Read What Beauty Page 15

CHAPTER 15

  A week later, on the night before the sculpture symposium, I get home at seven and nearly trip over two suitcases laid inside the door. A viral fear prickles my short hairs — Belinda has packed her bags for flight! She has tired of NYC life (and me!) but doesn’t want to jeopardize my dream! Karen K has left a message (we’re listed) on the answering machine! B’s transformation from horse & carriage art-girlfriend to manager/agent-cum-unrequited-fiancé has torn her personality into three!

  All are possible. I look for evidence to justify my fear. It’s silent in the house. A single light shines over the kitchen island. Is that a Dear Minus letter leaning against the stockpot? I squint — No – Yes – Maybe — but can’t be sure. My next step sends a toe into the side of a suitcase. This luggage doesn’t match. Hers are Macaw blue; mine are Cordovan brown; while these are Hunter green.

  Suddenly a voice bolts from the living room’s dark end.

  “What’s two-seventy-five divided by fourteen?”

  “God-dammit, Dad! You scared the shit out of me.”

  Dad walks from the shadows darkening the bookshelves. “You’d better keep it in your pants, son. Belinda just ran out to that garage you two always talk about, for toilet paper and some carrots.”

  “It’s a supermarket, Dad. Gourmet Garage.” I nudge the bags further inside and close the door. Dad comes into the light and surrounds me with man hugs. When we come apart, I hold onto his shoulders. The memory strikes me that we haven’t seen each other in four months. Not since I flew to Chicago for a Christmas-season basketball game to see Michael Jordan score fifty-three against the Nicks. I wore my old Bulls jersey with “32” on it, bought in MJ’s rookie year. I say, “You look good, Dad.” Holding onto dad’s shoulders, I find that he looks older now, or is this my close-up perception gleaned through memory’s brown glass?

  “Ahhh!” he says in feigned deprecation. He takes my hands in his long, bony fingers. We stand facing each other, holding hands in a fashion, a sort of double handshake. The gesture is out of custom, but somehow we make it okay because of time and circumstances. Its relevancy has to do with mom’s absence: we don’t know how to act; she was part of our link, the matchmaker some days and the challenger or referee on others.

  All this makes necessary a word here about mom. If I haven’t focused on my mom much, it’s because she, like all great moms (they resemble one another in care and trust far more than the basic daily hug your run-of-the-mill mom dispenses), my mother wanted recognition for how her children turned out. For mom this meant the essential essence of Mother: “You do your best work by your right-minded children.” She’d say this to M-C and me, when we got fussy about something or other on our rapid walks toward adulthood. That’s Mom. Or at least, that was Mom.

  And for this other reason — mom’s death — I can’t find a context for her absence. To speak of her is to always use the past tense, but I fear this. Still. She’s been gone three years and I’m fearful, and a little guilty. I can’t explain these feelings. I wouldn’t know how to if I understood them, and I don’t. Maybe I shouldn’t try.

  This moment between Dad and I comes and goes soon enough, so he lets go of me and steps back a pace. “Wait a second, pop,” I say, and point at the luggage. “What are you doing here?”

  Dad rises up on his toes, and his shoes squeak along the flexing leather. “To tell the truth, I miss you, Minus. You’ve got this exhibition tomorrow, and I thought if I were to hang out in the audience, it might give you some added energy. You know, a bit of a lift when the pressure tightens around you like that python you used to keep.”

  I do know. And that python hasn’t crossed my mind in years. At any rate, Dad holds his hands together in case I don’t know, and a demonstration is needed for which he’ll bind his knuckles in a knot, twisting and grinding like he’s cracking walnuts. Dad winks, or really it’s a double blink because he’s gone teary eyed. This is something new. I hope it’s just a phase and not dementia — or, worse, forlornness.

  “Wow,” I tell him, a bit at a loss. Is it his presence, the look of age worn into him, or the misty eyes? None of the above. Me, it’s me. “That’s great, Dad. This is awesome.”

  A key slips the lock behind us and Belinda walks through the door with a brown grocery bag cradled in her arm. Carrot greens and the cellophane crease of a potato chip bag peek from the top.

  “So I missed the reunion,” she says, folding the door closed. “I had my camera ready and everything.” She kisses me, kisses Dad again on his proffered cheek (he delivers a mini hug, hands patting her shoulders), and then she scuttles over to the kitchen island to drop her keys and the grocery bag. “I’m not giving away evidence, am I, Mr Orth, if I tell Minus you called from the airport?”

  My dad pockets his hands. “Well, I couldn’t’ve called you, Minus. That would have scotched the surprise, right?”

  I don’t need to know how he got from La Guardia, or how Belinda likely saved the day and my surprise. It’s seven-twelve and she’s home with me (and Dad), not holding Gretchen’s reigns or the ear of some gallery manager. I appreciate the sacrifice she’s made to be here. To me she’s fantastic for any old reason, but tonight there’s no reason I can’t cook them a lip-smacking dinner.

  “I’m cooking!” Belinda calls out. She points at me from under the kitchen lights. My manner is still quiet with her, it’s been sheepish for days now — a straggling penitent expression for last week’s disappearance — so I nod without protest. This sets her aback because I usually cajole my way to the stove, and if that doesn’t work, impress a little Chicago “muscle” to hip-check her away from the griddle. Trust is not the issue (among pans, garlic infusion, or portion size); I choose to make her life more relaxing than my own when we’re at home.

  She recognizes the latent shame hooding my eyes, and mouths the word STOP! just to knock some sense into me (she’s labeled those missing hours my “art affair” — at which she caught me rosy-palmed).

  “There’s a six-pack of something in bottles at the bottom of this bag, and I want you two to find a seat on the sofa and do a father-son thing. You need to get sleep tonight, honey. And Mr Orth? Don’t worry, the pull-out is comfy, even for your back.” She winks at me, a final measure of what I hope is forgiveness. The gesture is so simple that I wonder: This is love? Yes, you dumb-ass, and don’t forget what it looks like. Feels good, by the way, doesn’t it?

  Natural, too, in fact.

  I get the beer and grab the bag of chips and a bowl, leaving her to clang pots and pans without me hovering, or even to ask what’s on the menu. Over on the sofa, Dad commandeers the chips as I pop the tops off two bottles of some New York State micro-brew. Dad says he’s seen the label in Chicago liquor stores, but this’ll be his inaugural taste. He upends the bottle against his mouth and I watch his gullet pulse with each swallow. I’m amazed how close we humans are to goats and birds and fish. My dad has cut his hair and blended it forward into what I fear looks more like Moe Howard than that new TV doctor he’s patterned it after, whose real-life aunt is a famous opera singer.

  Dad’s hair shines under the track lighting. This shorter cut gives his head, and his body, a lean, fit shape he’s owned since my earliest memory. His hands are hairy across their backs, like silver and black wires teased from electrical sockets, and trail up his arms beneath shirtsleeves rolled back to the elbows. This man’s face is my own, minus my flat ears and thin lips inherited from mom’s people, the Grass clan. There are folds and lines and brown spots on his hands and on his forehead, none of which I’ve noticed before. Such is the phenomenon, I think, when you see a person after a long absence (or a serious of absences). I remember like it was last night the day we celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday; I’m four years shy of that age now, and can’t somehow put the two of us together in that same age-to-world ratio; his life experience has been so different from mine. How is that? Because you are different, pal! ‘Tis a fact no parent can live without. They do
n’t want clones, not after taking all that time, all that work, raising you to be an individual amongst the crowd, with your own goals. That’s part of why Dad keeps after me about Mary Catherine; he senses I’ve given up on something he could never imagine to.

  “You never answered me,” Dad says. “The math question.”

  My mind hurdles the memories and settles into our present. I think of the problem. A question. At the door. A two-digit division of a three-digit number: 275 ÷ 14 ….

  “Nineteen …” I say and, in calculation, feel my eyes rotate to the ceiling. “And there’s some change, isn’t there?”

  “There isn’t change,” says Dad.

  “Pftoohy! Yes there is.”

  His head snaps up, eyes cocked right. A moment passes. Belinda chops a vegetable; something hits hot oil and spits. Dad looks into his beer. The aroma of frying onion drifts over to our end of the room.

  “Jeez,” he says. “I thought for sure it … but, I thought … a whole number. You’re right. Huh.”

  This is a good time to try out my New Yorker Yiddish accent. “Do you vant I should get out the calcalate’a?”

  “Naw,” Dad says. “You’re just right enough. I guess you wouldn’t be pulling my leg with your usual wrong answer that’s too close to be wrong. Not on our reunion night.” Nevertheless, he thinks over the product a moment longer, then shakes his head. He points at his beer bottle. “This is some brew, huh?”

  Over dinner we celebrate Belinda’s finding a replacement to guide Gretchen. She’s decided to rent the carriage, not sell outright. I don’t want to think this is a way of keeping Plan B in her pocket should ArtMan and MuseWoman (her new pet names for us) falter-but-not-crumble; but there it is. I won’t hear myself say this, though, not on threat of torture. We toast a few times to Dad’s surprise visit, and tomorrow’s symposium. Then Mary Catherine’s name comes up: she’s going on a pilgrimage to Germany, seeking out Luther’s birthplace and other martyrdom sites. Reformation and rebirth is a big issue with her church of choice (“To be born again is to have it all,” she once told me). Then she’ll go on to Rome as a missionary for her sect, with plans to stand in St Peter’s Square and pass out pro-schismatic literature to all the papist pilgrims and those merely along for the ride and spectacle. “I think she’s got a shot,” Dad says. “Or she’ll get shot,” I counter. Belinda abstains from comment. Away from Dad’s line of sight, I toggle my head to catch Belinda’s eye, and somehow she divines within my look that she should change the subject.

  “Dad, I’ve always wondered,” she says. “How did you give Minus his name when Mary Catherine got hers from the Bible?”

  I try to attack her from under the table, but my shin hits the wood cross-beam instead, and I’m left only to grimace. Belinda mugs at me, while Dad looks put-over. Abruptly then he winks (this must be a new phase of the quietly aging: the oldster transmitting affectionate signals to oldster women, and why not include young women, or even dogs). He thinks we’re playing a Lovebirds’ game, and actually looks embarrassed, though I can hardly see why he should be.

  “I lucked out,” I say, “Quirky name but not stupid,” attempting to deflect the subject, hoping this covers all angles.

