from Rider [II]

And yesterday something shattering happened. Not yesterday, but several (that’s becoming a favorite word) weeks ago I came across Kitaj’s The Jewish Rider and wept: there he was in the very image of my stepfather; the pate where a few strands of hair still frolic, the same skinny legs, the same misguided attempt to dress in a sporty way (who’s watching?), the same abstractedness, the same shlumpy—boneless—posture, gazing not at the landscape flashing past with wires lashed to the treetops as if with one tug the countryside would vanish, or listening to the tick of the rails, but fixed—distractedly—on his lower extremities, white loafers and the crease in his pants and nylon socks to see whether or not he should roll them up … ; no: looking both beyond and through physical space into an inner dark. Why else draw the eyes as shadows? It’s his glimpse into another world. * My mother’s father hunted and rode. My father rode and fished. My stepfather never budged from his Barca Lounger once the amber liquid began to pour. He had a spiritual life and a social life and no physical life. But he liked it that I was always outside: maybe that’s why he never got on my back about grades; he might have thought that this boy has to be outside at this time in his life. Maybe it’s more important that he roam the canyons and the hills that he know the streets that he come home covered with leaves and bark and mud, than that he sit there like a good young scholar like I was, a Rabbi at twenty giving money home to my parents in their cabbagy tenement in the Bronx. This is a boy who needs space. One time— I think I had my learner's permit— he rented a Mustang convertible in L.A. and for several days I drove around past the long rows of used car lots and the bruised facades of restaurants digging up relatives, my hoarse-voiced arthritic aunt in the shadows of her goldenrod colored ranch house, limping like Ruffian after her last run in the wet dirt at Belmont Stakes. * But I’ve said nothing about what made me weep. It's in the contrast between Kitaj's alter cocker seeking comfort on a train, and Rembrandt’s taut youth setting off into the rampant amber on horseback; it’s in the image of active life juxtaposed with the image of sedentary contemplation— though no one travels on horseback now and heroism has become attending AIDS patients or sheltering the homeless. The raw youth’s feet are planted lightly yet firmly in his stirrups. His coat glows with many colors. Not so The Jewish Rider. And yet—there's something more. * Michael Hoffman writes that New York is not what it was when I was too young to have marked the existence of The Blue Note, but I can pick up this trail by walking across the park to the Frick. And Barbara Hershey wouldn’t have been at the Frick in 1959 (they don’t allow children under sixteen) in black skin tight pants, black sweater, (the female uniform of our generation whose male version substitutes black jeans, baseball hat, and bomber jacket— though who knows what decorous garments she’d checked in the cloakroom), and white boots with plenty of Elizabethan ruff at the edges, pausing to look at The Polish Rider while I scribbled notes. Her white boots stood out against the dominant dark like the Jewish Rider’s white loafers. And that was good because the light in the painting is brief whatever the time of day, sunrise or sunset, and the rider’s gaze, looking out over unknown space, is inward. I followed his eyes through the archway toward canvases where clouds roll over harbors against the whiteness of sails or toward gilded robes and velvet-hung rooms, then back to meet wisdom’s bared breast in Veronese’s Wisdom and Strength… (Why didn’t Veronese have the nerve to call his painting Woman With Bare Breasts, like Tintoretto? Why an allegorical title when the bare flesh and bones and sinew would have done?) He spends his life looking not at far off hills or citadels or the lights in the village below: he has no choice but to fix on her one bared breast, her swelling nipple. I can’t figure out what landscape he might be facing in the painted world. The clatter of rocks and hooves echoes over the stony plain. * I was no rider, but a pretend horse and rider always rode beside my train window—at a canter no matter how fast the rails clicked by— and though he wore a bandana and leaned slightly forward in the saddle to pull himself aboard, his gaze, wide-ranging yet intent, was like the Polish Rider’s. Even as an only child I was never lonely. My mother's father rode until he was old and on a narrow pass his horse jammed him up against rockface. In his narrative of his life this collision marked the ruin of his hip the rise of his cataracts. My father rode “every morning before work.” I never witnessed that, but at a ranch in upper New York State while I bloodied my hands tugging the reins of a frothing giant who would not budge from a weedpatch, I watched him disappear in his black polo shirt and khaki jodhpurs as he galloped over a far off hill: more at ease in the saddle—in the air— than I’d ever seen him in civilian life. My woman friend in El Paso lives to ride. Only the Jewish Rider and I do not ride! * That’s the stuff of events. What about the signature inscribed by the sun, the dark clouds sinister in just being there; thresholds, exchanges going on in the village below, candles lit in the deep interiors, bread, wine, the plate making its way around the table; what about— leaping centuries ahead— the energy from generators blazing like auras through the clouds the scattered lights, the rotating tops of ambulances; the tuna casseroles and macaroni and cheese making the rounds, apple sauce passing from high chair to bib, the Wonder Bread on a calcified plate, children eating, heads down, in silence, communicating through eye movements, the mother wiping her lips, the father grinning stupidly and drooling; the television quacking in the background, the perfect suburban night unfolding in bedroom and drive-in and den, the sprinkler system ticking. The snipers in the tower—. This is what the riders, guests everywhere and nowhere, say goodbye to as their horses break into a canter as night comes down. And last night, driving to Connecticut, I understood that the Polish Rider gleans the permutations of light after dusk, that its olive-gray smudges reflect the absence of pitch-darkness. I was wrong about the Polish Rider all along: he doesn’t depart at nightfall, he stops for a moment crossing difficult terrain (anticipating rockslide?) in the night, because, as the faint light rimming the edges of the sky makes clear, night is not absolute black, but rough-hewn and curious. The rider lives in order to depart. The Woman Who Rode She hitched her horse to the gateposts of my house. Bare trees, frost, the whole bit. I wanted our lives to be like that: as rife with silences as a Quaker meeting. She came to me in her stride. Dropped her crop on the chair. Peeled off her britches and boots; crawled under the covers. Her hour in the saddle had “made her ready.” I felt like an accessory. The wound was open. Drowsily I rolled onto her, no longer caring if she was using me. As the new year wore on and black ice made riding a fast track to certain death or paralysis, she grew tense. Came to me now with clinical terms, “schi” words I worked hard to break down. The good news was she was not a true “split personality”—the glitch that “she was divorced from herself, and could not love or care.” * The light in her house was like the light before dawn. On the last of my rare visits her mother jarred preserves while we watched instant replays of Robert Kennedy die and die. Her father skulked upstairs, perhaps testing gadgets; or wishing me off his daughter; or taking precautions I would not overhear what words were ricocheting on his “hot line” to the patent office. * Any objective observer standing back from the distraction of the impinging present could see that her torment overleapt any visible signs and that she was— as a WASP “rider”—the wrong person for the place she was in. Her resilience could not be in question. She lived to stray from known paths to leap stone fences and break into open fields. When her horse went down in an Irish bog and she was trampled—hooves branding her cheek— the next day she up and mounted him again. * When she came to me in the dream last night her smile had loosened. How lovely she looked in her blue silk blouse. How well it lit up the colors of her hair.