It’s impossible in my line of work not to make the occasional mistake. One always hopes that it will happen, like this, with a small and unimportant work. Anyone else in our department would have shrugged off the discrepancy, but I couldn’t let it go. The spot had begun to flash at me like some kind of sinister searchlight, focusing on me and my imperfections. I tormented myself with the problem, sat at my desk at night making notes, questioning whether I could do a repaint or whether I’d only make matters worse. My experience had taught me that with rare exception, once you had cleaned a section it was extremely difficult to resurface without treating the whole work as well.
As I walked back to the museum after seeing my father, my mind again fastened on this foul-up. I thought about making a quiet call to an old professor of mine at the National Gallery. My stomach felt unsettled; something in my mouth tasted rank.
When I got to the studio, Emmeline was in her office consulting with Mark, our antiquities man. Through the open door, I could see a bouquet of red roses surely sent by Emmeline’s husband, Felix. On the windowsill next to my easel, I discovered two of the same roses placed in a glass bud vase. It was a gesture typical of Emmeline, simple and thoughtful, of which she would not want me to make much. I moved the flowers aside and looked at the altarpiece. Inches above the sapphirine sea, the medallion of sky glared an unlikely chalky white. Picking up a cotton swab, I leaned in to work a lower corner of the painting but began to feel very strange. All in what must have been a second or two, I was overwhelmed by exhaustion. My hearing went funny, my eyeballs felt covered by itchy wool, and the painted sea I was focused on turned suddenly from green, to gray, to a spangly, dusty sort of nothing at all. Before I fainted, I remember stretching out a steadying hand and the sound of my palette clattering to the floor.
Mark knelt before me, and Emmeline had my head in her lap. I must have been out for at least a couple of minutes.
“Too much naphtha,” I said, trying to pretend that I was not lying on the floor of the studio but actually standing professionally before my incredible fuckup.
“You’re not supposed to drink the stuff, Addy,” said Mark, fiddling with his earring and giving me a gentle wink.
“I’ve ruined it,” I said.
Emmeline laughed softly.
“We all make mistakes, darling. No point in killing yourself over it.”
“Nah. So messy,” seconded Mark.
I sat up and shook them both off, though I felt sweat dampening me from scalp to toe. When Emmeline insisted that I go home and get some rest, I simply didn’t have the strength to argue.
I boarded the crosstown bus, but as the doors began to shut, I felt sure I would vomit. I remember yelling to the driver to let me off. A handful of private school teenagers, trussed up with huge backpacks, lumbered away from me in attitudes of contempt and disgust as I made for the door. Afraid of being trapped again in a closed space, I walked home and tried to calm myself by repeating the words “It’s OK, you’ll be fine.” One more mad person in the park.
What occurred after the first day of my illness was evident to me only in the aftermath, when I began cleaning up my wrecked apartment. But the first stages, though uncomfortable, remain clear enough to recall.
I sat on the floor near the radiator for what seemed like an eternity. My fainting spell had left me feeling numb, evacuated, and as I sat there I had a strange kind of out-of-body experience. Like a pathologist inspecting a cadaver, I could see and feel my body expanding, firing, warming under the blaze of the coming fever. Blood ran slow, molten, through slackening valves. My heart, totally out of sync with my breathing, felt as if it were thudding against the bars of a cage. Each bone in my body hung from its net of tendons aimed toward the floor in a bid for eternal rest. My very scalp felt inflamed.
I thought of what my father had said to me in the coffee shop, replayed the whole encounter over and over. Backward and forward, slow and fast, I dissected the scene like a film editor making the final cut. I spoke the lines out loud, substituted my wan, stuttering pleasantries with zingers and wicked one-liners. And all the while, I felt a fireball of heat gathering inside of me, a hailstorm of anger and vitriol. I could not have deciphered anymore whether my sickness was physical or mental, but it had soon consumed me utterly. The rage I felt was nearly erotic in its intensity, the flames of it licking at me as I lay there on the worn rug in my clammy little apartment. It had been years since I’d felt anything so acutely.
