The Last Flight of Poxl West (27 page)

“Okay, sorry,” he said. “I mean, I know you know I see you looking at her. And I saw the way she looked at you when we were talking about your uncle. She even told me she'd read the book.”

“She did?”

“She said she did. She might even have said she liked it. Although I got the feeling from talking to her that she was not so impressed by the way he wrote about having left that woman in Holland. I know how much you care about your uncle's heroism. But seems possible a reader like Rachel might not be so impressed by all of what he did. All of which might not matter so much anymore.”

“Jesus,” I said.

For a minute, neither of us said anything more.

“Okay, let me try it this way,” Rabbi Ben said. There was a kind of seriousness on his face I'd not observed in him before. The skin was bunched above his hirsute brow. I could see that the smirk I often had seen in his eyes was somehow absent. “How did you feel before you learned about it?”

“Good,” I said. “Proud. I mean, the guy was my uncle. He was, you know, he might as well have been my grandfather, for what he meant to my family. He'd read me all those stories before they ever even appeared in the book, and now…”

“Now what?”

“Now he's a fraud.”

“Well, is he? I don't know any of this anywhere near as much as you do, but I read all about it. I read the book. But in terms of what he's been accused of, what did he really do wrong?”

“He didn't fly that sortie over Hamburg he said he did.” I could see a flinch of smile reappear in Rabbi Ben's eyes when I said “sortie.” “Flight,” I said. “He didn't fly that bombing run.”

“But he was telling a story, right? Honestly, I don't see what's so wrong with it. He confessed to his error. Book's still mostly true, I'd say. He's led an amazing life and told it well.”

“I was basically bragging about him for months,” I said before I had time not to. “I said I was gonna bring him to talk to our Hebrew class.”

“And if you had, I'm sure he would've been great. Will be. Why don't you invite him?”

“Still?” I said.

“Anytime. Listen, I know you don't care so much about Kabbalah. I know you might not have time in the next little while to read much up on it. But it's my main jam. Thing. It's my main thing. You know the main book of Kabbalah.”

It was called the Zohar, I said. I'd listened to him enough to know.

“It was written by this thirteenth-century Spanish Jew named Moses de Léon. Moses de Léon went into his study every day and came out every week with new material about the
Ein Sof,
about the Sefirot—the main tenets of Jewish mysticism. He would bring them out, read them to his friends. When people asked him where it came from, he said he was translating an ancient Aramaic text. Claimed he went back to his study every day and translated a little more. But you know where he got it?”

I said I didn't know.

“Up here,” Rabbi Ben said.

He was tapping at his temple with his forefinger.

“There was no ancient Aramaic text called the Zohar. There was a book that Moses de Léon wanted to write. A book based on how he saw Adonai, HaShem, the unspeakable represented by the Tetragrammaton, the God he wanted us to reach. And people wouldn't listen to it from him, so he said he was translating some ancient text—and then he just went ahead and made up his story. That's what people do when they write. They make up stories, details to fit the stories they need to tell. And people are still reading—worshiping—that book, almost seven hundred years later. I've basically given my whole spiritual life over to it.”

In the picture behind Rabbi Ben, that old, big-eared Kabbalah scholar looked down at us. For the first time I looked back. I needed a minute before I could respond. A minute when I wasn't looking at Rabbi Ben. A minute when I wasn't even thinking about what Poxl West would think. A minute when it was just what I thought, directly.

“So listen,” Rabbi Ben said. “I think it's time for class.”

He'd never had anything but time for me. Today he'd said his piece. Maybe he thought it would be better for me not to respond. Maybe he understood what I know now: that I couldn't possibly have processed all of what had been happening in those months enough to really say anything yet. Or maybe he just hadn't ever had a rap session with anyone before and didn't know how to end it. “We should get to the classroom. But if you want to bring Poxl West to my class some time in the future—anytime in the future, my man—you just bring him.”

I told him I'd give it some thought.

