Travels in Vermeer (16 page)

In place of the ethereal, sun-raked emptiness of the left-hand side of the painting, the right half is a feast of objects. First, there is the table, covered with the luxurious, crimson-and-blue-on-ochre Persian carpet, its heavy fringe splayed dramatically on the cold marble floor. Atop the table floats a delicate silver platter bearing a white porcelain pitcher that glows like a risen moon. I notice how the platter itself is defined—as simply as the pearl in
Girl with a Pearl Earring
—by an irregular, freehand, platinum line on the sunlit edge. Just behind all that, there's a cerulean blue chair that stands, facing the light, between the table and the couple. I lean in close and see the brilliant, white-gold studs on the chair—the paint laid on so thick that each stud actually protrudes from the canvas, much as real, hammered rivets would protrude from the leather. I reel back for a moment, dazzled.

From a distance, the saturated impression is overwhelming. Many elements of the painting are either bright gold or ochre, especially the virginal at the center, which is both—its raised lid bearing the ornate inscription “Musica Letitiae Comes Medicina Doloris.” (“Music, the companion of joy, the balm of sorrow.”) The girl, in her creamy yellow blouse, stands before it, and the amber bass viol lies face up behind her, between her back and the viewer. The blue in this room is more covert—the chair is the only overtly blue object. Still, the atmosphere is drenched with lapis, smoldering in the carpet and the shadows, even in the black-blue tiles of the floor. The entire foreground seethes deep blue, like a surreal poem of fire.

This dialogue between Vermeer's favorite colors pervades the entire atmosphere of the room. Portions of the wall and the virginal are either gold with sun, or blue with shadow. The gold bass viol and the bright blue chair beside it await whoever would play or sit. And, looking again at the two windows, I see how the right-hand casement shimmers with golden light, while the one on the left is cool and blue. I think if I could actually see outside, there'd be a building on the right, and nothing but blue sky on the left. But I can't know that, all I know is what the glass contains—the glass that seductively refracts the world rather than revealing it, and in so doing makes it seem new and strange.

And then there is the couple, frozen forever in what appears to be a distant rapture. He is all formal elegance, his tunic black as the hat of the officer in the Frick, as he gazes at her, lost in thought, afloat on the currents of her song. The sun strikes her, as she plays, on her creamy yellow left sleeve. I lean in close and make out the vanishing point, the pinhole in her sleeve, where the rigorous geometry of the room is centered. One thing that makes this painting especially complicated is that there's a mirror, hanging on the wall above the keyboard, reflecting the woman's face, which the viewer could not otherwise see. In the looking-glass world, the woman's gaze is turned toward the man—though her figure below, in our own world, keeps her eyes on her music. Vermeer revised the woman's position, I've read, turning her discreetly away from the man, and yet he took the liberty of leaving her reflection as it was, stealing a mysterious glance.

It is a circular, closed system of glances, like that of
The Art of Painting,
and the viewer is part of the system—we are complicit, privy to secrets. In the same way that one seems to glimpse, by chance, the model's image being painted on the canvas in
The Art of Painting,
just so I catch the girl's reflection in the mirror here, in
The Music Lesson.
There is also a famous enigma in this mirror, above the face of the woman: one can see the leg of an easel, and just beyond that, part of a box presumed to contain the artist's supplies. The easel would have been located in the center of the room, of course, where the artist (and the viewer) would stand. In other words, he puts himself, for once, smack into the intensely private orbit of the scene. A self-reflexive gesture? A calculated tease? But why?

The view is as simplistic, yet charged with as much meaning as the inscription itself, or the precious pitcher, or the visible part of a painting hanging to the right behind them—a popular and rather lascivious genre scene known as a
Roman Charity
. A father, Cimon, who has been condemned to starve in chains, is secretly breastfed by his daughter, Pero. I don't know how that twisted drama, with its shades of pathos and eros, relates to Vermeer's scene of extraordinary refinement, but I think it refers to the “balm” of music in the context of love's captivity.

