Chapter 8 #2
“You know who Marcel Proust is?” The words burst out of me before I can stop them.
I don’t mean to be so blunt, but I never would have thought that a popular jock like Tyler Travers would know or care about a classic gay French writer from the early 1900s.
It doesn’t exactly track with his tastes from when we were kids, either—I mean, he loved Jar Jar Binks.
It’s already weird enough that Tyler seems so into obscure art—he’s into books, too?
I bristle a little. Books and art are my things.
Shouldn’t he just be wrapped up in basketball and, like, cryptocurrency or something?
Tyler laughs, not offended. “Yeah, I really like Proust. In Search of Lost Time is my favorite book. Why do you think I chose the name ‘Marcel’ for French Club?”
“Ohhhh,” I say in shock. “Wow.” I hadn’t thought about that for a second—I’d assumed he’d just thought the name “Marcel” sounded cool or goofy or reminded him of Ross’s pet monkey on Friends.
I shake my head, dazed. “Okay, so you’re a Marcel Proust fan. I didn’t see that coming. Why did Marcel Proust like this painting so much? Was he a serial killer?”
Tyler snorts. “No. At least, not that we know of. Proust said that when he looked inside the stingray,” he explains, “he saw the soaring ceilings of a grand cathedral like Notre-Dame.” His hands move a lot as he talks.
I notice they’re big and calloused—perfect for palming a basketball—but at the same time, surprisingly graceful.
I squint at the canvas. “I think I see it,” I say. “The stingray’s rib bones are sort of like the big arches in the ceiling.”
“That’s what I see, too!” says Tyler, bumping my shoulder with his.
I’m startled, and I inch away, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“Still lifes are so cool,” he goes on. “Each artist built these objects from scratch, one brushstroke at a time, in the way only they could see them. So you’re never just looking at inanimate objects.
You’re seeing a piece of another human being’s soul. ”
While I’m shocked and confused at how Tyler Travers could be so surprisingly deep, I notice, too, that the painting seems to transform before my eyes.
It’s not dull or dark anymore. The stingray’s insides aren’t just pink and red and brown like I’d thought at first—there are notes of green, sky blue, gold.
The gash in the stingray’s flesh doesn’t look like a gnarly wound or even a cathedral but a portal into another kingdom—perhaps an ocean kingdom, where this stingray once soared through the water as free as a bird soaring through the air.
My nerves tingle, my soul seems to lift out of my body, and I feel as though I’m soaring, too, high over the city.
I clear my throat. “Whoa,” I croak, my mouth dry.
“I know, right?” says Tyler. “Proust loved La raie because it isn’t what most people think of as beautiful or aspirational—but it can be if you look at it a certain way. Like, the key to happiness isn’t to ignore ugly or boring things but to look at them even closer until you see their beauty.”
Something about Tyler’s words triggers a flashback I’ve buried for a long time.
Suddenly, I’m crouching in a dark hallway.
It’s nighttime at the house in Sandy Springs we used to live in before Mom and I moved into our apartment complex.
It must have been Dad’s last days, when the stomach cancer had gotten to the point where the hospitals couldn’t do anything more for him, and Mom had brought him home.
He couldn’t swallow pills. He’d been eating through tubes ever since his gastrectomy.
Mom and a nurse who came a couple of hours every day would have to carry his emaciated body to the bathroom once a day.
Dad was always so brave and almost never complained, but recently, I’d heard him cry out at night that he was so miserable he just wanted to die.
“I’m so sorry I kept us from living the beautiful life you always wanted,” I hear Mom saying through her tears. “If I’d known we had so little time left …”
I’d known for as long as I could remember that Mom and Dad had always talked about owning a touring business in Paris.
Sometimes they’d brainstorm ideas at the dinner table—a private tour of the Louvre, with different works of art paired with different wines; a literary/food tour of the Latin Quarter; a game of hide-and-seek for all ages in the Catacombs.
They’d even come up with a name for their company: Enchanté Adventures.
Too bad, though, that when I came along, they had to put all these dreams on hold.
Dad had come to America on a student visa to study and eventually work in technology, and Mom worried that raising me in Paris would be too unpredictable.
“But Sunghee,” Dad rasped. Every word took so much effort. “This is it. C’est la belle vie.”
This is the beautiful life.
Leave it to Dad to have the best movie line in real life.
Then I heard Mom cry in a way that people never cry in movies, not even the R-rated ones that have 90 percent ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and win Oscars.
Gasping sobs, throaty, from the lowest depths of her belly.
If a main character cried like that in a movie, the critics would say that it was too over the top.
What they would really mean is that it was too real.
I step away from the painting. My eyes are burning, and I blink. I won’t let myself cry. Not over Dad, not in front of the dead stingray painting. And definitely not in front of Tyler Travers.
All of this is too real.
“Ben, are you feeling all right?” asks Tyler, sounding a little concerned.
“I’m fine,” I say quickly, turning my back to him before he can see me blinking away tears. “But let’s go now. Back to the hostel.”