Heart of the City (32 page)

FOR BOB Koppel, Sundays brought a sense of exhausted possibility. Sundays were the stern-faced schoolmarm standing, arms crossed, at the end of each week, reminding us of life’s relentless repetition, and of the futility of escape. For much of this cold, gray day, he knocked about the apartment, pacing the parquet floors and thinking that his psychoanalytic session the next morning could not come too soon.

His mother, a French teacher, had died of a brain tumor when he was twenty, and when she left the world something of himself went with her. The lessons of tradition and purpose the rabbis had taught at the yeshiva in Queens seemed suddenly hollow. What did they know of the real world, of its cruel exactions? It was shameful for a grandson and nephew of great rabbis to think this way. Yet it was he how he felt.

Looked at in a certain light, the eight years since his mother’s death had been a search for a replacement. If not for her, exactly, then for meaning. After graduating from Yeshiva University, he signed up with the Vista program and taught school in Harlem for a year. When his tour was over, he enrolled in a doctoral program in philosophy at Columbia, finding intellectual solace in the writings of the existentialists and phenomenologists. For four years Bob worked, if without much conviction, toward a PhD. But then, around the time of a breakup with a longtime girlfriend, he dropped out. All that remained now was psychoanalysis. Its focus on dreams and symbols and on enigmas of mind and self was about the only thing in his life that felt real.

Lying on the couch, still in his underwear, he ran his fingers over the stubble on his face. He wondered, mostly as an intellectual exercise, how long it had been since his last shave. Then,
studying the runic shapes of clouds lolling past the window of his East Eighty-fifth Street apartment, he fell asleep. He awoke in a fog. He looked at his watch—3:05 p.m.—and then at the front door. A scornful pile of unopened mail filled a stand by the doorway, and for a moment he considered opening a few letters. Leafing the pile in search of a safe place to start, he found the square-shaped program from his visit the week before to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When he was a boy, the Met was one of the few places besides synagogues, Shabbat dinners, and bar mitzvahs where his mother and father took him on weekends. He came to see it as a kind of secular temple. It was in some ways the last tether to his past.

Under the listings for December 21 was a lecture on “The Christmas Story in Painting” and a film,
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
. Great, he thought, shaking his head and understanding why his parents often skipped the museum in late December. Deeper in the program, though, he noticed a few exhibits he hadn’t had time for.

Just an hour or so was left before closing. He put on a ragged pair of Levi’s, a wool sweater, and a red hunting coat. Then he headed out of his building into the frostbit air.

MARA WANTED the sight and sound of other people. That is, she wanted not so much to talk to people as to move among them. It was what people did at Christmastime, wasn’t it? Why should she putter around the apartment and mope?

She swallowed a few spoonfuls of leftover
rijstaffel
and then wrestled herself into bluejeans, Brazilian leather boots, and a blue sweater she had knitted for herself. She combed her hair, letting a few blond locks rest on the high cheekbones that were another part of her inheritance. From her apartment, it was three blocks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If she hurried, she’d have an hour before it closed.

She leaned, shivering, into the arctic wind blasting up East Eighty-fourth Street. Everyone there will be with someone, she thought. Everyone but me.

At 3:15, a tour group was leaving the museum and coming down the steps to Fifth Avenue. Couples were huddling for warmth, their words turning to steam. Mara hustled past them and into the warmth of the Great Hall. Behind the stairs—in the Medieval Sculpture Hall—was the Christmas tree, a twenty-foot-tall blue spruce. It was bedizened with eighteenth-century Neapolitan figurines of censer-toting cherubs in undulating robes. At the base was an exquisitely detailed baroque Nativity scene, with crèche shepherds and sheep, a group of curious peasants, and the three Magi with a menagerie that included a camel, goats, and an elephant.

Mara examined the faces of children as they entered the room: first the open mouths and wide eyes, then the slow smile and giddy questions. “Look, Mommy, look, do you see?” “Can we get one, please, Daddy?” “How do they put the angels up so high?” A father in a dark suit knelt down, draped his arm around his young daughter, and told the story of the Nativity. Something welled inside Mara. She turned away, toward the escalators, but a tapestry she hadn’t noticed before stopped her cold.

