City of Strangers (7 page)

Claire's eyes follow his down the street, to where the man was just standing, and she asks, the irritation still in her voice, what Paul is looking at.

'Nothing,' he says. 'For a minute I thought it was someone I know.'

From the day last May that she took the job at the museum Claire Brennan hasn't felt quite herself. Previously she slummed in galleries, advising the wealthy on purchases of art they didn't understand and enjoyed predominantly as a badge of status, and worked as a junior curator in smaller museums devoted to a single theme or region. Now, juggled by the little accidents of the New York art world, and having cashed in a decade's worth of connections, Claire has earned herself a position as a curator of painting and sculpture at the city's principal house of modern art. She's worked so hard to arrive at such success. Even so, the experience has been a strange one. Routine decisions suddenly have the pitch of high intrigue, subject to painstaking analysis and second-guessing. Reporters appear at her office. Little more than a year ago a wealthy donor willed to the museum an enormous sum of money, leaving its endowment swollen and its board of directors gluttonous, eager to make an earth-rattling acquisition. They set their sights on a canvas by a major postwar artist that had recently come onto the market, and the discussions of how much the museum was prepared to spend made Claire's face a little hot, the feeling of a child eavesdropping on adults as they discuss adult things. In the end it cost thirty million dollars.

This morning she had considerable difficulty rising. She called to tell her assistant that she wouldn't be in until the afternoon – she felt sick, she said, which was as good as true – and around one o'clock she was finally leaving when she found Paul on her doorstep. That didn't help. He was drunk, or at least on the way. How much of that was her fault? Last night troubles her because she doesn't know why she did what she did. He ambushed her, appeared at her door, but she didn't have to allow his obvious emotional need to overwhelm her. For whom was she feeling sorry when she invited him up? Her decision had the impetuous recklessness of sex during college, when it mattered to have sex but mattered less whom you had it with, when its very casualness gave a little thrill to the ego. Might she simply have wanted proof that she could still have him? She isn't lonely. She wouldn't have gone out of her way to seduce her ex-husband. She was careful, from the moment their clothes came off, not to kiss him on the mouth.

Now she moves briskly through the museum's lower galleries, half filled with the sluggish weekday crowds, mostly tourists, who drift from painting to painting with the indolence of mosquitoes. Invariably, they collect in front of the pieces everyone knows. They stare because they know they are supposed to. Few of the tourists have any interest in what currently hangs on the west wall of the atrium, a sequence of four linked, abstract paintings by Cy Twombly. Each depicts one of the seasons, and her favorite, since seeing them for the first time years ago in London, has always been
Inverno
– winter – in which a giant black sun seems to sink through the bottom of the frame. She could use a moment with these paintings to take her mind off Paul, but there isn't time now, and, in any case, standing in the presence of a painting should really be a private act. Claire's professional life, of course, demands that she spend much of her day looking at art in the company of others, but she has worked diligently to preserve a separate province within herself.

In her office the soft, pungent odor of fresh print fills the air. Her assistant has left a new round of reports on her desk. They detail a roster of paintings up for sale and the slate of artists who will soon have new groups of works the museum may like. It's a busy season. Miami was disappointing this year, but in the coming months a number of interesting young artists will hold solo exhibitions around the city. March brings the Armory show. So much to keep an eye on. That's why she's here: to discover innovation and uproot its best examples, to evangelize for the art she believes in. And if she does her job well, the museum can avoid paying an outrageous sum forty years from now for a painting they could have had cheap. Such is the case with the recent purchase, made available to the museum when its artist was a younger man, not yet a commodity; the offer was declined. She tries not to consider the money as a material weight: rows of houses, bushels of grain, crates of medicine. At the end of the week the painting will hang here. But how can anyone look at it without thinking of the money? Who at this point can truly see it?

There's a knock on the door. Splits open in the seams of her reverie. Sitting, she takes some documents and scatters them on the desk, then calls, 'Come in.'

The man who enters is David Kim. Under his arm is a fat stack of papers. He's always busy with something, a restless engine of efficiency. It's hard to imagine him daydreaming.

