The Art Lover by Carole Maso

Author:Carole Maso [Maso, Carole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811218399
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2015-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

The Box in the Sky

You are still, it seems, a member of the Film Society. A few days ago I received the advance announcement for the Twenty-third New York Film Festival. How we loved to mull over the calendar. This year there’s Godard’s Hail Mary. A British documentary called 28 Up that looks interesting, and a lot more, of course. We never missed a year, not for all those years except last year. I did not come home from Cummington; I missed it, and you, Max.

The Film Festival always felt like a new beginning somehow, the changing of bad times for better times, a wind from the north, the smell of chimneys being used for the first time of the season, a movement inward. It felt like fall, as much a beginning as school was, and you dressed us up each year and took us to the opening night party. “Daddy,” I said. “Call me Max now,” you said. We scuffed our feet across ballrooms with the likes of Buñuel and Antonioni. It was a childhood not to be forgotten. You, such an elegant man those gala opening nights in your tuxedo, and your unlikely entourage: two grief-stricken twin boys and a small girl. You, with your unfiltered Camels at the time, talking to beautiful women with deep waves in their dark hair and such white throats.

We were well behaved. We did not follow you too closely; we entertained ourselves. We had contests to see who could eat the most of those tiny sandwiches, the most strawberries, the most chocolate tarts.

Why did you bring us all those years? I can only guess it was for the “visual effect,” the standard you measured everything by. About my brothers you said, “I have always loved the visual effect of twins,” as if they had sprung from your eye, something perfect and realized, not a random event, a quirk of nature. With you nothing seemed random, everything had its aesthetic raison d’être, even Mother—her illness, her beauty. She fit somehow perfectly into your world view, your particular brand of romanticism, your nihilism, your cynicism. You could bear all of it, finally, but her death, though even you thought she had taken it too far sometimes—her indifference, her detachment.

“You went too far, goddamnit,” I heard you yell to her one night after all the dinner guests had left, you alone warming your brandy over the fire. “We have three children and you have been half responsible. From your body, Veronica, like it or not, there has come life. Not an appealing thought to you, perhaps, but true nonetheless.”

And you buckling my shoe while I kicked before the first New York Film Festival, she dead only a few weeks then. “They are savages, Veronica, they are little monsters and I do not know what to do.” I remember that so perfectly. As you got us ready to go to that first festival to watch films we didn’t understand, you buckling my shoe and muttering maniacally,

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