Pug Hill (3 page)

And then, there is, of course, Elliot. There is always, always Elliot. I seem to be very infatuated with Elliot.

Just this very morning, as I walked up Columbus Avenue, to stop back at my apartment to get ready for work, as I do not have any of my stuff at Evan’s, I think I thought
then
that I had too many problems. And I think I even thought that I had no
idea
how to solve them. Some sort of problem god must have heard me think this and he must’ve said, “Oh, no, sister, you think you’ve got problems? You think these are problems you can’t solve? I’ll show you problems.”

I look down at my watch, and a wave of guilt washes over me for busting out of work in the middle of the day in the dramatic way that I just have. The guilt at least takes my mind off all the problems, solvable and not so. As I stand up, take one last look around to make sure there isn’t maybe just one pug, I think that at least I can count on something. I can count on the guilt. I’m half Jewish and half Catholic; I’ve got the market on guilt pretty well covered. And anyway, I can’t think any more about any of it. It just isn’t the same sorting out your problems at Pug Hill when the pugs aren’t here. I make a mental note to come back over the weekend. I hope Evan hasn’t already made plans to go ice fishing or something equally as fun.

I get up and turn away from the hill, the hill so very free of any sweet, snorting pugs. I don’t walk back down the hill, back across more empty lawn covered with leaves. Instead, I walk on the other side, along the cement path. I do this, I know, because I don’t want to inflict any additional water damage on my Ugg boots. Before every fashion victim in New York and LA wore them, Ugg boots were originally worn by Australian surfers. The surfers like them because the sheepskin is warm in the winter and cool in the summer. I picture surfer dudes in Australia carrying surfboards into the ocean, waves lapping at Ugg boots left on the shore. I look down at my boots again and wonder if I have, as I fear I have with so many things, perhaps quite completely missed the point.

I walk quickly away from Pug Hill and back up to the Met. I hurry past the Paul Manship sculpture of the three bears, trying not to think that the absence of the pugs is a bad omen. Usually I’m not in this much of a hurry; usually I stop for a minute and look at the sculpture. Though I’m beginning to realize that, today, nothing is usual. I reenter the museum through the south side employee entrance; I take a left, a right, go through a long snaking underground hallway, and I’m back at the door to the Conservation Studio.

I walk back into the Conservation Studio, this room that houses so many beautiful, priceless (if slightly worse-for-wear) masterpieces of art, and the first thing I see is Elliot. Lately, I could walk into a room that held a million more beautiful, priceless, timeless objects than this one does and if Elliot were in it, he would, time and again, be the first thing I see. I pad silently over to my work space, trying to draw as little attention as possible to myself, to the fact that I have, most recently, been gone. It’s not very difficult. One of the things about paintings restorers (technically you can say paintings restorer or paintings conservator, but I prefer restorer; I find conservator to be a bit of a mouthful) is that they have to concentrate so much on their paintings in order to properly restore them that generally, they are much more wrapped up in their paintings than they are in their coworkers. Unless, of course, the paintings restorer in question happens to be me. Then, of course, it’s a whole different story. Lately, I’ve been having a bit of trouble with concentrating. It’s harder and harder, what with Elliot always being right there.

I settle into my chair and look over again at Elliot, hunched studiously over an Old Master landscape, as oblivious to me and to everyone else as he usually is. He reaches up to brush his curly light brown hair—a light brown color that I like to think is almost red—away from his forehead. I sigh quietly and turn away from him. I turn toward my easel to contemplate Mark Rothko’s No. 13, (
White, Red on Yellow
), the painting I’ve just begun to work on. It’s a large canvas, a field of luminous yellow with a white rectangle at the top and a red rectangle at the bottom. What’s happened to this Rothko is that sometime before the painting made its way to the Met, it was stored in a place where the humidity level wasn’t quite right and the canvas expanded and contracted, and the paint on it didn’t. Dry paint isn’t flexible, isn’t malleable at all; it can’t expand and contract the way a canvas can. So now, there are a few flecks of missing paint in each section, and my job is to match the color exactly, to fill in the missing spots. With something like a Rothko, where color is so important, where color might just be everything, there isn’t any room for error. Everything you do has to be perfect, just as everything you add has to be reversible, and I have to admit, I think the restoration of this painting, the precision that it will demand, might take me forever. I haven’t been sure of where to begin and I’m certainly not sure now.

As I stare at it, losing focus, for a moment all I can see is red, and I decide, a bit brazenly really, to start with the red. I flip through my paintbrushes, looking for the smallest, thinnest one. I don’t know if I should attempt much more, after the finding of the paintbrush, because right now I’m finding it harder and harder to be sure of anything. The only thing I’m sure of is that after the knowledge that I will have to make a speech—a real, actual speech in front of people!—in the near enough future, and after the disappointment that is Pug Hill when the pugs aren’t there, the last thing I really want to do is spend the last few hours of the day swimming in the sea of unprofessed love that work has become.

It wasn’t always like this. The sea of unprofessed love used to be known only as the Conservation Studio at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Debilitating crush on coworker notwithstanding, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of all the wonderful places in New York, has always been my favorite place. When I find myself alone here, after hours, walking through the Egyptian wing, wandering in the sculpture rooms, the halls after halls of European and American paintings, I’m still, after so many years, struck by the sheer awesomeness, the real beauty of it all. I’ve always loved the museum. I’ve always loved the type of concentrated, focused work that I do here, restoring masterpieces of art, erasing any imperfections. The museum has always been such a sanctuary to me. That is until Elliot showed up and my sanctuary became a place where, sometimes, if you listened really carefully, you could hear Patsy Cline singing “Crazy” in the background.

