History of Art

by Margaret Luongo

  Tully continues to read the board. “What for?”

  “I have to get away from this.” He waves his hand, gesturing around the station.

  “That’s why people get on trains,” Tully says. “Will you defer?”

  “I don’t know,” Max says. “Maybe. Yes—that’s a good idea. I can stay with Aunt Susie, sit in with some bands. Maybe learn about recording.”

  “What would I do there?”

  “Play with me. Go to Stanford. Defer. Anything. Would you look at me?”

  “Would I stay with your Aunt Susie, too?”

  Max feels he might cry from happiness. Or wet his pants. “Yes, she won’t mind—she’d love it.”

  Tully swallows. Finally, he looks at Max. “You’re not going to freak in the middle of this, are you, and leave me stranded in San Francisco?”

  Max grabs Tully’s wrist, presses his fingers into his pulse. “I would never do that.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “I’ll text her. She’ll understand.”

  The big board flashes their track number. Tully shakes hands with Fitz and pecks Helane on the cheek. Max tells his mother he loves her.

  “I know you do, honey,” Helane says. “And I you.”

  Max shakes his father’s hand and forces himself to look Fitz in the eye. “I’ll see you,” Max says. Every time I look in the mirror.

  Max and Tully walk down the tunnel toward the tracks and wait a suitable amount of time before returning to the lobby to purchase new tickets. Max calls Aunt Susie to announce their plans. On the train, he listens to more of the music he hopes to make, the musicians making worlds of sound together. He watches Tully across from him, who from time to time shows him his research: potential jobs, clubs where they can play, their new neighborhood and life. He’s found a studio they could afford, eventually, after they find work, light-filled and near the clubs. Max still feels he might weep or fall to his knees.

  “Let’s,” he says.

  The sun leaps into a clearing, catches them both. They squint and shield their eyes.

  “Yes,” Tully says. “Let’s.”

  HISTORY OF ART

  Mars

  What he doesn’t need: more bronze figures of himself, naked with a spear. Flattering at first, the votives accumulated into a tiny army, ready to wage war for peace, spears hoisted at odd, almost languid angles. He appreciates the nod to his virility—the semi-erect penis, enough to command respect, but modest enough not to detract from the impression of battle-readiness. Some figures arrive intentionally broken, as if they weren’t useless enough already, and he arranges the pieces on his shelves. The piles of arrows, swords, and shields please him—he collects for Ares, too, who can’t be bothered, so there’s quite a hoard. Around suppertime the aroma of burnt offerings—meat, grains, and fish—wafts up to him: delicious foods he can never consume. They won’t let him forget what they’re up to, the humans. Clinging to their offerings, the faint notion that this war will bring peace.

  He prizes most the bronze figures of the devoted themselves, young warriors clothed in armor, a hand extended—a sign that the beseecher would give, however inferior the offering. They remain plump-cheeked and muscular, frozen in their gesture of desire. These beseechers make a separate army, one to whom he owes remembrance. From the corner of his eye at all hours and angles he sees their outstretched arms, palms open to accept their destiny. From time to time he dusts one off, fondly strokes a cheek, recalls the soldier’s last conflict. Once and only once did he turn a pair of feet from battle, the warrior confused and melancholy: long life, no glory.

  Misdirected offerings tear at him: the bronze eyes and ears, the terra-cotta feet. He’d kept a pair of ears once, longer than seemly, tracing the shell-like curves of their inner workings—as if he could heal or sharpen a perception other than the warlike. Had he prolonged suffering, in keeping devotions not his? His own longing frightened him. He wrapped the ears in linen and delivered them to Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Like an oaf, he didn’t say anything, just thrust the package at her. She might have said, I’ve been expecting these. He fled.

  The way he likes himself best: in silva, with a colossal scythe, cutting back the wilds for planting. Sometimes, muscles straining, he remembers Ninurta—the god recumbent, wreathed by the fragrance of sesame oil and baking bread—his wisdom that fertile soil needs a fearsome army. The son of Juno swings his scythe, he hacks and hacks, visualizing human crops, rows and rows of sturdy stalks stretching to the horizon.

