Two
THURSDAY
In what circle of hell do apparently spiteful, possibly demented artists punish unto eternity the patrons and curators who devoted themselves to polishing the artists’ reputations and lavishing expert care on their work…only to be spurned, kicked in the proverbial jaw, when the artists finally keel over? Meredith Galarza now knows there is precisely such a place and that, undeservedly in the extreme, she has won a skip-death-do-not-pass-Cerberus ticket, express to that very station.
She takes out the folder of correspondence for what must be the hundredth time in a week. She reads the letter on top, the most recent (unless others went astray and, considering the state of the postal service, why not?) dated three months ago. One of the several ways in which she and the writer of this letter had bonded, or so she believed, was through their love of handwritten communication. How painfully she remembers the glow she felt whenever her office mail contained a square envelope of the sturdy saffron-yellow stock on which he had written his personal letters for twenty-seven years. And how naïvely she took for granted that she would be the one to sort and archive thousands of missives written on that stock to hundreds of people over those years and possibly many more beyond.
Dear Merry,
As always, what a reliable pleasure to share lunch with you in the sultriest corner of our secret bistro, so outdated that even the canniest critics would pass it witlessly by—and a good thing, as they would sneer at its dowdy-yet-timeless offerings, its blessed blindness to the Next Nouveau. I seem unable to veer from my “usual” sole bonne femme, and I like to flatter myself that Jacques keeps it on the menu just for codgers comme moi. Vive le senescence!
While I won’t deny a certain disappointment, I see the wisdom in shooting for what one might call “aesthetic diversity.” Stuart’s work and mine may not see eye to eye, but they occupy the same planet in relative peace, don’t they? And what’s in a name, especially the name of a gallery, some pompous engraving on a wall? Puts me in mind of tombstones.
I’m feeling in decent fettle—we won’t talk about the heavy cream on that sole—and thus am not overly impatient, either. It’s good news that the building is well under way, and how shrewd of you to aim for “carbon-neutral”[sic??]. Green-minded efforts do more than feather one’s cap. They pull in the $hekels. In all affairs related to the arts, deep pockets are the only true insurance nowadays.
To have a “wing of my own” (pace Mrs. Woolf) would have been a dream come true, but if Stuart’s on board for a “shared” enterprise, so be it. If anything reveals how swiftly times change, it just might be Stuart and his apocalyptic fantasias.
BTW, I am impressed by Enrico’s work on the Ivo drawings. What would the slapdash memo-pad artists of the world do without magicians like him? He is our passport to posterity. Please be sure to pass on my gratitude and awe.
A bowl of soup summons; my nostrils detect ginger, that noble cleanser of arteries.
Yours as ever,
Mortadella
She can find no sign of his impending desertion here. He signed off with one of his playful, self-appointed nicknames (others she loved: Mortopoulos, Mortissimo, Mordred the Malcontent). And in the margin, he penned a steaming bowl of soup, above it a nose with flaring nostrils, beneath it a forked gingerroot…hinting, now, at a forked tongue…from which a long curlicued tendril of ink descends to become a kite string in the hand of a scrawled boy. Merry remembers the relief she felt on reading this letter—her conviction that she was more secure than ever in their partnership, in her future as the guardian of all things Mort Lear. (She feels another stab at the thought of his Wonderland collection, a further loss. Oh, that pair of 1920s evening gloves embroidered with the Mad Hatter on one sleeve, the March Hare on the other; how she had itched to try them on!)
Each time she reads this letter, with its collusive flirty tone (so go ahead and call her a fag hag) and its graphic embellishments, she is baffled all over again. She had even begun to fantasize that the Greek vase in his studio might come to roost at the museum. As recently as two weeks ago, she envisioned creating a partial facsimile of his studio as a foyer through which viewers would enter the gallery devoted to his work—like a literal gateway to the man’s imagination. She hadn’t had a chance to mention the idea to Mort—would it have made a difference?
