by Carole Maso
Are you done yet, Max?
“Because finally there was no way beyond the catchwords. The feeling floated on top, no matter what degree of sincerity or diligence. There was just no way in—the amount of talent, intelligence, wit, simply did not permit it. And so each was doomed to fail, even if the competition was not overwhelming, because they had made inappropriate choices. Don’t get me wrong—those who have talent are obliged to pursue it, Caroline, and those who do not are obliged not to.”
You always got the last word in, even when it seemed you were not listening. Somehow you always got your say. It was part of your elegance, your brilliance, not as an art historian or a teacher, but as a father.
I think of the things we loved best. Sunday afternoons together. Lunch uptown at Shun Lee West. Chopsticks, fortunes, tea. And a movie at five at one of the Lincoln Center theaters. I loved conversations with you. Your active mind. One day you’d say, “Let’s go check out the Philip Johnson building.”
“You mean the AT&T building?”
“Yes, well, whatever.”
“Let’s go see Kagemusha.”
Let’s do this. And that.
“What do you think about the new Peter Brook piece? What about that Mark Morris you like so much?” Your probing mind. “What about Jennifer Bartlett? David Salle? Karole Armitage?
“Oh, those wretched buildings on Third Avenue . . . Modern architecture implies a value system, undeniably a social one as well as an aesthetic one. Modern architecture was to be a symbol of the ideal city, a new utopia, it was to embrace idealism, and ironically it became the ultimate symbol of the corporate state.”
I always assumed everyone’s conversations were like ours, based on what you led me to believe was a certain general knowledge. Of course one was expected to know postmodern from modern, orthodox from neo. I wonder what you would think of neo-geo.
“What about the Gwathmey Siegel addition to the Guggenheim?” I asked.
“No. It is not acceptable. No. It is not satisfactory. Over my dead body,” you said.
One day we were walking in the museum together. A man and his wife were looking at a Pollock, I forget which one. “I can paint better than this,” the man said. I looked to you. Your face was contorted with amusement and horror. Your voice rising with the ludicrousness of it.
“Can you? Really?” You were appalled. Delighted. Usually you said nothing, that was your response, the measure of your contempt for ordinary people, for the man on the street. And the man stupidly nodding. You could turn on me too, I knew, at any moment I seemed ordinary to you, unexceptional. You had no allegiances other than to excellence and so were not really a snob. You told me that Vermont butter was as good as French butter. That many dried pastas were better than fresh. That there’s a young woman in Brooklyn really making art.
But was I excellent enough for you? I suspect I was not. Though after you read Delirium you said, “It’s good!” as if it surprised you. “It’s energetic and very funny, also a little terrifying,” you said. “A little anarchic. It’s filled with promise and I’m proud of you.” But I had not written the novel that would be better than that one, that would go further, and you must have been disappointed, as I was, having instilled in me your love of excellence.
Do I try to find a manageable shape for you? Do I put my rage for you into art, where it is acceptable?
“Only, Caroline, my dear, if you’re smart enough and talented enough.”
I open one of your cookbooks looking for something to make. I want to use your fabulous pots, your Cuisinart, your little Oskar.
How about a duck in port wine with figs from our friend Alice B. Toklas, Max?
I put on “Love for Three Oranges” by Prokofiev.
The phone rings. The phone machine clicks on. “This is David,” the voice says. “Pick up the phone if you’re there, Caroline. I’m not calling from around the corner.”
I decide I’d better pick it up. “Hi, David. How’s Milano?”
“OK. What are you doing?”
“I’m thinking of making a duck.”
“How’s everything in New York?”
“Well, if you really want to know—Jesus, David, it’s no joke, you threw Max around the Guggenheim without me.”
“It’s what he wanted, Caroline. He was very specific. And I didn’t throw him, I sort of twirled him.”
“I don’t know, David, it’s just not funny.”
“Well, yeah, I thought it sort of was.”
“Oh, David, you think it’s hysterical when the beard on Saint Simon turns out to be a fish.”
“You’d have to be here. And it wasn’t a fish. What looked to be a part of his beard that was sticking out rather unnaturally has actually turned out to be a section of tapestry from the background. Every vein in his neck is visible now, every fold in the robe and the details of the hands. On the table in front of Simon these incredible still lifes have emerged. A fish with lemon and orange slices. And you can see the curls on Saint Philip’s head!”
“So the restoration is going well?”
“Very. It’s really wild. You should come over and take a look.”
“Sure, David. Have you heard from Grey?”
“Not a word. As far as I know, he’s still on that dig in Greece. Nothing from him in a while, though. Look, I’ve got to go.”
“Me, too,” I say. “Ciao, bambino.” I take the duck out of the deep freeze.
I think of the things we loved best:
Anything new.
What the light looked like.
Chopsticks and tea.
Jules and Jim.
Mom.
The drive down the Hudson after we dropped off the boys.
The figure 5 in gold.
A duck with figs.
After her death, Max forbade us to call him Dad anymore. “Look, you’ve got to grow up right now,” he said, and he stared into our sad little faces. “One ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad’ is quite enough to lose. I want you all to call me Max, from here on.”
