Metropolitan Stories

by Christine Coulson

  Nick pushes back from his chair and wonders if it’s time for lunch. He stares at the face of his watch as if it’s in another language, one that he used to know, but now struggles with. It is only 10:30. He decides to go to the Staff Cafeteria for a coffee, more for the comfort than the caffeine.

  * * *

  —

  I can’t shake you today. You’re like a bad penny,” Julia says with a smile from behind him at the coffee station. She is tall and capable, in a no-nonsense “I-know-more-than-you-need-to-know” way. “Sorry I hung up on you, but you have to trust me. I’ll get you the gallery space.”

  “I know, I know, but someone told me that Marta already got the B Galleries for her Middle Kingdom show, and I really can’t have my pictures hanging on eleven-foot-high walls in Service Building B. The work needs to breathe, and I promised all the lenders that we were in the B Galleries.”

  “Heard it all this morning, Nick,” Julia sings, her voice trailing off as she walks away with her tea. “Good morning, J.P.,” she adds, greeting the cashier. Nick realizes Julia has moved on and quickens his pace to get behind her. “I’ll pay for this gentleman’s coffee, too. He needs a break.”

  “OK, baby. You looking good today.” J.P. winks at Julia, ignoring Nick.

  “No, no, I got it.” Nick reaches for his wallet with a jolt, as if he’s just woken up to what’s happening. He is unfailingly nervous about money.

  “It’ll be fine, Nick,” Julia snaps, “Like I said on the phone, let me take care of it.”

  “The coffee or the galleries?”

  “Both! Argh. Just give me a day.” The frustration in her voice is clear, but tinged with affection. They have been here before.

  “OK, OK. Call me when you know anything.”

  She turns her head and rolls her eyes with a smile, a gesture that reassures him of her devotion.

  “Or if I can help!” he yells after her.

  She is on her way now, advancing with quick, deliberate strides, calling over her shoulder, “You can’t.”

  He looks up and sees Dave, a guard he’s known for fifteen years and who has witnessed this exchange.

  “Don’t mess with her, man,” Dave offers, “She’ll do what she says. Always does.” He has seen a lot standing in those galleries, heard a lot in this cafeteria.

  “I know, I know. But my pictures cannot hang in rooms with ten-foot ceilings,” Nick says, a little excited to have a new audience for his complaint. That may actually be why he came down to the basement cafeteria. Everyone in his department has heard his grumbling already, and agrees with him. He needs fresh ears.

  “She won’t let that happen,” Dave replies and turns away, “My break’s over. See you in the Petrie Court.”

  Nick looks at his coffee and realizes he forgot to add milk. He heads to the milk station and scans the room for anyone else he might buttonhole over his issue, but the breakfast rush has passed, and it’s too early for the lunch crowd. The room is empty except for a huddle of riggers getting ready to move a monumental Egyptian statue. At another table, some technology guys in matching fleece and khakis talk about cabling. Not his people.

  He could go upstairs and call his husband. He won’t want to hear it, but he’s legally obligated to listen. No, he won’t have the right passion for the problem, Nick thinks. Only another curator will understand.

  He dials the head of the Medieval Department, but gets voicemail. He tries Katrina in Asian Art, but is told she is in London to preview the auctions. On his third try, he gets Tim, the head of Paintings Conservation, who is empathetic and patient, but hardly delivers the requisite outrage.

  “I’m sure Julia will figure it out. I know it’s hard, but just let her do her thing.”

  “I know, I know, but how does this even happen? I’m told one thing at one time, and another thing later, and I just don’t know how we are supposed to function like this. I feel like we never know what’s going on. My pictures cannot hang on nine-foot walls.”

  Tim sits on the other end of the phone and scans eBay for Staffordshire figurines to add to his personal collection. Nick’s rant unfurls into a looping commentary that is both absurd and self-sustaining. He inventories every conspiracy theory he has hatched about why he is being assigned the low-ceilinged Service Building B instead of the grand B Galleries for his show.

