“Why so infrequently?” I asked almost angrily. I visited my family every three or four months even though every time I left Houston I vowed never to return.
“They know the time for me to work is now. They trust me.”
His humility struck me then, and my memory dredged up Jamie Olson’s Superlative for Nate, “The Kindest Man in the Universe.” Nate always brushed aside these compliments, and I saw he did not require approval from anyone, not even his own family, to live his life.
The afternoon was perfect as Tuesday had been, its morning events dissonant with the second summer. Nate and I turned onto the towpath along the canal which ran southwesterly toward Delaware. We walked side by side along the edge of the high grasses, and for a moment, it was as if I’d stepped back into the cane of my childhood in Sugar Land. Eventually, we came upon the vast and verdant Revolutionary War battlefield from which rose four Greek columns. It was strangely beautiful to stroll through what had once been the site of death and war but was now overtaken by nature and time.
At a muddy patch in the grass, I slowed down. Nate and I were quiet then, breathing in the stillness of the golden hour. He passed ahead of me. The sun hovered midway in the sky and pushed its rays through a web of low-hanging branches, and there were no linnets as in Yeats’s poem, just the feeling of them. Nate turned to face me. I caught up. The sun blasted a halo behind his head.
It took time for the city to return to its regular confidence and openness. Some residents used the event as an excuse to leave New York, and there was the inevitable anti-Muslim backlash, which hurt more than just the Muslims.
Sometimes after a meeting at a community house on the Lower East Side, I made my way down to Canal Street and observed the clangorous commerce of the Guangdong and Fujian immigrants. They resembled me more than many of my friends did, and I wondered how much of their lives I knew. With eyes acculturated by whiteness, I considered how foreign we might look to those who were not like us. From cramped stalls sluicing onto the street, vendors peddled cell phones, hawked lychees, sold fake Gucci purses, just like the ones my own father had years ago. Observing the new immigrants never at rest, I imagined a hypothetical universe in which a catastrophe brought us under a negative spotlight.
I considered any prejudice beneath New Yorkers, whom I’d hoped in my childish conception would be uniformly enlightened. My Pollyannaish attitude—that people would inevitably discover hatred based on race as arbitrary, a kind of category mistake—momentarily teetered in the aftermath of 9/11. But I also understood the city was a small place inside which millions negotiated existence, and the possibility of communal human life seemed to be based on trust—not the harder self-trust but, rather, trust that you wouldn’t be murdered the moment you stepped out of your apartment. Whenever I passed into the shadow of an air-conditioning unit, its heavy white butt precariously leaning out a high window, I felt like Mrs. Dalloway, having the “perpetual sense… that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”
5.
A COLLEGE FRIEND CALLED, SAYING her godmother had tickets to a play. After the show, she and I had dinner with her elegant relative and one of the actors.
As the four of us ate in a quiet corner of the restaurant, the conversation eventually turned to 9/11. Naturally, the older women wanted to know how Aminah and I, as representatives of the younger generation, viewed the attacks.
Aminah said she saw many cases related to the aftermath of 9/11 in her work at the district attorney’s office, and I said it would be the defining experience of our generation. But really, I was enjoying a third glass of wine.
At that point, Aminah’s godmother turned to the famous actor and declared how much she’d enjoyed the play that night. “Art will save us all,” the godmother said, lifting a glass.
I frowned and did not lift mine. Since September 11, an image had been playing in a loop in my mind: me with a shovel in a morass of dust and debris, uncovering bones and remnants of the dead. Was this my unconscious goading me toward law school, toward a life as an attorney helping the wronged? But then the image dissolved into paintings in a museum, tall sculptures in a field, finally, a play where tickets were $200 each. How was art supposed to save anything?
Maybe it was the wine or my youth and ignorance, but I blurted out, “Art is wonderful, but I don’t think it saves lives the way you can if you’re working every day toward societal reforms.” I paused. “Art couldn’t save the lives of those people on 9/11.”
The two ladies turned toward me, their raised glasses unclinked in the air.
“If we don’t have art, then that’s a reflection of where we are in society, and that’s a problem,” Aminah’s godmother offered gently. She wasn’t trying to make me feel ashamed. She simply understood what I then did not—that art wasn’t only for leisure but also for change.
When we were on the street, Aminah’s godmother waved over a cab when I told her I was headed back on the train to Park Slope. Like most people who had lived in Manhattan all their lives, she distrusted Brooklyn.
“I’m a Jewish mother, and I’m not going to let you get on the subway this late,” she said, pushing a twenty-dollar bill into my hand. We hugged, and like a fairy godmother she kissed me. I was asleep in the cab before it reached the Brooklyn Bridge.
Emancipated from the school environment at last, I crowded my evenings and weekends with films, food, and art, and it was with this unbound spirit I signed up for a sculpture class at one of the downtown community centers.
Joe Russo, my teacher, was probably in his midthirties, about a decade older than he presented, but that seemed the way with artists. I was meeting more of them in New York and noticed their lively, unconventional lifestyles were elixirs holding age at bay. Joe had curly black hair he tied in a bun atop his head and a fan of crinkles that surfaced at the outer edges of his eyes whenever he smiled, which was often.
