The Stand-In

by David Helwig

  That was another of the essays that Tarrington stole from our conversations; “The Virgin’s Breast and Other Dirty Movies.” We had been discussing Mediterranean culture one night after we saw La Dolce Vita at a Film Society screening. We had both told our first-year classes to attend, an assignment that was thought infra dig and a little scandalous by some of the others. After a number of drinks, Tarrington announced that he was going to create a giant sculpture called The Great Tits of Ekberg, but instead he wrote the essay. Five years later when he was able to forget how much of what he was writing came from me.

  Two evenings later we played badminton, the four of us, and I noticed bruises on Madeleine’s pale thigh and wondered how he had done it and whether he was prompted by Fellini’s disorderly world. Tarrington’s Lust, a sprightly Elizabethan number for the virginals.

  Belle, where are you going? Don’t leave. I find it reassuring to see a familiar face. Is it something I said? Unrespectful to our old pal DT, I suppose, didn’t observe the old saw, de mortuis, nil nisi bonum. I have a brain full of Latin tags, but I can’t put them all into effect. It’s not to be expected. Well there, she’s gone, and I regret it. It was a long long time ago that we met, when she arrived as assistant to the Dean of Arts and soon enough, because she was quick-witted and wise, became the effective Dean of Arts and stayed that until retirement, and while of course she was never paid a salary to compare to the Dean’s salary, she was the brains of the office no matter which academic butterfly wore the title. When The Boat Shed opened, run by that rather sweet couple who divorced and sold it after five years, Annabelle and I were among its first customers, but now I have spoken unkindly of old Delerium Tremens, and she has remained faithful to his memory and departed. Tarrington’s Lust: perhaps he left a bruise or two on Annabelle’s firm flesh as well and she is loyal to those old wounds.

  No striped ties in Madden Hall today, not one to be seen as I cast my eyes over the attentive group, smaller than yesterday’s of course, but listening politely, no heckling, only Annabelle Disney’s abrupt departure. Faced with the choice between me and Tarrington, she chose him, but she would always have made that choice. I wonder whether the striped ties belonged to the very busy or whether I am no longer under their scrutiny, having revealed myself as harmless, unlikely to call into question any matters of importance. I would like to call into question the accepted wisdom, but there is so much of it, ponderous, immoveable. I can only mark a detail here or there. I don’t possess Tarrington’s gift of the apparently significant phrase, the grabby oxymoron.

  Moron and oxymoron. My brother was a moron—I know we don’t use that word—but he had been put away and I never saw him, though I know that as a small child I was eagerly watched for signs of mental decay, but I have lasted all these years with my wits about me. I remember the occasion of his death when I was fourteen. Once, after my parents died, I thought of him, Joseph was his name, and he was long gone, and on a certain afternoon as I stood by the back window with binoculars watching an osprey hunting beyond the marsh, I thought that only I in the world was aware that Joseph had existed, that he was as close to oblivion as could be, but now I have mentioned him to all of you, though I had no such intention, and now he exists for you, and some of you are still young and sixty years from now, may recall this set of lectures—I flatter myself that such a thing is possible—and when you do you will remember Joseph and he will have as much existence as any other remembered soul. For how many years, he babbled there. No mind. Well yes and no.

  Perhaps Annabelle left us to take a windblown walk to the library and once there to use her influence and get a first peek at the Tarrington papers, to have a look at the letters I wrote to him those many years ago.

  Petrus Christus. We had finished with him, I suppose. The painting is a puzzle, but so are many paintings. So in its way is the Manet I mentioned earlier. There is an odd idea abroad that art is related to beauty, and that was one of the things I liked to dispose of early in the Introduction to Civilization course. Tarrington and I would compete to see who could denounce the belief most fervently, most wickedly, and we would meet afterward for badminton and quote our good lines aloud. You see we were friends at that time. We were friends when we met on the Quai des Grands Augustins. Yes, I think we were, and the light from the river glittered among the trees, and at the back was a mirror that caught fragments of it all. That night, through some strange misapprehension, I got into the metro station after the last train and suddenly found that the lights had gone out, and I thought it too dangerous to find my way out in the dark, so I endured the night there, the odd winds and sounds, and the terrible thoughts of life ending and nothing achieved. A week later I returned to summer here and what ensued.

  The van Eyck wedding picture which we have already discussed appears to be the earliest of those I plan to mention, and scholars who have chosen to comment on the use of convex mirrors in other paintings of this time and place usually describe them as something derived from van Eyck, and probably they are right, but each painter uses them in his own way. The most obscure of them is Robert Campin. Who may not be himself at all—that is he may not be the man who painted the paintings known by his name. The wonders of scholarship. I will skip some of the historical problems as to whether Campin and the Master of Flémalle are the same man. Call him what name you wish. I have a greater problem in the fact that I have never seen the original, and can only deal with it through inadequate reproductions. It is dated just four years after the van Eyck paintings and appears to be the most directly derived from it. Campin, one would say, was no ironist, and what the convex mirror sums up is what would be expected, a back view of John the Baptist and a kneeling donor, the same scene which the painting portrays from the front, though there may be other details. Hard to make out from reproduction, a small figure perhaps, who could be the artist, an open door.

