Myla quietly read each chapter heading, her tongue lilting over the vowels. The words reminded her of the titles of the books that had lined the walls of her childhood home; she’d fingered the spines, wondering at the mysterious content of each tome. She closed her eyes and remembered how thick all those books had felt. Thick with pages, and knowledge, and possibility. This was how it felt to hold her father’s book.
She sat up in bed and flattened the manuscript on her lap. She began where she’d begun the other day, and when she reached the end of the first three paragraphs of the section she now knew was called Gaining Perspective, she continued reading. The thrill of her father’s ideas made a patch of hope around her body. Nothing could stop her.
WE GET ON THE AIRPLANE TO New York and I choose the window seat once I convince Myla she’d rather sit by Ruth. David sits in front of us, and every once in a while he turns around and makes sure everything’s okay. It’s the first time I remember being on an airplane. A whole decade ago, when I was just a baby and my mom was still alive, we went on an airplane down to San Francisco to visit her family. But I don’t remember that.
What I remember is maybe the feeling of flying, because when I lift my feet as the plane takes off, the flip in my stomach is familiar. But just when I know how to name it, what to say, we’ve already shot up past the clouds, and the world below is only patches of green. By then the words leave my mind and I have to turn back to the dim humming inside of the plane, to conversation with my family. The lurch, the pull, is gone.
Myla wants to talk about the pictures. Ruth is happy to have a million conversations about them with her. I don’t know why we have to talk about them. The doing seems all that matters; even looking at them feels funny. Myla thinks I don’t want to talk about the pictures because I think she’s vain. But that’s not it. She’s not vain. The pictures make her count all the good and bad things about herself. She wants other people to look at her pictures that way, to have them declare who she is, but I don’t. I just want to be me. I just want the me in the pictures to be left alone. I want to speak for myself. To be.
Ruth keeps trying to talk to me. She asks me about New York and whether I’m excited and I say yes, mostly because I’m supposed to. I’m excited about the city, and David’s saying we can explore some museums and shop at FAO Schwarz. What I’m not excited about is the gallery with all sorts of people standing in front of my picture whispering. What I’m not excited about is sitting in a corner, waiting for Myla to decide she’s bored and wants to go home, like I have for the last hour. What I’m not excited about is the moment when I look up and catch my own eye, across the gallery, on the wall, and remember the particular day—the sun on my back, the song in my head—and know I can never be there again in that perfect bright moment. I’ll be jealous of the me in the picture, warm and alive. It’s a strange thing. Even Myla doesn’t understand.
proof
the two girls are together on a trickling streambed. The older one is in front, and she stands with her feet a shoulder’s width apart, her hands poised on her hips. She looks as if she’s up for a challenge, her chin set in such a way that there’s a trace of rebellion on her face. The muscles in her arms are flexed. Her legs are strong. She has breasts and the fierceness of someone who knows the world, who expects a fight.
The younger one is behind, softer, out of focus. She curls on a rock, a dollop of brightness behind her sister’s sour stance. At first glance you think she’s threatened by the older one’s towering presence in the foreground, but then you see that’s not the case. You look closer and realize she’s content. A smile settles on her face, in the corners of her mouth, and her eyes look lovingly in the older one’s direction.
The older girl is a mammal. You see that she’s guarding the younger one from something unnamed. Not the camera, for she’s obviously comfortable in front of it, knows her way around its edges. Not the viewer. Or at least not you. If you’re looking at this picture, and you’re able to see the protection in her body, then you’re not the person she’s guarding against. It means you have an eye for the girls’ well-being. It means you’re not the one who ends it.
chapter thirteen
steve cleared the last of the dishes from the breakfast table and kissed Myla on the cheek. “You two be good,” he said, chuckling. Apparently he’d noticed Samuel’s move upstairs.
The screen door banged shut, and Myla turned her gaze to Samuel. He was engrossed in the Times crossword, something that had never particularly interested her. In her mind, puzzles had always seemed a waste of valuable research time. But there Samuel sat, closing and opening his eyes, deep in concentration. She watched him for a time, until he looked up at her. He said, “So I guess we aren’t in a fight anymore.”
Myla smiled. “We were never in a fight. We were distant. But if you want to call it a fight, then yes, I guess we’re no longer in it.”
He took a final bite of corn muffin and raised an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t mind if that’s how we make up from now on.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t,” she said, blushing. Her body was flushed with life, touched by her father’s ideas and Samuel’s body. Even the rain outside seemed to convey a brightness she knew other people probably weren’t seeing. She felt lifted by language, by wanting to tell Samuel all sorts of things. Words were ready to tumble out.
Samuel set down the crossword. “Do you want to go back upstairs? I’ve been feeling distant from you for, oh, the last forty-five minutes or so.”
“Let’s take a walk.”
He shrugged. “Not the answer I was hoping for.”
“It’ll be better after the walk,” Myla said, standing up.
He groaned in complaint.
“Think of the distance we will have established by then,” she teased, smiling at herself as she went to put on her jacket. Pulling her bag onto her shoulder, she giggled at how effortless this flirting was. Samuel followed her and kissed her against the front door. She managed to find the doorknob behind her. “Your methods of persuasion won’t work on me. Besides, I have something to tell you. A secret.”
