Metropolitan Stories

by Christine Coulson

  Melvin thought about the museum inhaling so much of the world—all that history, all that spiritual juice, all the passions and laments of each visitor—without ever really exhaling. He regarded the stone-clad walls as somehow porous, allowing the particles of time to soak needily into their surfaces.

  How exhausting to hold everyone else’s shit, he thought. He considered the acrid linoleum of his apartment’s cabinets and floors, so resistant to absorption that everything clung to its surface, a sticky film across the impenetrable material of his life.

  Beyond the Medieval Hall, through an arched opening aligned with the gates, an expansive gallery stretched between the French period rooms to the south and the English period rooms to the north. More polished objects filled the cases of this gallery, while tapestries cloaked the walls in a faded glory rooted more in bounty than belief.

  Melvin found a bench to rest his office-conditioned body and the growing burden of his briefcase. He had been in motion for only twenty minutes but had already expended the daily dose of energy that he once used at work for his repeated laps to and from the coffee machine.

  He slouched forward to consider his next direction, facing France as though he might enter and buy a baguette.

  A bold brightness drew him to look to his right, where a skylighted space glowed like a sunrise on the horizon. Melvin stood up to poke his head in, leaving his heavy briefcase propped against the bench.

  He crossed the threshold of the space to find no art in sight. An enormous, open area expanded to create an angled shape—a baseball field appendage hanging into Central Park from one of the museum’s original façades. Generous aisles allowed you to walk around the perimeter of a two-story open core, capped by a glass pyramid. Staircases with polished brass handrails gave access down to the lower floor.

  Between the aisles and the central open area were unadorned walls, each pierced with enormous rectangular openings, like the ghosts of some long-lost series of murals. The gridded windows of the skylight projected an enormous black web over the fields of white concrete.

  This space was disorienting, and Melvin wondered if he had wandered into another museum, a place that no longer held the breath of centuries, but trapped a different kind of air: crisp, clear, new.

  He noticed a guard approaching and was strangely relieved.

  “Excuse me,” Melvin said, “What is this place?”

  “The Lehman Wing,” the guard responded. “One guy’s collection kept all together back here by itself. If you go through that opening over there you can see everything the way it was in his house.”

  The guard pointed toward a large, square portal along the perimeter of the space. “And man, those were some sweeeeeet digs.” He smiled, a gold tooth glinting in the penetrating light.

  “Jeez…wonder what he had to pay for this?” Melvin replied, arching his neck back as if he were measuring the cost per square molecule of air.

  “Oh, that’s some real dough, you know it,” the guard shook his head in disbelief. “Not too many people come back here…”

  “Well, thanks,” Melvin replied. “I may as well check out his stuff.” He spoke as if there were a tag sale inside.

  The extreme arrogance of this monument fascinated Melvin, and he wondered how it had happened. How did one guy make a deal with the Met to get all this space with his name on it?

  The privilege and strength of this complete stranger made Melvin’s own paltry footprint in the world feel even more trivial, particularly now that he had lost the only traction he once possessed.

  Melvin slipped through the unmarked opening that the guard had shown him and approached a glowing red room at odds with the bleached interiors of the vast open space. Inside, just as Robert Lehman had specified before he died in 1969, were the old red velvet curtains and flocked wallpaper from his family’s lavish house on West 54th Street.

  The room was small but filled with objects, its tall ceilings evocative of more stately proportions. Below the crimson wallpaper was a dado of deep brown wood against which Renaissance chairs and elaborately sculpted chests were placed. The whole space was outlined with intricate dark wood moldings along the ceiling, layered with swags and rows of ornament.

  Over a marble fireplace, its surface encrusted with further extravagant decoration, hung El Greco’s painting of St. Jerome—a wizened, bearded face, painted with gestural streaks, perched atop a voluminous red cloak, a portrait of intensity and disproportion. St. Jerome was flanked on the left by another El Greco, Christ Carrying the Cross—serene with glistening eyes despite the weight of his burden, a tragedy foretold by the painting’s brooding skies.

  “You should try that with a cigarette,” Melvin murmured to himself.

  On the right was a roughly painted Rembrandt, a diminutive man with a broad hat and bright eyes set into a piggish face.

  The opposite wall held a large Goya of a countess and her infant daughter—both glimmering in satin and lace—the mother staring away from the doll-like child. The countess appeared devoid of emotion, a stern porcelain mask within a dull haze of brown hair. Four eighteenth-century paintings of Venice, enlarged postcards of an unchanged city, surrounded the Goya portrait.

  Melvin walked slowly around the room and read the labels on each work of art: life and death, sex and love, war and religion, power and money. Small, dark statues of satyrs and angels stood like cast shadows in a long case. A group of sixteenth-century Limoges enameled objects weighed upon old shelves behind glass.

  A bronze sculpture of a woman sitting on top of a man down on all fours caught Melvin’s eye, and he leaned in to discover that it was a late-fourteenth-century vessel illustrating a tale in which Aristotle allowed himself to be humiliated by a seductive woman named Phyllis in order to teach his student, Alexander the Great, a lesson. Sex and power, Melvin thought.

