History of Art

by Margaret Luongo

  The next day, I have a headache. Dean straightens his tie while I lie across the bed in my running clothes. Soon I’ll head to the track, where I’ll work on the coach of a local triathlon club. His mother died recently, and I want to make myself available to handle the sale of the estate. It’s delicate business. One can’t appear eager. After I drop Dean at the private high school where he teaches history, I drive to the track in my father’s old Mercedes. It’s butterscotch-colored and doesn’t require as much maintenance as you’d think. I have fond memories of riding in the backseat when I was small, on our way to the homes of the recently deceased, where my father or mother would manage the sale of generations’ worth of heirlooms. Much of my business comes from connections my parents made long ago.

  Coach is himself on the downhill slide of life, though he’s as healthy as a man approaching seventy can be. Sometimes he jogs with me during my slow warmup. He makes fun of the young girls who turn out in their perfect outfits—the white singlets and powder-blue running shorts, their hair pulled into tight ponies. “See that girl?” He points to a young woman stretching at the perimeter of the track. A few young men—actual athletes with rocklike quads and sinewy calves—stand around her, smiling. Once practice starts they’ll forget about her.

  “I see her.” I already know the punch line.

  “I’ve never seen her run.”

  “You should ask her to join the team.” I mean this to be funny.

  “I should,” he says. “I will.” He veers away from me, running at his true speed, far faster than a man his age should be able to. He has such an intentional gait—he means to get somewhere, the way he pushes off from the track, putting it behind him. He pulls up beside the girl, introduces himself. The young men break away and hit the track. Coach will have the girl on his team in a day or so, and she may last a few weeks or even a few months. She’s young, and probably not used to pushing herself or staying with things after they’ve stopped being fun. She may run too hard, start off too quickly, injure herself, quit. But he’ll get her for a little while, and who knows what he’ll be able to do with her. I’ve seen him take regular people—insurance agents and human resource officers—and turn them into competitive athletes. He jogs with the girl around the track, talking and laughing with her. The sun glints off the windshields of the cars in the parking lot, and I feel my jaw tighten; I’ll have another headache later.

  After I’ve run six miles through the neighboring streets, after Coach has done what he can stand to do with the girl, we reconvene at the track for a leisurely stretch. This is where our best talks occur. I tell him to let me know if he needs assistance with his mother’s estate. He doesn’t answer for a while. Then he says, “What did you do with your parents’ estate?” He knows my parents are dead, though they died at different times: Dad first, heart attack, then Mother, lung cancer. “I mean, that would be weird, selling your parents’ stuff.”

  We’re both on our backs, not looking at each other.

  “I still have it. Dean and I live in their house.”

  “What—you just fit your stuff in around theirs?”

  I imagine the disaster that would have been. “We got rid of most of our furniture. It was cheap.”

  “What about your husband’s stuff? Didn’t he have parents who gave him things?”

  Dean had rooms full of blond modern museum-type chairs and tables that didn’t go with anything.

  “Dean has his own room. We converted the carport. He keeps the things he can’t part with there.”

  “So you have a whole house full of things you can’t part with, but all his stuff has to fit in the carport?”

  “It’s not a carport anymore—it’s really a very nice room. Why are you making this a problem?”

  He doesn’t answer my question. “My girls are coming this weekend to take what they want. I’ll let you know if I need your help after that.”

  We make plans to meet for a beer after his practice on Thursday, while Dean’s taking a course for recertification.

  At home, in the foyer, the glare from a mahogany picture frame slices into my field of vision and I wince. The oval frame holds a photograph from my grandparents’ wedding, New Year’s Day, 1906. Neither of them smiles, in the European tradition of leaden portraiture. Would it have been impossible for them to smile—on a happy occasion? Would it have killed them?

