The music seemed louder now. Maybe just a loud passage. It was good but wrong for this full-scale diorama. Everything was just so. Did anything here have sentimental value to the Vornados? No family pictures, only black-and-white photos of trees, framed paintings of pastoral scenes. A set. Wasn’t it a set? Even the cracked paint on the bookshelf, which held musty unread volumes in cloth bindings splashed with mildew, was the painstaking work of an artisan, one of the local eccentrics about whom the Vornados had a million stories. Were the books even real? Should he stick his hand into the fire and extract a glowing log to test the quality of the illusion?
This is a cognac ad, he said.
My mother studied his face. She knew this declarative tone. Salty, she said.
Fireside ambience, he said. Wool sweaters, loafers, amber liquid in heavy crystal. Hearty laughter and musings on contemporary life. The photographer would set up outside the windows over there.
Cut it out, she whispered. Feeney had been talking but now my father had everyone’s attention. Bo and Jane’s faces were open expressions of bemusement—they were waiting for him to turn the joke. Feeney was frowning as though he’d been distracted from some Clausewitz he’d been laboring to parse.
What’s that, Saltwater? Feeney said.
My father ignored him and spoke to the air over their heads: The host’s personality exudes a Caravaggiesque glow that illuminates the gathered friends’ faces as they share intimacies and rest easy. What’s that? The market’s doing a swan dive? Babies freezing to death in China? They’re rioting in the Bronx? Never mind all that! We’re safe here behind the bulletproof fortifications of wealth and class.
He held up his fingers to frame the shot.
Jane tipped back her wineglass and took a sip, watching him over the foot.
I don’t exclude myself, he said. I’m in the shot. I’m fully present. I’m enjoying the spoils of your labors. This place puts neurotics like me right at ease, like a warm glass of milk. It’s a mind-control experiment. So much care put into the removal of uncertainty! Everything as predictable as a clock. We’re the only thing left to chance. We’re the only variables! Isn’t that something? It’s utterly precious and a perfect narcotic, to wit. Bo, I have to ask you, though. There’s something about all this perfection that’s a little emasculating, don’t you think? Those perfectly flawed needlepoints in the bathroom? To have lavished such care on anything that doesn’t require gun oil or have a gearbox? Either you’re under your wife’s thumb or you’re a willing participant in this façade. Wait. Don’t tell me it was all your idea.
Bo was relaxed, a tumbler balanced on his crossed knee. What a gas, he said to my mother.
Oh, he’s just getting warmed up, she said.
Bo hadn’t yet decided how he would react. Perhaps with the tolerant jocularity of a movie star pried from his dinner conversation by an ardent fan. Or perhaps he’d get up and smash the bastard’s jaw.
Surely you must have realized that other men would ask these questions, my father said. I’m asking on behalf of these theoretical men, you understand? Because it’s a lovely house. It’s cozy as could be. It’s just, I don’t know, hard to identify the masculine presence.
Bo took a slug from his glass.
No offense, Jane, my father said.
She smirked at him and waved her hand. And there—it was all right. Bo had his answer. They’d take it as a badly delivered joke, this assassination. They’d blame it on his drinking.
But there is another possibility, my father said.
Erwin, honestly, my mother said.
Oh come on. What’s the unexamined life? Here’s the answer, in the form of a question. What if they’ve created this all explicitly to force these kinds of questions? What if they’ve done it all intentionally, just to attract the mockery of superior old bastards like myself? What if the façade isn’t a mask to cover their insecurities but a medium for self-expression?
That’s three, Bo said.
What?
That’s three questions, Bo said.
So it is. Here’s a fourth: What if you’re a couple of Warhols? House as kitsch—your commitment to reproduction, it’s a riff on the absurdity of the historical American house, the central lie of which is that there can be any history in a house that’s only a hundred years old. America doesn’t have a fucking history. Christ, go to Prague and they’ve got rats in the basement with more extensive family trees than the Kennedys. Here’s what I want to know. How did you get them to do it? How’d you get the carpenters to overwork the floors just so? And all the handles? They’re so carefully mean. Patinated, but with that shellacked permanence, like they’re in amber. It’s one thing to find an artisan who can age a piece of furniture, but to find one who can age it and then add the final step, so that the work itself is apparent in the final product, so that it displays its own artifice—that’s real craftsmanship. That’s what Jencks is talking about. True postmodernism. Am I taking this too far?
Oh, absolutely not, Bo said.
Good, because I’m quite serious. We’re sitting in a piece of art here. This, all this, it’s a commentary on those batty old Wasps who let their mansions come down around their ears because god forbid they should act like they care about stuff. Only new money cares about stuff. You had everything custom-made for this place, isn’t that right? All the Chippendale stuff upstairs, that dining table? Made to order, distressed and faux-finished? You’re the vanguard of an age of intentional inauthenticity! You’re giving
