Metropolitan Stories
Page 5
“That’s a snooze,” Maira replied, disappointed. “He’s so stiff and he looks a little gay with that apple.”
“Well, darling, he is Adam, after all,” Radish answered with deliberate perk. “The fruit accessory is prescribed by the actual story.”
“It’s just another example of the male-dominated halicarchy,” she proclaimed with conviction. “This fetishizing of the heroic male nude. And don’t call me darling.”
Radish flipped his tie and spooned too many scrambled eggs into his mouth to prevent the obligation of responding.
“Have you ever felt like the objects are kind of, well, reaching out to you?” Radish asked after swallowing.
“What?” Maira answered.
“Like when you look at something in the museum, you feel something, well, beyond what you yourself would normally know?” he continued.
“For example?” Maira raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“Well, do you ever get cold near the Washington Crossing the Delaware painting? Or feel a breeze near that eighteenth-century Indian watercolor of the huge bat in the Islamic Galleries, like it’s flapping its wings?” Radish smoothed his pants knowing that he wasn’t getting any traction with Maira.
“No, Henry, I don’t,” she smirked, “And you sound like a fucking lunatic.”
Radish didn’t mention that he could also hear the complaints of the boys in Washington’s boat as they crossed the Delaware: “This was a crap idea,” the soldiers grumbled as Radish shivered.
“Right. Of course. It’s just, well, they are great paintings, I suppose. Powerful stuff…,” Radish stammered. He stood up and tucked his shirt into his pants for the third time since they’d sat down. “We should probably go,” he said to end the conversation.
Radish remained distinctive among the guards for his tidiness. He never liked to be wrinkled. His museum uniform, made from a synthetic that could be run through a machine and still not show a crease, was kept with meticulous care. He was perhaps the only guard who grumbled that the Met’s cleaning service, rather than truly pressing the shirts, simply left them stiff with starch.
Sometimes Radish would go up to the European Paintings galleries and admire the paper-like collars on the Dutch portraits. The people looked miserable, but they seemed to glow in the silvery reflection of their confining neck gear. Radish felt their piety like a too-tight skin when he looked at their rigid posture and tart lips.
What he had tried to explain to Maira at breakfast was his curious ability to transfer the sentiment of the Met’s art to his own soul. He experienced these things not like the average curator or visitor, but as if they were happening to him.
And not just piety and cold weather. Radish felt the triumph of Tiepolo’s towering Marius, as if he were the victorious Roman general. He endured the tragedy of David’s Death of Socrates like he actually stood there, in the room, when the gulp of hemlock went down. He would nearly collapse—soporific, tranquilized—as he looked at the three slumbering figures sculpted atop Lorenzo Bartolini’s Demidoff Table.
Before that morning, Radish had never tried to discuss this phenomenon, this appropriation of feeling; it was beyond his control and so fell among the many things that both frightened and sustained him: Maira, Manhattan…his mother.
But he did wonder. Could others hear Carpeaux’s Ugolino moan as he deliberated which son to eat? Could they hear the crowds around the Assyrian Gates of Nineveh? The pious chants in the Medieval Hall?
* * *
—
Radish had discovered the Met a few years earlier on his initial visit to New York, a present from his American grandmother when he turned twenty-one. He climbed the steps of the museum for the first time, entered the Great Hall, and had the strange urge to go immediately to the second floor and stand before a late-nineteenth-century photograph of the Countess de Castiglione. In it, she turns a single eye to the camera as she looks through a small oval opening in a velvet frame she holds.
Radish had never seen this image, didn’t know it existed, but the pull through the galleries was nonnegotiable, as if a small child were dragging him toward something shiny and loud.
“Welcome,” the image echoed in his head as Radish felt the bored privilege of a spoiled, beautiful woman. He did not find the sensation jarring. Rather, it seemed a poignant tribute to the distant dreams he himself had occupied for much of his life. He thought of his toy soldiers, arranged carefully in his mother’s garden when he was a child. He had spent hours mimicking tiny, desperate cries to voice the fear and peril he imagined any real soldier would feel.
Radish stood staring at the Countess in the photo, cloaked in the relief that comes from recognition, like hearing a familiar word in a foreign language.
It was the beginning of something.
* * *
—
Where are you posted?” Maira asked as they stood in the basement at the beginning of their shift.
“Greek and Roman, Medieval, then the American Wing, then Blumenthal.”
“Awww sweet, you can hang out with your little friend Adam,” Maira taunted.
Radish didn’t ask where she was posted, but he wanted to know. His affection for Maira persisted in spite of her teasing, driven by carnal need, inexperience, or both.
“See you later,” he said as he trailed down the gray hallway. A canopy of pipes and ducts sheltered the four-block-long warren of corridors, filled with empty crates and ancient workrooms where art was packed and pedestals built. Yellow signs declared, “Yield to Art in Transit.”
Most of the staff had left by the time Radish arrived each night. His night shift meant that he missed the final 5:30 “sweep” of the day when the guards moved from the perimeter of the building through all 962 galleries to make sure they were empty. Maira saw it once and described the guards as “optipresent,” dramatically appearing from every direction like an occupying army in the Great Hall.
