I like Modernism. Post-Impressionism. Abstract Expressionism. Artists of the twentieth century. But on the wall in front of me is Cubism and I hate Picasso.
I turn. Now I’m staring at a Rothko on the opposite wall. I didn’t know the guy painted people, but here they are. I found them just last summer, at the Old Hithe Art Museum. I found these smiling faces like five or six or seven suns. Blue hands in the bottom block. Green ears in the center stripe. Red green blue horizon swipes. White waves. A dark red wishy-wash square to hold everything in. The painting is Untitled. Rothko was born in Latvia. He went to college in Connecticut. Ran out of money. Got famous. Then he slit one wrist and he died. I read that on the internet. There was no note. He knew the Kennedys.
I hear someone say, “Excuse me!”
It’s the Art Guard. The guy who is paid to stare at people and paintings and people in paintings. It’s him in the corner and me. Nobody else in the gallery.
“Sorry,” I say, because apology is a reflex.
Art Guard says, “Don’t apologize. I get it, you like Rothko. He points at the wall behind me. Do you know who painted that?”
“Picasso,” I say. “I know his paintings well. People were gawking at him this summer.”
He says, “You study art history?”
“Not really, just interested.”
“You don’t like Picasso?”
I look back at the Rothko with the faces and think perhaps these are the only faces Rothko ever painted. “There are other artists,” I tell Art Guard.
Art Guard nods his head, shuts his eyes behind rose-colored glasses. He opens them. He says, “Like you?”
I swat my hand, I can’t paint.
“Ha.” He points like Uncle Sam. “You’re a poet.” He says this with conviction.
I ask, “Aren’t we all?”
Tell me about Picasso.
I tell him about Picasso. Child bride. Button eyes. Long lines lying in sharp light. He talks to me. He walks to me. Now we’re gawking at Picasso. We stare at Le Tableau Bleu. Oil on canvas. Blue and black and grey. Jostled grins and overlapping arms and blocks and squares and ovals cut in half. None of this makes sense. Art Guard spins on his heels. “What does it mean?” Art Guard is hungry for my thoughts.
I say, “I couldn’t say.”
“Try.”
“It’s people doing things. People walking—”
Art Guard holds out his hand to shake. He says, “You know your stuff. What’s your name, kid?”
“Vanessa,” I say.
“Where ya from,” Vanessa?
“The South,” I say.
“And you’re here.”
“Here I am.”
“And you know so much about Picasso.”
“They’ve got libraries in the South. They’ve got libraries in New England. They’ve got libraries everywhere. There’s the internet. I go to museums.”
“You go here,” Art Guard points to the ground. “You study here at Poncy University in Old Hithe.”
“No,” I nearly shout, “no, no, no, I don’t go here. I go to a small school in Philadelphia. I visited Old Hithe a while ago to see this art museum. I remember this room when I shut my eyes sometimes. Concrete walls and windows with the afternoon sun and people gawking at Picasso. A Poncy Girl gawking at Picasso. Small, square Rothko with the faces. Salvador Dalí.”
“Vanessa,” he says and he puts a hand on my shoulder. “You skipped Picasso last time, too.” I let him keep his hand on my shoulder. He says, “You kept on walking.”
Early this morning, I skipped class and took the Massachusetts train from Philadelphia. The class I skipped is called “Philosophy of Walking.” In the class, we sometimes are made to skip or run or jog or lay on the ground with our backs up, inverse-dead-fish, to avoid staring into the sun. Mostly we walk. We walk and the professor talks. Talk and walk. It’s a cross-listed gym credit. Wednesdays are “Walking Wednesdays.” The professor is young and likes alliteration. He makes us read Camus and Calvino, loose pieces of Freud and Plato, other philosophers whom I’m now forgetting or haven’t yet read. But I haven’t forgotten Michel de Certeau. Our man, our muse. Certeau knew cities, he wrote about Paris and New York. Art Guard knows Certeau, too.
“You know,” Art Guard hums and his glasses are pinker when he’s looking through them, into my face. He says, “I was here. I saw you walk by Picasso and now you’ve come back. I’ve never never never seen anybody but a small handful of people skip lookin’ at Picasso and you’re one of them.”
I say “Okay. Good memory.”
Art Guard says, “You’re the one with the memory. You’re the one who knows Dalí.”