  A pair of Dutch portraits depicted a bleak couple with bulbous bodies and dour prosperity. Power, but, Melvin suspected, probably not much sex.

  Melvin could see other rooms beyond the red one. A compelling painting of a woman in a blue dress hung over a fireplace in the next gallery, and two sinuous brass chandeliers led the way to further velvet walls beyond. But he found himself happily trapped in the consoling womb of this first chamber.

  In the center of the room, facing the fireplace, was an unremarkable old sofa, modest in scale, wide enough for only two people of Melvin’s size. This was Mr. Lehman’s real trick, the clever tactic that he knew would allow visitors to truly understand what it was like to live with masterpieces—to sit and read the newspaper with Rembrandt, to do the crossword puzzle with El Greco.

  Melvin hesitated, then sat on the old sofa, rigid and erect, expecting a guard to enter to correct him. But there was only silence. He looked like a patient in a dentist’s office, waiting for what he knew would be a painful appointment.

  His eyes swirled around the sumptuous room, searching for a way to comprehend its luxury. He felt the chasm between this privileged world and the lonely nights he spent with a TV tray and sitcoms for company. Maybe an occasional evening of porn.

  An image of the plastic-covered furniture from his childhood living room flashed in his mind.

  Melvin’s posture slackened into its usual weak arc. He sank into the sofa—really not that different from the old couch in his own bland apartment.

  Eventually—out of torpor, allure, or both—the Lehman sofa’s cocooning depths consumed him; he loosened his tie and slid down into the cushions, a gesture of comfort and occupation.

  Sitting within this grandeur, Melvin realized the frailty of the categories he had devised on the steps. What he had forgotten was something much bigger than those themes of love and death and power. What he encountered now was overwhelming beauty. It dominated his senses. It was a foreign experience, but he didn’t need to be rich to recognize it.

  The combination of the
soft patterned walls, the gilt curves of the frames, the subtle surfaces of the paintings, the warmth of the bronze statues and luminous wood—it all overtook him.

  Melvin’s much more ordinary pulp and flesh literally dissolved into the room, unable to sustain its existence against the might of such splendor. The more beauty he absorbed, the more it absorbed him. An equal transfer, melting his common self into Mr. Lehman’s illusion.

  What began as a dip into another man’s world became a slow vanishing. Melvin’s quotidian flab, his manufactured wool suit, the eroded leather and rubber soles of his shoes, all dissipated, followed by his turtle head, drifts of dandruff, meaty hands, and swollen, hairless ankles. It all quietly disappeared into soft, twinkling flecks.

  Melvin observed his own dissolution with relief. The yoke of decisions and bills and his unknown future loosened and then, finally, released. There would be no meeting at the unemployment office, no admission that he had lost his job.

  For hours he sat there, until he was completely invisible. His once grainy figure on the gallery video cameras faded like a thin cloud burned away by the sun.

  * * *

  —

  All clear! No one’s in here,” a guard shouted as she walked through the room at about 12:30 PM.

  As she passed, the newly invisible Melvin remained tucked into Mr. Lehman’s sofa, staring at the paintings of Christ, St. Jerome, and the piggish man: his new roommates. They were a humorless bunch—more pathos than party—their oversized hands occupied with books and a cross. But still, the total number of Melvin’s friends had just tripled. That was surely something. Of course, people at the office had called him Mel and asked about his day, but that was an office farce that adults were taught to mimic. No one had contacted him since he was laid off.

  “I’m not that fun either,” Melvin confessed to the threesome, by way of introduction.

  Melvin kept his back turned to the Goya countess and avoided the pouting Dutch couple, knowing that he would conquer them with the infinite time that lay ahead. Satyrs, angels, an enameled Mars and Minerva, were all by his side. That saucy Phyllis could ride him anytime.

  Melvin had claimed his future, his new home—a fresh routine among masterpieces and the lush trappings of a Lehman life. Life and death, sex and love, war and religion, power and money: all in this perfect room, its every surface coated in beauty.

  * * *

  —

  Walter was surprised when he didn’t see Melvin on the steps again. But he would think of him every time he looked up at those uncarved piles of stone.

  No one else noticed Melvin’s absence except his janitor-doormen—and only months later, when they were counting their holiday tips. Tommy, the youngest and most unreliable, said he’d heard Melvin had won the lottery, quit his job, and never come back. “Beautiful,” the eldest, Gino, responded wistfully, not looking up from sorting his money, but immediately smitten by the fantasy. In that freshly hatched fairy-tale, Melvin became their Lehman, a presence they could visit and admire only now that he was gone.

  ADAM

  He was put on a pedestal long ago, centuries. He had decorated a Venetian tomb. Now a museum pedestal defined his world and gave importance to the cold, hard surface of his beauty. He was a relic of the Renaissance, all marble glow and graceful balance. A depiction of a naked, hungry Adam before he munched the apple.

