The Members Club

The Art Museum Cafe is in the heart of the museum. It’s in a courtyard, in a hollow space between the halls. You cannot see the art from here, but you can be seen, theoretically, by those inside, looking through windows, looking down. There is a shallow fountain in the center of this hollow space containing four bronze mermaids, faded seafoam green. Four spouts of water at low pressure, just a gentle little trickle, not enough to be a feature or distraction.

The fountain is surrounded by white, circular tables, most of them occupied. Most, occupied by couples. The tables closest to the fountain have yellow umbrellas. There’s another row of circle tables. No umbrellas. That is where we sit.

My husband and I order glasses of red wine. We are a little chilly, wearing clothes that aren’t quite warm enough. The sun was out when we left. Now, the sun is clouded, and the wind is picking up, enough to be a bit unpleasant. We get the wine, and we’re determined to pretend we want to be there, in the open air, the hollow space, among its weather. I sip the wine. A warm flush. Sour. Slightly tannic. With each sip of it, my stomach gets a little more unsettled.

Brown finches hop beneath the tables, pecking at some bits of chips. They gather in the bushes, chirping, waiting for their window. As soon as someone leaves, they flutter over in a frenzy, taking what they can before the waiters come to clear the plates. Most of the people sitting at the tables with yellow umbrellas are gray-haired couples in khakis and white button-downs. Most of the others are mother and daughter pairs. They sit surrounded by their shopping bags.

I’m people watching, I suppose. That’s what my mother calls it. She claims people watching is her favorite thing to do. She does what I am doing, more or less: she sits in a cafe, and sips a glass of wine, and scans the world around her. She says she likes to think about what people might be thinking, likes to think about the overlaps between inner and outer life, and if you ask her, she will even invent little stories: He just broke up with his girlfriend. She is having a bad day.

These little stories she invents have always felt forced to me. I don’t doubt that she perceives what she’s perceiving, and believes them, but I’ve always felt false, cagey, when she asks me what I think someone’s thinking. I don’t know. And I don’t think I want to know. It’s not that I don’t care. I always feel something, people watching, whether I’m appreciating something strange, or simply measuring myself against the things that I am seeing. Noticing. A kind of thinking without thinking about thinking. But not my mother. She is not content to watch without attempting to interpret, searching for some clue, some message. That is where the value of the act reveals itself to her, in her ability to read a person, and re-translate.

I’m taking notes, here, at this table, on a legal pad (the same pad that I use for planning lessons, making grocery lists). I’m taking notes that I’ll assemble into narratives (if you define a narrative as something that has been assembled). I’m taking notes with the intention of assemblage, assembling a book, even if I have no idea what it will be about. A book about watching, I guess. My mother’s favorite thing. I can already tell she wouldn’t really like it.

A young man and an older man sit near us. They’re across from one another, at another umbrella-less table. The young man has a ponytail and glasses. He is wearing a t-shirt from Yellowstone National Park. The older man is wearing a gray suit. They both have laptops opened up in front of them, and they are looking at the screens. The older man has ordered tea and salad. The young man has a water and an untouched sandwich.

There is another ponytailed man nearby us, at an umbrella-less table. He has gray hair and a shirt that says POLKA WILL NEVER DIE. We make eye contact for a moment. He eyes me and my pad suspiciously.

A heavyset young man is sitting by himself at an umbrella table with a crushed can and a plate of nearly finished fries. He rubs his hands back and forth, like he wants to start a fire. He looks around. His eyes don’t rest on anything.

A teenage-looking cafe worker in a black t-shirt and black jeans pushes by us with a garbage can on wheels. He grips the garbage can, with both hands covered in blue sterile gloves. The wheels scrape and rattle through the gravel.

An elderly couple spoons from their bowls in unison. Both eating the same thing: a salmon-pink mound with a lemon peel.

A large man in a button-down houses his whole bruschetta in two bites, just like a snake. I am impressed.

I wonder what my mother gets from people watching. Maybe some sense of belonging, being in a club, among her kind. Or, maybe less specific. Being human among humans, being in a space of action, sitting still among day-to-day rhythms. Maybe she likes the feeling that so much is happening (yet, nothing’s really happening). A sense of quiet ownership. The feeling that, I understand all this activity around me, but I’m apart from it. I don’t need to participate.

