American Estrangement Read online

  “A body never forgets,” she promised us.

  It’s past noon when I take a break, my fingertips burning, and order my free lunch from the organically farmed restaurant down the street. I over-order: sandwich, soup, side, soda, side. Might as well. They tell me it’ll be here in ten minutes. They sound like they’re all smiles. Fifteen minutes later it hasn’t arrived. Twenty minutes later I’m starving and I’m not going to tip. This is when the door to the gallery swings open, but instead of the delivery guy walking in, it’s the woman from the other day, the one at the funicular who told the production assistant it was “bullshit.” She’s dressed again in a skirt and heels, and when her heels click on the gallery floor they make a sound that echoes. She stands at my front desk, arms crossed, face still sunburned, eyes still brown, and she says to me, using a voice appropriate for a high-end art gallery with a librarylike atmosphere, almost a whisper, “I’m interested in Untitled X.”

  It turns out her name is Mimi and she’s the owner’s daughter. In a small town, even this would be considered coincidental. She also happens to work at a hot-shit art gallery on the other side of Aspen. “ ‘Art’ runs in the family,” she tells me. She puts “art” in air quotes. She’s not the front desk receptionist, she’s the director. She’s two removed from power. “Nepotism,” she says. She’s jaded. Her father only mentioned her art gallery once, and that was to say, “We’re interested in different things.” I took that to mean that the other gallery made money.

  The first time Mimi takes me there is after hours, for what may or may not be a first date. She has the key to the front door, and when she flicks the overhead lights I’m surrounded by the exceedingly pleasant view of realism, pastoralism, Aspenism. Here are paintings, heavy on the impasto, that are intended to calm the soul, soothe the mind, that would look good hanging above the IT guy’s couch. Snow-covered cottages, moonlit villages, lingering dusks, scenes that don’t need interpretation or context to make themselves understood. These paintings aren’t speaking to the postwar upheaval of the twentieth century, by way of a newly invented visual language. In fact, they’re not speaking to anything at all. This is the art of the here and now, made five, ten, fifteen years ago, art that goes for three figures, sometimes four, never five. The gallery does a brisk business at the low end.

  As I look at the paintings with Mimi, she doesn’t bother asking me, What is it that you’re seeing? I can see what it is I’m seeing: a sailboat floating on a lake at twilight, ripples in the water, the moon in the sky, entitled Sailboat on a Lake at Twilight.

  I’m standing close to Mimi. “Beautiful,” I say.

  But Mimi gives a wide sweep of her hand, encompassing all the artwork, saying, “I think it’s bullshit.”

  Later, I give myself a tour of the front desk, swiveling in the receptionist’s chair, opening and closing the drawers, wondering what it’s like to sit here nine hours a day, five days a week, less one hour for lunch.

  “Where’s the typewriter?” I ask Mimi, which is a joke. We have a good laugh. We have a glass of wine. “Have as much as you want,” Mimi says. There’s an entire case in the back office, recent year, leftover from the last opening, attended, incidentally, by the living local artist and three hundred people.

  “I’m responsible for bartending,” Mimi says. “It’s in the job description.” We have a good laugh about this, too. I imagine eighty bottles of white wine being popped and poured by Mimi, concealing her contempt for the art, for the patrons. “If I get them drunk, they buy more.”

  The only living artist who ever visited my gallery was an elderly woman, walking with a cane and a caretaker, and whom the owner spoke to in reverential tones. She’d flown from New York to Aspen, two-hour layover in Denver, to spend a couple hours looking at her paintings on the walls. She seemed to like what the owner had done with her work, how it was framed and hung and lit. She’d stood in front of each piece for several minutes, about to say something, but saying nothing. Finally, she asked if anything had sold. “Not yet,” the owner had said. He’d sounded hopeful, as if any minute things would change. After she was gone, the owner told me, “She knew Jackson Pollock.”

  The wine is going to my head, and the swivel chair seems to be swiveling on its own. The gallery is peaceful, innocent, tranquil. Pastoralism come to life.

