DAUBS OF COLOR IN THE COLD (Pt. 2)

The sun had set, but the sky still shone a fading purple. The leftovers had been packed up and put in the fridge to be taken home at the end of the night. The housekeepers were cleaning the kitchen. The little kids were out of the pool, and the one or two who had given their parents a hard time about it were scowling in time-out. The technicians Uncle Mason had hired were setting up the fireworks in the tennis court. I was standing about ten yards behind my mother, my grandmother, Uncle Drake and Aunt Kim. I only caught snippets of their conversation. Mason this, Mason that. When’s he going to settle down? Nothing but backbiting.

I felt a tap on my shoulder. Uncle Mason motioned with a cock of his head, Follow me.

We passed through the dining room into the foyer, down a long hallway that I knew led to his office. The air I was breathing turned rarified even before Uncle Mason had swung open those doors. It didn’t matter that the office wasn’t some Wonka-esque phantasmagorium, that it was exactly the temple of fiduciary consequence you would expect a businessman to have. None of that mattered. I was where you children didn’t get to go, and I was there at Uncle Mason’s invitation.

We crossed the room to a small door I assumed was a closet. But closets don’t have locks on them. Uncle Mason unlocked the door, then turned back to me. “Remember, this is between us, right?”

For a nanosecond I experienced a victim’s frisson. For a wisp of a moment I wondered if this was going to end badly for me, but I shook that off. Anyone else, maybe, but not Uncle Mason. “Just us,” I said.

He opened the door. It was pitch black inside. Uncle Mason reached in and flipped a switch that clacked with a breaker’s baritone. A staircase led beneath the house. Uncle Mason motioned for me to enter first. He followed me through the door and locked it behind us.

I reached the foot of the staircase and found myself in a sort of antechamber of basic cinderblock walls, no furnishing. A single white door sat in one wall to the side. To its right was some kind of aperture, and within it was the mouth of a black rubber chute just big enough to fit your hand in. Above the door was a plaque of alder, an inscription burned into it:

I paint my own reality.

                  Frida Kahlo

Uncle Mason stood before the chute’s aperture. “Don’t bother trying to get in here without me. I’m the only person in the world who can get through this door.”

He stuck his hand through the aperture, into the chute. He stood for several seconds before he flinched and withdrew his hand. A tiny drop of blood was pooling from a puncture in his palm. He grabbed the doorknob with his uninjured hand and led me into his art gallery.

It was vast, beyond cavernous, unspooling before me like a carpet in all directions, maybe further even than the confines of the compound. With plain concrete for a floor and stark white paint on the walls below waist-level, its simplicity was an eyesore. But the paintings, a legion of paintings from every conceivable school and era, blanketed the walls to the ceiling. They fit together in a harlequin tapestry that left no breathing room between the frames. Their colors were thick and sweet like melted chocolate, and yet they glowed like fish that swam in the most inhospitable depths of the ocean.

When I was a kid, I’d gone to the Madsen Museum of Art on a field trip. The effect had missed me completely, and I wrote off art with a capital-A. But there was an elusive bait floating through the subterranean expanse, an enticement that seemed to dart behind corners as my head turned. It wasn’t just an art gallery. To call it that doesn’t do it justice. It felt more like an ancient temple or some majestic cathedral. The air inside was so still, I didn’t even feel it as I walked. I could smell the faint vestige of some alien potpourri. I could taste it. The illumination pooled perfectly upon every exhibit, but the thick lines of yellow light on wood and metal shimmered with sentience.

Uncle Mason stood back and let me take it all in. He didn’t want to break the spell with unnecessary speech. He just watched me with a smile that was two parts thankful and one part relieved.

I turned a corner and hanging just above eye level, ten feet away, was The Night Café. Even I recognized it. “That’s a Van Gogh!”

“It’s not the original,” Uncle Mason said. “None of them are. They’re all prints.”

I looked around the gallery, trying to fathom what I wasn’t seeing, why replicas deserved such ostentatious display. “I don’t get it,” I said.

“Every print I own is one of a kind.”

