The Art Lover Read online

  by Carole Maso

  Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frieda Kahlo

  The Room Lit by Roses: A Journal of Pregnancy and Birth

  Ghost Dance

  The American Woman in the Chinese Hat

  AVA

  Aureole: An Erotic Sequence

  Defiance

  Break Every Rule: Essays on Language, Longing, and Moments of Desire

  FOR GARY FALK, WHO SAW HOOPS OF GOLD.

  1954–1986

  Spring 1985

  1

  A girl in a striped bathing suit sits at the water’s edge. She digs deeply in the sand and from the vast beach makes shapes: an arch, a pyramid, two towers. Not child, but not yet adult, she is at that tender age of becoming.

  A man further back on the beach, now getting up, calls to her. He calls something out as if it were pure song. “The sun” I think is what he says. She turns. No. “Alison!” He is saying her name. “Alison.” Although there is only a slight physical resemblance, the man can only be her father. You can tell by the way he moves toward her. As she stands up now I can see the intricate jigsaw shapes their bodies make to fit together. They will gnaw off an arm if necessary to properly fit, bleed at a joint, tilt the head, or nod a little too deeply just to maintain the vaguely heart-shaped vacuum that must always exist somehow between them. They move closer for a moment as if to compensate for someone lost or gone away, someone missing. Wordlessly they move to shield each other from things yet to come, as if the body were capable of anything. Not big things necessarily, perhaps just against the sun which shines at times so brutally, or some small disappointment, the denial of a promotion, or a B on a test instead of an A—or protection against the collapsing walls of the sand city. They shift to greet each other. They turn at the last moment to maintain the correct distance.

  “Father,” she calls him now as she drags a pail of sand motioning. Arm up toward him. Arm back. Hand in the sand. Closer now. “Daddy.” His hand on her shoulder. His hand dipping into the water, moving back and forth, back and forth, clarifying the world. Daddy.

  The day is slightly chilly. It is early spring. In the distance a wall of yellow—the forsythia in bloom. In the distance an umbrella, a hat. And now out of the water another girl rises. It is as if she has been created by the man’s back-and-forth motion in the water. She cries with delight. Clearly she is a member of this family of father and daughter.

  “Alison!” she calls to the girl. “Come in.” She laughs and dives into a wave. “Both of you!” she shouts. “I’ll be your porpoise.” They watch her body arc through the cool blue. When she finally comes out, I see she is a woman really, a young woman, and that she resembles the father more than the younger girl. She drips all over them, and they shout, “Candace, no!” The father moves away. She steps closer.

  “Stop, it’s freezing cold,” he says.

  “What do you expect? It’s still May.” She laughs, wrapping herself in towel after towel.

  “Your lips are blue,” he says.

  “And my hair is red,” she laughs.

  “We should go in and change.” He collects tape recorder, suntan lotion, book, towel. “Our picnic dinner awaits us.”

  “One more minute,” Candace says, wrapping her hand tightly around his arm, then releasing him. With a finger, Alison presses teeth into the top of her sand tower.

  “A cornice,” Candace says. “How very postmodern of you. Now all we need is a moat.” She digs deep into the sand, scooping out handfuls and throws them at her father.

  “Candace!” he cries.

  Alison pours water into the moat, then smoothes the curving walls. Fortifies all sides. Makes a gum-wrapper flag. “Where’s Mom?” she asks.

  “Over there,” Father says, turning. Headless, half-headed, under an umbrella, on the other side of the beach, she is reading.

  “Mother,” Alison calls. “Come see! Come see!”

  2

  The woman walks across the large lawn, over a stream where trillium grow and into a meadow. Her long skirt billows in the wind. Under her arm she carries a large blue blanket. She unfolds the blanket, extends her arms and the blanket balloons, then waves, then settles on the grass. She sits on the edge of the blue square and looks at the summer house she loves, just opened for the season. She is waist high in grass.

  I know by the trees, the gentians at her feet, the quality of light, that it is spring. This is the Berkshires and spring comes slowly here, not like in the cities. Here there is some holding back, the sense that we are on the verge of something, a promise of some sort. There is something vaguely sexual in the air, in the laugh of the woman.

  She breathes deeply and sighs. She is in love with light. Her eye caresses each blade of grass, each lavender shadow. She stretches her legs out. There are ants, I’m sure, the first ones of the season, now near her ankle. Does she hum a song? Something about her suggests to me she’s not from our time. What? A glance? A way of dressing? I think she sings a Bach cantata and its high alleluias rise up and float across the field. Her daughter waves to her from the edge of the field, calling her name, calling her back over and over to this world.

  The woman smiles as the girl bounds down the steep farmhouse steps and runs across the lawn to her, carrying a basket. The man emerges from the house, crosses the lawn, the stream, the meadow to his family. Only the older daughter is missing now. One suspects, I suspect, she watches from far off, like any teenager. Soon she too will descend the steep stairs and join them for a picnic in the meadow. There is asparagus from the garden, salmon and fiddleheads. Chèvre and pears.

