The Afterlife: A Memoir

by Donald Antrim

  And yet I have to admit that it affected me. Whenever I think about it, I am struck by a desire to see it again.

  All I have to look at, though, is the photograph S. took during his stay in New York, a badly aimed, poorly lit snapshot printed on Kodak paper. I also have a few scraps of the canvas that S. scissored off the painting’s stretcher. And I have copies of the replies written to S. by curators to whom he had sent letters of inquiry and, presumably, duplicates of the photograph. One letter to S., dated November 28, 1988, and sent to my mother’s address in Miami, is from the Frick Collection, and it suggests that S. contact the European Paintings Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The letter is a clear blow-off. Who could blame the people at the Frick? An undiscovered Leonardo? Another letter, from the New York Public Library, proposes that S. get in touch with the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, in reference to the Leonardo da Vinci collection there. A December 9, 1988, letter from Sotheby’s indicates a lack of interest in offering the work at auction.

  What was S. doing?

  In addition to posting letters to museums, he was going to the Frick Art Reference Library, on Seventy-first Street, where he spent days paging through old art books in the hope of finding a plate that matched the snapshot he carried everywhere he went. He stressed to me the value of old art books, reasoning that the painting — which, he theorized, had been either stolen or lost from a private collection — might have been in currency in former times. When I wondered aloud why he didn’t throw the painting into a taxi and haul it straight to the Met, he made the excuse that, after all, it was not his painting to cart around town. Besides, he told me, he enjoyed looking through those old books in those fascinating archives, which were, I realized, a world away from suburban Miami and his life as an underemployed artist with a history of dead-end jobs.

  In Miami, my mother waited for word. We spoke more and more frequently. “Have you heard any news from S. about the painting?” she’d ask me. Or I might ask her, “Have you heard any news from S. about the painting?” But I’m not sure that I ever told her, in so many words, what I thought of S. and his ideas about the painting.

  “Mom, can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why doesn’t he take the painting to be evaluated by someone who knows about these things?”

  “Don, this is his project. I think we ought to just let him do things his way. It’s important to him.”

  “I know that. But his way isn’t very productive.”

  “We don’t know that yet.”

  “Well.”

  “This means a lot to him, and he needs to sort it out in his own good time,” she told me, and I could hear, in her voice, the serene detachment so crucial to ongoing sobriety. But I also heard — and maybe this was what that detachment was meant to hide — something that sounded a lot like fear. She was, after all, S.’s partner. She was implicated in his scheme to identify what might become, if he could prove its authenticity, one of the most famous paintings in the world. My mother, in the years after she got sober, had shown an alarming gullibility in matters relating to mental and spiritual health. By 1988, I had become adept at listening to her describe workshops devoted to past-life channeling, to radical forms of astrology to speaking in dead languages. What was her angle on the painting? Did she truly think that her boyfriend had stumbled on a Leonardo da Vinci? Or was she simply concerned about the effects on S. of what might, were he ever to actually identify the painting, come as a shattering disappointment?

  And what about me? Why was I going along with this nonsense, phoning museums and antiquarian booksellers and dealers, and asking them, on S.’s behalf, what a person might do, in the event that such a person might or might not know about a painting that might or might not be a missing priceless European treasure?

  After a handful of humiliating phone calls, I gave up. I simply couldn’t do it. I wished S. well — he had by then returned to Miami — and I asked him to keep me informed of his progress. I put the snapshots he’d given me, along with the swatches of decaying brown fabric, in a drawer. And I tried to stop thinking about the problem of the painting.

  One aspect of the problem, however, had me bothered. For many years, back in the days when she was drinking, my mother (in the manner of so many high-functioning alcoholics who get a lot done) had run a college department that specialized in costume history, fashion design, and textile chemistry. She knew how to date a fabric sample. Or, if she didn’t know how to do it herself, she knew how to contact people who did.

  I asked her about this. “Mom, does that canvas seem to you to be about five hundred years old?”

  “It’s so hard to tell, Don.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can’t you take a piece over to the University of Miami and see if anyone there can subject it to some tests?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I need to respect the fact that this is not my affair.”

  “You don’t want to find out, do you? You don’t want to know!” I said to her at some point along the way.

  Most likely, I was getting squared off to pick a fight with K., who, in fact, had been more than decent about this whole enterprise.

  “How’s your mother?” K. would sometimes ask, when she saw me stagger off the phone like a person who’d drunk from a goblet that had smoke billowing over its rim.

  “They’re out of their minds! They’re out of their minds! Leonardo da Vinci? Fuck me!”

  “Donald, you knew it was insane.”

  “I know.”

  “So what’s the surprise?”

  “It’s not — it’s not that it’s a surprise. It’s not a surprise.”

  “Okay? So?”