“I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Night Café prints for sale online.”

“Not like this one. There are maybe ten people in the world who own prints like these. And no one has a collection as extensive as mine.”

I looked at him. “Okay. So, what makes them so special?”

I followed him across the gallery to an alcove subsumed in shadow. He said, “Look at this one here.” It was a large landscape, an idyllic scene from hundreds of years ago, of a bay with a ship below a lighthouse. The sun was setting behind some pink clouds and the whole picture had an amber-emerald hue.

“This is Calm at a Mediterranean Port,” said Uncle Mason. “From 1770 by Claude-Joseph Vernet. Neoclassicist. Forty-four and a half inches by fifty-seven and three-eighths inches.” He took me by the shoulders and positioned me directly in front of it. “Now, I want you to just look at the painting. Don’t think about it or try to understand it or appreciate it. Just look at it.”

I had no idea how I was supposed to do that, but I did as Uncle Mason said. I stood still and looked. My brain kept flicking the back of my ear, sneaking its attention off to one passing thought or another like a child trying to wander off in a grocery store. I wouldn’t let it. It took time, several minutes before my focus surrendered and turned itself fully to the picture in front of my eyes. They went right to the ship in the water. Crewmen were unloading it. The sails were billowing in the breeze even as the fluyt sat anchored in the bay. The hull, its dark boards rich as syrup, was backlit by the setting sun. I could almost feel the heat on my shoulders, smell the brine on the air. Then I heard birds. Gulls were circling above the ship, and I could hear them crying out against the blue-yellow gradient behind them. I could hear the seawater lapping against the dinghy in the lower foreground. Fishermen were hoisting a net from the small craft, and I could hear them too, speaking to one another in a language I didn’t understand. I could hear them as truly as I could hear Uncle Mason behind me.

“Look.”

I didn’t feel any crackling of cosmic energy, didn’t hear some ethereal hum of magic. I didn’t feel any kind of gravitational lurch into the canvas. There was only the barely perceptible movement of air around me, then I blinked, and I was standing on a stone quay in a port on the Mediterranean Sea. I was under a real sky with a real storm cloud that was just starting to roll in. The gulls above the ship were flying. The fisherman pulling his net out of his boat, wrapping it around his shoulders, was maybe thirty feet in front of me. I could distinguish the scents of the two men smoking their pipes. Two different kinds of tobacco. The smoke and the smell didn’t even bother me. Nothing could bother me. I was in eighteenth-century Europe.

From behind me I heard, “Remarkable isn’t it?”

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even turn around to look at him with my slackened jaw and bulging eyes. I didn’t understand, but it was all so miraculous that I didn’t care.

Uncle Mason blew all the stress and anxiety out his nostrils. “Vernet,” he said, “he was one of the only landscape painters of the eighteenth century to always put people in his paintings. I think he saw them as inseparable from the scene. And of course they are. Imagine this image without the fisherman and the sailors, without the prostitutes waiting for a prospective john to come ashore with pay to burn. There’d be no ships in the harbor. No birds overhead. No fishing lines arching into the water. The town would look like an abandoned ruin. It wouldn’t be nearly as beautiful.”

I regained enough composure and ignored just enough bewilderment to turn around. Uncle Mason was basking in the yellow-orange of the sunset, letting the light iron the lines out of his face. The silver in his hair had been painted gold. He had his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, like he’d been taking a leisurely stroll on the beach at dusk during a week’s vacation, and he’d stopped at the shoreline to let the ocean run over his feet.

“Is this real?” I eked out.

“You mean, are we really in eighteenth century Italy? No.”

“Is that where this is?”

“Most likely it’s somewhere in the Bay of Naples. Vernet lived in Italy for twenty years and painted a lot of landscapes around the bay.” He pointed to the largest vessel in the painting-come-to-life. “See the flag there? In the late eighteenth century that was the flag of Amsterdam, and they would have traded with Naples.”

“Uncle Mason,” I said, “what is this? Is this time travel?”

“Not the way you’re thinking of it. Look around. Has anybody noticed two strangers in weird clothing speaking a strange English dialect?”

