Impossible Views of the World

by Lucy Ives

  “Is that so?”

  I thought about this for a moment. “Well, when does that ever really happen?” I didn’t know what to say next. “Smell you later,” I said.

  The museum was quiet. It smelled all right. It was a pretty OK place to be.

  Clutching my tote and finding it stiff I recalled that due to the massive influx of information reconfiguring my life at breakneck speed over the past seven days, I had not yet had a moment to crack the volume of The Four Seasons I’d been lucky enough to obtain, awkwardly but still, from Paul’s apartment on Friday eve. I grinned and slid the item out.

  I stopped midstride. This was not The Four Seasons. It was a slender 1971 catalog of the period rooms in the American Wing including, the title told me, “Special Emphasis on the Decorative Arts.” I may have whimpered. The proof I’d believed I had in hand of Alice’s vanished Elysia Club bequest was now unceremoniously lost again. In my defense, this 1971 thing was the exact same stupid size as the bound Four Seasons back issues, but, admittedly, I should have paid more attention to what I was carrying off with me, post Ella.

  I frowned, examined the book. So this was what Paul had been looking at. How charming of him to review one of the department’s more mediocre publications. Examining the spine and edges I noted a few dog-ears. At the base of the grand interior stair, I flipped to the first marked page. “Room 734: Virginia Salon, circa 1810–1840, with Games Table.” I gulped. It was the number that did it, then the word “Games.”

  I was sprinting into the back of the museum like a freak. I saw who Paul was, what he had been doing over time. He had been, in a sense, working against the museum from within. And he had been hiding his works in plain sight.

  I almost already knew what I would see. Or, as I had been gawking at these objects for several years without knowing what they were, I was aware of exactly what I was about to look at. In one of the hands of cards that sat as if abandoned by an invisible worthy on the green felt of the combination card and billiard table in room 734, there were not one but two queens of spades, and the face of one of these queens, who held a diminutive mallet made from cut glass in one fist and a yellow quill in the other, was the long-nosed face of Ella Voss; and in room 737, the Marble Parlor, so called for its trompe l’oeil limnings of a veiny approximation of this stone, in a corner of the elaborate if roughly executed mural that depicted a distant mountain pass, there hiked a drooping man who bore a ruddy fan of polished coral; and in room 740, the Pennsylvania Dutch nursery, the single false window with a view out onto painted conifers was hung with a mirrored prism in the shape of a daisy, which cast a daisy-shaped net of light over the finely joined cradle, an offering to the fictional Lorelei.

  As I say, I did not need to gaze long. I had already seen all this. I already knew where and what each thing was. I had only to adjust my thinking regarding the provenance of these objects. But what I had not seen, I realized, was what Paul had secreted into room 743, which, if I am being candid, is perhaps my favorite out of all the period sector, but which, because of its remoteness, down a small stair at the northeastern edge of the wing, I had not visited in some months. This room was a narrow clerk’s chamber, taken from a Wall Street turret long ago condemned. It was a favorite with children, who liked to run squealing into the slender, curved space, which was too small for many adults. As far as I could remember, the office contained nothing more than a folding desk built into the wall and a stool on a metal arm that swung out to permit the factotum a seat. And a lamp with a smutty glass chimney, for ambience, I presumed. My own minor stature made entering the spot a cinch, perhaps part of the reason for my liking of it. I descended the little stair.

  At first, nothing seemed to have been altered. Deflated, I dropped onto the hard clerk’s stool, an item the museum had long ago given up defending from contemporary buttocks. I gazed at the barren desk and dirty lamp, which, unlike the stool, were encased in a cube of Plexi. Here something pale to the right of the desk caught my eye: A metal pin held in place, to the desk’s outer edge, a scrap of paper. I craned my head around and all but jammed my nose into the protective barrier. Foggily I could perceive that the scrap of paper was an image seemingly cut from some period print publication, a political cartoon, if I wasn’t mistaken, probably of very early republican vintage. I got off the stool and squatted, pressing myself against the wall the better to look. There were two figures and a caption. Squinting, I made out the words: Importing thee Curious LLASKA TUSKER. I duly noted the parallel with my erstwhile article on “The Curious Zebra,” which perhaps Paul had read, after all. “Jiminy Cricket,” I muttered, because maybe it was nonsense and maybe I just couldn’t see. I breathed on the Plexi and wiped with my cuff. A minor shift toward clarity transpired. The two entities depicted in the cartoon were, I could now report, to the left, a diminutive human figure prancing along, gazing up to her left. This figure wore a slipper-shaped hat to which was affixed a star-shaped decoration. The hat wearer also held in her left hand a chain, and this chain was affixed to a collar at the neck of the figure on the right. And what a figure it was. It gazed boldly out of the print with a human face, a face nearly identical to the face of the woman who led it, containing large, almond-shaped eyes and a serene smile. It was roughly four times the height of the prancing hat wearer and stood on three pairs of legs, each of which appeared to have been derived from a different mammal, perhaps a goat, lion, and elk, though not necessarily in that order. Teats descended from the thing’s impressive undercarriage and continued, plumply, in vaguely sexy pairs, up its chest all the way to its neck, indicating that it was capable of supporting quite a supply of younger versions of itself. The rest of the animal was cloaked in neatly organized feathers, like many rounded flags or leaves, and its shapely catlike body terminated in a tufted leopard’s tail. Giant diaphanous moth wings patterned with illusory eyes sprouted at its shoulders; it had the soft, open ears of a deer, small tusks in its cheeks. Branching antlers hung with flowering garlands filled the top of the picture.

