Museum Stairs

 The other day I ran into Alastair. In the subway. Deep in the tunnel that connects two of the lines, orange and blue. There is a nice spot where the long corridor, low-ceiled and dingy, opens into the escalators, which climb steeply upward through several subterranean layers to street level. Standing there on the very bottom, looking up, neck muscles straining, inhaling the damp air, it is not unlike being in a cathedral, celestial music and stained-glass-filtered sunlight somewhere just out of reach.

It is somewhat embarrassing to admit but my first thought upon seeing Alastair, before nostalgia, before recognizing our common cause, was that I wish I had found it first. The perfect spot, in so many ways.

At the same time, I wasn’t surprised. He was always one step ahead of me, even when we saw each other every day, back when we shared a desk in the PhD room on the seventh floor of the library at The Almost Ivy League University. I’m not sure when or why, but at some point, near the start of the program, he started to see me as a rival, competing with me at every turn, the coursework, comprehensive exams, lectureship of undergraduate courses, the dissertation, secretly at first and progressively more unabashedly. By the time he walked across the graduation stage, a full semester before me, he had no qualms about rubbing it in my face. Once and for all he had established his superiority as a scholar, either that or his competence as a bureaucrat since, these days, completing a doctorate program is every bit as much of an administrative feat as an intellectual one.

This is London (1959), Miroslav Sasek

He had a folding chair and a stool, which he set up against the wall, just outside the steady stream of foot traffic. A perfect set up. Light and easy to disassemble. In the case of a sweep. In the case of a bust. In a matter of seconds, he could close shop and disappear into the crowd, just another commuter.

Even as a student, he was always a light traveler. I would often catch him running out of the door of the PhD room to catch a flight to some big conference. To rub elbows. To drop names. To revel in the pomp and pageantry. And, most importantly, to beef up his resumé. He had this oversized soft-shelled briefcase, just big enough for his laptop and two changes of clothes, one, conference formal, and the other, dark academic casual. Tweed, argyle, patches on the elbows, the whole show.

I always thought that I should have gone to more conferences, that I should have tried harder, but, seeing Alastair again, I was glad I hadn’t.

I spotted him from deep within the darkness of the damp tunnel and its din. I was shuffling along with my wares, distracted. The sight of it, his set up, stopped me in my tracks. It also presented me with a dilemma. He hadn’t seen me or, if he had, he hadn’t recognized me, which was understandable, given the beard and all the other changes to my appearance. I could turn around, scurry off, and forget about the whole incident, saving us both the inevitable awkwardness. Or I could face the situation head on, in all its delicateness, all its dangers.

I was never one to scurry.

“Alastair, is that you?” He spun around violently, a crazed look in his eyes, as if he hadn’t heard his name spoken in a very long time. His eyes narrowed. He tilted his head. His nostrils flared. His chest heaved up and down. He said nothing.

“It’s me, Guy, Guy Remedi. You know, from the pods.” It used to be our nickname for the PhD room, on account of the rows upon rows of cubicles.

His eyes softened. His shoulders dropped. Suddenly, he looked smaller, disheveled, his clothes slightly too big for his frame. I hadn’t recognized it at first because it was so faded, but upon closer inspection I realized that he was wearing one of his old tweed jackets. It had seen better days.

“You have a food in your beard, a piece of falafel or something,” he said, in the same tone that he might critique an academic article. 

I grabbed the end of my beard with my hand and held it in front of my face. There were more gray hairs than the last time I checked, a lot more. Alastair had been right. There was something in my beard. It wasn’t food, however, but a tiny piece of paper. I had been cutting and pasting all morning, working on the brochures.

“I’m going to have to ask you to step to the side. You’re blocking the sign.” He was right. I hadn’t noticed. At the foot of the stool, there was a sign, handwritten. It read, “Poems for the Commute.”