How on earth could Mort have put the destiny of all his work and all his collections—including the drawings that Enrico had so masterfully saved from the swift entropy that dooms most works on paper—in the hands of that caretaker woman? How on earth could she begin to understand what to do with her boss’s brilliant, prolific, and materially fragile legacy? The lawyer Merry had spoken to—Mort’s lawyer—said something about his client’s wish to establish a foundation that would fund a shelter for runaway boys. Forget the why; what, practically speaking, did this mean? That his drawings, manuscripts, and collections would be sold to fund this place? (Well, what else could it mean? Unless, even through the recession that had led to her husband’s layoff and the loss of the insurance that covered in vitro, Mort was a crack day trader. The sale of his snug estate might bring five or six mil, but that was pocket change when you aimed to endow such a thankless if worthy mission.)
She spent most of that phone call in a sweaty, panicked delirium—probably a preview of hot flashes, about which she’s heard plenty of complaints from friends who don’t see them as a minor price to pay for the gift of bearing children. Hot flash or mortification, she ought to have quickly and graciously ended the call, gone off and had a whopper of a drink, a good cry, or both, then lawyered up and called back on speakerphone for details. Such as, was his client in sound mind? (Could you enter dementia that fast? The will had been revised a month after Mort’s cozy letter with the charming bowl of soup.)
Photocopies of every letter in the folder before her, along with every e-mail and faxed scribble that ever passed between Mort and members of the museum staff over the past eight years (nearly the same time Merry spent attempting to get pregnant), are now in the hands of the museum’s board members and lawyers. She feels like a death row prisoner, waiting for the Supreme Court to grant her a stay of execution. Because without the keystone of Mort’s artwork and papers, the new museum, as presented to the donors already on board, is in trouble. For God’s sake, the floor intended to contain the Shine/Lear Collection is probably being girdered off this very minute, halfway across the city.
She looks grimly around her small, windowless office in the building she has regarded as a waystation en route to something sleeker, even modestly grand. Long Island City has grown hipper (and more expensive) around them over the past several years, but even a Frank Gehry or a Santiago Calatrava would be hard-pressed to turn this drafty, monolithic sarcophagus—hemmed in on three sides by taller industrial buildings—into anything with a vision, let alone a view. The new site, airier if not trendier, began as nothing more than a weedy, garbage-strewn acre of Gowanus Canal wasteland where a condemned casket factory had crumbled to the ground, its “vintage” bricks hauled away for salvage. Jonas Hecht, the architect they chose, immediately saw the forlorn setting as a favor from the gods. Unlike a building wedged between two skyscrapers at some imperial Midtown address, this structure would be filled with light and watery gleamings—and there was room to spare for a small parking lot. Good Lord, parking!
Privately, Merry has already fantasized about her view of the canal, possibly even a glimpse of the distant harbor.
It’s driving her crazy that Mort’s gatekeeper won’t return her messages and calls. She has only the office contacts now, because of course Mort’s cell phone is defunct. Why did she never bother to forge a personal connection with Daulair? Because, you fuckup, she tells herself, you never thought you’d need her, not with your “direct line” to the Great Man himself. Sometimes Merry fears that the so-called art world is turning her into a knee-jerk snob. It has already turned her, by necessity, into a social climber.
She will w
ait to hear what the suits have to say, the board members who have ruthless real-world jobs and salaries to match. And then it’s likely she’ll have to drive all the way to what she’s always thought of as Lear’s Lair in the mosquitoey wilderness beyond the suburbs. If she has to, she will beg.
Before leaving, she puts in her briefcase a photocopy of that magazine profile on which it is rumored a movie’s being based. Well, more than rumored by this point. The actor who signed on to play Lear just won a dozen awards and is now the subject of magazine profiles himself.
How in the world any of this can help her cause, Merry has no idea. But not since her do-or-die last-ditch shot at childbirth-through-chemistry has she felt this desperate or determined. She texts the girl next door to take Linus for an extra loop in the park, since she will be getting home late.
