Audio: Saïd Sayrafiezadeh reads.
By the time six o’clock is about to roll around, I’m beginning to wonder if working in an art gallery is taking some sort of toll on my psyche. One part of the problem is that I haven’t done anything all day, since there hasn’t been anything to do, and the other part of the problem is something I can’t quite name yet. This is the moment when the owner emerges from his back office—three minutes before six—holding a two-page handwritten letter that he needs me to type right now, because there’s a collector on the West Coast who might be interested in “Untitled X.”
“One more thing before you go,” he says, as if the list of today’s tasks has been long.
“I’d be happy to,” I tell him. I’m full of good cheer and work ethic. I was hired a month ago, and I want the owner to think of me as a team player—but the truth is I don’t get paid for overtime.
The truth is I’ve spent today the way I spend most days, sitting behind the front desk for nine hours, less one hour for lunch, engulfed in a sea of silence and serenity, waiting for something to happen, while I gaze into the middle distance of white walls hung with Abstract Expressionism. This is the art of seventy years ago, the art of art, the art of ideas, the art of Rorschach, lines, shapes, splashes, repudiating verisimilitude and easy answers, sixty by sixty, and selling for five figures if the owner’s lucky. No, we don’t have Pollocks or de Koonings, we have the ones no one’s heard of, the ones that don’t go for seven figures, and that don’t hang in the Denver Art Museum, where I worked in the café before getting my act together to send out art-related résumés across the state of Colorado. “Executed optimal operations during peak hours,” I wrote in my cover letter—business-speak poached from the Internet but accurate nonetheless.
Today, the only visitor was the mailman at noon, who put his big blue bag on my Formica front desk and spent a few minutes making small talk about sports and the weather, which was cloudless and cool, because in Aspen it’s always cloudless and cool. A month ago, I was living in Denver, where it was also cloudless and cool. The mailman spoke too loudly for an upscale art gallery with a library-like atmosphere—“CLOUDLESS AND COOL”—but no one was here to hear him. Before he left, I tried to get him to stay longer, saying plaintively, “I can give you a personal tour if you like,” but he thought I was talking about Aspen. “I’ve lived here my whole life,” he said.
Now it’s six hours later, twelve past six to be exact, and I’m doing my best to type out two pages of handwritten letter. What I’m actually engaged in is a white-collar high-wire act without a safety net, where each typo means I have to start over with fresh stationery. If I were allowed to use the state-of-the-art computer that’s been staring at me all day in sleep mode, I’d have finished ten minutes ago. Instead, I’m hammering away on the manual typewriter, olive green and Smith Corona, circa the nineteen-fifties, which also happens to be when the art on the walls is from. In other words, the obsolete past.
“Dear __________:” the letter begins. “I believe I have something in which you might be interested . . . ”
The owner prefers a colon in the salutation; he prefers the day of the month spelled out, “twenty-eighth”; he prefers a carbon copy filed alphabetically in the bottom drawer, the original “cc” in blue ink. He describes the painting’s provenance, its importance to modern art, its five-figure price, which he wants spelled out. He’s hovering by my desk as I type, dressed in his three-piece suit and denim smock, the embodiment of where art meets commerce, although as far as I can tell it’s been more art than commerce of late. If he’s noticed that I’m on my third piece of letterhead, he seems not to care. He’s a good guy; he hired me, after all. “I like your background,” he’d told me during my job interview. He was referring to my two years at the Denver Art Museum, never mind that I was in food service. What he really liked, speaking of nepotism, was that I came recommended by the father of a friend of a friend. I’m four removed from power, meaning that I’ve been given an entry-level position as a receptionist without having done much to earn it. As for the owner, he’s been in this business thirty years, starting with nothing except an innate ability to “see art,” and he’s worked his way up to where he is today.
“ ‘Seeing’ is not the same as ‘looking,’ ” he’d said. I pretended I understood the distinction.
