Burnaway

[cont.]
Well, it didn’t matter. She didn’t come to New York to look at postcards of art. She pushed her small carry-on bag under Alex’s bed, trudged down the five flights and walked over to the subway at Myrtle-Wyckoff. The L train was packed from the time she got on it until she got off at Union Station for the 4 up to 59^th Street. Her feet would hurt later from walking so long on cement but she liked to stroll the length of the park up to the Metropolitan Museum. Usually she walked up Fifth Avenue to the museum. The blocks of cold, formal buildings across the street from the wealth of trees. Today, though, she decided to take one of the meandering paths through the park. It was a remarkably warm fall day and the park was filled with people as if no one in the city had actual jobs. She made a point of walking by the Alice in Wonderland, that bronze polished by millions of little slithy toves which did gyre and gimble in the wabe. She and Barbara shared their first kiss there. It held good memories. As she stared fondly at the pocket watch held by the rabbit, she noticed a small blond boy peeking over the mushroom. Much to her surprise, Larry Cotter was holding the toddler up. Larry’s hair was still unnaturally dark but the sags under his eyes had returned. Cosmetic surgery apparently has a limited life span.
“Maggie,” he called out to her. “How are you? Come meet my son Jacob.”
The toddler smiled at her and waved his pudgy fingers, then stuck them in his mouth.
“How is Odessa? What’s she up to these days?”
“She’s madly preparing for the Miami fair.”
“I saw that article about her in the LA Times. She looks really good. Is she seeing someone?”
“Yes, she is.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Probably not. He’s a doctor.”
“I wonder if things would have turned out differently if I had gone to medical school like my father wanted. Tell me, why is it that women always want to improve you?”
Maggie said nothing.
“Do tell Odessa I miss her. I think about her all the time.”
“She has a phone you know.”
“How do you talk to the love of your life after she’s told you that you aren’t good enough?”
“It doesn’t look like you’ve suffered too much.”
“I’m glad my broken heart doesn’t show.”
Maggie nodded, said goodbye to Jacob and wandered her way up to the museum. She didn’t envy his wife.
She did envy Odessa, now in love again. Some people attract love, attract loving partners. And the doctor, a big bear of a man, was head over heels in love. Well, it couldn’t happen to two nicer people. You have to be open to it, Alex kept reminding her. He was right but, like him, she could know exactly how she should behave and still not do so. Maybe that’s why they were such good friends. Neither of them expected their advice to be followed.
As she approached the museum, feeling the sweat rolling down between her shoulder blades, she waded her way up through the throngs of young tourists sitting on the steep granite steps outside, sunning themselves. Inside was thankfully so much cooler. There were huge bouquets of fresh flowers like sentinels hovering over crooked lines of pale, wilted people waiting to pay for their tickets. Most people ahead of her headed straight for the famous paintings upstairs. She often never left the first floor – the rows of copies of Greek statues treasured by the Romans, around the corner to the Rockefeller Collection, for the Asmat costumes of rattan, bark and fiber. Science fiction demons could not be less human than these ceremonial costumes. Even inside of cases they had a strong smell of fear and destruction about them. The divine really should be scary to look at, not like the smiling Madonna, not like the forgiving Saints. The divine should be a mask covering the mortal, making all before it fearful of action and inaction, terrifying in its beauty. And there, beyond the glass cases, was her favorite of all, the Spirit Boat, the wuramon. For the Asmats, still headhunters when these objects were collected, the tree was the source of life and those who carved wood were the conduits to the divine. There it was, this long boat with no hull, a turtle at its center, the human figures bowed, elbows attached to their knees, looking downward, looking inward. It was so easy to envision the Asmat boys crawling over its rough surface, braving the splinters and the spirits of the recently dead embodied in it as part of their initiation rite into manhood. Their journey from child to adult in one swoop. It is so much simpler when everyone knows the rules and plays the parts. So much simpler not to think but to follow.
All important journeys are inward, though, aren’t they? We all pretend we are shamans now with special knowledge, all of us fully prepared for jumping into the unknown. But the symbolism of the boat was right. We only think we are moving forward: like the figures looking down, like the turtles returning to the safety of their shells, all journeys are inward.
Such nonsense. This is what happens when she doesn’t get enough sleep. This loop of conjecture, this folding of ideas upon one another until they contradict each other. She needed to move, get her blood flowing. The red eye flight had been noisy so she hadn’t slept more than just bits punctuated by the snores of the oversized man who overflowed the seat next to her. She threaded her way back through the crowd clogging the steps outside the museum, crossed over at the light to go along Madison back down to the Whitney Museum. She’d read that it was moving to the Meatpacking district in 2015. Didn’t that area flood with Hurricane Sandy? Several Chelsea galleries along 10^th Avenue had been flooded, basements filled, filthy water going all the way up to mid-waist on the first floor, so much work destroyed. Surely the Whitney architects had done a risk assessment, taken into account the rising water levels because of melting polar ice. Maybe it didn’t matter long term. Scientists kept issuing warnings that life as we know it is about to falter, our massive carbon emissions functioning like the dinosaurs’ meteor to catapult the planet into another mass extinction. Is that why so much contemporary art is deliberately not made to last? Not meant to last out the generation. Some prescience about the future?