If Linus were a cat, and if she drank Chardonnay and believed in the soul-cleansing powers of yoga, Merry would fulfill every single criteria defining a tiresome urban cliché: the well-educated, well-heeled, well-respected nouvelle spinster. Here she is, thirty-nine years old, her marriage shipwrecked on the shoals of infertility angst, her apartment stripped of rent stabilization (what is stable anymore?), careening perilously toward a size twelve, wondering if it’s time to stop coloring her hair and whether, if she does, she’ll luck into that stately shade of chrome, the one you picture whenever you hear someone—though is it ever a woman?—described as an éminence grise.
She tries, but fails, not to look at the framed sketch on the wall beside her office door, another of Mort’s chummy cartoons. In a speeding car shaped like a snail, with a large Superman S mounted on the roof, two figures lean forward: in profile, Mort and Merry. Their faces, just a few strokes of ink, are gleeful, giddy with speed. They look like a pair of outlaws, Bonnie and Clyde as book nerds. The caption reads M&M in their S Car GO!
Mort had sent it to her after a lunch, two years ago, at which they shared an order of escargots and marveled at how or why people had come to eat these creatures in the first place, let alone regard them as a “delicacy.”
Looking at it now, she realizes, feels almost exactly like looking into Benjamin’s eyes just before they left that conference room after signing the divorce papers to go their separate ways forever. Benjamin had looked away first, quickly, probably dying to get back to the girlfriend he’d found all too quickly after moving out. Merry had to wonder if there had been, to put it discreetly, some “overlap” there.
But, to put it less discreetly, who could really blame him for growing cold toward a woman he must have heard, countless times, burst into tears behind the bathroom door at the sight of her own blood?
“Step away,” she says to herself firmly. “Step away from the self-pity.”
The thing to do, and she will, is to call her mother, a woman who embraced her later-life singlehood, years ago, with grace, even a wry sort of cheer. Merry’s mother is a model of fortitude. She will know, the minute she hears Merry’s voice, that her daughter is distressed. Without prying—though Merry could tell her about almost anything—she will calm Merry down. Calm is essential. Calm and then a plan.
—
The engine ticks as it cools. She holds the keys in her lap but does not reach to open the door. Through the row of dogwoods between the studio and the garage, the pool’s slick cover glares darkly in the sun, as if indignant at being ignored.
Tommy cannot seem to get out. She keeps glancing at, then looking away from, the box on the passenger seat. It sits, unceremoniously, on top of the day’s mail (dozens of pastel-colored envelopes: the tide of condolence continues to rise).
She heard little to nothing of what the funeral director said after handing her the mahogany box containing Morty’s ashes. She does recall his giving her a plain, unmarked envelope—which she knows contains the receipt for all the charges associated with the “cremains”—and her subsequent refusal of a shopping bag in which to carry the box. (“How eco-smug we are,” Morty would say whenever they remembered to shop with their own bags, a collection of colorful totes foisted on them at bookshops and literary festivals.)
Finally she gets out. She goes around the car to retrieve the box, balancing the bundled mail on top. In the house, she sets it on the kitchen table. She hasn’t thought about where to put it or even, in the long run, whether she should open it and spread the ashes, bury it, or regard it as a portentous keepsake, a lead box containing a radioactive jewel. Morty left no wishes about what to do with his remains; cremation itself was a guess, based on casual remarks like “Someday, when I’m nothing but a heap of ashes…”
The junk mail she always discards at the post office. At home, she separates the true mail into personal and business, then the personal into letters addressed to Morty and those addressed to her. Normally, by far the greater share would be Morty’s, and while the flow of generic fan letters has hardly dried up, letters and cards to Tommy have begun to proliferate. Among them, she recognizes Dani’s awkward script immediately. She forces herself to open it first.
Dear Toms,
I saw the news. That’s sad. Jane and I want you to know we’re thinking of you. What a shock. When I was with you and Morty in the fall, he seemed in great shape.
We’re all okay if pretty sleep deprived (me and Jane, that is). Joe is growing like a weed. Maybe it’s my imagination, but he’s looking like Dad. Definitely the eyes.
Call sometime if you like. You know where we are. Jane sends a hug.
