Impossible Views of the World

by Lucy Ives

  For Bonnie, there is a kind of extra truth to the hands metaphor, which point I won’t belabor, except to say that her need of others was probably, in the end, what made her such a star. You have to be like this, somehow. You simply cannot be self-sufficient and have this job. It does not work like that.

  From what I understand, Bonnie lost her hand when she was an adolescent, maybe eleven years of age. She is not the one who told me this story, so it is possibly apocryphal, certainly part of the lore that surrounds her. It was a hunting accident. She was somewhere remote with her father, northern California or Washington State. He was some kind of heir/environmentalist. I had never heard of him, Konrad Mangold, but I guess he had written an early essay on pop ecology that showed up in Playboy and was a big deal at the time. It was the late fifties. The legend is that he would take Bonnie out with him into the country, and they would live off the land. You’re supposed to imagine that they had a Land Rover and a smartly kitted cabin that used to belong to a senator, that Konrad took field notes in watercolor, killed and cured his own venison, read the stars. But, to make a long story short, Konrad shot off four of the fingers on Bonnie’s left hand one blazing July noon, and because they were at such a remove from modern medicine, Konrad decided on a genre of field dressing he claimed had been engineered in the Black Forest in the first weeks of spring 1945, a glorified tourniquet no doubt, since when they were at last able to access a professional, the whole hand had to go.

  It is from this strange event, as I have perhaps already suggested, that all of Bonnie’s power comes. The guilt of a wealthy, virile dad was subsequently manipulated by young Bonnie, and I do not think that she has stopped getting what she wants since. It is not worth nothing to have had an early loss like this, to have thought unflinchingly through it.

  [ 4 ]

  Fred’s latest show title, “Land of the Limner,” dredged up an anachronistic term and broadcast it worldwide, pretty much sans context. I was not sure how much I admired this plan. I was in possession of a pretty carefully cultivated fear of the public’s uncooperativeness, but my trepidation was not always shared by the more entitled of my colleagues. It was, at any rate, Fred’s baby and therefore inviolable.

  The word limner has a weird pre-American history: Derived from Middle English limnur, indicating in the fourteenth century an illuminator of manuscripts, it came, in the sixteenth century, to be associated with the production of watercolor-on-vellum miniatures, which was strictly a leisure activity and nobody’s job. By the 1570s, limnings were a popular form of recreational portraiture in England, exempt from the control of the guild of the Painter-Stainers Company because of their association with nonprofessional image making, i.e., rich people’s fun. Limnings, as miniature portraits, showed up in the colonies of New England before the invention of the mezzotint engraving technique and so were one of the only formats for the transatlantic transmission of portraiture for imitation and reproduction by incompetent Americans. Limnings were obsessive little things. They emphasized particulars of costume and facial features, contributing to the development of early New England’s cramped portrait styles and a sense of what painted faces should look like, i.e., heinous.

  When the word came at last to refer to an actual American painter, a limner, it indicated an itinerant artist who was self-taught. Limners produced works characterized by flatness and fields of bright or otherwise unmixed color. The appearance of flatness was not solely due to an inability on the part of the artist to employ perspective and modeling but also to the origin of the image, in part or in sum, as a preexisting print, usually an engraving of some kind, or, later, a photograph. The limner moved from town to town, making portraits of adults, children, and sometimes pets. The work was commercial and not always strictly defined. Limners were aligned with (and sometimes did the same things as) decorative painters, engravers, carriage painters, sign painters, cabinetmakers, glazers, brush makers, painters of floor cloths, and inventors, among other freelancers. Limners necessarily advertised in local newspapers, therefore, offering their varied services, sometimes along with a promise to refund clients not entirely satisfied with the likeness produced.

