by Chris Knopf
I made a move toward the car to make sure but Amanda gently gripped my forearm, so I stopped. Seconds later one side of the Grand Prix was up off the ground. Everyone applauded, a muffled sound since they were all wearing red leather gloves. Then one of them blew on a bosun’s whistle, which prompted three of the red jumpsuits to run back into the garage, out of which came two more people, one in a white jumpsuit and red ski mask, the other in a tuxedo wearing a rubber mask that made him look a lot like Woody Woodpecker. He was carrying an old cast iron music stand, which he set up about ten feet from the front of the car and began to conduct the affair with a baton that he pulled from inside of his tuxedo.
Meanwhile, the white jumpsuit pulled out a chrome impact wrench and snapped it to the end of a blue hose that had been hidden in the long grass. Then before I fully grasped what was happening, he used the wrench to take off the two raised tires. The garage door rolled open again and the three red jumpsuits dragged out a wheel balancer. I knew that because I used to balance wheels on it when I worked for Contemporary Car Care. It came from Italy and accommodated standard hubs as well as wire wheels, which you had to tune and true-up as well as balance. A heavy machine, they’d somehow managed to get it up on an industrial grade dolly so they could roll it over the gravel drive to within a few feet of my car. Two other red jumpsuits brought over my tires and hoisted them one at a time onto the machine for balancing. I tried to remember the last time they’d been balanced, and couldn’t, since I’d only driven the car on the highway once in the last five years, lessening the need.
Somewhere over my head in the trees somebody started playing a French horn. That brought my attention back to the Grand Prix, where another team was changing my oil, with one guy on a creeper under the car emptying the oil pan, the other ready to fill from above. I wondered how trustworthy the old jack was, especially given the weight of the Grand Prix, hoisted up on two wheels. I fought the urge to go find a pair of jack stands, though it wasn’t long before they had all the tires balanced and all four wheels back on the ground. At this point, a pair of garden hoses appeared and the whole crew worked on washing the car, caring little about keeping the jumpsuits dry. In fact, on the final rinse, the holder of the hose turned it on the rest and the whole event degenerated (or advanced, hard to tell) into a kids’ water fight, with a lot of yelling and laughter, which caused me to realize that until now it had been an entirely soundless production, except for the French horn, now silent.
One of first rifts I can remember forming between me and my daughter was after a trip to the City to go to museums, at her urging, since at about sixteen she was already considering going to art school. Allison’s education and enrichment was normally Abby’s task, but there was something about big museums that repelled my wife. Probably because they were filled with art and people who understood what it might all mean, raising the danger someone would ask her opinion on the subject. She had none, since she’d made no attempt to learn anything about Western civilization, except to feel that museums might be useful to her daughter. So under the pretext of improving our father-daughter relationship, already starting to fray Abby volunteered me for the duty.
Abby thought being an engineer made me biologically incapable of knowing anything about art beyond spelling the word. Allison, building on that assumption, and flush with self-importance having had a high school art appreciation course, spent the day instructing me and expressing pity over my sad lack of comprehension. Nevertheless, I did my best to support her critical judgment as we moved from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, and into the Romantic Period, agreeing that Leonardo was awesome and that El Greco gave us the creeps. Trouble came when we were standing before some huge piece of canvas apparently ruined by somebody who’d knocked over a can of paint. She said she loved it. I said I didn’t get it. She sighed with exasperation.
“You just don’t know how to like it,” she said.
“No, I’m saying I don’t get it.”
“That’s your way of saying you don’t like it. You’re saying you don’t want to understand it.”
In retrospect, I should have said something like, “You’re right, honey, why don’t you help me understand.” Instead I let her hypothesis of my motives take root, later to combine with other grim hostilities and sad misconceptions, until it all grew into a profound alienation.
I did take the central criticism to heart, and put some effort into learning about contemporary art, and even started to like some things I’d earlier pass by. I learned to approach every artistic expression with an open mind. Tabula rasa. To withhold reflex judgments, and allow the underlying intentions of the artist to reveal themselves over time. Most of all, to be caring and sensitive.
“So what the fuck was that all about?” I asked Amanda, after they finally turned off the hoses, applauded each other, turned to us and did a deep bow, before walking back into one of the outbuildings, stripping off the soaked jumpsuits as they went.
“It’s just Butch. Performance art is his first love.”
“I’m glad he’s not a deconstructionist.”
“You took it well.”
“I only wish he’d looked at the differential while the car was off the ground. I think it’s leaking.”
She took my arm and led me toward the house.
“It’s how he got started as an artist, according to Dione. Doing theater, writing one-act plays. But the formalities of all that became too restraining. So he started his own thing.”
“Looks like a team sport. Must like a lot of people around him.”
“They do everything together. Some have been with Butch a long time. Two or three all the way back to Boston. Like Charles and Edgar.”
“Really.”
“That’s where he started. He ran a framing shop in a loft in the North End for one of the galleries to help pay for his theater work. Turned it into a full-out artists’ commune until the gallery found out and fired him. So he came down here when you could still find cheap places to crash. The rest is history, art history if you believe Butch. You should let him tell the story, though. It’s hilarious.”