  But Dad shakes his head and says, “We had a lot of discussion about our daughter’s name, his mother and me. Too much, as it turned out. Long story short, in the end we flipped a coin.” He drinks from his second beer, enjoying this moment of our perplexity. I’m the most confused, because this is one explanation (of many) I haven’t heard. “A simple marital compromise,” Dad explains. “She gets to name the girls, I get to name the boys. The coin toss determined veto rights.”

  “Veto rights?” I ask.

  Dad nods, all sage now. He asks me, “What’s your middle name?” I glance quickly at Belinda, which Dad catches. “Ah-ha! She doesn’t know, does she? Okay, so now, Belinda, you’ll know why a veto right was so important. Not that this means you’ll have anything on your man for later, but…. Go on, Minus, tell her.” He’s lauding his parenthood over me, a baron’s rights by his vassal. I know he could wait all night, and needle me along the way, so with Belinda’s eyes bugging for a big laugh, and laugh she shall, I take the plunge.

  “Adlebert.”

  Belinda laughs. “That is a little dorky.” She delivers her own below-the-table poke.

  “Ouch!” I jump like a little girl surprised by a spider.

  “You see?” Dad says. “I saved you from many a pummeling on the playground, son.”

  We lie in bed. Dad’s snores penetrate the solid-core door to serenade us after we’ve made quiet, peaceful love. I’m feeling particularly grateful for all things Belinda. She’s in my arms, and she’s so womanly and soft, warm skinned yet moist with the vestiges of coital triumph. If today were Thanksgiving, I might be able to come up with a prayer. But something else is also on my mind, and I rock Belinda lightly as an attention seeker. She expels a soft grunt.

  “Belinda,” I ask, in the darkness, “How important is this symposium to your … our … objective?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Just have fun, boyfriend.” She sighs, all full again with sleep. “Be yourself. Come off as yourself.”

  For a while I listen to her breathing. It steadies, gets long and deep, and finally slows to five breaths per minute. My mind wanders even as my limbs lie leaden on the mattress. Belinda has tucked her head into the crease of my neck. In the room’s silence and the door vibrating with Dad’s snores, I try out the answer: Bee, my answer is … Belinda, I have an answer for you now, finally, and … Belinda, my love, I’ll be yours if you’ll still have me. YES is my answer.

  “Okay, Minus.” Her fair breath tickles my neck. “No regrets now.”

  My muscles tighten. I had only whispered, and didn’t think I spoke the words aloud. In the silence and our intimacy, my voice must have worked its way through her slumber. Now she’s fallen back to sleep, if she was ever conscious. Would she remember this in the morning? Doubtfully. But if so, I’m ready to reveal my true heart.

  Novices to live art exhibitions are the equivalent to a kid making a visit to Santa’s workshop. Power tools whirl, whine, scream, and chunter. When a chorus of hammers strike chisels, you feel your molars dance in the back of your mouth. Rock dust becomes aerosol, riding the breezes or hanging in the air like gnat clouds. The dust makes you sneeze, so it’s best to bring along a pocketful of tissues. A hospital mask wouldn’t hurt, but then you’ll wonder if you’re not bicycling down some hazy Shanghai thoroughfare.

  For us sculptors, the fun begins when chunks of marble or granite drop to the ground. People cheer, call out, do The Wave. It’s my guess these are the natural responses from a culture dominated by spectator sports. Live sculpture is a spectator sport at its dullest, perhaps, unless you like crashing spelling bees. In the final stages of a symposium, notable for its six- or nine-day format, the soothing sounds of sandpaper on rock can lull many a kid or grandpa to sleep. While the sculptors’ muscles ache as they finish with polishing socks swept across brilliant stone, I like to stop for a moment to listen. And I’m reminded of Jackie Gleason doing the old soft shoe.

  Art crosses all barriers. It connects humans to their genetic roots: cave-painters from the Upper Paleolithic era demonstrate our instinct for beauty. To you and me, that’s around 40,000 years of art. Anyhow, “live art” brings art to the public, under its eye, and leaves art for the public whence it’s complete. Not a bad deal for the sculptor, when the sponsor provides the stone, the site, and advertising.

  Mid-Town Arts has wanted to bring this exhibition to midtown, where its offices and education center are located near the NY Public Library, at 42nd Street and 5th Avenue. Bryant Park has been the oft-floated suggestion, although the main library branch, whose back windows overlook the green-lawn park on which lunch hour crowds gather, has fought the move. Thus Riverside Park is the event’s home.

  Our site along the Hudson River has its advantages over the
fishbowl of midtown. Space, noise control, and shade. They’ve run the exhibition for four years straight, and I can liken the competition to what you’d see at a Gold Gloves event between rival cities: rough boys and girls that duke it out with the minimum corner teams, prize money, and fans.

  Despite their largess, Mid-Town Arts can give us only two days to work. New York City park permits are at a premium. The eight invited sculptors have agreed to knock off at seven tonight, to help host a BBQ celebration. We’ve promised the sponsors to be back carving stone by eight sharp Sunday morning. Nevertheless, time is a sculptor’s gift or his nemesis. For any hope to complete our sculptures in the eighteen-hour time limit, we’re to carve in limestone. It’s softer than marble, more stable than alabaster, and has a consistent, grainy texture.

  When Belinda and Dad and I get to Riverside Park an hour before chisel time, we find the limestone blocks have been put on their raised wooden platforms. The exhibition area is set up as an elliptical ring. They’ve roped this area off from public access at a safe distance. Power generators sit outside the ropes, guarded by a rotation of rent-a-cops. The purring machines are wisely hidden behind trees that block this end of the park’s Hudson River view.

  Stretched across the grass, like sci-fi pythons, are hundreds of yards of black power cords braided through the middle of the oval and under a small dais at which sponsors can sit and shoot video for promo bits and entertain VIPs. From here the cords fan like spider’s silk toward each of the rock pedestals and into square blue terminals for our power tools. Belinda carries a white beach bag over her shoulder. Dad has two folding lawn chairs. I carry two bags stuffed with my supplies, and a look in my eye like Dracula getting back late to his coffin.

  “Hey, Minus,” Belinda says, when we’re halfway across the park, “I thought Vendulka was coming to help you with the prep?”

  My step stutters at the thought. “Shit. I forgot to call her.” We press on. Dad looks sideways at us. “No matter. We’re here.”

  A flock of people mingle outside the ropes, no more than fifty onlookers, yet. They’re a mixed bag of morning walkers and old-timers who wake before sunrise. They watch the cubic-yard limestone blocks as though they’ll sprout arms and legs and get up to dance any time now.

  An opening in the ropes directs us to the sign-in table, over which a nylon banner — “NY Chiseler’s Paradise: 5th Annual Sculpture Exhibition” — advertises who we are in black chock-a-block letters with red shadow outlines. Beneath the banner I find four of my fellow sculptors talking with organizers from Mid-Town Arts. Two men in yellow polo shirts hand them laminated ID badges clipped to braided cord. The sculptors hang them around their necks and get a “good luck” handshake.

  Angela Whitter, president of Mid-Town Arts, takes my invitation letter and ticks my name on her clipboard sheet. Her long, pale face runs pasty under the diffused light of a flowery, broad-brimmed hat. “Hope you brought your sunscreen, Minus,” she says, to which I ask, “Doesn’t it ever rain in this city?” My quip is meant to be friendly and not show my nerves. Angela looks frustrated, like I’ve jinxed today’s weather. “Sunscreen,” I offer lamely, “lots of it right here.” I jiggle my bag and a rattle of metal responds.

  Belinda and Dad have gone around the ropes to scope out a spot under a tree near my stone. I wander over and introduce myself to the other sculptors. We’re a disparate gang, if much can be seen from gender and size. To read our files (passed between us through the mail months ago) we’re no closer in artistic temperament than NYC is to Iowa. There’s Tommy the Scot, with granite-textured stubble below a stone-bald head, and big loch-gray eyes that move about like two fish behind glass. Ariel from Copenhagen, her voice laced with a doughy Scandiweegie accent, is a small tow-headed woman whose body lies hidden ever more in a faded red smock draped over baggy jeans. “We’re all dressed to work and I don’t see any wash facilities,” she says. “Do they vaunt us to sponge bathe in the river?” Her round face and apple chin are sallow, but she has soulful eyes that smooth the witchy angles.

  Muriel of Wisconsin stands as wide as her state is long, with a cheesy pallor behind apple-red cheeks. She hasn’t much to say but watches us all carefully. And I recognize Benjamin Ali from a magazine photo (“the Israeli Arab” – a self-introduction – “but not a Jew”). He’s small and jittery, with a head too big for its body (features the photo couldn’t project), eyes like coal, a Semitic nose and full beard. Outside all this description he wears Levi’s and black Nike’s, a brown western-style shirt (yellow filigree stitched across the shoulders) with sleeves cut off unevenly at the upper arms.

  “So sure, yeah-okay,” Muriel says. “Looks like we’re here with bells on our feet and ribbon in our hair.”

  No one responds.

  We’re hesitant because we’re artists and thus a bit loony, always distrustful of authority and competition, sizing each other up for this exhibition, as if we’re TV sports All-Stars getting paid millions, but for today we’re to play a friendly pick-up game. Sure, if you believe that, there’s this old bridge I have for sale –

  “Minus! Where you been, brah?”

  The MexiCali accent is one I recognize. I brace myself as I turn. Manuel “Rocky” Trujillo grabs me in a bear hug, lifts me, and squeezes the grin off my mouth, then plants on my cheek a wet, Mexican kiss of peace. “Good to see you, bruvver!” Rocky lets me go and my heels drop into the grass. Rocky shines his teeth at the other artists and gives his name before I can catch my breath from his arresting welcome.

  Ariel takes a half step back, making ready to run if Rocky reaches out to give her the same treatment. But Rocky laughs, “I’m ony foolin’ wid’yous,” and shakes her small, dimpled hand with his big brown paw. “Wow, I betch’ya got lots of muss-kulls under that smock, Ariel, if you pound rock all day long. Hey, Minus, you hear that? Pound rock! Ha!!” I let the big Mexican draw out my own laugh. The others aren’t sure what to make of Rocky — or me, anymore — but they lighten up under our cheer and camaraderie.

  Tommy makes the point that today’s gig is only about shaking the fruit tree, and why not have fun with these two days, whatever happens with the stone. “Eh?”

