History of Art Page 11

  She approached him and turned sideways. “Relax,” she said, looking him in the eye. She pressed against him slightly, aware of the edge of the stair, and felt his body go limp against hers. In a panic, she pressed against him more firmly, pinning him to the wall. The man panted, and his hurried breath quickened her pulse.

  “You’re fine,” she said. He stared into her eyes. He was now quite pale—almost gray—and she feared he might collapse if she stepped aside.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “We’re not stuck.”

  He searched her face for meaning. After a moment’s hesitation, he glanced over her shoulder and down, down into the center of the stone stairwell. Lorna turned her head carefully, slightly, and followed his gaze. The stairwell was more capacious than she’d remembered. In fact, if she lost her footing, she could easily tumble down the one hundred or so meters, with time enough to think things through—how stupid it was to fall, how careless; how idiotic to think she could get stuck; how incredulous her parents would be to lose her like this, so near her homecoming, after having lost her, temporarily, once before—shattering various body parts along the way on the long trip to the first story’s stone floor. Survival did not guarantee recovery. She pressed harder into the man. “Don’t,” she said. “We’ll fall.”

  FINE ARTS

  The affair was necessary. The thought comes to you in your small town’s small art museum. You stand before the horse made from aluminum soda cans. Your daughter holds your hand, tugging and pitching like a kite caught in the wind. She has seen the horse before; she knows her business here, and it involves crayons and low tables and other children, in a part of the museum where talking and touching are permitted. An older couple pauses by the sculpture. You wonder if the white-haired woman in the coral jacket would understand your affair. Does she keep secrets from her husband? What kind? How many? The unbidden attraction to a stranger, the price of a pair of sandals? Does she think about confessing? The two of them are uniformly brown and wrinkled, as if they have sat on the same beaches, roasted on the same shores, every minute of their lives.

  From behind, you feel the hot push of humid air on your neck and bare arms; your husband and son approach from outdoors. They join you beside the horse sculpture. Your husband nickers and whinnies softly. Your son, his eyes shining with admiration, pulls on your husband’s lips. He watches carefully to see how this new sound is made. Everything you do amazes the children now, though you know that soon—in a few years—all your jokes and habits will have worn irritating grooves in their brains.

  In the rotunda, a plaster statue of a woman commands the entire space, though she occupies only a tiny portion at the center. Her top half is curvy, slope-shouldered, with perfect apple breasts. Her lower half is gryphon-like; in one clawed foot she holds a small globe. Her wings would seem to beat the air, but the coils of her hair stand away from her head and suggest falling. Her plaster hair is painted yellow and her wide eyes are green, her parted lips pink, plump, resigned. She’s falling, and she’s taking the world with her.

  “She scares me,” your husband says.

  You wonder if she was modeled after the artist’s wife or girlfriend. “You should be scared,” you say.

  He doesn’t mind art, your husband, and that bothers you. You doubt he’s ever been seriously troubled by it. You wish the artist had painted the falling woman’s nipples, or put a ring through one of them.

  He doesn’t mind art, so he’ll take the children to the activity center, where volunteers hand out vinyl bags with paper and crayons. He doesn’t mind the coloring, or the time spent with the children. He is happy to give you this break. He knows you’ll return refreshed, that you’ll squeeze his arm on the way out and regard him with flustered gratitude. He’ll draw you a picture at the small table with the children—probably a heart or a bicycle. He’s very good at hearts and bicycles. His hearts are anatomically correct and sometimes festooned with garlands of flowers, or superimposed with maps—the place where you live marked with an alligator on the blue-and-red highway of the descending coronary artery. It’s the one thing about him that surprises you still.

  You enter an exhibit of twentieth-century cityscapes in black-and-white, and your world falls away. For the time you spend in the exhibit, the world of the photographs—the grit of the sidewalks, the damp of the air—is more real to you than your world. You peer into the lighted blocks of tenement windows, trying to glimpse the lives inside. What did they care about? Whom did they love? In one image, the uniform blackness of the night provokes a longing in you to plant your thumb in the sky, to leave a dull smudge.

