“It’s yours,” I said. “Congratulations.”
I have been slowly adding to my own collection since moving to New York. I acquired a Francis Bacon nude that I fell hard for at the artist’s retrospective at the Met several years ago. The piece was on loan from a European museum, and the fact that I might never see it again made it all the more irresistible. My naked Bacon and I are forever embroiled in a long-distance romance.
Usually, I gravitate toward works that are overlooked, tucked back in a far corner, or that are a museum’s “John Doe”—Artist Unknown. I am just as likely to make a medieval suit of armor mine as I am an obscure Diane Arbus. I also push myself to go into galleries that I would not normally think about entering. Often, this is a source of my best finds. I am strongly anti-museum-map and militantly in favor of getting lost. While there’s nothing wrong with navigating straight to the old masters, I believe it’s far nicer to lose your way in a labyrinth of galleries and suddenly find yourself, as I did one Saturday evening, face-to-face with an Odilon Redon bouquet looking so fresh I could have sworn the paint was still wet.
Perhaps the best part about possessing art in this way is that what’s mine can be yours, and vice versa. In fact, I would not be surprised if half of New York City has also put dibs on the Monet that Emily chose. This made it no less hers.
I brought her in closer to her new acquisition: “Emily, meet your Monet. Monet, Emily.”
Words did not fail her: “Hello, beautiful,” she whispered.
Teatime
NOTES FROM A JOURNAL
12-1-14:
After nearly five months in the clock repair shop around the corner, O’s beloved grandfather clock (his mother’s) is finally back home, in one piece, and working again for the first time in seven or eight years. Working pretty well, that is, not perfectly.
At one point last night, the clock chimed, startling us (we’re not used to it). O and I counted the chimes carefully. A big smile broke out on his face. “Oh! That’s very eccentric! Earlier, it did ten chimes at four o’clock, and now, seven at nine.”
We laughed how this is like having an aging parent in the house, one who’s a little “dotty,” gets a little lost, misremembers, from time to time…
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12-21-14:
Sunday, a very cold, gray Sunday:
O and I got bundled up and walked—walked down Fourth Street to Christopher, walked slowly, carefully, minding the ice and the cracks in the sidewalks and the curbs. O was in a good mood. He has completed the final edits on his book, his memoir; it has been sent to Knopf; and I think he feels a great weight lifted. In this book, he discusses his sexuality and private life, including our relationship, for the first time ever. He’s done it! The proof is sitting on his table: a manuscript at least six inches high—My Own Life, he wants to call it. “It accounts for your whole life,” I said spontaneously.
“It is an accounting of part of my life,” Oliver corrected more carefully, laying stress on the an, “not without some omissions but all in all the truth.”
We were walking down Fourth Street to McNulty’s to get coffee, a stroll we’ve taken many times, in many different kinds of weather, and light…
“Look at that tree!” I said, stopping, and putting a hand to his back to make sure he felt steady as he looked up.
“Oh yes, that’s a marvelous one,” he whispered. The tree was enormous, tall, and gnarly, limbs growing in all different directions—west, east, up, down. Part of the tree was covered in ivy, and the bottom half of the trunk was circled in Christmas lights.
“There are a lot of things growing there,” I said.
“Indeed,” O said.
We kept walking. He talked; I listened. In the apartment, he’d nonchalantly said something arresting: “I find I am more interested in the positive pathologies—”
“The ‘positive pathologies’? What’s that?”
“Things like the zigzagging of migraine auras, tics, spasms, seizures—excesses, hypertrophies of physiology, not losses, absences.”
I understood; it made sense—he who has lived a hypertrophied life. He talked about this more as we walked. I felt this was material for an essay, another for his collection on the “neurophysiology of everyday life” he’s been thinking about. But all of this serious talk did not keep us from enjoying the sights. We saw lots of nice lights and decorations. (“Those are jolly,” said O, seeing greens and lights on an iron rod fence.) A small tree in a yard was decorated with round glass bulbs. Wreaths bedecked doorways.
We felt happy living in the Village.
We remembered memorable walks: “Do you remember that little boy? That little Indian boy,” I said, “the one I took pictures of?”
“Oh yes, he was not only amazingly photogenic, but had a whole repertoire of poses. Do you suppose he was born that way?”