Karma Police

Short Stories

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a short story. It’s from a collection called Lives of the Artists.

Best,

Sam

KARMA POLICE

His family was very middle-class, stolidly so, more than what they actually made, it was built into what they talked about, savings and mutual funds and health care, these were the favorite topics of conversation, they treated them like a game the way other people might follow sports, so-and-so, one of their friends, might have gotten a good job with a raise but would have to forego benefits, and that set off a flurry of mental math, of prurient speculation into the home economics of the friend, more than once in his childhood dinner would be interrupted by one parent or another taking out a pen and calculating some acquaintance’s likely budget all over the paper tablecloth. These were old memories, treasured memories, the thrifty parents, proud of making every cent count. His father taught micro-economics part-time at a community college. He wrote a book on household spending, Jon much later could remember the Cheshire Cat grin his father had every time he snuck in a little bit of work on it, the book was treated as a real indulgence, a respite from, who knows what, cutting coupons or something.

Improbably enough, the book was published, and then — this was the kind of thing that never could have been predicted on any paper napkin — it became a bestseller, it was clearly written, accessible, his father had a good sense of humor, very cranky and idiosyncratic, an acquired taste — the assumption had been that it would never travel outside their four walls. The book became kind of a household staple for a whole generation. His parents’ impulse was to bank that money, hunker down, maybe let themselves get the more expensive milk from the closer grocery store, but it said very clearly in Howard Wexler’s Simplicity Itself: A Home Economics Guide that money should be put to work and the best investment was real estate in a choice location. From here the dining room table was turned into a war room, Rand McNally maps were bought, neighborhoods scoured for value, his mother became a kind of shoe leather gumshoe, visiting place after place. They zeroed in on artists’ lofts, the assumption was that artists had a good eye for an apartment but would have messed everything up financially, be in a position to sell. And his father’s logic and his mother’s legwork paid off and they struck gold, a vast downtown loft that had been a textiles factory converted with great care into a string of studios. The principal tenant was an abstract expressionist who, at one point, had exhibited with de Kooning. Jon was taken to see it before the closing. It was packed floor to ceiling with enormous canvases. Some, he could see, were nearly blank, some were covered with wild waving lines, the painter had apparently passed through several different stages and movements. Tucked somewhere behind the canvases, like some kind of trick device, trap door or false wall in a very different kind of home, was a twin bed, chest of drawers, and a kitchen equipped only with skillet and coffee pot. The mania for home improvement, which must have seized the painter back in the ‘30s or ‘40s or whenever he commandeered the factory, and which had led to cornices, all kinds of whimsical, homey touches, had long ago deserted him, the lone carpet was badly soiled, the plaster was peeling halfway down one side of the counter. He was going to live with an abandoned daughter, to whom he had recently begged forgiveness. Out of force of habit, he asked slyly if the Wexlers wouldn’t take a few of the paintings, which he could offer at a steep discount. And he moved them around on their wheeled contraptions, unveiled them with ceremony, but his heart wasn’t in it, Jon could see that. His parents, as a kind of goodwill gesture, bought a small drawing, basically a series of zigzagging swiggles, that they hung outside the door, next to the mezuzah. As Jon was leaving on that first visit, his mother holding the door wide for him, he looked back and saw the old painter standing there with his hands on his hips, obviously working through the problem of how to get rid of everything.

***

Life paths are very mysterious. Later on, particularly in Philadelphia, his cold-water flat, in which Jon had plenty of time to reflect, to speculate on diverging paths, he wondered if it was that visit that truly shaped him, that quick decisive glimpse of the old painter, or if it was all the time spent in the apartment, if he inhaled something there, the painter who’d left no trace of himself in art history — Jon did search pretty assiduously in some catalog listings and then again when the Internet came out — had deposited his intellectual property, his legacy, somehow in the spirit of the apartment, and it had seeped into Jon, his twin bed positioned exactly where the painter’s had been, something about the position of his head meaning that he shared the painter’s feverish dreams, eating his breakfast cereal at the same counter where the painter had his black coffee and scorched toast meaning that they had somehow oriented themselves to the world in the same way, chewing their breakfast thoughtfully, some private, utterly shameless, shameful vision forming of their own immortality, everything else fading away, the building, the neighborhood, the whole city, but each moment of their life would remain, even that inconspicuous breakfast would remain, because it contributed in its way to the great work of art that, who knows, captured the inner spirit of that time, that would live on and on, endlessly embroidered by the generations that came after them.

