History of Art

by Margaret Luongo

  TIP: If you are jaded, tired, depressed, or middle-aged, through drawing you will see—really see—always as if for the first time.

  NOTES

  1. Herbert S. Zim and Ira N. Gabrielson, A Guide to the Most Familiar American Birds. Golden Nature Guide (New York: Golden Press, 1949), 5.

  2. Zim and Gabrielson, A Guide, 13.

  3. Zim and Gabrielson, A Guide, 13.

  EXILE

  Marie Antoinette Escapes to Ireland

  The dream: A kid glove, tender white, thrown down a rabbit hole. Mist clings to her cheeks. Clouds roll off the bay, bumping over cliffs. The glove emerges—a key. The key, a man’s hand. The doorknob clouds. She rests her head on the wet grass. The clouds roll fast, a carriage to the other coast. Shouts rise behind her. Dew moistens her ear. She digs her fingers into the turf. The glove falls, the clouds race. She wants to let go; she wants to hold on. The clouds’ shadows sweep across her—a corset, a wig, a shoe without a buckle—the hand, cleansed of its work.

  Hameau de la Reine

  I took the boy to her palace to instill some sense of the world’s cruelty. While he went hungry, others had plenty. Rain had washed the blood from the streets, the mobs had dispersed, and nothing had seemed to touch him.

  He sat in the shadow cast by the balustrade, knees drawn up, head tucked. Was he tired? Hungry? Finally, he looked up.

  Why is the giant sad?

  He’d paused by the fountain of Enceladus. Now he wanted an explanation.

  The mighty never expect to fall, I said. When they do it pains them very much.

  More than it does us, he said.

  The pain is the same for everyone.

  A look passed across his face—clouds moving fast. I told him about the goats at le petit hameau.

  It was the queen’s special place.

  Why are there goats?

  Because it pleased the queen.

  At the Queen’s Hamlet, he became besotted with the goats, murmuring and petting, romping, telling them what fine creatures they were. I waited outside the pen, annoyed by his pleasure. He must have sensed my anger because presently he came to the gate and let himself out.

  The queen will be pleased her pets are looked after.

  I reminded him that the lady had met her Heavenly Father. He looked up at me.

  No, Papa. He placed his small hand on my arm, as if to comfort me. She is in another place.

  Which place is that?

  She is at home, he said, with her sisters and brothers. They play games and drink cocoa.

  And what of the queen’s own family?

  The boy raised his hand. No, he said, no. He walked ahead, picked up a branch and swatted the long grass beside the path. Soon he grew tired and asked me to carry him.

  After supper, to amuse my wife, I asked our son again what had happened to the queen. Still weary from our walk, he yawned and rested his head on his arm.

  She sleeps in a fortress on a hill. She will wait until it’s safe.

  My wife sat very still and said nothing. I wondered how he might further embellish the tale, so I asked him again about the queen’s family, her husband the king, their children—A boy about your age, I said, another boy, and a girl.

  He sat up, his pale face twisted into a mask of sudden agony, as if he’d been run through with a pike. Breathless from the shock, he sat frozen in that grimace. When he found his breath, the sound that came forth took mine. His mother stood, overturning her chair. I covered my ears. Tears sprang forth as naturally as if I had been wounded. Eventually his mother gathered him to her and took him off to bed.

  The next morning, he seemed his usual self. We tended the animals, and he was, as ever, helpful and attentive to the various tasks.

  Economy Marie Antoinette

  Practicing the economies of revolution, she has her hair done never. The old wig will do. She goes without most days, tucking her formerly regal locks behind her ears, or bundling it into a knot to pick turnips and lettuce for supper. She works the garden in her petticoat and stays—why waste a gown?—and there’s no one to do laundry but her. How careless she had been of dripping wax, muddy puddles, the earth in the garden. Now she does her own mending, by candlelight, though this she snuffs to avoid rendering fat. Soap—a luxury. She hoards the hard-milled lavender, inhales its aroma deeply: the last cake, and it would have been gone in half the time if not for her husband’s sacrifice. She caught him leaving the cottage that sun-filled morning, having risen in the echo of his footfall on the stair. He stood at the door, rifle cradled in his arm, doorknob in hand. I’ll be back, he said. He tipped his head toward the rifle. Dinner, he said. She let him go. In turning on the stair she paused, as if to call out to him. Instead, she stood still, felt light and transparent as an opening between parted curtains.

