After he’d gone, I sat for a while in The Spiral before I went up to The Barn looking for the woman who called herself Crystalline, who I sensed was something other than the rest, but no luck. Instead, I found Siddhartha sitting at our table drinking the familiar green goo from a slim glass.
“Cleanse day,” he whispered. “Last meal you’ll get until tomorrow.”
I sat down. “Think I’ll give it a pass.”
“Listen, let me finish this thing and we’ll talk after.”
“Right. Sorry. Silent lunch. Must obey the rules.”
Fifteen minutes later we were walking toward the studios where all the front walls were retractable and as we passed, one of them was open wide enough for me to catch a glimpse of Theo né Theo standing before a blank canvas. He held the top of his head with his right hand, apparently deep in thought, or seeking inspiration, or trying to find the right pose.
He was wearing white overalls splattered with paint. Difficult to tell whether the stains were the result of frantic painting, or if they’d been designed by the latest prodigy of bohemian chic.
When he turned, I waved. In return, he rolled his door closed.
“You’ve met Theo?” Sid asked.
“And Crystalline.”
“Right. The celebrated Crystalline.”
“You’re not a fan?”
“She’s very talented.”
“Diplomatic of you.”
He smiled and changed the subject. “Unless you’re invited, it’s better not to engage with the artists while they’re in their studios.”
In this gentle reprimand, he sounded very much like Plume.
He took me to a studio a few down from Theo’s and rolled back the door. His canvases all faced the wall. There was a wide table in the middle of the room where he’d arranged cans of brushes, and pencils and all other paraphernalia of the painter. A little fridge in one corner. A deep chair in the other. Two red Jielde floor lamps. Through the glass wall was a tricolor flag of sky, forest, and grass. It was the same pasture we’d walked, but in the daylight, from this angle, it was easier to measure its massive scale.
“You’d be amazed how different it looks in the morning, in the evening. I’d put up with about anything for this place. It’s incredibly rare.”
“I can imagine.”
I hoped he would turn one of his paintings around.
“It’s very tidy.”
Frankel’s studio was the most chaotic place I’d ever seen, which was the opposite of what I’d anticipated. People came and went constantly. Phones rang. There was always music playing. Live and recorded. Often simultaneously. Everything seemed expendable. Nothing felt fragile, but before I saw it, I had the idea that it would be austere, that to make what he did, he would toil in monastic calm. His work, everything from the notebooks to the major installations, no matter the period, no matter the subject, possessed an uncanny amalgamation of stillness, violence and softness. Underlying all of it was something solid and eternal, as if whatever he produced immediately carried the weight of the ancient. That was the great mystery, I thought, the magical, ineffable thing that allows a piece of art to seem both contemporary and infinite.
The first time I went to see him on Hester Street, a band was set up in the vast front room where the almond-colored leather couches and aquamarine rugs were spread over the worn plank floors. The East Eggs: two studiously scruffy young men—one on bass, the other on drums—and a striking woman with a shaved head, a bit older, strapped to a red Rickenbacker 360. She called herself Malice. When I walked in that late afternoon, she was snarling her way through The Jam’s greatest hits and whenever I hear “In the City,” I think of those kids, their eyes closed in that wide-open atrium, the pink winter afternoon sky pouring down on them through the skylights, playing for an audience of artists and stragglers, everyone dressed and posed to make a point.
I was very happy there, even if I was aware that it was all a bit too cozy for an untrained, undisciplined journalist. Painters or sculptors or musicians or actors or models or poets, they all knew who I was and no one who hung around Hester Street in those days was there just for the pleasure and family of it. Everyone was striving, and they all believed having their names in print would carry them closer to empires of their own, but, for the most part, I only wanted them as color. I was always there for Frankel, and I was jealous of the hours I spent with him alone.
Now Sid looked around his own studio and shrugged. “Mr. Light doesn’t approve of disorder.”
“He doesn’t approve of disorder?”
“He prefers us to keep our studios clean.”
“Right,” I said. “And you?”
He gave me that slightly embarrassed smile. “I wouldn’t mind a bit of a mess.”
“But?”
“These are small prices to pay. You want tea?”
I did. He flipped on a kettle and when he was finished—Earl Grey, milk and sugar without asking me—we sat at the table before his lovely view, looking through the glass. There was a tin next to a pencil can and from it he produced a roll of gingersnaps. “Contraband,” he said.
“What about the cleanse?”
“You look hungry.”
“Nice of you. Where’d you get them?”
“There’s a little town not so far. Nothing much.”
“Is it worth the walk?”
“There’s a bar. Good burgers. I like the guy who owns it. Sunny.”
Now he looked away from me, as if he’d made a mistake, stepped out of line.
“Why do you hesitate, Sid?”