I am the one who knows Dalí. I was standing in this room. Next to Rothko, they’ve got Salvador Dalí. Two Dalís. Spanish titles. A man walks in the one, way back on top of a rock. Dalí paints shapes that do not exist in the real world. Rainbows. Time-telling instruments. Keys. A little blue thing. Linen shirts. I stood next to a girl who wore a Poncy t-shirt and I asked her, “Do you know Dalí?” And Poncy Girl said yes, of course she knew Dalí and I said, “Did you know about his brother?” and Poncy Girl went, “His brother?”
“The brother who died before he was born,” I told Poncy Girl. “The original Salvador Dalí, the older, deceased brother of this Salvador Dalí,” and I waved my hand at the painting on the wall. “His mother had a shrine to his older, already dead brother on her bedroom chest of drawers. Candles. Photos. Letters.” I looked at Poncy Girl. “He was a terrible child, our own Dalí, the second Dalí—our Dalí pushed a kid off of a bridge. They were riding tricycles, Dalí and the kid, and after the fall, the child was hurting for life.”
Poncy Girl stepped back.
A guy behind us said, “That true? About the bridge?”
Someone else said, “The shrine? His namesake?”
“All of it,” I said. And then people were gawking at Dalí.
Art guard says to me now, “People left Picasso for you. You remember. People never leave Picasso.” He says, “You like Rothko, you like Dalí.”
I say they’re fine, not my favorite.
“Who’s your favorite, then?”
“Marcel Duchamp.”
“R. Mutt.” He points again.
“Very nice.” I say, “You know his Fountain.”
“No one knows his Fountain. They threw out the original. I picture,” Art Guard says, “a urinal smashed into a million porcelain pieces in a New York alley.”
“There’s an imitation in Philly.”
“Isn’t this all imitation?” He takes his finger and twirls it in the air. He looks up to where Heaven might be, up above the ceiling tiles.
“So hard to say.”
Art Guard is wearing a watch on his wrist and a walky-talky on his belt loop. He looks at the watch. Art Guard says, “I have to do my sweep.”
I pull my phone from my pocket and it says 4:58. “The museum is closing,” Art Guard says, “But you can come.”
“Really?”
“Come,” Art Guard waves his hand to invite me. “Walk with me. Tell me what you know.”
So fast, we’re in Italy and Egypt and England. We’re in France and Greece and Japan. We’re in Mongolia and the horn of Africa and the elevator. Rising, rising, rising in a concrete box. On the top floor, there, they’ve captured Space.
The elevator says ding.
Art Guard says, “Here we are, kid.”
The whole top floor is reserved for special exhibitions. There is a special exhibition going on now about Space. “Time in Space.” Art Guard says to go check out the far wall. It’s all acrylic. They look like photographs, those painted images of Space. Space, Space, the proper noun, not the abstract verb. Perfect pictures of blankness. Blinks of white and shades of blue and rainbows form a supernova before the shock waves plow through galaxies. Flecks of acrylic protrude from one canvas depicting two-hundred-billion-trillion stars like sharp shimmering jewels and I reach.
“Kid! What are ya’ doin’?”
My hand drops.
Art Guard shakes his head and taps a toe and his eyes blink hard behind the glasses.
I say, “Can I try on your glasses?”
“They’re not prescription,” he says.
“I don’t mind, really. I don’t wear glasses myself. I have everything to gain. I’m so young. I’m just curious how the sky might look through those things.”
“Pinker,” he says, “lighter.”
I ask, “Is this how you see the world, Art Guard?”
Art Guard rests the glasses on the bridge of my nose and cuts to spilling all the details of his life. Art Guard is a fast talker, an oversharer. Art Guard has a bulldog named Rocky. Art Guard collects folk records and matchbooks, cheap pens in a crystal cup on his dinner table. Art Guard grew up in Montreal with a native tongue of French but hardly uses it except to curse; excuses himself but isn’t overtly polite. Doesn’t play ice hockey because he can’t ice skate, only roller. Art Guard moved to New York in the ’80s. Then Boston. Art Guard wanted to be an artist, then rich, then a family man. Art Guard is forty-eight with grown twin sons, two years my junior. Art Guard does not know what the twins are up to these days. Where they live. What kind of cars they drive. If they drive cars at all. Art Guard has been guarding art since before I was born. Twenty-two years, four months, nine days.
Art Guard walks in a circle. I stand looking at Space.
