A Friend of the Family (13 page)

I
F YOU HAD
asked me a week or two previous, I would have told you there were very few things I’d be less likely to do on a perfectly reasonable Saturday than shlep to Manhattan and spend twenty dollars on art, especially since (and whether I’m saying this out of fatherly pride or ignorance I’d rather not examine) I could see the same sort of stuff or better just by heading over to the studio above my very own garage.

“Twenty dollars,” Iris marveled as we lined up behind a tour group of Swedes. “Is it just me, or does that take nerve?”

“What do they do about tourists who come from countries where twenty dollars is, like, a week’s worth of wages?” The Red Menace, dressed entirely in camouflage, a flak jacket and a tight little miniskirt, scowled at the entire lobby.

“Those kinds of tourists probably don’t make it all the way to New York,” said Laura gently. “Or if they do, they’re not the ones who only make twenty dollars a week.”

Amy turned her scowl to Laura, but she was already floating away to an art installation near the coat check. Thirty years old, but her father was going to pay her way—well, I suppose that was the family dynamic and I shouldn’t notice, but … I watched her tilt her head, purse her lips at a canvas streaked with red, green, a constellation of sparkling gold bullets. Laura was dressed in dark cords and a dark,
long-sleeved T-shirt, her hair back—again, she reminded me of a graduate student, astigmatic, poverty-stricken, pale from too much time in the stacks. I watched as she considered the bullet painting, and I wondered what she saw. I would have turned to ask my son, the expert, but he had already gone to stand next to her. Evidently I was buying his ticket, too.

“I think they like each other,” Iris said to me as she pocketed her credit card.

I shrugged and turned to the lip-pierced kid behind the register. “Two, please.”

The first few floors of MOMA — a building, by the way, designed to make the average shlub from New Jersey
feel
like the average shlub from New Jersey, all vertiginous white walls and odd angles and don’t-even-think-about-it-buster guards idling along the doorways—were jammed with the sort of exhibits I would have made fun of if it had been just Joe and me, if everyone else had stayed home. A group of paintings called
The Four Seasons,
which looked, each of them, like the floor of a sloppy nursery school. Some kind of oil painting that turned out to be only partly an oil painting, and partly an octopus shape made out of—wait for it—elephant dung. A canoe hanging from the ceiling stuck with five thousand arrows.

“What do you think of that?” I whispered to Joe, pointing upward to the canoe. The seven of us were all still doing our best to stick together, moving as a slack cohesive unit from one baffling artwork to the next.

“I think it’s—”

“Commentary,” said Amy, who’d overheard.

“On?”

“Well, it’s a canoe, right? Transportation for indigenous people from the Eskimos to the Polynesians.”

“Yes,” Joe agreed.

“But it’s hanging above us. And it’s pierced with arrows,” she said. “What do you think all those arrows represent?” Ah, the Socratic method; I remembered it from medical school.

“Modernity?” Joe guessed.

“White people?” I asked.

“Colonialism.” Amy triumphed, putting her left hand on her narrow hip. “The destruction of traditional cultures, cultures native to the ground they were found on, by mostly European forces bent on stealing wealth and kidnapping labor to promote their own imperial ends, and fill their war chests, too. So they could battle their European neighbors, you know? England versus Spain, the Dutch versus the English, the French versus the English. Did you ever really consider where the tools and the wealth to fight the Armada came from?”

“I guess I didn’t,” Joe said. He sounded guilty.

“Exactly,” Amy said. We went quiet then, the three of us, staring at the canoe. I couldn’t help thinking what it would feel like if one of those arrows dropped down and boinked me on the head. It would probably smart like nobody’s business.

“I suppose now it would be a decent analogy for the war in Iraq,” Amy reflected. “This canoe, I mean.”

“Really? They use canoes in Iraq?”

She shook her head at me, but pityingly: I was only a shlub from New Jersey worried about being boinked on the head.

“Haven’t you heard of the Iraqi marshes?” she asked. “One of the treasures of the Middle East? A nature preserve for dozens of types of fish, and birds, the sacred ibis, the African darter? The homeland of the Marsh Arab people? It was drained by Saddam during the war with Iran, and with the ongoing warfare there, efforts to restore the wetlands have proved totally unsuccessful.”

