City of Strangers (11 page)

He looks at a picture of Ben and Beth with a woman he doesn't recognize, but who could be Beth's sister. He says, 'I always wondered if you asked Ben to convert before you married him.'

She makes a quizzical face. 'No, not at all. It was his idea, actually. And once he gets going... My father had a brother who married outside the faith. Someone on my mother's side, too, I think. We weren't that kind of family. I was in love. I would have married him no matter what.'

Paul glances out the window at the clutter of buildings in the distance. 'I didn't mean to pry.'

She says, 'It always surprised me.' Paul looks at her. 'The strength of his faith, I mean. Maybe it's always that way, if you convert to a religion instead of growing up with it. Maybe it belongs to you in a way I don't understand.'

'He insisted on converting.'

'It's funny. I think that over the years my own faith has grown stronger because of him. I think differently about God. He's made me more serious about Judaism. More serious about all of it, I suppose.'

She grows silent, her expression like that of a woman snapping shut her purse to prevent a stranger from seeing inside. The reason for Paul's visit has drifted away during their conversation, but the present silence offers no resistance, and it returns, poisoning the air between them.

'Let me warm you up.' Beth takes his coffee, which Paul has barely touched, and heads for the kitchen.

'I should go, actually.'

Beth stops and nods. There isn't an established ritual for parting from his sister-in-law; they have had too few opportunities. He wavers, unsure if he's supposed to embrace her, and then realizes that because of the two mugs in her hands it would, in any case, be impossible.

On his way back to the subway, Paul passes a row of white news vans waiting along the street like ambulances. The locus of interest seems to be one of the apartment buildings on West Eighty-second Street, perhaps a private disgrace made newsworthy by the identity of one of its principals. It could be a death. In any case, nothing is happening at the moment, and the only activity on the block is a reporter, dressed in a suit, having a cigarette and jawing with the cameraman.

He could have left the city after his divorce. Nothing holds him here; he could have gone anywhere. The work he does is moveable. Other cities are inexpensive, intimate, uncrowded; they have different seasons, new people, unfamiliar streets. He could have gone to San Francisco. He could have gone to a place like Denver or Minneapolis, one of those smaller cities in the middle of the country routinely praised as 'livable' – able to be lived in. Is he able to live here? People often leave after a personal loss; people will move out of grief. Then again, those same things can make people stay put. He has never thought of leaving, not seriously. Not even to pursue one of the old post-college dreams, taking up life as an expatriate, in Amsterdam, Budapest, Buenos Aires. Berlin is supposedly cheap these days.

They are tearing down a building on West Seventy-second Street. He looks inside, through its stripped face, at floors where workmen carefully pull back unwanted beams and pieces of stone. Pink, fluffy insulation swells in the gaps like an infection. The building is being remodeled then, not torn down; the destruction moves too slowly for a demolition. He gets on the subway, gets off.

Who would he tell, if he left?

He stands on Madison Avenue. Paul hasn't been this busy in weeks, even months. Fresh from delivering the card to Beth, he now has a meeting, arranged on short notice, with this editor, Bentham, a man whom as little as forty-eight hours ago he firmly intended never to see again. He dislikes Bentham and knows that a second encounter won't change that. But earlier today, in the period of clarity that often follows sleep, he sat for a long time, drinking coffee and staring out the window, only vaguely aware of the movement of buses and people, and made a decision.

It would be good, Paul came to think, if this morning's obituary were not the last comment on his father's life committed to the public record. A book of the kind Bentham has proposed wouldn't, in and of itself, constitute an act of disloyalty; it would all depend on how he handled the material.

And there lay a second idea – Ben. Without fully understanding the charges facing his brother, Paul recognizes how much worse it has been made by the past the newspapers have exhumed: Ben Wald, né Metzger, a practicing Jew no less, is the son of a Nazi. It fits the picture they want. One buried secret stands as proof of others. Even Paul feels a growing sense of umbrage at this turn of events. He cannot judge Ben's innocence or guilt, although it isn't hard to imagine his brother forcing the system to abide by him instead of the reverse – but that isn't the point. Using their father was shameless. The papers have erased forty years of tireless effort. No matter what his crimes, Ben has earned the right not to be a Metzger.

