Two Pictures
When I was a small child I went on many Saturdays with my grandfather to the Museum of Modern Art. The museum was located where it is now, on Fifty-third Street, but then it was a different place. It was small, and intimate, and it was a place you went to look at pictures. In some ways the museum felt to me like an extension of my grandfather. My grandfather (he was my father’s father) was a man of medium height, whose red hair had turned white by the time I knew him. He wore a small mustache. Though I know I saw him frequently in other seasons, I think of him wearing a gray overcoat and a black beret. He was a great reader, and a devotee of Spinoza, particularly. Later, when I was about twelve, and he was dying but did not know that yet, he told me that his favorite book was The Magic Mountain, and he gave it to me to read. His childhood, first in Russia and then in New York, where his stepfather was unkind to him, was repressive. He ran away, and then came back. He was a lawyer, but sometime in his middle years he became a painter. The room in which I stayed when I spent the weekend at my grandparents’ apartment was his studio. It smelled of oil paint and turpentine.
On Saturday mornings after breakfast we took the E train to the museum. This was a convenient train, because the stop was directly outside my grandparent’s building, in Chelsea, and it stopped on Fifty-third Street and Fifth Avenue. Often, in my memory, it was snowing. Because this was the early sixties, when little girls did not generally wear trousers, I wore heavy black serge tights, a smocked dress with a knitted cardigan, black patent-leather Mary Jane shoes, and a wool coat that pinched my neck when the top button was closed.
My grandfather was a member of the museum: he showed a little card and we were ushered in with a bit of ceremony by the guard. This was in the days when the museum was almost empty on a Saturday morning, and because of this, often our mornings there felt like private visits. My grandfather sometimes had a picture in mind that he wanted to look at. He was drawn, always, to the pictures by Braque, and Cézanne, which were on the second floor. These were the paintings of his youth, and they excited him. He liked to look at pictures for a long time, and he showed me how to look, too. Sometimes he would take me, as on a journey, from one corner of the painting to another, explaining how the light and color were talking to each other. If he was feeling lighthearted he gave the blue, or the red, something to say, like “Hello” or “Do you think it will rain?” I was perhaps five or six at the time, and this never failed to amuse me.
When my grandfather was through looking, and we had passed through and said hello to a few friends, The Starry Night and Matisse’s blue and green dancers, on the stairwell, which I loved with my whole heart, it was time for my paintings.
There were two. We visited each one, in turn, and as I had stood with my grandfather without tugging at him, or hopping on one foot, or saying that I was hungry, he stood and waited until I was finished looking. The first picture was Guernica. Later I heard it said about Guernica that when you look at it you know all there is to know about war. No one, certainly not my grandfather, said anything like that to me, at the time. At some point I think he explained the circumstances of the picture to me, while we stood in front of it. Picasso had painted it after the German and Italian forces had bombed the town called Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. I knew Picasso from the other pictures he had painted that hung in the museum, of blue clowns and a girl with a flower.
This picture was not like those pictures. It was huge. The impression, looking at it, was that it was three dimensional: the painting was a room, and you were inside it. I remember it as the biggest painting in the museum but that may not be true. It looked so to me. It was hung on the third floor, between the elevators. It was then, at that time, the most violent image I had ever seen. I was not as a child allowed to watch much television; then, though, violent images were not usual fare for children, nor for anyone else. There was, as compared to now, a dearth of images.
My method for looking at the painting was the one I had learned from my grandfather. I looked at one corner at a time. Here in this corner was a woman screaming. Below her, a little to the left, a horse was screaming. What were they saying to each other? I couldn’t answer. A woman’s face came out of cloud. A flowerpot lay in shards. I did not, and do not, even now, have the vocabulary. Perhaps there is none, for those screams.
Sometimes I stood at one end of the picture, and just looked, close up, at a little patch. From the little patch, it was hard to see what else was going on. On other visits I walked from one end of the canvas to the other, my head slightly averted, as if I weren’t really looking. It was, I think, my first experience of voyeurism. Every time I returned to look at the painting I was surprised to find that it was painted in shades of black and white and gray. In my mind it was red. I was always careful not to look at the baby.
When I was done looking we went back through the galleries to see my other picture. Sometimes we had seen it already, because it was hung in a hall, on a separate, small wall, in the permanent gallery my grandfather liked to visit first. When this happened I simply took my turn looking, or sometimes I pretended not to see it, depending on my mood, and then we went back.
This picture was by Pavel Tchelitchew. It was called Hide-and-Seek. It was a painting of a green tree. The tree was green, and the sky around the tree was also green, and inside the tree, there were tiny faces of children. These children were trapped, and trying to get out. I could tell they wanted to get out by their faces. It was a nightmare tree. But if you knew to step back a little from the trunk of the tree, the arms and twigs of the tree were really capillaries, and the tree was inside the head of a girl. I think it was my grandfather who pointed this out to me. The girl was about my age. She had dreamed the tree, but the tree had taken root. What were the faces saying to each other? What was the girl saying to the tree? This picture so frightened me that when we were in the gallery and came upon it suddenly, I turned my back to it and looked down at my shiny shoes.
