Through the Children's Gate (39 page)

We tried to console her, but it was no use.

“But look, he's just like Bluie!” we protested weakly.

“He looks like Bluie,” she admitted. “He looks like Bluie. But he's not Bluie. He's a stranger. He doesn't know me. He's not my friend, who I could talk to.”

That evening we took turns staying up with her, sitting in the rocking chair in her room and rocking until she slept. The room, I realized, was full of Bluies: things that she had ascribed feelings and thoughts and intentions to, all the while knowing that they didn't really have them. There were Buzzes and Woodies, American Girl dolls, and stuffed animals from her infancy. Children, small children particularly, don't just have more consciousness than the rest of us. They believe in consciousness more than the rest of us; their default conviction is that everything might be able to think, feel, and talk. This conviction is one that entertainment companies both recognize and exploit, with talking toys and lovable sharks, though at some other level, the children are entertained by them because they know it's all made up—no child believes that her own toys in her own bedroom talk like Woody and Buzz in the movie. Ascribing feelings to things is a way of protecting your own right to have feelings. Expanding the circle of consciousness extends the rule of feelings.

Olivia loved Bluie because it is in a child's nature to ascribe intentions and emotions to things that don't have them, rather as Hitchcock did with actresses. She knows that she is Olivia because one of the things that she is capable of doing is imagining that Bluie is Bluie. Though you read about the condition “mind-blindness” in autistic children, the alternative, I saw, was not to be mind-sighted. The essential condition of youth is to be mind-visionary: to see everything as though it might have a mind. We begin as small children imagining that everything could have consciousness—fish, dolls, toy soldiers, even parents—and spend the rest of our lives paring the list down until we are left alone in bed, the only mind left.

And yet, though I had been instructed by my reading that we imagine minds as much as know them, I also realized, looking at the little girl who had cried herself to sleep, that the difference didn't quite matter.
A pet is an act of empathy, a theory of love the child makes, but it is also a living thing, and when it dies, it moves briefly but decisively outside the realm of thought, where everything can be given the shape of our own mind, and into the cold climate of physical existence, where things are off or things are on. Science might be dissolving life and mind into smaller parts, but among the higher animals, at least, with eyes and skeletons and hungers, the line between life and non-life is pretty much fixed and hard; from the other side of that window, no traveler, or goldfish, has yet come home to his bowl.

The real proof of consciousness is the pain of loss. Reddie, swimming in his studio, did not know that Bluie had gone; Bluie himself may in some sense not have known that he had gone. But Olivia did. The pain we feel is not the same as the hum we know, and it is the pain, not the hum, that is the price of being conscious, and the point of being human. I looked at the sleeping child, hoping that she would be over her grief in the morning.

M
om,” Luke said the next morning, “you shouldn't have done that big Bluie's-in-the-fish-hospital thing. It just stretched it out.” The three of us were sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for Olivia to wake up.

“I didn't do a big Bluie's-in-the-fish-hospital thing,” Martha objected querulously. She was pretty tired. “I did a big Bluie's-in-the-rehab-clinic-right-next-to-the-fish-hospital thing.”

“Well, that makes it worse,” Luke said.

“Let's try this,” Martha said. “Let's tell her that, though Bluie did die, this Bluie is kind of Bluie reborn.”

I thought she might have something, and in the next fifteen minutes, we did a quick, instinctive tour of the world's religions. We made up a risen-from-the-grave Christian story: the Passion of the Bluie. We considered a Buddhist story: Bluie goes round and round. We even played with a Jewish story: Bluie couldn't be kept alive by the doctors, but what a lovely bowl he left for his family!

Then we heard the door of Olivia's room open, and she came to the table, theatrically calm, and sat down. “I'm going to call the new fish
Lucky,” she announced. “And can I please have the Honey Nut Cheerios?” She knew that the Honey Nut Cheerios were, strictly speaking, off limits, but that no one was going to call her on it this morning.