I worked next to a retiree who’d been studying with Joe for years and who divulged that Joe’s father was a famous sculptor and the two had a rocky relationship. Joe had an easy, affable way about him, so I imagined the elder Russo must be gruff and unjust if they didn’t get along. It occurred to me that even if you went off and had the guts to be an artist and live a beautiful, pure life making things—it didn’t always mean you were a beautiful person.
The class met in a lofty studio building on East Broadway. We always worked from a model. My favorite was a woman who had the thick, powerful haunches of a modern dancer. During the first poses, she sat on the podium and twisted herself. Later, she stood in a modified contrapposto, one leg in front of the other and with her arms clasped above her head.
Joe played classical music during class, but if he tired of Liszt, he put on samba or the Argentinian tango. As the music swelled in the background, I pulled from my brick of moist clay, built around the armature, rolled tapered cylinders for thighs or arms, and scored the clay where I needed to stick on an ear, shaped like a wedge of cheese. I was a god fashioning a golem one-tenth my size. Out of nothing, here was a face, a bent leg, an impossible finger with nail and dimples. Joe never told me I had talent, but I felt, as I had when drawing as a child, entirely essential, instead of extrinsic as when I focused on my race and my alienation from my family. In the art, I found myself a full and powerful human being.
Joe went from tabouret to tabouret around the room, helping each student, but I enjoyed placing only my fingerprints on her body. Wielding the tools that resembled miniature shovels or trowels was mystical. Did you know you could fashion an eyelid by cutting into and then pushing a bit of clay up into the socket? Did you know you could pull the edge of a subway card along a surface to smooth away the bumps? Did you know you could twist the torso left and the hips right and there, you’d have a more dynamic pose?
Then, one evening, as Eartha Kitt’s feline voice issued from the speakers and I flicked my eye from the model back to the golem on my stand, suddenly, in another world parallel to the one I inhabited, an old, old tree in an old, old forest crumpled and snapped in two along a fulcrum. A ripping sound filled the massive woods, and dust billowed into the clean, oxygenated air. The moist red innards of the splintered trunk breathed, exposed for the first time. In this brokenness was nature, breathing life. The bloom of dust settled, giving way to a scene in the middle of the forest: hunched over with a shovel, I sifted through mud and debris, uncovering pieces of dead people and trying to sew them together, to give them life.
But I am in the studio now, I reminded myself, in the world separate from the fecund forest. Joe is gently correcting, the student next to me is humming “C’est Si Bon,” and I am molding a septum. When I picked up the mud leg I’d rolled and attached it to the mud body, suddenly its wholeness proved it was alive. There was the world of the forest in which the image born on 9/11 played out, and there was the world of the studio on East Broadway: neither demanded that I save dying people. Instead, the thing I had done all my life, watching, hiding in the background in which I must be an expert so that I could earn my place to act within it—this human history had developed my eye. But now, instead of employing it to hide and disappear, I would put this powerful eye to work to build something and be truly useful. In that instant—c’est si bon—I knew I was not meant to find the dead, but somehow create a representation of the living.
6.
IT WAS ALMOST SUMMER AND I’d been in New York for more than ten months. My Rumspringa was nearing an end.
My boss offered to keep me on another year at the nonprofit, and I wanted to stay in New York and make art. But if I was honest, one of the main reasons I didn’t want to go on to law school was Nate.
Nate and I started dating a few months after 9/11, and even when we’d had our initial relationship conversation he threw up his hands—Princeton to New York was long-distance. He began with a tautology: “I am where I am. The things in front of me are the things I can do best with.” I responded that the city wasn’t far from Princeton, that I was still right in front of him. But I couldn’t say the same about Cambridge.
Then back at Easter, Nate had received some news: his mother was diagnosed with cancer, and it was terminal. When he told me over the phone, I said for the first time, not having planned it, that I loved him. “Thank you,” he responded. I did not mind not having my love verbally reciprocated. Wasn’t love a way to say I’m sorry? Sorry for what you are going through, sorry for your suffering, sorry and I love you?
A week later, he called from Bozeman. The sore throat his father had gotten after a wet camping trip was lingering. Tests were run, cancer found.
“I’ll be on the East Coast next week to grab some things, but I’m going to come back here for a while,” he said.
I ran through what this meant for his work first, and then for us second. I love you, I said. Thank you, he said.
I took the commuter rail to Cold Spring in the Hudson Valley. On the main street, I went into a shop and bought a hiking map of the mountain. It was a gray day, and the clouds were long, thin horsetails suspended in the sky. Couples and families with dogs took up the path, but as I hiked closer to the peak, the crowd thinned. My eyes darted from trail blaze to trail blaze, blue squares painted on white aspens, and my feet moved easily from rock to rock. I reflected on the conversation I’d had with Umma the previous day, which had inspired my decision to leave the city that afternoon.
She was breathless when she answered. “Sarah had a birthday party and some of the kids came back to our house.” Children shrieked in the background. “You don’t sound good. What’s wrong?”
“I wrote Harvard.”
“About what?”
“About staying out another year. They said yes.”