  One wants to keep this family well. Seeing them this way from some distance I can tell they are talking, but I can’t make out what they say. They laugh and their laughter is carried toward me on the breeze. The teenage daughter, holding bunches of lilacs, crosses the stream now, crosses the meadow, kneels down, putting her arms around her father’s neck, and gives him a kiss. The family come no closer than this, they hang back, keep their distance. But I have faith in them. And so for now the light is what I notice most, and certain familiar gestures. The jug of wine being lifted over and over. The mother pointing to the sky. The younger girl pinwheeling around the family doing cartwheels, her legs blurring. The man reclines in the purply grass. I can almost hear their mild laughs, their swoonings. The mother saying “comet” under her breath. I can almost smell the evening as it arrives.

  They are still just a lovely picture, a word picture of a family really, picnicking in the meadow near their summer house in Massachusetts, though it is not yet summer. And while the figures appear static, they are not in fact—it is only my wish for them: that they stay together, that the light remain. Dusk comes quickly. Still there is laughter, sighs, rapture, a jug of wine, enough love to last.

  I cannot guess yet how remote I, the onlooker, I the one who is telling their story, have become, how cautious. If there is a clue in this scene of something about to go awry, I do not see it. I overlook it. Or perhaps I prefer not to see. If I could tilt this tableau, flip it so that the house and the lake are nearest me and the family becomes small in the meadow, perhaps what I would see is the city of sand collapsing now, the overripe sunfish gone to the bottom of the lake for the night, the white house ghostly and luminous in this light. But something prevents me from doing this. Only one thing stands out now, dwarfing everything—the family, the beautiful pink of the salmon’s head in the grass which is so green, the Berkshires themselves, which look like an ocean in this light—oddly, in all of this there is only one thing that cannot be ignored—and that is the enormous starburst in the arch over the farmhouse door.

  A Few of the Things I Know About You

  You were elegant, graying, distinguished, with a slight paun
ch. You were cerebral, exacting, lively, passionate.

  You were not old.

  You were critical, cold at times, a little monstrous. Melancholy only on occasion. Intelligent. Your grayish eyes traversed great distances of time and space.

  You liked Brahms, Mahler, Stravinsky. You had a genuine appreciation for life and also a deep cynicism that struck me more often than not simply as good sense.

  You had many passions. Women found you irresistible.

  You were not old.

  Things are not in our control.

  One need not look very far to see what I am talking about. Look on any day of the week, on any page of the newspaper. For example:

  Cape Canaveral, Florida—Wherever it is going, whatever it is carrying, however long its planned mission, the Space Shuttle Discovery took off this afternoon on the first flight of American astronauts dedicated exclusively to secret military objectives.

  For example:

  Methyl isocyanate has escaped from a Union Carbide tank in Bhopal, India, killing more than 2,000 people.

  I read this in the newspaper. I die a little with this news, accompanied by a photograph of mother and child.

  Things are not in our control.

  We see close up and also from a great distance, and we are dizzied by the constant shift in perspective.

  We see close up. Walk down any street on any day in New York City. Men lie drunk and destitute on the streets. Women too, their shopping bags filled with their whole lives. This is not only on the Bowery anymore or other so-called bad sections of the city. Go to Madison Avenue. Everywhere a hand reaches out for money. From the gutter a hand at my ankle.

  And now my father is dead. From the grave, a hand. I have come back to his house to settle what can be settled. A townhouse on West Eleventh Street in Manhattan. I am surrounded by his things—his papers, his extensive library, his coffee mug, his pipes, his brandy glasses. So little goes with the body of a man. So much is left behind. Canvases, paints, diplomas, honorary diplomas. In the bedroom closet three pairs of women’s shoes, all different sizes. On his bureau his pocket watch. His second pair of glasses. His whole life before me—only he, strangely missing.

  I am back in New York, his New York, my New York, after a full year away. I walk the streets. I have started reading the papers again.

  It has become almost possible to skip the bad parts of the newspaper altogether. One can be reasonably well assured that in the Living section of the New York Times or the Home section or the Weekend section, one will be in relatively little danger. Beware though and proceed with care through Tuesday’s Science section. Occasionally a Sudden Infant Death Syndrome baby will be slipped in or some detailed account of the latest antisocial behavior: autoerotic death, for instance. Finally, distrust most those stories that seem most innocuous, regardless of what section they appear in. For example: an article about a circus unicorn. Great, you think. Harmless. You’re reading. OK. But the unicorn turns out to be a goat whose horns were diabolically fused together to make one mythic horn, center head.

  I did not get to him in time.

  In time for what? one wonders. We had cared for each other. We had, it seemed, been saying good-bye our whole lives. From the time I was little and he called me his cherub. Even then he was saying good-bye, putting me into a painting, holding me afar and admiring.

  Max, I had wanted a firmer grasp.

  “She held very still,” you always said.

  You lived a good life. I believe, I have faith that you are in heaven. You were kind and generous, in your own way. I picture God’s hand in yours.

  I suspect that there are lots of new things to see up there, to comment on, lots of places to turn your intelligent, discerning eye. I believe you are in heaven.

  Some days I notice on the Bowery that the men have lifted themselves up, at least for a moment, out of the gutter, the doorway, the broken stoop, have torn a shirt into strips for rags, have bought or stolen a bottle of Windex and have begun cleaning the windshields of cars stopped at red lights, for change.

