A Painting for the Temple

Abstract

A Painting for the Temple Justin Taylor (bio) Spencer Silver could scarcely believe his eyes. While whole swaths of Soho, the Village, and even Chinatown had been razed and replaced—or his impression was that they had been—here on East Eighty-Sixth and Lexington, where the wild light of the January day had so dazzled him upon emergence from the subway that he'd stumbled on the stairs and now stood gathering himself by the window of a CVS, it seemed as though everything remained as he remembered it. He had lived in this neighborhood for only one year, and not on purpose. It was not a place to which he felt bound by nostalgia; nor was he nostalgic in general. Had he been, he'd be in Bushwick, rending his garments on the steps of the old Spanish church that was now (he'd heard) a prada store. He had come to the Upper East Side this brisk morning to see the Hilma af Klint show at the Guggenheim. It was a Monday, and he figured if he got there when the doors opened, he'd have the place mostly to himself. Later he was meeting his old friend Helen for lunch downtown. After that, he'd have to grab his bag from the hotel in Chelsea and head for JFK. [End Page 311] It was a quick trip, barely a long weekend. He had come for the opening of a group show at his gallery in which some of his recent sculpture-work appeared. He'd built a dozen small boxes out of freight pallet scraps, slathered their outsides in cyanotype, and painted their interiors black. Into each empty box he had dropped a handful of half-dollars he'd painted gold, then he'd filled the box to its brim with clear resin that dried into something that looked like a block of glass or unusually pure ice. The coins gleamed and drew the eye, little sunken treasures in the lucent, impenetrable gloom, while the cyanotype on the boxes' exteriors made them look like fallen bricks of sky. He called the series Portable Impossible Oceans. They were selling okay. Spencer had invited Helen to the opening, but she'd said she couldn't (or had she in fact said wouldn't?) leave the baby for that long. She'd suggested Monday lunch instead, if he didn't already have plans and didn't mind being "chaperoned," her way of letting him know that she'd be bringing the baby and perhaps, too, a sly acknowledgement of the fact that they had, for a stretch—indeed for two separate stretches—been lovers. Now he was walking west on Eighty-Seventh Street, passing by the Morton Williams where he'd always done his grocery shopping. Across from the market was the Park Avenue Synagogue, which he had never had occasion to enter. This brought to mind his grandmother, with whom he and his sister, Dana, had lived after their mother died in a car wreck when Spencer was ten and Dana fourteen. He did not think of his grandmother at this moment because she was Jewish, though she was (as were Spencer and Dana, officially) but because the last time he'd visited her in Boynton Beach, Florida, it had been the weekend after the shooting at Squirrel Hill made national headlines. That had been three, almost four months ago. He remembered the scene outside the synagogue across the [End Page 312] street from his grandmother's nursing home: a row of police cars with lights on, a fire engine with a huge American flag flapping from the top of its fully extended white ladder. Grandma had still been in independent living then. He hadn't known whether his grandmother took notice of the hubbub and, if so, what sense she made of it. He hadn't asked. Dana was in Florida now, helping Grandma get resettled in an assisted living unit, which had lately become available. Her new room, like her old one, was furnished. What little there was to pack and move was being handled by the staff at the facility. Dana was perfectly capable of...