The gallery was treated like a crime scene. They carefully drew a grid over the floor, violently scattered with marble dust and shards. The contents of each square were gathered into a plastic bag and numbered, like art CSI.
* * *
—
It would take eleven years to rebuild Adam—along with a new stone pedestal. His pieces would reunite like gentle handshakes, miniature grips of silent, steady embrace.
Adam would become a star at the Met for his resurrection and be given his own gallery to match his new fame.
He would never move again.
And Radish would never return.
But Adam would always hold dear that electric memory of freedom, that sweet, syrupy, airborne moment of release. The rush of a boundary crossed, mixed with the black depth of the unknown. It seemed to last hours as he spun toward the ground that night, drowned in the whir and fizz of the gallery’s darkness.
Now, Adam has fiberglass pins in his legs and invisible patches throughout his body. Like an ancient athlete, he has retreated. He no longer watches the visitors with intrigue and envy, no longer wonders when he will be needed. He lived that dream, tasted that apple, and now only tends to his stillness, and rests.
BIG-BONED
I like to pretend I’m judging the museum staff when they’re paying for their food.
Sometimes I just raise an eyebrow at the amount as I type the individual prices into the cash register.
Sometimes I comment without any eye contact, out loud but as if I’m talking to myself, “Well, somebody is hungry today…”
They don’t like this.
I do.
It’s fun to get dramatic, and I exaggerate my Italian accent.
“Oh bambino, you be careful, right? It’s winter now, but bikini season coming.” I say this to the big guys in Construction.
You see, I’m “big-boned,” like those Construction guys.
Man? Woman? Not sure.
I’m just a figure, an underdrawing.
In 1545, I was sketched in charcoal on a canvas by the Venetian painter Tintoretto. Il Furioso, they called him, because of his bold style and speed. He hoped my lines looked like Michelangelo’s.
Michelangelo’s drawing and Titian’s color: that’s all Tintoretto ever wanted for his art.
My hair is a series of thick squiggles, my eyes black pools capped by quick staccato lines for eyebrows. The rest of me is made of big, arching gestures: meaty arms, a strong neck, bumps of drapery. Believe me, I’m no Michelangelo.
I was drawn on the canvas for The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, part of a group of figures standing around while Jesus makes food for thousands from just a few loaves of bread and a couple of sardines.
Tintoretto left me out of the finished painting. A last-minute change in composition. But I’m still there, underneath that miracle, below that painted surface.
No one recognizes me. Not even the curators from the European Paintings Department or the conservators who have examined me in infrared scans.
I am part of the Met’s collection, yet totally invisible.
I came down to the cafeteria to help the staff, to comfort them. A year ago, two curators stood near my painting mourning the destruction of an Italian sculpture of Adam. They wept as they recalled the crash. The brutal, pulverizing crash. I imagined the staff’s grief. A death in the collection needed kindness and empathy and a figure on which to lean, even a hastily sketched one. Could broken lines repair broken hearts over broken marble? I was going to try.
Early the next morning, I pushed past the surface of Tintoretto’s painting into the museum. It was like passing through a puddle, slipping into the dark water, and coming out the other side. On that first day, I felt so piccolo, so exposed. I headed to the Staff Cafeteria where I knew I’d find them.
Pani e pesci, I thought to comfort myself as I tripped on my robe while crossing the empty museum, it’s just loaves and fishes. I ditched the robe in the cafeteria locker room and, after a little rummaging, presto, a uniform.
“Va bene,” I said as I looked in the mirror, hoping that my 450-year affiliation with those loaves and fishes would translate into some kind of food service experience.
My nametag now says “J.P.” I wear it on the black shirt that’s part of my uniform. I got J.P. from the wall of donor names on the side of the stairs off the Great Hall.
The “Staff Caf,” as they call it, is where they all gather. The staff emerges from their isolated rooms, tucked in corners throughout the museum, to eat and chatter here each day.
It’s no palazzo, this place. A bunch of low-ceilinged rooms below the Egyptian Galleries filled with bland chairs and tables, including one room with a fountain, where people used to smoke. It has an area that serves hot food and another that serves cold. A salad bar, coffee station, and special theme days, like Mexico! or Strawberries! Everyone complains about the stomachaches.
But when filled, the dull atmosphere is brightened by a kind of carbonated conversation: warm and gossipy. Famiglia. The talk stretches between tables and across departments to keep inaccurate stories alive. These tales swell into a shared mythology. I’ve overheard them all: covert romances, dubious decisions, demanding donors, the night-shift antics of a guard called Radish.
My affection for the staff blossomed quickly. I love them all. The weird ones. The rude ones. The funny, cheap, and grumbly ones. The stylish ones, the chatty ones, the generous, short, and tired ones.
I once saw one of the skinny girls fall in her super-high heels right near the mashed potatoes. She slid like a cartoon character, until a guard caught her just before she hit the ground. Her skirt flew up and inverted around her waist, like one of those cones you see on the head of a dog. I love her, too.
