Starry Night (10 page)

“I think you're not supposed to move place cards,” I said.

Nolan looked at me without a shred of regret. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “But to hell with that, right?”

“Right.” I looked around the table to see if anyone else was tuning in to this.
Nope.
It felt like three years in slow motion for my ass to hit the seat, but when it did, Charlie was on the other side of me talking to an Asian woman I didn't recognize but I figured also had a low-level job at the museum or why would she be sitting with us?

“This smells good.” Nolan gave me a huge I'm-blowing-your-mind smile and gently blew on a spoonful of soup before he ate it up.

 

18

“I'm a flexitarian.”

“You are? What's that?” I asked, just before putting a fork jammed with beef fillet, mashed potatoes, and green sauce in my mouth.

“I would rather eat things that didn't have a mother or father, so I do that at home and at school and stuff.
But
if I go to someone's house and they are serving ribs, or like this steak tonight, I'll just eat it, because I don't want to be difficult.” He crunched into his fennel-raisin semolina roll.

“Are you against it in like a moral way? Or for health reasons?” I said with my mouth still a little full.

“No, no judgment. I just saw this movie at school that would turn any thinking person into a vegan, so I'm mindful of what I put in my body, but I don't want to be rude so…”

“Oh.” I swallowed and thought for a second about two cows standing in the field watching me chew on their kid.

“So, Reagan said you are in a band?”

“Yeah, you guys should come see us sometime. We're playing the Harvest Festival up at Columbia soon, like next week I think. Can I ask you something?”

“Uh-huh.” I held my breath, in anticipation of I had no idea what. I could feel myself breaking out in a tiny sweat.

“Who are you?”

Now, this might sound weird, but Nolan's “who are you” did not come out badly. That question sounds a little asshole-ish or pretentious and Dr. Phil-ish, like, “Who
are
you?” but it was more like he was asking because he was
enchanted
with me, so that was wild—
and
nobody had ever asked me who I was before, so I was way into it.

“Um, well, I—”

“Like, what kind of name is Wren?” he interrupted.

“Oh, my aunt named me.”

“How come?” He took a drink of water but still looked at me, waiting for the story.

“So, after I was born…”

“What hospital?”

“Columbia Presbyterian. We were all born there.”

“Okay.”

“Where were you born?”

“Columbia Presbyterian.”

“What!”
Kismet … “Wow. When's your birthday?” I asked.

“May 10. When's yours?”

“September 25,” I said. We sat there looking at each other for longer than it's normal to without talking.

“So, your name?” I am not exaggerating when I tell you that he was looking at me like I was a luna moth emerging from a cocoon or like I was the only living girl in New York City. Has anyone ever done that to you? Nobody had ever done that to me, ever.

“So my mother was holding me in the hospital bed, and she said to my aunt that compared to holding Oliver, who apparently was the size of a baby hippo, she said I felt like a…” His elbow was on the table and he was resting his chin and cheek on his hand. He had a silver ring on his pinky that I had not noticed before. “… tiny bird. And my aunt said, ‘Like a wren.'” He smiled. “So that was what they called me. I think I was supposed to be named Lillian, after my grandmother, but…”

“At first, I thought your brother said he had a sister named Gwen.”

“Nope, Wren.”

“I am so going to write a song about a girl named Wren.”

“You are?” I started fiddling with the salt and pepper shakers on the table.

“Yeah, man.” He sat up, picked up his fork, nailed the last piece of beef, and put it in his mouth. “Who do you know named Wren?” Chew chew chew. “It's out of a fairy tale.” Chew chew. “In fact,
you
”—he pointed his fork at me—“look like a fairy tale.” He put the fork back in his teeth upside down. “Like Rapunzel.”

Charlie elbowed me, jolting me out of the spell that was being cast on me.

“Hello? How good is this?” Charlie was holding up a roasted parsnip. I didn't think he had heard Nolan call me a fairy tale.

