GH O TI

f i sh

Issue No. 2

The Release

My husband was not doing well in Roanoke, Virginia. We had moved there from San Francisco (for me, for school) and Alan was left alone during the day to write articles for the magazine where he is on staff. At first we were charmed by this small southern city, by our neighborhood full of sidewalks and old trees. In Roanoke we paid so little in rent that we were able to sock away much of Alan’s paycheck. Better still we discovered that many of the restaurants near us featured homemade cakes and pies for dessert, usually made by the chef’s mama.

Our attitude towards our new home changed after November 2nd. We always knew that in Roanoke, as a couple of mixed-faith lefties who go to ridiculous extremes to buy organic vegetables, we were strangers in a strange land. But suddenly, after Bush won re-election, the strange land began to feel hostile. The state of Virginia, after all, had voted for that man. Half the families on our street had yard signs declaring their loyalty to him. Our seventy-something Baptist neighbor who had brought Alan and me a homemade pie the first week we were here commented that our house would look awfully nice if only we’d take down that Kerry sticker.

I had school to distract me, but Alan had only me. His work was isolating (he e-mailed his articles to an editor thousands of miles away); the days were getting shorter, and he was becoming depressed. He would drink too much at dinner and walk stonily to bed without even turning out the lights.

And then he was assigned two articles, both of which required him to spend a good deal of time in New York. I suggested he sublet an apartment there for a couple of months, just to get through winter. We could visit each other on the weekends. It would be romantic. I could concentrate on my writing instead of coaxing him out of a funk.

As soon as he signed the lease for the sublet I alternated between feeling wonderfully magnanimous for having suggested the urban retreat, and horribly insecure that he decided to take me up on it. It was a tough reality to accept: my husband would rather be in New York alone than in Roanoke with me.

#

My first trip to visit him was scheduled for Valentine’s weekend. The only planes that go from Roanoke to New York are sixteen-seat turbo-props whose propellers drone during the entire bumpy flight. I braved the noise and the dips by taking deep breaths and trying to read. I had brought two books with me: one a collection of Buddhist essays, the other Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.

What, you might ask, is a nice liberal girl doing reading Lewis’s theology? Well, two reasons. One, the novel I am writing for my thesis is narrated by a young fundamentalist girl whose father stars in a Christian soap opera, and in order to know her beliefs, I need to read the authors who influence her church. Two, I have always been attracted to Jesus, although my relationship to Him is best described as fickle. (The Jesus who lures the outcasts: terrific. The Jesus who lures W: not so good.)

I should add that my Christianity is at its peak when I am in an airplane, about to land. We lurched and dropped our way to the runway, me praying the whole time. Once on ground, I took a terrifying cab ride to 72^nd and Columbus where Alan greeted me at the door of our new apartment. He showed me around. Since the apartment is a one-room studio, the tour didn’t take very long. Afterwards we decided to take a walk even though it was very cold outside.

We were only one block away from Central Park, so we walked there and looked at the Christo Gates, which would be unfurled the next morning. The gates, a 22 million dollar gift to New York City from Christo and Jeanne-Claude, spanned the length of the trails through the park. The night before the unfurling, all that was visible was the sculpture part of the exhibit, the dark metal gates from which bright orange flags would hang. Central Park is huge, 843 acres, and those gates lined every one of its walkways. The orange flags, which would be released the next morning at 8:30, were tightly rolled and kept, pressed against the top of each gate, like butterflies in cocoons, waiting.

Alan and I walked and talked about God. I was on a religious quest, wanting somehow to find hope in what seems to be an increasingly sorrowful world. I wanted to tell him about C.S. Lewis’s ideas of God, but Alan was reluctant to get into the nitty-gritty of Christian theology. It just seemed impossible to him that God would ever be exclusionary. That had always been my take on the matter—I’d be a Unitarian if the services weren’t so goddamn boring—but lately, the world seemed a darker place than I’d ever imagined, and I wondered if the darkness reflected God’s nature. (Of course, I was aware that it was my own myopia and stunted knowledge of history that ever made me believe the world was a particularly safe place for humans to live.)

