A Spectral Hue

by Craig Laurance Gidney

  The washer rumbled menacingly after he turned it on. Hopefully it wouldn’t eat his clothes, like the laundry room at his dorm sometimes did. His mother had called him earlier that day to check in on him.

  “Are you getting enough material for your thesis?” she had asked him.

  He had told her yes.

  What he hadn’t told her was how disappointed he was with the Whitby-Grayson Museum. He had hoped that visiting it and seeing Whitby’s and the other artists’ work up close would have been, somehow, more meaningful. Xavier was underwhelmed.

  He remembered walking to the Whitby-Grayson Museum a couple of days ago. It was a fifteen-minute walk from Iris’s place. The houses he passed on the way there were a mixture of weathered wood and putty-colored aluminum siding. Most of them were two stories tall but there were a couple of one-story ramblers that looked like retrofitted double-wide trailers. The few people he saw on the street or getting in cars were African-Americans. Most of the men wore woolen knit caps and rubber waders and boots. The women wore track suits or house dresses. They all had standoffish expressions, neither curious nor welcoming. So much for skinfolk being kinfolk.

  When he was a freshman at the college, he’d had vague ambitions to capture uniquely African-American spaces, like this town. Shimmer had a rich history of freedmen who became successful watermen, even when Maryland and Delaware were slave states. Xavier wanted to chronicle this in acrylic, like Jacob Lawrence had painted with gouache and cardboard. Seeing these faces, with their granite expressions, made Xavier want to commit them to canvas. There was something timeless about this place. The trappings of modernity (the cars, the cellular phones) did not hide that this town was isolated, out of time. People still lived by the whims of the bay. Xavier imagined spreading burnt umber and ochre, earth tones and shades of white to capture the bleak scene. He heard the bleating of gulls and saw their black-and-white wings arc over the sleepy town.

  Hazel Whitby had walked down these streets. So had Shadrach Grayson. Perhaps they had seen and interacted with some of these folks’ ancestors. He could easily see why they would remake the world they knew into something rich and strange. In this wet and grey landscape, Whitby’s purple-garbed angel and Grayson’s mysterious hovering will-o’-the-wisps gave the bleakness of shore life a touch of mystery.

  The work of the Shimmer Artists intrigued him. Their stories implied that there was something else, apart from artistic drive, that made them create. If he was honest with himself, he was fascinated with the idea of ‘channeling’ creativity. His own work had a dead-on-arrival feel. He’d tried realism and abstraction, watercolor and oils. In the end, his paintings were inert things, waiting for the spark that made Hazel Whitby’s work alive. Back at college, there was another black student, Enoch Porter, who claimed that some spirit guide flashed images of what to paint into his brain. At the time, Xavier thought that he was full of shit. Enoch painted pop-art. Warholesque, candy-bright, superficial portraits of Michael Jackson and Prince as messianic figures. It was so obvious. Jackson as many-armed Shiva, Prince as Dionysus in a vineyard. When he was criticized in class for cultural appropriation and the general jejune style, Enoch would say that he had to paint the image in his head, free of self-awareness. The thing was, while Enoch Porter’s work was derivative, it popped. You couldn’t look away. The vines slithered behind the haloed Prince, Jackson’s extra arms were in motion.

  Xavier entered what passed for a commercial district in Shimmer, past a restaurant called Bertha’s, a boutique and a beauty shop. All three were closed. Shimmer had the feel of a ghost town. Empty, abandoned, echoing with seabird screeches. No cars cruised down the slick streets. Shimmer wasn’t a resort town. There were no tourist attractions, just the endless wet marshland. It was the kind of creepy town in horror movies, where the outsider is sacrificed to some ancient ritual.

  The museum itself was an ugly industrial building. He’d seen it online many times, but in the harsh grey light, it looked cheap. The online pictures had probably been digitally altered. Xavier felt that Whitby’s work ought to be in a more dignified place. He was used to the gravitas of the Smithsonian buildings. Maybe his scholarship would make Whitby’s work more well-known.

