“Huh?”
“This neighborhood.”
He thought Michael might mention the trees, or the handsome buildings. But the boy said, “Lots of old white people.”
Yes, it wasn’t half as diverse as what the boy was used to. When Noah was a kid, he wouldn’t even have seen whiteness, let alone named it.
As they passed a stoop, Michael asked, “Did somebody get offed here?”
“What? Where?” Noah jerked around.
Michael pointed at a cluster of balloons tied to the handrail.
The boy thought it was some kind of memorial, Noah realized. “That means a kid’s birthday party.”
A nonchalant nod.
Walking on, Noah recalled a recent headline about a study of reading tests across New York neighborhoods. Each recent local murder had a stupefying effect, pulling children’s scores down by two or three grades. It made sense to Noah, in terms of brain chemistry; the fight-or-flight response superseded all abstract thought.
Michael turned his head to gape at a pair of silken Afghan hounds going by, pointed black faces held high above the cluster of Lhasa apsos and shih tzus. “That dude has like eight dogs.”
“Oh they’re not his, he’s just the walker.”
The kid’s forehead creased.
“He’s paid to take them out, while their owners are at work.”
Noah couldn’t tell if Michael thought this was the coolest job or the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.
Back in the apartment, as he and Michael ate their sandwiches on the kitchen stools, he glanced through the boy’s agenda. On each weekly double-page spread there was a perky message in Comic Sans: What skills do you need to go from your house to the store? or Planning ahead helps you avoid stress. But what skills would help a sixth-grader prepare for contingencies such as his mother’s imprisonment, his grandmother’s death? Every day eat a variety of fruit and vegetables to keep healthy.
“Have some grapes,” Noah said.
“I did already.”
“Where are the stems? Have they become invisible?”
Coldly, Michael took a grape.
Downtown, the photography center had a more complicated floor plan than Noah remembered.
Michael was dragging. “Why haul my ass all this way to see some picture?”
At last: Noah came to a standstill in front of the large crisp print. So gorgeous; his fingers itched to hold it one more time.
Père Sonne [Pierre Personnet] (French, Marne-la-Coquette, 1860–1944 Nice)
Tuyeau de Cuisine [Kitchen Pipe] ca. 1942 [?], [printed mid-1960s]. Black-and-white gelatin silver print.
Gift of Dr. Noah Selvaggio and Dr. Joan Chubatovsky, 1992.
It had raised a few eyebrows back in 1969, he remembered, Joan keeping her own name. But if her Russian grandparents, who’d fled the shtetl back in 1903, had gotten through Ellis Island with Chubatovsky intact, she wasn’t going to trade it in.
“Hey, that’s you, vag-seller.” Michael put his finger to the information panel, where it said Selvaggio.
A guard barked behind him: “No touching.”
The boy’s hand recoiled.
“We donated a whole set of still lifes after my mother died,” Noah said. “When Père Sonne was too old to get around much, he started doing close-ups, portraits of objects, and he called the whole set ‘Objection.’ It could be a pun, see—the objects are registering their objection.”
Way over his head, Joan commented.
Noah tried again. “This drainpipe may be saying, ‘Hey, look at me…’”
“‘I’m a dumb-ass drainpipe,’” Michael suggested, “‘big whoop.’”
Noah countered, “‘I’m a drainpipe, and I don’t have to symbolize anything because I’m useful and beautiful all on my own.’”
The boy let out a snort.
“This print has been valued at somewhere in the low five figures.”
Michael worked out what that meant. “You’re shitting me.”
“Shh!”
“Suckers.” He cocked one finger at the photograph. “I could snap better than that on my phone, easy.”
“Easily,” Noah told him.
“Huh?”
“Easy is the adjective. To say how you’d snap it, you need the adverb, which is easily.”
The boy let his eyes roll back in his head.
Noah knew he was being petty. “And sorry, you couldn’t have taken that picture. It’s all in the composition, how it’s shaped.”
