The First Day Read online

  They usually played together, but now Philip switched on the television and they sat in front of it. Anna rarely allowed Sam to watch, so it was still a pleasure, an almost illicit joy. He sat on the floor, staring up, unmoving. After some time, perhaps an hour, he looked around to find that Philip was not in the room. He got up, walked around the house, but could not find him. He climbed the stairs, and heard a noise from his mother’s room.

  At first Philip did not see him and Sam stood silently, staring. Philip turned around, suddenly aware he was being watched. The look on his face was of neither surprise nor shame; he glared with impatience.

  What are you doing? Sam asked.

  Get on to the bed, Sam.

  Why?

  Just do it.

  Are we going to play a game?

  Philip paused, nodded. A game, yes.

  Sam climbed on to the bed. He was excited, thrilled to be with his brother.

  Close your eyes, Philip said.

  A hesitation on Sam’s part, but he closes his eyes.

  Whatever happens, you keep your eyes closed, right? That’s the game.

  Sam squeezes his eyes shut tighter. Okay, he says.

  For a moment nothing happens. Outside, the distant drone of a lawnmower. The room itself is silent.

  Suddenly, the sharpest pain across his cheek. The door slams. He opens his eyes and tries to look down at where his cheek is but can see nothing, he can only feel, a stinging, hot. Pain spreads across his face. Philip has gone.

  I raise my hand to my cheek and take it away. There is blood all over it.

  This is my first memory.

  And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness . . . And the evening and the morning were the first day.

  The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

  IV

  A new Caravaggio. I say new. You know that I have worked at the Met for almost fifteen years? Okay. I mean, someone found it, the C, in a basement in some tiny village outside Rome, wrapped in what could be described as swaddling bands (I know). Amazing that these things still happen. The Met outmuscled the Prado and bought it. Balthasar and I were allocating. All song and dance. With these bigger events—even with the excitement about working them—there was always pressure on the rota. In the end, regardless of all the moving around and overtime, we were still short of guards. For old times’ sake? he asked me. You know, Sam, it might do you no harm, remembering what it’s like to be one of the little people.

  So I end up, for a week, on the floor. I’d no interest in working the new piece—too many people—but I was happy enough, truth be told, to take Rubens-to-Vermeer. Six galleries. I knew every painting intimately, better than any of the other guards. I was on the floor for ten years before I moved upstairs, and—not to blow my own trumpet—they didn’t promote me for no reason.

  There was a skill, too. It looked simple, but there was more to it than standing around, making sure punters didn’t get too close to the works, didn’t stick their fingers where they shouldn’t. When done right it was about a tone, a freedom. I was not blind to the fact that most of the visitors were not poor, that a line still existed that many people were unwilling or unable to cross. I lived still on the fringe of Bushwick, in a fourth-floor walk-up. My neighbours in the building were mostly working-class immigrants from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, none of whom, I suspected, had ever set foot in the Met. Still, at least the space existed, the possibility, and if it didn’t quite constitute democracy it came closer than a lot else in New York.

  On the first day, as suspected, the Caravaggio drew the crowds and left the upper galleries quiet. I recalled when I had first started in the job, marking the days by measures of noise. In the downstairs galleries, among the mummies and Renaissance statues, a hubbub always arose, friendly chatter punctuated by laughter, easy banter; the phonetics of fifty languages floating in the air, snatches to be caught and tasted. But upstairs, among the paintings, there was silence, a hushed reverence. People dropped their voices to whispers, became intimate with one another, leaned in close to share thoughts. Thousands of times I watched visitors stop on their own before a painting, moved in a way they had not expected; for some, tears came. I remembered one man in his eighties who had come for a week and wept every day in front of Rembrandt’s portrait of Gerard de Lairesse. De Lairesse suffered from congenital syphilis and eventually went blind, and in Rembrandt’s painting the disease is already ravaging his face, his features swollen. Rembrandt refuses to hide it, and it gives the painting an astonishing frankness, a brutal, compassionate honesty.