  Tim clicks “Add to Cart” on a flawless porcelain cow creamer, and listens. He has served this purpose before, the role of the empathetic ear. He is known as a benevolent colleague for his ability to appear concerned by saying very little.

  “Let me know if there is anything I can do,” Tim finally interrupts after ten minutes. “I’m happy to chime in if it would be helpful.” It’s the longest Tim has spoken during the call, but it’s all Nick will remember.

  After they finish, Nick puts his head in his hands and registers again that he is losing his hair. He has just turned fifty, and the displacement of volume from his head to his midsection is a growing trend, one only accelerated by his current stress. He left Minnesota at nineteen with a nerdy charm—wavy dark hair and the nose of a Roman senator—at odds with the Nordic looks of the corn-fed boys at his high school. But in the east coast world of pasty academics and bookish intellectuals, he was a bright and handsome Midwesterner: F. Scott Fitzgerald without the complicated wife. That new status alone propelled him to pursue his PhD. Now, the gradual dimming of that early star is devastating. His gaze lands on his shirt buttons, small fortifications straining to contain his stomach’s unscheduled expansion.

  He knows he should call Mrs. Havering to continue his charm offensive. She could pay for both the exhibition and the catalog. And if she were the show’s sponsor, there is no way they would move him out of the B Galleries. The price is a near-daily phone call to listen to her whinge about the world’s slights against her.

  Nick is willing to indulge her; he knows that much of his success has been tied to his consistent ability to entice the right patrons and collectors. But he needs an angle for Havering. He looks at the exhibition checklist on his desk, the inventory of every work of art he wants for the show, and decides to give her an update on the loans. He finds her number on a sticky note attached to his phone, a constant reminder to call and cajole.

  After several rings, a voice says, “Haver-bing-ah reseedi-dence.” The accent is thick, but its origins unclear.

  “Hello. Is Mrs. Havering at home? This is Nick Morton from the Metropolitan Museum.”

  No response follows. Instead, the phone clatters on the kitchen counter and then drags across the granite until it falls to the floor. Nick can envision the phone itself, a yellowing, rotary dial, Park Avenue relic installed in the early 1980s.

  “Hello? Who is this?” Mrs. Havering sounds skeptical that anyone is really on the phone.

  He hears the maid’s quick, heavy breathing through the kitchen phone before she bangs it back into its cradle.

  “Mrs. Havering. It’s Nick…Nick Morton, from the Met.”

  “Oh, hello. What do you want?”

  Nick is not surprised by the brusque tone; it is always the same, and makes the tempo to every conversation with Havering uneasy.

  “I thought you would be excited to hear that we got the loans from Berlin. They are giving us every painting we asked for.”

  “Well, I’m not sure why I would want to know that, but OK,” she stammers with cynical force, then tries to be positive. She likes Nick. “That’s good news. It is. You know I was supposed to go to Berlin last year, but I didn’t.”

  This, too, is typical of Havering. She has a way of interjecting information without participating in the standard protocol of fleshing out any kind of story around it. There is no back and forth, just forth. Nick should recognize his own twin in this style, but doesn’t.

  “Uh, sorry to hear that—” he searches, wondering if this is the right app
roach.

  “Well, I didn’t want to go. If I did, I would have gone.”

  “Of course,” he stabilizes, but knows he will capsize again. He will not bring up the gallery situation for fear of completely sinking.

  “If that’s all you want to tell me, I have to go. I have a board meeting at Lincoln Center so they can show me how ungrateful they are for my generosity. Again.” Click.

  It is the second time someone has hung up on Nick today. He sits holding the phone, listening to the lights buzz above him as he looks around his office. The desk and table overflow with books and papers in a system he alone claims to understand. He has nested here over the last two decades.

