Travels in Vermeer (10 page)

“It's fabulous,” I say. “I can't believe it. As good as Florence.”

“It's the mascarpone,” she says. “It has to be fresh.”

“Tell me, Stephanie,” I say. “How is it—this—working out? Because I'd like to see you again.”

“Sure,” she says. “Listen, there's something you should know. My firm is supposed to be opening a branch in Wilmington. I'd be the obvious choice to run it. It's one of the reasons I winked at you.”

4. Keyhole

We're roaring back through the blue night. Again and again, she brakes unnecessarily hard, it seems to me, nearly pitching me into the dash. “Look,” she says, glancing up toward a yellow light, after one of these stops. “See that?”

“Yeah, I see it,” I say, sunk low in the seat.

“But do you know what it means?” she asks.

The instant red turns to green, her right foot pins me back in the big leather seat again.

“
Slow down,”
I say. “It means,
caution, slow down
.”

“Wrong,” she says. “It means:
clear the intersection
. No wonder you get tickets.”

“You're right,” I say. “I should read the Handbook.”

When we reach her house, it's late, so I sign off in her drive. Quickly, to make it easy for her.

“I'll come to the coast in a week or two. As soon as I know something,” she says.

“I'll show you around, anyway,” I say, “whatever happens.”

She gives me a half-hug; I can feel the long muscles in her supple, feline shoulders. I don't expect more, don't even want more. I'm happy.

Perfectly happy, driving down I-40—on my left, a half-moon, white as candle wax, rising behind the flowery crowns of the long-leaf pines. A dream, I think.

I have a chance, I tell myself. It's all I could ask for.

I write her in the morning. “No matter what,” I say. “Just let me know. I'll come to you. I dreamt last night that we both bought motorcycles. We were roaring off to the mountains in the summer. Maybe a picnic, or just talking for hours beneath a waterfall. I know exactly where to go.”

She writes back immediately; tells me I'm sweet. Thanks me for coming. She has a big trial coming up, she's under a lot of pressure, but she'll write again soon.

But she doesn't write back that week or the next.

Night after night, I want to email her, but decide to restrain myself. She said she'll write, I think. But she doesn't, she simply
doesn't
, and that's the end of it. I'm through. Part of me thinks: two roads diverged, etcetera. But the simple truth is that I've already gotten more from my travels—from Vermeer—than from anything else in this passage of my life. Not long ago, it seemed his art was a dream, a mirror reflecting life, or a keyhole through which we peer at it. I realize Vermeer is what's real for me now; life is the dream.

N
EW
Y
ORK

[
April
]

1. The Gaze

Coming out of the Hunter College subway station on Lexington Avenue, I head by instinct toward Central Park a couple of blocks away. I think about the primal sense—translated from forest to city—that divines a half-seen clearing, river or open air. Even if I can't see the park, I can feel it—
there
at the end of
this
street, but not
that
one. Of course, this feeling is especially powerful in New York, with its more dramatic skyline contrasted with dramatic openness in the middle. I follow East Seventieth Street toward the April-green haze at the end of it, and arrive at the black, wrought-iron gates of the Frick Collection, on Fifth Avenue just across from the park.

The Frick and the Mauritshuis are close relatives, not only in terms of the physical buildings (former mansions), but also in terms of the feeling of intimacy and the personal eclecticism of each collection. The Mauritshuis, a nationalized seventeenth-century palace, was built by Count Johan Maurits, once governor of the Dutch colony in Brazil. Prince William V of Nassau-Orange (1748–1806) owned the original collection of Dutch and Flemish art. In 1816, his son, King William I (1772–1843), donated it to the Dutch state. The Frick, on the other hand, was the idyll, refuge, and passion of one man. It was built by the infamous Pittsburgh tycoon Henry Clay Frick, in 1913, to accommodate his personal collection of paintings and other art objects. When he died in 1919, he left the building, including all the furnishings and art, with an endowment, and so The Frick Collection was born.

