The Truth About Death (15 page)

I’d called Mankoff as soon as I’d known I was coming to New York. I hadn’t been able to find his number—or any number—on the
New Yorker
website, but I was able to get it from my editor at Princeton. I talked to Mankoff’s assistant, Colin, and told him I was going to be curating an exhibit at the Morgan Library and wanted to talk to Bob Mankoff about medieval marginalia as the first cartoons. He said he’d tell Mankoff. Five minutes later I got a call: I outlined my plan for the exhibit at the Morgan, and I offered to send him a copy of the talk I’d given there in October, and he was interested. We set up an appointment.

I could have taken the cartoons to the “open call” on Tuesday, when anyone can bring in his or her cartoons, but I thought I’d have a better chance if I had a private audience, like a private audience with the pope. I wasn’t sure how I’d introduce the subject of
my
cartoons. I’d just have to see how it played out. Maybe I could just say, “By the way, take a look
at these.” I was confident that he’d take one look at my batch of cartoons and bless them on the spot.

I arrived in New York on Monday night, spent Tuesday and Wednesday with Cyrus at the Morgan, laying out a four-year timeline for mounting the exhibit and going over what we’d need to borrow, if anything, from the Met—limiting ourselves to items that Morgan himself had donated to the Met. At breakfast on Thursday Jack and Sally were annoyed at a cartoon in the latest
New Yorker
: a couple lying in bed on their backs, staring up at the ceiling. “Hey,” the woman says. “You’re the one who wanted a three-way.”

Jack and Sally couldn’t get it. They passed the magazine back and forth.

“What’s that thing on her glasses?” Jack asked. “Take a look.” He passed the open magazine back to Sally.

“Maybe she’s wearing Google Glasses,” Sally said. She handed it to me.

“I’m not sure what Google Glasses are,” I said.

“It’s like a little computer screen attached to your glasses.”

“I’ve got to run,” I said. “Let me take it with me so I’ll have something to read on the train.”

“It just got here,” Sally said.

“I’ll bring it back—don’t worry.” I told Jack and Sally I was going back to the Morgan, but I took the C train downtown toward Forty-Second Street.

Some of my confidence evaporated on the subway, as if I really
were
going to a private audience with the pope and the pope knew what I was up to. I was thinking that if Simon were with me, or Hildi or even Olive, I’d be able to explain myself better, at least not make a fool of myself. I seemed to see them out of the corner of my eye. But the young woman getting off at Seventy-Second Street wasn’t
Hildi. Later, the Seeing Eye dog on the platform at Columbus Circle wasn’t Olive. The man in a dark blue suit, rep tie, and crisp white shirt, as if he were heading for a funeral, wasn’t Simon.

I held my MetroCard in my fist, afraid I’d lose it if I put it in my large briefcase, which was very full: a tin of homemade shortbread for Mankoff; a small collapsible umbrella; a copy of
Marginalia
; a draft of an article about the Egerton
MS
1894, from the British Library, which was—I was planning to argue—the very first comic strip, though it wasn’t something we’d be able to borrow for the exhibit; Mankoff’s
How About Never—Is Never Good for You?
, which was very large and heavier than
The Naked Cartoonist
, which I’d shoved into the side pocket of the briefcase.

Sally’s
New Yorker
was on my lap. I looked again at the offending cartoon. It didn’t make sense even if the woman
was
wearing Google Glasses, whatever they were. I showed it to the man on my right, and then to the woman on my left. They both shook their heads. I could always ask Bob Mankoff to explain it. Would that be a good icebreaker or would it just reveal my ignorance?

In the station at Forty-Second Street my cell phone started to vibrate. Subway stations, Jack had warned me, now had Wi-Fi, but my phone was a cheap flip-top and I couldn’t hear anything. All I could do was shout into the phone and hope that Jack or Sally or whoever had called could hear me. “I’m in the subway station,” I shouted. “I’m in the subway station. I can’t hear you.” Jack had offered to buy me an iPhone, but I wasn’t sure I wanted one.

I don’t know what happened, but suddenly I was very disoriented. I suppose, in retrospect, that I’d taken a wrong exit and was heading north on Seventh Avenue
instead of east on Forty-Second Street. Everything had turned around.

