Misty’s here with Tabbi, looking for books about horses and insects her teacher wants her to read before Tabbi starts seventh grade this fall.
No computers. No connections to the Internet or database terminals means no summer people. No lattes allowed. No videotapes or DVDs to check out. Nothing permitted above a whisper. Tabbi’s off in the kids’ section, and your wife’s in her own personal coma: the art book section.
What they teach you in art school is that famous old masters like Rembrandt and Caravaggio and van Eyck, they just traced. They drew the way Tabbi’s teacher won’t let her. Hans Holbein, Diego Velazquez, they sat in a velvet tent in the murky dark and sketched the outside world that shined in through a small lens. Or bounced off a curved mirror. Or like a pinhole camera, just projected into their tiny dark room through a little hole. Projecting the outside world onto the screen of their canvas. Canaletto, Gainsborough, Vermeer, they stayed there in the dark for hours or days, tracing the building or naked model in the bright sunlight outside. Sometimes they even painted the colors straight over the projected colors, matching the shine of a fabric as it fell in projected folds. Painting an exact portrait in a single afternoon.
Just for the record, camera obscura is Latin for “dark chamber.”
Where the assembly line meets the masterpiece. A camera using paint instead of silver oxide. Canvas instead of film.
They spend all morning here, and at some point Tabbi comes to stand next to her mother. Tabbi’s holding a book open in her hands and says, “Mom?” Her nose still on the page, she tells Misty, “Did you know it takes a fire of at least sixteen-hundred degrees lasting seven hours to consume the average human body?”
The book’s got black-and-white photos of burn victims curled into the “pugilist position,” their charred arms pulled up in front of their faces. Their hands are clenched into fists, cooked by the heat of the fire. Charred black prizefighters. The book’s called Fire Forensic Investigation .
Just for the record, today’s weather is nervous disgust with tentative apprehension.
Mrs. Terrymore looks up from her desk. Misty tells Tabbi, “Put it back.”
Today in the library, in the art section, your wife’s touching books at random on the reference shelf. For no reason, she opens a book, and it says how when an artist used a mirror to throw an image onto canvas, the image would be reversed. This is why everyone in so many old-master paintings is left-handed. When they used a lens, the image would be upside down. Whatever way they saw the image, it was distorted. In this book, an old woodcut print shows an artist tracing a projection. Across the page, someone’s written, “You can do this with your mind.”
It’s why birds sing, to mark their territory. It’s why dogs pee.
The same as the bottom of the table in the Wood and Gold Dining Room, Maura Kincaid’s life-after-death message:
“Choose any book at the library,” she wrote.
Her lasting effect in pencil. Her homemade immortality.
This new message is signed Constance Burton .
“You can do this with your mind.”
At random, Misty pulls down another book and lets it fall open. It’s about the artist Charles Meryon, a brilliant French engraver who became schizophrenic and died in an asylum. In one engraving of the French Marine Ministry, a classic stone building behind a row of tall fluted columns, the work looks perfect until you notice a swarm of monsters decending from the sky.
And written across the clouds above the monsters, in pencil, it says: “We are their bait and their trap.” Signed Maura Kincaid .
With her eyes closed, Misty walks her fingers across the spines of books on the shelf. Feeling the ridges of leather and paper and cloth, she pulls out a book without looking and lets it fall open in her hand.
Here’s Francisco Goya, poisoned by the lead in his bright paints. Colors he applied with his fingers and thumbs, scooping them out of tubs until he suffered from lead encephalopathy, leading to deafness, depression, and insanity. Here on the page is a painting of the god Saturn eating his children—a murky mix of black around a bug-eyed giant biting the arms off a headless body. In the white margin of the page, someone’s written: “If you’ve found this, you can still save yourself.”
It’s signed Constance Burton .
In the next book, the French painter Watteau shows himself as a pale, spindly guitar player, dying of tuberculosis as he was in real life. Across the blue sky of the scene, is written: “Do not paint them their pictures.” Signed Constance Burton .
To test herself, your wife walks across the library, past the old librarian watching through little round glasses of black wire. In her arms, Misty’s carrying the books on Watteau, Goya, the camera obscura, all of them open and nested one inside the next. Tabbi looks up, watching from a table heaped with kids’ books. In the literature section, Misty closes her eyes again and walks, trailing her fingers across the old spines. For no reason, she stops and pulls one out.
It’s a book about Jonathan Swift, about how he developed Meniere’s syndrome and his life was ruined by dizziness and deafness. In his bitterness, he wrote the dark satires Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, suggesting the British could survive by eating the increasing flood of Irish children. His best work.
The book falls open to a page where someone has written: “They would have you kill all of God’s children to save theirs.” It’s signed Maura Kincaid .
Your wife, she wedges this new book inside the last book, and closes her eyes again. Carrying her armload of books, she reaches out to touch another book. Misty walks her fingers from spine to spine. Her eyes closed, she steps forward—into a soft wall and the smell of talcum powder. When she looks, there’s dark red lipstick in a white powdered face. A green cap across a forehead, above it a head of curly gray hair. Printed on the cap, it says, “Call 1-800-555-1785 for Complete Satisfaction.” Below that, black-wire eye glasses. A tweed suit.
“Excuse me,” a voice says, and it’s Mrs. Terrymore, the librarian. She’s standing there, arms folded.
And Misty takes a step back.
The dark red lipstick says, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t destroy the books by piling them together that way.”
Poor Misty, she says she’s sorry. Always the outsider, she goes to put them on a table.
And Mrs. Terrymore, with her hands open, clutching, she says, “Please, let me reshelve them. Please.”
Misty says, not yet. She says she’d like to check them out, and while the two women wrestle over the armload, one book slips out and slams flat on the floor. Loud as a slap across your face. It flaps open to where you can read: “Do not paint them their pictures.”
And Mrs. Terrymore says, “I’m afraid those are reference books.”
And Misty says, No they’re not. Not all of them. You can read the words: “If you’ve found this, you can still save yourself.”
Through her black-wire glasses, the librarian sees this and says, “Always more damage. Every year.” She looks at a tall clock in a dark walnut case, and she says, “Well, if you don’t mind, we’ve closed early today.” She checks her wristwatch against the tall clock, saying, “We closed ten minutes ago.”
Tabbi’s already checked out her books. She’s standing by the front door, waiting, and calls, “Hurry, Mom. You have to be at work.”
And with one hand, the librarian fishes in the pocket of her tweed jacket and brings out a big pink gum eraser.
July 7
THE STAINED-GLASS windows of the island church, little white trash Misty Marie Kleinman, she could draw them before she could read or write. Before she’d ever seen stained glass. She’d never been inside a church, any church. Godless little Misty Kleinman, she could draw the tombstones in the village cemetery out on Waytansea Point, drawing the dates and epitaphs before she knew they were numbers and words.