History of Art

by Margaret Luongo

  At the train station, she feels fine, relieved, in fact, because she understands now that a transference of power occurs: at the school, Max will become whoever he is supposed to be, and she will have nothing more to do with it. She cannot be blamed for whatever happens next—or can she? She has got him this far without drowning, electrocuting, or losing him to mayhem, never mind kidnappers and molesters, who now seem to lurk around every tree, but who in her girlhood were nearly unheard of. In her day, parents threatened abandonment—at the convent, the orphanage, a midwestern relative’s farm. She and Fitz have seen to his education, his diet, his mental well-being, his teeth, his vision (those glasses! Such a handsome boy; why does he hide it?), his hygiene (deodorant, age ten, shaving, age fifteen), his morality, his decency, his respect for elders and the opposite sex, for himself, and for others generally. They’ve made him understand the value of a dollar without perverting his natural generosity. He’s learned Spanish; he likes children well enough. Objectively, well, to her, anyway, he seems OK; more than adequate, well equipped to—what?

  Sometimes she has come upon him in his bedroom, cradling the horn, facing the window with his back to the door. She’s found watching him a comfort, both of them inert but perhaps communing through stillness. Then Fitz would slam his way into the house and she would slump a little; Max would flinch. Fitz does mysterious things—he lunches with colleagues and golfs with clients. He spends whole weekends at the marina working on his small sailboat, a 1978 Montego, which he lovingly restored. He’s schooled Max in sailing and maintaining the boat, which requires constant looking after—scraping, patching, and repainting. Helane wonders that Fitz has not entirely worn the boat away with his attention.

  “You have to put the time in,” Fitz tells him, often. “There is no substitute for your effort.” Max golfs and he is good, a natural in some ways, and his father’s friends enjoy his youth and talent because he always loses. His attention often lies elsewhere, though if pressed he could not account for his wandering thoughts. He’s not thinking, exactly; he’s leaving himself open—for whatever might be interesting. He watches these men, the way they groom so carefully their hair and sideburns, the way they tip the servers in the club, the way they move things forward with each other. How often he has seen at the end of nine or eighteen holes a new scheme hatched, an alliance made. What does Max want? He could never articulate it, or even form the thought, but he can’t see how Fitz’s friends could connect him to his desires. This golfing and lunch Max understands to be Fitz’s campaign; he knows that he should perform his own version of this act in the future. Perhaps he should have been doing so already and has already fallen behind in his accounts.

  In the station, while Max and Helane watch the board, Fitz examines the pocket watch. He puts on his spectacles to read the inscriptions—from Fitz’s great-grandfather to his grandfather to his father, then, inexplicably, to Fitz’s sister, and from her to Max.

  Fitz hands the watch back to Max. “In some ways you remind me of Susie.”

  “Really?” says Max.

  “They’re nothing alike,” Helane says without taking her eyes from the board.

  Max wants to know in what ways he resembles his aunt. Is the resemblance auspicious? “I’m thinking of an internship in San Francisco,” he says, though he only just thought it the second before he said it.

  “An internship,” Fitz says. “Smart.”

  In what, he wonders, as his father must also be wondering.

  “Susie would love to see you,” Helane says.

  Fitz watches the board now, too. “Just don’t get lost out there. Your aunt went west with lipstick and a nice smile, and the next time I saw her, she looked like a Boy Scout who ate Twinkies in his tent and read comics under the covers.”

  Helane smiles faintly. “I don’t think that’s what she was doing under the covers.”

  “She had a mustache. She seemed proud of it,” Fitz muses.

  “All women have mustaches in their natural state.”

  Fitz laughs. “Nothing natural about living in society, my love.”

