The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  Veronica’s decked out in white running shoes and a lavender jenny-from-the-block tracksuit that she doesn’t quite have the body to pull off; the outfit is at serious odds with her teased-out hair and insomniac pallor. Her wide smile is probably intended to be disarming, but it’s straying into cymbal-playing-monkey territory and has pretty much the opposite effect.

  She nods at the portrait of the merchant as she strolls up. They don’t make ’em like that no more, eh? she says.

  Curtis glances back at the painting. The merchant’s eyes are sharp in its smoky halflight, staring at him across five and a half centuries. That’s the truth, he says. Looks like it could’ve been taken with a camera.

  It was, Veronica says.

  Curtis blinks, looks at her, tracks her eyes back to the oak panel. There are small cracks in the paint on the merchant’s nose and forehead. Say again? he says.

  It was taken with a camera. As in camera obscura, as in a darkened room for the projection of images. I mean, it is a painting, obviously. In the Fifteenth Century, there was no way to chemically fix an image. Van Eyck projected the sitter onto the panel with some kind of optical device, and then he painted over the projection.

  Veronica brushes past Curtis toward the wall, sweeping her hand over the portrait’s face like she’s tagging it with an invisible spraycan. Look how he’s framed, she says. Look how he’s lit. Look at that softness, those shadows. You see that in Leonardo’s sfumato, then later in Giorgione, Hals, Rembrandt. Canaletto and Vermeer, too, but those guys came later; they had fancy glass lenses. Van Eyck had to make do with a concave mirror. But the basic approach is the same. You see how the tonal grading opens the figure’s dimensions and gives the painting depth? That’s a total giveaway. You take a look at a Spanish or Sienese painting from the same period, it’ll be as flat and closed-off as the king of clubs.

  What, Curtis says, are you talking about?

  You haven’t heard about this? All the big guys, all the marquee names—van Eyck, Leonardo, Giorgione, Raphael, Holbein, Caravaggio—they all used optical devices. This is old news, man. This was on 60 Minutes like a year ago.

  Curtis looks at her, irritated, and then looks at the merchant again. The portrait’s eyes seem to follow him through the room.

  Veronica is backing into the gallery, turning girlishly on the ball of her foot. No optics in Titian or Tintoretto, she says, gesturing at the walls. But you can still see the influence of the optical style. Dark backgrounds? That’s from optics. Images projected in a camera obscura always have dark backgrounds. But holy shit, the van Dyck? The ruffles on that collar, are you kidding? Definitely optics. The Lotto, too, although he hides it pretty well. And check out the Pontormo. Look how fucked his proportions are. He used the camera obscura to nail down Mary’s face and hands, the baby Jesus’s head and arm. The rest of the painting’s on a different planet. The hands and the faces don’t fit the bodies. If that Mary were to crawl down from the canvas she’d look like a power forward for the NBA. Those arms are like four feet long.

  She grabs Curtis’s elbow and tugs him into the next room, talking loud, pointing. A young couple in matching sweatshirts and khakis is standing next to the wolfhound as they round the corner. Their brows are furrowed in disapproval, like this is the Sistine Chapel or something. Curtis gives them a mind-your-own-business glare.

  Let me see if I’m getting this, he says. You’re telling me all this stuff was—

  Don’t say traced. Traced sounds dismissive. There’s a lot more to it than that. You’ve got to get the tonal values right, and the colors. It’s not easy. It’s not like these guys were cheating. You gotta remember, we’re talking about the Dark Ages here. Painting didn’t exist as some kind of noble alternative to photography like it does today, expressive of some ineffable human truth or whatever. It was just the only means these people had of recording images. Nobody cared whether van Eyck captured his subject’s individual essence: they had no concept of individual essences. They just wanted to know if the fucking thing looked like Uncle Hubrecht or not.

  Veronica slows her stride. Her eyes pass from painting to painting. I will never understand, she says, why people lose their shit over this. I mean, so what if they used optics? Why do we have to make these guys out to be superheroes? I was at Columbia when Hockney first started talking about this stuff, and believe me, nobody wanted to hear it. They were all about pure theory: Bataille, Derrida, Lacan. Nobody cared how paintings were actually done. You’d make an argument based on science, on methods, on empirical observations, and they’d look at you like you’d just come to fix the color copier or something. It’s not that they didn’t believe it. They just didn’t see the point.

