Travels in Vermeer (2 page)

Maybe it was an escapist fantasy that guided me here, or perhaps some deeper instinct. In any case, my life is about to change and by an unexpected route: through looking at old Dutch paintings. I have never formally studied art, but I've always loved to look at it. And as a young boy, I habitually lost myself in artistic efforts: drawings and watercolors, landscapes and seascapes. Sometimes I wonder if I might've become an artist, rather than a writer. In any case, I knew Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum was the home of many Rembrandts. But Rembrandt won't figure in my story; the transformation ahead of me will come courtesy of Johannes Vermeer.

I step out into the flow of crowds slowly drifting from square to square. In a corner breakfast bar, I choose a round
stroopwafel
from a glass decanter, dip the caramel-filled edge of it into black coffee, munch dreamily for a moment, then pocket the rest for later. I buy a canal tour-boat ticket—then climb into the long, bus-like contraption that barely slithers beneath each hump-backed sandstone bridge. We trace the rings of canals—the Kaizersgracht, the Prinsengracht—around the arc of the city. I look where I am pointed to look:
There
is the door of the Anne Frank House.
There
, at the corner, is the Westerkerk. See the yellow royal crown on the tower?
There
is the—

After only a few minutes, I start to grow weary of looking at the city like this, so I disembark at one of the stone landings, heavily climb the steps and cross a street. Almost immediately, I'm lost in the emerald vastness of the Museumplein, my backpack seemingly filled with rocks. A reflecting pool as long as a football field, a Ferris wheel beside it; the opera house and the Rijksmuseum lined up to face each other from afar at either end. The main gate of the Rijksmuseum is fenced off for renovations. I circle around to the temporary entrance on one end, and note tomorrow's visiting hours, nine to six.

I head back toward the center of this city of bridges, each arching its back beneath me as I cross. Atop each bridge, the black iron railings torque like tortuously braided tree roots. Down along the Flower Market on the Singel, barges and stalls with baskets of blossoms—a little early for tulips, but here are the deep-lit hues of crocuses and daffodils. I ghost through half-real squares with working jugglers, mimes, and every sort of street life or street theater imaginable.

Dog-tired at the center of town, my elbows propped on yet another bridge-railing, I gaze down yet another canal. Here, I'm transfixed by the lovely reflections, caught in the black waters, of the magenta fluorescent tubes that outline the windows on both sides. Evening throngs mill through the chill March air, past wigged mannequin displays in fetish boutiques, coffee shops
,
and the upscale live-sex theaters. De Wallen. Here and here and here are the window girls, done up as satin black thong fantasies, or as schoolgirl-plaidskirt fantasies, or simply as generic blondes. Some sway or swish to their iPods, half-heartedly baiting the waters, hands braced at the corners of the window frames. Some sit on pedestal stools while talking on cells or smoking. Here is a middle-aged fraulein in garters, with a crop tucked under one arm and an open sneer for every son-of-a-bitch who passes.

It's the fleshpot of fleshpots, a stone's throw from the harbor, so even the drunkest sailor couldn't miss it. But there are no drunken sailors now.

With surprising clarity, I remember certain scenes from my years in the Navy–paradise alleys in the depths of San Juan, Rota, Barcelona, all of the classic Sixth Fleet liberty ports. I had left my father's house, in Columbia, Missouri, the day after high school graduation, drifted for a few months, worked odd jobs in the Rockies, and then enlisted. It's difficult enough to simply be eighteen, but when you're eighteen and knotted up within yourself in the foul, hot hold of a steam-driven ship for months on end, those smoke-filled mercies—brothels and hovels stocked with neighborhood-sweetheart, twenty-buck whores—shine bright in the mind, like the final proof of God.

I remember riding the liberty launch into the Bay of Naples. 1975. The crew of my ship, the amphibious attack ship USS
El Paso,
had just rescued a thousand American civilians from the siege of Beirut. First, we spent a month anchored off shore in mined waters, waiting for negotiations that ultimately broke down. Suddenly one night we got the call, and went in thundering fast and hard with landing craft. A small band of Marines picked up the Americans in front of the embassy, and led them in single file down to the boats. From there, we delivered them—crowded on every deck, like anxious immigrants, each with a single suitcase—to Cyprus. It was our moment, our single, incandescent moment. Gerald Ford telephoned—patched in live, on the intercom—to thank us.

