Starry Night

  The room suddenly burst into applause and I saw my father walk up to a podium. The chances that he would see me standing there with Nolan and not in my seat where I was supposed to be were high, thanks to my red dress, not that he could do anything from a podium. My parents were in Nan and David Noorlander mode, not Mom and Dad mode, but I still had to make quick moves.

  “Okay, come on—not that way, just follow me.” I let go of his hand and rushed down the far side of the room, away from all the tables. I darted in and out of waiters moving to bus the dinner plates and guests making their way to the bathrooms before dessert. It was like we were in a James Bond movie. We reached the entrance, where we had all come in to dinner and that would lead us out of there. I turned around and heard my father say, “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen.”

  I froze with fear that he was about to say, “You see that girl in the red dress running off with a boy who is unrecognizable to me? That is my naughty daughter, Wren.” But he didn’t. He said, “If I could take you away from your dinners for just a moment to introduce our honored guest, Cy Dowd.” More exploding applause.

  “Do you want to stay?” Nolan said.

  I should have stayed. I shouldn’t have left the party without telling anyone where I was going. But every impulse in my body said go.

  “No.” I looked back. Could I see my mother’s silhouette sitting at one of the tables? Could she see me? Was she watching me? Nope. “No. Let’s go!” I took his hand and bolted around the corner to the Egyptian gallery. We had to run through at least six rooms before we got to the main hall, and to the big stairs that lead to the master paintings. We ran farther and farther away from the party. I felt like the space shuttle blasting up into the atmosphere. As it gets farther away from Earth, pieces of metal start falling off it, like it’s being freed from everything that was keeping it grounded.

  When we ran by the cases of amulets—tiny good luck charms that Egyptian people of the Middle Kingdom carried around with them or stuck in their coffins—I had to screech to a halt. Some of the talismans are as small as a fingernail—carved bats, cats, and falcons, coins, little jewels, statues of people standing up very straight.

  “Look at these. Have you ever seen them?” I said breathlessly. Nolan didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. “These!” I pulled him in, pointing to the hundreds of teeny figurines. “When I was little, I used to hope that if I was very good, my father would open this case with a special museum key and give me one of these.”

  “I guess that didn’t happen?” he said, a little winded too.

  “Yeah, he doesn’t have a key. I’m not sure there is a key, and anyway, I don’t think I was ever really good enough to deserve one of these.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing.” I supposed I wanted him to hear that, but I also wanted to take it back the minute I said it because it’s kind of weird to tell someone you think you are a dud.

  “Which one would you have now?” Leaning in close to me with his face flushed from running, he looked hot. I wondered if he played a sport. “Pretend I have a key.” The thought of a game made me smile.

  “Oh, okay. Well, let’s see.” I totally focused on choosing, like maybe he could give me one. “I like those amber bees.” He smiled at me like I had picked well.

  “Which one would you choose?” I asked. He scanned the case, giving each ornament a good hard look, and then he said confidently, “Definitely that blue eye. I want that thing around my neck.”

  I turned and looked at his neck. His skin was smooth and maybe had leftover tan from the summer. Even though his tie was still fastened, I imagined what the base of his neck looked like. That bone at the bottom that is shaped like a U. I involuntarily swallowed and willed myself to breathe.

  “I think they do have reproductions of those in the gift shop,” I said, looking back up to his eyes.

  “Well, that makes me feel uncool and unoriginal. I bet they don’t have the bees in the gift shop.”

  “No, they don’t.” I smiled because I had looked for them before.

  “Is this where you wanted to take me?”

  “No, no—come on.” I started running again, past the kneeling high priestess, past the masks and the coffins, back into the great hall, and up to the wide, milky marble stairs. If you had an image of the yards and yards of red silk billowing behind me as I ran through the oyster-colored galleries, you were right.