  I stood, stiffly. “LLASKA TUSKER”: I contemplated the familiar letters colluding in the strange creature’s name. I recalled what I had told Cate about the invisible hand. The animal was similar. It was also mine, if I was its, if I were prepared to recognize that I was in no small part feral, i.e., alive.

  —

  I WAS LETTING MYSELF into my own office now, arranging things and myself there. I was filled with an unusual glee even as I prepared for a mild day of ministering to everything I had neglected during the past week’s adventures, which was really a lot.

  What my mother does not realize, I reflected as I set the office to order, is that if I do what she proposes, and really I think I might, I will take her business and I will turn it into something else. Meaning possibly an actual gallery. Perhaps, in a final slight, she believes that I will not be able to transform it, and it is, paradoxically, to my weakness that she entrusts her life’s work. But my mother does not know me. Her understanding of me takes a contradictory form. She both admits and ignores my capacity, and I mainly understand her largesse as an attempt to head off revenge. Because at some level my mother knows that I must be revenged on her if ever I am to become an adult, and she would rather that I take my revenge on her pseudonymous print dealership than on her pseudonymous self. She is a person who has a talent for being in more than one place at once, you see, and I imagine that this will still be true of her even after she is dead.

  My mother does not entirely want to know me. In some ways this is a gift.

  I was just about to turn on my computer when there came a sudden knock. I flinched. I continued to follow through with the initial gesture and hit the power button before I said, “Yes?”

  But I already knew. I turned.

  “Hello,” said Fred. He was in the doorway, holding a large envelope.

  “Good morning,” I told him. “That was a nice service.” I was referring to Sunday.

  “Yes. It was.” Fred paused. “Ma
y I come in?”

  I lied. “I don’t see why not.”

  Fred closed the door. He pulled the antique chair up to the side of my desk and sat down, setting the envelope between us. He smiled.

  An unforeseen thought popped into my skull. Paul wasn’t the suspicious one. I mean, in spite of his elaborate less-than-readymades. Paul had never been the suspicious one! All along I had been the one who was suspicious, who had felt there was something unsound here or there. Paul may have worked against the museum, but he had probably liked that there was something here to work against, to counterfeit, to de-authenticate; it was even necessary to him. My own feelings were a bit different. I wasn’t sure how I should look at Fred right now, so I just looked at him like myself.

  Fred eyed me, letting me know, even in the silence, that I should be impressed by the thing he had. He seemed fixated on his envelope and was eager for me to open it.

  “Oh, I should open this?” I asked, mostly to be annoying.

  “Yes. That would be great.” Fred put his hands on top of his head, like he was twelve.

  Gingerly, I unclasped the envelope. There was a single piece of paper inside. It was old, I could tell already. I drew it very carefully out in order to prevent tears or crumbling. In fact, part of it had already been torn away in the upper left-hand corner, as if a staple had been carelessly removed.

  I knew quickly what it was and could feel Fred watching my face for new detail like he was going over it with his hands.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Pretty amazing, right?”

  Something occurred to me and I said it before really having a chance to think it through. “I can’t believe how many of these are in your show.”

  Fred was certainly wearing some sort of look of appreciation, although I was not observing his face. “I know, right? Paul was doing some very interesting research, very interesting, but he did not quite perceive its use.”

  Fred had Mabel Styke’s letter, the document I had sought and been unable to find in the museum’s archive. It included a list of all the paintings donated anonymously to the Central Museum of Art by Styke’s employer, Alice Gaypoole Wynne, in August 1930. Many of these were portraits related to the Wunsch family, keys to the deep matrilineal history of the Wynnes. Others were classics of American modernism.

  “So what happened to the later stuff? A lot of that’s privately owned now, no?” I asked. There was a Kuniyoshi, for example, and a few very early Stettheimers, all paintings, it now occurred to me, that were currently hanging in the limner show.

  “Anything of any value was quietly deaccessioned after the war. The board felt anything too obviously associated with Alice Gaypoole Wynne was kryptonite. It all reeked of bohemia and loose morals, not to mention mediocre realism. Very scene-y stuff. Camp, kind of. Anyway, Alice was a total scandal because of what the tabloids said.”

  “And the older things?”

  “I think the curator in charge, Jonah Durr Weiss, of whom you may have heard, had an affection for this material, if not for Mabel Styke, and he sort of half hid it in storage, whatever couldn’t have sold at that time anyway. I came upon it by chance.” Fred’s voice grew warm, and he had to clear his throat. “Well, or almost by chance.”

  “You came upon it or Paul came upon it?”

  Fred presented himself as completely unruffled. “Ha! It’s a good question. I’m sure Paul knew about this for years! Paul kind of knew everything about everything, though of course, Stella, you’ve lately been becoming more and more aware of that.”