The other cashiers don’t see what I see.
They don’t feel the way I do about the staff.
And the staff knows it, like a crush across any cafeteria. When you’re walking with your tray, and someone’s watching you, even if you’re not interested, you know they’re there. When they tease you, you feel that crush like a swinging pillow to the head.
They all wonder about me. I catch them looking. They know I see them as they really are.
I listen to the curator of Byzantine art explain a complex theory she has about why someone was hired in the Director’s Office. She’s trained in messy histories told through intricate objects. For her, everything bends to a complicated plot, with secret chambers hiding pilgrimage treasure.
I like to think of the archaeologists in pith helmets with Indiana Jones whips, gathering treasure as a huge boulder rolls behind them, propelled by some ancient curse. But I hear them talking about volume thirty-two of their cuneiform text translations and know it’s all more serious than that.
The guys who change the lightbulbs—the “lampers”—always have light still blazing in their pockets and smeared across their uniforms. The brightness gets trapped under their fingernails, too.
The Department of Photographs sits together every day like a group portrait commemorating some daily, fairy-tale Thanksgiving.
There’s a tiny old man who organizes the Met shopping bags in a basement hallway. He has long, thin threads of hair bound with hundreds of rubber bands forming an inch-wide stick down his back. No one’s ever seen him outside the building. I’m always nice to him. He leaves rubber bands everywhere he goes, like a trail of breadcrumbs leading back to his colossal paper bag mountain. It is said that he lives there in great splendor.
Sometimes the people who manage the museum’s money come in quickly, but they always leave to eat at their desks. They are different. They know they scare the others.
I’m not part of the staff’s conversations. I only have a moment with them, so we have a different relationship. And as with any Italian love affair, there must be seduction.
At
first, I am distant with each one, transparent with my judgment, curt with my responses. Chilly.
“A lot today,” I say aloud to myself as I tally their tray-load of food, like I’ve been tracking them for a while. A few noises, like, “hmmm…” or a simple, bemused “allora” always rattle them a little. Total silence sends them spinning.
Despite this judgment, I watch them specifically pick my line—one of four to choose from—and slide their plastic trays along the grooved metal counter toward me. They stare at me, the shy side-glance of the beloved, for as long as they can until they think they’ll get caught. It’s always two seconds too long.
Then, one day—sometimes it takes months—I think, basta. It’s time. The hard-to-get routine must yield to unbridled charm. It begins simply, but with a happy urgency.
“Have a good day, baby,” I say sweetly, and a little loud. They are startled and then pretend that’s normal.
“You, too,” they shoot back hesitantly. And then they go tell their friends.
I keep it coming.
“I like your pants.”
“You look good today, honey.”
“You have a nice weekend.”
“Baby, where you get that shirt?”
The abruptness and lack of escape makes for a kind of intimacy.
And I wait for them to love me back.
They don’t see me yet, but I dream that someday they’ll know me for the half-finished drawing that I really am. Because, hey, aren’t we all a little non-finito?
For now, I’ll keep showing up every day and slipping back under the blanket of my painting each night—secretly knowing that the staff is just like me. They appear in the Staff Caf like I appear on those infrared scans—obvious, undeniable. And then they disappear, melting back beneath the painting of the museum, quietly anonymous in their making and their doing.
Until the next day, when we all reappear in that basement again. They load their trays, swap their stories, and stare at me—one more time—for just a little longer than they should.
FOUND
It was just past noon when Virginia Gerard emerged from the empty English period rooms with plans to head out to the steps for a cigarette. She saw the abandoned briefcase alongside the bench. She had been trained for this situation, but now questioned the protocol.
What if someone just left their briefcase there? What if they only went to the bathroom? What’s the big deal, she thought to herself.
But she knew there would be trouble if she didn’t follow procedure, and she couldn’t afford to lose this job or its health insurance. Unlike many guards, this was not Virginia’s “day job.” This was her job. She was not a conceptual artist or fiction writer or ukulele player. She was a single mother with gnawed fingernails chiseled by the lasting disquiet of struggle.
Virginia liked the authority of being a guard. In those galleries, she did not feel small and pitied and watched. In the museum, she did the watching. She did the protecting. She had the answers.
But she was no hero. She just wanted a cigarette.
Virginia waited a moment to see if someone would come and collect the briefcase. Leaning against the wall, annoyed by the intrusion into her break, she wondered if she could pretend she hadn’t even seen it.
When no one appeared—and after considering the security cameras that would have tracked her staring at the case—she walked toward the Medieval Hall and picked up the in-house phone to dial 4000.
“Command Center,” the supervisor said immediately.
“Um, uh, hi. I’m on break, but there’s a large briefcase left in the gallery between the Medieval Hall and the Lehman Wing. I think we’re supposed to tell you when that happens?”
She emphasized the break, naively hoping he might tell her to go ahead and leave it to him.
“Are you a security officer?” the supervisor asked curtly.
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. I should have said that,” Virginia replied.
“Anyone around there? See anyone who could claim it?” the supervisor continued.
