It still seems odd that this woman—part lady, part love goddess—regards me with such a shadowed, greenish face. And yet everything that might ordinarily attract my eye in this luminous painting is similarly shadowed: her mouth, her chest, her arms and hands, even the pearls at her throat dissolve to a smoky blur.
I look into her face for fifteen minutes or so, then look away. Then try again. After the intensities of The Milkmaid, of The Girl with a Pearl Earring, and all the others, this small and enigmatic face seems almost disinterested in me. But the longer I look, the more I trust her, and the more placid she appears, at ease in her clothes, in this light, in this room. As tall as she is, she floats in space—and gazes slightly down on me—and would appear even taller if I took the seat.
I imagine sitting two feet from her silk dress, with its lovely, columnar shadows, my right shoulder nearly touching the upper left corner of the side of the virginal—where, I’ve read, the artist has signed the work, though I’ve never seen the signature because it isn’t visible in the reproductions. I lean in close now, reading glasses on, and find it—faint as it is, his monogram “Meer” with the letter I inserted in the V of the M.
This isn’t one of Vermeer’s more popular paintings. But for the moment—seeing and being seen by the lady—the image feels ennobling, and I feel worthy of it.
13. A Lady Seated at a Virginal
I’ve moved a few feet to the right, and taken up a comfortable viewpoint, Uniball in hand. I write, “questionable morals.” This is my immediate response to the sly, come-hither glance of A Lady Seated at a Virginal. In A Lady Standing, the virginal is on the right and the woman faces right. In A Lady Seated, the virginal is on the left and the woman faces left. The scenarios are opposite, and so is my response. Rather than standing back contemplatively, as I did with A Lady Standing, I’m drawn in close to this slouching woman. Her expression is coyly neutral from a distance, but up close she seems to flash a knowing smile—almost a leer.
There is a floral curtain hanging at the upper left foreground, similar to that in The Art of Painting and Allegory of Faith. The curtain not only adds depth in this scene, but also a sense of voyeuristic pleasure to the ambiguous scene beyond it, in the room. Especially striking is the strangely phosphorescent glow of the Delftware baseboard tiles in the shadows beneath the virginal. The out-of-focus figures in each tile swim through the darkness like miniature, deep-sea creatures. Propped in the foreground is the startlingly crisp, whisky-colored viola de gamba, each of its six strings molten and clear. How odd it is that this instrument is the only clearly focused object in the room!
Some regard this painting as Vermeer’s last work, in part because it seems to fulfill a certain trajectory. Wheelock wrote that “his brushwork became more abstract” as he matured, and lists A Lady Seated at a Virginal as an example of this. The lack of focus here has led some to insinuate that Vermeer’s art was beginning to decline due to the circumstances (poverty, despair, perhaps even madness) that would soon lead to his death. 1672 is known as the Rampjaar, the Dutch “disaster year,” when France and England invaded the United Provinces, and the great economy collapsed. A Lady Seated at a Virginal is a product of the Rampjaar.
Wheelock also says that “none of the nuances of human psychology in his earlier works are present here.” I’m not sure I’d go that far, but the difference from earlier works is glaring. Take, for instance, the painting-within-a-painting. It’s based on a ribald bordello painting called The Procuress, that was owned by Vermeer’s motherin-law and has appeared before, in his painting The Concert. Here, it is starkly simplified—the three characters (whore, gallant, procuress) almost a cartoon. The gilt frame of the painting, especially the treatment of gold-on-gold highlights, has evolved into a rather listless, abstract pattern of paint daubs.
The window, principal beauty of so many luminous Vermeers, looms like a vestigial afterthought in the darkened corner. It’s covered with an indifferently painted blue curtain (the only one like it in the oeuvre), and what we can see of the lower pane reveals only blackness. Is it a night scene? And why include the window at all, only to cover it? The sheet of music, propped on the virginal before the woman, is totally illegible as musical staves, the bars reduced to watery daubs that bleed across the sepia page. And the woman’s blue satin dress is hardly more than a jumble of shimmery folds piled up haphazardly on the chair-back behind her. The wall-tiles, so crystalline and convincing in the companion painting, are faded and blurred here. From the painter of precisely scaled maps, of decisively real bricks and stoneware and leaded glass, of the triumphantly palpable weft of the silk dress in A Lady Standing at a Virginal, these qualities are disturbing.