  K. had a point. Unfortunately, an understanding of reality is a liability in a situation in which reality is inadmissible — or, rather, in a situation in which people’s feelings and hunches, their hungers and appetites, serve as reality. Hidden inside the unfolding narrative of the painting — a narrative not only of feelings and hunches but also of grandiose hopes and dreams — was, I felt, the story of my alcoholic family. This story, now being told through the story of a moldy old painting that might, until shown otherwise, be a Leonardo da Vinci, was, I thought, a story in which pretty much everything that could ever happen in life — everything that could come true tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that — might, until shown otherwise, be the miraculous, transformative thing that, like a great work of art, brings us closer to salvation.

  “Your mother,” K. would say to me whenever I got off the phone. Then she would sigh.

  A few years before S. undertook his pilgrimage to the art libraries of New York, I boarded a plane and flew to Miami to visit my mother. It was a trip I had been looking forward to. In some ways, I suppose, I had been looking forward to this trip for much of my life. The time had come, my mother and I had agreed, for us to have a talk about our past. Specifically, she had invited me to sit at the table and tell her what it had been like, during the years in which she’d lived in and out of a blackout, to be her child.

  It was, as I recall, the week of Thanksgiving. My grandparents were driving down from North Carolina. They, S., and I were gathering at my mother’s apartment to give thanks for her relatively new sobriety, which, however insecure, had nonetheless been hard won.

  A night or two before this celebration was to take place, I sat in the dining room with S. and my mother. I suppose I must have been twenty-seven years old at the time. I remember — and I should have been more savvy about these kinds of signs and portents — that the two of them sat in chairs that had been pulled out from the table and pushed hard against the dining-room wall. I, on the other hand, sat in an improvised place lacking defined coordinates — the ambiguous middle of the room. In the scene as it was set, my mother and S. were positioned like heads of state, listening, in their official capacity
, to the appeals of a supplicant. But they were also a couple of nervous alcoholics with their backs to the wall, waiting to be attacked. As usual, my mother was smoking up a storm. Her ashtray, her cigarettes, her lighter, and her coffee in its brightred mug sat close to her on the table. Somewhere in the apartment, her fluffy white cat with a skin disease was lurking.

  “Don, I want you to know that I know there are things you need to say to me,” she said. And I had to wonder: What was he doing here? She leaned forward. “You go ahead.”

  “Um.”

  “I suspect you must be upset and curious about some things.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve got a lot of serenity in my life now, so I can hear you.” She turned to S. “Isn’t that right?”

  “Do you have serenity, Don?” my mother asked me.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes and no.”

  “That doesn’t sound like serenity.”

  “I guess it’s something I’ll have to work on.”

  “You’re angry.”

  I sighed. Things weren’t getting off to a good start. I said to my mother, “Really, I just wanted to be able to say a few things.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I was hoping we’d talk. About the way things were when Terry and I were little. When we were growing up.”

  But what, after all, did I want to tell her? Did I want to tell her how scary she’d looked to me when she was drunk? Did I want to tell her what it had been like to lie awake at night, waiting for the house to be quiet? Or did I want to tell her that I, her son, lived every day with the fear that I would never know how to love another person? Were these the kinds of things that a man could say to his mother? Were these the kinds of things that a man could say to his recovering-alcoholic mother while her recovering-alcoholic boyfriend was sitting beside her?

  I sat in my chair. They sat in their chairs. Not one of us, I think, was serene. Everywhere on the white walls of my mother’s condominium were the framed Art Deco prints that my father had bought for her, fashion illustrations by Icart and Erté, and a large series of magazine plates of the sort that had been featured in popular French publications of the early twentieth century. The plates showed women wearing improbable dresses and enormous hats, some of them walking the favored dogs of the day, borzois and other distinguished breeds. This was my mother’s art. It was from a period in history, and represented a set of styles, that she loved. I now have most of it — about a dozen pieces — in my apartment in New York, wedged behind furniture, propped against walls, where it can’t easily be seen. For a while, after my mother died, I tried hanging one of the Icarts, a beautiful illustration of a woman undressing in a darkened bedroom. I gave it a prominent place over a low sofa in the living room. But after a while I couldn’t bear to look at it. I had to take it down and put it away.

  That night in Florida, the night in the dining room, I watched my mother smoke her cigarettes and drink her coffee. Every now and then, she reached downward and made tiny come-hither motions with her hand, in the direction of the cat, which stood off in the shadows, as if uncertain whether it was safe to come all the way into the room. I had watched my mother smoke cigarettes and drink coffee my entire life. Never at night, though. At night it had been Jim Beam in a large glass.

  She said to me — and I could hear, again, that nasal, southern-Appalachian sound in her voice—“Everything you want to talk about is in the past.”

  “I know.”

  “Why do you need to live in the past?”

  “I’m not living in the past.”

  “You are. You live in the past. I’ve let the past go. I don’t live in the past. I won’t.”

  “I’m not asking you to.”

  “Don’t come into my home and attack my serenity. I don’t need your hostility. If you have something constructive to add to this conversation, go ahead. But if you’re going to tear me down and get at me with your hostility, that’s something I don’t need. You want to live in the past, and you want to drag me back into all that shit. You’re angry. You’re angry and you’re hostile.”

