Letter

When I visit my parents in Brookline I usually stay in Boris’s old room. It’s dark in there due to the brick-print wallpaper and tree cover out one of the windows. The walls—as in every room in the house—is plastered with my pictures. That’s never not weird to me, but after decades, I’ve learned how not to focus on the decor too much. What I can’t ignore is the oddness of spending nights in this room.

My parents moved to this house when I had one foot out the door. I was halfway through senior year of high school. My old room, across the hall from Boris’s, soon became Max’s. My parents half-heartedly argued that it should remain mine, but I convinced them that it should be his, even though he’d only just been born when we moved in. I had no intention of making this house my home.

I chose my room because it has it’s own entrance through a sun room on the side of the house. The summer before I left for my doomed semester at Parson’s in NYC, I turned that sun room and most of the bedroom into a studio. In my mind’s eye it’s not much different than the room I sit in typing this. Piles of books, art materials, easels; half-finished pictures tacked to the walls. Every place I’ve lived, even with compromises made for coinhabitants, looks more or less this same way. A living space is a reflection of its dweller’s mind, so I guess mine is a kind of dynamic mess, though I can reach into any pile of crap and find what I’m looking for.

Anyways, the reason I’m telling you about the bedrooms in my parents’ house is that on this visit, for the first time in forever, I slept in Max’s room rather than Boris’s. I think they started putting me in Boris’s room when I visited because for many years after I’d left Max was still living in his. So then it became the default. But sometime in the last few years I learned that my father now uses Boris’s room as a kind of study/headquarters, meaning that when I visit, he has to vacate and move over into Max’s. Habits and patterns are hard to break. I’ve been asking to stay in Max’s room ever since I found out, but they insist on putting me into Boris’s. They think I like it there. I don’t.

It’s so dark. And whenever I stay there, I think about what a shitty older brother I was to him. It’s heavy. So this time I insist on Max’s room and they relent. The sun streams in every morning, they warn me. Sort of like night and day, though it’s just across the hall. Don’t overinterpret what I’m saying about light and dark, it’s just a fact of the layout of the house within its topography. I don’t remember whether Boris wanted Max’s room when we first moved in, but I assume I had dibs being the oldest. Life’s unfair that way.

The light does stream in full force every morning. The bed is right up against the windows because there’s no other place for it. There are only a couple of my pictures here because much of the decor is how Max left it fifteen years ago. A whole shelf of completed Lego projects, a few stuffed animals, some sports trophies, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and books of fairytales in Russian that they read to him at bedtime when he was small. The old desktop computer wheezes on at intervals. The sounds of other people’s homes—even those related to me—never stop feeling strange. If there’s any trace feeling of the half year I lived in this room it’s stored in some remote lockbox in a forgotten annex of my memory. It won’t be retrieved and is unlikely to yield much of value.

Rooms used to be my primary subject matter. In this house, the vast majority of work hanging on the walls is pictures of the places I’ve lived. A few were made in the house on previous visits. I try to at least leave a drawing by way of thanks for my parents’ hospitality. They think of this as my home too, which is sweet but untrue. It was interesting to stay in a different room this time. I think I’ll ask to stay there on future visits.

But the only place that feels like home is the place on Lock Street. The one below the gut rehab that may never end.

—I reviewed a great play at the Trap Door.

—Wednesday morning my talk with writer Kathleen Rooney goes up. Listen other talks here.

The drive east goes swimmingly until I hit the Pennsylvania part of I-80. Time slows to a crawl as roadwork alternates with roadkill punctuated by rain and wind.  A couple hours away from the North Bergen, NJ Super 8 where I’ve reserved a room, the highway becomes a parking lot. I ignore the electronic billboard warning of the crash ahead and have no smartphone to try for a detour, so I sit and wait. A few cars up a man takes his dog for a walk between parked trucks. Clusters gather to discuss and complain. After we move up a few inches, the impatient trucker behind me taps my rear bumper in his eagerness to move on. He apologizes profusely and seeing as there’s no damage to my rented Maxima, I forget about it.

We start moving two-and-a-half hours later. As we ease by the accident site, halfway into the shoulder of the median, it’s clear why we were stuck so long. The ass end of an 18-wheeler points skyward, perpendicular to the roadway, the tractor not visible in the ditch below, as two oversized tow trucks sit to either side, a small committee of men loitering about, no doubt debating the best way to right this wreck. Three other trucks are by the curb, in various states of damage. I can’t complain about the inconvenience caused, but whatever wind there was at my sails is now blowing straight in my face. By the time I locate the motel it’s after 10pm, no time to find out what North Bergen’s all about.

The next morning, I dip into the Lincoln Tunnel, whose Jersey side is a few hundred feet from where I slept, and tool around Manhattan awhile before realizing that I’ve lucked into being there with a car on a Sunday, which means free parking wherever I like. I park right in front of Mick’s record store, then walk north to the Morgan. Gil meets me there at 11am and we go in to look at Holbein’s portraits. The small galleries are glutted with a crowd whose median age makes me feel like a tike. I think a few date back to the times of the paintings on show. The room with the Dance of Death engravings must read differently to them. More personal, closer to home.

Edging close to one of the impossibly detailed faces, I endure a litany of pompous close-reading from the expert ahead of me. She assures her companion that some mediocre apprentice must have botched a bit of the subject’s hair because it blends into the foliage behing his right ear. I’d wager my life’s fortune this woman has never done anything with a paintbrush that anyone will ever recall. But she knows everything there is to know about the work of others.