“Right, right, right,” I said, but Neal ushered her away before she could tell us anything else, leaving Joe and me to feel oddly delighted by her imperial little dressing-down. “That’s one heck of a girl there, huh?”

“And have you noticed how short her skirt is?”

“Amazing.”

“Truly.”

We wandered over to the next piece of art.

Minutes later, as we moved into a room full of video screens and desecrated American flags, my twitchy eye found Alec and Laura. They were standing together as they moved from piece to piece, but they weren’t really saying much, and I couldn’t tell, from the respectful distance I tried to keep, whether their silence was awkward or familiar, a mutual understanding that in the presence of great art, it’s better not to say a word, or a simple lack of any idea what to say to each other. Alec, every so often, would mutter something, and Laura would tilt her head at her grandfather’s angle, but they really didn’t seem to be sharing too much, and they certainly weren’t touching, which seemed meaningful.

After forty minutes or so of pretending to understand the first-floor installations (at twenty bucks, we weren’t about to dismiss a single exhibit), we meandered upstairs to the deco furniture and modernist housewares. In the front part of the first room, by the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Fifty-third Street, a Jaguar E-Type sat on a platform, shiny like glass and absolutely useless in the middle of all this wacky art. It was like seeing an embalmed thoroughbred. The four gentleman in our company stood in front of the car and mourned.

“One day,” Neal said. “Seriously. One day I’m gonna have a car just like that. How much do you think that baby costs? Like, half a mil?”

Half a mil?

“What’s the point?” Alec prickled. “It’s not like there are any roads you can drive something like that on. That car’s meant for speedways and the autobahn and that’s it. If you can’t drive it ninety, don’t bother.”

“Or,” I suggested, “maybe you’re supposed to drive it really slow, preferably somewhere like Rodeo Drive or Monte Carlo, so that everyone can admire it. Like James Bond.”

“That’s ridiculous. What’s the horsepower on this thing?” Alec seemed to be getting mad; I patted his arm, but he shrugged me away. I supposed he was getting nowhere fast with Laura. “If you’re gonna have a car like this, you should drive it like it’s supposed to be driven,” he said. “Otherwise you might as well stick it in a museum.”

“I really am gonna have one of those things one day,” Neal murmured.

“Will you take your old man for a ride?” Joe asked. “Especially if you’re gonna go spinning through Monte Carlo like James Bond?”

“Sure,” Neal said. The kid was impossible to tease. He wanted to touch the car, I could tell. He wanted to bend over and lick the glassy paint job.

“You’ll never drive a car like that, no offense, Neal,” Alec said. “I don’t even think they make them anymore.”

He shrugged. “So then I’ll find one,” he said, “on the Internet. On eBay.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“Dude,” Neal said. “They sell everything on eBay.”

At this, Joe and I grinned at each other and left to turn one more 360 around the gallery. I didn’t know how Joe could have spawned a kid quite as unlike himself as Neal—what odd coupling of helixes had produced such an equal and opposite reaction. And still, sometimes
at my late-night darkest, I thought of Neal and Joe and felt a twinge of something like—well, something close enough to envy. To yearning. Neal Stern was brilliant, a good kid with a profitable career in front of him, and a foxy little girlfriend, and never once had he been busted for drugs, nor had his friends stolen a pair of opal brooches from his mother for no apparent reason. And even if he could be a little hard to take sometimes, I couldn’t help admiring his drive, his preternatural assurance about what his life would bring him. But it’s fine, it’s fine, I told myself. Alec will be fine. Lavish a little more patience on him, a little more time, and soon enough he’ll return to school, finish a degree, meet a nice girl, and forge a career, and by the time Elaine and I have traded in the Pearl Street Victorian for an expanded water-view bungalow on Lake George, Alec will be investing in a minivan to bring up the grandbabies for the summer.

(I shouldn’t be so cavalier about it. This was — and is — my truest, most deeply longed-for fantasy. It’s so simple. It shouldn’t be so hard. It’s what everyone we know wants, too.)

“So you liked that ride, huh, Dr. Pete?” said Laura, who caught me idling in front of a pod-shaped silver coffee table.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, it was pretty, but cars, you know. They aren’t really my thing. Just need ’em to get you from one place to another.”

