Lying In Bed (15 page)

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Gideon looked with a little worry in his eyes. “Is there somewhere in the museum we can get coffee? You look a little peaked.”

“Peaked?”

“Yes, it means tired, weak, overwhelmed.”

“I know what it means. It’s just a very old-fashioned word.”

“I’m a very old-fashioned kind of guy.”

“Really?”

He shook his head and laughed. “No, not really. But my grandmother was a school teacher and she taught me one new word every single day until I turned 18 and went off to college, where she fully expected me to keep up the habit.”

“And did you?”

It was all light and silly banter, clearly a relief for me from the intensity of the story. I didn’t know what Gideon got out of it, and right then, that didn’t matter to me very much.

The Petrie Court is on the ground floor in the west wing of the museum. One of the most recent additions to the main structure, it’s entire back wall is made of glass and looks out onto Central Park, which that May morning was a lush, verdant green.

There were several empty tables and we took one next to the window. From where we sat, I could see Cleopatra’s Needle, flowering spring trees, people walking their dogs, nannies with their charges, mothers and children, and a pair of lovers walking by more slowly than anyone else.

Gideon had coffee, black and I had cappuccino. He’d also gotten us a plate of biscotti and had insisted I take one.

“You’re embarrassed, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Yes…” I blurted, sorry as soon as the words were out of my mouth. I hadn’t wanted to admit that. He was a client. There was no reason to discuss my feelings with him.

“Why?” he asked.

“Really? You don’t know?”

“Well, I assume because of what you were saying but it was wonderful – both the story itself and watching you disappear into the telling like that. It’s the way all artists create.” He paused and then added: “Real artists.”

One of his hands rested on the table, fingers splayed, veins pronounced. I saw the scars again. And again felt the urge to reach out and trace them with my fingers. I wondered what he did that he cut himself so often. And not with a straight instrument. Most of the scars curved like miniature crescent moons.

This was not a social visit. It was not for me to ask him about himself. He’d hired me, becoming my boss in a way. He hadn’t offered anything about himself in the car to Westhampton the week before and I didn’t expect him to now.

“What happened to your hands?”

“You have such a good imagination, I’m going to make you guess.” There was a mischievous light in his green eyes.

“Oh, that’s not fair.”

He didn’t offer any sympathy, but sat, still and silent, just smiling.

“Fishing?”

His burst out laughing. “Fishing? What on earth made you think of fishing?”

I shrugged.

“Do you really think I am a fisherman?”

“I don’t have any idea what you do but something about the shape of the scars on you hands made me think they might have been made by hooks.”

‘Hooks? Well, then you shouldn’t stop at fisherman. Butchers use hooks too, meat hooks. Maybe I’m a butcher.”

I looked down at his hands again. There was a grace to the way they moved. The reverential way he had picked up the spoon to stir his coffee, his fingers curled around the cup. It was obvious to me he was very aware of the shapes he was touching. It was impossible to imagine the man sitting opposite me, with his blue shirt and black jeans and hair falling into his eyes, standing behind a counter hacking away at a side of beef. But I knew that he worked with his hands in some way.

“No, you aren’t a butcher.”

“I am. And I’m mortally wounded because you have an attitude about butchers. I can tell from the way you pronounced the word and moved back in your seat away from it a little bit.”

“I didn’t.”

He nodded. “You did.”

I searched his face. Was he serious? There was no hint. He had stopped smiling and indeed seemed upset. Had I insulted him? Then he started laughing again. “No. I’m not a butcher. Don’t worry. Aren’t you going to take another guess?”

“I’d say a musician but the scars wouldn’t make sense.”

“Nope. Next?”

Around us, the room had filled up and an elderly couple walked by looking for a table. The gentleman noticed that our cups were empty and asked Gideon if we would be leaving soon.

“We’re leaving right now, in fact,” he said graciously and stood, ending our guessing game.

We walked out of the café section. He still hadn’t told me what he did. And I didn’t want to ask again.