When I’m done typing the letter it’s six-thirty, but time doesn’t matter to the owner. He reads the final copy twice, handling the paper carefully, admiring his turns of phrase, and then he does what he always does, measures the top and bottom margins with the ruler he carries in his denim smock. He’s used to dealing in tenths of centimetres and percentages of UV. Sometimes my margins are askew, but today they’re flawless, and this pleases him, and it seems to be a good time to recommend, gently, that if I were able to type his correspondence with the two-thousand-dollar computer sitting on the front desk in sleep mode we wouldn’t ever have to worry about things like imperfect margins again.
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“It’s done automatically,” I tell him, like, Isn’t that neat.
He shakes his head. “I don’t want automatic,” he says. Of course he doesn’t. He wants debossed type. He wants pigment on the page. He wants art from the past.
Then he signs his name in big looping script, full of hope, sealing it up for the mailman tomorrow at noon.
“Thank you,” the owner says to me, and he retreats to his office, while I file the carbon copy in the bottom drawer next to the petty cash and take out fifteen dollars for myself, because I don’t get paid for overtime.
It’s six-forty-five and it’s cloudless and cool. Whatever you’ve heard about the beauty of Aspen is true: snowcapped mountains with golden light, etc. Every person I pass has the same healthy sheen that comes from having twenty-four-hour access to fresh air, pure water, unlimited optimism. No one knows me, but they all smile anyway. In Denver, the streets were more crowded and the people smiled less. “You’re going to love it in Aspen,” one of the museum guards told me, on my last day at the café. He was fifty removed from power. He’d never been out of Denver, so what he said was theory. “I know I will,” I said, but I’d never been out of Denver, either.
Now I’m strolling through town trying to love it, trying to shake off the last nine-plus hours inside the art gallery, less one hour for lunch. I’ve been staring at Abstract Expressionism for so long that when I close my eyes I don’t see an afterimage of the snowcapped mountains with golden light, I see how the artists would have depicted those snowcapped mountains: white, yellow, angle, triangle, yellow, white. Then they’d title it “Mountain,” hang it on the wall, and let the viewer ponder. Not mountain but un-mountain. Not mountain but essence of mountain. Suddenly I’m seeing everything through the prism of the Abstract Expressionist’s paintbrush—the stores, the streets, the signs, each object disassembled to its component parts of color and form, even the smiling faces of the strangers who pass by me, white, white, white, and underneath it all is the soundtrack of the continuous clacking of the typewriter keys. This is what I mean when I say that I’m beginning to wonder if working in an art gallery is taking some sort of toll on my psyche.
On the corner of the next street, between a locally owned bakery and a family-owned florist, is an independently owned bookstore, big bay window filled with books, sandwich-board sign on the sidewalk that eschews the tongue-in-cheek message for the no-nonsense “open,” which I read as o, p, e, n. I’ve passed this bookstore before, and I’ve often thought of going in. There’s a young woman about my age exiting the store; she’s wearing a skirt and heels, presumably for her office job, and carrying under her arm a bagful of books, cash-flow concerns not a problem. In the doorway we have one of those socially awkward interchanges where we’re trying to sidestep each other, left, right, left, right. Her face is sunburned from days of cloudless skies. Or maybe she’s just embarrassed. She stops and stares at me, and for some reason the gallery owner’s maxim comes back to me full force, “Seeing is not the same as looking.”
No one is inside the store except the cashier, standing behind the counter, subsumed by silence, sunset light streaming through the big bay window. He’s probably been gazing into the middle distance of book spines since nine o’clock this morning. “Hello,” he says to me. H, e, l, l, o. I have the fleeting thought that I should do for him what the mailman did for me, make small talk, after which the cashier will offer a personal tour of his store.