  In the shower I try to rinse away my headache. I’ll make some calls at the shop, keep some appointments. Collectors come for the vases, paintings, and jewelry the dead have left and the living don’t want. I have auctioned entire households of furniture—secretaries stuffed with crinkled letters in foreign languages, pantries full of home-canned tomatoes, beans, cabbage, and soup, moldy sporting equipment—white leather skates, wooden tennis racquets, scuffed bocce sets and rusted horseshoes. And over everything the thick dust, the heavy, living smell of thriving mold and mildew. In my office, stacked in bookcases with glass doors, sit tins and leather albums of unlabeled family photographs and daguerreotypes. Researchers from the university come to paw through them, searching for items of cultural interest, anything that will justify their hypotheses. A pale graduate student came by once to see my collection of “families engaged in leisure pursuits.” I gestured to the cabinets, told him I hadn’t sorted the photographs. He offered to catalogue them by period and subject, but I told him no, the families should stay together. He shook his head, repeatedly, all week as he came every day to sift through the photos.

  At my desk, I unfold the newspaper and glance at the front page. Someone’s young son drowned in a swimming pool; a teenager drove her parents’ car into a tree. I think of the girl’s room, her plastic beads, ribbons from cheerleading or equestrian, those collages girls make when they are bored, lonely, or angst-filled, the inevitable diary. The boy’s room: posters of sports stars—hockey, baseball, basketball—and the gold and silver trophies. Maybe a musical instrument, bought on installment, with a dried-up reed. I turn quickly to the obituaries and make note of likely candidates. I keep a stock of tasteful sympathy cards, though truthfully there’s no such thing. I include my business card, which describes my services in plain terms. I mail about thirty of these a week and attract the interest and business of about one in thirty. Often I get calls six months, a year, or even three years after the fact. It takes a while for the family to pick through what’s left. Sometimes they never do; the boxes sit for years until someone decides it’s time to move, or a new baby arrives, and the boxes of diapers and toys crowd out the dead.

  I’m making out the cards when the bells on the front door chime. A fairly young man enters. He wears a cheap-looking suit—the jacket hangs crooked and the pants pull across the front. The shirt is pale yellow and looks like part of a Catholic boy’s school uniform. In his hand, he holds one of my cards. He clears his throat when he sees me behind my desk.

  “Are you—?” He waves the card at me.

  I put down my pen. “I am.”

  After a little hitching motion, he clumps toward my desk. His pants are short and show his dark-brown socks when he walks. I imagine he sprang up late for work and threw on clothes without a single glance at the mirror. He tells me his parents are dead and he wants an appraisal of their possessions. They lived in a house just outside town, in a swank subdivision, built on a rise in the woods—the kind of place where executives lived side by side with successful artists and everyone had cocktail parties. My parents would have attended parties there, but I’d never had a client from this neighborhood.

  I agree to drive over with him. He lays his hand on the dash of the Mercedes and leaves a sweaty palm print.

  “Nice car.”

  I see him calculate its worth. “Thanks. What did your parents do?”

  The man sneers. “My mother was an artist, and my father was a collector.”

  This seems promising. “He collected art?”

  “He thought it was.”

  “Are you an artist?”

/>   He laughs out the window, then turns to face me. “Do I look like one?”

  I want to say, You look like the manager of a fast-food joint. He is, in fact, the manager of the Popeye’s on Main Street, where he presides over fryers filled with catfish nuggets, big pots of gumbo, and baking sheets of dry, buttery biscuits. I remember his pale unwholesome face floating under the grease hood with all the brown faces of the cooks.

  His parents’ house is filled with junk. The house itself is lovely—all windows and natural wood. On the main level, we pause by a wall of sliding glass doors to take in the view of dense green growth. Live oaks strung with blue-gray Spanish moss make lacework of the sky. Saw palmettos scratch and rustle. The top-heavy pines stand stiff, upright—the straight men of the hummock. I imagine he must have fond memories of such a lovely place.

  “Will you be moving in?”

  “I’m selling it,” he says. “You want to buy? I’ll sell it to you right now.”

  He probably can’t afford the taxes, but his voice tells me he wants to be rid of it for other reasons.

  “It is a fine house. Maybe you should show me the other things first. I’d have to talk to my husband.” I don’t want to insult the place by outright refusal.