  Anyway, it was to the creation of a definitive list of paintings that would be exhibited in this show, of the limner and his “Land,” that I had been dispatched. Already out with respect to the window were concerns about Paul Coral’s privacy, professional and otherwise, plus any consideration regarding how he might feel about me doing what was, for all intents and purposes, still his job. I wanted to laugh a little. Additionally, no one seemed to care whether or not I understood why I was doing what I was about to be doing, which was sort of priceless. Evidently, it was assumed that my fealty to the department was such that I either already knew what was up due to grapevine machinations (true) or was not concerned, thanks to unconditional devotion. I arrived at the door to Paul Coral’s office. It was unlocked.

  I proceeded to do my job. I ensconced myself in Paul’s peeling midcentury Naugahyde lounger. I fired up his PC. I collected pertinent dimensions, materials, and provenance for a list of some forty works, beginning with the stiffly blushing maidens favored by patroon limners who sold their services to Dutch ranchers of New York in the eighteenth century, passing through the paradisiacal imaginings of photographer and full-time Christian fantasist Erastus Salisbury Field, and concluding with the advent of modernism. I threw this shit together in Word, resized Ozen’s images for her, dropped them in, then printed to PDF. I composed a measured email to Bonnie and scheduled it, document attached, to be delivered at 3:16 P.M.

  Then I did a lot of other things. Upon entry to the office I had promptly locked the door. Though it was the case that this gesture on my part was likely to arouse suspicion in anyone attempting to enter the space suddenly, I could always chalk up my gesture to accident, claim ignorance of the way in which Paul’s doorknob functioned, burst into tears. I could present myself as harried and visibly shaken by the intrusion. I could express annoyance and behave in a distracted manner. I was meanwhile copying the contents of Paul’s account onto a thumb drive.

  And not only this: I knew that I did not have time to go through Paul’s filing cabinets. But to tell the truth I was not overly concerned with the deep history of Paul Coral’s career. What I wanted to understand was the contemporary era. I wanted to understand why Paul was, so obviously and very nearly loudly, doing nothing at all, all the time. Because what this indicated to me was that Paul Coral was in fact doing something else, and that he was doing a lot of something else, and that all of his efforts to appear un-or underoccupied were actually a way of hiding in plain sight, as it were, his real business.

  I did allow myself to go through the top drawers in his desk. There was not so much here: a dried sprig of lilac, a nickel, and a yellow pebble. Well, and there was also a plastic lanyard to which was attached a ring of three keys. I might have pondered this act, but for some reason history and the laws of physics conspired to render events such that I did not ponder this act. I simply removed the keys from the back of the metal drawer and placed them in my pocket. This was how it happened.

  And there was something else. There was a piece of paper floating loose in the shallow central top drawer of the desk, the space normally reserved for pens. This piece of paper had been folded into a smaller square and then unfolded and refolded multiple times, as if someone had been in the habit of carrying it around in the breast pocket of his shirt. It was an image, on a legal-size sheet of paper. It was in the drawer facedown and so I extracted it, turned it over. In an eerie echo of Bonnie’s earlier citation of my so-called skills, it was a xeroxed reproduction of an image of a map.

  It was also one of the more astonishing images I have ever seen.

  This map, titled “ELYSIA” in an intricately linked script, showed a township near a river. I studied it. It had not been drawn up by someone whose exclusive business was the making of maps, as evidenced by the extreme, one might say exquisite, detail of
the forest areas outlining the town. These wilds were portrayed not from overhead but from the side, seen as by someone on the ground, trunks beneath a full canopy. Birds no bigger than the heads of pins flitted here and there, and quadrupeds cavorted amiably.

  But the author’s true skill was revealed in the image of the town itself. Its buildings were small, hutlike, and precious. The structures were all similar, but each was exquisitely unique, with peaked roofs and elaborately carved, domed doorways, frilled window frames fitted with leaded glass. What appeared to be glittering mirrors, crystals, diamonds, or some other type of decorative article were fixed in numerous surfaces and dangled from the buildings’ winsome eaves. A select number of arteries, passing between and among the varied lots, had minute names in a fine script I could just make out: Metzotinto ln., Landskip ln., Frieze strt., Fret-Work brdr., Stair way. In the adjacent waters the words The River Hudson had been inscribed in curling italic characters as supple as wet black hairs. Pointillist waves flexed decoratively alongside.

