THE ALARM CLICKED on to WFMU, in midstream of “I’ll Be Zeus” by Bionic Love, which slowly tilted Andy awake, his vision falling on his clothes, disposed on the floor near his bed like a chalk outline. A goddamn crime scene he thought, what with all the stupid things he did last night. Like the way he said, “My father, well, he’s A. N. Dyer, the writer,” to that bookish girl from Brearley whose father was probably a billionaire and partied with rock stars. And the way he got stoned and insisted that everyone listen, like really listen, to “Jupiter” from Holst’s The Planets, a choice even the morning radio seemed to vote against. Oh shit and the way he demanded Martini & Rossi Asti Spumanti, and the way he pretended to trip and fall and actually did trip and fall into a bunch of girls from Chapin, spilling their red wine and giving their pants a menstrual pantomime, which he himself pointed out, and Doug Streff laughed because he laughed at all Andy’s antics. “You one silly bastard,” Doug said in a big hug of a Greek accent, totally made-up. But everyone was in a festive mood. It was the first night of spring break, the New York tribes of boarding school kids and private school kids gathering in a neutral setting (the host was booted from St. Paul’s for writing bad checks and now went to Poly Prep) before they all left on their family vacations. Why the hell did he invite Jeanie Spokes to this low-roller affair? She had been unreachable since visiting the apartment after the funeral, and he was still suffering from the blue balls of showing her around, of having her briefly in his room, right near his bed, which he pointed to and said, “Welcome to Hogwarts,” hoping this was clever and funny, but she left soon after and since then had responded with total electronic silence, like maybe she had wised up and decided that seventeen was way too young. Hogwarts? Jesus. And what does he do to convince her otherwise? He emails her an invite to this lurkathon of seventeen-year-olds, and not cool cinematic seventeen-year-olds but seventeen-year-olds who remind you that being seventeen actually sucks. Fucking Muggles. During the entire party he hoped she wouldn’t show, and when she didn’t, he was devastated.
On the floor his shirtsleeve seemed to stretch toward the bed in a last-ditch plea of Save me please! Andy would have sunk further into the evening’s postmortem except he was happiest waking up in this room, in this bed, the sheets cool and clean, impossibly clean compared to the Exeter papyrus. What did Gerd use, some special Scandinavian flakes? He rolled over and pushed the snooze button mid (“Dip back your head, into my shower of gold, feel no dread, I’m a swan and I’m cold”) chorus. It was 10:46 A.M. He had no reason to be awake. The alarm was set so he could roll over and fall back asleep, without worry yet still conscious of time. It was like floating in an ocean of untroubled purpose. Maybe this is how babies exist in the womb—fetuses, he supposed, if being technical—and we, or me, maybe I still carry a link to that primal buoyancy, to that great grand whatever of my warm watery beginnings. Andy readjusted the pillow under his stomach. Maybe, he thought, this is a trace memory of my mother.
Her name was Sina Astreyl, and she was twenty-three and Swedish, originally from the town of Mora. All Andy really knew about her came from three photographs: Sina on a snowy street; Sina with a poodle; Sina in the doorway of a yellow house with green shutters. In all three photos Sina was smiling, revealing deep-rooted teeth that proclaimed joy as both a natural phenomenon and a fierce pursuit. Her eyes seemed alert, like an athlete parsing the split-second differences between success and failure. The photos had no dates, no inscriptions, but whatever their circumstance they were taken close together: all three Sinas wear the same blue parka and all three Sinas seem lit by the same affection for the photographer. Gerd once told Andy that they were likely taken during something called Vasaloppet week, a popular cross-country ski marathon that finished in Mora. “You can see the banners and the crowds. It’s a great big party,” she said, scratching his scalp the way he liked. “She’s lovely. I can see her face in yours.” But Andy wished he had more of her blond hair and blue eyes, her easy Nordic complexion. He was determined to visit Mora and someday investigate his maternal side, but in the meantime he just had these photos of a woman who looked as if she were speeding downhill.