“Give it all the thought you want,” Rabbi Ben said. “When you know, I'll know.”

*   *   *

For a year and then another year, we didn't hear from Poxl. I went to Hebrew class and then I didn't—I was confirmed in the temple, and there was no higher step. I never did try to reach my uncle, and never extended an invitation for him to attend Rabbi Ben's class. Uncle Poxl's memory faded and that senescence was another absence, another void. No one mourns the death of a book. No fly buzzes at the death of a reputation. The prep school where he'd taught found a new teacher to take over his classroom. The Patriots were good, but not good enough to make it back to the Super Bowl. My father took me to Fenway a dozen times each summer—his firm got great seats. It would be almost two decades before the Red Sox returned to the World Series. By then, I had a kid of my own.

I found new things to write about for my senior history class. I got more interested in an art class my senior year than I thought I might, not having cared for art beyond those trips Poxl had taken me on to the MFA, where what I cared about was him and not the paintings on the walls. We studied modernism. When Mrs. Hornicker turned her brown plastic slide tray and an image of
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon
flashed up on the screen, I sat back. Here were women with a dozen faces each, all blocked in washed-out colors, as if through the scrim of a Boston winter. I read a biography of Picasso and wrote about him. I got an A
+
for the first time in a year, and a “See me.”

“Your interest in Picasso is obvious,” Mrs. Hornicker said. “I'm going to take a small group of students up to MoMA in New York to see the permanent collection.” I asked my parents. They said yes.

*   *   *

A month later we were walking up Fifty-third Street. It was the first week in October, and the sky was so blue it seemed to push down toward the gray city pavement. I walked through air so crisp I felt as if a hand was at my back, pushing me forward with the ineluctable rhythm that seemed to carry the millions of humans rushing through Manhattan every midday.

Inside the museum we browsed through the permanent collection. Picassos were hung opposite Pollocks and de Koonings, Duchamps and Rauschenbergs. Here we were, standing before the very works we'd just been looking at in books, set against pale gray-painted walls. I walked with determination. Where the colors of
Les Demoiselles
had looked washed-out in our textbook, now I saw the painting was covered in bright vermilions, oranges like the jack-o'-lanterns we bought at Volente's Farm every autumn. Something about that brilliance pushed me away. The ceilings of the place felt too low, painted too white. In the doorways of every room I moved to after seeing the Picasso were scowl-faced security guards. None of the faces on the myriad old women in furs who passed me was a Hepburn face. I walked around, looking for a painting with muted colors like the peach pinks I'd seen in the Picasso reproduction in my book at home.

In the last room I entered I came upon it: a watercolor of a girl with a large tuft of black hair. The canvas was beige, her face the same hue as the background. Her body was defined only by a dowdy black outline. Brushstrokes led down to blithely drawn legs. In between them, two curvilinear lines of gibbous, then concave labia. Just as my neck began to burn with my realization of their sex, as I recognized I was looking at a woman's spread legs, a voice broke in.

“It's a Schiele,” the voice said.

I turned. On the bench behind me, looking at this painting, was a wizened old man. I smelled the naphthalene on his suit before I saw him. He wore a blue Brooks Brothers suit and around his neck a scarf with two stripes in different shades of dark green. His face was blanched, hidden by a wiry red beard. “
Mädchen mit schwarzem Haar, Girl with Black Hair.
Not a major work, but characteristic of the essentially pornographic watercolors he did when he was young and painting in Czesky Krumlov.”

The speech sounded like it had been written on the placard on the wall in the museum. This wiry man had been talking for longer than I'd like to remember before I realized it was my uncle Poxl. His face had undergone a transformation so violent it took me a moment to recognize him. His nose bore bright red bulbs. The red of veins spread back to his temples like a woman before she has properly rubbed in blush. The whites of his eyes were yellow. They, too, bore spreading red veins. Small patches all around his face were pocked with the white skin of scar tissue, remnants of hastily removed melanomas. He was still well dressed, my uncle, and he acknowledged me before I acknowledged him.

