City of Strangers

by Ian Mackenzie

'It seems so.' There's a hard, sharp glint suspended in the back of Bentham's eye, like something frozen in thick ice. 'What changed your mind?'

  'That isn't important. All you need to know is that I'll do it.'

  The editor smiles and, in mock deference to Paul's show of hostility, puts up a pair of open palms.

  'When we last met, you said this would be my book.'

  'I did.'

  'No swastikas on the cover. Nothing tasteless.'

  'Yes.'

  'And you'll publish it, this book, however I choose to write it?'

  'There will have to be a certain measure of editorial discretion, of course.'

  'I want you to know that I'm agreeing to this only with serious misgivings.'

  The editor pauses and, leaning toward Paul, joins his hands in an arrow, aimed directly across the desk.

  'I would say you've made that awfully clear.'

  He waits for a large, threshing pack of schoolchildren to cross over before having the bar code on his own ticket scanned. They rush ahead like swallows down the roped corridor that admits entrance to the museum, as their teacher makes a futile pursuit, calling for them to hush down, to respect the place they're in. A second teacher lags reluctantly behind; he is younger and seems faintly embarrassed by it all. Paul sees a guard grin. By the time he finds them again in the main hall, whose ceiling reaches far enough above them to achieve the distance and abstraction of sky, the teacher has regained control of her students. They remember what she surely told them before arriving: this is a museum, not a playground; the works of art here are priceless, or at least worth millions of dollars; you are to keep your voices down, walk at a reasonable pace, and, above all, you are not to touch anything. The students each clutch a black-and-white composition notebook.

  It is a field trip, a chance to force-feed culture to ten-year-olds. He remembers these from his own childhood in Brooklyn, the voltage of an excursion to Manhattan, then as much an idea as a place; Frank never took him, never saw the point – Manhattan was more buildings, more people, more noise, more construction, more car exhaust, more assholes and criminals and deadbeats and drunks. Paul would prefer not to analyze his reasons for being here now. He's visited this museum dozens of times, but not since the divorce. Elsewhere in the building, Claire is at work, sitting at a desk or walking around the office as she speaks on the phone; she isn't down in the galleries, among people. She won't see him. Feeling a pungent sense of displeasure after meeting with Bentham again, he came here: he can purchase a ticket like anyone else and with that, the price of admission, have the run of the museum. It is a public place.

  In the atrium he spots a series of four abstract paintings by Cy Twombly. They are among Claire's favorites; he didn't know they had come to New York. Behind him two of the children dart past like rabbits, jostling his coat. A clutch of five girls, gossips, loiter nearby, giggling and writing in their notebooks. They don't look at the art. Elsewhere the younger, male teacher sternly addresses a group of boys. Despite the teachers' efforts, the volume of chatter swells and fills the enormous hall. There are perhaps thirty kids in the room, caroming around the floor like pool balls. Finding it difficult to concentrate on the paintings in front of him, Paul moves to the next room, the gallery of contemporary art. Big things. Found objects. Video. Industrial materials, manipulated photographs, looping words of lurid pink neon.

  Claire knows how to look at such things, and how to speak intelligently about their intent; he has always had trouble. These frictionless surfaces offer no traction. Although he has no formal training, Paul has long felt entitled to his opinions of art, as someone who has spent so much time around it. He and Claire share a love of earlier artists, or they once did, of the postwar generation, the abstract expressionists, de Kooning and Johns, and the artists before them, the clearly marked trail going back – Picasso, yes, and also Giacometti, Schiele, the German expressionists, and then Munch, Vuillard, Rodin, Manet. They both admire Cézanne. Claire knows more, has an internal library of images a thousand times the size of his own, but at heart she likes what he likes. Together they saw dozens of museums – and it has never occurred to him with quite such immediacy that he's been conditioned to look at art with her, to anticipate Claire's opinions and to have her nearby to offer his own. He hasn't visited a single museum since the divorce; the last ten months are perhaps the longest he's gone in his adult life without setting foot inside one. He feels the build-up of unexpressed thoughts like a stuck vein inside his head and looks more than once to his right, his mouth already beginning to form a word, as if she will be there to hear it.

