She turned the paper around.
Outsider Artist—the term was so new there was yet to be any strict consensus about its meaning—had something to do with the artist’s lack of formal education or training, which didn’t make much sense when you thought about it. How many of the artists in his own warehouse had declined or been unable to access formal education and training? Besides, from what this review of the new show described, a truer delineation ought to be based on the artist’s sanity, or the lack thereof; they all seemed to be mental patients or street people, laborers building palaces out of toothpicks in their basements at night or self-ordained ministers proclaiming their vision of God. He studied the accompanying photograph: a truly bizarre picture by a Chicago janitor who’d apparently cut pictures of little girls out of magazines and painted them into battle scenes. Some of the little girls even had male genitalia. Sick!
“You should go see it,” said our mother. “Actually, let’s both go. It sounds bizarre, doesn’t it?”
Salo agreed that it did.
“Well,” he heard himself say, “that’s a nice idea.”
Now, at the Metropolitan Pavilion, Johanna was late, five minutes, then ten, then twenty. The entrance area was indeed jammed, with more people pushing past him and into the building. There was no seating, and he was growing irritated past the point of retrieval. Then he heard his name. Over at the registration desk, a harried young person was holding a cordless phone and looking around.
“Yes,” he said as he made his way through the crowd, “I’m Salo Oppenheimer.”
“Okay,” the man said. He looked barely older than his own kids, but was wearing some kind of official badge. “Someone’s calling for you. But please don’t take long, we need the line.”
Salo took the phone. It was Johanna.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “What’s happened?”
“Oh, I got a call from Aaron’s office.” She sounded frustrated, not frightened. “They wanted me to come in right away. I went racing over there, thinking something terrible was going on.”
“But it wasn’t?” He was relieved, and now annoyed. Aaron, who at any other school would be called the “principal” but at Walden was called the “head of school,” had always struck him as histrionic and prone to exaggeration.
“No. Well, except that it started with Harrison being unhappy that his class was repeating some material from last year, then suddenly it morphed into serious concern about how the kids aren’t speaking to each other at school, and is there something going on in the family that Walden needs to perform some kind of an intervention over.”
“You mean an exorcism.” This was Walden at its worst, Salo thought. All the drum banging and collective guilt and ethical processing—it was a far cry from his own Collegiate experience, but he had made his peace with that, and besides, he could see that all three of his children, even Lewyn, were reading and writing and doing age-appropriate math. Still, the delight these people seemed to take in breaching family privacy!
“What?”
“What did you tell them?”
He could hear her annoyance, even over the volume of the lobby.
“I said what I always say: Thank you so much for pointing this out, and our whole family will discuss it.”
Salo nodded. There had been a similar incident the previous year, with Aaron. That time the instigating concern had been Lewyn’s “self-isolation,” but this, like the current round, had metastasized into Aaron’s all-triplet-all-Oppenheimer expression of Waldenian concern, and the actual suggestion that the family enter counseling.
“So, no list of approved therapists this time?”
“Well, it was offered. But I said I still had the information from last year. I wonder if everybody gets this level of personal attention.”