Travels in Vermeer (15 page)

4. The Man in the Oilskin Parka

I'm sitting on the settee in the middle of the room when an American, probably in his thirties, strides in. He casually makes a beeline toward the Vermeer in front of me. He's wearing a dark-green British oilskin parka, with a matching wide-brim rain hat. He's slender, with good looks to match his crisp, appropriate clothes. I nod in a dreamy muse. He leans solicitously for a while, checking back with me a couple of times to make sure he's not interfering with my view. He's a bit self-conscious; he makes too much of it. When he apologizes for disturbing me, I say, “No, it's all right. Go ahead; I'll be here for a while.” I gaze at his back.

After a few minutes of close study, he comes back to the center of the room and stands beside me. “Beautiful, isn't it,” he says. “I've never seen another like it.”

“Yeah,” I say. “But it's not a Vermeer.”

“Oh, yes,” he says. “It
is
. It
is
a Vermeer.” He looks at me with faint alarm.

After a nervous moment, I try again. “That's not what I meant. I mean it's just so
odd
. Why he placed her so far off-center … and with that greenish pallor, she's so unappealing.”

But I have spoken too quietly (as I often do), and he says, “Yes, the color makes her so appealing. There's usually something in the foreground, too, something in front of them, as if to protect them,” he adds. “But not this time.”

“The lion-head chair-backs,” I say. As I say it, I realize there's a single lion-head behind the guitar player, reduced to a simple, dark silhouette. Still, to me, the repertoire—the windows, the chair-backs, and Vermeer's whole dynamic language—seems shuttered in these last great works.

“Or the table with the Persian carpet in
The Music Lesson,
” he says, “which really adds depth when you see it in person.”

“You've seen
that?
” I ask, suddenly alert again. “I walked all over Windsor Castle looking for that painting two days ago.”

“I saw it last week, at Buckingham Palace. In the Queen's Gallery,” he says with a shrug. He pauses and looks at me. “Around the left side of the palace.”

I thank him, smiling: he cannot know how much he has helped me.

After he leaves, I give it another half hour.

When these travels began, I was pretty sure which Vermeers appealed to me most strongly. The work that reached out to me was the same early to mid-career work that reaches so many others—the lovely, pensive women and the two landscapes. I came to London curious about how I'd react to the later works and to what seems to be a falling off.

The feeling I struggle with is not disappointment in
The Guitar Player,
but a vertigo-like sense of disorientation. It isn't simply that the light we didn't even know we were looking for (and yet so powerfully find in Vermeer) isn't there anymore. In the later work, the faces are not simply unlit, they are dark. Even the windows that would have lit the faces are shuttered. The terms of the experiment have changed; the language has changed. Even the famous stillness has changed, so that what is captured is not a face at all, but the blur of a sidelong glance, reverberating through space.

Musical instruments have moved to the fore. Here, the numinous guitar dominates the composition. Virginals and the viola da gamba play prominent roles in the paintings I'm about to see,
The Music Lesson
and London's two National Gallery paintings,
A Lady Seated at a Virginal
and
A Lady Standing at a Virginal
. The instruments no longer accompany the subjects; they
are
the subjects, just as in many modernist paintings.

This is perhaps my issue with the later work. I've come to Vermeer primarily for what his paintings teach me about myself, by placing me in the grip of intimacy, of romance, and allowing me to think about my own responses. But the context has changed, and I feel more than a little lost now.

5. Maria

I exit through the front this time, and cross over the steaming, emerald heath again, past Spaniard's Inn, haunt of the Romantics, on my right. When I come to a fork in the road, I turn left down East Heath, rather than back down High Street. It is all village on my right, the backs of the brick rowhouses. The great heath, with its paths and pastures, prams and joggers and leashed dogs, is on my left. I come to Keats's Grove, an island of ghostly sycamores with great, flat leaves, then round the corner to Keats's House. It consists of two white Regency cottages: one belonging to Keats's friend Charles Brown, who took him in when he was ill; the other to the family of his true love, Fanny Brawne. The cottages were later joined to form a single abode. Keats lived here from 1818 to 1820, which means he spent nearly his entire writing life here.

