by Lucy Ives
Caro froze. She screwed her eyes shut, and for a moment I was concerned that she was about to expire on the spot.
Caro saw fit to open one eye. “Oh,” was what she said.
I waited.
The other eye popped into view. Caro closed her mouth and smiled, simpered. “Ha,” she said. Then, merrily stabbing the air in front of her face with her fork, “No!”
[ 10 ]
I bit my lip. Why not being acquainted with someone should be cause for this much joy I really couldn’t speculate.
Caro munched her greens. Though she had made her way through no more than 5 percent of her salad, she appeared extremely full of something or other.
“Maybe,” I suggested, “you’ve heard his name somewhere?”
Caro guffawed. “Unlikely, I’m afraid! As you know, dear, I’ve never really done well with institutional politics. Your colleagues at the museum would find it extremely amusing to think a lone gun like me kept tabs on them. I’d really love”—by which she meant that she would hate—“to give them that kind of satisfaction.”
“Wait, really? Are you saying that you know Paul?”
Caro continued delicately chewing, as if I had not said anything.
“Mom?”
Caro swallowed whatever now extremely well-masticated bite she’d been working on. She made a show of deftly daubing the front and then the edges of her mouth with her napkin. She closed her eyes and sighed as if sated.
I waited.
“I cannot believe we’re having this conversation.”
“If,” I let her know, “you were to explain to me what we are talking about right now”—I paused for effect—“I would consider it a real act of charity!”
“Oh”—said Caro—“Stella.”
“I’m asking you, Mom!”
Caro shook her head. “I just hate to disappoint you.”
A lifetime’s worth of anecdotal evidence caused me to sincerely doubt that this was the case, but nevertheless I played along. “Disappoint me?”
“Yes. You’re acting as if a mere manner of speaking actually meant something. I’m being quite general, you know.”
“You’re being general?”
“Indeed, I am.”
“So, like”—I took a beat—“use my illusion?”
Caro was not familiar with this concept. And when Caro is unfamiliar with a concept, it makes her more than a little peeved, vexed. “Please let’s not insinuate that I am intentionally deceiving you! To be frank, I don’t even know what we’re talking about right now!”
“Right,” I said. “Yes. That makes sense.” The irony was thick, rubbery, and in its sudden, gelatinous entry into reality it had become modally indistinguishable from earnest and/or literal speech. This was the double-edged sword of working in the same industry as one’s parent; as much as she might be a source of information, Caro could also withhold indefinitely, no matter how I squirmed. In other words, my mother also knew I knew she knew.
Caro squinted. She now appeared to be attempting to determine if my language mocked her, and therefore constituted a threat to her well-known superiority, or if I were merely acknowledging, in my own feeble and debased way, how great she was. When she at last put her fork down, I believed that I had struck a nerve.
Caro cocked her head. It was an action of unforced grace and indicated that she was about to make a pronouncement. I willed my own face not to register interest and/or need.
She began, “You know that your father and I are planning to leave town in a couple of weeks?” It was as if most of our preceding exchange simply had not taken place.
I let Caro know that, yes, I was aware of this.
“Well, darling, you know how sensitive the cat is. You know her attitude.”
I blinked.
Caro was still talking to some piece of the air. “She’s extremely sensitive! I so hate to move her. Such carefully developed expectations I have never seen in an animal! And she really expects, you know, your father to be there, right at eight A.M., with the wet food. She barely touches it, but it has to be there, otherwise things simply are not right, and then at six P.M., again. I just can’t bear to think of what she’ll do.”
“What she’ll do?”
“How disappointed she’ll be! I can’t just have the doormen leaving her dry food all week long!”
“No,” I started to say.
“Yes, and we know that you are extremely diligent, Stella. I’m sure it’s nothing for you to swing by on your way into the office. And, of course, you’ll play with her for a little while, that’s absolutely essential. And comb her two or three times? That really calms her down. And the litter box, she’s very particular about that, as anyone would be, and it has to be cleaned at least once a day, otherwise you really don’t know what she has in store. They thrive on structure and repetition, you know, and it’s so hard for them to trust. It’s a little known fact but, as I know you’ve heard me say before, cats are as motivated by loyalty as dogs, if not more so. It’s only human inconstancy that masks this trait. Stella, dear, it really takes someone as on task as you, someone so dependable and so driven, I mean, someone who”—Caro apparently struggled to obtain the correct words—“who would understand that sometimes duty comes before love, and that, well, we could all be called upon to give up romantic love for our career! I’m just so impressed by how well you’ve done!”
Something was transpiring on my face that I hoped approximated a mild smile of pleasure and manifest delight. I wanted Caro to know that I eternally and forever meant business. That business was all my joy. And that I, a priori, condemned all fantasists, utopians, socialists, human rights activists, devoted liberals, kindergarten teachers, or anyone else for whom all aspects of life were not entirely up for grabs and/or résumé building. That I was extremely smart and therefore was likewise incapable of feeling whatever it was I was clearly meant to be feeling, based on the eminently reasonable kinds of things she said. And so I told my mother, “But of course!”