That seemed as good a theory as anything for why Jon ended up on the path he did. There was no obvious reason for him to become a painter — definitely nothing in his heritage. His parents were the least likely inhabitants of Soho. They were still very Edison, New Jersey, their conversation still hinged on guessing other people’s finances, but now it was transferred to speculating about the art galleries and the street vendors and the graffitists. Real estate in the city probably was a good long-term investment – they had thought that through in many permutations – but it didn’t exactly suit them psychologically in the short-run. His father was now a regular invitee to conferences all over the country, and that meant meeting women who had been primed for his sense of humor by reading his book, and that meant long, empty evenings, in which there was little to do except test out a system of his at the casino, if there was one available, or at an OTB parlor if there wasn’t.

They were finished by the time Jon started high school. His father became a ghostly presence, bringing him along to conferences where he was speaking and on discreet trips to Belmont and the Aqueduct where Jon was initiated into arcane betting systems involving all sorts of hedges and offsets. And he came over for long, Friday night dinners — an attempt to retain some sort of ‘continuity’ — although he kept tapping his foot under the table and, once the niceties were dispensed with, he and Jon’s mother got into these wildly detailed arguments, who had made which mistake when, who had squandered which money, it was the same sort of penny-counting as in the good old days although now emotions and life decisions factored into it too, it was a real thorny question, why, for instance, he had flown rather than taken the train, to a talk in Buffalo, and his point was that if you looked at the schedules and the costs, air travel actually made more sense, and her point was that it was dead-to-rights that he had a mistress there and was anxious to get to her as fast as possible. He left, often by storming off, and she smoked. It was hard to work out what had gone so unbelievably wrong – the Soho loft was a good apartment, had to be, they were already making money on it, were renting a couple of the rooms as studio apartments, the property would only appreciate in value, but, meanwhile, every trip to the grocery store, every time Jon rode his bike to school, was a trip through a war zone. Jon didn’t mind it so much, he became friendly in a fashion with his usual muggers, they nodded to each other when they were off-duty, once he passed them while they were fooling around with his watch. But Margie his mother had no sense of humor about it. She’d carry her bags home from the grocery store — the closer, better one had closed, the proprietors moving to Mamaroneck — now it was a long walk through the Village and across Houston, her expecting to be jumped or at least hit by traffic at every moment, and then the way she’d just drop her bags once she was finally through the door, go straight to the window for a cigarette. Jon, who would usually be drawing or reading through comic books, would see her muttering to herself, her head turning back and forth while she smoked, she looked exactly like a sleeper trying to shake herself out of a nightmare.

Jon went away to school. He painted, became a smoker, there was a dreaminess he had that he found hard to account for — a way that he would drift off in class, that information would fail to lodge in his brain, that certain tasks would pile up. It was hard for him to understand, unnerved him; it was so far from his parents’ dogged practicality. After he graduated, he took a driving trip out West. He saw some beautiful skies, got broke, saw a lot of students’ crash pads. He and his friends limped home, the car moseying along to try to save on gas. He got home in time for Friday night dinner. His mother looked him up and down. “You need a rest,” she announced. He was really addicted to cigarettes at this point, wasn’t willing to smoke around her, he kept bouncing his knee up and down while he waited for the brisket to roast, he figured it was probably a good facsimile of what his father was like on his rare visits.

He let a week go by and then he asked his mother if she could give him a lift to Philadelphia. Why Philadelphia? she asked suspiciously. He told her he’d met somebody on his travels who said he might have room for him and a job for him in Philadelphia. She looked at him levelly, like he was a grocer who’d quoted some outrageous price and she was waiting for him to negotiate himself down from it.

“I thought you’d stay here,” she said. “I thought you needed to be here.”

He raised his eyebrows, nodded, like the other person had just made a great point, but he didn’t respond to it — it was a trick of his father’s, this ending the conversation with the other person thinking they’d won.

