Otto Dix
Last weekend, we drove back to New York City, Roz and I. We took the old car because we hoped to park on the street. We arrived Friday afternoon: we parked in a garage. So, it’s only $25 a day; and we were staying again with Roz’s son Bart, the writer, who lives with Dominga and her son, the pocket Junot Diaz,* Alfredo, Bosilla Junot I, Prince of Sardonia. The conditions are crowded - they’re still in the same apartment I visited them in two years ago: the guests sleep in Bart and Dominga’s bed; she sleeps with Alfredo in his bed; and Bart kips on the couch.
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| Dr. Hans Koch by Otto Dix |
Saturday we went to MOMA. Alfredo wanted to show us Otto Dix’s portrait of Dr. Mayer-Hermann. We looked at it for some time, or so it seemed to me. “Why?” I asked him, meaning why did he want to show it to us? “So you could see it,” he said. Downstairs in the museum store, he showed us a book of Dix’s work. “I don’t have this at home,” he said. I asked him if he wanted it. “No, I can look at it here,” he said.
Sunday we went to Big Liberal Presbyterian Church except for Roz, who said she had a headache. “What was the sermon about?” she asked when she met us afterward for Korean food, her headache miraculously gone. (“Poof!” she said.) She was there waiting for us, sitting at one end of the table. I sat at the other. Bart sat between us on one side and Alfredo, next to me, and Dominga, next to her, on the other.
“It was about the raising of Lazarus,” I said.
“Yes,” Alfredo said. “Jesus raised him on a Sunday, so he could vote on Tuesday.”
“Yes,” Bart said. “And there were sample ballots in the narthex if he needed one.”
“Likely he did not,” Alfredo said. “Because he was ‘woke.’”
“I see,” Roz said.
Alfredo beckoned to me: “Do you think she does?” he whispered. “Did she get the pun?”
Leaning, toward him: “I think she did,” I whispered back. “She sometimes likes to pretend she doesn’t get it to make you uncomfortable.”
“Oh,” he said. He smiled. I bent down again. He whispered, “That’s a very good strategy, I think.” Then, “Heh, heh, heh,” he laughed, just like that: “Heh, heh, heh.”
Roz looked down the table at us and shook her head.
“That means she does get it,” Alfredo said a little louder.
“Yes, I think so,” I said.
“Oh, there’s Will,” Dominga said. She waved. Bart turned in his chair. “I didn’t see them in church,” Dominga said.
Will came over. Roz and I had met him and Verónica and their daughter, Leona, two years ago, when we were up for Thanksgiving. He was teaching English at CUNY, she was Dominga’s boss at Macy’s, Leona was Alfredo’s best bud. (See here.*) But that was two years ago, I reminded myself; and Will looked more than two years older. He waved at the waiter, who brought another chair. Will sat down by Bart, who was saying,
“We didn’t see you at church.”
“I was in the balcony,” Will said, “out of the line of fire.”
“Vero and Leona?” Dominga asked.
“Off somewhere with my mother,” Will said. “Somewhere not to do with church.”
“What do you mean ‘out of the line of fire’?” Bart asked.
“It’s not the right expression,” Will said. “‘Out of the line of righteousness,’ maybe.” Bart shrugged. “Don’t you think sometimes that we have forgotten that we are all miserable sinners, strangers to the truth? That our ‘compassion’ that we're so proud of is pretense. All we do, it seems to me sometimes, is for show. Especially, we’re going to show them, the real sinners; I mean, they’re just mean.” Now, he shrugged. But then he went on. “Mean! But it’s not that we can’t be mean, too. We wouldn’t act mean, of course. But we can say all the mean things we want. They deserve it. They can’t heat up the kitchen and then try to slip out for a quiet smoke on the porch. So, it’s not just meanness, ours isn’t. It’s a question of fairness as well. Our meanness is fair. Again, they deserve it.
“Maybe I can take that in the sermon,” he said, “but not in the prayers. My God, not in the prayers.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t hear it?”
Bart shrugged again. “Maybe you have better ears,” he said.
“My dad, bless his all-too-gentle soul, used to say that you could pray while you were preaching, but you should never preach while you were praying.”
“I’d forgotten he was a preacher, your dad” Bart said.
“Sometimes he forgot, too,” Will said. “Maybe his most endearing trait.”
The waiter came with our waters and flatware. Alfredo beckoned to me, and I leaned toward him.
“I don’t think Will is very happy today,” he said. I shook my head “no.”
Roz said Bart and Will should order for all of us, and we could put everything in the middle of the table and share. That didn’t make everything better, but it made it less bad.
Monday we came home.
11.07.18
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