The Strangers' Gallery

by Paul Bowdring

  Dr. Devine asked Miranda if she wished to come in to say goodbye. She said no, she didn’t think she would be able to do it. She asked Dr. Devine what they would do with the body. She had heard that in some places the bodies of euthanized animals were given to pet food companies, and she didn’t want that to happen to Dorothy. Dr. Devine assured her that it wouldn’t and asked her where she had heard stories like that. Miranda couldn’t remember—in some magazine or other. Dorothy would be cremated, the veterinarian said.

  Miranda then made a strange request. She said it just popped into her head.

  “Could you put those forget-me-nots in with her?” she asked Dr. Devine, in reply to which, of course, no matter what she thought of it, how much she wanted to plant those seeds instead of incinerating them, the good doctor could only say yes.

  Epilogue

  September 1996

  THE BLUE TULIP

  The May garden owes much of its glory to tulips…every hue save blue…Come fall, we plant a few dozen new bulbs in different locations—or in fresh soil in the old places.

  —Patrick Lima, Portraits of Flowers

  Miranda’s back garden has no grass, only shapeless mats and clumps of vegetation interspersed with mud puddles, gravel, rocks, and stumps—like an urban barrens of berry bushes, scrub, erratics, and shallow ponds. Mine looks almost tropical by comparison, or decaying tropical, as it gets direct sunlight for most of the day. Miranda’s grass has never recovered, perhaps, from the wear and tear inflicted by a family of eight who’d lived in this house for thirty years before she bought it two years ago. The garden is shaded by tall maples as well, and, as it faces northeast, gets only a little early morning sun. The scant plant life has all but faded now, and the children’s broken and abandoned playthings, all handmade, give the garden a neglected, melancholy look. There are rusted swings hanging from an unpainted wooden frame, a three-sided, half empty sandbox, and a toppling tree house, its planks as grey as the maple holding it up, with a plastic skipping rope and a hula hoop hanging from the open door. The gaping mouth of a car tire, like despair itself, hangs by a rope from a low branch of another maple tree. But multifarious wild plants—crocus, dandelion, clover, buttercups, daisies, and forget-me-nots—have shown their small bright faces throughout the spring and summer.

  On the fifteenth of June—Father’s Day eve!—Miranda and I had slept together for the first time, and I awoke at seven-thirty on Father’s Day to what sounded like the faint chirping of birds through the open bedroom window; but it was just Miranda, still sleeping peacefully, her slow breath whistling through her teeth. Will no one tell me what she sings? Sunlight was pouring in through the gently billowing French lace curtains. I got up quietly and put on my clothes to go back to my own house to get ready for work. Walking past the uncurtained hall window, I caught sight of a Wordsworthian host of golden dandelion, a thousand yellow faces looking up at me from beneath the trees, covering the entire garden. Surely, I thought, this is our emblematic plant, our indestructible national flower, not that anti-social, carnivorous bog bitch, the pitcher plant, more animal than plant, which blooms and dies and shows its face to no one, but this…this joyful, convivial perennial, spring’s bright patriot, the spirit of Miles Harnett incarnate, which neither toxic herbicide nor bare-handed serial floracide could ever eradicate.

  A couple of weeks later I awoke there again on another Sunday morning and thought I was seeing, through the translucent lace curtain of the bedroom window, large snowflakes floating in the air. Falling in little pearls of paint on everything, I thought, recalling how someone had described the light in Vermeer’s paintings in one or other of the many books on Dutch art and culture that Anton had brought home from libraries and bookshops to educate me. It might have been “the Murrays” (as Anton used to refer to them, as if they were our next-door neighbours), a crack husband-and-wife team of art historians who had exalted the “poetry” of Vermeer, but were far less impressed by the “sober prose” of the average Dutch master.

  Imagine what Vermeer, “the poet of yellow,” as another art historian had called him, might have done with the dandelion if he’d had a go at them. Instead of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, Vermeer’s Dandelion would probably be the art world’s universal floral icon.