The night you found her kneeling in the street staring up at the cement cross and scrolls, St. Vincent’s written in the stone, was not the night she died, but almost.
Found: my mother’s childhood Bible.
I put on “For my brother reported missing in action 1943” by John Jacob Niles. On the television a man hacks down fields of beautiful flowers with a machete.
The duck unthawed turns out to be a goose.
I turn on the sound. It’s Laos and the flowers I see now, in the close-up, are poppies. It’s a story about the heroin trade.
I go out to get the Sunday Times on Saturday night, like you. I briskly walk to the corner of Waverly and Sixth Avenue, retracing your steps. You liked to watch the pink and green and blue hairs, as you called them, lining up at the Waverly for the midnight show. It’s odd to think I lived a year without the Times, without all this. How it would have amused you to think of. Why didn’t I ever come to see you, Max? Why didn’t you ever send me that letter? It makes me wonder what else went unsaid.
When I get there I’ll check to make sure all the sections of the paper are there, standing in the same spot you did. Like you, I’ll go home and immediately begin to read. The Book Review first, the Arts and Leisure, The Week in Review, the Magazine. You were always done with the paper by two o’clock the next day. By two on Sunday the news is stale, you said. Old news.
I think of you in fall, the season of betrayal, out for a walk to buy the Sunday Times. No one, not the woman with the dog, studying her lines for acting dass, not the size-7 pumps, not the fuzzy slippers playing the CD player and waiting for you, not the stiletto heels leaving a message on your machine, not even you have a clue. Only I—barefoot—far off in the country—under a starburst, next to a fire, somehow know, that this will be the last year of your life.
Sex in the Hexagon
after Wallace Stevens
1.
There are more than six ways, of course,
/> but this six-sided glass building
with its six different views poses
limitations of its own, challenges.
2.
They were robin’s egg blue, your eyes
and also the sky. You spread
open my thighs. Outside I noticed the field
was being hayed. I cut my hand on the blades
of your blond hair.
3.
In my mind as we
slowly rotate you turn from
man to woman to faun to wood
nymph and back again. Man.
Woman. Bobcat, bear, swan.
Dolphin, under and over and under me,
then you change again.
4.
How lucky we were to be facing
west when the sun set. Your
head sinking to meet me. No
regard for the bed.
5.
I confuse early spring for winter.
It’s easy with you gnawing on my neck.
I confuse my blood with the crimson sun
which has long ago set but
still burns in my head. I confuse
the red with the firetruck as you move into me now.
I confuse my own screams of pleasure with sirens.
With terror.
6.
Think of something fast—a story
in the dark to prolong this sixth pleasure:
For uniting what were their names?
Delphinus, the Dolphin, was placed among the stars.
To humiliate Cassiopeia half the year
She must hang upside down.
Repeat.
The Dolphin was placed in the sky—
it’s no use, to think of the spring sky
with your fingers on my own beating
Spring. The stars pulsate.
You and me and the stars are one.
Candace
This is a chance not to be missed, because only Halley’s Comet gives us the opportunity we need. Though it remained unseen between 1911 and its recovery in 1982, we have always known its exact position, and we have been able to make plans well in advance. The Americans have missed their opportunity — their Halley probe was cancelled on the grounds of cost, which seems an almost incredible decision (if you doubt me, compare the cost of a comet probe with that of half a nuclear submarine). However, five probes remain: two Russian, two Japanese and one European. The Russian and Japanese probes will bypass the comet at fairly close range. The European spacecraft, Giotto, will — we hope — actually penetrate the comet’s head, and send back direct pictures of the nucleus, about which we still know very little.
Why Did God Make Us?
She opened her catechism.
Q: Who made us?
A: God made us.
Q: Why did God make us?
A: God made us to show forth His goodness and to make us happy with Him in Heaven.
Jesus’ New Face
An orange becomes whole, a gleaming knife appears, then miraculously there are two slices of fish and a piece of lemon. Saint Matthew’s dark matted hair becomes brown curls before my brother’s astonished eye. Half of Saint Simon’s beard returns to shadow.
His gaze moves toward the head of Jesus, not yet touched. What, once they get to it, will the new face reveal? A debate, I imagine, arises, at different tables in small restaurants all over Milano. A debate arises, What will the real face reveal after layers of overpaint have been removed? Is it exclusively a narrative, a drama of the moment when Jesus says, “One of you shall betray me”? Or does it also include a moment when Jesus, anticipating his death, “took bread and gave it to his disciples and said, ‘Take, eat this, for this is my body.’ And he took the cup and gave it to them saying, ‘Drink, all of you, for this is my blood which shall be shed for you so that sins may be forgiven.’”
Will the face be resigned and suffused with transcendence? “The eucharist,” a man shouts across the cafe at another. A man walks across the floor, takes the other man’s shirt in his hands and whispers, “It’s the betrayal.” “Sacramental,” an elegant woman in black states, lifting her veil.
“You are all right, it is simultaneously about both. That is what’s so marvelous. That is Leonardo’s genius.” The old man puts down his vermouth and smiles.
The face of Christ will look like a star.
What?
A star for a head?
