“So…,” my voice trailed off, signaling my continued confusion, coupled with the persistent awareness that this test must have a final goal.
“Oh, it would be just ducky if you could bring the leg up to the Egyptian Department so they can put it in the statue’s basket,” Hebe instructed casually. “Tell ’em Hebe Winlock sent it. They’ll know. That statue was a real star of the Meketre horde. One of a pair of goddesses. The Egyptian government got the one carrying the beer—they always get half of what we find.
“Ours is almost three feet tall, dressed to the nines in feathers and balancing the basket on her head with such humanity…”
He looked wistful at the thought of the four-thousand-year-old Egyptian woman, as if she were a former lover, then snapped from his reverie and blurted, “Splendid! Good to have that done. Back to the trenches now. Well, quite literally for you. You’ll take the aqueducts back?”
“Uh, yes, sir,” I replied.
“Splendid!” he repeated, “Always the best way. Lovely to meet you. I’d shake your hand, but we don’t want to lose that meat again!” He winked, grabbed the hat marked WINLOCK, and left the room again.
I took one last look out the window to the boundless desert and its dazzling light. What seemed like a thousand workers crawled over the sand dunes like ants in a bustling colony.
But I couldn’t linger. Like them, I had work to do.
I went back through the blue door, into the narrow tunnel, and down the dark ramp again. I found one of the staircases from the tunnels to the basement and emerged at the ground-floor Command Center with the small, wooden animal leg in my hand.
I borrowed a piece of paper and a cheese, wrote MEKETRE on the paper, and carefully wrapped it around the artifact, at once so ordinary and so incomprehensible. I scribbled “Egyptian Department” on the Recipient line of the yellow envelope and hand-delivered it.
“Dorothea is going to want to see this immediately,” I told the receptionist in the Egyptian offices to encourage her to get it to the department’s chief curator. The receptionist seemed unmoved. “Like, now,” I added.
* * *
—
Dick Trachner’s peculiar test seemed small and petty next to my dismembered antelope, but I still wanted to prove myself, still wanted to show that I could be that get-it-done girl. I decided to play it cool and go back to my stool as I would after any assignment, unfazed by the desert diversion.
Before I returned to the Development Office, I stopped at the Temple of Dendur in the Egyptian galleries. I scanned its surfaces and there, below the hieroglyphs, “Leonardo 1820” was carved with all the splatter and wit of any graffiti—the tender amusement of another age, Helen’s brother, Bobby, having a hoot.
Next, I visited the galleries devoted to the Meketre treasure to see the Egyptian Offering Bearer. Her feathered dress and elaborate ankle bracelets mirrored my own sartorial ambitions. She rested on block-like bare feet, one advancing in front of the other, her gentle curves beautifully conforming to the shape of her unhurried stride—so different from my own pressured pace.
The serene expression on the Offering Bearer’s face enhanced her enduring calm and seemed the ideal welcome to the afterlife. Her hand barely touched her square basket, balanced on her head and generously filled with meats of all kinds. Instead, the hand soared upward in a slim silhouette that emphasized her grace. I noticed my own tense hands. It would be a while before I matured into any kind of elegance.
But right then, right there, in that gallery, I looked straight into the black ink of the Offering Bearer’s eyes, and we met across millennia. Past and present leaned lazily against each other again.
She delivered meats.
I delivered cheeses.
GIFT MAN
The collection is monumental, peerless, transformative: The Met deploys every possible adjective to describe its importance and its magnitude. The fifty-four paintings in this one private collection capture a critical movement in art history: its early experiments, lost works, not always the biggest and boldest examples, but the most important, the most indicative of its core.
As paintings conservators, we are invited to visit the collection. Our swoons bounce within the quilted silence of its Park Avenue home. “Pristine condition,” we whisper and sigh. We know these paintings could fill the very spot where the Met’s holdings have a gaping hole.
The man behind this extraordinary collection—the Gift Man—is giving it all away. He toys with every eligible museum—Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, L.A.—before deciding who should receive his art. The spry seventy-year-old deftly allows rumors to swirl about private meetings and stealth negotiations, leaving each suitor desperate and grasping. Every museum is on its knees, box open, ring glinting, quoting Byron, Browning, Billy Joel—anything to make this romance rain.
The Met plays the game with gusto and skill: 85 percent of our collection has come to the museum by gift. We want these paintings. We want them with an itchy, greedy, determined kind of desire. Like a kid on Christmas Eve wants a puppy with a bright red bow around its neck. But it’s bigger than that, because there’s more at stake. More ego, more conquest. There’s only one puppy, and only one museum will find it under their tree.
The Gift Man’s publicist drafts press releases about each possibility so that he can consider how they read. “A gift to the nation” has a nice ring. “A shocking surprise” also seems like fun. Ultimately, “strength to strength,” the Met’s favorite chestnut, wins.
We get the puppy.
* * *
—
A powerful magazine editor wants to mark the occasion with an image of the Gift Man at the museum, surrounded by some of the masterpieces that he will now share with the world. The magazine’s most famous photographer will take the picture.
