The Sleep-Over Artist Read online

  His father’s accent was a normal American accent beneath which bubbled a vast cauldron of linguistic weirdness called “German,” which sometimes splashed out in an odd-sounding phrase or word. When his father actually spoke the language, Alex went into hysterics. German, as his father spoke it, was the language of a person bitterly complaining that someone has opened his box of chocolates and taken a bite out of each and every one.

  Alex once heard his father have a screaming fight on the telephone in German, with his sister, while in his underwear. Alex thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen until his father shouted at him to go to his room. This shut him up, because his father rarely raised his voice. From that point on, though, German was the language of someone being really angry while in their underwear.

  Sometimes his mother laughed with him, though she had her own strange linguistic cauldron, something called Hebrew, which was, measured purely on the quantity of strange sounds, an even more comic language, but which had a much less amusing effect on Alex. There was something in his mother’s voice when she spoke it—melodic, hopeful, wary—that made him feel disorientingly sad.

  His father concentrated while he cooked. Alex liked his dad’s face when it was concentrating. Once, when his father had been staring at the crossword puzzle for a long time—the clean lines of his eyebrows furrowed, his forehead crinkly with ridges which disappeared only when he laughed—he had sighed and looked up and said, to no one in particular, “What I don’t know could fill a textbook.”

  Alex had found it a fascinating concept: the book of things his father didn’t know.

  His father spent a lot of time preparing each piece of meat in flour and bread crumbs, and then he lowered each piece rather lovingly into the frying pan to the accompaniment of a fierce sizzle. Then he stared at the pieces with a concerned look on his face, poking them occasionally with a fork. His father was a doctor, which Alex grasped, and also a psychoanalyst, which he didn’t grasp at all, but which he intuited to mean he treated patients in a manner similar to the way he was currently treating the Wiener schnitzel. Alex loved the look of concern of his father’s face.

  The Wiener schnitzel was good. They ate in silence, sitting across the table from each other. Then his father, without any warning, threw his balled-up napkin at Alex.

  “Papa!” he yelled with wide, delighted eyes.

  This was one of their favorite games, a rare treat. One of them would launch a sneak attack, and his mother would always cry out in mock displeasure at this breach of civility. Order would be restored, the meal would continue, and the other would bide his time, waiting to retaliate with his own napkin attack. It would give the whole meal a suspenseful air. Now Alex bided his time. But without his mother’s protest it wasn’t the same.

  HIS MOTHER BROUGHT home a poster advertising her concert. It was a picture of her spotlit against darkness in a flowing white dress, her head tossed back, arms raised over her head, and one knee raised. Her hair fell straight back, like a horse’s tail. The raised leg had a vaguely military quality.

  “Mom, you look like a horse,” he said.

  “Thank you,” she said, laughing.

  She looked disturbingly weightless, as if she were an angel floating in the night, being recalled to heaven for minor repairs. She hung the poster in the kitchen.

  As the concert drew near, dinner was composed of one meal that she cooked for him and his father, and another special meal she cooked for herself, her training diet, as she put it, which was invariably boiled chicken and which, he informed her with no effort to be diplomatic, was disgusting. Once she had bit into a chicken leg and some blood squirted out. This confirmed his suspicion that his mother was an animal.

