A Permanent Member of the Family

by Russell Banks

  Ellen didn’t agree. “Don’t you think you should wait? Like he asked?”

  “Naw, they’ll keep it to themselves if I tell them to.” He opened the refrigerator and pulled out a cold can of Heineken. “What do you think, Sam’s going to announce it at a faculty meeting? Ted’ll put it in the paper?”

  “No, but they might mention it to someone who would.”

  “I’ll tell them it’s strictly confidential. Christ, Ellen, I want to celebrate! This is fucking life-changing!” He cracked open the Heineken and knocked back three quick swallows and wiped his chin with the broad back of his hand. “Damn! A fucking genius grant!” He grinned and slung an arm around Ellen and hugged her with it.

  She gently pushed him away as if they were dancing and the music had stopped. She switched on the electric teapot and shook out a teabag and dropped it into a mug. “Why don’t you feed the dogs now, so you won’t have to do it in the dark before we go out?”

  He studied the two Siberian huskies sleeping by the woodstove. “Yeah. Good idea.” After a few seconds, while she watched her tea steep, he said, “Why do I think you’re slightly displeased by this very good news?”

  “No, I’m happy that your life will be changed by this, Erik. Really. It’s what you want and deserve. I’m just not so sure I want my life changed by it.”

  “That’s up to you. Nothing in your life has to change if you don’t want it to. In my case, however, in a few days, as soon as the press release goes out, it’s going to be out of my control.”

  “Poor guy,” she said. “Poor genius,” she added, and quickly laughed and touched his forearm with her fingertips. “But you deserve it.”

  Ellen was not alone in believing that Erik Mann deserved a MacArthur. He was an artist who built elaborate installations the size of suburban living rooms out of American Standard plumbing supplies and kitchen and bathroom fixtures that he bought new in bulk through Spa City Supply in Saratoga Springs. He had taught at Skidmore College for over twenty years and was famous locally. Though his work was little known to the general public and was not collected or exhibited widely in the United States, it was admired by many of his more famous fellow artists and certain respected critics. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, had won prizes and fellowships—nothing till now on the scale of a MacArthur, of course—and had an enviable reputation abroad, mostly in Germany and in Japan, where he had recently been given a retrospective in a jumbo-jet hangar at Narita International Airport. The show had boosted his international standing and the prices his work commanded. Because of the scale and theatricality of his installations, however, few of them were ever actually purchased. Nonetheless, whether exhibited or not, their construction from conception to completion was documented, photographed and filmed, with the materials archived at Skidmore’s Tang Museum, where the archive itself was regarded by critics and scholars as a major work of art.

  The award was for half a million tax-free dollars spread over five years. One did not apply for a MacArthur. A layered network of anonymous recommenders and jurors decided whose life and career was about to be suddenly embellished. Based in Chicago, the foundation granted barely a dozen fellowships a year, usually to cutting-edge social scientists and mathematicians, little-known poets, writers of esoteric or experimental fiction and plays, and scholars tilling fields like the history of Paleolithic dance or the hermeneutics of hopscotch, marbles and other children’s games, fields too obscure to have a conventional academic home. They were popularly referred to as “genius grants.”

  MacArthurs rarely went to visual artists, and when one did it was usually to a conceptual artist whose work more closely resembled theater or dance than something actually made by human hands in a studio. All the more reason for Erik to celebrate. He built his outsized bathroom and kitchen installations by hand in a vast, high-ceilinged studio on the first floor of a mid-nineteenth-century mill. The factory sat on the bank of the Hudson River in the once-thriving town of Schuylerville, ten miles east of Saratoga Springs. He had bought the building for less than a year’s salary a decade ago when he was promoted to senior professor and given tenure. He had renovated the derelict mill himself, stripping it back to the brick walls, replacing the huge windows, jacking and leveling the chestnut-timbered floors, installing electricity, plumbing and central heat, sanding and varnishing the floors. He viewed the entire renovated building—the first-floor studio and his and Ellen’s living quarters on the second floor and Ellen’s weaving studio up on the third—as perhaps his most ambitious installation. He called the building “the mother of all installations.” By design, the process of constructing this installation was ongoing and endless and, unlike the rest of his work, was without irony. It referred to nothing other than itself.