  She’s losing steam, getting distracted. Tension steals back into her shoulders, her face. I forgot that, Curtis says. That you studied art.

  Art history, she says. Not art. Completely different. As I quickly found out.

  They walk a few paces in silence. Veronica stares at the parquet, lost in thought. Curtis walks beside her, eyeing the walls. He’d been imagining the paintings talking to her, pouring out their secrets in a language he couldn’t understand, or even hear. Now that she’s not looking, they seem to go dark one by one, like tenement windows.

  You come down here a lot? he says. To the museum?

  She laughs, looks up. I’ve been in the casino every night for a week, she says. Six hours a night, hundred bucks a hand minimum. I’ve racked up so many comps that they’re about to name one of the towers after me. I’m getting sick from eating ossobuco and foie gras at every meal. So I figure, free museum tickets? Sure, why not? I like it here. It’s quiet. It’s a nice place to hide.

  Hide from who?

  She smiles at that, shakes her head. I just remembered, she says. I haven’t eaten anything since this morning. You want lunch? I got vouchers out the wazoo.

  I ate, but I’ll tag along. You feel safe walking around out there?

  She grins—a little crazy—and eases closer as they walk. She’s maybe a half-inch taller than he is. Well, she says, you’re gonna protect me. Right?

  He stops. She steps around, turns to face him. He searches her expression for a tell—a clue that she’s just opening up to reel him in—but even as he does it he knows that it’s hopeless, that he’s outclassed. If she’s playing him, then he’s going to get played. It’s the only move he’s got.

  Look, he says. You asked me before if I’m the only one Damon sent out here to find Stanley. I told you yes. That’s what I thought at the time. I was wrong. There’s another guy. Local. Tall white guy. Sort of a dirtbag. Calls himself Albedo. You know him?

  Her face turns sour. She shakes her head no. She’s telling the truth.

  Well, Curtis says, you probably ought to keep an eye out, and steer clear. He wants to make some trouble for you.

  Damon sent this guy?

  Yeah.

  And Damon sent you.

  The muscles are tight in her jaw and forehead. There’s way more rage in her face than fear. For a second he thinks she might bite him. He looks away.

  Then what the fuck are you telling me about him for, Curtis, if you guys are on the same team?

  I want to do this my way, Curtis says. That’s all I want.

  She wheels and takes a few steps in silence, then stops again. Staring at the floor. After a while she looks up, past him, at the canvases to his right. Calm now, one hand on her cocked hip. Her posture reminds him of an explorer surveying a treacherous valley, and also of a white girl from Santa Barbara that he dated for a few weeks during his one semester at Cal Lutheran.

  Look what happens after 1839, she says.

  He tracks her gaze past the bare-breasted Venus he ogled earlier to a couple of later canvasses: a haystack and a field of flowers; a pond glimpsed between trees. Brightly daubed mosaics of color. Curtis looks at them for a second, trying to see what she’s seeing, before his eye slides back across the rusted steel to the Venus. Her piled hair and small whit
e breasts. Her sleepy smile. A ray of late-morning light falls on her from somewhere, and she’s stretching, waking up. Her face half-hidden by her plump raised arm. Her single visible eye watching him with undisguised lust.

  1865 and 1880, Veronica’s saying. Corot and Monet. For the first time in four hundred years paintings are flattening out. Chemical photography begins in 1839. All of a sudden the replication of projected images by hand isn’t such a neat trick anymore. The challenge from here is to paint the world the way the mind sees it, not the eye. Not to capture external objects but the act of perception itself. The monocular tradition—the thumb and the eyeball, the picture plane and the camera lens, the illusion of depth—that’s over. Now it’s all about two eyes and a brain in between. Flat retinas and flat canvases. The eye that tricks itself. This is the beginning of modern art.

  Curtis shoots her an uneasy glance, but she’s not looking at him. Her eyes are shifting up and down the walls, chasing a thought, following a story written there. She’s talking to herself. It’s impossible to tell how much she knows about him, how much she might have forgotten.