Some undefinable time later, before night came and threw my apartment into total darkness, I pulled down from the bookshelves a stack of philosophy books I’d acquired in college. Flipping through Durant, I came upon the lines that were flickering around the back of my overheated mind but had continued to elude me. In an angry letter to her son, Arthur Schopenhauer’s mother once wrote:
You are unbearable and burdensome, and very hard to live with; all your good qualities are overshadowed by your conceit, and made useless to the world simply because you cannot restrain your propensity to pick holes in other people.
This struck me as hilarious, and I had to lie down on the floor again from the strain of laughing. I remembered vividly the night I’d first discovered that line.
When I was a sophomore in college, emboldened by the delicious freedom those years give a person to investigate — and cultivate contempt for — one’s parents, I took a kind of antiseptic interest in the subject to which my father had devoted himself. I read Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer’s The World As Will and Idea. I enrolled in a couple of courses in the university’s philosophy department, gathering a slow appreciation for the discipline. I thought I might gain some insight into, if nothing else, what I believed was Hank’s impossible nature. I felt very grown-up, investing myself in this analysis. Clearly, however, I was leading up to some far more dramatic effort.
One night, facing finals and stirred by what the psychiatrist at Health Services called my “routine anxiety disorder,” I charged into the university library. During these attacks, I found that light of any kind made my already throbbing head feel as if it were going to implode and so I’d taken to wearing sunglasses until the episodes passed. I can only imagine what kind of lunatic I looked like darting through the dimly lit stacks, squinting behind dark shades as I ran my finger down the titles. I searched out two volumes of my father’s work (noting with satisfaction that neither had been circulated in a half dozen years) and hustled them to a study carrel. I had of course seen the books — his Ph.D. thesis on Schopenhauer and another whose subject I forget — on my parents’ bookshelves for years. But it had never occurred to me before that I might read and understand them. Throwing my coat over my head to block the fluorescent light, I dug into Hank’s works, making angry notes in the margins as I went along.
Dad made a name for himself by anticipating the chaos and violence of the sixties. During the midfifties’ sock hop of optimism, Henry Abraham was crooning gloom and doom, his message amplified by McCarthyism and the country’s combustible racial divisions. His Ph.D. thesis warned against an ahistorical approach to morality, suggesting that mankind would repeatedly commit atrocities against one another because we continued to divide our species into the “subhuman” and the “morally right.” Hank sought to transcend the argument that such a thing as human rights even existed and concentrate instead on our protean ability to become what as a society we deem acceptable or necessary. He made quite a splash; his scholarship and keen intelligence were difficult to ignore. But, in a post-Holocaust world, Hank’s philosophy was ultimately totally unpopular.
It wasn’t until the end of the decade, when black men and women took seats at lunch counters demanding to be served, that Hank was “discovered.” A tiny swell of support moved in his direction, consisting mostly of fellow academics and black intellectuals who foresaw terrible trouble ahead. At Columbia, where he had studied Dewey and stayed on as an associate professor, his colleagues began to talk him up and by 1962 he was hailed as a minor o
racle. It was during that time that he and my mother fell in love. An actress with a promising theatrical career, as well as the beautiful daughter of a famous artist, Barbara could by all accounts have had her pick of New York’s bachelors. But at a smoky party on Riverside Drive, she chose Hank and sealed her fate. He was, she once told me, “simply the most beautiful, fascinating man I’d ever met.”
When I was very young, Hank had taken a prestigious chair in New Haven and become an impassioned political activist, teaching to packed classes. The students embraced him as a happening counterculturalist. Selma, Vietnam, Cambodia — Hank saw it all coming; he knew the score. Of course, he hadn’t prophesied the mellowing of the nation’s consciousness a few years later. In the self-improvement seventies, Hank’s point of view became at best irrelevant and at worst a real drag. By the time the tall ships sailed up the Hudson in all their vain Bicentennial grandeur, Henry Abraham had flamed out.