  “It might be the work of a silversmith,” I muttered, speaking aloud for the first time in several hours. I was squinting to read what looked to be a poem. This text was contained in a sort of ornamental lozenge bordered with pleated ribbons and tiny seashells, indicating the author’s lingering interest in the rococo revival contemporary with the nation’s secession from England.

  I selected a rectangular magnifying glass from a coffee can containing pens, etc., on Paul’s desk and switched on its small recessed light.

  Where is this paradise you seek,

  A place where no one mourns,

  And nothing irreplaceable is lost,

  And nothing lost is irretrievable?

  Where is this paradise you seek,

  With tears dry and wrongs righted,

  Where nothing that occurs in dreams

  Knows human fear or cruelty?

  Where is this paradise you seek,

  Dear seeker, careful one, lover of the world?

  Where is this paradise you seek?

  Where is this blessed Elysia?

  I switched off the magnifier and gazed again across the surface of the reproduction. The town was an eerie item, a hermetic shape hewn from the wilderness or perhaps simply discovered there, once all the trees had been razed, like a divine brand or promissory seal set down on a bald patch of Eden.

  I swallowed, blinked. I was, for some reason, having a sort of feeling. I was becoming supremely, lustrously psyched. I didn’t know what this thing was, or why Paul had it, or what any of this meant. But the map was stirring and peculiar. It was abnormal and naïve. And it appeared to be very, very good. This meticulous image might even have been created for the sole purpose of visual seduction. Exhibit one: I, an expert in American graphics, was well in its thrall. And I thought through the poem again, tried to listen to the tinny, phantom music, muttering, “Dear seeker, careful one, lover of the world …” I shut my eyes. I wanted to walk around inside this picture.

  As with all moments of intense temptation, I went rapidly on to be completely blind to both my own brazenness and my own wish. In a quick snatching movement, I had folded up the photocopy and slipped it, of all places, into my bra. Why dawdle? Anyway, it was something like four P.M. and I hadn’t eaten anything plus I still had a whole day’s worth of email to attend to.

  By six P.M. it was clear that I was not going to succeed in getting my act together on this particular day. I was at my desk and the emails were piling up unattended. Letting certain recent major errors stand, I was now privately obsessing over a minor one, which is to say my seizure of the map. My initial pronouncement that the map might have been engraved by a silversmith was based on nothing more than the likeness of the overwrought script used for the map’s title to a certain script one sees on hollowware of the period. Really there was no reason to assume that the individual who had engraved the plate that had produced the map of Elysia was a silversmith. Certainly he was not a mapmaker, that much was clear, but he (and I do regret the historical facts that force me to assure you that “he” was indubitably a he) knew his way around an etching after a fashion that made me think that he must have been academically trained, which is to say, in Europe.

  Most works of this period are pretty predictable. And what was catching my eye here wasn’t accuracy but rather detail. The delineation of shadow and the dappling of shadow on the miniature forest floor, which one could just perceive at the wood’s fringe, were spectacular. Deer and rabbits surprised in the midst of their grazing looked up, tiny fringed ears erect. Leopards pranced behind narrow trunks—how they had arrived on the North American continent in time for the creation of this chart, I did not know. Grapes dangled invitingly. To be fair, the Dionysian park was not really very American at all, though there was the occasional pheasantlike fowl spreading its tail feathers, and beaver likewise shared the peaceable kingdom. There were beasts in excess and some that had never existed. In one hollow, a winged snake made its nest in an intricate basket of scavenged twigs.

  I obsessed over the minuscule scenes, caressed the xerox, smelled and very nearly licked it. There was one grotto, dim and even more difficult to make out than the rest, in which I thought one could spy two human forms, pale and entangled in embrace, but this might just have been an error of the stylus, toying with my curious eye.

