Читать книгу The Ambidextrist - Peter Rock - Страница 10

FOUR

ADVICE

Terrell shivers. He wants to untuck his shirt, to whip off his belt, to shout. It is dark in the museum, with hardly any windows, and all those are full of sun; the sun is everywhere outside, where he wants to be. Here, inside, there is no one else his age. The only other black people are the security guards, who either sit on benches, looking bored, or sleepwalk past, radios squawking from their hips.

The rooms go on and on. Underground and up in the air. It is the biggest building Terrell knows, and being inside it is almost as bad as church—church is over, at least for today.

He likes the room of armor, all the swords and spears and the round shields. He likes the black and white photographs of naked women. Nudes, Ruth said, and had not made him stop looking. Now he passes paintings that are only orange squares, and then endless pictures of flowers. None of this interests him. Boats in the ocean, snow in the mountains, white women in long dresses. Terrell wants to scratch the paint away with his fingernails.

In a corner, though, stands a wooden box, two feet high with a small window on one side. He bends down to see inside, where three metal points have marked lines—red, blue, and black—on a small piece of paper. If anything is moving, it is too slow to tell. Terrell waits, staring inside, trying to figure it out. He jumps a little at the sound of the voice.

“You’re probably wondering what that is.”

Two cowboy boots point at Terrell, the man standing close. Terrell looks up, into the skinny white face.

“What it is, is you got the red, there, measuring the temperature and humidity, to protect the art. The blue keeps track of seismical activity—earthquakes, even little ones. Tremors.”

The man stands too close, his voice just above a whisper. Terrell tries to step back, away, and kicks the wall behind him. The man’s blue jacket looks like some sort of costume; he is no taller than Terrell; he smiles as he speaks, and the air between them smells like peppermint.

“Scott,” he says. “That’s my name. How about you?”

“Eric,” Terrell says. “Eric Swan.”

“And how old are you, Eric?”

“Thirteen.”

“Thirteen,” Scott says, rubbing his hands together.

“I didn’t ask to talk to you,” Terrell says.

“Exactly,” Scott says, not even slowing. “If I’m scaring you, you don’t have to. You’re not frightened of me, are you?”

“What about the black line, then?” Terrell says.

“Now we’re having a conversation,” Scott says. “You have to like that.”

“The black line,” Terrell says, standing his ground.

“The black line,” Scott says. “That one can detect when a person’s lying, like I’m doing right now. See that jump there, the black one?”

“What?”

“Why would I lie to you? I’ll tell you why—I’m testing you. You have to test people all the time, to see the edges of a situation, who you can trust. Strangers you just met, even your friends—maybe your friends most of all, since you have to trust them more.”

People shuffle around them, pause to stare into paintings, then move away. The skin of Terrell’s face feels hot. He does not look at Scott, but past him, over his shoulder, at a painting of a haystack.

“Answer me this,” Scott says. “Have you made some real mistakes in the people you’ve picked as friends?”

“No.”

“Go ahead and trust them, then,” Scott says. “You’ll be sorry.”

“Terrell!” Ruth says, suddenly ten feet away. “You come away from there!”

“No reason you had to lie to me about your name.” Scott says.

“Machine didn’t catch me,” Terrell says, moving away. “You would have known.”

It seems Scott is following, also stepping toward Ruth, but when Terrell looks back, he is gone.

“Mind yourself,” Ruth says. Her face is all twisted, her braids clicking. “Don’t you know better than that? Man like that, next thing I know you’ll be gone for good. Who knows what that kind of person wants with a boy like you?”

“We were just talking,” Terrell says, enjoying himself. “He was all right.”

“He was not all right.”

Terrell walks ahead again, beyond the sound of her voice. Circling from room to room, he looks at the floor, then the ceiling. He is not supposed to get more than one room ahead of her; when he hears her humming grow louder, he moves on. Almost every Sunday, it is this same thing. Ruth only goes to church because she thinks it’s good for him, and because she likes to sing. Jesus set a good example, she says, wherever it was he came from. Terrell doubts that Ruth even likes it here, in the museum; she’ll tell the neighbors about it, as if it will impress them.