“I haven’t been here in a long time. I’m going to wander around for a while,” he said as we reached the gallery exit.

I was being dismissed, and what surprised me was that it seemed to matter, but before I could even focus on what I was thinking, he said: “Do you have to go back to the store? Or do you want to walk around with me?”

It pleased me too much that he’d asked but I chose not to think about that.

We went upstairs to the European collection because Gideon wanted to see the Rodin sculptures.

The long hall was designed to resemble a 19th-century art gallery, with multiple paintings hanging above and below each other and many pieces of sculpture on display. Gideon stopped in front of each one, studying it with a careful eye.

The first marble he lingered over was The Kiss, a full size Carrera marble study of sensuality. Two lovers entwined in an embrace. A swirl of emotion. There was nothing urgent or unbridled about their togetherness. Rather it was a sustained moment, a frozen, emblazoned interlude of two nudes, seated, enfolded in each other’s arms. Every point where they touched - their arms, their legs, their lips - was a loving tribute to their connection. These were not new lovers who couldn’t grab fast enough, but rather a man and a woman who had been together long enough to luxuriate in themselves.

Rodin’s passion was subdued. I’d read about the artist and his own boundless sexploits — but that wasn’t the overriding emotion he exhibited in this work.

The marble glowed as if there were a candle inside the stone, illuminating it, making the hard surface shine like polished skin. More than anything else, I wanted to reach out and run my hand down the man’s back, lay my palm there and feel his heart beat.

Gideon didn’t speak. He didn’t look at me. He was engrossed in the work and absorbed by it in a way that excluded me but without insulting me.

When he was done, we moved on to the Hand of God, another white marble of a huge masculine hand holding another embracing couple, their entire beings twisted into each other as they make love.

I’d seen this piece, how many times – two dozen? Three? Most of the last four years that I’d been living in the city I had come to the museum at least twice a month. And usually I walked through these galleries, stopping to focus on only one painting or one piece of sculpture. But now, standing in front of The Hand with Gideon by my side, I was seeing it differently. The sexuality in the piece was like an assault. An reminder of what I didn’t have, hadn’t had, and something I had stopped looking for – had even embraced the lack of with relief.

“What?”

I looked over at Gideon, confused again since I hadn’t said anything.

“What’s wrong?” he asked this time.

I shook my head.

He motioned towards the sculpture. “Something about it bothers you. Don’t you like it? Some people think it’s overly sentimental.”

“It’s not that…” There was no way I could explain anything that I’d been thinking. Not how the sculpture reminded me of what I didn’t have. Not how he seemed to know, yet again, that something was on my mind.

“I was going to bring you to this gallery if you hadn’t liked the bedroom downstairs.”

“What was the story going to be here? Maybe I would like it better after all.” There was teasing in his voice again. And it caught me off guard.

“No fair. You put me through my paces in the Venetian bedroom. I’m all storied out.”

“How many places did you come up with? What if I hadn’t like either the bedroom or this one? Where would we have gone next? Show me.”

We walked to
the end of the gallery, out into the hallway where we got on an elevator and took it up to the top floor. The doors opened and we stepped out into strong sunshine on the roof garden of the Museum.

People usually expect elaborate beds of flowers, exotic trees, artistic plantings at the museum, but the 2000-square-foot space is lined with very simple three-foot-high boxwood hedges and one long, geometric wooden pergola with a wisteria vine growing on it, to offer shade.

This lack of adornment keeps the focus on the astonishing view. To the west, south and north, you look out at the entirety of Central Park. Tree tops, in a hundred shades of green, stretch out to the perimeter of the park, where they are bordered by skyscrapers standing like protective sentinels over the city’s more fragile playground. And beyond the buildings are miles of blue sky.

It’s difficult to take it all in. So much… too much beauty and strength and creativity and delicacy.

And in the immediate foreground there is the art itself

“I’ve always thought,” I said, “it’s unfair of the museum to ask these pieces of sculpture to compete with the view.”