  Eventually her attention lands on the Venus, and she flashes a lupine grin. She’s a real creampuff, isn’t she? she says. Even a hundred years before photography, you can tell people are getting bored. Everybody knows the game. You look at her, she looks at you. Trying to get under your skin through your eyeballs. All the old tricks are almost embarrassing. Joshua Reynolds owned a camera obscura that folded into a book.

  Curtis and Veronica stand side by side, very still, for a long time. He can almost feel her quick and steady pulse through the sanitized air.

  The Venus’s single eye is all pupil, wide and bottomless. The red curtains painted behind her are billowy, frozen, with a pool of dark tangled in their folds. The position she’s in—right elbow above her head—doesn’t look very comfortable. The blond Cupid that tugs at her sash will never untie it. The hand that hides her face will never fall away.

  C’mon, Veronica says after a while. Let’s go upstairs. I’ll buy you a doughnut.

  36

  The area between the slots and the Doge’s Palace is swarmed by packs of middle-aged white guys wearing golf shirts and identical red-and-white Ace Hardware caps. Some are wheeling luggage, some have the blush of afternoon drunkenness on their cheeks, and all shout back and forth in thick-necked last-day-of-school bonhomie. Curtis and Veronica weave between them, Veronica walking a little in front, alert and unhurried, head sweeping from side to side like a prowling lion’s. Curtis notes the efficient shuttle of her calves and shoulders, and he thinks back to Friday night, watching her at the blackjack table. Her spine tilted like an antenna toward the cards.

  They step onto the escalator. Veronica leans on the rubber handrail, looking up at the vast oval canvas on the ceiling: a sturdy blond queen enthroned on a cloud, a levitating angel crowning her from above. Two steps down, his head level with her ribs, Curtis sees that Veronica’s vinyl handbag is two-thirds unzipped, and he remembers the little SIG that she pulled on him last night. It should make him nervous, the fact that she’s carrying, and he wonders why it doesn’t, why he feels relieved. Then, for a sudden sick instant, he’s sure he’s never going to see Stanley Glass alive in this world again. The feeling thins out like smoke, and he follows Veronica into the Great Hall.

  On their way toward the fake sky they pass another living statue, or maybe it’s the one Curtis saw last night; he can’t tell. Same whiteface, same robes, same roundlet cap. Ringed by a marble railing topped with crumpled dollar bills. Veronica doesn’t give it a second glance.

  At the Krispy Kreme in the Food Court she swaps a voucher for a half-dozen glazed, and they carry them back to the Grand Canal to walk along the railing and listen to the shouts and songs of gondoliers plying the chlorinated water below. How much to ride the boats? Curtis asks.

  Like fifteen bucks, I think. In Italy, the real thing would set you back a C-note.

  A commedia dell’arte troupe is headed their way—a courtesan and a masked scaramouche harassing what looks like Napoleon—and Veronica makes a swift evasive left onto a bridge, surprising an older couple cuddling over the canal. The permed-and-dyed wife looks at Curtis, then at Veronica, then back at Curtis. Her eyes narrow. The husband—tan, silverhaired, crew sweater around his neck—puts a hand on her back and steers her away.

  Whoops, Veronica says. Did we just walk into a Viagra ad?

  She takes a doughnut from the box and leans to eat it, her elbows propped on the marble rail. Sugar flakes fall from her fingers, vanishing as they hit the water. There’s a tattoo, a big one, across the base of her spine; Curtis looks at it for a second, looks away, looks back. It’s a tree with seven branches, each labeled with a symbol: sun and moon, male and female, something that looks like a four, or maybe a two, and something that looks like a flat, or a lower-case b. They’re familiar, but Curtis can’t place them. The highest branch, the seventh, is hidden by Veronica’s top. Two figures are under the tree; Curtis can just see their heads over her waistband. The design is inked in black, like an old woodcut. Thinking of his own tats—bird-ball-and-chain on his right deltoid, devil dog on his left pec—and the way they’ve softened over time, he figures hers as eight or nine years old, minimum.