  Mirror, mirror on the wall. That’s the other great Disney, of course. I say that although Annabelle is not here to enjoy the reference. Mirror, mirror on the wall. I remember one night coming in late from a public lecture, and finding my wife Anne sitting naked on the bedroom floor in front of a mirror with a pencil and paper, attempting to draw herself. When I appeared in the bedroom door, she crumpled the pictures and would not show them to me, and she pulled on a dressing gown and carried them off and burned them. She wanted to see herself and couldn’t, she said when she came back, and I said there was no need, for I could see her, and I drew back the fabric of the dressing gown and described what I could see, the pink, soft body, and perhaps she was pleased. I don’t know whether she ever tried to draw herself again.

  The donors in those early religious paintings had found a way to see themselves as part of a holy story, to combine vanity and piety. Look at me on my knees with the saint just behind my back, the two of us reflected in the same mirror. I have paid a good sum to a master painter in order to have this done. It will hang in my house. All the things I own return me to myself, show who I am, but this more than any. John Baptist with his beard and curls and little lamb, bare-legged, in a loose cloak, holds a book which must be a book of truth and on my knees I am attentive to that truth. You can see my seriousness in my face.

  A pause for a glass of water also gives me a moment to catch my breath, stretch, perhaps assemble my thoughts. As I draw toward the end of this second talk, I confess that I understand those who need a little Dutch courage mixed with their water, something to propel them the last few steps up the hill. There is no hilltop, of course, for the landscape of these lectures is discontinuous. Even the capacity of the convex mirror to catch events over a wide angle is insufficient, and of course the things captured are distorted. Welcome to the funhouse. It is some years since I have gone to a midway, so perhaps the innocent charms of the house of mirrors where you giggled at yourself stretched or compacted, where you kept discovering a new angle of the reflecting maze, are all gone by. I have seen a ferris wheel on a di
stant horizon, and I’m sure that somewhere the rollercoaster still makes the timid shriek, so perhaps the house of mirrors is to be found. If so, I should take my grandchildren, but they live a long way off, and we meet only occasionally, although more often now than in the past. It was at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto that I saw my first house of mirrors, and I remember a moment of terror when I thought I would never escape, but would be trapped there forever watching my own small frightened face coming at me wherever I looked. I wonder if children are still scared by such things.

  More water. The memory of that old terror dries the mouth. In my first year lecturing here, I carried a glass of water with me to every class because I was nervous about standing in front of all those students and thought my mouth might dry to the point where I would be left mute. I got over that soon enough and developed a glib fluency.

  De mortuis nil nisi bonum. And of those who vanish, like Madeleine, what are we to say? She was never seen again. That is what we can say and no more. I do wish that Belle had not flown the coop. Frank Puncheon reached the end of his patience and has not appeared today, and besides we knew each other very little. Occasional badminton. A moment’s chat in the coffee shop. Annabelle remembers it all, I’m sure, and that is reassuring in some ways, though she holds her own opinions, and there are many things we chose not to mention over all those years, and after her marriage to a respectable widower, we met only occasionally and in public.

  Denman Tarrington is gone, and the past with him. He lies there on the tiles, and in the room beside his, a man sits waiting for a phone call and listening to the shower running endlessly in the cubicle beyond the wall. The water was left running, did I mention that? It was what caused the other man to phone the front desk. Earlier, he thought he heard angry voices, but now the sound of the water goes on and on, and it begins to work on his nerves, which are a little rattled already. He is in New York for a job interview. The man is an accountant with a somewhat chequered past. When very young, he was arrested for possession of marijuana—he was in fact selling it, but the quantity he had on him was small enough that though he was convicted, he served only a comparatively short sentence in a prison in Washington State. When he got out of prison, he began to study accountancy, and he is quick with figures and has had some success. He has a small office in a suburb of St. Louis called University City, and he lives on a pleasant street with tall trees and little traffic, but recently his wife told him she wants a divorce, and that she plans to take the two children and move to Palo Alto. She is in love with someone. Everyone is in love with someone. On the day in question, our man is in New York because he has applied for a job with a firm of forensic accountants, and yesterday he went through an interview with them. He feels that the interview went well, and he is waiting impatiently for the phone call that will summon him back for a second and decisive interview, and in his state of impatience and apprehension, the continual running of water in the room next door makes him want to scream. Repeated noises will do that.

  When he planned the trip to New York, he wondered about staying at the YMCA to save a few dollars. He makes money, but there’s never enough, and the YMCA is connected in his mind with his Canadian grandfather who worked for the institution. In childhood, he met this grandfather at his home in Ottawa. He was a kindly man, and the memory of him is a good one. Still, our accountant decided that it wouldn’t look right if he had to have messages left at the desk of the Y, not when he was trying for a New York job. Look successful. Always look successful. So he is paying for the hotel room, and the water is running endlessly just behind his head as he lies on the bed trying to be patient, and just before the phone rings, he calls down to the desk to complain. Because of his complaint, a bellman will come to the room, open it with a pass key and find the late Denman Tarrington, that prominent thinker and essayist, lying in the steam. So long DT.

