By Nightfall. Michael Cunningham
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of Columbia, too.”
“Blessings on your journey, then.”
The waitress brings Peter’s coffee, asks if they’ve had time to consider the menu, which they haven’t. She says she’ll check back. She is a sweet-faced, sturdy girl with a Georgia accent, some-body’s much-loved daughter, probably newly arrived in New York, determined to sing or act or whatever, extragenial, eager to seem as much like a waitress as she possibly can, not to mention the fact that anyone who can afford to come to a place like JoJo at this moment in history is something of a celebrity by definition.
Bette says, “I want to love art again.”
“I think I know what you mean.”
“Who doesn’t? The money thing—”
“I know. And now, all of a sudden, there isn’t any more. Money, I mean.”
“There’s still some.”
“Well, yeah. I mean, I hope that’s true …”
“And it seems we’ve all gone directly from struggling to survive to being semi-established and beside the point.”
Very briefly, an inner careen. We all? Back off, bitch angel of death. I’m not infected by failure.
She says, “I don’t mean you, Peter.”
What must have passed across his face just then?
“Don’t you?”
“I’m being clumsy, aren’t I? I’m beside the point. You’re one of the very few decent, serious people out there. Everyone else is, you know. Either a nineteen-year-old selling his friends’ stuff out of his apartment in Bed-Stuy, or they’re fucking Mobil Oil.”
“Well, yeah. I do know.”
“Aren’t you even a little bit sick of it?”
“Some days,” he says.
“You’re still young.”
“Forty isn’t young.”
Hm, shaved a few years off, didn’t you?
“I haven’t told anyone yet,” she says. “About quitting, I mean. I called you because I thought you might want to take Groff. And maybe one or two of the others. But you like Groff, right?”
Rupert Groff. Not exactly Peter’s thing, but young, and on the cusp. Bette lucked into him two years ago, when she went to give the talk at Yale. Once she’s made the announcement about closing her gallery, he’s the one they’ll all be after.
“I do,” Peter says.
He likes Groff well enough, and really, this is someone who could bring in some serious money.
“I think you’re the best match for him,” Bette says. “I’m afraid one of the giants will snatch him up and ruin him.”
“That’s dramatic.”
“Don’t play dumb.”
“A thousand pardons.”
“They’ll pressure him to do the work in gold, they’ll overpromote him, and in all likelihood he’ll be finished by the time he’s thirty.”
“Or having his retrospective at the Whitney.”
“Some of these kids are ready early. He’s not. He’s developing. He needs someone who’ll push him, but in the right ways.”
“And you think I’m that guy.”
“What I’m saying is, I don’t think you’re an asshole.”
I don’t know, Bette. I’m not as big as some of them, I’m not as rich, and if that means I’m not an asshole, fine.
“I like to think I’m not,” he says. “What makes you think Groff will want to go with me?”
“I’ll talk to him. Then you can talk to him.”
“What’s he like?”
“Sweet. A little oafish. Not the sharpest tack in the box.”
The waitress returns to ask again if they’ve had time to consider the menu. They promise apologetically to look, to decide in a couple of minutes, and they do exactly that. Who wouldn’t want to help this lovely, earnest girl, who’s so far from home, feel like she’s succeeding at posing as a New York waitress?
An hour later, Peter and Bette walk together through the Great Hall at the Met, grand, somnolent portal into the civilized world. Why deny its satisfactions—its elephantine poise, its capacity to excite the very molecules of its own air with a sense of reverent occasion and queenly glamour and the centuries-long looting of five continents? The Hall receives with a vast patience. It’s the mother who will never die, and right up front are her votaries, the women of the central kiosk, elderly for the most part, kind-looking, waiting to offer information from under the enormous floral arrangement (cherry blossoms, just now) that festoons the air over their heads with petal and leaf.
Peter pays the admissions (Bette paid for lunch). They clip on the small metal circles (these things must have a name, what would it be?), he to his jacket and she to the scoop neck of her black cotton sweater, which for a moment draws both their attention to her prominent, freckled clavicle and the miniature gathering of wrinkles, like a puckering of cloth, that have settled into the skin between her breasts. Bette knows that Peter is looking, gives him back a look of what he can only call haggard flirtation—a furious sensuality, not directly sexual but charged with some quality made up of sex and defiance, the sort of look Helen must have aimed at the Trojans. Bette Rice, a queen kidnapped by age and illness.
He times his ascent of the staircase with that of Bette, who climbs at a smoker’s pace. She’s just had a Marlboro Light in front of the museum, and said, in response to the skeptical glance Peter had decided against, “Trust me, a cancer scare is not the time to give up smoking.”
At the top of the stairs, Tiepolo’s Marius continues to triumph. The boy continues banging on his tambourine.
On the way to the contemporary galleries, Peter pauses before the Rodin at the entrance to Nineteenth-Century European. Bette gets a few paces ahead, turns, and comes back.
“Still here,” she says. They came for the Hirst, why is Peter stopping? Hasn’t he seen the Rodin a thousand times?
Peter says, “You know how …”
“Yes?”
“How something pops out at you sometimes?”
“Today, Rodin pops out?”
“Yeah. I don’t know why.”
Bette settles beside Peter with that aspect of mother-alligator calm she can summon. This is probably how she was with her sons when they were small, when they were fascinated by something that bored her—this attitude of informed but charitable willingness. This would be part of why they turned out okay.
She says, “No denying its merits.”
“No.”
Here, as always, is Auguste Neyt, aka The Vanquished, aka The Bronze Age: perfect bronze man-child, exactly life-size, trim and lithe, holding his invisible spear. Rodin was still unknown when he sculpted and cast this naked man, sans Ancient Greek musculature or French devotion to allegory; Rodin a minor figure then but proven right by time—the heroic was dying out, the real was arriving for a long, long stay. Now Rodin has been and gone and yes, of course, he’s part of history, but new artists don’t revere him, no one makes a pilgrimage, you learn about him in school, you pass his sculptures and maquettes on your way to see the Damien Hirst.
Still. It’s fucking bronze, it could last forever (didn’t the Koenig sphere survive 9/11?). Alien archeologists might unearth it one day and really, would it be such bad evidence of who and what we were? Auguste Neyt, centuries dead by then, his