Travels in Vermeer (13 page)

This seated lady swoons operatically. It's unsettling to see Vermeer's staggering technique, the fearsome clarity of his imagination enlisted in service of … what? Some speculate that the painting was commissioned by a Catholic patron—probably one who had seen
The Art of Painting
and asked for a religious version of it, a translation of sorts. Late in his life, with his huge family and the collapsing art market, Vermeer might have felt obligated to try such a thing. If it is a cold, impersonal sort of vision, then that is in keeping with the tradition of the Leiden
finschilders
, or painters of small, detailed works. It seems hardly a Vermeer at all—unlike
Mistress and Maid,
for instance, which seems so clearly a Vermeer to me, so subtle and domestic, despite its unfinished state.

On my way out, just as I'm re-entering and crossing the large room containing
A Woman Sleeping,
a tour group enters from the opposite side, led by a somewhat rumpled, pleasantly professorial guide. He assembles the group before the Vermeer, and begins talking about Dutch genre scenes. I hang around at the back of the circle, biding my time happily for a couple of minutes, until he asks for questions. I step out, trace the mysterious object in the still life with a fingertip (a few feet in front of the canvas, this time), and ask, “Can you please tell me what this is?”

He has thought about this before and, both nodding and smoothing the corners of his gray mustache, defines it authoritatively: “It's a pair of knives, lying tip to tip.” He enthusiastically parses it with his thumb. He wants me, a fellow Vermeer lover, to understand. The others in the group are invisible for this moment. “See?” he says. I feel an immediate click of satisfaction and thank him. How typical for Vermeer to give us only what the eye takes in, I think, not what we comprehend—our comprehension is not Vermeer's concern. It's as if his goal is to picture life as God himself might see it, without human interference. And as if he knows this is what we really want. I glance again at the painting—the open door and all it beckons toward, the pristine emptiness of the room beyond—and turn to leave.

7. The Green Dragon Club

I retrace my steps in early evening, this time inside the wall. I've decided to meander through the park, to take a better look at Alice in Wonderland and the Stuart Little pond, and then I'll go on past the Children's Zoo toward the Leo House in Chelsea. It's cooler now, the light is flatly filtering through the groves, and most of the children are gone. I've got my camera out—not for myself, but for the photos I'll show to Sophia. When I can say,
I'd like to take you here someday.

As I walk, though, I'm remembering an old, brown, bison-shaped leather armchair, an icon of my own childhood. After dinner, we three small boys would wrestle for our favorite perch on the arms— we'd ride them, buckaroo style—and both baby girls would plop down in Dad's lap. We called it The Green Dragon Club—those mirror-bright nights, collapsible characters of a collapsible world— my happiest memory of my father. (After he died, at the family memorial in his Unitarian church in Columbia, I suddenly recalled The Green Dragon Club, and described it at the gathering.)

Maybe it didn't seem so great at the time, back then, all that squirming and shoving for position, but the instant Dad adjusted his bifocals and began to read, that house was transformed. There, in the center of the room, a big rabbit hopped past Alice, dreaming as she lay by the riverbank. And then, as we watched, “the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket,” and my father laughed his sonorous (and often phlegmatic) belly laugh, and each of us in that big chair soared.

Arriving at the base of the huge, ensemble sculpture, I circle it as I take shots of Sophia's favorite characters at leisure. A close-up of the Dormouse, a close-up of Alice.

Poor Alice, never the right size Alice! A confounding bottle commands her: DRINK ME. A confounding cake commands her: EAT ME. But nothing ever works as it should; she never quite fits the Looking-Glass World. Children grasp Alice's dilemma intuitively since they, too, find themselves in unstable bodies. They, too, never quite fit.

Back home, I have an ugly, but supremely comfortable beige Lazy-Boy recliner. (It was one of the items Sara didn't want when she left.) In the reading hour after dinner and after bath time, Sophia and I take to this chair just as I once took to my own father's overstuffed leather armchair. We've started calling this hour The Green Dragon Club—that was Sophia's idea, in fact. She wedges her tiny, pajama-clad hips blissfully on the left side next to mine, and I encircle her with my left arm, holding the evening's book in both hands—the left half of it on her right thigh, the right half of it on my left. As I begin to read, she traces the words with her right index finger, as if she could control the pace of the story thus (and she can). Shadowy figures materialize before us—the March Hare and the Cheshire Cat float a few feet beyond our toes.