  You amble through a temporary exhibit of Asian sculpture. Diminutive warriors hold phantom shields and spears. You’re sorry about their missing noses. Some have lost fingers, unable to let go of their gear. The statues have value for the simple fact of their longevity. Hang in there, they seem to say, you may lose only your nose. You touch the finger-stubs of one warrior and feel awe for the missing pieces; in their absence they grant this body more power. You think of the gryphon-woman, her falling-yet-­clutching, her wild tenacity. How thrilling to persist, to fall, to lose.

  You find your way to a low chair set before a window, overlooking a small courtyard. Lizards scuttle over small stones, plunging into the tangle of vines and palmettos. You ease into the low chair. There’s something about this position—knees higher than hips—that soothes. Your husband told you once, something to do with blood flow. “Or maybe you just like it,” he’d said, careful to avoid reducing your every preference to biology, though you’re not sure you mind biological explanations. It’s another bit of solicitude on his part, and you wonder how much of his brain he devotes to thinking about your concerns. Perhaps today, as a tribute to your wedding anniversary, he will draw a picture of his brain and mark all of its centers that are consumed with thoughts of you, though he would qualify the implication of “centers”: “There’s no single place where thoughts live,” he has said, “only pathways, reinforced by rehearsal.”

  As you watch the lizards, you think about the art in the museum where the affair started, in the city where your husband conducted his residency. While he saved people or didn’t, you tended your affair. Frank Stella—his prints, not the man—started it all. The set of five prints possessed an unmistakable eroticism, though there wasn’t a curved line among them. You had always thought of the erotic as a curve.

  In the Museum of Fine Arts, for all your posturing about your love of abstraction, what you really loved was its apparent meaninglessness. You felt the prints; you didn’t think about them. For the same reason, the nineteenth-century sculpture did you in, the semiclad females—a breast perched above the fold of a tunic, a toe peeking out of a sandal, the placid lips that would always keep secrets, the stolid gaze implying there were secrets to be kept. In this state—your mind free of reason, your breast longing to be exposed—the affair seemed inevitable. You could tell your husband, persuade him it was necessary—that your cells cried out for it, for where was he? Becoming a doctor. Becoming the man who would support your family, who would draw pictures with your children while you try to justify an affair of many years past.

  In the gift shop, you purchase a postcard and address it to your former lover. Every year you send a different card. This year it’s a postcard of the gryphon-woman. You never write a message. You imagine he smiles—a twitch at one corner of his mouth. Maybe he saves the cards, maybe he doesn’t. This year, you want to buy two cards. You want to find exactly the right image for your husband. If only you could send him the quiet face of the marble beauty in Boston. Here there’s only the wild-haired, wild-eyed falling woman. You settle finally on a postcard depicting an off-white piece of paper that has been folded and unfolded. The creases have been printed with white ink. You write, “The affair was necessary.” You know this is true, and not true. Too much has been made of this. You address the card to yourself.

  Back at the activity center, you admire your c
hildren’s drawings of the falling woman. Your son has colored her lips green. Your daughter has given the woman a daisy tattoo on her left breast. Your husband has drawn two hearts. The hearts are side by side, almost touching but not quite. He has drawn them carefully, from the crown of pale arteries to the glistening shroud of the pericardial sac. He has labeled them: “Mine” and “Yours.” Yours is the larger of the two.

  THE WAR ARTIST MAKES GOD VISIBLE

  AFTER STANLEY SPENCER’S GREAT WAR MEMORIAL

  Resurrection 1

  The captain holds his helmet. Four bayonets pierce his torso. Ferns grow from his wounds. He knows the body rejuvenates; he’s seen it in the wards—the growth of new tissue, the expulsion through the skin of glass shards and shrapnel. While he stands holding his helmet, watching his men touch their wounds and feel warmth returning to their limbs, his own veins burn and thrum with the fire of blood. What could God mean? He imagines the vicar clearing his throat, fumbling for the bottle of scotch he keeps in his file cabinet, behind the records of births, weddings, and deaths.

