“Meats & Cheeses,” one of the loosely connected stories in Christine Coulson’s debut novel, features a recently appointed phone answering, errand-running assistant at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In just a year, the Met’s “strange cocktail of confident superiority and tolerated eccentricity” had introduced Kate “to a promised land.” But she remained “a straight-A nerd with style and speed,” who knew she had something to prove “but didn’t know what it was.”
As part of her initiation, the senior vice president for operations sends Kate to “pick up something in the tunnels.” Armed with a map and instructions – “look for the blue door. Good luck” – Kate crawls along, passing demoted statues, shelves of retired pieces of sculpture in the Greek and Roman Department, and ends up in the office of the Met’s Egyptian Expedition. Her mission accomplished, Kate stops at a gallery showcasing the Egyptian Offering Bearer and contrasts the Bearer’s serene expression, enduring calm and grace, with her own tense hands. Although she recognizes it will be quite a while before she acquires “any kind of elegance,” Kate stares “straight into the black ink” of the Offering Bearer’s eyes “and we met across millennia” in a place that left both of them “exhilarated and soothed.”
An elegantly written, wry, quirky tribute to the Met, Metropolitan Stories draws on Coulson’s 25 years of service at the Museum, in Development, the Director’s Office, and the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. Coulson’s fictional galleries are stocked with objects made everywhere and from every conceivable material, with lots of mileage on them, who come alive to speak for themselves. And with their minders – a director, donors, acquisition staff, curators, “Mezz Girl” receptionists, security guards, custodians, cafeteria workers – and the “dramas, delicate fears, skyscraper egos, and cracked and broken hearts” they bring to the Museum. Metropolitan Stories also hosts ghosts.
Coulson is by no means the first writer to endow inanimate objects with emotions. Or lapse into sentimentality along the way. Nonetheless, more often than not, her magical realism illuminates human aspiration, determination, frailty, and the effect works of art have on the staff at the Met.
A chair made for Louise-Elizabeth, the Duchess of Parma, in 1749, Coulson indicates, remembers Isabella, her eight-year-old daughter, stroking her crimson velvet, “trying to appear grown up and sophisticated.” The chair also recalls the lonely years, when 18th century chairs fell out of favor and Met staff banished her to dark, dank, dirty warehouses.
The figures from Rembrandt’s self-portraits abandon their paintings, according to Coulson, to console Michel Larousse, director of the Met, whose vulnerability on his 65th birthday they understood, having “felt it all before themselves.”
And, after spending centuries adorning a Venetian tomb, David was acquired by the Met. “A garden sculpture to most, but revolutionary to those who understood his historical force,” he decides to climb down from his pedestal. After several experiments – a glide of the hips, a twist of the wrist – David steps down, trips and crashes. Eleven years later, a rebuilt David becomes a star because of his resurrection, with his own gallery. He will never move again, but always holds dear that moment of freedom, with its “rush of a boundary crossed, mixed with the black depth of the unknown.”
Metropolitan Stories is at its best, however, when Coulson provides sketches of Museum personnel. She describes in detail a curator’s analysis of Jim Campbell’s “Walking Man” video, which connects digital technology to Greek kouros, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese scroll paintings, the caricatures of Hogarth, and the agrarian nostalgia of Winslow Homer. And she contrasts this presentation with another curator’s fixation on the gallery to which his exhibition was assigned and the failure to serve cashews at the opening reception.
Coulson can be seriously funny. After Henry Radish, a security guard, is caught coupling with his girlfriend in a supply closet, she tells us, a punctilious administrator circulates a memo recommending that the doors be equipped with an inside lock “to prevent interlopers from being nonplussed” and that staff users “check the day sheet first for possible schedule conflicts.”
Moody Russell, one of the Met’s “lampers,” we learn, enjoys light bulb jokes, is afraid of the dark, and is on duty during the New York City blackout.
Metropolitan Stories ends with the death of Constantine Srossic, who worked for 68 years organizing the Met’s shopping bags, a powerful symbol, even though virtually no one knew his name, “within an institution defined by loyalty.” In the aftermath of his death, chaos reigns in the Museum’s shops. Assigned to understand the Rubber Band Man’s routine and inventory his supplies, Edith, a young assistant, stumbles on Srossic’s secret creation, a miniature version of a 1775 room from the Hotel de Crillon, constructed entirely from white paper. Inside a desk, she finds a memo from the Met’s director in 1963, thanking the staff for their work under intense pressure while the Mona Lisa was on exhibition in the Museum. Edith then discovers an unframed painting “that seemed to carry the weight of centuries.” “Jesus f'ing Christ,” she exclaims. But for now, she sits in the paper palace, marveling at its miracle.
That experience, Coulson writes, marked the real beginning of the young woman’s career at the Met, “each day cut and folded by the belief that just beyond the museum’s worn paths and daily rituals, there lies the possibility of something wholly unimaginable.”
The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
METROPOLITAN STORIES: A NOVEL By Christine CoulsonOther Press 249 pages; $15.99