Whistler

CHAPTER 1

“Old guy,” my husband said in a low voice, his lips touching my ear. “Near the exit sign.”

“Stop it.” The joke itself was old as rocks.

Jonathan raised his eyebrows. “I’m serious. He kept looking at you in the ticket line. Then he followed us through Medieval Art, and now he’s just standing there. Do you see him? He looks at you whenever you’re not looking.”

“Everyone cuts through Medieval,” I said. “It doesn’t constitute stalking.” We were in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York.

“I didn’t say stalking.”

It wasn’t crowded by the standards of the Met, no blockbuster Van Gogh exhibit or Costume Institute to gum things up.

If you took the time to notice the people around you, chances were you’d see some of them again in a different wing.

“That guy?” I asked, tipping my head slightly in the direction of a tall, thin man who looked like a French film star—black jeans, loose black curls.

My husband straightened up. “Could you take me seriously for one minute?”

Why did the French guy imply a lack of seriousness? I didn’t ask. Jonathan was leaving tomorrow for what might be a long trip, and I had just posted grades for the end of the school year. We decided to make use of the city, have a nice day. “I’m taking you seriously.”

“Okay, let’s go up a floor and see what happens.”

“We just got here.” I liked the American Wing, the Tiffany glass and baseball cards, that tragic bust of Lincoln.

“We’ll come right back.” He started walking in the direction of Armor again, that dimly lit hall of schoolchildren staring at swords and shields. A shiver of gladness passed through me because they were not my schoolchildren and it was not my field trip.

“A suit of armor could weigh more than sixty pounds,” the teacher said as we passed, reading her facts off a display card, though the children were plenty old enough to read.

The boys would all be picturing themselves going into battle with a mace and the girls would be thinking about the burdened horses that had to carry both the men and their armor.

“Still with us?” I asked Jonathan.

He looked without looking. Either he was making the whole thing up or he would have been a brilliant spy. “Yes.”

We picked up speed in Medieval Art. Jonathan hates how fast I walk and will often stop to let me sail on past without noticing he is no longer with me, but in Medieval Art, he set the pace.

I guess the old guy hung in there because when we got to the Grand Staircase, Jonathan asked me if I’d taken a jealous lover.

“Funny,” I said, and up we went.

“If he follows us to Modern and Contemporary, we’ll know.”

“What will we know?” I set my stair-climbing pace to his, mindful of his knee.

“That he’s in love with you,” Jonathan said generously. “That old guys can’t get enough of you.”

It was not the first time I’d regretted having told him this.

In my defense, I only said it once and that was decades ago, never thinking that one day we’d be married and he would hold on to the information like a souvenir postcard from another era.

My husband had taken me as his date to a hospital board dinner more than twenty years ago when the head of general surgery all but climbed across the table to sit beside me.

He then proceeded to tell me his every thought, about the emergency appendectomy he had performed before arriving, about what the food on our plates was doing to our livers, about starlight.

When finally the evening was over, Jonathan apologized in the valet line.

“I have no idea what that was about,” he said.

I knew what it was about, but it was stupid of me to say it to Jonathan: Old guys love me.

They had always loved me. I never experienced a flicker of interest from a man my own age, but show me a man ten or fifteen years older, twenty years older, and he’d be pulling me aside to tell me he couldn’t remember the last time he felt this way.

I meant to be funny, but Jonathan received my explanation as permission.

There in the valet line he took me in his arms and kissed me as his car was pulling up, the headlights dousing us in white light.

He was forty-seven to my thirty then, as he was seventy to my fifty-three now.

At the top of the museum’s marble stairs we took a left, bypassing Drawings and Prints and heading straight to Modern and Contemporary.

For this I gave my husband credit. People don’t come to the second floor and skip Drawings and Prints unless they have an agenda.

I, for one, never went to Modern and Contemporary at the Met because there were other places in this city to go if modern and contemporary was what I was after, but there it was, a monumental slab of granite into which two horses had been chiseled.