  I was always intrigued by those visitors who were prone to be so touched. I would look for them as they entered the rooms I was attending. It was an art in itself; I slowly developed a sense, began to identify something in the way they moved, or looked, that I couldn’t quite articulate, but which became increasingly accurate. It was not common, of course, this excessive reaction; but there were times I felt it coming as soon as the person even entered the room. I did not share this with anyone, not even my closest colleagues, aware of how it would have sounded. I had forgotten this sense over the years, away from the galleries, but I returned to it again, moving from room to room, watching people watching paintings.

  The next morning my head rang, a tinny hollow echo I couldn’t shake out. After work I’d gone with a few people for drinks at a tiny bar on Lexington. I didn’t do this often, but it was Marcela’s birthday, one of the few colleagues I counted as a friend. We started the job within a few months of one another, and quickly discovered a shared, private, almost embarrassed love of the work. We would leave the Met some evenings and head straight for the Whitney, or across to the Guggenheim, thirsty for more. There was nothing sexual in these jaunts, no demands extended beyond simple presence simply shared. She was new to the city, to the country, straight from Caracas, and whatever quantity of intimacy we both required, neither too much nor too little, we stumbled into easily. She was vibrant, generous; she told stories as though they would go out of date, witty and relentless. I loved these both for themselves and for the freedom they allowed me to simply listen, to offer my participation in the form of silence. Wise men speak only when they have something to say, etc. We wined it up and by midnight I was, as my mother would say, lit.

  It had been so long since I had been hungover at work, I had forgotten how miserable it was. At break I threw down two cups of coffee and a pint of water. The floor a bit much for you? Balthasar joked.

  At midday the galleries were still quiet. I moved slowly, appreciative of the peace. I was thinking—true story—of my mother, and resolved to call her. I had been lax of late. I walked through towards the Vermeers, the images forming in my mind before I even reached the paintings, the droplets of white, the paint transformed, catalysed into light. I walked towards my favourite, the Young Woman with a Water Pitcher.

  I stopped at the entrance to the gallery. Someone was already standing in front of the painting, staring closely, moving his face around it, meerkat-like. It was an awkward, unusual movement. I had seen it before—there are no ways to look at a painting, I suspect, that I haven’t witnessed—and yet something this time stopped me short, intrigued me. I watched him from twenty feet away, marked his clothing, the jacket cut well and fitted, the polished shoes, his hands clasped behind his back. He took a step back from the painting, a final pause to take it in as a whole, to recompose the pieces. As he moved off to the left, to the next painting, I saw it, the scar, and felt my throat constrict, my body knowing before the rest of me. Philip.

  I moved swiftly, noiselessly backward, almost bumping into an old Chinese couple. I kept moving (get out of eyesight), then turned and walked straight through the galleries to the staff stairway. I punched the buttons and pushed through and walked, half ran, down the stairs into a dim corridor. I leaned against the wall, catching my breath. My hand
instinctively went to my own face, and I consciously (self-consciously) pulled it back down again. How many years? I started counting, as though the discipline would help. Thirty-five. A smile caught up with me. I shook my head. It wasn’t really Philip. How could it have been? Philip is dead. Thousands of people every day, millions every year, sooner or later someone was bound to look like my brother. Half-brother. I put a hand to my chest and felt my heart through my shirt, still beating, mocking me.

  I started to walk back up the stairs, but quickly felt my throat again, the fear tight again, and stopped where I was. I tried to replay what just happened—as a child, my first therapist told me to do this with the original incident (incident!) when I had nightmares, a pretty stupid idea I thought even then—but each time he turned to the left, the scar ended everything, blurred the picture, cauterised the whole scene. I couldn’t actually see his face, I realised. I hadn’t seen him, I had seen only the scar. But I had seen scars before, and not reacted, not run. Jesus.

  After five minutes of prevaricating I retreated to the staff room. I found Balthasar where I expected.

  You are not in the right place, he said.