  “Yes, yes,” says Benjamin the Israeli Arab. “We’ll be friends before the end of tomorrow. No way how the chips fly, it’s a peaceful contest.” Ben’s joke is at least genuine, but flat. I’m not sure it isn’t a joke. Tommy the Scot bellows something unintelligible, and with his slant-toothed smile and bald head wagging, we understand its merriment. Muriel and Ariel have already formed a chick alliance, shoulders almost fused, keeping Rocky’s friendly touch at a distance. I remember that another woman was supposed to be here, and when I turn around for a peek, I see the last two artists sling badges over their heads at the registration table. Soon we stand in a circle of eight, with French Francis (willow-tall with tapered fingers and a ferret’s nose) and Rikky the Korean (Asiatic eyes, fireplug frame, black hair sculpted in bed-of-nails fashion) make their late acquaintance.

  I can’t hope to define these artists’ styles from personality alone, not before I see their stone take shape. Along with that post package with the single-page bios, we had sent photos of recent work. What can be seen from those are no more than what pen pals get at the first letter exchange. I wonder what they thought of my sculptures, as I gauge their faces in different attitudes. No more or less than I had while thumbing through their photos, I imagine.

  There is one experiment I have in mind, to see how their constitutions are molded. I ask my compatriots-of-the-chisel what they’re working on back in the studio. Xenophobic hackles rise. “Oops,” I say. “My bad. Must be true what I read, then, that trust between artists is harder to come by than a first-date kiss.” French Francis tucks her chin down, ready for a fight, and says, “Why do you ask?” This reflects our collective sentiment in a nutshell, a violation we’ve all felt sometimes: the stinging slap of artistic theft. Since I believe swift waters need to be trodden to show the w
orld your balance, I tell her I’m sculpting pieces that will change the public’s view of modern humans and their god-imaging predecessors. This is only a typical artist boast; the trouble lies in not pulling off what you’ve promised. Of course, I’ve spoken in a vague metaphor that, in the worst light, fits me in with MFA students at a bull session.

  Ariel says, “Who cares about the public? Or museums. Only collectors have the money to make us rich.” A different voice adds, “And famous.” I don’t catch who’s said it because my neck twists suddenly towards this: “Don’t give up on the public just to roll in the mud like a pig.” A few snickers rise, and Ariel bridles. “There’s not room enough in this town for the both of us,” says Ben, using a John Wayne drawl that’s all out of proportion to his cowboy clothes. He mimes spitting a gob of tobacco at some distant spittoon. After the panel discussion, I’m glad to hear not all artists agree with Ariel’s green-eyed judgment.

  “Well,” Rocky whistles between us, and looks up into the sky so he doesn’t have to see our reaction. “Welcome to paradise.” I follow his lazy gaze: a fat cloud rotates on a lofty wind.

  Bart Ballard, Mid-Town Arts’s major-domo, comes around the registration table to collect us. Angela Whitter follows behind. Bart’s tall with a big crown of salted hair, and jerky-textured features mottled by pigment variations from (I’m only guessing) too little sun. Bart gathers our attention with an easy, confident voice. “You can begin work whenever you want, once I send you to your rock.” Like pasture sheep, we all nod and look around to make sure we’re nodding. Bart promises water and snacks (fruit and energy bars) will be carted around hourly. We’re to feel free to talk with the audience, if and when the urge strikes us. “In fact, we encourage your interaction.” He smiles and passes this along face to face. He clasps his hands together as though he’ll bow like a yogi. “Any questions?”

  We artists stand wooden or slack, scratching scabs off our knuckles or blinking in the unfamiliar light called sunshine — artists simply don’t get outside much, unless they have to walk dogs for a living. Hurry up, our body language says. With a quiet good luck, we disperse. No bullhorn today, no fanfare, no backslapping, and just a few waves. Our smiles are trenchant now that concentration has taken over.

  I make a brisk march with my bag back to my stone. Belinda and Dad lean forward in their lawn chairs. They have spirited faces on, so they must have had a good talk, I think. I unbutton my collared shirt and take off my pants, getting myself down to the gym shorts and T-shirt that’ll be comfortable inside my work jumper.

  Dad beams fatherly cheer. “Break a leg, son.” He throws up a clenched fist. Belinda is suddenly serious. “Are you ready for this?” Now I really wonder what she and Dad were talking about. Marriage? Art-success versus the-life-of-failure compromise? Had she told Dad about my midnight “answer” whispered in the dark? Perhaps the more benign mathematical equations that determine the mass lost from each stone block to leave its equivalent life image? Don’t make yourself care, Minus, I tell myself, It’s none of your business. “I should be in my honeycomb working on my Mythos,” I tell her. She speaks hot concern: “You are, honey.” And she taps her head and points at me. “Make me proud-er, Mighty Minus.” She springs from her chair and comes to the rope, kisses the end of my nose, and I leave her with my own uncertain smile, and one wink.

  At one minute before nine o’clock, a cowbell clatters from under the canopied dais. I come away from a trance in which I saw birds circling above, their wings outstretched and hazily framed by the sun’s white-yellow rays. Gratefully, they were not buzzards. Now they are gone.

  Around the ring, the sculptors work with purpose: electric saws wind up, hair is tied back or tucked beneath caps, last drinks from water bottles or stiff coffees and then the vessel is tossed aside. All this while they continue to stare at a block of white limestone, willing it to say more as the moment of cutting begins. Perhaps for some of them the stone has answered the question we’ve all asked: What lives inside you?

  My block shows rough blemishes where splits have been made to form the basic cube. Cold-stone-dead, and somehow alive. You can see everything in the gnarled surface — a middle-aged grin, two pixy dimples, the pocked eyes of a judge, an owl with a fish grasped in its beak — or you can see nothing. An artist must ask simple questions. What have you to say? Small cracks across its skin look like clenched teeth. My hand reaches out to let its fingers touch the stone, where they glide and stroke. I want to learn its texture, density, temperature, and to remember its tone when I slap it like a newborn’s bottom. This time the slap yields a report of porous density.

  My stone is nearly square; of no concern to me, today. I’m going to work her into an oval, leave a broad base for her shoulders and just a hint of a high bosom. I already see her face, and where from the part in her smooth, silken hair, an infant serpent shall peek its dangerous glower. That’ll be how people can identify her. A songbird wakens me, and lifts my spirit for my first cut. Her trilling will soon be overrun by quarry work, and she’ll leave the treetops and head over to Central Park, or across the Hudson to the high bluffs of New Jersey’s Palisades overlooking the river and Manhattan’s high-rises. The sun’s buttery light slashes through the trees onto the stone. Beyond the rope, Dad has opened a newspaper. Belinda stares at me, which is just as well; she does this all the time.

  “Oooo-KAY.”

  This is me, taking measure of the day ahead.

  The zippers on my canvas bags rip through the still air as I work quickly to prepare. My hands pull out chisels – “rifflers” in the sculpture world – one wooden mallet, an ash-wood hammer with a square head, a steel hammer, and finally my pneumatic hammer and electric angle grinder with their dozen chisels, bits, and blades. These get set in their places on a card table beside the cube. Next come the rough-hair brushes, rasps & files, carpenters’ pencils, and cloth rags.

  A grinder’s high-pitched whine shears the sounds of barking dogs and playing children. Shouts erupts from behind me. “Hey! HEY! It’s on, man!” and “Someone’s doing it!” Already the audience that I’d counted as fifty-strong has grown to twice that. Mid-Town Arts has advertised well. I expect today’s gapers to rush and recede like a fickle estuary. A woman holding two bags of groceries walks behind a trio of joggers who run in place. Their sweat stains the fronts of their shirts.

  An oversize patio umbrella has been pounded into the hard black soil next to my limestone cube. Helpful when the sun gets to its zenith, although I think the nearby trees will protect me most of the day. I step into my white coveralls and pull the zipper to my neck. I cinch the cuffs tight around the ankles and wrists with Velcro straps. A bandana wraps my hair and forehead, tucked beneath a dust mask with its double filter. I insert wax earplugs specially made by an audiologist, which dull dangerously high sounds to the level of rude walkers on the floor above you. Finally, I pull on a pair of leather gloves, women’s size S.

  My hands take up and feel the heft of a tooth chisel and steel hammer. I begin to pound a vertical line into the rock, dropping hammer strikes with second-hand steadiness. The limestone parts easily, and soon I’m into a fourth row. I’ll switch over to the flat chisels and the angle grinder when I’ve finished cutting “pin stripes” into this side. The electric grinder is ideal for limestone, and an essential tool for helping me finish the piece before deadline. I’m only doing some hand chiseling now to gauge the stone’s properties. What I’m learning will come in handy while doing close-in work as the sun rides somewhere over Pennsylvania’s piney reaches.

  Lots of hammer shots echo stony reports below the treetops. In the distance, Rocky’s voice drifts through the noise, followed by Tommy the Scot’s mush-mouth reply. Off to my right, Rikki kneels atop his cube, hammering a flat chisel the length of a baseball bat against its corners. Rectangular chunks splinter away like a calving glacier. That’s one strong man, I think. Dad’s laugh jumps at me from behind. Glancing back, I find he’s adjusted his chair t
o lean back against the tree, its front legs in the air while his feet rock with a toe-heel bias. The bulk of the newspaper sections have fallen around him like trampled snow.

  Last night, as Belinda fixed dinner, Dad asked me if I was happy. “Belinda’s a good girl,” he said. “Yes, Dad, she is,” I answered, and confided my love for her, although that had been obvious to him from the first time he saw us together. There was something more in his look, though, the sound of his voice, maybe, that had changed for me in the months apart. I had to ask, “Dad, you look different. Haircut?” “Sure, I’m done with parting it any which way.” The big josher. But not the biggest, this time. Something lurks between the sarcasm. Yes, he’d dodged my comment, but earlier he’d missed that math question. Mom wouldn’t have let him off so easily; she might have given me more grief for not saying anything to Dad about his error. My angle grinder spins out a dragon’s breath of dust as I hew teeth to chisel out later, like frozen dominoes. I cut deep into the top and bottom, shallow along the middle. Mom’s face frowns within the dust cloud. I remember Mom the year before she died. They’d gone water skiing up at Gray’s Lake with friends of theirs who owned a weekend cabin and speed boat. I came up for the day, early enough Saturday to scare a deer off the front lawn. Mom was fixing Bloody Marys on the back porch, already in her bathing suit, covered by a sheer yellow and blue sundress. She looked good. Great, even. She had tied back her hair. The satiny ponytail danced while she stirred the pitcher’s contents, and her body swayed to something softly piano-like coming through the screen window from an Oldies station. What life, energy, and vigor, I remember thinking. “You’re a sculpture in the flesh,” I told her. You tell your parents this sort of thing and they wave off the compliment; but what you say is true, the warm glow of health and happiness to be that age — any age past fifty, right? I can only imagine. Later, in the sunshine, glistening with sun oil and smelling of tropical fruits, she dove into the water from the back of the Donaldson’s boat and broke the surface like a mermaid — or the mother of a mermaid. No, I’ll change that back to my first image. Then Mom got up on those water skis and skimmed the lake’s surface twice around. She waved to other skiers, fishermen, people sunning on docks or eating at the patio restaurant near the lakeside clubhouse, before she finally tossed the rope aside and sunk into the gurgling white wake with a Whoop-whoop that worked as exclamation to the fun she’d had. Eight months later she lay in a hospital bed, a withered carrot in place of that muscled and tanned body from the previous summer. This is a story millions of other kids can tell of a parent’s final weeks, days, hours. And it had become my memory. And then Mom was dead, with the Donaldson’s long-ago invitation for a repeat weekend “next year” glowing like an ocean sunset. We humans may be sculptures in living tissue, but this only means we are not cold stone, and don’t wear well through the years.

