Marine Park(53)

            Kings Highway, where we get the train, is the best station in the city. In the winter, it looks like one of those old Russian train stops where you can imagine people escaping wars. People with all sorts of weird belongings in canvas bags, with their babushka scarves, huddled together against the cold. At nighttime, you could see the trains far out in both directions, a B stretching in from Coney Island, doors open and the smell of the sand, or a Q coming down from the city, off the Manhattan Bridge. When you catch the Q you have to know to sit on the bench on the right side; I mean the side on your right when the Q is heading toward Manhattan. Then you’re in a perfect position when it goes over the river to see all the skyline through the Brooklyn Bridge. I can’t understand people who sit on the other side, looking at nothing. It’s like they don’t ride the train every day.

            We couldn’t go into the Met without playing in the Ancient Playground first. It was right next to the museum, with pyramids and stone temples that you could climb up, ladders on the inside. Lorris and I would time each other in a circuit down and through the tunnels. Mom and Dad sat on the street end, watching the cars and not really talking. When we had our half hour we went inside, and Dad would put four quarters down for all of us. No one was dumb enough to give him a look, but he always said he was ready for it. The point is it’s free, he liked to say. It’s for the people. I used to leave a nickel. I liked the part with the colonial rooms that are made just the way they used to look. God, I could look at those forever. And the big glass room with the fountain and Greek sculptures. There’s one of two bears that’s smooth and looks out of place; that was Lorris’s favorite, but the rest are mostly people, caught in uncomfortable positions.

            Few months before, I’d gone to the Met with some girl from the neighborhood. She was studying art at New Paltz. I hadn’t seen her in a while and I figured I’d give her a call. She said the Met was a great idea; it was like her favorite museum ever. I picked her up in Sheepshead, and we drove in. Let me tell you, it was a good idea to go to the Met with her. She took me into rooms I didn’t even know they had there. And she always knew something about what we were looking at, especially the Greek pottery, which was her specialty. When we got to the colonial rooms, she asked if I knew that most of the fireplaces came from real houses here in New York City. They packed up whole walls and trucked them over, she said, her brown hair shaking as her eyes got bigger. I said I hadn’t known about that, even though of course I did, because I thought it was making her feel good to tell me things. I think it worked.

            In front of the French impressionists, I had my thumb in my pocket, and she slid her hand around the little hole my arms made. “See when you step back,” she said, pointing, “it comes into even clearer focus. You have to look at a painting from different sides. Once I saw the Gertsch painting of the girl, and her eyes follow you when you change sides.” She had a poster of it up in her room; she showed me later that night. When she was in the bathroom after, I tried it, going from one side to the other, and the eyes followed sure, but even better was that the expression in her mouth changed. Pouting and sensual on one side and depressed on the other. The whole rest of the time in the museum she kept her hand around my arm there.

            Lorris texted at three to say he was on his way: Is it all right if we drop off a few of my friends on the way home? Guys from the baseball team. I said, Yeah, I might be a little late, but meet me a block up from the station. I had the key in the ignition so I could listen to the radio but save the gas. You’d be surprised how much time you can waste just going through stations looking for a good song. When trains came in I turned it off and opened the windows so I could listen to everyone going by—which is what I imagine Barcelona in that painting Dad has would be like, sort of late at night but people still all around, taxis off the avenue. The taxis in Marine Park were all manned by Russian immigrants, most of whom didn’t know English. They played cards in the control center right next to the station, where you could go to pick up a ride. Nights I wasn’t driving—if I came back late from an outing when my boys were back from college, or hanging out after work—sometimes I got one of them to drive me back, if I couldn’t stand the idea of the walk. Sometimes you could converse, if you had the right charades aptitude, and if so they’d give you a swig from the warm vodka they had in paper bags in the glove compartment. You’d offer it back to them, they’d make a fake show of looking around in the empty streets, and then laugh that big hairy laugh and have a drink and an indistinguishable toast with you.