I read my father’s work until the library shut down. Then I went back to my dorm room, pulled out a couple sheets of notebook paper, and wrote him a long letter, posting it to Vermont, where he was on sabbatical with his bride, Linda, whom he had finally married. He’d sent me a postcard with news of his wedding and a return address, “if you need anything.” Mercifully, I’ve forgotten much of what I wrote. I did devote some space to an exigesis of my father’s hypocrisy, enumerating the ways in which he had betrayed his own philosophy. I questioned why he had married my mother, a rich woman, why he had married at all, given what we knew of the horrors of Materialism, the deceptive nature of Love, man’s propensity for cruelty. “You seem, ultimately, to have missed the point, Professor,” I wrote with such fury that I can still remember how the ballpoint pen dug into the page. As I recall, I signed off the letter with one last toxic dart. “I hope your honeymoon offers you the kind of rest you so richly deserve. Perhaps you’ll be glad to know just how big a break you’re getting. I’ve enrolled in a snappy little course on contemporary American philosophy. You are not on the syllabus. Your loving daughter, Adelaide.”
Not surprisingly, I didn’t hear much from Dad after that. He tried some — a phone call every birthday, notes attached to a magazine piece or newspaper article he thought might interest me — but I wasn’t very encouraging, and after a few years he gave up. What I knew of his life came from my mother, who, for her own complex reasons, kept in occasional touch with him. Eventually, he moved back to the city, where Linda had been offered a high-paying job as a translator for a large corporation. My father took a position teaching undergraduates at a college up the Hudson, where he no doubt waited for the cycles of history to spin around and lift him up again to his brief, former glory. For my part, I took comfort in a philosophy constructed in direct opposition to his beliefs: I embraced my own very human right to ignore his existence.
I’m sorry.
So now I was sick, really disgustingly sick, and my encounter with my father ran a viral course through me.
I’m sorry.
These last words of Dad’s played like a scratched record in my head, in the end drowning out the rest of our exchange. His thin lips moved, disembodied, before my eyes, exhorting me, taunting me, until I was cramped with nausea and crawled to the bathroom, where I began to expel everything my body could offer up.
For the next few days, I was in and out of consciousness. I guess I had surges of physical strength, because I managed to move around the apartment with some indeterminate purpose. I pulled a few things out of the refrigerator — milk, jam, a jar of honey — and left them, untouched, on the counter. I ran a bath, probably hot at one time, but I doubt I ever stepped into it. At one point, I remember waking and striking my head on something flat. It took a few moments before I could figure out that I was wedged for some reason partway under the couch. A clot of dust had lodged between my lips.
Boxes were removed from the cramped storage spaces in my closets, cleaning products unearthed from beneath the sink, sofa cushions reassigned to the floor. Were a stranger to have wandered into my apartment after these four days (and a stranger was exactly what I felt like when I returned to reality), he might imagine that whoever created that mess was either crazy or had been searching long and hard for something. That, anyway, was my conclusion when I stood on the fourth morning, my legs weak as two blades of grass, and surveyed the scene. If I had found something, though, I have no idea what it was. My place looked like a hastily planned yard sale.
I had a little patch, a half day or so, of wellness toward the end of my odyssey. I remember taking some soup and aspirin, changing into a fresh nightgown, and answering the phone once when it rang. My friend Reid (we’d met in a cooking class at the New School — my last attempt at clubby socialization — and he was the only person with whom I spoke on a regular basis) offered to come take care of me, but I was too embarrassed by the bizarre state of my apartment to accept.
My fever spiked again on that last bad day, and then I had a night of dreaming that I can still recall with almost perfect clarity. In fact the very obviousness, the almost hyperreal quality of the images is what made them hard to forget. They didn’t show much creativity. If anything the dream seemed pedantic, designed to insure I didn’t miss a thing. It was as though, in all that retching, I’d popped the top on some moldy, musty trunk full of my uninvited past. When I awoke, I felt buried by the dust of it all.