  Another day I hear that a most unlikely fellow, the leader of a rock band called The Boomtown Rats, has come up with a way to help feed the people of Ethiopia.

  And buried in each Sunday Times is a map of the stars accompanied by a little star story. You can, if you like, simply by looking up into the sky, chart them with this handy diagram. This is one perfectly safe and reliable part of the paper.

  But sometimes even the sky is dangerous. I look up and see your face in the stars.

  “A neat trick,” you’d say.

  I’ve been watching a building go up on the West Side. I’m especially fond of it because it looks like a tube of lipstick to me, though the fact of the matter is it’s made of mortar and steel or whatever, it has no windows, the people who will have to work there day after day will not get any light, there’s probably inadequate ventilation and who knows about the fire exits. But still I love that building. I want things to be beautiful.

  I get stuck too easily. Sometimes it takes so long just to finish one sentence in the newspaper. For example: “Because it is too early for peach picking in Western Georgia . . .” I stopped, just wanting to be there, imagining the roundness of the young fruit, feeling the early heat.

  I have gotten distracted far too easily my whole life. The past year, away in the country at the Cummington Community of the Arts, I was stopped so often by blue flowers on the side of the road or by the ostrich plume fern or a stone wall. Or by a certain composer’s interesting face or body. One loses one’s way so easily. One is blue-petaled at the least suggestion, passing a field of gentians on the way down the hill to the mailbox. Staying there even as I take the mail from the box and attempt to separate it. One becomes irretrievably lost in the music, or the musician. One loses a certain analytic perspective.

  I am a lover of detail, a marker—it’s a way of keeping the world in place. One documents, makes lists to avoid becoming simply petals. I am like you, Max: a looker, an accountant, a record keeper, a creator of categories, a documenter. For evidence I rip flyers from telephone poles, save every scrap of paper I get. Listen carefully. Organize. Reorganize.

  I open her clenched hand. In her palm a swirl of green, a fiddlehead fern, a small emerald of hope. No.

  I am trying to regain my analytic perspective.

  I began foreseeing his death in that recurring New England shape, that architectural sunrise, that starburst over every door, in the gate, in the churches. In the farmhouse I lived in. In the center of town. I started photographing it. There is a need for evidence. I saw the starburst in my face. I had a picture taken of it. In this pattern, this cool geometry, there was something about to explode. It moved inside my father’s head. He had a stroke and died. I did not get there in time.

  One wonders. In time for what? We loved each other so much we felt it necessary, in preparation, to say good-bye our whole lives.

  One becomes a blue flower, a mountain, a gate, a stream. The landscape is not stationary; it follows you around. And the dead? We shall see, I suppose.

  “She held very still.”

  She does, she holds very still.

  The landscape changes moment to moment like your face once did as you read, as you looked at a painting, as you gazed out the window. I often wondered if you were thinking of Mother, but I never asked. You would often catch me staring at you. I would say, “How much your face changes, Max.” You would say, “It is essentially a matter of light.”

  I am back in your Village apartment, your enormous art history library before me. A few blocks away your students are just getting out for the year. Distinguished Professor of Art History, Chairman of the Department, you were always everyone’s favorite, though you could not see why and regarded their affection with some suspicion. Even the beautiful ones—you kept a skeptical, a healthy, you called it, distance. You had many lovers, I know, but none of them were your students.

  I picture God’s hand in y
ours.

  But other times I think no, you were not old enough to die. There was a certain spring to your walk. You must have sensed something. You were a sensitive man, but you gave us no warning. You were not that old. And there were children to consider.

  “Children, indeed,” you would have said. I, the youngest at thirty. My brothers far away, having learned the lessons of art and distance you taught well.

  I believe in one God the Father Almighty. And I have faith that you are in heaven, content with new visual stimulus.

  You were not that old. There were many women after my mother. Right up until the end. You were a sensitive man. You must have sensed it. Did a young large-breasted woman lying over you whisper death in your ear? Did you try to ward death off, pumping yourself into her?

  “No.”

  I did not get to you in time.

  “Caroline, please.”

  You lived such a civilized life. Life of beautiful food. Goat’s cheese, artichoke life, asparagus in the afternoon. Wine-cellar life. Academic life. Book life. Life of the mind. And of the body. All those women, Max. Exotic, perfumed, the lovely white-throated night women, giggling, sighing, a shoe falling off a perfect foot, a silk stocking. Young pretty women, patting me on the head. I did understand. Oh, yes. I never questioned that you missed my mother. But she was dead, and you were a practical man of desire.

  Can I miss the mother I barely knew? A woman I only vaguely recall? A patterned dress, a scent of spices, dark hair that fell around white shoulders. Is it possible to miss her, this phantom mother? No, I think not, you would say.

  You mourned her and the part of your own life that followed her into the earth. This closet filled with paints, charcoals, paper, linseed oils, half-drawings, paintings of her, untouched all these years. With her death you closed that door for good, never stretching a canvas again, never picking up a brush.

  “She held very still,” he said. “She was a wonderful model. She never moved.”