  I am not well.

  You are hungover.

  I am going to throw up.

  Avoid the Hogarths, he nodded.

  Can you take over?

  Go home, he said.

  I walked quickly downtown, street followed by avenue, L-ing a diagonal distance, putting as much as I could between myself and the museum. I was going nowhere in particular, just away from where I’d been. He’d been. In thirty minutes I crossed the new footbridge into Queens, and began to slow down, the tension dissipating. I kept walking, past the cemeteries at New Calvary and Mount Zion, and finally hit Flushing. On Stanhope Street there was a kid’s birthday party. Latin music pumping, helium-filled pink Disney balloons tied to the railings. The screams of the children, their boisterous playfulness, returned something to me, at least briefly. I walked up the four flights of stairs to my apartment a few minutes later with something approaching calm.

  Are you not at work? Orr asked me, before I even closed the door. He was listening to music coming from a small speaker opposite him, as though it were his audience, or he its. I recognised Arvo Pärt’s In Principio. I introduced my father to Pärt, when he first moved in with me. I had not expected him to like it, but he had taken to Pärt, and Tavener, and Górecki, immediately, and I experienced both a satisfaction and a theft, as though in the act of sharing I had had something taken away.

  I’m not feeling well, I told him, and he looked at me as though he could see. I had to remind myself that he couldn’t. It is a strange thing, this presence of my father.

  There are none so blind as those who will not see. He ran the line off as a routine, whenever someone asked him about his eyes, or even if they didn’t. Making light. He shuffled around Bushwick with his white stick, negotiating crossings with the help of passers-by, many of them Puerto Rican or Dominican, amused by him and his Irish accent, his endless stories. They were generous to him, and he to them, in his way, he thought, though he was less certain of himself than he had once been.

  The area had changed from when he first arrived, almost ten years before. Gentrification had begun to parody itself; bars and cafés competed with their &s, their craft beers and artisanal baking. The little food stalls that once dotted the streets, offering pinchos, empanadas, arepas, were largely gone, as the people who frequented them moved away. Orr still visited daily the few remaining, including one run by a man he called Guest, a mispronunciation of his real name that was never corrected. Guest was at least as old as Orr, and had a voice low and kind, moving easily back and forth from Spanish to English. He wore clothes in the old Cuban style, guayabera shirts and a battered fedora. He changed the hat-band every few days: if my father guessed the colour correctly he got his lunch for free. Guest often told him he was right even when he wasn’t. At the weekends he was accompanied at the stall by his grandchildren, who also befriended Orr in their irreverent, easy manner, teasing and gently mocking him as he reeled off his tall tales. Orr had never felt so at home.

  And how we got here? I had been in New York for almost ten years myself when my father arrived to live with me. At eighteen I left school. My mother secured me an invitation from one of her academic friends teaching at a small college in upstate New York, and so I visited America for the first time. The arrangement was simple: I would work in the college gardens for the summer, tending the lawns and hedges and flowerbeds on the small campus, and they would give me room and board. The invitation was, I suppose, an intervention on my mother’s part. She worried about my listlessness, my frustration with life in Belfast, and felt that a few months away might help me find a path to follow, or at least break through what she saw as my languid hesitation about the future. I packed a bag, a few changes of clothes, a couple of Russian novels (the magnanimity of youth!) I felt would last me the break, and winged it across the ocean.

  Anna saw listlessness, but it was something else. I was a marked child. My face wore a scar that I could forget for minutes, occasionally hours; but the memory would return, almost like the pain itself, and I would retreat back inside, chasing myself inwards, as though trying to bury something in my own body. I longed not to be seen.

  Doctors did what they could, and with skin grafts and time the scar had faded. Still, it was impossible not to notice, and I had never in all the years since it happened met a single person whose eyes did not move there, find it immediately. It was a focal point; even when someone was not looking at it, they were, I knew, forcing themselves to look elsewhere. It was a gravitation, a black hole (my black hole!) which one gave in to or resisted. Unignorable me.