'I've got the final plans for the April show,' he says, running a thumb along the edge of her desk.

David's supreme sense of confidence both unsettles and impresses her. He's the head curator of the architecture department and, as far as she can tell, doesn't doubt the decisions he makes, not beforehand and certainly not afterward. His parents were both diplomats – Korean father, Canadian mother – and, as he explained to her once, his childhood was accordingly disjointed. Rather than damage him, it was a gift: spending his early years in several countries seems to have made him at home wherever he is, whomever he's with.

'You can drop it there.' She indicates one of the few spaces on her desk.

'You're busy?' He shifts his weight, and for a moment she feels mischievously proud: she has made David Kim unsure of himself.

'No, not at all. I just got in – no meetings this morning. I was a little lost in thought.'

He smiles and puts the papers on her desk, gently squaring the edges, and turns to leave.

'David, wait. You don't have to go.'

He stops, smiling. 'That's a relief. You can save me from another round of calls to donors.'

'You do all right. Bernard won't stop talking about how much you squeezed out of them last month.'

He dips his head: a man aware of his own charm. When he looks up, he says: 'I almost forgot to tell you. My sister had the baby.' When she doesn't speak, he adds, 'It's a little strange when you don't have any kids yourself. Nice, too. Being an uncle, I mean.'

Claire's eyes go briefly out of focus. 'Congratulations.'

'And congratulations to you, too.'

'What for?'

'Doesn't it go up this week?'

'That's what they tell me.'

'It's going to look wonderful there in the main hall, with the Newman.'

'You'll have to see for yourself,' she says. 'Friday. One of Bernard's wine-and-cheese affairs.'

'If he isn't careful he's going to drink us right out of an endowment. Someone ought to remind him how much good champagne costs.'

David hovers between desk and door, managing to seem much closer than he is. Since setting down the papers he's hardly moved. Claire has the urge to rise, maybe go to him – she doesn't know what she would do next. It feels so formal, sitting here behind a desk while he stands. He could have taken the other chair. But their conversation has begun to dry up; it would be strange now to ask him to sit. Then again, perhaps it's for the best – they're at work. David gives no sign that he feels any of the same discomfort. He says: 'I'll get out of your hair.'

'You're not in my hair.' He's done at least one thing right: she's stopped thinking about Paul.

Opening the door, he turns. 'I hope we're still on for tomorrow night.'

Claire nods. She smiles.

The sun is low and the alcohol has worn off completely by the time the train puts him back in Brooklyn. Ordinary thoughts fill his mind; mundanity returns. Paul thinks of an article whose deadline is approaching and, preferring this idle mental drift to the expectant screen of his computer, takes his time; he walks with luxurious slowness and turns into Prospect Park to use the paths there. It was late spring when he moved into the neighborhood, and, in a state of torpor and absentminded grief following the divorce, he convinced himself that it was the best place to be – near the park, which during the hot months was ripe with life. It would make depression impossible. He spent hours in the park by himself: fireworks on Independence Day, concerts at the band shell, even a few short jogs on the circuit road, although he quickly gave those up; fitness wasn't a priority. The air was grassily bright and smelled sweetly of tanning lotion; it shivered around the charcoal pits of barbecues and fluttered with the screams of happy children. Kites turned in the sky, twitches of color. The lawns were wide, undulating, and green. They would endure a cycle of freezing and brief thaws after the grass died, and the ground would soften into a greasy, gelatinous mud. Dogs shit everywhere.