  Londinium

  Art is long and so are curses. In the Museum of London, relics of superstitious Romans reside in glass cases that preserve the grudges of yesteryear. The small marble figure of a plump Venus, found buried in the Walbrook Valley; the necklace of emerald beads linked by gold figure eights; the scrap of lead inscribed “Martia Martina.”

  Your rival scratches your name, “Martia Martina,” inverted, on a scrap of lead. She stands at the stream’s edge, folds the scrap over, and hurls it into the water for quick delivery to the gods. Later, you stand on the same bank, looking for evidence of your fate in the current. You finger the beads you wear for protection. She dies. You live. You cast a statue of Venus into the stream as thanks for the victory in love. Babies come. You die, of course. And Martia Martina, your backwards name, crackles, metallic, over the speaker system in the museum’s permanent exhibition—a curse so old as to make you immortal.

  Painting as a Pastime

  A man needs a hobby to turn his mind from affairs of state. Flowers, for instance, of your own arrangement or en plein air or whatever the staff or the women of the house have assembled or laid carelessly by, such as the bouquet you found under the plane tree at the north end of the heath, tied round with the stem of a daisy. Delighted at first, you thought it left for you by her, but how? She couldn’t know you’d come here, and you’d made it clear you wanted to be alone. Still, you set up your easel and spent the afternoon observing: how the center of the bouquet appears crushed, as if a hand, a small hand, had rested on and pressed into it, as if the hand supported the weight of a reclining person. The flowers, the petals, the leaves, bent at various angles, some limp, some—a few daisies—with their heads turned violently, necks snapped. No real care had been taken to create balance. Some flowers were chosen for their proximity to the path: the ethereal and utterly common wild carrot; the equally ubiquitous spear thistle. Yellow goatsbeard, pulled shut now in the midday heat, had lured the rambler off the path, and then she stooped for the red clover, closer to the ground, tiny full globes of itself, like pointillist grapes. In the middle of the bouquet, the stacked faces of the common selfheal glare, dark and lionlike, deep from some damp part of her ramble, possibly near here, possibly the final flower plucked before the gatherer sank to the grass under this tree and carelessly leaned into the flowers she had just gathered, half-crushing them. And in the grass near the bouquet, a pair of shaded indentations, the vague impression of repose. The grass still flattened. You look for signs of recent retreat—a trampled path or bent-back branches—but there’s only stillness. The light breeze moving through the leaves and meadow. The wood doves’ call. Some buglike chatter. When you turn back to your subject, here and there, the blades of grass have righted themselves.

  Art Appreciation

  The sniper watches as you sketch the beach. Bullets pock the sand around you, sending up small fine showers. Through his sights, he is close enough to see your sketch pad and the hurried way you render the terrain. Men storm the beach; many fall. The only territory gained will be on paper—a map. He could shoot you, but instead he watches, remembers his first drawing class, years before the world went mad: a vague aroma of pastels and wax; the professor walking among the students, murmuring corrections here and there. Through the tall windows light streaked in, illuminating dusty air. The still life itself: a goblet with water and seashells; a recently caught fish (“Work quickly,” the professor suggested), with its gleaming plump eye; a
doll propped on a block of driftwood, its torso naked, showing where the porcelain limbs and cloth joined; a man’s walking stick, broken, an owl carved at its head; a clutch of crumbling dried roses; scattered sand. The professor’s restless energy swirled throughout the room. His magnificent sideburns, the one extravagance of his appearance, his droll way of instructing, as if they were all in on the joke—thrilling.

  “Forget everything you know,” he said, “about seashells and goblets, dolls and fish—if you can forget that smell.” The ­students laughed. “Draw what you see, not what your noodle thinks it knows.”

  He was an obedient student. He stared and sketched, and as he sketched he felt a shifting in his brain, and then the shattering—he and the objects on the table breaking apart, weightless and drifting. He turned his new eye to the fair-haired girls across the table, their fine features, the jaw, the neck, the collarbones; the professor pacing, the vents in his tweed jacket swinging open; the tall narrow houses adjacent to the school; the canals flowing; the trams creaking; the government buildings with their undulating flags—all a vast blanket of connection. He had never felt such expansive warmth—what he imagined then might be love, or later, simple desire.