The story goes that Sina Astreyl was working as an au pair when she slammed into A. N. Dyer with her charge’s stroller. It happened in Central Park, by the model-boat pond. “She was practically jogging and she clipped me in the ankle,” his father once told him. “There was blood.” Blood? “Not much, a scrape’s worth.” Over the next week the two discovered that they were on the same park schedule, and when he saw her he teased her by carefully stepping aside. “She was adorably embarrassed.” Did you like her? “She was much younger, so liking never really crossed my mind.” But after a few weeks of these fellow transits they began to hitch up in synchronous loops. “It was nice company, that’s all.” What did you talk about? “She liked poetry, Rilke, whom I once adored. She shined her youth against my darkening age.” And then one Thursday, her free day, she appeared unburdened by stroller and “We started on our usual loop but halfway through we sort of moved closer, more for warmth than intimacy.” Did you kiss her? “Listen to you. Let’s just say our walks grew longer.” But all this walking and talking and other things only lasted a few months, maybe seven discrete Thursdays in total, until one day, a Monday, she failed to show. “I waited and waited.” Where was she? “I don’t know. I never saw her again.” Never? “Never.” A year later a lawyer from way upstate contacted him with news of her death. “Seemed she had a cerebral aneurysm.” What’s that? “It’s like a heart attack in your brain.” The lawyer also informed him that there was a child, a five-month-old boy, and the boy was—“Me?” asked Andy, cheerful to be finally included in this tale. His father nodded. Sina Astreyl had no immediate family and since he was listed on the birth certificate, he agreed to take custody. At the age of sixty-two became a father again. “Were you glad?” Andy asked.
“Was I glad? Of course I was.”
“Your mother?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmm.” His father seemed to listen for a hint of song through the static. “Well she was wonderful. Full of life. Always swirling about, always busy. But tough too. Brave. She made the best of a difficult situation, that’s for sure, and she loved you very much, would have done anything for you. I’m sorry you don’t have that kind of person in your life. You just have plain old me.”
“C’mon, Dad.”
“I’m not much of a parent.”
“Stop it, okay.” Even at ten Andy knew where this was going.
“I’m not a good person,” his father said. “It’s not like I’m evil, but I’m not good.”
“Stop, please.”
“It’s just the way it is.”
“Dad—”
“But you’re different, you’re all good.”
“But if you’re not a good person why should I believe you?”
“That’s clever,” he said, tapping Andy’s chest. “See, you’re a clever boy, which you’ll need to watch, that cleverness, because it’ll come easily to you. But what kind of father talks to his ten-year-old like this? It’s insanity. And I’m not a terrible person, of course, I’m just saying you should have friends, lots of friends, and find a girl you love, and find a job you like well enough but focus your passions on hobbies. Those are the happiest people. Try to do something beyond what’s inside your measly head. Be a citizen of the street rather than the ruler of your own world. I’m speaking as a cautionary tale.” Cud-like material started to mortar the corners of his mouth, like even his insides wanted him to clam up. “Do you understand?”
“I guess so,” Andy said.
“Don’t be a ghost haunting your own life.”
“Yeah, okay, thanks.” Anything to make him stop.
And that was just one of many good-nights.
Andy repositioned the pillow from under his stomach to between his knees. Would he be a different person if he had had his mother in his life? Well, sure. But it wasn’t like something he missed, plus he had Gerd and a certain amount of nonmaternal freedom, with a touch of demi-orphan appeal, that brought back to mind last night and the Brearley girl and her thick caterpillar eyebrows, their fur a hint of the butterfly between her legs. “Have you read Ampersand?” Had he really asked her that? Was he so desperate for a little sway?
“No,” she’d said.
“Well, you should. It’s like a total classic.”
“And that’s your dad?”
“Yep. His name is my name too.” Then Andy had half-sung, half-shouted, “a na na na na na!”
The girl had frowned playfully, those caterpillars arching their backs. “A John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt reference?”
“That’s right,” Andy had said. “All the cool kids are singing it nowadays. Very addicting. Once you start you can never stop. And speaking of jingle and heimer …”
From floor level, tucked within his pants, the Hallelujah chorus sounded, courtesy of Andy’s new ringtone, which was probably the most awesome ringtone ever, with its high holy majesty, even if it interrupted a half-asleep-semi-erotic trending-toward-full-blown fantasy involving a girl with metamorphic eyebrows. Andy dragged his pants up. It was proba—Jeanie Spokes?