  On their way to Ted and Joan’s they stopped at the Wine Boutique in Wilton and bought two bottles of Dom Pérignon. It was snowing in thin, gauzy sheets, slicking the roads slightly, and Ellen reminded Erik that he’d drunk three Heinekens already and told him to slow down. “If it keeps snowing, we may have to spend the night at Ted and Joan’s. Especially after champagne and whatever else they serve with dinner. They like to keep your glass filled,” she said. “It lets them keep their own filled without anyone noticing, I guess.”

  “I detect a note of judgment in that. What would your master say?”

  “My teacher.”

  “Right, your teacher.” Ellen was a Buddhist, or as she said, a student of Buddhism. Erik was emphatically neither and enjoyed poking her for her devotion to her studies and practice and her roshi. Though they’d never married, Erik and Ellen had been together thirty-two years, nearly their entire adult lives. They’d met when they were in their early twenties in New York, when she was a design student at Pratt and he was living on the Lower East Side, the son of a plumber and grandson of a carpenter, a recent graduate of the Boston Museum School inventing himself out of whole cloth as an artist. From the start they were sexually liberated bohemians, and their life together had at times been turbulent and troubled. He had his love affairs and she, in revenge, had hers, but as the years passed it became evident to both that no one else would ever understand and accept them as thoroughly as they understood and accepted each other. They had no children, and the only thing that they periodically quarreled over now was how to train and care for their two female Siberian huskies. Ellen was maternal toward them, but Erik was the alpha in the pack—Ellen’s nickname for him was Big Dog.

  When they arrived at Ted and Joan’s, the other two guests, Sam and Raphael, were already settled on the long, low sofa in front of the fire, drinks in hand. The men had married in June, not long after same-sex marriage was legalized in New York, and were still acting like newlyweds, rarely taking their eyes off one another. Sam liked talking about being married, especially in the company of married heterosexual couples. “Five years of living together, and every morning I wake up and look across the bed, and there’s my husband, and it’s brand new! But a little déjà vu, too,” he explained. “Like, hello? Haven’t I been here before?”

  In his early fifties with a steel-gray buzz cut and trim, flat-bellied body, Sam looked more like an aging triathlete than a photographer of color landscapes that deliberately evoked the pastoral paintings of the Hudson River School. His photographs were the size of picture windows and sold individually for many thousands of dollars. Erik didn’t much care for them, however. He thought them soft, too easy on the eyes.

  Sam’s husband, Raphael, had recently turned thirty and had been a student of Sam’s at Skidmore. He was writing a novel and had been at it since graduation, but thanks to Sam didn’t need to earn a living while he wrote it. Tall and slender, he was handsome in a dark, intense way, with a long aquiline face and pale skin and a mahogany mane of curly hair. He was an ostentatiously intelligent young man with a weakness for sarcasm that everyone knew was only a cover for his insecurity. It was not easy being married to a man like Sam, despite—or perhaps because o
f—his generosity and warmth, the unashamed pleasure he took from his well-tuned athletic body and his undeniable success as an artist and teacher. Ellen often defended Raphael this way.

  Erik found Raphael’s sarcasm, what he called the young man’s smart-ass negativity, irritating, avoided sitting next to him on any occasion and spoke to him only when he had to. “If Raphael was a girl instead of a boy, a female ex-student living with Sam, and living off him, I might add,” Erik once pointed out to Ellen, “you women wouldn’t cut the kid so much slack.”

  She had responded that if Raphael actually were an attractive female ex-student and not an attractive gay man, Erik would be interested in her opinions and would think she was witty instead of sarcastic. Erik said he couldn’t argue with that.

  Ted took their coats, and Joan carried the two bottles of Dom Pérignon to the kitchen. “I better get down the whatchacallits, the flutes,” she called back. “What’s the occasion, anyhow?”

  Ellen said, “I’ll let Erik tell you. Though he’s not supposed to,” she added and followed Joan into the kitchen.