From the basement, Radish would choose a staircase and ascend to the galleries, where he would push through one of many hidden doors into the radiance of what he thought of as “the big show.” Often he chose to land near the Temple of Dendur, majestic against a wall of windows that allowed the ancient monument to collide with modern life and Central Park traffic.
Or he would select one of the original staircases from the museum’s 1880 building, still hung with signs that read “TO THE GALLERIES” with gilded arrows pointing upward. From there he would arrive in the Medieval Hall with its glittering reliquaries overripe with faith and adoration; one held what was supposed to be Mary Magdalene’s tooth embedded in rock crystal and surrounded by gold filigree, like a dental trophy for best extraction. Radish’s gums throbbed violently when he looked at it.
Radish loved the instant when his slender silhouette stepped from behind the curtain, lit by the serenity of the museum at night. After the public had gone, there was an atmosphere within the galleries that took over like a thick fog. The silence crackled with a different energy, allowing the art to somehow relax, breathe.
That night, while Radish was in the Medieval Hall, he saw Maira through the colonnade leading to Arms and Armor and caught up with her.
“My brother used to love this stuff,” she said to him as he approached. Her eyes swept across the room. “I guess every boy does, at some age.”
Radish could hardly hear her. For him, the metal echoed with the howl of battles and death and smelled of burning corpses and ravaged flesh. At the same time, the ceremonial armor sang mightily, a parade of blind fervor bellowing around it like some overwrought opera.
“What?” Radish said too loudly, as if they were speaking at a rock concert. The word bounced around the room, pivoting off glass cases and stone walls.
“Why are you yelling?” she asked in a loud whisper, embarrassed despite their solitude.
“Sorry,” he replied, again too loudly
“Let’s get out of here.”
Radish pulled Maira into the Italian Decorative Arts Galleries where things were less turbulent for him.
“Where’s your next post? I have a break, so I’ll walk you there,” Radish said gallantly, knowing that surveillance cameras watched their every move.
“I’ve got to go to L.A.W. now,” Maira replied, referring to the modern wing. Radish looked nervous. Modern art was complicated: at times stolid in its formalist acrobatics and then swirling and tumbling with death and mortality in a way that was overwhelming. Rothko’s No. 13 painting could simply bang him off his feet. He had learned to avoid it.
“Good,” he said, “let’s go by the Leigh Bowery portrait. That might be my second favorite work of art, if you’re still interested in my list.”
“The giant potato man?” Maira screeched. “Reeeaally? I mean, I love Lucian Freud, and it’s a great painting, but there’s certainly no beauty in a big, naked fat guy on a bench.”
Radish frowned. He often sought out the poetic mass of Lucian Freud’s naked portrait of Bowery. The six-foot canvas could barely contain the figure’s bulk of raw flesh, seen from behind, leaning forward with a tired, lumbering consent. Radish loved the picture’s sleepy heft and felt it like a lonely embrace.
“I don’t know,” he said, deflated, “it soothes me sometimes.”
“Have you noticed that all your favorite works of art are naked men?” Maira quipped, smiling. “If I didn’t sleep with you so often, I’d swear you were gay.”
“Well, I’ll just have to keep proving myself then,” he smiled and nudged her gently.
He left Maira in the modern wing and headed upstairs for the last ten minutes of his break. In the wake of Maira’s bite, he knew his insecurity could be recalibrated with Bronzino’s sixteenth-century Portrait of a Young Man. Its direct stare and mild condescension filled Radish with renewed swagger, like a houseplant freshly watered.
He moved to his post in the American Wing where he discovered an 1828 miniature painting no bigger than the palm of his hand, depicting only the ethereal breasts of the artist—swollen, glowing pearls within a silkened nest—painted for her lover who had married someone else. The tiny masterpiece sent him spinning with her desire. Her jealous passion tightened the crotch of his pants and made him lightheaded in the small limits of an otherwise bland room filled with traditional portraits.
“What are you looking at?” Maira snuck behind him, peered into the case, and laughed. As he sheepishly turned away, she noticed the swelling silhouette at his crotch. “Jesus!” she yelled, “Do you have a boner?!”
In earlier days, Radish would have scuttled into a closet with Maira to finish what the picture had started, but instead he escaped to the boys in Washington’s Revolutionary boat to cool things down. Maira followed, still laughing.
“Well, my friend, I think we just found your new favorite,” she joked.
* * *
—
Radish would look back on that evening fondly after Maira had grown tired of him. Only three weeks later, the break-up unfolded with a clash between his youthful reticence and her dramatic pouting.
“Henry, maybe I don’t want to have sex with a guy whose arms are skinnier than mine?” she whined. “My therapist says it’s not healthy for my body image.”
“Darling, your arms are lovely. Their size has never diminished my attraction to you.” Radish replied, in his youthful scrambling—and with an unfortunate formality.