Outside, the rain was hard to distinguish from the gray sky. Samuel squinted up at the clouds and said, “Umbrella?”
Myla laughed. “No native Oregonian would ever be caught dead with an umbrella. Especially on a day like today. This? This is nothing.” She stepped off the porch. “Unless you’re scared of a little water . . .”
“No, I relish being soaked to the bone. But in case it starts raining any harder . . .” He picked up a small umbrella resting by the door and put it in his jacket pocket.
Steve and Jane’s house was only a couple of blocks from the lookout point above Oaks Bottom. Standing on the lip of the lookout, one could see the marsh below, and beyond it an old-fashioned, still-intact amusement park where Steve had taken them when they were kids. Beyond that unfurled the ribbon of the Willamette River, then the buildings of downtown Portland. The West Hills rose dark green behind Portland, glowering and brightening with each passing cloud. This place, where they were standing, displayed the wide vistas Myla was craving.
Looking out over the city, she told Samuel about the mysterious manuscript. She told him about its unknown origins, about the bright bird that had seemed to summon Tim the librarian, and the smell of the manuscript, the weight of it, the familiarity of her father on each page. She told him she wasn’t ready for Steve or Jane to know about the book’s existence. She didn’t look at Samuel as she spoke, almost couldn’t look at him, because she felt that such sight might break the spell of this conversation. She wanted to trust him, but she trusted her own words more. She needed to do whatever she could to speak.
“And have you read it yet?” Samuel asked when Myla finally came to a resting place.
“This morning. I read a hundred and fifty pages. You were sleeping.” She could look at him again as she was brought back around to her memory of him curled up beside her.
“And?”
She took a deep breath. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read. He calls it an essay, but it’s five hundred and eighty-one pages long. He uses very familiar language, accessible language. He makes it clear that he wants this to be a book anyone can read. And I know my father: he thinks it’s a book that everyone should read.” Myla shook her head and smiled. “It looks as if he’s read everything, and not just to agree with someone else’s point of view. He’s scrutinized every piece of art ever made—I’m exaggerating, of course—but I mean that he leaves no stone unturned if it will help him shape his ideas. Because that’s essentially what he’s doing: shaping ideas, small arguments, into a huge, sweeping theory.”
“What are some of the arguments?”
Myla slipped the pages out of her bag. A few drops of water splotched down on the cover page, and she brought the papers up to her chest, under her jacket.
Samuel gamely pulled the umbrella from his pocket and sheltered her with it. “I hope I’m not going to get you arrested by the rain police,” he joked. Then he lifted his head, shouting out to the city: “One Oregonian over here, risking her reputation for a little shelter! Send out the squad cars! Alert the media!” He grinned down at Myla, and she couldn’t help but laugh.
Then she looked down at her father’s manuscript. “Okay. So the book is called Spectacular Futures: How Art Makes Up Our Minds. What he means by that is pure David: he believes that humans think they shape art, but that’s not necessarily true. Art shapes them. At the very least, it’s a reciprocal relationship.”
“I like the title,” Samuel said. “I’ll be lucky if my first book is called Samuel Blake Thinks About American Culture. But enough about me. How does he launch his theory?”
“Well, his first assertion is pretty direct: he says that straight lines are a human invention. They’re not visible in nature; the human mind made them up.”
“Is that true?”
“Well, look around.” She spread her gaze across the great vista before her. She had to admit that at least from this view, the only visible straight lines were those that edged the downtown buildings, or spined the bridges over the Willamette River, or tightened the telephone lines. Angles and lines were attached to the human. Messiness and unpredictability rose from the natural world.
“So what does he say next?” Samuel asked. “There are a lot of words there.”
As the rain let up, they started walking the edge of the lookout, winding their way into the suburban village. Old trees towered up from the backyards of wooden bungalows. Myla was explaining: “He says that the straight line, or linearity, began to colonize architecture. Human space began to be rationalized and regularized, and artists, naturally, depicted human space the way it looked to them. Once you live inside straight lines, you begin to see along them. Which heralds the invention of perspective.”
“Wait, so he’s saying that before the straight line was ‘invented’ by some prehistoric man, people didn’t see the same way we do? They didn’t see the world with perspective?”
She shrugged. “It’s not just about seeing. It’s about a whole way of life. David argues that the invention of the straight line had a huge philosophical impact on Homo sapiens. He cites cave paintings as an example of how art worked before the straight line: early peoples drew the stories of their hunts with no depiction of the ground beneath their feet. They drew one man hundreds of times, moving from moment to moment. And David believes that points not to a lack of sophistication but rather to philosophical differences between their lifestyle and ours. He maintains that much of the philosophical shift owes itself to the invention of the straight line.” She paused. “Even today countless aboriginal artists favor a nonlinear perspective.”
Samuel was smiling. “So David’s seeing the development of art and the development of human consciousness as essentially the same thing. He sees them as inextricably linked.”