He didn’t want her to see exactly where was going, so he brought a Rand McNally atlas with them, navigated her to a SEPTA stop, had her drop him off pretty much when they were just in city limits. She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. He knew the gesture, meant that she was craving a cigarette. “I really hope you know what you’re doing,” she told him.

***

And he didn’t, of course he didn’t. It was madness to not be dropped off at the actual address, he carried his suitcases up and down the SEPTA steps, feeling very much like wounded prey. When he arrived, the friend — really just a guy he’d met, part of a student commune in Berkeley — looked at him quizzically, like he was trying to remember who he was. The job was not forthcoming, that had been a misunderstanding, based on some idea that there might be jobs, if one looked. But there was the room, actually the furnace room in the basement of a crumbling house. The friend showed Jon to where he might sleep, showed him the empty basement space that he might use as a studio. When he was left alone, Jon took out his crumpled pack, straightened the least bent of his cigarettes, closed his eyes and let his shoulders melt as he exhaled the smoke.

His dreaminess was a difficult quality, it had been somehow deeply underestimated all through his upbringing; because he was Jewish, because his father was a CPA, he sort of assumed he was made of the same stuff, but he wasn’t, he could tell that he wasn’t, when his host organized one of these meetings to explain all the house rules for the various artists slash vagabonds who were there, he found himself weirdly unable to retain what had been said even a moment earlier, he could only imagine what it would be like to actually show up at a regular job, the time you were supposed to arrive, the time you were supposed to leave, the way you were supposed to carry yourself around your bosses, the way you were supposed to carry yourself around your colleagues. Not that he thought it was evil or Fascistic especially, the way that the rest of the artist vagabonds assumed it to be, just that he couldn’t do it. Even sitting by himself and willing himself to paint was a difficult structure, he stared at the canvas, he rebelled, he wandered outside to smoke, he smoked again once he was back inside, he had no idea what he wanted to paint, why he wanted to paint really, he had kept at it in school, but he hadn’t been an art major or anything, hadn’t wanted to subject himself to that crazy discipline, he was sure of only one thing, and that was that he had made the right decision to not let himself settle into the Soho apartment, by now he would have been teased out of what he was doing, his mother would have proven, would have ample evidence to prove, that he was lazy, shiftless, that he didn’t know what he was doing.

That was basically the next ten years. As far as he could tell, he’d made just one move in his life, one significant lift, that irrational drive to the outer limits of the SEPTA and everything else was laziness and inertia. The discipline did come, but it didn’t come through meditation or the calisthenic exercises that were prescribed by various of the vagabonds who passed through the house, or from the work ethic that featured so heavily in Howard Wexler’s Simplicity Itself. It seemed to come from just a deep boredom, he had stared at the canvas for so long, had gone on so many smoke breaks that eventually he gorged himself on nicotine, had so many hours to kill in his downtime from his subsistence jobs at the laundromat and the bar, that eventually there was nothing else to do but paint a picture, two, three, four hours a day, whatever time he couldn’t think of any other way to fill.

He was always broke, he never went on dates — this habit seemed to have stayed with him from Simplicity Itself and the paper tablecloth, he computed what the date would cost, the movie, the popcorn, the beer, the dinner for two, calculated that against how many days he could make that money last, calculated that against his wages — and, no matter how much he was tempted, he was good-looking in a wolfish way, he had a certain style, an idiosyncratic sense of humor, he did meet women if only through having vacant hours in the day in which he strolled around the neighborhood, he always held off. He started to exhibit, little shows in abandoned warehouses, things like that, they had a street cred, if not exactly fame. Once, at an exhibition, he spotted a woman alone standing by a corner of one of his paintings, a towering Philip Guston-like panoply of colors and shapes — hoods and gas masks — with vaguely political resonance. He was in a good mood, he was drunk on the gallery wine, he went up to her asking what she thought. She looked tiny, she had a little tea cup of a wine glass that she was clutching in both hands like it was an acorn.

“That’s your painting?” she said.

He had some hope of being incognito, springing the surprise on her at the right time, but he conceded that it was.