But the store is tiny, it’s musty, it’s the opposite of Barnes & Noble. No tour needed. Here are the history books, the political books, the tell-alls. Here is Stephen King, six shelves of sixty-some volumes, “The Dark Half,” “The Dead Zone,” to name two. The titles tell you everything you need to know about what you’re going to find inside—somebody in jeopardy—and so do the covers, with their giant type, bold colors, silhouetted figures. Stephen King isn’t writing with only metaphor or misdirection in mind, or art and society. Yes, this is the antidote to the past nine hours, a good book, a fun book, a page-turner, something with straightforward prose, crystal-clear storytelling, something that goes down easy. But which of these volumes should I choose? The covers might be similar but the subjects are wide-ranging: cats, dogs, clowns, authors, the list goes on. Here’s one about a little boy who is paralyzed and attacked by a werewolf, and another about a little boy who is killed and comes back from the dead, and here’s yet another, the most famous of all, about a little boy with special powers living in an empty hotel being pursued by a deranged man wielding a mallet.
As I go from book to book, gauging and appraising, I get the sense that I’m being watched by the cashier, behind the counter ten feet away, suspicious, displeased, small-town smile gone, patience gone, too, about to call out to me, No more browsing! Let’s make a selection! But no one talks like this in Aspen, of course. In Aspen, you can stay as long as you like, friend, browse as long as you like. You can thumb through all six shelves until your mind has become so saturated with themes of violence and horror and degradation that you’re no longer even in the right section but have unwittingly drifted into self-help, which, oddly, has been placed next to Stephen King. These covers are different, with thin type, light colors, and stock photos, and they have prosaic titles like “A Practical Guide” or “A Workbook.” I am far from art now. I’m even farther from metaphor and misdirection. But Stephen King’s theme remains: somebody is in jeopardy. Depression, drug addiction, domestic violence. Who will cope? Who will recover? Who will be dead by the end? Come to think of it, it makes perfect sense to have placed self-help here, horrors side by side. Death, disease, dementia. I’m not even sure what I’m looking for anymore. Still, I gauge and appraise, plucking one more book at random with a title that I’m able to render only by its component parts: boys. abused. sexually.
The big bay window is behind me, but I can tell that the sun has set on the snowcapped mountains, and I can hear the cashier getting ready to go home. The book in my hand resembles all the other books, plain font on white cover, but the stock photo of a figure alone in a room, casting an impossibly long shadow, is vintage Stephen King. The author is a Dr. So-and-So, Ph.D., and he hasn’t written “a practical guide” or “a workbook” but, rather, “an investigation into the long-lasting impact,” his words. He writes, at least in the preface, with an authority that I find tactless. He presumes to know his reader. He claims that he has the statistics to prove it. “Twenty-five years of clinical research,” he says. His assessment is unflinching: symptoms, everything; prognosis, grim. If there’s any optimism in this book, the citizens of Aspen will have to slog through three hundred pages to find it.
Basically, what the doctor is suggesting is that you shouldn’t be wasting your time with make-believe stories about a boy being pursued through an empty hotel by a man wielding a mallet—speaking of metaphor. What you really need to be doing is “coming to terms,” and you need to be doing it now. You have to start figuring out how the obsolete past is interfering with the inescapable present, ten, fifteen, twenty years later, particularly how it’s interfering with your attempts at love and happiness. But the main impediment, as far as the doctor is concerned, is that you, the reader, don’t know how to figure any of this out, and another impediment is that you don’t know if you even want to.
This is when the cashier calls out, “Closing time,” in a voice so mellifluous, so Aspen apologetic, and for a moment I’m able to glimpse an Abstract Expressionist view of myself, where I’ve been reduced to my own component parts, standing bleary-eyed in a bookstore, a long way from home, fifteen dollars of ill-gotten gains crumpled in my pocket.
Beneath it all, I can hear the clacking of the typewriter as Stephen King pounds out another best-seller.
