History of Art Read online

  When her father opened or closed the closet door, the hinges, smothered in decades of paint, moaned and squeaked. In the early days when she heard the sound, her heart jolted, electrified. Later the sound wore on her—a grating down her spine so real she sat up and shivered. Eventually she heard the sound even when he wasn’t home. It distracted her from homework and chores. She took to visiting the bust when he was at the university or running errands. She touched the cool marble with her fingertips, traced the broken nose and blank eyes, pinched the chin between thumb and fingers as if to snap it off. Once, she slapped the cheek. The bust stared, placid and remote.

  She began painting her own face lavishly with makeup, chopping her hair and dyeing it lurid colors. Her father regarded her with surprise and possibly offense, as if to say, Who are you? Mine? I don’t think so. Then she stopped eating, which landed her in the hospital, and she was as inscrutable to him as ever. Clayton and Bell tended to her, in their offhand way. So casual was their method that she was never sure they actually cared for her; they seemed to find lounging by her railed bed fine for talking about baseball, hunting, and girls. She fed off their attention. Back at school, she enveloped herself in a shimmering veneer of functionality—extra effort in all things, from grooming and studying to volunteering at the nursing home and singing in the church choir; excellent grades; the acquisition of friends and languages—her drive emanating from a hardened core of spite. She was too busy for her father. She didn’t see him to know if he was looking. In the end, they had the same head after all, for art and quiet study. She did not think her activities bore any relation to him.

  III

  She found a real estate agent to list the house and farm. At home, she could not forget the bust. From her research she learned it had likely been commissioned by a wealthy Roman in remembrance of his dead wife. Occasionally the bust appeared to her in the middle of things—unloading the children from the car; staring over a glass of wine after dinner; during faculty meetings, her face masked with contemplation. She imagined different fates: What if her father had donated it to the local museum? He’d have to answer for having it, though a dying man might not care. She pictured the head in a landfill, a banana peel draped across its ruined nose, or planted in someone’s yard in town, next to a gnome or bonneted goose, by the koi pond or in the birdbath.

  She found herself unable to comprehend why he’d stolen it—a complete perversion of the task he’d been assigned. After the war, Europe was a ruin of obliterated places, people, and families. Perhaps in that chaos, he felt the bust belonged as much to him as anyone. Who, after all, would give it such attention? Maybe he’d tried, later in life, to ship her back to her place of origin, but surely that place no longer existed. Maybe he’d waited for someone to come looking.

  The land sold quickly, for commercial development, the house to be torn down. In her mind she revisited every room, opened all the closets and cupboards. She imagined her own ghost in the future, haunting the inevitable strip mall that would occupy the spot where she’d grown up.

  IV

  She recalled a museum visit she and her father had taken together, when she’d returned home for winter break. The museum had emptied its storage facility and put on display every antiquity in its collection. She paused before one of the many glass cases, stunned by the sheer number of lead spoons, foggy glass vials, iron hairpins and makeup spatulas—millennia of refuse, lost or abandoned by humans as they pursued and fled one another across the globe.

  “Does this make you love or hate humanity more?” her father had asked.

  “I feel sick,” she said. “People owned these things, and now they’re dead.”

  “Yes,” he said, “they’re so dead they’re not even dust. So, you’re undecided?”

  She’d passed around his back to view the terra-cotta canopic jars. Jackal-headed lids protected the ancient innards of wealthy Egyptians.

  “Those dummies,” her father said, following her gaze.

  She would have felt stunned, had she not already felt stunned. “I didn’t know the Egyptians were dummies,” she said. “They’re not generally known for that.”

  “They certainly thought a lot of their spleens,” he said.

  “They didn’t know any better.”

  “Exactly.”

  She felt stung, as if she had been tricked. Was this the same man who had adored a representation of his dead wife? She itched to slap his face with his own sentimentality, but she felt foolish—ignorant of some great and sneering knowledge he possessed.