  Look at that shit, Veronica says. She’s nodding at the old couple, now strolling the arcade hand in hand. It’s so middlebrow I could shoot somebody. Come to the themed city! Experience the themed culture! Purchase and consume your own reified emotions! Huzzah! Another loveless marriage preserved! I guaran-goddamn-tee you when that guy comes back for COMDEX in November the first thing he’ll do is put on his fuzzy white robe and order himself a nineteen-year-old callgirl for a leisurely half-and-half. He’ll come back to this hotel because he had such a great time here with the wife. He won’t see any contradiction in what he’s doing. And he’ll be right.

  She finishes her doughnut, sucks the tips of her fingers. I hate this place, Curtis, she says. I hate the good things about it most of all. I hate that I like it sometimes. It’s such a relief to outsource your thoughts and feelings. You don’t have to worry about making an original gesture because original gestures are impossible. You just stick to the script. It’s like senior prom with gambling and shopping.

  Hey, Curtis says. Can I ask you a question?

  Sure.

  Did you ask to meet for a specific reason, or did you just want to talk? Either’s fine with me. But if we need to do some business, I’d just as soon get it out of the way.

  She laughs silently, straightens up. The tattoo disappears. I did invite you for a specific reason, she says. Which was, in fact, to talk. This morning I made a few calls to people in Philly and D.C., and I checked you out. Everybody told me basically the same shit. Stand-up guy. A little square. Not mixed up in anything heavy. Nobody in Atlantic City seemed to know you at all, which I took to be a good sign. But I wanted to feel you out myself. Without pulling a gun on you first.

  I appreciate that. How am I doing?

  Not bad. You’re a good listener. If we can improve on great sense of humor, I think you’ll be all squared away. You’re gonna make some young lady very happy.

  Thanks. You mind if I ask who you talked to in Philly and D.C.?

  No, I don’t mind, she says. But I’m not going to tell you, either.

  She grins at him, but she won’t hold his gaze, and he starts watching her carefully, sure he’s close to something. Curtis hasn’t been part of her world in years. There’s only one person she could’ve talked to this morning.

  Veronica turns away, crosses the bridge, walks back the way they came along the opposite side of the canal. He falls into step on her left. Somewhere behind them Napoleon and the courtesan are singing a hammy duet for the sidewalk diners; their harmonies blend and clash with the piped-in Vivaldi on the sound system, the murmured conversations of passersby, the low hum of air conditioners underneath everything. Just ahead there’s a German family—ein Papa, eine M
ama und zwei Kinder—studying a lightbox map of the shopping area, their sharp angelic features gilt from below, like they’re peering into a sanctum sanctorum.

  I think you should go home, Curtis, Veronica says. Right now. You’ve got no good reason to be out here. Don’t get mixed up in this.

  I’m not mixed up in anything. I’m just looking for Stanley. Just trying to help.

  She gives him an irritated look, the same look he often draws from Danielle when he’s being stubborn, and it makes him stifle a smile. Curtis, she says. C’mon. Damon Blackburn? Seriously? I know he’s your old war buddy or whatever. But you’ve got to know the guy’s shady.

  No, I don’t know that. Why don’t you tell me about that.

  Veronica draws a breath, opens her mouth to speak, then exhales quietly. She does this a couple of times. She’s slowing down; her neck and shoulders droop. For a second he’s afraid she’ll fall asleep right there on the pavement.

  I would like to know, she says, exactly what Damon told you. About the marker he gave Stanley, and about the counters who hit the Point. I’d like to know exactly what he wants you to do for him, and why.

  Curtis thinks about how best to respond. He’s not holding much, and he figures he’ll just lay it out. Damon told me he loaned Stanley ten grand, he says. Not long after, the counters hit the Point, and those other places. Stanley stopped returning Damon’s calls. Damon’s afraid that if Stanley defaults, Spectacular management will think he had something to do with the counters, and they’ll fire Damon for approving the loan. So he asked me to find Stanley, and to report back. That’s all he wants.

  And you believed that.

  Not really, no.

  Why not?

  Curtis is cautious with his answer. Damon and Stanley are friends, he says. I’ve never known Stanley to borrow money from a friend.

  Veronica closes her eyes, smiles. That was the right answer, and he waits for the coins to drop. She’s still creeping forward, listing from side to side. Curtis thinks of spinal patients he met in physical therapy, and also some Japanese dancers he saw one time in Okinawa.