In the dream I was well again, and returning to work after all those days off. I showered and had coffee, caught the crosstown bus, did everything suggestive of an absolute reality. It was that kind of a dream. The sort where you tell yourself, Well, I know I’m not dreaming, that’s for sure. At the south entrance of the museum, Segundo the guard was minding his post, his dolorous face fixed on the surveillance television. Life as usual. When he saw me on the screen, he swiveled on his stool and raised his bushy thatch of eyebrow. Good to have you back, Addy. Your show is very fine, he said. What show? I asked. Your show, he said. His opacity confused me, but thinking little of it, I crossed the Great Hall and took the elevator to the second floor. Making a left, I walked down through the Japanese Gallery and was just outside the American Wing when the landscape suddenly got strange.
Where usually there hung Binghams and Bierstadts and Eakinses, I saw instead the distant outline of figures that appeared intensely, personally familiar. I stood back and looked above the doorway. In gilt gallery lettering were these words:
Adelaide Abraham: A Life
How clever, I said to no one. Just like the title of my grandfather’s biography. Noah Kane: A Life. Did they know? Never mind. The rooms were empty and quiet.
On the first wall I discovered a white tapestry featuring an intricate pattern of multicolored balloons. I leaned in close to inspect the cotton fibers and their patches of age and discoloration. Without any surprise I acknowledged what I was actually viewing: the top half of a set of bedsheets from when I was very small. On more than one occasion I’d woken up in the middle of the night and screamed, mistaking the balloons for an army of bugs. Eventually the sheets had been thrown out. Or so I thought.
On the succeeding wall hung a Lucite box and inside it, an unframed painting of my mother on a beach towel, rubbing oil into my father’s tanned back. At the bottom of the picture were a toddler’s toes, as though I’d grabbed the family camera and sloppily snapped a photo. Beyond the box, a small pen-and-ink in an oversized gilt frame depicted a scene from a similarly childlike perspective. A gas pump and the white clapboard of the station were background for the red sleeve of a child’s coat pressed up against a car window. Rain streaked the glass. Yet another, gouache, was an angle of my grandmother’s wide front porch and the blur of a dark, skirted leg crossing the threshold into the day’s waning light.
On and on went the show, some of the pieces mundane and others rich with drama and danger. Although the media were various, all of the work was masterful and precise, and difficult to turn away from. Some felt like tableaux vivants, and more than once I
expected the people in the paintings to talk to me. They’re paintings, Addy, I had to remind myself. Each one was carefully hung, and I was horrified and a little excited to think that they would be admired and rejected, analyzed and dissected by the museum-going public. I forged ahead for what seemed like an eternity, until an earpiercing caterwaul froze me in my place. Looking up to the cross-hatch of gallery skylights, I saw the dirty pads of an alley cat striding across the glass. I woke with a jolt, my heart pounding. The feline wail of an ambulance passed by my building and continued down Broadway. On my pillow was a stain, a small, angry fist of blood, the source of which I couldn’t find. It was early morning, and my fever had broken.
I returned to work for real that morning. But I don’t suppose I was ever the same. I didn’t feel like me at all, but as though I’d been kidnapped from myself and dropped at an unmarked crossroads with no identification and no map. The museum struck me as completely alien terrain, some unfamiliar, nearly lunar plane. It frightened me. That place of infinite beauty and perfect light suddenly became my betrayer. I had always relied on the museum as a place where I could disappear. I felt cradled and cosseted there, as though the vast scope of the place could minimize, annihilate my anxieties and fears. Now I saw the museum as something else, wholly indifferent to me. A place of cold marble and ghosts. Tombs. Dead things.
Emmeline admonished me for not allowing her to visit, a decision I didn’t remember having made or uttered. I knew I’d lost some weight and probably didn’t look terrific. But it was her tense solicitude, and the repeated suggestion I see a doctor, that convinced me how truly bad off I must have been. Something weird and mighty had gone to work on me, and it showed all over my hollowed face.
All the Finest Girls Page 9