The Mirror Thief(94)

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 f*cking 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 f*ck 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 white 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.