  Monticello

  I have ever believed that if there had been no queen, there would have been no revolution.

  —Thomas Jefferson

  My dear Marie-Thérèse,

  I write with news of your playmate and my sweet sister, Polly, who this May found peace with her Heavenly Father and our beloved Mother. Polly spoke of you before her illness, remembering our brief time together in Paris. We mused over Madame Hemings’s uncanny sensibility to bring us together—and her cunning at keeping it hidden from Father. Dear Polly spoke of your kindness. She felt, young as she was, an immediate bond with you, though our meetings were brief and too few. I daresay the bond came in part over our dear mothers—ours lost to us, yours so soon to be lost. She raged at the injustice. She argued with Father. The French people, she said, would have found some other spark to ignite their flame. In fact, she never forgave him for his inaction. She called him a coward. I tell you this only to show Polly’s depth of feeling for you.

  We were in the drawing room, one of the first warm mornings of spring, when the air feels close. Polly was restless, possibly with the onset of illness. She stalked around the room, batting her skirts in an argument with herself. “You could have done something,” she said to Father. He looked up from his book. “I could have, yes,” he said. She paled, and her lip trembled; this was not the answer she expected—nor I—but he was never one to answer an attack.

  “You let a mob destroy them,” she said.

  Father closed his book. “You can’t be certain what transpired. Stories abound.”

  We had heard them all, my dear—all. I hope you were spared.

  I believe she knew the end was near, and she’d made a mental accounting of her life’s great affections. We know what it’s like to lose family; Polly and I were the last of our siblings. She felt your loss as if it were her own—felt it more keenly for wondering about Father’s role. I don’t know if she ever reconciled the love she felt for Father and the great affection she felt for you. We had only one conversation after her outburst, the content of which I pore over, but it bears no relevance here.

  I wish you would come to Monticello. This fantasy eases my conscience for whatever part my father played in your family’s demise. I rest easier simply knowing that you live.

  With great affection and humility,

  Your own Patsy

  Nouvelle-Orléans

  Part of the bucket brigade the first time her new city burned, she worked alongside the concertmaster, her old teacher, heaving tarred-leather buckets of water down the line. Inside, the warping wood groaned and snapped, and a terrible caterwauling of flexing strings, bowed by heat, rose up, up—and subsided in the humid night. He didn’t have a moment to consider her delicate nature—just felt her there, the motion of her torso, pivoting with each bucket. Music would be made again, he knew, even as the wood burned. Later she confessed that the sound of the city burning reminded her of Paris all that long last summer. It hadn’t occurred to her that burning was a way to start anew.

  “Paris was not yours to burn,” he said. They sipped poiré before their pupils arrived.

  “Yet it burned,” she said. She drank from her small glass
and closed her eyes. “I cursed you for stuffing me in that harpsichord. I wet myself.”

  He began to protest, but she interrupted.

  “You punished me. You took me from my family. I rode the street of the condemned. I smelled their blood. I still smell it.”

  “But not your blood.”

  “They were screaming—‘Burn it!’—because they knew it was mine. I hoped to die. Why didn’t they oblige?”

  He gave a modest half shrug. “I told them their sons and daughters would play your instruments.”

  The doorbell sounded with the arrival of her next pupil, the untalented daughter of a well-to-do architect—an ersatz Marie-Thérèse. She opened her eyes and rose. Smoothing her skirts, she strode to the door to answer.

  Clio, the Muse of History, Writes Off History

  Her docket full with men for centuries, she unrolls the queen’s scroll in 1985. Then the washer goes out of balance, her son is expelled from private school, her alma mater taps her for fundraising, and she doesn’t resume work until 1998. By then, so much has been recorded, in every medium. She despairs of the task. Instead, she celebrates women with less history.