One thing especially bothers me. The sidelong rake of light from the left that animates the essence of Vermeer, that is Vermeer, is not here. But there is some light falling into the scene, rather than across it. I figure this is related to the second light source, apparently falling from over my left shoulder. The lighting in the pair is another opposite: that which is lit here, remains dark in the other; that which is dark here, is well lit in the other. The face of A Lady Seated, as it turns, offers its glowing, doe-eyed prettiness, the fine ringlets about her brow rendered as summary light-strokes. Probably the brightest passage is her pale gold sleeve, dissolving in incandescence.
As for the mute, inviting figure of the viol de gamba, propped majestically in the foreground, it seems to parallel the chair in the other painting. Both objects loom close to the plane of the canvas and work to create depth as well as functioning as stand-ins for the male, situated just where the lover should be, with whom the viewer is aligned. Especially striking is the bow, thrust dramatically through the strings, the grip end angling up to be seen or grasped. Then I notice the brass frets on the fingerboard of the instrument. Actually, I can’t really make out the frets themselves, only the blunt ends of each one, where they catch the light, ambiguously smoldering in the dimness. Why is this so moving to me? I suddenly wonder. Then I know. It’s as if all the bittersweet erotic energy of one’s mid-life were concentrated there, at my fingertips.
I’m sitting frequently now, weary of marble. (I’ve been standing on the sides of my aching feet, like a tree sloth.) The guard nods: fifteen minutes. Still, I wonder. Is this painting about sex? I keep returning to certain upright shapes—the bow standing in quivering focus, the stout leg of the virginal—in combination with the woman’s own malleable, knowing regard. Seductive, beckoning, subaqueous, the source of the light, here at the end, blanked out beneath blue cloth.
14. The Last Word
I turn back to the standing and seated women. These two figures brood over Vermeer’s entire oeuvre: the mistress and the maid. In the earlier work, A Lady Standing at a Virginal, the room is bathed in a daunting clarity. Immaculate, soft shadows blend into the luminous white. The cupid stands quite openly at last, announcing the theme of committed love. The woman’s benign uprightness confirms it. There’s something ceremonious about her stance, about the way her fingers hover limply over the keyboard. It is an undisguised pose, a pause in the midst of her real life with the viewer, her husband. With me.
The invitation in A Lady Seated at a Virginal is very different, but equally challenging. Of course, the lady isn’t really playing the virginal, which one wouldn’t play sitting down in any case. She’s simply posing with it—her soft, silky forearms on display— while simultaneously twisting in her seat to meet my gaze. Her lap swivels toward me even as her knees remain at home beneath the keyboard. Her shoulders are slumped, as if she were near-sighted and couldn’t see anything very clearly. Her amazingly sinuous, swanlike neck is bent coyly forward, embellished with a lustrous strand of pearls. The only decisive features about her are her onyx irises. The eyes themselves are slightly provocative and almond-shaped. She keeps inviting me, Come on, her lips so plump as she turns toward me.
And as I take my leave, I think of the other women, too—the maid at her faux nap, the solitaries, and the letter-
readers. The gold-weigher, the lacemaker, the milkmaid. The scumbled flesh tones and shadows of each face. The yearning depths of an earthenware jug, the triumphant sunlit bell tower; every form of love, I imagine, the painter had ever known.
Here at the end, in his pair of ladies at the virginals, Vermeer offers an anatomy of love, both virtuous and carnal. In each, I sit virtually at the lady’s lap, and there’s nothing subtle about the way I’m addressed. The cupid’s inclusion, in A Lady Standing, is as clear as day for once, and the woman’s figure looms ramrod straight, with her decorous ribbons, her fluted Doric skirt. The cupid here is one of those miracles of simplicity—like looking back, across the Kolk, at one’s own life—to see the lineaments of love, the Petrarchan ideal, attached to this matronly woman. Her modest smile, her calm regard is the music she doesn’t play. Her beauty is in that manner, in that certainty, that loving acceptance. She sees the best in me. She’s what I need, if not always what I want.
