Memento Park Read online

  I told him the figure. Once it gave me pleasure to flaunt this information. Now it felt petty. There was a long silence. Then:

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Yeah, you know, after taxes, commissions, it’s not as much as it sounds.”

  “It’s a lot of money, Mátyás.”

  Dogs. Shaving.

  “Yeah. I guess it is.”

  “Well, thanks for calling.”

  “Hang on, I need to ask you something.”

  He hesitated. “Sure.”

  Why must you always be such an inscrutable, remote, self-righteous bastard?

  “The Australians called me. What’s the deal with this painting, Dad? They said you didn’t want it.”

  The ensuing silence was so long I thought we’d been cut off. “Dad?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You don’t what?”

  “I don’t vant it.” Vhy not?

  “I don’t understand, Dad. This thing is potentially worth a few million dollars. Did they tell you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And what? It has nothing to do with me. Or with you.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Don’t talk to me like that.”

  Fast cars. Dogs. Dogs.

  “I’m sorry. But Dad, please. You never told me … I never knew your family owned art.”

  “There are many things you don’t know, Mátyás.” Rebuke, not invitation.

  “Well, why don’t you change that? Tell me about this painting. Tell me why you don’t want this money.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. No story, no painting, no money.”

  “Well, that’s helpful.” He hated sarcasm, it drove him batshit, so it was always my fallback tactic. But this time, he surprised me. After another long silence, he struggled as he spoke with what appeared to be—and how I resist the word even now that all is known—sincerity.

  “Mátyás. You must listen.” He sighed. “There is nothing there but loss. Heartbreak. Everything connected with that painting is…” His voice fell to a whisper. “This one time you must trust me to … to keep you safe.”

  My father had never spoken to me like this before. Not once in all the years of my life. It was the father I’d dreamed of. So simple, so direct, so genuine. It could only be a scam.

  “Yeah. All right, Dad. Whatever you say.”

  Another protracted silence. Then: “Kiss Tracy for me.” And his inevitable send-off: “Pushpushpush.”

  And just like the Ghost Father, he was gone, dissolved into the morning mists. I held the phone in my hand. The bedsheets were soaked with sweat, as though I had just completed a marathon. It seemed unimaginable to me that he’d hung up, that my father, the schemer, the pursuer of angles, could be so unmoved by this pot of gold. For a moment, I considered the impossible notion that he’d told me the truth, that there was a bucket of horror at the end of this rainbow, but I discarded it as quickly as I’d considered it. It was far too early in the tale for such momentous shifts. Fortunately, thanks to the World Jewish Congress, I had a contingency plan.

  THESE ARE THE THINGS I associate with Rachel, with the first time I awoke beside her: dusk in the city as the streets downshift with evening traffic, taxicab headlights plangently illuminating the avenues; the tiny crooked streets of Paris’s Jewish quarter; bundles of fresh vegetables overflowing the stands of a weekend farmers market, earth-covered mushrooms especially; bales of hay, warm and pungent under the midday sun. It’s such a dreadful cliché, but I watched her as she slept, my arm trapped beneath her head, the thick, ropy strands of her wheat-colored hair cushioning my bicep. In my small Budapest hotel room, I found myself uneasy at the transgression I’d committed, yet tranquil within Rachel’s perimeter. She twitched, a nocturnal rabbit staying one step ahead of dream foxes. I watched her face for some hint of subconscious distress but instead she seemed to smile, knowingly. I marveled at contrasts. Where Tracy’s hair was flaxen and silky, Rachel’s was rough-hewn and unruly; Tracy’s skin was so flawless as to appear untouched, whereas Rachel’s bore the traces of a dozen slights and imperfections over the years. And yet I beheld in her a serenity I could not understand, an ability to attend life’s daily outrages with such repose. It was the same serenity I would come to see in Rabbi Wolfe, although I thought her a fool for not raging against the dying of her light. In Rachel’s case I envied it, coveted it.