  Trapped in these thoughts, he isn't looking at the art in front of him. If his eyes focus long enough to notice anything, it is his own fading reflection in the glass of the frame, and the reflections flickering behind him, a room's worth of bodies, fragmented and floating back and forth. In this tableau, at the center of which hangs his own face, he notices another's: a woman's, her features obscured but her figure familiar, familiar enough; she stands at about the right height, with the right length of hair, with a similar style of dress.

  He turns – she's already moving toward a sculpture in the middle of the floor. He doesn't follow at once. When he does, he selects an indirect course, standing not beside her at the sculpture, but at a piece on the opposite side of the room; once again, he isn't really looking, rather using the glass of the frame as a mirror, a way to pick out her movements, which surely gives the impression of staring all the more intensely at the art itself. She stands at the sculpture for a long time, then walks away, out of the room. Paul dithers, makes up his mind. He goes after her.

  The main hall again. Most of the children have gone. Three kids blast across one of the exposed catwalks of the upper galleries. A call echoes down.

  She's looking at the paintings Paul stopped by earlier, the sequence of four, each one a season; she stands at the first, at spring, and Paul, preserving a certain distance, begins at the end, with winter, although his eyes focus on the piece immediately to his left. Autunno. Vermilion, magenta, brown, and black, purples and yellows, all erupt in bursts and shocked splotches, and in fat, longitudinal drips that run almost to the bottom; in places the brush strokes are so thick that the paint burbles off the canvas, hangs there in gnarled, gristly threads. From elsewhere he hears a guard's tired remonstrations: 'No flash. No flash.' In the outermost parenthesis of his vision he sees her advance from spring to summer. The resemblance is uncanny.

  A figure steps between them – a small girl. She looks eight or nine, perhaps too young to be part of the school group, although Paul isn't good at guessing ages, and upon approaching the painting, Autunno, she squeezes her face into a quizzical pouch. The piece gives her no grip, no figure for her to wrap her imagination around, no scene for which to invent a narrative. It is simply color and blank space, absence and presence, a grisly convulsion. She stares. The woman, Paul notices, now looks away, as if deciding where to go next.

  Paul is about to turn as well when he sees that the young girl's finger, inches from the canvas and extended in an innocent gesture of indication, hasn't stopped moving; then, without the hesitation that would suggest an awareness of the inherent transgression, it is touching the artwork, penetrating what seemed impenetrable. The canvas bends like a mattress. She picks briefly at a particularly thick clot as at a scab, before she pulls away her hand and then, as if nothing has happened, leaves. Paul's mind is fixed on the sight. It has the visceral shock of a finger pressing against the wet, purple bulge of an exposed brain. No one else saw what took place, no alarms were triggered, none of the guards was watching. Whatever now bristles inside of him recalls the first sensations as he approached the two men beating the boy, but more concentrated, all that violence shrunk to the tip of a small girl's index finger.

  Even as he finally turns away and, catching a glimpse of the woman just as she leaves the main hall, quickly follows her out, Paul feels an unfamiliar chemical elation from what he saw.
The crowds are growing. Tourists chatter like magpies. A glutted escalator carries them to the third floor. His thoughts still blink with a strobing flutter; the image of the girl's finger touching the canvas holds his mind like a startling piece of pornography. He manages not to lose the woman. Briefly she and Paul are in the architecture wing; he pretends to look at a photograph of a Soviet-era housing complex. Half the windows are broken. A French couple behind him seem much more interested by it than he is, and he stands aside to allow them a closer look. When she leaves he waits a beat, then makes his own exit.