Most of the rooms are empty, but floorboards creak and voices answer each other, bouncing through doorways. All the air has been sucked in and out by all the people, again and again, every day. Terrell can hardly breathe.

Out in the foyer of the museum, things open up. The ceiling is high, and sun shines in through the row of front doors. His friends are out there, now—close by, probably; it’s safer around here than in the neighborhoods, and cooler along the river, in the fountains, on the grass under the bushes. He trusts them; he doesn’t have to test them. Terrell smiles, thinking of the man, Scott. Ruth hadn’t liked that one bit.

He turns away from the sun and begins climbing the marble steps. At least, in here, he is safe from being laughed at, wearing this shirt with the collar, these pants with creases up the front. These brown shoes used to belong to someone else. Someone with deformed feet.

At the top of the stairs a twenty foot tall metal woman stands, naked and green, pulling a bow back, ready to shoot an arrow. If she let go, the string would tweak her nipple. Terrell bends his neck, looking at her, until he hears Ruth at the bottom of the stairs, singing some hymn to herself; then he steps through a stone doorway, into rooms full of crosses, paintings of old people praying. He runs his fingers along the smooth sides of vases big enough to hold him, if he could fit through their necks. The rooms are darker, glass cases lit up. Little men made of pottery. Clay horses.

*

The whole time he was talking to the boy, Scott’s thoughts had been forking out ahead of him. Now he waits upstairs in the Asian wing, ready for Terrell to come along.

Scott has been following him, waiting for the right moment, ever since he saw the woman the boy came in with. She had swung through the front doors, into the foyer, and filled all that space. The ceiling stretched eighty feet overhead and a mobile as big as a rowhouse hung from it, pieces of curved metal twisting from cables. She wore a blue dress, her hips thick and high. Beads in her hair—strings of long, thin braids. Her feet forced into tight white sandals. Scott liked the look of her, the shape of her, like someone you could hold onto at the end of a long day when you were tired, something solid to hold onto while everything else whirled past. He chose the boy because he wanted to meet her; he needs a handhold, an opening. Now the boy is coming closer—his light footsteps, the shuffle of shoes too big for him. Scott waits, hidden.

“Terrell,” he says, stepping out from behind a pillar. “Now I know your name.”

“So what?” Terrell tries to keep moving, but soon gives up. “You been following me?” he says.

“Just thought we got kind of interrupted by your mother,” Scott says, “right when we were getting somewhere. You see, all I was saying back there, that was true, and it got me thinking of a few other things no one told me about, when I was younger. Had to learn it all myself.”

“The only reason I talked to you,” Terrell says, “the only reason I’m talking to you, is because Ruth—that’s my sister, not my mother—doesn’t like it, me talking to you. If she sees me doing it, then maybe we’ll get to leave early. I never wanted to talk to you.”

Scott does not respond, not right away. They stand still for a moment, silent in that space, faded paint on the huge wooden beams above, dull brass fittings on the heavy wardrobes along the wall. Through a doorway, skylights illuminate a bamboo fence, low trees. A tea house and Buddhist shrine have been taken apart piece by piece, then put back together, brought all the way from Japan. Scott has seen it before, plenty of times.

“Well,” he says. “I think that may be true, and it’s real clever of you, but I think it’s more than that, talking to me. You’re trying to prove something to me, and that’s cool. It’s not like I need you to be afraid of me.”

“I’m not.”

“But, man, there are givers and there are takers, you know? I’m telling you some things here; this is beyond generosity.”

Footsteps draw closer, and Scott waits, silent again. A guard walks into the room, his face in shadow, then goes around them, through another doorway. His footsteps fade.