  Months passed at school, her feelings smothered by the academic calendar, exams, reading. At night, as a comfort before she slept, she recalled images of the famous artworks she studied, and often she dreamt of them. There they were, night after night, familiar and unchanging in their details. Except that, years later, when she became fortunate enough to view the works themselves, it was as if she were meeting an old friend for whom she’d once had warm feelings, feelings that brimmed to the surface, only to find that no such feelings existed—the friend a stranger. Something in her memory had altered the images—her mind had intensified focus on some trivial aspect of a painting, or misremembered the position or demeanor of a figure. On her honeymoon trip to London, in the National Portrait Gallery, she’d left her husband frozen in distress as she searched for her favorite Reynolds, which clearly hung on the wall before her. Over and over, she compared the title next to the painting with the title she’d written in her small notebook: they were the same, but this was not the figure of her memory. She accosted a docent, pointing to the title written in her own hand. “Where is this painting?” The docent, an elderly woman, clutched her arm and said, “I’ll fetch someone. We’ll get it sorted,” and never returned. She felt the loss as she would the death of a friend. She became timid of her memory and began to suspect she might have fabricated the exchange she’d had in the museum with her father.

  V

  Sometimes she thought to mention it—all of it—to her husband: the missing bust, her father’s misanthropy, her jealousy aroused by an object. Then she thought, for God’s sake, it’s a thing. The bust had stood for someone real, though, and people had stood before it in memory of that person. They were all dead now, including her father. She broached the subject instead with Clayton, in a late-night phone call, both of them outdoors, a thousand miles apart and hiding smokes from their spouses.

  “What did you think of Dad’s war booty?”

  Clayton exhaled. “Got no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “The bust—the head—of the woman?”

  “He had a woman’s head?”

  “A portrait bust.” She leaned on the deck’s railing, moving only to guide her cigarette the short distance to her mouth.

  “I don’t recall any such thing. He brought this home with him? How?”

  “He probably shipped it to his university. He kept it in his bedroom closet, with his ties.”

  “Whoa—what are you smoking?”

  “What are you smoking?”

  “There was no head in Dad’s closet. Maybe a hat form—is that what you saw?”

  “I touched it. I slapped its face. It was marble—”

  “You slapped it? OK. I believe you. No, I never saw it.”

  They smoked quietly and said nothing for a while.

  “Why would he take it, though?”

  “You want this to make sense?”

  It had never occurred to her that a logical reason couldn’t be found.

  “Well,” Clayton said, “anyway, there’s nothing left, so just forget about it.”

  But there were hairpins still, and Schweppes cans and rifles. Maybe he’d been right to get rid of things. She’d told her brothers to do something with the rifles and shotguns; he must have forgotten them, or maybe he hadn’t. She couldn’t guess his motives. He had been for so long the man who had stolen something beautiful, broken, and human, obsessed over it in secret, then disposed of it. She wonde
red who he’d been before he went to Europe. She wished she had some memory of his potential to embellish, a version of father to suit her needs.

  CHINESE OPERA

  I kept the guts of the music box after Donny smashed it. The black lacquered wood had shattered on the staircase while in his crib our son shrieked his face into a purple mask. My father had given me the music box as a reward for singing at his boss’s party. At the party, he took me aside—into the bedroom of the boss’s daughter. Her white-canopied bed glowed, the dust ruffle a cloud. He leaned down to speak to me.

  “I want you to do this,” he said. Light from the vanity lamp reflected off the thick lenses of his glasses, so that his eyes were a blurry glare. “I really, really do.”

  I shook my head and shrank into myself. Pressing me would cause more resistance, he knew, and he straightened. He glanced at the music box on the antiqued dresser, and my gaze followed his. The lid was open to display a figure from the Chinese opera. Her face was pale, her cheeks painted in swaths of begonia pink. Over her head she brandished a silver sword, and two feather plumes rose from her black hair, like the wild curling horns of a ram. Her chin pointed upward, her face lifted in righteous fury. The angle of her left arm suggested a foe advancing from beyond the velvet lining of the box, one she was prepared to smite. I hung on the force of that gesture. My father saw my need.