There weren’t many people in the park, at least not nearly as many as we’d see the next morning. It was cold enough that I was acutely aware of my nose and cheeks, but I was also wearing an oversized coat of my mother’s, black and funereal, along with long johns and a thermal undershirt. After five days rattling around in my Roanoke house on my own, it was nice to be arm in arm with Alan, talking, talking, talking.

The next morning we woke up early to watch the unfurling of the flags. There were a lot of people in the park, but not so many we had to fight for a view. The park, after all, is rugged and varied in its planned topography. If there was a big group standing by one gate, there were fewer at another. If you wanted a bird’s eye view you could always climb one of the outcroppings of rock that is found throughout Central Park

Alan and I did just that. We stood overlooking a lawn where dogs were emancipated—freed first from their tight city apartments, freed again on this lawn, from their leashes. The dogs sprinted and fetched and panted. A big fluffy white one seemed so enraptured by his situation (lots of grass, no leash, other dogs’ balls) that he seemed to boing across the grass, as if he were on a pogo stick.

And then two police officers, both women, arrived on horseback. They only had to tell one owner to put her dog back on its leash; everyone else quickly found and leashed their dog, and moved on to another spot. The speed with which the owners packed up their dogs—allegedly in obedience to NY city law, but who are we kidding, they would just find another grassy place for their pups to play on—reminded me of the immigrant street vendors I saw in London who could swoop up their black-market goods with two folds of the blanket anytime an officer walked by.

“Everyone is so obedient,” I said.

“New York has become a police state,” said Alan.

#

We walked down from the rocks. The unfurling was in earnest now. The way it worked was a group of five or six volunteers, all wearing gray vests autographed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, were assigned a section of gates to open. (Let’s say half a mile.) Each group had a long pole, probably fifteen feet high, with a metal hook at the end of it. (Think of Captain Hook with a really, really long arm.) Their job was to hook the loop of the jacket that covered the furled flags. When they pulled on the loop they released the Velcro zipper that kept the jacket wrapped around the furled and tamed flags. So when the Velcro was unstuck, the jacket fell off and in one exuberant moment, the flag—with nothing left to hold it in place—dropped, unfurling itself and taking on the shape of a flirty, pleated orange skirt. And just as the skirt dropped, the cardboard tube, which had been rolled inside the skirt, dropped too. Sometimes on top of a volunteer’s heads. Sometimes bouncing along the sidewalk. Sometimes landing in one particular volunteer’s arms, a man, who was especially good with the hook and who smiled, pleased, when he caught a tube, as if he had just reeled in a big one.

On Saturday mornings there are always joggers in the park. They jog whether or not a 22 million dollar art installation is being unveiled before them or not. So add them to the scene. Also, kids. Surely, their parents hoped the little ankle-biters would be entranced by the exhibit, that it might unleash their own precocious genius. That perhaps they’d mention their flags during one of their interviews for pre-school. But no. That’s not right. That’s my stereotype of a sort of frantic over-parenting that I know exists in blue cities, New York especially, particularly in the neighborhoods on either side of the park. But I wasn’t seeing much of it that morning. A little dark haired girl kept asking her mother if they could stay for “one more. Just one more?” A little boy rode on his father’s shoulders, slapping at the base of each flag as they walked beneath it.

And that was allowed. You could touch the flags (or the skirts, or whatever metaphor they contain for you). That is an important detail of the scene, a detail of absence, but crucial none the same. There were no security guards telling people to stand a certain distance from the gates. There were no security guards at all. There were cops parked on the side of the streets that ran through the park, but they were there to make sure no one drove on them during the exhibit.