  When I pull myself away to rest, I catch Belinda waving her arms at me. She pantomimes spreading something on bread, stacking meat and cheese, closing it and taking a big, sloppy bite of whatever phantom sandwich she’s built. She must be hungry, but I’m not ready for that kind of break. I shake my head and work the grinder’s throttle. She retreats with Dad across the grass toward West Side Drive and a big deli sandwich that awaits somewhere, Dad waving from the distance. As soon as they ascend the stairs out of the park, I regret not placing an order. Maybe she’ll take pity on me and bring back a morsel. Dad can never finish a NY hero alone.

  I notice people have sat in the chairs Dad and Belinda vacated. Elliptical shadows, more waving arms, and some of the red-faced residents residually annoyed by the noise (as if the park’s organic noises weren’t enough to set them off). Their sweat-shiny faces and primary colored clothing keep them mildly undefined, although blurred they are not. I wave back and feel as if it’s repeating in a mirror. Hatted heads, sun-glassed eyes, bodies covered in summer shirts and dresses. Sweat darkens their underarms, like crescent rolls, and tags the odd fatted male’s man-tits. A woman with a movie-star hairstyle and designer shades the size of teacup saucers is their fairy godmother; she’s a vision more than a living being. Around her neck hangs a thin silver chain with an aquamarine stone lying flat near the depression at the base of her throat. At first, she seems to linger at the rope. Her mousse-colored dress is impeccably worn, and her narrow hips show unlined through the light material. Then she drifts back into the people walking from either direction, and in an eye-blink she’s gone, tucked behind all these heads.

  On with your work, then, maestro. In the hours since beginning, I’ve rounded the top half and hewn the bottom to complete the bust’s outline. Her ideal that’s in my mind is a youthful face to emote the teenager leaving girlhood behind, stripped away because she knows now the strength of her charms. Worse, she has used them — but on the wrong person, and now suffers the wrath of that who was scorned. I’ve left a knot protruding from the high side of her head, left of center. This foreign visage will take all my skills in the last hours of tomorrow’s work session. Yes, she shall be beautiful, in the ripeness of youth, where only the suggestion of the changeling blights her olive-shaped, dangerous eyes, and how the serpent leers its knowing. My finger triggers the angle grinder just as a shout penetrates my earplugs.

  Vendulka stands at the rope, waving her hand like it’s a flag attached to a stick. Behind her, Peter N leans against the tree. This is a distraction, but I can’t nod them off without repercussions. I’ve invited them. (Vendy invited herself, okay, but she was doing it because Bert had turned traitor). I’m almost afraid to pull out the earplugs and hear the unfettered world release its noise, so different and yet conventional. Before I can take off the mask, Vendy grabs the double filters as I press my stomach against the rope, and she shakes the mask like it’s a dog’s snout. I’m reminded of people working in theme parks, dressed as fury, larger-than-life animals, and tormented by brats in just the same way. She kisses me on either cheek, Euro fashion. Her Slavic pout puckers her chin. “Can you hear me in there?” Off slides the mask and out come the earplugs. She launches herself into an apology. “I couldn’t feel right unless to stop by just this just once today. I forget all about you!” I nod, thank her, and feel the noise of the park surge through my head. She perks up, touches my shoulder, and says, “Okay, bye now!” and trots off down the nearby path, where her ass cheeks jump with each stride. I think, It is the thought that counts.

  Pete pushes himself away from the tree. “That woman is straaaa-aaange. But she is a bit of a babe.” This is the antidote to all strangeness, we agree. At least, as long as you don’t get too close to burn your fingers. For some reason that’s unfathomable to me (maybe the sunshine and heat — Pete’s no more used to getting tans than other working artists) Pete becomes crude. “That Euro-pussy’s gotta be fashionable, no? Does she at least shave her armpits?” He grins and folds his lips down. I tell him to shut the fuck up, and help him to notice all the kids and moms and grandmas walking around. I ask him why he’s here, and he says (in his own way) he’s scoping out that nexus between form and function, where the confluence of creativity, brute strength, and cleverness begets turbulence. “I’ve never sculpted before,” he admits. He then settles a soothing grin on me and says, “Think mighty rivers, drunken sailors, and dragon sightings.” I ask him if he’s been painting all morning or drinking all night.

  He leaps the question and lands into a critique of the standing sculptures we see from our shady spot. Peter surprises me when he claims to like what he sees: Rikki’s sleeping swan (“elegant, like Asia”), the Israeli Arab’s fat-stomached woman (“pregnancy is hope”), and the depths of French Francis’s inverted cross (“I see the crucifixes of modern Gaullist Catholicism”). He argues that a theme is present, unnoticed by the sculptors but inherent in our core personalities. The theme is optimism against the mounting evidence that serves the childless and homeless and politically aware. I tell him I like his compliments; I absent myself of perturbation for Pete’s refusal to levy w
ords for my unfinished bust. He flutters his hands like a dreamland angel to send me a breeze, because now my face has rivulets racing toward my jaw and neck. It’s a mirthless attempt to send the psychosomatic sails of my fears against the rocks that are my sculpture. Pete knows I won’t accept praise. In this we are fraternal twins. When he leaves, walks off into the crowd like an aphid to a field of wildflowers, I affix the mask over my face and return to my work.

  The angle grinder whines in reply to its short rest when I flutter its trigger. Inside my jumper I feel the sweat running from my pits, chest and the inside of my thighs. Shadows lie flat now, sun-pressed inkblots spilled from a fountain pen. I take full breaths, slow and easy to prevent blackout, and focus on the bust. “Time is a nemesis, Minus.” This is the mantra I penitently whisper. As I make smaller cuts and shave the outline into more defined features, my mind draws back to Peter. We met just after success had first come to him — recognition but no real money yet (shortly to arrive). Chicago was a stop-off on an early trans-national tour showcasing art pieces he’d amassed and placed in storage over a three-year workaholic period. I’d wondered aloud if three years had been too long, enough to miss the avant-garde appeal Eighties’ art had been pulling from canvas-based, abstract ideas. Pete committed me to a secret: he had adjusted his colors according to basic criticisms heard “around and about,” and had found himself while he traveled. That’s all? That’s all. Now, of course, he doesn’t make such compromises because he doesn’t need to. He also told me, “I can paint using mustard and ketchup and they’ll still buy it. Brother, I don’t get it myself.” Pete and I agree on this: influence, at least for a while, is everything. You ride it until it stops, and the damnedest thing is its rarity to predict your own influence’s end. I told Peter I didn’t envy him his rising fame or growing fortune. He respected that I stepped back when others were rushing forward to catch the glare from his fame.

  My grinder buffets a jaw line with smooth, sideways strokes. I’m close to hand-work here, and damned do I wish for a chisel and mallet.

  Sometime later I hear Belinda’s voice calling from the chairs. She’s one of those unabashed women who can easily hold her hands beside her mouth for a shrill that’ll bring taxis from around the corner, screeching to a stop at her side. An acquaintance couple from Iowa’s hog wealth likened her decibel power to champion pig callers.

  She holds up a sandwich wrapped in white butcher’s paper. I’ve only had water breaks and three bites from an apple till now. My stomach gurgles at the sight, its sound an internal resonance difficult to ignore under the circumstances of work, heat, and fatigue. She unwraps the sandwich halfway so my hands don’t soil the food. I nibble like this for five minutes, chewing and swallowing while I gauge the next series of cuts, wetting my dry throat with slugs from a water bottle.

  By five o’clock I’ve cut the block down thirty percent. I walk around what now can be described as a sculpture, noting what’s been accomplished, what’s to come, where each flaw shows and what’s needed to make corrections to bring the image together, and to find the light in her stone eyes. Around me, five other sculptors continue their work, but Ariel from Copenhagen already sits in the shade of her umbrella, angled toward the sun (she has to be in the worst spot of the group, the late-afternoon heat striking her like an anvil). She wipes her forehead with a red towel. She looks whacked. Tommy the Scot also stands beside his sculpture, but in the sunshine, his skin red and glistening. He lifts a beer bottle and drains it to the count of four.

  “I’m done,” I tell Belinda. “For today.” Dad snoozes in his chair, chin to chest, belly slow in its rise & fall that informs on his life signs, one hand folded across his lap while the other hangs down, the knuckles buried in the grass. How can he sleep with this noise? Easily, I suppose, as the simple yet sudden idea of lying down in the grass makes my brain want to spread like water across a thirsty lawn. I pull out my earplugs and slide the dust mask up to a crown, leaving the filters pointing skyward like radio drums. “It’s time to party.”

  After a shower in that promised portable hut (four-stalls; men’s & women’s on opposite sides, separated by thin plastic that’s sure to yield various sighs, grunts, yelps, and dropped soap jokes), I sit in the grass beside my sculpture, drinking in the cooler air, and listen to Dad ask me for crossword clues he hasn’t been able to answer throughout the day. Belinda answers him because I’m somewhere else and she wants to leave me there until I’m ready to venture back along a path that leaves no footprints. Across the lawn, beyond the rope, barbecue fires blaze and smoke into the unmoving evening air. Music starts from a portable CD player, hip-hop beats that get Mexican Rocky shaking his big gut, trying to entice Danish Ariel out of a folded posture; she shakes her head, and I can see her grimace from back here. Rocky doesn’t let this dissuade him. He turns and there in his sights is a slightly wiggling Wisconsin Muriel, see-sawing her hips that only help to make her breasts jiggle like dice in a cup. Big dice. The two meet halfway and a cheer alights from the crowd as the pair begin to boogie-woogie in the blue fire smoke.

