Chapter Thirty-Three: The Met
86th and Lex was as close as they could get to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was early evening. A few grim automobiles pulled up in front of the imposing old buildings, depositing men and women in overcoats with umbrellas. They walked west, to Fifth Avenue and then south a few blocks through the rainy, concrete hush. Blue street lamps, widely dispersed, lit the pavement. The cobalt light was broken up between the shadows of the trees and awnings like pieces of stained glass. The museum emerged from the rank trees and vegetation of the park. Its monumental steps led up to banks of ancient revolving doors. A few orange and red lights lit portions of the brutal, 19th century facade. They walked up the steps and pushed through the slow doors into the lobby. A small crowd was gathered around the entrance to the galleries. There a security guard took donations and handed out yellow hard hats with lamps attached and gallery maps. Both young people and eccentric, moth eaten elderly people were there to hear Miss Bailey. Once the province of old families in the neighborhood and antiquarians, the Met was now the stomping ground also of those on the edge of fashion: artists, prostitutes, hangers on. Viewing the galleries before sitting down to drinks and music had become a thing to do.
Felix and Peter wandered the unlit galleries. The halls were endless, echoey caverns of grey and white and black marble. They had to walk with their heads down to see their way though they could follow the lights of others. The lights on the helmets raced and bounced along in a pack then staggered off in different directions as the crowd broke up and entered different galleries. They were in a series of rooms full of Renaissance paintings with huge gilt frames stacked floor to ceiling. The lamps were too weak to light the highest of the paintings. The circles of white light played across the surfaces. With a little practice Felix could fix a painting with his eyes and carefully let the beam travel over the surface, taking in its details. Then he would stand back and see the whole canvas dimly. At least, Felix thought, there’s art to look at. His mouth was dry, and his heart beat hard anticipating Peter’s questions about Paregane. But they didn’t come. He confined himself to spare, cryptic utterances about the art, or bitchy comments about the other people.
They spent time in the Egyptian rooms, staring at sarcophagi. The mummified remains beneath the glass cubes looked like they had been partly devoured by the stone. Dark, leathery flesh pulled back on teeth and empty eye sockets. Mummy cases with stunned, almost happy faces stood haphazardly about. The displays along the wall were crammed with scarabs, papyrus scrolls, figurines of jackals, ibises and asses. The few descriptive plaques had faded to illegibility. He had no idea what any of it was or meant but there was something stifling about it. They were buried in the building and the shadows and now the funerary art swallowed them into its gut till he felt like he was in a pyramid. Felix knew about pyramids, they had studied them in elementary school. He had made one out of soap in third grade and they watched educational shows about the secrets of ancient Egypt, how they embalmed the Pharaohs, the history of tomb raiders. Then in high school there was a fad for mummy movies recycled out of recently rediscovered and restored films. But these mainly spewed out phantasmagoric images of melting flesh and bat- like humans.
The lamps reflected off of the glass cases so he had to press up close to see into them. It was silent. It smelled of dust and stone. He wanted to speak but couldn’t. If he opened his mouth to speak he might blurt it out. The truth sat in him like shit. Peter stood beside him. He had to know. He was torturing him on purpose. The air was cold. They drew together and Felix felt them shiver as one. Finally Peter spoke. “Let’s go to the temple,” he said.
To get there they had to go through galleries of American colonial paintings, portraits of governors in white wigs with dead lips, men with hunting dogs, women staring out of eyes a little too big. There was furniture, canopied beds, escritoires. They looked at 19th century paintings then, academic paintings and the Impressionists. These were familiar from college.
“The thing to do is find a wing no one’s been to,” Peter said, as they scrutinized the worn map for a route to the temple. “We stumbled into the Islamic wing a couple of months back and everything was covered in cobwebs.”