  The museum grounds included a small blocked-in garden. It was wet and there were maybe ten marsh-bells growing out of the soppy soil. What a strange, ugly flower it was. The shape of the flower bells was too long to be aesthetically pleasing. There was something reptilian about the fringes of the petals, and the stamens looked uncomfortably like penises. It didn’t help that each flower was made of forty or fifty micro flowers, all with their lolling flaccidity on display. Xavier knew that the marsh-bell was an orchid of some kind, and the word ‘orchid’ derived from the word for testes. The marsh-bell, however, was just a little too on-the-nose. Looking up at one close up, he could see why the flower had inspired the artists. The color was vibrant. The flowers looked like an obscure percussion instrument.

  “They are a bitch to maintain,” someone with a deep voice said.

  Xavier turned, saw a field of gray coverall fabric. He looked up into the face of the tallest man he had ever seen. He was a few shades darker than Xavier. His skin had blue undertones. His hair was styled in an afro mohawk, stubble around the sides, wooly and unkempt on top. His eyes were light gray, his face smooth.

  Xavier was suddenly self-conscious. “Well,” he managed to get out, “orchids are notoriously fussy.”

  “These ones certainly are. They require a special soil, and have to be kept moist constantly,” the tall man continued. He was also very thin, almost unhealthily so. There was a gauntness to his cheeks. Xavier thought that he could probably see his ribs beneath the loosely fitted coverall. His voice was deep, but it had a cadence to it, a softness to the end of his sentences that made Xavier think that he might be queer. Gaydar was mixture of crapshoot guessing and decoding masculinity. There was a feline quality about the way he shaped words. His consonants were gentle caresses, not abrupt stops. People always assumed that Xavier was queer, probably due to his slight stature and delicate features. He didn’t mind it that much.

  “Is the museum open yet?” Xavier asked him.

  “I was just going to unlock it.”

  “Do you know if Dr. Lenski is in yet?”

  “He doesn’t come in until noon. Did you have an appointment?”

  The custodian let him in the building. It was disappointing. Black tile floors, exposed piping painted a uniform grey, beige walls. There was one main room, dedicated to Hazel’s quilts, another one for Shadrach’s paintings, and a smaller gallery for people inspired by the two of them. The tapestries were the brightest thing in this drab place. Maybe they were the brightest thing in all of Shimmer.

  “I’ll let you know when Howard comes in.” Xavier glanced back to the tall custodian with the gray eyes. He’d momentarily forgotten him, drinking in the many displayed tapestries.

  “I’d appreciate that,” he replied. “By the way, I’m Xavier.”

  “Xavier. Like Professor X?”

  “Who?”

  “From the X-Men. The comics. The movie with Patrick Stewart. Never mind.” He flashed a grin. His teeth were all messed up, yellow tombstones on blackened gums. It was still a nice smile. “I’m Linc, by the way.”

  Linc left him alone in the museum, probably to attend to those fussy marsh-bells.

  Marsh-bells were all over Hazel’s work. They bloomed all over the pieces of fabric, like an invasive species. The rest of the tapestries’ colors had, somehow, faded. The blues and browns were no longer vibrant, which made the brightness of the magenta shade all the more prominent. When Hazel had made these quilts, magenta dye was relatively rare, reserved for only the wealthiest of families.

  The Whitby family was only modestly wealthy, as they were not tobacco farmers like many of their neighbors. So where had Hazel gotten such brilliant fabric?

  He had been studying one of the pieces up close when Dr. Lenski came in
and introduced himself. Lenski was a fine-featured bald man, slender and in the mold of Dr. Giordano with his retro-spectacles, finely creased shirt and pants. (Lenski also pinged his gaydar. The man was eccentric—he wore clothes only in shades of pink and black. Black outfit, pink tie. A black shirt with pink roses, etc.) He’d given Xavier a tour of the museum and let him use a desk in the tiny office. The archives, while well-maintained, were nowhere near as extensive he expected. The WiFi signal was weak and would drop without warning.

  Finally, the artwork seemed, somehow, less, after that first glance at it. It was weird. The works in the archives and in the galleries seemed to be robbed of their unique charm. They were dulled, greyed-out and inert. The Shimmer Artists were known for the way they achieved a kind of primitive trompe l’oeil effect with their use of color that made the work move. Whitby’s tapestries could entrance him for hours. Now, they were just lifeless pieces of fabric.