Afterwards, we walk south, looking for a place to eat. Gil doesn’t have a spot in mind, so I suggest Veselka, but we can see from a half a block away that there’s a line out the door. We duck down a few steps into a restaurant  nearby. It’s all but empty inside. The room is dominated by a large bar, crowned with a sculpture that looks like the Golden Calf. The only other diners soon get up and make their way to a back room. Thereafter, a half dozen others come in and beeline there as well. We speculate what the place is about. Certainly not a brunch spot. Some kind of cabaret or club. Whatever it is, we’re not in the know, which is perfectly fine for our purposes.

After saying goodbye to Gil, I go into the record store and shoot the shit with Mick awhile. It’s a new job, but he’s worked at record stores most of his life, so it’s sort of old hat. We talk music and art. He tells me he’s begun creating a new language in his free time.

Then I drive to Boston. Somewhere in Connecticut, the clerk at a gas station tells me he’s only there as a favor to a friend. He restores classic cars and is the biggest supplier of honey in the region. He names an impressive number of beehives which I can’t remember. His friend wanted him to work at the gas station after his wife left him and he survived a cancer scare. If I’d stayed at the counter longer, there’s no telling how many more parts of his life story I’d know. I got a good start on his biography in under five minutes.

The next afternoon I go to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to see the Philip Guston retrospective. It’s the show delayed years because the museums lined up to host it were afraid that his Klansmen paintings would be misunderstood in the wake of the country’s recent racial reckonings. The curators have stepped all over themselves to guarantee that not a single visitor could misinterpret the artist’s intent or be offended in the least. 

I’m offended, but not for any of the reasons they’ve gamed out. It’s a visually busy, neurotic hang. All the wall labels, charts, videos, and extraneous detrita make it difficult to just take in the art. Guston’s been near and dear to me for forty years. I’ve got an image of his tattooed on my gut. No mountain full of guilt-ridden explainers could completely ruin my time with these pictures, but the staff of this museum give it the old college try. To add insult to injury, two of the curators lead a guided tour through the galleries the same time I visit. It’s a game of leap-frog to be in whatever room they’re not.

The overall impression recalls the recreation of Hitler’s Degenerate Art exhibit that toured museums thirty years ago. The organizers took pains to add context to explain the Nazi Party’s hatred of some of the great masterpieces of the early 20th century. That show celebrated art that was unjustly mocked and maligned. The purpose of the Guston show is less clear. The curators clearly don’t trust viewers to make up their own minds about this artist’s intent. Perhaps they themselves aren’t sure that renderings of hooded men are not a tacit endorsement of hatred. Maybe we’ve reached a point that every last nuance must be spelled out in neon letters half a story high. I hope not.

I doodle in my sketchbook trying to tune out the learned voices and enjoy the company of the lumpy pink and beige figures that populate Guston’s canvases. I’ve known them a long time. Nobody’s verbiage—no matter how well-meaning or wrong-headed—can spoil my good feelings toward these flawed, tormented beings.

Some of them work better than mirrors.

—I talked to musician Rick Rizzo and wrote a review of Tobias Carroll’s forthcoming book.

Dear S,

I spent the last few hours rereading your letters. I have them bundled together and bound with silver string in the back of a desk drawer. They’ve followed me to a house and three apartments since we lost touch.

By the time your mother called to tell me you died, we hadn’t spoken a couple years. Our friendship——if that’s what it was——cost us both plenty. Two broken marriages, dozens of friends estranged, so many drunken blurry nights and days. We only “worked” in counterpoint to our other entanglements. Our bond served to torpedo the success of any connection to others.

Yet we were never enough for one another. I was never what you wanted. There were times when I’d talk myself into believing I was in love with you. But the truth is I was just lonely and you were there and vulnerable and I felt like you needed me. It wasn’t physical attraction. You were every other guy’s type, but not mine.

My pile of letters is out of sequence. I took the time to gather yours aside from other correspondence but didn’t bother to order it. Perhaps it isn’t necessary. The themes recur and recur and recur. Whatever guy you’re with falls in love with you and you’re shocked and put out. You can’t understand why they can’t just be friends without needing to fuck you. The frequency of your writing always increases when the paramour du jour is pressuring you into commitment you don’t want or need. You always leave the door or window open a crack for your other admirers when things get serious with the one you’re with.

We get along best when you’re far away. Face-to-face contact confuses things. In letters and phone calls the ties that bind us can remain beautiful and clean.

Dear B,

I was surprised to hear from you. It’s been awhile. I thought maybe we were done with each other after that last visit. People grow apart. It’s what we do. Kids don’t know that. They think their friends will be their friends forever. Rarely happens. Still, for all those miserable school years, you’re all I had.

Now I don’t even remember what brought us so close. Sounds cold to type it out in ink on paper. When there are gaps in friendships, it gets hard to pick up the thread. What felt so sturdy, so permanent, now looks tired, insubstantial. I get weary trying to reconstruct whatever it was that tied me to you.

Why did you write today? Are you feeling cast off by whoever you’re with? Is it a cry for help? You always played so tough, but underneath the bluster, you’re soft and weak. You romanticize childhood in embarrassing ways. Do you really want to go back to that kind of helplessness? All we were in charge of was what cartoon to watch or what junk food to swipe from Jaffe’s. You recount those awful years as if they were a paradise.

I feel pity for you if that’s what you truly believe. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and chalk up the whining and wallowing to the current breakup.

When a thing falls apart, we shrink, retract into our shells, nurse our wounds. I guess your cocoon is packed with Strat-o-matic, popcorn, and Warner Brothers cartoons. The chick walking out the door is tired of paying for your pot, tired of hearing your elaborate reasons for not getting a job, sick of indulging your monomaniacal kinks in the boudoir. But all you can think of is a nostalgic yesteryear.

—I wrote about a play full of old memories, the Reader reran my Navalny review, and a new one of the first Barry Levinson movie worth seeing in at least twenty years.