The next day, he visited the Museum of Natural History's first-floor exhibit. In October, it was getting dark so early again. Ray was familiar with the competition in Time between lex talionis and the rule of human law, the latter often subsuming rather than superseding the former. Those whales often had scars that matched the cookie-cutter-shaped suckers on a giant squid's tentacles, evidence of a struggle between predator and prey. The giant squid's toothed tentacles warded off deep-diving sperm whales. He imagined the squid as an inverted insect. The gladius was formed of chitin, a material also found in insect exoskeletons. But unlike gelatinous clams and snails, giant squids did possess a paddle-shaped internal support, called a gladius, that retained their form. Invertebrates, they had no structural bones. Giant squids each had eight arms and two longer tooth-suckered tentacles for grasping prey. He wondered about cephalopods.īack in his apartment library, his laptop revealed that the giant squid hid in clouds of ink. ![]() Little else was, but he reversed his steps. By the time Ray walked down the steps at 81st, his heartbeat was normal. Walking had crystallized the law and the facts. This was where he walked every morning and evening in decent weather, the traffic pulsing on the East River Drive below. Ray fled his apartment, across the street from his building into Carl Schurz Park. Then, a giant squid rose out of dark water. He had to stand in the farthest dining room corner away from the picture for anything representational to arise out of the abstract shapes. Its red/orange was overpowered by thick black daubs. When it arrived before Hallowe'en, the huge canvas overwhelmed his space. The living room's 9-foot ceilings and 20-foot-long wall behind the couch would just accommodate the painting, if he removed the baby grand piano. He knew the two empty nest bedrooms converted to library and flat-screen TV sanctum wouldn't do, and he certainly didn't want that squid in the master. Ray's spacious 10th-floor condo had been decorated decades earlier by his wife who after the divorce had moved to the East Hampton house. He could see from its dimensions it would be an ordeal to install in his apartment. A photo the lawyers sent showed Ray that his newly inherited Portrait of a Giant Squid was as color-saturated and indecipherably abstract as MOMA's except for its dominant circular center entangled in wavy, sucker-circled lines suggesting a squid's giant eye and tentacles. MOMA displayed two from her cephalopod series. After learning about the pain ing, Ray visited three Manhattan museums exhibiting Riesenkalmars. Ruth Riesenkalmar's work had finally emerged from eclipseby her husband's, and the museum site of their house and shared studios on Long Island had been renamed, hyphenated to include her. The legal document said that his cousin Donna's estate included a painting by a major 20th century artist. Also, he agreed with John Updike: "The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding." Four decades of international business travel had extinguished wanderlust. He'd kept his distance, having no inclination to travel to California. After Donna friended Ray on Facebook, there had been posts and messages and some emails, never Skype. ![]() ![]() In the past decade of social media, Donna had located more distant members of their scattered family, discovering they were a clan of only children. Donna's parents had moved from New York to Los Angeles in the early Fifties. His mother had died at 69 in 1987, younger than he was in this August of 2014. In his mother's photo albums from the postwar 1940s, Ray appeared as a toddler, and this older cousin had stood over him in that summertime, casting a shadow. It would be an understatement to say that in April, Ray was surprised to be his first cousin Donna's heir.
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