In the secret, grassy quadrangle of the Gardens, I crawled before I could walk, I walked before I could run, I ran before I could dance, I danced before I could sing, and I danced and sang until I learned stillness and silence and stood motionless and listening at the Gardens’ heart, on summer evenings sparkling with fireflies, and became, at least in my own opinion, an artist. To be precise, a would-be writer of films. And, in my dreams, a filmmaker, even, in the grand old formulation, an auteur.
I’ve been hiding behind the first person plural, and may do so again, but I’m getting around to introducing myself. I am. But in a way I’m not so different from my subjects, who were self-concealers also—the family whose arrival in my neck of the woods provided me with the big project for which I had, with growing desperation, been searching. If the Goldens were heavily invested in the erasure of their past, then I, who have taken it upon myself to be their chronicler—and perhaps their imagineer, a term invented for the devisers of rides in Disney theme parks—am by nature self-effacing. What was it that Isherwood said at the outset of Goodbye to Berlin? “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.” But that was then, and this is the age of smart cameras that do all one’s thinking for one. Maybe I’m a smart camera. I record, but I’m not exactly passive. I think. I alter. Possibly I even invent. To be an imagineer, after all, is very different from being a literalist. Van Gogh’s picture of a starry night doesn’t look like a photograph of a starry night, but it’s a great depiction of a starry night nonetheless. Let’s just agree that I prefer the painting to the photograph. I am a camera that paints.
Call me René. I have always liked it that the narrator of Moby-Dick doesn’t actually tell us his name. Call-me-Ishmael might in “reality,” which is to say in the petty Actual that lay outside the grand Real of the novel, he might have been called, oh, anything. He might have been Brad, or Trig, or Ornette, or Schuyler, or Zeke. He might even have been called Ishmael. We don’t know, and so, like my great forebear, I forbear to say unto you plainly, my name’s René. Call me René: that’s the best I can do for you.
We proceed. Both my parents were college professors (do you note, in their son, an inherited note of the professorial?) who bought our house near the corner of Sullivan and Houston back in the Jurassic era when things were cheap. I present them to you: Gabe and Darcey Unterlinden, long-time married couple, not only respected scholars but beloved teachers, and, like the great Poirot (he’s fictional, but you can’t have everything, as Mia Farrow said in The Purple Rose of Cairo)…Belgians. Belgians long ago, I hastily clarify, Americans since forever, Gabe oddly persevering with a curious, heavy, and largely invented pan-European accent, Darcey comfortably Yankee. The professors were players of Ping-Pong (they challenged Nero Golden when they heard of his fondness for the game, and he beat them both soundly, though they were both pretty good). They were quoters of poetry to each other. They were baseball fans, oh, and giggling addicts of reality television, lovers of opera, jointly and constantly planning their never-to-be-written monograph on the form, to be called The Chick Always Dies.
They loved their city for its unlikeness to the rest of the country. “Rome iss not Italy,” my father taught me, “and London iss not England and Paris iss not France, and dis, where we are right now, dis is not de United States of America. Dis iss New York.”
“Between the metropolis and the hinterland,” my mother added her footnote, “always resentment, always alienation.”
“After 9/11, America tries to pretend it loves us,” said my dad. “How long does dat last?”
“Not so fucking long,” my mother completed his thought. (She was a user of swear words. She claimed she didn’t know she was doing it. They just slipped out.)
“Iss a bubble, like everyone says now,” my father said. “Iss like in de Jim Carrey movie, only expanded to big-city size.”
“The Truman Show,” my mother helpfully clarified. “And not even the whole city is in the bubble, because the bubble is made of money and the money isn’t evenly spread.”
In this they differed from the common opinion that the bubble was composed of progressive attitudes, or rather they held, like good post-Marxists, that liberalism was economically generated.
“De Bronx, Queens, maybe not so much in de bubble,” my father said.
“Staten Island, definitely not in the bubble.”
“Brooklyn?”
“Brooklyn. Yeah, maybe in the bubble. Parts of Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn’s great…” my father said, and then in unison they finished their favorite and much-repeated old joke, “…but iss in Brooklyn.”
“De point is, we like de bubble, and so do you,” my father said. “We don’t want to live in a red state, and you—you’d be done for in for example Kansas, where dey don’t believe in evolution.”
“In a way, Kansas does disprove Darwin’s theory,” my mother mused. “It proves the fittest are not always the ones who survive. Sometimes the unfittest survive instead.”
“But iss not just crazy cowboys,” my father said, and my mother jumped in.
“We don’t want to live in California.”
(At this point their bubble got confusing, becoming cultural as well as economic, right coast versus left coast, Biggie-not-Tupac. They didn’t seem to care about the contradictoriness of their position.)
“So dis iss who you are,” my father wanted me to know. “The boy in the bubble.”
“These are days of miracle and wonder,” my mother said. “And don’t cry, baby, don’t cry, don’t fucking cry.”