Both buildings were residences—palatial, but lived-in residences, which makes them ideal for experiencing a Vermeer. The hot, seventeenth-century, Dutch art market, driven by a newly wealthy middle class buying up paintings for fashionable homes (when they weren't investing in tulips), was domestic and secular in nature. Smaller paintings, especially portraits or exotic still-lifes—filled with the luxury items a maritime economy could provide—were in. The idea of seeing a real Vermeer in somebody's living room boggles the mind nowadays, but that's the right setting for this artist's eye-level interiors, and the Frick or the Mauritshuis is as close as one gets to that experience.

The first painting I see in the Frick, in the passageway called the South Hall, is a small, jewel-like Vermeer:
Officer with Laughing Girl
(c. 1655–60). Kees Kaldenbach had called this painting “extraordinarily luminous,” and it's clear, as soon as I turn the corner, why he'd said that. In this early genre piece, Vermeer imagines a relationship between the officer and the young woman that not only reflects light but, like most of the Vermeers I've seen, this one actually seems to glow. The seemingly casual placement—in a murky passageway, among period marble and velvet furnishings—only emphasizes its alchemical radiance.

Officer with Laughing Girl
seems especially vulnerable, too, hanging alone and so close to the museum's outer doors, and this vulnerability is heightened by the fact that none of the paintings here are covered with glass.

I give
Officer with Laughing Girl
a wide berth at first. I linger in its vicinity. Passers-by on their way to the great galleries at the end of the hall, filled with big canvases by Rembrandt, El Greco, Velazquez, say, “Look! A Vermeer!” Just as in all the other museums. But when we're alone again, I zoom in. To do this, I have to lean over a gilt-painted antique chair, placed directly beneath the painting. A gold, tasseled rope is laid across its gold satin cushion, embroidered with cupids and bizarre, winged busts—in order to keep onlookers back, I suppose. It doesn't completely work, in my case. The gorgeousness of the painting prompts me to lean precariously over the chair, until I trigger the motion sensor. I've done this often enough, in other museums, to feel only a little shame when the alarm beeps. A smiling young guard with tight cornrows—wearing a maroon jacket like a Shriner—appears discreetly to my left. We exchange nods as I back off.

Again and again, when I glance up, my breath catches in my throat. The feeling isn't
Here is art
, but
Here is life
.

As critics point out,
Officer with Laughing Girl
comes directly (much more directly than Vermeer's later work) out of the mid-century genre tradition. It bears a striking resemblance especially to Pieter De Hooch's
The Card Players.
Vermeer painted only a few such scenes, and these early works culminate in
Officer with Laughing Girl
. Edward Snow says this painting has “the feeling more of a last than a first work.” In fact it
was
a last work of sorts, as, after this, Vermeer settled almost completely on the solitary subject, his calling all along. Snow spends the middle portion of his book thinking about three further exceptions in the oeuvre,
The Concert, Couple Standing at a Virginal,
and
An Artist in His Studio,
all depictions of groups or couples. He calls these paintings “reflections on the matrix within which his solitary women take shape.”

The window at left in
Officer with Laughing Girl,
especially the sun-infused lozenges of panes on the upper row, is among my favorites of all his magnificent windows. (My very favorite is the one in
The Milkmaid
.) The outside surfaces of the partially open, inward opening, right-hand casement shimmer with swirling, gray-green, platinum shapes as the light rakes over it, registering nuances as slight as the varying thicknesses of the faceted panes. Smudges, imperfections are passionately captured with Vermeer's characteristic brew of verisimilitude and freedom. On the other, still-closed casement— blue in the center, gold on the sides—I make out the ochre ghost of a building in the lower left-hand corner. Once through the window, the otherworldly flow of north light is registered by one of Vermeer's first bare walls, and is caught especially in the face of the bonneted girl.

At first I see this as a traditional genre scene, which might be taken either as a girl visiting with her suitor in her house or as a woman in a bordello “entertaining” an officer in uniform. The male figure is viewed from the back. We cannot quite see his expression as he sits across from her at a table, but he wears a bright red jacket with a sash or shoulder strap, and a large black hat, tilted jauntily. Foregrounded as he is, he's a disproportionately massive and shadowy shape. He looms between window and woman, taking up all the space and blocking the painting's left center. It's a radical perspective that suggests the use of a camera.