In A Lady Seated, I’m drawn into the shadowy room almost directly from behind the girl. The procuress on the wall is murky and vague in this case—simplified to its essence—and the girl’s figure also displays no will of her own, it seems, except for the will to pose. Truthfully, my instinct is to reach for her. Her dress is a mess of abstraction, and it’s a mess because that’s how she’s sitting, and because that’s just the sort of girl she is. It’s almost as if she were wearing a daringly open black raincoat, holding a custard pie. It’s part of the design, I’d say, part of the work’s designs on me. She keeps me honest, too, for no account of love would be complete without her, and her frank acknowledgment. I take another step toward her. The pearls on her throat burn exquisitely, like pinpricks mapping the shadows. She’s what I cannot help but want, she’s what I can’t shake off, she’s Vermeer’s last word on the matter.
15. Salvation and Shipwreck
Now the guard coughs … now he says, “It’s time.”
I sling my backpack over my shoulder, doggedly scribbling a few last lines in my notebook. Finally, I turn to go.
Down a long corridor, I come to the deserted staircase hall—an immense openness beneath the central glass dome ceiling—and descend, my left fingertips grazing the brass rail, polished gold by human touch. The women hover in my head on the plane between past and future. I remember the twin gates, of ivory and of horn, from Book VI of The Aeneid:
Two gates the silent house of Sleep adorn:
Of polished ivory this, that of transparent horn:
True visions through transparent horn arise,
Through polished ivory pass deluding lies.
(ll. 893–896. Trans. John Dryden)
I’m the last one out again. My mind is floating a few steps ahead of me, down the marble staircase, past the desk to the right of the entrance, where the Indian girl sits, head down, sorting a pile of audio guides into the various languages. Then I will pass quietly through the slab-glass front door, out through the echoing portico into the watery neon buzz of the square. These two women—salvation and shipwreck—will attend me through the West End theatre marquee throngs: the black umbrellas, drinkers and diners glancing out at me through rainy windows. Past corner pubs all advertising “Sunday Roast” on their chalkboards: savory aromas of minted lamb and beef on the bone and Yorkshire puddings wafting down the sidewalks.
TWO MARRIAGES
1. Jackie
If someone could see straight into you, could take in all of you in a single glance, what would he or she see?
I was twenty-eight when I met Jackie, a playwright/director/ actress. She was thirty-seven, a twice-divorced and disillusioned high-school teacher. We were both natives of Columbia, we met, somewhat oddly, in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, at a rustic summer school for performing arts. I was the soft-spoken, newly sober maintenance man; she was the rather flamboyant theatre director, older than I by a decade. She was slim and worldly and wore feathered hats. We charmed and mauled each other for weeks. Then, to our mutual surprise, we discovered we wanted each other for good. What followed was a deliriously happy, seven-year period of growth—during which we both finished doctorates (in Theatre and English) from the University of Utah, and came into our own.
Later, in the late 1980s, at her peak, Jackie got sick and never really got better. She felt cold and nauseated—as if with an endless flu—and lost weight she couldn’t afford to lose. Her darkly exotic skin took on an almost jaundiced pallor. Meanwhile, her career was taking off, with endless roles, performances in avant-garde black box productions, as well as in mainstream plays and musicals. She even published a little: poems and plays and critical essays.
She had a summer fellowship in ’89 to study at Stratford. She came back gaunt, her complexion positively anemic. This was serious, and she was frightened, but not especially open to advice. By December, it turned out that the fibroid lump in her breast—which had already been thoroughly checked and biopsied and declared benign the previous year—was not, in fact, benign. Back then, “the big C” still seemed the darkest curse of all, and it had taken precious months for her, for me, for everyone to see through the stigma, the secrecy, and the misinformation.
