Memento Park Page 22

  I turned my attention to his work. There were some paintings, some sculpture, a hodgepodge, unified only by the artist’s abiding sense of the bizarre. I was struck by a bronze of a human face with massive ram’s horns extruding, and topped with white, brittle hairs. On my third glass of wine, I alternated between mirth and fear. My interpretive radar was alcohol-blunted and could not quite differentiate charlatanism from profundity.

  A young woman came and stood beside me. She was quite beautiful, dark-haired, festooned with leather wristbands and bracelets, and her arms bore lines of tattooed text. Don’t Give Up the Fight, her left forearm advised. She spoke to me, resuming midsentence, it seemed, as I regarded the object. She spoke animatedly, never taking her eyes from the art, parsing the work, praising its tension and its surprising depth, given that the artist was such a shallow, womanizing cocksucker. Then she turned and registered with irritation that I was not who she thought. She stalked away and it occurred to me that I could now buy every last piece of art hanging in this gallery.

  I don’t know how long I stayed but it was long enough for me to get drunk. The crowd began to disperse and I was swaying before a canvas when I sensed someone at my elbow. I turned to find the artist. He greeted me, said I looked familiar. Did he recognize me? Did he sense my newly minted fortune? Or was he merely being friendly? I told him that I’d just wandered in. A civilian, he said, and asked what I thought of the show. I turned to face him, trying to hold his eye with my own crossing pair, and told him that I didn’t really understand it but it scared me a little. He seemed satisfied with the answer. It was a desirable outcome, he said, we placed too high a premium on comfort, spent too little time confronting things that disquieted us, that we didn’t understand. That we weren’t meant to understand. This confused me. Not meant to understand? What kind of an artist didn’t want to be understood?

  He smiled without answering. This was the shallow cocksucker? I was so confused I forgot to ask him about posterity. He shook my hand and wandered off to join the young woman of the wristbands, who smiled and kissed him. Arms entwined, they greeted other visitors as I stumbled off into the balmy night, reeling from the cheap cabernet in my veins, and began the long walk home.

  * * *

  RACHEL WAS SITTING ON MY STOOP when I got home. I hadn’t seen her since Chicago. I was surprised and not.

  “How long have you been sitting here?”

  “I don’t know. A while.”

  “Here, come inside.”

  I moved to unlock the front door but she interposed herself in between. I nearly plunged my key into her belly. She refused to give way. Beneath my mezuzah, she fiddled with the buttons on her coat, agitated, not making eye contact with me.

  “I sang to you, Matt.”

  I didn’t understand.

  “In your hospital. That night. I sang to you.”

  So I hadn’t imagined it. She said it as though she was confessing to a regretted intimacy.

  “I feel like I’ve been part of something that’s all wrong.”

  I knew she meant the painting but I wondered if she was also referring to that afternoon among the statues. I thought of asking her but I didn’t really want to hear the answer. As long as there’s an empty space, I can fill it with any version of events that suits me. Once the words are spoken, the cement begins to dry.

  “Why do I feel like this? Like there’s some deception going on here?”

  “I don’t know, Rachel. You tell me.”

  “That thing you did, going to Chicago, not telling me. It was awful.”

  “I know. And I’m sorry. But this isn’t about that. If I hadn’t gone, would you feel any different?”

  Rachel had no answer for that. She surprised me by pulling out a cigarette and lighting it with a shaky hand. She inhaled deeply, rubbed her eyes.

  “I didn’t know you smoked.”

  She ignored me, very much in her own nutshell. “My dad, since his retirement, it’s been all Talmud all the time. He’s actually become quite the scholar.” She paused and looked up. “You do know what the Talmud is?”

  I couldn’t tell if it was a dig or an honest question. I nodded.

  “Not your thing, I know. I guess it’s not mine, either, not like with him, anyway. But he read me this bit the other night—he’s got a scary sixth sense—from, wait for it, Ethics of Fathers, right?” Gallows chuckles. “It says”—she squinted as she recalled the words—“that freedom of choice is granted, and the world is judged with goodness, but in accordance with the amount of man’s good deeds. So I guess I just wanted to ask you: Does this feel like a good deed to you?”