  I would likely have continued in this vein for several hours more had there not been a blunt banging sound indicating that Bonnie was employing her left hand to knock at my door and that I therefore had approximately three seconds to slap my MacBook down over the map, no doubt jeopardizing its vulnerable hard drive.

  Bonnie let herself in and announced that she was not displeased with my work. Evidently, she had received my email. She informed me that if I had meaningful research to do this week, then she hoped I’d cut myself some slack and get to it.

  I think, by the way, that this is what many people long for, generally speaking, in a boss. Or a mentor. I guess “long” is probably too strong a verb, but, then, I was quite happy. I even did a little affective jig, beamed up at her, such was the collegial mood.

  “And this is what you’ll be wearing tonight for the gala?” She was looking me up and down where I sat. I should note, too, that the longer she remained in my office, the freer Bonnie seemed to feel to forget our not entirely unfriendly moments of yore. She was hovering, now scanning the stacks of maniacally annotated academic articles on my shelves.

  “Oh shoot!” I said. I tried to laugh it off. “I’ve been so blindsided by these developments …” I made no effort to complete the sentence.

  Bonnie let this outburst lie where it had ignominiously fallen. “Well, I hope you have a date.”

  There was something else pissing Bonnie off, but it wasn’t going to be possible to know what that was, that much was written on the wall.

  “Sure,” I informed her.

  Bonnie performed a curt smile for my benefit. If I hadn’t known her better, I would have said that she was privately enduring some sort of mental torment. “See you downstairs.”

  She disappeared, leaving in her wake an open door, which I rose to softly close.

  Sometimes it is best to assume that one is not the unique cause of others’ anger and/or unease. I will not say that it is always best to make such assumptions, but under normal circumstances one can generally decide that the unhappiness of others is due to effects independent of, and likely unknowable to, oneself.

  With this in mind, I distracted myself by researching the underwriter of the gala I was about to attend, ready or not. In the bathroom, I consulted Wikipedia on my phone while I changed into something less comfortable. I had time for two numbing grafs:

  GDF WANSEE is a leading Belgian-based multinational corporation headquartered near Brussels,[1] with operations in water, water treatment and desalination, and waste management. In the early 2000s WANSEE also encompassed American telecommunications assets, but has since divested these.[2]

&nbs
p; History[ edit ]

  WANSEE is one of the world’s oldest continuously operated multinational corporations. Traceable to the 1822 founding of the Algemeene Nederlandsche Maatschappij ter begunstiging van de volksvlijt (literally: General Dutch Company for the privileging of people’s industry) by King William I, WANSEE emerged when, in 1859, a branch of the Dutch consortium joined the French-and Egyptian-controlled Canal Company, or Compagnie universelle du canal maritime égyptienne.[3] Its current name comes from involvement of the shipping corporation Van Der See BV.[4] It is thought that GDF WANSEE’s long service is due to its remarkable prescience with respect to international water crises.

  “‘Prescience with respect to,’” I said to no one in particular. “Ha!” Engineering of was more likely. But WANSEE’s success was also apparently due to its ability to distract detractors with social occasions and I was (a) talking to myself and (b) about to be late to this evening’s circus.

  I privately, to myself, called the look I had on my “late sixties look.” It wasn’t a particularly inspired choice of meme, but there’s something about dressing slightly conservatively when you’re actually not that made me think it worked for me. I had been told that the garment I had on was a sheath dress. The neckline did a certain thing. I was also wearing a pair of low YSL heels from about 1991 and was carrying a black envelope clutch (basically unidentifiable, designer-wise) from Forever 21. I descended, sola, to the lobby.

  And I was more than ready, in spite of what I had said to Bonnie, to attend this evening’s event alone. Which was why I was rather confused by the sight of a formerly close acquaintance, who was now no longer such a friend, and who, upon espying me, became not so much happy as nearly frenzied with weird delight. This person was my husband, Whitaker.