I asked several people where the
New Yorker
was. No one had heard of the
New Yorker.
“How about the Condé Nast Building?” No one had any idea, and I wondered again if I’d gotten off at the wrong stop. I couldn’t tell east from west by looking at the gray sky.

Finally I asked a Bible salesman—a large African-American man standing in front of a little booth set up on the sidewalk. There were several people at the booth selling Bibles and handing out pamphlets and tracts. The man I spoke to had no idea either, but he pulled out his iPhone and tapped it several times. “It’s right there,” he said. “You see that Walgreens? It’s just before Walgreens.”

I turned around and saw the Walgreens, and all of a sudden the world did a 180-degree turn and I was facing the right direction. I knew where I was. I pulled the tin of shortbread out of my briefcase, struggled to get it open, and gave each of the Bible people a piece.

“God bless you and keep you,” the leader said, “and may His face shine upon you,” and all of a sudden I had a vision of myself as a New Yorker. I was tempted to explore this fantasy, but my briefcase was very heavy and I was a little bit dizzy, and I thought I’d better sit down first.

There was no place to sit down in the lobby of the Condé Nast Building. Not a chair, not a bench, not a ledge, so I plunked myself down on a long step that ran across the entire lobby in front of the desk, which was staffed by a dozen men in uniforms. I guess I didn’t look like I belonged—in jeans and flats and a man’s white shirt—because after about sixty seconds one of these uniforms came over and told me I couldn’t sit on the step. Maybe I should have worn the outfit I’d worn at the
Morgan: a two-piece dark suit, patterned blouse, and closedtoe pumps. I stood up and walked over to the desk.

I got out my tin of shortbread and offered him a piece.

“Look, lady,” he said.

“Try it,” I said. “It’s really good.”

“You got business here?” he asked.

“I’m here to see Bob Mankoff,” I said. “I’m a little early.”

“Nobody’s supposed to sit on the step,” he said. “Look,” he said again. “I got a little stool you can sit on for a few minutes, okay?” He brought a little three-legged stool for me, and I offered him another piece of shortbread.

“Okay,” I said, holding up five fingers. “I’m a little early. Just give me five minutes.”

“Who’d you say?”

“Bob Mankoff.”

“He work here?”

“I hope so.”

“This is good,” he said, biting off a piece of shortbread. “Five, ten minutes.” He looked at his watch. “Then you got to check in at the desk. They’ll page this Mankoff guy and tell you where to find him and check if it’s okay to go on up. I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks,” I said. I tried to imagine what it would
feel
like to be a New Yorker. Maybe I
could
move to New York. Jack and Sally wanted me to move to the city. They’d even picked out a condo for me to look at on Eighty-First Street. I could sell the funeral home. From Eighty-First Street, I could walk to the Met and the Guggenheim and the Frick. It would be an easy commute to the Morgan, where I’d be spending a lot of time during the next four years. I could see my grandchildren every day. Become a new person. Start a new life.

I opened the tin again and ate one of the pieces of shortbread. It was raining outside. I was glad I had a small umbrella in my briefcase.

I’d seen pictures of Mankoff and was prepared for the unruly hair, the beard, the heavy black glasses, and the big smile. He looked from a distance almost like a cartoon drawing of himself, one of his own drawings. I was looking across a warren of cubicles. He was standing in an open office doorway, just as he was in the photo on the jacket of
How About Never—Is Never Good for You?
In that photo there’s a banana peel on the welcome mat. A warning?

At first I thought there was something wrong with his eye, and then I realized he had something stuck to his glasses like the woman in the cartoon. He was wearing Google Glasses. The cartoon still didn’t make sense to me. I held it in my hand as if it were a ticket or a bus pass or a passport that would admit me to Mankoff’s world.

“Do I know you?” he asked, studying my face.

“Hey,” I blurted out without thinking, holding out the magazine, “you’re the one who wanted a three-way.”

He looked at the cartoon and laughed.

“You didn’t used to be able to get away with that,” I said, recovering.

“That was before Tina Brown. All edge. You disapprove?”

“Not exactly. Just never appealed to me. I suppose that corresponds to some defect in my character. Reluctance to take risks, for example.”

He laughed. “You came to see me,” he said.

