Luminous Airplanes (7 page)
It was for my sake that my mothers ran away from Thebes. They didn’t want to have their child in a little town in the Catskills where things happened so slowly that people were still speaking French six generations after the first settlers arrived. By Thebes standards, my mothers were more like weather than like people: they changed fast, and they moved on. They took me to New York, where they were going to be famous artists, only they had no idea about money and knew how to do nothing, nothing. For a few scary years in the 1970s my mothers barely scraped by, she, waitressing, and she, clerking in a photo lab; she, selling ladies’ clothes, and she, waitressing; she, answering telephones for a Senegalese clairvoyant, and she, answering telephones for an Israeli dentist. The three of us, she, she, and me, lived in an apartment on West Ninety-eighth Street, with two tiny bedrooms and a view, if you leaned dangerously far out the living-room window, of a blue-gray shard that was alleged to be the Hudson River.
Later, when they had real jobs and even health insurance, my mothers liked to tell stories about those years, to prove how tough we had all been and how close we’d come to not making it. There was the time, Celeste said, when she lit a fire in the ornamental fireplace, because the heat in the apartment was broken, and how was she supposed to know the chimney had been sealed since the nineteenth century? The apartment filled with smoke and the three of us were nearly evicted and if you lifted the living-room rug you could still see the burned boards where the fire had spread before the super put it out, using a blanket from my mothers’ bed, which was a technique for fire prevention that Celeste had never seen before. And the worst of it was, she said, that afterward the blanket was ruined, and she and her sister had to sleep in their coats.
“You slept in
my
coat,” Marie said, if she was present. “Your coat had those big horn buttons, remember? You said they dug into you?”
my
coat,” Marie said, if she was present. “Your coat had those big horn buttons, remember? You said they dug into you?”
Celeste pretended to be perplexed. “But if I slept in your coat, what did you sleep in?”
“Sweaters, I guess.”
“Those were difficult times.”
There was something in Celeste’s voice, though, that made me think she missed those years, that in retrospect they seemed less difficult than the ones that came later. My mothers went to Hunter College; after they graduated Celeste got a job teaching art to middle-school students in the Bronx. Marie worked in the offices of semilegitimate publications with names like
California Lifestyle
and
Platonic Caves,
typing, making copies, answering the telephone, always in a short skirt, which Celeste didn’t approve of, but Marie rebutted that she couldn’t type to save her life, and without the skirts she’d be back to working for the clairvoyant, who could, presumably, see up her skirt no matter how long it was.
California Lifestyle
and
Platonic Caves,
typing, making copies, answering the telephone, always in a short skirt, which Celeste didn’t approve of, but Marie rebutted that she couldn’t type to save her life, and without the skirts she’d be back to working for the clairvoyant, who could, presumably, see up her skirt no matter how long it was.
In the evenings my mothers sat at their worktables in the living room, making their art. They knitted sweaters for monsters with wrong arms and extra heads; they stamped papier-mâché medallions of modern saints of their own invention; they mixed brightly colored fluids in the sink and bottled them in glass phials on which they pasted labels, Potion of Temporary Resistance to Temptation, Elixir of Getting That Opportunity Back, Low-Flying Potion, Potion for Those Afraid to Drink the Other Potions in This Collection. Celeste painted miniature landscapes in the manner of Hieronymus Bosch, in which the Upper West Side revealed its true, hellish character; Marie applied a Ouija board to a subway map and took photographs of the places the spirits told her to go. I loved the things they made, which was fortunate, because our apartment was becoming a museum of their work. The potions took up residence in the medicine cabinet; the demons capered over the nonworking fireplace. I found a three-armed sweater in my dresser, a joke, I think, but maybe not; the apartment wasn’t big and my mothers were always making.