“That’s such a wild thing to have your self-worth be your work,” she said. She was clearly in the middle of some deep reflection. “I go to work and I do my job and it has nothing to do with me. I can’t imagine putting all of yourself into something and saying this is me — take me or leave me.”

He was used to this, existentialism from people whom he wished were instead buying his paintings, and he wasn’t sure her analysis applied specifically to him, but he accepted it, he was flattered, they stood together and they looked at what he’d made.

“Well, different people have different things they do,” he said, “different ways they contribute to the world, they kind of hedge and distribute themselves around and that’s a smart way to be and I guess I don’t have that — like I look at this and that’s me, that’s all of me.”

***

He had been in touch with his mother — he wasn’t the sort of person who would just cut connection completely. She had turned herself into something of a tycoon — a ‘slumlord,’ she said with wry satisfaction. The alimony payments had been infrequent and then dried up completely — there were additional editions of Simplicity Itself and there were conferences but they couldn’t keep pace with the ‘system’ that he felt honor-bound to test out, whether at Saratoga or Arlington Park. Her artist tenants had of course trashed her studios and, one by one, as they moved out, she had to revamp the place, had to teach herself how to replace windows and how to run a new set of wires from a fuse box. When Jon visited with Celia, she was actually in the process of renovating a new place, they walked around it, all the wires loose, a wall and cabinet recently demo’d, she was like a general giving them a tour of a battlefield where she’d just won a great victory, she was telling them about the Mafia guy from Staten Island who’d been eying this place and the clever trick she’d run at the zoning board to fend him off and the Hasids who’d suddenly come horning in trying to buy, and Jon and Celia were both laughing so hard that they had to steady themselves on the walls, and his mother’s eyes were gleaming as she watched their reaction, she was becoming a Napoleon of Soho, she was going to flip this broken-down place and she was already thinking about the next one, the gentry were moving in and the artists out, she felt she could make millions if she just keep herself from getting whacked by the Mob or the Hasids.

She gave Celia a personal tour of certain details, showed her where exactly she’d had to put down glue to rescue a broken cabinet, where the break was in the fuse box that she’d initially worried meant she was going to blow up the whole building. Jon hung back to smoke. He could hear them murmuring, the way the conversation drifted to himself, to shared confidences. “You have to do all your own couponing?” his mother was saying. She was asking about Celia’s school — Celia taught middle school — his mother was nodding along a lot, they were making the same sorts of sounds, practical sounds, they were commiserating, it was hard working, it was hard doing everything pretty much on your own, at the end of the day you couldn’t count on men to support you.

Celia was a hit, on the drive back to Philadelphia she kept shaking her head. “I can’t believe how resourceful your mother is,” she kept saying, “I’m thinking about making her my role model.” He was trying to have a sense of humor about it. He drove and watched the city lights starting to accumulate, guide him into Philly. He’d made himself extraneous, he knew that, maybe that had been the point all along, an annoyance, a condescension, an unwillingness to write household budgets on paper tablecloths, a leaving of the business of living to other people. He shouldn’t have been surprised that they condescended towards him in turn. 

Celia was about two months pregnant at that time. They’d spent most of the drive up arguing about whether or not they should tell his mother and he was adamant that they didn’t. Already, Celia had the easy, lazy look of somebody who’d achieved their mission in life, she was trying to wedge herself into some kind of sleeping shape in the passenger seat. Her skin was glowing, she was full of goodwill towards everybody, almost everybody she met — most of all his mother — she took to have a whole set of answers that she could download, the way you might borrow somebody else’s recipes. Jon felt completely validated that they hadn’t said a word to his mother. That would have immediately meant a budget conversation, a careers conversation, an urban crime conversation — New York seemed to be pulling itself out of its terminal decline, was becoming a feasible place to live again, Philly was stubbornly the preserve of hoodlums and artists, if he’d said a thing, they might have been hauled back, who knows she might have booted their car, thrown herself across the doorframe to keep them from leaving, she would have insisted on fixing up a cute little studio for them, anything to keep them from raising a kid in West Philadelphia on the salary of a teacher and a painter.

