Travels in Vermeer

 

 

 

Travels in Vermeer |
A MEMOIR

 

 

Michael White

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Karen & Michael Braziller Book

PERSEA BOOKS
|
NEW YORK

Prelude [October]

Amsterdam [March]

The Hague and Delft [June]

Anne [November]

Washington, D. C. [December]

Stephanie [March]

New York [April]

How It Works

London [May]

Two Marriages

An Ending [May]

Suggested Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

 

 

TRAVELS IN VERMEER

 

 

 

She strikes you stock-still from a distance, though you don't know how or why. For she isn't pretty exactly, this woman busy at her work, her face downturned but angled into the light that rakes across the scene from left to right. She might be a lace-maker, or a lady of means. She might be a kitchen maid, who pours milk from an earthenware pitcher as lightly, as expertly, as if she were cradling a baby. It's always the same room, but a different fantasy. Here she stands, at the still point of another world.

 

 

 

P
RELUDE

[
October
]

 

 

There's a small window cut into my front door, composed of four identical square panes with a perfect cross of slim, oak muntins dividing them. Sometimes I stand at the door, staring idly at a neighbor walking his dog outside or at the rain drizzling through the longleaf branches—slicking down my front sidewalk—or at nothing. I rest my forehead on the juncture of this cross. It dents the skin of my forehead, and is oddly comforting.

It's already October, 2003, the grass a matte gray. The house is silent, except for the chronic ringing in my ears. If I were standing on the beach five miles away, I might notice how the glass-green rollers, folding over the offshore sandbars, have turned slate-gray. I might notice how the currents, plying the lap of sand, have switched from south to north and the surfers have donned their wetsuits. But I haven't been to the beach for months. Here, in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina, the pines are releasing their summer needles: drifts of blonde straw are piling up on the slopes of my roof and snuffing out what little life remains in the lawn.

I'm in the midst of a bad divorce, and have nearly lost what's left of my wits trekking from lawyer's office to courtroom to mediation to counseling and through all the blank space in-between. Nearly all the anxiety on my end has to do with my daughter, Sophia, who is only three. Sara—my beautiful, considerably younger, estranged wife—has a shark of a lawyer and is seeking full custody.

Turns out I'm not quite the man I thought I was. The one who dealt with his alcoholism half a lifetime ago and still keeps up a contented and continuous sobriety. The devoted husband who stood beside his first wife through her battle with cancer; who did all he could to help her pass with courage and dignity. The poet who earned his doctorate, published books, stubbornly found his share of success. The passionate, popular, outdoorsy, “cool” professor. I'm not sure where that guy,
any
of those guys, went. At home, there are convulsive fits of sobbing, once or twice a day, and I am taken aback by how long this lasts. At the university where I teach, a lingering sensation of falling dogs me in the halls. Friends have taken sides. Department meetings are dreadful. But I still manage to pump myself up for classes. I still gladly lose myself in the earnest faces of students, trying to inspire them.

Now it's Saturday, two weeks after the temporary custody hearing. It's only the first step in what, in North Carolina, is a yearlong process, but so far nothing seems to be going my way. I'd wanted a fifty/fifty custody split; what I got is the traditional every-other-weekend visitation. I'm sitting in my armchair, in a colorless, dreamless haze of therapist-recommended Lexapro, staring at my own feet, when a loud knock jolts me out of my skin. I rise, furtively, in order to steal a glance through the door without being seen. It's Sara: a whiff of beauty in the frame. I think:
No
. Another curve-ball. Because my divorce is crazy and bitter and acrimonious, and because the stakes (my relationship with my daughter) are high, there's safety in distance, in a locked door. I sit back down. But, a moment later, she knocks again—a cordial but slightly impatient rap. I start to get up, then sit back down, and cross my arms.

Suddenly, I realize the door isn't locked so, staying low, I make it the three steps to the doorknob in the same instant it begins to turn. I'm fumbling with the chain too late as she pushes the door open about a foot until it stops against my right knee. Then I peer through the little square window.

Sometimes, time speeds up: not just an hour, but months flash past. Other times, it stops—the weight of everything, past present future bearing down. One thing I know: in the time it takes to open one's mouth, to reach for the dangling chainlock, what happened or would happen in court in the minds of others doesn't count, what happens now is what counts.

Here's what I see. Sara in a black raincoat, hair cut in a sharply angled pageboy—dyed a richer shade of black, her huge brown eyes outlined dramatically, her lips a flame-red jolt against the gray world. She's holding a fresh-baked vanilla custard pie in each hand. When she catches my eye, she raises one pie up next to her ear, so I can see it clearly:
See
? Then she nods for me to let her in.

I realize that the language of this encounter—pies and lipstick, raincoat absurdly open on the lightly freckled swell of her breasts— might seem like some sort of joke. Maybe it's even outrageous, a cliché, for this to happen weeks after she left me amid a flurry of scandalous accusations. But it's dead serious for me.

I'd always done most of the cooking, but one thing Sara had done for five years in the kitchen is ply me with desserts. I didn't really have a sweet tooth at first, so it was sport for her. She spent years whipping up crunchy Christmas toffees, gooey brownies, frothy coconut macaroons for me, but when it turned out that I couldn't be trusted alone in the same room with a simple vanilla custard pie—for there'd be nothing left but a few crumbs on the counter—
that
was a triumph.