  Mirror, mirror on the wall. The doges tried to keep secret the technology of the wonderful Venetian mirrors with their astonishing bevelled edges, but the trick escaped and went north. The mirror was the first great advance in the technology of the self, the dominant instrument of our vanity until the camera came along. Explorers carried mirrors into those societies we no longer call primitive and created astonishment. The word mirror is related to the word mirage.

  Yes, I stop more often to drink. You can tell that we are once again close to the day’s conclusion. Your president waits patiently, having learned in his years of public life how not to fidget in his chair. Today’s lecture will soon be done. We mark out the ends of things, the punctuations that offer relief from incoherence. We find words. She was never seen again. We were each trying to be Tarrington’s equal in carelessness. There was a fire burning across the night. The tide was rising. Annabelle, who was there, has abandoned me on this bare gibbet.

  As I totter about here, guzzling my water, there is a look of concern on the face of one of my young friends in the second row. I hope you will not take it badly that I refer to you in that way. As friends. Certain that you will tolerate my little jokes, I have adopted you, all three, and as I mentioned Annabelle and those past things, I reflected that you are now the age we were in those days, and you are living out the savage intensities of those years. Two of you are perhaps a couple, and the other is the observer or is waiting for the cure of a vanished madness. It is possible that the three of you share intricate delights and jealousies or that I misread the fashions of the time, and one of you awaits a soldier home from the wars. Forgive my intrusion. There are those who say that passion is no longer fashionable among the young, that they do it and forget. Like the province of Quebec, je me souviens.

  The bird is about the fall to the court, but I make a long step and with a sweeping forehand swat it down the sideline.

  Campin, van Eyck, Petrus Christus, and let me see who is left. Memlinc, yes, a nice artist’s joke, for we are looking at a diptych, Virgin and Child in one wing, in the other, the young donor, in his twenty-third year, it says. Anne was in her twenty-third year when we married. Where and how the two sections of the diptych were to be hung we can only guess, but behind the Virgin and child is another of those convex mirrors, van Eyck’s legacy, summing things up, joining, and in it, we can see the Virgin’s back and the donor kneeling in front of her, the figures from both panels brought together in one. A trick, a joke, call it what you will, but it bridges the contradiction of space and picture planes, and as the young donor got older, he must have been pleased to show the trick to his friends, look at me there and yet also there, like one of those movies in which an actor gets to play both twins.

  The painting is in Bruges. Those of you who plan to summer in Europe can go and take a look at it, and you will have your own opinions, of course, and while you are there in that part of Europe, you can take a look at our next work, in that great maze of heaped-up masterpieces, the Louvre. Anne and I went to the Louvre just after we were married, but she tired easily in those days, her feet would swell, and she found it all overwhelming and went to sit outside while I wandered down the endless corridors, making notes. Long before the days of the glass pyramid, that was, before the hotels had been Americanized, when a toilet was still a hole in the floor somewhere down the hall. Anne didn’t like Paris, and the next time I went, she spent the two weeks visiting her aunt. When I returned, the house was empty. I called, and she said she had decided to stay longer, so I was alone with my thoughts, as I had been that night in Paris. I’ve mentioned that summer. The shuttlecock summer.

  My head is spinning, and I can’t remember what I have said and not said. Lost in the hall of mirrors, I see my own distorted face, and try not to cry, to believe that I will find my way out, that my parents will be there, that all will be well. I will gather my forces for a race to the end. Tarrington lies in the steam while the man next door is picking up the phone, and we turn to Quentin Matsys. Gold again here, and no saints, though one would say that the painting
must have been done under the influence of that other, for the mirror is once again set on a table so that it shows a view of what is outside.

  A memory: I am in the lobby of a New York hotel, and I am surrounded by men and women from some sort of convention, all of them with those cheerful name tags, and close to me is a man whose tag reads, Hi, My name is Legion. Chances are I made that up, whether waking or sleeping. There was that business of the striped ties. I saw them, then didn’t. Ubi sunt qui apud nos fuerunt? Where indeed. Perhaps my phone is ringing. Perhaps the ties are concealed under high-necked sweaters worn against the cold and snow that we know waits for us beyond the walls of Madden Hall.

  Denman Tarrington got his name in the newspapers one last time. The badminton bird lay in the long grass, its feathers damp with dew. Feathers on a summer lawn where a neighbour’s cat has torn apart a song-sparrow, the lovely long call vanished. I pick up the feathers and hide them from Anne. The dead bird lies in the grass. I will drive to the hill above the beach and with the binoculars I will try for a sighting of the Piping Plover. Not easy to distinguish from the more common Semipalmated Plover or even the Least Plover, but with my powerful opera glasses, I can make such fine distinctions. The tides are high at this phase of the moon, and everything is flooded with the moaning salt. There is a wind in the hollow of the dunes and we feel it on our bare skin. Her skin is very pale.

  Perhaps as I stand here lecturing, the phone in my hotel room is ringing over and over again. I must finish up here and go to answer it.