A Head in Cambodia. Nancy Tingley
from the New York Times called this morning. There’s a message from the Guardian as well. The news of the head has already made it to London.” I didn’t add that my unopened emails from friends at the Met and the British Museum told me the news had reached the museum world.
“Arthur, what do you plan to do?”
My jaw dropped. Caleb was going to leave it to Philen to extricate us from this fiasco?
“Well, I don’t know . . .” Philen said. I waited, looking up at him. Caleb swung his chair back down, picked up a paper clip, and bent it open into a straight piece of wire. Finally Philen said, “We’ll just have to wait for it to blow over.”
“We need to do more than that, Arthur. You’ve made the museum look bad, and P.P. as well. Add to that the fact you’ll be traveling with P.P. in just a few weeks. You’ll be together for two weeks, day in and day out. Unless you resolve the situation before you depart, that’s going to be rather uncomfortable.”
Philen puffed up. “Well, that’s what I was saying before Jenna interrupted me. If we take the head back to Cambodia, then it will be out of our hands.”
I jumped up and leaned so close to him that I could tell he’d had bacon for breakfast. “That’s not a solution,” I said, my voice rising, “that’s a slither out of the problem.” I stepped back. “If we do that, we’ll never get any information on whether the head is authentic or not. What people will remember is that we bought a Khmer sculpture that was a fake. The museum will look bad. And I will look bad because I’m the curator in charge of Asian art.” As I spoke, I realized that the problem wasn’t so much P.P.’s now as it was ours. Damn Philen.
Caleb gave me a look. “Jenna’s correct. It isn’t a solution.” He tapped the straightened paper clip on his desk. “Arthur, I want you to issue another press release saying that the head is presently being authenticated and that you were precipitous in issuing the first release.” With a final tap of the paper clip before he threw it down, he said, “I want you to put your name to it.”
Philen paled. He’d expected to be in the news, but as the hero returning a stolen object.
“I have a conference call in about five minutes,” Caleb said, “and I need to prepare for it. Arthur, let me see the text before you send it out. That will be a new policy, that all press releases cross my desk before distribution.”
Philen was out the door before I could blink. “I’m not looking forward to traveling with the two of them. Do you think you can dissuade Philen from going?”
“I doubt it.” Caleb already had his nose in a file. Clearly this much conflict was enough for one day. I suspected he’d go out of town on an unscheduled trip to recover.
7
“I don’t know where Eric is,” my mother said. “You know he’s often late.”
I looked at the kitchen clock. “It’s 7:30. He’s not usually this late. We need to eat. I need to eat. I have more work to do tonight.”
“It’s Sunday night.” She wiped the countertop, hopeful that I wouldn’t insist if I saw that she was busy.
“It’s Sunday night and I was at the museum all day yesterday and again this morning.”
“What were you doing?”
“Preparing my talk for the opening, trying to catch up on all the things that have fallen by the wayside as we install the exhibition. The usual.” I ran my finger over scars on the kitchen table, skirting the placemats that she’d laid out before I arrived.
“Didn’t you ride?” She bundled her hair into a ponytail that she wrapped and then tied into a knot. When my hair was long, I’d done the same.
I am my mother’s double. Our height, our auburn hair, our turquoise eyes, wide brow, and small but mobile mouth. Our differences result from gravity, which hasn’t yet affected me, and the lines that shoot out from the corners of her eyes and have begun to alter her mouth. Though she exercises at a gym a few times a week and has a friend she walks with the other days, she’s become thicker over the years. I thought of her and Polly walking, and wondered what they talked about. Their husbands? Kids? Dissatisfactions? It wasn’t that I thought of her as old and her life narrow, just that she was a world apart from me.
“I did ride early this morning, my only fun activity all weekend.” I stretched out my legs, trying to relax, to quell my impatience.
“Where did you go?” The question was perfunctory; she was stalling so that Eric would appear and we could sit down together. Sean was out of town. “We rode out the Bolinas Ridge, Pine Mountain, the usual. Really, Mom, I need to eat.”
“So do I,” said my father, coming into the kitchen, the sound of a basketball game trailing him. He opened the fridge, his belly sinking over his waistband as he bent to pull a beer from the fridge door.
At least it was beer, not whiskey. I wondered what time he’d started drinking.
“We’re waiting for Eric,” my mother said as she opened the pot on the stove and stirred the chili. Eric loved her chili. I was less enthusiastic.
“Wasn’t he supposed to be here an hour ago, two hours ago?” He popped open the beer and watched her as he took a sip.
“Yes, but he’s late as usual.” She tried to be light about it, though I knew Eric’s tardiness drove her as crazy as it did the rest of us. My mother was the classic codependent, a role perfected throughout her years of marriage to my father. She covered for Eric, adjusting her schedule to fit his, making excuses for him, just as she’d always covered for my father.
He took a step toward the TV. “Did your mother tell you he got stopped for another DUI?” There was disgust in his voice.
“No,” I said, turning to my mother. “But he doesn’t even have a license anymore.”
“That’s right. They held him in jail. They wouldn’t release him until your mother posted bond and he signed a paper saying he’d seek help. Go to rehab.”
“Can they do that?”
“Don’t know if they can, but they did. May just be an attempt to scare him into sobriety. He said he went to AA last week.” He took another sip.
I caught myself counting his sips; it was bad enough counting bottles. “Alcohol isn’t his problem. It’s the drugs.” I turned to my mother, who was probably better informed, “So what’s happening with the rehab?”
“He has to go to court first,” she said.
“I’ve washed my hands of him,” my father said as he headed back toward the crowd roaring from the TV. Someone had made a great play. “Five more minutes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked my mother.
“I thought I’d let him tell you. We don’t know what’s happening. When his court date is. How we’re going to pay for rehab.”
“The court doesn’t take any financial responsibility if they tell him that going to rehab is his punishment? So how will he pay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s eat, Mom,” I said, taking shallow bowls out of the cupboard and sticking them in the warm oven. “It’s pointless to arrange our lives around Eric. And anyway, how would he get here? He shouldn’t drive.”
“Yes,” she said, defeated. “You should have picked him up.”
I took a deep breath. We all felt defeated around Eric. His addictions, his self-annihilation so clear, so brutal. Like a train without brakes careening down a track.
My dad, though, my dad. I felt defeated around him too, but for different reasons. Eric’s violent swings were hard enough to deal with, but I felt more helpless in