“No, I don’t see anyone. I’ve been watching it for about five minutes to see if someone would come get it.”
“And where exactly is it?” he pressed further.
“It’s next to a bench in the gallery west of the Medieval Hall, between the French and English period rooms,” Virginia explained.
“OK, let me get it up on the screen.” He scrolled through the camera views until the gallery was on the central monitor. “Yep, I’ve got situational awareness on it now.”
Virginia rolled her eyes at the tough-guy CIA lingo the Met security chiefs loved to use.
The supervisor zoomed in on the worn briefcase, then took a deep breath before continuing.
“OK, what’s your name?” he asked.
“Virginia Gerard.”
“OK, Virginia. You’re going to do exactly what I tell you.”
“OK.”
“First, go back to the briefcase and rope off that gallery from the Medieval Hall, the French period rooms, and the English period rooms. That will isolate the area. Then, go into the Lehman Wing and get the other guards—I think Dave is back there today.
“You’re going to sweep those galleries and get everyone out of there via the ground floor service exit. I can’t see anyone in there on my screens, but I may be missing people. You should be able to clear the galleries and go out through the basement at 84th Street. Move any visitors to the street and then come to the front steps to be redeployed. Got it?”
“Yes, sir. Are we, uh, evacuating?” Virginia asked with a tone that suggested that this was somehow her fault. She just wanted a cigarette.
There was a pause before he answered, but she knew already.
“You’re damn right we’re evacuating,” he said just before hanging up.
Virginia did as she was told, and soon the usual klop-klop of visitors walking on the museum’s stone floors was replaced by the buzz and commotion of hundreds of footsteps moving toward the Fifth Avenue entrance. The practice of polite whispering had also been abandoned, and a wave of echoed complaints tumbled through the galleries.
Even the art speculated about this jolt to the Met’s usual rhythm. The tapestries that surrounded the briefcase regarded it with disdain—a rat in a connoisseur’s kitchen. Some objects remembered when they themselves were evacuated during World War II, ninety truckloads filled with works of art packed up like children, sent to live on an estate outside Philadelphia, where they stayed for two years. Safe in their crates, but blinded from one another, they longed for home and the release of being unpacked and displayed, air and visitors floating around them again.
Now, the displaced swarm streamed past the art and out of the museum, confused and irritated, sloppily spilling from all three sets of doors at the top of the Fifth Avenue steps, like commuters from a broken-down bus.
The staff connected lazily within the throng, got food for lunch, and gossiped, sharing conflicting explanations for what was happening. The locals shrugged with a detached cool, signaling that they could come back anytime. The tourists consulted their guidebooks, happy to replace the Met with another attraction nearby. Walter considered the mess that this slow stampede would leave behind on his steps.
The suburban ladies in their pantsuits and carefully tied scarves held the most ire. They planned their museum visits like military operations, with prescribed train times, lunch reservations, and advanced reading. They tensely gripped their handbag straps at their shoulders and clucked about not renewing their Met memberships.
In the final years of the twentieth century, fear was not yet a reflex. The whole thing was just a hassle, an interruption of plans. Within two years, the Met’s vulnerability would shift to a constant concern. Crowds scrutinized. Entrances watched. Bags checked. No one would hesitate about an abandoned briefcase again.
He looked to his right, where his steely boss, Dick Trachner, stood next to him, and nodded with affirmation that the museum’s security protocol was proceeding as planned.
* * *
—
Melvin’s briefcase would be mangled by the bomb-sniffing dogs who were summoned by the police. It would be removed from the museum, put in an armored truck, and brought to the NYPD Bomb Squad on Charles Street.
Inside it, they would find only blank paper.
Farther south, down on Varick Street, an unemployment counselor would shout Melvin’s name into a room filled with orange plastic chairs, hear no response, and move to the next person on his list.
Virginia would sit on the steps and finally have her cigarette, not realizing that they had just rehearsed for a day, not long away, when the world would shatter.
THE TALENT
Nick, I love you, but I am hanging up the phone. I promise, I’ll figure this out.” Click.
Nick slumps in his chair as he hears this and knows she’s right. She will protect him. But his instinct is always to fret, always to worry about what is not said, what he doesn’t know, what is coming, lurking, looming.
In the third grade, his teacher asked her students to bring in an old magazine for an art project, and he could barely sleep that night. He wondered if he should take his grandfather’s Field & Stream (more socially acceptable) or his mother’s House & Garden (better images). What would everyone else bring? What were they going to be asked to do with it? What was the plan?
He settled on an issue of TIME. They were instructed to use the magazines to make a collage that visualized a colloquial expression. He pasted the figure of a tiny woman under a large image of Jackie Kennedy’s mouth and connected the two with a hooked handle to illustrate “Let a smile be your umbrella.” It was a phrase his mother would repeat dismissively when he sulked about being excluded at recess. She had long ago labeled him an Eeyore for his sullen anxiety. He still thinks she gave bullshit advice.
Metropolitan Stories Page 9