Yours,
Dani
So now it’s on Tommy to close the rift, isn’t it? She can’t help feeling annoyed, however unfairly. All his life, Dani has stirred up in Tommy a strange stew of exasperation, concern, and guilt.
Tommy was, typical of eldest children, the obedient one, the good student, the make-no-waves, so-mature-for-her-age daughter of hardworking parents. Dani wasn’t exactly the opposite—he did nothing malevolent or hurtful—but he was a boy’s boy, restless and prone to inadvertent trouble, a shirker of homework and curfews. Their mother was always telling him—in her liberal-pacifist-we-love-you-no-matter-what tone of voice—how worried she was that he wouldn’t find his way in the world if he couldn’t take school seriously.
“Or just find your passion. God knows even your daydreamy sister is passionate about her books, and I’m sure she’ll find a way to make hay of that passion, even if she doesn’t make a lot of money. Because life is not about money, and neither is happiness! As your father and I have always tried to show you by example. We are well off because we know how lucky we are to have what we do. Most of all, the two of you.”
Dani’s teenage resistance took the benign form of turning sullen, resistant to communication. Back-talking, with which their friends could so readily enrage their own parents, only made Mom or Dad sit Dani down for a “centering talk” or some “collective deep breaths.” Even when he discovered Pink Floyd and Aerosmith, and tried to deploy their music as a blaring form of disrespect, a pointed pushback to his father’s hallowed blowin’-in-the-wind, let’s-be-Woody-’n’-Arlo nostalgia, that backfired, too.
“Sit me down, Danilo, and help me get an ear for this music,” their father said one evening over dinner. “I want to be enlightened. I mean it!” (Never mind that Dani’s music drove Tommy nuts.)
At the time, Tommy took it for granted how “all-accepting” her parents were—even after Dani was suspended for spray-painting the back wall of a local school with a group of devil-may-care (but hardly delinquent) friends. It wasn’t as if they covered that wall with obscenities; they simply mounted a battle cry for freedom, painting in large, sloppy letters something like RIZE UP 2 REBEL! or YOUTH REBELZ ROOL! Juvenile, insipid stuff. He had just started his senior year in high school.
Dani’s mother, after picking him up from the precinct, told him that she was glad he had the urge to express himself, but he needed to “channel it differently.” All this she reported to Tommy over the phone. Tommy had been working for Morty, at his apartm
ent, for two years. She was twenty-four and had just saved enough to rent a studio in the East Village.
Tommy was content to listen to her mother’s all-suffering complaints, and then Mom said, “So your dad and I have a proposal.” In an effort to separate Dani from his circle of what she called “overly expressive” friends, they came up with the notion of paying part of Tommy’s rent in exchange for having Dani live with her during the week so that he could attend a more liberal high school up in Manhattan, perhaps even make a more promising set of friends. On weekends, he would return to Brooklyn.
Ever the obedient daughter, Tommy said yes. Because she spent long days working at Morty’s place, often staying till six or seven, Dani met her there after school, instead of going back to her apartment—which was dark as well as cramped. Morty’s place occupied the top two floors of a brick town house. The lower level had been sculpted into an open, loftlike space, airy and colorful, strewn haphazardly with large cushions where Dani could curl up with his Walkman and do his homework (or go through the motions). He clearly liked it when they stayed on for dinner.
Tommy enjoyed cooking—like her apartment, her skills were modest but made her feel grown up, the way reading Thomas Hardy had made her feel grown up a decade before—and though he never said so, it was obvious that Dani was just as grateful as Morty to be fed.
It was unsettling, however, to see Morty and Dani together. It forced her back to her childhood, to those afternoons at the playground. As they ate together in the kitchen (Morty sometimes standing by the counter, on the phone), she could tell that Dani had no recall of the connection—but what if a memory was tripped by this renewed proximity? And Morty treated Dani almost too kindly. Once he even said, out of the blue, “You know, if you graduate and can’t figure out what to do with yourself, I’ll find you something, somewhere. I have plenty of friends with interesting jobs. You don’t need to worry about moving back in with your parents. That’s a fate worse than an IRS audit.”