  I stood there aching, my throat constricted.

  “It’s not rhetorical, Matt. I’m asking you: Does this feel like a good deed?”

  Full of desire to speak but without words.

  “Rachel … I don’t fucking know.” Too drunk, too tired.

  She stamped out the cigarette. “Figure it out, would you? Push yourself.”

  Pushpushpush. I watched her walk off for what I was certain was the last time. As I watched my father walk away. I am always watching people walking away. Give me the lines and I’ll speak them. Spell out the action for me and I’ll do it, sometimes with aplomb. But call for volition, agency, and something keeps me rooted in place.

  I turned back to my doorframe, to my mezuzah. It appeared to be mocking me, rakishly aslant, and I laughed, a wild and slightly unhinged laugh. I went inside, found my toolbox, extracted a flat screwdriver, and returned to the door. I stood there clutching the weapon, chest heaving under my subsiding laughter, and raised the point toward the mezuzah’s edge, which seemed to be giving me the finger, and I began to pound at the butt of the screwdriver with the heel of my palm. It slipped under the body and I twisted and pulled on the screwdriver until, with a crack of protest, the mezuzah leapt from the doorframe and landed somewhere in my bushes, where I left it as I stepped inside and turned off the porch light.

  I stood in my darkened dining room and picked up my phone. Eleven messages, mostly from press. I listened to Rabbi Wolfe’s voice mail. It was brief, strangely friendly. She congratulated me on the outcome of the arbitration and said she would not try to fight it, that she didn’t have the time, and anyway, the evidence had shaken her certainty. She speculated that perhaps this award was in its own way some kind of restitution for what happened to me at the banks of the Danube. For there is no man who has not his hour, she said, and no thing that has not its place. This long, dark story, so laden with sorrows, where would it end? It was over, yet it felt unfinished. I stepped back out into the night, dropped on all fours, and drunkenly groped around in the darkness until I located the mezuzah. I brushed it clean against my pant leg and slipped it into my pocket.

  THIS LONG NIGHT has begun, at last, to lift. I feel the change before I see it, a lightening in the room, a lightening outside the window. The fluorescent glow that has attended me all night has been dimmed by an unseen hand, and I’m reminded of the moment when the house lights come up. Final bows and then it’s time to leave the stage. But not before a final twist. Consider it a reward for your patience, Virgil. For your remarkable indulgence this evening.

  A month or so had passed since I’d been awarded the painting and I’d settled into a gray and featureless routine of drinking, sleeping late, and occasional auditions. Ricky McCabe had gone obligingly to his death. I spent my time thinking, about Tracy, about my father, and even a little about Rachel. My days were marked by a dullness, an omnipresent regret that weighted me down like a man drowning in a winter coat. I was like a monk who had renounced his worldly self, albeit a drunk, morose, self-pitying monk.

  The stillness I’d cultivated was punctured one morning, just days before Budapest Street Scene was to ascend to the auction block. I was hungover, as had become my fashion, and at first, in the grips of a nightmare that had me back at the Danube, being kicked and beaten once more. The dream pounding I was receiving blurred with the pounding
at my front door and the pounding in my alcohol-addled skull, but eventually I roused myself and shuffled downstairs. I squinted into the brilliant morning sunshine, which backlit the delivery boy on my stoop like some celestial messenger. He asked for a signature, which I drew with my nail-bitten index finger across the display of his large electronic tablet, and then he turned and departed without further ado, leaving a battered box on my doorstep. I bent over—what a cacophony of trumpets that set off in my poor head—and pulled the carton inside.