  At the hall window, however, I saw that all the dandelion were gone and the air was thick with dandelion seed, not falling but floating up from the ground below. I felt as if I were witnessing the start of some great migration; or, like Holland’s most famous scientific pioneer, Anton van Leeuwenhoek—the Father of Microbiology, as he’s sometimes called—observing for the first time through one of the hundreds of microscopes he had made himself, a multitude of microscopic life: bacteria, spermatozoa, and red blood cells. Animalcules, he called them, or little beasties.

  “Many very little animalcules, very prettily a-moving,” he wrote in one of his letters to the Royal Society of London. Anton liked to mimic his famous countryman, and not always at the most appropriate of times. He had a childlike fascination with insects, and would, in a singsong version of these words, in any public place, express Van Leeuwenhoek-like glee while down on his hands and knees observing a carpenter creeping across the floor; or affect a glum sort of singsong glee while looking dejectedly at a supper dish—a rijsttafel, most likely—that had turned out not quite right, prompting me to microscopically examine every bite.

  Though Anton claimed to have no interest in science, I think he was bemused and intrigued by the fact that Anton van Leeuwenhoek, another namesake, along with Chekhov and Mussert, had been the first to observe and describe the shape and movement of human seed. There is an extensive archive at the Royal Society documenting his discoveries: a series of letters spanning fifty years, and Anton had read them all during his sojourns in London.

  A seventeenth-century amateur scientist—a draper or an usher by profession—Van Leeuwenhoek would surely have won the Nobel Prize for science, as so many of his professional scientific descendants have done, had he lived in the twentieth century—seven Dutchmen in all, according to Anton. He was born in 1632, the same year as his even more famous countrymen the amateur philosopher Spinoza (a professional lens-grinder) and the amateur painter Vermeer (a professional art dealer and tavern keeper).

  What a year! What an age! What a country! It is estimated that Van Leeuwenhoek designed and constructed about 450 microscopes, only a handful of which still exist. They were even smaller than the human hand. He once made a lens from a grain of sand and used it in a tiny microscope to study a grain of sand. His small, simple, single-lens microscopes had great resolution and magnifying power and were not surpassed until the nineteenth century.

  I spent a few hours in the reference room of the main library after work. In a book on Newfoundland wildflowers, I read that the so-called common dandelion is one of the most successful organisms on the planet. Apparently, the seeds are equipped with a sort of parachute or balloon for high-altitude, long-distance dispersal, and a grapnel to hook on to the soil when they land and germinate. They can travel high up in the jet stream, and airline pilots have spotted them at extremely high altitudes. But they can also travel low down, can survive a trip through the intestines of grazing animals bound for greener pastures. And dandelion don’t need a partner to reproduce! Though they produce large amounts of nectar and pollen, they can reproduce asexually if insects are scarce, as they are in the early spring when dandelion begin to flower. The plant’s renowned hardiness, its resistance to adversity, has made it a medicinal favourite, an all-round tonic, since the Middle Ages: the leaves and buds for salads, the flowers for wine, the roasted roots for coffee.

  Mother was always a great gatherer of dandelion greens. “Boil twice and sprinkle with fried bacon and olive oil,” our wildflower expert-cum-chef recommended. Mother didn’t need any such advice, for she would boil the living daylights out of them. I’m sure whatever nutrients they had went down the drain with the
cooking water. She ate them straight, not even salted or peppered, but I needed at least two of Mr. Heinz’s 57 varieties to get them down.

  That night, in my own bed, I had a dream about Elaine. I was leaving for work on a Saturday morning, and the weekend paper was lying on the steps of the verandah, the front page in dense print, with no headlines or pictures, and it seemed to hold some secret message for me. I walked around the corner of the house to the back garden to say goodbye, but when I got to the back, it was Miranda’s garden I was looking at and not our own. It was late spring, but there was nothing in bloom, no leaves on the trees. Elaine was on her knees on a bare patch of ground, holding a trowel and wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat. A makeshift tray was by her side, her familiar wooden tangerine box, holding seedlings in small peat pots. Although I couldn’t make out what these plants were, I knew what they were. She was planting dandelion! I wanted to laugh, but knew that I shouldn’t. When I spoke her name, she turned her head and smiled at me, sadly, over her shoulder.

