In my first winter in the city, I went to The Met to see Alice Neel’s Elenka. Lina Klein said, “Look until you are woozy. Stand there until you can see me. She is how I would like to be. Will you remember me that way, Solomon?” I did as she asked. I looked until they coalesced, until Elenka’s long, regal nose became Lina Klein’s, until the fight in her eyes became my grandmother’s, until I was lightheaded and had to get outside. And then a strange thing happened on the train home: my eyes were closed, and I was looking at that image of a face which flamed with intelligence and daring, left hand raised, fingers curling, caught between affectation and fist, surrender and war. Then someone sat next to me, and I stopped looking at Elenka to see a woman at my side. They were about the same age and she, too, had vibrant, disturbing eyes. The stranger took my hand away from my neck and replaced it with hers. She said, “It’s all right. I’m harmless. Let me do it. Close your eyes again.”
It wasn’t in my nature to give in so easily, but often then New York refused me my nature, and so all the way from 86th Street to Union Square she massaged my neck. When she stopped, I turned to her and she said, “You’ll be fine.” Then she gathered her things and stepped through the doors.
I touched my pockets. I still had my wallet. She hadn’t tried to fuck me or take anything from me or sell me anything or turn me to Scientology. I would never know what she wanted.
I came home and stood before my grandmother’s tall living room window with a slice of pizza in my hand looking down through the orange light of Orchard Street and swore oaths of devotion. I was brightly alive, grateful to the museum and to the painting. I loved New York and the inexplicable woman and the trains full of lunatics and depressives, strivers and frauds, amateurs and prodigies, painters, musicians, poets, filmmakers, murderers, fascists, sadists, lovers, geniuses and fools.
That was in 2004, in a time of rare confluences of youth and happiness, when the pleasure and relief I felt from the company of a painting, or the presence of a stranger, was enough to keep me burning, before I began to wonder whether I was a person at all.
After Sebastian Light torched his garden, after he threw me out of his plantation house and locked the doors, after the cops and the fire department came and went, after I kicked through the ashes of Eva’s studio, after I found her sitting on the knoll, sanguine, homeless, face slashed with ash, after we walked together to the highway, after we hitched a ride and shared the bed of a red Toyota Tacoma with an Australian Shepherd named Hercules, after she gave me her phone number and I gave her money for a plane ticket home to Tucson, I flew to Los Angeles to sit with my mother again at our sparkling swap meet table.
The first thing she said was, “You smell like smoke,” which made me laugh.
“What’s so funny, Soli?”
I didn’t know, but I couldn’t stop and even she wasn’t tough enough to stop herself and then there we were giggling together for no reason either of us could have explained.
Eventually we got it together and were able to catch our breaths and wipe our eyes and drink our coffee.
“You seem better,” I said.
“I was fine to begin with,” she said, but without the stupid, stubborn rage of her earlier iterations. She said it with a little knowing, a little self-deprecation and I felt such a rush of love that I had to get up and go look out the window.
“What are you doing back here?”
I turned around to look at her face.
“I’ve come to revive your furies.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
I shrugged and returned to the table. “I don’t know. It’s just a phrase. Something I wrote while I was away.”
“About me?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t need reviving, Solomon.”
“Good.”
“Where have you been all this time anyway?”
“Fuck if I know, Mom.”
“You went to an ashram, didn’t you?”
“It’s possible.”
She smiled. “And now what?”
“New York.”
“Better than an ashram.”
“I hope so.”
That night my mother roasted a chicken, while I cubed and fried potatoes. Later I found a dusty bottle of Manischewitz under the kitchen sink behind the Clorox and poured us two glasses before she could complain.
“Where did this come from?” I asked.
“I’m sure it was your grandmother’s. Come on,” she said and walked out of the kitchen. When I found her, she was sitting in the empty bathtub with the bottle between her knees, looking up at me.
And then there we were, fully dressed, facing each other in the dry, cold tub right where Lina Klein had stopped her life. We touched glasses and drank the terrible wine.
After a while, I said, “Do you forgive her?”
“I think that depends on whether you forgive her.”
“Why?”
“If you did,” she said, “it would be easier for me.”
For my mother, this was a remarkably tender thing to say.
“I forgive her then.”
She poured us each another glass.
“All right.”
“All right what, Mom?”
“Then I forgive her, too.”
I didn’t believe her. I said, “You know what I was thinking about on the plane?”
“Tell me.”
She was already a little drunk.
“I was ten, maybe eleven years old. I’d lost another fight the day before and I didn’t want to go to school. For some reason you said, Okay.”
She smiled. “Not like me.”
“No. It was not like you. But you picked up the phone and called in sick for us both. We spent the whole day watching reruns of The Twilight Zone and eating popcorn with garlic salt and grape popsicles from Safeway, pretending to have sore throats.”
“I remember,” she said, reaching down to squeeze my ankle with her free hand. “The next day you went back to school and got your ass kicked again.”