  Helane blushes and looks over Max’s head at her husband, and Max feels like an angry child again. Who are these people? He raises the handle of his suitcase, tilting it toward him as if ready to sprint to the track as soon as the ALL ABOARD shows. He’s ready, Helane thinks, and so am I. Later that night, after a bottle of their most expensive Bordeaux, she will let Fitz think he has gotten her drunk—maybe she will get drunk—she will fuck his brains out, fall dead asleep, and in the morning cheerfully wave him off to golf, pack her bags, and be off herself. At the bank she will open her own account, take half of what is hers. Her lawyer will deliver the divorce papers at home (eighteen holes, Fitz’s ETA 3:00 p.m., post-brunch). Fitz will not be too surprised. A clean break—he’ll appreciate that. Their work is done, and once he sorts out logistics, which won’t take long—Fitz is fair and efficient—he will search the ranks of eligible lady friends. He will date independently wealthy women. Made as he is for domesticity, he will probably remarry. Helane might not. First on her list, after the divorce is settled: Paris and reading the classics, and anything else good, in French—what she was doing before the interruptions of Fitz and then Max. Though she loves him, Max has truly been the greater disruption. When she thinks of their time together, she thinks of them in the SUV, on their way to Pee-Wee Football, Boy Scouts, the club for swimming, golf, and birthday parties; ski lessons, dances, soccer practice, hockey practice, swim meets, tennis matches, music lessons, tutoring, the doctor, the dentist, the orthodontist, the orthopedist when he broke bones; CYO, Key Club, road races for charity, volunteer work at the animal shelter, various summer jobs, the movies with friends, Christmas shopping, back-to-school shopping, the shore, without Fitz, just to get away. Nearly two decades together, in the quiet climate-controlled interior. They prefer stillness, and that is how she remembers their time together: dazed, tranquil, silent.

  Max returns the watch to his pocket, and the weight of it at the top of his thigh, edging into his crotch, thrills him.

  “For fuck’s sake,” Tully said, “a pocket watch?”

  Max and Tully were stoned behind the clubhouse one night, after skinny-dipping in the pool. They reclined, still nude, both with raging hard-ons. They thought it the natural state of life. They thought they would always be hard.

  “Are you taking it with you to school?” Tully was going to MIT.

  “Yes,” Max said. “When it breaks, you can fix it.” Their hands brushed.

  “That watch is the crudest, most depressing representation of time I have ever seen.”

  “What should I do with it?”

  “Give it to your old man.”

  “He won’t take it. Even offering would insult him, like I pity him or something.” Max turned on his side to face Tully. “Do you ever think about the future?”

  “You asshole—that’s all I think about.”

  “Don’t go to school. Let’s—”

  Tully turned on his side to face Max. “Let’s—?”

  Max lowered his eyes and dipped his finger into a puddle, dragging it in a looping spiral along the cement.

  “You’re a good guy, Son of Fitz, but you need to get your head out of your ass.”

  Max laughed.

  “Seriously. What do you want to do?”

  Max cradled his head in his arm as he lay on his side and half-shrugged.

  “What do you care about?”

  “My parents—”

  “That’s not what I mean, you dope.”

  Max, high, cracked up.

  “What pisses you off?”

  “Um . . .” Max said.

  “Fuck you and your um. I’m not just some asshole you know.”

  “You are the Prime Asshole.”

  “Damn right.”

  “What pisses you off?” Max asked.

  “How stupid and boring almost everyone is. How smug and wasteful we are. We already know about me
.”

  Max closed his eyes. “I just want to lie here. I want to be still.”

  “How does the world not know what a pussy you are?”

  “Maybe I’m Buddhist,” Max said.

  “You’re half-WASP and half-Catholic. I’m afraid to ask, but have you decided on your major?”

  “I thought we were high. You sound like my parents.”

  “You would shit yourself if your parents ever initiated a direct conversation.”

  Max giggled. “True. Though I feel violated by your question, since you asked, Performance—horn—with a minor in Philosophy.”

  Tully’s silence felt pressurized. “Congratulations. I think it would be impossible to devise a more useless course of study.”

  Max rolled on his back, convulsed with laughter, his cock slapping his belly. When his laughter subsided, he turned toward his friend again and found them face to face. Tully grabbed a handful of Max’s hair. “You can sleep on my couch anytime.”

