Travels in Vermeer (6 page)

Today, the sprawling, nineteenth-century Maria van Jesse Catholic Church occupies the block of the Oude Langendijk where Maria Thins' house once stood. The actual space of the Vermeer home is now taken up by a very small side-chapel with its own, tiny entrance off an alley. No one's inside when I go in and sit. The pews face north, the left side is outer wall, the right a barred entrance to the main nave, where the pews face the other way. Because of its location, here in the Papenhoek, where Mass had to be held in secret, I see the luminous little chapel as a sort of memorial. And it's a lovely place, which Kaldenbach had described as “hallowed ground.” Yet I feel nothing.

What had I expected? The cast of north light filtering down from the left as in the paintings, stray sounds of the Markt, stillness of the hours? It is, but it isn't here. The chapel, belonging to another age, has nothing to do with Vermeer. It isn't his space anymore. I realize immediately that this is how it should be. I swallow, pause for a moment, then turn to go.

Abruptly the Nieuwe Kerk carillon begins to chime, shivering through the modern stained glass. I can't place the song, some sort of country waltz. Then I remember that the bells were replaced the year Vermeer was painting
View of Delft
. These are the same bells he would've heard—reverberating through every square inch of his studio—for most of his working life. So I listen and listen and wait for the carillon to end before taking my leave, out through the side entrance, back toward the Markt again.

My next stop is but a couple of dozen yards away: the Nieuwe Kerk itself. It is a high, bright sanctuary, dominated by William of Orange's ornate marble mausoleum, placed where I might expect an altar. This Dutch landmark (the architect was Hendrick De Keyser, who also designed Amsterdam's beloved Westerkerk) is probably the grandest monument in the entire country, always a mainstay of the tour circuit. Painters came for inspiration and beggars worked the area for easy pickings even in Vermeer's day. It's an operatic, canopied deathbed effigy complete with weeping cherubs, a likeness of the beloved hero's dog, and the memento mori of grinning skulls. Which gives me a faint case of the creeps.

The Markt happens to be a market this particular day, and I wind my way very slowly through the rows of fragrant fish stalls, cheese stalls. The steeple chimes the hour again, but the pigeons milling about the square—wherever they find a few square feet—don't fly away or even stir.

I walk circuitously toward the leaning tower of the Oude Kerk, visible over a bank or two of rooftops. The older, brick and white stone church, like the newer one, was originally Catholic, but was stripped bare by iconoclasts during the Reformation. Walking into it, it feels unfinished, undecided, and in fact, its gothic cruciform shape was never completed. There's only part of one of the crossing halls, the northern one. I walk on the foot-worn markers, tour the entire space—without finding any trace of Vermeer at all—then go back to the entrance, and purchase a guide map in the souvenir shop.

Vermeer's grave is located a bit off center, where the crossing would have been. There's only the chiseled name and dates on a stone perhaps sixteen inches square: an ordinary stone in the floor. I stare at it balefully. Suddenly I don't know why I'm here. My visit to Delft is over.

I resign myself to wandering aimlessly. I buy a big, conical purple candle for Sophia, because it's goofy and sparkly and I know she will love it. For myself, I buy a small Delft porcelain plate, painted a rich ultramarine, because it looks authentic—it looks like Delft. It depicts a long-tailed bird, maybe a pheasant.

Eventually, late afternoon, I stumble onto the tourist information office in the center of the city. The girl at the desk is probably a university student, twenty or twenty-one. Thin, brunette, thick glasses, reading a fat paperback novel I can't make out. I say I'm looking for Vermeer. She fishes for a brochure beneath the counter, but stops, mid-gesture, and looks at me again, a conspiratorial look in her great dark eyes.

“There's nothing left,” she confides.

“I know,” I say. “But I've come a long way.”

“Sorry,” she says, with a little smile. She opens a map and points at the standpoint for
View of Delft
.

“You can still go there,” she says. “But it looks nothing like it did then.”

“I know. I was there.”

She brightens. “If you want to see what it looked like in Vermeer's day, go to the Oostpoort.” She traces a route with a slender thumb along the Oosteinde canal to, and through, the city's last remaining gate. She also makes a little X on my map just past the Oostpoort, in the Oostplein, site of a great ice-cream shop. “Do you like ice cream?”