  NY faces are faces of the world. History shows that people too often think in colors, but that’s only one angle of the canvas. A pointillist’s yellow dot placed between two blue dots yields a green image when seen from a short distance, thus altering our perception of light. Yet people are far more shape than color; and faces are people. Have a look in a mirror and what you’ll find, when you take the time to notice, is the same face you see on the uncountable masses when you walk through a mall or sit in a park, admire Bernini’s “Apollo and Daphne” or wait for a table at a restaurant, watch television or covet your neighbor’s wife.

  Karen K wrote, “There’s enough self-delusion in the world to make the beautiful ghastly, the grotesque bewitching.” I agree, and I say more: our obsession with self-beautifying is genetic. People will tell you that beautifying is taught. They’re wrong. We lived as animals in every sense of the word before “society” tamed us, and yet genetics have made us primp and dab, comb and wipe. Only, you can never really tame a beast. Adding luxuries — telephones and automobiles, frozen vegetables and CD players, hand cream and picture frames, home computers and no-pain dental surgery — merely brings the beast closer to its origins of Need vs. Desire. The human face is the face of a beast; a beautiful, grotesque, beastly stretch of malleable flesh. NYC is this, and it is its people, too. Malleable from within because the inner workings of the beast ride the rails of emotion, its track the double helix of its DNA. Even in their most static of high-charged three-dimensional animation (see “Apollo and Daphne”), sculptures are indifferent to the human condition. Odd, then, when humans show them equal indifference. Out of fear or ignorance, I don’t know, but there is this: humans trump sculpted rock — and all art — when their insolence becomes abject instead of occasional.

  Dad holds my beer while I take a leak behind a tree. He shields me from the cops patrolling the picnic grounds where a couple dozen people — friends and family of the sculptors, all given official name tags to affix to their chests — have shown up for the barbeque. With just three Porta-Potty toilets stationed alongside the shower trailer (one filled with flies, standing unused) most of the men gave over the plastic huts to the women and have taken to the trees, a practice which the police have turned a blind eye to for the night. On the other hand, one should never overlook the zealous beat cop.

  My urgent urination makes angry cobra hisses in the grass around the tree trunk. Dad tells me to hurry up or else someone might think we’re “getting gay” and come “bash us.” My next sigh isn’t for the relief of my bladder. I zip up and see Dad motioning for quiet, and to head the opposite way we’d come. He keeps close and whispers that he’s heard noises back there, people or something, sounds which he doesn’t want to disturb. We’re shoulder to shoulder, stumbling benignly in the dark.

  “I wish you wouldn’t have moved away, son.” His timbre is hushed, a voice inside a plush-carpeted room
. Dad has become melancholic after the last beer. “You could have stayed on after –”

  “Come on, Dad. I needed to live my life. Get on with things, you know? You told me you understood.”

  “Sorry. That was selfish.”

  “Has something happened? What’s changed?”

  “Nothing,” he says between the dark. “Everything. But that’s — it’s not okay but it’s been tough getting used to. I’m not going to lie to you. Everyone’s gone! Your sister. You. My wife.”

  His admissions wrench my emotions, although there’s little I can do. Moving back to Chicago next week wouldn’t solve anything for Dad, and my life would be turned inside out. Besides, he’d only think things were okay, until he realized his days were filled with the same work, the same people, and a once-a-week dinner or beer with me (and Belinda; of course she would come with me, as my brief fantasy-horror has played itself out).

  “I’m coming back, Pop. Some day. New York has always been a stopover, in my mind, and never the top of the hill. I can’t come home yet, though. Not now.” I stop him in a clearing, where a semblance of ambient light lets us see each other. “My life has taken its turns, too, you have to have noticed. Things are … happening. And I don’t want to interrupt them. The consequences would be terrible. For me and Belinda, and my work.”

  I tell him about Belinda’s marriage proposal, in this half darkness that lets me talk as if he’s the ghost of Hamlet’s father and I’m not Hamlet and so not much in a hurry. He’s happy, pats me on the shoulder, squeezes my upper arm, until I admit that I haven’t answered her, not yet (last night’s whispered practice notwithstanding), even though I want to marry her. He doesn’t understand this, to which I respond “Ditto.” I swear him to secrecy. “It’ll all come out okay,” I promise. “In fact, super great.” Then I change the subject, to my Mythos. He likes the idea, and gets the whole motif. Hearing myself tell it like I do, so matter-of-fact, and to my Dad, one of my biggest supporters (always), gives me a charge. Still, Dad wonders about the future instead of accepting that the future is all we have, sometimes.

  “Who knows … I might still be around. You know what I mean. Alive.” He does like to wax on. He has that right, with his son standing close. “Or maybe I’ll move, too. Can’t quite see myself in Florida, though.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? You’re like fifty-eight, Dad. Step up on the auction block again. You look good. A Silver-fucking-Fox.”

  “Hey-hey! The language.”

  “Get yourself laid already.”

  “Don’t you dare say ‘That’s what your mother would’ve wanted.’ ”

  Never in so many words, I won’t. We both stop for a breather when a crowd of teenagers troops by, all arm-leg-shoulder movement, and overly boisterous voices cutting across the octaves, nothing in key. Mom told him something I haven’t forgotten: don’t cry for her too long. She said to him, “There’s too much to waste by reliving the past. Mourning a life that had its best times while the times of memory were yet unbroken.” She had to gasp these words because her lungs were already cobwebbed with tumors. “You’re a good man and lots of women — one more woman — would be lucky to get a-hold of you.” That she could joke in her collapse struck me, not as brave, but comforting to herself. At this point Mary Catherine left the room. Dad was shaken. He leaned over her, held her shoulders and placed his cheek against hers. She cupped her hand behind his head and winked at me. The sensation of deep love and abject grief nearly collapsed my legs. “One woman has had you long enough, Carl,” mom told him. “Give yourself a break from all of this … and then let another lady learn, as I had, to bask in your best qualities.”

  Dad choked on his grief. I watched this through some amniotic fluid of unreality turned on a wheel that became my life. Then I swooned and had to lean against the wall. Mom told him, finally, after listening to him cry a while longer, her hand stroking his back, “Have Minus teach you how to cook, Carl. Just in case.” Dad balled like a newborn. Mom patted him until the sobs calmed.

  I guess, after all, mom did say those things in so many words. Just not the icky, demeaning ones she could have plucked from the language her white-bread students used, the ones she’d taught for twenty-eight years in that north-suburban school. In the dark, I see that scene roll over in my mind one more time. Not for the last time, I’m sure. Dad, meanwhile, hasn’t lost contact with his own inner-wisdom.

  “Besides,” he says beside me, his voice crackly, like we’re on the phone together with a bad connection, “where would I go to find a woman? I’m not hanging out at some mall strolling through all those retirees. Have you seen them? It’s terrible. Besides, I’d look like a john picking his way down Maxwell Street on a cold Friday night. Or, take that idea of joining a fifty-five-PLUS social group. An or-gan-I-zation. I might as well hire a pimp.”

  “So stay away from people ten years older than you. Go young! Have fun for a while, and then. … What about the college? You’ve got at least a dozen profs who are perfectly nice … even a few who are lovely women. Women that have something going for them. Ask a few out on dates. What harm could come?”

  “Those women are colleagues. Friends! For Christ’s sake, faculty turpitude laws would get me fired for sexual harassment.”

  “That sounds a bit rough, Dad. Unless you showed up in nothing but a raincoat.”

  He doesn’t even chuckle. There’s depression opposite me in the darkness. Then he surprises me. “You really think I should, son? Date? Me on the mare-market.”

  “It’s ‘meat market’ Dad, but I like your phrase; and, yes, I do think you should. No mincing words here. Life is long, whatever number you’re at. We can make it sweet, too. Don’t we owe ourselves that much?” I pause. This can be a risk worth the price. “Mom would insist. She did, as you remember.”

  There, I’d said it. I wonder, though, if he does remember her deathbed plea. Our footsteps crunch over sticks and leaves. He’s quiet. He’s thinking about it.

  “So, you think the ‘ole man’s got something left, huh?”

  “Sure I do. And … you always admired the Founding Fathers, right? Ben Franklin had kids into his eighties.”

  “Hey. I’m not looking for bambinos.”

  “I’m just saying that the equipment works until it doesn’t work any more. That goes for the heart, too, Pop.”

  He mumbles words I don’t catch, but I think I’ve got him at least wanting to believe a future lies ahead for him — one that dances, not lurks. “Thanks, Minus,” he says. I hear him sniff. Maybe mom’s with him now. He’s never been one to disappoint.

  “So,” he says. “You talked with your sister lately?”

  This is the wrong subject, and anyway it’s our telephone talk signal for the end of the conversation. Hard to hang up, though, when the man you’ve looked up to all your life is walking you toward a canopy of lights and into a smoky field of barbequed pork. Dad chuckles. I think he must have come to the same conclusion.

  When we get back to the party, Belinda is in league with a pair of gallery people (they don’t travel alone, apparently; are they afraid a pack of artists will pick off a loner from the herd, a weakling, for revenge?). I nod to each because we’ve already met. Belinda has given them my business card: stenciled vellum with the look of chiseled marble. Who thinks up this stuff? Dad took a dozen earlier and walked the rope-line, working the audience. I saw two on the ground when I trekked back from my shower. Now he’s empty, of beer and BBQ enthusiasm and “Minus Orth” art cards (they remind me of trading cards, and I suddenly imagine a world with artists competing with sports stars wrapped in a package with a free stick of gum. If only McDonald’s would think classy, and use its merchandising power to trade in ArtCards, match a masterpiece with its artist to redeem for food, a Big Mac, a Happy Meal; art might just survive. What might a McArt museum look like?).

  We need to leave. I motion to Belinda.

  While waiting off to the side of the dance-trampled gr
ass, with Dad next to me dancing in place to some swing suddenly caterwauled through the air, I see a cloaked image through the trees behind us. It keeps to the outside of the roped-off sculptures under white flood-lights. A black cape, European in imagery and cheesiness, flaps on each stride, but his gait is familiar to me. I tell Dad that I’ll find him with Belinda, that I’ll be right back. He chides me for my weak bladder, but stays put.

  When I walk into the light, the caped figure brings himself out from the thick night on two sturdy legs, feet hitting the soil like panther paws. I adopt a ghoulish tone and dilute my voice. “Hello, Viscount. You look vaguely Transylvanian tonight. Should I have worn a necklace of garlic?”