“I don’t think the sculpture minds. It’s probably honored.” Gideon was inspecting a large late-20
^th
-century piece. Made of aluminum, and echoing the shape of the buildings around us, the monolith was rubbed in such a way that the surface shone like a million suns.

“I didn’t know Nelson had a piece here,” Gideon said, more to himself but loud enough that I could hear.

“You know him?”

He nodded.

“He was my professor at school. My mentor.”

Ah. So that explained the scars. He was a sculptor. I should have guessed from the way he’d examined the Rodins on the floor below. He hadn’t been interested in a typical gallery goer’s way. Now I understood what I’d seen on his face: the kind of reverence that only an artist can show another artist.

Like the work or not, admire a style or don’t, there’s a respect most artists pay each other.

“A sculptor?”

He nodded, laughed. “Not a fisherman. Not a butcher. The scars are from the tools. I’m not as patient as I should be. I get caught up in what I’m doing. Move too fast.”

“Do you have a studio in New York?” I asked.

“Not one that’s my own. I used to teach up at Cornell and lived in Ithaca. But I quit recently. Nelson’s in Italy and I’ve got his loft until I find someplace”

“Were you tenured?”

He nodded.

“And you quit?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Do you show?” I knew all the galleries and was suddenly very curious to know about Gideon’s work and find out what kind of artist he was.

He mentioned the name of a prestigious gallery in SoHo. “I’ve had two solo exhibitions in the last few years. Been in a couple of group shows.”

“I’d like to see your work.”

“You can come to the studio sometime.”

“I’d like to see it before I write any more letters for you.”

“Why?”

I didn’t know why. Not why I wanted to see it so badly, so suddenly, or why I’d blurted it out. But I had.

“I need to see what you create. I can’t write the stories… as if you are writing them… without getting a better idea of who you are, and what you think, and especially of your art.

“But you were doing fine at the ocean and in the Venetian room.”

We’d walked around the oversize Nelson sculpture and were now circling a huge Rodin bronze called the Burghers of Calais. We didn’t speak for a few minutes, moving from the Rodin to an amusing Claes Oldenburg of a giant paperclip on its side, and then taking in a reclining nude by Maiol. Finally, we wound up, side by side, standing at the west wall, looking out at the park.

“What will it add to the stories, knowing more about me?”

“It will help me to include specifics that will make it perfectly clear that this is something that came from you. That these visions are yours.”

He shook his head. “No. Just like I didn’t want to fill out the questionnaire, I don’t want you to insert those things into the stories. What you do is no different than taking a mound of clay and shaping it into a form. There’s a wholeness to it. I don’t want to take your clay and stick my own fingers in it just because I’m giving it as a gift.”

“Does that mean I can’t see your sculpture?”

“You can see it, but not for the wrong reason.”

“Okay. How about I’d like to see it because you’ve seen what I do. Because I’m curious about how talented you are. Because I am an artist and I might learn from your work. Are those good enough reasons?”

There was one more, but I wasn’t offering that one up out loud. Wasn’t even allowing myself to think it. Besides, I wasn’t sure it was a good reason at all. Probably the worst one I’d had in a long time.

We took the
elevator back down to the first floor and headed for the main exit. On the way, we walked through the photography gallery. I hadn’t planned this route. Clearly, I had forgotten that the exit from the west bank of elevators would naturally bring us this way. While I certainly had an affinity for photography and believed it was an art as worthy as any other, it always seemed slightly out of place in the Met. An afterthought. A step cousin. The Museum of Modern Art farther downtown, my mother and I agreed, was a much better venue.

For obvious reasons the photography gallery in the Met is always one of the most current exhibitions. They showed an eclectic mix including early examples dating back to the turn of the last century when the art form was new, but they also had experimental photography from the last few decades. The latter dozen or so changed often. Photographs being – even the best ones – less expensive than original paintings or sculptures, the museum had an exhaustive collection.

As we meandered, Gideon’s eyes traveled from one print to the next, and I watched, curious to see what caught his attention.