At the Strangers' Gate Page 6

  Headed for the door…There really wasn’t very far to go, what with there only being three steps between the table and the entrance. Still, I went there, and I opened it.

  Then Martha, with a show of force and conviction and inner authority that I would not see again even during childbirth, summoning up a spirit all the more impressive for rising from such a gracious and fundamentally noncontentious person, went to the door and stopped me.

  “You are going back and you are going to finish cooking that fish!” she said.

  We looked each other in the eye and we knew that this was a fateful moment in the history of our marriage, and I went back and I finished cooking the fish.

  About a week later, the super, Mr. Fernandez, came to our door—there was something mildly thrilling about having a super named Mr. Fernandez—and explained that everyone was complaining about the amount of smoke that was coming from our little basement apartment. Apparently, it was rising right up through the six stories of the building, setting off smoke alarms. I realized at that moment that, in order both to keep our lease and to save our marriage, I was going to have to change my approach to cooking.

  One way we could help ourselves, I had already realized, was through a magic word of common invention but of our special use. And that magic word is “medium.” The beautiful thing about “medium” as a word is that it slides over insensibly toward its near companion—to “medium well” or “medium-rare.” Your partner hears the “medium,” and the waiter alone hears the “rare” or “well done,” and you get to belong to two categories of moral taste simultaneously. It is a wonderful word, “medium,” and it can save any marriage if you use it properly. Even if the only place you ever go is out, once a week, for a hamburger on Second Avenue.

  And since I wasn’t going to be allowed to sauté and flambé in that nine-by-eleven room any longer, I had to do the only thing I could do instead—and that was to slowly braise, to stew everything that came to me. And the beautiful thing about braising and stewing, as I discovered in the Blue Room, is that it only has two moral components to it, two degrees of feeling—tough and tender. You are no longer implicated in rare or well done, or even mediating with medium. Things are either properly tough and have to be cooked down, or they are appropriately tender and ready to be eaten. And they more often became tender than remained tough, because I took the time to will them so.

  The truth, in retrospect, is that what Rose and Ron did not know, or quite see, is that if you make a good marriage, the prices may stay the same. But the portions mysteriously grow larger.

  4

  My First Job

  After our first year in the Blue Room, Martha said to me, “Why don’t you go look for a job?” She had already begun working for the documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, whose “archive,” consisting of thirty-some years of loose film reels, needed…something. What the something was had been left to her to discover. It had to be organized. And she was originally it.

  “Working” had never quite occurred to me, really, as a pathway in life. I mean work for pay, of course—I was working hard at Renaissance iconography and Byzantine icons in graduate school. And I was working in another, more far-fetched, way as well. Once a week, I would write a piece for The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section—a larksome high-hearted thing, bending toward wistfulness in the end, and all this emotion neatly compressed within fifteen hundred words—about something or other I’d seen or experienced in the city over the previous week. A man reading Le Monde on the subway; something happening on the bus; the first snowfall. Then Martha and I would walk the fifty-plus blocks from the Blue Room to the old offices of The New Yorker on West Forty-third Street, and slip the short essay under the door, or hand it to the baffled and impatient receptionist. (I didn’t know—a meaningless-seeming distinction that would years later nonetheless prove significant in my working life—that these small letters “from a friend” were actually called “Comment,” not “Talk.” Or that, still later, I would become friends with that receptionist, and an auditor of tales about her fascinating love life with the writers on the other side of the door.) At the time, the pieces would then come bouncing back from the magazine with a celerity that suggested the entire transaction were being conducted on a particle accelerator, with messages written and returned at something approaching the speed of light. And of course I would patiently work on my songs, one after another, picking them out on the guitar and committing them to hissy cassettes. “God Bless the IRT,” I told Martha, was the best but not the only of the crop of the “new work.” She listened attentively, as she always did, and offered “notes” on my notes.

  But the only thing I’d ever done in college that you could call “work” was work in the library of the business school three nights a week during the summer. So I took that out into the world, and I got a job at a place called the Frick Art Reference Library, which was, and still is, I suppose, a library above the Frick Collection in New York. I knew that collection well. There were beautiful Rembrandts and Bellinis in it, and Martha and I loved most of all Fragonard’s feather-light but heart-deep series, The Progress of Love. I had even made a mental note to adapt it for the ballet, after I was done with my careers as a Broadway composer, popular essayist, and seemingly effortless restaurant-frequenting man about town.

  The Frick Art Reference Library sat up above the picture galleries, and it was like a little piece of the nineteenth century on East Seventieth Street. I don’t mean the good nineteenth century, the nineteenth century of wonderful Christmas teas and gaslit streets, the nineteenth century we envy. I mean the bad nineteenth century, the nineteenth century where miners were shot en masse, and everyone died of communicable diseases. There was only one phone booth at the Frick Art Reference Library, and on it was a sign, “Please disinfect phone after using.” There was a blue bottle of disinfectant alongside the sign, and napkins. You really did have to disinfect it every time you used it, though I never knew what illness you were disinfecting it against. I always imagined that it was something like consumption or neuralgia or lumbago or catarrh or some other complaint of the Civil War period. I went there, and to their eventual great chagrin, they gave me a job, and the job I got—my first job, my first experience of grown-up toil—was running what’s called “the authority file.”