The Famous Photographer’s squadrons land in the Met’s galleries like so many pigeons upon a ledge. They scout locations, remove unsightly details from view, adjust clouds to diffuse the light. There are test shots and trials and awkward discussions about how unusable the museum is as a backdrop for their work. “Not ugly,” they explain, “just not workable for us. We really need to be somewhere with texture. Where would that be?”
They dismiss the Roman Court as “so beige” and the Met’s original façade, still visible in the Petrie Sculpture Court, as “too brick-y.” They speak constantly and cryptically of a journey: “The African Galleries are nice, but we need to take the viewer on a journey.”
“How ‘bout Africa?” a guard murmurs in response to their marshmallow drama.
They seem to assume that the museum is withholding a secret set of rooms. And they are right.
We hide the conservation studios, siblings divided by medium: paintings, textiles, objects, paper, photographs, costume, arms and armor. The most beautiful among the sisters is ours, Paintings Conservation. Walls of twenty-foot-high windows fill the cavernous space with northern light. A forest of paintings crowds the room, propped on easels and against walls. Barbizon landscapes, German altarpieces, American portraits, modern murals. No frames. Our most heroic paintings sit raw and exposed.
The studio atmosphere is solemn. We work silently pursuing tender treatments that make no sense to the uninitiated: consolidating, swabbing, ironing, rolling. We clean a monumental landscape with Q-tips and fill tiny losses on a Renaissance panel with a miniature clutch of eyelashes. We remove a nest of pen scribbles—the pictorial complaint of a bored student—from a Matisse.
Despite our fragile work, the Famous Photographer gets access to this inner sanctum. A prize for the Gift Man.
* * *
—
In a gallery of monumental Buddhas, we guide the Famous Photographer’s team to our anonymous locked door. We climb two stories up an industrial staircase where a gray corridor leads them to our studio, glowing at the end of the hallway.
Distu
rbing our hush, the Famous Photographer’s team declares the space “so authentic” and “perfect just as it is.” Then, they request changes. Light meters and unwelcome curiosity poke into our intimate world. They measure as if planning to redecorate, move in.
They return the day of the photo shoot, hours before the Famous Photographer or the Gift Man, and set up on one end of our long room. We imagine their piles of equipment tipping the whole space on its side.
We are pulled from our work and brought into the foreign buzz of these fast-moving creatures. Four masterworks from the Gift Man’s collection are arranged for the camera. Old-fashioned hand cranks clamp the pictures into place on seven-foot-high wooden easels. Wheels make the easels mobile but vulnerable to the team’s frenetic movements.
Lights are organized and test shots taken, while the Famous Photographer judges from some unknown, off-site location. We watch, saucer-eyed, as one among the team, a fit Viking with long hair and facial scruff, plants his feet where the Gift Man will eventually stand. The Viking turns his eyes to the camera like an aspiring underwear model, narrowing them with shameless conceit.
We look on, dumbstruck by his lack of self-consciousness. Our lives are devoted to our absence—to the idea that no trace of ourselves should be left in our work. We have succeeded only if our interventions—new varnish, retouching, repairs—are not just invisible, but reversible, able to be completely erased—wiped away—by future generations.
The Famous Photographer arrives hours later, good-humored and ready. Her team swirls around her, enthusing about the light and the exclusive location. She plays the cool older mom, chatting amicably with us in a practiced style meant to be both friendly and aloof. She understands her star power and shows little care for the inconvenience she has caused.
But the Gift Man understands timing. He will not be denied his entrance. He arrives just late enough to ensure that we are all waiting for him and enters the studio to a ripple of applause. He is then positioned near his paintings, on the mark where the Viking preened.
The Famous Photographer cheers and hugs the Gift Man like this is the opportunity of a lifetime.
“Oh, Gift Man,” she coos from behind the camera, “I’ve gotta tell you, there is nowhere else I can imagine being than in this room, at this moment, with you, and these paintings.” She stresses the you over these paintings, stroking his ego in a way that she hopes will show up on film.
The Gift Man responds in his trademark vaudevillian style. “Hey lady, everyone here is in the same business: We make things look good.” He grins with a winking, complicit smile.
“I know the drill,” he continues, “Shoulders back! Tits out!”
As he shouts the words, he snaps into the pose of kings and generals. It is as if a wind machine has been switched on, pushing against his deflated cheeks and whipping his remaining strands of hair.
“Oh, you’re such a pro, Gift Man,” the Famous Photographer cajoles.
The Gift Man knows his tits line will warm up the room and send us all home with a story. And isn’t that the goal of it all, really? Sending us home with a story about him. Not just here in this room, but out there, in the world, forever.
And oh, do we tell the tale of this day again and again—for years! It is birthday cake and lollipops every time. We make it bigger and louder with each repeating, embellishing it, inflating it—and the Gift Man—until it almost bursts.
* * *
—
The photo shoot is efficient, extended just long enough to make it seem complicated. The Gift Man and the Famous Photographer leave together to continue their banter, while we restore the studio to its serene state.
We settle back on our stools and return to our delicate work. But we are changed, and as we clean our paintings with gentle swirling motions, the same song plays in our heads.
