When they were nine, all three of them went off to camp in Maine, but only Harrison lasted past the first year. Harrison loved Androscoggin, and would spend many summers there, piling up badges and honors, assembling a pack of admiring buddies, and mastering the arcane skills of the canoe before defecting to CTY at Johns Hopkins, to be with other teenagers who knew what “Supply Side Economics” meant. For Lewyn, though, it was a torment from the moment his parents returned to the car. Oppressed by homesickness, scratching at rashes from plants and insects and sheer anxiety, and only occasionally managing to kick a ball or tie a knot, Lewyn failed to do manly things in the wilderness with the other boys, and begged to spend his summers on the Vineyard with his mother and Sally （who’d also defected, without explanation, after a single Pinecliffe summer）。
And then came the September morning when her children, who were no longer children by then, entered the storied stone building that housed Walden’s middle and upper schools, and marched off to their separate sixth-grade homerooms for the first time, each having asked Johanna not to accompany them. She had stood on the sidewalk, looking after them as they went inside, and then wandered home to her quiet house to spend the day wondering what she was supposed to be doing with herself. Climbing the stairs, she watched the three of them grow up in those magical birthday photographs, just as she had done thousands of times before, but this time she stopped in front of the picture she had hung only days before. Three individuals forcing rictus smiles, waiting for the shutter to click so they could each return to whatever it was they’d been summoned from. Johanna felt herself sit heavily on that top step to the landing, near a spot on the wall that had indeed, as her husband once predicted, borne the brunt of innumerable book bags and backpacks.
Finally, finally, the tiniest pinprick of reality came through the force field of her stubborn delusion, presenting Johanna with the first filament of an idea. That they were two adults plus three children, made concurrently. That they were five humans cohabiting. That they were not, and never had been, a family.
And her husband, what was more, while she hadn’t been paying nearly enough attention, had slipped past them all and disappeared—not in terms of his physical self, of course, though his physical self came home later and later each night, after longer and longer visits to his warehouse in Coney Island or Red Bank or wherever it was—but his attentive self, his essential self, which by then lived somewhere else entirely.
Chapter Six
Outsider
In which Salo Oppenheimer remembers some additional injuries, and ceases to tumble
One January afternoon in 1993, Salo Oppenheimer walked into something called the Outsider Art Fair at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea, and looked around for his wife.
The two of them hadn’t visited a gallery together for years, not since before the children were born, in fact, and he had long since moved the slow, deliberate, and frequently joyful perusal of art into the column of things he did away from the rest of them. But this had been Johanna’s idea, offered over brunch at their local spot, the previous Sunday.
“Have you been over to see this thing?” She pointed at the Arts Section. All five of them were reading at the table. “Somebody at school was telling me.”
“No. I don’t know about it.”
“She went a few nights ago. This mom. She said the place is jammed full of young people. Lots of energy. It’s called Outsider Artists. It’s where the art world is going, she said.”
“Well, I doubt that.” Salo, himself, had just bought another Twombly. Much smaller than his beloved rust-colored scrawl （which, along with its peer-contemporaries, was part of something now being called the “Blackboard Series”） and far, far more expensive. Increasingly, it seemed to him, the art world was going where he had already been, for years. That meant there was less to find, and way too many people waving around money.
“So what’s an ‘Outsider Artist’ then?” he asked.