  Havering makes him think of his own mother, who has spiraled into an equally tyrannical grouch at age eighty-one. When she last visited, she removed the flowers from her room, telling him, “I don’t need these,” as she dropped the vase on the kitchen counter with a dull thump. “Let a smile be your umbrella!” he should have said.

  Nick suddenly realizes he is ten minutes late for the Dry Run and races down the hallway, taking the stairs to the second floor and skirting past visitors to cross the Nineteenth-Century Paintings Galleries toward the Boardroom elevator. By the time he reaches the Rodin galleries, he realizes he is the source of the panting sound he hears. He slows down to an uneven, hustling gait, so that he is not visibly sweating when he arrives.

  The meeting is a dress rehearsal for the Trustee Acquisitions Meeting, where objects are presented to be purchased for the collection. This Dry Run phase is a peer-review process, and much more intimidating than the actual Trustees. Curators can be ruthless or supportive, and ultimately make recommendations to the Director, who decides which objects will move forward.

  Nick makes a loud entrance, the kind that is inevitable when hoping not to be noticed, activating every squeak and thud available in the double doors of the cavernous boardroom. As he moves inside he nearly knocks over a four-thousand-year-old Cycladic terracotta jug, one of the objects installed for review around the perimeter of the room.

  He then abandons any attempt at stealth.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he says to the entire room. As he circles the enormous table to find an empty seat, he unspools his thoughts. “What a day. I was just on the phone with Mona Havering, and boy is she hard work. And now my exhibition galleries are being taken away. Julia says she’s going to figure it out, but I don’t know what’s going on. I can’t show my pictures in galleries with eight-foot ceilings. And I’ve got to go to London next week. I’m sorry I’m wearing my old glasses, but I couldn’t find the new ones this morning after the dog ran into the elevator of our building, and I had to chase after him.”

  He piles these random laments like a small house of cards, steadily placing one complaint on top of the other, as if curious where the tipping point might actually be. The others watch this theater patiently, struck by the arrogance of Nick’s running commentary, but well accustomed to their colleague’s half-empty worldview.

  A deep baritone intercedes to halt the soliloquy, “Nick. If you are quite finished, we might proceed with the meeting,” Michel Larousse intones, short-fused by the interruption. “Peter, go ahead.”

  “Right. Sorry,” Nick apologizes sheepishly.

  He only now notices that his friend Peter Geldman is already standing in front of the assembled curators. He is about to propose a Jim Campbell video of a walking man. On an LED screen the size of a television, the diffused silhouette of a figure is seen from the side casting a long shadow, walking with infinite steps as if on some invisible treadmill.

  Peter looks at the video and waits so that his audience must also linger on its rhythm. He unchar­acteristically wears a gray suit, a costume that has hung for sixteen years on the back of his office door and which makes no sense on his sloping frame. The top button of his shirt is undone, the small split forming an arrow to the mangled knot that defines his tie, pulled hard to the left as if trying to escape the awkward situation of the whole outfit.

  Peter is both nervous and untouchable, the curse and blessing of those who choose to introduce anything avant-garde to the Met. The crowd will inevitably be resistant and wary of wandering into such unknown turf.

  As he speaks, Peter clutches the fabric of his lapels, making his hands into tight fists. He then pushes inward and upward as if squeezing the ideas out of his chest, so that they spill from his mouth. What is then said is in total opposition to this contorted visual presentation. He speaks with crisp clarity—and disarming strength.

  “This is Jim Campbell’s Motion and Rest #2 from 2002. In this series, Campbell is examining the ways that digital technology transforms the nature of perception and subjective experience. His art combines an MIT education in mathematics and electrical engineering with a keen historical awareness of the relationship these two fields have with earlier visual media, particularly photography and film.

  “For the Motion and Rest series, the artist took as inspiration the stop-motion photographs of Eadweard Muybridge from the 1880s. These were works that simultaneously furthered scientific understanding of the human body and, by extension, prepared it for the rote techniques of assembly-line production developed at the same moment by industrial engineer Frederick Taylor.

