Allan Stein. Matthew Stadler

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СКАЧАТЬ right past him, blowing smoke from her cigarette, saying nothing. Finally he went away.) I have none of my mother’s cool reserve, so I avoided my colleagues when I could or, if forced by good manners to accept a repeated invitation to lunch, tried to speak cheerfully about my “new career” at Herbert’s museum, a fiction I had devised, which, like most lies, eventually became true. I learned a great deal about art from Herbert during the few weeks that he helped me perpetrate this lie.

      It first occurred to me one cold March afternoon while we sat at a café drinking. Herbert likes to drink and so do I. We are compatible in many ways, and being neighbors a great deal of our lives became shared; watering plants, checking the mail, and chitchat soon became socializing, shared travel, and a natural intimacy that has made me more comfortable with him than with anyone. This particular café (that cold March afternoon) was called Shackles, under which name it masqueraded as a pre-Victorian public house. Nothing in our city is pre-Victorian, except perhaps the famous lakes and the view out.

      Dark wood, patterned velvet, newsprint advertisements for nineteenth-century ales (enlarged, scarred, and varnished for display), wall sconces fashioned from gas fixtures, and poor lighting made up Shackles’s costume. Windows, curtained on brass rods at eye level, let us watch the street while easily hiding ourselves, if need be, by a simple crouch or slouch nearer the table. The unfortunate waiters were disguised as croupiers from Gold Rush-era Nevada (preposterous puffy sleeves, frilly red armbands frayed to the elastic, tidy vests with fake watch pockets and chains, plus anomalous cummerbunds), none of which kept the young students who took these jobs from supplementing the costume with beautiful earrings of silver or brass, chrome-pierced nostrils, ersatz-Maori cheek tattoos, braids and bangles twined about their elegant thin wrists or tied in colorful cloth cascading from their heads—the result being much more like science fiction than the vague nostalgia the owners must have been aiming for. One of the waiters was a lanky blond angel named Tristan, and Herbert adored him. Tristan was also a student at the university, and Herbert kept offering him an “internship” at the museum, to which the boy always replied, “It sounds completely fascinating,” before shuffling off with our drink orders, and then nothing would come of it. We drank there whenever Tristan was working. When he wasn’t working, Shackles became, to Herbert, “that hideous dive” and we went to a much nicer café near to our apartment house.

      Our city is a virtual monument to indiscriminate nostalgia, sometimes (particularly when I look out my window at the nighttime buildings smartly lit by floods and spots) appearing like a grand, jumbled stage set for all the dramas of Western history. Muscular towers of concrete and glass, paid for by young stock wizards and software geniuses, offer a heady compote of modern forms and ornaments, collapsing three hundred years of the Enlightenment—vaulting skylights, vast glass cathedrals, forests of tall columns appended by apses (in which vendors sell coffee, magazines, and snacks), death-defying elevated wings of stone, granite monstrances balanced on steel pins, and sprawling webs of metal and tinted glass suffused with natural light (for the enjoyment of employees taking their sack lunch in the firm’s “winter garden”)—into singular monuments, so that one can review an entire history without straying out-of-doors. Lighted in the manner of Rome’s Campidoglio, these generous knickknacks dominate the city at night.

      Their grand theatricality is sadly compromised, for me, by the awkward, insistent fact that I grew up here. My childhood lurks behind these bright scrims and screens, unruly and constant, threatening to overturn the whole facade and reveal the actual place to me. Once, for example, about a year ago, on a date with a young friend named Herman, keeper of the computers at our school, the trashy glamour of the Downtown Fun House with its strung lights and carnival noise (a fabulous room of tilting pinball machines delivering their trilled ringing scores and piles of loose change which Herman, drunk, said was like Tivoli Gardens, which he described to me in German or Danish, making elegant gestures with his beer and singing God knows what song, so that for a moment I was far away in Denmark or Germany with my beer and this grandly sophisticated friend singing on the verge of some world war or depression) all dissolved when I spun (some would say reeled), and saw a dull canvas mural of two leering clowns painted in a hideous all too familiar greenish-pink. It had hung beside the Skee-Ball lanes covering a hole for the last thirty years, in a sad, dirty corner of this house of marvels, an eddy of quiet amidst the swirling noise. I had only ever seen it once before, when I was ten, and I had pissed there because my mother insisted it was all right to do so. You had better just do it, she said, and I unzipped my pants and did. A policeman came over, put his hand on my shoulder, and told me to stop. I could only stare at the clowns, which I’ve never really forgotten, and comply. Mama was kind enough to pretend it hadn’t happened. “Look what some boy has done,” she whispered, taking my hand and pulling me away from the corner.

      Typically, the memory had ambushed me, replacing Denmark and the World War with my own messy life, and recasting my glamorous European date, Herman, as a loud, tasteless drunk. I knew all along it was there, waiting, but it sneaked up on me, rather like the smell of lavender, suppressed by the evening cold, that kept creeping out of the broad canyon of the Verdon River and stirring Stéphane from his sleep, rousing the boy enough to make me panic that he might get up and leave, might return to the world and abandon me in the shell of our last ruin, that he would walk out of his scripted fever into life, into a world we had shut out, at least for a few days. Isn’t it strange how distant the boy is, was, and those last days near the edge of the sea in France where we left pages ago, ages ago, to meet Herbert, who’s still waiting, too sober and impatient at Shackles, for our conversation to resume? And all the time the boy was here, hidden by a thought, behind a thin distraction, the noise of a conversation, in that gap between words when silence extends one beat too long.

      I enjoy the noise of a good conversation, particularly with Herbert, who has opinions and a stylish way of talking, so that even when he is silent my mind is occupied by him, his nervous hands smoothing the table’s edge, his fish-dart glances, and the way his face rearranges itself around the twin-ridged frenum of his upper lip when he wants something. Adrift in my chameleon instabilities—I could become as easily a society matron as a loud sports guy in the next second, should the right acquaintance walk through the door—I never knew from which blurry edge the next bright color would bleed; Herbert was a swath of singular hue (the dusty pink of Travertine marble in the languid heat of Rome, late summer, late afternoon, for example, so antiquated and pleasing was his effect on me), a familiar resting place that imbued me with a clear, if slightly dated, identity.

      “What exactly will Tristan be doing as your intern?” I asked.

      Herbert stared at the retreating boy. “I think he’s so talented, don’t you?”

      I turned and we watched him together. Tristan’s rambling journey led first to a cluster of tables, where his drunk friends shared a cigarette and told him a joke, which Tristan didn’t get, so there was a long period of explanation, including a great deal of scribbling on a napkin, arrows and words, until finally the boy burst out laughing while his friends sat calmly, passing their one cigarette like a last round of munitions. Tristan moved then to the bar, where he chatted with the newest “croupier” and told him the joke, pulling out the scribbled napkin, which he’d kept, all the while clutching our drink order and gesturing with it, even as the bartender cleaned the spindle of the slips that had been placed there.

      “What talent? The way he deflects your interest without killing it?”

      “His manner, and that cool reserve.” If Herbert smoked he would have flicked ash at this point, but he didn’t smoke. “I need someone with exactly his skills.”

      “I wonder what interests he has?” Herbert might not have heard me, or he didn’t really care about the boy’s interests. “What makes you think he knows anything about working at a museum?”

      “What’s there to know?”

      “Well, social skills, at the very least.”

      “Exactly.” СКАЧАТЬ