Our city is a virtual monument to indiscriminate nostalgia, sometimes (particularly when I look out my window at the nighttime buildings smartly lit by floods and spots) appearing like a grand, jumbled stage set for all the dramas of Western history. Muscular towers of concrete and glass, paid for by young stock wizards and software geniuses, offer a heady compote of modern forms and ornaments, collapsing three hundred years of the Enlightenment—vaulting skylights, vast glass cathedrals, forests of tall columns appended by apses (in which vendors sell coffee, magazines, and snacks), death-defying elevated wings of stone, granite monstrances balanced on steel pins, and sprawling webs of metal and tinted glass suffused with natural light (for the enjoyment of employees taking their sack lunch in the firm’s “winter garden”)—into singular monuments, so that one can review an entire history without straying out-of-doors. Lighted in the manner of Rome’s Campidoglio, these generous knickknacks dominate the city at night.
Their grand theatricality is sadly compromised, for me, by the awkward, insistent fact that I grew up here. My childhood lurks behind these bright scrims and screens, unruly and constant, threatening to overturn the whole facade and reveal the actual place to me. Once, for example, about a year ago, on a date with a young friend named Herman, keeper of the computers at our school, the trashy glamour of the Downtown Fun House with its strung lights and carnival noise (a fabulous room of tilting pinball machines delivering their trilled ringing scores and piles of loose change which Herman, drunk, said was like Tivoli Gardens, which he described to me in German or Danish, making elegant gestures with his beer and singing God knows what song, so that for a moment I was far away in Denmark or Germany with my beer and this grandly sophisticated friend singing on the verge of some world war or depression) all dissolved when I spun (some would say reeled), and saw a dull canvas mural of two leering clowns painted in a hideous all too familiar greenish-pink. It had hung beside the Skee-Ball lanes covering a hole for the last thirty years, in a sad, dirty corner of this house of marvels, an eddy of quiet amidst the swirling noise. I had only ever seen it once before, when I was ten, and I had pissed there because my mother insisted it was all right to do so. You had better just do it, she said, and I unzipped my pants and did. A policeman came over, put his hand on my shoulder, and told me to stop. I could only stare at the clowns, which I’ve never really forgotten, and comply. Mama was kind enough to pretend it hadn’t happened. “Look what some boy has done,” she whispered, taking my hand and pulling me away from the corner.
Typically, the memory had ambushed me, replacing Denmark and the World War with my own messy life, and recasting my glamorous European date, Herman, as a loud, tasteless drunk. I knew all along it was there, waiting, but it sneaked up on me, rather like the smell of lavender, suppressed by the evening cold, that kept creeping out of the broad canyon of the Verdon River and stirring Stéphane from his sleep, rousing the boy enough to make me panic that he might get up and leave, might return to the world and abandon me in the shell of our last ruin, that he would walk out of his scripted fever into life, into a world we had shut out, at least for a few days. Isn’t it strange how distant the boy is, was, and those last days near the edge of the sea in France where we left pages ago, ages ago, to meet Herbert, who’s still waiting, too sober and impatient at Shackles, for our conversation to resume? And all the time the boy was here, hidden by a thought, behind a thin distraction, the noise of a conversation, in that gap between words when silence extends one beat too long.
I enjoy the noise of a good conversation, particularly with Herbert, who has opinions and a stylish way of talking, so that even when he is silent my mind is occupied by him, his nervous hands smoothing the table’s edge, his fish-dart glances, and the way his face rearranges itself around the twin-ridged frenum of his upper lip when he wants something. Adrift in my chameleon instabilities—I could become as easily a society matron as a loud sports guy in the next second, should the right acquaintance walk through the door—I never knew from which blurry edge the next bright color would bleed; Herbert was a swath of singular hue (the dusty pink of Travertine marble in the languid heat of Rome, late summer, late afternoon, for example, so antiquated and pleasing was his effect on me), a familiar resting place that imbued me with a clear, if slightly dated, identity.
“What exactly will Tristan be doing as your intern?” I asked.
Herbert stared at the retreating boy. “I think he’s so talented, don’t you?”
I turned and we watched him together. Tristan’s rambling journey led first to a cluster of tables, where his drunk friends shared a cigarette and told him a joke, which Tristan didn’t get, so there was a long period of explanation, including a great deal of scribbling on a napkin, arrows and words, until finally the boy burst out laughing while his friends sat calmly, passing their one cigarette like a last round of munitions. Tristan moved then to the bar, where he chatted with the newest “croupier” and told him the joke, pulling out the scribbled napkin, which he’d kept, all the while clutching our drink order and gesturing with it, even as the bartender cleaned the spindle of the slips that had been placed there.
“What talent? The way he deflects your interest without killing it?”
“His manner, and that cool reserve.” If Herbert smoked he would have flicked ash at this point, but he didn’t smoke. “I need someone with exactly his skills.”
“I wonder what interests he has?” Herbert might not have heard me, or he didn’t really care about the boy’s interests. “What makes you think he knows anything about working at a museum?”
“What’s there to know?”
“Well, social skills, at the very least.”
“Exactly.” Herbert brightened at the thought. “I can just see him, charming rich old homosexuals by the tableful.” Herbert said “homosexuals” as if it were a Linnaen tag for some insect-devouring plant, with a lot of sibilance and spit. “No one would be safe. Entire prewar collections of sodomite erotica would flood the museum.”
“I suppose he could worm his way into the confidence of some old widower.”
“Mmm.”
“Or the family of a rich industrialist.”
“Mmm, fawning over the crayon scrawls of the twelve-year-old Scotch-tape heiress.”
“The Infanta.”
“Or her brother.”
I said nothing, just stared at Herbert; maybe I lifted my eyebrow slightly.
Herbert took this silence as some kind of arch comment, an insight so enormous I could not deign to constrain it inside a few miserable words, so that while I was thinking nothing he believed I was thinking everything. He stared and bristled, then grinned at me and stammered, “No.” Herbert often uttered this single word when he had stumbled across something he dearly hoped was true.
“Yes,” was my obligatory reply. If I’d had my drink I would have sipped from it, but the drinks were still unmade.
“No.” We searched the room for Tristan, but he was nowhere in sight.
“Probably.” Someone kept tapping at the window with an umbrella, an older woman in Gore-Tex balaclava and rain parka, beckoning to her mukluked companion (parked at a table behind me) who responded in mime, Come in come in. Why should no one in the bar be allowed to hear the halfhearted invitation she was so obviously mouthing? Her friend shuffled to the doorway and brought half the afternoon’s storm in with her, rain and leaves