The Mirror Thief (38 page)

Curtis has walked by the museum at least twice a day since he checked in; he’s never really paid it any mind. It seemed to have nothing
to do with Stanley—to be the kind of thing he’d write off as theme-park bullshit, a waste of floorspace, a consolation prize for uptight spouses of gamblers and conventioneers—but maybe Curtis has missed something. Didn’t Veronica say that Stanley had gotten interested in art? Maybe it was history; Curtis can’t remember. It may not matter anyway. Veronica doesn’t seem to understand Stanley a whole lot better than he does himself.

The book is on the nightstand where Curtis left it this morning. He picks it up, carries it to the table by the window. He was half asleep when he read through it last night, still a little buzzed from Veronica’s bourbon, and not much stayed with him. He thinks he remembers a poem about a painter, or about art—at least he thought that’s what it was about—but flipping around now, he can’t find it. It seems unlikely that he could miss it in a book with under eighty pages, and he wonders if it was in his head: if a line he read just reminded him of something that Veronica told him, or that Stanley said long ago, or even something he saw himself in some museum while he was on leave in Europe. He can’t be sure.

Soon Curtis isn’t reading anymore, just thinking, staring at the framed print over the couch: the tiny masts of tall ships poking from a yellow-brown chaos of sky and sea. Something scary about that painting. He hasn’t really noticed that before.

He checks his cell display: 2:15. Plenty of time to scope the museum in advance. He shuts the book, stands up, and is turning toward the steps when he notices a fax in the machine.

Damon, from four hours ago. A full-page sketch of a giant phallus bent into a graceful question mark. A pair of shaggy testes dangling where the point should be. WHUT DA FUUUK??? written in heavy letters inside its interior curve.

Curtis flattens the fax on the desk. He shreds it into neat ribbons across the diagonal, making straight tears with the sharp beveled edge of the desk. Then he stacks the ribbons and tears them again, making a palmful of black-and-white confetti. Each tear makes a good sound, a certain sound. It’s nice to feel certain about something.

On his way out the door, he scatters the confetti in the toilet, pisses on it, and flushes it down.

The museum is a dark steel box that runs between the lobby and the casino floor. After a counterclockwise turn around the armillary sphere, Curtis shows his ticket at the entrance. He does a cursory walkthrough to make sure Veronica’s not already here. The place is small; it doesn’t take him long. Three bulkheads divide the gallery into four rooms, with about ten paintings in each room. The rusted-steel walls seem to float in midair, not quite touching the deck or the ceiling; Curtis sees shadows and feet pass by through the gaps at the bottom. He brushes a stealthy finger across the surface of one to see if it really is steel: it’s chocolate-brown, glazed to look moist and oily. He feels like he’s inside a fancy leather handbag, or a healthy kidney.

Afternoon sun trickles through slots in the outer wall, augmenting tracklights hung along the maple overhead. Outside, the morning’s clear blue has gone dull and planar, a yellow pall across the sky. Only a couple of dozen people wander around; a few more are in the gift shop. None of them is Veronica. Curtis works his way back through the exhibit, dividing his attention between the art and the crowd, keeping himself alert. He’ll spot Veronica with no trouble, but he’s worried that the Whistler might be lurking somewhere. He doubts he’d recognize the kid right away, if at all.

The exhibit is chronological, ending with a growling cartoon dog from 1965. Curtis is walking through it in reverse, moving backward in time. Barely looking at the paintings. He’s never thought much of modern art, with its drips and splats and big monochrome squares. At one piece, a plain black box on a plain white background, he has to stop and shake his head.

