Page 62 of Below the Shadow of the City

“Well tell me, where would you take me if I somehow could join you above ground in the city.” I couldn’t picture Maddox strolling through Central Park or across the Brooklyn Bridge, it’s a foreign land compared to the laundry room and his neighborhood. I imagine sitting beside him on the subway or walking down my street. My mind tries swapping past partners' silhouettes with Maddox’s and it isn’t working. They exist in two different worlds.

“We’d have to go to the farmer’s market, I have some favorite vendors there who I’ve gotten to know over the years, you’d do a great job of carrying all my bags for me, fruit is heavy, you know.”

“I’d happily be the brawn of your operation,” he laughs so easily, and I don’t grow tired of the sound.

“Then, naturally, I’d need to show you all the touristy spots around Manhattan, Times Square, Central Park, probably a Yankees game, and maybe I’d even force you to do one of those horrible guided tours.” In my ten years here I haven’t even done some quintessential New York tourist things. Thinking of experiencing it for the first time with Maddox sends a sweet swell through my chest. “And I’d take you to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I used to spend a lot of time there. It’s one of the most beautiful places in the city.”

“I actually do adore art, I don’t know if that’s shocking information or not.”

“Am I shocked that the massive horned brute loves a good Monet? Honestly? No, you’re very much the soft sensitive type, which I certainly can appreciate.”

He leans in and kisses my cheek, his lips seem especially soft. “On days when I need a reprieve from everything, I often find myself looking through the digital collections of The Met or MoMA. If we’re name dropping famous artists, though, Van Gogh is my personal preference. I hardly have any true connection to him, but oddly when I stare at him I feel an odd kinship to him.” God, what I would give to stand beside him looking at impressionist paintings.

“I’m inclined to push everyone to love Monet,” I say. “And usually once they see the famous water lily pond painting I tell them to go straight to Central Park so they can live and breathe it. Art is what connects the human spirit to the world around us,” I look at Maddox and then at the landscape, life and art converging. “It’s such a unique and beautiful thing that mankind has always been inclined to recreate their surroundings using pictures.

You know the cavemen painted people dancing? There was no survival reasoning behind it, they were capturing a moment in their lives, and for thousands of years people have used art to immortalize landscapes, people, and even the mundane. Then it evolved to capture abstract emotions or pain or ecstasy. Looking at art is looking into the soul of our existence, what we care for, what we find beautiful, and what we feel.”

“And these are the exact walls of yours I’ve been dying to break through,” he says with a soft smile. “I’ve never thought to put it into words in such a way, but I’m realizing that might be why I get weirdly emotional looking at a self portrait of a human man who’s been dead 200 years.”

The first time I saw Dance by Matisse at the Museum of Modern Art was on a school field trip. The bus had dropped a rowdy art class practically on the front steps, with little more than a scavenger hunt of a worksheet as guidelines. Too old for proper chaperones, too young to be trusted to not run out the doors of the museum and explore the city entirely solo. While most of the students had organically grouped up, I found myself alone, as I had for most of high school.

Being invisible was my superpower though, and I was able to slip off unnoticed and explore the museum as I’d wished. The worksheet was doable for anyone who had intrinsic knowledge of major art history, as I had, so after scribbling the answers down on a bench in a corner, I wandered.

For the first time in my life I could see the real life work that had only previously existed in textbooks or as reposted photos on my Tumblr. Salvador Dalì’s The Persistence of Memory gave me chills. Van Gogh’s Starry Night made me cry.

Nothing made my mind quiet like Dance and its depiction of figures holding hands as they moved in a circle.

My teenage brain placed the massive painting as a natural evolution from The Dancers of Cogul, the very cave painting I’d mentioned to Maddox and the piece I’d studied obsessively in art class. Browsing the gift shop I saw a mug with Keith Haring’s own take on dancers on it and I had as much of an epiphany about humanity and the arts as a teenager could. How interwoven it all was. How decade after decade, artist after artist, the joy of the human spirit was captured in a dance.

There was an invisible thread connecting mankind to one another in an intangible way. For a girl who’d craved nothing more than genuine human connection, who wanted to find myself grasping the hand of another while gleefully spinning in a circle, the cave artist, Matisse, and Keith Haring had created all that I’d desired. I bought the mug and cradled it in my hands for the hour-long bus ride back home.

Though logic and emotion were often at odds in my mind, art was incredibly simple, often simpler than words. I’m hardly a writer myself, I can’t form narratives in my mind to unpack my emotions. When I first moved to New York and had a few dollars to spare for a pay-as-you-wish ticket I spent days wandering the quiet wings of the museum. I’d stop and watch a piece for a spell, hoping it would tell me something. Explain some complicated feeling I hadn’t figured out for myself yet, or tell me how to fix myself.

All of this has brought me closer to Maddox, who’d just implied his feeling of kinship to Vincent Van Gogh. I could almost pull the invisible threads between us tighter. He knows how it feels to yearn for something he can’t put into words and the connection you feel to a long dead stranger.

“You love art so much but you haven’t seen it in person for yourself,” I state.

“No,” he says quietly, “I haven’t.”

“Don’t you wish⁠—”

“Things were different? Of course. It’s all I’ve known for 29 years, it’s not as sad as you probably think it is.”

“It’s still pretty fucking sad, Maddox. The circumstances are kind of shitty.”

“They are, and sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live out of hiding, for all of us to, and maybe someday it’ll happen. I can’t live in fear of hypotheticals. Right now I have you and this view, and that’s more than enough.”

He’s definitive in his reply, and it’s enough to tell me to not continue. He holds a sadness below the surface that rarely makes an appearance, as if he’s holding it down with his two hands to keep it submerged. Maddox is so bright, and so warm, it’s impossible at times to believe he could even have the smallest speck of darkness in him. It’s come out in droplets, something about his mother, or his distance with his father, or, even rarer, his acknowledgment that the world is built to keep him hidden away.

I’m melting into him as he removes stone after stone from my tower. And I’m about to let him in further when⁠—

“Sigrid?” A sharp female voice calls to me and I squeeze my eyes shut hoping that it’s a weird figment of my imagination. Maybe hearing my name aloud is a manifestation of my continued anxiety about dating Maddox. His head swivels as fast as mine does towards the source of the sound. He heard it too. He mutters “fuck” under his breath. Maddox begins to stand and I lay a hand on him to silently tell him to stay sitting on the concrete steps. “This is my mess, I can’t bring you into it.” I say firmly, though my voice trembles.

Maddox pulls his hood tighter over his head and shrinks himself, and my heart tugs towards him. This wasn’t supposed to go this way. Our night above ground taking in city lights and the cold breeze off the East River wasn’t supposed to be horribly interrupted. In the darkness I see a flash of red hair, backlit by the streetlights. She shouldn’t be out this late, not by herself, not at Domino Park.

“Perrie,” I raise myself and turn towards her. “What are you doing here?” She doesn’t deserve any pleasantries, she’s barely a ghost to me anymore. Anything that remained between us has been exorcised almost entirely. Maybe I’m still cursed, maybe months or years from now I’ll be haunted by Maddox’s ghost too. For now, I’m finally cleansed of any of my past demons.

“I texted you,” she starts. “You never replied.”