  In the twenty-first century, having caught up on women, she revisits Antoinette’s life. She sorts through the intimate moments—private conversations, secret relationships, the girl communing with herself. Some clever humans have imagined for her an inner life, a clandestine life, quite close to the actual: an imaginary figure, yet so thoroughly known. Clio falls asleep at her desk, the cat curled atop the fax machine.

  When she wakes, she knows what to do. She buys a pantsuit and chunky heels, revamps her home office, trashes the fax, goes wireless. Her new line: Foresight. She celebrates the unformed; she tells people where to look. From her position, she sees the leggy preteen in Baltimore, walking home from dance class, whispers through her headset into the cerebral cortex, Prima ballerina, fluent in three languages. To the boy in Düsseldorf, dismantling his brother’s motherboard, Important inventor. To the mother in Stockholm, writing a novel while her son naps, You are a column of fire, searing the conscience of your generation. At a foreign university, to a so-so student of economics—she finds there are many—Your country needs you; revolution is coming!

  She finds the sweetly strung-out youngster under a bridge in Paris, his nose bleeding after a light beating. She thinks of her son, what he could have become. You are a god, my child. Go boldly, shape men! His smile cracks the blood drying on his face as he feels for the knife in his pocket. “Shape” in the figurative sense!—but the timer on the bread machine pierces her consciousness, and she loses the thought. Removing her headset, she sighs and shuffles through the coming month’s press releases. Everything has already been written.

  Versailles, Indiana

  Great-Grandmare I calls her, like a big bad dream or a lady horse. I pretend to know more than I know—French and other things besides—but she won’t speak anyway, French or German, and she never learnt English. The little girls I’ve trained to wait on us: Sally makes petit gâteaux, each one stranger than the last: lavender-ginger poppyseed; mandarin orange with pomegranate glaze; but Great-Grandmère beams at the tower of Lady Baltimore with the glistening butter cream, the white the white of her flesh, powdered smooth in the morning, slick with the glow of her sweat by afternoon. In the garden, she keeps herself covered—big hats and flowing sleeves—but when she bends over, Mon Dieu!—the doughy folds, confections of flesh. Polly makes the tea, calls us to table, and the girls serve us in courses: clear soup, cucumber sandwiches, mussels, raspberries and cream, and always the cake, the cake!—the leftovers we find on trays outside our doors at breakfast, sometimes battered and fried, sticky with caramel. I taste, I only taste, before I’m off—bathed and dressed to make my rounds. I collect the money that is owed. I see Polly sometimes, through a shop window, pale fingers conjuring an item for her pocket—she never gets caught. Who steals mussels? Everything we know we learnt out of school.

  I meet the boys in the park, behind the bushes on the berm. The clouds are pearl-colored, like the pearls in my pocket, Miss Wilson’s, the gray like Grandmère’s eyes. I show them to the boys, Miss Wilson’s French still in my ear. Oh, the lessons! The boys adjust their belts and gel their hair, put a shine on their lips and shoes. I show them pictures of the other Versailles, Not like “sails,” I tell them, but “sigh”—what the clientéle do after shaking the bushes. I have told them of Grandmère’s many escape attempts. I tell them they will still be my boys in the other Versailles, and we practice our French. I feed them leftover cakes and give them gifts: belts and studded collars, white loafers and tight jeans. We wax each other’s bodies clean.

  Switzerland

  To ever be seen through Antoinette’s eyes, as one deserving of riches and grace. To be caught in the beam of her approval, which radiates from her being. A cool hand, despite the warmth of her gaze.

  “You must stay near to me,” she murmurs, pressing my hand to her bosom.

  “I will stay close.” The doctor’s bag clicks shut. She pours me water; the pitcher’s spout clinks against the glass. My husband’s hushed voice as he confers with the doctor: strain. . . long journey . . . delirium and fever. She gathers up her skirts, and sinks down next to me on the bed. I will never again leave her.

