Maybe she broached the subject at the museum and not over coffee or the like because in the galleries as on our walks our gazes were parallel, directed in front of us at canvas and not at each other, a condition of our most intimate exchanges; we would work out our views as we coconstructed the literal view before us. We did not avoid each other’s eyes and I admired the overcast-sky quality of hers, dark epithelium and clear stroma, but we tended to fall quiet when they met. Which meant we’d eat a lunch in silence or idle talk, only for me to learn on the subsequent walk home that her mother had been diagnosed in a late stage. You might have seen us walking on Atlantic, tears streaming down her face, my arm around her shoulders, but our gazes straight ahead; or perhaps you’ve seen me during one of my own increasingly frequent lacrimal events being comforted in kind while we moved across the Brooklyn Bridge, less a couple than conjoined.
That day we were standing before Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc—Alex looks a little like this version of her — and she said, apropos of nothing: “I’m thirty-six and single.” (Thank god she had broken up with her latest, a divorced labor lawyer in his late forties who had done some work for the health clinic she’d codirected before it folded. After two glasses of wine, he invariably began regaling everyone within earshot with stories about his time undertaking suspiciously vague humanitarian labor in Guatemala; after three glasses of wine, the lawyer started in on his ex-wife’s sexual repression and general frigidity; after four or five, he began to interweave these incommensurate discourses, so that genocide and his feelings of sexual rejection achieved implied equivalence within his slurred speech. Whenever I was around, I made certain his glass was full, hastening the relationship’s demise.) “Not a day has gone by in the last six years when I haven’t wanted a kid. I’m that cliché. I want my mom to meet my child. I have seventy-five weeks of unemployment benefits and insurance plus modest savings, and while I know that means I should be more afraid to reproduce than ever, what it actually makes me feel is that there will never be a good time, that I can’t wait for professional and biological rhythms to coincide. We’re best friends. You can’t live without me. What if you donate the sperm? We could work out your level of involvement. I know it’s crazy and I want you to say yes.”
Three translucent angels hover in the top left of the painting. They have just summoned Joan, who has been working at a loom in her parents’ garden, to rescue France. One angel holds her head in her hands. Joan appears to stagger toward the viewer, reaching her left arm out, maybe for support, in the swoon of being called. Instead of grasping branches or leaves, her hand, which is carefully positioned on the sight line of one of the other angels, seems to dissolve. The museum placard says that Bastien-Lepage was attacked for his failure to reconcile the ethereality of the angels with the realism of the future saint’s body, but that “failure” is what makes it one of my favorite paintings. It’s as if the tension between the metaphysical and physical worlds, between two orders of temporality, produces a glitch in the pictorial matrix; the background swallows her fingers. Standing there that afternoon with Alex, I was reminded of the photograph Marty carries in Back to the Future, crucial movie of my youth: as Marty’s time-traveling disrupts the prehistory of his family, he and his siblings begin to fade from the snapshot. Only here it’s a presence, not an absence, that eats away at her hand: she’s being pulled into the future.
The presence of the future
The absence of the future
* * *
We were coconstructing a shoe-box diorama to accompany the book Roberto and I planned to self-publish about the scientific confusion regarding the brontosaurus: in the nineteenth century a paleontologist put the skull of a camarasaurus on an apatosaurus skeleton and believed he’d discovered a new species, so that one of the two iconic dinosaurs of my youth turns out not to have existed, a revision that, along with the demotion of Pluto from planet to plutoid, retrospectively struck hard at my childhood worldview, my remembered sense of both galactic space and geological time. Roberto was an eight-year-old in my friend Aaron’s third-grade class at a dual-language school in Sunset Park. I had asked Aaron if there was some way I could be of use to one of his charges while also smuggling in occasional Spanish practice. Roberto was intelligent and sociable, but even more susceptible to distraction than the average child, and Aaron thought our working on a series of projects after school might trick him into, or at least model for him, modes of concentration. I had no official permission to be in the school, although Aaron had asked Roberto’s mom — emphasizing that I was a published author — if she was comfortable with the prospect, and she was.
During our first session, Roberto had a nut-related allergic reaction to the granola bars I’d brought but failed to clear with Aaron and, as the boy crimsoned and wheezed, smiling all the while, I was seized with animal terror; I imagined having to open his windpipe with a pencil. Luckily, Aaron returned from his meeting in an adjacent classroom and calmed me down, explaining Roberto’s allergy was minor and the reaction would soon pass, but that I should be careful in the future; he didn’t know I was bringing a snack. The third or fourth week of tutoring, when Aaron was again out of the room, Roberto, without warning, mutinied, informing me he was going to find his friends and, since I wasn’t his teacher, I couldn’t stop him. He bolted down the hall and I walked quickly after him, cheeks burning with an embarrassment I feared any adult witnesses would confuse for a species of lechery. I eventually located him in the corner of the gym that was also the cafeteria, in a small circle of his classmates that had formed around a truly gargantuan water bug carcass, and I lured Roberto back to the classroom only by promising I’d let him play with my iPhone.
By now, the third month of tutoring, we were close friends: for snack I brought fresh fruit he never ate and Aaron had had Roberto’s mom threaten the child about disobeying me. In the initial aftermath of my diagnosis, when every few minutes I believed I was dissecting, the time I spent trying to coax Roberto into focusing on the mythology of the kraken or recently discovered prehistoric shark remains was the only time in which I was myself distracted from the potentially fatal swelling at my sinus of Valsalva.
Thus only a few days after the Marfan evaluation I was again in a child-sized chair, cutting out with those awkward elementary school scissors various dinosaurs we’d printed off the Internet onto construction paper to serve as prey or companion for the apatosaurus in the diorama, no doubt anachronistically, as we hadn’t the patience to determine which dinosaurs corresponded to what geological period, when Roberto returned to a subject that had entered his dreams since he’d watched a show on the Discovery Channel about the advent of a second ice age.