“Everything about an umbrella is beautiful,” Claire says as she clicks open the black and white polka-dot canopy. Rain taps like anxious fingers on a table. We step up to street level, surprised by an unseasonably pleasant petrichor; this December has been dry, sunny, vapid.
“Is that something you believe, or is that something you are saying to try and sound poetic.” I say as I wedge a shoulder beside hers to try and seek shelter from the rain.
“The whole point of it is to protect its owner— it’s the only thing with that intention that doesn’t end up harming others. Think about it; guns, fences, cops, missiles, dogs. They all end up taking something from somebody.”
“You’re missing the point of it, it’s a product, it’s meant to make someone money. Someone who's probably exploiting little Malaysian children or elderly Mexican women. There are probably fibers of dead workers' finger skin sewn into each polka-dot.”
She scoffs and walks a little bit ahead, says “you’re a cynic. You’re taking the wrong view; it was designed at one point with an entirely earnest intention, to protect people from the rain and the sun. Two opposite things—I think that's beautiful.”
A candy apple red BMW drives close to the curb, splashing gray water on me, the smell of wet trash becomes overwhelmingly intimate. “I'm pretty sure a parasol is what protects you from the sun, and an umbrella from the rain—they’re categorically different.”
“No, I think you’re missing the point almost entirely, things can be good even when made in bad ways or bad places. You’re conflating shit that doesn’t have anything to do with each other. You can choose to see what’s there B, it's a simple thing doing something good. The things you think that make this all bad are just ideas, the umbrella actually protects us from the rain, this is real—look, come here.” She tries to pull me close under the cover of nylon black. I tense up a little, I fail to fall into her, depriving the quiet part of me that more than anything wants to be near her, to live ad-nauseam in her kindness. Just a second in that other, brighter, world.
She buys us both mineral waters from the MoMA cafe. She wants to take me on a date today because she says I’d been too sad lately, spending too much time reading, doing grad school applications, and getting hammered on stolen wine. I am alone everyday, and Claire says it’s making me miserable. I say people make me miserable, and she says it’s because I'm not around them enough. I take a sip of water, it tastes like sulfur. I thank her and ask her to put it in her bag, hidden away with no chance of being finished. We walk into the gallery, she is walking ahead of me with her arms crossed. Her hair is cut short. She has sparse gray hairs making salt and pepper off the back of her skull. She says she's had them since childhood. They were the first thing I noticed when we met in our Freshman year modernism seminar. There is a hole in my heart where I could’ve learned about Mann but rather opted to stare at Claire until one day asking her to go on a date. We ate Chinese food beneath the Brooklyn Bridge on Letter Writing Day and she told me how she raised her sisters after her mom died. She told me she was going to write something in homage to her one day. She was a bigger person than most. She was really a person, and I figured eventually it’d rub off. I’m yet to see any empirical evidence of this.
She stops at the Robert Frank exhibition. There is a black and white picture of a man in a pork-pie hat walking across a busy street, a bunch of old cars right behind him—the picture is crooked, but it is beautiful. I walk up to it and try to give myself to this world; to try and bathe in the safe nostalgia of a classic car. It rejects me. A baby begins crying. I am distracted, this silver city recedes back to the wall. I turn to my side and see Claire, her profile is beautiful, I consider telling her I love her, but don’t. She knows already, and I've said it enough over the past few years to last a lifetime. She grabs at my hand, I hold hers tight, squeeze three times to try and tell her I love her. We walk through a thinning crowd and up a flight of stairs. I think about the future, about the past. We seem to be walking with some intention, ie; she’s pulling me. We wind up in a little side room. There is a black rectangle on the wall, a canvas that in a white sans serif font says DEC. 17TH, 1979.
Claire squeezes my hand and asks, “do you know what this is?”
“Conceptual ‘art’ or something.”
“No,” she says, “the date, what is the date?”
“Uhm. I think it is the day The Decemberists staged a coup d’etat on Alexander the First. I’m not sure.”
“You think it’s about The Decemberists?”
“Maybe, I don't even know if that's the exact date.” I say, “But the sequel to War and Peace was supposed to be called that, or maybe it was to Anna Karenina.”
She laughs, says, “It’s also a terrible indie-folk band. But maybe some of those things are true, but no— what’s the date?” She squeezes my hand. Her nails dig my palm. I wince and focus. Give myself over to the wall in attempt to understand.
“It’s today. It's today's date.”
“Yes. It's today.”
And with the evitable weight of an imaginary meteor coming down and shattering earth, I think I understand what she’s been getting at; There exists a duality. On the wall there is a date, on which a hundred something years ago a bunch of Russian dissidents may or may not have attempted to overthrow the state. We don’t even know, yet the possibility exists in abundance. Three years later there was a copycat coup attempted in Argentina tha bore the same name. And simultaneously that word was also supposed to be the title of a novel that was never finished. A novel about the failed coup d’etat of the Russian Empire. There was an opera made about a hundred years later that actualized Tolstoy’s plot—it was the highlight of its director's career, yet completely unknown. Yet the title bears most relevance to a recently retrograde indie-folk band. Their name is supposed to convey the melancholy of December. I read this on their Wikipedia page. If they were smarter they would’ve said it was meant to carry the weight of the past, the history of failure with which the namesake was associated. All this is the problem. The melancholy of anything having to have ever passed at all. And here before me was the solution as Claire knows it; the present; the infinitely renewing opportunity to imbue time with meaning. On the wall sits a transfiguration of experience; one man's dictation of a date connoting a whole world's lifetime of events. Yet the painting is meant to be here, now. To be looked at then left. To serve as a reminder of the facility of history as we do or do or don’t know it. To evoke an accordion of emotions and memories associated with the most primal maker of having lived; decorated time. To evoke and then to remind you of the beautiful fact that none of that has anything to do with why it is beautiful— it is beautiful because it is liberated. Liberated from knowledge, from history. A portal through another world that takes you right back to where you once began: a being absolved of markers, virginal and clean. And thus I understood the value of an umbrella; it is not its history, but simply what it does.