On the way to the house I stopped to hold the bottom of a ladder stuck up into one of the maple trees for a teenage girl who was descending with a French horn under her arm.
“Hi, Evelyn,” said Amanda, putting out her hand to shake. “Lovely music. Added an essential ingredient to the experience. Evelyn is Butch and Dione’s daughter. Meet Sam Acquillo.”
“Owner of the car. Equally essential.”
She took my hand. She was tall and slim, like her father, with her mother’s broad face and freckles. She wore a pair of freshly ironed khaki shorts and a white cotton shirt, her light brown hair tied back in a ponytail.
“I’m sorry about all this,” she said to Amanda, brushing some bark debris off her shorts. “You know how my father is when he gets an enthusiasm.”
“It was fun,” said Amanda.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll be back for my five-thousand-mile checkup.”
She walked with us toward the house.
“He loves to use all the stuff left over from when this was a repair shop. I don’t know where the red suits came from. I don’t know much about any of this stuff. The French horn was Mommy’s idea. My father had to put me in the tree. So stupid.”
When we got to the house we followed Evelyn through the screened-in porch past the mannequins and into what I remembered was a mudroom, now lined with shelves crammed with model trains and cars, china figurines from several different eras, Pez dispensers, salt and pepper shakers, Christmas ornaments—miniature Santas riding sleighs, skiing or offering bottles of Coke, some lit from within, others gyrating in a mechanized flat-footed dance—chrome cocktail decanters, martini glasses and an unnerving assortment of voodoo dolls, or so I surmised from the pins and grimacing faces. I rushed Amanda through to the kitchen, where Dione was leaning over a huge butcherblock center island aggressively massaging a large wad of yellowy
dough. She wore a scooped neck T-shirt that exposed a string of glass beads, more like marbles, half submerged in the folds of her neck. Her hair, barely under control at the fundraiser, was now in full revolt, springing from her head at random angles, or tucked hastily into dark tortoise-shell barrettes. Sweat gleamed on her forehead and upper lip, and both cheeks glowed red, not unlike the creepy illuminated Santas.
The kitchen itself was no less claustrophobically decorated than the passageway, though the theme here was more agrarian. I had to duck to get underneath bundles of fragrant grasses twisted into manageable shapes and hung from hooks in the ceiling. The walls were also lined with open shelves that held enough copper pots, fry pans, cauldrons, double boilers, casserole dishes, woks and fondue sets to prepare Thanksgiving dinner for most of Long Island. More striking were the glass jars, the kind you seal with glass tops and wire clasps. There might have been hundreds, each filled with a different material, granular or liquid, each a different color.
“Hey, Sweetie. You did great,” she said to Evelyn, who walked by without comment and disappeared through a door at the other end of the room. Dione smiled at us as if there’d just been a pleasant exchange, and dug her hands into the dough.
“Most people need love, I knead bread. That’s K, N, E, A, D.’ It’s a joke,” said Dione, through short puffs of exertion as she squeezed and beat the dough, occasionally lifting it off the table and slapping it back down again.
“You bake?” she asked Amanda.
“I hardly cook,” she answered.
“Great exercise—for the forearms and the olfactories,” she said, calling my attention to the symphony of smells that swirled around the room. Not all pleasant, including the one coming off Dione herself. But I could also pick out spices, like curry and nutmeg, cinnamon, maybe, and coffee. There must have been a loaf or two of bread in the oven, with its unmistakable aroma. My ability in the kitchen trailed Amanda’s by a considerable distance, so I’m sure there were things wafting around the air that would have impressed a more cultivated nose. To me it was more like an assault my olfactories were struggling to withstand.
“So, your red jumpsuit must be at the cleaners,” I said to Dione.
She smiled broadly.
“What a kick, huh? They only just worked it out today. You can blame Amanda.”
Amanda put her hands out like somebody was about to swing a stick at her. She looked at me like I had the stick.
“Oh no, I had nothing to do with that.”
“When Butch called you about the Council Rock you told him about Sam’s big old car. That gave him the idea.”
“Come over to Oak Point and we’ll return the favor,” I said. “Just give me time to install the lift. Don’t have as big a crew.”
“No, no, you can’t repeat the same performance. It has to be distinctively right for the moment,” said Dione as she left the center island and walked over to a large cabinet that held a stack of stereo components.
“Bach, Mingus or Green Day? What’s your mood?”
“Smirnoff,” I said.
Amanda frowned at me.
“Bach would be lovely,” she said.
“I was getting to the drink requests. Though I thought you were an Absolut man.”
“I used to be, but now I’m rethinking the gray areas.”
The music blasted out from all corners of the room, causing both of us to jump a little. Dione apologized and turned it down.
“Sorry, I was trying to listen to NPR over the French horn. Need company when I’m baking bread.”
When she moved away from the center island I could see she was barefoot and wore a pair of blue-jean cutoffs that struggled to contain the vaguely contoured mass of her thighs and butt. Also that she was braless, though containing those mighty globes probably wouldn’t have done much to improve the situation. I doubted any undergarment could have restrained her nipples, which stuck out from her T-shirt like a pair of artillery rounds.