  But at first, long before all that came to pass, she was my lawyer and I her client. When she returned my call a few days after the new year, she explained that her assistance was being provided at a reduced rate in light of the historical importance of the case, but with the full resources of a heavyweight Century City law firm behind it. That she felt a strong personal conviction about matters of restitution. That she would be honored to play a role in reuniting me with my property.

  Before I called, I visited the law firm’s website, where I found Rachel’s profile and photo. She was, it appeared, a newly minted partner, the youngest at the firm at thirty-three, I would learn later. It was fortunate that Tracy’s jealousy had receded, I would not have been able to reassure her about this one. On the one hand, it seems hard to imagine any additional impetus to pursue this claim was required; Ms. Mockley had given me millions of reasons to proceed. And yet, was there something about Rachel’s photo, about the way she looked, that drew me in? It wasn’t merely that she was beautiful—she was, is, but we mustn’t forget with whom I was sharing my bed. Did I already perceive that serenity? Can it be that there was something familiar about Rachel? Something in her eyes, in the curl of her hair, that whispered “home”? Or am I just rewriting the story now that the facts are all known? I wouldn’t put it past myself; I’ve always been one for jumping to the last page of the script, unwilling to dwell in uncertainty for too long. It’s something that has frustrated the better directors who have worked with me, who wish I was a bit more “organic” or “genuine” or “free,” to use the many words they employ to try to get what they want out of me. But I think the word they are all avoiding is “honest.”

  I don’t know what I expected to find in Rachel’s office, what manner of exotica I imagined would greet me. Undulating palms? Jasmine incense? Dead Sea salts? Why was I so intently on the lookout for exotic signifiers? I was thus unprepared for the quotidian reality of a successful young partner’s office: chic, modern, all streamlined elegance with smog-streaked views, and almost no personal touches of any kind. I was more than an hour late for our meeting. I had forgotten just how bad Friday afternoon traffic on the Westside of Los Angeles could be, the avenues clogged with multicolored metallic beetles, especially in the weeks after the holidays when all the vacationing commuters were back on the road. It’s a privilege of my lifestyle that I am largely able to avoid the circadian tos-and-fros of Los Angeles’s workaday traffic patterns. As a result, I hurried into her office, breathless, ashamed, at nearly four-thirty. Rachel’s manner was impenetrably apologetic.

  “I’m really sorry, Mr. Santos. My assistant tried to reach you. I’m afraid it’s gotten too late for our meeting.”

  “Matt. Please. I’m sorry, traffic was positively biblical. A plague of Priuses.”

  Did she smile? I don’t remember. I have pored over every gesture, every inflection, every moment of that first meeting and now the impressions are rubbed smooth like sandstone beneath centuries of waves. I think she smiled. Does it matter? Surely not. And yet, it mattered to me at the time. With the likes of Tracy at home, what did I imagine I was up to with this … with this what?

  This Jewish girl? Can I possibly have been thinking that?

  Why do the words desert me so suddenly, Virgil? We both know a shortage of words is not my affliction. “You’re the one for the pretty speeches, the poetry, the eloquent statements,” Tracy would complain later, after all began to fester, exposed to the light. But now? Here? In this first moment? Did I know something?

 
Gah. Let me begin again. I walked into Rachel’s office, apologizing in my most charming manner for my tardiness. She was equally apologetic, and expressed consoling sympathy about the vagaries of Los Angeles traffic. But she was firm in her insistence that we would need to reschedule, there was no longer enough time left in the day for what needed to be done. I glanced at my watch, four-thirty. Did I register the surprise I felt? What ambitious Los Angeles lawyer calls it a day before six? She noted the look, she told me later. She didn’t much care for it, recoiled from its implication. But she said nothing. Instead, as she gathered her papers, she gave me an outline of what the restitution process was likely to entail and how little would be required of me. A few signatures, an interview, but the effort of preparing the documentation to be submitted on my behalf was to be almost entirely Rachel’s. She would pull all the pieces together, submit my application, and then we would see. The only complication she could envision was the possibility of a competing claim, but her preliminary research showed none had been filed.

  She paused over a photocopy of the picture of my father’s Budapest living room.

