For fuck’s sake, he rebuked himself, thinking of the man’s arrogant dismissal of him and Trina, why didn’t I just call him a spoilt cunt, or a rude cunt, or even a faggot cunt? All of them were inexcusable, but none was as disgraceful — no, as blasphemous—as what he had said.
He turned into a small alcove off the main gallery and that was when he saw the Hopper, a row of tenement shopfronts, the red and yellow pigments bold and earthy at the same time, the blue of the morning sky repeated in a stretch of awning, in the hues of the curtains of the apartments above the shops. The beauty of the painting stilled the chaos inside his head; he forgot about the heat of the day, the insulting behaviour of the young man, the wretched abasement of his own response to it. The melancholy of the painting, the quiet, empty street, the evocation of solitude, made him long to be back home. He had to stop himself reaching out to touch the painting, seeking its solace.
Trina had come up next to him. He smiled at her wide-eyed admiration of the work. He leaned across to her and said softly, ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’
‘I’m not ready to talk to you yet.’
His shame had vanished completely. ‘Fuck off then.’ He didn’t care if he was overheard.
So this is contemporary art. The top level consisted of works in the collection that had been exhibited in biennales over the last forty years. Though Bill was no expert in art, he knew enough to recognise the beauty in the Rothko and the Johns, the Bourgeois and the Kruger. But in the gallery he had just entered, a large flat-topped cubicle took up most of the floor space. Branches and twigs had been arranged around it but seemingly with no attention to line or design. It looked as primitive as the little sculptures his niece brought back from kindergarten; except, at four years of age, his niece already had a more developed aesthetic eye than did the sculptor of the work in front of him. The walls were made of the thinnest chipboard, unpainted and untreated. Bill walked around the cubicle. An unsmiling security guard was standing watch and as he walked past him, Bill playfully rolled his eyes. The man did not blink, continued to look determinedly ahead. He turned around to take a quick peek at the man but the guard’s face remained stony, there was no shift in his straight-backed stance.
There was more wood and metal and wiring haphazardly thrown together as sculpture on the lower level; there was also an early sixties Mustang convertible, the inside gutted, and a video projection of a desert highway flashing across the windscreen, random Polaroids of the desert landscape around Joshua Tree stuck along its chassis. In another room, a DVD on a loop played what seemed to be a harshly over-lit video of a woman’s hand grating a plastic toy; it was not a doll, which would have at least made some kind of sociological sense; nor was it a war toy, which would also have had a discernible purpose. Two women, plump and silver-haired, dressed as though they had set off for church or temple that morning, were looking quizzically at the screen. There’s nothing there, he wanted to say to them, don’t bother, but if the day was teaching him anything it was that he should just keep his big stupid fat mouth shut.
He wandered into a passage that led to a large darkened gallery in which one long wall was divided into two screens. On the first panel a dignified old man, in a thick checked shirt buttoned at the collar, was answering questions from an off-screen interviewer. Something about the old man’s suspicious but dignified manner in front of the camera spoke of a much earlier age, as did the vivid colours of the image, shot on film, pulsating with depth. On the second panel an abstract collage of found footage — from nature documentaries, educational instructions, old family Super 8—reminded Bill of his early childhood, as did the whirring of the projector. The second panel played silently while on the first the old man struggled to answer questions about himself. Within minutes Bill recognised that the old man had dementia, that his memory had been ripped from him the way his own grandfather’s memory had been stolen. The strain in the old man’s voice, the unsettling fear in his eyes as he tried to recall if he did indeed have children, was almost unbearable to watch.
Bill let his eyes rest on the footage of a man and woman setting up a tent by a river: the saturated colours of the Super 8 stock, blown up to fit the wall, were as rich and brilliant as the brushstrokes in the Hopper painting. There were footsteps and he turned to see the elderly couple from the lift enter the room, hesitating for a moment as they adjusted to the near darkness.
Bill slipped out, terrified that they would recognise him, walked quickly to the stairs and straight down them to the ground level. It was only then that he regretted not finding out the artist’s name; the installation about the loss of memory had moved him. The three young attendants were still seated at the counter but he couldn’t face asking them, didn’t want to have to deal with their rudeness, the insinuation in the young man’s tone that he was somehow not worthy to bear witness to such art.
He pushed through the glass doors and took in breath after breath of the hot dirty air. With the exception of the Hopper and the unknown artist’s video installation, the Whitney had only offered him emptiness. He hoped Trina would feel something of how he felt, agree with his reaction. If she didn’t, if she liked that place, responded to that art, it seemed to him impossible for them to trust one another’s feelings again. He felt it would separate her from him forever.
He was awaiting her exit from the gallery with such eagerness that her sudden appearance and grim silence momentarily confused him. Then he remembered and he couldn’t suppress a groan: she hadn’t forgiven him.
She took out the bottle of water, drank from it, and returned it to her pack without offering him any. ‘I’m hungry,’ she announced. ‘There’s a place Chloe told me about, she said it was a fantastic old-school kosher deli.’
‘That sounds good. Where is it?’
‘On the Upper West Side.’
It was already close to two o’clock and it would mean having to walk all the way across the park. Or catch a cab. He didn’t want to go but he didn’t want to upset her further, so he just stood there looking indecisive.
She looked at him as if he were some idiot. ‘You don’t want to go there?’
‘No, no,’ he lied, ‘I do.’
She slipped the backpack onto her shoulders and started walking. He called her name and she swung around, her annoyance evident.
‘I think we should get a cab.’
‘I want to walk.’
‘We’re hungry, it’s hot, it’s across Central Park. Come on — let’s get a cab.’
‘No.’ She was shaking her head, her arms folded. ‘I want to walk. So I’m going to suggest that we split up and we’ll have lunch separately.’
‘No, I think we should have lunch together.’
‘I’m not sure I want to have lunch with you.’
For God’s sake, they had just been words, about a preppy stuck-up shit who had insulted her. And the little prick hadn’t even heard them. But Bill knew that there was no possibility of winning that argument, knew that he didn’t deserve to.
‘I’m really sorry. It was an awful, idiotic thing to say.’
‘It was more than that,’ she spat out. ‘It was a racist thing to say.’ Her voice wasn’t raised at all, but he was conscious of the delivery van that had eased into a park behind her, and that the driver was black. ‘I feel like I don’t know you.’