History of Art Read online

  History of Art

  History of ART

  stories

  MARGARET LUONGO

  LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

  BATON ROUGE

  Published by Louisiana State University Press

  Copyright © 2016 by Louisiana State University Press

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  LSU Press Paperback Original

  First printing

  Designer: Laura Roubique Gleason

  Typeface: Adobe Jenson Pro

  Printer and binder: Lightning Source

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, circumstances, and events are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual occurrences, institutions, or individuals, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Luongo, Margaret, 1967– author.

  Title: History of art : stories / Margaret Luongo.

  Description: Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015035402 | ISBN 978-0-8071-6302-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-0-8071-6303-0 (pdf) | ISBN 978-0-8071-6304-7 (epub) | ISBN 978-0-8071-6305-4 (mobi)

  Classification: LCC PS3612.U66 A6 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015035402

  The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

  For Bernard, Tom, Pete, and Bernadette—

  The first storytellers

  Contents

  The War Artist

  Word Problem

  The Confused Husband

  Magnolia Grandiflora

  Seeing Birds

  Exile

  In This Life

  History of Art

  Foreground

  Fine Arts

  The War Artist Makes God Visible

  Repatriation

  Chinese Opera

  Girls Come Calling

  Three Portraits of Elaine Shapiro

  Acknowledgments

  Works Consulted

  History of ART

  THE WAR ARTIST

  “When do I start?” the war artist asked.

  The captain glanced at his watch, his thin lips pressed into a sliver. Thirty seconds passed.

  “Today,” he said. From down the hallway a pistol shot rang out, followed by the sprightly pop of a champagne cork. “Right now, in fact.” He handed the war artist a neatly folded uniform, saluted her, and walked out the door.

  The war artist heard the jingle of the captain’s keys and the solid thunk of the thrown bolt. She tried the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. Looking through the small window, thick glass meshed with wire, she saw the gray of another metal door across the hall. She knelt and opened the slot, near the floor, and peered through it. “Hello?” she called. The hallway’s fluorescent lights buzzed.

  She turned back into the room. Tattered mobiles of jets and helicopters stirred busily in the artificial breeze of the air handlers. She sorted through her footlocker and bins of supplies. The office was stocked with her favorite materials, and for a moment this reassured her. Among the bins she found a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and two shot glasses. Slices of light shone through the skylights. A small fluff of cloud passed over the sun. She changed into the fatigues the captain had left, sat at her drafting table, and waited.

  She sketched to pass the time and to exercise her hand, soldiers in action poses that resembled her son’s army men. The fatigues felt stiff. The room was so quiet that the scratching of her pen seemed to fill it. She drew her surroundings—a boring exercise, but an exercise nevertheless: a cot, a footlocker, a metal desk and chair, an easel, all done up in the sandy shades of this war’s theater—dry sand, wet sand, oil and sand, dirt and sand. She wondered what her children were doing, and checked her watch. They’d be walking home from school with their father, chatting in their high-pitched voices. They’d stop for a snack along the way, something wholesome or not, depending on her husband’s mood. They might yet expect to find her at home. She wondered when she would be deployed. She had told the children it was an honor to serve as the nation’s war artist, that she owed it to the soldiers to do a good job. The weight of her new responsibility—to make the war comprehensible to those who couldn’t witness it—exhausted her. She rested her head on the table and dozed.

  During her nap, her civilian clothes disappeared and more fatigues arrived, along with an MRE and a pistol. She held the gun away from her, dangling it by the butt between her thumb and forefinger. She glanced around the room. Where to put it? Away, she felt, was the only safe answer. She assumed it was loaded. She would get the captain to take it away. In the meantime, for safekeeping, she placed it in her footlocker, nestled between mosquito netting and a poncho.

  She turned her attention to the MRE. Three thousand calories, the package said. My, the war artist said. She had hoped for an itinerary or instructions for her deployment, but there was nothing else. She sketched the bulky MRE in its thick beige plastic, using watercolor pencils to finish it, and she tacked it on the wall over her cot. Better. The room had needed a little something.

  She had only had a moment to admire her work when a thunderous booming shook the room. She covered her ears and cowered behind her easel. Another explosion followed, then the rapid fire of guns. The war artist curled into a ball and shielded her head with her arms. Sirens and shouting filled the hallway outside her door. More gunfire, more explosions, a moment of silence. She was panting. Then the screaming began, and cries in a language she didn’t recognize, beseeching cries of a woman. It sounded as though someone had reached into the woman and pulled out her insides. The war artist understood from the sounds that the woman pounded on the chest of a soldier, all the while screaming about her children.

  Focused intently as she was, she failed to recognize the sudden silence. It occurred to her that she might have been listening to a recording. The war was being fought elsewhere, not inside a government building. Yet a particulate substance floated in the air and coated her fatigues. New cracks crawled up the walls and around the skylights, and occasional chunks of plaster fell. The war artist beat her fists on the metal door and shouted, “Hello? Hello?” but no one came. Her arms and legs trembled. Dust from the newly cracked walls tickled her nose, and she sneezed into her sleeve.