  Anton’s black tulips have long faded, and Miranda didn’t paint them after all, but she has produced a very black painting, a strange, Dutch-masterish, Rembrandt-like portrait. Her first painting of a human subject, after a hundred or more “portraits” of flowers, it is of a young woman with long black hair and a sad, sullen expression on her face. She is wearing a white-collared black dress, and in her hands is a single blue tulip—the only colour they don’t come in, according to Anton. When I went over to Miranda’s house for supper this evening, the picture was on the easel in her living room, where she does all her painting. This room, she says, gets the best and longest light. She told me she’d been working on it all summer long. She usually leaves her work-in-progress on display. I wondered why she had been so secretive about this one.

  Now I am certainly no connoisseur or confident critic of art—I’m not even sure I know what I like—but I do like to look at paintings, especially oil paintings. It’s because I’m fond of impasto, Anton once told me. Or rough impasto, as he put it, making it sound like some sort of sexual predilection instead of an aesthetic one. I seem to be drawn to paintings with texture, heavily impasted, with great lumps and swirls and tracks of paint, à la Van Gogh, the first Dutch master to appear after—two hundred years after—the short-lived Dutch Golden Age in the mid-seventeenth century.

  We don’t see many oil paintings these days. Everything but, it seems. They have been replaced by endless varieties of mechanically reproduced prints, along with installations, video portraits, sound sculptures, and performance art. Artists lurk like guerillas in galleries, “at the interface between beauty and the beholder,” talking about making art, or why they can’t make it or won’t make it. Even abstract artists who used to work in oils on real sheets of canvas have drifted into more abstract abstraction, so-called conceptual art. Artists thinking about making art, and using just as much space on the walls for written explications as for the art itself. Artists writing about making art, taking “textual soundings”—the artist as his own critic. I had to read my way through the galleries on my last two visits, wade through “the documentation of the artistic process.” I thought I might have wandered into the Archives by mistake. I go to an art gallery for esthetic pleasure, but I might just as well have been back at work.

  It’s ironic that since the term visual artist has become widespread—the word artist having been appropriated by everyone from acrobats to tattooists (“Your skin, our canvas”)—visual art has spread itself wide and thin, has become much less visual, more aural, oral, conceptual, mechanical, kinetic, documentary, or dramatic.

  Still, having said all that, I must note that my first response to Miranda’s plain, old-fashioned, impasto oil painting was that it was far from beautiful—though, of course, I told her that it was. The Murrays would probably say that it had more of the sober prose of the average Dutch master than the poetry of Vermeer. Her portraits of flowers are far more appealing—more human, strangely enough. And I did not ask, “Who is it?” this bereft-looking young woman turned away from the viewer, gazing into the distance, though perhaps not looking out, but in. Was this “the Vermeer gaze,” attentive but preoccupied, reflective, introspective? Vermeer had learned this from Rembrandt, Anton told me.

  Miranda’s painting reminded me, at first, of Anton’s mother. He had once shown me a small but fine-grained black-and-white photograph of her, enclosed in a tarnished silver locket. No doubt he had also shown it to Miranda. But it might also have been Miranda’s mother, suddenly and unexpectedly taken from her. A black-and-white picture of her mother as a young woman, in an oval wood frame, had pride of place on the mantelpiece. The face in the painting also recalled the portrait, in oils, of the young Mary Travers on the wall of the Travers Tavern on Water Street. I don’t know if Miranda had ever seen that, but perhaps Anton had taken her down there for a drink. Perhaps it was a self-portrait; the eyes were much like her own, though colder, almost accusing. The lightly impasted background, with mere hints of yellows, greys, and blues, seemed to swirl around the solitary figure in black, isolating it, fixing it, and the large, shapeless hands in her lap, holding the blue tulip, anchored everything in a sea of nameless sorrow.

