by Mark Sarvas
Rachel glided with familiarity through the galleries, slowing a bit as we passed through a hall of works by the Old Masters. Is it my imagination, or do people behave differently around them? The talking is softer, the mood respectful, or fearful, I’m not certain which. Perhaps the age or the subject matter is too distant, too far removed, and we are uncertain how to locate ourselves in relation to these works. One of us, it seems, doesn’t belong here. I have never warmed to them, with their biblical tableaux and oppressive religiosity; or else their staid, bourgeois portraiture. Only the nature morte, with all its fussy verisimilitude, its glistening water droplets, appeals to me. But I prefer the indeterminate, shifting reality of Cézanne, his glorious mountain of quivering cubes, as riotous in its coloring as any of my mother’s Christmas trees. Rachel, however, drifted among the artworks, unbowed, and when she spoke about the paintings, it was with a kind of love, a feeling deeper than whatever informs the obligatory chatter of the docents.
I know she spoke of many things, of the biblical scenes, of painterly technique, of impasto, of chiaroscuro, which she then connected in a line to the Kálmán bathers we’d come to see, but I wasn’t listening, not fully. I was basking in the radiance of the art refracted through her reverence, and I remembered, in contrast, my first—and last—museum visit with Tracy. An international Van Gogh exhibition came through town, replete with the usual blockbuster crowds and ticket prices. Tracy paused in front of the greatest hits, watching me, I think, for cues on how to react, but she became overwhelmed and beat a hasty retreat to the café, where she took weary refuge in a double espresso. In contrast, the longer Rachel spent among the paintings, the more luminous she became.
I’d just about had my fill of Judas and Lazarus and John the Baptist when I strayed upon a large, disquieting canvas. An old man holds a knife to the throat of a young boy but an angel has stayed his hand. The three figures, joined by a ram, are shrouded in a forbidding darkness, although a distant, rising light appears to illuminate parts of each figure, including the bald dome of the patriarch, his back turned from what I now know to be his son.
“And you think your dad is trouble.”
I looked at her blankly, missing the reference.
“Abraham? Isaac?” She regarded me with mild disbelief.
The tale began to come back to me. “It’s about a sacrifice, right?” She raised an eyebrow and I ventured on, grinning. “And a goat. I definitely remember a goat.”
“Oh, Matt,” she said, smiling. The rebuke was gentle, indulgent. I listened as she walked me through the tale, chapter and verse. We moved on, but I was unable to shake the image of the father prepared to slay his son, and the son so docile in his fate. I understand only now how much I resented them both.
Walking on, we came to rest before a reclining Matisse nude. Our easy rapport gave way to awkward throat clearing, and I found myself unable to make eye contact with Rachel. Such a strange, childlike response! I glanced at her, and it seemed as though she’d flushed for just a moment. And then she surprised me with a gesture of such … I can only call it tenderness. She leaned forward and sniffed at the edge of the painting, as though sampling a fine Bordeaux. I found the gesture both charming and intimate—it was as though she were alone in the gallery. She exhaled sibilantly and drifted to the next painting. I stood before the odalisque, aware of my racing heart.
At that precise moment, a little boy raced into the open gallery and paused before a Giacometti. He pointed at the attenuated giant, shrieked with delight, and ran on. I envied that boy, Rachel. For a moment, at least, I wanted his freedom to express the sheer, unspeakable wonder of a previously unimagined form of beauty filling one’s vision. I think if I had been given liberty to point at you and shriek with similar abandon, I just might have. Or not. I wonder these days about all I might have achieved if I hadn’t always been waiting for permission to act.
Rachel guided me to the Kálmán and wandered away to look at nearby paintings, tactfully leaving me to contemplate the bathers. I still felt the pressure of her somewhere behind my eyes and so I forced myself to read the descriptive plaque in an attempt to focus. The card bore an audio guide graphic proclaiming its significance to the collection. The bathers were a recurring motif for Kálmán—he’d painted them both before and after Budapest Street Scene. This particular version had come afterward, about three years before Kálmán put a rusty Luger in his mouth, and was confiscated almost immediately and shown in Berlin with the other so-called degenerate art before being sold off for a pittance. The card assured me that the painting was restituted after the war and came to rest here legally. I turned my attention from the card to the bathers themselves.
The painting was full of dark hues, a gloomy work, so different from the bathers of Cézanne and of Picasso. Here, greens so dark they were nearly black slipped into actual blacks and oppressive blues. Three pale bathers—again, three figures—are grouped beneath some leafy trees, where they stand against an indistinct background, lit only by occasional feathers of color across their torsos. Under the glare of the spotlight reflecting on the glass protecting the canvas, I noted that, again, one of the three figures stood with his back turned to the viewer. The longer I looked, the more convinced I became of the similarities between these bathers and the street scene, and I puzzled over the timing, wondering whether this was Kálmán’s prelapsarian view of the Budapest Street Scene. Or was this a return to the primitive in the wake of cataclysm? Probably neither. It was nothing more than a group of bathers.