  Xavier stewed over his lack of enthusiasm as he did his laundry. Iris helpfully gave him an actual laundry basket. In between the trips to the laundry room, he organized the notes and pictures he had taken. He added the strange palimpsest picture of the marsh-bell in his rented room. Why not? It seemed to have more vigor than the work he’d seen at the gallery.

  Something caught his eye when he went down to the laundry room. Opposite the machinery were clear plastic storage tubs, neatly stacked up. The bin on the bottom was marked in masking tape with the name Tamar Dupré.

  Xavier recalled that Dupré was one of the names of the Shimmer Artists in the collection.

  “Well, shit,” he mumbled.

  “Is everything okay?” Iris’s voice came from upstairs.

  “Everything’s… my clothes aren’t dry yet. That’s all.”

  “It takes a couple of times to get really dry. I’ve been meaning to have that dryer looked at. Just start it again.”

  “Thanks,” he said. He was glad that she didn’t come down to check on him. He started the dryer again and it rattled.

  The top bin wasn’t heavy. It was just large, unwieldy and tightly tucked into its alcove. It took some jimmying to move the huge gray box out of its cubby. Whatever sounds he made were masked by the machine’s sound. He thought he heard Iris retreat from the kitchen, but he worked quickly just the same. With the storage bins taking up most of the space, Xavier felt slightly claustrophobic, which added to his slight paranoia. The palette of gray on gray, the bleeding walls, the lone lightbulb… The underground room felt forgotten, neglected.

  He peeled off the top of the bin and found that it was filled with many pieces of cardboard. By the dim light, Xavier saw the floral motif, and the glitter of lustrous purple. It was similar to the picture that hung above his bed, that same layered collage style of tissue paper and obscured images. He saw black women’s faces hiding behind or in the center of flowers. The images had been cut out from magazines or fabric and wallpaper samples. Then she had used a clear drying glue to meld the juxtapositions together.

  Iris must have known Tamar. How else would she have gotten this motherlode of work?

  ***

  He found the book four years after the first time he saw the quilt Edyie Baird owned. He was fifteen at the time, and he had vague interests in being an architect. Drawing was the only thing he was passionate about. Everything else bored him to tears, even though he was a good student. There was something about the smell of pencil lead, and calling something into existence, be it a trigonometry figure or the more complicated shapes he eventually created. His class notes were always filled with doodles. At first, geometric shapes, mathematically precise triangles and three-dimensional cubes. Then he began drawing figures. Bird-headed men, sphinxes, and things from mythology.

  At some point, Xavier knew that this was not just an idle hobby. It was the core of who he was. He experimented with graphite, chalk, and ink. He moved into strict realism. Portraits of fruit, quick sketches of people on the metro, buildings on the National Mall, copies of things in the Smithsonian.

  For his fifteenth birthday, he got an iPad, along with an electronic stylus. That’s when Xavier started posting his work on Deviant Art under the name Xemplar. (The logo was in a heavy serif font, all caps, with X purple, his tribute to Prince.) He developed a fan base. At one point, he had nearly 800 followers. He even got a commission here and there. (Mostly drawings of pets or RPG characters.)

  Xavier started scouring eBay and used bookstores for art books. He could draw, but he felt hopelessly ignorant. He amassed a decent library of slightly worn coffee table-sized art books and smaller Time/Life Edition survey books on Impressionism, Surrealism and Romanticism. He skimmed the texts, opting instead to copy the paintings in the books. He absorbed everything through visual and muscle memory. Shading, light, color theory were all acquired by obsessive practice.

  Then he found Strange Gardens: The Quilts of Hazel Whitby in a remainder bin. The book was in good condition. Even the dustjacket was intact. Before Xavier bought the book, he flipped through it. The tapestries, reproduced in full color, were as vivid as ever. And the spots of magenta in the abstract maps still shimmered, as if they were animated blobs. The book was only ten dollars, significantly discounted from the $39.95 list price. He saw the black stripe on the deckled edge that marked it as a remainder. There was only one copy of the art book. Most remaindered books came in sets.

