With a wheezing sound Kinch laughed as if he’d said something very witty, intended to annoy his dignified silver-haired visitor.
“I realize it isn’t very ‘fresh’ in here—I can’t open any window, unfortunately. The noise—the drafty cold—would annihilate me. And I have to keep the damn drapes closed most of the time. In my quarantine life it’s always a kind of pre-dusk—as in a painting of Hopper—that wan, fading light, the mannequin-people who seem scarcely to be breathing, the melancholy clumsiness of the world from which there is no escape since that is the world.”
Kinch spoke eloquently, sadly. Yet his sensuous, damp-looking lips quivered as if he were about to burst into an irreverent smile.
To spare Naomi the awkwardness of a reply Madelena deftly intervened. “Hopper is ‘clumsy’—set beside painters like Whistler and Homer who can replicate the world so precisely. Yet when you’re looking at Hopper’s paintings you are utterly persuaded, you don’t feel that ‘clumsiness’ at all.”
Kinch made a derisive snorting sound. “You may not, Professor Kein. More discerning others do.”
With a vague naive hope of aligning herself with her grandmother who was looking vexed, and making some statement of her own, for surely it was time for her to speak, Naomi remarked that Madelena had taken her to the Whitney Museum the other day where they’d seen paintings by Hopper she had never seen before in reproductions and these she’d thought very “beautiful,” “haunting” . . .
“Of course you did, Naomi. ‘Beautiful’—‘haunting.’”
Was Kinch speaking ironically? Was he laughing at her? Yet he seemed kindly, and not at all malicious.
Dour-faced Sonia approached asking if their guests would like something to drink? Tea, sparkling water, wine . . . With some fuss she set down a tray containing several cheeses, a scattering of pale crackers, shriveled-looking olives.
Tea for Madelena, sparkling water for Naomi. “Nothing for me just now”—Kinch said primly.
“Ah, before I forget—here. Your favorites.”
Madelena handed the little bag of mangoes to Kinch who accepted it with a childish sort of delight, all but smacking his lips.
“Take these away, Sonia, will you?—and prepare a little dish for us.”
Dour-faced Sonia took away the mangoes without a word.
Madelena inquired after a new medication Kinch had begun taking, and what progress he was making on a composition commissioned by the Juilliard String Quartet; Kinch inquired after “your old Laslov.”
A gruff sort of intimacy existed between the two. Each appeared to be just slightly critical of the other, or bemused; yet affectionate, even proud. Especially, Madelena glanced at Naomi to see how she was taking Kinch’s provocative manner, that was always on the edge of rudeness. Madelena was the more gracious of the two, speaking of “we”—“Naomi and me”—who’d been seeing such interesting exhibits in the city, and such an excellent performance of Les Contes d’Hoffmann.
“Really! The review in the Times wasn’t so enthusiastic, I think.”
“I thought it was very enthusiastic.”
“Not if you know how to decode that critic’s ‘enthusiasm.’ If you read between the lines . . .”
“The Picasso exhibit is really quite extraordinary . . .”
“No. Not possible. Nothing in Picasso is extraordinary any longer. An artist with just two modes—naive-primitive, and prurient. Both are outworn in the twenty-first century.”
As they spoke together in their quasi-flirtatious banter Naomi glanced about the room. She was becoming accustomed to the acrid smell, and her eyes were adjusting to the diminished light. Through a doorway she saw, in an adjoining room, that had formerly been a dining room she supposed, an article of furniture that must have been a mobile desk, with sliding parts; on the desk-top were an old-fashioned manual typewriter, neatly stacked sheets of paper, journals, books. The desk was somewhat lower to the floor than an ordinary desk, ideal for one in a wheelchair. Against a wall was a “baby grand” piano outfitted with crane-necked lights.
In the living room were mismatched furnishings. Leather sofa, upholstered chairs, glass-topped coffee table. Against a farther wall was a display of what appeared to be antique musical instruments, predominately strings; on the hardwood floor a large, faded but still beautiful rug of the kind Naomi knew to be “Persian”—quite a dazzling rug, in fact, that reminded Naomi of a smaller rug in Madelena’s living room. The walls were solid-packed with mostly hardcover books. Naomi wondered if, like the books in Madelena’s apartment, these were carefully alphabetized.