“I thought all men liked cars,” she said.

“Not all men.”

“Well.” She took off her glasses and wiped them, casually, on the side of her T-shirt, lifting it just enough so that I could catch a glimpse of the white, white skin of her belly. Which could not have been her intention, and I shouldn’t have been looking, but still I found myself all too quickly staring down at her shoes and then at my own.

“I grew up in a city, remember,” I said. “So cars weren’t a big deal for us. My dad didn’t even buy one until I was seven or eight. We took
public transportation. My mom never learned to drive. Not like you kids, cars for your seventeenth birthdays.”

“I didn’t get a car for my seventeenth birthday,” she said. “And not for my eighteenth either. But that was okay. I wasn’t really allowed to drive.”

Were we really going to take the conversation in this particular direction? “Well, I guess you weren’t—”

“I was too scared to get my license,” she said. “I only got it when I started working at the goat farm, I guess five years ago now. I had to be able to drive a truck. But I remember starting at Country Day, watching all the seniors in their fancy cars, driving to school a whole five or six blocks from their houses. I remember thinking that it seemed so ridiculous. But of course, I was the only one still taking the bus.”

“Well, neither did Alec,” I said. “Get a car for his birthday.”

“No?”

“He wanted one.” And would have gotten one, too, had it not been for the Dan and Shmuley incident, and had he not been behaving like such a shit for most of his sixteenth year.

“That’s funny,” Laura said. “He seems like the kind of kid who’s always had everything he ever wanted.”

Now what did
that
mean? “He’s been rewarded appropriately when he does well,” I said, “and encouraged to behave differently when he doesn’t.”

“I remember him as such a sweet boy, you know?”

“He’s still a sweet boy.”

“He’s changed, though.”

“Of course he’s changed.” What was she getting at? “But he’s still a wonderful kid. We’ve been very lucky.”

“Yes?”

“Yes,” I said. “Very.”

“High school can be so hard,” she said. “It kills me how little adults remember it, or how they try to glorify it. But everything that’s happened to me in my life started from that place.” She stuck her hands deep in her pockets and looked up at me with a bleak smile, and I surprised myself by smiling back. And by letting something loosen, quickly and surprisingly, like a can falling off a shelf.

“You’ve come so far since then,” I said.

“I have and I haven’t. I’ve certainly traveled a lot, learned how to do things. I have actual manual
skills,
which I’m proud of, certainly. I can reattach a muffler. I can pour rounds of goat cheese. But you know”—she kept looking straight at me—“no matter how far I go, no matter how much I do—”

“Well” — I cut her off—“that was a long time ago.”

“It was,” she said. “But I’m starting to be able to talk about it, which feels good. The weird thing is there’s nobody who wants to talk about it with me. My parents certainly don’t—why would they? And my siblings find the whole thing mortifying. They don’t remember it, and they don’t want to hear about it now. All this time later, I can at least—well, I don’t have to pretend it never happened, but I guess everyone else still does.”

She tilted her head, and in that moment I saw in her not the baby killer, not the older woman out to unravel my son’s fragile grasp on maturity, but a girl who’d been through a nightmare and had come back to rejoin her society. I saw the girl I’d pretended to see all the time.

“How are you doing these days?” I asked her, letting my voice go a little softer. “Is everything all right?”

“It is,” she said. “Most of the time.”

“It’s good to see you again,” I said.

“Thanks.” She smiled at me, slid her eyeglasses back on her face,
and hung her head as though she were a little bit embarrassed, and I felt a little embarrassed, too. “It’s really nice to see you, too, Dr. Pete.” And then we smiled at each other once more, and she turned away, heading over to a big poster of a leopard standing in front of a panther, growling, and I myself turned to a strange sort of black wooden structure — maybe another representation of colonialism? I couldn’t tell. A black sort of basin shape, protected by sinuous, infolded wings, and a tall post sprouting from the head of the basin, curving over as if to peer inside, and the whole thing rocked back and forth. I looked over at the sign to see what the hell it was. Oh, of course, I thought, taking an appreciative step back. I touched it, guards be damned, and admired its gentle back-and-forth. The protective, curvy wings. The post for a mobile to hang from. The irony wasn’t lost on me: a cradle.