They wandered around an exhibit of Haut Couture, with diminutive mannequins dressed in emerald sequined evening gowns; uncannily similar to ones he had seen on t.v. with Moises. They were dulled by dirt and some lay on their sides, tipped over and never set upright, the child-sized clothing lifeless on the floor.
Finally they reached the Temple of Dendur. Two hundred years ago the museum had purchased and reassembled the Egyptian temple in a specially constructed glass addition. Several giant oaks had been felled by storms over the years and now the glass lay smashed on the ground. It glowed in their lamplights. Trees had encroached from all sides; the park was growing up around and over everything. The temple was a huge block of hewn stone covered in moss and lichen, diminished by the vines, limbs and trunks that swung in and out of their lamps as they danced over the walls.
“It’s so strange,” Peter said.
“It feels like some long deceased world conqueror like Tamburlain once ruled here and built this place as a mausoleum, as if he believed he could drag the spoils he had plundered with him down into the underworld.”
Peter nodded and the lamp went up and down Felix’s body. They focused their beams on each other’s faces, blinking back the light. “I think it’s time,” Peter said. “I could use a drink.”
“Me too.”
They surveyed the temple and the glass one last time and walked to the cafe, which was located on the main floor, in a black marble room with heavy velvet curtains, maroon and dark green. There was a small stage with colored lights and a baby grand piano. Tables for two were arranged in front of the stage, each with a candle in a glass, an ashtray, salt and pepper and sugar packs. Along one wall, against the heavy drapes, a makeshift bar was set up and along the opposite wall was a counter serving hot drinks, sandwiches and sweets wrapped in cellophane. Ceiling spots lit statues and busts on pedestals, muscular Greek men with tiny penises and hollow eyes, grotesque Hellenistic faces in the throes of physical and mental agony, a randy Venus looking matronly and whorish, more out of Shakespeare than Virgil. The entrance was a long hallway lined with suits of armour on either side, lit by spotlights in the ceiling, glinting off the shiny metal and giving the lowered beavers an unnerving expression of life.
They walked in their unbroken mood of enchantment with a few other couples into the room, ordered gin and tonics and took a seat in the front row of tables. Peter lit the candle, which he then used to light a long, thin cigar. After a while in which they sat silently sipping their cocktails, Miss Bailey came out on stage in a long teal and gentian evening gown woven of glass beads. She smiled a coarse, vulgar, good-humoured smile full of bad teeth. Her hair was pinned up exposing her attached ears. Her bare arms shook and wiggled as
she gestured and began to speak in a thick, borough accent which was both exceedingly rare and eagerly sought after if genuine. There were things that couldn’t be faked, nuances of the letter ‘R’, of terminal syllables, of speed, vocabulary and diction.
Twenty or thirty people were crowded around the tables, mixed young and old. The men wore black tuxedos with bow ties and cummerbunds and tails. In the dark they looked retro and elegant but a close look revealed how shabby they were, the cuffs frayed, the tails chewed up like the ears of an old tomcat. The women wore evening gowns like Miss Bailey’s and like Miss Bailey’s their evening gowns were ancient hand me downs, worn by generations of women sinking slowly into poverty and irrelevance, their only wealth the enormous apartments they inhabited. A haze of smoke hovered near the ceiling. Miss Bailey sat down at the piano, hit a few notes and cleared her throat and went straight into Stormy Weather. Polite, necessary applause followed but Miss Bailey knew her audience was incapable of expressing in handclaps the desperate enthusiasm they felt for her. They all felt it, for the museum, for the music, for each other. Age had left them the brittle containers of bitter memories and feelings. Generations of loss, of hunger lived on in them. They were the heirs of a dead world that would not vanish. The past was drawn and written on their hearts like hieroglyphs in a burial chamber. They had gripped the hands of dying people who had touched other dying hands, hands that had delivered the new world out of the old. Long, cold winters with snow on the street, summers and springs of delightful sun, avenues choked with traffic, sidewalks so thick with people they were described as a sea of heads, and cities lit up through the night, thronged with crowds, playgrounds alive with the shrieks of children.