I turn away from Elliot. I put on my magnifying visor, pull the magnifying part down over my eyes and look at the red part of my Rothko. I wonder briefly if maybe I shouldn’t start with the white part or the yellow part, rather than the red. The red, and I know this, has a way of being so hard.

At 5:30 exactly, the phone rings. I try my best to ignore it.

“Conservation.” I hear Sergei’s heavy voice from across the room, and then louder, projecting, “Elliot, it is Claire!”

“Thanks, man,” Elliot says. He turns away from his easel, reaches for his phone and brings it to his mouth. “Hey,” he says, his voice softer, sweeter than it generally is. Claire.

Right, there’s that. There’s Claire. Maybe I should have mentioned it. There’s another thing about the impossibility of there ever being a Hope and Elliot, the happy couple so destined to be together, so clearly, clearly right for each other. Other than the fact that I have a boyfriend, and the fact that Elliot generally doesn’t notice me, there is the fact that Elliot has a girlfriend, Claire.

Claire.
Claire.
Anyone who grew up in the eighties, anyone who was raised on John Hughes movies knows that Claire is a fat girl’s name.

I turn away from the Rothko and begin to gather my things. Usually, on days when the sky is not so clearly about to fall, I don’t leave work so early. No one leaves work this early. Elliot, I think, never leaves work, ever. On top of being intense and sexy and deep and meaningful and really very handsome, Elliot is also quite diligent. Try as I might to get to work ahead of him, I never have. As late as I have toiled at times into the night, Elliot has always stayed later. It’s actually almost annoying enough to make me not head over heels in lust with him. But not quite.

Today though, I want to leave at 5:30, because I have dinner at The Union Club with squash-playing fiancé at 8:00, and I just really feel that I need to go home and chill out for an hour or two, need to, you know, give myself a minute. I think it’s important sometimes to give yourself a minute. Because it’s so early and everyone’s so busy, I don’t say good night to anyone, not even to Elliot. Well, especially not to Elliot. I shut down my computer and slip silently out the door.

At Eighty-sixth and Central Park West, I get off the crosstown bus and head down to Eighty-fifth Street, then toward Columbus. In the distance, I can see the steps that lead up to my brownstone. I look at those steps and I smile in spite of myself, in spite of my belief that, among other things, I may never live to see the other side of this speech. I’ve always loved that my building has outdoor steps; loved this more I imagine than you’d think a person would.

I speed up and soon enough I’m walking up the beloved outdoor steps and then up the three flights of interior stairs. The interior stairs are far less beloved: they are actually a bit skanky. I unlock the door to my apartment and walk in. I let out a breath I didn’t even realize I’d been holding, and look around at the familiar room.
This is good right now,
I think, as I shut the door behind me. I inhale the lingering scent of the Soku Lime relaxation candle I was burning at some point over the weekend, before today happened, before I had any idea how much I really needed to relax. I put my bag down on the floor by the door and cross the room to put my keys in the dish on my mantelpiece. It’s an unspoken agreement I have with my apartment: if I leave the keys on top of the mantelpiece I will find them again when I have to leave. If I put them anywhere else it will take me hours.

I rest my hand on the mantelpiece and look down at the white-painted bricks that were put in place, sometime long before I got here, to board up the fireplace. Like many brownstone-dwelling Upper West Siders, I have the ubiquitous “decorative” fireplace. “Decorative,” on the Upper West Side means “doesn’t work.” I wonder if there is any symbolic significance to the fact that Evan and I both live on the Upper West Side.

I look away from the boarded-up fireplace, stare instead for a moment at the wall. I do not have the ubiquitous Upper West Side exposed brick wall. Having never actually been a fan of the exposed brick wall, I’m really okay with that. What I do have are beautiful moldings and closet doors with proper handles. I have built-in bookcases and an archway that leads from the living room area of the apartment to the sleeping area of the apartment. In the front I have a bay window, and off the back of my kitchen, I have that ever-so-elusive element of New York real estate,
outdoor space:
a tiny balcony that has room enough for exactly two small folding chairs. I look out at the chairs, all-weather chairs so it’s perfectly safe for them to stay out there all winter. I really like those chairs, the way they sit so close together, looking out at the backs of all the other brownstones. Sometimes I imagine them as a happy couple, sitting so close on the balcony, happy together through the coldest of winters. Today they just seem smug.

I walk away from them, through the archway, into the sleeping area. It’s cold; it always is at first, when the heat’s been off all day while I’m gone, but I don’t turn the heat on. I strip down to my underwear (I have a pretty big thing about clothes that have been outside in the city being inside the bed). I push the pillows that are just for show, but not ever used (two white European squares and actually two others), into the space between the bed and the wall. I pull back the quilt and the sheet, and I scoot inside and underneath as quickly as I can. I hate the cold. I hate being cold, have less of a threshold for it than I think I should, but I’ve always quite liked being under the covers in bed in a slightly-colder-than-you’ d-ideally-want-it apartment. This is the only thing I like about winter.

Eventually I get warm, almost but not quite hot; this inevitably happens if you wait long enough. I pull the covers down from over my head, to chest level, freeing my arms. As I smooth the sheet around me like a strapless dress, it occurs to me what this might look like if anyone were watching. Sometimes when I’m bored, I like to imagine someone’s watching me. I do this also when I like someone new. I’ll say to myself, Okay starting right now, he’s watching, and then I try to imagine what he must see. If someone were watching me right now, let’s say, Elliot, for example, I might look very much like an actress on TV or in a PG-rated movie who has just had a much more entertaining afternoon than I, in reality, have had.