“I'd always wanted to take you to see Schieles,” Poxl said. He made no move to get up, but he patted the space beside him. “Not this, though,” he said. “No, no, you would have to see even more than this.”

I sat down next to him. For a moment we looked at the painting. Poxl didn't turn to look at me. I started to say fifty-eight things but they all bottlenecked. Instead I said: “You come here often?”

“What kind of pickup line is this?” Poxl said. “You want an old man, he's yours.” Space invisible as static electricity seemed to grow between us. My uncle realized how odd this bit of humor was and he quickly said, “For a time I worked as a docent at the Jewish Museum. That's all I ever really wanted to do from the beginning—
see
masterpieces. I didn't have to make them. Now I just come to look at the art.”

Once Poxl started talking, it was as if he couldn't stop. He explained that in the time after he was discovered—that's how he put it, “after I was discovered,” though it took me a while to realize he meant found to be a fraud, not discovered as a talent—he settled into an apartment he'd rented in Hell's Kitchen. It was a short walk over to MoMA.

“I felt anonymous here amid all the great paintings,” he said. “All the real art.”

For the past couple of years, he could do little more than hide out and visit museums. His publisher couldn't take back the advance he'd received for
Skylock,
which was just enough to live quietly on Tenth Avenue while he tutored kids from prep schools in Westchester, kids referred by friends of his old colleagues in Boston.

But he was shunned. He had no one. It was as if his attempt at a foray into public life—into the public eye, into the fame that he'd long desired, let's be honest—had negated his M.Phil, his having almost completed his Ph.D., his expertise on Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama. His ability to teach anyone anything. “Even my closest friends eventually cut me off,” he said.

He stopped talking. He just stared ahead. I did, too. Had he considered my parents his closest friends? They wouldn't have thought so. Poxl hadn't called and he hadn't left a number where to reach him. And though I wasn't yet emboldened enough to say it, wasn't this one more lie? It was Poxl who had cut them off, his friends and family, us. Not the other way around. But I had to say something.

“I missed all those trips downtown,” I said. “I missed the opera. I even missed the Museum of Fine Arts. I know it wasn't MoMA, but it was my introduction to the world.”

A woman passed between us and the Schiele painting. Poxl had begun to turn his shoulders so he was half-facing me. I'd done the same. I had one knee up on the bench.

“Why don't you let me buy you lunch,” Poxl said. “Why don't you let me take you to the Galerie St. Etienne, where we can see more Schieles, so many, and we can lunch on the way.”

I looked around. I didn't see my teacher anywhere, or any of my classmates. We weren't to leave the permanent collection, on threat of a suspension from school. But here was Poxl West, sitting before me.

I told him I couldn't leave the museum but that we could eat there at MoMA if he wanted.

We went off to the museum's small café. He didn't ask what I wanted, just bought me a cup of coffee. I didn't drink coffee, so I let it sit in front of me.

“I was always going to bring you to New York City,” he said. He'd just sat down and started talking like he had when he saw me back in the gallery, like we hadn't lost a beat. “I was going to finish out the tour, and then I was going to bring you down to the Galerie St. Etienne to really show you something.”

“I guess,” I said.

“You don't believe me?” Poxl said.

“You never even sent the signed copies you'd promised you were going to send before the book came out.”

A tiny bead of sweat had formed at the tip of Poxl's red, red nose. I sat looking at him. For how long had I wanted to ask him what he was thinking, not sending us those books? Me. For not sending
me
that book. It makes me as angry to think of it today as it did then. For how long had he been in my mind and then fled? And now here he was, the great man reduced to something smaller. My uncle, for all intents and purposes my grandfather, but diminished.

“I don't know what to believe anymore, Poxl.”

“Oh, right,” he said. “That.” I put the stirrer he'd picked up at the front of the café into his coffee and turned it around in the cup. I didn't even need to look under the table to see that his feet must again be crossed atop one another.