  19

  Van Gogh’s Starry Night is not at the Met. It lives at the Museum of Modern Art on Fifty-Third Street. My disappointment that The Starry Night does not hang in the museum where I spend the most time is quite real. Once when I was six or seven, around the same time I believed Dad had keys to the cases that held the world’s tiniest treasures, I asked if he could trade one of the museum’s great works—a Sargent? a Picasso?—for The Starry Night. I thought it was a reasonable trade. Dad was and still is nuts about Picasso, but I found all those exaggerated noses and blue paintings scary. I thought the museum would be better off with one less Picasso and the most glorious van Gogh. Anyway, you might be thinking that I would take Nolan to see The Starry Night, but we were in the wrong museum. I never ended up showing him that painting.

  The Great Hall, compared to what it looked like two hours before, was nearly empty. There were people dodging out of the party early and quite a few museum guards and party planners milling around, but all the action was in the Temple of Dendur room. Near the entrance where Bennet had been standing there was a long table that was being set up with gift bags for people to take home with them when they left. Nolan and I were on the other side of the room from that action. If we went upstairs, there easily could be a guard who would send us right back down. It’s not like you can just waltz around the museum as you please—it’s the Met—but I had a crazy feeling in me that even if we saw a guard, I would be able to talk my way into going where I wanted to go. I felt empowered.

  “So, we might get busted, but let’s go upstairs,” I said.

  “I think that is a supremely good idea,” Nolan said, and held out his hand for me to take. No, that isn’t right. Really, he reached out and took my hand. I know that is how it went because even though I was emboldened enough to blow off my parents’ dinner and sneak upstairs to forbidden galleries filled with priceless art, I definitely didn’t have the courage to voluntarily put my hand in his. No, he took my hand. My hand. My hand. He. Took. My. Hand.

  We dashed to the side of the stairs and climbed them together. They are so white and huge that it is impossible to believe nobody saw us, but we made it up to the third stair from the top before we saw a guard. Her back was to us.

  “Wait, stay here,” Nolan whispered and pulled me to the wall, where the names of benefactors are carved. I started to giggle.

  “Shhh. Wait, wait, wait. Let’s see if she sees us.”

  And like in a movie, the security guard, whom I didn’t recognize, started walking in the opposite direction from where we were standing.

  “Go!” he said.

  I shot up the last three stairs and made a beeline, taking off past the Asian court to the rooms where the European paintings hung on the walls. I had to hike the skirt of the dress up a little to run, but that made me feel even more like a Bond girl.

  There were no guards in the rooms where we stopped. Bizarre, but true.

  “Let’s just stay here,” I whispered, winded. We were standing in front of Vermeer’s Study of a Young Woman. “I would take you to the van Goghs, but we might be pushing our luck to go over there.” I pointed into the next dimly lit gallery, which housed some of the museum’s most famous paintings. “And”—I still couldn’t really catch my breath, I motioned in front of me—“she’s so beautiful, right?” We both looked at the painting of the sweet girl with the pearl earring staring at us. It was like she was amused that people had come to see her when there was a party downstairs.

  “She is beautiful.” He put his hair behind his ear. “Her eyes ar
e so wide apart.”

  “I’ve always thought she looked nice.” I paused and looked at the girl, who was probably my age. “And you know what’s weird?”

  “What?”

  “She looks like someone you could go to school with or who’s on your soccer team. I never picture people from the 1600s being so friendly.” I looked at him to see if he agreed with me. “Don’t you think she looks normal?”

  “You know what I think is weird?” Nolan asked. I shook my head back and forth. “You know this was painted in the 1600s without looking at the sign.”

  “Well, sort of, yeah, I mean that’s when Vermeer painted.” He smiled at me. “But, I have also looked at the sign before.”

  “You guys are all cool,” he said.

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Yeah, Oliver is a math freak, your sister is a TV star, your parents run the frigging world, and you know when this random painting was painted and all about tiny Egyptian artifacts.”