“Yeah, it's good, Charlie,” I said without even looking at him or my own parsnips. I'm not even sure I had tasted them yet.

“Wren! It's a parsnip
fry
, have you even tried it? Are you even listening to me?” I looked at the parsnip Charlie was holding in my personal space. I had the instinct to whack that fry out of his hand and into the wishing pool at the other end of the room.

“It
is
good, man,” Nolan leaned in and said sincerely. “Your father is a great chef. Your dad's the chef, right?”

“Yes, thank you, he is.” Charlie took a bite of the root vegetable. “I get really proud of him at things like this. He started out as a school cook.”

“That's impressive, man. See—you have to pay your dues.” They were now talking over me, so I leaned back and watched Nolan be totally awesome to Charlie.

“Oh, yeah! Well, if you want, I mean if you are finished, I can go find them. I think they are sitting up there—or I can show you the kitchen! I can go back there anytime I want,” Charlie said.

“Thanks, I totally want to do that. I have never been backstage at one of these things, and maybe there is more of that carrot soup around!” He lifted his eyes at Charlie like maybe he could hook him up. It totally worked.

“Butternut squash … there probably is,” Charlie said sheepishly.

“Cool. But first I'm going to”—he pushed his chair out, took my hand, and pulled me up—“take Wren on a stroll.”

I let Nolan pull me, looking at Charlie for approval. I felt a little guilty leaving him at the table, but despite that I lifted away like a balloon being released from a little boy's hand.

“Wanna take me somewhere, Wren?” Nolan asked.

“Oh sure, I mean, yeah.”

“Oh okay, well, after then,” Charlie said. “You can see the kitchen and maybe we can get a sneak peak at these insane lace cookies they are serving with coffee.”

I looked to where I thought Farah was sitting at the other table, but her chair was empty. Had she gone to the bathroom? It was all a blur. I couldn't focus on where anyone was. I had been in a twilight zone of boy-ness all through dinner and now everything was distorted. Even the Temple of Dendur, a place I thought I knew by heart, was as foreign as, well, an ancient Egyptian temple.

Nolan started walking toward the American Wing, pulling me like I was one of those kid toys, like a duck on wheels that you can drag, but he paused right before we got close to the guards. “Can you take me somewhere in here?” He pointed his finger in the air and spun it around, meaning the museum. “Someplace you like? You said this was your second home.”

The room suddenly burst into applause and I saw my father walk up to a podium. The chances that he would see me standing there with Nolan and not in my seat where I was supposed to be were high, thanks to my red dress, not that he could do anything from a podium. My parents were in Nan and David Noorlander mode, not Mom and Dad mode, but I still had to make quick moves.

“Okay, come on—not that way, just follow me.” I let go of his hand and rushed down the far side of the room, away from all the tables. I darted in and out of waiters moving to bus the dinner plates and guests making their way to the bathrooms before dessert. It was like we were in a James Bond movie. We reached the entrance, where we had all come in to dinner and that would lead us out of there. I turned around and heard my father say, “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen.”

I froze with fear that he was about to say, “You see that girl in the red dress running off with a boy who is unrecognizable to me? That is my naughty daughter, Wren.” But he didn't. He said, “If I could take you away from your dinners for just a moment to introduce our honored guest, Cy Dowd.” More exploding applause.

“Do you want to stay?” Nolan said.

I should have stayed. I shouldn't have left the party without telling anyone where I was going. But every impulse in my body said go.

“No.” I looked back. Could I see my mother's silhouette sitting at one of the tables? Could she see me? Was she watching me? Nope. “No. Let's go!” I took his hand and bolted around the corner to the Egyptian gallery. We had to run through at least six rooms before we got to the main hall, and to the big stairs that lead to the master paintings. We ran farther and farther away from the party. I felt like the space shuttle blasting up into the atmosphere. As it gets farther away from Earth, pieces of metal start falling off it, like it's being freed from everything that was keeping it grounded.