  In the fourth-floor galleries the pace slows. At certain pieces she hovers: one of Pollock's hypnotic, wiry nests; a baboon howling with terrific pain; a giant abstract canvas, covered in tarry black, with only a few spills of color, a hatching of blood and yolk. Fluorescent lights of different lengths slatted into a bright cathedral: his eyes hurt when he stares at it. Paul preserves a steady distance between himself and the woman, but enjoys, after she has walked away, trying to retrieve, in the air, a residue of her thoughts, a fiber of emotion. He avoids a clean view of her face, observing her only in sidelong glances, slivers of profile, nothing his eye can hold onto. It ensures also that she doesn't see him. He lets her chart the course. Occasionally someone speaks too loudly in one of the galleries and breaks his reverie – it is always a woman, middle-aged, from out of town. Around him footsteps scuff and slap the hardwood floor.

  He can admit now that she bears little resemblance to Claire. With every glimpse of her face, even fragments and flashes of it, the knowledge ossifies; he knows she isn't his wife, she isn't even a close match. Yet this awareness doesn't diminish his enthusiasm: he follows more closely, and more carelessly.

  Things thicken considerably in the room of Picassos. People press toward him with the peculiar intimacy of the art museum; they bump his shoulder while trying to read a title card or examine a brush stroke. In the jostle of heads, it takes Paul a moment to realize that she's already come and gone. He spots her in the far doorway, the back of her, and pushes through. By the time he reaches the next room, she is nowhere to be found.

  Slowly and mindlessly he follows the escalators back down to the main hall. To his surprise she is there, standing once more in front of the Twombly paintings, framed by the enormous white wall. As he halts beside her – they are standing in front of the last piece: Inverno – she senses his presence and turns slightly. They smile. Now that he can see her face directly he understands how foolish this has been. He feels faintly ashamed.

  She moves her eyes from him to the paintings. 'You seem to really love these,' she says. He must look nonplussed, because she adds: 'Earlier. You were staring at them so intently.'

  She has been aware of him, too.

  He nods. 'I've always found this one a bit terrifying.'

  They look together at the hazy black orb sinking through the dun canvas: it suggests not only the end of a given year, the frozen passages of winter, but the onset of a greater, more grievous finale. In its dying sun it is easy to imagine that Twombly had in mind a much more permanent descent.

  'It surprised me,' she says, 'how quickly he turns from something lovely to something so dark and – yes, so terrifying.'

  He says, 'I once saw them in London with my wife.'

  She gives him a strained smile, and both turn back to the painting. After a suitable interval, she wanders away, pauses at the piece on the opposite side of the room, and then vanishes down the stairs in the direction of the museum's exit.

  Paul lowers himself onto a bench. He wasn't following this woman but Claire, a fantasy of proximity, and into the space he has allowed a stranger to occupy for the past hour now seep memories of his wife.

  When the end of their marriage perhaps had become inevitable, he and Claire went to Venice. It was a vacation not only from home but from marriage itself: the weight, the accretion of silence, the litany of grievances. Months later they would be divorced. But for a week they were happy: they ate long dinners and had conversations that reminded Paul of their first year; they took walks through the city and spent hours in the museums, holding hands and talking about the art; after staring at an erotic canvas by Modigliani they even snuck into a bathroom to make love. Claire threw pennies into fountains, laughed at herself for trusting in wishes. Their voices climbed the egg-brown walls of empty squares. Venice encased them in the un familiar, made them residents of their own private ambit. Like anonymous lovers they devoured the city and each other; no whim passed unindulged. The versions of themselves who were unhappy in marriage, who were charting a slow path toward its demise – those unfortunate people were back in New York, stewing glumly in their apartment, chewing bitterly on the silence. Meanwhile, in Venice, Paul made a cuckold of himself, taking every chance to touch Claire, to bite down on a mouthful of her flesh and hold it between his teeth.

  In the afternoons they would nap after making love. At some point he'd wake, or she would, and they would loll in bed like buoys, touching and parting without pattern or purpose. Minutes would collect with a satisfying sense of time accumulating rather than passing. On one such afternoon, rolling over and looking at him through eyes clotted with sleep, she mumbled: 'Isn't this like a movie? Can't you imagine us in black and white right now?'

  She spoke again. 'I love the sound of bodies in bed. In films now there's never enough silence. They never let a moment breathe. I love older movies. They used to listen. Skin against sheets – I love that sound. I want our movie to have that. No talking, no soundtrack.'