  He knows you feel the beach this way, to make it just so for the map: no longer beach but something strange—not a thing that could be contested, gained or lost. He holds himself very still, his own self shattering with you.

  Untitled and unfinished

  He was a sentimental painter, his teachers said, years after he’d passed through their classes. No one loved a pastoral more; he couldn’t see the point in blowing apart form, or in paint for its own sake. He privileged his point of view and found fault with others’. On cycling trips through the countryside, his stomach growling, the shouts and laughter from the picnics of his youth came back to him. When he walked down the street or smoked in cafés, he saw few faces like his mother’s—the blue-eyed, round-faced doll of a woman, so petite and pale. He painted her from memory, placing her amid the settings he loved best: a Bavarian hillside, pausing for a picnic beneath a fir; by the Danube, gazing into her reflection, a castle in the distance; amid a rolling golden wheat field, her silken hair alight around her like a halo. An idealization?—no; a manifestation of her inner beauty, which only he could see. He painted her alone, not with the men who paid her visits, not one of them man enough to pretend interest in him. The settings he culled from memory, of places he’d visited, or seen in books or on other people’s postcards tacked to walls. He couldn’t ever make her fit, not really—he cursed his lack of talent. The scenes felt static, covered over in a yellowed glaze that sometimes cracked. And she would be there, bent over the gunmetal water as if to do the washing, or slumped against the tree, at rest between chores. Only in the wheat field did her presence make any sense, her illuminated hair rising up to a blue sky, much like the color of her eyes. He’d painted her vest blue, too, the color an accident—too vibrant, he feared, but no; it proved the right exaggeration. It was his last painting. Tired of criticism, he showed it to no one; instead, he translated quaintness of landscape and mother-love to rhetoric and politics. He painted the future with words people could see, like rolling hillsides, and he filled their bellies with echoes of plenty and contentment.

  LCpl Buckner Visits the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

  Jackpot—WWI. She thinks I don’t know what I’m doing. What did she call me? Peach-fuzz. Peach-fuzz jarine from Virginia. Shit. She’s right about the peach fuzz. Go ahead, Peach-fuzz, fight them Iraqis. I need to get with her again, whatever they say. Daddy will send me across the room—Happy landing, motherfucker!—then be done with it. Mama, no. Take it personal, like I can’t think of a better way than bring some black girl home. Fucking women. Cold shoulder—ten years? Twenty? Fuck. A gas mask. This shit’s weird. That’s a urinal—the fuck? Well, a lot of people did die. That bastard wishes he did, no-face, in-a-basket motherfucker the rest of his life, fucking throw me off a bridge. I’d beg Tamika to toss me. Kick me to death with those fuck-me boots, baby. Don’t carry me around like no dog in a basket. Fucked up. Shit. What you wanna kill them people for? They ain’t done nothing to you. You want to kill that drill instructor. Kill that motherfucker. Seriously. Those eyes, those lips. Sir, can’t go, sir. Girlfriend says I’m a cracker if I do. Sir, yes, sir. A long line of crackers. Breaking the pattern, Sir, yes, sir. These assholes were seriously messed up. Draft-dodger . . . draft-dodger. Figures. Freud-reading officer. He can say it’s fucked-up—but only after, not during. A long line of crackers, fighting other people’s wars. Fuck. She’s right. She has the tightest pussy. Nothing, no one—don’t think now. Not the time. Ripped-up pieces of shit—train schedules, newspaper. This is art? I’m gonna get shot at for this? Ha, ha. Freedom of speech, freedom, period. Christ, it’s my choice. What you got against them people? Nothing, all right? Except they have something against me. Us. You think they’d let me fuck your black pussy in Iraq? No? Well, then.