  The box was large, nearly three feet square, but with little heft. The pitted, sagging cardboard had been battered by a transatlantic journey. My heart was trampolining, its heavy beat further amplifying the misbegotten ache in my head. Why did this box, with all its international transit markings, seem so sinister to me? I backed away from it slowly, and at once felt myself ridiculous. I pulled a pair of scissors from a drawer and attacked the brown paper tape that held the flaps closed. I opened the box and recognized the fusty odor of Klara’s Budapest apartment. A small note lay atop the contents. Klara was thanking me again for my kindness, which had so improved her situation. She’d made some repairs to her apartment, had decent food, and would even have heat throughout the winter for the first time in a decade. She’d had some keepsakes from my father—he’d fled Hungary in such a hurry that he left some items with her, always intending to recover them and never getting around to it. She almost handed them over while we were there but held back, reluctant to part with them, with him. But she felt in light of my generosity the only proper thing to do was to send them on to me. She apologized for the delay and hoped I might find them helpful.

  I removed the contents, laying them on my coffee table to perform a quick inventory. Mostly junk, useless things, really. A few books and magazines in Hungarian. A child’s toy, a battered sailboat. An envelope of photos. These drew my interest first, and I sat down as I flipped through them, no more than two dozen or so. They were mostly black-and-white photos of what I took to be family members I did not recognize. I did a double take when I found a picture of myself as a young boy that turned out, upon closer scrutiny, to be a photo of my father. He was playing in the very courtyard I had visited, and I cannot recall ever seeing him looking so innocent, so like a child. He was always preternaturally old to me but here he was, no less young and joyful than I had been at that age.

  There was one last surprising photo of my father as a young boy. He was standing at the front of a temple, was wearing a dark suit and a kippah, reading from what I took to be a Torah. Could this have been a bar mitzvah photo—a bar mitzvah he had never mentioned to me? His father was in the photo, proudly looking on, and there was no anger left in me, Virgil, only sadness.

  There were a few other objects Klara had sent along. Some articles of clothing. One of the lace doilies I’d seen in the photo of my father with the Kálmán painting. The last thing in the box was a roll of what appeared to be tattered, musty canvases. I pulled them out and unfurled them on my living room floor.

  There were six in all. Four appeared to be preparatory studies for a copy of Budapest Street Scene, and two were incomplete attempts, abandoned for reasons unknown to my nontechnical eye, but somehow failing to meet my grandfather’s exacting standards. How long I stood there trying to figure it out, Virgil, what a dimwit I must seem to you. Why would my grandfather bother with copies of his own painting? It made no sense to me. My mind returned to my grandfather’s storied knack for imitation. And all at once it became clear to me. My father’s—and his father’s—greatest score. It wasn’t a copy, it was a forgery. Created to deceive, like my own urgent report cards. It was the only logical explanation: they must have duped Halasz, their Arrow Cross intercessor, and traded him a forgery for their exit papers. Which could only mean the painting about to go on sale wasn’t mine, that the painting glimpsed in that creased black-and-white photo that Judge Handlebar had placed such faith in was a copy. However Cassian Yuhaus came into possession of his painting, the genuine article, and whether it really did belong to Rabbi Wolfe or not, it wasn’t through my family. It has nothing to do with you, my father had said. I sat on the couch, clutching one of the paintings, in awe of the fraud my grandfather had executed. A little bit of talent, or at least skill, had presented itself in the Santos family line, after all. I thought again of those ersatz report cards and smiled. What, after all, is acting, but the skilled copying of another? What, I now wondered, became of the version Halasz took, undoubtedly lost forever? Had he destroyed it when he realized it was a fake?

  Fake. The word boomed within me like a thunderclap. I looked over to my father’s ashes, still perched atop the fireplace, the toy Corvette resting beside him. You brave, brilliant, sneaky bastard. In that moment, Virgil, I loved him more than I ever had. Something had been restored to me, at last.

  THE CEMETERY, perched on a Los Angeles hillside with distant views of the ocean, had none of the wildness, none of the gothic, overgrown atmospherics of its Budapest cousin. Cemeteries and synagogues. How circular my travels have been. The lawns were well tended, the spaces bright and wide-open, bereft of trees, as if to place no obstruction between the mourners and Hashem’s heavenly digs. It was a radiant fall morning, crisp and distantly smoky.