It was, I thought, an inventive stroke. Did the name refer to new Bluie 's unearned good fortune in finding a home thanks to the death of the original Bluie? (He had, after all, fulfilled the oldest New York fantasy: He had found and moved into someone else's vacated and rent-controlled apartment.) Or did it refer to his good fortune in being alive at all to swim around in the world a little longer? Certainly luck seemed like a wiser thing to celebrate in a fish than reincarnation.

But then an odd thing happened. After a couple of days of everyone calling him Lucky, we noticed that Olivia, on her own, began to call the new fish Bluie. It was as if, having made a grand and instructive emotional tour, she had ended up right where she started. We begin with the problem of mind, pass through the experience of pain—and end up loving the same old fish.

I understood suddenly why Hitchcock had given away the secret in the middle of
Vertigo.
The surprise is revealed because Hitchcock could not see what was surprising. He didn't think that there was anything bizarre in the idea of someone constantly being remade in the image of someone else's schemes or desires or weird plot points, because he thought that this is what life and love consist of. Suspense, not surprise, was the element Hitchcock swam in—not
What next? but How will we get to the inevitable place again?
Hitchcock himself, after all, did not adapt to circumstances. He made circumstances adapt to him. When Grace Kelly married a prince, there was Kim Novak, and when Kim Novak rebelled, there was Tippi Hedren. Every five-year-old has one fish, as every great director has a single Blonde. What Hitchcock's films of the fifties have in common with all the world's religions is the faith that death can be overcome, or at least made tolerable, by repetitive obsession. First the mind, then the pain, and then the echo: That is the order of life. James Stewart learned this, and now Olivia had, too.

Luke had a much more sinister view about what had happened to Bluie—less
Vertigo
and more
Psycho.

“What I think is,” he said, “Reddie put Bluie up to swimming into
that window and then laughed inside when he saw what happened. It was, like, the Revenge of Reddie. He hated Bluie all this time for having a bigger house than he did, and finally tricked him to his death. Reddie is the bad guy, with all these plots and schemes. Look at him! He's the villain.”

And for a moment or two, watching poor Reddie swimming in his low-rent bowl, I did think I could see an evil gleam in his small fishy eye, a startling resemblance to Anthony Perkins in his drawn, nervous excitability and long-simmering rage. I watched him in slightly panicky wonder. He looked like a fish who knows his own mind.

I
n the spring of 2003, the American art historian Kirk Varnedoe accepted the title of head coach of a football team called the Giant Metrozoids, which practiced then every week in Central Park. It was a busy time for him. He had just become a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, after thirteen years as the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and he was preparing the Mellon Lectures for the National Gallery of Art in Washington—a series of six lectures on abstract art that he was supposed to deliver that spring. He was also dying, with a metastasis in his lung of a colon cancer that had been discovered in 1996, and, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, he was running through all the possible varieties of chemotherapy, none of which did much good, at least not for very long.

The Giant Metrozoids were not, on the face of it, much of a challenge for him. They began with a group of eight-year-olds in my son Luke's second-grade class. Football had replaced Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and the sinister water yo-yo (poisonous) as a preoccupation and a craze. The boys had become wrapped up in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ march to victory in the Super Bowl that winter, and they had made up their minds to be football players. They wanted a team—“a real team that practices and has T-shirts and knows plays and everything”—that could play flag football, against an as yet unknown opponent, and I set about trying to organize it. (The name was a compromise: Some of the boys had wanted to be called the Giants, while
cool opinion had landed on the Freakazoids; Metrozoids was arrived at by some diplomatic back formation with “Metropolitan.”)

Once I had the T-shirts, white and blue, we needed a coach, and Kirk, Luke's godfather, was the only choice; during one of his chemotherapy sessions, I suggested a little tentatively that he might try it. He had been a defensive-backfield coach at Williams College for a year after graduation, before he went to Stanford to do art history, and I knew that he had thought of taking up coaching as a full-time profession, only to decide, as he said once, “If you're going to spend your life coaching football, you have to be smart enough to do it well and dumb enough to think it matters.” But he said yes eagerly. He gave me instructions on what he would need, and made a date with the boys.