The next day is cloudless and cool, and all the streets by the gondola have been closed because Shaun White is in town. He’s just won some major snowboarding championship, and now he’s come to Aspen with his flowing red hair to shoot a Pepsi commercial or a video game or “a show for Netflix,” someone in the crowd is saying. Anyone’s guess is as good as anyone’s. There are trucks and cables and cones, and a production assistant is standing in the intersection, arms folded, telling us we have to wait to cross the street. He likes telling us this. When the light turns green we still can’t go, and then it turns green again, and if it turns green one more time I’m going to be late getting back to the art gallery from lunch. Someone’s asking the production assistant if Shaun White is on the gondola now, but the production assistant has no idea. “I just do what they tell me,” he says. He’s a hundred degrees removed from Shaun White.
There’s a little girl sitting on top of her mother’s shoulders, pointing up at the mountain, a forty-degree slope of green topped with white, saying, “I can see Shaun White, Mommy!” No, she can’t. She’s craning her neck, shielding her eyes against the unchanging Aspen sky. She wants to get up the mountain. She wants to meet Shaun White. “Can I, Mommy?” She reminds me of myself at her age and my own unrestrained excitement, specifically regarding a certain Denver skyscraper, where my mother worked as a secretary. She’d started at a law firm on the twenty-eighth floor, and then moved to the thirty-third floor, and finally to the forty-first floor, and each time she’d moved it had seemed to me that she was rising higher, both literally and figuratively.
“No,” she’d tell me, “I’m only rising literally.”
She’d brought me to her office once, as part of “Take Your Daughter to Work Day.” I was a boy, but the pedagogical benefits were still applicable. This was when I was six years old, or maybe seven. We rode an elevator that went as fast as a train, skipping the first thirtysomething floors, and when the doors opened I could see the entirety of Denver. There was Mile High Stadium, there was Coors Field, there were ten thousand people crawling on the sidewalk. I spent some of the day helping my mother open mail, but mostly I sat in a swivel chair beside her, swinging my legs and watching her type. I was mesmerized by her fingers. She could have been playing a piano sonata at the concert hall, which could also be seen from the window. When it was time for us to go home, her boss came out to meet me, a big man in a pin-striped suit, shaking my hand and asking the standard question: What is it you want to be when you grow up, “now that you’ve seen the inner workings of a law firm.”
“I want to be a secretary,” I’d told him.
By the fourth green light, there’s a woman in the crowd saying to the production assistant, “This is bullshit.” It’s the same woman from the bookstore the day before, the one with the sunburned face, whose way I couldn’t get out of—in a town of seven thousand people, this isn’t all that coincidental. It’s not clear to me if she’s suggesting that having to wait to cross the street is bullshit or if having to wait to cross the street because of Shaun White is bullshit. Either way, it’s not the kind of talk you often hear in Aspen.
“I just do what they tell me,” the production assistant says again, which apparently is his go-to for all interactions with the masses.
But the woman is not persuaded. “That’s no excuse,” she says.
“He’s just doing his job, honey,” one of the bystanders says, as if this will resolve the matter, and another tourist is saying that he can see Shaun White coming down the mountain on his snowboard, look, look, look, and everyone is pushing and pulling to look, and I’m pushing the other way, through the crowd, which has doubled in size. I know I’m going to be late, and the owner will be having to cover for me at the front desk, sitting next to the typewriter, gazing into his gallery of unsold art. “Are you a prompt person?” he’d asked at my job interview. “Yes, I am!” I’d said with conviction. I was doing my best to differentiate myself from the twenty other applicants, which is tough when fielding only yes-or-no questions. In the end, it was nepotism that put me over the edge.
The next morning I’m at work, an hour already gone by, when the doctor’s preface pops into my empty head. I can see the word “preface” in all caps, sans serif, the sentences marching across my line of vision, across the paintings, shades and shapes without rhyme or reason, as if the artists had given up. Now, as I stare into the vastness of the art gallery, as large and pristine as a high-end hotel lobby without furniture, an unformed idea emerges on the horizon of my consciousness. The abstraction of the gallery dovetails with the abstraction of my memory: blotchy, indistinct, non-narrative, yes, childlike. I don’t remember the specifics of that summer afternoon in Denver when my mother left me with a neighbor to go to work. No name, no face, no address. In other words, nothing actionable. I was four or five, maybe I was six, maybe it wasn’t summer, maybe it wasn’t work she’d gone to. I assume the doctor would say that the memory has intentionally been buried.