  “Campbell’s updated versions are wall-mounted panels composed of hundreds of tiny white LED lights through which is fed looped footage of figures walking in profile, and whose outlines are composed of the negative space left by the undulating ripples of white light that define their contours.

  “This application of a black-and-white dot matrix relates them to yet another development of the 1880s: the halftone method of photographic reproduction in which many of Muybridge’s motion studies first appeared.”

  Peter pauses, letting them absorb these ideas before his ending.

  “But look closely. Unlike Muybridge’s well-built, agile human specimens, Campbell’s subjects hobble and lurch before stopping to rest and catch their breath—the result of various disabilities such as limps or severe arthritis. They perform an implicit, ironic rebuke to any blind faith in technology’s mythic link to progress and human fulfillment.

  “There is a mesmerizing social commentary built within the work’s visual poetry.”

  Peter finishes by letting go of his lapels, part release, part challenge. His colleagues are struck by his brevity and his confidence. What looked to them like a rudimentary video game has now emerged as something quite different. They see connections to the movement suggested in the earliest Greek kouros, the linear evocations of action in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the repetition of patterns in the paintings of Cy Twombly, the revealed narratives of Chinese scroll painting, the social caricature of Hogarth, and the agrarian nostalgia of Winslow Homer’s post–Civil War paintings. Any hesitation they had about the validity of this video as art is now set aside, replaced with an acquiescence that the museum should acquire it.

  Nick watches this unfold, and wonders if the ungainliness of Peter’s performance is part of a clever strategy. Peter may just be shrewd enough to understand the effective distraction of his own graceless appearance when coupled with the charisma of his extraordinary mind.

  Michel is unenthusiastic, but cannot argue with the pithy arc of Peter’s presentation; he asks if anyone has questions and is met with silence. No one will dare wrestle with Peter’s expertise in the risky territory of contemporary video. Some curators are great scholars, others great exhibition makers, still others, superb collectors. It is rare to have a curator like Peter, who excels at all three.

  As the meeting continues with the Cycladic vase, Nick looks across the table at a Greek and Roman scholar with a near photographic memory who has spent her forty-two-year career pursuing the endless puzzle of reconstructing ancient Greek vases. Somehow that path seems simpler than the more showy, ambitious one that Nick has chosen with big exhibitions, high-power
ed donors, and a growing profile both within and outside the museum.

  Perhaps he did it all wrong? He stews on that larger idea, magnifying it into an existential crisis, until he removes his glasses to scratch his nose and shifts seamlessly back to thoughts of the dog in the elevator. This is Nick’s peculiar gift: the ability to escape the downward spiral of his own instincts by worrying about anything and everything simultaneously.

  The video of the walking man has been moved to the side, but is still playing. Nick stares at it, hypnotized. He is the walking man—going nowhere despite his constant efforts.

  He looks back at the Greek vase specialist and considers the puzzle that has been wrought around his show’s galleries going to Marta instead of him. He decides he must craft some plan of attack. Marta is not in the meeting so this could be the ideal time to rally others around this injustice. Or Michel. If only Nick could catch him afterward, though Michel is known for his swift exits through the catering door.

  When the meeting finally ends, Nick’s strategy of rallying his colleagues is thwarted by gossip about a donor photoshoot in Paintings Conservation, a story that consumes the group as Tim recounts it with typical animation.

  “I know the drill, lady. Shoulders back! Tits out!” Tim mocks, exaggerating the donor’s pose for the photographer with a twist of his own body. His colleagues roar with laughter.

  Impatiently grasping for some empathy, Nick bets on the Staff Cafeteria again now that it’s lunchtime. As he crosses the Ancient Near East Galleries he sees Alexander Ferris, his exhibition’s press officer. Alexander’s youth and startling good looks do little to pacify Nick’s sense of his own diminishing attractiveness, but Ferris’s impenetrable swagger could come in handy. Maybe a press release has been sent out announcing that his show will be in the B Galleries?