  FOREGROUND

  She woke up remembering part of a dream, but the dream was real: a memory of Bernard telling her how much he liked to say her name, that it reminded him of the word “alone,” that when pronouncing it slowly, one couldn’t help but sound beseeching and bereft. “Llloorrrnnaaa,” he said, dragging out each sound. As he said it, he reached out to her in slow motion on the bed and then collapsed on her bosom. “Devastating,” he said.

  The cat eyed her from the foot of the bed. The cathedral bells rang nine o’clock. She’d stayed up too late. She wanted to be ready when Sondra arrived at the gallery; it wouldn’t do to have her tell Bernard that Lorna had overslept or appeared in any way negligent, resentful, or unprepared. “Time’s up,” she said to the cat. She walked in front of the windows without bothering to cover herself; by now the neighbors would have hopped on their bicycles and pedaled off to work or school.

  She had stopped bothering with the Dutch newspaper since Bernard had gone. In fact she’d let them pile up on the doorstep until she’d spied a neighbor stacking them neatly to the right of her door. Now, she clicked the television to BBC World News. Today in Madrid people were still reeling from the train bombings. Lorna ate yogurt in front of the television, while the cat rubbed his cheek against her ankle. A stock picture of a canal in Amsterdam appeared over the anchor’s shoulder. Lorna leaned forward, spoon in mouth. No news about the missing American girl, who had last week waved good-bye to her classmates outside a coffeehouse and hadn’t been seen since. No developments, the anchor said. No witnesses, no clues.

  “She’s covered her trail, Buttons,” she told the cat.

  Lorna had engineered her own less drastic disappearance eight years ago: a Fulbright and then marriage to Bernard, a Dutch man and nonbeliever, her parents’ misgivings remote and weakly transmitted from Ohio. She tried to explain in terms they would understand: a boulder rolled away from the cave of her soul, a rebirth. Now she could disappear for a week without anyone noticing. After two weeks of silence, her father would phone. After two and a half weeks, her mother would call the embassy. She most wanted to retreat to a cave of herself; when she emerged, things would be different, in ways she could not foresee. What she could do with two weeks! What could she do with two weeks?

  Reaching into the closet, she disentangled a purple and navy suit from a bouclé dress, yanked the suit free, and slung it to the bed. “Shower time,” she said to Buttons, whose ears were back. He gave her a wild-eyed look and switched his ginger tail. The many cardboard boxes, the appearance of his carrier, and Bernard’s absence had all raised alarms, and the cat had gone manic—prone to startle and when startled, prone to skitter through the apartment, fishtailing around corners and slamming into walls.

  “Don’t give me that, please,” she said to Buttons. “I can’t handle it from you today.”

  After she showered she tossed the suit to the closet floor and dressed in jeans, boots, and a baggy sweater. At the gallery Bernard preferred her to wear suits and
to twist her wavy brown hair into an up-do. Often by the end of the day, Lorna’s head ached from all the pins and clips. In the suits she felt like someone else, which was interesting for a while. When she listened to herself speak, half the time she didn’t know where the spiel came from. Often, she sounded informed and confident. Sometimes she recognized with pleasure bits of information she’d learned in art history courses and critiques. Always she was aware of Bernard listening. At first she felt proud to command his attention. Later she caught him wincing or frowning at something she’d said, or so she thought; Bernard told her he was too occupied with business to attend to her every utterance.

  After she said good-bye to Buttons, she walked along the canal at the street level. A call had come in, and as she walked, she listened to the man on her cell phone, who wanted to buy a painting he’d seen during the last opening, a painting of pig by a Russian artist. Lorna did not want to sell it to him—not for sentimental reasons; she hated the painting. “It’s so pink, Buttons,” she had told the cat. “It’s an insult to pigs.”

  “It’s not that easy,” she said into the phone.

  “Has it been sold?”

  “No.”

  “Has someone else expressed an interest?”

  She said, inventing quickly, “It’s a matter of proportion. It’s an odd painting, not a very large canvas, and it’s all foreground. Are you sure you have the proper place for it? I can’t have you taking it home and then deciding it doesn’t work over the sofa, if you see what I mean.”

  The man was talking now, away from the phone, in Dutch. He returned after a moment.

  “I assure you, miss, I will not return the painting.”