  “You like that?” He reached for the music box. My heart fluttered at the thought of his fingerprints marring its glossy surface. “I’ll give it to you.”

  My breath caught. He nodded. I felt smaller, but hard and sharp, gathered together in some vital way.

  I sang in a corner of the kitchen, the adults standing around me, attentive and straining to hear my voice. In the car on the way home, my father presented me with the music box. I don’t know how he smuggled it out. A few months later he overwound it. The figure remained stuck with her sword down, her white face and painted-on eyebrows directed abstractly at the objects I’d collected: a four-leaf clover; a wooden nickel tossed from a parade float; a plastic ballerina I’d swiped from a friend’s birthday cake, hardened frosting still clinging to her pointed foot; one wheat-back penny.

  Then Donny got his hands on it. The barrel and tines look like 10-karat gold, but they aren’t gold. I don’t know what they’re made of.

  GIRLS COME CALLING

  Every day between four and five, my old friend took a nap. He refused to lock his front door, and a gang of wild-haired girls from the public school would let themselves in shortly after four. They had claimed his corner as their territory and the summer before had spray-painted a pink death’s head on the sidewalk in front of his house. I imagined them escaping the heat of late afternoon, their dusky faces poised in the cool dim hallway.

  The first time it happened, the girls wrote messages on the inside of the door in pink lip gloss and purple nail polish. Afterwards, I stood looking with him. I’d come over to borrow a book. Lately I’d made it a habit to feign some need in order to check on him. I often found him sitting still, a cat curled in his lap, papers and books piled on the table in front of him. He looked, in these moments, as if he were reading from a great distance.

  “You should lock your door,” I said.

  “You can tell a lot about the culture this way,” he said, gesturing to the door.

  I thought I should know what he meant, so I didn’t ask what he saw. The girls had written vows to their best friends and unkind descriptions of girls they did not like. They made their signs, flowers with bubble-like petals, skulls clutching rosebuds in their sardonic mouths, cartoonish smiling horses and cats. He didn’t repaint the door, and for a few days the girls added to it with spray paint, bits of broken mirror, colored buttons, bottle caps, and tissue paper, until the door glowed and shimmered with color. None of the original paint showed. The girls made a border of feathers around the doorframe, a single row alternating hot pink and orange. He said it took them a week to complete, and sometimes he woke to hear them talking as they worked. I’d assumed he slept straight through.

  “Why don’t you call the police?” I said, and he said that the sound of their industry never failed to put him to sleep again.

  When the girls finished the door, they started other small projects. They cut out a cube of space from the pages of The Riverside Shakespeare and constructed a tableau in the shadow box they’d created. They used fabric from my friend’s old button-downs and gardening pants to make rolling hillsides, trees, and honeysuckle vines. They whittled tiny girl-figures from clothespins. All the girl-figures held hands, and they wore their yarn hair in pigtails tied with colorful bits of rag.

  “Why’d they choose The Riverside Shakespeare?” I was wondering about the cultural significance.

  My friend wheezed in a way that sounded profoundly meditative. “It’s the right size,” he said.

  Over time the girls’ efforts became more grand. During the summer, they entered a phase of bringing the outdoors in. Over the back porch stood a wisteria-draped arbor that filtered the light to hazy lavender. The smell from those velvety bunches was lovely, but it was too hot to sit outside—the heat made my friend’s legs swell—and the mosquitoes were ferocious. For two weeks the girls disassembled the arbor and reassembled it in the living room. They devised a system of troughs in which to transplant the wisteria. My friend thought to take longer naps in order to give them more time for their labors, but he feared insulting them by suggesting that they needed the time. On the last day, they strung white lights through the vines to mimic the stars, which of course was pure fancy; we were too close to the city to see stars.

