The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [215]
“I know,” I lied, the troll grinning mischievously in its violence, its orange hair standing erect in murderous ecstasy.
My disappointment didn’t last. It wasn’t enough to free me permanently, and I look back now “across time’s moat” and I wish I could shake sense into that kid: “Enough,” I’d say. “That guy’s not what you want to be.” But younger selves refuse to follow older wisdom.
For my twelfth birthday, when I was deep in an espionage fetish, he made me a high-quality Soviet passport, with my stern photo expertly installed behind Cyrillic seals and visa stamps showing my travels to North Korea, Vietnam, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. I knew that the work involved—the research, the hand stitching, the specialized glue and paints—reflected his sincere love for me. I also knew by then that love was only one element of such an extravagant gift: the rest was professional vanity and a quantity of probable felonious rehearsal.
For my thirteenth, he gave me a baseball signed to me by my hero, Rod Carew, the Minnesota Twins’ star second baseman and, later, first baseman and a Jewish convert from Panama, easily the coolest Jew within ten thousand miles of my house. It’s not that this item was so difficult to obtain. It’s just that by the time I was thirteen, I had started to assume that anything that passed through his hands was fake. I threw the ball away.
Later he gave Dana a sweet-sixteen present: a “consolation” driver’s license after she failed the exam twice. Since Dad was in prison when we turned sixteen, the license was made by Chuck Glassow, Dad’s college friend who, officially, owned a grocery store. We had known Chuck for years, and he used to come out for dinner with us occasionally when Dana and I spent weekends with Dad. He was a little like Dad, very well-read, but less flamboyant about it. He was taller even than my six-foot-one father. When I was twelve or so, with all my contradictory feelings about Dad and manhood simmering up to a boil, I still liked Chuck, though I was also ashamed that I thought my father lost in comparison. This diminishment of my father may have been unavoidable anyhow at that time; that’s part of being a twelve-year-old boy (as my own sons, now fifteen, continue to teach me).
I liked how Chuck swore. It was, I see now, an affectation, like quoting Latin and Greek (which he also did); his cursing was Runy-onesque, calculated, cooked up. “She should consider blowing that attitude all the way out of her ass and lighting it on fire,” he said of one of the grumpy, antique waitresses at the Embers restaurant, and I thought he was a figure of high glamour.
He was an especially slender man, long and thin in every direction and every limb. “Artie,” he said after he saw me talking to a neighbor, a girl my age but already quite a bit more developed. “She’s too big for you. But I’m drawn in that direction, too. My lady of the moment? She and I? A Giacometti putting it to a Botero.” I didn’t understand the references, but the line made him laugh so hard he shook. I laughed, too, of course—a twelve-year-old having a grown man crack dirty jokes for him.
And then, a few days later, he mailed me a photograph, apparently taken in front of the Greek temple façade of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, of a grimacing, wire-thin Giacometti statue putting it to a plump Botero statue, beatific at the rear intrusion. The huge composite statue stood to the left of the grand staircase. I had never noticed it there before, remarkably.
So I puffed my Huffy over to the museum where I found the usual sculpture to the left of the main stairs: an angel with a sword standing on a wolf, or something. Even more improbable than Glassow’s, all things considered.
From nothing, from a passing joke that occurred to him as he said it, Glassow had made this crazy and pointless photo, implying a sculpture that never was, a collaboration and history between two artists who never met, and a ribald sense of humor in the city