Then we approached fleet landing, under a flame-clear sky, bouncing through a little harbor chop. We could see the queue of girls on the pier, dolled up in heels and fishnet in broad daylight, late sun shadowing the immolated backdrop of Castel Nuovo. To the victors go the spoils.

Now, on the bridge, in this other liberty port, I hear a titter from behind as two women pass arm-in-arm. Normal, urban ladies, with scarves and topcoats. “Oh no, you would
not
,” one says. “Would
so
.” They are Brits, about my age. They're starting to gray but are still spritely, you might say, enjoying themselves immensely. Girls' night out.

For me, what the red lights of De Wallen signify is theme-park or “cultural tourist” lust and, charming as it is, there's little heat in it, for me. I'm far more tempted by the clink of glasses, laughter from every corner brewpub. I'm imagining a frothy swallow of Heineken, so I keep moving, moving, shivering, my mouth watering, and I don't stop.

Hours later, out of the wrong direction, I arrive on the waterfront, where I'd marked an
X
for the Renaissance Hotel on my map. It's a modern high-rise, earthen and mahogany tones inside. My room is on the fourth floor. I swing open the French windows to a canal view of gray sky, lead-gray water. Only eight o'clock, but I'm truly done—and lonelier than I've felt in years.

What am I doing here? I slump in the chair for half an hour without moving. In the bathroom, I line up pill bottles and inhalers on the sink—my Advair, Wellbutrin, Lexapro, Aleve—then sleep in my clothes until sunrise.

2. Daydreaming

There's a story I sometimes tell my college students about how I was placed in “slow” classes in grade school, a designation that lasted through high school. The reason, I think, was because I was extraordinarily shy and inward, and always traveling in my mind. I can conjure up my experience in a single scene. I remember an open window beside me, with a view across the emerald football field, its white chalked lines and wooden bleachers, and beyond that, nothing but rolling hills. I'd stare and stare, in a trance-like state, as the teacher's voice washed unintelligibly over me—as soothing as ocean waves, I might say now, though I never saw the ocean in my childhood. If I retained nothing from Basic Math or Wood Shop, at least I became a world-class dreamer.

The only event that had much impact on the reveries of my youth was the rather violent break-up of my family when I was thirteen. There were five children: three boys, then two girls. I was the second. For many months (it seemed forever), leading up to the split, there'd been nightly screams and threats and shattered plates and smashed furniture. Upstairs, in my bed, I tried covering my ears with my pillow. This break-up didn't disturb my inwardness so much as drive me deeper and more sullenly within myself. I even began using my alleged “slowness” as a crutch, an excuse for the daydreaming that was my principal survival mechanism.

At that time, my father, a biochemist, accepted a yearlong visiting position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There were rumors of another woman. At the end of the year, when he finally showed up one day unannounced at our house, my mother attacked him with his own golf clubs, shattering most of the glass in his car before he managed to back out of the driveway.

After the divorce and after my father had returned to Missouri, my mother tried several times to force him to take me. What she said was that she couldn't afford to feed five children on a music teacher's salary. What I heard was that she didn't want me. He didn't want me, either. And I didn't want to go with him. Several times that year, my mother made me ask him. She'd dial his number, then hand over the heavy black receiver. He always said: Tell her no.

One Friday afternoon, in April, my mother suggested we go for a drive. I had just turned thirteen, so I presumed the outing had something to do with my birthday. But when we approached her red VW convertible, I saw, with a sinking feeling, that my thin twin mattress was stuck implausibly in the back of it.

“Wait, why is my mattress in the car?” I asked.

“Don't worry,” she said, “we're getting you a new one.”
Okay,
I thought. We rode for a mile or two, through newer and newer suburbs, she with an odd smile frozen on her face.

“Look at that beautiful lake,” she said, as if I'd never seen Fairview Lake before.