  For a while the girls went into a fallow period, which my friend said was necessary for creative types. He woke to the smell of popcorn and found an oily bowl with a few kernels unpopped at the bottom. He’d find his books on the coffee table, tented or with pages dog-eared. The girls were reading Chekhov, Kafka, Woolf, and Dave Barry. They added items to his grocery list, and dutifully he purchased these: chocolate milk, peanut butter, marshmallow fluff. In the evenings we sat in his new living room, drinking chocolate milk and gazing at the girl-made heavens. He said he’d heard them talking about the ceiling, how to paint the sky in the exact way it appeared at the onset of dusk, when parts of it seem drained of color. Their voices, he said, were full of awe. They decided not to attempt it.

  Books he’d never seen before started showing up—untranslated Rilke—and sometimes he heard them practice their German. His eyes shone with pride when he told me. I picked a kernel of popcorn from between the couch cushions and popped it in my mouth. “Well,” I said. “Good for them.”

  In the fall school started, and as far as he could tell, the girls slept. They came—he could tell by the disarrangement of the couch pillows, the way every item in the room appeared slightly askew: magazines hanging off the coffee table, about to drop; the remote control slipped between the cushions; one crumpled white sock beneath the kitchen table. The cats looked more dazed than usual. They lay draped across the couch and armchair, their narrow bodies exhausted from so much petting, neck-ruffing, and cheek stroking. The fur around their eyes and forehead had been rubbed the wrong way, and they squinted and purred their besotted approval at us.

  The days became crisp, but the girls didn’t. My friend still woke up—from their silence, not their voices. Occasionally he heard a plaintive syllable or sigh, the rustling of a page or skirt, but nothing more.

  Evidence of boys appeared. Different, deeper voices floated to his room, their laughter squeezing his heart into a crazy thumping.

  “Young love,” he drawled one day when I started up from the couch.

  “Wet spot!” I cried.

  The boys left a musty funk—an unfresh quality covered over with unsubtle cologne.

  “They stink,” I said, flapping an issue of The New Yorker.

  “The wisteria’s dead,” he said. Spots had formed on the twisting trunks, and the leafless mottled vines seemed grasping—bou
nded by the walls and ceiling of the living room.

  “And they’re rude.” One or several boys had written a series of limericks about my friend’s ancestors and had tacked them on Post-its to each sepia portrait. The little poems were formally correct, and I suspect the girls were impressed. My friend delighted in the boys’ verse, chuckling and finally wheezing until his face went pure red.

  “The boys don’t hurt anything,” he said, smiling fondly. “They just eat a lot.”

  “Still,” I said, “the girls have been fallow a long time.”

  “True,” he said. “They are distracted.”

  “Lock your door,” I said.

  He held up a white footie sock, which he had retrieved from beneath the coffee table, as if it explained his position. “I can’t,” he said, shaking the sock at me. “I won’t.”

  I came over last week to find him still in bed. The cats sat high on the top shelves of bookcases, squinting and switching their tails. The girls stood all around his bed. One sat in a straight-back chair beside him, holding his long-fingered hand. Another smoothed the hair away from his forehead. Already the color had drained away, and one of the girls remarked upon the alabaster cast of his skin. In the living room, the boys waited on the couch, reading magazines and doing their Latin homework.

  THREE PORTRAITS OF ELAINE SHAPIRO

  I

  Elaine Shapiro visited New York City for the last time when she was twenty-two. She rode in from New Jersey with her boyfriend Avi at the wheel to attend the wedding of his cousin, a bronzed blonde with line-thin brows. Elaine had seen pictures of her at the shower: riding horses with her fiancé, sunning herself in a bikini on a cruise, posing with sorority sisters at a fundraiser. She had just found a job in publishing. “Not a job,” Avi had said. “An internship.”