  The night of the concert had been full of anxiety for Alex, even though all he had to do was sit there in the dark and watch. He sat with his father, in the front row. They were in an auditorium somewhere inside the looming Gothic structure of the Riverside Church. The place was full of people. That poster on his kitchen wall was everywhere; his mother floating through the night. There were three dances. In the first two the stage was filled with dancers flinging themselves around the stage and arriving at strange positions. He observed a peculiar something in the way his mother danced—she danced with abandon. The last dance she did by herself. At a certain point she stood very still and her knees trembled. Alex sat still amidst the crowd in the dark theater, next to his father, who had also been very still throughout, and wondered if her knees were trembling because she was nervous, or if it was part of the dance and her knees were supposed to tremble. At the end someone took his hand and pulled him from his seat while everyone was clapping. They rushed him backstage, where they shoved a bouquet of red roses into his arms (they were about the size of his torso) and gently pushed him onto the stage. He tottered out and presented her with the roses. People were clapping. The applause came down like sheets of rain. The lights were bright, white, and cruel. He held the roses up to her and for some reason felt worried that they would be too heavy for him to lift. He would collapse under their weight in front of the whole auditorium. She took them from him, smiling wildly, a frightening look on her face. He could see her makeup, thickly applied, theatrical, and the little beads of sweat that pressed out from beneath it. The applause was a crashing wave. Her smile was so wild. She kissed him and then in front of the whole theater wiped the lipstick from his cheek with her thumb.

  Later, when the storm of applause was long past and the auditorium an empty shell, all the dancers and his mother took down the set. A bare lightbulb illuminated the scene. He sat beside his father and watched, appalled that so much effort should be in service to such a fleeting thing. His father sat with him in the front row, holding his chin in his hand as if he were tolerating something. In the end they went home without her.

  AFTER MR. GOLD’S announcement, Alex made a pit stop in front of his cubby before heading over to English at the far end of the room. He liked visiting his cubby. The very word made him happy. Cubby. Standing in front of his, seemingly so alike in size and shape to all the other cubbies yet so distinctly his own, he muttered the word in long sustained hummed sighs: “cubby cubby cubby cubby.” This sound was similar to the humming sound he made when he was particularly enjoying some food he was eating, about which his mother had scolded him on a number of occasions as being impolite and unseemly, even though it was just the two of them at the dinner table and he had pointed out that by humming a little he was indicating that he was enjoying the food and therefore paying her a compliment.

  Alex stared into his cubby, about to extract his English book, and then glanced at some of the surrounding cubbies. Though identical in shape and similar in content, they all possessed a certain glamour his did not. They also possessed something else his did not—a pencil case. These pencil cases were made of denim and had little pockets, or made of industrial rubber, or done in colors like canary yellow or mint green. And they all bulged with hidden contents.

  He reached his hand into one of the other cubbies, took a pencil case—a denim one, the most popular model—and put it in his own cubby. He had been relieving his classmates of their pencil cases for weeks.

  This transaction complete, he headed across the room as though it were prairie and he an adventurer setting off for new territory, but not before casting an urgent glance in the direction of Mr. Gold, to make sure he hadn’t seen anything.

  A peculiar pang of sadness sprang up within him when Mr. Gold smiled at him as he walked by.

  Mr. Gold had some sort of minor speech impediment. Little bits of spittle often flew from his wide mouth as he spoke, and when he found himself stammering his forehead would change color. Something about his mouth and forehead communicated feelings, and this made Mr. Gold somewhat pathetic. He was always going on about the theory of evolution, origin of the species, natural selection, and other rules that governed the world of animals and humans alike. “Survival is the fundamental most basic activity of
every species,” he had said. “These animals have learned to survive over thousands of years.”

  He seemed very intent on communicating his love for science and for nature. But what he best communicated was that if you loved little animals, and the theory of evolution, and spat a little when you talked, and had feelings, then you would be a science teacher whose best friends were gerbils.

  The English section was the most comfortable part of the room. There were huge pillows on which you could loll and huge wooden blocks of various colors on which you could sit. Its most exciting feature, however, was the teacher, a young British woman named Stacey, whose brown hair bounced and shimmered whenever she turned her head.

  Stacey’s breasts, like the pillows and the blocks, were oversized. She usually wore faded blue denim, often in combination with a light blue kerchief around her neck, and eye shadow that was pale blue. Sometimes she wore a blue dress. Sometimes she wore light blue silk shirts with the top two buttons undone. The combination of her sleekness, her pale blueness, and her breasts made it seem as though she might at any moment lift off and float away, and she so entranced the male population of the fifth grade that her English classes were markedly more hysterical, emotive, and unruly than any other class.