But Paul lost interest in the park long before the cold came, even before autumn brought an occasional eerie current of fog. By then he had found the bars on Fifth Avenue, down the hill in Park Slope; there seemed to be dozens. Many were popular with the crops of fresh arrivals to Brooklyn, kids from the suburbs of Cleveland and Baltimore and St Louis and Omaha, and from even smaller and more far-flung cities no one ever thinks of. Radiating a strange panic, they came in droves, like an exodus in reverse. They came with expensive educations and bank accounts full of their parents' money, and when the air was warm they filled the gardens of those bars, drinking two-dollar cans of tasteless beer. The men had new beards. Paul eavesdropped on their conversations, which were unfailingly dull, each one a version of another he'd heard. Everyone had a favorite bar in Brooklyn, it seemed, and it was never the bar he was drinking at. Most of the time Paul avoided the gardens altogether: he preferred to drink indoors, in the brutal scullery-like darkness, on a hard stool with his knees pinned against the oak and bottles arrayed before him in twinkling rows, even as the reproachful squares of sunlight near the exit gazed at him. He did crossword puzzles and read magazines. If the Mets were playing an afternoon game, he watched that. He didn't have friends, at least not ones he cared enough to call, and his work was finished by two o'clock; he could drink all afternoon, and as late into the night as he wanted.

It's a much different Brooklyn from his father's, not that Frank watched the transformations of the past decade with great interest or concern. His apartment in Greenpoint, where he has lived since the death of Paul's mother, sits on a block of India Street that, before the kids began arriving in hordes, was home only to the elderly and to families, mostly Polish, who had emigrated to America before and after the war. Crime wasn't an issue. But the neighbors still had their concerns – tree-planting, clean sidewalks, broken streetlights – and they sometimes sent around a petition to have one problem or another dealt with by the city. This was the early eighties, Ed Koch was the mayor, and nothing ever changed. Paul seldom saw his father interact with anyone but himself, and so it was always mildly amusing to see an outsider, usually a small woman with a rippling, ugly dress, attempting to interest him in some minor fiasco.

Frank didn't have friends, but there were men he saw regularly, at a restaurant on Manhattan Avenue, where he would order a coffee and a plate of fried meat pierogis or schnitzel. He sat alone – or rather, with Paul, before Paul was old enough plausibly to look after himself. He wasn't there to converse, but when you make a point of haunting the same restaurant with military regularity – in Frank's case, around six o'clock on most weekday evenings, and during the afternoons on both Saturday and Sunday – the other regulars eventually take a certain comfort in your presence. He wore a hat and trench coat, which he did no matter where he went and in all but the hottest weather, and would hang these on the pegs by the door. People usually asked about Paul, especially the waitresses, who all spoke heavily accented English. They assumed that Frank and Paul were grandfather and grandson, and they were unfailingly touched by the sight of such devotion across three generations. Frank never quite corrected them; this was when he was around seventy, and no one would have mistaken him for a younger man.

With these men Frank had conversations about things that otherwise didn't seem to interest him – the election, baseball, movies, subway repairs, international politics, the Pope. Their talk was rigidly male, terse and disjointed and topical, and no one ever spoke of women, except in the most abstract terms. Now and then one of the men warned Paul against marriage. Shaking his own left hand like a prosthetic limb, he would cry, 'It's a life in prison!' At this the others chuckled, croaked, and wheezed; they all smoked heavily. No one asked Frank about his own naked ring finger. They spoke in crosscurrents: it was impossible to follow the flow of the conversation, with its irregular interruptions of laughter and its sudden reversals, because there wasn't a flow to the conversation: they were men, strangers, filling silence. It was nonetheless an arena of participation, and Frank, as nowhere else in life, participated. Frank, who didn't go to the cinema, expressed an opinion on De Niro's performance in
Raging Bull
. Frank, who didn't follow any team, concurred with another man's estimation of Reggie Jackson's chances of winning the MVP. Where did he get his information? Later in life, himself now an adult male, Paul understood how his father, who read nothing but newspapers, was able to stand his ground in a conversation on almost any topic.

The greater surprise was that Frank bothered at all. Elsewhere he was spectral in his absence from the texture of everyday life, but in that restaurant, among its other regulars, he became a living thing, with blood and lungs and a mind, and Paul could see the flickering outline of the man who once was. He wasn't animated, and he never got especially heated in his opinions – because, of course, he didn't really care, his interests, whatever they were, weren't baseball or politics – but he looked other men in the eye, he listened, he was obviously content to be there. He would stay long after his plate had been cleared and his coffee had grown cold.