Walking out through the northeast quarter of town, I pass a kleuterschool (preschool), a library, a laundromat, a bike repair shop. Sophia will later point out, looking at a digital photo, that the Oostpoort looks like a small castle—with two very slender round brick towers on either side of the entrance, each pierced with arrow slits. In front of all this, there’s a lovely water gate with a drawbridge, for the Oostpoort secured the road as well as the canal. There were once eight similarly fortified gates in the royal city. A ragged remnant of wall, about two feet long, is still attached to either side of the Oostpoort.
In the ice cream shop, I order “bosbessen,” because it’s the only word on the menu I believe I can pronounce. Surprisingly, the girl—with a slight smile—repeats it back with exactly the same pronunciation. It’s an exquisite flavor of bilberry, as it turns out, the best in Holland, for seventy euro-cents. By the time I wander back to the station on the other side of the city’s heart, the market is dismantled—all but the lingering odor of herring, the fumes of delivery trucks—and the cafés are filling up, the bikes all clattering home.
7. A Poem
I don’t know what I’d expected from Delft—to see the city in the painting or the painting in the city. But as I wandered the streets full of tourists and students, I imagined what I did not see: glazed tiles, Persian carpets, maps, blue leather chairs, the plaster wall. And I imagined Vermeer’s studio—what it must have meant, that paradise of hours. The artist’s dream, I think, is simply to vanish into his vision. Keats and his nightingale, Vermeer and his studio.
Later, I’m left with doubt—as if I’ve struck a complete blank— but I’m also left with a Marble notebook filled with scribblings. One night, wondering what to make of my notes, I draft a poem called “View of Delft,” using some of the better images. At once I realize I’ll be writing more poems. This one ends:
… No matter how
decisively the pointillés describe
seams in the stone, the scene—no matter how
invitingly sun warms the unseen center—
what I’m left with, looking back upon
this hour, this loveliness, remains a distance
I can’t cross, a city I can’t enter.
ANNE
[ November ]
It’s Friday afternoon. I’m traipsing about a vast and sodden lawn—trying to keep my Rockports dry—looking for the entrance to a sprawling, former high school in the Piedmont. Now it’s a luxury condo redevelopment called “The Varsity.” I’m here to meet the owner/renovator of the place, a recently retired school principal close to my age. “The Varsity,” apparently, wasn’t the school where she had worked; she had inherited it when her father passed, and it had been closed for a number of years before she redeveloped it. All of this seems unnecessarily confusing.
This is my first Match.com date. I’ve done it—the whole computer dating thing—a little skeptically, with my counselor Tracy’s gentle coaxing. When I sign up, I’m prompted for a username, and draw a blank, and because I don’t really care, I take one of the silly suggestions: “Ariesguy24.” (Thereafter, for months, I field numerous questions about the personal significance of this tag. Am I twenty-four? Believe in astrology? No and no.) I begin winnowing pages of ads, the flattering snapshots of smiling, cup-half-full women sitting at bars, proffering a toast—or leaning, windblown, against the rail of a sailboat or beach cottage—in fifteen or twenty minutes. (It’s really odd, I just want to say, how many women claim to love NASCAR, football, and Harleys.) There’s a giddy, kid-in-the-candystore feeling to all the winks and IM’s … but it fades pretty fast.
I skim the ads when I come home from work—three heads to a row, six rows to a page—each night’s catch of faces. I set up coffees, lunches, beach walks. More than once I can’t recognize them when I see them (though the photos are all within the past year). Of course I smile, when I meet them, anyway.
But then I begin to hone in on Anne, and we email back and forth all October, about teaching and inspiration and burnout. Her messages come very quickly and thoughtfully. I look at one particular snapshot of her often: she’s wearing jeans, standing in front of a blackboard. There’s another of her skydiving; another of her in a swimsuit, with dark, bobbed hair and a killer smile; another of an abstract, mostly purple acrylic painting of hers. She’s cut-to-the-chase, completely grown-up. Seems perfect.