The other day—it is almost half a century later, and it is late afternoon—I was walking up from the beach, in late August. I was on the path set into the high dune, with my children and the children of my friend, and when we got to the top, the path and the parking lot were alive with huge dragonflies. The sky was a black whir. Because my children are older than the last time the dragonflies came around, when they were frightened of them (the dragonflies emerge on the dune every few years, as part of a mysterious cycle, like cicadas) one of them said, “Oh, they won’t hurt you,” and their little convoy passed under the hum to the car.
Most of the dragonflies were congregated on a path that runs to the right of the parking lot, if you are facing the beach. The path is smothered in June by beach roses, and in August, by rose hips. When I was a child there was a sign on that path, painted with a skull and crossbones. Under this sign a legend read, NO ADMITTANCE. Across the path was a piece of chain. The road then led to an air force radar station. The station, its headlight sweeping the beach at night, kept watch for enemy missiles. One day, we knew, missiles would be launched toward us by the Soviet Union, but these would be stymied by radar. Now the sign is gone, and people climb up the path a little way in order to get cell phone reception.
I stood on the dune for a little while longer, watching and listening to the dragonflies. The last time I they came they had almost driven me mad; I think now they were indicative of a frenzy I sensed but knew nothing about, inside myself, the way the endless wind, a few days before, the back side of the hurricane, seemed a slow slithering fuse on the sill, electric on my skin. But last month I was happy to see the dragonflies, if only because it meant that time had passed.
Behind me, a little girl came up the dune, following her mother. She was wearing a pink two-piece bathing suit that was falling down, and her head was huge on a neck that almost could not support it. She was dismayed by the dragonflies. Her mother, who had two older children, dra
gging towels and pails up the hill, took one look at her and said, “Oh, Annie, it’s Dragonfly Alley.”
That art can transform a whir of black wings, burnish and give it back, is something we know, but what finds a home in the mind is a mystery. At the top of the dune the girl and her mother and I smiled at each other, at the edge of the parking lot: we knew all about wands, and wizards, and Diagon Alley. In Diagon Alley, does the wizard choose the wand, or does the wand choose the wizard? That my grandfather countenanced these visits to the two pictures, which I see now, from this distance, as morbid and obsessive, remains a mystery to me, but when I was a child it was with my grandfather that I felt safe.
Although both times I have been married it was to men to whom painting was important—one, like my grandfather, is a painter, and one is in the business of art—I know next to nothing about painting. Draw a house, my children say. My drawings look like hen scratches, my houses have lopsided windows. Smoke comes out of the crooked chimneys like pigs’ tails. But that these two pictures no longer hang in the museum is something I find difficult to hold in my mind. Guernica was returned to Spain in l997, although, a life-size needlepoint replica hangs in the United Nations. Hide-and-Seek is out of fashion: when I called the museum I was told it was in storage. That neither of these pictures is there may be a reason that I don’t like the new museum, which is cold and too big and has too many things to buy, like a department store. Both pictures were landscapes of terror. At the museum, I knew, you couldn’t stand too close to the pictures, or touch them. I shifted from foot to foot, holding my grandfather’s hand. You are here, the map said.
How can that be? I thought. But I knew it was true. The world was a glove, it could turn inside out. The pictures were about what I knew, and what I didn’t know yet, but would. I knew that too. They were one way I learned about these things.
Going In
The beach we go to is the most beautiful beach in the world. This may sound like overstatement, but it is a statement of fact. It lies almost at the end of Cape Cod, where the hand of the Cape’s flexed arm, extended into the Atlantic, turns and cups the bay. The bay is formed by the inner curve of that arm. In the summer, the house where we have stayed for many years—and where we may or may not remain, a niggling question that has just recently introduced itself, like the buzzing of a fly or the new, pernicious wasp that found its way to the beach this summer, a helicopter from an invading country, emboldened by a lack of predators; that house, with its splintery pine walls and its Joseph Cornell boxes of shells, is on that inner curve. It sits on a high promontory above the bay like a lookout station. From the small gray porch you can see all the way to Plymouth. It was on this hill that the Pilgrims first received corn from the Payomet people who lived here; there is a marker, a few miles away at High Head, where they discovered and drank from a spring. A friend to whom I recently recounted this history said, you must say: they stole the corn.
The beach we go to is on the ocean side, two miles away. When I went to the beach in June this year I was startled at how long the sun lasted over the dune; in August the sun slides out of sight by late afternoon. The light lasts longer by the water. In August in the afternoon, we move our towels closer and closer to the shore until we are almost in, but it is too cold to go in. It is almost always too cold to go in. It is bracing, the shock of the cold on the skin, but we persist: as if going in were an act of penance, an expiation, a test of character to appease the Puritans, their eyes watching us from the lost trees. When I was a girl I stayed in for hours, my lips turning blue, in my red serge bathing suit. Now my children wear wetsuits and swoop like herons on their surfboards, landing on shore only to turn their backs and go out again.