  Alex was obsessed with Stacey. She was the faculty supervisor on his school bus, and so he saw her every morning and afternoon. He felt a special bond with her. She lived near him, on Eighty-third Street and Broadway, and he often entertained fantasies of breaking into her building and knocking on her back door at some unlikely hour, and of her opening it in just a sheer bluish nightgown which would hang over her body like a thin transparent veil. She would invite him in.

  During English class Alex administered a neck and shoulder massage with one hand to the grade’s most popular boy, Arnold Gerstein. Arnold looked like a doll. He had blue eyes and clear skin and buttony features, and his brown hair sat atop his head like a helmet.

  One day Alex had sat next to Arnold in English and said, “Do you want a massage?”

  He had recently seen a gangster movie on television in which the head gangster was given a massage by one of his assistants. The head gangster tended to his business while his neck and shoulders got a rubdown. Alex calculated that the role of massage administrator to head gangster was as high as he was likely to get in the complex hierarchy of the fifth grade.

  Arnold and Alex were friends, though this didn’t prevent Arnold calling him fathead and lardface and so forth with a casual thoughtless cruelty that nevertheless had the effect of making Arnold the object of a certain kind of obsession and almost love for Alex, whose reflex for obsessing about (and almost worshiping) his tormentors was sadly well developed.

  He often went to Arnold’s house after school. Arnold lived on Fifth Avenue in a modern building not far from the Metropolitan Museum. Like the museum, Arnold’s house had a uniformed guard. Her name was Mary. She was a black woman and wore a white uniform that made her look like a nurse. Her job, as far as Alex could tell, was to keep the house clean, to do the dirty work of incessantly reminding Arnold and his older siblings to behave, and, Alex could vaguely sense, to absorb all the random hostility that Arnold might otherwise vent on his parents.

  There was a stretch of fifth grade when Alex essentially became an honorary member of the Gerstein family, coming over for many afternoons, and often spending the night on weekends. He was often present for the strange scenario of Mr. Gerstein coming home from work. Mr. Gerstein owned a company that manufactured pet food, and seemed to want nothing more out of life than to come home from work and be allowed to submerge, without harassment or interruption, into his easy chair with the New York Post sports pages, an act which was always accompanied by a momentous groan that never ceased to amaze and fascinate and repulse Alex. It sounded as though Mr. Gerstein were lowering himself into a bath that was much too hot but which he was nevertheless committed to entering. It was at precisely this near-orgasmic moment that Mrs. Gerstein, with the timing of a predator intimate with its prey, would present the day’s troubles to Mr. Gerstein.

  One day Mr. Gerstein walked in the door, and she began to complain bitterly that Arnold’s older sister, Gabby, was spending too much time with Eve Blum, who was a bad influence. It was an acknowledged fact among the Gerstein family that Gabby was, as Mrs. Gerstein once put it, “fragile.” Whenever she had an exam she barricaded herself in her room and the whole house was put on silent alert, as though Gabby were spinning an incredibly delicate web between herself and a good college that a single raised voice could tear to shreds.

  The idea that there were bad influences—and therefore a group of people who were bad, and another group who were influenced—captured Alex’s imagination, though it should be said that almost everything about Arnold Gerstein and his family captured Alex’s imagination, held it down like a prisoner, and tortured it. But that is another matter.

  ONE DAY, WITHOUT any warning, Alex’s father went to the hospital. And then ten days later he returned from the hospital. It was an April day near the end of fourth grade. The bus dropped Alex off in the usual spot and he ambled the two blocks to his building, and then up the elevator, and when he entered the front door he encountered a suitcase in the foyer. Voices emanated down the long hallway from the master bedroom. One of them was excruciatingly familiar, a woman’s voice, his mother’s; the other was also familiar, and he felt its deeper reverberations somewhere in his chest.