  “It might help to get this authenticated. It’s such a compelling piece of evidence. Do you think your father might sign an affidavit? It could be useful later.”

  I sighed and shook my head. “I wouldn’t count too much on his cooperation.”

  “So I’ve heard. That’s weird, don’t you think?”

  “Everything to do with my father is weird.”

  She smiled and set the photo into a file, which she slid into her briefcase. “Well, weird or not, I’m hoping it will be fairly easy as these things go.” Her tone suggested the meeting had come to an end, but I was not ready to quit her so quickly.

  “It can’t be as easy as all that. I mean, that’s it? We’re done?”

  “Well, no, it’s not quite that easy, it’s true—which is why I’d like you to come back next week. We can do this on Monday. I have an opening at three. You’ll have the weekend to plan your route and be on time,” she said, and rose with a smile. “My assistant will book the appointment.”

  I rose with her. “Won’t he wait just a little?” Nervy boy.

  “He will,” she said, looking at her watch again. “But sunset won’t.”

  How did I overcome the deficit of that initial impression, my tone deafness, all the cues missed, the signals read incorrectly? It was a disastrous performance on nearly every level. And yet, just a few weeks later, we would be standing in a museum together, looking at paintings. I’m sure there was a path from the one moment to the next but I can’t seem to remember it. Does it seem portentous to say we were guided there? Of course it does. But based on what happened next, I am left with no other suitable explanation. We went through our obligatory goodbyes and confirmed our contact information. Rachel picked up her briefcase, to underscore the finality of the interview. I followed her to the door of her office. Then it happened.

  Throughout this tale, I have encountered moments that have seemed, in turn, like the ones that changed all that followed. Perhaps they all have been, in their way, the story beginning anew over and over again. Mr. Calvino, allow me to present Mr. Escher. You two will have much to discuss. But this, this truly was the beginning of the things that turned out to matter most. As I followed her through the door of her office, I watched as she reached in passing with her left index finger and allowed it to graze a mezuzah she had affixed to the doorframe. How can I explain that touch, its effect on me? I vibrate with it still, that gentle stroke. I replay the moment again and again, trying to understand how so simple a movement could have unleashed so much in me. I was startled by the intimacy of the thing, how joined to the mezuzah she became in so fleeting an instant. It electrified me. It wasn’t that I wanted to be the mezuzah, to feel the shock of her finger trailing gently across me. Rather, I wanted to feel for myself whatever it was that had animated the gesture. I wanted to understand this profound, silent serenity, this reverie; to know how she had accomplished this astonishing feat of seeming substantial and ethereal at once, of being transported by a devotion that was not reflexive but ran deeper than consciousness.

  More questions. As though there weren’t enough already. But these burned with a different intensity, an urgency that my father’s painting, for all its millions, could not match. Much later, I asked Rabbi Wolfe about mezuzahs in one of the few pleasant conversations we had. I wondered if their placement in workplaces was normal or sanctioned. She advised me that, according to halakhah, that arcane and complicated body of Jewish religious law, every doorway in a Jewish person’s home or business that leads into an area fit for human habitation or in which a person spends significant amounts of time requires a mezuzah. I remembered, with shame, the mezuzah on the front door of my family home, mummified under dozens of coats of old paint. As a boy, I asked my father about it, and he shrugged and informed me it had come with the house.

  I know it is time to talk about Rabbi Wolfe. She’s hovered at the perimeter of events long enough, a spectral presence, and she deserves to be admitted. To be faced. Her role in this affair is, after all, decisive. But I’m not ready yet. Of all the aspects of this saga, I find her the most vexing. I cannot even describe, with any certainty, my feelings about her. Anger? Sorrow? Pity? A strange kind of love? A hard woman to know, our rabbi, and an even harder one to like. Wisdom without warmth. Yes, she looms large. But her hour upon the stage will emerge soon enough. Patience, Virgil. Trust the tale, not the teller.