I don't say anything, but nod so emphatically she has to smile, the afternoon sun lighting her pale, freckled face—her luminous teeth—and says she often stops there when she goes to the Oostpoort.

Walking out through the northeast quarter of town, I pass a
kleuterschool
(preschool), a library, a laundromat, a bike repair shop. Sophia will later point out, looking at a digital photo, that the Oostpoort looks like a small castle—with two very slender round brick towers on either side of the entrance, each pierced with arrow slits. In front of all this, there's a lovely water gate with a drawbridge, for the Oostpoort secured the road as well as the canal. There were once eight similarly fortified gates in the royal city. A ragged remnant of wall, about two feet long, is still attached to either side of the Oostpoort.

In the ice cream shop, I order “bosbessen,” because it's the only word on the menu I believe I can pronounce. Surprisingly, the girl—with a slight smile—repeats it back with exactly the same pronunciation. It's an exquisite flavor of bilberry, as it turns out, the best in Holland, for seventy euro-cents. By the time I wander back to the station on the other side of the city's heart, the market is dismantled—all but the lingering odor of herring, the fumes of delivery trucks—and the cafés are filling up, the bikes all clattering home.

7. A Poem

I don't know what I'd expected from Delft—to see the city in the painting or the painting in the city. But as I wandered the streets full of tourists and students, I imagined what I did not see: glazed tiles, Persian carpets, maps, blue leather chairs, the plaster wall. And I imagined Vermeer's studio—what it must have meant, that paradise of hours. The artist's dream, I think, is simply to vanish into his vision. Keats and his nightingale, Vermeer and his studio.

Later, I'm left with doubt—as if I've struck a complete blank— but I'm also left with a Marble notebook filled with scribblings. One night, wondering what to make of my notes, I draft a poem called “View of Delft,” using some of the better images. At once I realize I'll be writing more poems. This one ends:

… No matter how
decisively the pointillés describe

seams in the stone, the scene—no matter how
invitingly sun warms the unseen center—

what I'm left with, looking back upon
this hour, this loveliness, remains a distance

I can't cross, a city I can't enter.

A
NNE

[
November
]

It's Friday afternoon. I'm traipsing about a vast and sodden lawn—trying to keep my Rockports dry—looking for the entrance to a sprawling, former high school in the Piedmont. Now it's a luxury condo redevelopment called “The Varsity.” I'm here to meet the owner/renovator of the place, a recently retired school principal close to my age. “The Varsity,” apparently, wasn't the school where she had worked; she had inherited it when her father passed, and it had been closed for a number of years before she redeveloped it. All of this seems unnecessarily confusing.

This is my first Match.com date. I've done it—the whole computer dating thing—a little skeptically, with my counselor Tracy's gentle coaxing. When I sign up, I'm prompted for a username, and draw a blank, and because I don't really care, I take one of the silly suggestions: “Ariesguy24.” (Thereafter, for months, I field numerous questions about the personal significance of this tag. Am I twenty-four? Believe in astrology? No and no.) I begin winnowing pages of ads, the flattering snapshots of smiling, cup-half-full women sitting at bars, proffering a toast—or leaning, windblown, against the rail of a sailboat or beach cottage—in fifteen or twenty minutes. (It's really odd, I just want to say, how many women claim to love NASCAR, football, and Harleys.) There's a giddy, kid-in-the-candystore feeling to all the winks and IM's … but it fades pretty fast.

I skim the ads when I come home from work—three heads to a row, six rows to a page—each night's catch of faces. I set up coffees, lunches, beach walks. More than once I can't recognize them when I see them (though the photos are all within the past year). Of course I smile, when I meet them, anyway.

But then I begin to hone in on Anne, and we email back and forth all October, about teaching and inspiration and burnout. Her messages come very quickly and thoughtfully. I look at one particular snapshot of her often: she's wearing jeans, standing in front of a blackboard. There's another of her skydiving; another of her in a swimsuit, with dark, bobbed hair and a killer smile; another of an abstract, mostly purple acrylic painting of hers. She's cut-to-the-chase, completely grown-up. Seems perfect.