Art Guard is pacing. He does not look at me when he says, “Tell me why you’re here.”
I tell him I can’t eat. I can’t sleep and I think I have insomnia. I haven’t been to class in weeks. I miss the girl I met here in the gallery. She went to Poncy and she still goes here, I think. We walked the streets and talked about philosophy. I bought us ice cream cones and she showed me her apartment. Her skin was so soft and her bedsheets had small polka dots on them and I missed her when I left Old Hithe. We talked on the phone for a few months but then she stopped answering. I’ve tried texting but she won’t respond. I’ve tried writing but I can’t remember her address. I’ve tried forgetting her but this philosophy class I’m in makes me think about her all the time. Every day I am a day closer to dying. I think I am having a crisis.
Art Guard hos and hums. His rubber shoe soles make noise on our concrete floor.
Then he’s quiet. I’m quiet. There is no one else left to make noise.
“Well, well,” he says from the next room over. “What are you going to do?”
“I think I’d just like to keep looking at this painting. Lovely Space. It makes me feel quite human and contemplative.”
“No,” Art Guard says, “I mean what will you do about the girl?” And now he’s walking back to me to look at the wall.
But there’s nothing I can do except stand here, stare here, look for her maybe, and wait. “It’s getting late,” I yawn, “I should go back to Philly.”
“What’s in Philly?”
“My empty dorm room, a big cracked bell, and Fountain.”
Art Guard asks if I’m hungry.
“Not particularly.”
“I don’t want to give you the wrong idea,” Art Guard says, “but the ice cream parlor just opened today. For the seasons, for spring and for summer, and I’m headed that way, anyway. That’s the way of the train station, if that’s where you’re headed. Back to Philadelphia. So far. How far?”
“Several hours and a holdover in New York.”
“Train tickets aren’t cheap.”
“It’s costly to sustain oneself in the modern world.”
“Kid,” Art Guard looks at me. “Don’t lie to me. Tell me you’ve eaten today.”
“I’m quiet.”
“We’re getting you ice cream, alright? But it’s not a question. Kid, come on. Gimme my glasses, go down the stairs, stand out on the steps, I’m gonna check out and lock up. I’ll be out in a minute.”
And the outside world is pastel. I should be writing an essay. I should be scared but I’m not. Art Guard comes tromping down the steps. “Let’s go kid, this way.” He points to the heart of the small city, Old Hithe.
Through the small city of Old Hithe, we walk. We talk. Art Guard says, “Aren’t you cold? Where’s your coat?”
“I didn’t know I needed one.”
“It’s cold.”
“Then why the need for ice cream?”
Art Guard says, “Touché.”
“That must be French,” I say.
Art Guard gets strawberry. I get whatever the kid scooping recommends. Art Guard pays cash for both and tells the kid to keep the change.
It’s an outdated place. Checker floors. Old-time ice cream advertisements on the wall with neon lights that blink. There are kids in pea coats who look sullen and sad-sacked. They probably go to Poncy. All the places at the window bar have people with hollow cheeks and melted ice cream clanking on laptops. There are tables for standing and all of them are packed with more pea coats, with people who are smiling, and maybe they go to Poncy, but I don’t know because none of them are Poncy Girl. There’s a small metal table in the corner and Art Guard sits there. Art Guard asks, “Is this table good?” He widens his arms, raises his eyebrows. He looks like a painting of Jesus Christ.
“Fine,” I say, “fine, fine. And thank you for the ice cream. The kid said it was Sweet Cream.”
Art Guard’s glasses are glowing pinker in the sharp fluorescent overheads. Amy Winehouse is singing through the speakers. I must have been nodding my head.
Art Guard huffs, “You know Amy Winehouse?”
I know everything and have a brain freeze.
Art Guard is near finished with his ice cream, so fast. He chews it in his teeth. His tongue is coated in pink film and he says, “Let me tell you a story.”
“Talk away,” I say. Another train is always on the way, tripping a few rail ties behind.
He says okay. He’s my age, twenty or so, and in Paris. “You ever been to Paris, kid?”
I’ve never.
“Okay,” he says, “imagine you’re in New York. You’ve been to New York?”
I have.