Or maybe it wasn’t two horses so much as it was one horse and its ghost. It was the only piece in the room, affixed to the wall across from a bank of windows overlooking Central Park.

We had come so far from those flat-faced angels and their gilded halos, proffered lilies and velvet gowns. “Who is this?” I asked my husband.

“There he is,” Jonathan said, and for a second I thought he meant the artist.

Not the artist but an old man, visibly winded from the significant distance we had traveled. He walked into the room where we were and then, seeing us seeing him, immediately walked away.

“Oh,” I said to Jonathan.

“Yes,” he said.

I went to the wall, knowing better than to put my hands on art and wanting to do exactly that. Two Horses, Charles Ray, Chicago-born, 1953.

“Do you know who he is?” my husband asked. He still wasn’t talking about art.

I shook my head.

“What do you want to do?”

“Do?” I asked. Are you seeing this?

“You can’t tell me you aren’t interested.”

I wasn’t interested in a stranger’s attention, nor was I troubled by it.

Men rarely understood this. “How do you know he isn’t looking at you?

” I asked. “Did you think about that? Maybe you went to school together.” But wait, I didn’t mean that.

It sounded unkind. The man was clearly older than Jonathan. The old man was older than my old man.

“It isn’t me,” my husband said.

“Okay then, it’s me. We’re not going to invite him for dinner.”

“You don’t have any curiosity?”

I had plenty of curiosity, but I wasn’t curious about this.

My dear dead father, whom I had seen not nearly enough of in his life, gave me one piece of advice that I have found endlessly useful: If you don’t want to engage with someone, don’t engage, by which he meant don’t smack the side of the car that cuts you off at the crosswalk because the person in the car might have a gun.

Don’t think you get to say your piece and then walk away.

That’s what I was thinking when Jonathan left to follow the man who had followed me there.

Not that Jonathan was angry; it wasn’t that at all.

He meant to start a conversation with a stranger.

I wanted to think about nothing but those horses, but the distraction of my absent husband proved powerful. Jonathan was gone and then he was still gone. When I became annoyed, I went to find him.

There they were, the two of them tucked in a corner of the next gallery.

Jonathan was talking, and the man, who wore a navy blazer and pink collared shirt, gray slacks, looked up at him, nodding.

His hair was thick and straight and very white, and his glasses were tortoise and round, topped by a noticeable pair of eyebrows.

When he saw me crossing the room, he touched my husband’s arm and my husband turned and smiled at me, a smile that said, You’re never going to believe this.

“You’re never going to believe this,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, and then I said hello to the man.

He nodded at me as if he wanted to speak and could not speak. His obvious mortification made me feel tenderly towards him. I know, I wanted to say to this stranger in regard to my husband, he does this sometimes.

“This is your stepfather,” Jonathan said.

I looked at the man, and then at Jonathan. Of course it was not my stepfather. Lucas Ekker lived outside of Boston in a large house with my mother.

“Keep going back. One more stepfather,” Jonathan said, watching me work.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie Triplett said.

All of this transpired quietly; no one turned to watch life’s drama unpacked in the gallery, but still I made a sound. I put my hand to my mouth to stop it, but it had already gotten away from me. It was his voice, Eddie Triplett’s voice coming out of this old man’s mouth. “Eddie.”

“I didn’t mean to chase you,” he said.

“He thought he saw your mother,” my husband said.

Eddie shook his head. “I knew it wasn’t your mother.”

“At first,” Jonathan said. “When he first saw you. Look, you’re crying. Daphne never cries,” he said to Eddie. “I can count on one hand the number of times.” He cut himself off to take the handkerchief out of his pocket and hand it to me.

“Duck,” Eddie said, his voice full of sorrow.

And with that I bowed my head and covered my face.

I hadn’t known there was something in me to break, but there it was and break it did.

I stepped into an open crack in time and fell backwards.

It was not a few tears. Jonathan put his arm around my shoulder, understanding none of it but knowing the big reveal should not have come here, in front of art.

“What do you say the three of us go to the Dining Room and get a glass of water, a cup of tea?”