Metropolitan Stories

by Christine Coulson

  James J. Rorimer

  Director

  Edith had heard about the momentous loan from the French government in a docent lecture she once attended. Da Vinci’s masterpiece was shown in the Medieval Hall against a deep burgundy velvet curtain in what looked like a puppet theater. People came in droves, with crowds spilling out of the museum and stretching for blocks, despite harsh winter conditions. Once inside, visitors were ushered past the painting and encouraged not to stop, as armed Marine guards yelled: “Keep the line moving!” “No standing!” “Keep moving!” “Get along!”

  The docent had ended with an apocryphal story about a boy who waited in line for hours. When the moment arrived for him to stand before the picture, the boy opened his coat—to show it to his puppy.

  There had also been the cartoonish claim that the actual Mona Lisa never went back to the Louvre, and what was now on view in Paris was only a copy.

  But a painting with its own Secret Service detail doesn’t get lost going through the Met. Edith had only seen the sealed door to the legendary Storeroom One, but she knew that every work of art that had ever entered or left the museum went through that sacred space near the basement loading dock. Nothing was ever lost.

  The Mona Lisa memo was likely the only correspondence that the Rubber Band Man ever received from any Director of the Met during his decades at the museum. It was touching that he kept it for so many years. A memo from Michel Larousse would likely have the same effect on her.

  As Edith settled into her discovery, she fixed upon the doors in the room. She tried to open the one opposite the entrance, but it didn’t budge; it was only an illusion within the design. She then approached the door behind the desk—the one that seemed to be part of a large cabinet—and unlatched the cardboard handle from the substantial holder that curled around it like a small hand. The door immediately released on its rubber band hinges. It swung open until it hit the back of the desk, which Edith then moved to the side.

  As the door stretched fully open, an interior light turned on, illuminating the cabinet’s contents resting on a shallow shelf. And there it sat, as iconic and trite as a postcard image, but much bigger and, well, more charismatic.

  “What the hell…,” she wondered to no one. It was a curious shrine in the otherwise pristine environment, and an odd, hidden tribute to such a clichéd work of art. “I guess he was really excited when that thing came to town…,” Edith mumbled to herself, as she looked more closely at the painting.

  The picture was unframed, less than two feet across and maybe two and a half feet high—an inch-thick panel simply propped against the recessed wall that had been crafted to make the cabinet. Edith instinctively picked it up and flipped it over expecting to see more cardboard, more illusion. But it was solid: an ancient, worn piece of wood. She remembered reading that sixty-one copies of the Mona Lisa existed all over the world. Maybe sixty-two, she thought.

  On the back, an uppercase letter H was written in one hand and the number twenty-nine scrawled in another; “L Joconde” sat like a signature on the upper left. The remains of dried paper tape outlined the edges of the panel and three lines of an old label were stuck along the top section: “des Tableaux à Versailles” in archaic type and the rest “…du Directeur” written in someone’s timeworn scribbled French. A red stamp with a crown and fleur-de-lis read MR No. 316.

  Two odd shapes were cut from the panel itself, one filled with wood, the other with a strip of linen; they looked like abstract butterflies, stacked and connected vertically by another piece of linen.

  Edith turned it over again, confronting the image itself, and almost felt a breeze as the portrait registered in her eyes once more. From the front she could see that the panel was split from the top of the picture, the cleave luckily stopping at the sitter’s hairline so as not to corrupt the famous face. The strange butterfly shapes on the back were likely an attempt to address this split. A web of delicate cracks extended over the painting’s entire surface.

  A sensation glowed from the painting, golden and warm and insistent, a true soul rather than a tired tourist attraction. It hummed with a unity and balance, an intangible clarity that vibrated just below the artist’s diffused rendering.

  It seemed to carry the weight of centuries.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Edith said, this time loudly. Her heart began to race, signaling both her own confusion and the feeling that she had wandered into something at once deeply poetic and profoundly complicated. She put the painting back briskly, not wanting to get caught with it in her hands. Any scholar could confirm what Edith now instinctively knew: She had just touched the Mona Lisa.