This is when the I.T. guy walks into the art gallery unannounced, lugging his tool kit and his industrial-grade laptop. He’s been hired to come every couple of months to service the computer we never use.
“How’s it running?” he wants to know. He’s speaking too loudly for what’s acceptable, but no one else is here.
“It’s running fine,” I say.
He seems disappointed. He takes a seat at my desk, peering into the monitor, waking up the computer from deep sleep, clicking around, checking this and that. He’s meticulous about his work, and I respect this. He’s also oblivious to the presence of the typewriter, one foot from his elbow. If he were to lean a little more to the side, he’d hit the carriage return and make it ding. I don’t have the heart to tell him that this is our technology of choice.
“I can’t find anything wrong,” he tells me, but he’s going to need to reinstall the operating system anyway. “Just to be safe,” he says. I know he’s trying to pad his time sheet. I respect this, too.
I make a show of checking my watch, considering, mulling, as if I have things to do. I have eight hours to go.
While we wait for the operating system to reinstall, the I.T. guy leans back in the chair, hands behind his head, and says, surprisingly, “I like that painting.” He’s pointing at a silver painting, all lines and inscrutable marks.
“What do you like about it?” I ask him.
“It’s pretty,” he says. “It’s nice.” He doesn’t know what else to say. “It would look good above my couch.” We laugh. He shrugs. He’s not concerned with context and history or metaphor and misdirection.
“I’ve been getting into Baroque lately,” he says. He’s showing off now.
“So have I,” I tell him. I’m lying. I’m happy to draw this conversation out as long as possible.
“What do you like about Baroque?” I ask.
“I like his use of color,” he says.
“His?”
“Yes.”
I wonder if he means Georges Braque. Or if he couldn’t care less about art and is just trying to ingratiate himself to me, the big man at the front desk who signs his time sheet. For all I know, he tells the bookstore person that he likes books, and the florist that he likes flowers. I’m just the receptionist, I want to say to him.
He looks around the gallery, elbows on the desk. “Do you have any Baroque?”
“No, we don’t.”
“You should get some.”
“I’ll be sure to tell the owner.”
And the next thing I know, I’m giving the I.T. guy a tour of the gallery, a brief introduction to thirty-four works of Abstract Expressionism while the operating-system installation finishes. We go from painting to painting, stopping so I can speak like an expert in the field, point out the details up close, explain the background of the painter, the significance of the brushstroke, the things that you have to know are there, the things that you would never be able to see just by looking.
When we arrive at the silver painting that he likes, he squints hard, an inch from the canvas, as if he’s about to discover something, something figurative maybe, the way we do when we lie on our backs beneath a passing cloud.
“What is it that you’re seeing?” I ask him.
He leans back. He leans close. “I’m not seeing anything,” he says.
“Me, neither,” I say.
The owner needs me to stay in the art gallery all day the next day, from nine to six, no outdoor Aspen break, so that I can type up the letter about “Untitled X” to sixty different collectors.
“Lunch is on me,” he says, which is fair.
“Dear _________:” each letter begins. “I believe I have something in which you might be interested . . . ”
It’s the same letter as before: provenance, importance, five-figure price. If I were allowed to use the computer I would be done in an hour.
Today the gallery is filled with the sound of metal on metal, as if I were laboring in a blacksmith’s forge, physical exertion necessary for the fabrication of each letter, space, and punctuation mark, including “:”. Nothing comes easy in clerical work. If the art gallery wasn’t air-conditioned, I’d be wiping my brow. The only pause in the pounding comes when the carriage bell dings to indicate that the edge of the page is drawing near. This is where the margins can become problematic.
