The afternoon that Jacob called, the Yitzhak Bloom Senior Curator of Modernist Paintings came down to Rachel’s office in the basement of the Museum of Jewish Art and asked her, as he sometimes did, if she wanted to go to lunch.
Rachel worked alone, in a room with a desk and a phone. It was a setup out of East Berlin, the interrogation chamber from every spy movie: bare floor, neon light tubes affixed to the ceiling, a metal desk in which all the drawers were locked, and two chairs, one she sat in and one she faced, though that one was always empty, and she was never sure whether she should feel like the prisoner or the interrogator. Beyond this, she had only a map of the galleries and a chart providing each painting on display with a numeric code. At first there had been a Monet print on the wall, as well as a framed Ansel Adams photograph leaning in the corner, so that the room felt less like an interrogation chamber than a high school guidance counselor’s office, but they both disappeared during her first week, and the room reaccrued its essential character. Several times she had moved the empty chair into the closet down the hall where the coffee machine was kept —if everything else could vanish, so could a chair—but it was always returned by the next day, sitting across from her, bare, somehow recriminatory, vaguely expectant.
So having another person in her space was always a little surprising, even if the curator, gazing at her with his usual mix of mild reproach and gauzy concern, seemed not abundantly different from the empty chair. Also, he would not cross into the room. He hesitated on the threshold as he asked her to lunch, brisk, polite, a little genteel and a little sweaty, dressed totally in seersucker.
For lunch they got sushi. “Who could eat anything hot in this weather?” the curator said, every time, no matter the season. Perhaps she was supposed to derive something meaningful from this. She did not like sushi that much, but enjoyed how long it took the curator to eat it. He was a precise man and he separated the chopsticks with a single clean snap, rubbed them together, locked them between his fingers and never once put them down or had to readjust them during the meal. He was dexterous and blond, fortyish, his face changed colors as he spoke, went from sallow to florid, his name was Simon, and because he had to avoid getting soy sauce on his seersucker suit, he took forever to eat.
He liked to ask her questions about her aspirations. “Would you want to work back upstairs?” “Did you ever intend to go into academia?” “Have you considered digital platforms?” Between questions he dipped his fish in soy sauce, raised it vertically, and then at the very last moment, in ridiculous slow motion, leaned in with his mouth already open like an ancient tortoise and closed his teeth around it. He didn’t much listen to her answers, but in her experience with curators, it was rare enough that he even asked the questions. After Trump’s election he had started coming by more often, ostensibly to check that she was doing all right, that this had not been the final blow. “You know,” he said. “The straw. The camel. After the year you’ve had.”
He’d hired her originally—she supposed—because they hit it off talking about Cubism in her interview, and she’d long ago noticed that his syntax matched his interests. He was a Cubist conversationalist. All fragment and implication. She liked it. The tenuous logic, the straight-on side-eye of a simple sentence. The way he referenced her grief only in euphemisms. She could pretend not to know what he meant.
This time, Rachel ordered miso soup and udon noodles. He looked concerned. “Deviation is the heart of progress,” she said and smiled and slurped soup and wiped her chin and then watched his eyes. Beneath Simon’s precision lurked, she felt sure, a simmering prissiness.
“Are you looking forward to our Lurio exhibit?” he asked.
Rachel had managed to ensnare a noodle with her chopsticks, but it was a very long noodle, and caught between sucking it slowly into her mouth while he watched or biting it, she chose to bite it. The severed half plopped limply back into her bowl. She smiled. Lurio was her specialty. A chapter from her dissertation on his depiction of desire, what she had called “subject-object intimacy,” in his early Paris portraits had been well published. Their standing collection and the coming show and all the opportunities for study and scholarship were originally why she had wanted to work at the museum. But since she’d been hired, over a year ago, no one had mentioned it, and it was only two years out. Did he imagine she’d stay in the basement for all that time, content and unconsulted?
“Of course,” she said. “I haven’t seen Juliet Goldman or Jewess on the Eve since I was a grad student.” These were both on almost permanent display at the Prado, where, as a student, she’d been given a three-month summer fellowship. She never knew just how much of her CV to remind him of in these conversations where the power dynamics remained inscrutable.
“Oh, those,” he said. “We’ll have them. Bit of concern where to put them. Wallwise. I don’t think we’ll go chronologically, but they’ll need some different backing. Early and all. Very red.”
“What are you thinking for themes?” Rachel had been curating the exhibit in her head for months now. Simon would insist, of course, on a thematic organization of his own devising, but for Lurio a chronological display would actually make sense: his fin de siècle affectations, followed by the period of silence and then, almost overnight, his sudden passionate adoption of what he’d been hiding ever since he changed his name from Lurtz: his eastern European Judaism. They could end with the last few works done in Canada after the war. The sequence of Enoch among the heavenly hosts, violent, shattering with Blakeian geometry and color. If these were, as most scholars claimed, the mournful eulogy to a lost world, she didn’t see it. In all of them Enoch, witness to the divine machine, seems struck not by wonder, but rage. Yes, she always thought of Blake; whatever hand or eye dreamed up the world must be monstrous. Enoch confronts the celestial hosts, all wearing capes of swastika red under an oppressive horizon of jutting lightning and glaring orange mountains. It’s supposed to be heaven, but if he believed in it, she couldn’t imagine how else Lurio would fashion hell.
“What are you thinking for themes?” she asked again. For the previous ten seconds, a huge green piece of a caterpillar roll had required the curator’s entire attention.
“Oh, right. Well, it’s early days you know. But probably going with Devotion and Temperament. Inner Storm, Outer Order. The Artist’s Journey. That kind of thing.”
Lurio had been into absinthe and hashish while in Paris, though he quit when it began hurting his health and slowing his output. Still, it was what everyone focused on. The Bohemian excess, the booze, the drugs, the naked muses.
From The Tavern at the End of History by Morris Collins.
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