Mr. Bones by Paul Theroux Page A

looked nervous.
    Pa had followed us out to the gravel path. He said, “Everyone’s got raccoons. You’d just make it worse.”
    Ma stared at him, surprised, as though seeing a stranger. That was not the sort of thing he’d ever said to her before. He was awarded custody because he was kind, reasonable, helpful, forgiving—nurturing, was how he put it to the judge. But he had a thin, mean face now, dimly lit and sunken eyes, unshaven cheeks, and discolored teeth. Normally he would not have been awake at this time. Ma had disturbed him.
    She said, “I’ve missed you boys so much.”
    We told her we’d missed her too, but in a low voice so that Pa wouldn’t hear.
    â€œI’ve got a job now. I do counseling. I have a full caseload.” She shoved her cuff back from her wrist and looked at her watch. “I’ll have to leave pretty soon.”
    Sam said, “Can we come with you?”
    She saw that I had the same question on my face. She didn’t say anything. She looked up at Pa, who was standing like a sentry with his hands behind his back.
    â€œTake them.” His eyes were weirdly lit, and he was pale and spiky-haired from sleeping all day. “What good are they here? They think it’s all a joke. They don’t realize how much is at stake.” He turned away. “I’ve got my hands full.”
    Without another word, he crossed the lawn and headed back to the house, leaving the lights off, as he did these evenings, so that he was better able to see the animals. When I looked back, I saw him staring with yellow eyes at Ma leading us away from him.

Mrs. Everest
    A LTHOUGH I WAS not prepared for it—but how could anyone be?—Mrs. Everest introduced me to the work of the artist Felix Gonzales-Torres, specifically a piece composed of about nine dollars’ worth of light fixtures: two bulbs on extension cords twisted together, hung against a bare wall, and plugged into a socket at the baseboard. I expected her to say, “It’s
supposed
to make you angry.” But Mrs. Everest called it an eloquent depiction of grief.
    â€œAs an artist yourself, you can appreciate the depth of meaning here.”
    I said, “This means absolutely nothing to me”—the wrong answer, because she then told me that she was negotiating to exhibit this genius’s work at her gallery, and I’d been hoping that she’d show my work too.
    Instead of changing the subject, she reminded me of how little I knew by describing another of his works, this one consisting of 175 pounds of wrapped candy heaped against a wall. When I smiled, trying to imagine this, she said, as though to a child, “It represents his friend Ross, who died. That’s how much he weighed. Gallerygoers eat the candy and make him thinner. See?”
    And the extension cords,
Untitled (March 5th) #2,
one of a series, was said to depict the two men, Gonzales-Torres and his lover, entwined. Mrs. Everest showed me the catalogue entry from a museum where the installation was on view.
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The work is open to a wide range of interpretations—naked and vulnerable, or poignant and warm. The implicit romanticism of the work’s metaphor of two luminous bodies, tempered by the knowledge that at any second one of the bulbs could burn out, with the other left to shine on alone.
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    â€œWhen I think of luminous bodies, Andy Wyeth’s Helga paintings come to mind.”
    I dared say this because many of my paintings have been compared to those of Andy, who was my friend.
    Pretending to be deaf is a conventional form of passive aggression—Mrs. Everest claimed she could not hear any of my comments, squinted when I repeated them, and instead of answering merely shrugged, implying that they were too banal to address. In what I realized later was her belittling my work, she talked in her odd chewing way about an upcoming show at her gallery,