BOB NOTICED the woman as he entered the Medieval Sculpture Hall. He felt immediately sorry—faintly heartbroken even—that she seemed to be leaving. Her hair, the color of wheat, fell simply, like some milkmaid’s, down her back. Her cheekbones looked Nordic and her jeans, so snug they might have been lacquered on. Not every object of beauty here, he thought, was in the catalog. He glanced up at the glimmering tree for only a moment before turning his head again. She hadn’t left. She was there, somewhat distant now, near the entrance to the hall, her
arms on her hips and her right leg forward a little bit. She looked as though she were taking notes on a painting.

Then something else: farther along the same wall, perhaps twenty feet away, another man was stealing glances at her while his wife, or girlfriend, was looking in the other direction. Others see it too, Bob thought. It was a kind of validation. When he turned back a second later, though, the woman was gone. Again, a pang akin to heartbreak. What had so absorbed her seemed like the most pressing question in the world. What kind of art drew women like her?

He approached the wall where she had stood and was surprised. It was not a painting at all but a somewhat faded tapestry. There was a sea of anxious faces, kings with scepters, bent men with canes. There was a young woman with hands clasped at her navel, a naked baby. It was a difficult image, not even particularly colorful. The heavy-handed religious imagery was even a bit of a downer. It didn’t make sense. Was this woman in graduate school? A student of art history, perhaps? What in Heaven’s name was this thing? Bob squinted at the plaque: the tapestry, it said, was an allegory of man’s fall and eventual salvation. Brussels. Early 1500s. When he saw the title, Bob shook his head and smiled. The tapestry was called “Episode from the Story of the Redemption of Man.”

ON THE second floor, at the entrance to the special exhibition galleries, there was a sign for a new exhibit: “Patterns of Collecting.” Yes, Mara had read something about it in the
Times
. The Met’s swashbuckling young director, Thomas Hoving, had wanted to both show off the encyclopedic scope of the museum’s collections and explain its policies and procedures for acquiring works of art. Some five hundred of the twenty thousand objects collected between 1965 and 1975 would be on display, ranging from Egyptian sphinxes to Roman bronzes, from a French fountain
and Tibetan robes to a New England highboy and photographs by Man Ray.

The exhibit required the cooperation of all eighteen of the Met’s curatorial departments and had prompted Hoving to commission a companion paperback, an anthology of the Met’s curatorial war stories called
The Chase
,
the Capture
. What had the critic said? The exhibit, true, was a paean to the breadth and quality of the Met’s collection. But it was also an act of defensive-ness on the part of Hoving, who had been criticized for his ravenous pursuit of new treasures, with price no object. In 1962, while still an associate curator, he had traced a twelfth-century Bury St. Edmunds Cross, carved in walrus ivory, to a bank vault in Zurich and openly pleaded with the dealer. “I am being devoured by this cross,” he said. “I want it, I need it.” He got it. In 1970, as director, Hoving authorized the Met to pay a record-setting $5.5 million at auction for Diego Velázquez’s
Juan de Pareja
.

Mara had discovered painting and writing as a girl, her imagination an escape from her parents’ austerity and the upheavals of her early years. Latvia had been whipsawed by successive Soviet and Nazi occupations by the time she was born, in Riga, in 1942. Her family—her father was an esteemed physician; her mother, a nurse—became refugees in wartime Germany. With the help of a Rhode Island doctor and the Unitarian Church, the family immigrated to the United States in 1950, settling in Newport. Looking around this city of seaside mansions and patrician country clubs, seven-year-old Mara knew almost from the moment she arrived that she would never feel at home. Her father would build a successful medical practice in the city—treating the city’s upper crust—because the people in those mansions liked his high European bearing, the very thing that made him so cold at home.

Until the birth of two siblings when she was twelve and thirteen, she had been an only child. In her isolation, she would amble along Thames Street, making up stories about the people
inside the old bars and musty houses. She wrote elaborate poems. She painted pictures of lonely boats on the seashore. In high school, she won the poetry award and high praise from teachers. But none of that mattered to her parents. When they saw her hunched over her sketch pad or writing journal, they sputtered disapproval. “Waste of time,” her mother said. “Who needs words? Especially yours.”

College, at Brown, wasn’t the escape she’d hoped for. When her parents saw creative writing and art courses on her report card, they threatened to cut off tuition. They wanted her to switch to more practical subjects, like science or German. Only now, after graduating and moving to New York, did she have the freedom to indulge her passions. She had day jobs—as a substitute teacher, a receptionist at a film-editing firm, an assistant to the head of a company that shipped American films to Germany. But her real life, as she saw it, unfolded after work. In ballet class. In front of the easel. In the hour before bed, when she filled her journals with free associations on art, literature, and life.