Vermeer, in fact, is sometimes described as “voyeuristic”—a word that conflicts jarringly with his sensitivity. His modern parallel is Degas: both specialized in the anatomies of intimate, unguarded moments. I imagine Vermeer crouching in his darkened booth, examining every square centimeter. I wonder if the impulse to paint some part of himself into the picture this time was a matter of naturalism, a way of acknowledging the inescapable fact of his own existence. A way, perhaps, of dispelling part of the voyeuristic shadow he must have felt he cast on his work. In any case, it's as close as we get to a self-portrait—this nebulous bit of easel.

I check my watch:
5:15
. No one has entered the room. I can only see this painting for the first time once. I understand that what I am doing—trying to memorize every existing detail—is hopeless. And yet there's something sacred here, and I want to burn it into memory. Fifteen minutes left. I stand up.

I'm remembering something that I'd seen on leaving Kenwood a couple of hours ago. I'd crossed in front of the seemingly endless length of the stuccoed mansion to the other end, where the drive led out and away. On my left, the magnificent grounds swooped down toward some enchanted forest from childhood. There in the distance, a three-arched, white wooden footbridge stood at the edge of the clearing, nestled among the oaks, the meadows lit with daffodils.

But the bridge that completes the picture isn't a real bridge. It's a folly, a flat apparition called The Sham Bridge that, when viewed from the right distance and against the pastoral backdrop of Hampstead Heath, can't help but succeed. Even though I already knew all of this—because I'd read about it in a guidebook—I still half believed in the bridge when I walked past it.

Vermeer fits comfortably into this illusionist tradition, along with artists like Fabritius and van Hoogstraten. But the Vermeer paintings that foreground such trickery, works like
The Little Street
or
The Love Letter
, are anomalies. It's more common for Vermeer to use his magic sparingly and selectively. The plump ruff of a jacket, the sheen of a pearl or a lower lip are precise and irresistible appeals. They are servants of the painting's cause.

Then I look at the suitor here: his figure evanescent, thinly painted, with an evanescent, even more thinly painted sash across his chest. He's nearly a see-through man, a lost ghost, as transparent as his sash. In the optical scheme, the objects in the middle distance are in hard focus; those toward the back, like the man, the inscription, the painting-within-the-painting, are not.

5:28
. I notice how the handle on the pitcher is turned to the right, as if offering itself to the grasp—to my grasp, though, not to either of the figures behind it. It is a satisfyingly substantial, broadly curved handle, sunlit on its inside edge. Easy to imagine its heft in the hand. The brilliant blue chair faces me; the neck of the bass viol beside it lies comfortably close; and the scalloped sides of the viol's body are perfectly made to be held between the thighs.

With all this, I don't need to see the man clearly—I feel the song for myself. The door opens behind me. It's a different guard, a woman this time, to tell me that the museum is closing. I nod and jot:

didn't get very far—

then I turn my back, a difficult thing to do, on
The Music Lesson.

8. Faux

As I join the guard in the doorway, I half-whisper, trying to keep my voice down, “What a lovely room this is.” I gesture vaguely behind me at its green linen-covered walls; elaborate zigzag hardwood parquet; and arched central skylight, with flanking glass panels embellished with enormous plaster flowers.

“Yes, well … it isn't what it seems,” she says in a normal speaking voice, because we're the last ones left in the building.

“What do you mean?”

She stops and turns. She's ageless, a sparkling, pale-eyed redhead in a royal-blue uniform with scarlet trim. Her gold nametag reads: “Diane.”

“Well, these walls for instance. Here. Try this,” she says, stepping back into the room and rapping sharply with her knuckles. “See?”

I rap: it is a fake wall, a movable soundproof partition.

“But…” I say, looking at the marble baseboards.

“Plastic,” she says, with a twinkle. I lean over and rap there as well.

“Look at the size of some of these canvases. How do you think we fit them in through these doors?” She pauses. “We don't. We build the room around them.”

I ask her about the skylight, the flowers. She tells me they were recently cast from antique molds discovered in the palace basement after the war. Then she leads me out onto the landing, raps on the greenish marble columns flanking the marble stairs: hollow tin. But skillfully painted tin. It passes. Diane points out how some of these doors, with inset windows, lead into galleries; in other doors, the insets are filled with mirrors. She takes out her keys, unlocks one of these doors so I can see how each doorway is equipped with the foldable mirror behind it. Depending on the exhibition, each door can be used as a door or camouflaged as a mirrored partition that seems to enlarge the room.