***

In spite of the long odds, Charles survived his childhood, walked to school, was mugged once or twice although not with anything like the frequency of Jon’s muggings when he took his bike to Stuyvesant. And Jon, astonishingly, was making money — not great money, not money that generated any satisfaction on the calls back to New York — but middle-class money, the same kind of money, actually, that he would have been making if he had been an accountant or a middle manager or whatever safe path had been envisioned for him. He taught art at a couple of different colleges, and he was interviewed frequently — he had become the epitome of what was seen as a ‘Philadelphia School,’ abstract expressionism surviving by moving into three-dimensional space, painted over shattering glass, that kind of thing, or with great rolling valleys and hills in the canvases. Every time he was interviewed, he sold at least one new work. On a few occasions, he was flown to some symposium or museum opening, grouped on a stage with other artists, and they muttered gnomic things about Pop and the commodity fetish. It was lots of fun. He had moved out of the boiler room long ago, first moved in with Celia to the apartment she shared with a roommate, then displaced the roommate. And, when Celia had a moment, a series of crying jags connected to Charles’ latest mugging, he frowned and nodded and agreed that they had enough for a house in Ardmore — Celia driving back into the inner city to teach at her school.

Celia was a very disciplined, very optimistic person, an idealist, a go-getter, she was constantly winning teaching awards, but she had her breakdowns every so often, and once they were installed in the house, and Jon’s mother had come down from New York to do a bit of the contracting work, and the mortgage was being paid off on schedule, there was one more crying jag — this time about college, about wanting to be able to send Charles to a ‘real school.’

This was shortly after the controversy with the Brooklyn Museum — the first time anybody, newspapers, the ‘mainstream,’ had had to think about art in decades. Suddenly, all these people, TV anchors, tabloid editorialists, were leaping to the defense of modern art, the sanctity of modern art. Jon, to be honest, had a certain amount of sympathy with Giuliani and his goons — which he expressed much to Celia’s discomfiture. The art was dreck, sharks in formaldehyde, dung on the Virgin Mary. It was utterly shameless, auction-bait, a matter of jumping up and down, trying to get some sort of attention, and they’d managed to hook Giuliani with it.

Jon sat dreamily in the basement of the new house, which they’d converted to his studio. Charles was at school and wouldn’t be back for a few hours. He had been associated with a style and an integrity that went with the style — a vision of abstract expressionism, the high seriousness of art, that formed an unbroken link to Rothko and de Kooning, bypassed Warhol completely — but, to be honest, he couldn’t quite work out how he had settled on that style. He had been living in a basement, had a day job at the fluff-and-fold, everybody around him had an intensity so he had it too, he pretty much just repeated those lines later on when he started getting hit up for interviews. He looked out the upper grille of the basement window at the leafy suburban streets, his knee bobbed up and down, jonesing for cigarettes years after he’d quit, it had been inertia then when he was broke in an urban basement, it was inertia now when he was solidly middle-class in a basement in the suburbs. The work that he would make, he reflected, was called Monolith, it would have three criteria: it would be large so that it would take up as much space as possible in a gallery; it would be sensational, which he could accomplish by having bits of pop culture references, political statements, hanging off it like ornaments on a Christmas tree; and it would be elliptical, which was done by similar means, carving into the monolith several gnomic sayings that would seem in some way to connect to one another like clues in a treasure hunt.

The technical requirements for the work exceeded his abilities at the moment, but he was, after all, his mother’s son. He went to metal yards and bargained for scrap metal, he hauled back pieces of wood from the warehouses of lumber companies. He barricaded the basement to Charles, taught himself to weld, and, very much risking life and limb, succeeded in fusing together his bits of metal and wood. When he had his monolith prepared and had no idea whether it could be raised without toppling over and hitting all the gallerygoers at the Brooklyn Museum or Sotheby’s or wherever it ended up, he wasn’t too proud to hire a professional handyman for a few days, have him build the supports. An agent was summoned, brought to the basement, walked around it, actually fingered some of the ‘ornaments’ hanging off it, the dog tags, the AIDS ribbons, the lockets with photos in them, mostly the chaff of Celia’s family albums. He was frowning, appraising. Eventually, he said, “It’s a masterpiece,” as if he were certifying it kosher or prime grade. A week later, there was a museum van outside and these very burly, professional handlers, the sort of people you’d trust to defuse a bomb or dispose of a body, wrapped it up and carried it upstairs and off to its exhibit, and Jon tracked it from there via press clippings to the auction house and its sale for $250,000, which just so happened to be exactly the budget that he and Celia had allocated for four years at a top school, additional expenses included.