—
BACK AT MY DESK, I was meek. It is usual for my interactions with Caro to drain me heart and soul, but this was one for the books and/or archive.org.
In my inbox was a message from Bonnie, addressed to the entire department. It contained a link permitting me to direct my browser to a certain piece of coverage in the Times, an Arts feature. Although it was getting pushed out of first place online by a video about the size of logos on American sneakers, it was still a substantial bone.
The writer was a columnist named Glinda Corn. I’d seen some of her work before, and her favorite bugbear, then as now, was something she liked to call “connoisseurship,” which was really just another word for being successful, which was to say, being known in your profession for having achieved success.
The piece ran:
A CURATOR OF AMERICAN ART AND DECORATIVE OBJECTS GETS CREATIVE
BY GLINDA CORN
Several years ago the curator Frederick Lu suffered a crisis of faith.
“I was feeling a certain lack of enthusiasm for what was then, approximately two years ago, the going thinking about how American works ought to be exhibited, what was modern, what was by contrast Colonial, antique,” Mr. Lu said yesterday in an interview in his office at Manhattan’s Central Museum of Art (CeMArt), where he is Thurston J. and Jeanne A. Prentiss Curator of American Decorative Arts of the Department of American Objects.
Mr. Lu, who sat at his desk beneath an early landscape of the U.S. Capitol, described meditative after-hours walks in the museum’s storage area, during which he began to appreciate the breadth of the Central Museum’s collection. He said, “I realized that these were things that were crucial to the present of this country, that came out of multiple, complex pasts—pasts that might not always be clear on first glance. There was something more here that Americans really needed to see.”
Mr. Lu, 38, “exudes calm resolve and canny verve,” said entrepreneurial chef and television personality Gordon Ram
say, who has become a passionate advocate of the museum and of Mr. Lu himself, inviting Lu to judge a segment of his reality cooking show, MasterChef. Lu, no stranger to pressure tests, was until recently nationally ranked in field archery and is one of the youngest senior curators ever appointed in the Central Museum’s history. “I have always understood that our museum’s mission will probably be forever married to the idea that there is a single artistic genius and this artist-genius has created certain indelible, irreplaceable works, cornerstones of culture,” Mr. Lu noted. “But when it comes to the American collection, this sort of model for appreciation just isn’t going to fly. Our problem was that we were in denial about that. We needed to get creative.”
The decision to rehabilitate a collection of esoteric American paintings, of various time periods and styles, which had gone largely unseen by the public for the past hundred years, represents a definite change in museum policy. Lu fought hard to win support among his colleagues. As Nicola di Carboncino, CeMArt’s director, explained, “One has to work to have space in an institution like ours, and, as with anywhere else in New York City, real estate comes at a premium.”
Mr. Lu, a native New Yorker, is the son of Lulu Weynmaaren Lu, the interior designer and lifestyle author, and John Lu, the founder and owner of Recepro, the telecommunications firm. In between studies at Princeton and Yale, Lu took time off to work for his father, in order to become, he said, “a curator who knows his way around a boardroom as well as a gallery.”
Mr. Lu believes that he has learned from the business world. “I just see the importance, the absolutely crucial importance, of communicating to people in terms they can understand,” he said. “What I realized, too, is that we were taking the wrong approach in the way we were displaying crucially significant work.”
Mr. Lu said that, based on his own observations and interviews he himself has conducted with the public during biweekly “strolls,” many museum visitors seemed unaware of the incredible value of even “everyday items, like, to give an example somewhat at random, an eighteenth-century rococo dish for displaying pickles and salted nuts, a product of the first porcelain factory in the United States.” He said, “We want to invite visitors to imagine this eighteenth-century piece as somehow commensurate with an object they would have in their own homes, like from IKEA.”
“Land of the Limner,” his newest exhibition, is on view until August 31st of this year. The selections are of paintings made between the years 1620 and 1950, chosen specifically to illustrate a range of styles, from primitive familial scenes to stark modernist studies, in what he called “the changing nature of the American portrait.”
“What I aim to do,” Mr. Lu said, “is to rehabilitate our American imaginations. We aren’t like other nations, that much is clear, but I think the problem is that we’ve forgotten why. We’ve lost that sense of wonder.”
Though change happens slowly in a sprawling institution like CeMArt, Mr. Lu is determined to start the ball rolling in his own department.
“Part of my goal is to show the way in which America reentered Europe, at the same time as Europeans and people of other heritages were arriving in America,” Mr. Lu said. “Americans have always been quite aspirational.”
[ 11 ]
I hadn’t brought my laptop in, and due to the vintage of the institutional desktop’s operating system, the browser had long ago ceased to be updated, and images weren’t loading properly, so though I was invited to “View the slideshow” accompanying Fred’s profile, I elected instead to put the machine to sleep and check in with Bonnie before I called it a day.
Bonnie was present. “Hi there,” I said.
After an encounter with my mother, Bonnie is cake. She is like an eccentric aunt who enjoys spoiling me and appreciates my impractical side. She presents herself as a plausible fantasy and/or replacement parent.
“Oh. Hi there.” Bonnie wasn’t precisely in the mood, but she was not entirely out of it, either. “The coverage is slowly trickling in.”
