The Folded Clock: A Diary

Chapter 87: May 5

Today I met for lunch a famous German artist, the one who violates the homes of others with her personal possessions. She arrived in New York a few days ago to install a show in a church. She was violating the house of God now.

I professed to her my adoration when, a month earlier, I’d interviewed her over Skype. She’d suggested, or maybe I’d suggested it: when she was next in town, we should have lunch.

The artist agreed to meet me at Café Sabarsky. I arrived first. I was worried we’d lose our chance at a table, so I lied to the hostess and told her the artist was in the restroom. When I called the artist to check on her whereabouts, she was still many blocks away. I confessed to the hostess, “I was mistaken about the artist’s location. Would you like your table back?”

Ten minutes later, the artist arrived. Though German she smelled of certain powerfully feminine moisturizers and shampoos I associate with the French. We sat. She wondered about the size of the small Wiener Schnitzel. “But will it be small enough?” she mused. I ordered a beer. We discussed female sexiness. I mentioned my ten-year-old daughter who was, in my opinion, very sexy. She’d been sexy since birth. One of the first things I remember noticing about her body, at thirty seconds of age, were her sexy and muscular arms. (I equivocated to the artist: probably every woman thinks her baby is sexy.)

Not long after I mentioned my daughter, the artist announced that she did not often befriend people with children. The artist does not have children. She said that if a person with a child uses the child as an excuse to explain why she cannot go out with the artist — to a restaurant or a movie — the artist stops calling the person. She waits twenty years until the person’s children are gone to call her again.

After lunch we walked to the church to see the show the German artist was installing. It was hard to tell where the church stopped and the art began. People were praying and crying in the pews; others were scrambling to see the artist’s show, not yet open to the public. A Brazilian woman succeeded in pleading her case (she was flying home that night) and was admitted. The Brazilian and I wandered the church together while the artist asked our opinions about lighting. There was something so relaxed and easygoing about the artist. She seemed happy just having people around, even if she didn’t speak or interact with us much. Maybe she made friends this way, by fast-forwarding to the point where no one needed to perform, when not every second required that someone behave like a genius worth getting to know better.

“Do you want to go to MoMA?” the artist asked me.

We took a cab to MoMA. En route we passed some police installing crowd rails along Fifth Avenue. We quickly deduced: these were preparations for a fancy ball that night. In prior years I would have spun meaning from this confluence of the German artist and me passing a red carpet event in a cab. I would have spun a message from the universe: someday I would be famous like the artist and I would be invited to a ball. When I was twenty and visiting Florence and not yet a writer, I had received such a message. I’d planned to eat at a restaurant where all the renowned Florentine writers ate (ask me to name a Florentine writer). One day of each year (I read in my guidebook) the restaurant was closed for a literary awards ceremony. The day I tried to go to the restaurant was the day it was closed for the literary awards ceremony. I couldn’t have been more thrilled. The universe was telling me: I was going to be an award-winning writer!

Today I received no such message about my future.

The German artist and I arrived at MoMA. We wandered around the show of another German artist, Sigmar Polke. I owned a book by Sigmar Polke, though to be honest I wasn’t sure if Sigmar Polke was a woman or a man. I study so much, I read so much, yet there seems no avoiding these moments when the basics escape me.

In MoMA it was unclear how much space the German artist wanted or did not want when looking at art, whether or not she wanted to be alone. I stayed close but tried not to hover. The German artist, unsurprisingly, knew a lot of people in the museum. She stopped to say hello to this person and that. I’d wander off and reconnect with her when she was by herself again.

“He should be dead,” she said of one man with whom she’d just been speaking.

This man was also an artist. Last she’d heard, she said, he’d been terribly sick. His appearance in this gallery, she seemed to imply, nearly qualified as a resurrection. Fittingly he’d been brought back to life not in a church but in a museum. Or maybe not so fittingly. Most artists I know hate MoMA.

We stopped in front of a painting of socks. I proclaimed Polke to have a good sense of humor.

“That man,” she said of the man who should be dead, “he told me that, in person, Polke wasn’t funny.” With the artist I could not tell: was she delivering a plain piece of information, or was she schooling me?

We hurried through the rest of the show because MoMA was closing. The guards funneled us through a hallway where we re-encountered the man who should be dead.

I asked the man who should be dead about Polke’s supposed lack of funniness. I wondered if maybe he wasn’t funny in the manner of certain Germans. As Primo Levi said of Germans, “They love order, systems, bureaucracy; even more, although rough and irascible blockheads, they cherish an infantile delight in glittering, many-colored objects.”

The man who should be dead conceded — maybe, in that sense, Polke might be considered funny. He knew a lot of famous people, this man, because his family had run a hotel in the Alps; Picasso had stayed there, too.

The German artist asked, Was Picasso funny?

No, said the man, Picasso was a ladies’ man. He was not funny.

We mused for a while on the topic of “Were They Funny?” Shakespeare, was he funny in person? Was Manet? Was Rilke? All of these dead people, were they funny or not? You couldn’t tell by their work what it would have been like to hang out with them in person. I couldn’t tell by the German artist’s work what it would be like to hang out with her in person. It was different than I’d expected for sure, and all day long I’d been managing the shortfall.

After a stop in the MoMA design store, during which the German artist asked to see a Scandinavian juicer I liked, and which she clearly didn’t, we exited onto the street. On the corner of Fifty-third and Sixth, we parted ways. Our good-bye was unceremonious, as though we’d see each other in three days or never again. At this same intersection is a Hilton Hotel where, when I was twenty-three, I used to cash the paychecks I received from my temp job as a secretary. This corner signifies a time when I was young and I was broke and I was using a hotel as a bank, and yet I felt certain that my line was true. Now I no longer have strong gut feelings about rightness or wrongness. I lack quick conviction. I can no longer process the messages the universe is sending me, if it is sending me messages at all. I don’t even know whether or not today I made a friend.