As for the raincoat. Our relationship might be dysfunctional, absurd, and riddled with clichés, it might swallow its pride and show up with a pie in each hand, but when we made love, we made love, and we did it body and soul. We'd rowed across long summers, years of darkness—headboard battering potholes into the plaster wall behind it, sheets drenched in the Carolina mugginess which she had loved to let in—years of love that cannot be unmade. Such a fleeting dream of eternity: seen only in glimpses, flights beyond ourselves until we fell gasping into each other's arms.

Then she starts to push open the door. “Sara?” I say, puzzled, as she puts her weight into it hard. I'm bracing my hip to meet her. “Wait,” I say, though of course I don't mean
wait
, I mean
stop
. She manages to jam her shoe through the door, then most of her leg, so I relent a little: I don't want to hurt her. I hold all my weight on the door, and I know she can't budge it, but I try not to push back any more than necessary—not an easy thing to do. She shoves back hard a couple of times anyway—my mind spinning a zillion miles an hour, trying to take it in, react correctly—this beautiful, panicky girl in trench coat, bearing her considerable gifts on a blasé, brown-grass day, one long leg muscling through her former front door, with a golden, cellophane-covered, still-warm pie in each hand. We're locked for a good half-minute in this pantomime. I can smell the cinnamon mixed with Sara's own orchidaceous scent. Then she gives up, pulls back her leg through the door our former friends once entered without knocking, and I slam it and set the chain to be sure.

For a few seconds, through the window, we read each other's eyes. Despite everything, all the manipulations of our divorce, the somewhat irrelevant boyfriend (who'd hang up when I happened to answer), what anyone dignified or rational would think about the attempt she is making, I truly feel for her. I wish I could let her in. I
want
to let her in; in another moment, I think, I will do it. I'll ask her to sit down, brew coffee, and cut pie for us both. I'll ask what's on her mind.

I lean my forehead against the cross. Today, in this dreary light, Sara is irresistibly lovely. I remember the day our daughter, Sophia, was born. When the nurse announced, “It's a girl,” I danced—unselfconsciously, for once—around the room in the flapping hospital gown. In the moments after, the nurse preparing to clean her up, Sophia lay quietly on the table. Not a peep. Then, cautiously, her tongue snaked straight up out of her mouth, and made two or three tentative circles in the air. Testing, tasting the atmosphere. Sara was exhausted, her eyes unfocused beneath dank bangs. Within the half hour, by prior agreement, I went out for two-dozen gooey-hot Krispy Kreme doughnuts, which we gobbled up with cold white milk before the new mom slept for twelve straight hours.

Of course, I think, she's broken up with the new boyfriend, so she's here to reclaim the life she'd so recently vacated, as if nothing much had happened.
What is your problem?
she seems to convey with a childishly scrunched pout:
Just open the damn door!

I don't show it, I keep my expression deadpan, but I'm torn with hope, with hurt. If she says,
I'm sorry
, I decide, I'll open the door. I will. I watch intently, waiting.
Say it.

For years I'll imagine this moment, dream of it, maybe for the rest of my life.

She bends down at the foot of the door, the squeaking storm door still propped open by her hip. Then she rises, steps free, looks me dead in the eye again, and turns. I watch as she strides across the grass to the grayish Accord that was once ours, gets in, drives off. I keep looking, my thoughts racing:
What just happened? What did I do?

I stand for a long time, forehead pressed against the cross in the window. Then I open the front door. Holding the storm door open a few inches is one of the pies. The other pie is out on the porch next to some disused flowerpots. I lean down and pick up the pie at my feet—still warm and fragrant—though I know I won't be able to eat it. I leave the other pie where it is for now.

On Monday morning, I meet with my lawyer, Jim L., to “go over,” as he says, “the rest of it.” I can't get used to his office: a splendidly dark and glossy leather-and-mahogany sanctuary, where he spends his days forever in the eye of a storm. When I tell him about Sara coming with pies, how I didn't let her in, he proclaims, “Good!” His tone is simultaneously decisive and relieved. It's as if we'd dodged a bullet.

On Tuesday morning, I meet with Tracy, my counselor, as usual. Her office is a converted back porch, with leaded windows all around. My seat is a pew-like bench, strewn with huge, loose pillows, which I can hunker down in for one blessed hour each week. There's a catalpa tree out back I like to gaze at, the kind with long brown pods that crack each spring and release their spinning, double-winged seeds in any bit of breeze. When I tell her about the pies, Tracy beams, says, “Good! Thank
God
.” But it's not as if we'd dodged a bullet. It's as if we've made great progress

As for me, I'm not so sure. I wonder if I'll ever be sure. Whether love is uplifting or not, is healthy and sane and wholesome or not, it's still the threshold of eternity, the closest most of us ever come. How can we walk away from it?

A
MSTERDAM

[
March
]

1. Traveling

It's spring break. I'm standing in front of Amsterdam's Central Station, a little to the side because of the throngs flowing in and out. I watch trams filter toward me through an overhead space of wires and suspended lamp globes. They gather before the station, drop off a few people, and pull away to the right. I take my time. I'm jetlagged in the pale mid-morning. The ocean at my back, the city rays out all around, a baroque skyline of marquees, towers, and gilt domes wrapped around the center, where I stand with nowhere in particular to go.

What am I doing here? Back in Wilmington, with the first big court date for my divorce looming, all I'd wanted was an ocean behind me. But now that I've cashed in my Frequent Flyer miles, flown all night and disembarked at Schiphol, I suddenly wonder why I've chosen Amsterdam. It seemed to make sense a few days ago. It was one of the few great European cities I'd never visited. I'd always imagined it as Oz, although crisscrossed with canals.