***

He sold several pieces of work after that and no longer had the mortgage worry or the tuition worry and no longer, really, even had the worry about having to keep busy — he sometimes used to feel, in front of his canvas, that he was getting flogged, always had to produce, had to get to his ten thousand hours, had to break down to the deeper level of himself, had to crack all of art wide open and produce a completely different style. Now that he had some time to spare, he did the spirituality seminars that Celia was always urging on him and that he had always genially ignored. Even in the thickets of his Buddhism — and he really did get into it — he didn’t take it with complete seriousness: all Jews, he’d found, got into Buddhism at one point or another.

It was a good opportunity, he discovered, to think about his life from a slightly different vantage-point. He sat cross-legged and straight-backed at weekend meditation seminars and breathed in and out through his nostrils and thought about the karma of Hoffman, the painter who had occupied his family’s loft before they did and then, according to the Internet, died at his daughter’s in Florida. He would have loved to have sold Monolith,would have loved to have wandered through museums as Jon had done, Charles and Celia in tow, waiting to bump into one of his pieces as if it were a scavenger hunt. And maybe Hoffman, on respirator and allowance in his wing of his daughter’s house, wouldn’t have seen it this way, but he did feel a certain filial satisfaction, Jon, a feeling that, through him, Hoffman’s loose and unclaimed karma might have been accounted for. And he felt it too with his mother, she wasn’t obviously an artist — it was hard to see it through the paper tablecloth and the careful saving of the deposit slips and the labyrinthine arguments with the handymen and contractors — but it was there, she had the right frame of mind for it, the right sense of inner balance and the drive to push it through, she made sure to send clippings of his reviews and interviews in every letter she sent to him, very much the way that she used to send coupons and recipes, and there was a pride there, not exactly well-informed but a real pride, he had the feeling that he was accounting too for a karma of hers, maybe one she didn’t even know she possessed. Although it was also perfectly possible that he was taking the concept of karma too literally.

***

Charles was a thoughtful, sensitive boy who took after his mother although had Jon’s mop of curly hair. He did things like send everybody out of the house so that he could surprise his mother with pancakes on her birthday and, years before he learned how to read, held the newspaper open at breakfast just like his parents did. Celia closely supervised his education and he was a very good student although, once, looking for something in his room, Jon came across the doodles that covered virtually all the margins of his spiral-bound notebook, and they seemed to collapse time for him. It didn’t seem to matter the subject Charles was in, math, science, French, in the margins were the same spirals and anemones, sometimes very shrewd sketches of the classmates around him, apparently Celia’s rigorous supplementary education had been no more successful in curbing Charles’ dreaminess than Jon’s mother’s scolding and remonstration had been in dealing with his own.

Before he went to college, Charles was dispatched to New York to spend time with his grandmother and to visit schools. Jon happened to have a talk to deliver at the 92^nd St Y while Charles was there. He had become a regular figure on the arts circuit, the unruly curled hair, the look of permanent adolescence. He was asked about staying with it, about his dedication, which had become a legendary thing – he was prepared for that, there were only about three or four questions that were ever asked at these events, each in breathless rotation.

He took the microphone back from the other panelist, cradled it in his hands, said, “I don’t think of it as dedication or hard work really. This is the best way to live, it’s what I’d rather do than anything else — that’s the way I think of it.” There was an effusive round of applause.