  “Dreamy,” Mimi says.

  “Yes,” I coo.

  But she’s talking about her father and his art. “He lives in the past,” she says. It’s hard to argue that.

  “Don’t we all?” I say.

  “I don’t,” she says. According to Mimi, her father has been trying to unload Untitled X for years. “Don’t get your hopes up,” she tells me.

  “I won’t,” I say.

  She thinks her father will eventually go out of business, liquidate the art, bring a merciful end to abstract expressionism in Aspen. I wish I’d known this before taking the job.

  “It’s tragic,” she says.

  “Yes, it is,” I say, but what I’m imagining is being unemployed in Aspen, walking the streets, trying to find work somewhere, maybe running the funicular.

  Mimi tells me that her first love was the Denver Art Museum. Her first love was my day job. Her father would take her there when she was a girl, driving three hours one way for each new exhibit, slowing down to ten miles an hour at the Continental Divide so his daughter could experience the precise moment of before and after in America. She tells me how she would wander through the galleries of the museum alone, looking at the art by herself, understanding it intuitively, immediately, without instruction or guidance. “Art runs in the family,” she says. Here she does not use air quotes.

  “What was it like working in the café?” she wants to know.

  “I stole things,” I tell her. I tell her how I would take bags of chips printed with Van Gogh’s face and then sell them to the museum guards at half price. I tell it like it’s a funny story, but when I’m done she says, “That’s sad.”

  “I thought it was funny,” I say.

  “We should go there sometime,” she says. I’m not sure if she’s asking me out on a second date.

  “Sure,” I say, but I have no interest in going back to Denver.

  She tells me when she first discovered one of Monet’s water lily paintings, second floor of the museum, she sat in front of it for half an hour. “I was six years old,” she says, “maybe I was seven.” She remembers with clarity having been transfixed by the great artist’s brushwork, the colors, the perspective. Without knowing anything about him, she’d somehow understood that it had been painted by a man with failing eyesight.

  “But how could you have known that?” I ask.

  She pours me more wine. She pours herself more wine. She turns on the computer and the screen lights up. “Show me how you type,” she says.

  “I’m driving drunk,” I say.

  This she finds funny. She’s standing close to me. Her hip by my shoulder.

  “What should I type?” I ask.

  “I don’t care,” she says.

  Before I can conjure something clever, my fingers are moving on their own over the space-age keyboard, seventy, eighty, ninety words a minute, as if I’m skating on ice, no missteps, no typos. “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country!”

  Then Mimi’s sitting on my lap, making the first move, making the swivel chair swivel, and when she kisses me, her hair falls in my face, and I can smell the white wine on her breath. The gallery is subsumed by that silence with which I’ve grown so familiar, and when she comes up for air, she’s staring into my eyes, staring hard, a few inches from my face, as if she’s just noticed something, astute observer that she is.

  “What is it that you’re seeing?” I ask.

  FAIRGROUND

  I’ve only been to one hanging in my life and that was when I was six or seven years old, or maybe I was eight, but who can really remember that far back with complete accuracy? This also happened to be du
ring the period when the city was being rezoned, Sector A now Sector G, Sector G now Sectors Q and R, and so on, thanks to the mayor who’d won by a landslide. It was going to take a while for everyone to get used to the changes, but everyone agreed that it would be worth it in the end. Sometimes, when I was out walking with my mom, we would pass a row of school buses lined up like ducks at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to turn green, the faces of the secured populations looking through the windows with indifference and resignation, as if they’d been traveling for weeks across the country rather than hours across the city. They would be crammed into the buses, children, too, twice as many as the bus could comfortably hold, their belongings piled on their laps, often higher than their heads, suitcases, backpacks, lamps without lampshades. If you could carry it, you could bring it. That was the directive. That seemed fair.

  “Don’t stare,” my mother would say. “It’s not polite.”

