She had been brought to the gathering by her gallerist, who was now also, though not exclusively, Apu’s: a twinkling silver-haired rogue named Frankie Sottovoce who had gained notoriety in his youth by spray-painting the twelve-inch high letters NLF on one of the three monumental Claude Monet paintings of water lilies at the Museum of Modern Art, to protest the war in Vietnam, echoing the act of the unknown vandal who, in the same year, 1974, had scratched the two-foot-high letters IRA into the lower right-hand corner of Peter Paul Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, an act for which Sottovoce, when feeling boastful about his radical-left activist younger self, would also improbably claim responsibility. The paintings were easily restored, the IRA lost its war, the Vietcong won theirs, and the gallerist went on to have a distinguished career, and discovered and successfully promoted, among many others, the metal-cutting sculptor Ubah Tuur.
Ubah means “flower” or “blossom” in Somali, and is sometimes written as Ubax, the “x” in Somali being a throaty sound that Anglophone throats struggle to make, a voiceless pharyngeal fricative. Hence “Ubah,” a simplified concession to non-Somali pharyngeal incompetence. She was beautiful in the way the women of the Horn are beautiful, long-necked and graceful in the arms, and in the long summer evening she seemed to Petya a flowering tree beneath whose boughs he could rest, healed by her cooling shade, for the rest of his life. At a certain point in the evening she sang: not the ululating Somali song he had expected to emerge from those rich lips but Patti Smith’s famous ode to love itself, full of darkness and desire, with its comforting, treacherous repetitions, can’t hurt you now, can’t hurt you now…and by the time she was done he was lost. He rushed in her direction and stopped dead in front of her, at a loss. Overcome by his sudden rush of impossible, unspeakable love, he began to babble at his just-discovered dream girl about this and that, poetry and subatomic physics and the private lives of movie stars, and she listened gravely, accepting all his short-circuit non sequiturs as if they were entirely natural, and he felt, for once in his life, understood. Then she began to speak and he listened mesmerized, mongoose to her cobra. Afterwards he was able to repeat verbatim every single word that came out of her flawless mouth.
Her early work, she said, was inspired by the primitive artists she had met on a visit to Haiti, who cut oil drums in half, flattened the two halves, and then, using the simplest of tools—hammers and screwdrivers—cut and beat them into intricate latticework images of branches, foliage and birds. She talked to Petya for a long time about using a blowtorch to cut steel and iron into lacelike intricacies and showed him images of her work on her phone: the remains of wrecked (bombed?) cars and tanks, transformed into the most delicate filigree forms, the metal penetrated by shapely patterned air and acquiring an airiness of its own. She spoke in the language of the art world, war of symbols, desirable oppositions, the high-abstract insider jargon, describing her quest for empathetic images creating a balance as well as a clash by contrasting ideas and materials, and she examined, too, the absurdity of having opposing extremist stances, like a wrestler in a tutu. She was a brilliant speaker, charismatic and almost incomprehensibly fast, pushing a hand through her hair and clutching at her head as she spoke; but in the end he burst out (his autism forcing him to speak the truth), “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”
Immediately he hated himself. What kind of a fool, with the words “I love you” stuck in his throat, offered his brilliant beloved scorn instead of adoration? Now she would hate him and would be justified in doing so and his life would be meaningless and damned.
She stared at him for a long moment and then burst into healing laughter. “It’s a defense mechanism,” she said. “One worries one will not be taken seriously if one lacks a sufficiency of theory, especially if one is female. Actually, my work speaks pretty clearly for itself. I push beauty into horror and I want it to disturb you and make you think. Come up to Rhinebeck and take a look.”
I’m now sure—as I piece together the puzzle of the Golden house, and try to reconstruct my memory of the exact sequence of events of that important night, setting them down as they come back to me—that this was the point of the evening at which things started to go wrong for Petya, as his desire to accept Ubah’s invitation did battle with the demons that obliged him to fear the outside world. He made a strange gesture with both arms, half-helpless, half-angry, and at once began to soliloquize in a rapid series of non sequiturs about whatever crossed his anguished mind. His mood grew darker as he expostulated on various topics, coming at last to the question of Broadway musicals and his dislike of most of them. Then came the awkward Python episode and his disappearance indoors and then his anguish on the windowsill. Love, in Petya, was never far from despair.
All that summer he was sad, locked in his room bathed in blue light, playing and (as we afterwards discovered) creating computer games of immense complexity and beauty, and dreaming of that haunting face behind a protective face mask and of the steel-cutting flame moving in her hand as she created fantasy and delicacy out of brute metal. He thought of her as a kind of superhero, his blowtorch goddess, and wanted above all things to be with her but he feared the journey, a Prince too full of troubles to be able to pursue his vanished Cinderella. Nor could he call her and tell her how he felt. He was like a continent of erratic garrulity containing a no-go zone of oral paralysis. And finally it was Apu who took pity on him and offered to help. “I’ll rent a car with blacked-out windows,” he declared. “We’re going to get you access.”
Apu swore, afterwards, that that had been his only motive: to get Petya across the frontier of his fear and give him a shot at the girl. But maybe he wasn’t telling the truth.
And so Petya screwed up his courage and made the call, and Ubah Tuur invited the brothers up for the weekend, and was understanding enough to tell him, “There’s a good solid fence all the way around the property, so maybe you can think of it as interior space, like your communal gardens. If you can get your head around that I can show you the work that’s standing on the land as well as what’s in the studio.”