A book about their father would give Paul the opportunity to make this fact loudly known, to pump it into the public chambers of information. He may be deluding himself. But if there is a chance to have his brother understand that he doesn't judge him for turning his back on their father, that though he doesn't agree with it he recognizes the integrity in it, then perhaps Ben will soften his own judgment of Paul for not doing the same. In print it might be possible – mightn't it? – to revise the terms of their brotherhood by making Ben a figure of sympathy: a man of highest principle who made a terrifying choice, at the cost of his own father, because it was the only one he felt was right.

And if Bentham isn't lying, or irrationally optimistic, this book could restore a basic aspect of dignity to Paul's life. It could sell. He could, more than notionally, be a writer. In time he could move out of his lonely apartment, his distant neighborhood, into somewhere brighter, fuller, busier. In time he could even afford to live in Manhattan. Would it impress Claire? It seemed until recently that his chances were gone. He would have to be truly mad to reject, on the basis of a vague, shifting principle, the only one that has come along in years.

An assistant takes Paul immediately to Bentham's office. He is sitting behind the desk, writing in an appointment book.

'I've reconsidered your offer,' says Paul after the editor invites him to sit.

'It seems so.' There's a hard, sharp glint suspended in the back of Bentham's eye, like something frozen in thick ice. 'What changed your mind?'

'That isn't important. All you need to know is that I'll do it.'

The editor smiles and, in mock deference to Paul's show of hostility, puts up a pair of open palms.

'When we last met, you said this would be my book.'

'I did.'

'No swastikas on the cover. Nothing tasteless.'

'Yes.'

'And you'll publish it, this book, however I choose to write it?'

'There will have to be a certain measure of editorial discretion, of course.'

'I want you to know that I'm agreeing to this only with serious misgivings.'

The editor pauses and, leaning toward Paul, joins his hands in an arrow, aimed directly across the desk.

'I would say you've made that awfully clear.'

He waits for a large, threshing pack of schoolchildren to cross over before having the bar code on his own ticket scanned. They rush ahead like swallows down the roped corridor that admits entrance to the museum, as their teacher makes a futile pursuit, calling for them to hush down, to respect the place they're in. A second teacher lags reluctantly behind; he is younger and seems faintly embarrassed by it all. Paul sees a guard grin. By the time he finds them again in the main hall, whose ceiling reaches far enough above them to achieve the distance and abstraction of sky, the teacher has regained control of her students. They remember what she surely told them before arriving: this is a museum, not a playground; the works of art here are priceless, or at least worth millions of dollars; you are to keep your voices down, walk at a reasonable pace, and, above all, you are not to touch anything. The students each clutch a black-and-white composition notebook.

It is a field trip, a chance to force-feed culture to ten-year-olds. He remembers these from his own childhood in Brooklyn, the voltage of an excursion to Manhattan, then as much an idea as a place; Frank never took him, never saw the point – Manhattan was more buildings, more people, more noise, more construction, more car exhaust, more assholes and criminals and deadbeats and drunks. Paul would prefer not to analyze his reasons for being here now. He's visited this museum dozens of times, but not since the divorce. Elsewhere in the building, Claire is at work, sitting at a desk or walking around the office as she speaks on the phone; she isn't down in the galleries, among people. She won't see him. Feeling a pungent sense of displeasure after meeting with Bentham again, he came here: he can purchase a ticket like anyone else and with that, the price of admission, have the run of the museum. It is a public place.

In the atrium he spots a series of four abstract paintings by Cy Twombly. They are among Claire's favorites; he didn't know they had come to New York. Behind him two of the children dart past like rabbits, jostling his coat. A clutch of five girls, gossips, loiter nearby, giggling and writing in their notebooks. They don't look at the art. Elsewhere the younger, male teacher sternly addresses a group of boys. Despite the teachers' efforts, the volume of chatter swells and fills the enormous hall. There are perhaps thirty kids in the room, caroming around the floor like pool balls. Finding it difficult to concentrate on the paintings in front of him, Paul moves to the next room, the gallery of contemporary art. Big things. Found objects. Video. Industrial materials, manipulated photographs, looping words of lurid pink neon.