Afterwards, he met Charles in Central Park. Christo’s Gates were up and they walked around together. Charles seemed a bit sour about them, and the rapturous tourists who posed next to them, and Jon was pleased about that — he too found The Gates to be gimmicky and pop, although he liked that they had included all of their correspondence with the zoning board and the city as part of the exhibit — he felt that Margie would appreciate that, she would probably cut out The Times’ article on that and mail it to him, if she hadn’t already. Charles was in a very light jeans jacket, too light for the weather, he had his hands in his pockets, he was talking about schools, the pluses of Columbia and of NYU, the more expensive the school the more it seemed to be the ‘right fit.’ He was in a Napoleonic mood, his grandmother’s influence was discernible. “If I do a degree in management, that would give me the chance to go straight to business school,” he was saying, “although I think most people who do that work for a couple of years first.” They were walking through the Ramble in no particular order — in every direction, there were more orange gates, it was an odd sort of exhibition, Jon reflected, in which every piece of work in it looked exactly the same. It all sounded great what Charles was talking about, business school, law school, advanced degrees, executive MBAs, all of them great paths, Jon had almost nothing to say, no expertise, nothing he could weigh in on.

***

The next years were all of a piece. It seemed to him that his life had broken into distinct sections. Each one had its own intact logic; none connected with any of the others. There was the Soho investment; there was the drive to Philadelphia and the depositing on the outskirts; there was Monolith; and, before that, somewhere in the mists of time, there was Edison, New Jersey, laughing so hard at something his father said, somewhere in the middle of computing expenses, that he actually started rolling on the floor. In the post-Monolith phase, there were talks and awards. Celia had retired from teaching and, of all things, had taken up painting as a hobby. They were an empty nest; he didn’t quite understand what the reticence had been — the same as his parents’ — in having only one kid. He had affairs. There were rules about them, which were tacit and observed by everybody — nothing close to home, no emotional attachments, nothing complicating.

These all would have seemed like good problems to have back when he was working his day job at the laundromat, but of course it was hard to think about things that way. What he was aware of was a certain lightness. He did paint and sculpt, exhibited, sold, his discipline was so wired into him that he couldn’t not work, it sometimes even gave him pleasure, although he’d been doing it so long, made so many things, that he felt he was a bit out of ideas, expressed whatever it was that he had to say. He’d gotten to the phase where his work was more jokey, more playful — he took this as a good sign, all old artists got there eventually. He experimented with making a painting and crossing it out, painting something over it. He found a line from one of these tough-minded French philosophers, saying “To be an artist is terrible, it is to be a public poisoner, not of bodies but of souls” and he sprayed that all over an enormous floor-to-ceiling canvas, and, in a nod to Monolith, adorned it with figures from the history of art, the Mona Lisa with crosses in her eyes, David with a mustache squiggled across his lip, just a general Christmas tree of chaos and confusion. Nobody could tell what point exactly he was making; the sale of it exceeded even Monolith.

He and Celia split up eventually — it just seemed like they were out of moves in the relationship. He found himself a cute loft in New York not far from the building that his mother eventually sold. He went to exhibits and gallery openings, the whole New York life that his abstemiousness, his decision to escape from home had kept him from. Charles was there too but they communicated mostly through articles – cut-out newspaper clippings that he mailed him, and, when that seemed really passé, e-mail links.

Celia called him up sometimes to worry about Charles. Usually the conversation would be about something else, but there was always an agenda at the back of it, and he was relieved, selfishly, that the hidden item now wasn’t her trying to sniff out one of his affairs, her trying to catch the whiff of emotional attachment, it was the latest iteration of Charles’ inability to find his footing. A promising-sounding dorm room enterprise, something about online education, had ended when he finished college. A start-up with a media bent had collapsed amid mutual recriminations. There was a company that offered a deluxe burger to Wall Street types, a company that tried to liaise between corporations and non-profits. They all sounded sort of reasonable, at least they had an angle, it sounded like a world of sharks and venture capital firms and he had no idea how it all worked, his head spun when Charles tried to explain it to him, but it sounded like he was close to money, and it was exciting, it was exciting to have a son like that — following a completely different fate.

Charles asked to meet with him. They lived in the same city but treated each other as acquaintances — the premise was that they were both busy, both adults living separate lives. Jon regretted a bit that he hadn’t kept up with horseracing, it would have been nice to spend a Saturday afternoon testing out a system at Belmont, but his life had gone in a very different direction. Charles asked to meet him at a café on the Upper West Side, he was already there, sitting in his coat, when Jon arrived. He had a coffee in front of him and was tapping on the saucer with a spoon.