  “Wait a minute,” I begged. And I went on: “In the first place, there’s a difference between anger and hostility.” What a mistake. My mother glared at me, and then turned away and looked at S., who, frankly, seemed terrified. She said to him, in a kind of scream, “I don’t need this hatred from my own child!”

  And to me she said, “You can be a supportive member of this family or you can get out of my house.”

  It was not long before I found myself lying on the carpet in my mother’s dining room, curled up, weeping. From time to time, I looked up and saw my mother or S., or the pair of them, peering out of their bedroom on the far side of the apartment. It was as if, like the cat, they were afraid to step into the room. Were they afraid of contamination? Contamination by the Past? I was the Past. The bedroom door would open a short way, and light would spill out, and, by that light, I could distinguish their figures. My mother looked tall and imposing in her plain white housedress. S., by contrast, was small and slight and wiry, a thin man whose gestures and movements, like his voice (and the cryptic signatures he gave his own paintings, and the haphazard research methods he would use, years later, to avoid properly identifying the painting in New York), conveyed his need to remain unseen, undetected, and, like the creator of the work that became his obsession, unknown.

  I do not recall precisely how things played out over the remainder of that dismal trip to Florida. Nor do I recall at what point I became certain that S. and my mother were conspiring to leave the identity of the painting a mystery By the middle of 1989, the matter seemed to have been dropped.

  Then, after what seemed a long stretch of time, I got a phone call. It was S. He said that he had something important to tell me concerning the painting, which, as it turned out, was still in the hands of one of the cousins. S. told me that he had been doing a lot of thinking about the painting. He told me that he was, by the way, grateful for my help during the months when he had worked so hard to establish the painting’s authenticity. But he had been wrong, he said, wrong about the painting. After much meditation on the problem, he had come to realize why he—we—had failed to identify the painting. He told me that this realization had caused him much pain, and a great deal of soul-searching. He told me that the painting was not what he had taken it to be.

  Of the many silences in all the conversations I had with S. in those years — the years before he fell out of AA and out of my mother’s life — this seemed the longest. I held the phone to my ear. What was S. trying to tell me?

  “Excuse me?”

  “Frederic Church,” he said again.

  Frederic Church? The Hudson River School painter? Nineteenth century? Owned that Persian-style mansion overlooking the Hudson in upstate New York? Famous for his landscapes? Spent some time in South America? Painted animals and birds?

  “Frederic Church,” I said to S. “Thank you for telling me that.” And a while later we finished our conversation and hung up.

  K. and I had, by this time, moved to another, smaller, apartment on the Upper East Side. For the better part of a year, I had been depressed, and our relationship — confined, as it were, to a space far too cramped to permit either privacy or a comfortable intimacy — was beginning to unravel.

  “He says he now thinks it’s a Frederic Church,” I told her when, later that night, she got home from work, slammed the door to our apartment, and dumped her shoulder bag on the floor.

  “Whatever,” K. said, capturing perfectly, I thought, the strange and sad and true essence of everything.

  And, really, that should have been that. But there was more to come.

  Over a year had passed since S.’s first trip north to look at the painting. Now, in early winter, he came back. For a period of months, he lived in Manhattan, in a Chelsea boardinghouse, a building, as I imagine it, similar to the one where years earlier this story had begun. It must, for S., have been s
omething of a homecoming. Shortly before Christmas, my mother got on a plane and flew to New York for a weeklong visit. Together, she and S. camped out in his room. There was no phone; my communication with my mother was restricted to times when she could manage to fight the winter winds and get to a pay phone on the corner. Because her circulation was bad from smoking, this was a hardship for her. Also, she was beginning to have trouble walking. During the days, S. visited galleries and museum libraries. Of course, he came up with nothing.

  I had thought, I remember, that this would be a good time for my mother and K. to meet. I suggested the idea to both of them. K. said she was ready to meet my mother, and my mother crowed at the thought of meeting K., whom she had spoken with on a few occasions, when I’d shoved the phone into K.’s hand and suggested that she say hello. But what was I thinking? Did I imagine that the four of us — my emphysemic mother, her passive-aggressive boyfriend, my increasingly fedup girlfriend, and I — would go out to a restaurant and order a meal together? Did I picture us sitting down like a family and talking about Leonardo da Vinci and Frederic Church? Nothing came of it. K. and my mother never met. And before I knew it my mother had packed her bags and gone home. A while later, S. was gone, too.

  This time, though, he had something to show for his trouble. Of the cousins who at one time or another had, or had had, some connection to the painting, two were now dead, and a third — and this was not the man who had read the magazine article dedicated to the important painting — had gone ahead and given the painting to S. I learned from my mother that the cousin had said to S. something along the lines of “You’re the only person in the world crazy enough to give a damn about the thing. Take it.”