  “Your couch,” Max said. “I want a wing in your mansion.”

  Tully released Max’s hair and rolled onto his back. Max wanted to know where his people went when they retreated. He wondered if Tully’s place was like his, a lake of silence that opened into channels of sound.

  He’d been turned on his head ever since meeting with the guidance counselor, that fuck. Tully could never get Max to tell him what the priest had said, but he saw Max go to chapel during lunch for speed-Mass. Tully himself was in AP biology and devoted his half lunch to extra lab work—sustenance and science. He’d thought about cornering the old man, bumping up against him in the hall, pushing him into the lockers and holding him there with his chest. Tully wanted to mishandle him, for Max’s sake. What useful earthly guidance could a priest give? Probably this change in demeanor was no one’s fault, he knew, maybe just a rattling from surges of hormones, or a flip-out to which the less rational are prone, the fuzzy thinkers, reeling with voluptuous, vague desire for beauty and grandeur, with no way of finding any, lost as they are in the weeds of their longing. Mostly Tully wanted to punch the priest because he found himself thinking, If only he would apply himself, which he guessed was what the old fart had told his friend.

  Not even Tully knew about the night Max had sneaked out of the house after his parents settled down for the night, his mother to read in bed, his father to do whatever he did in his study. All day, he had successfully evaded everyone: he’d gone to school late, having overslept accidentally. He’d stopped for breakfast at Denny’s, where no one paid him any mind, and he engulfed his eggs, bacon, and pancakes. Checking in at the front office before third period, he drew an extravagant signature, which ended in a flourish off the page, about a foot from the face of the secretary. “Someone’s got spring fever,” she said. “Or senioritis.”

  “A little of both, I think,” Max said.

  He slipped into the small space left for him in the regular day. He’d missed religion and biology, the first a dreary subject, as taught by a dour young brother. Max was glad to have missed whatever had gone on; usually he surfaced for questions, none of which he could answer, because they were philosophical tricks, too advanced for Max and his classmates and based as they were on the brother’s life experiences. Or they were rhetorical: Do you think God wants you to have fun? He was slightly sorry to have missed biology. He imagined Tully calmly conducting the lab, betraying no surprise or concern over his absence. Max was useless in lab. Once, he had shaken a thermometer carelessly and broken it in two; ever since, Tully forbade him touching anything. Mostly he wrote down what Tully told him to, sneaking glances at the pale interior of Tully’s wrist as he transferred liquid from one vessel to another.

  Between composition and literature, he popped his head into Mrs. B’s room to let her know he wouldn’t make band practice. “Not feeling well,” he said. “Oh, too bad!” she cried. Before she could say more, “Thank you, Mrs. B! I’ll see you tomorrow, for sure,” and he was off, the fabric of the day torn, himself stepping through.

  He turned off his phone. He had no idea what he was doing. The vagueness thrilled him. Key to his enjoyment: the idea that he would go somewhere alone, to have an experience all his own—he’d finally have something to tell Tully. Or, even better, a secret to keep. He stopped at the library and researched bus schedules and downtown jazz clubs. At the park, he practiced his horn and ate falafel from a food truck. At home, he claimed to have a project to complete and begged off dinner. He lay on his bed and listened to the sounds of the neighborhood putting itself to sleep: trash carts rattling to the curb; the clinking leashes of dogs being walked and the soft tones of the humans walking them; crickets; a whoop, from somewhere a scream.

  He didn’t climb out the window. He left through the side door, from the mudroom. They rarely used the front door, and the back door led to a place outmoded, the place of birthday and pool parties, tucked away now and quaintly remembered like his rocking horse and corduroy overalls. He walked to the bus stop as if it were something he always did, when in fact he had never. He was not sure his parents were aware of bus service. The ride felt comfortable, natural. Mostly he looked out the window, into the dark, and marveled at the landscape, utterly transformed from this new vantage. Occasionally he glanced at fellow passengers, some dozing, some reading or playing on their phones, as if this space were an extension of themselves.