  An authority file is a filing cabinet filled with cards—little three-by-five cards were used in those days, before anything was digitized. It gave, and I suppose still gives, the name of an artist and his or her birthdate. If that’s all you have, if you don’t have a death date, in an authority file the card sits above the rod, hasn’t been “dropped below the rod.” And when you can find a death date to pin to the artist, you drop the card below the rod.

  My job consisted of trying to kill off as many artists every day as I could. Newspapers would arrive from around the world each morning, from Spain and Russia and England and elsewhere. Sometimes, they would be several weeks old. Another sub-librarian would clip out the obituary sections. Then I would have to pore over them, searching the obituary pages for the names of artists and news of their passing. When, delighted, I found an artist’s obituary, I would take out the artist’s card, type the death date on it, and go see the head librarian and ask her whether we could put the artist’s card below the rod.

  We would do it together. First, I would remove the long rod from the cards it held in line through the uniform punch-holes in their lower thirds. Then, while I held the cards together, she would drop the one with the new death date into its place, and then skillfully push the rod back through the entire tunnel of punch holes, putting the small fatal hole in line with all the others, with the rod running through them. It was pretty skilled labor, and a sort of funeral for art, held on the sixth floor. At first I liked rooting for the elderly artists to outlast the head librarian, although there was something fateful in their daily fall. It was like living with the Fates, and watching them at work.

  Of course,
if you do a job like that for a while, you begin to get this strange, Twilight Zone feeling that you are responsible for the life and death of artists. You are cutting the thread of fate for some poor aging Abstract Expressionist counting out his days in Mexico, some surviving Fauvist hanging on there in Provence. Their cards linger precariously above the rod, day after day and year after year, and then, one morning, you find yourself making history in the way it is really made, by adding a death date to a single card.

  The problem was, I was about as badly cut out for that job as any human being could possibly be. I’m none of the things a librarian should be now, and I was none of those things then. I’m terribly disorganized and I don’t keep good records, and I don’t remember where I put anything. On my first day at work, they gave me the scepter, the orb, the symbol of being a member of the closed court of the Frick Art Reference Library—and that was a key to the stacks, because all the stacks were closed and you had to come and beg entry to them. If you were a woman, you had to wear a skirt. If you were a man, you had to wear a jacket and tie, and then you might be allowed to consult a book, but only if allowed by us librarians, who held the key.

  And they gave me this key, and they explained how important it was, and within two hours, I had lost it. I still don’t remember where I lost it or how I lost it, but I know that I lost it. And for the rest of the year, for want of the missing key, what I had to do whenever I needed to go into the stacks to look for a book was to linger, kind of clandestinely, by the edge of the door, until some other librarian, with her key about her, went in, and then I would slip in beside her, making pleasantries all the while.

  This is a terrible way to be a librarian, to have to wait for chance encounters, a bit like one of those white slavers who wait at Charles de Gaulle Airport for American women in Liam Neeson movies. That was my life, and that’s how it was spent, trying to kill off aging artists and waiting for somebody else to go into the stacks to retrieve a book. On my lunch hour, I would slip downstairs into the collection. I would look at the Rembrandts and the Bellinis. They seemed different. Even the Fragonards had lost some of their featheriness. They seemed stodgier than before.

  I was learning a necessary lesson in the duller side of life. I was getting a glimpse at how much glummer and grimmer New York could be than I had imagined. Upstairs at the Frick looked quite different from downstairs at the Frick. What you saw when you sneaked behind the collection wasn’t the obverse, secret side of the paintings, encoding some occult signature. It was just a grim little nineteenth-century space, with all the charm of a blacking factory.

  At the Institute of Fine Arts, the lectures and seminars I was taking weren’t, as I had hoped, a sort of seminar in being Kenneth Clark, a key to the mysterious glamour of museums. Instead, they were something between courses in stamp collecting and puzzle solving. Most of them were mindlessly devoted to “iconography,” solving essentially meaningless little symbolic riddles that stood on the margin of the pictures’ meaning. (Old pictures did have little puzzles in them, but no one at the time had cared about them much: Renaissance people cared about the picture’s style, magnificence, original contributions, about the tremor of the thing.) Or else the classes were devoted to connoisseurship, learning the sequences of one artist or another without caring much about what the pictures meant.

  The one exception was a seminar on Picasso I took with William Rubin, the great chief curator of painting and sculpture at MoMA. But even that ended, if not badly, then at least ambiguously. God knows he was filled with vitality—he looked as if he lived on a diet of organ meat, and the very name of Picasso was sacred to him. I went without food for four days as I readied my seminar report on Picasso’s portraiture. When, finally, I delivered it and Rubin was, if not rapturous, then at least not disapproving, I slipped over to the Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle hotel, which I still associated with the kind of glamour I had come to New York intending to experience, and I ordered the only drink with whose name I was vaguely familiar: a Black Russian, a vile combination of Kahlúa and vodka. I drank it down, and, sitting there on the banquette in my jeans (since I had no suit pants) and sneakers (since I had no dress shoes), I promptly passed out, slipping to the terrazzo flooring, and had to be helped out of the bar by a crew of pointedly efficient Italian waiters.