Claire knows how to look at such things, and how to speak intelligently about their intent; he has always had trouble. These frictionless surfaces offer no traction. Although he has no formal training, Paul has long felt entitled to his opinions of art, as someone who has spent so much time around it. He and Claire share a love of earlier artists, or they once did, of the postwar generation, the abstract expressionists, de Kooning and Johns, and the artists before them, the clearly marked trail going back – Picasso, yes, and also Giacometti, Schiele, the German expressionists, and then Munch, Vuillard, Rodin, Manet. They both admire Cézanne. Claire knows more, has an internal library of images a thousand times the size of his own, but at heart she likes what he likes. Together they saw dozens of museums – and it has never occurred to him with quite such immediacy that he's been conditioned to look at art with her, to anticipate Claire's opinions and to have her nearby to offer his own. He hasn't visited a single museum since the divorce; the last ten months are perhaps the longest he's gone in his adult life without setting foot inside one. He feels the build-up of unexpressed thoughts like a stuck vein inside his head and looks more than once to his right, his mouth already beginning to form a word, as if she will be there to hear it.

Trapped in these thoughts, he isn't looking at the art in front of him. If his eyes focus long enough to notice anything, it is his own fading reflection in the glass of the frame, and the reflections flickering behind him, a room's worth of bodies, fragmented and floating back and forth. In this tableau, at the center of which hangs his own face, he notices another's: a woman's, her features obscured but her figure familiar, familiar enough; she stands at about the right height, with the right length of hair, with a similar style of dress.

He turns – she's already moving toward a sculpture in the middle of the floor. He doesn't follow at once. When he does, he selects an indirect course, standing not beside her at the sculpture, but at a piece on the opposite side of the room; once again, he isn't really looking, rather using the glass of the frame as a mirror, a way to pick out her movements, which surely gives the impression of staring all the more intensely at the art itself. She stands at the sculpture for a long time, then walks away, out of the room. Paul dithers, makes up his mind. He goes after her.

The main hall again. Most of the children have gone. Three kids blast across one of the exposed catwalks of the upper galleries. A call echoes down.

She's looking at the paintings Paul stopped by earlier, the sequence of four, each one a season; she stands at the first, at spring, and Paul, preserving a certain distance, begins at the end, with winter, although his eyes focus on the piece immediately to his left.
Autunno
. Vermilion, magenta, brown, and black, purples and yellows, all erupt in bursts and shocked splotches, and in fat, longitudinal drips that run almost to the bottom; in places the brush strokes are so thick that the paint burbles off the canvas, hangs there in gnarled, gristly threads. From elsewhere he hears a guard's tired remonstrations: 'No flash. No flash.' In the outermost parenthesis of his vision he sees her advance from spring to summer. The resemblance is uncanny.

A figure steps between them – a small girl. She looks eight or nine, perhaps too young to be part of the school group, although Paul isn't good at guessing ages, and upon approaching the painting,
Autunno
, she squeezes her face into a quizzical pouch. The piece gives her no grip, no figure for her to wrap her imagination around, no scene for which to invent a narrative. It is simply color and blank space, absence and presence, a grisly convulsion. She stares. The woman, Paul notices, now looks away, as if deciding where to go next.

Paul is about to turn as well when he sees that the young girl's finger, inches from the canvas and extended in an innocent gesture of indication, hasn't stopped moving; then, without the hesitation that would suggest an awareness of the inherent transgression, it is touching the artwork, penetrating what seemed impenetrable. The canvas bends like a mattress. She picks briefly at a particularly thick clot as at a scab, before she pulls away her hand and then, as if nothing has happened, leaves. Paul's mind is fixed on the sight. It has the visceral shock of a finger pressing against the wet, purple bulge of an exposed brain. No one else saw what took place, no alarms were triggered, none of the guards was watching. Whatever now bristles inside of him recalls the first sensations as he approached the two men beating the boy, but more concentrated, all that violence shrunk to the tip of a small girl's index finger.