4.
The Harp Player
“I want to extend an invitation,” my father said to me that night. He paused the videotape, Ma nuit chez Maud. My mother and sister had pronounced themselves tired ten minutes ago and left us, the Paquette men, to consume two pints of H?agen-Dazs ourselves. “Nancy Dunn and I got to talking at the office, and we thought it might be a nice excursion for you and Khadijah if we all went to see the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition in Boston, at the MFA.” He was wearing gym clothes, because he had just worked out on the rowing machine. In a white, sweat-stained T-shirt and short, purple Wattsbury College track shorts, he was regally unwashed, his already formidable air of authority strengthened by his immodesty. The sweat in his straight, dark hair made it stand in unpredictable spikes. “Do you have any plans for Sunday? Your mother is going to be taking Rachel to some Yiddish Book Center thing. I thought this might appeal to you more.” At leisure, he waited for my reply.
“Sounds cool,” I said, after a moment of frenzied reflection.
“Some hesitation, Son?” He swirled the melted ice cream in his bowl. “Do you harbor some ambivalence toward the Pre-Raphaelites?”
You owned a cock ring, I thought. My friends buried it beneath a copse of pines. But I raised my eyebrows and made a civilized response. “I love the ancient Italians.”
He winced. “Oof, Wattsbury High School. Oof, PC education. Teach the nuances of H. Rap Brown, but the Pre-Raphaelites . . . Sorry. I don’t mean to be snotty with you, your mother’s been on me about that.” He put down his bowl and massaged his temples. “Would you like some wine?”
I was barely able to contain my joy. “Don’t get up, Dad,” I said. “I’ll go to the kitchen and get a glass.”
When I returned he was lost in thought. He barely looked at my glass as he filled it, letting a little of the Argentine Malbec cry down the side. “Did you know Nancy was a far more radical youth than your mother and me?” He grinned. “Nancy was a hippie to be reckoned with. When the rest of us were practicing Buddhism, she was in this gaggle of non-Islamic Sufis, Emersonian Sufis. They sang and danced by Walden Pond until a different bunch of Thoreau-Whitman grad student types drove them off the territory through guilt-tripping. They argued they were destroying the silence, whereas the Sufis believed they were creating a microcosm of a peaceful society. Nancy was the appointed artist, very talented. She would draw these geometric patterns that corresponded to the peace dances. But once Khadijah was in the mix she got bit by the neocon bug. It was the times, you know; she rediscovered the middle-class work ethic. It’s like a little death that must come for us all someday.” He reached out and pushed Play on the VCR. We sank back into the black-and-white netherworld that was France.
Having a father who had a crush on the mother of an interesting girl was actually kind of awesome. In some sense, it didn’t matter what the Dads were up to, what mechanisms they were using on each other. They were taking Khadijah and me to Boston, to stroll through a museum at their heels. I knew that using us as cover would work. My parents had mentioned the Silverglate-Dunns in passing any number of times, so there must have been some friendliness between our families; my mother would see nothing objectionable in a trip to Boston with kids in tow. The Dads would stand with heads cocked dreamily to one side and whisper intelligent things to each other about non-Italian paintings, never suspecting that Khadijah and I would whisper intelligent things to each other about them.
The next morning, after homeroom, I made for the hall where Khadijah took French. She whirled around the corner a moment after I arrived and reflected my look of amazement back at me.
“Sorry about your dad’s . . .” She formed a ring with her hands. She made the ring vibrate.
“We’re all going to a museum. Like a family.”
“Come with me.” We twisted through the crowd, never touching, never speaking, never drawing so close that anyone would think us in league. She took a sharp right in the midst of the hard science hallway, and we were in a short passage with a blue door at its end. She banged through it, and I followed her into a closet of retired Apples. Their cords dangled like viscera from the shelves. She had a nose for corners, recesses, empty spaces.
“Are they insane?” I asked her. I could see in her face that she felt what I felt: the thrill at discovering the Dads’ misbehavior, the fear of losing them.