I don’t feel free. I feel anxiously aware of my gaze, trying not to look too long at one person, in one direction. I finish my wine. Now, they will notice I have no reason to be here. No reason to avoid watching me, watching them.

A security guard on his break. I check, and he’s not watching me. He sits, sipping a ginger ale. He’s scrolling on his phone with his free hand. His feet are propped up on another chair. There is a dark blue backpack on the gravel floor beneath it.

I glance back toward the heavyset young man, who has now finished all his fries, who is no longer looking all around him.

His eyes are locked on me.

I look down, for a moment.

Look up cautiously, a moment later.

He’s still staring.

We migrate from the Art Museum Cafe into one of the main halls with a wall-length painting by Ragesh Shaw called Paradise Lost. There are about a dozen people gathered near the painting. Most of them are resting on the benches and not looking at it. There’s a rather striking couple, with the bench-sitters. The two of them are wearing denim jackets, matching Slayer patches. One of them sports a large mohawk. The other has red dyed hair that’s plastered into a plastic-looking shell.

A handful of people wanders past the painting, idly looking toward it without pausing. The one place everyone does stop is by the panel near the middle, which depicts a group of monkeys in a cherry blossom tree.

Something keeps beeping, intermittently—consistently—at a thirty second interval. Each time the beep sounds, everyone looks up, and looks around—unable to locate the source of it—and looks back down.

We move downstairs to the Egyptian Room. It’s low-lit, dark-walled, less like an old stone tomb than a modern basement theater. The sounds of footsteps and the sounds of creaking floorboards. Some echoing. Some clapping loudly. And some making hardly any sound.

An old man in a cardigan stops at each sign, leans over, reads intently, only glancing at each artifact.

A little girl is also leaning. While her parents gaze at the sarcophagus, she humps the signpost, furtively.

We climb back up into a bright-lit, white-walled open passageway. The art in this white passageway feels haphazard. There’s a weather vane. A sleek modernist clock. A slab of limestone, pulled from some ruin. An abstract painting. A realist seascape. We’re on the lower level, in a space between four columns. There’s a floor above, and people can look down. Most of the people move through the passageway, but some decide to rest against the columns, peek around over the bannister.

I see a beautiful security guard with long glossy black braids. She watches another woman who is weaving through the passageway. The guard’s eyes follow the woman as she pauses, contemplates the clock, the abstract painting, but the woman doesn’t notice her.

A man is hunching over on a bench, his long black jacket pulled around his head, like he is sleeping in a strange cocoon. At least, I assume he’s sleeping, until I walk past him, and I see a flash of bright light, from the corner of my eye. What was that flash? Did he just take a photo of me? I slow down, and glance over my shoulder, toward the bench. The man is hunching over, still, his black cocoon pulled up around him, looking no different than he did before.

We move around through the medieval art. Mostly crucifixion scenes: a gaunt, gray Christ on a black or dark red background. The room we enter, now, is organized around a giant wooden cross which hangs in the middle of the far wall.

There is a bench before the cross. Four teen girls. Blonde half-ponytails. Eyes shut, as though half-asleep. One of the girls is sprawled, face down, across the laps of her three friends. Each of the other girls has placed a hand upon her back.

Outside the modern wing: a different set of four teen bench-girls. One is sitting on the floor, cross-legged, sifting through a gift shop bag. The girls on the bench scroll through their phones. The floor-girl taps the others on the leg, to show them gift shop postcards of the paintings.

In the Greek section, there’s a long, black folding barricade among the nude sculptures. There is a DO NOT ENTER sign, taped onto it. The DO NOT ENTER sign ignites my curiosity, of course. It makes me want to know what I am not allowed to see.

I watch a few curious people stop, discovering a gap between the panels. Watch them pause to peek in, through the opening. One man looks for a while, turns to leave, then turns back for a double-take. There must be something really good in there.

I approach the gap and peek inside. It’s narrow, but reveals just enough that I can understand the double-take. The crack is turned toward a rather shapely statue, and the strong thighs—perfect, sculpted ass—are all that I can see.