  “You—” I try to tell my dear Antoinette, but the pain stabs deeper. I gasp. “You are—”

  “Yes,” she murmurs near my ear.

  “You will always be—”

  “Yes,” she says and kisses my temple, her perfume all around me.

  IN THIS LIFE

  In this life, John Lennon’s parents are American. They don’t know John Lennon is John Lennon; he himself doesn’t know. He suspects—something. He feels special, then foolish for thinking himself so. At the Amtrak station in New Haven, he waits with his parents for the train to Boston. His mother is a good fifteen years younger than his father. This morning when John Lennon passed his parents’ bedroom door he heard a sound—A sob? A gasp?—and paused: and heard nothing more. Now she stands, still and to his left, all three of them staring, silent, at the big board, waiting for his track to be announced.

  He could wear contacts, but he likes to remove his glasses when he feels uncomfortable, as he did in the office of Father George, the guidance counselor. The priest revealed John Lennon’s IQ. Glancing above his glasses, beyond his desk to John Lennon’s foggy form, he pronounced the young man an underachiever. “Not too soon to give a damn, if you have it in you.”

  John removed his glasses then, and in the soft unreality he thought, Berklee, yes: he saw pages of music on a stand, someone’s finger turning them; sitting in the quartet’s embrace and waiting for his part to come around in a closet-sized practice room, lost in a world of sound. When he put his glasses on again, he retreated from the hard edges around him, holding himself carefully, away and still, until band practice. He hadn’t chosen the French horn any more than he had chosen band. He tested well for music; the shy music director blushed over his talent, taught him extra chords during the guitar unit, and invited him to join band, no audition, at a parent-teacher conference. “I need—the band needs—a French horn; a difficult instrument, but in the right hands. . . .”

  Jostling with the other horns, he felt happy and light. Practice alone on the horn felt like the most exquisite kind of loneliness—an extravagant indulgence, to wallow in the feelings of the moment in a self-created miasma or ecstasy. To reunite with his bandmates, to be so vulnerable and alive with them—these were his most intimate moments.

  “You look like fucking James Joyce,” Tully, the first trumpet, told him.

  “James Joyce was an excellent writer,” he said.

  “It’s the glasses,” another horn said.

  “No,” said Tully, “it’s the way he looks uncomfortable all the time. Why do you even play that thing?”

  “It’s as good an instrument as any,” John Lennon said, by which he meant I couldn’t stop
hearing this voice if I tried.

  A regretful moment of reflection passed among the brass, most of whom would be graduating soon. What if they had spent the last four years of their lives engaged in activities that, objectively speaking, were no better or worse than others? They had seen this clearly, all of them, and Mrs. B, the music director, watched the pall descend over the horn section, a pall normally associated only with John Lennon, whose name, in this life, is Max—Max Fitzgerald.

  Max and his father, who goes by Fitz, came near to having a talk before leaving for the station, while Max sat on his bed, packed and listening: the ticking of the pocket watch given him by his favorite relative, Fitz’s delinquent hippie of a sister; the leaves of the maple outside his window rustling in the breeze; the faint peep of small birds; a screaming blue jay; an SUV tossing a low-hanging branch; a child’s cry, so rare he thought, “Which bird is that?” What he really waited for: the sound of his own horn, playing a new tune, things he taught himself outside practice and struggled to know. He was waiting to hear his part of “Autumn Leaves” when Fitz caught him.

  “I’m proud of you,” Fitz said, “and I want you to be happy.” What he meant was, “We’ve invested considerable resources in your development. We expect a return.”

  Max turned to face his father. “I’ll try to do something worthwhile with my life.”

  Fitz, finding himself annoyed that Max could read him so easily, said, “Atta boy. Let’s go. Your mother’s in the car.”

  Max’s mother rarely cries, and when she does, the act resembles primal self-protection, the camouflage practiced by vulnerable wildlife: she sits (or stands) still, unblinking, only the faintest hint of trembling. She practiced her camouflage in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead through the windshield, seeing no further than the panic of the one thought in her mind: If he leaves, I’ll die; I’m dying.