  What I do remember for sure is that I’d been taken to the hanging as something of an afternoon diversion by Mr. Montgomery, my stepfather, the first stepfather in a sequence of several, and with full consent of my mother, who considered the outing a good opportunity for me to bond with a man I’d just met a few weeks earlier. “You’ll learn to love him,” she’d told me, an upbeat prediction that as far as I could see was based on little evidence.

  The day trip with Mr. Montgomery had also been a way for my mother to have some alone time so she could study for her upcoming exam, because this also happened to be during that period when she’d gone back to school, mid-thirties, trying to do something different with her life, something “meaningful,” and become a librarian. If all went well, she’d soon be able to get us out of our apartment above the nail salon, where we’d been living for a year, and where the scent of nail polish would waft up through the vents between the hours of ten and six. I thought it smelled nice, and my mother thought it smelled annoying, and eventually we were so used to it that we no longer smelled it at all. She told me that she’d take me downstairs “one of these days” so that I could have my nails painted at half price—half price being one of the perks of living above a nail salon.

  “Think about what color you want,” she’d said.

  “What colors do they have?”

  “They have every color.”

  “Then I want blue.”

  “You have to dream bigger than that,” she said. She listed colors I hadn’t known were colors: orange cream dream, tiger blossom, tickle my heart, timberline violet.

  “Tiger blossom,” I said.

  “Good choice,” she said.

  Seeing Mr. Montgomery and me off on that fall afternoon, she’d stood in the doorway of our apartment, Dewey Decimal study guide under her arm, telling us, “Have fun, boys!”

  “Oh, we will!” Mr. Montgomery had said.

  But the prospect of an outing with me had apparently made Mr. Montgomery contemplative, unexpectedly so, and he’d sat in the parked car for a while, saying nothing, hands on the wheel, key in the ignition, motor off, gazing through the windshield at I knew not what. I’d sat there, too, wondering if we were having car trouble. Finally, he’d turned to me, eyes moist, saying how it had just occurred to him, right then, how he was passing the tradition downward. “Do you know what I’m talking about, son?” he’d asked. No, I didn’t. “Yes, I do,” I said. He seemed moved by this. He rubbed the back of my neck with something like fondness. The sensation was unfamiliar but pleasant. According to Mr. Montgomery, when he’d been a boy about my age, six, seven, or eight, he’d been taken to his very first execution by his father, as had his father before him, and so on down the generational line, great-great-great-grand. I was dubious that Mr. Montgomery had ever been a boy my age, let alone a boy at all, but he appeared to remember the past with emotion. “Like yesterday,” he told me. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. The back of his hand looked old. This was what fathers did with sons, he said. This was what I would one day do with my sons. He spoke with confidence and assertion.

  “I understand, Mr. Montgomery,” I said.

  “You don’t have to call me ‘Mr. Montgomery,’ ” he said.

  “I won’t,” I said.

  He wanted me to call him by his first name, William, or one of the variations thereof. “You can call me Will or Willy,” he said. “You can call me Bill or Billy.”

  It was an hour to the fairground and the reminiscences were going to make us late. He leaned forward in his seat as if doing so made the car go faster. Through the windshield the scenery of the city passed by at an alarming rate, occasionally broken by a flash of white space where trees and grass had been eliminated, and where we could briefly glimpse the towering snowcapped mountain, beyond which lay the next city.

  Frankly, I didn’t know what my mother saw in Mr. Montgomery. They seemed to have nothing in common, beginning with the fact that Mr. Montgomery’s primary experience in a public library had been to use the public bathroom. “I needed to pee bad,” he’d said. I didn’t find this funny, but he and my mother sure did, and they told the anecdote jointly and often, interpreting the distance that separated them on the compatibility index as something that strengthened their bond, rather than a troubling indicator that they were wrong for each other.