No one who knew her was surprised at how determinedly Jackie fought for her life, through the mastectomies, the latest chemo-cocktails, radiation, and the attempted bone marrow transplant. Every week there was some new, desperate battle to defend the vital centers against an enemy that seemed almost demonic. Which are the dangerous tumors, you wonder; which can you afford to ignore? You don’t know, no one knows, but for every tumor she managed to beat back, a couple of new ones appeared, virtually overnight.
After the first round of chemo, the cancer went into remission, and Jackie landed a tenure-track job at the University of Texas. (She was virtually bald at her interview, but carried it off with Sinead O’Connor aplomb.) So we’d parted temporarily—she to Austin, I remaining in Salt Lake, to study for my doctoral exams. Six months later, she was still working her way through the hellish yet optimistic process of breast reconstruction—having her pectoral muscles expanded gradually, one side at a time, over implants filled with salt water—when, in what seemed a malicious irony, the cancer came back. I left Utah immediately, in a U-Haul truck; and though I continued to teach part-time in community colleges here and there, I essentially stayed at her side for the next two years.
The first year together in Austin was the trial of our lives, both of us making great efforts to keep up our careers. Meanwhile, we were trying not to panic, living in hospital wards, arranging trips to places like M.D. Anderson in Houston, and of course, continually convalescing, waiting for blood counts to rebound from the latest chemo or radiation. A fine balance is needed, we learned, as we tried to gauge how aggressively to attack, to try to overwhelm each tumor, while the cancer was aggressively attacking at the same time. And worse than the treatments were the side effects—the gauntlet of fevers, nausea, ulcers, and despair.
But there was happiness all along the way, too. One afternoon, lying in bed in her lovely penthouse apartment in downtown Austin, I asked if she remembered how we used to talk, in our first years, about getting married. Why didn’t we? I wondered aloud. A moment later, surprising myself, I asked her, this time for real. Immediately, she said yes—and for a long time, we simply wept quietly and happily. It was our impossibly romantic gift to each other.
A couple of days later, we got dressed up—I wore my one blue suit; she wore a silk dress printed with orchids—and then slipped away to see the judge. We hadn’t yet told her parents: we eloped! Jackie was very frail, already walking with a cane, and she had less than a year to live. The room was filled with the purest, most hallowed love imaginable. Our triumph wrested from despair, her hand trembling when I fitted the simple gold ring upon her finger.
Soon enough, it was time for her to resign, for us to go back to Missouri, so that she could be close to her family. We rented a townhouse just up the street from her parents. It wasn’t that we had give
n up, we thought; we were circling our wagons for the real fight. But I remember bathing her one night, a few months before the end, and as I soaped her back, I could feel a bed of new tumors nestled among her ribs and shoulder blades, like walnuts pushing out from beneath her skin. I couldn’t count them, and didn’t try. I decided not to mention them; her spirits were not often high, and she enjoyed her baths.
Much of Jackie’s last year was fogged. She wore a portable morphine pump that delivered doses of morphine through a central line straight into her heart. This contained her pain, but the side effects were grave, and—endlessly generous and brilliant and vivacious as she naturally was—it took everything I had to negotiate the disorientation, paranoia, and hallucinatory rages that so often consumed her now. Even so, we were never closer, never more selflessly, light-heartedly in love than we were in those last six months. We’d been together eight years then—we knew how to comfort each other, crack each other up—but now there was an edge of ecstasy, of urgency to every thought and joke and touch we shared. We often spoke of how lucky we were, how we’d finally found what mattered. The truth of our relationship was clear, really clear, for the first time, and though we were sorry that it took what it took for to us appreciate what we had … well, finally we knew.
We talked and talked. We’d joke our way through each day’s appointments—the doctors and nurses loved us—and almost seemed to grow giddier the sicker Jackie became. She had time to think about all the details of her death, including the gravesite in her family’s plot. We took an afternoon to visit it—me pushing her chair, with oxygen tank, her father close by. It was her decision, whether to be buried there or not. At first, we were both under-whelmed by the nondescript, suburban style of the cemetery, its stones set flush with the ground, for easier mowing. But when she noticed the heavy-headed catalpa tree almost directly above her plot, a sense of peace came over her, and she smiled. It had always been her favorite kind of tree.
Travels in Vermeer Page 14