Maybe it wasn’t nepotism that got me hired over those twenty other applicants, most of whom came equipped with art-history degrees. Maybe it was my ability to type seventy words a minute. This, thanks to my mother, but also thanks to my sixth-grade typing teacher, who was earnest and exacting, who would spend five minutes before each class expounding to a room of mostly uninterested eleven-year-olds on how we were developing a skill that would serve us in the real world. Hers was a practical approach to education. “Never mind literature,” she’d tell us. “Never mind history.” She didn’t need to convince me of the efficacy of typing. I’d been made a believer on the forty-first floor overlooking the streets of Denver. I was getting B’s in those other subjects, anyway.
Standing in front of the classroom, she would call out the keys of the home row, that row of gibberish which made all communication possible. “A, S, D, F, J, K, L, semicolon!” She was a small woman, but her voice boomed over the din of twenty-five decade-old Dell computers tapping out an uneven rhythm. Again and again, we students marched back and forth across the keyboard, a room full of sixth graders being drilled for a vocational army.
“A, S, D, F, J, K, L, semicolon!”
“If you can master this,” the teacher would shout, “you can master anything!”
She knew what she was talking about. One month into the semester, we’d advanced to a complete sentence, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country!” she would scream, and as she screamed so would we type. “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country!”
We were never supposed to look at our fingers on the keys, we were never supposed to look at the computer monitors, we were supposed to rely purely on muscle memory.
“A body never forgets,” she promised us.
It’s past noon when I finally take a break, my fingertips throbbing, and order my free lunch from the organic restaurant down the street. I over-order: sandwich, soup, side, soda, side. I might as well. They tell me it’ll be here in ten minutes. They sound as though they’re all smiles. Fifteen minutes later it hasn’t arrived. Twenty minutes later I’m starving and I’m not going to tip. This is when the door to the gallery swings open, but instead of the delivery guy walking in it’s the woman from the other day, the one at the gondola who told the production assistant it was bullshit. She stands at my desk, arms crossed, face sunburned, and she says to me, using a voice appropriate for a high-end art gallery with a library-like atmosphere, almost a whisper, “I’m interested in buying ‘Untitled X.’ ”
It turns out that her name is Mimi and she’s the gallery owner’s daughter. Even in a town of seven thousand, this is coincidental. She also happens to work at a big-time art gallery on the other side of Aspen. “Art runs in the family,” she tells me. She puts “art” in air quotes. She’s not the receptionist, she’s the director. She’s one removed from power. “Nepotism,” she says. She’s jaded. Her father once mentioned her art gallery, but that was only to say “We’re interested in different things,” which I took to mean that the other gallery made money.
The first time Mimi takes me there is after hours, for what may or may not be a first date. When she flicks on the overhead lights I’m surrounded by the exceedingly pleasant view of realism, pastoralism, Aspenism. Here are paintings, heavy on the impasto, that are intended to calm the soul, soothe the mind, that would look good hanging above the I.T. guy’s couch. Snow-covered cottages, moonlit villages, lingering dusks, scenes that don’t need interpretation or context to make themselves understood. These paintings aren’t speaking to the postwar upheaval of the twentieth century, by way of a newly invented visual language. In fact, they’re not speaking to anything at all. This is the art of the here and now, made a year ago, art that goes for three figures, sometimes four, never five. The gallery does a brisk business at the low end.
Mimi doesn’t have to ask me, What is it that you’re seeing? I can see what it is I’m seeing: a sailboat on a lake at twilight, ripples in the water, moon in the sky. Title: “Sailboat on a Lake at Twilight.”
“Beautiful,” I say.
But Mimi gives a wide sweep of her hand, encompassing all the art work. “I think it’s bullshit,” she says.
I take a tour of the front desk, swivelling in the receptionist’s chair, opening and closing the drawers, wondering what it would be like to sit here five days a week, nine hours a day, less one hour for lunch.