She, on the other hand, seems tiny, almost childlike, and emotionally open. Besides the cotton bonnet drawn closely about her face, she wears the yellow bodice with black braiding (perhaps Vermeer's most characteristic outfit), and a white collar. There's nothing overtly disclosed here to make me think of the women who appear in the traditional bawdy genre scenes of the time.

In fact, I'm deeply moved by the ways Vermeer shelters her, even from my own intense gaze. Rather than present her in the typical attire of tousled, open blouse with dramatic décolletage, he covers almost every square inch of her with the stiff, embroidered dress—only a hint of throat exposed—her bonnet tied tightly beneath her chin.

The artist Jonathan Janson, on his website
The Essential Vermeer,
summarizes critical sentiment: “It is impossible for us to ignore the young woman's radiant optimism … Her expression is so positively charged that even the officer's reticence is effectively dissimulated.” This is what I expected to see in the Frick: another of Vermeer's serene, angelic studies like
The Milkmaid
or
Woman Holding a Balance.
The
real
Vermeer, for me.

Yet, as I keep studying her, the girl's animated presence takes me by surprise. She sits leaning a little toward the officer, hands before her on the table—her right hand lightly curled around the stem of a full wineglass. What Janson sees as “radiant optimism” can be seen in another way: her face seems almost livid, lit with alcohol and desire.

Or else she is flushed from the chill I can feel, wafting through the open window.

Yet, her lips are full and defiantly—almost shockingly—red.

Finally, I see something more: her left hand. There's a single gesture at the heart of this painting—it's how her hand lies relaxed, palm-upward, on the table, index finger provocatively curled toward the officer. The hand shapes a startlingly lewd caress—though all it holds at the moment is light and air—inches from the body of the wary officer.

I can hardly believe it—but it does confirm on the simplest level what is going on between the two. Still, the painting remains unknowable, each volatile detail contradicting the next. The girl is seen in the most flattering, yet also the least flattering light possible—which is, for me, part of Vermeer's triumph.

The viewer is the complicating factor—I am the third character, addressed more and more directly as Vermeer matures. I gaze now, a little voyeuristically, over the officer's shoulder at the girl, evaluating her much as he might. Who is she? I wonder. His body language is tense, his right arm akimbo, his huge right hand massively crumpled on his right hip, where she can't see it, but I can. The officer's face is shown in three-quarter profile, from the rear—the protruding nose, the merest glint of an eye. I can't read his apparently conflicted and withheld intentions, but there's more, much more than a hint of threat in him. He makes me wonder: As a man, how often have I presented myself in such a way? How often have I been the shadow looming in a room?

And still her unguarded sweetness comes shining back. No matter how I see her, what is undeniable is the intent, native warmth of her smile, framed by the bonnet—as it is in
Woman Holding a Balance,
as it is with his other beneficent creatures. Apart from her startling flush or the apparently lewd gesture of her left hand, her face—her unguarded sweetness—is still the focal point, deepening the work by denying easy resolution. It knocks me flat.

It is a purity of love that permeates the lighted cube of space. Her right-hand edge is traced with light. Her white collar is shadowed just at the edge dun-gray, a bit darker than necessary, in order to contrast more decisively with the whitewash
.
Her bonnet is one of the characteristic, subliminal miracles of its type. It features a shadow on the side that is similar to the shadow-hands that gently support the heads of his later women. Folded behind the head, following the curve of the skull, it forms an illumined sliver of crescent moon. Like the more dramatic hands in the later works, this moon isn't immediately obvious, but once it is seen, it can't be unseen. In any case, this slender figment of moon seems to cup the lovely girl's skull, protecting her, cradling her with a sidelong halo.

All this, again, in service of
what
? For Vermeer doesn't follow nature, exactly, and he doesn't exactly follow light. It's the light of love he cares about: her lit face facing down the dark. Her purity, the purity of love envelops the officer too, and envelops me as well. She is not Mary Magdalene. She is no more nor less, thank God, than her mortal, bought-and-paid for self; her plaintively, lewdly beckoning hand; but she is enough. She is all there is.