  IT’S GOTTEN STUFFY and warm in here, which surprises me. I would have imagined the climate-control apparatus ran all night to protect the auction house’s ill-gotten gains. Apparently that is not the case, although I suspect some intricate network of devices and quivering needles in the back is poised to bring a vast lumbering array to life to adjust things should a certain critical point be reached. The thought is comforting—to be looked after, provided for, responded to—and I find myself longing for so convenient an arrangement to regulate my own disorderly affairs.

  I can feel the coarse bristling fabric of my chair’s backrest dampening my shirt. I have thought to ask Virgil to run a little air through the place, but the reproachful look he gave me when I pulled the chair over leads me to believe my request would not be warmly met. It was a defeat of some kind to sit down, puncturing the effect I’d worked so hard to establish: the intense, solitary brooder of unknowable depth.

  The painting has changed yet again, transformed beneath my scrutiny as the hours pass. To what can I attribute this latest evolution? I have spent so many hours with my attention fixed on this canvas that it’s difficult to imagine there is anything left for me to discover. Perhaps there isn’t. It isn’t that new details emerge. Yet the character of the whole keeps shifting. Certainly, the painting seems softer to me now, its edges smoother and less forbidding than they seemed just hours ago. The blues, in particular, once electric, now seem to pulsate thickly, slowly, like an aristocratic heartbeat. Whatever the truth of it, it is surely a different painting now than it was months ago when I first stood before it with Rachel at my—

  But I get ahead of myself. Patience, Matt, as the old man would say. For now, the painting. The thing itself, here on the wall before me. My thoughts return to the human hand that painted it, long lost, reduced to dust in blood-soaked European soil. Could Ervin Laszlo Kálmán have imagined, in his wildest dreams, that his work would last? He had his ambitions, amply documented. But his world was so riven by tragedy, did he merely cast his forlorn children into the world and hope for the best?

  Lest I judge this wayward father too harshly, I remind myself that, like the rest of Europe’s youth, he was summoned up and flung into the charnel house. He entered basic training late in 1915, and records indicate that the emperor found him an inferior specimen, sensitive and unsteady. When he should have been learning how to operate his artillery, he was discussing the finer points of synthetic cubism with other artistically inclined soldiers.


  He did not last long on the front, having a complete nervous collapse in the spring of 1916, undone by the carnage at the Battle of Lutsk. He squatted in a trench soaked with the blood of a childhood friend who bled to death from a severed leg, the leg Kálmán would later commemorate in his self-portrait. He was discharged and sent to a sanatorium, where he was treated for what they used to call “shell shock” with morphine and veronal, beginning a lifelong addiction. He lost thirty pounds and was plagued by nightmares. He frequently shat blood. Under the patient ministrations of his doctors he began to make some progress until he learned of his friend Heti’s death in July of 1916. He collapsed again and did not lift a pen—or a brush—for another year, during which he was in and out of a variety of mental hospitals.

  Things began to turn for him late in 1917, a year in which he resumed his correspondence with other artists, most notably his lengthy discussions of color with Matisse, whose influence can be seen in his famous bather paintings of that year. These were the first big canvases Kálmán had undertaken since his conscription, and they showed the mark the war had left on him, as I would see for myself in a few weeks at Rachel’s urging. They are the first of his works now accorded masterpiece status. He briefly managed to overcome his addictions and, with the war’s end in 1918, he returned to Budapest to mourn the deaths of his many friends. But before returning to Budapest, he spent three weeks relaxing at Lake Balaton.

  This particular fact has always stood out to me for the simple reason that as a child I spent two summers there, at what we used to call sleepaway camp, on the banks of Eastern Europe’s answer to Lake Tahoe. It admitted one foreigner of Hungarian extraction for every twelve native Hungarians, and was my mother’s idea, this insistence that I should have some connection to my heritage. My father could not have cared less. I was a miserable and lonely nine-year-old and wrote my parents plaintive, prestamped postcards begging to be brought home, postcards that went unanswered. We were taught Hungarian every day, not a word of which I have retained. We were fed Hungarian meals. We were taught to sing the Internationale, which would have incensed my father had he known. It did not occur to me at the time to use this information to expedite my passage home. The legendary Santos opportunism was, in my youth, a recessive trait.