“Yeah.”
“You turned out all right in the end though.”
“God, look at us. I sure hope this isn’t the end.”
“One never knows,” she said and closed her eyes.
I hadn’t been inside the Orchard Street apartment since I’d abandoned it for Chelsea and Charity and Pale. All those years and God knows how many tenants of various durations, yet it seemed to me the same. She’d resisted all the real-estate people who’d advocated for fewer “personal effects,” for newer, more fashionable furniture. She’d taken her clothes and left everything else, even the art. She told me that anyone willing to spend so much money on rent would be too stupid to notice what might be stolen. This never struck me as sound reasoning, but she’d gambled and as far as I could tell, it was all still there, even the small Epstein dove on the mantle, even the Frankel Christ on the dresser. The green velvet couch in the living room looked no worse for wear. The two mediocre Lina Klein portraits were still above the bed and, in the hall bathroom, above the toilet, was the framed photograph from the Times of Frankel with his big arm around my shoulders. One of these days, I’d have to go back to Hester Street and face him, but it was something I still didn’t have the courage for.
After I let some air in and filled the fridge and unpacked, it was all so much the same that in those first months home I often forgot that Lina Klein was no longer alive. Often I would come home from an opening or a party or a play and reach into my pocket to call her in California, to tell her that I’d returned to advocate for this city as she loved it, as I believed it to be when I was young, as somewhere it must still exist, for its wild corners, its dead-end alleys, its tunnels, its windowless basements, its abandoned water towers, places untouched by the world of Pale, where nothing is for money.
Just as I did thirteen years ago, I began with bits and pieces. Five hundred words here, a thousand there. Mostly no one had heard of me, but everyone was desperate for content. After seven months, I went to see the asshole editor.
“No one’s ever heard of Eva Solomon,” he said. “You have to give me more than a talented painter.”
“It’s not merely talent. It’s something else,” I said.
“You need more.”
I held out for nearly a month, but finally I broke and went back and sold him the whole story: Sebastian Light, The Coded Garden, The Biennale, the box cutter, the fire, the lost painting.
“But she’s central,” I said. “She has to be the point.”
“Write it and we’ll see what the point is.”
I went to see Charity at her apartment. Everything appeared utterly the same—the television on the wall, the grey Italian couch, upon which she sat very straight with her legs crossed, the view over the galleries divided into a perfect grid by her polished factory windows.
I said, “I’m sorry for having disappeared like that. There’s no good excuse for it. No matter what happened. I really am sorry.”
She looked at me as if we’d only just met.
“You’ve always been a bit of a coward, Sol.”
I nodded.
“Still,” she said, “I am sorry about your grandmother.”
“Thank you. The apartment looks good.”
“You never liked living here.”
I didn’t want to lie to anyone ever again.
She shook her head. “Did you find your life of purity?”
I smiled, but her expression remained impassive.
“It was cruel to leave the way I did.”
“Yes” she said and stood up. “There’s a box of your stuff in the closet. Your peacoat is on the hook.”
I followed her to the entryway and once she had handed me my things and I was standing in the hall, she said, “You know you’re no different than anyone else, right?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t,” she said, and closed the door.
When I had the asshole editor’s guarantee, I called Eva in Tucson.
“Are you still an artist, Eva Solomon?”
“I’m still painting if that’s what you mean.”
“Good. I’m going to write about you.”
“Come on. Why?”
“Because you’re great.”
“What if you’re the only one who thinks so?”
“Then you’re very lucky. I’ve got ten thousand words to make you famous.”
“I don’t want to be famous.” She sounded giddy.
“Then hang up and stay in the desert.”
“Otherwise?”
“Otherwise, meet me in Nantes in ten days.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“What are we doing there?”
“We’re going to go and look at Benner together.”
“You know I can’t afford that, Solomon Solomon.”
“I’ll take care of it,” I said. “Will you come?”
“Of course, I’ll come.”
In all my memories of New York City, I am separated from its people. Even in those magnificent moments of the early years, in recollections glossed by the distance of time, even if there were others present, no matter the glamour, the romance of novelty and prospect, still, all of it is unshared. I am always removed. But I swear that I will no longer stand at the edge of things, half-committed, peering in on lit rooms, a frightened child spying from the dark.
There are artists here with so much less than I have, artists who refuse to bend, who would rather starve than give in to the algorithms. I have a small fortress. I have some gold. I could help build hospitals. I could feed the hungry. I could return west to look after my mother. I could join Hamas or the IDF. But I won’t do any of those things. Instead, I choose to fight for Lina Klein’s legacy, for a world of lawless art and illogical passions. Instead, I have come home to this minuscule island to fight our futile war.
“Find a beautiful ship, bind yourself to it, sail and sail and sail and when the time comes, Solomon, bail water until you drown.”
Hers was often terrible advice, but I have liked to follow it anyway.