Vermeer is a new love; Keats a first love. I've never been one to make pilgrimages; I don't much care to visit author's homes. The life isn't in the shrine; it's in the work. But because I'm here, I allow myself an hour to traipse through the rooms. It is a comfortable, studiously quiet house, with creaky floorboards. I look at the painting of Keats by Severn in the sitting room. Upstairs, next to Keats's bedroom, is a glass case containing mementoes of his romance with Fanny. I'm riveted by the gold engagement ring that Keats, flat broke and showing the first signs of tuberculosis, gave the lovely eighteen-year-old. The story goes that Fanny never took off the ring, despite her marriage a few years after Keats's death in Rome. I'd always pictured this ring—its gem a lowly garnet stone, all he could afford—as humble, a peasant offering. In fact I find it rather sophisticated, its open scrollwork carved in a beautifully expressive, abstract style. The stone itself is quite worn.

Writing to her, Keats said, “Indeed I think a real Love is enough to occupy the wildest heart …”

I walk out into the garden. There's little to see, besides beds of violets and the plum tree beneath which Keats wrote “Ode to a Nightingale.” (This tree is a graft from the original tree, actually.) I rummage in the depths of my backpack for my snack, a bruised red pear saved from breakfast at the hotel. I sit on a bench and eat it. Leaving, I turn left toward High Street, the main drag, and Hampstead Station. Remembering how I'd climbed the hill toward Kenwood, I turn left downhill and walk for a block or two, but I don't recognize anything in the dense and cheerful profusion of cafés, flower shops, sundry boutiques.

Out of one of them, a woman suddenly appears, is walking next to me—a beautiful woman about my age in formal black raincoat, ivory scarf. (I'm in my Rockports, jeans, green heather sweater.) Both of us are walking rather quickly downhill, both of us are going somewhere. I make up my mind to catch her with a longer stride or two. “Excuse me, can you tell me where Hampstead Station is?” I ask.

“Where are you trying to go?” she says, without breaking pace. Her voice is low and as indeterminately exotic as her darkly swept-back looks, the clack/clack of her heels on brick.

“London,” I say.

She laughs softly, out of the corner of her glance. “This
is
London,” she says, with a quick, open wave of a hand encompassing everything.

“I mean, you know, the center. Trafalgar. The National Gallery,” I say.

“Hampstead Station is back that way,” she says, pointing behind us up the hill. “But you might as well keep going to Belsize Park, it's the same distance either way.”

We walk along, through a stoplight, still without breaking stride. The street we are on has changed to Rosslyn Hill.

“Straight ahead,” she says. “Are you a Kiwi?”

“What?”

“Are you from New Zealand?”

“No. America. U. S.,” I say.

“Oh. What part?”

“North Carolina.”

“Hmm, I'm surprised. Most Americans have big voices. Noisy.” She smiles, she shrugs. “Yours is soft.” After a moment, she adds, “I mean, it's nice. I like it.”

“What about you—where are you from?” I ask.

“I'm from Colombia. But I've been here a long time.”

Softly, softly, out of the corner of her attention.

Off to the left, the Royal Free Hospital looms above the rolling precincts of lawns and parking lots, fenced tennis courts.

“Your station is another block. Look, you can see the sign,” she says. Beyond the next corner, the blocks of trendy cafés and shop fronts begin again, and among them, the sign for the tube—a red “O” with a blue bar across it. Gray-blue ink of evening in the electric air.

She stops at the light. “This is my street,” she says.

“My name is Michael.”

“Maria.”

Another soft smile. She turns left, walks on, doesn't look back. The fragrance in her wake lingers another moment, as cool as irises.

6. Buckingham Palace

When I step out of the Green Park station, it's already dark. Rain is falling hard, umbrellas snapping open the moment each one enters the night. I open mine as well. For a moment, I am not walking somewhere; I am simply moving with the tide. I had picked out this station randomly, because it seemed to be in the middle of the map. Outside, on the corner, stands a treelike black finger post; one of the signs points to “BUCKINGHAM PALACE.” I turn right, negotiate a plywood walkway, and find myself on a sidewalk crossing The Green Park. I walk beneath a file of lampposts ghosting among the dappled, white-and-grayish London planes, their leaves the size of notebook paper.

