Turtles All the Way Down(23)
“Yeah,” Davis said. “When I was a kid, we had to have a projectionist come out, but now it’s all digital.”
“Like, inside your house?” Mychal asked, still confused.
“Yeah, I’ll show you,” Davis said.
Daisy looked over at me. “You up for it, Holmesy?” I contracted my face into a smile and nodded.
—
I drove Harold to Davis’s house; Daisy drove with Mychal in his parents’ minivan, and Davis led in his Escalade. Our little caravan headed west on Eighty-Sixth Street to Michigan Road, and then followed it down past Walmart, past the pawnshops and payday loan outfits to the gates of Davis’s estate across the road from the art museum. The Pickett estate wasn’t in a nice neighborhood, exactly, but it was so gigantic that it functioned as a neighborhood unto itself.
The gate opened, and we followed Davis to a parking lot beside the glass mansion. The house looked even more amazing in the dark. Through the walls, I could see the whole kitchen suffused with gold light.
Mychal ran up to me as I exited Harold. “Do you know—oh my God, I’ve always wanted to see this house. This is Tu-Quyen Pham, you know.”
“Who?”
“The architect,” he said. “Tu-Quyen Pham. She’s crazy famous. She’s only designed three residences in the U.S. Oh my God, I can’t believe I am seeing this.”
We followed him into the house, and Mychal exclaimed a series of artist names. “Pettibon! Picasso! Oh my God, that’s KERRY JAMES MARSHALL.” I only knew who Picasso was.
“Yeah, I actually pressed Dad to buy that one,” Davis said. “Couple years ago, he took me to an art fair in Miami Beach. I really love KJM’s work.” I noticed Noah was lying on the same couch, playing what appeared to be the same video game. “Noah, these are my friends. Friends, Noah.”
“’Sup,” Noah said.
“Is it okay if I just, like, walk around?” Mychal asked.
“Yeah, of course. Check out the Rauschenberg combine upstairs.”
“No way,” Mychal said, and charged up the stairs, Daisy trailing behind him.
I found myself pulled toward the painting that Mychal had called “Pettibon.” It was a colorful spiral, or maybe a multicolored rose, or a whirlpool. By some trick of the curved lines, my eyes got lost in the painting so that I kept having to refocus on tiny individual pieces of it. It didn’t feel like something I was looking at so much as something I was part of. I felt, and then dismissed, an urge to grab the painting off the wall and run away with it.
I jumped a little when Davis placed his hand on the small of my back. “Raymond Pettibon. He’s most famous for his paintings of surfers, but I like his spirals. He was a punk musician before he became an artist. He was in Black Flag before it was Black Flag.”
“I don’t know what Black Flag is,” I said.
He pulled out his phone and tapped around a bit, and then a screeching wave of sound, complete with a screaming, gravelly voice, filled the room from speakers above. “That’s Black Flag,” he said, then used his phone to stop the music. “Want to see the theater?”
I nodded, and he took me downstairs to the basement, except it wasn’t really a basement because the ceilings were like fifteen feet high. We walked down the hallway to a bookshelf lined with hardcover books. “My dad’s collection of first editions,” he said. “We’re not allowed to read any of them, of course. The oil from human hands damages them. But you can take out this one,” he said, and pointed at a hardcover copy of Tender Is the Night.
I reached for it, and the moment my hand touched the spine, the bookshelf parted in the middle and opened inward to reveal the theater, which had six stadium-style rows of black leather seats. “By F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Davis explained, “whose full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.” I didn’t say anything; I couldn’t get over the size of the movie screen. “It’s probably obvious how hard I’m trying to impress you,” he said.
“Well, it’s not working. I always hang out in mansions with hidden movie theaters.”
“Want to watch something? Or we could go for a walk? There’s something I want to show you outside.”
“We shouldn’t abandon Daisy and Mychal.”
“I’ll let them know.” He fiddled around on his phone for a second and then spoke into it. “We’re going for a walk. Make yourselves at home. Theater’s in the basement if you’re interested.”
A moment later, his voice began playing over the speakers, repeating what he’d just said. “I could’ve just texted her,” I said.
“Yeah, but that wouldn’t have been as awesome.”
—
I zipped up my hoodie and followed Davis outside. We walked in silence down one of the asphalt golf paths, past the pool, which was lit from inside the water, slowly changing colors from red to orange to yellow to green. The light cast an eerie glow up onto the windows of the terrarium that reminded me of pictures of the northern lights.
We kept walking until we reached one of the oblong sand bunkers of the golf course. Davis lay down inside of it, his head resting on its grassy lip. I lay down next to him, our jackets touching without our skin touching. He pointed up at the sky and said, “So the light pollution is terrible, but the brightest star you see—there, see it?” I nodded. “That’s not a star. That’s Jupiter. But Jupiter is, like, depending on orbits and stuff, between three hundred sixty and six hundred seventy million miles away. Right now, it’s around five hundred million miles, which is around forty-five light-minutes. You know what light-time is?”