Finally, she pulled into a strange apartment complex with a small parking lot. “Get out and help me with this mattress,” she said. We unloaded it at the edge of the lot. “Better drag it over there onto the grass,” she said.

While I was doing that, I glanced up just in time to see her duck back into the car.

“No,” I pleaded. “Don't.”

I stood behind the car to block her from backing out. She shifted into first gear, and drove forward over the curb. I remember how she glanced back once, with that same paralyzed smile, then jounced downhill across the lawn, and back to the street again.

This was the first time I'd seen where my father lived, in a modest brick four-plex. I sat on the curb, completely desolate, and waited a couple of hours for him to return home from his lab on the University of Missouri campus. He always worked late, six days a week.

Finally, at six p.m., he pulled into the parking lot, walked past me wordlessly, unlocked the back door of his ground-floor apartment, and disappeared inside. I waited another minute before I followed him.

He didn't kick me out; he knew he couldn't.

Back when the family was still together, my father kept a heavy, pigskin razor strop hanging on its own nail in the kitchen. Spankings were carried out with a grim sense of ceremony; the other children had to stand and watch. Probably this wasn't too unusual in those days, nor was it what made me resist living with him after the divorce. What I resisted was his silence. He simply didn't converse with his children. In the next few years I spent with him, he'd come home late, fix a martini, and that was pretty much it.

My father had many fine qualities: a relentless imagination and a stunning array of interests, from progressive politics to gardening to classical music to avant-garde film. I could say much the same of my mother, a classical violist and lifelong music teacher. But neither had much aptitude for parenting.

That's why I enlisted. It turned out there were two and only two aspects of the Navy that suited me: drinking and traveling. Because I continued to drink like a sailor after my discharge, I ended up in recovery a few years later. That was almost twenty-five years ago. I've yet to find a reason to stop traveling.

3. Why, Why

The next morning, I drop in at a MacBike location a block from my hotel, rent a big, black clunker, and head off for the Rijksmuseum. In the Philips Wing, an exhibition of seventeenth-century paintings, “The Masterpieces,” is on temporary display. The rest of the museum is undergoing its long-anticipated renovation, or reincarnation. The show is a best-hits narrative, culminating in Rembrandt's colossal
Night Watch,
always the crown jewel here. In seventeen rooms, the show sketches the explosion of secular art: portrait, still life, seascape, genre scene. The twenty Rembrandts, including the great
The Jewish Bride,
are arrayed in the two galleries toward the end. The latter is a picture of a somewhat older couple (perhaps Isaac and Rebecca), clasping each other solemnly. It's as arresting for its splendid golden textures and hallowed light, as for its subject; it makes me realize how rare it is to see such a sincere celebration, without a tinge of irony, of older adults in love.

Along the way, there are a couple of smaller rooms devoted to groups of paintings by Jan Steen and Johannes Vermeer. Because there are so many Rembrandts to see, I decide to give the Vermeer room only a minute or two. I stop and gaze down the length of the space; three works by the Delft master hang on the far wall. (A fourth appears with related genre works—busy group scenes—on the right-hand wall.) The Vermeers are unexpectedly small, but the force of the spell they cast is so eerily powerful that it's difficult to move, to breathe.

So I stop, I look around. The walls are cream-colored floral damask; the floor is parquet, with a centered, rectangular, slate blue rug. Behind me: Gabriel Metsu's frankly disturbing yet sympathetic
The Sick Child
. I take a step or two toward the small Vermeer on the wall to my right: it's called
The Love Letter
. Revealed through a dark doorway is a complicated scene. A well-dressed lady, holding a lute (I think), receives, over her shoulder, the eponymous letter from her maid. The room they are in is opulent, filled with bourgeois clutter (a laundry basket, a broom, a crumpled sheet of music). There's a sense of withheld meaning in this painting—withheld from me— and it doesn't attract me.

I move ahead to the Vermeers on the far wall.
The Milkmaid
is in the center. On the left is a cityscape,
The Little Street.
On the right is the pensive
Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.
But it is
The Milkmaid
that stuns from a distance, drawing my eyes magnetically to the lowered eyes of the woman, her shadow incised against the luminous whitewash. I feel a shiver all the way up and down my spine.