I come out of the park at the Mall, St. James Palace on my left, and the imperial wedding-cake extravaganza of Victoria Memorial a few hundred feet to my right. I turn and walk past the marble queen on her throne—a gilt Victory presiding above her—round the roundabout, toward the façade of Buckingham looming just behind, with its wrought-iron, gilt-topped gates. I veer around to the portico of the Queen's Gallery on the left side, and between the squat Ionic columns guarding the entrance.

“What time do you close?” I ask the man at the counter. He's short and grizzled and reddish, with extremely sharp gray eyes.

“Good evening, sir,” he says. “The gallery closes at 17:30. I'm closing this desk now. Would you like to buy a ticket?”

I check my watch: 4:45.

“One more question,” I say, smiling, my bankcard out. “Do you happen to have Vermeer's
The Music Lesson
on display?”

“Yes, sir. It's right upstairs. After we go through (he glances toward the walk-through metal detector), I'll take you up.” He processes my check card, I sign the receipt, and then he conducts me through and on to the coatroom to check my backpack. “Wait,” I say, asking for my pack again. I fish out my notebook and Uniball.

“I'm sorry, sir. No pens in the gallery. Pencil-lead only.”

“My problem is, I can't
see
pencil-lead anymore.”

He mulls this over for a moment. “Well,” he says, “just be prepared to give up the pen if someone asks for it. Shall we go?” We're walking toward the service elevator just beneath the staircase. “It's faster this way.” He winks. “You'll have more time with the painting.”

In the elevator, he asks, “So you're a writer, eh? Traveling the world, seeing the Vermeers, and writing a book about it, are you?'

This takes me aback. How did he know? He waits for the door to close, then presses the button with a slight smile.

“Yep,” I say. I mention my day at Windsor. The erroneous web site.

He nods, with a grin. “Well, it sounds like a brilliant project,” he says. “Brilliant.”

He holds the glass door leading into the exhibition room open for me. World's best museum staff, I'm thinking.

Then, as we enter the room, I see the painting from twenty-five feet away, say, “Oh Lord,” and open my notebook. I say ”thank you,” as he discreetly takes his leave, bowing faintly, like a trusted lackey in Shakespeare. I glance back, but it's too late: I've missed his name.

7. The Music Lesson

I write these words in the upper corners of my notebook. The pull of the painting is instantaneous, mesmerizing.

A girl with her back to me is playing the virginal, centered against the far wall. Her suitor stands stock-still in profile to the right, his right forearm propped on the corner of the instrument as he listens intently to the song. From a distance, his face looks affectless, zoned-out. It reminds me a little of the ambiguous face of
Young Woman with Water Pitcher
in New York. I spend several minutes looking at him, trying to decide how I feel. But I keep glancing at the back of the girl's head every few seconds; somehow, more tension is expressed
there
than in the man's face. It's possible to read his disengaged expression as a natural effect of being so entranced by the music, that he is no longer aware of time, or even of his own body. Considering the romantic theme, it would be hard to imagine a more remote existential state than the one this young man seems to be in, even a few feet from his love.

There is a dizzying sense of depth in this painting—it's by far the deepest of Vermeer's interiors. The room is expanded to cathedral-like dimensions; the lovers are lost in the moment, and so am I. The distance from the couple to me—or to the frontal plane of the canvas—is emphasized in a number of ways.

First is the extent of the left wall visible. This elongated wall is a complex scheme which shows, this once, half of the second set of windows—for there would have been three pairs of windows, consisting of upper and lower casements, on the wall of the studio, the third set behind the standpoint and thus out of view. This second casement was the second source of light, responsible for the doubled shadows here, as well as in other paintings. The leading in the windows is the same abstract, circles-and-squares pattern present in seven other Vermeers. The wall gradually lightens toward the back. There is a similarly exaggerated view of the floor, which here appears as white squares (with the artist's characteristic freehand marbling) on a black ground, and this simple pattern practically counts the number of footfalls through the room for us. It's also one of the few Vermeers that reveal the roof-beams, which are beautifully weathered, and aligned across my sight as if, again, to measure the distance between the couple and myself.