“Yes, I’m blind,” I say.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“What gave it away? Do my socks not match or something?”
“Well, no…” he stammers.
“I’m kidding. I’ve got a cane and sunglasses. Of course I’m blind.”
“Listen,” he says. “I’m a security guard. The security guard, actually. I travel with this exhibit. I just wanted to say that if you’re interested, you are welcome to touch these paintings.”
I’m stunned. It’s not unusual these days for museums to allow the visually impaired to touch some artwork. But a van Gogh?
“For real?”
“Yes, sir. This is the personal collection of Edward Kramer. Mr. Kramer has a son with special needs, and he wants to be sure that people of all abilities can appreciate them. But you have to be really, really gentle. The paint is a century and a half old. Touch it as lightly as possible. And wash your hands first. Gets rid of the oil on your skin that can damage the paint.”
“Fair enough. Where’s the restroom?” I ask.
“I’ll show you,” says Cecily. “I want to make sure you go into the right one.”
The guard walks away.
“Wait,” I say, taken aback. “What was that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.”
“Were you making fun of blind people?”
“No, I would never—” She stops and sighs. “Yesterday, before journalism, you…”
“What?”
“You went into the girls’ bathroom.”
That hot feeling builds in my face. “Please tell me you’re joking.”
“I wish I was,” she says.
“At least tell me you were the only one who saw.”
“Uh…”
“How many more?”
“It’s really not that big—”
“Two? Three?”
“Don’t worry about—”
“Ten?”
“Twenty. Okay, more like twenty-five,” she says. “Absolute max: thirty.”
“THIRTY?”
“It was basically the whole journalism class, with the exception of Mrs. Everbrook. Everyone felt really terrible about it, if that’s any consolation. And the doors are right beside each other, so you aren’t even the first person to make the mistake.”
“Well, you were the only one who told me,” I say. “You took the hit. Thanks. That couldn’t have been easy.”
“The truth has a price,” she says. “That’s what my mom always says.”
Her mom is right. It stings, knowing all those students were watching me make a fool of myself.
I go to the (correct) restroom and wash my hands. The first painting I touch is called Les Alyscamps.
“Let’s play a game,” I suggest. “I’ll touch it and try to guess what it’s a painting of.”
“Okay,” she says.
I start from the bottom, running my hands softly across the canvas the way I read braille. The paint has a dry, layered texture to it. There are places where the paint is globbed on smooth and thick, and others where it has tiny canyons of texture. I spread my fingers wider to absorb the shape of the bottom half of the canvas. The object in the painting starts out covering the entire width of the canvas, and then as it moves upward, it gets smaller and smaller until it ends in a point. I think of objects I know of with this shape.
“Is it a slice of pie?” I guess.
“Nope,” she says.
“A piece of pizza?”
“Nope.”
“A Dorito?”
“When was your last meal?”
I laugh. “But am I close?”
“No, it’s not any kind of food. And for the record, I don’t think Doritos had been invented yet.”
“But it’s triangle-shaped, right?”
She thinks for a moment. “Well… yeah, I guess it is,” she says, as if she hadn’t noticed this before.
“Fine, I give up. What is it?”
“A road.”
“But roads are straight lines,” I say, confused. “Is it an impressionistic street or something?”
“No, it’s just the perspective.”
I don’t understand.
“You know,” she adds when I say nothing. “Like, it gets smaller in the distance. Well, the street’s not actually getting smaller—it’s just how it looks when it’s far away,” she says.
“Yeah, I just don’t understand what you’re saying,” I admit.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she says, a note of sensitivity entering her voice. “I just assumed… So I guess you don’t know what perspective is?”
“I know what the word means,” I say, sounding a little more defensive than I intended. “Like people have different perspectives on issues. Or people look at things from different perspectives. But how does that make the road a triangle?”
“Well, okay. Basically, as things get farther away, they look smaller,” she explains patiently.
“They change size?”
“They don’t actually change size. Just how much space they take up in your field of vision.”
“Why?”
“Um, I don’t really know, actually. It just is.”
“So why is the street in the painting pointy?”
“Van Gogh is painting as if he’s looking along the road, so the farther away it gets from him, the smaller it looks to him, until it disappears completely at the horizon.”