They weren’t famous yet, but they had friends, and those friends had friends who had taken steps in that direction. My mothers talked about them all the time, enthusiastically but not uncritically, as though they, my mothers, were commenting on a sport from which they themselves had retired some years before. From their conversation I got the impression that it wasn’t hard to become famous. One day a gallery owner came to visit, and the next you had a show; the critic from the
Times
praised your work even if he didn’t understand what it was about. Then collectors sought you out, and you had to be careful; it was important to turn away from the collectors and their vulgar need, to encapsulate yourself in solitude and silence, so that you could emerge a few years later with your mature work, which was extremely difficult and cut no deals with anybody. That’s when the museums took you on, and afterward things happened without you, international exhibitions, retrospectives, scholarly monographs; the secret nominators spoke your name in secret and you got the MacArthur genius grant and as to what happened after that, why, you could imagine it yourself. With a mixture of excitement and dread—I wanted them to get their wish, but I didn’t know what would happen to me when they did—I pictured my mothers rising into the sky like two unwinking stars, possessed, finally, of all the solitude and silence they could ask for. Mostly it was a matter of not making mistakes along the way. Not like Leonora Kurtz, who worked with Marie, and had talent but
listened to her boyfriend too much
; not like Donatello DelAmbrosio, Celeste’s friend of the wonderful name, who
needed to get out of the shadow of Fluxus
. Not like Katy Gladwin, whose paintings were
too theoretical
, or Hugh Heap, whose string sculptures were
cute but not really about anything
, or Guy Anstine, whose white boxes were
just white boxes, you’ve seen one you’ve seen a thousand
. Not like Javier Provo, whose murals were in a Warhol movie and who was becoming actually famous, but was nonetheless
completely preoccupied with his own body image
. My mothers would not make these mistakes. They were ready to go up; they were waiting in our apartment, waiting and making.
Times
praised your work even if he didn’t understand what it was about. Then collectors sought you out, and you had to be careful; it was important to turn away from the collectors and their vulgar need, to encapsulate yourself in solitude and silence, so that you could emerge a few years later with your mature work, which was extremely difficult and cut no deals with anybody. That’s when the museums took you on, and afterward things happened without you, international exhibitions, retrospectives, scholarly monographs; the secret nominators spoke your name in secret and you got the MacArthur genius grant and as to what happened after that, why, you could imagine it yourself. With a mixture of excitement and dread—I wanted them to get their wish, but I didn’t know what would happen to me when they did—I pictured my mothers rising into the sky like two unwinking stars, possessed, finally, of all the solitude and silence they could ask for. Mostly it was a matter of not making mistakes along the way. Not like Leonora Kurtz, who worked with Marie, and had talent but
listened to her boyfriend too much
; not like Donatello DelAmbrosio, Celeste’s friend of the wonderful name, who
needed to get out of the shadow of Fluxus
. Not like Katy Gladwin, whose paintings were
too theoretical
, or Hugh Heap, whose string sculptures were
cute but not really about anything
, or Guy Anstine, whose white boxes were
just white boxes, you’ve seen one you’ve seen a thousand
. Not like Javier Provo, whose murals were in a Warhol movie and who was becoming actually famous, but was nonetheless
completely preoccupied with his own body image
. My mothers would not make these mistakes. They were ready to go up; they were waiting in our apartment, waiting and making.
Maybe their potions weren’t strong enough, maybe the demons they compacted with turned out not to have the powers they, the demons, had promised, maybe their saints were spurious; the ascension my mothers were waiting for did not arrive. Of course we were still waiting for it. We would always be waiting for it, but by the time I was nine or ten years old, my mothers had begun to glance backward to those first years in New York when food was scarce and success certain.
“You remember the time we saw that rat?” Celeste asked Marie wistfully. “It was about four feet long, sitting on the kitchen windowsill?”
“
I
saw the rat,” Marie said. “I told you about it. You wouldn’t come and look.”
I
saw the rat,” Marie said. “I told you about it. You wouldn’t come and look.”
“There were a lot of rats on the Upper West Side back then. Do you remember?” she asked me.
“No,” I said. “I remember bugs, but no rats.”
“Ah, bugs,” said Celeste. “Those enormous roaches. I remember when I was taking a bath, and this roach fell into the tub. I’d never seen such an enormous cockroach.”
“I remember your scream,” Marie said. “I’d never heard such an enormous scream.”
“Those were difficult times,” Celeste said.
Celeste Marie, Marie Celeste. My low-flying stars.