On the first Friday afternoon, I took the red cones he had asked for and arranged them carefully on our chosen field, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street, just a couple of blocks from the Children's Gate. I looked over my shoulder at the pseudo-Renaissance mansion that houses NYU's Institute of Fine Arts, right across the street. We had met there, twenty-three years earlier, his first year at the Institute of Fine Arts, and mine, too. He had arrived from Stanford and Paris and Columbia, a young scholar, just thirty-four, who had made his reputation by cleaning up one of the messier stalls in the art-historical stable, the question of the authentic Rodin drawings. Then he had helped revive some unfairly forgotten reputations, particularly that of the misunderstood “academic” Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte.

But, as with Lawrence Taylor's first season with the Giants, though we knew he was supposed to be good, nobody was this good. He would come into the lecture room in turtleneck and sports jacket, professor-wear, and, staring at his shoes and without any preliminaries, wait for the lights to dim, demand, “First slide, please,” and, pacing back and forth, look up at the image, no text in his hand but a list of slides. “Last time we left off looking at Cézanne in the eighties, when the conversation between his code, registered in the deliberately crippled, dot-dot-dash, telegraphic repetition of brushstrokes, and his
construction, built up in the blocky, stage-set recessional spaces, set out like flats on a theater,” he would begin, improvising, spitballing, seeing meaning in everything. A Judd box was as alive for him as a Rodin bronze, and his natural mode was to talk in terms of tension rather than harmony. What was weird about the pictures was exactly what there was to prize about them, and, his style implied, all the nettled and querulous critics who tried to homogenize the pictures into a single story undervalued them, because, in a sense, they undervalued life, which was never going to be harmonized, either.

It was football that made us friends. In that first fall, he had me typed as a clever guy, and his attitude was that in the professions of the mind, clever guys finish nowhere at all. That spring we organized a touch-football game at the institute, and although I am the most flat-footed, least-gifted touch-football player in the whole history of the world, I somehow managed to play in it. A bunch of us persuaded our young professor to come out and join in one Sunday. The game was meant to be a gentle co-ed touch game. But Kirk altered it by his presence. He was slamming so many bodies and dominating so much that a wary, alarmed circle of caution formed around him.

Finally, I insisted to John Wilson, the Texan Renaissance scholar in the huddle, that if he faked a short pass and everybody made a lot of noise—“I got it!,” “There it is!,” and so on—Kirk would react instantly and run toward the sound, and I could sneak behind him for the touchdown.

Well, the play worked, and, perhaps recognizing that it was an entirely verbal construction, Kirk spotted its author and came right over, narrow-eyed and almost angry. “Smart play,” he said shortly, with the unspoken words “Smart-ass play” resonating in the leaves above our heads. But then he shook his fist happily, a sign meaning okay, nice one. He turned away.
He sees right through me,
I thought;
he knows exactly what I'm up to.
I began working harder, and we became friends.

A
quarter century later, he was coming to the same field from the hospital. He was a handsome man, in a big-screen way, with the deepset
eyes and boyish smile and even the lumpy, interesting complexion of a Harrison Ford or a Robert Redford. The bull-like constitution that had kept him alive for seven years, as the doctors poured drugs into him like Drano into a clogged sink, might have explained why the chemo, which thinned and balded almost everyone else, had somehow made him gain weight and grow hair, so, though he was a little stocky now, and a little gray, his step was solid and his eyes were rimmed with oddly long Egyptian lashes.

The boys came running from school, excited to have been wearing their Metrozoid T-shirts all day, waiting for practice: Eric and Derek and Ken, good athletes, determined and knowing and nodding brief, been-there-before nods as they chucked the ball around; Jacob and Charlie and Garrett talking a little too quickly and uncertainly about how many downs you had and how many yards you had to go; Will and Luke and Matthew very verbal, evangelizing for a game, please, can't we, like, have a game with another team, right away, we're ready; and Gabriel just eager for a chance to get the ball and roll joyfully in the mud. I was curious to see what Kirk would do with them. He was, first and foremost, a teacher, and his lectures still resonated in the halls of the institute. But how would he teach these eight-year-olds to play football? Orate at them? Motivate them? Dazzle them with plays and schemes?