“What are we? Schoolchildren?” says Ion.
But Nick’s still going: “I just wonder about any straight male who says to himself, ‘You know what I’d like to do for the rest of my life? Examine penises.’”
By way of changing the conversation, I tell them about the museum visit I have scheduled for tomorrow with the girl from journalism.
“What’s her name?” asks Nick.
“Cecily.”
“Wait. Cecily Hoder?” asks Whitford, surprised.
“Yeah.”
No one says anything.
“What?” I ask.
“If she didn’t have a different lunch period than us,” Ion says, “Cecily Hoder would be sitting here. She’s the fourth member of our academic quiz team.”
CHAPTER 5
In the art museum the next afternoon, each click of my cane on the hard, smooth floor reverberates like a shotgun blast. It’s so quiet I can hear a faint buzz overhead, presumably from the ceiling lights. That’s a funny thing about artificial light: You can hear it. But I’ve never heard the sun, moon, or stars. Natural light, it seems, travels in silence. Like a Tesla.
Cecily and I stand in front of a painting, silent. No snaps of her camera yet. She’s just looking at it, I guess.
Remembering that I’m here to make things up to her after our disastrous first encounter, I try to break the ice by asking her how she got into photography.
“Through painting, actually,” she says.
“So why not…” I say. I speak carefully, lest I induce another tearful breakdown.
“Paint?” she suggests.
“Well, yeah.”
“Oh, I can’t paint.”
“No?”
“Definitely not.”
“I’ve never painted, but how hard can it be? You hold the brush and then you rub paint on the paper until it looks like what you see. Right?” I ask.
“Yeah, but it’s not like that. You are re-creating the image. That takes talent.”
“To paint what’s right there in front of you?”
“Of course.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Um, let me think of an example.” She pauses. “Okay, it’s like how you can be looking at something, a person or a beautiful landscape like, I don’t know, the Grand Canyon, but then you take a photo with a cell phone camera and it doesn’t look the same. It takes skill even to create photos that represent what the eye sees.”
Sigh. Will people never learn? “Still doesn’t mean much to me.”
“Oh, right, sorry. I guess it’s like… You know what my voice sounds like, right?”
“Yeah.” I ponder her voice for a moment. It’s controlled and pressurized, like the water flowing through a turbine in a dam. But dams don’t just generate power. They are a barricade. They hold back a flood.
“And the sound of my voice is very clear coming through your ears?”
The question interrupts my thoughts about hydropower. “Sure.”
“Can you imitate it?”
“How do you mean?”
“Like, can you re-create the sound of my voice using your own vocal cords?”
“Oh… I think I get it now.”
“Right, and that’s what’s so cool about art,” she says, speaking faster. “Van Gogh was an impressionist, so he wasn’t even trying to paint scenes that look like what a person would see with their eyes. Sorry, is this weird to talk about? Like, seeing and stuff? I don’t mean—”
“No, it’s fascinating, actually. Please continue.”
“All right, so a realist is an artist who paints an image that looks similar to what a good photographer could capture on film. That’s, like, if you could imitate the sound of my speech with near-perfect accuracy using your own voice. But an impressionist paints not what the scene actually is, but what it feels like.”
“It’s distorted?”
“No, not distorted. It’s… interpreted… represented in a different way. Like a metaphor. Like an impressionistic version of my voice might not sound like me at all, at least not in a literal sense. It might be a piece of music that when you hear it makes you think of my voice. You hear it and say, ‘Yes, that captures the essence of what Cecily sounds like.’”
I’m silent.
“Sorry, did I lose you?” she asks. “I know I kind of geek out about—”
“No, I just—wow, that’s a really good description. Thank you. No one has ever explained art to me like that before.”
“You’re welcome,” she says, more softly.
She removes the lens cap from her camera, and the shutter clicks a few times.
Trying to keep the conversation going, I ask, “So what sort of stuff did van Gogh paint?”
“Landscapes and plants, mostly.”
“Not people?”
“He painted people, but that’s not what he’s known for.”
“How come?”
She’s silent for a moment. “Maybe because what is considered beautiful in nature has remained constant throughout history, but the definition of human beauty changes every few years based on how the media defines the so-called perfect body.”
Just then a set of footsteps approaches and a voice interrupts us.
“Excuse me, sir, may I ask you a personal question?” he says.