“It’s shaped like a fucking drainpipe.”
“Now you’re being disrespectful.”
“Because my great-great hasn’t earned my respect with this piece of crap.”
Noah tried again. “See how the pipe curves just above the floor, as if it’s a tired person who’s longing to sit down? The paint flaking off at the join, and the rust eating into it? That drip forming at the seal, it seems to slow the moment right down. And Père Sonne took the shot from just the right angle so the pipe’s shadow would look like a liquid leaking out—like blood, even.” His long, spatulate finger hovered over the spot.
“Sir! Move away from the exhibit or I’ll have to call Security.”
“I wouldn’t dream of touching it,” Noah snapped at the guard, as he stepped back. “For your information, I’m the donor of this particular work.”
The guard’s face was unconvinced.
“There’s more of his work upstairs,” Noah told Michael.
The boy rubbed his eyes. “Can we go?”
“Just a quick look?”
“I’m tired.” He did look wrecked.
“All right,” Noah said. “I just need five minutes in the shop.”
Michael wouldn’t take an interest in anything there, even though Noah would have been glad to buy him a book or a craft set. The boy leaned against the wall, arms wrapped around himself as if he didn’t trust them not to knock something over.
Noah glanced at the O to S bookcase, between PENN, Irving, and PLATT LYNES, George. This was where he’d picked up a few studies over the years; specialist monographs on how Père Sonne fit into late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century portrait photography, plein air versus studio work, the art of the Mediterranean, social realism, the cult of celebrity in the 1920s… But now an unfamiliar title hooked his gaze: Père Sonne: A Life’s Work by one Max Harstad. He snatched down the heavy paperback and checked the copyright page: new this year.
Thrilled, Noah couldn’t resist skipping right to himself in the index: “Selvaggio, Noé Pierre, son of Margot Isabelle Selvaggio née Personnet, grandson of P.S., 329, 342, 389–94, 427.” Though when he flicked back to those passages, they turned out to be mere mentions of occasions when he’d been with his grandfather in Nice.
Noah’s memories of his first years were few and slight. Making caverns of stones on the beach; low radio music at night; the warm savor of tobacco from a pipe. His pépère’s pipe, surely, since Marc had been broken of the habit back in 1914 by having his hand blown off.
As they walked to the bus stop, Noah’s eyes watered in the buffeting wind. He thought to check his phone: no messages from Rosa or the passport people. If it didn’t come through by the end of the working day—what was he going to do?
Cancel his trip, he supposed, as he wasn’t a complete monster. But he’d always resent it.
“So your dad didn’t live with you guys.”
“What’s that?” Noah looked down at Michael.
“Back in France. You and your mom lived at your grandpa’s?”
“We were all together at first,” Noah told him. “Marc had been a fervent fan of Père Sonne’s, published essays about his work.” He must have stood out from the crowd of acolytes, for Margot; older, maimed, interestingly melancholy. “But after I was born… I think it just got too small in that apartment.”
He meant metaphorically small, but Michael nodded, leaning against the bus shelter: “Cody got the bed.”
“Sorry, I�
��m not following.”
“When his girlfriend kicked him out, he had to crash at our place, and Grandma said Cody needed the bed more than her so she went on the couch instead of me, and I got a mattress.” Michael must have seen Noah wince, because he added, “I liked it. Didn’t hurt my back like the couch.”
“How’s the bed at my place, by the way?”
A surly shrug.
Noah wasn’t trying to make the boy say anything disloyal about the life that had been ripped from him less than a week ago. “Anyway, if you share a home with a renowned genius… I think it gets a bit exhausting.”
“Not for Jay-Z.”
Noah must have looked blank.
“With Beyoncé!”
“Oh, right.”
“Probably different if you’re both, like, world-famous,” Michael added.
Noah thought of those decades of fielding calls for Joan. “Anyway, my father moved out for a while, when I was small. I never got the full story.”
“Was he running around on her?”