  “Don’t wait too long if you’re really interested. These places don’t go on the market often. I mean, somebody has to die.”

  He turns, and I follow down a cool, dim hall. We pause in an open doorway. Huddled in the room like terrified rodents, obsolete computers and monitors stare at us. The father collected vintage Macs and PCs, and now their gray cases and blank glassy screens sit waiting for their caretaker to come and—do what, exactly, with them?

  “He was going to make the Mac Classics into fishbowls and sell them on e-Bay. This was just a hobby,” the son tells me.

  A little farther down the hall, he opens another door. The hulking, matronly forms of antique clothes washers greet us. “Ditto for these,” he says.

  We climb creaking narrow stairs to the upper level, and the son leads me to the father’s workshop. The doorbell rings, followed by loud pounding. “That’s the egg man,” he says, and he turns abruptly to answer the door. The two talk, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. The son returns, out of breath from the stairs, looking a little embarrassed. “Can I borrow two dollars? I don’t have enough cash, and I need to pay him.”

  “Sure, no problem.” I reach into my purse.

  He snatches the bills and says “Thanks.”

  I realize he’s not sheepish at all; he’s in a hurry. He probably has to get back to work. I guess he told the egg man about his father’s death right there on the doorstep. I turn back to the room. On the desk is an egg. Someone has been painting it but has left off work. The bottom half is still white; the top half displays an intricate floral pattern rendered in glossy jewel tones. To the left of the desk sits a long wooden table, its surface covered with eggs that have been drained of their insides and covered in pigments, some with geometric patterns or flowering vines, others with animals. A rooster with majestic russet plumage catches my eye.

  The son returns, slightly red-faced and out of breath. He hands me two cartons of eggs. “These are yours. I forgot to have delivery stopped.”

  I stare at him.

  “My father paints them? Painted them.”

  I agree to take the eggs but nothing else. I ask him to tell me about them, and he rolls his eyes.

  “It’s a Ukrainian thing. All the oldsters go for it. The house was always filled with this old-country crap. You should see my mother’s paintings.”

  I tell him I’d like to see his mother’s paintings.

  “She made her own paint,” the son says. “She was a loon—they both were. She used the yolks my father blew out of the shells.”

  The mother had painted a series of a cuckoo clock—fifteen smallish canvases. Though each clock has all the numbers it needs to mark the passage of time, none has hands. Instead, each face reflects a different quality of light. Some have a cool feel, as if only weak daylight washes the scene. In others, the canvas glows gold—lamps keeping dark away. In the murkiest, twilight nearly obscures the Roman numerals—a faint edge shows here and there—and the clock itself seems to lurk on the darkened wall, marking time in a private way. Among these hang the more subtle deviations, small slices of the day captured for examination. I wonder what the boy did while his mother worked all these many hours, if he played patiently nearby or if the mother worked quickly, so as not to be late picking him up from school.

  “Do you have more of your mother’s art?”

  “This is it. The rest she sold.”

  “Why not these?”

  He puts his hands on his hips. We both regard the paintings. “She said it reminded her of me—my childhood.”

  I drag my gaze from the paintings to the man. “What did she mean by that?”

  He exhales through his nose. “I have no idea.”

  “Well,” I say, “they’re lovely,” though what I mean is they’re full of sorrow. “I’ll take them.”

  “Great,” he says. “Good.”

  I hadn’t noticed at first, but the pink background of the paintings matches almost exactly the pink of the wall on which they hang. The wainscoting also matches.

  “What happened to the clock?”

  The man is already removing the paintings from the wall. “I broke it.”

  He agrees to pack the eggs and drop them off at the shop. I take his mother’s art with me. I already know where it will hang: in the foyer where my grandparents’ wedding photo hangs over the mahogany table, beside the grandfather clock. The paintings need a wall to themselves; all of those items will have to be relocated.

  Inside, I hear an abrupt sound from Dean’s room, the sound of someone rising quickly from a chair. Dean shuffles into the foyer and stands there, still in his school clothes, home three hours too soon.