“Look,” she says. “We're especially proud of this.”

She places her palm on the deeply burnished mahogany handrail, set atop black wrought iron balusters. Beneath the rail, a length of bright-gold tasseled rope loops among and around each baluster, and so on down the steps. I touch the velvet rope only to discover it too is cold wrought iron—shockingly cold—that was forged and painted to look exactly, drape exactly like heavy braided rope, woven sinuously through the more literal wrought iron balusters.

“Yes,” she says. “It's faux. It's real faux.” She beams. Then walks me cheerfully, conspiratorially even, down to the locked entrance, her keys jangling at her waist.

It's only a taste of mystery, this hour like the tick of rain on glass—and it leaves me a little unsteady on my feet.

9. Lightness

I walk back to my hotel through damp streets shining with moonlight, past the ghost-white swans afloat in St. James Park, thinking about the see-through man in
The Music Lesson.
From a certain distance, he is Vermeer's way of expressing the lightness of love.

Marriage, I'm thinking, is often the opposite. For instance, the summer when Sophia was one, we took a celebratory trip through Germany and Italy. For the first part of it, Sara was singing with the university choir, in various village churches in Bavaria. For weeks, I carried a wonderfully heavy sleepy baby on my back, along with a diaper bag on my arm, as I manhandled two huge, tweed suitcases onto and off of crowded buses and sweltering regional trains, through countless inns and hostels and customs offices. The fancy, wheeled suitcases were Swiss—they weren't Swiss-made, but they had a catchy Swiss brand name that eludes me now, with an embroidered Swiss red cross for a logo. They were stuffed with gifts for everyone Sara could think of, and the suitcases themselves were gifts to us, purchased in honor of our rediscovered marital happiness in one of those flowery riverboat towns along the Rhine. The suitcases would never be used again after this summer. I remember wheeling and slinging and hoisting my comically heavy burden through the pristine train stations of Germany and Switzerland, through the gloriously grimy and chaotic stations of Italy. I took pride in the sheer athleticism of this feat; few could have managed it. I also took pride in my gifted wife and angelic blonde baby girl. I felt nearly invincible then, though the marriage was in its last months.

Perhaps the lightness exists only in falling in love. The summer after my ninth grade year was the summer of my first love. I was living with my father on Wilson Avenue in Columbia, in the first of a series of rather unfortunate houses he rented for us. One day I discovered Hinkson Creek through thick bushes at the end of the narrow, brick street. After that, I was always heading off down there—the cool and sheltered feel of it big enough to lose myself in for a day.

Walking home one evening, a voice called out to me, a mellow and matter-of-fact girl's voice called out to me from a porch swing as I passed. I think I waved and kept my head down, unsure if I'd imagined it. But on my way home the very next day, I gathered my nerve when I saw her again. She called,
Hello there, hello again
, and I stopped.

Her name was Cheryl. She lived in New Jersey, but was visiting her grandmother in Columbia that summer. She stands slim and gracefully tall in memory; but in reality, she was an inch shorter than I was then. Similarly, she seems forever wise to me, because she had already turned sixteen, while I was still fifteen. Dusk after dusk, we sat on that swing together, drinking orange or grape soda, watching the butterflies waft down the street in shafts of green-gold light. Here was something I knew about, and could explain to her: their names, Monarchs and Viceroys and Cabbage Moths, and the differences between them. Slowly each sunset sank—those lush, flamingo sunsets of the Midwest. Bats jittered amongst the trees, and fireflies soundlessly lit up one by one a few feet above each lawn. I couldn't believe her green-eyed prettiness: fine freckles and eyebrows and perfectly tilted nose. I couldn't believe the fact of her sitting so peacefully, merely an inch away from me.

This was the closest I've been to
The Music Lesson's
dreamy sensation of romance, its almost narcotic suspension of time and place. It wouldn't have occurred to me to ask her to go anywhere, to want for anything more than what each moment already provided. We didn't talk much. When we did, we imagined careers, or told our dreams, or wished on the first star, that sort of thing. Sometime after dark, her grandmother would call her in, and I'd drift home in a state of profound disequilibrium.