  He ran down the hall and discovered his father in bed, propped up on some pillows and wearing his blue seersucker robe. He sat there looking very much like himself, his thick black hair in a state of mild rebellion, the newspaper spread out to his side. The television was on low, a nature documentary of some kind. He was clean-shaven. When Alex hugged him and kissed him he felt the reassuring sandpaper of his cheek.

  The very sight of him in that bedroom, unadorned by tubes in his arms, a white smock, a plastic wrist band, filled Alex with relief, though it was mitigated by a strange instinctive caution. Prior to his father’s stay in the hospital there had been no such thing as normal—there had been his mother and father and himself, all tumbling through life as though swept forward by an infinitely cascading wave, its sound and light and shape changing and evolving but never with an end in sight. His father’s departure to the hospital was like that moment when the wave crashes onto the beach and then, spread thinly over the sand, hissingly retreats into silence.

  The documentary on television was about these wild, cowlike animals called wildebeests. They spent a lot of time grazing on the vast plains of Kenya.

  His mother fussed over the two of them. Her mood was festive. It was like a holiday, a weekend, and someone being sick all rolled into one event. His father sipped black coffee in bed and peered at the stock market pages with the same mildly perturbed and mystified expression that Alex always enjoyed spying on. That vast array of tiny symbols was obviously part of the book of things about which his father didn’t know.

  They turned the volume up a little, and his father alternated between watching the wildebeests and perusing the newspaper, and when he absentmindedly reached up and ran his hand through his thick black hair, Alex shuddered for some reason.

  Apparently, the wildebeests were migrating.

  “I want you to know that certain things are going to change now,” said his father.

  “Like what?”

  His father proceeded to dole out dispensations like a king. Allowance was to increase. Sporting events would be attended. And from now on he was going to start calling him Alex, as opposed to Alexander, a silent wish Alex had expressed only to himself. That his father knew about it filled him with awe, gratitude, and suspicion.

  The wildebeests staggered in a huge horde amidst a cloud of red dust from watering hole to watering hole, trying to elude the many perils of their migration. Sometimes they were relaxed and grazed calmly; other times they ran in a panic. Alex sat with his father, who seemed in high spirits, and conte
mplated the new regime of his life now that his father was back from the hospital.

  “And I’m going to quit smoking,” said his father.

  They turned to look at each other. Alex’s great passion was finding and stealing his father’s cigarettes. These packets of Marlboro Reds, or sometimes Dunhills, were like treasure. He would steal them, hide them, and wait for his father to erupt in rage upon discovering their absence. Then he either would or would not break down and tell him where they were, depending. It was a test of wills.

  He absorbed this news with a tinge of regret. He had been looking forward to stealing the cigarettes again.

  “Are you sure?” he asked.

  His father nodded.

  “Then what are those?” said Alex, nodding at an unopened pack.

  “Those are for show,” said his father.

  They turned back to the television.

  There were so many wildebeests! There was something soothing about their sheer volume. They grazed peacefully, but when frightened they bunched up and ran so close together it was as though they were a single undulating being; they looked like the surface of a brown ocean. At one point a whole horde of them fell over a shallow cliff. Plumes of red dust rose in the air as they struggled to clamber back up.

  Their brown bodies were sympathetic and interesting. Their mooing was emotive. Their necks were less graceful than a horse’s, but more elegant than a cow’s. Their shoulders were bony and anxious, as though they worried too much. But then they had a lot to worry about: drought, disease, predators everywhere. When they ate and drank they seemed truly happy, and when they got scared they really did seem scared. Even on television, the atmosphere of panic when a lion came close was palpable, a deep animal fear. They made fearful sounds that struck a chord in some placeless part of Alex’s body; their desperation reverberated from the top of his head to his toes, a feeling similar to a roller coaster’s first rickety plunge.