Therefore, I make a cross-state drive on a Friday afternoon, just after one of those drenching, late fall rains. I can’t shake a vaguely fugitive feeling as I circle the building, trying every locked door. At this point in my life, I’ve somehow not yet owned a cell phone. But I manage to blunder my way inside anyway, past the security system, up a delivery ramp. The dock is open because there’s a young couple moving in, unloading their sofa out of a U-Haul truck. I locate the service elevator, exit on the sixth floor, and there, at the end of the hall is the penthouse suite. When I knock, Anne says, “Come on in,” but by then, the door has already swung open. All at once, I’m standing in the middle of an enormous, luminous space, listening as she talks about the ongoing renovations, the adjoining restaurant, the nightclub, the gallery, as she puts on purple hoop earrings, adjusts the music, boils water for tea.
“How do you take it?” she says. I’m not picky.
Finally, I get to look at her. Here is the killer smile in the flesh, the flawless, uniform teeth. She’s slim in her jeans, with bright green eyes and fine freckles. I love how she’s let her hair go peppery gray.
The size of the room astounds, the height of the cathedral ceiling astounds, the abundance of clear north light astounds. I go to the casements, holding a cup I suspect she has glazed herself. I douse the teabag up and down, releasing its jasmine fragrance, and look across the still-wet suburbs—unawakened, blonde as straw—and into the scrubbed pale skies beyond. When I look down, I notice, next to my hand, the original, articulated, brass hand-crank that swings the window out—I wonder where the bolted-down pencil-sharpener could be. Also here, on the sill, stands a cut-glass pitcher, filled to the gills with a bouquet of bright purple pinwheels. “Ninety-nine cents apiece,” she says, from across the room. “I love Walmart.”
She takes me up a stairway spilling down through the center of the apartment, and shows me the immaculate suite-within-a-suite where I’ll be staying the night, with its enormous, claw-foot tub. It’s a little odd to be spending the night on a first date, but this was her idea; it’s a long drive. On our way out to tour the buildings, she opens a door on the far side of the main room, opening on whiteness, emptiness, and the mirror twin to the space where she lives.
“I haven’t decided what to do with this. Everyone tells me I should use it as a painting studio … But I don’t paint any more. This is my art now,” she says, gesturing around and above. She closes the door gently, as if on a sleeping ghost.
I follow her around to see the lobby, the pool, the gym, and here or there, she points out strategically preserved vestiges of the former school. For instance, she leads me down a long, strangely angled corridor full of apartments. Over the doorway at the end is a fragment of the old proscenium arch—complete with the original plaster comedy-and-tragedy masks—that would have crowned the peak of the “fourth wall.” The rest has been filled in with sheetrock and carpeting and elevators.
“Oklahoma,” I say, half-singing the syllables.
She smiles once more, a sudden flash. “Saturday Night Fever, more likely.”
“Ha, you’re right,” I say.
Flash-forward a couple of hours, past the delicate “nouvelle” dinner (some sort of medallions, in some sort of sauce, with pale stalks of asparagus) in her restaurant, where the music—an excellent Blue Ridge folk duet—is too loud for relaxed conversation. I’m never quite comfortable, my back to the light, my elbows constantly in the path of the waitresses.
We’re back at her place again. I’m sitting on a velvety black sofa. She’s boiling water again, more a formality than anyth
ing else. I become conscious, with a sudden chill, there are virtually no books in her house. Yet on the wall before me is a full-scale reproduction of one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings—the two pristine white calla lilies, each with its fingerlike yellow spadix, on a bright pink ground.
“It’s my favorite painting,” she says, setting down my cup on the end table, along with a dish of enormous, buttery, oatmeal-raisin cookies.
“I love it, too,” I say.
“I have it on my back.”
“You what?”
“Tattooed. On my back. That painting.”
I nibble a cookie for a moment. “Curiouser and curiouser,” I say…“May I see it?”
“Sure,” she says. She turns without rising from the sofa, unbuttons her long-sleeved white shirt, slips out of it, and then, in a moment, reaches back to unclasp her black bra, and slips that off her shoulders as well. She remains sitting; back sinuously turned toward me, arms lightly crossed, unashamedly, over her small breasts.