It is a mystery to me why I cannot think of this particular piece of geometry—the bay, the backshore, the straight line from Corn Hill to Plymouth, the High Head spring—without thinking of the Pilgrims. But there they are, in their funny hats and dark clothes, fierce, monkeylike, behind the scrubby trees. One day early in the morning I drove my husband down the last knuckle of the Cape to the airport at Provincetown—he had an appointment in New York. That half an hour after I left I would turn around, because he had forgotten not only his wallet but his keys, was indicative of the disorder we were entering then, that even now illegible year, though I did not at the time realize it, nor would I for many months afterward; these were warnings that even the firkins in the pines could have told me about.
After Truro, the second-growth forest of locusts and elms thins out. A millennia ago the glacier from the frozen sea, carrying rocks and earth, stopped just here, at High Head. The bluff it left rises one hundred feet, and at the bottom is the kidney shape of Pilgrim Lake, the glacier’s afterthought. In good weather the lake reflects the sky. Beyond the lake, on the left, begin the string of Monopoly house cottages that front Provincetown Harbor. To me these had always looked cheerful. The houses I have known on the Cape are more elaborate: bigger, more entrenched in the dream of summer passed down from aunts and cousins, vested in the idea of permanence and perfection: the hurricane lamp, the curtain with its hokey pattern of seashells. They have room under their eaves for quarrels and reliquaries; even the less lived-in have hidden away matchboxes where mice have died and shrines made of small stones for buried butterflies. They are houses that have secrets and spit them out by accident. A friend of mine called the other day and told me that when he closed up his house this summer he opened a drawer and found a cache of writing paper from the magazine where his stepfather had worked for fifty years, imprinted with the magazine’s first address, an undistinguished office building whose lobby held a shoe shine stand and a barber shop, where he knew his stepfather had been happy. On a closet shelf in my mother’s house on the Cape—a house with six bedrooms and a cellar that smells of damp, to which I am allergic—there is an old gray tennis ball. The day a few summers ago that the International Astronomical Union decided that Pluto was not, after all, a planet, the children found it at the foot of the dune. It had been washed up by the high tide. It looked like a fossil fallen from the sky. “It’s Pluto!” someone said. I have been unable to admit that I am saving it, but whenever I return to that house I check a little anxiously to make sure that Karen, the zealous cleaning woman whom my mother employs, and who leaves notes like “Monday: dusted under the sink!,” hasn’t thrown it away.
So to me, the houses along Route Six, white as Chiclets, rented—I always imagined—by the week by people, hoping for sand and surf, for the charcoal barbecue, to “get away,” seemed enviable, coming as I do from a tribe that when it arrives on the Cape isn’t getting away, but getting to, arriving at a place with its own intricate maze of switchbacks, where the person you were the summer before, in the same old shirt, and the one before that, examines your soul for new stains. One August, though, because some people we knew, on a whim—because with one thing and another it had been an expensive year, or maybe because the house they usually took in the woods had been sold, or taken back by the owners for the month because their niece was getting married at the Red Inn, the usual course of why a house falls away, like a snail shell—decided to rent one of those houses. They were lithe, loose-limbed people. He was a musician, and she, to her chagrin, I think, the daughter of a senator, who taught in a Montessori school. In the looping, elliptical world of the Cape, they were not really our friends, but friends of friends, who had met them years ago when their children played Frisbee together on the beach. Then, I want to say, as it turned out—but of course it did not turn out at all, or if it did, for a while it turned out badly—there was a connection between us. This woman’s half sister was the sister-in-law of my first husband’s cousin. Or something like that. This couple, though, were still not our friends. They were the friends of friends … but there was a link. Later, I would learn that there was bad blood between the sister-in-law and the cousin, but that’s another story, told to me in the dusty Palm Court of the Plaza
by a woman twice my age, who knew them both, the week before the hotel was closed. When I told my husband about these connections, at first, and then when I learned more, his interest did not match mine. He is one of ten children while I am one of three—chess pieces in an end game, sensitive to nuance, poised for conflict. To these kind of intimate coincidences he admits only a nodding acquaintance: better, to him, to be less known.
“Come by and see us!” they said, as we packed up one afternoon to leave the beach. Usually when we are in our house on Corn Hill we go nowhere, but I told my husband as we walked up to the car that I wanted to go; I had never been inside one of those houses. I had in my mind a vision of a simple bright room, a protohouse, with a table and three chairs, a tidy kitchen, two or three beds. A house unlike ours, with grit in the corners of the stairs and wet laundry on the railings. Like most visions this turned out to be only partially accurate. We went after dinner. It was midsummer so the sun was still bright in the early evening. They gave us directions. Off the shore road before the Mobil station we turned left toward the water. It was the third identical house on the right after the sandy parking lot, and the front of the house, with a door and two windows, faced the bay. It opened directly onto a small deck, about six feet wide. The deck was like the deck of a ship. At the end of it was the water.
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