Rider: The Rider Quintet, vol. 1

11

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 76 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. 77 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 78 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...