I found Rachel standing in front of a small but striking seascape by a painter who was a contemporary of Kálmán’s, who had suffered a similar fate despite trying to play nice with the Nazis. Her attention was fixed on the green, churning waves upon which a single red boat was being tossed. The painting exuded such foreboding that even now, more than a half century after its creation, I found myself rapt beside Rachel. Foamy whitecaps raged against a green-black sea, and the sinister movement of the waves felt so intense that I think we were both tempted to hold on to each other for support. This time, I had no difficulty looking at her, and in her eyes I saw a kind of fear tinged with excitement. It was the first of many times I wanted to kiss her, and although I did not act on the impulse, I allowed my hand to brush against hers, a hand fuller than Tracy’s sleek metacarpals. The fleeting, almost accidental gesture felt shockingly intimate to me. Rachel neither pulled her hand away nor moved it to meet mine, which I chose to interpret as tacit encouragement. For if no means no, I have always taken anything short of no to mean maybe.
A STORY IN THE NEWSPAPER the other day caught my attention. A sculptor, en route to dedicate a memorial he had designed to commemorate a World War II massacre, was killed in a plane crash. What made the story poignant was that his father had been killed in the original massacre, so now the press made much of both generations being claimed by the same tragedy. In his last interview, the artist spoke about the difficulties of designing a monument to a father he’d never known, but I thought he’d gotten it wrong. Surely it was easier this way, the blank slate unencumbered by inconvenient reality. He was free to idealize, could imagine any father a son might wish for. I was touched by his expression of love and loss for a father he’d never known.
I was thinking of plane crashes as I waited for my father at baggage claim. I’ve often had lurid daydreams about being one of those people called in by airline personnel when the flight of a loved one has gone down. That these daydreams almost always accompanied my father’s visits would seem to bear further examination. I didn’t wish him dead. But I’ve watched the footage of these survivors, rent by grief, and have envied such deep feelings.
What I had instead was a world-class case of the hiccups. They started that morning, in the shower, and persisted throughout the day, resisting every folklore cure I threw at them. I waited at baggage claim, despite my father’s insistence that I meet him curbside, and scanned the crowd when my phone chirped. An e-mail from Rachel asking
me to call her for the latest update. I wanted nothing more than to bolt from the airport and fling myself into the sanctuary of her office. I had begun to type a reply when I heard his whistle.
Ever since I’d been a boy, we’d had a family whistle, a unique call that served to summon or locate us amid crowds, like a muezzin’s call to worship. It was a lyrical knot of ascending and descending scales, a sort of musical sheepshank. I’d always appreciated the obvious good sense of the scheme but now, hearing his call, I felt like a dog being summoned by his master. I spotted his dyed black hair weaving its way toward me, through the crowd.
“I told you to wait outside.”
“Hi, Dad.” Hic. “I came in. Special occasion. Shoot me.”
I moved forward uneasily to hug him, which he received, allowing his hand to brush my left shoulder. I know it was my imagination but it seemed I could still smell the paint from his shop clinging to him, though he had retired years earlier. He once explained to me it was the solvent content of the paint evaporating that caused the sour smells I associated with him, with my youth. I stepped back and took him in between hiccups as he scanned the conveyor for his suitcase. I hadn’t seen him in at least a year, probably longer. He now had a wizened, elfin quality that I’d never noticed before. A malign elf, mind you. The kind that would steal your pot of gold while you slept and replace it with a bucket of steaming feces. Still, there was undeniable power, vitality in his sinewy muscles as he blocked my effort to reach his suitcase and hoisted it off the conveyor in a single, graceful motion. There was something formidable about him, about his adherence to adamantine standards that I could neither meet nor shake free of. Where my father was concerned, I was like one of those early Mercury rockets that struggled to slip gravity’s fingers, only to plunge back burning into the sea.
“Come on, Dad. Let me help.” Hic.
He looked at me, as though my hiccups indicated a failure of character or will. “Where’s your car?”
I gestured to the parking structure across the street. “Outside.”
“Let’s go.”
We stepped out of the terminal into that odd mixture of carbon monoxide and ocean breezes that always invigorates me whenever I return home. The sun was shimmering and the sky was cloudless, that deep Cézanne blue. I looked to my father, hoping for some kind of reaction, proud of myself for having chosen such a beautiful place to live. His gaze was fixed straight ahead, waiting for the DON’T WALK sign to release him.
“It’s beautiful here, huh?” I prompted.
“It’s an airport, Matt.”
The light changed and as we crossed, I could see him struggle with the weight of his large metal suitcase, filled with toy cars. He bought it before wheels became ubiquitous and he was too cheap to replace it. He preferred to struggle with it, a marker of some deep well of virtue that his shiftless son could never understand. It drove me fucking crazy, Virgil.
“Dad, gimme the—hic—damn suitcase.”
“I’m fine.” His standard reply. He was always fine. What a blessing, I thought, to be fine so much of the time.
We stepped up on the curb and into the parking structure. I led him to where I thought I had parked but didn’t see my car. I slowed and began to look around, uncertain, my stomach beginning to churn. My dad didn’t say anything for a moment as I scanned the rows. Finally:
“Matt, what is it?”