Years ago, during one of his surprise reappearances in Curtis’s boyhood, Curtis’s dad spent an afternoon lecturing him about black painters—Raymond Saunders, Frank Bowling, Beauford Delaney, Alma Thomas—and about how Picasso stole his best ideas from African masks
he’d seen in the Musée de l’Homme. The next Saturday Curtis rode his secondhand Schwinn the two fast downhill miles to the new MLK Library and sat and flipped through massive hardbound books for hours, befuddled by bright blotches and smears. And then months later, when his father visited again, the sermon was about how black abstractionists were just aping the white man, how they didn’t challenge the sensibilities of white culture, and how jazz was the only revolutionary Afro-American artform. Curtis smiles, wondering what his father would be saying were he here today. Probably something about how Islam forbids image-making.
The Holy Prophet, peace be upon him, teaches that on the Day of Resurrection, all the artists will be commanded to give life to the stuff that they created. And when they can’t do it, they’ll be punished. Think about it, Little Man. It makes sense. Every living thing comes from God. God made us all in his image. And it ain’t right to make images of God
.

When Curtis comes to a torpid bare-breasted Venus that resembles nothing so much as a Playboy centerfold from the late Fifties, he starts paying closer attention to the art. He’s in the 1700s now—older than America—and the paintings are more realistic, more precise. An angel with a flaming sword. A pale creepy infant prince. A baleful wolfhound with intelligent orange eyes. Curtis leans in to get a close look at the hound, the detail in its fur, its chain, its collar. He and Danielle always talked about getting a dog once they moved out to East Lansdowne. A big dog. They’ve been there almost four months now and still haven’t done it. Curtis would feel better about being away if he knew Danielle had a big dog around.

As he nears the museum entrance he’s back in the Renaissance, spotting names he remembers from Mediterranean shoreleaves: Lotto, Tintoretto, Titian. One big canvas looks familiar, although the artist’s name—
FRANCESCO BASSANO
, 1549–1592—doesn’t ring any bells.
AUTUMN
, it’s called: a group of rustics harvesting apples and stomping grapes beneath the eerie green light of an overcast sky. Curtis isn’t sure what about it caught his attention, unless maybe it’s the thunderbolt-brandishing centaur bounding through the distant clouds, which reminds him a little of the bearded gods on the map in the lobby. Studying
the canvas, he spends a moment trying to figure out whether he saw the real one in Italy before he remembers that this
is
the real one.

He’s looking at the exhibit’s oldest piece, a portrait of an unsmiling merchant from 1436, when Veronica breezes in. Just the sight of her puts him on edge. The shuteye she caught on the couch last night hasn’t done much for her: even from across the room her eyes are hooded in blue. Her movements seem loose, marionettelike, as if she’s held up by something invisible outside herself, as if each step she takes is an arrested collapse. Her feet brush the blond parquet as she glides toward him.

Veronica’s decked out in white running shoes and a lavender jenny-from-the-block tracksuit that she doesn’t quite have the body to pull off; the outfit is at serious odds with her teased-out hair and insomniac pallor. Her wide smile is probably intended to be disarming, but it’s straying into cymbal-playing-monkey territory and has pretty much the opposite effect.

She nods at the portrait of the merchant as she strolls up. They don’t make ’em like that no more, eh? she says.

Curtis glances back at the painting. The merchant’s eyes are sharp in its smoky halflight, staring at him across five and a half centuries. That’s the truth, he says. Looks like it could’ve been taken with a camera.

It was, Veronica says.

Curtis blinks, looks at her, tracks her eyes back to the oak panel. There are small cracks in the paint on the merchant’s nose and forehead. Say again? he says.

It
was
taken with a camera. As in camera obscura, as in a darkened room for the projection of images. I mean, it
is
a painting, obviously. In the Fifteenth Century, there was no way to chemically fix an image. Van Eyck projected the sitter onto the panel with some kind of optical device, and then he painted over the projection.

Veronica brushes past Curtis toward the wall, sweeping her hand over the portrait’s face like she’s tagging it with an invisible spraycan. Look how he’s framed, she says. Look how he’s lit. Look at that softness, those shadows. You see that in Leonardo’s
sfumato
, then later in Giorgione, Hals, Rembrandt. Canaletto and Vermeer, too, but those guys came
later; they had fancy glass lenses. Van Eyck had to make do with a concave mirror. But the basic approach is the same. You see how the tonal grading opens the figure’s dimensions and gives the painting depth? That’s a total giveaway. You take a look at a Spanish or Sienese painting from the same period, it’ll be as flat and closed-off as the king of clubs.