They talked idly, about neighborhoods and television shows. Charles had just been through a breakup, he was beginning to date again, there was some commiseration with that. It was the same conversational pattern as with Celia, the rolling-around of polite topics, finally, belatedly, the agenda when your brain had already started to fog – both his parents had been brutally direct, he was sorry that that trait seemed to have disappeared.

Charles was tapping the saucer with his spoon. “It’s just not working,” he said. “I think I made a wrong turn somewhere.”

He was slender, with very delicate features, he was trying to dress himself up, wear a blazer, fit in in a fast-moving world, but the hair still made him look like a high school drummer, he still had pimples on his forehead, it would be hard to pass for a shark.

“I don’t know what it is, but I think there’s some instinct — the start-up instinct, the making-money instinct that I, that I’m just kind of missing.”

He was leaning in, with his elbows on the table, but couldn’t make eye contact with Jon. He was talking and smoothing out a napkin. “I’ve applied to a couple of different art programs,” he said. “I think it’s a long shot, but I just felt it was the right thing to do. I’ve written the essays, I was wondering if you’d look at the portfolio. There are rec letters too, and I wondered if you know anybody, anybody you work with, who might be able to help with that.”

His voice was very low. This took courage, Jon reminded himself. Not exactly a great show, but courage was involved in facing fears, pushing through them, not just in coming out ahead. He said he’d be happy to look, he’d think about what would make sense for letters, the application shouldn’t be too difficult.

“But have you — ” Jon said, “have you been working at it?”

“Sure,” Charles said and the napkin was shuffled forwards and back like an air-hockey puck. “I do it all the time, meetings, downtime, evenings. I feel like there’s never a day when I’m not drawing.”

The moment seemed to call for something. Charles made the effort to supply it. “What you do,” he said, “that always seemed like great work to me, that seemed like a really good life, and maybe I was too nervous or something to follow what you were doing when I was in school, it’s maybe taken me a little longer to figure out who I am, I feel like I’ve maybe done that the hard way, through process of elimination, but now I’m pretty sure — I know the kind of work that I want to be doing, I think it’s the only work that I find in any way actually interesting.”

The waiter had come by, asked if they wanted anything, Jon had taken the check, reached for his wallet to pay it. He let himself work through the mechanics of that, took his time to frown at the bill, add up the tip. He was stalling of course, he’d been a very hands-off parent, the education supervising had been Celia’s, almost everything had been outsourced to the school, the barrage of extracurriculars, the whole ethos was to let your kids find their own way. Money wouldn’t be a terrible issue, at least not for a while, Margie had done well, she’d left Charles a nice inheritance when she’d passed. Jon had plenty of money too although was actively squandering it on his New York place, his divorcé’s lifestyle. It would bite eventually, inheritance and loans would be enough to float Charles through an MFA program, maybe five or ten years after that, but eventually it would run out, there was no way of knowing if anybody would be around to help out at that point. And then there were the questions of talent, dedication, age, it was a cruel and close-knit community, it didn’t like dilettantes, despised anyone who tried to jump to the front of the line without paying dues. There had to be something else, there really did — it was a wide world out there.

He settled up, put his wallet back, looked Charles in the eye. “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t think it’s the best idea. To succeed at it is infinitesimal — to do that takes a mania, truly, just a complete ridiculous mania.”

“But you talk about how much you enjoy it,” Charles said. Something was catching in his voice, something very teenage, it would be a real problem in a business meeting if something like that happened; Jon could see why things weren’t exactly working out. “You talk about how it’s the best life, the only life,” he said, “and I didn’t before for some reason, but I’m starting to see that now, it’s starting to become really clear to me.”

Jon took his time replying. He looked at the frizzed hair, the delicate features, the soul in the hands, the way they were dancing around on the tablecloth. Sometimes he looked at him and felt he were staring into a mirror. He wasn’t a Buddhist anymore, that phase had passed, but he seemed still to have some sense of karma and fate, of something integral to each person, of how they were meant to spend their life. He tried to be as gentle as possible.

“It’s not a good idea,” Jon said. “You’ll have to find something else.”