“And for the lady, Pinot Noir is what I remember,” she said, swinging open the doors of another tall cabinet, this one stocked floor to ceiling with bottles and cans—food, wine, liquor, household cleaners, olive oil, motor oil, anything that came in a cylindrical container.
“That’d be lovely,” said Amanda.
“I’m not sure about the Pinot part, but the Noir seems to suit you,” said Dione, pulling the cork like a veteran sommelier.
“Noir means black, even I know that,” said Amanda. “Should I be flattered?”
“No, merely impressed,” said Dione, while I stood there feeling again like I was watching a Kabuki play without a libretto, or whatever you call the thing that tells you what the hell is going on. I had about thirty years in heavy industry, ten of which I ran a technology operation in support of a huge global corporation that made billions refining fundamental resources like air, iron and crude oil. I got to see a lot of things, and work my way around a lot of people, many of whom spoke a different language, prayed in mosques or performed their trades under the threat of secret police. A lot of times things were a little strange and confusing, but at least we shared a frame of reference. We were all basically trying to do the same thing, which was to squeeze the greatest return on investment out of every molecule of matter God chose to make accessible to human manipulation. It was all ostensibly about science and engineering, though I guess you could say there was considerable art in the pursuit. I was beginning to feel, however, that none of it could prepare me for artists.
On cue, Butch and his merry men burst into the kitchen, all naked, drying themselves off and joking around, shoving and snapping towels at each other’s butt. They were followed by two women, young and furtive, their towels cinched up tight around their chests. Dione opened the refrigerator and dispensed Gatorade and soda as they moved through the kitchen and out another door, I assumed heading upstairs to dress, though I wouldn’t have bet on anything at that point. Throughout the parade Amanda leaned unflinching against a stack of shelves, sipping her wine.
“Well,” she said, after the last guy cleared the room. “I supposed that was the long and the short of it.”
Dione toasted her with her wineglass and I went over to the tall cabinet to see if I could find something clear and astringent you could pour over ice cubes. Dione apologized again and dug out a liter bottle of some fruity flavored version of Absolut. I accepted it magnanimously.
“So how do you like living out on Oak Point?” Dione asked Amanda. “It must be exciting, being so close to the water. The primordial soup.”
“The soup’s over on the ocean side,” I said. “The Little Peconic’s more like a broth.”
“I’m happy there,” answered Amanda, ignoring me. “It’s a good place to collect yourself.”
“She’s already joined the neighborhood watch,” I said. “Which mostly involves keeping an eye on the bay”
“So I suppose you know a threat when you see one?” asked Dione, returning to strangle some more bread dough.
“I used to. Now I’m not so sure.”
“More gray areas?”
“More gray hair. Getting harder to keep up.”
Amanda let out a sympathetic little sound and wrapped her arms around me.
“Don’t listen to him. He keeps up fine.”
Dione picked up a slab of dough and slammed it down hard enough to cause a little piece to fly up and hit me on the cheek. She grinned at me and knocked it away with a swift flick of her finger.
“I don’t doubt that to be true.”
Butch appeared in the kitchen wearing a Hawaiian shirt, sandals and baggy off-white cotton pants that stopped at mid-calf His wet hair was combed straight back and his face scrubbed pink. His eyes would widen occasionally, setting off the irises in a field of white. I wondered if he’d trained himself to do that, an appropriate accessory to the mania that surrounded him like static electricity.
“We’re planning to gather in the Great Hall of the Ancients in about five minute
s. What sort of fruit do we have? I’m thinking of a big basket, overload it like the horn of plenty.”
“He means the barn,” said Dione. “Will this do?” she asked Butch, pulling a soft woven bag, the kind sophisticates use to haul groceries, down off a high shelf. “I’m not sure what we have in the way of fruit.”
It wasn’t hard for me to imagine, given everything else in the kitchen, that she had an orchard full of apples, peaches and pears piled inside one of the towering cabinets.
“Your call, darling,” he said. “I’ll rally the troops. You bring the fruit and the guests, configured any way that pleases you.”
“I’ll carry the bag,” I said.
The Great Hall of the Ancients was as Dione had said. The original barn built at the same time as the farmhouse, where the guys I used to work for kept racks and bins filled with salvaged parts, a tool crib and several oddball sports cars in various stages of restoration. All of that was gone, replaced by a wide open space, causing me to see for the first time the barn’s beautiful hand-hewn post-and-beam framing. Or maybe it was always there, and I’d only had eyes for machine tools and sheet metal.
In the middle of the center bay people were finding their way to folding chairs set up in a U-shape, inside of which was a small table holding a projector and laptop computer. A screen was mounted on the opposite wall, in front of which Butch stood nervously folding and unfolding a telescoping pointer.
“Sit, sit, sit. We have a lot to cover. Arrange your chairs so you can see the screen, but keep the U-shape. Does anyone know the significance of the broken oval in ancient celestial-based iconography? The rite of the parabola?”