“Andy?”
“Oh, hey, yeah, hey. Howdy.” Howdy?
“Sorry I missed you last night.”
“Oh yeah, no problem, just a flier, you know. A reach-out.” A reach-out?
“I’ve been in a weird mood lately,” she told him.
Hmm, weird? “No need to explain.”
“I’d like to see you,” she said.
“Yeah, sure—”
“Like now,” she said.
Andy sat up as if barged in on.
“Where are you?” she asked.
The agreeable noise she made wavered between a sigh and a purr, with Andy caught in the middle. “Do you know where I am right now?” she said.
“At work?”
“No.”
Andy’s pulse rate was like an elbowing friend. “Outside my building?”
“Try a museum.”
“Okay, a museum.”
“Try guessing which one.”
“Um, MoMA?”
“Nope.” Nope never sounded more bilabial.
“The Frick?”
“Nope.”
“The Whitney? The Guggenheim? El Museo del Barrio?”
“Nope, nope, ni siquiera cerca. You’re missing the obvious.”
“The Tenement Museum?” he said, proud of his flirty misdirection.
“Andy.”
“Hey, it’s a fine museum.”
“I’m at the Met, you loser, and I’m standing in front of my favorite work of art, practically blushing, Andy, like I’m the secret inspiration for this artist. I feel positively pinned between rough hands.”
“Oh,” Andy said, suddenly feeling very young.
“Now listen, I’ll be here for the next, let’s see, hour and thirteen minutes. I’m not going to move an inch. I’m just going to stand here and wait and see if you can find me. Think of it as a game of hide-and-seek and like any game there’s a prize for the winner. You think you’re up to the challenge?”
After a pause that unpacked many thoughts,
… get moving asshole … should I take a quick shower … Monet … there’s no way I have time for a shower … this is kind of cheesy … do I need a condom … damn, I’m so comfortable here … Cézanne … minimum brush my teeth … just get up … I’ll screw this up somehow … badly … going to have to run … I might get laid … to sprint even … maybe it’s more sexy than cheesy … Degas … does “prize” perhaps mean anal sex … this bed is crazy comfy cozy … Renoir … I’ll get sweaty with all that running … jump in a taxi … Georgia O’Keeffe … Fifth goes the wrong way … why did I drink Asti Spumanti last night … could swing up Madison but that’s a pain … feeling kind of horny … need to pee … could I pee on her … Spumanti … Manet … man am I tired …
the ball-peen of significance shattered all deliberation into core instinct—Just fucking move!—and launched Andy from bed and once launched put him into a state of panic, his hourglass head leaking sand into his empty, increasingly anxious, stomach.
“Somewhere in the Met?” he clarified.
“Yes.”
“Like the Met on Eightieth and Fifth, with the knights and stuff?”
“Yes, doofus, that Met.”
Andy reanimated the clothes from last night. “That’s a big place,” he said.
“It is.”
Andy stepped-wiggled-stomped into his shoes. “Any hints?”
“No.”
“No hints?”
“No.”
“Like maybe it’s a painting?”
“No hints.”
“Because it’s a big place.”
“And getting bigger by the second.” And with that Jeanie hung up.
Andy stood there, bogged down by a quick strategy session concerning art history and the feminine spirit and the geography of the Metropolitan Museum and Jeanie Spokes’s possible position within that geography, Jeanie waiting for him, Jeanie perhaps ready, willing, and ableing for him in European Paintings; in Modern and Contemporary Art; in the Temple of Dendur; in Greek and Roman Art; in Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; Arms and Armor; Ancient Near Eastern Art; Asian Art—Andy shook himself free and rushed from his room, nearly barreling into me, kneeling by his door.
“Everything all right?” I asked, pretending to tie my loafers.
“Can’t talk,” he said.
“Where are you going?”
But he was already halfway down the stairs.
