She’d met Bennett at the Museum of Modern Art, where she was filling one of the cavernous Sundays other, hipper students spent in bed, recovering from the night before at CBGBs or a party in a Tribeca loft with Keith Haring. The lesbians, two doors down in her dorm, for instance. They smoked a ton of weed. They’d triggered the fire alarm once, and the story went around that one of them had given the firemen head to keep Parsons’ administration from finding out. Rosie liked to believe this was true because those girls were fierce and wielded their sexuality like a mallet. They were bawdy. She wished she had their blood, even a pint of it, even a thimble-full so she could stare down the pervy guy selling The Village Voice on the corner. When she passed he’d make slurping noises. When the lesbians came in his direction, he walked briskly away as if he’d remembered an important appointment.
MoMA was empty at this hour, just after opening. The museum was familiar to her now, she knew where everyone was, Hopper, Rothko, O’Keeffe. Rosie sometimes felt her solitude in specific places of her body; today it was round and solid in her belly like an old donut. She felt the weight of it pulling her shoulders forward, so she straightened herself up. No one was watching, no one ever watched Rosie, she was not eye-catching, but she wanted the eyes of strangers to pause, to simply acknowledge her breathing existence, and then, maybe, wonder — for the briefest moment — if she was interesting. The feeling of sitting alone in the vast, noisy cafeteria back at high school in Lowell on a day Chris had been sick was always with her; the sitting and wondering which was worse: being alone and the other kids snickering at her aloneness; or being so invisible no one even noticed she was alone.
Shoulders back again, and out, along the hanger of her collar bone. Gran, at least, had taught her how to stand as a tall girl. She entered the Futurists gallery, Giacometti’s wiry dog and skinny people. She was not convinced by Léger with his Legolike colors and squat structures; he seemed to be trying too hard.
Perhaps she recognized the fault.
But Boccioni swept his images across the canvas, she could feel their movement across her face, like a phalanx of ghosts passing through a room, the way the past transitioned into the present and future: the whole concept of time being unrestrained. Once, she’d found the imprint of a bird’s wing in the snow behind Gran’s house — that was the idea, capturing the momentary in a way that didn’t feel stolid, or like imprisonment. It was part of an on-going story outside the picture’s frame. The frame was a restriction, a construct, no different to a camera lens that went “click,” and the very word “capturing” was therefore problematic.
“You are transfixed,” a man said. “An acolyte.”
And because she was in the middle of her idea, she was the person who’d chosen to be in MoMA due to her preference for contemporary art over eggs bennie, she spoke without restraint or shame, an entire sentence that even ran on: “He’s doing with time what Picasso and Braque did with space, he’s breaking it apart, de-constructing, he’s saying there is no time, only what we impose.”
Then she blushed, she could not even look at the man standing next to her, though she could smell him, the sharp astringent of his aftershave, the starch of his shirt. When she did glance, she noted the smidge of shaving cream in his ear and a worn paperback copy of Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus in the pocket of his tweed jacket.
He was looking at her. “Do you work here?”
Which was flattering because the most happening people worked at MoMA, one of the lesbians had a summer internship. Rosie parted her lips, words came out. “Time is energy, we can’t contain it.”
“You agree with Boccioni, then?”
“I have no basis to disagree. But that’s not the same thing.”
“No basis?”
“I’m 18, I’ve lived in Lowell, Massachusetts, all my life.”
“You have the profile of a silent screen actress.”
Again, she felt the heat of a blush.
“But the point of art,” he went on, “is that you can be from Lowell, Massachusetts, and still understand.”
“No. That’s not the point of art.” Why was she speaking like this? What mechanisms were slipping into place? Perhaps because he was a stranger and it was Sunday and the lesbians were having brunch together in a café on Christopher Street and it was bitterly cold outside. Katya had a tattoo on her arm and May wore Doc Martens, they were acknowledged by other Parsons students as gifted performance artists, they knew Annie Sprinkle and were doing a performance around menstrual blood. The event was being held in an abandoned meat-packing warehouse just off Hudson. Katya had invited Rosie, and May had said, “Squeak,” and Katya had elbowed May, who’d snorted out a laugh. Rosie’d had no idea how to interpret that laugh — laughing at or with? The next day Rosie found a drawing of a mouse on her door, the mouse was spurting blood from its rear end, presumably a period. The blood dripped down to the floor, where there was a ticket to the event. There were bloody fingerprints all over the ticket and the words please cum.
“The point of art,” Rosie heard herself. “Is that you don’t understand meaning, there’s no ‘meaning’ or ‘understanding’ only fragmentary connection, where your consciousness connects with that of the artist. Because the artist, himself, herself, is working in an intense yet balanced dialectic of inner, personal space and outer experience of culture and society. ‘Understanding’ and ‘meaning’ are static, while art is continually evolving and synthesizing. Even as the paint dries, the work is already becoming something else for the viewer, the painter has already let it go.”
The man considered, hand on chin. “Did you read that somewhere?”
“I —” she began, and ended. Ended where she always began. Stupid and dull.
Yet, miraculously, he waited, and when he realized she had no more words, he made a small, possibly sympathetic smile. She noticed the size of him, six feet, broad, with a lion’s mane of hair. “What I mean,” he said, “is that sounds didactic not visceral. Like something you’ve learned, but not experienced. Art needs to be felt. Don’t you think?” He tapped his heart with his fist.
Rosie nodded. She thought of the unicorn tapestries.
“And I wonder,” the man went on. “If we dragged the hot dog vendor on the corner in here and showed him any of these paintings what he might have to say.”
She waited. She hoped he could not see the nervous dampness on her upper lip. The tag in her sweater was scratching the nape of her neck. She’d bought it in a thrift store on Broadway, thinking it was hip. But she suspected the bright blue didn’t suit her, not just the hue but the noise.
Yet he did not move away, he regarded her, expectantly.
When she did not answer, he frowned a little: “Should we? Go and get him?”
“No.” More of a breath than a word, a silly giggle.
“He’d be completely underwhelmed. Let me tell you. He’d laugh if we told him how much these paintings were worth, were revered, and we’d label him a barbarian, a dolt. A lot of this —” the man swept his arms out, around, and at that moment she focused on the small blot of shaving cream in his ear and she wondered why he was here, alone, on a Sunday morning without a wife, a lover to wipe it away. Was he like her? Pretending not to be lonely? “— makes us feel important because we understand it. But we’re cheating because we’ve been told what it means. In books, by teachers, on the goddam pretentious little blurbs on the wall here.”