  That night I had another dream about Elaine. She was making a pastry dish—she loved to bake—something savoury, not sweet. Spanakopita, maybe. But this was something special and complex, more than mere pastry. A tapastry, she called it, which was why she needed to use a special table: our two-hundred-year-old Cuban mahogany antique table, I realized, the one we never got around to getting refinished. But in the dream it had been refinished, looked just as it did when Anton and I visited her shop last fall, and though it had been used as our kitchen table while we were together, in the dream I objected to her using it for that purpose again. It seemed we were having a major disagreement about that.

  “A tapastry,” she repeated, as if that settled the case. “Baking is an art. I need a solid, round table.” With a long, thin rolling pin, she began kneading a paper-thin sheet of dough, a phyllo leaf, on the floured table. “Knead, rest, and stretch,” she chanted quietly. “Knead, rest, and stretch.” She was moving around the round table with the big round sheet of dough resting on her forearms and the backs of her hands, stretching it with her knuckles, making it bigger and thinner, till it covered the entire table. Then she held out an open hand like a surgeon to her assistant, and I immediately handed her a brush, a painter’s badger-hair brush—Vermeer had used only badger-hair brushes—and she began to coat the phyllo leaf with paint.

  After that dream, I must have dreamt about Anton, for I awoke to the unmistakable sound of his ankle joint cracking on the hall stairs, like a small dry branch snapping underfoot in the woods. It was a sound I’d heard many times over the past year, when he would wake me up in the middle of the night on his way downstairs to the bathroom or the kitchen. This summer I had been awakened at five in the morning by the continuous, high-pitched beep of the smoke alarms, and I searched the house in a panic for smoke or fire. High humidity had set them off, the electrician told me the next day, after checking what he called my “hard-wired alarums.” Perhaps my personal hard-wired alarum was detecting or expecting the fugitive Anton. The crack of his ankle joint sounded so sharp and clear, I was sure I heard it after I had woken up.

  Labour Day passed, as it should, without any labour. After a very late breakfast—Miranda doesn’t like the word brunch; it reminds her of the sound of mastication—I sat at the kitchen table reading Saturday’s newspaper while she had a long bath. For breakfast, besides waffles, maple syrup, and cantaloupe, we each had a small glass of orange juice and champagne. “One small one shouldn’t hurt,” she said. (She has given up smoking.) She wanted to celebrate having a year off work, a year free from ordinary labour, but there was some extraordinary labour soon to come.

  While I was reading the paper, a wasp came in through a hole in the window screen and flew straight into one of t
he empty champagne glasses as if it knew exactly where it was going. The long-stemmed glass wasn’t completely empty, obviously, and the wasp was so busy in there it almost toppled it. It flew far from straight when it finally came out, did several entertaining spin-top twirls on its head on the kitchen table before tacking off into the living room. I thought of the many thousands of potential wasp-artistes whose careers Anton and I had aborted last September when we destroyed their nest.

  Miranda had an almost childlike fear of wasps and bees, so I followed the fearsome creature into the living room. Standing beside Miranda’s easel, I noticed that her “Dutch” painting had already developed a craquelure effect, as if it had gotten old overnight. Was she using some kind of forger’s paint? I wondered. The wasp had calmed down, seemed to be dozing in the sun on the windowpane, so I captured him with an empty water glass and a Van Gogh Bedroom at Arles cork coaster that were both conveniently at hand on the coffee table—a trick Elaine had taught me—and escorted him outside.

  In the afternoon we went for a walk around the neighbourhood. It was a cool but dazzlingly sunny and windless day. Not everyone had the day, let alone the year, free from labour. A moving van—“Four Strong Men Who Work Quickly” written on its side—was parked in front of Miles’s old house. It had been sold, and perhaps a young family was moving in on the eve of the new school year. Two of the Four Strong Men were rolling a big item of furniture wrapped in heavy khaki cloth up a long metal ramp between the truck and the top of the front steps. The house looked exactly the same, but the old Newfoundland flag—the Pink, White, and Green—had been taken down.