I didn’t answer. Hic. I stood on my tiptoes, looking over the tops of SUVs. I could feel the sweat dappling my forehead.
“Hang on.”
“What? You don’t remember where you parked?” His tone was thick with disgust, as though he had foretold this scenario, expected nothing less from me. My heart thudded. I could feel his gorge rising. I began to look more desperately, trying to keep the explosion at bay.
“I know I left it in this row…”
I tried to find the car, prayed it was stolen, as I felt his eyes heavy on my back. I did not need to turn to face him to register his contempt. Yes, a strong word, but, as usual, my old man stood there in judgment of his son. For this, he must have been thinking, I escaped the Communists? For a son who can’t even remember where he’s parked? Perhaps you think I judge him harshly, Virgil. But within a moment, he could no longer contain himself, and the outburst came, as expected.
“Goddammit, Matt. What the hell is wrong with you?” His voice rising.
I flinched, expecting a blow that didn’t come. I continued looking down the aisles, clicking my alarm button in the air.
“Is your head so completely up your ass? Don’t you pay attention to anything but yourself?” Shouting at me now, red-faced, drawing the stares of passersby.
I turned to face him, both mortified and furious. I wanted to tell him to shut the fuck up. That I’d made a goddamn mistake, that was all, as though he’d never made any himself. My father, as I have said, was prone to rages, so this one shouldn’t have stood out. But I realized, as he set down the suitcase in a huff, the real reason for his anger: The suitcase had become too heavy for him. And I had seen his weakness. The greatest fear of the Santos men, I can attest. For an instant, my anger lifted and I felt sorry for my father.
My hiccups had stopped. I pressed the alarm button again and, at last, a confirming chirp issued far down the row.
* * *
WE DROVE IN SILENCE. My father offered a single approving grunt about my BMW, but after that there was nothing but the gentle whoosh of the AC and the rhythmic thump of the road beneath us. The only thing that broke the silence was an occasional clearing of the throat, both his and mine. It’s a habit, a tic really, that emerges in times of stress, and I was shocked to find just how much we sounded like each other. It was as though I was standing atop the Grand Canyon, and each phlegmy, staccato burst was answered by its ancestral echo. Did my father feel as usurped as I felt dismayed? His features revealed nothing. He watched the boulevards pass with scant interest.
The car, I was sure, smelled of paint.
My phone rang. The car’s display screen identified Tracy as the incoming caller. I let the call go to voice mail, unprepared to navigate a phone conversation with my father in earshot. We drove on for another moment before he spoke.
“You should have answered.”
“We’ll be seeing her soon.”
“It’s rude, Matt.”
I thought about confronting my father right then and there. Don’t laugh, Virgil, I really did. But the prospect of talking to him enervated me. I was preemptively spent. When I was a child, my father had seltzer delivered to the house. It was the only thing he liked to drink, and it was delivered in those old-style fountain bottles, metal heads affixed onto glass bodies. I was warned to treat them with care. The contents were under extreme pressure, and if I dropped a bottle I was assured it would explode. But I was drawn to them, to their crystalline colors, pale blues and greens and yellows, shades that seemed to exist nowhere else. (It was only many years later that I learned that these bottles were invented in 1829 by—wait for it—a Hungarian.) I dropped one, as predicted, and it shattered against the concrete step of our garage where they were stored. A piece of glass sliced through my shin, and, as my mother bandaged my cut, my father reprimanded me for not heeding his warnings—Pay attention, Matt! What I remember most, however, about these bottles was the sound they made when they were empty, an exhausted sigh of carbon dioxide, sputtering but final. I felt that same sputtering emptiness whenever I contemplated asking my father any of the questions that bedeviled me.
So we drove in silence. I glanced at his carry-on bag in the rearview, the one in which he always carried his most valuable toys. Although I no longer knew which pieces were nestled in there, I could still imagine them as if I had wrapped and packed them myself. The tissue paper, tattered and worn from years of reuse, wrapped carefully around the toy and then placed within a cocoon of bubble wrap. It was my own sacrament, wrapping and unwrapping his toys, preparing them for market. I conservatively estimated that
I had performed the ritual thousands of times before moving to L.A., watching as cars of every make and size passed through my hands. I came to know the objects as if they were mine. But now, years later, they had all merged, indistinct in my memory. Only the space car stood apart.
A single piece of molded plastic, bubble-gum pink. A cheap friction wheel set on a single rusted axle. It resembled nothing so much as a giant, extraterrestrial sperm on wheels. My father read the disbelief on my face when he bought it for five dollars. Disbelief transformed into shock when he wrote a price of sixty-five dollars in his distinctive blocky scrawl on a tiny round adhesive sticker, which he affixed to the underside of the chassis.
“Really?” I said as he placed the toy on our display table.
“It will sell,” he said. His usual maddening certainty.
“Sixty-five dollars? No way.”
“Want to bet? If I don’t sell it, I give you the sixty-five. If I do, you pay me.” That was always how my father ended debate. Cash on the barrelhead, put your money where your mouth is. He knew I seldom had the courage or the means to take the bait. Just sixteen, I didn’t have the money to bet, but I shook on it, I was that sure.