“Where’s the typewriter?” I ask Mimi, which is a joke. We have a good laugh. We have a glass of wine. “Have as much as you want,” she says. There’s a whole case in the back office, white wine, recent year, left over from the last opening, attended, incidentally, by the living local artist and three hundred people.
Mimi tells me that the receptionist is responsible for bartending. “It’s in the job description,” she says. We have a good laugh about this, too. I imagine eighty bottles of white wine being popped and poured. “If they get drunk, they buy more,” she tells me.
The only living artist who ever visited my gallery was an elderly woman, walking with a caretaker and a cane, whom the owner spoke to in reverential tones. She’d flown from New York to Aspen, two-hour layover in Denver, to spend the afternoon looking at her paintings on the walls. She seemed to like what the owner had done with her work, how it was hung and lit and framed with just the right percentage of UV. She’d stood in front of each piece for several minutes, about to say something but saying nothing. Finally, she asked if anything had sold. “Not yet,” the owner had said. He’d sounded hopeful, as if things were bound to change. After she was gone, the owner told me, “She knew Jackson Pollock personally.”
The wine is going to my head, and the swivel chair seems to be swivelling on its own. The gallery is peaceful, innocent, tranquil. Pastoralism come to life.
“Dreamy,” Mimi says.
“Yes,” I coo.
But she’s talking about her father and his art. “He lives in the past,” she says.
“Don’t we all?” I say.
“I don’t,” she says. According to Mimi, her father has been trying to unload everything for years, including “Untitled X.” “Don’t get your hopes up,” she tells me.
“I won’t,” I say.
She thinks her father will eventually go out of business, liquidate the art, bring a merciful end to his Abstract Expressionism in Aspen.
“It’s tragic,” she says.
“Yes,” I say, but what I’m imagining is being unemployed in Aspen, walking the streets, trying to find work, maybe running the gondola.
Mimi tells me that her first love was the Denver Art Museum. Her first love was my day job. Her father would take her there when she was a little girl, driving three hours each way for every new exhibit, slowing down to ten miles an hour at the Continental Divide, so that his daughter could experience the precise moment of before and after in America. She tells me how she would wander through the galleries of the museum, looking at the art alone, understanding it intuitively, immediately, without instruction or guidance. “Art runs in the family,” she says. Here she does not use air quotes.
“What was it like working in the café?” she wants to know.
“I stole things,” I tell her. I tell her how I would take bags of potato chips printed with van Gogh’s face and then sell them to the museum guards at half price. I tell it like it’s a funny story, but when I’m done she says, “That’s sad.”
“I thought it was clever,” I say.
“We should go there sometime,” she says. I’m not sure if she’s asking me out on a second date.
She tells me that when she first discovered one of Monet’s water-lily paintings, second floor of the museum, she sat in front of it for half an hour. “I was six years old,” she says. “Maybe I was seven.” She remembers with clarity having been transfixed by the great artist’s brushwork, the colors, the perspective. Without knowing anything about him, she’d somehow understood that it had been painted by a man with failing eyesight.
“But how could you have known that?” I ask.
She pours me more wine. She pours herself more wine. She turns on the computer and the screen lights up. “Show me how you type,” she says.
“I’m driving drunk,” I say.
This she finds funny. She’s standing close to me. Her hip by my shoulder.
“What should I type?” I ask, but suddenly my fingers are moving on their own over the space-age keyboard, seventy words a minute, as if I’m skating on ice, no missteps, no typos, all muscle memory. “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country!”
Then Mimi’s sitting on my lap, making the first move, making the swivel chair swivel, and when she kisses me her hair falls in my face, and I can smell the white wine on her breath. The gallery is subsumed by that silence with which I’ve grown so familiar, and when she comes up for air she’s staring into my eyes, staring hard, a few inches from my face, as if she’s just noticed something, astute observer that she is.
“What is it that you’re seeing?” I ask. ♦
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