The Portrait of a Mirror
Page 27
It was purely on an abstract, conceptual level that Dale understood himself to be the same living human person who led Vivien McBride through a shrieking colonnade of sparklers as they blurred in pointillistic streaks through the starry, starry night; the same person who kissed her like the sailor in Times Square returning from World War II—or, if not actually like him, then at least mirroring the pose. Because wasn’t it impossible now, really, for a man to kiss a woman like that? Even when you set aside, like, issues of consent and heteronormativity. Did not the picture’s ubiquitous existence preclude its ability to be repeated with the same wild joyous utter lack of reference? Yes? Yes? . . . No?
• • •
Dale opened the door to the Mark V for his bride and rounded the car to climb in beside her, saddling up close to join her in waving goodbye. The chauffeur drove forward gently at first, eliciting a new flurry of cheers that, as they accelerated further, sank precipitously into the diminuendo of time and distance and, as they turned off the golf course path and onto the proper thoroughfare, lingered for a moment longer in their minds before it was quiet. The car grew extravagantly still. Dale moved to undo his bow tie, only to realize he’d already untied it. Vivien’s bottom lip began to quiver.
—It was such a beautiful wedding, she said.
—Yes, it was.
Dale’s words echoed in the wells of silence. Not the loaded, unsaid kind, but the truly empty silence of having nothing to say.
—Such a beautiful wedding, Vivien said again, but almost as if its beauty was regrettable.
The next morning over breakfast, Wes and Diana read all about it in the New York Times.
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For readers interested in learning more about Ovidian art, I highly recommend the books of Paul Barolsky. Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Botticelli to Picasso (Yale University Press, 2014) in particular recalls the “Art and Myth” seminar he taught for many years at the University of Virginia, which inspired Vivien’s exhibition. Paul: thank you for introducing me to Ovid and his heirs, for illuminating the architecture of my mind in the specter of their exquisite self-reflexivity.
I’m also grateful to the catalyst of my misery and the love of my life, Michael McDuffie; to our darling son, Dorian; to my parents, Natalie Thorington and Nicholas Joukovsky; to my wonderful friends who were early readers and supporters—Jessica Hirschey, Tara Singh Carlson, Jia Tolentino, Defne Gunay, Blake Edwards, Sid Pailla, Josh Cincinnati, Kyle O’Connor and the rest of RyukTV; to my brilliant agent, Sarah Fuentes and Fletcher & Company; to Alyson Sinclair and Nectar Literary; and to my editor, Chelsea Cutchens—I am so deeply honored that of all the potential books that cross your desk, you chose to make mine a reality. Thank you and the whole Abrams/Overlook team—Jessica Focht, Andrew Gibeley, Devin Grosz, Sarah Masterson Hally, Kimberly Lew, Lisa Silverman, Mamie VanLangen, Jessica Wiener, John McGhee, and Janine Barlow—for publishing The Portrait of a Mirror, for publishing it so gorgeously. For making it a work of art, too.
The last word here is reserved for the incomparable Evan S. Thomas, to whom this book is dedicated. To those who loved Evan as I did: I hope you will look on the character of Julian Pappas-Fidicia fondly. To say that Julian was “based” on Evan feels inadequate. My goal was nothing short of resurrection.
APPENDIX A
Anxieties of Influence
Novels & Novellas
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | James Joyce
À rebours | Joris-Karl Huysmans
American Psycho | Bret Easton Ellis
Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy
Atonement | Ian McEwan
Brideshead Revisited | Evelyn Waugh
Changing Places | David Lodge
Complete Works | Jane Austen
Infinite Jest | David Foster Wallace
Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert
Middlemarch | George Eliot
Moby-Dick | Herman Melville
Nightmare Abbey | Thomas Love Peacock
On the Road | Jack Kerouac
Small World | David Lodge
The Age of Innocence | Edith Wharton
The Corrections | Jonathan Franzen
The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Metamorphosis | Franz Kafka
The Picture of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde
The Portrait of a Lady | Henry James
The Secret History | Donna Tartt
Ulysses | James Joyce
Poetry
Aeneid | Virgil
“Delight in Disorder” | Robert Herrick
Divine Comedy | Dante Alighieri
“Kubla Khan” | Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Metamorphoses | Ovid
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” | John Keats
Odes | Horace
Odyssey | Homer
Paradise Lost | John Milton
“The Phoenix and the Turtle” | William Shakespeare
The Waste Land | T. S. Eliot
Philosophy, Nonfiction, Humor, Essays & Criticism
Bernini | Howard Hibbard
Caravaggio | Howard Hibbard
Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist | Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz
Michael and Natasha: The Life and Love of Michael II, the Last of the
Romanov Tsars | Rosemary & Donald Crawford
“My Wedding Hair” | Emma Rathbone
“On Painting” | Leon Battista Alberti
Ovid and the Metamorphoses of Modern Art from Botticelli to Picasso | Paul Barolsky
The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry | Harold Bloom
The Book of the Courtier | Baldassare Castiglione
The Birth of Tragedy | Friedrich Nietzsche
The Power of Glamour | Virginia Postrel
The Theory of the Leisure Class | Thorstein Veblen
“Tradition and the Individual Talent” | T. S. Eliot
“Ulysses, Order, and Myth” | T. S. Eliot
Plays & Musicals
A Midsummer Night’s Dream | William Shakespeare
Antigone | Sophocles
Evita | Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice
Faust | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Hamlet | William Shakespeare
Macbeth | William Shakespeare
Film & Television
A Beautiful Mind | Ron Howard, Akiva Goldsman, and Sylvia Nasar
Chocolat | Lasse Halström and Robert Nelson Jacobs
Cinema Paradiso | Giuseppe Tornatore
Citizen Kane | Orson Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz
Dead Poets Society | Peter Weir and Tom Schulman
Ex Machina | Alex Garland
Family Guy | Seth MacFarlane
Law & Order: SVU | Dick Wolf
Little Women | Gillian Armstrong, Robin Swicord, and Louisa May Alcott
Match Point | Woody Allen
Metropolitan | Whit Stillman
St. Elmo’s Fire | Joel Schumacher and Carl Kurlander
The Da Vinci Code | Ron Howard, Akiva Goldsman, and Dan Brown
The Graduate | Mike Nichols, Calder Willingham, and Buck Henry
The Imitation Game | Morton Tyldum, Graham Moore, and Andrew Hodges
The Princess Bride | Rob Reiner and William Goldman
The Social Network | David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin
You Only Live Twice | Lewis Gilbert, Roald Dahl, and Ian Fleming
APPENDIX B
Soundtrack Supplement
“Sympathy for the Devil” | The Rolling Stones
“Caught by the River” | Doves
“I Heard It Through the Grapevine” | Marvin Gaye
“Diane Young” | Vampire Weekend
“Video Games” | Lana Del Rey
“We Used to Wait” | Arcade Fire
“Welcome Home, Son” | Radical Face
“I’ll Be Your Mirror” | The Velvet Underground
“Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” | Arcade Fire
&
nbsp; “Caravane” | Raphaël
“I Can Only Imagine” | David Guetta feat. Chris Brown and Lil Wayne
“You’re So Vain” | Carly Simon
“Reflektor” | Arcade Fire
“Reflections” | MisterWives
“Torn” | Natalie Imbruglia
“Locomotion” | Carole King
“Lost in My Mind” | The Head and the Heart
“The Sound of Silence” | Simon & Garfunkel
“Pompeii” | Bastille
“Mirror Master” | Young the Giant