  No one came to explain what had happened. The war artist set to her pencils. She drew quickly, with harsh movements, fragments of the scene she had heard. The face of the mother filled an entire panel, her mouth a terrible wound. The soldier occupied his own panel, away from the mother, his arm raised in a half-realized gesture of comfort. Apart from these, she described a mostly empty space for the children: a faint horizon line with nothing above or below it save a few flecks to signify earth and a wisp of cloud for sky.

  She slept lightly, and in the night she woke to weather. The breeze at first was not unpleasant. She lifted her face to the hot wind, and it ruffled her hair. Particles of something fine swept across her face and forearms, clinging to each strand of hair. She shut her eyes against the graininess. The wind increased, ruffling her easel pad, scattering her kraft-paper sketches and gathering them up again in a whirling spout. The dust stung her skin and worked itself between her lips to coat her gums. She pulled herself into a tight ball and waited out the storm. Ink bottles pelted her, pens and pencils skittered across the floor, and charcoal sticks exploded against the walls, adding their powder to the air.

  When the storm ended, everything in the room was coated with a laye
r of the finest sand she’d ever felt. Impossible to wash away, it burrowed under her watchband and worked beneath the wire of her brassiere. Everything she touched was coated in grit. When she sketched, she pressed her fingers into it on the shaft of the pen. Each sheet of paper became a kind of sandpaper. Eventually, the sand infiltrated all of her inks and paints so that everything she made contained it: the portraits of her husband and children that she drew from memory; the lakeside landscape of her family’s summer home; a still life of her children’s lunch bags and schoolbooks. When she blinked she felt it; too insignificant to induce tears, it stayed put. When she ate, it crunched like glass between her teeth. Each day, more sand blew in on a hot wind from a great furnace.

  Over the next few weeks, boxes of treats arrived from her family and friends who thought she was at war: pulverized cookies, melted Power Bars, outdated magazines, sunblock, salt tablets. She painted pictures of whole cookies and tall frosty milkshakes. She made pastels of ice cream sundaes, as cartoonlike in their sumptuousness as centerfolds. At night, and only after she felt she’d made a good-faith effort to produce, she reread letters from her family. Small details thrilled her: buying tomatoes at the farmer’s market; making pancakes at home and setting off the smoke detector; the neighbor’s cat darting in the open door and surprising everyone with a live mouse.

  She, in turn, had little to say—and little she could say. Her first letter—“Dear Family, Your letters and pictures delight me! I still haven’t been shipped overseas and am in fact very near you. . . .”—came back to her, with instructions to avoid mention of her location. The letter was returned the very day she’d passed it through the slot to the soldier who delivered her meals, packages, and letters. She became adept at concealing the truth without actually lying: “Dear Children, Very hot here, and the sand gets in everything! I must have eaten a bushel! It’s strange to draw something as dry as the desert with watercolor pencils, but I find it my preferred medium. Be good to each other, and mind Daddy. All my love, Your Mommy.”

  The war artist tried to keep in shape by drawing and sketching, but she had grown tired of her room as a subject, and she could only draw so much from memory and desire. She found herself re-creating bland desert landscapes and predictable wartime tableaux, lifted from movies she’d seen. She requested newspapers and Internet access, via a note to the captain. The next day, several postcards skittered across the floor, having been flung through the slot. All depicted the desert around Las Vegas, circa 1950.

  “What’s this?” she called through the slot to the soldier. She could just see the butt of his rifle as he walked away from her down the hall. She was in the habit of calling after him. “Fresh fruit would be nice!” when another MRE thunked to the floor. “Thank you!” she’d call when he dropped off her packages and letters.

  She flipped through the postcards, making sure she hadn’t missed something more relevant. The last card had stuck to one of its mates, the edges of the canceled stamps interlocking. The front side showed a spangled showgirl dressed like Uncle Sam in ­fishnets and plunging neckline. On the reverse, written in faded India ink, she read: “Very hot here! Sand everywhere. Eating bushels. More, love.” The war artist swore.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?” She heard a phlegmatic click from a corner of the room. She spun about, trying to locate the source. Then a different sound, a pattering, followed by a rushing swish of sand, spilling from the sprinkler heads above her. For the rest of the day and all through the night, the sand rained down. She found an umbrella in her footlocker and held it above her while the sand swirled and drifted in the manufactured breeze. Goggles protected her eyes. The heat in the room intensified until the war artist was forced to strip down to her briefs and brassiere.

  By the time the storm ended, about a foot of sand had fallen. She cleared her tabletop and desk, shook out her linens. Her cot now was flush with the ground, and she kicked sand into her bedding any time she moved near it. The new landscape was awkward to walk in, and she found herself ill-disposed to do anything. Bourbon improved her frame of mind.

  She was seated thus, in her underwear, sipping bourbon, when a young man in civilian clothing arrived. Sweat plopped from her chin and nose onto the blank paper in front of her.