Therefore, I make a cross-state drive on a Friday afternoon, just after one of those drenching, late fall rains. I can't shake a vaguely fugitive feeling as I circle the building, trying every locked door. At this point in my life, I've somehow not yet owned a cell phone. But I manage to blunder my way inside anyway, past the security system, up a delivery ramp. The dock is open because there's a young couple moving in, unloading their sofa out of a U-Haul truck. I locate the service elevator, exit on the sixth floor, and there, at the end of the hall is the penthouse suite. When I knock, Anne says, “Come on in,” but by then, the door has already swung open. All at once, I'm standing in the middle of an enormous, luminous space, listening as she talks about the ongoing renovations, the adjoining restaurant, the nightclub, the gallery, as she puts on purple hoop earrings, adjusts the music, boils water for tea.

“How do you take it?” she says. I'm not picky.

Finally, I get to look at her. Here is the killer smile in the flesh, the flawless, uniform teeth. She's slim in her jeans, with bright green eyes and fine freckles. I love how she's let her hair go peppery gray.

The size of the room astounds, the height of the cathedral ceiling astounds, the abundance of clear north light astounds. I go to the casements, holding a cup I suspect she has glazed herself. I douse the teabag up and down, releasing its jasmine fragrance, and look across the still-wet suburbs—unawakened, blonde as straw—and into the scrubbed pale skies beyond. When I look down, I notice, next to my hand, the original, articulated, brass hand-crank that swings the window out—I wonder where the bolted-down pencil-sharpener could be. Also here, on the sill, stands a cut-glass pitcher, filled to the gills with a bouquet of bright purple pinwheels. “Ninety-nine cents apiece,” she says, from across the room. “I love Walmart.”

She takes me up a stairway spilling down through the center of the apartment, and shows me the immaculate suite-within-a-suite where I'll be staying the night, with its enormous, claw-foot tub. It's a little odd to be spending the night on a first date, but this was her idea; it's a long drive. On our way out to tour the buildings, she opens a door on the far side of the main room, opening on whiteness, emptiness, and the mirror twin to the space where she lives.

“I haven't decided what to do with this. Everyone tells me I should use it as a painting studio … But I don't paint any more.
This
is my art now,” she says, gesturing around and above. She closes the door gently, as if on a sleeping ghost.

I follow her around to see the lobby, the pool, the gym, and here or there, she points out strategically preserved vestiges of the former school. For instance, she leads me down a long, strangely angled corridor full of apartments. Over the doorway at the end is a fragment of the old proscenium arch—complete with the original plaster comedy-and-tragedy masks—that would have crowned the peak of the “fourth wall.” The rest has been filled in with sheetrock and carpeting and elevators.

“
Oklahoma
,” I say, half-singing the syllables.

She smiles once more, a sudden flash. “
Saturday Night Fever
, more likely.”

“Ha, you're right,” I say.

Flash-forward a couple of hours, past the delicate “nouvelle” dinner (some sort of medallions, in some sort of sauce, with pale stalks of asparagus) in her restaurant, where the music—an excellent Blue Ridge folk duet—is too loud for relaxed conversation. I'm never quite comfortable, my back to the light, my elbows constantly in the path of the waitresses.

We're back at her place again. I'm sitting on a velvety black sofa. She's boiling water again, more a formality than anything else. I become conscious, with a sudden chill, there are virtually no books in her house. Yet on the wall before me is a full-scale reproduction of one of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings—the two pristine white calla lilies, each with its fingerlike yellow spadix, on a bright pink ground.

“It's my favorite painting,” she says, setting down my cup on the end table, along with a dish of enormous, buttery, oatmeal-raisin cookies.

“I love it, too,” I say.

“I have it on my back.”

“You what?”

“Tattooed. On my back. That painting.”

I nibble a cookie for a moment. “Curiouser and curiouser,” I say…“May I see it?”

“Sure,” she says. She turns without rising from the sofa, unbuttons her long-sleeved white shirt, slips out of it, and then, in a moment, reaches back to unclasp her black bra, and slips that off her shoulders as well. She remains sitting; back sinuously turned toward me, arms lightly crossed, unashamedly, over her small breasts.