“She’s wearing Google Glasses, isn’t she? Just like you. That’s the little white thing on her glasses, isn’t it? But I still don’t get it. Where’s the ‘three-way’?”

“She’s been streaming everything to a third party, and it’s singular, by the way: ‘Google Glass.’ ”

“That’s what Google Glass does? Takes pictures of what you’re doing in bed and sends them to someone else?”

“Well, that’s only one thing. What it does is take pictures of what you’re looking at and streams them to your followers on the web.”

“I see.”

“Come in,” he said backing into an office that was the opposite of Cyrus Walker’s office in the Morgan. No Persian rugs made you want to take off your shoes. No chandeliers sparkled like stars in the vault of heaven. No inlaid walnut bookcases displayed precious volumes. No inlaid walnut library table held a vase of fresh flowers. No Renaissance paintings graced the walls. The walls, like Mankoff’s desk, were covered with cartoons.

And Mankoff himself was the opposite of Cyrus Walker. Cyrus could have passed for an undertaker, like the man I saw in the subway—dark blue linen suit, probably Italian, with a crisp white shirt and rep tie. Mankoff was wearing khakis and a loose short-sleeved turquoise-and-yellow shirt that wasn’t exactly Hawaiian, but that made you think “Hawaiian.”

I suppose we were both dressing too young. “You know what I think?” he said, reading my thoughts. “Don’t pay any attention to what other people think about you, because it doesn’t matter.”

“Am I in the right place?” I said.

“If you’re looking for Bob Mankoff,” he said.

“I meant New York,” I said. “Everyone’s so nice—one of the uniforms in the lobby even brought me a stool to sit on. I thought I must be somewhere else.”

“That’s because everyone here is from the Midwest.”

“On the subway,” I said, “I suddenly had a vision of myself as a New Yorker. My son and daughter-in-law want me to move to New York. They even want me to look at a condo.”

“You’re from the Midwest,” he said again. “You’d fit right in.”

“
You’re
not from the Midwest,” I said.

“That’s why I
don’t
fit in,” he said.

We sat down with the desk between us. I had a good view of the city through the window behind Mankoff, but I didn’t recognize anything and wasn’t even sure what direction I was facing.

I put a copy of
Marginalia
down on his desk on top of a pile of cartoons, and we leafed through it.

“These images,” I said, “function like
New Yorker
cartoons. There they are around the edges. Nothing to do with the main story, but they affect the way you read the main story. Like the ‘three-way’ cartoon right in the middle of a long article on the Federal Reserve or nuns and the penis tree in the
Roman de la Rose.
” I had the page marked and opened the book to it. In one image a black-robed nun is plucking penises from a tree and putting them in a basket. In a second image two nuns are gathering penises and sticking them in their robes. “Or this snakeman playing the bagpipes through his anus.” I had this page marked too. A crowned head is attached to a long snakelike neck. At the other end of the neck the man is farting into the chanter of a bagpipe. “These would be good for the caption contest,” I said.

He laughed. “Never get away with it.”

“All these images are in the Morgan,” I said. “They’re images of dissent, transgression. They liven things up. They remind us of our bodily reality. Most scholars dismiss them as graffiti, scribes bored out of their minds, but I think they belong at the center like the cartoons in the
New Yorker.
I can’t remember a single article or story from the
New Yorker
, but I can remember hundreds of cartoons.”

He laughed. “Got a theory?”

“Not exactly, but let me tell you about my husband. He worked in Graves Registration in Vietnam before he became an undertaker. He faced death every day, but he never got over our daughter’s death. I never got over it either, but I’ve tried not to let it poison my life. And then after he had a heart attack, he was even more depressed. Refused a stent; refused bypass surgery. Wouldn’t do anything his doctors wanted him to do. And then about two months before he died, we started looking at
New Yorker
cartoons. We had hundreds of old
New Yorker
s in the attic. It gave him a new lease on life. He even started talking about bypass surgery, which is what his doctors had wanted from the beginning. When we ran out of cartoons he wanted me to draw more—our own cartoons. He was full of ideas. I couldn’t keep up with him. I had to stop working on my book—this copy’s for you, by the way.”

“Well,” he said. “Death can be pretty funny. Like sex.”

“If you’d ever been to the National Funeral Directors conference in Atlanta and heard the jokes, you wouldn’t say that.”