Excerpt
The Art of Vanishing
1JeanThe final visitors of the day were ushered out of the gallery and I reached both arms above my head, stretching away the stiffness of eight hours spent sitting in one position. I put one hand on my chin, pushing it back in an effort to crack my neck. I heard a slight pop and felt that usual rush of relief, repeating the same on the other side. Another day of work in the books, I let myself bask in the sheer sense of achievement, even if I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I’d accomplished today.
Nevertheless, I felt lucky to be here; I was sure there were many who would do just about anything for a job in the hallowed halls of an institution such as this one. Sure, we weren’t as large or as prestigious as the massive museums of New York, Paris, London, Madrid, et cetera. But the art world was an exclusive one. I knew how hard it could be to get a foot in the door, or to have the means to try in the first place.
Some days I worried I’d become too accustomed to this space and would forget to take in how special it was. I challenged myself to take a real look today. I surveyed the room around me as I continued to stretch. It was unchanging in its day-to-day, mustard-colored fabric coating the walls that lay beneath multitudes of artwork. Every square inch of available hanging area was covered; these panels were heavy with paintings. In any blank space that remained, eccentric items were affixed: door hinges, sketches, coat hooks, rusting kitchen utensils. Wide wooden baseboards connected the overstuffed walls to the floor, which was scuffed from the constant steps of that day’s patrons, trying to get a closer look.
I peeled my eyes from a particularly curious hinge hanging on the wall opposite where I sat and looked back out into the gallery. I saw her, standing directly in front of me. I wondered if she could see me too, the real me. She was staring straight at me like she knew what I was thinking. But that was impossible, wasn’t it?
I quickly lowered my arms to my sides, but she maintained eye contact. She asked me a question with her eyes, and I was tempted to speak aloud to answer it.
Our mutual reverie was interrupted by the sound of plastic wheels clattering against the wood floor. Linda, a fixture of the museum, pushed a bucket into the room, steering its trundling mass by the handle of a mop. Linda was dressed in her typical uniform: a navy blue jumpsuit with her name embroidered in white script just beneath her left shoulder and a pair of graying athletic sneakers.
“Come on, Claire—it’s Claire, right? We’ll get started in my rooms today. Once we’ve got that down, we’ll move on to your assignment. I know they call it training, but you better be prepared to work tonight because if we don’t get my portion done in half the hours it normally takes me, we’ll have no time for yours.”
She, Claire presumably, was dressed in a matching navy jumpsuit. It was the wrong size, the fabric bunching around her calves. She had cuffed it as well as she could at her ankles, but her pant legs still skimmed the ground behind the heels of her sneakers. Claire said nothing in response, just nodded and followed Linda out of the room. I craned my neck, rising out of my seat to attempt to watch them for as long as I could, but the canvas held me back and I lost track of where they had gone. I sank back into my chair and heard my older sister, Marguerite, snort as she passed behind me, heading out into the garden. Alone now, I strained my ears to listen to any sounds of their progress. The sun set through the grand windows, and I waited in the darkness.
I was used to it, the waiting. I am the foremost expert in a single page of an unremarkable French novel from 1917. Time and repetition have dissolved the words from a segment of story into an indiscernible pattern of lines and curves. Within a small margin of error, I can confidently say I could re-create this page so precisely, you wouldn’t be able to tell it from the original. After all, I’ve been staring at it for more than a century.
It wasn’t always just me and the page. For decades, I whiled away my days watching the passersby for the fraction of their lives that they shared with me. Until one day I stopped. To be completely straight with you, I was bored. The constant progression of people, all similar in their inherent differences, felt so incredibly predictable. Which is how I came to waste my time looking at the same piece of paper, hearing my younger brother plunk out the same melody on the piano under my sister’s perennially patient stare. Now it is only at night, when we are freed from the duties of the day and can stretch out within the relative comfort of our own home, that I peel my gaze from the page and take in life as it stands in front of me.
What felt like an eternity later, Claire and Linda reentered our room, the lights snapping on as they registered the women’s movement.
“Dear lord, it’s like you’re doing all of this for the first time,” Linda moaned as she sank the mop’s sopping tentacles back into the dingy water.
“I am,” Claire responded. The sound of her voice struck a chord dangerously close to my soul. Now that she’d returned, I was eager to have the chance to study her. She was beautiful; there was no other way to put it. But it was more complex than that. After one hundred and two years of life like this, I had seen an inestimable number of people, so many of them beautiful. She was enchanting. It was as if something magical emanated from her fingertips, dripping off her in each enthralling motion.
I wondered if I was already in love with her, laughing at myself as the thought entered and exited my mind.
She was small in stature, but then again, so was I. Her eyes were a rich brown, not the kind that seemed flecked with light but a much darker brown, one that seemed to go on forever, nearly blending in with her pupils. Her hair was piled on her head in a towering loose construction of a bun; it was nearly the size of her small head. As she watched Linda demonstrate the proper technique, she nervously scratched behind her ear.
“You have no cleaning experience?” Linda asked. Claire shook her head. “Literally none? How the heck did you get this job? Your dad work at the agency or something?”
“I didn’t go to the agency. I just came to the museum and asked if there was something I could do and they gave me a number to call. I thought I was coming in to interview or something, but when I got here yesterday, they just handed me a uniform and told me to come back tonight. I think they got confused and thought I’d already been hired.”
“Well, aren’t you a lucky one.” Linda passed Claire the handle of the mop. “Come on, you’ve got this room. This doesn’t have to take all night.”
As Claire pushed the mop along the floor by our frame, she breathed in so deeply, it was like she could smell our garden through the open window. Linda, already tired of waiting, sat on a bench and pulled out her cellphone.
“You play Candy Crush?”
“No, never got into it.”
“Oh. Well, I’m, like, really good at it,” Linda said.
Uninterested in and unable to understand what it was they were talking about, I simply watched Claire push the mop around the room. Linda was right, she worked incredibly slowly, unhurriedly looping back to reach the sections she’d missed while she’d been staring up at the pieces on the wall. In Claire’s defense, there was a lot to look at. The walls were brimming with art of all sizes and styles. I had grown accustomed to the congestion over the years, but I did remember that not all museums were so full.
“Do you have a favorite?” Claire asked.
“A favorite what?”
“The paintings and stuff—do you have a favorite?”
“I don’t really look at ’em. Since the mop is on the ground, and everything,” Linda said with a pointed glance at the floor. “I just try to get done as fast as possible.”
“Oh, yeah, makes sense, I just thought, since you’d been here for a while, you know—”
“I only took this gig because you don’t have to talk to people. I was at a hotel before this, and there are always people around and they always feel like they can always ask you for something even if it isn’t your job to help them with whatever BS they need.”
“That totally makes sense,” Claire said, mopping a bit more furiously.
“Nope, don’t care about the paintings. It’s all the same to me. Just, like, random colors and people and stuff on a wall.”
“Yeah, I don’t really know anything about art either,” Claire claimed, but the glint in her eyes as she scanned the room said otherwise.
I’ve always felt people expect too much from the experience of looking at a painting. They think if the meaning of life doesn’t leap off the canvas and into their minds, they’re not doing it right or, worse, the art has failed them and the whole thing’s been a waste. Who says a painting is supposed to do all that work for you? You look at it and you see what you see and you feel what you feel, and it might be transcendent or it might be just another moment in your life and all those things are okay.