  “May I?” Tracy asked, pointing at the urn as we walked through the cemetery. It felt strange to relinquish my father’s mortal remains, but I handed him over, and she cradled him with tenderness, smiling as though they’d just shared a private joke.

  We walked in a silence that was neither rebuking nor punishing but merely acknowledged we had passed into a place beyond words. Only my father’s admonition hung as a cloud over the landscape, Do not fuck this up. I looked at Tracy with regret, aware of the ruin I’d caused, and felt how totally I had misunderstood my father’s final commandment.

  The night after Klara’s package arrived, I watched McCabe’s video myself, in its entirety. I wanted to see what Tracy had seen in it, what had moved her so. What I saw surprised me.

  What struck me most was the vacancy in his eyes, a cold, black emptiness that contrasted with his whispered intensity, as if he were somehow half formed, incomplete. He would respond to each muffled question with a variation on “I didn’t do it.” There was something almost childlike in his disavowals.

  “How did the blood get on your clothes?”

  “I don’t know.” He’d shrug, looking trapped by each question. “I tried to help her up.”

  “Were you angry at her?”

  “No, never. She was nice. Nice old lady.”

  Please don’t let me die.

  And on it went like that, McCabe conveying a terrified innocence that I now knew to be a lie. But for his dead eyes, he appeared to have convinced himself of the truth of his narrative—he’d certainly convinced Tracy of it. He’d believed in it wholly, because his life depended on it, but belief isn’t enough, and so another unreliable version of history falls. Documentary evidence, Rachel had called it. I’m not so sure any such thing exists. Perhaps there is nothing beyond the story.

  Tracy had ignored my calls, texts, entreaties, until I mentioned that I was burying my father and thought she might want to join me. After some hesitation, she agreed, and now I wished the walk had taken longer, given us more time in the wordless morning, but we were quickly upon the hulk of rising marble. The inside was quiet and dark and our eyes took a moment to adjust from the sunlight. Every sound, every moment seemed magnified in the polished stillness of the columbarium, where we were met by an attendant. He was tall and stooped, and his dark suit made me think of one of those old Russian chess grandmasters. His gaze was respectfully averted as Tracy handed my father back to me. She brushed a tear aside. I was moved by her sorrow, Virgil. I wanted nothing more than to take her into my arms, to apologize for all my misdeeds, to apologize for underestimating her so thoroughly. My hand trembled as I set my father into his niche, a small padded square in a massive wall of squares, reminding me of photos I’d seen of
the Automat. I stepped back and nodded to Spassky, who closed the glass door and locked it, handed me the key, and left us to our business.

  As his footsteps receded, Tracy lowered her head and began muttering. At first I thought it was a Catholic prayer, remembered from childhood, but I began to make out the Hebrew words: Y’hei sh’mei raba m’varach l’alam ul’almei almaya … She continued a moment longer in this vein, ended with a hushed Amein. The surprise must have been evident on my face because she blushed a bit and looked away. Mourner’s kaddish, she explained. I googled it. She looked at me evenly. You’re not the only one who can learn lines, you know. I laughed, a gentle, appreciative laugh, moved by this final kindness.

  Teach it to me, I said. I want to say it before we go.

  She scrutinized my eyes for a moment, to ensure I was not mocking her, nodded, and led me through the prayer, syllable by syllable. When I looked it up myself soon after, I was struck by the focus on God, the absence of the deceased from the prayer. Beyond any blessing and song, praise and consolation that are uttered in the world. I was right. Truly, my Tracy had been touched by God.

  Now I must stop calling her that.

  She asked if I wanted a moment alone with my father. I nodded and she went to wait outside. We’d come to an end, after so many months, and I pressed my forehead against his niche and my arms wide on either side as if I were holding up the wall. I felt bereft, Virgil. I stood there, my shoulders shaking. So much loss.