He picked up a thin brush from the table and took a deep breath. Then he said, “You might like to talk to him. That’s all.”
“Why would I want to talk to him?”
“It was his family who sold the land to Light.”
“How would Light feel about me going down there? About you telling me this?”
He looked at his tea. “That’s not really the story you came to write, is it?”
“Why not?”
“It’s the same one we’ve heard a thousand times.”
“Which is?
“Where are you from, Sol?”
“Los Angeles.”
“And before that?”
“New York. Russians. Germans. Jews. And you?”
“I was born in Chicago. First generation.”
“And your parents?”
“Bangalore.”
“I see you’ve managed to change the subject.”
“Not at all. My grandparents were loyal subjects of the Crown. How many times have we heard the same old story? Pink men with money get sick of the cold, head out into the world and take what they want.”
“That’s an awfully concise history of the world.”
“The difference between your people and my people is that we never managed to do our own colonizing.”
“What’s Kashmir then?”
He smiled. “Fair point. Though our history isn’t quite so simple.”
“Neither is ours.”
He laughed.
“Have you ever asked Light about Sunny?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“In my experience, he doesn’t like to be questioned.”
“And you want to please your master.”
“I want to stay and paint, yes.”
“Well, it’s nice that Queen Victoria allows you to leave from time to time.”
“We’re not prisoners here.”
“But leaving is not encouraged.”
“It is not.”
“Strange, this garden of his.”
“He says, ‘To leave The Garden is to leave the muse.’”
“Come on.”
“Art is all. He’s an absolutist. You are either devoted to the work, or you are a fraud. No middle ground. I know he may seem ridiculous—all the koans, rules and rituals—but I really do believe the same thing. The work must become an obsession. As the man says, ‘It requires the passion of the pilgrim.’ And I understand, too. I’m not fucking around with this. You know, a lot of people here take it for granted. As if this isn’t rare. As if being given a studio, food, a place to sleep is part of life. And it is for a lot of them. They have parents who will give them whatever they ask for. But I’ve got nothing to fall back on. I haven’t spoken to my parents for fifteen years. I have four thousand dollars in a checking account. That’s it.”
“Does Light know?”
“Know what?”
“How little you have.”
“I’m not looking for sympathy. What I’m saying is that while all this might seem a sort of silly lark, a kind of brief adventure with an eccentric, it’s a lot more than that to me. Painting is all I have. I’m sorry to sound a cliché, but it’s true. Too late to turn around. So, when it comes to the lectures, the evals, the rituals, I’ll swallow it. And I’ll do it happily. It doesn’t make any real difference. My war is elsewhere.”
“What’s an eval?”
“Each week he drops by a studio and looks at the work. Gives his impressions.”
“And what do you think of his taste?”
“I’ve never seen a prettier place.”
I narrowed my eyes at him, but he looked away and when he did, I was struck both by his beauty and an abrupt flatness in expression.
“Have you ever seen his work?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Some say the sculptures at the entrance to The Spiral are his.”
“But he doesn’t claim them?”
“I’ve never heard him claim them. But I’ve never asked.”
“Why not?”
“It’s difficult to explain. He doesn’t spend much time with us except for in—”
“Official capacities?”
“I guess so, yes. He doesn’t eat dinner with us. He generally keeps to himself.”
“Do you believe he’s an artist?”
“In one way or another. And if it’s true that the sculptures are his, then all the more so.”
“You’re a cagey fucker.”
He looked up and smiled. “Would you like to see the card?”
“Why are you so evasive?”
“Why are you so suspicious?”
“I don’t know. A mysterious man sends a beautiful woman to deliver a personal invitation to his garden paradise. Why would I be suspicious?”
“I meant why are you so suspicious of me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’re a honeytrap.”
I didn’t know where that line had come from, and I certainly hadn’t meant for it to sound so absurdly sultry, but it brought his eyes to mine.
“A honeytrap? Are you afraid I’ll seduce you, Sol?”
“A joke,” I said, but there was a spinning in my chest and this time it was me who looked away, pretending to study a can of turpentine.
“HinJew,” he said. “You know the expression?”
I laughed. “No.”
“My sister married a Jew. It’s a thing, you know. The HinJews. They say we share many similarities, our cultures. Whatever that means. We’ve established that both peoples use a history of oppression and the threat of terrorism as an excuse to oppress, but do your people ride elephants and work in call centers? Are you born with magical insight and a direct connection to medical schools and spirit worlds?”
I liked him so much. I missed sarcasm and sharp irony. Even in New York, it was falling fast out of fashion. Caution and fear of offense had replaced rough irreverence. Charity never said a cruel word against anyone. No one did, no one dared. Except for the obvious and group-sanctioned villains, everything and everyone was amazing. Nothing destroys humor like fear, and God were we terrified by the time I flew.