  How did this happen? What was sitting in the Louvre? Impossible.

  But there it was.

  For all the magic of the Rubber Band Man’s constructed world, this was real.

  Edith’s first instinct was to leave. She thought irrationally about fingerprints and evidence, the project of counting the bags, and her chance to make a mark. “Well this should do it,” she mused, appeasing the competing directions that willfully pushed at her.

  She took a deep breath and couldn’t help but smile at the cleverness of the whole thing. The quiet revolution of paper, scissors, and the world’s most famous painting. A magnificent life devoted to a pure and constant beauty.

  Was Constantine Srossic so different from the curators who tended to their galleries with the same love and precision? The painting never actually left the museum.

  There was a storm ahead, to be sure. Science and experts would confirm what seemed to burst from the painting unsolicited. There was a tale to be told, a mystery to be solved, and a good chance that no one would give a shit about shopping bags anymore.

  But for now, Edith would just sit in Constantine Srossic’s paper palace and delight in its miracle—like it was her own private world, her own exquisite dream. A slice through a paper façade, revealing the glorious shape of an anonymous existence. The tender defiance of a tiny giant, tucked deep within the Met’s own mountain.

  Edith would forever hold this moment like a curator would hold the Mona Lisa itself—as something precious and monumental and far bigger than its humble history. That day was the real beginning of her Met career. She would walk along that basement corridor for another twenty-six years, each day cut and folded by the belief that just beyond the museum’s worn paths and daily rituals, there lies the possibility of something wholly unimaginable.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It took twelve months to write this book after thinking about it for twenty-three years. I am grateful to the Metropolitan Museum for allowing me a yearlong sabbatical in 2017 to get the words finally out of my head. My earliest supporters were a group of exceptional women who gave me the courage to make that leap: Deborah Needleman, Annabelle Selldorf, Julie Burstein, Rosemarie Ryan, Emily Rafferty, and Andy McNicol.

  Along the way, I had many terrific readers: Alice Attie, Deeda Blair, Andrew Bolton, Julie Burstein, Steven Estok, Michael Gallagher, Andrea Glimcher, John Habich, James Kaliardos, Maira Kalman, Christopher Noey, Russell Piccione, Jennifer Russell, Leanne Shapton, Andrew Solomon, Martin Solomon, and Stephen Yorke. Their encouragement and questions made all the difference.

  Hilary Leichter Griffin, my phenomenal editor during my sabbatical year, pushed the text in all the right places and pushed me at all the right moments.

  My magnificent publisher, Judith Gurewich, understood the book immediately and has the most finely tuned editorial ear in existence. Reading my book to her over the phone day after day allowed me to see what only she could hear. Her team at Other Press is superb and unrivaled. The amazing John Gall designed the book’s cover, nailing it on the first try.

  Residencies at the American Academy in Rome and the Shoichi Noma Reading Room at the New York Public Library were crucial during my sabbatical, as were the New York Society Library, the Bobst Library at NYU
, and the Met’s own Thomas J. Watson Library. The wonderful Kathleen Gerard lent me her son Rupert’s room so I could write on Shelter Island.

  Even in fiction, the truth is sometimes critical. At the Met, I had the help of Jim Moske and Barbara File in Archives, where I discovered small details like Jacob Rogers’s address and the memo to the staff after the Mona Lisa’s visit to the Met in 1963. The memo in “Night Moves” about the guards in the closet is also real and was passed to me by a colleague years ago. The description of Jim Campbell’s Walking Man video in “The Talent” comes from the outstanding catalog entry written by Doug Eklund, Curator of Photographs, one of the Met’s most brilliant minds. And I am grateful to Tom Scally, Buildings General Manager, who generously escorted me through the tunnels beneath the museum, which I had not seen in more than a decade.

  If I could thank each individual member of my Met family I would, but you are far too many in number, a sky full of stars. I will always remember the time captured in this book as our own Lake Wobegon days: All the women were strong, all the men were good-looking, and all the children were above average.

  And finally, there are no greater champions of this writer than my three Cs. You are my greatest loves and fiercest defenders. Every word is for you.