  He arrived early at the club, when the musicians were still setting up. They saw him approach the light spilling from the small stage. They saw his youth and his horn case, and they were kind. He explained. “I play, but I don’t play.” He was timid at first, but he didn’t panic. He followed and listened for a long time, until he recognized a tune. The saxophonist made space for him, and Max joined in, his horn’s voice nasal and melancholy against the saxophone’s, which sounded wise and upbeat, taking an interest in him, encouraging him along. Later, he imitated the sax player’s more sprightly tones—he didn’t know he could do that—and actually felt buoyed by syncopation and time-change. Whenever he knew the tune, he joined in behind the others and thought, this is what it feels like to be a younger brother. At the end of the night his hands trembled from exhaustion or giddiness, he couldn’t tell which. The thought that his life could be like this all the time stunned him. Everyone shook his hand and told him to come back. He said he would and never did. When he felt especially down, he remembered. Happiness lay at a club thirty minutes up the road. What would he disturb in going there? He thought about returning the way the depressed think about suicide; he held the moment as a comfort. If he should ever, if things got really bad—but why should he wait until things were bad?

  In the train station, he keeps something from himself; it’s a little thought, like a worm in his brain, sliding among the crenellations, disappearing around curves, losing itself in shadows of its own creation. Fitz notices his antsy angling with his luggage, and Max sees disapproval. “I can get us some coffee,” he offers. In his wallet, he has money—his own, earned caddying; a gift from his aunt, about which his parents know nothing; and a subsidy from Fitz, which he hadn’t wanted. You’re doing enough, he said, but Fitz pushed his hand away, his lips pursed with a disapproval that Max found vague yet encompassing. “Buy a few rounds for your new friends,” he said.

  Fitz turns everything into a lesson about character. “I don’t need any coffee.” He rocks back on his heels, as if to emphasize his haleness and lack of need.

  “No one needs coffee,” Helane says to Fitz. “But,” she says, turning to Max, “you should have some if you want it, honey.”

  Fitz flinches in Max’s periphery, and Max wonders if all such partings are so awkward. Fitz follows him to the kiosk at the center of the station. Max has left his suitcase with his mother, but he carries his horn with him.

  “Enjoy it while you can,” his father says.

  The cappuccino machine squeals. “It?” Max replies. He fiddles with some bills, preparing to pay.

  Fitz smiles i
n his habitual, pressed-lip way. “This,” he gestures to the horn case, between Max’s feet. “Playing at adulthood for the next four years. Enjoy it, because afterwards everything changes—and I mean everything.”

  Fitz’s face reddens as he speaks, and Max wonders if he might be having a heart attack. The idea that his father might do something awkward and unintentional in public interests him. “You mean when I get a job?”

  “That, in part. Do you have any idea—”

  “No,” Max says, cutting him off.

  “Well. That’s all right. For now.”

  “You’ll meet someone,” Fitz continues. “You’ll have to give things up.”

  The coffee arrives in its paper cup. “I don’t have anything,” Max says. They move away from the coffee stand, and both of them look at Helane.

  Fitz nods. “It may seem that way now.”

  “Am I going to school to get a job and a permanent fuck-buddy?” Max says this automatically; he isn’t sure where the words come from.

  “I don’t think your mother and I would put it that way. But yes, that’s what people do.”

  “What if I don’t want that?”

  Fitz’s laugh surprises him. “Want what you want.” He rocks back on his heels. “Don’t get me wrong,” he says. “You’ll like it—sometimes more, sometimes less—working, taking care of your family. It’s not bad, not bad at all.”

  “You’re saying all this just happens—it happened to you. You didn’t mean it.”

  “I’m saying there’s no choice, son. You may do other things for a while—some do. Don’t fight it, is what I’m telling you. The less you struggle, the faster you’ll—”

  Max doesn’t hear the rest. Tully walks into the station; they joked about riding the train together to their separate destinations.

  “Excuse me,” Max says. He strides over to Tully, who pauses to look at the departures. Tully does not acknowledge him. “Come with me,” Max says. “I’m going to San Francisco.”