“Once you get someone talking,” Scott says, “then you get to where you know more about them than they know about you. See what I mean? You never want to show someone all the way how smart you are.” He smiles, his eyes adjusting to the faint light coming through the latticed screens along the wall.

“You don’t know about me,” Terrell says. “It’s you doing all the talking.”

“Exactly,” Scott says. “True. But I’m careful about what I say” He pauses, waving his hands toward all the room’s corners. “You know why it’s so dark in here? Light wears things down, that’s why. What are you thinking about?”

“Read a book in school,” Terrell says, then stops, as if reconsidering how much he wants to say. “It was about two kids who slept in a museum,” he says. “Hid from the guards, every single night. You could do that here.”

“I have a place to sleep,” Scott says his voice rising. “Why would I want to do that?”

“I didn’t say that.”

Scott likes the shape of the boy’s face in the half-light—chin jutting out, jaw set, the skull smooth and rounded. He looks into it, and questions return to him, remembered from his interview at the hospital: Before you were fifteen, did you shoplift? Were you a bully? Bullied? Did you torture or kill animals? Set fire to or destroy things that weren’t yours? Would you say you like to see what you can get away with?

“Goodbye,” Terrell says. He turns quickly and struts away, before he can be slowed or stopped.

“Fine,” Scott says. He walks in the other direction, not wanting to appear desperate. He does not even look over his shoulder, to see if the boy is watching him. In the next room, wooden figures line the walls, their hands missing fingers, their bodies lacking arms, their earlobes stretched out. A dragon writhes across the ceiling above, ready to fall on Scott’s head.

“What are you smiling about?” the guard says, and Scott has to squint to see him, there in the corner.

“No law against it, is there?”

Two wooden heads sneer angrily, vertical cracks in their faces; they rest on thick columns, making it seem their bodies are encased or hidden behind.

“Usually it means someone’s trying to get away with something,” the guard says.

“Doesn’t it make you want to smile back?” Scott says.

“I’m working,” the guard says.

It is about time, after all, to return to the heat outside. Admission is free, Sunday mornings, and Scott has been inside almost all day. Nothing straightens him like the colors of the paintings, the cold rooms of statues. Now he walks past the Indian temple hall, stone people balancing the roof on their heads, and then finds one of the smaller, side stairways, and descends toward the coat check. He feels strong, full of anticipation. A window runs the length of the stairs, and through it he can see the dark water of the Schuylkill, its curves mirrored by the highway. Closer, a forty foot woman stretches across a billboard wearing a spangled white bathing suit and pantyhose, reclining with her blond hair thrown back. He can’t make out the words beneath her, nor the letters on the smokestacks spitting up black clouds. Trains come and go into the switching yards at 30th Street Station, heading out only to circle back.

He retrieves his pack from the coat check, then heads outside, onto the museum’s front steps. It is late afternoon, still getting hotter. Taking off his jacket, he jams it into the top of his pack. He likes to feel the sun on the skin of his arms.

Straight ahead, towers of glass stretch from the center of the city; to his right, a gilded horseman shines gold, blinding. Scott sits near a small fountain, where black girls play, screaming and splashing each other. Some wear bathing suits and others just T-shirts, their colored underwear showing through. Red, blue, flowered. One little girl leaps up, smiling, and flips her middle finger at her friends. The others laugh.

The sun shines heavily, not letting up; Scott wishes he had a hat. All he wants is to get a good look at the woman. Her name is Ruth. He does not want to talk to or touch her. Not yet. He knows you have to be ready for someone, to make it worth their while. It would be enough to see her in the sun, swinging her hips as she walks, shielding her eyes from the glare. Ruth. If she would only come outside and see him there, look at him, even if it is only a glance, her eyes passing over him, their slight pressure joining the heat of the sun. But too much time has gone by now, and she and the boy must have gone out the back way. Scott has missed her. Standing, he starts away from the fountain. A tour bus stops at the bottom of the steps, and people swarm up and past him, speaking all kinds of words he cannot understand.