  “Hello,” he said, offering his hand. “I am your translator.”

  The war artist wouldn’t move from behind her table, so the translator staggered through the sand to her. His slick-soled shoes slid and pitched him forward into the war artist’s table. They shook hands.

  “There’s nothing for you to translate,” the war artist said. Patches of sweat blossomed on the translator’s dress shirt. “I’m the only one here.”

  The translator held up his hand. “I get paid either way.”

  She offered him a drink, and he accepted. He sat cross-legged on the ground. She pulled on her trousers, and the translator explained the proud history of his region, the many accomplishments of his people, as well as the colonization, infighting, and religious oppression. The war artist rolled out fresh paper, and she drew a mural of the images and events the translator described. He kept pouring as he spoke, becoming more and more comfortable moving in the sand as they drained and he refilled their glasses. She looked at him from time to time; usually he stared off into a corner of the room, as if he could actually see the times and places of which he spoke. His slight accent felt lush to her, a spice she had never smelled or tasted. She felt she could slip inside the scenery she drew—the dusty streets, the ornate mosques and busy markets. She doodled away at some clouds and didn’t notice that the translator had stopped speaking. When the lull of his voice subsided, she looked up to find him gazing at her. The expression he wore looked a little hard, but she couldn’t read it. She looked back at the many feet of paper she had covered. She blushed.

  “You’ve inspired me.”

  He rose and looked down at what she’d drawn.

  “They knew about perspective before anyone else did, you know,” she said.

  “Who?”

  The war artist smiled. “Your people,” she said.

  “That’s all for today,” he said.

  She walked him to the door of her office, hoping to catch his scent, which she was sure would be exotic and thrilling: a spice or incense, some flower or plant unknown to her. All she smelled was sweat and booze. The soldier came and ushered the translator out.

  The war artist painted after the translator had gone—ancient monuments he’d described and some she imagined, all to convey the past grandeur of the place. She fell asleep quickly, relishing the warmth emanating from the sand.

  During the night, she woke to the sound of a helicopter hovering above her room. She threw back the covers and trudged to the skylights. The ground seemed to buckle under her feet. The pens on her drafting table jumped and fell nib-first into the sand. The helicopter abruptly flew off, circled, and came back to hover somewhere very near. The war artist gazed up at the two skylights framing the night sky, rectangles of inky dark and nothing more. She lay down again, and each time the helicopter hovered, her sternum vibrated. Her ears tuned to the sound of the slicing blades, and she fell asleep, her organs humming.

  The next day, she requested coffee for the translator’s visit. He had mentioned a specific kind—cardamom. The coffee was delivered in a china pot with pink rosebuds. The cups matched. Not quite right, the war artist said, and she and the translator laughed. The war artist shook her head as if to cast her hair away from her eyes, but she meant to clear away last night’s noise. Her body had recorded the thumping whir, muffled and interior. She smiled at the translator, worried that her new sound might leak out.

  “Today,” the translator told the war artist, “I will tell you about my family.” He clasped his hands behind his back and told of the economic hardship and the violence that had brought him to her country. In vague terms, he spoke of separation from his parents, his wife, and his children. The war artist felt heat rise on her cheek
s. She had thought him too young to be married with children, and the fact of his coming to her room had given her a proprietary feeling.

  The translator walked alongside the previous day’s mural, which the war artist had tacked to the wall. He spoke of oppression under the previous regime, the hardships and terror of the current war. Occasionally he fell silent and stared at his shoes sinking into the sand. Mostly, the war artist respected his emotions and waited for him to gather himself again. The translator stared at the palace the war artist had rendered, its gates open to a garden of orange-red flowers. Without speaking he lowered himself to the ground and sat.

  “So you help our government for the sake of justice?” the war artist said.

  “Justice?” The translator looked down at his lap. For a moment, the war artist was afraid he couldn’t continue, and she was sorry to have pried. He nodded. “I am very tired.”

  After the translator had gone, the war artist painted a new city, a new country—what might rise up like a field of wildflowers after this war: industry and parks; roads and public transportation; schools and universities; hospitals and laboratories, all peopled by rational, clear-eyed, hopeful citizens. What this new civilization could accomplish—and how the rest of the world would benefit from its example—once the dust had settled!

  She made herself eat a light supper, a small portion of her MRE, and practiced sleep hygiene with renewed zeal. She had grown accustomed to the cot and the unfamiliar sheets, the sand and the lack of scent. In the dark, she heard the rattle of her murals on the walls, shifting slightly in the breeze from the fans: the good sound of work, of something made. She thought of the murals someday hanging in a museum or other public building, alongside ancient friezes from palaces destroyed by war. Drifting as she was, the hard rolling sound didn’t trouble her. In fact, followed as it was by another hard something rolling, and another, the string of sounds was quite soothing. The hard, round things rolled in the hall, up against her door, and that reminded her of ocean waves lapping, until the explosions came. The sound tore through her ears, and blossomed red—fuller and fuller, pushing through her head, chest, and bones.