  Sam and Raphael and Ted all looked over at Erik, and Joan spun around and returned to the living room still carrying the two unopened bottles of champagne. Ellen waited just inside the kitchen door.

  “Well?” Joan said. “Let’s hear it, Big Dog.” An endearment, coming from her. She liked Erik more than any man she knew, except for Ted, and Erik liked her back. They teased each other playfully and often. She felt warmed by his attention and charmed by it and showed him her pleasure, as if she knew it aroused him sexually. Joan was a certified touch healer, and Erik regarded her work as a self-deceiving hoax, but she didn’t seem to care. She had enough faith in the theory and practice of touch healing to treat almost any form of skepticism or disbelief as merely silly and defensive, and Erik’s stubborn, insistent materialism amused her—which sometimes led him to exaggerate it. “People have been healing others with the touch of their hands for millennia,” she often explained. It was a skill that could be taught, even to a man like Erik, who would probably excel as a touch healer, she pointed out, given the strength and sensitivity of his hands. She had offered him free instruction, but he did not take her up on it. She was a good-looking, full-bodied woman with thick red hair, and he knew where that would lead.

  Ted handed Erik a glass of red wine, refilled his own and waved him toward the easy chair by the fire next to Raphael. Erik took the rocker in the corner instead, as if to avoid the limelight. No need for it when you’re the one everyone wants to hear. He took a sip of his wine and said, “Yeah, it’s true, I received some great news today. But you got to promise you won’t say a word about it to anyone else. Not till they release it to the press.”

  “The press?” Ted said. “Excuse me? That’s me, for Christ’s sake! Are you releasing this great news right now, man? Or is it strictly off the record?”

  “It’s off the fucking record, Ted! That’s what I’m saying. Otherwise I’ll stop right here and let you read about it in The New York Times next week.”

  “Of course, it’s off the record, Erik,” Joan said. “Please! Teddy has great . . . what? Journalistic integrity!”

  Erik wondered if she was already a little drunk. He knew that Ted and Joan had a drinking problem, but suspected that he had a drinking problem himself, so he ignored theirs in order to ignore his and left the gossip and expressions of concern to others.

  Ted and Joan were Erik’s and Ellen’s oldest friends in Saratoga Springs. They had two grown children each from their first marriages and a handful of grandchildren whose framed portraits and summer camp and holiday photographs were all over the house, on walls, shelves, and on top of the Steinway where late at night Ted played Chopin, badly, usually a little drunk. Ted had begun as a reporter for the local newspaper, The Saratogian, the year Erik was hired at Skidmore and rose steadily to become its publisher and owner. He and Joan had a more than casual interest in the arts. They owned two of Ellen’s woven wall hangings, for which they had yet to find a proper wall, and three of Sam’s landscapes, one of which, Moonrise over Lake George, hung in the living room opposite the fireplace. Ted had twice brought up the subject of buying one of Erik’s installations and donating it to the permanent collection at the Tang, but because of space restrictions it could only be exhibited when there was no other show up, so Erik was reluctant to part with it. He wasn’t sure Ted was serious anyhow.

  “Okay, I got a call today from the MacArthur Foundation,” Erik began. “Out of the blue.” He recounted his conversation with the director as close to word-for-word as he could remember. No one interrupted him, and by the time he’d finished, their faces were glowing with pleasure, Erik noticed, even Raphael’s. Apparently it was cool to have a friend who was a MacArthur. And to judge from Ellen’s proud, uplifted gaze, to be a MacArthur’s lifelong companion and helpmate was even cooler.

  “Wow! That’s the most exciting thing I’ve heard in my life!” Joan exclaimed, and rushed over and kissed him moistly on the mouth.

  Sam stood up, crossed the room to Erik’s chair. He quickly knelt, took Erik’s left hand, and kissed his wedding ring as if it were the pope’s. “My first MacArthur,” he said, then stood. “Seriously, Erik, congratulations! I’m truly happy for you.”

  Joan said, “Sam, you are a riot.”

  “You don’t know who the writers are, do you?” Raphael asked. “The usual suspects, I imagine.”