“It is,” I said.
“The world blunders on.”
“It does,” I agreed.
“Some people stick around for the ride.”
I wasn’t sure how many more mixed metaphors Bonnie would want to put me through before we could come at last to the possibility of literal speech. I decided to be direct. “How are you doing?”
“How am I doing?” Bonnie scratched her cheek with her prosthesis. “I’m fine, thank you. How are you doing?”
This was not going particularly well. “Good.”
“That’s good.”
“Yesterday was quite the day!” I felt sure that this was the type of statement we could both agree on.
“And how!” Bonnie’s face was a useless, placid sheet.
I forced myself to smile. “That was quite a party!”
“It was. I could not believe some of the guests.” Bonnie raised an eyebrow and engaged my gaze.
“Yes,” I said.
“Some real blasts from the past, if I do say so myself.”
“There were,” I muttered.
“Stella, is everything going, you know, OK?” The last word of her sentence was one of the most brutal euphemisms I have ever heard.
“Um, sure,” I maintained. I may have followed this up with a cheerful “Ha ha!” I am not entirely certain. It had not been, as everyone increasingly seemed to understand, a particularly good six to twenty-four months.
“I’m very glad to hear that.”
“Of course,” I lied.
“Because the uncertainty of staff in this department being what it is, I really could not stand to have to lose someone else.”
And there it was, acknowledgment and ultimatum rolled neatly into one, the Bonnie Mangold special. She was telling me a number of things: (1) that we were not yet speaking openly about whatever the situation with Paul was, and while she understood that it was only human of me to come into her office to inquire, it would be better if I were to assume a slightly more godly attitude and observe unfolding events from a dignified distance; (2) that Bonnie was aware that I was, at the moment, romantically fucked on several counts. As far as point two went, Bonnie was willing to let particulars slide, but she did not wish to see me rolling up to any additional CeMArt A-list events with the defendant in my nonamicable divorce absurdly in tow. (I willed myself not to consider the wide range of bizarre behavior in which Whit could have freely engaged after my exit.) The reasons for this stunt were not known to Bonnie, and she had little curiosity about them, but one thing she did know was that jealousy was the near-certain culprit. Reason told her that a triangle must have a third point, perhaps even a fourth, and she was doing her best not to look for candidates within the confines of our present working arrangement.
To the extent that I could smile, I smiled. “Thanks, Bonnie.” For once, I really meant this. Overwhelmed by her candor, I removed myself from the premises.
—
I WENT HOME. I mean, I got on the 6 and missed my stop and ended up riding all the way to Union Square. After a struggle, I was ejected from the L at Bedford. It was buzzing with design girls in polyester and thin little bandmates whose tattoos appeared to outweigh them. I pushed through this candy-colored dream of taste, smarting some from my relative dowdiness, and found the street above similarly occupied: proofreaders dressed as majorettes, anorexics in suspenders, rich women in artisanal clogs propping up sobbing toddlers, languorous Swedes engrossed in lifestyle banter, recent escapees of Florida bearing a rickety kitchen table back to their six-person share, the occasional fleet of skaters outfitted like it was 1991, designers who were teenagers in 1991 with Swiss-made glasses and three-thousand-dollar attachés, twenty-three-year-old investment bankers looking to fuck something.
I don’t care for Williamsburg, but I felt like I wanted the walk. I was unsure what, if anything, I understood about what I had lately experienced, my recent reading not really serving to help matters.
I walked.
McCarren Park’s floodlights were mystically dispersed by lambent, airborne moisture. Past the park I stopped in a bodega I frequent for coffee, The New Star, and visited very briefly with Idris, its middle-aged owner.
Idris observed, as he always did, “I notice you keep coming back.”
“Thanks, Idris, see you tomorrow.”
“By the way, my son is working then.”
“OK, great!”
I don’t really know what he said after that because I just ran out of the store. I get nervous about developing relationships these days, as much as I continue to seek them out. Everything has just been so unrelentingly bad. And I am sometimes a shy person, and this may be part of it. I was not looking for a new husband just yet, and, more than any of the above, it disturbed me that my singleton status, not to mention the accompanying loneliness, was so apparent to others.
I went into the twenty-four-hour organic market for wasabi peas and a couple of big bottles of lager. I was thinking about what I wanted to watch online, preferably something with women in outfits. It didn’t really matter what it was as long as they were under the age of twenty-five and haunted by technology-induced memory loss and bad credit rather than the disembodied spirits of Western feminism.
I mean, this was what I was thinking about as I threw myself into the apartment and proceeded to crack into my exceptionally unhealthy provisions. Because it wasn’t very long at all before I remembered that I happened to be in possession of materials that might explain recent events, were I to expend the modicum of effort necessary to interpret them.
I rooted around in my bags and picked out the flash drive, administered it to the relevant slot. An icon appeared, and I clicked on it. “Paul” I had named the folder. “Paul,” I prayed, “please explain to me what was going on in Elysia. And, if you can, please tell me where you are. I feel like I need you.”
Then I read for several hours, eventually dragging the laptop into bed, in which location sleep and literature united, and I fell into the following dream: