before, and nothing that I won’t hear again, probably. Eight letters, and the clue might read, “Above the shoulders, he’s nothing but crap.” Of course, they’d don’t put words like that in the Times crossword puzzle. If they did, anyone could finish it.
Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool
Before it was moved out near the fairground, the North Carolina Museum of Art was located in downtown Raleigh, and often, when we were young, my sister Gretchen and I would cut out of church and spend an hour looking at the paintings. The collection was not magnificent, but it was enough to give you a general overview, and to remind you that you pretty much sucked. Both Gretchen and I thought of ourselves as artists. She the kind that could actually draw and paint, and me the kind that pretended I could actually draw and paint. When my sister looked at a picture, she would stand at a distance, and then slowly, almost imperceptibly, drift forward, until her nose was right up against the canvas. She examined all of the painting, and then parts of it, her fingers dabbing in sympathy as she studied the brushstrokes.
“What are you thinking about?” I once asked.
And she said, “Oh, you know, the composition, the surfaces, the way things look realistic when you’re far away but weird when you’re up close.”
“Me too,” I said, but what I was really thinking was how grand it would be to own a legitimate piece of art and display it in my bedroom. Even with my babysitting income, paintings were out of the question, so instead I invested in postcards, which could be bought for a quarter in the museum shop and matted with shirt cardboard. This made them look more presentable.
I was looking for framing ideas one afternoon when I wandered into a little art gallery called the Little Art Gallery. It was a relatively new place, located in the North Hills Mall and owned by a woman named Ruth, who was about my mom’s age, and introduced me to the word “fabulous,” as in: “If you’re interested, I’ve got a fabulous new Matisse that just came in yesterday.”
This was a poster rather than a painting, but still I regarded it the way I thought a connoisseur might, removing my glasses and sucking on the stem as I tilted my head. “I’m just not sure how it will fit in with the rest of my collection,” I said, meaning my Gustav Klimt calendar and the cover of the King Crimson LP tacked above my dresser.
Ruth treated me as an adult, which must have been a task, given the way I carried on. “I don’t know if you realize it,” I once told her, “but it seems that Picasso is actually Spanish.”
“Is he?” she said.
“I had a few of his postcards on my French wall, the one where my desk is, but now I’ve moved them next to my bed, beside the Miró.”
She closed her eyes, pretending to imagine this new configuration. “Good move,” she said.
The Little Art Gallery was not far from my junior high, and I used to stop by after class and hang out. Hours later I’d return home, and when my mother asked where I had been, I’d say, “Oh, at my dealer’s.”
In 1970, the only artwork in my parents’ house was a family tree and an unframed charcoal portrait of my brother, my four sisters, and me done by a guy at a street fair. Both hung in the dining room, and I thought they were pretty good until I started spending time with Ruth and decided that they weren’t challenging enough.
“What more do you want from a group picture of six spoiled children?” my mother asked, and rather than trying to explain I took her to see Ruth. I knew that the two of them would get along. I just didn’t think they would get along so well. At first the topic of conversation was me — Ruth doing the cheerleading and Mom just sort of agreeing. “Oh, yes,” she said. “His bedroom is lovely. Everything in its place.”
Then my mother started hanging out at the gallery as well, and began buying things. Her first purchase was an elongated statue of a man made from what looked like twisted paper but was actually metal pressed into thin sheets. He stood maybe two feet tall and held three rusted wires, each attached to a blown-glass balloon that floated above his head. Mr. Balloon Man,