H
OW
I
T
W
ORKS

 

There's only England left on my itinerary. Only four more Vermeers.

I often think back on that afternoon I sat outside of the Rijskmuseum and hatched the outline of these travels. And yet, despite the research and planning and trips and the poems I've written, I've never felt like the author of any of it. I'm more like a character who walks from chapter to chapter. Each painting waits like a room furnished for me and me alone, a spell conjured for me and me alone, an instrument strummed so softly that only I can hear it.

From the outside, it might appear mundane, if not dull: teaching at a small, Southern university; single and sober, etcetera. But with all of the planning leading up to each ecstatic trip, this semi-secret life occupies nearly all of my interest and, if not for my weekends with Sophia, nearly all of my love. Meanwhile, I'm also doing what I've done since 1983: I go to A. A. Without which I'd be defenseless against the death of my first wife or the divorce of my second, or practically any major difficulty. Without which I wouldn't be looking at art at all, because I'd be dead.

I attended my first few meetings in rehab, in the dilapidated Mid-Missouri Mental Health Center, which no longer exists. Like virtually everyone else, I wasn't there by choice. I was stubborn and indignant. I didn't think I belonged there—either in rehab, or in A. A. But over the following days, I paid attention to the others in the meetings, to the ones with some sobriety. I stared at them, transfixed, as if they were zoo animals. They were smiling and relaxed and cleareyed—everything I was not. So it didn't take long for me to realize that I had nothing to lose. I decided to follow their suggestions.

I had one relapse—a two-day bender—six months after treatment. (My sobriety date is December 30, 1983.) One evening, as I walked home from my dishwashing job, I passed a popular college bar, a place I used to like. I could hear the laughter welling irresistibly from within. I stopped for a moment, thought of my life, my job, my tiny, rented room, and did not go in. I was twenty-eight years old. I walked past that bar the next day, too. But on the third day I went inside.

I inhaled the first beer without tasting it. But I couldn't stop. I went home, got every dollar I'd saved, and it was on. This was during a blizzard, the city encased in ice. Early Friday morning, after the bars closed, I fell hard in the middle of a street on the edge of campus, and couldn't get up. Three times I tried and slipped and fell. Then I thought, why bother? I felt comfortable lying there.

But after a few minutes, I did get up. I scrabbled to all fours and lurched off toward my room. Beginning the next day, I got a new home group, picked up a new white chip (claiming my second one-day chip was one of the hardest things I've done). After that meeting, I found a new sponsor, a man about the age I am today, a charismatic attorney with ten years of sobriety. Bill Wilson, one of our co-founders, wrote: “Because of our kinship in suffering, our channels of contact have always been charged with the language of the heart.” That's what I felt then; that's still the draw for me now. Newcomers tend to think that it's the lucky or the smart ones who survive. But survival has little to do with wisdom or experience. It's the beaten ones who make it, the ones who can truly give up honestly.

All through this year of my divorce, I double up on my meetings. One a day, and sometimes more. I volunteer at the nearby medium-security men's prison, where the simple fact that I leave, when the meeting ends, lends me a special status. In my home group here in Wilmington, I try to be one of the ones who's always present, one of the “old-timers.” Sometimes I don't say anything, but simply show up early, help make coffee, set up the folding chairs and banners and whatnot—there are many small, comforting things to do.

Meetings are pretty much the same wherever you go. We draw our coffee from the big cylindrical coffeemakers in churches, treatment centers, or prisons; we listen to the Preamble. Then, for an hour, we listen, half appalled and/or half in stitches to stories of people finding their way out of colossal setbacks, devastated lives. “What we were like, what happened, what we are like now.” At the end of most meetings, somebody reads the Ninth Step Promises (“Are these extravagant promises? We think not!”). Someone hands out chips, beginning with white. Then we circle up, hold hands, and say the Lord's Prayer, or the Third Step Prayer, or “a prayer of your choice in silence.” Afterwards, some of us shake hands and talk, while others put away chairs and books, or mop the floors. We old-timers seek out newcomers—especially those still in rehab or halfway houses— and offer encouragement along with our phone numbers. During the winter of my divorce, two newcomers ask me to sponsor them. Eventually, after long discussions, I tell each of these young men it would be an honor, just as my first sponsor once told me.

