Kristopher Jansma - Why We Came to the City

But Jacob didn’t care about the gaggle of Floridian women pretending to appreciate some Monet painting they probably had hanging up in their pastel-painted bathrooms.

“How dare he? How dare he? How dare he try to fucking kill himself when there are — when there are people who are legitimately—”

Irene arched an eyebrow at him. “Dying?”

Jacob scratched his arms furiously. “That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Yes, it is,” she hissed. “Yes, it is, Jacob, and you know what? That’s — that’s the worst thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“It isn’t what I was going to say,” he insisted — but of course it was. “Fine, it is what I was going to say, but that’s not how I meant it.”

She crossed her arms, and her eyes went black.

“You’re not dying, Irene. I don’t believe that. Really, I—”

“Let’s drop it,” she snapped.

“If you’d just—”

“I said DROP IT!”

She was so furious that Jacob stayed several feet behind her the rest of the way across the museum. As hard as it was, he remained silent as they came up to the Contemporary Wing.

Then they came to the Warhols. In better times, they had sat for hours there on the floor, talking smack about Pop Art and Anti-Art and Anti-Anti-Art and can’t we for fuck’s sake just make ART-ART? — but now Irene wasn’t interested when Jacob pretended not to be able to see the enormous camouflage-patterned self-portrait of Warhol.

“Where did he go? Isn’t there supposed to be a painting here?”

She was transfixed by a huge painting at the end of the aisle — Anselm Kiefer’s Bohemia Lies by the Sea. Twenty feet long and seven feet high, it showed a wild field of pink and orange poppies with a rutted road going up the center. It was one of their favorites — but this time it was familiar in a wholly different way.

“Looks just like Shelter Island,” Irene said quietly.

As soon as she said it, it brought a hollow ache to Jacob’s throat, and he knew why. He hadn’t thought of the painting while they’d been out there — but now he saw that it did resemble the shoreline where she had first confessed to him that she’d been sick. Where they’d drunk the bottle of wine. Down in his gut he knew it was the last time he’d been happy — right there, after she’d told him, but before he’d really believed it.

“I’ve got to sit down a second,” Irene said.

Jacob looked all around, but there were no benches. He couldn’t stand the sight of her hunching down on the ground in her beautiful white dress — the sort of dress you could get married in, on a beach anyway. He looked around for a guard.

“Hold on. Maybe — maybe someone can get you a wheelchair or something?”

“Just let me catch my breath,” she warned, as she stared at her reflection in the floor.

“Irene,” he tried again. “For Christ’s sake, you look like a ghost’s ghost. You can’t—”

She wrenched herself back up off the floor without a word. For the first time he wished she still had the eye patch on. Her gaze was Gorgon-like, petrifying, unbearable.

He stood rooted to the ground as she stalked off. In the white marble floor, he saw a miserable fuck staring up at him. What a pretentious prick he was. How could he ever have thought he could save anyone from anything? He turned and looked up at the gigantic self-portrait and knew, deep down, that he was nothing but a Warhol in his soul.

By the time he’d hurried after her into the dark room full of Josef Albers squares, lit only by the sickening Robert Irwin fluorescent bulbs on the far wall, she was nowhere to be found. He expected to find her sitting on the stairs that led down into the Modern galleries, but she wasn’t there either. Nor was she by the Klees, nor by the Mirós, and then — fuck — not among the O’Keeffes (which she still nursed a little junior high crush on). He spat, swore, spun around, and backtracked a little — sure that he’d just missed her and that, as exhausted as she was, she couldn’t have gone far — but she was nowhere.

He dashed into Arts of Africa and Oceania and the Americas, peering behind the Ethiopian totem poles and Filipino longboats and Eskimo death shrouds. He thought he spotted her studying a Korwar ancestor figure and then, a moment later, bending down to examine a Peruvian funerary mask — but no. Was she in a ladies’ room somewhere? Was she hiding in with the European Furniture? Jacob knew that all those decorative armoires bored her to tears, but if she wanted to get away from him, where better to go? He searched high and low amid the gilt caskets and marble funerary portraits.

Never before had it occurred to him how much death there was in museums. Paintings of dead people. Sculptures of people who’d died forever and ever ago. Ornate vases and chairs and mirrors made by some dead guy who had sold them at some point to someone, who’d then gone and died and left them to someone else who’d died, and on and on until the great undying museum got its hands on these remains . And every wing, every bench, every window had some dead person’s name on it. The dead Robert Lehman Collection. The dead Sackler Wing. The dead Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. The dead Thomas J. Watson Library. Oh, let’s all grab a quick bite at the dead Petrie Court Café before heading down to the dead Ruth and dead Harold Uris Center for Education. It wasn’t a museum so much as a mausoleum.

He rushed into the Branch Bank, with all that bland American furniture behind the facade, and then back out again on his way up to the Tiffany stained glass and then back down again toward Arms and Armor. Wall after wall of deathly instruments — swords and axes and crossbows and harquebuses. She wasn’t by the fifth-century red-figured vases from Greece or the twelfth-century bronze spearheads from the Trojan War. He ventured back into the Medieval Wing. There was nothing left to do but cover ground he’d been through already, in case she’d circled back. Having been everywhere else, he came back to the Warhols, past Bohemia Lies by the Sea , and there, at the bottom of the stairs he’d first come down, was Irene.

She was just sitting there, staring out into the room. Had she been there the whole time? Had he blown right by her? She was looking at a pair of Klee paintings. On the left was a round-edged, purple and pink fantasy — little houses all in rows with fat little windows and doors. Oriental Pleasure Garden, it was called. Beside it, Stricken City . A brown and sooty monstrosity, a jagged bolt of death through its center.

“Jesus,” he said, sitting down beside her. “I was running all over looking for you.”

Her eyes peered up from behind the veil of her let-down hair, and he could see they were cloudy. Looking almost right through him. Her skin had turned so white and bloodless that it no longer blended with her makeup. She looked like someone wearing an Irene mask made in a knock-off factory.

“Fuck,” he said. “Let’s get you up. Come on, walk with me, okay? Can you?”

With his arm around Irene, Jacob was able to coax her to her feet and then slowly through the crowded aisles of the modern art exhibits and out through the atrium of marble Greeks. One step at a time he guided her toward the lobby and the exit beyond — hoping that everyone would just think they were two lovers unable to be an inch apart. He wanted, so badly, for her to exit under her own power.

“This was nice,” she said as they came to the revolving doors. “I had a really nice time.”

“You’re delirious. You had a terrible time. I fucked it all up. But that’s okay.”

Jacob smiled as he eased past the security guards, trying to seem nonchalant. They stepped out into the blazing heat. Crowds milled down below them, pushed back from behind them. Traffic crawled along Fifth Avenue. He just had to get her into one of the cabs. He just had to get her down the steps.