  He pulls back his shoulders and tries to throw the cape over his left shoulder. The long train catches on the tree trunk, failing to bring about the classic Bella Lugosi move. “That was shite, lad,” Viscount Bruce says. “Never could do it right. Got this bloody thing from a Great War vet. Italian. I mean the cape, of course. Has to have come from cold storage, I should think.” He lifts the edges to his side, and now he looks like the image of a retired Batman, out for a night of pick-ups and debauchery of the local crime fightrixes. He steps further into the light of the distant lamps and looks closely at the fabric. He holds it out for me to see. “I believe moths have got at the lining. Hell and be damned! These old buildings have just about every pest known to the urban landscape.”

  Buzzing brings our heads around toward the sculptures. Gnats orbit the sodium lights like electrons. Another tribal beat lashes the air from the BBQ pits. We see dancers in shadow.

  “What brings you out here in Dracula’s darkness?” I ask. He ignores the question and looks into the space between the ring of sculptures.

  “I like your bust,” he says. “Can’t wait to see what you’ll do with that bone sticking out of its head.” He wags his nose at the sculptures as a bunny might to its carrots. “I read a book the other day. ‘How the Other Half Lives’ by Jacob Riis. I thought it would illustrate myself, or my close contemporaries.” He smiles, a pitiful irony given the subject, and one that exposes hidden embarrassment. “Turns out the damned book’s a depressive example of America’s underclass.”

  “A bit outdated, but apt for the times,” I say. “Do you ever see Riis’s drama of life from your five-bedroom apartment overlooking Central Park?” I can’t pass up this rudeness, and had hardly thought to stop myself. I think I know why. The FaceCards have cold feet about our subscription deal.

  “The occasional bum pushes a cart early in the morning, I’ve noticed,” says the viscount. He thinks I was serious; the spoilt among us simply fail to get sarcasm that isn’t self-delivered. He goes on, “Do they really exist, or are they the figments of our subconscious fears displayed as holographs? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. S’pose Freud had something to say of it. Though perhaps not. ‘Warming your own soup’ is what the maharani might say. I haven’t the first opinion of what that means. No matter.”

  He finally stops. I don’t respond. There is no possible response to what he’s said. Nevertheless, the silence is never silent, and we listen to our separate thoughts, eyes tucked in and focused on a pair of hands, or something equally close. My thought is split by a horn blast from a barge on the Hudson. The viscount abruptly shivers, and his teeth chatter in this sultry night.

  “I had planned to come around earlier today,” he says. “Had my earplugs in my pocket. Then something came up. Tomorrow I’m off to Portugal for a few days, and I wanted to catch you. Let you know what the group has been discussing.”

  For a moment I had thought I was wrong, hoped, and he was going to tell me something good. Inspiring. His hand grips my arm to turn us away from the lights. He asks me to explicate the level of competence of the sculptors at the symposium, what I see of the unfinished pieces. We’re walking now, and it occurs to me that the viscount is going to take a lap around the rope while my critique entertains him. I’ll have none of this, and I stop our sauntering pace. A stutter in his step makes him appear old.

  “What’s the story, Viscount?” When he looks at me, my face is in full lamplight, while his has the grainy texture of an old film. He sees that he’s made a mistake. There’s no need for rasped nerves here, his look seems to say, so I take a path he’ll appreciate. “This is business. Let’s take a drink at the bar, like men.” His chin rises, showing a waddled neck that stretches as he measures me. Then his eyes soften, and his mouth. His hand leaves my arm and comes up to rest on my shoulder.

  “We want to know what you’re working on,” he tells me. “Specifically. Do you have finished pieces? If so, let’s enjoy a mini-show, if you will. You see, Minus, this is a big investment for … for a few of us.” He lets a pause make its statement. Then he laughs. “Maquettes will suit the maharani’s inquisition.”

  This is what I hear: pressure. The minimalism that your everyday Joes and Janes bring to work is to be assumed. For me, I can only think of Jackson Pollock’s face, brooding at a white canvas, awaiting that vision to touch him before he can begin. Days pass; sometimes weeks. A feeling wholly different from inspiration, I can assure anyone.

  “That’s fair,” I reply. “You might want to take a close look at the bust you praised moments ago. It’s a prototype of the cycle in preparation. A long, varied, and robust collection. Naturally, I have sketches, too. The maharani is going to like them.” I want him to know it’s understood that he’s put her “inquisition” forward as proxy for their collective voice. So be it. They need to keep distance, however illusory it is. “And the archived works?” I ask. This addition is my own step into the circle.

  He takes his hand off my shoulder. The viscount pans his eyes across the field. “Later,” he says. Opposite us, two men walk into the light along the rope. Viscount Bruce steps back with that involuntary motion often observed in the unnaturally cautious. The men are dressed as twins: black tank tops, black shorts, black athletic shoes. Their hair is black, trimmed to the skull. They’re holding hands. The viscount sucks his teeth. Of course he and I know “later” means the prices of the older pieces will likely have risen, but no matter. Early pieces paid for by handsome inflation is a status symbol for some collectors.

  We part from the shadows and go separately into the darkness, I feeling a bit like Renfield lighting out with a list of Master’s wishes folded into his breast pocket, close to the lungs. It’s a feeling I know will change. I find Belinda and Dad moving in the light of a portable disco ball, shuffling more than dancing. They give me the look of What the !@&#.... We leave the party.

  “That’s pretty shitty of them,” Belinda says to me the next morning. Her lips perch on the rim of a paper coffee cup, hooded by a plastic cap that makes the cup look like an ice-cream cone. The Red Line subway rumbles and shimmies north on our early return to Riverside Park. Dad holds a newspaper open on his lap, and can’t hear a word we’re saying. It’s seven-twenty and this car is nearly full; it smells of sleep-pressed hair and bad breath and coffee and doughnuts. I take a bite of bagel and chew. I prefer plain bagels. The texture of the dough feels more bagel-ly than the “rosemary olive oil” “chocolate chip” or “everything” varieties. Belinda waits on my answer, and probably for me to agree with her. But I shake my head, and after swallowing I explain the FaceCards’ caution in a minimal phrase. “Occupational bailiwick.” She attempts to brush this aside, but the phrase is too weighty for that, and she must consider its implications. In bed last night, I debated whether to tell her at all; this morning I decided that, as my agent, she needs all the information when it’s available. Now I tell her, “If the FaceCards don’t pony up for the subscription, others will. Que sera, sera. My royals will miss out on this lot of seminal work.” She’s not happy with this answer. She is not satisfied that I’m not as unhappy as she is. Que sera, sera. We look away from each other and into the noise of this morning.

  Sunday morning subways are textural. Grandmothers accompany little girls dressed in crinoline cost
umes to ballet practice (or to church — sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference). Men and women who’ve paired up at a club a couple hours ago stand in isolated worlds of memory, dance sweat dried across their foreheads like tacky paste, and the soiled feeling of liquored intentions draining into second thoughts, or regret. Runners dressed for the track advance themselves in place, jiggle their hips and stretch their Achilles’ tendons, anxious to get out, upstairs, into the openness of the park. While the young are still dreaming in their beds, old men whose nightly sleep can be measured in minutes are out like the dawn patrol — unshowered and underfed, but caffeinated — out to lead the march of humanity that will catch up somewhere near noon, stumble outside to get the New York Times, lox and bagels and lattes, at about the same time the old boys are ready for the first nap of a lazy Sunday. There are too many people on Earth to notice all of them between Monday and Friday — the world belches people from its throat so they can earn their daily bread — thus they become impressionistic blurs. Perhaps just as they would like, and how an artist would like them.

  Twenty minutes later, Bart Ballard gives a holler and waves across the park’s ante meridian silence. Heads turn; irritation grunts from passers-by. I step into fresh coveralls, zip up, and listen to the sound from crotch to throat. Hammers hit chisels. Rasps shave layers off the limestone like an Italian grocer his parmesan wheel. Wood smoke lingers beside the acrid taste of store-bought coffee. Dust drifts along the air, an almost-fog that can’t quite compress the mix of smoke and dog shit, or even the car exhaust risen from the West Side Highway.

  “I think you’re in the lead, Minus,” says Dad. He’s just returned from a walk around the perimeter. All the artists are in action, he reports. I remind him this is not about speed, just as long as you finish before three-thirty. Two laps around my pedestal gives me the impression that Dad may be right, whatever that means. Six hours (or so) with hammer & chisel, rifflers & rasps, and I’ll have my work of art. The largest crust of my time has to be spent chiseling two pairs of eyes, two noses (one serpentine). And lots of hair. The remaining work can be with my various rifflers and flat files.

  The sculpture’s effect, where it holds its power, shall be found in her eyes, their set and gaze and painful furry. They must be half-and-half: at once yearning for help from the goddess who cut her, while also intense with growing anger, hatred, a crazed ferocity which shall soon turn many a warrior to stone. Her cheeks hold the pudge of youth, although now I think to refine them for a sleeker appearance, one that takes balance on the narrow edge between the two phases that have defined humans in life and myth. Her hair has body, but has yet to morph. Only the one serpent peers from the flowing locks, its size essential to glaze the motif with its foretold horrors.

  I pull on my leather gloves once more, and take a chisel in one hand, a wood mallet in the other. Speak to me, girl … How have you become evil? What were you before this? When had that fear, that anticipation of Athena’s wrath, first strike you? There, there, lovely Gorgon, show me those tears for the life that awaits you.

  At eleven o’clock I pull away the dusk mask. When I spit on the ground, my saliva is a mass of cottony bubbles. Belinda and Dad have disappeared. As to where, this I’ve missed because of my earplugs and, probably, they hadn’t bothered to tell me. Second-days at an exhibition, for family and friends and lovers, are less carnival and more survival. A new crop of spectators have replaced those from the morning, and stare at me in their casual and familiar way.

  New York City has awakened. It’s the sunshine and the feeling that there’s something to be seen, some Sunday action that’s not televised, that’s palpable and has vibrations and odors that tang the air. I feel like a gladiator, dressed for the ring and holding my weapons. There’s no sign from the crowd that I’ll be given thumbs up or thumbs down to seal my fate. Therefore my métier beckons me.

  Medusa is a beauty, her hair parted left of center. Three ropes drape down and back to hold the tresses in place, to adorn according to the pantheonic station to which she was born. A young snake, of narrow head and rapier tongue, looks tentatively from between the plaits. Its eyes are slow to the vicious turn to which its mistress’s have rolled; she straddles lovely and abominable. I sense that her allusion to history, and all she represents, is a metaphor precisely gauged for modernity.