  “My parents don’t run the world. Mom runs a pottery studio, and, yeah, the museum is cool, but Dad works really hard. I don’t think it’s easy running this place, but it’s not like he’s secretary of state or something.” I hoped he wasn’t going to launch into some kind of foreign policy talk because I just threw the secretary of state thing out there. I wasn’t prepared to hold my own in a discussion about the Middle East.

  “I’m sure it’s not easy, but it’s the frigging Met, so.” There was almost a don’t-be-stupid tone to his voice.

  “I know.” I didn’t know what else to say. Dad had been at his same job since before I could remember. I knew it was unusual, but it was also just what my father did every day. I made a mental note not to be blasé about it. “Though Oliver is really good at math, which I guess is cool. We used to give him impossible math problems, like 124 times 53, and he could do them in his head.”

  “Hold on.” Nolan closed his eyes and concentrated. He put his pointer fingers and thumbs between his eyebrows and his lips were moving a little. It was so quiet in that room.

  “You are not going to…”

  “Shhhh.” He kept his eyes closed and held his hand up like, Hold on.

  “6,572.”

  “What!”

  He laughed.

  “I’m sort of good at math too.”

  My mouth was open. “I suck at it!”

  “No! You could do this, it’s not that hard.” He was laughing. “You just do 120 times 50, which is 6,000, then multiply 4 times 50, which is 200, and then 124 times 3, which is 372, and then you add those all together and you get 6,572.”

  “Yeah, see, I couldn’t do that, like ever.”

  “I bet you could.”

  “No, I really couldn’t. If someone said if I could get the right answer they would give me that painting, I still couldn’t.”

  “Awww.” He reached over to pat my shoulder in a jokingly patronizing way, like poor-little-spaz-girl-who-can’t-do-math. I batted his hand away before he could touch me.

  “Shut up.” I was beaming at him. We calmed down again.

  “Do you want that painting in your bedroom?” he asked me.

  “Um, yeah. I really do.”

  “I wouldn’t.” He was smiling.

  “Well, then you aren’t such a smarty-pants because it’s priceless, it’s luminous … it’s a masterpiece!” I looked at the adorable froglike girl with her creamy skin. “I would love to lie in bed and look at her.”

  “She’s your bud from the 1600s,” he said.

  “Yup.”

  “You’re funny.”

  I was smiling at him like a goofball. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Bennet looking at us from the entrance to the gallery. He raised his eyebrows, put his finger up into the air like he had when I saw him at the start of the party, turned on his heel, and walked away.

  “Why wouldn’t your dad give you one of those little Egyptian things? I mean if they weren’t the museum’s obviously.”

  “Um?” I couldn’t get over Bennet. It was like he had given me a red Life Saver all over again. Nolan didn’t notice him. His relaxed posture and mellow disposition made you think he always came on up to the galleries after closing and hung out. My insides felt like there was a pack of electric eels swimming through my ribs.

  “You said that even if he had a key, you didn’t think you were good enough to get one.”

  “Oh no, I don’t know. I just…” He was looking at me like he really wanted the answer.

  “Sometimes when I was little, and even now…” He was still looking right at me, listening. I’m telling you, the guy listens like you hold the secrets to everlasting happiness. “I just can screw up.”

  “You don’t look like a screwup,” he said.

  “No?”

  “No, you look like her.” He pointed at the famous painting.

  “Well, how do you know she wasn’t a screwup?” I said, all the while taking in the amazing and unbelievable fact that he had just compared me to a Vermeer.

  “Why do you think you are a screwup?”

  “I’m like an apple. I look perfectly good from the outside, but when you bite into it, it has mealy insides.”

  “Mealy apples are the worst.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I don’t believe you have mealy insides, but you do look like an apple.”

  Charlie and Bennet said I look like fruit too, I thought.

  I looked down at the skirt of my dress that did look like the glossy skin of a Gala. I also took that moment to subtly shove the stained fabric back into the folds. My heart got momentarily heavy because, no matter what that lady had said about finding a good dry cleaner, those stains were never going to come out.