Charity did not respond well when I fell into my boring funks, when I grumbled about the vacuity, the stupidity of all that hope and cultivated enthusiasm, its languages and those of craven capitalism shamelessly Vitamixed into a bland slurry. I hated the wholesale rejection of rancor, hated more our terror of uttering the forbidden word. “What the world needs now is rage and revolt, not another credit card, Charity, not another pair of pants, day rave, small batch bourbon or chakra workshop,” I said, while she yawned and rolled her eyes. “I am so sick of those people,” I told her after another soul-flattening dinner, frantic for even the slightest sympathetic smile. But she only sighed and told me to practice loving kindness. Sipping from her steaming cup of fair-trade Night Coma, she said, “What’s wrong with being cautious, Sol? Why do you have to offend people?” I stormed around the bathroom shaking my fist, trying to talk over her yowling supersonic platinum-edition toothbrush. She just spat and rinsed and yanked a long line of CBD-infused floss from its silver dispenser. “Go to bed, Soli,” she said, tightening the two ends around her fingers until they turned purple. “Get some rest.”
And while she slept so easily beside me, I lay awake and remembered Lina Klein raising her eyes from a cup of tomato soup, saying, “It’s all a little much, Solomon. Enough with the doom and the gloom and the self-righteous blathering. It’s tedious. I warned you about her. I warned you about the job. I told you what happens when a Jew shares a bed with a Charity.”
So thank God for Siddhartha, peppercorn in the Splenda bowl.
“Let’s see the beautiful business card that launched your ship,” I said.
Siddhartha stood up and moved across the room while outside, the pasture grass convulsed in the lashing wind.
That night I sat outside in my robe watching the sky, remembering my grandmother telling me, for the first time, the story of my half-namesake, her great artist hero, Charlotte Salomon. She was visiting from New York and had taken me to The Getty, a place she found ridiculous.
“Another ruthless bastard trying to pretty his soul with art. Look at this place. What is it with the rich and their need to reproduce what already exists?”
We were sitting on a bench in the sculpture garden sharing a Snickers bar.
“After Kristallnacht she went to live with her grandparents in the south of France. They hid for a while in a villa there owned by yet another American millionaire. It must have looked something like this, with columns and statues and pretty views over the water. Then they moved to Nice, where her grandmother tried to hang herself. And you know what her grandfather told her after they got her down? That her aunt, her namesake, had committed suicide at eighteen. Charlotte’s own mother, too, who until that moment she’d believed had died of the flu, jumped out a window. A year later her grandmother did the same thing while Charlotte looked on. And then? Her grandfather insists they share a bed together. Just like my charming savior in Berlin, Soli. She despised him. More than Hitler. He taunted her. Said she’d be the next to kill herself. Encouraged her to do it. And after all this, you know what Charlotte does? Despite the French sending her and her pathetic grandfather to a camp and then surviving it? Despite her grandfather’s hands? She paints. And you know the question she said she was trying to answer?”
I shook my head.
“‘Whether to take her own life or embark on something quite insanely extraordinary.’ That’s what she said. It was suicide or do something ‘quite insanely extraordinary.’”
“And what happened to her?”
“Well, after a while she can’t take her grandfather, so she gets a room in a little hotel and while the Vichy cowards are coming, and the Gestapo and the Italians and her neighbors and all the rest of the awful world, she sings to herself and she paints and paints and paints. She takes it all, Sol, and she makes something beautiful.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d rhapsodized about an artist, but there was something in her face this time that was different.
“So she moves back to the villa and marries a man she doesn’t love, who was once the American millionaire’s lover. The Nazis found them, of course. They’re sent to Auschwitz. She’s five months pregnant. They gas her the day she arrives. And then that’s it. As if she’s just nothing.”
Lina Klein handed me the rest of the Snickers bar.
I could feel the chocolate beginning to melt between my fingers.
“I like to imagine you’re named after her.”
“Am I?”
“No. Different spelling. Your parents were thinking of the king if they were thinking at all. But when I look at you, I often imagine her.”
“Is that good?”
“Of course, it’s good. She was something outstanding.”
“What happened to the paintings?”
“They survived. And they weren’t just paintings. It was a novel. An opera. A memoir. It was everything at once made of everything she had seen and read and heard and loved and despised. Painters, musicians, poets, filmmakers, fascists, murderers, sadists, lovers, geniuses, fools. She painted it to music she heard only in her mind. Leben? oder Theater?, Life? or Theater? That’s what she called it.”
Before that moment, I don’t think I’d ever heard my grandmother speak a word of German.
“But what happened to it?”
“Before she was taken, she’d wrapped it up and gave it to a friend. A doctor. ‘C’est toute ma vie,’” she told him. “It’s my whole life.”