  “Are you all right?”

  On his face, a look of recognition appears.

  “I am sick,” he replies. His arms hang at his sides. I’ve never seen him more inert, like a machine waiting to be turned on.

  “What happened?” I go to him and touch his wrist.

  “Nothing happened.” He glances past me at the paintings. “What are those?”

  I explain and he nods. He moves to sit on the couch. “Aren’t you tired of it?”

  I panic a little. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  He loosens his tie. “I can’t breathe.”

  “I’ll open a window.” As I move past him, he takes my hand. “I quit my job.”

  Suddenly, I am no longer married to a history teacher. I sputter for a moment about the outrage of his not talking to me first, but before I can even begin to form the sentence, I drop into the chair opposite him and say, “Oh.” Practical considerations aside, “Oh.” So many questions bubble up and dissipate. I wait for Dean. He tells me he’s been seeing Janice—professionally—behind my back, instead of taking recertification classes. He isn’t made for teaching history. He’s meant for working in nature.

  “That’s how it always works for her clients,” I tell him. “They’d all be happy if only they could work outdoors. Don’t you think that’s a strange coincidence?”

  He doesn’t respond.

  “Are you going to be a game warden or a mail carrier?”

  Dean shrinks into himself. “I’m going to be a naturalist.” When I don’t respond he continues. “I’ll give tours of the parks and tell people about the land—its trees and plants and birds. It’s a whole other world.”

  It occurs to me that Dean will still be a historian, but now he’ll be historian of the trees, hills, hummocks, and creeks. I stand and straighten my skirt. “If this is what will make you happy, good for you.” It comes out more forcefully than I’d anticipated, and Dean seems even more depressed. “This will make you happy, right?”

  “I just wish,” he says, then stops.

  “What?” I say. �
��You wish what?” I feel a snarl rising in my throat and I want to snap, “You dare to wish what, exactly?” He doesn’t say anything. I turn away and busy myself clearing the wall for the paintings. As I reach for my grandparents’ wedding portrait, I feel my lips pucker into the sour pout I suspect may be responsible for the lines I’ve been seeing around my mouth lately. I try to catch my reflection in the portrait’s glass, but it’s too dark to see anything so faint. Dean helps me move the grandfather clock and mahogany table to our bedroom. We hang the paintings together, and I think about their creator. I try to read these artifacts from her life. I feel something like hope, but I don’t know why. We stand back to admire the effect.

  “I like them,” Dean says, and he takes my arm. “I really like them. You have a good eye.”

  I wave away the compliment. “Pish-posh,” I say. I’m pleased that he feels something for the paintings. I watch him from the corner of my eye, my husband, this unfamiliar creature. Janice’s fraudulent counseling feels predatory now—not the stuff of amusing stories—as if she had practiced on all those hapless wanderers until she could get to us. I had no idea Dean was lost. Why didn’t I? And why didn’t he come to me first?

  Over the next few weeks, Dean is transformed into a bigger presence in the house. Correction: he has a presence in the house. He goes for long walks and returns with pinecones and dried needles, leaves from deciduous trees and live oaks, all of which he deposits around the house in my mother’s Waterford and Limoges. I don’t raise an eyebrow. When he’s not looking, I touch the pinecones and leaves. He’s keeping a small journal—he draws pictures of the trees and plants he sees on his walks, writes the common and Latin names beside each. The book is quite lovely, its pages swollen from humidity.

  I never knew he could draw, didn’t realize he has been drawing all the time we’ve been together. I remember the maps he made for his classes, to mark out the old boundaries and show lines of battle, but it never occurred to me that he drew these. Now I remember they contain too much of Dean to have been traced. He included icons to help his students remember something about each country: the Netherlands marked with a windmill and a bicycle; France identified by the Bastille and a mob cap; Italy, the Colosseum and an olive tree. I am sorry for his students that he won’t be teaching anymore. I remember how excited he was to discover that they could learn, that he could teach them.