You could get as close to the flags as you wanted, even when they were being unfurled, your only risk being a potential bonk on the head from a falling cardboard tube. And there was another absence at work here—this one even more liberating than the lack of security guards. There was no corporate sponsorship of this event. No “Bank of America is proud to present…” no banners with a host of logos printed on it, showing which companies gave money to this work of art. No Visa commercials aired the week before on TV, itemizing the costs of a New York City vacation (airfare: $300, hotel: $200, carbide: $40) before telling you that seeing Christo was priceless. There was none of that. If you really, really needed to purchase something to feel as if you saw art, you could guy a T-shirt that said “The Gates”. Or, you could buy a book of sketches of the gates. All of that money went to New York City Parks and Recreation. None of it went back to Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

Consider it: a 22 million dollar art exhibit, and no profit to be made. People had asked to buy the gates once the exhibit is over, but Christo refused. The Gates were to be disassembled and recycled. People asked to buy bits of the flags. Again, Christo refused. The Gates were meant to be fleeting, ephemeral. They would be up for sixteen days and then they would be taken down, never to be displayed again. They were the ultimate sandcastles—thirty years in the making—built only to be washed away.

(I suppose you could say that the exposure Christo gets from this will bring him more profit than selling the gates would. Maybe. But he was already pretty damn exposed. This is not a fledgling artist making his bold entry into the art world.)

No. Consider it a gift, a gift to the city, a gift to the people who couldn’t afford to buy a piece of The Gates even if they were for sale. All those orange skirts, billowing. Survey the park, the leafless silver trees, their bare branches spidering against a winter sky. Notice the trees next to that audacious orange.

Later that day I saw an old nebbishe man ranting at a bookstore on Madison Avenue. His white hair was unkempt, his black framed glasses crooked. Whom he was talking to, I’m not sure. I think it was the shopkeeper. “People say the flags take away from nature,” he said, his voice filling the store, his New York accent heavy. “I say I noticed things I never saw before in the park. The trees. I’d never really looked at the trees.”

But I have taken us out of the park and into the bookstore where I sat in an old primer desk and flipped through a book about sociopaths (turns out 1 in every 25 of us is one). We need to return to the park, later that day, after eating bagels and lox with a friend I’ve known since I was little, the one who always wants me to tell the same story about the time my fundamentalist fifth grade teacher called me to her office to inform me that Jesus had warned her I was an evil influence on the class. I’m tired of the story. It’s really sort of sad and awful but it has become a classic cocktail party anecdote, usually initiated by an old friend urging me to “go on, tell about Miss Teal.”

We returned to the park, Alan and me. By this time (late afternoon) all of the flags were unfurled. Miles of uniform skirts lined the pathways, which were packed with people and baby strollers, so many it took a very long time to make our way back across to the west side. It had gotten colder, and the wind was pushing into us as we walked.

All of those people walking beside me, behind me, in front of me, they were all viewing this with different eyes than my own. I began to imagine the interpretations: If I were a better Christian I would see re-birth everywhere, a surprise renewal in a desolate setting. If I were an investment banker I might see missed opportunity: imagine all of the merchandising you could do around this stuff, not to mention the prices you’d get when you auctioned it off at the end. If I were a visual artist I would see inspiration, or maybe I’d be feel envious watching all those orange flags billowing, taunting me in the wind, you’ll never have my vision.

But I am a writer and have grown accustomed to seeing the world in metaphor and pattern. And so this is what I saw watching those waving skirts: I saw my unleashed marriage as a good thing. Better to have my husband happy and stimulated in the city—even if it means a temporary absence from me—rather than tucked into a corner office in our little house where no one knows him. Also, I was reminded of the exuberance of the unleashed dogs I had watched that morning. The skirts seemed like the dogs, liberated, joyful, doing what they were meant to do. They had held their breaths so long, and now they were on display: jaunty, cheeky, audacious. Teasing and taunting those who want ownership, delighting those who yearn to see art everywhere.

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