  A trio of boys call out to me from the ropes. Mom and dad hover in the background. Feeling a break is what my mind and muscles need, I place the hammer and chisel on the pedestal and walk over to them, sliding my dust mask around my neck so they can see me clearly. The boys all have pinched faces of pre-teens, noses and chins like mom, hair and eyes of dad. Salad-bowl haircuts don’t help to distinguish them, but their different heights assess their ages.

  “Are you deaf?” asks the tallest boy, who seems all arms and legs, between which sticks out a chicken chest. “All that pounding hurts my ears.”

  I pull out my earplugs: secret exposed. I let them dangle before the kids, like Svengali his chain and medallion. The smallest reaches out and I snatch them away. People edge in, taking my pause as their opportunity to ask me questions and craft tips: how long does it take to finish a sculpture? Who buys those big sculptures we see in office buildings and parks? How do you keep dimension right on such a big piece? Aren’t you afraid of lung disease from all the rock dust? My answers are patient reminders to myself that once upon a morning I had lifted a hammer for the first time. Someone offers me a cold bottle of water. A long-fingered hand slips off its ridges, whose red nails are shiny with sex appeal. I see heads of dull colors tossed among vibrant tints, some shortly bobbed while others lavishly long. We talk about where the art is to go, and if it can be bought by “regular people,” and then there’s a lull and some say good-bye and drift away like tail feathers lost to the wind. I insert the earplugs and pull down my mask. A last nod to the crowd sends me back to work.

  As noon drifts into middle afternoon, the warrior sounds and battle hardware have led to sighs and rasps and coughs. I’m naked above the waist, and have doffed the over-the-head mask for a simple mouth guard and safety glasses. The heat has blazed outside the ring of the umbrella’s shadow, causing my eyes to tear whenever I take them from the soft, white-dark of the limestone to see who has finished, who’s yet covered in sweat, their muscles flex-pumping with precision. I notice Bart Ballard and Angela Whitter walk to one sculptor’s work station after another. When they get round to me they give the “half-hour warning.” Their faces glow with clown-like encouragement.

  It’s time for blending. I use a curved file, its striations narrow and shallow, but sharp. My fingers hold the file along the length of its blade so they can sense the shape of the stone and gauge how much pressure to apply to scrape away the briefest aggregate. Her jaw line is delicate yet defined, the neck willowy with the hint of tension, her high cheekbones almost aquiver under the skin as she tenses with the effort to pull her lips back from the teeth. Then I take a rough, plastic-bristle brush to clean away the dust. There, there, my pretty … Perfection is but the grasp of your mind against the future of its reason, for it awaits you with outstretched arms. A softer brush dusts the crevices around her eyes, her plaited hair, and the serpent’s patient grin.

  My last task, and it’s from passion and honor I do this, is to wash her. The hose attached to the rubber octopus set out for our use is hot to the touch, and the water pours through its nozzle at a near scalding temperature. I wait for the water to cool, my mind on the Mythos cycle, and how this Medusa fits with the characters I have prepared to sculpt (she doesn’t fit; she’s too young; I’ll put her aside) until finally the icy temps of city water numb my hand. I train the spray on the sculpture, and the limestone darkens in its baptism.

  “That’s nice art, son.” Dad’s face is a flower in late bloom, his smile that which defines fatherly pride. “So beautiful.” I can feel a blush rising from my chest, a good feeling that I wash back through my body when my hand raises high an
d upends the hose over my head. The cold-water surge ripples in rushes down to my feet, where I stand under its flush until the final call sounds.

  Rocky Trujillo stands in our day’s falling light, his skin bronzed to its native leatherine tinge. A trucker’s hat is pushed to the back of his head, its Union Carbide patch faded and stained. “So why the Medusa head, brah?”

  I gasp through the swallow of a cold beer. “Something I’ve been working on, Rocky. Representational is making a comeback. I give you this: youth in the classics.” He knows I’m telling half truths. “Regardless, they want public art, dude. I want my work seen. Did you know that New York City has eighty-nine library branches? Dozens pepper Manhattan alone. Mid-Town is guaranteed to find this girl a home.”

  Rocky folds his arms and inhales, which pushes out his broad chest. He doesn’t like that I haven’t explained my Medusa. He says, “Is that, like, selling out?”

  “No, Rocky, it’s looking ahead. Despite Aristophanes’ claim, not all artists live with their heads in the clouds.”

  The horn shrills twice from the observers’ dais. We file over to collect our kudos and the chance for weighty recognition. We’re heavy-armed and, some of us, yet crusted from ankles to brow with rock dust dried over sweat. Family and friends, alongside park stragglers sidling up to see what for, stand behind the artists bunched in a grapevine wedge against the dais. In the deep shadows made by the surrounding trees, beyond where Hudson River boats call out a maritime version of evensong, we hear French Francis’s name. She jumps with joy, does a fist pump, and takes the dais to collect her prize. I hear through sporadic clapping a murmured, “Must be politics. Playing to Mitterand!” which makes me want to laugh, only I think the voice might be Dad’s. A cool sweat breaks across my upper lip, and I keep my eyes forward. Angela reminds the crowd that the sculptures will be displayed in the sculpture garden at City Hall for now, until final placements are determined. Then handshakes are swapped and everyone quickly goes their separate way.

  I shuffle back to my table, where I scan the ground for missing tools or the left-behind bag. On my walk the summation of the exhibition comes to me through this question: “What did I get from the Roundtable but the reputation as the guy who talks ‘good art’ but doesn’t deliver?” I run my shoe toe through the grass to feel for the solid object. An answer to my question comes like a phantom mosquito bite: Art spoils wherever more ego than heart gets injected. Get yourself together, man. Thrice around the pedestal yields a small chisel, which I deposit in my pocket. It’s a good piece. Don’t let fatigue spoil The Loneliest Gorgon its beauty.

  I turn to see a hunched apparition. It’s a fairytale crone. She’s staring at me from the pathway far behind the ropes. It’s my bag lady, who comes forward when I give a little wave. She wears her painter’s pants held at the waist by a big red belt cinched through a gold buckle. Her hands hold paper and pencil. We meet at the rope, where her voice and words startle me.

  “How does it feel? This. Your contentment?”

  Life becomes a very large wheel, from which all the little wheels, no matter how fast they turn, make the large wheel move by millimeters. Before I’m able to find my voice, I feel faint (she has said nothing, moved naught), but I don’t stagger in this dizziness. Seeing my muted self in the reflection of her moist eyes, all oblong rainbow colors and half-dark lines, I find my voice flat, a burnished sound.

  “Why are you here?”

  “You told me that you read art journals. A simple exercise,” she says, as the preceptor’s voice advises the novice. She’s done this on purpose. She’s working me. “Come to my building next Friday,” she commands. “In between your dog walking and –” She tosses the final thought away as a distraction. Her arrogance or my — what? Nothing is clear.

  Laughter from the distance — Rikky and Ariel of Copenhagen — takes my answer from the air. She tilts her head. I repeat myself. I think her eyes are not on me, have not been for some time. She has looked behind me at the Gorgon. Then she goes away, and as she recedes so does her stature, which in a few steps has transformed into a hunch-backed bag lady trolling the park garbage cans for her dinner.

  “Is that who I think it was?” Belinda asks a moment later. She’s come up from behind, brandishing a sweaty bottle of beer that’s half gone, the foam hanging to the inside of the bottle. “Or should I say, What was that?”

  “An admirer,” I say, “I think.” Belinda doesn’t see it, though. Not really, or at least not for what this meeting represents. And how could she? It’s an idea I want to make into a plan. One at a time, I peel back the shoulders of my coveralls, and strip the sweat-rimmed outfit down to my ankles.

  The next morning, Dad sits next to me in the back of a livery cab on the way to La Guardia for his flight home to Chicago. He can’t stop talking about the comfort of the Lincoln Continental we’re riding in. To the driver, this is a sugar cookie dunked in coffee. “And the price!” Dad guffaws. “Holy samoleans!” I explain to him that the flat rate paid for a comfortable ride is equal to the un-comfortable ride of a yellow cab roller-coaster trip. Outside the window, New York is gray and brown bricks, white cross-walk lines, faces like the 31 flavors of ice-cream.

  When we see Shea Stadium, Dad breathes a heavy sigh. I know he’s getting emotional, even though he’s not the guy that easily gets emotional. I recall his few nights with us, the subtle forgetfulness showing through; the playfulness and the memories for me of what my dad has always been for the family. I want to rid myself of thoughts lingering at the shores of dementia, or stuck at the ticket counter of Alzheimer’s Airlines. Of course, none of this is the case; only a son’s fears, and just as well, for Dad is far too young for complications of the aged, as well as I am grossly imaginative for my own good.

  We hug at the security gates. Dad holds back tears. He tells me he’s rubbed his eyes and forgot he applied Ben-Gay to his aching knees. There’s no conviction in his voice, though. He’s taking himself more seriously, these days. This is fine. I promise to call him.

  I meet Baron Raspe outside his building. He stares at the black canvas bag I carry, slung over my shoulder. I say, “Home slides and finger-paints collected from under the fridge magnets.” He laughs.

  We start off, making our way over to Park Avenue and Viscount Bruce’s apartment close to The Reservoir. The baron’s dark hair has a new cropped look to it, and he sports a three-day beard of silver whiskers; very distinguished — despite his paunch — in buff-colored worsted pants, a toasted salmon button down, and brindle tweed jacket. I wear my black suit and white shirt and blue tie; I’ve shaved for the evening. These FaceCards never look the same, while I’d be the perfect suspect for a police line-up.

  “Your sculptures,” the baron says, “and those sketches and paintings I saw in Chicago. What’s your theory of art, then?”

  “Do you mean this year?”

  “It changes so quickly? Heh-heh! Sounds mentally torturous. You must be already climbing walls; in your mind at least.”

  “British POWs called that ‘wire happy’ didn’t they? Sure, yeah. But I’ve never had the time to give that any thought. Climbing the walls, I mean. Too busy shifting my position, I suppose, among other things shifted. Artistic relevance is important, I think.”

  “That’s a word – relevance. That’s your theory, then?”

  “If I must have one today – now – ‘relevance’ will do well for an argument. Beauty at the core, of course. Relevant to humanity’s need for art.”

  “Need?”

  “Instinctual need. Oh, yes. We’ve always done it, and always will. Some better than others.”