  Ted said, “No usual suspect here. This time they got it right, man. That’s such fucking good news! And richly deserved. The genius grant! Congratulations, man!”

  Joan said, “People, the hors d’oeuvres! Don’t neglect the puff pastries, they’re from Mrs. London’s.”

  “I don’t know who any of the other winners are,” Erik said to Raphael without looking at him. “All the guy told me was the size of the award. They call it a fellowship, actually, not a genius grant. I’ll be able to take a leave of absence for five years.”

  Ted said, “I thought you really dug teaching.”

  “I can live without it for five years, believe me,” Erik said and laughed. “No faculty meetings! C’mon, Joan, open the champagne and pour!”

  She opened one bottle and Ted opened the other, and both poured. They all drank, even Raphael, who rarely took more than a glass of seltzer water with a wedge of lime, and by the time they moved into the dining room for dinner, they were very loud and seemed very happy.

  While Joan carefully transported a ceramic tureen of cold leek and potato soup from the kitchen to the table, Ted poured a decent pinot grigio. When he got to Erik’s glass, he paused before pouring and said, “If you don’t mind my saying, man, the truth is, you have a kind of forceful openness that attracts grace. I mean it. Attracts grace, not from above, of course, in the religious sense, but like from the fucking universe at large. From the life force, man.”

  “That’s bullshit. I’m just lucky is all.”

  “No, Ted’s right,” Joan said. “It’s what they call magnetism. Or charisma. You’re blessed with it, lovey, and it doesn’t come to you just because you’re lucky. You have to will it, you have to woo and win it with hard, sustained work and imagination. And talent. Until the world and everything in the world recognizes it in you and honors it. That’s what Teddy means by grace. Like with this award.”

  “Come on, it’s a fucking lottery . . . ,” Erik began.

  Joan said, “Let me finish, lovey. It’s not a lottery. You were given the MacArthur Fellowship or grant or whatever, because you deserve it. That’s what Teddy means by attracting grace. From the universe, the life force.”

  Raphael said, “God, next you’ll be washing his feet.”

  Erik said, “No one ‘deserves’ a MacArthur.”

  “Here, my dear,” Joan said and filled his soup bowl from the tureen. “At least you deserve to be first served.” She passed Erik his soup and proceeded to serve the others.

  Sam said, “Let me propose a toast,” and r
aised his glass. The others raised theirs. Erik slowly lifted his, too. He didn’t know why, but he wasn’t happy with the way this was going. He probably should have followed the foundation director’s instructions and just not mentioned the award, let them learn about it next week in the Times. A MacArthur was supposed to eliminate one’s need to compete with one’s friends and colleagues and fellow artists, but somehow it was having the opposite effect on Erik.

  “To grace! And to the few among us who attract it!” Sam said.

  Raphael pursed his lips and lowered his glass a bit. Then he brought it back to his lips and, with the others, drank. He put his glass on the table with emphasis. “It’s not really a lottery, you know. The MacArthur. It’s not just dumb luck. It’s friends of friends and their ex-students and acolytes and protégés who end up on that list. And I’m sorry, Ted, but it’s not grace, either. The universe really doesn’t give a damn. About Erik or anyone else.”

  Erik said, “Let’s just forget the whole MacArthur thing, can we? It’s a wheelbarrow of money, and I didn’t have to peddle my ass to get it, so I intend to enjoy it. End of story. And, Raphael, as far as I know I’m nobody’s acolyte or ex-student. All my teachers are dead. And I’m not friends with anybody who picks the winners.”

  “As far as you know,” Raphael said.

  Sam said, “Rafe, honey, come on! None of that matters. Those folks who dole out the MacArthurs, they all have loads of friends and ex-students who wouldn’t even be considered for one. Ted and Joan are right, the universe, or the life force or whatever they want to call it, has been kind to Erik because he’s been able to draw its attention to him and his work.”

  Rafael rolled his eyes and smiled down at his plate while Ted served the lamb shanks and roasted vegetables and Joan refilled the wineglasses. Ellen had been watching Erik warily, as if she knew he was about to say something he’d regret later. She raised her glass. “Okay, my turn! Here’s to good friends and long winter evenings together!”