The Kunstmuseen Krefeld was actually two side-by-side buildings made of brick, large and flat and blocky, like a middle school in a dreary American suburb. Salo and Margot had been on the road for nearly three hours, and she went to use the bathroom while he bought tickets. When she reappeared she asked the guard where those film pictures were, and then she was off to find what she’d come for. Salo followed. He was there, in Krefeld, Germany, with a girl he was more than ready to part from. He was there, but he was also, as always, in that other place, the tumbling place, the place he was used to now, or if he wasn’t used to it he knew he had to figure out how to be, because it was not going to change. He couldn’t remember how to walk as if the floor might not at any moment pitch sideways or upside down, but this was simply a skill he would have to master, and also he was getting better at it. He entered the first gallery.
Those paintings our father had grown up with in his parents’ Fifth Avenue apartment, rheumy apertures to other continents in other centuries, were as unremarkable to him as the Peter Max posters on the walls of his fraternity house, or the framed Eliot Porter photographs his college friends were beginning to put up on the Sheetrock walls of their New York apartments. Unremarkable, as in: not to be remarked upon, or taken notice of, which was very far from appreciation, let alone admiration, let alone love. And when, two years before the day Salo entered the Kunstmuseen Krefeld, trailing a girl he was fated never to see again, about half of his parents’ Old Master paintings departed in a sudden exodus to Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, our grandparents never bothered to ask if he wanted to keep one, or a few, or indeed all of them for himself. (Why would they? He’d never asked a single question about a single painting!) He’d simply returned home from his camp counselor job at Androscoggin that summer and noticed the blank wall beside his bedroom door where Boy with a Spoon (Bartholomeus van der Heist, 1643) had been hanging ever since he could remember. Boy with a Spoon had left the building, along with eleven others, and when it eventually materialized inside I.M. Pei’s brand-new concrete building while our father was still an undergraduate, he never even went to see it. That was how untouched he was by even that painting, or any other painting, until what happened next.
With his first step into the gallery, Salo lost his hard-won mastery of remaining upright. The floor playfully darted away, then flipped overhead, and down he went, hitting first with a bony hip and then an elbow and finally a cheek, which landed in near repose along with the rest of his head. Accordingly, he closed his eyes, strangely not unhappy and already marveling at the thing he had seen before he fell, feasting upon it inside his head: imprinted. Then—far too soon—the tug of hands on his own arms. These were guards, tall men in khaki uniforms and hissing walkie-talkies, and they pulled him up like a newborn insulted to be expelled from the womb. One of them set down a folding chair. It was, our father would learn, a special chair, kept precisely for the emergency needs of affected tourists.
“Stendahl syndrome” was the name for this, he would eventually learn. Dizziness, confusion, even fainting, usually by foreign visitors in the act of viewing great art. It was called that because the French writer had given its first and best description: I was in a sort of ecstasy … Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations … Everything spoke so vividly to my soul … Life was drained from me …
He thanked them, of course, but mostly he hoped they would go away, so he could look at it in peace, and eventually they did.
The painting was large and square. It had a kind of fawn-colored background nearly obscured by frantic, scribbled loops of orange and red, relentless, swirling in an exhausting scrawl. He could not take his eyes off that orange, that red, those rhythmic loops, their valiant attempt to scribble something away.
He thought: Is this really art?
He thought: Why does it help?
He thought: Who gets to look at this?
Margot came back, escorted by one of the guards. She came to his chair and bent down to look at Salo. “You seem okay,” she said. “They told me you fainted.”
“Maybe,” Salo said.
“Are you sick?” He could tell she didn’t want him to be sick. She did not want to drive a sick person three hours back to Amsterdam, and he was pretty sure she didn’t want to spend the night with a sick person in Krefeld, either.
“Oh no,” he said, trying to sound cheery. The whole time, he never took his eyes off the painting.
“Well, so you like modern art after all,” she observed.
“I like that,” he confirmed. “I don’t know what it is.”
She walked up to it and looked at the card. “Untitled. That’s helpful. He’s an American.” She tried to sound out his name, but couldn’t get closer than “tomb-ley” or “twom-ble.” “Oh look, he used house paint and wax crayon. Not quite your Flemish landscapes.”
No, our father agreed.
“Do you want to see the rest of the exhibit?”
He didn’t, he said, but she should go back. He wanted her to leave him alone with the painting. He wanted the world to leave him alone with the painting.
Basically, he found a way to stay until the Kunstmuseen closed that evening, after which he and Margot (who’d been very disappointed by those movie stills) endured the long drive back to Amsterdam and parted in Dam Square, never to meet again. Our father had recognized that he knew nothing about anything. He had not the first understanding of what he had seen, or where the thing he had seen had come from, or what other paintings by other artists were already in conversation with this one, or what any of this had to teach him. Also, he had no idea when he might live in a place where he might put such an object on his wall and look at it, every morning, every night. Also, he would not, for a few years yet, be in control of the money held in trust for him, and he would not begin drawing a salary from Wurttemberg until after finishing college. But he knew, as he had never known anything before, that he would somehow, at some time, own that painting.
Back at Cornell in the fall, he unenrolled from his fraternity, not because the men were in any way insensitive but because he found that he couldn’t stand to enter those rooms and not see Danny Abraham, a person he’d considered almost unbearably kind. Someone told him the girl who’d been Daniel’s date that terrible day had left Cornell. Salo could not remember her at all. He could not even picture her face; he was not sure he had even turned his head when the two of them, Daniel and the girl, climbed into the back seat of the Jeep, or if he’d ever been told her name. He didn’t ask where she’d gone; he felt only relief that he would not have to meet her in some classroom or cafeteria. For the rest of his time in college he wanted to not make any friends and not make any waves; he wanted only to complete his degree without fucking up another thing. He knew enough not to shift his major from economics to anything else, let alone art. Art was an established tradition within the Oppenheimer family, and that was enough to justify an early-morning survey course, and one on the Modernists, and one on Pollock and his circle. Art was also an acknowledged part of the apparatus of wealth, indeed, a not unuseful vector for acquiring wealth. (Selda and our grandfather, Hermann, were not sentimental and they were not stupid: the seventeen Old Master paintings that remained in the Fifth Avenue apartment after Boy with a Spoon and the others departed had been earmarked by Sotheby’s as having the greatest value and/or potential appreciation.) Salo did not need to have any of this explained to him. If he wanted to own and live in the world of paintings once the business of the workday was done, that was his right, indeed our family tradition! But he would continue to study economics and after graduation he would, without complaint, step into the place prepared for him by his father and the fathers before them—the Broad Street offices of Wurttemberg Holdings—there to serve the business of being an Oppenheimer for the rest of his professional life.