I looked at the fisherman and sailors and prostitutes lounging and talking and working on the dock. They were oblivious to our presence.

“They can’t see us?” I asked.

“They’re not real,” he answered. “We’re in a painting, not the past.”

“How is this possible?”

“Money makes a lot of things possible.”

“That’s not an answer. How’d you do this?”

“I didn’t. People much smarter I am did this.”

“Who?”

He gave me a paternal tilt of the head. “Right now that’s not something you get to know.”

“What? C’mon. How can you show me this and not tell me who’s responsible?”

Uncle Mason almost laughed. “Anna, I just brought you into a living painting, and that’s not enough for you? Look where you are. Listen. Breathe. Taste the salt on the air. You are experiencing life through someone else’s eyes.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you ever heard the expression, ‘Life is perspective?’ ”

“Sure.”

“And have you ever heard an artist or a writer or musician say that their responsibility is to tell the truth as they see it?”

“Yeah.”

He turned me back to face the Bay of Naples and presented it to me with a wave of his arm. “Look. We only ever get to experience the world through our own perspective. Everything, every event, every idea has to pass through the prism of our unique subjectivity. But here the subjectivity is completely different from your own, and you get to live that. That’s invaluable.”

I cast my eyes over the scene, looking for what Uncle Mason was showing me. They darted around from one detail to another, across the expanse of oils in motion. My eyes went to the fluyt in the middle distance, and for the first time I noticed a sailor in a red shirt leaning over the side of the deck. He was shouting something to the sailors in the gig pushing away from its port side. I again looked at the fishermen in dock and noticed their hats. Then I noticed everyone’s hat. There were so many different ones: Phrygian bonnets, clericals, chapeaus, wide-brimmed pirate hats. There was a man in a green-and-white turban with robes to match. One of the fishermen was cleaning his catch, and working beside him on her knees was his wife. She had to be his wife. Her dress was drab and utilitarian, good for physical labor. She wasn’t sporting the colors of the women lounging frame-left. They had to be prostitutes, as Uncle Mason said. The one with her back to me had a long pipe with embers glowing in the bowl, sending a lazy trickle of smoke upward.

I saw everyone in the painting and found myself picturing what it would look like if they weren’t there. Uncle Mason was right. It would’ve been a cemetery, a monument to dead stone. As beautiful as the sky was with its pale blue fist slowly closing over its luminous gem of a heart, as intoxicating as the mountain was awash in champagne pink, as much as the Mediterranean gleamed jade and rippled a lullaby into my ears, it would have been pointless without the people.

Uncle Mason put his hand on my shoulder. “C’mon.”

Before the words had vanished, I was back in the gallery with Uncle Mason standing beside me. I listened for the soundtrack to an Italian harbor and heard only reverberant absence. “How long have we been gone?” I asked.

“For all intents and purposes we never left.”

I looked around the gallery, at all the paintings, all the possibilities. As I turned round and round, the gallery a dizzying swish pan of opportunity, one grabbed me by the throat.

It hung alone in a remote corner, behind a wide curtain of black muslin. The still-pungent memory of the Mediterranean port evaporated, and the gallery was empty save an enshrouded taunt that was waving its arms, jumping up and down, and hollering my name.

“Well?”

I pried my attention away from the swath of mystery and turned to my uncle. “So, what now?”

He smiled. “I told you in the painting that money makes a lot of things possible. But none of those things are worthwhile if they don’t lead to some kind of wisdom. That’s what your lessons are going to be about. Not about names and dates and maps and a lot of information divorced from any semblance of life. Your school has that covered. You can memorize all the trivia you want, that doesn’t make you smart. It’s how you think about that trivia, how you add it all up and come up with an answer no one can provide you with that’s important. That’s intelligence, and wisdom walks hand in hand with it.” Uncle Mason gave me a look that was two parts affection and one part warning. “Are you up for it?”

I didn’t even think about it. “Yes.”

He gave me a warm slap on the shoulder as he walked past me. I followed him, the unknown painting veiled in black whistling for my scrutiny.