“Good,” he says, “Great. Imagine you’re in New York and you’re walking down the street. You got cabs nonstop honking horns and people walking in the bike lanes. Except, the buildings are dainty-like, and old, and there are tall windows and many balconies. Imagine the Eiffel Tower instead of the Chrysler Building. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“You go into a cafe and you get a cuppa. And you’re all alone and people are speaking French at you and you’re speaking French back. But they’re snobbing at your Canadian French with their Indo-European French. And you’re just there for vacation, for a while, you want to be an artist and whatever. You want to be an intellectual. But all that stops mattering. Because soon you got your coffee and you’re outside, sitting at a tiny table with a tiny cup. You’re writing in a blank book. And then people are shouting in French. They’re going, Le ciel! Le ciel! and they’re pointing up at the sky. So you look up. And the sky, it’s red. For just a moment, it’s red, in the middle of the day. Not blue, not black or white or clouded. The sky was red, I saw it.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know,” Art Guard says. “I’ve always wondered that. It never made the news, not that I saw. But I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Kid,” he has ice cream in his mouth, “what’s your favorite color?”
I tell him I don’t have one. “Do you have a favorite color?”
“Since then it’s been dark red.”
“Of course.” He drops a dollop of ice cream from his spoon on the table and does not wipe it up. We have no napkins.
He says, “You don’t believe me.”
I tell him, “Not really.”
“You think I’m lying.”
“Once I stopped hearing from Poncy Girl I realized she’d lied all the time.”
“About what?”
“She told me she was from the South as well.”
“Why does it matter where she’s from?”
“It doesn’t. I just thought we had something in common other than the fact that we are young and girls. She told me that she wanted to see me again, that she really liked me, that I was different.”
“She abandoned you.”
“She told me she cared about me.”
“Maybe you have different ways of caring.”
“She told me that, one day, there’ll be nothing left of us.”
Art Guard takes a beat. Then he says, “Cryptic.”
I readjust myself, cross my legs under the table. I fold my hands in my lap and tell Art Guard, “But I’d like to imagine there will be something left. I’d like to imagine there will be something like a memory, a flash of light, a blink in space, a rainbow.”
“You’ve lost me.”
“I’ve lost much in life.”
“Like what?”
“Friendships and memories and keys.”
He takes the key ring out of his pocket and jangles them all in his palm. A sad-sacked fellow scowls from the window seat. Art Guard says, “Well, kid, I hate to cut this short but I’ve got to go let Rocky out.”
“Rocky, of course, the dog. How could I forget?”
“Can’t forget Rocky.” Art Guard stands and stretches.
“I’d better get back to Philadelphia.”
Art Guard looks at me delicate and confused. Art Guard folds his hands on the table. I set my cup on the table. I have been skipping Philosophy of Walking because I went on a walk with the professor who tried helping me with condescending encouragement. I had been failing that class and all my others. I said I was scared of failing. He said he was scared to die. Perhaps all we’ve got are letters and art and they are vulnerable to open flames. Water damage. Oils on our fingers. My professor is a philosopher. He says he is prone to depressive lapses. He tells me that walking is a simple task to cure all our ailments of body and of mind. My professor told me that I was bad at writing essays. I need to take my reader by the hand, walk them smoothly through the argument. My arguments don’t go anywhere because I’m passive and inarticulate and perhaps incompetent as well. Me? Am I afraid of dying? I’m just a young, curious girl and that much is clear, but I’m missing the point. I need to improve my attendance. I need to be careful with where my feet land on concrete and stone. I need to go to Paris. I need to get out there and live. I asked him where there was and he had no answer but to shrug. That’s why I hopped on the Old Hithe-bound train. When Art Guard licks his teeth and grins, I tell him that I’ve got to go.
Certeau tells us that walking is inherent, necessary, done without thought like breathing or blinking or heart beating. Calvino walks in invisible cities. Camus walks himself into the guillotine. Freud makes people lay on soft benches and close their eyes to remember. Remember—translate—in dead language, Plato says we’ve got to feel. Touch. Taste. Smell. Sound. Sight. Dark and light, day and night. It’s nighttime now and I’m walking myself back into the Old Hithe street and I don’t belong here. I don’t have a pea coat. I don’t go to Poncy.
“Vanessa,” Art Guard walks out of the ice cream parlor. He says, “Please come here.” He holds open his arms.
This is the part where I walk away, towards the train station. I don’t run. This isn’t cheap cinema. I just walk, hold up my phone, and point to the blank screen like there’s someone on the other line who loves me.