Who could begrudge this virginal enthusiasm? Certainly not me. I myself was twenty-one, a full-fledged adult, when I finally unloaded that burden. Her name was Helen Dieter. She was stout and freckled, a soccer player, I recall, a fixture among a certain boisterous group of Yale women, Helen deemed the funny one though funny seemed defined by flashes of public nudity. I always assumed she was a lesbian. We were acquaintances our first year, classmates and coursemates sharing nods and hellos in hallways but never lingering for conversation, but by our last year we had progressed to minor speaking roles, our relationship based on being competitive English majors. Late spring she knocked on my door. It seemed she was celebrating a perfect mark on her senior essay, something about George Eliot and George Sand titled “By George” (I remember laughing at that asinine title), which went on to win her the Paine Memorial Prize for best senior essay and the Steere Prize for feminist theory and the Tinker Prize for Outstanding Senior in English, this half-drunk girl right here, who leaned into my room like a sister sticking out her tongue. Before I knew it, she was inspecting my bookshelves and my desk, where my own senior essay, “The Hostage Taker: The Kidnapping of Identity in the Works of A. N. Dyer,” lay blindfolded and gagged. I was on my third and final extension; another week late and I would fail. Papers, drafts, books were scattered everywhere, along with various forms of caffeine and desperation. Seeing this, Helen surprised me with a few supportive words—“You can do this, Philip, you can finish”—and then she was on me like a squirrel on a tree, with her small, sharp claws and nibbling teeth and evident love of nuts. Thankfully she did most of the work, since our styles were ill-suited (particularly since my style was all bluff), but I did have a sense, whether right or wrong, of her laughing at me, as I kissed her neck and blew into her ear, of her laughing with friends later in a bar, as I thrust, and came, and rolled over on my back, helplessly ashamed and pitifully transformed.
Helen Dieter is now a managing partner at Goldman Sachs.
And Yale still talks about the Dieter trifecta.
But Andy, seventeen years old and thrilled with possibility, hustled from the apartment in hopeful pursuit of art. Dix, Bonnard, Poussin, Klimt, Munch played a game of innuendo in his head, and as he waited for the elevator he called Doug Streff, who lived not far from the Met and could easily wander into another person’s misadventure.
“Where are you?” Andy quickly asked.
“You are never taking command of the stereo again.”
“I need a favor. Where are you? Doug? Doug?”
He lost the call in the elevator. Floors ticked down, every number firing a plosive fuck from Andy. Doug had been his best friend since Buckley, though Doug had departed in sixth grade for Indian Mountain and now went to Millbrook and if his highest academic dream came true he would finish up in Boulder. Considered a terrible influence by parents, he bore the brunt of much vestigial blame, like an overweight, overbred golden retriever with a minor drug habit. But he was always good company. All of your ideas were excellent ideas to Doug Streff.
“Doug?”
“So what was up with that music?”
“I was stoned.”
“You were such an asshole about it.”
“I know, I know.”
“You were like the listen police, listen, listen, listen.”
“It’s a very influential piece of second-rate music, like every movie score—”
“There you go again.”
“Whatever, where are you right now?”
“I’m in the park, watching kids in the playground—remember that playground on Eighty-first where I broke my nose? I’m sitting here watching the kids not break their noses and I’m sitting next to this guy named London, right, like the city, but his last name isn’t England, or I don’t think it’s England—is it England? No, it’s not England, it’s Williams, London Williams, which is a cool fucking name, and he has a son named Manchester, Mani for short, six years old and Mani is definitely not breaking his nose today because Mani is a careful little kid, right Mani.”
Andy blew past the doorman and hurried north. “Have you been smoking?”
“Perhaps.”
“It’s not even noon.”
“High noon.”
“Jesus.”
“And the big deal is? I believe last night you were fairly levitated. You certainly had your head up Uranus.”
“It was Jupiter and was I that bad?”
“Besides the whole Mein Stereo thing you were a hundred percent outstanding. At one point you had us all believing we were part of your massive déjà vu and you told us exactly what we were going to do next, and we believed you, or some of us believed you, or maybe just one of us, but it was fucking genius.”
Andy cringed. “Oh God.”
“No, no, it was superb. And you kept the ball rolling way longer than anyone thought possible. People started to walk away and you’d describe them leaving like you were five moves ahead.”
“I shouldn’t smoke.”
“You kidding me? You should smoke more. Just avoid the stereo.”