I spent the rest of the day on the sofa, reading
Progress in Flying Machines
. When it got dark I thought about going over to the Regenzeits’. I had promised Kerem I would visit soon, that I would consider myself a part of the family, just like I had been in the old days, but no one was home. They must be working late, I thought, getting Snowbird ready for the winter. I imagined Yesim at her desk, a pencil stuck in her hair. I imagined a brilliant blue day, the ground crackling with golden leaves, Yesim and me sitting on the Regenzeits’ porch, wearing bulky sweaters, holding mugs of hot cider. Then, in my imagination, one of my hands unpeeled itself from the side of the cup and settled on Yesim’s shoulder. In no time my tongue was in her mouth, my hands were in her black hair. In my imagination.
Progress in Flying Machines
. When it got dark I thought about going over to the Regenzeits’. I had promised Kerem I would visit soon, that I would consider myself a part of the family, just like I had been in the old days, but no one was home. They must be working late, I thought, getting Snowbird ready for the winter. I imagined Yesim at her desk, a pencil stuck in her hair. I imagined a brilliant blue day, the ground crackling with golden leaves, Yesim and me sitting on the Regenzeits’ porch, wearing bulky sweaters, holding mugs of hot cider. Then, in my imagination, one of my hands unpeeled itself from the side of the cup and settled on Yesim’s shoulder. In no time my tongue was in her mouth, my hands were in her black hair. In my imagination.
It was raining in gray sheets when I woke up the next morning, and with the rain came the autumn cold. I didn’t know how to turn on the heat; finally I went to the basement and looked at the furnace. It had gone out, and I couldn’t get it to start. I called the furnace company; they said they’d send someone as soon as they could. Looking out the kitchen window, I determined that Yesim drove a Subaru Outback, and Kerem a Ford Explorer. I went up to the attic bedroom and discovered that the boxes that filled the room were full of questionnaires left over from my grandfather’s lawsuit. Put a check next to every statement you agree with: 1. Morning is the time when I feel best. 2. My weight stays the same all year round. 3. I rarely cry for no reason. 4. I consider myself a “social person.” I sat on the bed and spent a long time thinking about I don’t know what. At five o’clock I called the furnace people again. A woman explained to me that they were waiting for a shipment of heating oil, which had not arrived because of a late-season hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. You want heat, talk to ExxonMobil, she said. I told her that I didn’t think ExxonMobil would take my call. Maybe not, she said, her voice weary and stiff.
Around six-thirty, I drove to town and bought a six-pack of Genesee Cream Ale and a box of chocolate donuts. Two teenage girls stood outside the gas station, in the shelter by the pumps, wearing more makeup than I would have expected girls at a gas station to wear.
“Hey, mister,” one of them said as I passed, “will you get us some beer?” She was prettier than she looked at first; I wanted to tell her not to wear so much makeup. I said I’d give each of them a beer if they wanted, but I didn’t feel comfortable buying them more than that.
The girl said they needed it for a party, it wasn’t like they were going to drink it all. I said no, really, I couldn’t, and the girl sighed and said, “OK, give us each a beer.”
I wondered whose daughter she was, where she lived, whether she had grown up in Thebes. For a moment I thought of asking if I could go to the party, if only so that I would have something to do on Saturday night. But the thought of being at a party, any party, was unpleasant, and in any case I doubted the girls would agree to take me. I pulled two beers out of the six-pack and handed them to the girls, with a warning not to drink in public. They rolled their eyes and made complicated hand gestures, as if communicating how uptight I was to a deaf observer.
When I got home, the Outback was alone in the Regenzeits’ driveway. I watched a martial-arts film on television. “You will be punished,” said the hero, or the hero’s dubber. “All of you. Punished!” I wanted to correct his use of the passive voice, I wanted there to be heat, I wanted to be done with the packing, which I hadn’t even begun. Instead I showered, washed my hair and shaved under the hot water, which, thankfully, still worked. I put on a clean shirt, found a bottle of wine in my grandparents’ pantry and went across to the Regenzeits’ house.
Yesim was wearing a big shapeless sweater; her hair was tied back in a squiggly ponytail. I held up my bottle of wine and said I was afraid we’d drunk their entire supply the other night.