  While I worked, and waited, I also wrote a play and a poem. The play was to be called The Anatomy of Art and it was a satire, though of what I don’t know—the art world, I suppose, though I scarcely knew enough of that world to satirize it. I recall that it had a long opening section of verbal misunderstandings, of which I was peculiarly proud, though I can’t remember the exchanges now—irritatingly, I can only recall the punch lines, which seem like Dada non sequiturs without the setups. The funniest line in the play, I recall, was an exchange between a museum guard and a winsome young woman curator that ended with the riposte “No. Mostly they lived on oats.” I can no longer remember what the setup was that made that funny, but I remember that I thought it was, unusually so.

  Then, at my desk, I wrote an epic poem in heroic couplets about the art world. I found a few scraps of it the other day. It was called, I think, Cathedrals of Art—I was impressed by Florine Stettheimer’s charming heraldic paintings of New York life in the twenties, just then coming back into fashion. In the titles of all of them she used Cathedrals to indicate peculiar New York establishments: Cathedrals of Commerce referencing department stores, and Cathedrals of Art, museums. Mine was a wry, satiric poem, again about the follies of the art world, about which then, as I say, I had something less than the vaguest idea. (When Robert Hughes actually had his mock-heroic couplets on the art world published, a few years later, I felt mildly resentful, even though by then he was a friend. His were more skilled than mine, and much more vitriolic, but, though published more widely, they didn’t live any longer.)

  Finally, one day, after a year of dodging, I noticed that there was a key in the door to the stacks, someone else’s key left in the keyhole. And I thought, “Oh, this is my chance. I’ll act now.” I slipped the key out of the door, out of the lock, and I put it in my pocket, and I went back to reading obituaries.

  And then, about an hour later, someone came up in a state of agitation and misery, and I said, “What’s wrong?” He said, “All of the librarians are locked into the stacks and we can’t get them out, because the master key is missing!”

  There are certain moments that arrive in life as a true test of character. You know the kind of person you are after that moment. You are the kind of person who goes and says, “I took this key. I’m sorry. Let me release all the librarians from being locked in a black, inky well, surrounded by books.” Or you are the kind of person who turns around, slips down the stairs, goes back to his nine-by-eleven basement room with the key still in his pocket and, thirty years later, still has the key locked in the top drawer of his desk. What did I do? I chose a middle way. I could have left and walked away with the librarians locked in the stacks. But I didn’t. Instead, I left the key on the floor, for someone else to find.

  I did learn something there at the Frick Art Reference Library. I learned that there’s somebody eyeing your card at every moment of your life. None of those artists knew that I was down there, peering over fate’s shoulder. Over the progress of every love lurks the authority file, with its fatalities.

  And a more important thing had happened. I wrote a sentence. It was my first true sentence. I used it to start a story. It went, “I am a student at the Institute of Fine Arts, and I work part time at the Frick Art Reference Library.” It couldn’t have been simpler, could not have been flatter or more naïvely declarative. And yet I knew at once that, writing it, I had broken through, that in the simple accumulation of obviousness lay a path toward writing more potent than all the puns and poems I had written. Wherever you were going, the power of sentences lay in their simple additive observations. It was a truth that I glimpsed, and that then escaped me. It escapes me still, as I pur
sue it, still.

  I had also learned that, no matter who you were or what you did, you were only going one way, straight below the rod. Even if no death notice turns up for you today, your card stays above the rod until one does. The claw of the head librarian gets us all in the end.

  Oh! I remember! It was a joke about the National Endowment for the Arts. That’s what it was. The museum guard explains that his father had been a dealer—that his father had had a stable that he kept fed. The pretty young curator, thinking that the stable was one of artists, not horses, replied, “NEA?” meaning that she supposed that’s how the father (and there was a father/fodder pun somewhere in there, too) kept them fed. And he replies, “No, mostly they lived on oats.” No wonder I was proud of it. Puns like that are only produced under the pressure of waiting for old men to die in Europe, and your first sentence to appear in earnest.

  5

  Seeing Theo

  After I lost the sort-of job I had at the Frick Library, killing off old artists who had once been young, I got a job, sort of, at the Museum of Modern Art, talking about old pictures that had once been new.

  Those were, and probably still are, the two kinds of jobs you can get as a newcomer to the city: the sort-of job, and the job, sort of. A sort-of job is one that’s really a job but that you don’t really want to do—a job that no one would really take if he had a choice. People worked for years at the Frick Library, but no one was really lifted by the experience. A job, sort of, is a job that could be good if you actually had it, but really you don’t, not in the way normal people have real jobs. These days those kinds of jobs are called internships, but thirty-five years ago, though they might ask you to do something for almost nothing, they didn’t quite yet have the nerve to ask you to work at something for nothing at all.