“The brazenness of it, Josh.”
I considered that brazen was probably an SAT word.
“It looks so much more wholesome if we come,” she continued. “We’re like a disguise. It’s obvious. The Pre-Raphaelites are baby unicorns and shit. And of course they picked the big Yiddish Book Center Open House day, because it puts my dad and your mom out of commission.”
“Why would you go see baby unicorns with somebody you have a thing with?” I asked.
“You know the painting on the cover of Reviving Ophelia? That’s the Pre-Raphaelites.”
I thought of the mad, cream-skinned girl lying prone in the river. “Superbrazen,” I agreed.
She made her hands into triumphant claws and shook them at her sides. “So f*cking brazen.”
“I feel bad for my mom,” I said. “And I hate your mom.”
Something warm passed between us. “I hate your dad,” she breathed, almost whispering. “As always.” She reinstated her backpack on her shoulders, and we parted.
? ? ?
It might have been the way Khadijah and I had begun to speak to each other, but the Pre-Raphaelites seemed to me to make pretty art. After we’d wandered fifteen minutes in beauty-nauseous silence, my father brought our party to a halt by a little Rossetti, in which a woman in her mid-twenties plucked a harp. She stared away from the instrument at an apparently sublime object out of frame, her eyes narrow, her mouth open. She was in love or lust or religious rapture, or all three. Down the hall, people swirled like water moccasins around the drowning girl in a brown and green dress, so we had a little row of non-Ophelian Rossettis to ourselves. I counted four long-haired harp-girls.
“Feminist Art Historian,” said my father to Nancy, “what say you? Is he remotely palatable? Or is his thing with pretty young muses just too creepo?”
My father wore an art outfit: a loose black jacket, a black T-shirt, gray jeans, his white Converse sneakers. Nancy cocked her head to one side, as I’d imagined she would. All I knew about the term neocon was that it denoted a new kind of conservative, but it nonetheless seemed clear to me that Nancy was neocon in matters of dress, if not in matters of state. She wore a loose white sweater over a purple collared shirt that looked like it could only be dry-cleaned, a string of pearls barely visible against the long neck Khadijah had inherited. Her beige, boot-cut slacks were creased. She was old-fashioned with no frills, old-fashioned gone efficient, like the word con, which was conservative with the extraneous cloth sliced away.
“When people think of Rossetti,” she replied, “they think of the scenes from Shakespeare, from Le Morte d’Arthur, tragic angels, enchantresses. And he must answer for any number of those. He painted Elizabeth Siddal as an idealized sprite, not quite human. But take this one.” She directed us to The Harp Player, A Study of Annie Miller. “It’s demystified, for me, it’s better. She’s just a woman playing an instrument. She’s got the epic hair, and the instrument is a harp—which is angelic. But her face isn’t angelic. She’s not consumed with lust, she’s not abject, like the star of the show over there.” Nancy gestured with her head toward the Ophelia crowd. “I like this one because he hasn’t plunked her in medieval times, or in a river. He lets her be awkward, stare at the floor. She’s not part of a story he needs to tell.”
When we pulled away in the Subaru, Nancy sighed so forlornly I could see her straighten in her seat as she took in breath and slump as she let air leave her body. My father asked her what was wrong.
“I just don’t know how my life came to be located so far from these beautiful things.”
My father’s arm flashed out to stroke her hair. She leaned into him, willing to be consoled. And then they remembered that Khadijah and I were sitting behind them. My father yanked back his hand as if Nancy had bitten it. Nancy jolted in her seat as if she’d been punched.
In the back, I tried to hold Khadijah’s gaze, to exchange a meaningful look, but she was gazing out the window, at the rain. The Dads glowered at the road. No one spoke as we waited at the tollbooth emblazoned with the Mass Pike insignia, a sapphire pilgrim hat tipped at a jaunty angle.
Khadijah nudged my sneaker with her clog. Using her index finger, she wrote in the moisture that had accumulated on the interior surface of the window, in dripping capitals: THEY HATE US.