Love and First Sight(12)

“Okay,” she says.

I start from the bottom, running my hands softly across the canvas the way I read braille. The paint has a dry, layered texture to it. There are places where the paint is globbed on smooth and thick, and others where it has tiny canyons of texture. I spread my fingers wider to absorb the shape of the bottom half of the canvas. The object in the painting starts out covering the entire width of the canvas, and then as it moves upward, it gets smaller and smaller until it ends in a point. I think of objects I know of with this shape.

“Is it a slice of pie?” I guess.

“Nope,” she says.

“A piece of pizza?”

“Nope.”

“A Dorito?”

“When was your last meal?”

I laugh. “But am I close?”

“No, it’s not any kind of food. And for the record, I don’t think Doritos had been invented yet.”

“But it’s triangle-shaped, right?”

She thinks for a moment. “Well… yeah, I guess it is,” she says, as if she hadn’t noticed this before.

“Fine, I give up. What is it?”

“A road.”

“But roads are straight lines,” I say, confused. “Is it an impressionistic street or something?”

“No, it’s just the perspective.”

I don’t understand.

“You know,” she adds when I say nothing. “Like, it gets smaller in the distance. Well, the street’s not actually getting smaller—it’s just how it looks when it’s far away,” she says.

“Yeah, I just don’t understand what you’re saying,” I admit.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says, a note of sensitivity entering her voice. “I just assumed… So I guess you don’t know what perspective is?”

“I know what the word means,” I say, sounding a little more defensive than I intended. “Like people have different perspectives on issues. Or people look at things from different perspectives. But how does that make the road a triangle?”

“Well, okay. Basically, as things get farther away, they look smaller,” she explains patiently.

“They change size?”

“They don’t actually change size. Just how much space they take up in your field of vision.”

“Why?”

“Um, I don’t really know, actually. It just is.”

“So why is the street in the painting pointy?”

“Van Gogh is painting as if he’s looking along the road, so the farther away it gets from him, the smaller it looks to him, until it disappears completely at the horizon.”

“It just disappears?”

“Well, sure. You can’t see forever.”

“I know that the eyes can’t see forever. But if I stand right beside this painting and touch the frame, and then step back to arm’s length and touch it again, the frame feels like the same width in my hand. So this perspective thing… wow… that kind of blows my mind, Cecily.”

“You’re welcome, I guess?” she says, like a question. “I’m surprised you’ve never heard that before.”

“Well, I mean, I moved away to the school for the blind when I was in kindergarten. I spent most summers at blind camps. So basically all my friends my whole life have been blind. Even many of the teachers at my school had visual impairments. So it was literally—”

“The blind leading the blind,” she interrupts.

I touch a few of the other paintings, and she explains each one to me. Listening to descriptions of art in this way lights up distant, rarely used corners of my brain.

“There’s another room,” she says. “Do you want me to, um, lead you there? Like with your arm?”

“Guide. We call it guiding. And yes, please.”

“So how does it work?”

“Just reach your elbow a little toward me, and I’ll hold it.”

When I grab her arm, I feel this tingle, almost like touching something that has an electric current running through it. It’s not painful. Just sort of shocking. I jerk my hand away.

“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice shrinking. “Did I do it wrong?”

“No, that was fine. I just… Never mind. You did great.”

I reach for her arm a second time, and when I touch her sweater, I feel that charge again.

Cecily guides me into the other room.

“You know how many paintings van Gogh created?” she asks.

“No idea.”

“Almost a thousand.”

“Wow.”

“And you know how many he sold?”

“All of them, I guess. I mean, he was a really famous painter, right?”

“Not till long after he died. In his entire life, he sold only one of his paintings.”

“One?” I ask in disbelief.

“One.”

“That’s why I relate to him, I think,” she says thoughtfully. “He was born at the wrong time.”

“So you’re like some kind of unrecognized genius, too?” I realize I’m still holding her arm, so I squeeze it playfully.

She laughs, and it works its way into my brain, reminding me of what she said earlier. Her laughter is like impressionist art. Because it captures the essence of itself, the essence of laughter.