“My God, no!” “Yes!” “No!”
“Take, eat, for this is my body.”
And he took the cup and gave it to them saying, “For this is the cup of my blood, the mystery of faith.”
“It is said,” David reports, “that Leonardo had great trouble conceiving the head of Jesus. A fellow artist told Leonardo, ‘It is your fault. You gave such divine beauty to apostles Philip and James the Eider that now you can do nothing else except leave the face unfinished.’”
“Is the face unfinished? Could Leonardo not paint it?” a man with tears in his eyes asks.
Sighing. Weeping. “Fool!” the others cry to the man with tears in his eyes.
Quietly, a young woman says, “A passive man of sorrow will appear.”
“I fear,” David says, “that the features of Christ have vanished. It is possible that all that remains is the glue and paint of restorers, of people like me. Caroline, it is possible the face of the Savior is blank.” He laughs a little—his stupid sense of humor.
“We are doing all we can to save the painting. Dr. Brambilla expects a beautiful recovery of Christ. We’ll see.”
An old woman stands on a chair. “The Christ’s face is not resigned, nor is he a man of sorrow. There must have been something divine, superhuman in that face, a great serenity. An island of tranquillity.”
I picture my brother standing on a scaffold balancing solvents, water, colors, in front of the enormous Jesus. He looks closely at the overpainting. Hands reach out toward the Savior from every direction. The eyes seem partially closed, the mouth slightly open. In this state he could be a man or a woman.
“There are things that we will inevitably lose: part of his hair, a bit of background, but the blue of his robe will be vibrant, and the red mantle,” Dr. Brambilla says.
David looks under the microscope at the shadow below the lip of Christ. He enlarges the power to forty. A tiny area becomes an enormous expanse, resembling land, with its many shades of brown, sloping hills and valleys. A solvent is applied, and we see through the liquid many more depths. He takes his tiny surgical scalpel now. Under the microscope is something huge. He hesitates a moment. Underneath this shall be the real Leonardo, obscured for centuries. He carefully lifts the patch of brown and sighs as it gives way to a rose color, filled with light.
The Box in the Sky
You are still, it seems, a member of the Film Society. A few days ago I received the advance announcement for the Twenty-third New York Film Festival. How we loved to mull over the calendar. This year there’s Godard’s Hail Mary. A British documentary called 28 Up that looks interesting, and a lot more, of course. We never missed a year, not for all those years except last year. I did not come home from Cummington; I missed it, and you, Max.
The Film Festival always felt like a new beginning somehow, the changing of bad times for better times, a wind from the north, the smell of chimneys being used for the first time of the season, a movement inward. It felt like fall, as much a beginning as school was, and you dressed us up each year and took us to the opening night party. “Daddy,” I said. “Call me Max now,” you said. We scuffed our feet across ballrooms with the likes of Buñuel and Antonioni. It was a childhood not to be forgotten. You, such an elegant man those gala opening nights in your tuxedo, and your unlikely entourage: two grief-stricken twin boys and a small girl. You, with your unfiltered Camels at the time, talking to beautiful women with deep waves in their dark hair and such white throats.
We were well behaved. We did not follow you too closely; we entertained ou
rselves. We had contests to see who could eat the most of those tiny sandwiches, the most strawberries, the most chocolate tarts.
Why did you bring us all those years? I can only guess it was for the “visual effect,” the standard you measured everything by. About my brothers you said, “I have always loved the visual effect of twins,” as if they had sprung from your eye, something perfect and realized, not a random event, a quirk of nature. With you nothing seemed random, everything had its aesthetic raison d’être, even Mother—her illness, her beauty. She fit somehow perfectly into your world view, your particular brand of romanticism, your nihilism, your cynicism. You could bear all of it, finally, but her death, though even you thought she had taken it too far sometimes—her indifference, her detachment.
“You went too far, goddamnit,” I heard you yell to her one night after all the dinner guests had left, you alone warming your brandy over the fire. “We have three children and you have been half responsible. From your body, Veronica, like it or not, there has come life. Not an appealing thought to you, perhaps, but true nonetheless.”
And you buckling my shoe while I kicked before the first New York Film Festival, she dead only a few weeks then. “They are savages, Veronica, they are little monsters and I do not know what to do.” I remember that so perfectly. As you got us ready to go to that first festival to watch films we didn’t understand, you buckling my shoe and muttering maniacally, “One, two, buckle my shoe,” then pausing, and looking into the distance, “I do not forgive you, Veronica.”
I was rather old for you to be buckling my shoe, but it seemed like something you needed to do.
How I grew to love those strange films, their isolated images of tree, snow, field, shattering glass, masks, sex. A montage of peasants. Abandoned cars, children playing hide-and-seek in France. How much I looked forward to each evening, the lights going out, the rise of an unfamiliar language, the sound of hopelessly strange or romantic or melancholy music. The talky French movies, the subtitles I could barely keep up with. Max, I am still a slow reader; I think it’s a writer’s trait. And after the film was over, how I clapped and clapped until my hands stung, and looked up to see the box where the director and actors sat. I always dreamed of sitting there, Max, in that box in the sky. I think it’s the reason I went to film school.