Jane Mendelsohn - Burning Down the House

It was my understanding that you had declined that offer.

Poppy’s hair blew around her head. She was slumped in a thin tweedy coat. Her legs in tights. Short boots tucked a few steps below her. Her bony knees up near her face.

That was probably stupid of me.

Probably.

Alix regarded her. She detested and adored this kid who right now looked like she might never leave the steps of the museum, who might just stay there, wondering and sad until she fell asleep and rolled into the gutter.

Actually, I’m sure he’d give you another chance.

Poppy stared out over the river of Fifth Avenue. Her delicate symmetrical face made Alix want to hit her. And to cry for her.

Why is it getting so windy? said Poppy, the prettiest little wrinkles like a series of commas across her brow. It’s only September.

C’mon, said Alix. Let’s go inside.

—

Once inside the museum they seemed to forget that they had arranged to see the latest show of the Costume Institute and instead began wandering the halls in the same random way that they had when Alix had taken Poppy to the Met as a little girl, Alix babysitting for an hour or so while the nanny was out. The paintings on the walls marched past in a carnival procession of color and feeling and the people shuffling around the galleries seemed to be museum pieces too, as if they had stepped out of the paintings and were now lost.

—

Poppy and Alix landed eventually on a long polished wooden bench facing a historical painting, The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar, by John Trumbull, 1789, and the violence that had been imagined on the steps would now take place. Poppy left her bag on the bench, she was always leaving her bag somewhere, and stood up close to the painting and read its accompanying description:

This painting depicts the events of the night of November 26, 1781, when British troops, long besieged by Spanish forces at Gibraltar, made a sortie, or sudden attack, against the encroaching enemy batteries. The focal point of the painting is the tragic death of the Spanish officer Don José de Barboza. Abandoned by his fleeing troops, he charged the attacking column alone, fell mortally wounded, and, refusing all assistance, died near his post. Trumbull portrays him rejecting the aid of General George Eliott, commander of the British troops.

There were two sides of the painting, the Spanish on the left and the British on the right. The open-necked flowing white clothes of the Spaniards contrasted with the uptight red coats of the British. The sky above them all was a lurid pink and yellow, hideous in its shimmering twilight. On the ground lay the dying Don José de Barboza, rejecting the somewhat coldly outstretched hand of General Eliott. Poppy thought that the painting was stilted and ugly and pretentious and stale, but she was drawn to it. It brought her to a place beyond judgment — beyond herself, beyond itself — even as she recognized the painting’s limitations.

—

Alix stood up from the bench swinging Poppy’s vintage Balenciaga bag by its long thin straps, nearly mopping the museum’s floor with it.

Eventually someone’s going to steal this bag, said Alix.

What do you think of this painting?

It’s ugly.

I think maybe that’s why I like it. You must understand that, that ugly/beautiful thing, said Poppy.

Alix had stopped swinging the bag by now.

You’re sure you want to say that to me? said Alix.

Why not? said Poppy.

You’re sure?

Why wouldn’t I be?

How will you ever have a real friend? said Alix.

—

Poppy had no idea what she had done to offend Alix, no idea that Alix had assumed Poppy was referring to Alix’s appearance as opposed to her aesthetic appreciation of an object, and so Poppy had no recourse but to hear Alix’s remark as an insult, which, of course, it was. But under other circumstances she might have been conscious of the pain that was behind it.

—

I guess I won’t have a real friend, said Poppy. Ever. So I can grow up to be just like you.

Two thick blobs of salty water welled in Poppy’s eyes. Through the blur of them she could make out Don José de Barboza rejecting General George Eliott’s offer of help. The don was turned away from him, looking at a dead soldier, and holding a glinting silver knife. Poppy could almost understand that she and Alix had just enacted a scene very like the one in the painting, one of rejection, wounding, and pride, but this awareness was more of a feeling than a consciousness and it had the effect of making her that much more hurt. How could people be so stupid as to act out what they saw in a painting just because it was staring at them? How out of control were human beings? And were they so out of control? Or had she and Alix landed in front of this painting because it was a depiction of their own private warfare? This was impossible, this trying to understand anything, this trying to communicate with anyone. It was getting too crowded in the museum. It felt as if all of the murdered soldiers in all of the paintings had risen from the canvases and were wandering around the halls: headless, steaming, ashen, stumped. Aghast, blackened, smoky. Alix and Poppy wound their way toward the exit.

ALIX AND POPPY didn’t notice when they left the museum, Alix scurrying, Poppy rambling, down the broad steps toward the sidewalk, that Neva was walking along the other side of Fifth Avenue — beyond the food carts and waiting taxis and the rush of black SUVs and colorful pedestrians — with Roman and Felix. She escorted the two blazered boys through the gorge of buildings on a shadowed side street, turning onto the avenue toward the late-afternoon majesty of the museum and then curving around to stay on the east side of Fifth to deposit Roman at a friend’s apartment for a visit of video warfare and interpersonal victimization, an activity Roman was looking forward to after having been beaten at After-School Chess Club by Felix. Neva and Felix rode up with him in the wood-paneled elevator and left him in the hands of the other boy’s meek nanny and a spiffy male house manager rushing with a vase of flowers from the kitchen into a library. From the far reaches of the foyer you could see the expansive kitchen, at work in which were two cooks, its floor a neon-green laminate. Investment art in shades of orange and electric pink loomed on the walls and a cartoonish, contemporary Japanese sculpture beckoned toward the living room, but Felix and Neva stayed near the front door, bade a brief goodbye to Roman, and lingered just long enough to see him knock off his shoes and join the other boy in a sports jersey (he had changed out of his school uniform already, not having been enrolled in Chess Club), and with sweaty hair happily race down a hallway to where the electronics awaited.

—

Neva and Felix now enter the museum. Felix takes a drawing class there once a week and Neva usually wanders the galleries while waiting for him. She and the boys have already settled into a routine only a few weeks into the school year. Patrizia is efficient about signing the children up for activities and arranging a full schedule for Neva to execute. But today instead of looking at paintings or pottery or jewel-encrusted headpieces Neva realizes that she has forgotten some of Felix’s art supplies at home and so she rushes back to the apartment to get them for him. She walks briskly up the avenue, the apartment is only a few blocks away, and she enjoys staying on the park side of the street, the full green trees making a canopy above her as if deftly sketched for her to walk beneath.

—

Under the trees she feels memories dart through her without stopping. Trees, smoke, a dog. She picks up glints of such images all around her and they flash in her brain making sudden connections too brief to comprehend but rushing through her with feeling after feeling. She has the sense of a wild place far back in her past, a welcoming wilderness to which a part of her wishes to return. At the same time she is attuned to the movement of her life speeding forward, onward, under this canopy of trees, toward some goal, gliding, gliding among a million possibilities toward one singular event. She knows that she cannot stop for either one, not the backward past or the uncertain future, knows that she has to keep going, keep soldiering in the present, under these leaves, marching through her memories, bearing her own witness.