Scattered among the old crowd were the young, a dozen or so like Felix and Peter, Felix in his wrinkled artichoke suit, Peter, relaxed, graceful, in a flush of youthful beauty and ease not just imagined, attained and lost so fast it doesn’t even become a memory.
As she sang One More for the Road Peter said to Felix, “I know what you’re doing.”
Felix was relieved to have it out at last, even though he was terrified of losing all he had gained, terrified of hurting Peter with his betrayal. “I can’t help it,” Felix said.
“It’s none of my business, of course. But you live with me, Felix. Your presence, when you’re on Paregane, is so imposing. Understand, it’s attractive.” He stumbled a bit. “I find it entrancing and scary all at once. But the others. It’s all they talk about. Moises doesn’t fuck me anymore. Edsel’s at our house all day long. When we go to parties they don’t leave your side and soon the four of you have drawn the room around you. Everyone wants to fuck you Felix. It’s driving Promethea crazy.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault, I guess. I like having you live with us.”
What? Felix thought. Then, cautiously, he said, “It’s not too crowded? I’m not in the way?”
“No, it’s not that. There’s always room and we need the rent. But I’m afraid of losing my boyfriend. Our life together–I mean, try and understand how important Moises and Promethea are to me, to each other. We’ve been together since college.”
Felix knew this was only one part of it, but it certainly wasn’t his place to remind Peter that he had rejected Promethea for Moises. “Do you want me to leave?” he asked, trying to conceal the panic he felt at the prospect of leaving behind his bed, pillow and blanket at the end of the room, or Promethea’s legs and feet.
Peter looked at his fingernails. “I don’t know what I want. When you’re using Paregane you’re so, strong, it’s like this black hole we’re all falling into. In a way I can’t resist what you want and in another way it just scares the shit right out of me. It seems to spread to their bodies even, so the light I see, the queer, otherworldly sun of your eyes, has lit up Promethea and Moises too. You–you’re like some beautiful animal, some godlike creature, a leopard made out of gold and jewels found in a Mayan tomb. Someone you want to fuck so badly it feels like to do so would mean dying and then it’s like dying gives me the pleasure a murderer feels squeezing the life out his victim. The spasms are all alike. Even these words and thoughts of mine, I should have kept them to myself. You incite me to this, Felix.” He spoke in a rush, without regard for what he was saying or who might hear.
Miss Bailey sang Forty Acres and a Mule, Highway Work and Is That All There Is. Her voice was a little off, spirited, humorous, edged with years of whiskey and cigarettes. Her piano playing was just passable. The performance was a lot like the clothes, elegant, flawed and old.
Felix said, “I think I should go. You’ve been so kind to take me in. I don’t want to–” he choked up. He didn’t want to leave them at all. “You’ve been a family to me. I’ve never known that. I’m just trying to find some peace of mind, find Veronica. I can’t live without her and no amount of stoicism works. The obsessive thoughts, reliving every moment we lived together, the constant analyzing, the fruitless search for a person or thing to accuse and convict of her murder. You knew me when she was alive. You know what it is to love like that. To be in the constant grip of a phantom. I just have to find her.”
“If I kicked you out the others would kill me. But let’s face it, Moises and Promethea are dying to take Paregane and if they do, I’ll lose them. The way it is, with me working all the time, and them all obsessed with you, it’s like we don’t exist as a family anymore, not for me anyway.” He became suddenly focused and looked Felix in the eyes. Felix felt Peter’s eye trying to pierce the rich brown and black wheels of his own, trying to enter him through the pupil but his dark, clear eyes were like autumn leaves reflected on a pool of water. He could absorb the thoughts and desires and orders of a hundred Peter Nguyens and one by one their lights would go out, joining his. “Don’t sleep with my boyfriend, Felix. And don’t break Promethea’s heart.”
“I promise,” Felix said.
