“Skeevs! He’s adorable! William, did you look like that when you were a baby?”
“That baby is Chinese,” William said. “I’m Korean.”
“Technically he’s half Chinese,” Skeevo said.
Irene shook her head, and even without seeing her second eyelid droop, William knew that she was sad. “Babies aren’t anything yet,” she said. “You can’t be one thing or the other until you get old enough to know what you are and what you aren’t.”
William wanted to argue, but she slumped into his shoulder.
He could feel her body tensing as she tried not to cry. Fortunately Skeevo was too busy dodging traffic to notice a tear leaking out from under her eye patch. William wiped it away. Then he caught the one falling from her good eye and wiped that one away too.
Infertility, Dr. Zarrani had said, was a likely long-term side effect of the chemo. So was ototoxicity (a sensitivity to high-pitched sounds), neuropathy (numbing of the fingers), heart damage, and most ironic of all, greater susceptibility to cancer in the future. Irene didn’t seem to care about anything except losing the ability to have a child.
“How do you feel about adoption, William?” she asked. “I’ve always wanted to adopt a baby. I’m basically adopted myself, you know.”
“I’m for it,” William said. The video ended with Skeevo’s son chewing merrily on his mother’s hair. “That’d really drive my mother off the wall.”
Irene sighed. “She’s so sweet. You should be nicer to her.”
William turned away and looked out the window at the dingy Brooklyn boulevard they were heading down. He took in a deep lungful of fresh air. It was difficult, but he needed to be ordinary again for a while. He needed to feel how he felt, late at night, while he lay awake next to her in bed, unable to sleep. In those dark hours with his eyes shut, he had been counting disappointments on a hundred imaginary fingers. Not things that he was disappointed by but disappointments of his own making. Things like having made more money than he deserved, doing mergers for companies with questionable ethics, being a terrible son—anything he felt the universe might be punishing him for by making the woman that he loved so sick.
He knew it was egotistical to believe it was somehow his fault, but this made more sense than trying to imagine it was her fault. All she ever did was turn ordinary things unordinary. Lying next to her, at home on the bed, or there on the truck seat, with her hair smelling burned and her arms feeling thin, with her skin red and her eye mutilated, he couldn’t bring himself to imagine what she could’ve done to deserve this.
AUGUST
The steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art burned through the seat of Jacob’s pants as he stared out at Fifth Avenue, waiting for Irene. He’d arrived early and was annoyed because he didn’t know exactly how early he was. He had given up wearing watches, and when his phone display broke, he’d refused to get a new one, because technically it still made calls—if he could remember the number to dial. Text messages were a lost cause, of course.
He had been wanting to call Irene all morning to insist that they bag this whole thing, but the only person’s number he could ever remember was George’s, and George had grown tired of Jacob calling him every ten minutes, asking him to look up someone else’s number. It didn’t matter. Jacob knew Irene would have insisted anyway. If he’d canceled on her, she’d have come by herself, just to prove she could.
It was their tradition to get dressed up and go to a museum on the second Sunday of every month. They had only missed one before, during a hurricane—but for God’s sake, she was supposed to be taking it easy, not going around in hundred-degree heat, and not spending all week at the gallery learning to arc weld. How was she supposed to operate a blowtorch when she had trouble lifting her purse? One of these days she was going to set herself on fire.
Whatever admiration he’d felt back in July for her dedication and energy was now, in August, a distant hallucination. Now he just wished she’d ease up. Allegedly July’s treatments had been much harsher than the previous rounds—allegedly, of course, because Jacob hadn’t been informed about the previous round—but the others had filled him in on the pattern: she’d feel queasy during the days of treatment but not totally awful. And then, just when the inconvenience of the hospital visits was over and she began fantasizing about getting her life back, the aggregated chemo drugs and radiation side effects would hit all at once. She looked airless half the time, as if instead of putting something into her, they were siphoning something out.
Jacob peered over the shoulder of a man on the step below him and saw on his phone that it was 12:19, which meant Irene was a little late—they’d agreed to meet at 12:15. The man was reading a story on Gawker about some handsome actor that Jacob recognized but couldn’t remember the name of, who had tried, and failed, to kill himself. The man kept looking up and making audible, dramatic gasping sounds, as if to make sure everyone nearby knew that he was shocked.
Several steps down from him were three orderly rows of squatting grade-school children, their teachers lazily circling them, looking up the avenue for their school bus. The rows of schoolkids began to get restless with the barber shop quartet busking on the corner, singing old standards like “I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo” and “You Make Me Feel So Young.” At some point the teachers responded. “Let’s do our song, kids. Come on!” Jacob eased back, curious if they’d be singing a little “Frère Jacques” or “The Farmer in the Dell”—but no, as he listened through the din of high-pitched voices, he could tell it wasn’t any of those childhood classics. “‘Baby, baby, baby, oh!’” the kids sang, “‘Baby, baby, baby, oh . . .’” Jacob saw to his horror that the teachers were actually encouraging this atrocity—recording it on their cell phones. Surely it would be on YouTube before their bus arrived. Jacob thought he’d never live to see the day he missed Barney the Purple Dinosaur, but now here he was.
