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| Drawing by Roy Lichtenstein |
“I just don’t see how a book can win a Pulitzer Prize when the author makes a mistake like using paper napkins.”
“Yes, no one used paper napkins in the 1940s. I mean, really, he should have been more careful. Why didn’t his editor catch this?.”
Is this conversation really happening, I think to myself, cooling my hands on a sweaty glass of ice water and pulling aching feet under my sundress. Why did I choose to wear these three inch canvas espadrille wedges to the city anyway? One too many trips downtown in sneakers, I conclude. The defining difference between Chicago tourists and those who seem to emerge right out of the concrete of the city is shoes. Wispy women in tall high heels of leg lengthening stylishness float between buildings as though their feet effortlessly defy gravity. “Next trip I will claim Chicago is home by stomping these sidewalks in some different shoes,” I resolutely decided to myself last Friday on the train ride home. Now, sitting in an oversized room of tidy Danish modern chairs with ten women born at least three decades before me, I look down at my summer torture devices lying on their sides in defeat. Wondering at the wisdom of my conclusion I begin to fantasize a plan to subtly escape this room. There is no escape door. I'm sitting on the wrong side of the table.
“Well, what I really want to talk about is why Chabon doesn’t develop his female characters in the way he does his male characters,” asserts the discussion facilitator from across the table. She peers over dark rimmed hipster glasses, closes her book, and says, “It makes the book terribly weak.”
My family finishes exploring the Lichtenstein exhibit and swallows down a $6.99 peanut butter and jelly sandwich at the last remaining open cafe in the Modern Wing. Two floors away I squirm in my chair at a book discussion I imagined would be of a different caliber. I begin, in the style of Chabon’s characters in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, to have my own Escapist fantasies about crawling under the table and out the labyrinthine halls that brought me to this airy room with its screened view of the city.
Outside, the band Death Cab For Cutie pumps a steady rhythm of base around a sea of tank top clad revelers enjoying Taste of Chicago. The tunnel visioned art critic continues on her personal soapbox of the marginalization of women in art and literature. But the woman to her right doesn't seem too concerned by the lack of piquant critique and brings up the paper napkins again. She isn't concerned with the 650 pages of beautiful prose and profound character development. Paper napkins just shouldn’t be in the novel.
This is definitely not the book discussion I fantasized while rushing to finish the last 100 pages of Chabon's novel with Phineas and Ferb reruns blaring from the living room. Glancing at my watch to see if enough obligatory time has been suffered, I gather my book and purse, slip pink feet into tall wedges, and walk out with a nod of thanks.
The warm humid night greets me spinning through the revolving doors of the museum's exit. I join the sidewalk crowds still wondering at my footwear choice and the disappointment of the book discussion. Across Michigan Avenue I find my family now happily buried in gelato. I collapse beside Rynn in her sticky booth. Pink sugar still rimming her face, Eleanor eagerly pulls four markers out of my purse- a red, a blue, a yellow, and a black. On a stray piece of paper ripped from a notebook, she scratches a quick drawing. In black ink she writes “KABOOM” and hands the drawing to me.
“This is for you, Mommy,” she declares. “See, Lichtenstein isn’t the only one who can have fun. Next, I think I’ll draw a sunset in polka dots.”
I think of the first paragraph of Chabon’s novel and suddenly the entire night comes into the sharp focus of a Lichtenstein painting.
“To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing...you weren’t the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini’s first magic act, you know, was called ‘Metamorphosis.’ It was never a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation....dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.” - Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