  This particular Adam was a favorite of scholars, but not of the visitors who crowded around other, more famous sculptures at the Met. His pure white form was the first life-sized nude of the Renaissance, idealized and simplified, with uninterrupted planes of muscle and a soft, dreamy grace. Supported by his right leg, his left foot lifted lightly off the ground, Adam was an art historian’s work of art: garden sculpture to most, but revolutionary to those who understood his historical force.

  So, Adam spent his days both admired and ignored. Through the centuries, his temptation to unhinge his glorious balance was as strong as that first apple must have been. He dreamt about bending his other knee or running his fingers through his hair. He imagined stretching the cavern of his mouth around the apple he held and hearing its hard crunch.

  Over those many years, Adam observed everything from men in tights to women in bustles and, since arriving at the Met in 1936, modern, often messy museum visitors. The current batch strolled and yawned, stared at their phones and pulled their limbs in every direction. Adam had long sketched these movements delicately in his mind—the heel leads, the elbow only closes in one direction, the fingers fold inward—and felt a fierce pull for that same freedom.

  * * *

  —

  Adam was five hundred and six years old when a guard called Radish arrived. Exceptionally tall and slender, he spent more time with the art than the others, and seemed to understand Adam’s powerful craving for some kind of action.

  Radish worked the night shift and would always visit the Blumenthal Patio where Adam stood. In the first few months, Radish shined: attentive and satisfied, occasionally joined by another, female guard. But later, he sulked: forlorn, always alone, somber and grieving.

  Radish would stare at Adam and sigh heavily, a sound identically shaped to Adam’s own yearning. The overlap forged a fierce connection between them—sculpture and security guard—both thwarted in their melancholy desire.

  “Hiya handsome,” Radish would say to Adam aloud, greeting him like an old friend. Adam hoped his distant expression, his glance upward and to the side, read as “don’t I know it” in response to each of Radish’s laments.

  Adam longed to reach out to Radish, but he knew better. He did his time, held his pose, waited for his heroic turn. All the art at the Met could move, but not until it had to. Not until it was needed.

  But he could start to plan. To prepare for that day, if it ever came.

  He began by only moving at night, only in one direction, only slightly.

  That first night, he put pressure on his left big toe and felt the pool of flesh expand. It was thrilling to stimulate that tiny piece of himself after five centuries.

  Further experiments followed: a centimeter-long glide of the hips, a reverent dip of the chin, the quiver of a pinky—never more than that. A midnight flip of the wrist was overly ambitious and set him still again for days.

  * * *

  —

  It was a Sunday night when Radish bubbled before him with a fresh enthusiasm. Adam observed this jolting excitement—this jumpy, skittish, twitching Radish—not understanding the source of his newfound gusto.

  Radish then darted to the service stairs in the southeast corner of the gallery, flung the door open, and disappeared. But Adam could tell he remained just beyond the door. Shadows blinked through the gap below, and curious noises echoed from the stairwell into the gallery.

  Moments after that heavy door closed, Security Chief Bruno Parker came through the Blumenthal Patio talking loudly into his two-way radio. “I’m in Blumenthal. I’ll check the front door and Great Hall Balcony, then take the service stairs back down here. Meet you in the Medieval Hall in fifteen.”

  The radio clicked off as Parker left, and Adam knew his chance to move had arrived. He would save Radish from being found by his boss in that stairwell.

  * * *

  —

  Adam’s first, bold motion was like stretching after a cramped overnight flight. Rather than the isolated pivots of his earlier experiments, the heavy shift ripped through years of constraint. Arms and legs flexed, torso and neck twisted, hips propelled forward, even eyebrows bent into action as his toes and fingers curled.

  His liberation flooded the room. Suddenly unbound, the thick exhilaration obscured everything. Space expanded within his body in a way that felt buoyant and rippled with life.

  Then it happened.

  He slipped. Or tripped.

  And crashed.

  The accident left him on the ground
, reaching toward the door where Radish had gone. The security camera was not angled to capture the fall; the footage from an adjacent gallery would only reveal the sudden appearance of Adam’s head on the floor.

  His legs had shattered. Thousands of pieces, drifts of pulverized marble, numb and disconnected.

  The pedestal had broken on Adam’s way down, and Adam knew that it would be blamed, not him.

  As he waited in the silence, he thought of the pedestal maker, a devoted carpenter who had served the museum for thirty-four years. The woodworker often visited his pedestals in the galleries with the humility of a farmer surveying a well-plowed field at the end of the day. This would crush him, too.

  * * *

  —

  Bruno Parker never came back. Adam laid on the ground until Radish emerged, limping, from the stairwell and discovered him.

  “Fuck,” Adam heard him say. Radish paused, tilted his head to the side, and seemed to register what it felt like to be truly broken, scattered in a thousand pieces. He gulped, gurgling with a sound that cried for everything that had ever been lost. Then he turned and went briskly away for help.

  * * *

  —

  They lifted Adam like a corpse, and he acquiesced quietly.

  The flash of cameras accompanied the mourning curators, methodical conservators, and the museum’s horrified Director. They could imagine no greater loss than the destruction of a work of art.