  Still, the first time I’d met Mr. Montgomery had been for dinner at Applebee’s, which had been a promising start. I’d worn slacks and my mother had worn lipstick. They’d sat side by side in the big burgundy booth, and I’d sat across from them, as if they were interviewing me for a job, everyone’s hands folded politely on the table. Mr. Montgomery had told me that I could order anything I wanted off the menu, and this added to the air of promise. “Sky’s the limit,” he’d said. He was showing off for my mother. “He’s going to learn to love you,” my mother had said to him. I knew he was trying to curry favor with me. I knew he knew I was the lone obstacle for him being able to sleep with my mother.

  So I ordered the most expensive thing off the menu, why not, the double-glazed baby back ribs, which I’d never heard of before.

  Apparently this was the wrong choice.

  “Don’t be presumptuous,” my mother said.

  “How about the mac and cheese?” Mr. Montgomery said. He was referring me to the children’s menu.

  So I acquiesced and ordered the typical child’s fare, chicken fingers and french fries.

  “Why not get a milkshake to go with that?” Mr. Montgomery said, trying to prove that he was actually easygoing with money.

  “Yummy,” my mother said.

  “No,” I said.

  We arrived at the fairground with barely time to spare. The parking lot was filled to capacity and people were streaming through the big white gate, above which read SECTOR N WELCOMES YOU TO THE CITY FAIRGROUND. Soon this would have to be changed to SECTOR V. Mr. Montgomery drove around looking for an empty spot, cursing, going in circles, apologizing for cursing, talking philosophically about how this was everyone else’s fault, that this was what happened when you stopped paying attention, big crowds, little sensitivity, no parking. Everything is connected, son, he said. Yes, he was happy that the turnout was good, because good turnout meant there was civic pride. “But civic pride comes at a cost,” he said. “Back in my day . . .” he said. He extemporized about the past. I said nothing. “Do you know what I’m talking about?” he said. He didn’t wait for an answer. Suddenly he turned to me. “There’s going to be blood today, son,” he said, as if he were only now realizing what this excursion was all about. “Are you okay with blood?” he asked. He sounded concerned. He sounded as if he were prepared to turn the car around if I had answered no.

  I wanted to be okay with blood. But I wasn’t so sure. I still had scabs on my knees from a few weeks earlier when my mother had tried to teach me how to ride a bicycle, and just when I was getting the hang of it, I’d crashed into the sidewalk. My mother had comforted me briefly, sweetly, cradling me in her lap, and two women from the nail salon had come over, weari
ng aprons, smelling of polish. “You have to get right back on, honey,” they’d said.

  “I like blood, sir,” I told Mr. Montgomery,

  He liked that I liked blood. “Good boy,” he said. He said, “You don’t have to call me ‘sir.’ ”

  We found a parking spot way on the other side, and when we got to the front gate, Mr. Montgomery paid ten dollars for two tickets on steel bleachers in the hot sun with people sitting in front of us wearing hats so I couldn’t see. We’d forgotten our own hats or had not known to bring hats. We were far from the stage but close to the sun. Five minutes in, my forehead was baking and so were the backs of my thighs, but I said nothing because I knew I should not be the kind of boy who complains and orders the most expensive thing off the menu.

  “Are you having fun yet?” Mr. Montgomery asked.

  “I sure am,” I said.

  But there was no indication of fun or even the prospect of fun. We were in a venue used for high school football games, and a banner hung breezeless in the air, celebrating a championship from twenty years ago. Next to the banner was a portrait of the mayor, appearing magnanimous and forward-thinking. He’d won by promising that he could do what needed to be done to remedy the persistent problems of the city: plumbing, mail delivery, etc. Also the secured populations. No one could argue that these were problems. No one as yet had been able to figure out how to fix them.

  Between the spectators’ hats I could glimpse the gallows, fourteen feet off the ground, accessed by a wooden staircase. A rope dangled from the crossbeam, and I knew that this was the instrument of death, but it seemed languid and ineffectual. How this contraption could take a life, much less draw blood, I couldn’t understand. Mr. Montgomery told me how in his day they didn’t have hangings, but shot the condemned instead. In his father’s day, they were beheaded with silver sabers, and so on down the line: guns, swords, poison, fire, great-great-great-grand. He waited for my reaction.