of intimacy, almost like this was his living room and Degas’s
Dancers
hung over his couch, Andy standing in the middle of the gallery like he was its secret patron and he thought, Enjoy, please enjoy all of this, and yet he wanted to give more, so much more, wanted to touch shoulders and slap fives, I want to give you more, he thought, watching the people turn slow circles clockwise, slow circles counterclockwise, a clockwork divided into pictures (half past Pissarro) of time compressed and composed by art, and suddenly and totally Andy understood the human impulse toward expression, the primary need after food and shelter, even before religion, this desire for creation and just then he thought, rather grandly, I am art, knowing he was super-stoned and this was nonsense, but still he thought, I am art, and maybe for the first time he appreciated what his father did, overhearing in front of Seurat’s
Circus Sideshow
a stooped woman shouting to her too-cheap-to-pony-up-for-the-audio-guide friend, “The luminous shadows endow objectively observed forms with mystery,” and the friend nodded and repeated “mystery” as if hoping to make the word her own. Andy watched and listened for who knows how long before Hallelujah rang him back to earth. It was Doug again. He was in the sculpture court, freaking in front of Carpeaux’s statue
Ugolino and His Sons
. “It might be the scariest slab of marble I’ve ever seen. Any luck on your end?”

“No.”

“You mind if I go and hit that hot dog cart outside?”

“No,” Andy said. “I’m basically out of time anyway.”

“You wanna join me?”

“Think I’m going to wander around a bit more.”

“Good luck with this Heather Topol–like girl.”

“Yeah, thanks, man.”

A great affection for Doug Streff welled within Andy. Right then he would have died for his friend, not that this sacrifice was called for, or even a possibility, but a fantasy bubbled up in his head of foiling a bullet with his chest, and as he drifted through the Astor Court and the American Wing, the Jain Meeting Hall, this fantasy escalated until Andy was checking the ground for possible grenades, searching for annihilating grace. I could die for you, he thought rather extravagantly, for all of you, death existing as gesture rather than extinction. That’s
when he stumbled upon Medieval Art, my old teaching grounds, with its Reliquary of Mary Magdalene that supposedly contains her tooth. All ten-year-olds love that tooth. I wonder if Andy heard traces of our fifth-grade class trip, the boys without fail having a hundred questions? Molar or incisor? Does it have a cavity? Did the Tooth Fairy come? Why a tooth? Why not the eyes? Or the tongue? I remember Andy asking, “Did they rip her apart after she was dead or was she still alive?” A few boys laughed, but I could tell he was serious.

Did he remember, even subconsciously, Christ of the Living Dead?

Or me grinning and ruffling his hair?

A tooth. A relic. Like a pair of old wingtip shoes.

As Andy’s head loosened into a more specific view, he thought about leaving but feared leaving would usher in forgetting, or worse, would reshuffle the experience into a funny story about an older girl and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which would be a shame because right now this seemed like something more, though the something was already losing its ripple, like that last solid notion before falling asleep.

Would Andy have recognized the opening of
Eastern Standard
?

I myself can recite the entire first paragraph. My guess is that Andy had probably read a few pages but grew bored when Rand starts piecing together his postcollegiate trip abroad, traveling through Europe with his two closest friends. Where’s the promised sex? Where’s the promised mayhem? And who cares about that door? Rand Finch sees his memories like heat lightning in the distance, the possible reflection of a long-anticipated war, until by the end he’s unsure if he’s the victim, the villain, or merely the viewer.

And I myself have roamed these galleries looking into the eyes of impossibly young women as if they were waiting for me, as if they might recognize me, a late middle-aged man who wished himself young. I have roamed these halls until bone-tired and like Andy have stumbled into the Robert Lehman Wing. It lies hidden behind that Gothic choir screen like a futuristic escape pod latched to a church. It is a reward for the persistent, much like the Renaissance itself. With a second wind I have orbited the galleries inside with their Memlings and El Grecos and a rather spectacular Ingres, and I have taken in Christus’s
A Goldsmith in His Shop, Possibly Saint Eligius
, and Di Paolo’s
The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise
, and I have been stopped in my tracks in front of
The Annunciation
by Botticelli, though I’m less inclined to believe that Jeanie Spokes ever paused here. But Andy leaned in close to that small tempera. He swore there was some residual heat here, some traces of friction from her eyes. This is it, he thought. There was no irony in his conviction, no easy teenage joke—
Jizzus Christ
—only a sweet and lovely painting of Gabriel kneeling and God’s light passing toward the bedchamber where Mary humbly waited. And Andy was right: it is a sweet and lovely painting. The label mentions that Robert Lehman gave this as a birthday present to his father. Imagine unwrapping that.

Andy’s phone rang.

It was Jeanie. “You didn’t find me,” she teased.

“I think I did, just too late.”

“Where?”

“I can feel you,” he said.

“Where?”

“Like I’m standing outside your window, watching you.”

“And what do you see?”

