Music for Wartime (33 page)

The rumor started that Chapman was working on a portrait of Ling. The two of us only communicated by occasional e-mail at that point—but we shared a dealer, the young and optimistic Beatrice, and she was the one to whisper to me in awe. “It’s eleven feet by thirteen,” she said. “And it’s not a photo.”

“He’s painting again?”

She leaned in. “With his
fist
.”

Beatrice was good to me. I’d spent the past two decades painting heaps of clothes, medicine cabinets, chairs. They sold, but I didn’t love them. If they were about my life, it was obliquely—the chairs and clothes being, after all, empty.

When the portrait arrived in New York six months later, I walked up to the gallery just to see it. Bea left me alone with the thing. She locked the front door.

I was more overwhelmed than I’d been by any piece of art since I was a very young man. Primary colors plus green, a sloppy stippling done, yes, with the fist. It was clear he hadn’t really punched it, because there was no splattering, no puckering. He must have pressed the backs of his fingers patiently to the canvas a thousand times. Even so, a sick man shouldn’t have tackled a piece that large. I knew, and the dealer knew, and I believe everyone who cared about it knew, that this was his last work. How could you continue, after something like this? What would be left to give?

It was Expressionist, if you had to categorize it. Maybe a bit derivative of Chuck Close, but only in scope—not in execution.

And if you stood across the room, it was Ling.

Not Ling as we’d all known him, but Ling as he’d appeared in the
Times
photo. Smiling, better than he’d looked in ’88 despite the white hair, despite the jowls. What had it meant for Chapman to put his fist to Ling’s face again? I’d never be able to ask. Was he absolving him, or executing him? Or had these always, to Chapman, been the same thing?

There’s one more story about Chapman, the one we told at his funeral. After his funeral, rather, at the Thoroughfare Diner in Evans, Virginia. Imagine the New York art world—three hundred of us, at least, dealers, painters, photographers, critics, former students—descending on the bed-and-breakfasts, the truck stops, the knickknack stores of a town that hadn’t seen a gay man, as far as they knew, since that one kid took off for San Francisco in the nineties. Chapman had blended in fine, beard to his chest by that point, rusty red pickup.

We took turns telling it, adding up the different details he’d given each of us: how toward the end, in the shower of his barn studio’s bathroom, Chapman slipped and fell. He hit his head and he twisted his ankle. Dizzy, unable to bend his neck, foot useless, he lay a long time on the bottom of the tub, feeling the water pelt his knees. He was weak from the cancer, weaker still from the chemo—and the wall of the tub was a porcelain cliff, insurmountable. He might pull up with his left hand to sit, but then what? Cross his injured right leg over and step out with it, lose his balance again on the wet floor? The metal safety rail was inches above the reach of his fingers. He knew he was going to die there.

He told people, later, about looking out the open bathroom door—how the only thing he could see was the giant portrait of Ling across the studio, half-finished. Ling’s eye, Ling’s ear, Ling’s hairline. He told everyone that Ling had saved him. I believe something different. I believe he summoned his strength one last time so he could save Ling. So he could resurrect him, finish him, send him home to New York. What I’m saying is: If you have a fish in your hand, it’s easier to run.

The solution came sudden and clear as a miracle: Hand over shoulder, blind, he stopped the drain with the rubber plug and switched the control from shower to faucet. He waited twenty minutes as the tub filled around him, as water poured over the side. It bore him up, Noah on the flood, until he could finally grasp the metal bar. He pushed against it, sailed himself to the lip of the tub, to the waterfall that ended on the tile floor and the submerged bath mat. It wasn’t graceful, he told us later, but we suspected it was more than that. It was grace itself. He floated over the edge, dropped into the puddle below, and—blessed, exhausted, fingers pruned—rolled to safety.

T
he most alarming photograph in my possession: my sixth birthday, eight children gathered at a picnic table, staring at a bomb. In the background, my grandfather’s hands rest on his bald head; my father stares at the sky. Above and behind them, unnoticed by anyone but the camera, my sister is flying.

Five minutes later, my mother would exchange the camera for a tray of chocolate cupcakes. Erin Tazio would throw the bomb up into the tree house, and as we sucked the crumbs off our crimped wrappers, we waited for the little hut to fly apart in fiery shards.

Ten minutes later, the sky would crack open with thunder as we all ran screaming for the house. My sister, underneath the neighbor’s trampoline, at first did not understand the sound of slicing rain.

Exactly six years before the picture was taken, I came out purple, the umbilical cord wound three times around my neck—as if some tribunal
in utero
had found me guilty for the crimes of a past life. My pardon came from the doctor’s quick fingers.

Two years and eight months later, my grandfather would call to joke about the time difference. “Happy New Year! I’m calling from the old year! Tell me, what is the future like?” We were as delighted by the joke as by the elaborate obstacle courses he set up in the basement the few times he came to Chicago—mazes and prizes and puzzles and traps.

Twenty years later, looking at the photo and forgetting the thunderstorm looming overhead, I would wonder if it was the suggestion of a bomb that made my father turn his face to the sky, where the bombs of his childhood had screamed. He squints, hands on hips, as if awaiting a message.

Less than one year later, I would take my first photograph, a color Polaroid of my grandfather balancing on his head in his Honolulu apartment. He was bare chested, his legs lotus folded in the air. He would stay like that for twenty minutes.

Another photograph, fifty years older: that same grandfather in strikingly Napoleonic parliamentary uniform, inscrutable and highly decorated, a wry smirk my daughter will inherit. He was also (in one of the all-time great conflicts of interest) the editor of Budapest’s daily newspaper. Sometime in 1941, following the suicide of the beleaguered and betrayed Hungarian president, Pál Teleki, and following the gains of the fascist Arrow Cross Party and the manipulations of the Germans, he denounced the encroaching forces at a meeting that the Gestapo officer Veesenmayer had called for Hungarian journalists. He was already running an anti-German radio station from the Buda Hills. It would broadcast until March 19, 1944, the day he was arrested.

Six years and seventeen hours before the photo of the bomb, I began to push my way out. My mother could not get up to change the channel on the hospital-room TV, nor could the Jewish woman in the next bed, and so for an hour, including the time it took for the short nurse to find a taller nurse who could reach the buttons, their labors were presided over by the final episode of the NBC miniseries
Holocaust
, starring Meryl Streep. The next day, the twentieth, I was born. It was the eighty-ninth anniversary of Hitler’s birth. Whether NBC planned the broadcast accordingly is unclear.

Twelve and a half years after the picture was taken, when my sister was in her thirty-ninth hour of labor, I would light a votive for her in Ely Cathedral because, although I didn’t believe in anything like that, she did. I would remember the picture, how her twelve-year-old body flew through the air, her black hair straight out behind.

Forty years earlier, held in a Budapest jail cell, my grandfather learned hatha yoga from a shot-down RAF pilot named Nigel who had grown up in India during the Raj. They closed their eyes and, as the bombs rained light through the small, unreachable windows, tried to levitate.