The two of them hadn’t visited a gallery together for years, not since before the children were born, in fact, and he had long since moved the slow, deliberate, and frequently joyful perusal of art into the column of things he did away from the rest of them. But this had been Johanna’s idea, offered over brunch at their local spot, the previous Sunday.
“Have you been over to see this thing?” She pointed at the Arts Section. All five of them were reading at the table. “Somebody at school was telling me.”
“No. I don’t know about it.”
“She went a few nights ago. This mom. She said the place is jammed full of young people. Lots of energy. It’s called Outsider Artists. It’s where the art world is going, she said.”
“Well, I doubt that.” Salo, himself, had just bought another Twombly. Much smaller than his beloved rust-colored scrawl (which, along with its peer-contemporaries, was part of something now being called the “Blackboard Series”) and far, far more expensive. Increasingly, it seemed to him, the art world was going where he had already been, for years. That meant there was less to find, and way too many people waving around money.
“So what’s an ‘Outsider Artist’ then?” he asked.
She turned the paper around.
Outsider Artist—the term was so new there was yet to be any strict consensus about its meaning—had something to do with the artist’s lack of formal education or training, which didn’t make much sense when you thought about it. How many of the artists in his own warehouse had declined or been unable to access formal education and training? Besides, from what this review of the new show described, a truer delineation ought to be based on the artist’s sanity, or the lack thereof; they all seemed to be mental patients or street people, laborers building palaces out of toothpicks in their basements at night or self-ordained ministers proclaiming their vision of God. He studied the accompanying photograph: a truly bizarre picture by a Chicago janitor who’d apparently cut pictures of little girls out of magazines and painted them into battle scenes. Some of the little girls even had male genitalia. Sick!
“You should go see it,” said our mother. “Actually, let’s both go. It sounds bizarre, doesn’t it?”
Salo agreed that it did.
“Well,” he heard himself say, “that’s a nice idea.”
Now, at the Metropolitan Pavilion, Johanna was late, five minutes, then ten, then twenty. The entrance area was indeed jammed, with more people pushing past him and into the building. There was no seating, and he was growing irritated past the point of retrieval. Then he heard his name. Over at the registration desk, a harried young person was holding a cordless phone and looking around.
“Yes,” he said as he made his way through the crowd, “I’m Salo Oppenheimer.”
“Okay,” the man said. He looked barely older than his own kids, but was wearing some kind of official badge. “Someone’s calling for you. But please don’t take long, we need the line.”
Salo took the phone. It was Johanna.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “What’s happened?”
“Oh, I got a call from Aaron’s office.” She sounded frustrated, not frightened. “They wanted me to come in right away. I went racing over there, thinking something terrible was going on.”
“But it wasn’t?” He was relieved, and now annoyed. Aaron, who at any other school would be called the “principal” but at Walden was called the “head of school,” had always struck him as histrionic and prone to exaggeration.
“No. Well, except that it started with Harrison being unhappy that his class was repeating some material from last year, then suddenly it morphed into serious concern about how the kids aren’t speaking to each other at school, and is there something going on in the family that Walden needs to perform some kind of an intervention over.”
“You mean an exorcism.” This was Walden at its worst, Salo thought. All the drum banging and collective guilt and ethical processing—it was a far cry from his own Collegiate experience, but he had made his peace with that, and besides, he could see that all three of his children, even Lewyn, were reading and writing and doing age-appropriate math. Still, the delight these people seemed to take in breaching family privacy!
“What?”
“What did you tell them?”
He could hear her annoyance, even over the volume of the lobby.
“I said what I always say: Thank you so much for pointing this out, and our whole family will discuss it.”
Salo nodded. There had been a similar incident the previous year, with Aaron. That time the instigating concern had been Lewyn’s “self-isolation,” but this, like the current round, had metastasized into Aaron’s all-triplet-all-Oppenheimer expression of Waldenian concern, and the actual suggestion that the family enter counseling.
“So, no list of approved therapists this time?”
“Well, it was offered. But I said I still had the information from last year. I wonder if everybody gets this level of personal attention.”
Even such a mild suggestion of fault-finding was noteworthy for Johanna, who having long ago chosen Walden for her children preferred not to question either its principles or its practices.
“Anyway, when I realized I wasn’t going to get there at four, I went to the school office and tried to call the show. I ended up talking to some PR office in Soho before they could get me connected to the Pavilion itself. I’m sorry, Salo.”
“No, don’t worry. I’m sure this isn’t our cup of tea, anyway.”
The “our” was a gift.
“I’ll just take a quick look and come home.” Perhaps, he thought, with his now-liberated hours, after a stop in Red Hook.
“Okay,” he heard her say. “I’m sorry, though. I was looking forward to it. Let me know if you see the one with the cut-out little girls.”
The harried person behind the desk was giving him some very unhappy attention. He was not yet reaching out his hand for the phone, but that had to be imminent.
“See you later.”
He expressed his thanks by purchasing a catalog, which indeed featured a cover photograph of a naked little girl shooting a rifle. Then he turned into the shock of another person, standing utterly still before him. Salo was significantly taller than this person, so he looked down.
“I heard your name called,” she said, the person. She was looking up at him: a woman, short, slight, African American. She wore the contemporary art uniform of black pants and black shirt, and had a video camera slung over one shoulder. Her other hand held a takeout cup of coffee.
“Yes?” said our father, automatically.
“It’s Salo, yes? Oppenheimer?”
“Yes,” said Salo, mystified.
“I don’t think you remember me,” she said.
You don’t think? I remember you? He gaped at her. Then it occurred to him: the wedding in Oak Bluffs. Where he had met Johanna. The bride had so many friends. Surely this was one of them.
“Oh, I do,” our father said, trying to persuade them both. “Martha’s Vineyard, right? The … wedding?” But now he couldn’t remember the name of the groom, his fraternity brother, let alone the bride. He’d lost touch with them both. And besides, after that weekend he was with Johanna, and the world had drawn itself around the two of them.
“Martha’s…?” said the woman. “No, I don’t think so. Not a wedding. I’m Stella. We were … I mean, I was. In the car. With you.”
It took a moment to land, and then another moment to release him, but by then he was lost to so many things: a clear sense of who he was, and where he was, and what he was supposed to be doing in the world. Because he had missed a signpost, a very, very important signpost, perhaps as far back as that long-ago morning, back past the years of tumbling through space while attempting to pass as a husband and father, back even further to that girl he hadn’t looked at, only an extra body in the back seat, only a shadow over his wrist as the Jeep rolled in the air. Here she was, standing in front of him, up to his shoulder, dressed in black and, appallingly, smiling at him. He would never have known her, not on the street or in the lobby of an “Outsider” art fair or anywhere else, but suddenly, now, it all came searing back at him. Her name was Stella.
“Stella,” he said.