“Oh, no,” Yesim said, “Kerem always has more hiding somewhere.”
I thought that would be the end of our conversation, but Yesim, after hesitating for a moment, asked if I wanted to come in. I said I didn’t want to interrupt her, it was late, I was sure she had things to do.
“You wouldn’t say that if you knew me,” Yesim said. We sat in the kitchen, which hadn’t changed much since I was a child. The olive-green tin canisters that said FLOUR and COFFEE and SUGAR in orange faux-woodblock lettering still stood on their rack; the same red-and-white-checked tablecloth still covered the round kitchen table. The old white curtains printed with blue game birds hung before the window; the same clock counted off COCA-COLA TIME over the massive olive-green refrigerator. Now that Mrs. Regenzeit had returned with her husband to Turkey, I wondered whether she missed the Populuxe splendor of her kitchen, the streamlined mixer, the color-coded fondue forks she sometimes used to twist her long black hair into a bun. Yesim made us tea. I asked whether her parents liked living in Akbez, and Yesim said she didn’t know, she hardly spoke to them anymore. “The truth is,” she said, “I can’t talk to my father now that he’s found religion.”
“He’s found religion?” I remembered Joe Regenzeit as having been religious already. Hadn’t he thanked the god whose name I misheard as
Olaf
for nearly everything?
Olaf
for nearly everything?
“Yes, he’s become a fanatic. It’s his way of saying
fuck you
to secular America.” The Yesim I remembered would not have said something like this. She did not curse; in fact, despite her sexual curiosity, she had always seemed to me somehow innocent. She told me that Joe Regenzeit had joined a
medrese,
that every third word out of his mouth was
obscene
or
whore.
Referring to America sometimes, and sometimes to Yesim.
fuck you
to secular America.” The Yesim I remembered would not have said something like this. She did not curse; in fact, despite her sexual curiosity, she had always seemed to me somehow innocent. She told me that Joe Regenzeit had joined a
medrese,
that every third word out of his mouth was
obscene
or
whore.
Referring to America sometimes, and sometimes to Yesim.
“It sounds like he’s gone off the deep end.”
“Yes,” Yesim said, “and the really strange thing is, he wants me to come live with him. It’s the only thing that will save me, he says.”
“Save you from what?”
“Myself, I think he means, but probably America, too.”
“It doesn’t sound like a hard decision. Don’t go.”
“What if he’s right?” Yesim asked.
I wanted to ask what he might be right about, but Yesim didn’t look as if she wanted to be questioned. Instead I asked how Snowbird was doing, and Yesim told me they were building a terrain park for snowboarders, basically a place for them to break their arms and legs. “It’s all right with me as long as they don’t sue,” she said.
Some Coca-Cola time passed silently.
“I’m glad we’re still friends,” I said.
Yesim smiled. “Were we friends? I thought you were friends with my brother.”
“What about the summer when Kerem went to soccer camp? What about
Man and Woman
?”
Man and Woman
?”
“What?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Oh, that,” Yesim said finally. “I’d forgotten what it was called.”
“I used to think about it all the time.”
“Is that so?”
“Never mind,” I said, blushing. “I’m babbling. My grandfather’s house doesn’t have heat, and the cold must have affected my brain. I’m used to San Francisco weather, although it gets cold there too …”
“If you don’t have any heat, you should stay here,” Yesim said. It was as though she were telling me that if I touched the stove I would burn myself.
She offered to make up a bed for me in the study. I protested, I’d be in Kerem’s way, and anyway there were plenty of blankets at my grandparents’ house. Yesim said Kerem was visiting Kathy and Max in Philadelphia and it was really no trouble. “Just stay there. I’ll get things ready.” I studied my reflection in the toaster: I was elongated, bent beyond all recognition. My hands were enormous and unusable. Yesim came back. She didn’t know where Kerem kept his pajamas, would I be all right?
I would give a lot to know what Yesim was thinking as she led me upstairs to Kerem’s study, where she’d made up a bed on her brother’s black leather sofa. Did she feel sorry for me? Did what I told her set some idea in motion, some desire? All I know is that she smiled, or seemed to be smiling.
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