  If this was it, the full measure, I might perhaps have found a different engagement, even an ownership. But the scar was only the method. Philip’s deliberation, his preparedness, settled in me as my own, personal gospel. Philip, slicing his own face first: a test, refusing the hospital, making sure that Anna could repair it, that the damage done would be severe but not fatal. A precision that could barely be contemplated, and yet would never leave. And all for me. A gift. Reparation.

  My first summer in Troy was perfect. It sounds excessive, I know: but really, I had never before experienced the freedom of working by myself all day, achieving something—creating beauty, coaxing nature into form—and getting up the next morning to do it all again. I stayed in a room in the college dorms, which were largely empty—only a handful of other students, also working manual jobs through the summer—and would wake in the morning without having to set an alarm, the birds chorusing outside my window. I did not often have to deal with people, and had whole afternoons to lose myself in, the rhythms of my body a new abandonment.

  I made a friend. Oki was a couple of years older, from Ghana. He was studying chemistry, and had taken the job of looking after the labs over the summer. He was staying in the dorms too, and I ran into him for the first time in the shared bathrooms. Nice scar, was his opening comment, before turning his bare back to me and showing a gash of his own, running down half the length of his otherwise perfectly smooth body. I appreciated the directness of his observation, his apparent fearlessness. I began to look forward to returning in the evenings, began even, to my own surprise, to linger longer in the showers, hoping Oki would appear. Two or three times I woke in the middle of the night, startled awake by my finger running down the length of Oki’s scar, my finger on Oki’s skin. It took me a moment to come around, to realise I had been dreaming.

  At the end of the summer, the college offered me a job. They were delighted with my work; in fairness, I was good at it. To bypass visa difficulties, they suggested I take a course at the college; they would allow me to study for free, and give me a stipend on top. I accepted on the spot. And lo, the mother rejoices.

  I chose to study the history of art. It was an intuitive decision, immediate. I had grown up the child of a poet, whose best friend—now lover,
we’ll come to that—was a painter. Their choices, their refusal to accept the customary way to assign value, had not turned me into an artist myself, but it had created in me a hierarchy of value, and I felt different from other people my age. As a child I was fascinated by Curran’s paintings. My mother often brought me with her on visits at the weekend, and Curran and I would paint together in his studio, canvases side by side in front of the huge windows above the glens. Curran helped me mix paint, taught me how to hold a brush, when and where to apply pressure, to release. I loved to hear him describe me as a natural, and loved Anna’s reactions, dramatic and exaggerated as I knew they were even then, to my presenting her with a finished piece. For a while our living room at home was like a gallery, and as many of the paintings hung around the walls were mine as Curran’s. This interest had run its course by the time I was thirteen. I made my mother take down my childish paintings, petulant and sulky as I was, learning embarrassment with them as I was learning to be embarrassed with myself, a grammar of shame colonising everything.

  My studies opened up again in me, however, that earlier thrill, that sense of discovery. The precision of the men and women who for thousands of years had carved and scraped and daubed at nature, reducing a piece of wood or stone to a person or an animal in a way that somehow resulted in an addition, an increase; it began to pulse in me. Everything, indiscriminate, grabbed my attention: those little wooden Pharaonic figurines, like children’s toys, workmen carrying baskets on their heads, filled with small carved loaves like stretched communion wafers; the Byzantine busts from Constantinople, all their noses broken off, as though the people they remembered had been themselves relentless brawlers; the dark, almost black, bronze sculptures from the early Renaissance in Italy, set off with a louche gold gilding that made me think of crass hotels. Paintings too. El Greco’s figures, stretched and haunted, their eyes heavy and knowing, I felt were almost shaking their heads at me. I discovered Rubens, the sensualist, his plump people full of life and sex and fat, so much more fleshy than his cautious contemporaries. It all made an impression, sank into me, and I even began, tentatively, to sketch for myself, albeit in the privacy of my dorm room.