What, Curtis says, are you talking about?

You haven’t heard about this? All the big guys, all the marquee names—van Eyck, Leonardo, Giorgione, Raphael, Holbein, Caravaggio—they all used optical devices. This is old news, man. This was on
60 Minutes
like a year ago.

Curtis looks at her, irritated, and then looks at the merchant again. The portrait’s eyes seem to follow him through the room.

Veronica is backing into the gallery, turning girlishly on the ball of her foot. No optics in Titian or Tintoretto, she says, gesturing at the walls. But you can still see the influence of the optical style. Dark backgrounds? That’s from optics. Images projected in a camera obscura always have dark backgrounds. But holy shit, the van Dyck? The ruffles on that collar, are you kidding? Definitely optics. The Lotto, too, although he hides it pretty well. And check out the Pontormo. Look how fucked his proportions are. He used the camera obscura to nail down Mary’s face and hands, the baby Jesus’s head and arm. The rest of the painting’s on a different planet. The hands and the faces don’t fit the bodies. If that Mary were to crawl down from the canvas she’d look like a power forward for the NBA. Those arms are like four feet long.

She grabs Curtis’s elbow and tugs him into the next room, talking loud, pointing. A young couple in matching sweatshirts and khakis is standing next to the wolfhound as they round the corner. Their brows are furrowed in disapproval, like this is the Sistine Chapel or something. Curtis gives them a mind-your-own-business glare.

Let me see if I’m getting this, he says. You’re telling me all this stuff was—

Don’t say
traced. Traced
sounds dismissive. There’s a lot more to it than that. You’ve got to get the tonal values right, and the colors. It’s not easy.
It’s not like these guys were cheating. You gotta remember, we’re talking about the Dark Ages here. Painting didn’t exist as some kind of noble alternative to photography like it does today, expressive of some ineffable human truth or whatever. It was just the only means these people had of recording images. Nobody cared whether van Eyck captured his subject’s individual essence: they had no concept of individual essences. They just wanted to know if the fucking thing looked like Uncle Hubrecht or not.

Veronica slows her stride. Her eyes pass from painting to painting. I will never understand, she says, why people lose their shit over this. I mean, so what if they used optics? Why do we have to make these guys out to be superheroes? I was at Columbia when Hockney first started talking about this stuff, and believe me,
nobody
wanted to hear it. They were all about pure theory: Bataille, Derrida, Lacan. Nobody cared how paintings were actually done. You’d make an argument based on science, on methods, on empirical observations, and they’d look at you like you’d just come to fix the color copier or something. It’s not that they didn’t believe it. They just didn’t see the point.

She’s losing steam, getting distracted. Tension steals back into her shoulders, her face. I forgot that, Curtis says. That you studied art.

Art history, she says. Not art. Completely different. As I quickly found out.

They walk a few paces in silence. Veronica stares at the parquet, lost in thought. Curtis walks beside her, eyeing the walls. He’d been imagining the paintings talking to her, pouring out their secrets in a language he couldn’t understand, or even hear. Now that she’s not looking, they seem to go dark one by one, like tenement windows.

You come down here a lot? he says. To the museum?

She laughs, looks up. I’ve been in the casino every night for a week, she says. Six hours a night, hundred bucks a hand minimum. I’ve racked up so many comps that they’re about to name one of the towers after me. I’m getting sick from eating ossobuco and foie gras at every meal. So I figure, free museum tickets? Sure, why not? I like it here. It’s quiet. It’s a nice place to hide.

Hide from who?

She smiles at that, shakes her head. I just remembered, she says. I haven’t eaten anything since this morning. You want lunch? I got vouchers out the wazoo.

I ate, but I’ll tag along. You feel safe walking around out there?