From 75th Street, through the trees on the western edge of Fifth, came a partial view of the Metropolitan Museum, and Andy remembered the point of this phone call. “I need your help,” he said, “if you’re not too incapacitated.”
“I’m in. Excuse me, London; later, Mani.”
“Can you like meet me in front of the Met, like right now?”
“Like now now?”
“Pretty close to now, yeah.”
“Got it, chief.”
The Met slowly revealed itself, low-slung yet massive, intimidating in its grand bureaucratic design, as if the world’s most important mail was being sorted inside. But all Andy saw was a hiding place. He rushed past the fountain and up the broad steps where tourists mingled in a strange kind of order, like notes on a sheet of music. Looking for Doug, waiting for Doug—where the fuck was Doug?—Andy grabbed for his cellphone when he heard his name and spotted his friend approaching, arms pumping faster than legs, like a salesman selling hurry.
“Hey.”
“We have an hour—”
“I packed you a bowl.” In his palm was a pipe the shape of a small wooden bird.
“I can’t.”
“It’s the Met, man. I’d be scared to go in there not stoned.”
“We don’t have time.”
“It’ll take two seconds.”
“I need to be focused.”
“On what?”
“I have like an hour to find this girl, a woman really, she’s twenty-four, brownish hair, hair to here, chunky glasses, cool chunky, though; kind of looks like Heather Topol from Chapin, but better-looking, Heather Topol if Heather Topol had a fairy godmother, but the same sort of features, sort of the most attractive version of the Heather Topol type.”
Doug stared at Andy.
“Fuck it,” Andy said.
They sidled to the shady, less populated side of the steps.
“So we’re looking for a Heather Topol–like girl,” Doug said, newly enthused.
Andy nodded as he took a hit.
“And what happens when we find this Topolian girl?”
“I get laid” from Andy with a smoky smile.
“Laid as in bow-chicka-bow-wow?”
Andy nodded, took another hit.
“Right there in the museum?”
Andy squinted. “No, you fucking idiot. Or I don’t think. Shit, that would be nuts. No, no way. Look, all I know is she’s standing in front of her favorite work of art. That’s the hint she gave me. I find that, I find her.”
“You fuck her.”
“That’s my guess.”
Doug refortified himself.
“I’m assuming European Paintings,” Andy said.
“Definitely. Like Renoir, Monet, Manet.”
“Might be too obvious.”
“Balthus. Modigliani.”
“I’ll check that area. But I need you to cruise Greek and Roman, Egyptian—”
“All those vases,” Doug said.
“Exactly. It’s a big museum.”
“The American Wing.”
“A really big museum.” Andy started to feel the task’s thin air.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Uncertain with how to start exactly, they both took one last hit until a hazy if genuine purpose sank in and they marched into the museum, past security peering into bags, into the great hall where pods of people crowded the information desk and the coat check and the circular seating areas, so many people, class trips, group tours, a dozen buses cracked open and whipped up in this inverted bowl, everyone’s clothing just a little too bright, everyone’s shoes just a little too comfortable, people of every stripe, visitors from other countries, parents with children, families on vacation, tri-staters in for the day, college students, couples in love, voices, accents, languages traveling up and around the rotunda and swirling in a batter of half-understood echoes—Andy rushed past them, disdainful of their blocking ways. He played the role of detective and these folks belonged on the other side of the crime-scene tape.
“So I’m looking for a Heather Topol type,” Doug clarified one final time.
“Standing in front of whatever she’s standing in front of.”