  The captain regards his ferns with tenderness. Mature leaves fan from his various wounds, and bright-green fiddleheads push their way through the bubble of his newly coursing fluids. On his walks at home, he had admired the lushness of ferns, the plant’s ability to flourish between the cracks in stone walls.

  Resurrection 2

  If any believed in such things, not one thought his resurrection would return him to the trenches. The soldiers gaze around them, reaching for their gear. They confirm their experience in each other’s eyes.

  One man leans against the trench wall, his face half-buried in the crook of his arm. He stares through the tangle of barbed wire. The earth is dry as ever. He imagines riding a train home to Cookham, embracing his mother and his sister, their smooth cheeks and nice-smelling hair. And his girl who can’t refuse him now—having been dead and come back raises one up in more than one sense. He imagines the girl waiting at Victoria Station. He will see her before she sees him, and it will seem to take forever to walk across the station. She turns her perfect face to him, and in that instant, he tastes meat pies and cider. A musty smell fills his nostrils, of the tiny paperboard houses and cotton-wool hedges that will make up the miniature town beneath their Christmas tree. He’ll say, “I’ve died and come back. I’ve died.” She’ll think he’s mad. She’ll expect him to get on with things—find a job, earn his pay, support the family they will have.

  He opens his eyes and turns toward the trench to face his mates, who fasten their belts and holsters. He catches the eye of one. “This is a fright, eh, mate?” The other man laughs and shakes his head. His face is stone white and still tinged blue around the eyes. “Never telling anyone this.”

  He closes his eyes again. Somewhere down the line, a flag snaps in the wind. In a moment the captain will pat his shoulder and hand the soldier his gun.

  Resurrection 3

  The dead and the wounded lie on stretchers pulled by mules and are bathed in the glow of the dressing station. Inside, white-draped figures tend to the wounded man. Despite the shells and gunfire, the mules stand calmly, gazing at the lantern-lit scene. A soldier leans against the corner of the building and peers in. One stretcher-bearer, loath to leave, looks to the soldier he has just carried, even while he turns toward the front, toward the bodies he has yet to collect. He cups the soldier’s cheek in his palm.

  Resurrection 4

  The lunatics are good workers.

  —Stanley Spencer, writing from Beaufort Military Hospital, Bristol, 1915

  Iodine of jam on stairsteps of bread heavenward. Urns of milky tea. More than enough of this and only this for everyone on Earth. Every part must be saved for the day peace comes. Little slivers of soul scraped from the feet, the rotted black bits and scooped-out divots, the legs and arms I will keep safe until the time when all are made whole again. Every corner scrubbed, all stink washed away. The sack stinks. My burden. The little fellow, he records the soul of each man, gives the drawing to him for the day our Maker sends his Son. Each has a record of his sacred soul. We are Christ’s angels, disguised here on Earth as we are.

  Ever busy, Sister Mother says, ever at rest—though never to me, only to the little fellow, who hides in the bottom of the linens closet with his books. We scrub floors together, he and I, though we know our work is more than it seems.

  Every precious soul preserved, but I ask and ask about the souls still abroad. They lie where they fall, the captain says, along with my eye. I change his bandage at night, when Sister Mother sleeps, the eyehole covered over with wrinkles of skin.

  I’ll go with you, I tell him. We’ll find the rest of your mortal soul and all the others, too.

  How will we ever find that? he asks.

  We’ll comb the earth, I tell him. I wrap his filthy bandage around my hand. If ever it existed we will find it.

  Resurrection 5

  The soldiers struggle to rise, entwined as they are in their white picket crosses. Already their capes make wings. “Spencer would make us all angels,” one grunts as he hoists himself out of his grave.