  “Well, thank you, but you should believe me. I’m so dyslexic you can’t believe it,” I stated almost too loudly.

  “So?”

  “So I have ADD too.”

  “So? So do I.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. I’m not really into labels though.” He raised his eyebrows at me.

  “Do you take anything for it?” I said, surprising myself because I don’t usually talk about my medication.

  “I used to when I was younger, and then my mother got sick of it because I couldn’t sleep so she chucked the bottle in the garbage can. But I still can’t sleep.”

  “I can sleep. I’m on drunillian. It helps me, I think.”

  “Are you on it now?”

  “It’s worn off. It wears off around seven.”

  “I remember that feeling. It felt like a dip. It was kind of too big a dip for me to handle. It bummed me out a lot. I felt like I couldn’t play my guitar, so that was unacceptable.”

  “Yeah, I was on one like that when I was littler, like in fifth grade. But then I started seeing Dr. Trout.”

  “Dr. Trout!” He laughed.

  “Yeah, I know, she’s my pediatric neuropsychologist…” I felt like maybe this wasn’t such a good conversation anymore.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, are you going to make fun of me or something?”

  “Hey, no, no…” He shook his head gently and pushed his bangs out of his eyes. “Tell me.”

  “It’s just that she put me on this other stuff where there is no dip, and it really works. I do much better in school. I feel more like a citizen on it. And I’m not on it during the summer. And it totally doesn’t mess with my drawing.”

  “That’s good,” he said. Sometimes I have a hard time looking people in the eye, but not with Nolan. It was like the only choice at that moment was to look into his eyes that were warm and kind and loving. “I have no judgment about that, Wren, I mean it.” I kind of felt tears gathering, so I blinked.

  “Well, I may not take it forever,” I said.

  “No, people can use it for a while, learn stuff from it, and then ditch it when it doesn’t serve them anymore. Happens a lot.”

  “Yeah. So do you play guitar or sing or…”

  “Both.
”

  “Right, that makes sense, that’s what people in bands do, like, um…” He reached out and rubbed the fabric of my skirt between his fingers. It was as if he had touched the inside of my thigh. I shivered.

  “Jimmy Page,” he said.

  “Yeah. Who’s Jimmy Page?”

  “What!?” His reaction was like a fire alarm had gone off in the room. He grabbed my shoulders and fake-shook them. “Jimmy Page in many people’s opinion, including mine, is the greatest, most brilliant genius rock guitarist that ever lived. He is the lead guitar player for Led Zeppelin. You have heard of Led Zeppelin, please tell me.”

  “Yesssss. God, yes.”

  “Thank god. This might have had to end right here if you didn’t know Zeppelin.”

  I couldn’t even respond. If it could end that meant something had started. And then his phone must have been on vibrate because he pulled it out of his pocket and read.

  “Listen, my boy from Pittsburgh is spinning down on Houston Street at this club. All these Pitt kids that I know came up for it and it’s going to be…” And then he did this move that I can’t really describe, but I guess it’s a cool-music-guy dance move you make if something is going to be off the hook. “They are wild, those kids from Pittsburgh. Do you want to go, like, right now? It’s”—he looked at his phone again—“nine-o-five.”

  “Well.” A spell had been broken. “Wait, how do you know people from Pittsburgh?”

  “I spend a weekend a month there. My dad’s a professor of biology at Pitt—the university.”

  “Really? But don’t you live here?” All this time I hadn’t even asked him about his family or anything.

  “Yeah, my mom lives here. My dad and stepmom live there, with my half brother, Bruno. It’s not far on the train.”

  “‘Stairway to Heaven!’” I said, way louder than anything else we had said since we were in that gallery. “Led Zeppelin sings that song ‘Stairway to Heaven.’”

  “Bingo.” He leaned forward, smiling, took my head in his hands and kissed me, right in front of the Vermeer.