Doug broke left, toward Greek and Roman, while Andy flashed his membership card and bounded up the central staircase toward European Paintings, Tiepolo’s The Triumph of Marius greeting him on the second floor, Andy pushing straight through the glass doors, excuse me and sorry to a bundle of Asian women, into the first gallery of nineteenth-century French (David, Ingres, Delacroix), Andy paying no attention to the paintings, only to the crowds around the paintings, The Death of Socrates getting the most eyeballs, but no Jeanie among the mourners, so on to the next gallery, more French (Boucher, Greuze, Fragonard) and a fruitless search for a gauzy portrait of a twenty-four-year-old brunette with a crooked smile, titled You Find Me, You Fuck Me, so Andy continued on, speed essential, though this time he was presented with a choice of staying straight or turning right and Andy chose straight (Clouet, La Tour) but no further female illumination here, only more galleries, more possibilities, straight, left, right, the galleries opening up onto a maze of human-made beauty, but no Jeanie, no hot-breath hello, and the enormity of the situation, as well as the THC streaming through his blood, panicked him, there’s no way, just no way, this place is too huge, as he tripped into sixteenth-century Florentine and Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man, which drew a swell of high school girls, Catholic judging by their uniform, who watched Andy scurry past and giggled in his wake like he was a boy in need of the nearest bathroom, Andy landing among eighteenth-century British (Reynolds, Gainsborough) and then backpedaling into seventeenth-century Flemish (Rubens, van Dyck), then more French, and Spanish, with Goya and some hopes for Don Manuel Osorio Manrique, with that bird and the three cats, surely a potential favorite, but only a few grandmother types gathered around as if descendants of those de Zuñiga felines, and Andy kept moving, his stomach churning excitement into dread, as Vermeer delivered no other girl interrupted and Rembrandt’s Aristotle seemed to sigh as if Homer had nothing on this poor kid’s plight, and now Andy was almost running, stumbling back on Bronzino’s Young Man again and muttering “fuck” loud enough for a guard to notice, Andy fast-walking into the Italian Renaissance, with its altarpieces and annunciations and lamentations, spotting three galleries away, rather incongruously, Sargent’s Madame X, another good chance, he thought, but no Mademoiselle S, and hope started to lose meaning as Andy turned left (Watteau), then right (Raphael), and found himself, once again, in front of Bronzino’s Young Man, who mocked him like he was as die-hard a virgin as that Virgin of virgins who hung on the wall opposite.
Andy’s phone went Hallelujah.
It was Doug.
“You have to come and see this bronze of a veiled dancer, Greek, like third century B.C., a boatload of time ago and they were doing this kind of shit.”
“Is there a Heather Topol–like girl standing in front of it?” Andy asked.
“No, but she should because this is profound.”
“Doug, keep looking.”
“Nothing in the Impressionists?”
“I’m lost in the Old Masters.”
“Every door is like a wormhole in here.”
“Doug.”
“Yeah?”
“Stay focused.”
“I’m on the move.”
After a roomful of El Grecos, Andy wandered into a large central arcade packed with oversized genre pictures, and he was relieved to be free of Old Masters. It was around here that he noticed the crowds more, despite their Jeanieless nature, the tour groups and the school groups and the senior groups regrouping in this area before entering the late nineteenth century, by far the most popular section in the museum, the galleries within bustling, two rows thick in front of some paintings, and Andy stared at these people and his distraction grew until it gained the power of unexpected thought, of these strangers here admiring paintings he had known since he was a young boy, these Manets and Monets and van Goghs, their familiarity breeding a certain kind of intimacy, almost like this was his living room and Degas’s Dancers hung over his couch, Andy standing in the middle of the gallery like he was its secret patron and he thought, Enjoy, please enjoy all of this, and yet he wanted to give more, so much more, wanted to touch shoulders and slap fives, I want to give you more, he thought, watching the people turn slow circles clockwise, slow circles counterclockwise, a clockwork divided into pictures (half past Pissarro) of time compressed and composed by art, and suddenly and totally Andy understood the human impulse toward expression, the primary need after food and shelter, even before religion, this desire for creation and just then he thought, rather grandly, I am art, knowing he was super-stoned and this was nonsense, but still he thought, I am art, and maybe for the first time he appreciated what his father did, overhearing in front of Seurat’s Circus Sideshow a stooped woman shouting to her too-cheap-to-pony-up-for-the-audio-guide friend, “The luminous shadows endow objectively observed forms with mystery,” and the friend nodded and repeated “mystery” as if hoping to make the word her own. Andy watched and listened for who knows how long before Hallelujah rang him back to earth. It was Doug again. He was in the sculpture court, freaking in front of Carpeaux’s statue Ugolino and His Sons. “It might be the scariest slab of marble I’ve ever seen. Any luck on your end?”
“No.”
“You mind if I go and hit that hot dog cart outside?”
“No,” Andy said. “I’m basically out of time anyway.”
“You wanna join me?”
