kept. But the frankest—SATS, SCHOOL ACTIVITIES: WHAT’S IT ALL FOR?—was held up in assembly by a frowning Mr. Evers, the principal, who said that while we were all in favor of free speech, slogans of this kind were unhelpful to the fabric of our community and undermined morale. Moreover, he explained, they made a bad impression on any guests. This is not, he said, in the spirit of Manchester High School. He advised that there were many avenues for expression, and that those who needed to express confusion or discontent were welcome to submit articles to the school newspaper for publication. That, he hoped, would be an end to it.
Dominic Crace, who knew full well who we were, didn’t turn us in, nor did he lock up the supplies; and we, who sniggered at Mr. Evers’s pompous speech, were nevertheless like flies in a trap, lured by the delights of Crace’s art room. The following year, my last, all of us who were still at the school—Alf had graduated, along with a few others, leaving six of us seniors, three juniors and a sophomore—signed up for Studio Art.
Our first homework assignment was to draw a bee inside a violin inside a pear. Everybody else took Crace literally, and drew painstaking pencil renditions of these items, ever smaller, like Chinese boxes. Nobody was very good at perspective, but for some this worked out better than for others. I didn’t even try to draw. I went home and built a large hollow papier-mâché pear on a coat hanger form—in two pieces, initially, that eventually I sealed together—and I lined the inside with gold foil. I made a violin out of a matchbox and a picture of an instrument cut from a glossy magazine, and I caught a honeybee out among my mother’s lavender, using the old bug-catcher from the attic. I asphyxiated him in the jar.
Having painted him with shellac, pleasingly, so he glistened, I laid the sleeping bee in the half-open violin matchbox, glued it to the floor inside the pear, and then, with my big brother’s help (he must have been already living in Tucson and home for a visit with Tweety, who eventually became his wife), I rigged up a tiny bulb, like a nightlight, inside the pear before I sealed it, and ran the cord discreetly out the bottom. Crucially, I burrowed a peephole through the pear’s skin, through the papier-mâché flesh, so you could peer inside it; and even now I have to say, when the cord was plugged in and the wall of gold foil illuminated the pear’s hollow core, the glistening sleeping bee in his violin matchbox was oddly beautiful. I decided that it was a russet pear, and painted the outside in beautiful crimson reds, many layers of paint so it was thick and shiny. I worked very hard at it—I loved the pointlessness of the enterprise; it gave me such satisfaction, an answer to my earlier posters. This, Mr. Evers, I thought, this is what it’s all for—and when I took it into class and set it up alongside all the pencil drawings, I had the exhilaration of seeing Mr. Crace make a temple of his hands beneath his chin (a temple, mind you, that pulled discreetly at the ends of his devilish goatee) and chuckle aloud.
“This,” he announced, looking around at us one after the other with a flicker of glee that suddenly brought to mind Willy Wonka rather than Petruchio, “now this is a work of art.” He paused, bent at the waist and peered in at my bee in his chamber, then straightened and whirled around. “Whose is this? Whose is it? It’s yours? I knew it. Well done, Nora Eldridge,” he said. “Well done, you.”
4
Sirena was an artist—is an artist. A real one, whatever that means. Now she’s even well known, in certain important circles. Even though she lives in Paris, Sirena isn’t French; she’s Italian. This isn’t obvious because her last name is Shahid and her husband’s first name is Skandar, and her son has the same name as the last shah of Iran—not that any of them is remotely Persian. They simply liked the name. Skandar is from Lebanon, from Beirut. Okay, someone in his family was from Palestine before that, but that’s a long time ago now; and at least some part of it, on his father’s side, I think, was from Beirut all along. One part of him is Christian and another part is Muslim,