“Love as a sad kind of fate,” he said, unembarrassed.

Andy might have located her among this profound company, but he was the one who prized the purity and grace, the uniting mystery, while I see Jeanie Spokes somewhere else in that museum, probably
upstairs in the gloom of works on paper, among those Dürer prints, her eyes considering the block of wood and how the blade had to cut away whatever remained white, slowly turning flatness into relief: a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, full of names of blasphemy with seven heads and ten horns.

E
VERYTHING WAS READY
for the 6:30
A.M
. departure. The
Los Angeles Times
had been suspended. The dog was in a kennel. The school, the after-school, the teams, the dance class, the band, the car pool, had all been notified of upcoming absences. Near the front door lay Richard Dyer’s family in luggage form. But Richard himself, sleepless for most of the night, found his early-morning thoughts riffling through what he had packed, like a surgeon suddenly unsure of basic anatomy. Did he own a proper pair of New York shoes anymore? Were Brooks Brothers tassel loafers still the brand of choice? Maybe he should go shopping after they landed, since all his decent clothes were stylish in that questionable California style of casual meets designer meets high school visions of dressing up. Under normal circumstances Richard did not care about such things (he famously wore only one necktie during his Exeter days, a solid brown affair that everyone dubbed the Skidmark. After more than twenty years of living in L.A. he still considered himself a visitor to this world; whatever customs or fashions these natives followed, well, he would participate for the sake of camouflage. So bring on the V-necks, the too-tight T-shirts, the designer jeans, the absurd sunglasses. It was almost fun. Nobody in these climes knew his New York self. Here he was free. Despite this liberation, Richard quietly bore his pedigree like a trench coat in case of rain, his shoulders hunched, ready for an unexpected Northeast chill. This inner Dyerness gave him comfort despite his willful renunciation of the past. Oh, the contradictory nature of self. But soon no more of this secret identity. He was returning to the home planet, with a wife and two kids in tow who were thoroughly Angeleno
and potentially mortifying. “Dad, these are my children.” Maybe he should take them shopping as well. Richard tried to picture Emmett and Chloe in the clothes of his youth, Emmett who never met a button he liked, Chloe who insisted on wearing every color of the rainbow, claiming this as her “signature look.” Then there was his wife, Candy, the former meth head who now worked the front desk at a veterinarian’s office, lover of tight pants and turquoise jewelry, whose parents christened her Candy never thinking Candice was within reach, softly snoring by his side, naked and warm and fragrant, her arms and shoulders covered in a tattoo of meandering vines (while Richard had a hand grenade on his chest with the pin pulled). “Dad, this is, this is Candy.” Richard hated his own knee-jerk snobbery. Defend her. “And I love her more than anything!” “And I don’t care what you think!!” “I’m nothing like you!!!” That old familiar feeling took up construction in his stomach, and he thought, I am so fucking doomed.

Jamie Dyer lugged his backpack up three flights of crummy Cobble Hill stairs, the weight more abstract than concrete. He dug out his key. He hated keys. He hated having his own apartment, back in New York no less. It seemed like a defeat. After all the years of traveling, far removed from the mainstream of his roots, filming almost everything the human condition had to offer, Jamie the adventurer, Jamie the fearless documentarian, Jamie the envy of friends who remained stuck in cities and suburbs and careers and families, after all these years, here he was, slouching back to gentrified Brooklyn, like he was fresh from college. His apartment was a mess. He was seven weeks into an I’m-not-cleaning-a-fucking-thing binge and almost expected a homeless man to have been spawned.
Welcome home, asshole
. Jamie unzipped his backpack, retrieved the HDCAM SR tape with the solemnity of a stolen artifact. He placed it on the table. She was once so beautiful, he thought. Time stood still in her shadow. Jamie, exhausted, stripped down and headed toward bed. Back then sex had been unspeakably fun, the vigorous sweat, the silly sounds, the straight-up thrill of it. Her pussy—Jamie wondered if this was being disrespectful to the dead or if
the dead begged for these memories—but her pussy was perfect, with its mitten of dark blond, its interior the impossible smooth of a conch—this was disrespectful, Jamie decided, picturing her spread on his bed instead of the books and magazines and random scraps of paper that surrounded him like a cat lady’s cats. This was no way to live as an adult, but he was five days from reaching terminal disgust. Back to Sylvia. Sexy Sylph. Her breasts conveyed the incredible physics of being both heavy and light, the nipples small and specific, as if added later by a famed enamelist in France. Stop, Jamie thought. But memory pressed on. Her face, her lips, her tongue licking the tip of his cock, her hair swaying against rare, sun-deprived skin. All of this happened almost thirty years ago yet the sensation curled through him, and as Jamie worked the static darkness, he sensed something else on the other side, something else microscopic yet in this grubby atmosphere a thousand times its normal size, scrabbling along the walls and the floor, carrying its weight on eight bent legs, pointy and black, like nibs leaving behind terrible hieroglyphics.
Scratch-scratch-scratch
.