  “Some more relevant?”

  “The evening’s buzzword. Yes. Undoubtedly.”

  “Oh, come now. A very Bosch thought.”

  “Hieronymus? Or were you implicating Germans in general?”

  I’m trying to be amusing in the old sense — showing interest by being interesting.

  I tell him, “Releva
nce to the human spirit is the drive all artists want, I think. Beauty helps to show in some light what other things struggle to hide. It makes relevant all war scenes, or a gnarled bust. And Rembrandt’s etchings, in one of which you’ll find in the foreground corner a dog dropping a shit in determined squat. But not and never the vapid, arid, color blotches all the rage these days among the bourgeois ‘collectors.’ Barmie! I think I got the theory into one sentence this time.”

  “You speak passionately about your subject, Minus. I’ll give you that over so many art-school artists. Too many of them for me to bother with, anymore.” The baron pulls out a cigar from an inner pocket. He halts me with a touch on the forearm, and, turning away from the wind, lights the stogie. Blue smoke pouring from his mouth, he says, “I’ve seen plenty of those young artists in New York, Rome, London — God, that city has more desperation in its artists than Paris, which is always trying to remake the nineteen-twenties scene.” We resume our walk. “These perpetual students don’t have what you say. They don’t have much of anything. High prices. So every artist has those.”

  “Hmm. Thanks for the compliment. I try not to be too hard on the degree-holding artists. Most had only been looking for direction. It takes a few years once out from under the teachers’ downy wings to become what you could have without those overseeing critical eyes — and the student mentality to always please Teacher.”

  “Go to war to become the man?”

  “Not so transformational for me, perhaps. But take this for what it’s worth: ‘Go to war to see the kind of man you are.’ ”

  We cross the street somewhere in the 80’s blocks, where cars are light this Thursday evening, away from the commotion and traffic snarls around Park and Grand Central Terminal. I hear the tacky sound of wheels over hot pavement (cooling now, past sundown), and somewhere from above the canned laughter of a television sitcom played too loudly. I walk with my head down to keep note of the sidewalk cracks. The streetlamps make our shined shoes gleam the color of a harvest moon.

  The baron says to me, “Money doesn’t interest me, Minus. I’d give it all away tomorrow. And again the next day.”

  “Okay. You can give it to me then,” I think. But I’m not going to bite at that one. He’s a nice man and my benefactor in spades. Only, sell that can of botulism to the starving runaway huddled in a filthy doorway outside the bus station. Add raindrops. Or tears; not such a cleansing analogy. This isn’t Bosch’s garden. It might be Rockwell after eating the fruit of knowledge. If he were so lucky, that is.

  “So shall your theory change again?” Baron Raspe tokes heavily on his cigar. It smells like the air expelled from a hot bicycle inner tube.

  “Shift, not change, is the word I recall using,” I correct him. “But let me replace theory with ‘vision,’ something that needs – hell, demands – refreshment every so often, like a pro golfer who takes a month off after a demanding schedule that has produced a glorious win at the sixteenth hole.”

  “Sixteenth? There are eighteen holes in golf, sport.”

  “Why wait till the end? Save some spirit in reserve, if you can. That’s my motto. We all need more the next time out. We all need a motto.”

  “I feel like you’re talking in parables.”

  “Please, no Jesus references. While all publicity is good — even among friends, and even bad publicity — we still remember what happened to The Beatles after Lennon’s arrogant comparison.”

  Upstairs at the classy address, kisses are proffered for the cheeks of the ladies; a smooth, fast handshake to Viscount Bruce, after he gives the baron a clutching double-handed grip and a winning smile. The FaceCards surround my canvas bag and me in the viscount’s well-lit foyer. They’re like kids. Spoilt kids.

  I set up the slide projector on the card table (no less posh than the maharani’s, only with less pedigree: twentieth-century czarist), the felt cover protected by a tea towel. Before I show the few slides I have, taken by Belinda at the Beehive, I pass around the sketches I made beginning that night after Karen K led me to the Guggenheim. I’m quick to watch the effect the images make on my patrons. Freifrau Frisse and Maharani Smrtee look at them with businesslike expressions. They hold the edges of the paper. Before long, the pages are passed from one set of hands to the other. Then the sketches make a second trip around the table. The men’s faces look to be made of flexible rubber. Their lips part or close, eyes fold when inspecting the hairsbreadth details in a face, and across hands or lips.

  I have a feeling they’d like to discuss what they see now by themselves, minus me in attendance. That’s fine, but they’ll have to wait because we’re here to play poker; I had planned to show the sketches and slides at the end of the evening. Not because that would have been after they’d had drinks, but for the time it would give me to escape shortly after I presented them the prototypes to my sculpture cycle.

  But now their eyes are on me and they have smiles, genuine signs of pleasure, of appreciation. This goes two levels: I’ve brought them what they asked for, and I’ve shown them that my work, good work, is in progress. They congratulate me, one at a time, in turn, from lowest to highest rank among them. I think they had worked this out beforehand. Such protocol escapes me, though I’m learning.

  I ask for the lights to be dimmed, and focus the first slide onto a screen that the viscount has prepared before my arrival. The screen stretches up high in front of the fireplace, and covers the viscount’s Cy Twombly. So much for cross-cultural protocol.

  Belinda’s multiple views of three Mythos in different stages of progress pop from the silver screen like they stand alive in the room with us. This is how I see my sculptures, anyhow. In the moon-glow lamplight cast by the reflecting screen, the FaceCards have glad lines wiped into their expressions.

  In the dark, Viscount Bruce says something I think the others feel is their birthright. “Isn’t it marvelous to appreciate art? The freedom to pursue an aesthetic quality in life is an extra dimension. Like being able to fly where others can only walk. More marvelous to have art for your own enjoyment, every day. Why not create an entire aesthetic ambiente?

  “Can’t we play poker now?” I think. A while goes by before I get my wish.

  If there was one night I should lay down some heavyweight hands, the FaceCards would not begrudge me this night to spill out paper money from their alligator billfolds and gold money clips. But I’m dealt lackluster hands of twos, fives, and nines (not even worthy for sucker bets) to their threes-of-a-kind and straights. Freifrau Frisse drops a king-high club flush.

  Gossip keeps the game and the evening light, fun. I knew this game; I am being recruited, and they want to see how much fun they can have with their shoves and prods. I don’t mind; we must all suffer through such happy-slappy gauntlets. These social runs far outweigh the significance the official ones can make on us. The level of sweat beaded on one’s forehead and chin serves as litmus paper. Tonight, mine feels dry. It’s the success of my Mythos sketches. My deal with the FaceCards is a mere formality, where last week it was not, and Belinda was sharp tongued. I’ll let them talk together, alone; but now I want to have fun. I can still afford to lose a few dollars to make them feel superior.

  I’m usually able to make my turn at gossip eventful. I don’t engage in child-play anymore, and suddenly telling tattles about Alfred and Binny would appear to my flush of noble refugees that I were disloyal. It’s a special, social error, among the FaceCards, to hear silence at the table after you’ve begun a story where the others are expected to kick in with ribbing or ribald comments. This is to suffer the taste of salt rime; like swallowing your own silent tears.

  I tell them, “I came across Karen Kosek again. We exchanged words.” I had their ears now. “When I spoke to her, she threatened to pull a knife on me.”

  “Did you run?”

  “Minus, you’re not supposed to talk with those people. They have cast aside society. We should do them the favor of treating them likewise.”

&nb
sp; “They are their own islands. Fiefdoms of one.”

  “I don’t think she’s a bag lady,” I say. But I don’t dare begin to tell them why I think this, much less that I know otherwise. This is sport; tittle-tattle. It matters little that I’m lying through my eye-teeth. “She’s in some sort of self-imposed exile. I’ve heard from other people that she was a hell-raiser among the literati and socialites after they accepted her into their circles. To her, I imagine, that was always going to be a trial run. Maybe a test that had no right answers.”

  “She saw too much of the limelight,” Baron Raspe says. “And that scorched her personality. My dear maharani, can you top up my glass, please? That’s something I read about your bag lady. You know, before. Then she went slum native. She tucked in down at a Bowery flop-house. Went to the mattresses, as the wise-guys used to say. Documented? Not sure. Scuttlebutt. That’s New York society, though, right? There’s a reason we four hardly find ourselves invited to such events. We’re aliens!”

  “All you have to do is look at Truman Capote and his legacy. Yikes!”

  I’m on and off my turn at the gossip wheel without having to say another word. The FaceCards, on the other hand, cherish tittle-tattle like teenagers watching porn.

  “An apocryphal story?” says Viscount Bruce. The maharani has egged him on for a ripper. “Okay. Then you’ll have it.” He clears his throat, ever the stage-spotlight ham. “My half-cousin comes from the line produced by the Bastard of Burgundy.”

  “One of his own bastards?”

  “Certainly so. The very same. My family wouldn’t be party to common bastardy. Nicknames like that need heirs to the throne, as it were.”

  “Brucy, is that really a story? I mean – sorry – but it has no middle or ending.”

  “If you insist.” The viscount drops his cards face down and tucks one hand into the other on the edge of the table. “The Bastard had himself a country wench while out riding of an evening. When her water broke nine months later, the father of a new bastard line opened his eyes on a mean world. Meaner. Jump now some five hundred years. My half-cousin has only recently returned from a year in Burgundy. He’d become all genealogical, rootsy and nostalgic; don’t ask me why.”

  A flourish of head shakes from these exiled aristocrats admit their incredulity.

  “Seems the news was that the brothers and father of some society bitch routed cousin James from town about ten months ago because he had just knocked her up good and plenty. Her own new bastard is named Gillian.”

  The freifrau chuckles into her diamond bracelet. “I do enjoy irony.”

  “Well … quite.”

  We complete the hand; Maharani Smrtee wins seven dollars. She shakes the coins in her cupped hands, like it’s a maraca. I deal out only the seventh hand of the night. The mantel clock strikes ten bells.

  Yes, they are all so good at this, their life among the clouds: winks and nods; small laughter and bouts of guffaw. I kick in with always less volume than the rest, because they like to hear themselves roar like animals. They revel in teaching me, the neophyte, the flawed pearl amongst the polished jewels, their game. On the other hand, I have the notion of playing the anthropologist, observing bonobos practicing rituals which are oddly familiar, but garbled through translation. Their point is to inspire envy in me.

  Only my thoughts betray them on this. With their gestures of normalcy, they only make themselves miss, all the more, their former lives at court.