“Stop calling me that! What kind of guy in his twenties talks like that? Daahhhling—like you’re in some old movie?”
Radish sputtered. “Darling” had always worked for his father. OK, he would be more straightforward, more American.
“Maybe I like your fat arms?” His voice climbed upward at the end of the question—and he immediately regretted the words—as he reached for her.
She pulled away violently. “Nice! So, my arms are fat? It’s a mute point now anyway, Henry,” she pressed, “It’s over.”
Moot, he corrected in his head, it’s a moot point. She really would have been better off as a mime, he thought.
* * *
—
The nights were long without Maira, and Radish drooped like a puppy that lost its chew toy under the sofa. Maira asked to be moved to the day shift so he never saw her, except once from the bubble of the morning bus as she walked into the museum at 84th Street.
Radish whiled away some of his loneliness at his posting near the third-century-BC Etruscan chariot, enjoying the thunder of its racing glory. But most often, he would go visit the slumping woman in Corot’s painting The Letter to feel the crushing heartbreak of a kindred spirit.
In Radish’s lowest moments, he tried to lean on his vanity. He knew exactly where all the reflective surfaces were: glass doorways, cases for Japanese screens, large-scale photographs in the Menschel gallery, all gave a full-length view—while the Wrightsman period rooms offered repeated reflections. How eighteenth-century France flattered with its faint candlelight and smoky glass.
But this once-reliable meal still left him hungry.
In the Greek and Roman galleries, he compared his own taut frame to the idealized nudes. As the streetlights raked across the Greek rooms along Fifth Avenue, Radish would jump from one to the next, flexing and posing to emulate the posture of each figure.
The dance would continue in the Engelhard Court, where he jockeyed among the American sculptures. He would begin with the golden Diana of the Hunt, alight on one foot and poised with her bow, and end by dramatically collapsing into the pensive Hiawatha, seated with crossed calves as he stroked his chin in contemplation.
Cameras captured this dance in the Security Control Room, but Radish didn’t care much anymore. Rumors had long tied him to the legendary closet romp, earning him a bold and mysterious reputation. Stories like that were unshakable, and their details were blurred and bloated every day over the cafeteria hot plates.
Dave, a thirty-three-year veteran guard with a gold tooth and the cool of a rap star stopped him one day in the Staff Cafeteria to tell him he was the talk of the Sentry Booth.
“You’re a real badass, my friend.” Dave whispered over the coffee cart early one morning. Radish looked around to find the intended target for this comment, but only saw a serene, Medieval Department curator quietly reading a book titled Holy War, Martyrdom and Terror over her oatmeal.
“Well, er, thank you,” Radish responded.
“Keep up the moves, my friend, keep it up,” Dave said as he smiled and walked away, past the angelic medievalist.
This brief camaraderie with another guard was oddly buoying, but he still missed Maira. Still suffered the dull stab of his first heartbreak. Still thought of his comment about her arms and felt it like a withering punch. Still wondered how he might get her back.
* * *
—
Radish’s anchor was Adam, the marble Renaissance sculpture he had told Maira was his favorite.
“Hiya handsome,” he would say to Adam each night as he stood in the Blumenthal Patio, a double-height relic of sixteenth-century Spanish architecture named after the donor who gave it to the museum in the 1940s.
Adam was different from the other works of art. Radish always felt the statue’s desire, not so much for the apple, but for some other satisfaction. It felt like hunger, but the pull was more desperate.
The two—sculpture and security guard—shared a fundamental, central ache.
It was while staring at Adam’s naked figure that the fragile bubble of a solution sprang from Radish’s mind. He just had to make his arms bigger than Maira’s! Huge arms, he thought. Big, muscly arms. Adam didn’t quite have them, but Radish could. Flexing, manly, pumped-up, action-hero arms. He neglected to envision how these bloated arms would look on his attenuated shape—outsized water wings on a late-learning swimmer.
Push-ups, he thought, push-ups.
The urge to pursue this new idea was childishly singular, and thrilling in its novelty. But privacy was needed. Posing with statues was one thing, but full-on exercise in his pressed uniform was beyond what he could share with the cameras. Radish looked at the door to the service stairwell off the Blumenthal Patio, a workout room if ever there was one.
As he slid into the limited space, the heavy door closed behind him, encasing him in bright fluorescent light. He paused, scoping out the perfectly sized landing where he stood and reassuring himself that there were no cameras to capture his impending activity.
The stairs’ wide handrail would serve as the ideal rack for his uniform, and with practiced expertise he rigorously folded the synthetic suit. His pants hung stiffly alongside the origami collapse of his jacket and starched shirt, with his tie still threaded through the buttoned-down collar.
Radish began his push-ups in this private chamber, plunging forward with greater and greater vigor as if there were a trophy at stake. Sweat appeared on his forehead, confirming the cleverness of his decision to remove his clothes.
An experiment with a one-armed push-up had disastrous results likely to materialize in some curious bruising, but Radish remained undeterred. He imagined the exercise immediately inflating his flaccid arms.
Maira would be his again.