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By Root 1065 0

from Dr. Otto’s class—the discussions, that is, and lectures, so many hours now lost. What he did remember, however, were first moments, first viewings, how priceless it was to be in the presence of works so great—so entertaining and romantic, so new he could never see what was coming—that life up to that point had suddenly seemed lacking. The movies made him feel utterly alive. There was the scene in the wine cellar in Notorious when Cary Grant unwittingly pushes a wine bottle toward the edge of a shelf, and if the bottle shattered it might be his and Ingrid Bergman’s undoing, a moment so suspenseful he and Alice took each other’s hands instinctively; and when it did fall, Alice screamed. He remembered Grace Kelly leaning in to kiss Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, her shadow blanketing his face—without question, Pepin thought, the most beautiful woman that ever was. Or Tippi Hedren sitting in a schoolyard smoking, following a lone crow flying across a cloudless sky and landing on the monkey bars, revealing that the whole playground was packed with thousands of the black birds.

He could go on. But there was one night in particular. He was riding his bike home from the evening viewing, his mind lambent with images, associations, connections. He couldn’t recall now what film he’d just seen, only that he’d stopped his bike on the dark road, warmed by and alive with the love and genius in the art, so grateful for it that he wanted to wait there and feel it course through him. This is what life is, he thought, a giving to the void. The artist made—he gave—and I received, and my life, this life, would be nothing without somehow giving something back.

He knew this as certainly as he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Alice.

Out of the cab, Pepin paused—befuddled, defeated, and horrified by what he saw. There were school buses everywhere.

They were parked along Central Park West, all along 81st Street and in the U-shaped driveway by the Center for Earth and Space. And there were schoolchildren everywhere too, of course, thousands, it seemed, milling at the museum’s entrances, a legion entering or exiting. My God, he thought, I’ll never find my wife. He wasn’t even sure of the best place to enter himself, so he ran up the wide steps on the Central Park West side toward the metal doors between the towering columns. TRUTH, it read on the Romanesque façade. KNOWLEDGE. VISION. In the distance, he could make out the cupola on the corner of 77th Street, its globed spire colored an undersea green, the tower gargoyled by giant eagles.

In the rotunda, under the vaulted ceiling and the high windows flooded with white light, was the skeleton of a barosaurus, her bones as brown as the wood of ancient galleons, reared up on her hind legs to defend her offspring behind her from an allosaurus. Pepin knew his dinosaurs; Spellbound’s DinAgon I and II had been massive hits worldwide. The ambient noise here befit some great event: heels echoing off the marble floors, multiplied and ramified, as loud as horse hooves; spoken sentences that carried so clearly—“The Blue Whale’s one floor down,” a guide said—it was as if they’d been whispered to you alone; and the reverberant talk transformed by the ricocheted acoustics off the octagonal patterns on the ceiling and walls, the hall turning it all to babble.

In a Hitchcock movie, Pepin thought, I’d be waiting in a line to buy a ticket while my wife appeared behind me. He kept an eye out for her while he shuffled toward the ticket counter and after what seemed an eternity purchased his, grabbing a floor plan and scanning it to get his bearings, clueless as to how to track Alice down until he heard her voice as close to his ear as if they were playing a game of telephone.

“Anthony,” she said, “put a lid on it, please.”

Miraculously, she crossed the hall right in front of him, herding her class as they exited the Butterfly Conservatory exhibit at the other end of the rotunda, her kids a ragtag rainbow crew of Hispanics, blacks, whites, Asians, Indians, the girls dressed for a day trip,