This child was the strangest combination of ignorant and worldly. Noah and Fernande had discussed that possibility, but… “I don’t think so. Then Germany invaded, or at least took over the north of France, and Marc went ahead to New York with all my grandfather’s prints and negatives—to get them away before the bombs started dropping, see?” Had Margot hurried her husband onto that ship, Noah wondered now, or begged him not to go? Could Marc be said to have abandoned his wife and toddler? Or had everyone behaved in a very civilized fashion, focused on keeping the art and the artist safe?
Père Sonne had wangled his son-in-law a position at a Greenwich Village gallery, Noah knew that much, and Marc had carried on burnishing the old man’s reputation and arranging some crucial sales. “Then when I was four, things got scarier”—Noah was glossing over the Italian occupation of Nice, and the far worse German one—“so my mom sent me over to my dad in New York, without her.”
Michael yawned.
“Oh, what the heck, we’ll get a cab home.” Noah stepped to the curb and put his arm up. If they were by any chance flying to France tonight, it was going to be a long one.
In the lobby of his building, on the mahogany bench, sat Rosa.
Flustered apologies all around. She’d been kept on hold so long by some branch of city bureaucracy that her phone had run out of juice. “How’re you doing, Michael?” she asked as they went up in the elevator.
“’Kay.” The boy looked run ragged, as if Noah had set him to work in a sweatshop the moment she’d left.
“He’s just tired.” What, was Noah some expert now? “Had a bad night. Sleep-wise,” he added, in case Rosa thought he meant a psychotic break. “He didn’t seem up to going to school—”
Michael’s eyes slid sideways at Noah, letting him know that he’d detected the bullshit.
“—so we, ah, took a cultural day and went to a gallery.”
“Did you call it in?”
“What’s that?”
A sigh Rosa couldn’t quite restrain. “On the first page of his file, with all the numbers, there’s one to register an absence on the school’s automatic attendance system.”
“Oh, sorry. I’ll know for next time.” Great—that sounded as if Noah was planning a lot of absenteeism.
Upstairs, Michael went straight down the passage.
“Well, he seems to be making himself at home,” Rosa said, and slid a navy-blue rectangle out of her purse.
The passport. Noah didn’t know if he was relieved or disappointed. He felt slightly sick. Time to marshal his strength.
He found Michael slumped on the Le Corbusier lounger.
“‘Is it a specific color?’ No. ‘Is it brown?’ Rarely. ‘Does it come in different types?’ Yes.”
“Good news,” Noah told him. It sounded bleak, somehow. He made sure to smile as he held up the passport.
Michael nodded, eyes returning to his game.
Noah found himself remembering a New Yorker cartoon: About your cat, Mr. Schrödinger—I have good news and bad news.
“What are you grinning at?”
“It’s hard to explain.” Or rather Noah could have explained Schrödinger’s refinement of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but there’d be nothing funny about it by the time he was done.
III
Takeoff Speed
LaGuardia was a hell of detours and obstacles these days. Noah sucked on a last cigarette outside the door.
Michael hung back, taking a picture of…what, Noah wondered? The stumpy air traffic–control tower?
Something occurred to him. “Have you been on an airplane before?” he asked the boy.
A shake of the head.
“But you must have been to an airport?”
Why must he have? Joan wondered.
Noah stubbbed out his butt and put it in the garbage, then beckoned Michael through the automatic doors.
“To Paris, then Nice? Very nice.” The check-in agent smirked.
Noah had a feeling she used that pun every time.
“Any bags?”
“Just carry-on.” He’d avoided checking in baggage ever since a trip to Santiago when Joan’s suitcase had gone astray, and she’d had to give a very important paper in the slightly less crumpled of Noah’s two linen jackets.
In the security line now, he and Michael were halfway along the third segment of the zigzag. “What are we waiting for this time?” the boy wanted to know.
“They have to check everybody thoroughly,” Noah told him.
“For what?”
“Anything dangerous.”
“Like what kind of dangerous?”