  The others groan, cursing, and struggle to extricate themselves from similar holes. One stares down at his tunic of feathers, worrying what the others will think. What sort of man picks around the battlefield like a half-plucked chick? Others reach out their stone-white arms to each other, without thinking; in the grip of such embraces, there’s no turning back, and what does this make them? Here on earth again, locked in each other’s eyes and embraces, grown men, stone men, stiff-upper-lip men, with a feeling that itches up their palms and forearms as they clasp hands. The itch crawls across their biceps and burrows into their armpits. It shoots up the backs of their necks and creeps along their scalps, follicle by follicle. The itch burns permanent pathways in their skin. The feeling is almost like love. It will have to be satisfied.

  REPATRIATION

  I

  The morning of the funeral, target practice with her brothers in the backyard, the nearest neighbor too far off to be bothered. The old man had saved Schweppes cans—had been saving it looked like years: bushel baskets and peach crates filled with them in the dank barn. On arrival, they fell to cleaning, not that the rifles needed it. She had mixed a pitcher of Manhattans—his favorite, a bilious-looking drink—and poured them into insulated plastic tumblers, cracked and glittery relics of their 1970s-spangled childhood. They took turns picking off cans. After the Manhattans were gone, she went back into the house for the shotguns. In the early-morning gloom, she stiff-legged around, kicking over the embroidered footstool, bashing into the lamp table, sending his crossword dictionary slapping to the floor. She heaved his 12-gauge out of the safe and found her brothers’ too. She cradled them in her arms, a bouquet, stumbling and sliding her way across the wet grass toward her brothers, who had put down their guns and were drinking beer now.

  “You look like a different ending for Carrie,” Bell said. “Why don’t you fetch another round?”

  “Because she wants to shoot,” said Clayton.

  “Damn straight. Fetch it yourself,” she said to Bell.

  He sat in a plastic lawn chair beside a plaster statue of a squirrel. He tapped its head with his forefinger. “Do you think he meant to tell us?”

  Clayton handed her shells. “If he’d wanted us to know, we’d have known he was dying before he turned up dead.”

  “Toss a can, Clayton.” She raised the barrel, and Clayton pushed it down again.

  “Let’s not.”

  “I want to,” she said.

  “Punch my chest,” he said, puffing himself into a broader ­target. “Punch me.”

  He wavered, his blue dress shirt aglow, the outline of his white T-shirt stark at the neck. She unloaded, set the gun down. “I could break something,” she said.

  Clayton handed her a beer. “You could at that.”

  II

  Later, post-funeral and after the folk cleared out, they were left w
ith food and liquor enough for four Christmases. The house he’d left clean and spare. They found nothing more personal than what appeared to be toast crumbs from his final breakfast scattered on the kitchen counter. In his will, their father had stipulated that the house and land be sold, the proceeds shared equally among them. His art books, slides, lecture notes, and other academic papers he had already donated to the library of his alma mater. On the subject of the marble bust, the will remained silent; it was simply gone. She thought the boys must not know about the head, as she’d come to think of it, which had sat in her father’s closet, pale and glowing, since she was a girl—probably longer. She had known on instinct that it had come from the war. Most fathers kept enemy bayonets or Nazi flags, but hers took a souvenir more suitable to his line of work.

  The bust first appeared to her shortly after her mother’s death. In those first few days she wandered the house, unmoored and unsure what to do with herself. Meals appeared sporadically, left on the counters by neighbors or pulled by her father, charred and smoking, from the oven. The boys had gone into the woods, hunting; she was too young for that. She’d been avoiding her father, making herself small and darting from rooms before he entered, his sorrow an animal slinking ahead of him. She came across him by accident once, while he stood in front of his open closet. She crept up behind without his noticing and saw what he saw: the pale glow of the thin-faced woman nestled among his silk ties on the shelf. Thick plaits of marble hair framed her face. Part of her upper lip and nose had chipped away, and the image flashed in her girlish mind of a roller-skating accident—the stone woman teetering, falling, her face breaking on the sidewalk. Later in adolescence, gasping in bed at night, she imagined the woman shattered by lust and rough kisses. The bust’s appearance, she knew, had something to do with her mother.