This is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress. The narrator believes her son has died.

As much as I need to understand the art of relationships and the love that strengthens them from within, I find myself cooking over into a consistent tussle with art history. Not for certain does art work as history, more like art as the fine-toothed blender of that history of our consciousness—the shared consciousness, the relative banal tributes we pay to civilization and our ancestors whether we liked and respected them or not.

I go back to the baroque time of Rembrandt. The Dutch master did not paint about the many bloody wars going on in their century—for the most part. Rembrandt painted himself and his wife and his mistress and various scenes from the Bible, The Night Watch as well, though there: “Rembrandt…did not paint their portraits, which did not interest him at all; there were not the makings of a picture in the scene that followed the gallant Captain's order to ‘turn out the guard.’ So he built up that queerly assorted group in which figure not only the officers but a dwarf and one of those strange women of his who seem to have stepped out of the Psalms; and he shows us a world whose rhythmic play of light and shade seem the stuff of music, soon to become a world where God is omnipresent." Yet these paintings show the traces and shards of the times, whether Vermeer’s cool interiors of wondrous solitary life, Steen’s special jests, or Hals’s bristling portraits, those scintillating views of people’s faces and such, especially the two vaunted late group pictures of the men and women of the Old Men's Almshouse—especially in the latter with the paint posting up and providing a wide view of five distinct women’s faces, postures, and hands. What legions of time and emotions are in this face that could launch a thousand son-in-laws to their doom? Did she have children? We will never know but we do have the timeless portrait. The wars these people have seen are all over these pictures—the battles are there without being seen—the letters in Vermeer might possibly have something to do with them again, as does the seemingly bilious, large-trousered man in the portrait of him and a young woman in front of a map in The Art of Painting (of course, a map is the key to it all). And why aren’t the Rembrandt self-portraits a reflection of this small empire? At first those self-portraits of the 1630s reflect halcyon days. Then, as the empire starts to dissipate, so do the pictures of Rembrandt and his face and even his clothes come out to different chalcedonies. And the one in the Met where he worked his mouth into a prudish lip snarl? One cannot truly see the past in these parts of the body but they are there, we can feel them. Just as one could feel, as Claudel imparted, those panels in Las Meninas—Velazquez making himself the purveyor of a new way of looking. And Velazquez was the court painter—he did do paintings of important events for Philip, like Prince Baltasar Carlos in the Riding School. I kept toggling between the two—Rembrandt and Velazquez and—yes, their years overlapped. One imbued the other, as the other moved a bit further because of the other and vice versa, though I didn’t believe there could be one without the other—of course there could, but something would have shifted. What exactly?

I begin to descry my son in the Infanta Maria’s face—though he had brown eyes and brown hair (so did Harry)—and I told this to Harry and he smiled at some contrails in the sky and kept quite silent, possibly suspect, though I wanted some reassurance or repost—even if he thought me out of my mind—and he flipped away from Las Meninas in the Jonathon Brown book and looked at other, vaguer but still powerful Velazquezs—like the Portrait of Philip V that’s in the Frick with those maraschino-cherry eyes and the small Portrait of a Young Girl that surprisingly resides in the New York Hispanic Society. What about those?, he seemed to indicate by a silent pop in his throat. You mean does my son share a likeness?

Did?

There were blood lines on my hands. You disgusting fucker—why would you say that?

For truth’s sake.

I’ll decide what the truth is—you know nothing about it.

He breathed his silly smiles. Michelle—I’m with you here now.

I wouldn’t sleep with him for a week. I also didn’t see him. I seemed to be peeling out of my skin. But who peeled me? I could not consider that I lied to myself. How can one actually lie to oneself? There is not a chance for the self to know the deeper self so well and any “lying” can be easily justified as something else, either plangent or otherwise. I could check in with a friend or Rex, a colleague who helped me in life, and they all might say the same thing to me: Mendacity, Michelle, mendacity! What would such a title mean? And whose mendacity? There were so many suspects. Perhaps I had looked at paintings too much or I looked at them as one looked at flesh—you are there in a park in summer with sunglasses on and there are all these persons and their skin heaping off them like the ghostly contours their age confers. They can’t see that you see them but you do and you are looking at the flesh that wraps around them, falling away since birth. But there is an age to paintings—the first Renoirs I saw at the Art Institute have only become younger—they are in Philadelphia next to Cezanne’s The Bathers as well—the canvas has been caught in time and can’t grow old because again has nothing to grow into, whereas the flesh of The Bathers astounds since it is ageless flesh—there is no human that can compare—and even if capable of being destroyed it lives on forever in the space it hastaken up in our minds and could physically outlast us—still hanging in the abandoned museum. Because it wasn’t food it would be undisturbed and when the last hungry person on the continent died, there it still would hang in the very calm light of the somnolent grace of impression—all the bathers in it, whether women or not, still bent and lying about some water, near the angled plane trees. And they aren’t truly large bathers, are they? Quite something else, from either the beginning or the end of time, and as I stand in Philadelphia looking at them or remembering myself standing there finding their pores, what is happening? It’s the flesh I know and love, the flesh of a Cezanne with this one as the fleshiest. We are all called to it and some others spend more time there than others, their eyebeams lock in a fight and fright of what there is to chance on this net curve of earth. You can’t touch the paintings—you could but as soon as you do you failed the great past we have with each other no matter the idiots and assholes in control—for we actually have these pacts and other controls and they can’t understand it, but want to stop it because they can’t join in—they won’t show the dejection of loose-limbed walking away from the playground though it is insignia’d all over their faces and suits, hands that praise only themselves. 

I won’t use timeworn excuses that no one gets—it hurts me less when I adore the flesh of paint. Maybe it hurts me more. The flesh of paint won’t age and can’t change—I can and do. So I fall apart in this one-way relationship. I can’t grow or watch the painting grow to produce something of substance—only maybe a wiry seat of intelligence to write about. And I can say this with some certainty, since I tried to extract some life-form out of my confrontation with paintings and the result was stillborn, it never went anywhere except to my head.

But I hadn’t begun to descry my son’s face in the Infanta Maria, I always had, as in I could imagine my son nestled against a wall in his room as he looked out into our corridor, hearing us “discuss” some monetary issue or the monetary issue that hid the psychological issue and I might pace back and see his shadowed form, with his small head pasted to the wall, though the door stood open, that’s how he heard us—and though his head bent to that fake brick his eyes aimed cross-wise, so the left eye of flesh carried a piece of the bridge of the nose in it, looking at me, but not exactly at me, as the Infanta Maria might infer. I smiled at him and as I approached, checked the floor so I wouldn’t step on the dog’s paws—the one from 1658. Or did I actually step into the painting and not my son’s room? Were they similar somehow—a rustic Cobble Hill pre-war and some large studio in the palace, with what I took to be sawdust on the floor? If I got what I wanted I would actually be doing what I’d wanted to do all along, step inside not history, but living art itself. And for this I would undoubtedly be considered a bad mother—many easily burning me at the stake. Harry-less I cried not for myself but for the idea of myself—that I might choose art before myself, but always in spite of myself. Hadn’t that often happened?