Noah leaned down to murmur in his ear. “I’m not going to say, because passengers have been arrested at security just for talking or joking about this kind of thing.”
“About bombs and shit?”
“Shh!”
A couple were being wheeled through the metal detector one after the other. Noah tried to decide whether they were older than him. It struck him that being able-bodied was a temporary condition, what with the weaknesses of infancy and age, and all that could go haywire in between.
Almost eight o’clock, when Noah next checked his watch. “Do you know we spend three years of our lives waiting in line?”
Eyes on his phone, Michael appeared not to hear.
The prospect of an overnight transatlantic flight with this boy was making his stomach tight.
What were you thinking, taking this on? Joan marveled.
Oh shush, you.
Was it some atavistic clan loyalty? Helping your sister’s descendants pass on some of your genes was strategic, he supposed.
Noah jumped at the sound of that fake-shutter snap. Michael was photographing the full-body scanner. “Put that away, it’s illegal to take pictures.”
“Seems like everything’s illegal here.”
Their turn at last. Noah read the sign: “You and I don’t have to take off our shoes and jackets. Over seventy-five, under twelve, they assume we’re harmless.”
“That’s bullshit! I could easily be a—”
“Shh!” Was the kid baiting him now or did he just not get it? “One joke and they’ll pull us out of line.” And I’ll go to France without you, Noah would have liked to say, but that would be childish, and petty. As well as unconvincing. A terrible thought: “You don’t have anything…sharp on you? Like what you brought to school that time?”
The kid’s cheek twitched furiously. Didn’t he know Noah would have been told about the knife? “That was for protection.”
Too late, anyway. The guard was asking if Noah had a pacemaker.
He made sure Michael’s toiletries were out of his backpack, and took his own tablet out of his satchel. The man on the other side of the metal detector was beckoning the boy through.
Noah watched him go. Nothing beeped.
Buckling up his satchel again, beside Michael at the conveyor belt, he said, “None of me is met
al, yet, but my eyes do have acrylic glass lenses implanted. That’s another handy polymer.”
Michael leaned in close to peer into Noah’s face.
Noah flared his eyes. “Can’t see them, can you? I’m one of the only members of my retired academics’ speaker club who can read a menu. How’s your sight?”
Michael shrugged.
He supposed—hoped—they tested these things at school. “Personnets have good vision. Well, my mother had a problem later in life, she could see almost nothing in her left, but that was because of an infection she got in the war.”
“I’ve got Grandma’s glasses.”
For a moment Noah thought the kid meant he used them himself. “Oh, as a…” Not souvenir. “A keepsake.”
“Huh?”
“You’re keeping them for her sake—to remember her by.”
Gruff: “I remember her fine.”
Noah yawned, needing more air. “So, a trip to France. That’ll be something to brag about.”
Michael shook his head, pained.
“No?”
“My teacher’ll tell the whole class and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, that dude thinks he’s all that.’”
“Ah.” The perpetual, cruel dynamics of childhood; every tall poppy slashed down. “Do I get the sense you don’t like your school?”
Michael let out a huff of breath. “I’m a gamer. I just put in the time till I can get online.”
On their way to the gate, they passed a framed poster of the Stars and Stripes made out of the names of the 9/11 dead.
“I heard that was Jews.”
Noah pulled up short and stared at Michael.
“Nine-Eleven, they all stayed home from work that day.”
Joan, give me strength. “That’s an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.” The kid was looking blank, so Noah translated: “A Jew-hating lie. Where did you hear it?”
A shrug. “Snapchat.”
Was that slang for gossip?
“No offense.” Michael’s eyes had slid off into the distance. “I didn’t mean your wife.”
Noah headed for the bookstore.
He picked up Time and Scientific American. He was confused by the jacket of a book called Nice Is Just a Place in France—it seemed a petulant accusation—until he realized that it meant nice as in pleasant-mannered; from the jacket he gathered that this was a satirical guide to being a betch, which he assumed was a variant on bitch.
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