We are about to leave when I notice a sign for the Members Club Lounge. I tap my husband on the shoulder eagerly. Club access is a museum membership perk we’ve been wondering about. A titillating mystery. We have been searching for it, idly, each time we’ve come to the museum, but somehow, we have never happened on it, until now. We both agree that it is time to take advantage of this membership, to see what kind of club we are a part of.

We pass the sign. We move toward an escalator, beside which stands a woman at a podium, in uniform. The woman shakes her head, and points us down another hall. You have to take the elevator for the Members Club. There is a man in uniform, standing beside the elevator. Are you going to the Members Club? he asks. We both nod eagerly. He ushers us into the elevator. Hits the button that will take us to the Members Club. At the top, the elevator opens, and he walks us down another hallway. There’s a double door, at which we’re greeted by a uniformed woman. She has the same haircut as mine. She compliments my hair, like it’s a rite of passage. Members Club? This way.

The Members Club is an expansive room with pale hardwood floors, white marble cafe tables, floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides. These floor-to-ceiling windows face the old historic downtown buildings and skyscrapers. An impressive view, to say the least. There is a cocktail bar. A long line, queued up at the bar. A row of cocktail glasses on the counter, waiting for their drinks. Another uniformed woman with rolled-up shirt sleeves, shaking mixers frantically. She has artful tattoos that look like they were hand-drawn.

There is a counter with three thermoses of coffee: complimentary. I pour a cup from the one labeled, DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. My husband points to an outdoor rooftop patio. We head through the closest door, among a wall of doors.

As we take our seats on the patio, a man in uniform calls out, Attention, please. He clears his throat dramatically. If you are new to the Members Club, he turns toward us, you must use these doors. The other doors remain closed, at all times.

The rooftop patio looks something like a greenhouse without plants. It’s minimal, and elegant. A ceiling of white tenting. There are some subtle hanging lights for ambience, which are not lit. There is a very clear view of the city. A couple sips into my coffee—which is bitter, strong—I notice there is music being piped through speakers in the ceiling. It’s instrumental, effervescent, stylistically ambiguous, like something you would hear played on a carousel.

There is an installation in between the patio and skyline viewing platform. It’s Minimalist. Sits in tension with the atmosphere. A raw wood, flat-roofed cabin with a single window. Several rolls of bundled twigs, stacked up against the wall. A pile of purple, yellow, brown, white ears of glazed ceramic corn, shaped into a structure like a large, upside-down bowl. There is a black sign on a post that reads:

PLEASE

DO NOT TOUCH

THE ARTWORK.

There is a white sign on the ground that reads:

PLEASE

DO NOT TOUCH

THE ARTWORK.

My husband and I look at one another, smiling like confused kids. This is it, huh? Wow, this is the Members Club.

We are both members of the Members Club. This space, here. Everything, here, in this space is something we have paid to be a member of.

We are both members of this skyline view. We are both members of that raw-wood, flat-roofed cabin and the glazed ceramic corn. We are both members of the coffee station and the bar. We are both members of the doors you can and cannot use.

And that man, over there, with his sunglasses and his backward-facing baseball cap, he is a fellow member of the Members Club. He is sketching the skyline—something everyone has access to—but from a special vantage, from a special, privileged view.

That grandmother, that mother, and that little 3 or 4 year-old girl, wearing matching pink-striped dresses: they are members of the Members Club. The little girl is picking from a steel cafeteria-style tray of mini cut-up fruits and vegetables. I watch her take a Babybel cheese from a fishnet bag, and peel the red wax wrapping with great skill. I watch her hold the little cheese round in her hand. She holds it in her hand for several minutes without eating it.

That group of four middle-aged women eating pale green gazpacho: they are also members of the Members Club. They are talking about their sons, their sons’ job searches, and the spiritual things that they are searching for, instead of jobs.

I hear one woman say, He’s waiting until August to apply. For now, he’s traveling.

The other women nod.

I hear another say, He loved it when he first started. But now, he doesn’t love it anymore.

The other women nod.

Another woman finishes her pale green gazpacho, gently dabs her mouth, like she’s been waiting for her turn.

He doesn’t want to work to live, she says. He wants to live to work.

The other women nod, and murmur—Hmmmm—in unison.

She is a member of the Members Club: that woman in the shady corner with the long brown hair that veils her gaze.

But I can see that she keeps looking up, looking around, and writing something down, there, on the notepad she is holding.