He was sore from the steps and could feel sweat over every inch of him. People rudely trampled by just inches from his spot, though there was plenty of room to go around. He couldn’t stop wiping at his forehead and knew it was turning all red. Then, just when he thought he might actually implode from unexpressed venom, there around the corner, past the hot dog vendors, he saw Irene coming at last. She wore a long, flowing white dress, and her hair was pulled up in an elegant twist that hid how thin it had become after all the treatments. She was fully made up, as she usually was now that the eye patch had come off. She’d figured out how to cover the scars with foundation and eye shadow. She’d put on a bit of blush. Her cheeks, like the rest of her these days, were colorless.
“You look like a million bucks,” he said eerily.
“Why didn’t you wait for me inside? You look like hell.”
• • •
They went up the steps and through the revolving doors into the crowded Great Hall. Irene tilted her head back to stare up at the vaulted ceiling, and Jacob noticed her lurch back. He moved quickly, as if to catch her, but she righted herself without a word. They got in line.
“One student,” Jacob said, flashing his faded college ID.
“You need to get a sticker to show you’re still enrolled,” the old man said.
“Sticker?” Jacob feigned ignorance. “What are you talking about?”
Normally they went through a round or two of this, but Irene stepped in before it could escalate. “Twenty-five dollars is only a suggested price. Just say you want to pay twelve.”
“They’ll think I’m cheap!”
“You are cheap.”
The old man began his spiel. “Sir, every dollar you spend goes directly to the museum’s collection, which is unparalleled in the country in terms of its variety and excellent—”
“Where are the dinosaurs?” Jacob asked, peering around as he pushed his ten and two singles across the counter.
“Sir, that’s at the Natural History Museum
across the—”
“Honey pie,” he whined to Irene, “I thought you said we were going to see the dinosaurs. We didn’t come out here all the way from Tacoma just to see some art.”
“You hush,” Irene snapped, as she took a pair of little sky-blue M-buttons from the man. She clamped her hand around Jacob’s wrist and jammed the button into his lapel.
“Ferme la bouche,” she said, then marched off into the Egyptian Wing.
Jacob doffed an imaginary hat. “I could be from Tacoma,” he said, mostly to himself, as he walked after her.
Normally, Irene liked to start by the mummies in the ancient Near Eastern art section, but this time she kept her back to them as she passed by the long, opposite wall, which displayed the scrolls for the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
“Can you read this?” she asked Jacob, pointing to the hieroglyphics.
He’d taken two semesters of Middle Egyptian in college, since he’d done Latin and Greek in high school and needed six “ancient language” credits for his classics major. He hardly remembered any of it, but usually Irene liked it when he ad-libbed.
“Ah yes,” he said. “This here is a pilot script for an ancient Egyptian police procedural called . . . let’s see here . . . yes. CSI: Akhetaten.”
Irene didn’t smile but ran her fingers along the English text on the glass as if she were blind and it was Braille. “‘A spell to keep the heat within the body of the deceased until resurrection. Which must be recited over the figure of a heavenly cow.’”
Jacob scratched an invisible beard. “Never have a figure of a heavenly cow when you need one, though. That’s the trouble.”
The next panel described the Hereafter. “Each of the seven gates of Osiris is monitored by an attendant, a guardian, and an announcer.”
“Well, sure. Under union rules, you can’t attend, guard, and announce without three separate contracts.”
Still no smile. “The Egyptians believed the dead lived in a Field of Peace, which they were taken to either on a ferryboat or aboard the solar bark of Ra.”
“Solar bark?”
“It says ‘solar bark.’”
“Like a dog bark or a tree bark?”
“Unclear. And here’s a spell to—interesting—a spell to transform someone into a swallow that can travel freely between the real world and the Hereafter.”
“Yeah, but then you’re a swallow,” Jacob sighed. “Ew. It says the guardian of the third gate is the Eater of His Own Excrement. That guy better at least be getting paid scale.”
He was sure this was one of his better performances, but Irene was drifting silently into the next room. She breezed through groups of Asian tourists while Jacob found himself shuffling left, right, and left again, trying not to knock two Hasidim into the five-thousand year-old Kneeling Bull Holding a Spouted Vessel.
He caught up with her inside the enormous greenhouse that enclosed the Temple of Dendur. “Are we racing?” he asked as they crossed the moat.
“I’m looking for something,” she said. “Sorry, I don’t need the whole Jacob Show today.”
She got like this when she was in the middle of a new piece in her studio. He liked it; he missed feeling that way himself, but he understood. She was the only other person he knew who had artistic impulses. Ordinarily this made her eager to pick his brain, seeking advice and context, but she had said nothing to him at all about her recent projects, not for months. Soon she was leaning into the archway where a nineteenth-century soldier had carved his name into its gray foot: LEONARDO 1820 PS GORDE o.
“You’re looking for ancient graffiti?”
“I’m looking for something”—she sighed, then sighed again with the last bit of breath—“disappointing.”