“Think I’m going to wander around a bit more.”
“Good luck with this Heather Topol–like girl.”
“Yeah, thanks, man.”
A great affection for Doug Streff welled within Andy. Right then he would have died for his friend, not that this sacrifice was called for, or even a possibility, but a fantasy bubbled up in his head of foiling a bullet with his chest, and as he drifted through the Astor Court and the American Wing, the Jain Meeting Hall, this fantasy escalated until Andy was checking the ground for possible grenades, searching for annihilating grace. I could die for you, he thought rather extravagantly, for all of you, death existing as gesture rather than extinction. That’s when he stumbled upon Medieval Art, my old teaching grounds, with its Reliquary of Mary Magdalene that supposedly contains her tooth. All ten-year-olds love that tooth. I wonder if Andy heard traces of our fifth-grade class trip, the boys without fail having a hundred questions? Molar or incisor? Does it have a cavity? Did the Tooth Fairy come? Why a tooth? Why not the eyes? Or the tongue? I remember Andy asking, “Did they rip her apart after she was dead or was she still alive?” A few boys laughed, but I could tell he was serious.
Did he remember, even subconsciously, Christ of the Living Dead?
Or me grinning and ruffling his hair?
A tooth. A relic. Like a pair of old wingtip shoes.
As Andy’s head loosened into a more specific view, he thought about leaving but feared leaving would usher in forgetting, or worse, would reshuffle the experience into a funny story about an older girl and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which would be a shame because right now this seemed like something more, though the something was already losing its ripple, like that last solid notion before falling asleep.
Every act of memory is an act of imagination.
Would Andy have recognized the opening of Eastern Standard?
The more Rand Finch remembered the stairs, and the door, and the light under the door, the less true the memory seemed. The sharpest truth is in the heads of those who have forgotten.
I myself can recite the entire first paragraph. My guess is that Andy had probably read a few pages but grew bored when Rand starts piecing together his postcollegiate trip abroad, traveling through Europe with his two closest friends. Where’s the promised sex? Where’s the promised mayhem? And who cares about that door? Rand Finch sees his memories like heat lightning in the distance, the possible reflection of a long-anticipated war, until by the end he’s unsure if he’s the victim, the villain, or merely the viewer.
And I myself have roamed these galleries looking into the eyes of impossibly young women as if they were waiting for me, as if they might recognize me, a late middle-aged man who wished himself young. I have roamed these halls until bone-tired and like Andy have stumbled into the Robert Lehman Wing. It lies hidden behind that Gothic choir screen like a futuristic escape pod latched to a church. It is a reward for the persistent, much like the Renaissance itself. With a second wind I have orbited the galleries inside with their Memlings and El Grecos and a rather spectacular Ingres, and I have taken in Christus’s A Goldsmith in His Shop, Possibly Saint Eligius, and Di Paolo’s The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, and I have been stopped in my tracks in front of The Annunciation by Botticelli, though I’m less inclined to believe that Jeanie Spokes ever paused here. But Andy leaned in close to that small tempera. He swore there was some residual heat here, some traces of friction from her eyes. This is it, he thought. There was no irony in his conviction, no easy teenage joke—Jizzus Christ—only a sweet and lovely painting of Gabriel kneeling and God’s light passing toward the bedchamber where Mary humbly waited. And Andy was right: it is a sweet and lovely painting. The label mentions that Robert Lehman gave this as a birthday present to his father. Imagine unwrapping that.
Andy’s phone rang.
It was Jeanie. “You didn’t find me,” she teased.
“I think I did, just too late.”
“Where?”
“I can feel you,” he said.
“Where?”
“Like I’m standing outside your window, watching you.”
“And what do you see?”
“Love as a sad kind of fate,” he said, unembarrassed.
Andy might have located her among this profound company, but he was the one who prized the purity and grace, the uniting mystery, while I see Jeanie Spokes somewhere else in that museum, probably upstairs in the gloom of works on paper, among those Dürer prints, her eyes considering the block of wood and how the blade had to cut away whatever remained white, slowly turning flatness into relief: a woman sitting on a scarlet beast, full of names of blasphemy with seven heads and ten horns.
Find the doorknob and decide the brass is still warm.