It isn’t a detail from the canvas, but the canvas itself—the vertical rectangle, reduced in size to cover the field of her back. There is a heightened vividness to the colors—white and yellow and green and pink—as a result of being translated from oil to needle-and-ink, and it is impressive, if unsettling.
“Wow,” I say.
“I don’t regret it,” she says. She stands, slips the shirt back on without the bra, and buttons it halfway up.
She opens up, in a rush, it seems, about the period after her divorce. Her father’s death that same year. How she’d inherited the corporation, and had had a crisis, partly because she didn’t really want to retire from teaching. And yet, she wasn’t teaching at the time—and the demands of being principal had been too stressful, anyway. She tells me how she’d done it, taken the property on, out of the blue, as an experiment, as part of a slew of midlife changes, and had discovered she liked it, had a knack for it—her head filled with a million projects, every day, these days. The vision, then the satisfaction of seeing the actual results. And the skydiving, the tattoo. “These things are a part of me now.” Still, it’s her dream to get back to the classroom someday, she says. And she will, she says.
My own changes seem comparatively simple, partly because I leave out the agony of my divorce. I tell her only about my joys: the hours with my daughter (I show her my wallet photos). Looking at Vermeer. And my own love of teaching, which I can’t foresee leaving. Ever. This is something we share.
It’s late. Hours must have passed. She offers me a firm, goodnight hug—a moment, a genuine moment of warmth.
After she retires, I take a long, luxurious bath in the claw-foot tub. I float, I drift, my legs stretched out in the almost-scalding water. What an odd song, I think. This evening, this meeting, had not been what I’d hoped for, not what I would have chosen for myself, but it was lovely in its own gentle way.
Next morning, Anne has an early meeting with contractors. At 7:45, I draw the door shut behind me. After I pull out onto the street, I stop at a Kwik-Mart, just down the hill. While the car is filling up, I grab a large, bad coffee, with an Otis Spunkmeyer blueberry muffin. Thus armed, I drive five hours back across the state.
The broad-crowned pines become a solid wall as the road levels out on the coastal plain.
When I get home, there’s an email from Anne. How much she had enjoyed our night, hearing about my daughter, talking about art. Next time, it will be her turn, she promises, to make the drive.
I write back, It was my pleasure. Then I sketch out my schedule over the next few weeks for her. I tell how amazing she is, how much I want to see her again. That’s what I say.
But no one makes the drive, and she never writes again.
WASHINGTON, D. C.
[ December ]
1. The Studio
I’m walking through the peculiarly cold, damp air of Washington, D. C., on a rainy winter morning, December 26. My car is parked a few blocks from the Mall. Christmas had quietly passed, my holiday ending when I dropped Sophia off at her mom’s new townhouse, promptly at two on Christmas afternoon. A pall of sentimental wood smoke hung on the gray air. This year, the new, younger husband, Hans, answered the door and let Sophia in. His smile was raw and cautious, and he didn’t know whether to try to shake my hand. I half-raised my own hand, as if to wave, then backed away.
These are miserable moments. Anyone can see that he is a better match for Sara than I ever was. It’s the aftermath of the divorce, with little relief in the feeling of defeat.
I’ve driven seven hours to see Woman Holding a Balance.
I’ve been to Washington before. In fact I was born here, in 1956, when my dad was teaching for a year at Georgetown, and I’ve been back many times. No matter: in the same way a painting becomes something else when you come to it in need, so cities can come alive for us and reveal their hidden worlds. But not this one, not today.
Now that I’m middle-aged, I think sometimes of Donald Justice’s poem “Men at Forty.” It begins:
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
“The doors to rooms they will not be / Coming back to,” I think, as I walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I linger, for a moment, in front of the United States Navy Memorial. It’s a plaza surrounded with an arrangement of flagpoles and patriotic, heroic bas-reliefs. I imagine it might’ve held more interest for me in an earlier life. Maybe when I was eighteen or nineteen, and in the Navy myself. Maybe not.