However it works, A. A. works. I could relapse again tomorrow. It happens. But I stay involved, and I've never been more thankful for A. A. than I am today. No matter how lousy I might feel when I walk into a meeting, I feel lighter when I leave. For twenty-five years now, this is my secret weapon. This is the story beneath the story.

L
ONDON

[
May
]

1. Descent

Once again, a turbulent crossing; once again, no sleep. We descend at dawn over an island sealed beneath low clouds. Here and there, clearings loom—emerald patches of heath and hedgerows, villages clustered around their steeples—ragged breaks in a sleepy stream of thought.

It's mid-May, a little over a year since my first trip to Amsterdam. My spring semester is done, and with Sophia still in school for two more weeks, I have an open window for my final trip. I'm filing off the plane with Gowing and Snow, umbrella and notebook packed in my shoulder bag, nothing that I won't need.

I take the express from Gatwick to Victoria, and emerge from the tube an hour later at Russell Square. I reconnoiter, cross the street into the park, and order a café au lait in the Russell Square Park Café. It's London, chilly and damp. I gaze warily across the deserted park. As much as I've contemplated this trip, I haven't been able to settle on a plan. I've got just four days in which to see four Vermeers, and I want to get it right.

The two late masterpieces in the National Gallery are
A Lady Standing at a Virginal
and
A Lady Seated at a Virginal
. They are virtual twins—critics like Snow have labeled them “explicit pendants.” From the beginning of my journey, this pair seemed the natural endpoint, because they are the endpoint of Vermeer's line of solitary women.

The other two Vermeers in England are
The Music Lesson,
in the Royal Collection, and
Lady with a Guitar,
in the Kenwood House in Hampstead. The first of these is a bit of an anomaly among England's Vermeers, not only because it's an earlier work (from around the time of
Woman Holding a Balance
), but also because it is a group scene, a conversation piece that connects the casual and traditional subject matter of
Officer and Laughing Girl
to the intensely private manner of
An Artist in His Studio
.
The Music Lesson
depicts an enigmatic romantic couple. The girl playing the virginal, her sinuous back facing toward us, the man standing in rapt attention beside her—and the intense dynamic, the magic—are comparable in the oeuvre only to
An Artist in His Studio
.

I let the counterman pick the change from my hand. I don't know where he's from, but he's wearing a purple silk turban, and has alarmingly lush eyebrows. I ask him how to find Cartwright Gardens, where my hotel is located. From behind the counter, he unfolds a map and traces out each turn, each blind alley, with his large thumb, because it's very close, but “it's complicated,” he says. That's how I find myself bumping along through leafy Bloomsbury, suitcase in tow, trying to follow the counterman's directions, while simultaneously planning my stay.

Chronologically, I probably ought to start with
The Music Lesson,
in Her Majesty's Royal Collection, at Windsor Castle. It's one of the most beautiful and distant and poetic of all the works. It's the one I'm most longing to see. Then maybe I should simply skip the woman at Kenwood, since in photos it seems greenish, off-center, and hard to relate to the other Vermeers. I plan to focus on the National Gallery ladies, the proper conclusion to my project.

My room at the Jenkins Hotel isn't ready. I stash my luggage between two set tables in the breakfast room downstairs and go for an aimless stroll. The garish smear of Leicester Square marquees in afternoon rain; graven names of poets in the Abbey; grace of anonymity. Standing on Westminster Bridge, I silently recall one of my favorite sonnets: “Earth has not anything to show more fair …” Wordsworth's note to the poem states it was “Written on the roof of a coach, on my way to France.” Meanwhile, for me, the decorous, wrought-iron darkness is deepening along the Thames. I arrive at the North Sea Fish Market a few minutes before it closes, just in time to order take-out—a huge, fresh slab of cod sprawled over a mawful of chips, with a splash of malt vinegar. I wolf down the steaming, flaky cod as I wander Gray's Inn Road past King's Cross, then back to Cartwright Gardens. I retrieve my suitcase, climb the stairs to my tiny room, and drop at once into dreamless sleep.