He never saw Uncle again. When he asked his grandmother what had happened to him, she said he had retired. Mai pen rai. It doesn’t matter. Father wondered if he had been drugged or whether he had simply fallen ill. He had been suspicious, worried that the grown-ups had hidden something from him. He checked his whole body for signs of a beating, but there was nothing. “It must all have been a fever dream,” he said, “but it frightened me. I couldn’t decide what was real and what wasn’t, and no one would tell me.” Then he said, “Secrets and silences and more secrets and more silences.”
“You never told me,” my mother said in a low voice. Her face was all squashed with sympathy. Watching her, I realized how that same look, when it was directed at me, drove me crazy. Too much empathy is annoying, but I’ve never understood why. You’d think it would be nice. Maybe it’s just mothers. You don’t want them that close. At the same time, I wondered if Khun Ya had ever looked at my father like that. I had the sudden thought that she might have preferred him as a grown-up.
What had he meant about more secrets and more silences? Why didn’t I ask him? Have I thought about this more since I’ve known about my father’s erotic life? He had secrets, too, secrets and silences. Why had he never told my mother that story? I sometimes wonder if I really knew him at all.
Oscar thinks my parents were both odd people. Once he used the word decadent to describe my father and neurotic for my mother. He thinks Ethan is very smart but “falls into the high autistic spectrum somewhere,” and he likes to call me the “fairly well-adjusted” one. He married the “fairly well-adjusted” one in the family. He thinks Father’s money protected us from the “real world,” that if we had been poor, our lives would have been very different. He is right about that. Still, he knows that real is not my favorite word. It’s all real — wealth, poverty, livers, hearts, thoughts, and art. (My mother used to say: Beware of naïve realism. Who knows what real is?) And then Oscar always looks at me and says, “Do my job for a day, and you’ll see what I mean.” He does his therapy with kids in foster care in a miserable little office in Brooklyn with a broken desk. The kids he sees are not adjusted at all, because their lives have been bollixed up, often from the very beginning. I fell in love with Oscar because he is devoted to his work, and he has lots of stories to tell. Oscar doesn’t care much about art. Maybe that’s my rebellion. I married a man who doesn’t give a hoot about paintings or sculptures and goes to the movies to be entertained.
Sweet Autumn Pinkney (edited transcript)
I haven’t seen Anton for years, and I don’t know where he is or what he’s up to now, but we had a moment of true balance when I was an assistant working on History of Art. My friend Bunny told me that this book was going to happen, and I thought I ought to tell my story. First, I’d like to say that, whatever other people might think, Anton was definitely not a dumb person. He read books, and he thought about big ideas. When I met him, he had this book called Anti-Octopus by two French guys that had something to do with how Freud was wrong, and it was very intellectual. But Anton was a spiritual person mostly, striving for the higher consciousness, even though he had just started making baby steps, if you know what I mean. I was at the beginning of my journey then, too. I was a follower of Peter Deunov, or Beinsa Douno, the Bulgarian master, and I was starting my work with chakras and healing crystals, and Anton and I talked a lot about cosmic rhythms, energy, and astrological signs. Not everybody puts all these knowledges together, but I think they’re all related in the big universal picture of things. Anton was kind of doubtful in the beginning, but then I think he realized that I had it — the power to read auras. I’ve always had it since I was a little kid. I just didn’t know what it was. Sometimes the energy fields, sounds, and colors I felt coming from people were so strong, I almost fell over, or I felt blockages in them, like they were in me, and I’d feel sick, kind of dizzy and faint. Training and meditation helped me to get my gift under control and use it for healing others. I have a practice now, and people from all over the greater Northeast come to me for help.
Right from the first day, I felt there was something out of whack in the studio — weird energy. There were already two assistants on the job, Edgar and Steve. The sculpture part was done, so we were helping put all the pictures on the sleeping woman. (I liked her better naked and plain, to tell the truth.) Anton had his plans — great big sheets with all kinds of writing and notes on them. He seemed anxious and was always leaning over and squinting at them. His aura was bluish, yellow, greenish, but some stoppage, too. I could see and feel how tense he was, so I put my hand on his arm and just left it there. In less than a minute, his aura got more and more blue; it was pretty cool. Anton smiled at me, and I remember thinking he might have died as a little child in a previous life — there was something so young in him, so unformed but full of spiritual potential. Probably the second or third day, Harry came in.
I felt her like a red scream. I had to back up. I mean, I wasn’t even close to her, and I had to step backwards because she was emitting so much all at once, racing, multicolored, and churning, but too much red and orange. Harry had a lot of power, passion, and ambition, but there was some black in her, something blacked out, blotted out, and I saw that, too. It can be a sign of night — grief, some kind of harshness. Anton wilted a little when he saw her, but I could feel their closeness. It was hard for him to match her energy, but he tried. It might have been good if I had just put my hands on her, too, but I didn’t dare. Too much voltage. I didn’t really get the Venus sculpture, what its greater meaning was supposed to be, but I caught the vibrations between Anton and Harry like sparks.
I hardly remember Steve now except that his aura was a very light pink, and he had long hair. Edgar radiated green most of the time, a pulsing yellow-green, partly because he had his music on all the time in his ears, so he wasn’t responding to much around him, just the techno beats in his ears, while his chin bobbed up and down, up and down, like one of those carnival dolls with its head on springs. I can’t remember when the story boxes came in, but I saw Edgar look at them, and he seemed excited for the first time and turned a little orange. Anton said he had done them at home because they were small. They arrived all finished. I don’t think I would be upset now, but I was at a much earlier phase of my enlightenment then, and the boxes made me kind of low. They were sad — the little children in there, the man’s arm, the lady who couldn’t fit in her own bathroom, the writing. They made me think of gloomy colors and whining sounds, and I said to myself, I’ve got to let Anton know, and that’s how the story between us really got started.
I worked late one night and told him about the boxes, and he looked upset. When I put my hands on his, he said, “What is it about you? You calm me down. I didn’t used to be like this. Things used to be cool.” Then he waved his hands around the studio and said, “Things were good, but now it’s changing.” I told him it was something about Harry, and he looked a little funny, but he didn’t tell me anything then, so I gave him a back rub, and he told me I was magic, and I said no, just psychic. I had learned some Tantric sexual practices from a teacher, Rami Elderbeer, who was dispensing his personal wisdom in NYC at the time, techniques that lead to higher minglings and ecstatic oneness, the dissolution of our bodily differences into the higher states where there are no boundaries. Rami knew I had the power from the start — he saw the indigo in me — an indigo child, he said.