  When he bought the book, he could have sworn the cashier said, “Huh,” in a slightly derisive manner as she searched for the bar code. He thought nothing of it.

  He started reading the book on the bus ride back home. Reading, not just looking at the pictures. Xavier knew that if he looked at those photos of Whitby’s quilts, he would become hypnotized by the motion of the tapestries, and trapped in the threads.

  The book had a scant history about Whitby:

  Hazel Whitby was sent as a gift from Mrs. Whitby’s sister Laura Osborn, shipped up from South Carolina with two barrels of rice and several lengths of Corsican lace. The child began creating her odd floral quilts shortly thereafter, perhaps inspired by the change of scenery.

  He flipped through the introduction, trying to find an explanation for the technique she used for the fluttering color effect. The author mentioned it in the last paragraph.

  Hazel Whitby’s tapestries have a shimmering quality, created by a subtle and sophisticated use of minute clashing colors. The precision of her stitch work is a marvel of trompe l’oeil artistry. Whitby’s muse was the Eastern Shore where she lived. She imbued her work with an almost Blakean mysticism…

  ***

  A strange garden spread out before Xavier on the cold concrete floor of the cellar. A wetland scene, under the watchful eyes of a giant marsh-bell. Dupré had used photographs, cutouts from magazines and catalogs and greeting cards, construction and tissue paper to create variations on the same landscape. These images and materials were mostly layered upon stock board, but there were some plates, and old Reader’s Digest books covered with images.

  Xavier wanted to drag the whole bin up to his room, and catalog them. He didn’t think that Iris would approve. Instead, he laid out each piece on the concrete floor, and took a picture of them with his phone. By the time he was done, it was almost eleven o’clock.

  He carefully placed the artwork back in the bin, and put it back. He thought about how poorly they were kept, in the dank cave of a basement. Finally, a discovery! But how will I talk to Iris about it? She keeps them for herself, for some reason…

  He couldn’t figure out why.

  7: Lincoln

  Since he grew up in the District of Columbia, Linc was used to museums being free, beautifully designed temples to art and learning. In his past, before his current nomadic life style, he had been to many museums, both in his own city and others. The Louvre, the Tate Modern, the Chicago Museum of Art. Museums were sterile, well-lighted, and full of wide-open spaces. They were architectural marvels, like the brutalist concrete circle that was the Smithsonian’s
Hirschhorn, or they were repurposed palaces. The Whitby-Grayson Museum, however, was the opposite of those.

  It looked like an old processing plant of some kind. It was a single-story low building, with baby blue-colored aluminum siding and a metal roof that was ridged like a ruffled potato chip. Since it was right on the water, Linc could imagine it being a fish processing plant. Watermen could have brought the day’s catch to this building, where one hundred or so workers chopped and portioned bluefish, bass, or picked crabs for lump meat. The whole place probably once stank of fish guts and the parking lot was lined with pinkish, bloody water. It was an ugly building, a rude eyesore on the landscape.

  At least the entrance was nice. The name of the museum was spelled out in metal letters, in industrial tones of copper, nickel-gray and some iridescent-looking metal that had peacock colors rippling across it. Linc tried the door. It was locked. There was a doorbell with the unmistakable black circle of a tiny camera housed in a lozenge of plastic. He pressed this, self-conscious of the length of his hair and the dinginess of his clothes. The contraption lit up, the red dot of the camera active and focused on him. That little red light stayed on for what seemed like a long time before he was buzzed in.

  He walked into a brightly lit lobby, buzzing with fluorescent tubes that were reflected in the sleek sealed concrete floor. A middle-aged white man sat behind an information desk. He had buzzed his hair, but it was just growing in. Linc could see patches of gray and reddish-brown worming their way up from the pink scalp, a pattern replicated in his goatee. He was thinnish, save for an incongruous lumpy stomach that appeared out of nowhere, out of context. He wore a pink gingham shirt that looked as if it had been ironed within an inch of its life. And his glasses frames were hot pink. He was maybe a foot shorter than Linc was.