Shoulders back, tits out, we think, over and over.
We rearrange ourselves, lifting our torsos upright as if strings pull us from our shoulders and the tops of our heads. Our necks reach forward and our backs arch slightly.
Shoulders back. Tits out.
We look at Sargent’s Madame X stretching high above us as we tend to her varnish. Then to Prud’hon’s Talleyrand and Manet’s saluting matador, all nearby. They’ve heard the Gift Man, too, maybe that day, maybe long ago. Different gift men through the years, all the same.
Shoulders back, tits out.
It’s the card they all play, persisting and posturing to send us home with their story.
Slowly, imperceptibly, we experiment. Our spines a little straighter, our chests pulled taut, we allow ourselves a flicker of ego, a raindrop of recognition. And for just a flash, a blink, we try on a little glory, and become a little less invisible, a little harder to wipe away.
Shoulders back, tits out.
NIGHT MOVES
On Thursday mornings during his first few months as a security guard, Henry Radish had breakfast at a local diner called Nectar with his sometime girlfriend and fellow guard, Maira. Maira seemed to like him less and less every day. She was soft and what his English mother would call “Jewish-looking,” with pale skin and dark curls.
They were both part of a new generation of Metropolitan Museum guards slowly replacing the retiring ranks who for decades had come through an extended network in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. A new requirement that all guards have college degrees had shifted the makeup of the nine-hundred-person force. The rule traded old-timers, thick and sturdy as corner bookies, for performance artists and playwrights, musicians and video game designers. Maira herself was an aspiring singer and former mime.
Radish was often intimidated by Maira’s Upper-West-Side American confidence, but he was sent small life rafts of superiority when she mistakenly referred to something as “a mute point” or a “codundrum.”
“Henry,” she declared one morning after he had found a rent-controlled apartment, “You should wallow in your good fortune.”
He smiled and clicked his tongue, a technique he had developed instead of correcting her: Revel, he thought, revel in your good fortune. If he was wearing his Met tie, he would look down and flip it under itself, a habit to avoid eye contact.
Tall and thin with a flop of dark hair and pale eyes, Radish was striking, though not quite handsome. He had been taught by his mother that being thin was a sign of refinement, and so developed a peculiar vanity to accompany his angular frame.
Radish stayed with Maira because he liked sex, and it was hard to find someone to have sex with you during the day. Maira shared his overnight shift and his physical appetites, so the relationship was convenient if not very inspiring. It probably peaked when she nakedly mimed pulling him toward her with a rope.
Once, at the start of their evening shift, he and Maira had squirreled themselves away in an Education Center supply closet for a quick session. They hadn’t realized that the Musical Instruments Department was hosting a concert that night, and the closet they’d chosen was where the roses had been stored for the conductor.
Nina Beerbower, the department’s punctilious administrator, was unflinching when she discovered them and reached over their fleshy tangle to grab the vase. “Dammit, those flowers had better not be ruined,” she sputtered and moved on.
A memo was circulated the following day:
THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
INTERDEPARTMENTAL MEMORANDUM
TO: Richard M. Trachner, Senior Vice President, Operations
FROM: Philip Peterson Little, Chairman, Department of Musical Instruments
RE: Uris Closet
April 27, 1994
While preparing for our benefit concert last evening, members of my department encountered a naked couple engaged in the pursuit of carnal knowledge in a closet of the Uris Conference Room. Of course, we musicians are used to such indiscretion and indeed applaud this display of youthf
ul enthusiasm, but if this usage is to be encouraged, the closet doors should be equipped with an inside lock to prevent interlopers from being nonplussed, and staff users should be asked to check the day sheet first for possible schedule conflicts.
cc: Bruno Parker, Chief Security Officer
No repercussions followed, no identities were shared. At the monthly operations briefing, Bruno Parker made reference to “fraternization among colleagues,” which stirred some nervous chuckles, but he ended it quickly, only recommending that such activities be “taken off-campus.”
Radish had heard about a senior staff member who had kept his mistress and his dog in one of the museum’s art warehouses and wasn’t fired when this setup was discovered. He suspected it was the same guy who deprived the American Wing of a kitchen because he needed to shower after he shagged his secretary at lunch. True or not, the stories of this stranger helped relax Radish’s anxiety that his tenure at the museum would be short-lived.
In the weeks that followed, he kept his head down, arrived early at the Command Center to receive his nightly postings, and found himself “guarding” with a comical intensity that made him squint his eyes.
* * *
—
What’s your favorite work of art?” Maira asked over breakfast one day, before immediately offering up hers. “I love those jasper lips in Egypt. They’re so languorous, don’t you think?” Radish at first thought she said glamorous, but then remembered who was speaking. It had become a game trying to sort out what she really meant in these moments, and this one stumped him.
“Henry. Henry?” Maira demanded. “Are you even listening to me?”
“Oh, sorry,” he replied, scrambling. “I’m just considering the answer to your question. I don’t know. It’s bloody hard to choose from the whole museum, but let’s see…,” he hesitated. “Perhaps that Adam sculpture in the Blumenthal Patio. He’s got a real magic.”
Metropolitan Stories Page 4