There was a binder atop the stool. While I fumbled to devise some way to disarm the tension, as unfortunate as it was unnecessary, in my opinion, I picked up the binder and started flipping through the pages. They were divided into two columns. On one side were the names of poems and line numbers of the passages selected. On the other side, the prices. All the big names were there. Homer, Virgil, Catullus, Dante, Garcilaso de la Vega, Quevedo, Gongora, Sor Juana, Sharespeare, Racine, Voltaire, Goethe, Novalis, Blake, Coleridge, Whitman, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Wilde, T.S. Elliot, Stevens, Pound, e.e.cummings, Hughes, Wallace, Lorca, Neruda, Rich, Angelou, Carson. I can’t say I was surprised by the selection. A fan of Harold Bloom, Alastair had always been big on the Western canon.

The instructions, printed in big block letters at the top of the pages, couldn’t have been clearer. Choose a poem, pay the humble price, hear a selection of the poem recited by Alastair, and receive a copy of the text, complete with a historical contextualization and detailed analysis of its form and content. Like a podcast, but analog, it read, for your edification during the commute.

Edification, I recalled, had always been one of Alastair’s favorite words.

“You know all these poems by heart?” The question, rhetorical, was intended to express admiration.

“What? You don’t? How you even passed comps is a mystery to me?” We both knew that Alastair was violating the conventions of polite conversation. He didn’t seem to mind.

The air changed directions suddenly. The scent of concentrated urine reached me from somewhere nearby, the dark recess of concrete beneath the escalator, the cracks in the foundation.

Alastair turned to face me, trembling slightly, like he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. I averted my gaze. It fell upon the oversized soft-shelled suitcase, hiding behind Alastair’s legs, propped up against the folding chair. It must be where he kept the copies of the poems.

“We both know you can’t come up with ideas of your own, but that doesn’t mean that you have to hunt me down and steal my ideas.” There it was! At least he got it off his chest.

The Bean and the Scene (1969), Barbara Westman

Fortunately for me, though, Alastair was wrong. I had my own ideas, every bit as good as his analog podcast one. And I had my own spot, perhaps not as good as his, but well suited, nonetheless, to my needs.

For months I had gone to the library every day. I would stay up all night at my room in The Halfway House. To produce the texts. I wrote them by hand. Little brochures. Each dedicated to a different movement in art history. Latin American Baroque. French Rococo. Second Generation Pre-Raphaelite Romanticism. Victorian Gothic. Mexican Surrealism. Brazilian Modernism. German Expressionism. Russian Futurism. Hyperrealism. Dozens of brochures. Like fanzines. Complete with sketches, rudimentary approximations of famous paintings, just similar enough for the viewer to be able to capture the reference but different enough to defamiliarize the original. Each booklet was customized, singular, unrepeatable.

On sunny days I picked a spot on the marble stairs at the foot of the fine arts museum downtown, a little off to the side. On an overturned milkcrate, I laid out my wares. The selection of brochures depended on the exhibitions on display on the inside of the building that day. I made special issues, dedicated to the analysis of all the high-profile works, the ones in the ads pasted around town. It was a parallel gift shop. What it lacked in Van Gogh refrigerator magnets and Mona Lisa aprons, it made up for in content.

It wasn’t uncommon for a museumgoer, an art lover, a history enthusiast, or even a tourist to stop and chat. To flip through a brochure. To find it interesting enough to purchase. Sales were respectable. Who knows? Perhaps I would be able to turn it into a blog one day, with some of the content available only to subscribers, or maybe even an online course.

Alastair had pulled it off. It’s true. He found a place. He found a way out. For those of us still in the profession. But he wasn’t the only one.

“Well, I’ll let you get to it, then. I don’t want to interfere with your sales,” I said, my tone upbeat, despite the circumstances. “And, for what it’s worth, I don’t need to steal your idea.” Alastair didn’t look convinced.

I bent down and picked up my milkcrate, dozens of handwritten brochures stowed safely in its interior, my wares. Without turning to say goodbye, I headed up the escalator to my connecting train, to a subway station downtown, to the museum stairs, my place in the sun.  

“Rush Hour” (1930), Sybil Andrews