“Yes,” said Myla. “One example: he takes the idea of the single motionless viewer, gazing at a canvas depicting a single moment in time, and shows how Alberti used that concept to invent Renaissance perspective. That’s the perspective we know and love—you know, the one with straight lines, lines we know are parallel, running from the corners of the painting back to a single point, the vanishing point, right in the center of the picture. And that’s where we come into it. I mean, essentially he’s saying that we’ve based Western art on the idea of perspective, but that the concept of perspective is not a given. It’s as much an invention as the straight line.”
Myla watched Samuel as he wrestled with what she’d just said. “So he’s talking about our desire for the real. He’s trying to look at truth and how we see it. He’s arguing that there can be no objective visual truth, because we’re always looking through the filter of culture, and the filter of human consciousness, and probably a dozen other filters besides.”
Myla wanted to rejoice. “Exactly! Exactly.” She leafed through the pages she’d been clutching to her chest. “Listen to his ideas at the end of this section:
“‘This depiction of ideally organized space was not inaccurate, but it discarded other versions of what, by seeming valid, seemed real. To see was to believe; the eye became the privileged arbiter of truth. The rule of the line determined what could be known. Reality depended on the line.’”
“It’s certainly rich with implications,” said Samuel, and he took Myla’s hand. They’d been circling through the neighborhood and were heading toward the center of town. “The rule of the line determined what could be known,” he repeated. Myla felt her father’s ideas swirling around her. And Samuel’s hand was warm.
DAVID TAKES ME TO THE Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is on Fifth Avenue. There are twenty-eight steps you have to climb just to get to the front door, and then you enter a place like a big marble ballroom. Once you’ve bought your tickets and folded the candy-blue metal button over your collar, you walk up this fancy staircase with twenty-three steps, and then there’s a place to rest, and then twenty-three more steps. It’s like a palace inside. David tells me there’s more art in this museum than he or I could even look at. And then he laughs and says, “Imagine that, Pru, imagine how many people for how many years have made all this art. And we’re the luckiest people because we get to see it.”
He takes me to the Nineteenth-Century European Paintings and Sculpture Galleries—that’s what it says on his map. When we first walk in, there’s this big painting of a lady, and her eyes watch you when you move. It’s like she’s in charge of making sure the right people can come in. Then David says, “Ooh, wait until you see this.” He takes me to a little room that seems hidden away. Outside the door is a metal ballerina dressed in real clothes and with a real ribbon in her metal hair. She’s so still that it makes me think about holding still for Ruth’s camera. And then we go inside the little room and it’s like being inside a wooden and glass box. The air is cool on my face. Behind the glass are all of these horses, small sculptures, running and jumping and prancing and standing still. It’s funny, because I know they’re just sculptures, and of course they can’t move, but the horses look alive. They look alive and miniature, and I want to have one for my own, but I could never choose which one. I wish Ruth had come to the museum with us, because I know she’d like to see how they’re alive in the same way that her photographs of horses are alive.
Also in the room are these miniature dancers. But they aren’t holding still like the ballerina outside. They have their legs in the air, and they’re bending over, and they’re stretching. And if you turn your head, it seems like they’ve moved when you weren’t looking. David says all the sculptures are by Degas, even the ballerina outside, and it’s funny to see how one man could make sculptures both so still and so ready to jump and move and play.
David says, “Let’s go to my favorite room.” He takes my hand and we go through room and room and room. We walk by a painting of a little girl named Marguerite and she has buggy eyes. I’m glad my eyes don’t l
ook like that, even though I know it’s mean to think that. Then we get to the room David’s talking about. He lets go of my hand like he can’t hold on to anything while he’s looking at these paintings, and that’s how I know we’ve arrived. He makes a sound like a waterfall through his lips.
“It’s called Cypresses, and it’s by—”
“Van Gogh.” I saw the sign, but I also knew it had to be by him just from walking toward it.
“Good eye,” says David. The painting is thick, like it has hands pulling out to me, asking me to walk closer, to touch it. I know enough about museums to know that isn’t allowed, but I also know enough about being David’s child to know he’s thinking the same thing I am.
“Pru,” he says, “there are things you need to know about painting, and then there are things you need to know.”
“What do you mean?” I ask him.
“You know how you thought those tiny dancers sculpted by Degas looked alive? That’s the word: alive. And you’re right; they do look as if they could leap and twirl right out of that glass case!”
He beams down at me and squeezes my shoulder. “Well, most art critics and historians use the word ‘real’ when what they really ought to be saying is ‘alive.’ I think just about every artist who ever lived is making art for one main reason: to show what it’s like to be alive, what it’s like to be really here.”
He stops talking for a minute, and I think he’s going to start saying things about van Gogh, because he’s just standing in front of the painting and nodding at it. But instead he asks me a question. “Did you see anything else today that seemed particularly alive, Prudence?”
I nod because I’m thinking of a statue of a man, a big naked statue made out of marble, with a broken-off nose. I tell David, and he nods and laughs. “Good, good. He was Greek, and looked as if he could breathe or toss a ball. We’re a lot like the Greeks.” Then he asks another question. “What about the medieval church paintings, you know, the ones with Mary and the baby Jesus, the ones in that long gallery we walked through? Did they look real to you? Alive in the same way the dancer did?”
The Effects of Light Page 17