I turn toward the domed National Gallery on the Mall, and cross the street. The Cabinet Galleries within offer a permanent exhibition containing the four Vermeers, part of a Dutch suite that opened in 1995. The space was built expressly for the intimate Dutch and Flemish “cabinet paintings.” The term refers to small paintings, often actually kept in cabinets, such as Pieter de Hooch’s A Dutch Courtyard, Paulus Potter’s A Farrier’s Shop, and Adriaen van Ostade’s The Cottage Dooryard. Vermeer comes last, in this lineage, like an exclamation mark.
But immediately on entering the museum from the ground-floor Constitution Avenue entrance, I come to a small placard signpost of Vermeer’s Girl with a Red Hat and the words “Dutch Painting” in red. An arrow points into the sculpture gallery. The Dutch suite is on the second floor, which is the main floor, but it turns out, due to a special exhibition, a small sampling of the Dutch and Flemish paintings, including the Vermeers, is now on temporary display here.
A moment later, I once again feel the shock of stepping into a room lit by Vermeers. From left to right are Girl with a Red Hat, Woman Holding a Balance, and Woman with a Flute. The small size of these paintings is startling. Red Hat, painted on a wooden panel, like the similar Flute, is only about nine by seven inches. Woman Holding a Balance is one of the many Vermeers that seem much bigger than they really are. But it’s about twice the size of the two tiny paintings on each side of it. These three hang crowded together in a tiny room, with a handful of other tiny Golden Age works, including Jan Philips Van Thielsen’s astonishing Rose and Tulip in a Glass Vase, and Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s River Landscape. The fourth Vermeer, a larger, opulent canvas called A Woman Writing hangs just around a corner, in the next room.
One advantage of the temporary grouping is that the room is absolutely quiet and intimate; I feel alone with the paintings, as if under glass. I stare and stare. Because Woman Holding a Balance is a masterpiece, because I want to start with something less majestic and work up, I ignore it at first. I fold my corduroy jacket over my arm, put on my reading glasses, and focus on Girl with a Red Hat.
The pull of the girl’s feverish, apparitional glance seems out of proportion to its tiny size, its colors, anything definable. I’d begun to feel comfortable in Vermeer’s room, the corner with cool light falling from left to right, its lovely girl, its measured quietness. But none of that holds true here, in this very different scene, and I don’t know why. The immediate conn
ection is The Girl with a Pearl Earring, the other passionately confrontational glance. And in fact these works, along with the Girl with a Flute and the Study of a Young Woman, in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, have much in common. They are sometimes considered “tronies,” a Dutch genre that art critic Alejandro Vergara defines as “paintings of busts or heads, generally wearing hats or exotic clothes and depicting anonymous or fictive characters.” Tronies weren’t considered portraits—or even finished paintings—but demonstrations of skill for the open market.
Two or three times, then, Vermeer’s magic wand was left on the shelf. Which is to say the gaze—the exquisitely calibrated practice of the studio, finely tuned as it was to strip the veil from the appearances of things—was left on the shelf in favor of a radically different method. And we are the unexpected subject—we, rather than the enchanted room, are what is seen into. The barriers the paintings erect are turned inside out, and figures like this fiery woman reach out to us passionately across the fourth wall and into our own dreams.
I’m standing before Red Hat, jotting my impressions in my Marble notebook. What I see is focused centrally, the red hat a curved swathe of lacerating, neon red that, on closer inspection, turns out to be composed of several graduated tints, turning at the edges to feathery brush-flecks. The girl’s cloak is a sumptuous ultramarine, with patterns of white and yellow. The center of the painting is not her dark eyes—that seem actually to recede beneath the shadow of the hat—but her remarkably lush, full-lit, and full-lipped mouth. All her forwardness is projected there, surrounded by curious highlights. On each side, for instance, she’s wearing enormous, hollow, glass-pearl earrings, like the exquisite, almost invisible earring in The Girl with a Pearl Earring. The shape is entirely implied by the vaguely comma-shaped touch of white lead that reads as reflection and contour. The ornament, the romance is nearly ghost or memory.
Travels in Vermeer Page 5