  Then: 'Hotel bedsheets are always so crisp – they're perfect for that.'

  He pinched the fabric and worked it between his fingers. She rolled away again so that he couldn't see her face. Without warning a feeling of inexpressible sadness filled his heart; he felt the room close around them, a hotel room in a foreign city, with its unfamiliar habits of light, its narcotic air of freedom. A temporary place.

  Paul, whose eyes have been shut now for a long time, opens them only with reluctance, finding it difficult to observe others' faces, their smiles, even children's looks of boredom. His father is dead. It's been hours since he considered that new fact. He checks his watch – he doesn't have anywhere to be, but he ought to go. Why did he come here? Why did he pretend that being here, in rooms full of art that he has seen with his wife, in the building where she works, wouldn't have exactly this effect on him? The muscles in his legs flex as if to stand, yet he can't. Memory, as painful as it can be, is addicting.

  In their third year, after the fighting had exhausted them, silence pushed into the marriage. Both left it unaddressed, seeming to think it would pass if they gave it time, and grateful, certainly, for a return to calm. Paul spent more hours in his office, a small room at the end of the hall; every week another friend of Claire's from college turned up, requiring a long evening out, at the end of which she would come home half drunk, chatty and brightly oblivious to Paul. Sex was infrequent. Eventually the silence came to seem like a piece of furniture that had been around too long to get rid of. At the very end the pressure that had built within the walls of the apartment abated. Both knew what was coming; both had adapted to the inevitability of divorce. It actually became easier. They were gentler with one another. They learned that divorce, like marriage, has a rhythm. They grew comfortable with the silence, used to the oppressive, dewy emotion that clung to everything in the apartment, to the upholstery, the dinner plates, the drapes – if it can be said that you get used to it, to that kind of sadness.

  6

  Paul has only a light headache, but swallows three aspirin, then decides it would be better to have four. In the hours that follow he molders in the apartment, tired but not asleep. The light changes first to a sultry gray and then finally to black. After it has been dark for a long time he stumbles from the sofa, lurching into the room. It responds with a mirthless chatter of creaks and groans; an empty room is always louder than a fully furnished one. His apartment is a study in absences: no bed,
no dining table, no place to sit other than the sofa. The end of his marriage swept away many of his possessions, and along with them the urge to acquire new ones.

  So few people even know he's here. The mailman, who sees his name along the bottoms of magazine covers; Ben, who was forced by circumstance to visit. Credit card companies, the gas and electric conglomerates, who remember him in their databases. It occurs to Paul that he hasn't even bothered to write his name on the list of tenants by the front door. Rashly, he rattles around the room in search of a pen, finally finding a cheap ballpoint on the windowsill; then, pulling on his jacket, he jogs downstairs, intending at least to affix his name to his place of residence. Outside the cold bangs into him; with frozen, ungloved fingers, he pries up the plastic cover that shields the tenant list. Against his apartment number he sees the name of the previous occupant. He uncaps the pen and tries to cross it out. Nothing happens – the pen is dry. He works it against the card until the nib scrapes through entirely, mutilating the paper and leaving a sordid gash. Paul lets the pen fall to the cement, where it gives a tepid double tap. He starts to reach for his keys, then stops: the thought is dismal, going back upstairs, returning to an apartment where no one even knows he lives.

  Instead he walks toward the cafe, though he can't remember if it's even open at this hour. Once, he has the feeling that someone is behind him, but when he turns there's no one there; even so, he's relieved to find the lights still on at the cafe. A few more steps and he can even see Pirro, slanted over a mop he pushes from one end of the window to the other, then back again.

  'You're just in time,' Pirro says when Paul walks in. 'I am about to close.'

  Without asking for Paul's order, he goes behind the counter and makes a coffee, the largest size.

  'All right if I sit here for a little?' asks Paul, taking the paper cup.

  'Sure, sure. It will take me thirty, forty minutes to clean up anyway. And you are a friend. You are always welcome.'