Extending his arms in mock-heroic pride, Jacob stood in front of her. “Behold! Portrait of a Profound Disappointment. Jewish-American in Origin. Circa 2009. Oil on Skin. Meat on Bone. Tweed on Meat.”
Ignoring him, she stepped into the cool antechamber at the center of the temple. There two small children were fighting over a handful of playing cards with hieroglyphics on them and trying to match them to the ones on the walls.
“Careful! Don’t trip on the wire!” Irene cautioned the kids, as they tried to climb over and under it at the same time. The little girl stamped her feet on the tile floor and looked up at Jacob, with an accusing finger pointed at her brother.
“He’s taking all the cards!”
“Where are your parents?” Jacob asked.
“Here,” Irene said, picking a card up off the floor that the girl’s brother had dropped. “Jacob, what’s this one?”
The little girl looked glumly down at the funny golden cross.
“That’s an ankh,” Jacob explained.
“Honk!” the girl shouted.
“Ankh,” Jacob repeated. “Less h, more ank.”
“Ankh!” she tried again. Her brother chimed in, eager to see what was going on.
“It was a symbol of eternal life.”
“What’s a symbol?” the boy asked.
“It’s like a big brass disk.”
“Whaaaaaat?” the boy asked nervously.
“Go find your parents,” Jacob said, standing aside so the pair of them could rush off. “And hold on to that card. You’ll live forever!”
The children bolted around his legs, back out to the main room, and when Jacob looked back, Irene was smiling, two tears on her cheeks. Other people were trying to get into the temple now, but Jacob held a big hand out toward them and shifted his frame to block the door again. “Sorry. Private party.”
Irene turned back to the graffiti etched in the wall again: A L Corry RN 1817. She moved her hand over the carved letters, and a little dust came off on them.
“What’s going on?” he said, stepping over to her.
“You’re going to be such a good dad,” she sniffed. “I want to be around to see that.”
Don’t be ridiculous, Jacob wanted to say. In ten years we’ll all be sitting around George and Sara’s tacky living room somewhere, with their rug rats and yours all crawling up the goddamn walls, and we’ll think back on this whole year, and we’ll tell the older kids about how Aunt Irene had cancer once, and they’ll never even believe it. All this, he wanted to say.
Instead he said, “Ew. You know, procreative sex is against my religion.”
“Just be serious for a minute, would you?”
Jacob stood silently, mouth open, no words coming.
Finally he said, “If you want to be disappointed, let’s go look at the Warhols.”
They made their way out of the Temple of Dendur, bypassing the American Wing altogether and squirming through the Medieval and Greek sections on their way to the second floor Contemporary galleries. As they walked, Jacob tried to tell her about the movie he’d gone to see with Oliver the week before.
“Which movie?”
“Some stupid thing. Title from an Elvis song.”
“Can’t Help Falling in Love? With Stone Culligan?” her eyes lit up. “You know he tried to kill himself yesterday.”
“Who did?” Jacob asked.
“Stone Culligan! It was all over the news. He and that supermodel, Branca, broke up, and he slammed his Jet Ski into a bridge. They say he bruised his spine and he’s lucky to be alive!”
“Lucky to . . . you’re damn right he’s lucky to be alive. He’s got the face of the David, and he’s worth a quajillion dollars. Doesn’t even have any talent, not that that matters to this fucking planetful of philistines.”
“Keep your voice down, okay? You’re scaring people.”
But Jacob didn’t care about the gaggle of Floridian women pretending to appreciate some Monet painting they probably had hanging up in their pastel-painted bathrooms.
“How dare he? How dare he? How dare he try to fucking kill
himself when there are—when there are people who are legitimately—”
Irene arched an eyebrow at him. “Dying?”
Jacob scratched his arms furiously. “That’s not what I was going to say.”
“Yes, it is,” she hissed. “Yes, it is, Jacob, and you know what? That’s—that’s the worst thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“It isn’t what I was going to say,” he insisted—but of course it was. “Fine, it is what I was going to say, but that’s not how I meant it.”
She crossed her arms, and her eyes went black.
“You’re not dying, Irene. I don’t believe that. Really, I—”
“Let’s drop it,” she snapped.
“If you’d just—”
“I said DROP IT!”
She was so furious that Jacob stayed several feet behind her the rest of the way across the museum. As hard as it was, he remained silent as they came up to the Contemporary Wing.
Then they came to the Warhols. In better times, they had sat for hours there on the floor, talking smack about Pop Art and Anti-Art and Anti-Anti-Art and can’t we for fuck’s sake just make ART-ART?—but now Irene wasn’t interested when Jacob pretended not to be able to see the enormous camouflage-patterned self-portrait of Warhol.
“Where did he go? Isn’t there supposed to be a painting here?”
She was transfixed by a huge painting at the end of the aisle—Anselm Kiefer’s Bohemia Lies by the Sea. Twenty feet long and seven feet high, it showed a wild field of pink and orange poppies with a rutted road going up the center. It was one of their favorites—but this time it was familiar in a wholly different way.
Why We Came to the City Page 20