When we ran by the cases of amulets—tiny good luck charms that Egyptian people of the Middle Kingdom carried around with them or stuck in their coffins—I had to screech to a halt. Some of the talismans are as small as a fingernail—carved bats, cats, and falcons, coins, little jewels, statues of people standing up very straight.

“Look at these. Have you ever seen them?” I said breathlessly. Nolan didn't seem to know what I was talking about. “These!” I pulled him in, pointing to the hundreds of teeny figurines. “When I was little, I used to hope that if I was very good, my father would open this case with a special museum key and give me one of these.”

“I guess that didn't happen?” he said, a little winded too.

“Yeah, he doesn't have a key. I'm not sure there is a key, and anyway, I don't think I was ever really good enough to deserve one of these.”

“What?”

“Oh, nothing.” I supposed I wanted him to hear that, but I also wanted to take it back the minute I said it because it's kind of weird to tell someone you think you are a dud.

“Which one would you have now?” Leaning in close to me with his face flushed from running, he looked hot. I wondered if he played a sport. “Pretend I have a key.” The thought of a game made me smile.

“Oh, okay. Well, let's see.” I totally focused on choosing, like maybe he
could
give me one. “I like those amber bees.” He smiled at me like I had picked well.

“Which one would you choose?” I asked. He scanned the case, giving each ornament a good hard look, and then he said confidently, “Definitely that blue eye. I want that thing around my neck.”

I turned and looked at his neck. His skin was smooth and maybe had leftover tan from the summer. Even though his tie was still fastened, I imagined what the base of his neck looked like. That bone at the bottom that is shaped like a U. I involuntarily swallowed and willed myself to breathe.

“I think they do have reproductions of those in the gift shop,” I said, looking back up to his eyes.

“Well, that makes me feel uncool and unoriginal. I bet they don't have the bees in the gift shop.”

“No, they don't.” I smiled because I had looked for them before.

“Is this where you wanted to take me?”

“No, no—come on.” I started running again, past the kneeling high priestess, past the masks and the coffins, back into the great hall, and up to the wide, milky marble stairs. If you had an image of the yards and yards of red silk billowing behind me as I ran through the oyster-colored galleries, you were right.

 

19

Van Gogh's
Starry Night
is
not
at the Met. It lives at the Museum of Modern Art on Fifty-Third Street. My disappointment that
The Starry Night
does not hang in the museum where I spend the most time is quite real. Once when I was six or seven, around the same time I believed Dad had keys to the cases that held the world's tiniest treasures, I asked if he could trade one of the museum's great works—a Sargent? a Picasso?—for
The Starry Night.
I thought it was a reasonable trade. Dad was and still is nuts about Picasso, but I found all those exaggerated noses and blue paintings scary. I thought the museum would be better off with one less Picasso and
the
most glorious van Gogh. Anyway, you might be thinking that I would take Nolan to see
The Starry Night
, but we were in the wrong museum. I never ended up showing him that painting.

The Great Hall, compared to what it looked like two hours before, was nearly empty. There were people dodging out of the party early and quite a few museum guards and party planners milling around, but all the action was in the Temple of Dendur room. Near the entrance where Bennet had been standing there was a long table that was being set up with gift bags for people to take home with them when they left. Nolan and I were on the other side of the room from that action. If we went upstairs, there easily could be a guard who would send us right back down. It's not like you can just waltz around the museum as you please—it's the Met—but I had a crazy feeling in me that even if we saw a guard, I would be able to talk my way into going where I wanted to go. I felt empowered.

“So, we might get busted, but let's go upstairs,” I said.

“I think that is a supremely good idea,” Nolan said, and held out his hand for me to take. No, that isn't right. Really, he reached out and took my hand. I know that is how it went because even though I was emboldened enough to blow off my parents' dinner and sneak upstairs to forbidden galleries filled with priceless art, I definitely didn't have the courage to voluntarily put my hand in his. No, he took my hand. My hand. My hand. He. Took. My. Hand.