  He thought that he was threatening me.

  I remained impassive. “Paul had a very impressive understanding of this collection,” was what I said.

  “And so,” Fred told me, “do you, Stella. More and more, every day as things improve between us, I’m so glad that we can work together and admire one another’s work. Which I do, so very much.” He let out a deep breath. “And, as I imagine you also understand, my recovery of these paintings, that were within the collection but hidden, as it were, in plain sight all along, has certain additional interesting repercussions, because of the original donor.”

  He indicated the list in my hand.

  “I’ve been having some incredibly rewarding conversations with Electra Wynne, who, as you know, is Alice Gaypoole Wynne’s grandniece. She has been very gratified to learn more about this forgotten and truly fantastic piece of the history of her family, and as a way of supporting the careful work that is being done in our department, she would like to make it possible for us to offer a new endowed senior position to a member of staff who, in her words, best embodies the values of her grandaunt, and, Stella, I really can’t think of anyone who better expresses those qualities than you.”

  Fred was beaming at me.

  I stared down at the yellow typed page in my hands. For some reason, I really liked Mabel Styke’s closing salutation, here deployed again: “Your friend.” I liked how plain it was. I felt I knew what she meant by it.

  It also occurred to me that I could now jump to my feet and tear this page up or even suddenly begin eating it, thus foiling Fred’s plan, depriving him of proof. But if I knew Fred, he’d already photographed and scanned this thing a million times before sharing it with me. And even if he hadn’t, and even if there were no other proof extant on this planet that those paintings hanging in his show were correctly labeled as he had labeled them, I could guarantee you that Fred was still going to get his way.

  Carefully, I slid the letter back into its envelope. “We wouldn’t want to damage that!” I said.

  I started looking around my desk for a pen, because I had just remembered that Bonnie had said there were some forms related to insurance that I needed to print out and sign, and today was the deadline. I switched my printer on to let it warm up.

  Fred was still sitting there. I turned to him. He didn’t look angry or even frustrated with me, rather, or by contrast, he appeared continuously amused. “What are you doing over there?” he said. I hope I may be allowed to observe that his suggestion of any significant distance between us was, at this point, farcical.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Just a few little chores!”

  “Quite all right,” he told me, taking the envelope back. In this process, I should mention, whether by chance or by design, his right index finger brushed gently against the side of my bare arm. It was electric. All I could think of was us holding each other.

  Fred just kept sitting there, languidly tapping his long fingers against the surface of my desk.

  I could feel him smiling. He said, “So I bet you might like a moment to take in this development. It’s quite understandable. It’s really a lot to consider, what with last week’s tragic news, and I’m sure your feelings are all over the map. Makes sense to me.” Fred stood. “So you’ll think about it? And let me know when you’re ready? This isn’t something we’d announce for another few weeks, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Great. Then I’ll see you later on at the meeting?” he told me, preparing to slip out of my office before I had time to supply an ambiguous retort.

  It had, anyway, by this moment become clear, as in crystalline, that I would not be staying, that I would not be accepting this wonderful new Wynne-afforded post, nor would I be contributing to the fulfillment of WANSEE’s vision of a world of tens of tiny CeMArts, each enlivening its own exclusionary city. I had learned that I preferred the wilds, or as close as I could get to them, which might be by overhauling Basset’s. And what I said, as Fred Lu left, was, “I will see you there,” by which I meant, “I will see you only there,” by which I meant, “My time is now limited.” And then, strangest of things that are strange, I believe Frederick Lu heard my meaning. He heard something, I don’t know what exactly, but he heard me saying “No,” and to him, with the result that he became momentarily discombobulated, bereft of coordination and sense, and actually he fell pretty hard, even shrieking softly, as he collided with the hallway�
��s ecru carpeting.

  I sat in my chair, paging through insurance documents.

  “I’m OK, I’m OK,” Fred was insisting, somewhere.

  In the event of, began the line I was reading.

  [appendix: timeline]

  1479–1458 B.C.:

  Reign of Hatshepsut, fifth pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty of Egypt

  A.D. 37:

  Emperor Caligula abruptly becomes insane after nearly dying of an unknown illness in the eighth month of his reign

  1568:

  Art historian Giorgio Vasari describes Titian’s 1509 A Man with a Quilted Sleeve, in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, incorrectly maintaining that it is a portrait of the poet Ludovico Ariosto

  1726:

  Publication of Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, a.k.a. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

  1754:

  Columbia University founded

  1782:

  Clemente Susini, renowned for sensual wax models depicting dissected female corpses, becomes chief modeler at the Florentine Natural History Museum

  1792:

  Publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women

  1797:

  Étienne-Gaspard “Robertson” Robert, Belgian inventor, presents the first fantasmagorie at the Pavillon de l’Echiquier in postrevolutionary Paris

  1799:

  New York State act freeing future children of slaves, and all slaves in 1827

  1815–1850:

  Greek Revival in arts and architecture in the United States

  1825:

  Settlement of Seneca Village, first Manhattan community of African American property owners, between West 82nd and West 89th Streets