By Jessica Pearce
The Frick is right off Central Park, but most people don’t know it. Most go to the Met, which is more of a tourist trap than anything else. I go to the Frick every Friday afternoon, partially because I like how the art never changes and partially because I hope it will and I’ll be the first to notice. I used to take Hazel with me, and we’d look at this series of four paintings for hours. Each painting represented a season. Summer, fall, winter, spring. And each time, we’d notice something different about the paintings: a girl was blushing in spring, a dog was barking in the background of summer. That was back when I could appreciate Hazel’s eyes up close and think about how they reminded me of those candied pecans people sell at theme parks or shopping malls. After we split, they took the paintings down to touch them up. But it’s been seven months since then, and the paintings still aren’t back.
I hand Frank my pass, and he punches a hole in it. Frank’s a cool old guy. Like, the kind of cool old guy that probably got high with a bunch of hippies when he was in his thirties or stood in for Simon to sing with Garfunkel because he had those types of connections.
“Cold outside?” Frank says.
“As ever,” I say.
Frank gives me back the pass. It looks like someone went hole-puncher-happy on it. “They’re not up,” he says.
I shove the pass into my front pocket. “Figured,” I say.
“Enjoy,” he says.
When I first started coming, I listened to the audiotapes you can carry around to use as a guide. I’ve memorized the tape by now, so I just wander through the halls and wonder how this Frick guy got so rich. Frank said it was from the steel industry, but it’s hard to imagine a guy getting the money to build a place like this and buy all this art from investing in a few pieces of metal.
I get to the rotunda with the big windowed dome and the stone fountain, and I sit on a bench and stare at the sky. If it’s dark enough, you can see Aquila, a constellation that’s supposed to look like an eagle but mostly looks like a stepped-on square with a tail dangling from it. So I’m in this process of staring at the sky when I feel a person sitting down next to me, and then I’m staring at a person who reminds me of Hazel. Who actually is Hazel. And I think: looking at the sky is a lot easier than looking in the eyes of someone you used to love.
My mouth feels like it’s hanging open. Though I know it’s not, I check anyway. Closed.
Hazel says, “You can’t see it yet.”
“It’s got to get dark first,” I say.
“I know,” she says, smiling. Her smile is whiter and brighter somehow.
“The paintings still aren’t back,” I say.
“I heard the Met’s borrowing them,” she says.
“For what?” I say.
She shrugs. “It’s the Met.”
There’s not anything really wrong with the Met, except that everybody knows about it. Hazel said once that the Met’s popularity makes it feel fake because when more people know about something the less special it becomes and the more fake it feels. I think there’s a lot of truth to that.
“You remember how in the fall one, there’s that guy picking apples off a red and yellow tree, and he’s got that look on his face like he’s not sure why he’s picking the apples, only that he is?” Hazel says.
“Sure,” I say.
“Well, I’ve thought about that guy, and I think that maybe I’m a lot like him. Because I keep doing things without knowing why I’m doing them but knowing I am all the same,” she says.
“Oh?” I say.
“I get you’re probably thinking, what’s she doing telling me this? And you’ve got a point. It’s just, I don’t know. I feel like,” she says. She stops to think about what she feels like.
“Like you should know why you’re picking the apples?” I say.
She turns her head toward me. “Exactly.”
I think for a while, not saying anything. A part of me can see how frail this is. Like if I say or do the wrong thing or take one misstep, then this weird place, this pocket of time we’re in will evaporate and the museum will come back. Another part of me wants to ignore the frailty. Wants to get up and leave. To walk down a long street until I reach a park or a tall building or a pizza joint or anywhere other than here. Then I say, “Maybe it’s not so much about the why.”
She thinks for a while, too, and then she says, “You think?”
“Yeah,” I say, nodding. “I mean, maybe it’s more about the fact that you’re picking the apples at all. Or that the guy in the painting is. It’s sort of amazing, if you think about it like that. Despite everything, he’s picking the apples anyway.”
“I guess.”
We watch people walk around the museum. They look funny with their heads bobbling up and down and back and forth as they glance at everything. Hazel takes her museum pass out of her pocket. It only has five holes in it.
“Got rid of your old one?” I say.
She doesn’t answer, but she doesn’t need to. She holds the pass up to the ceiling and looks at the sky again, peering through the holes. “It’s different out there,” she says.
I look at the sky with her. “How so,” I say.
She puts the pass down, and we look at each other. “You know,” she says, “we were stuck here, inside these walls. Our relationship was. Whatever was happening out there didn’t matter. Until I realized that it did.” She stares at the fountain, which doesn’t have water in it. I think: I’ll let Frank know later.
“It’s different,” she says.
I remember this one time, more than any other time, during the summer after Hazel and I had graduated from Pratt. Hazel’s got this thing for fireworks, so I asked Frank if we could go up to the roof of The Frick to watch some for the Fourth of July. He said yes. When the Fourth came, I took us up there and we made a bed of pillows and blankets to lie on. We watched fireworks explode, disturbing the air above, beneath, and all around them. The light from the fireworks reflected onto Hazel’s face and outlined her features, almost as if they were becoming a part of her. She was radiant in that moment.
