I ate, but I’ll tag along. You feel safe walking around out there?
She grins—a little crazy—and eases closer as they walk. She’s maybe a half-inch taller than he is. Well, she says, you’re gonna protect me. Right?
He stops. She steps around, turns to face him. He searches her expression for a tell—a clue that she’s just opening up to reel him in—but even as he does it he knows that it’s hopeless, that he’s outclassed. If she’s playing him, then he’s going to get played. It’s the only move he’s got.
Look, he says. You asked me before if I’m the only one Damon sent out here to find Stanley. I told you yes. That’s what I thought at the time. I was wrong. There’s another guy. Local. Tall white guy. Sort of a dirtbag. Calls himself Albedo. You know him?
Her face turns sour. She shakes her head no. She’s telling the truth.
Well, Curtis says, you probably ought to keep an eye out, and steer clear. He wants to make some trouble for you.
Damon sent this guy?
Yeah.
And Damon sent you.
The muscles are tight in her jaw and forehead. There’s way more rage in her face than fear. For a second he thinks she might bite him. He looks away.
Then what the fuck are you telling me about him for, Curtis, if you guys are on the same team?
I want to do this my way, Curtis says. That’s all I want.
She wheels and takes a few steps in silence, then stops again. Staring at the floor. After a while she looks up, past him, at the canvases to his right. Calm now, one hand on her cocked hip. Her posture reminds him of an explorer surveying a treacherous valley, and also of a white girl from Santa Barbara that he dated for a few weeks during his one semester at Cal Lutheran.
Look what happens after 1839, she says.
He tracks her gaze past the bare-breasted Venus he ogled earlier to a couple of later canvasses: a haystack and a field of flowers; a pond glimpsed between trees. Brightly daubed mosaics of color. Curtis looks at them for a second, trying to see what she’s seeing, before his eye slides back across the rusted steel to the Venus. Her piled hair and small white breasts. Her sleepy smile. A ray of late-morning light falls on her from somewhere, and she’s stretching, waking up. Her face half-hidden by her plump raised arm. Her single visible eye watching him with undisguised lust.
1865 and 1880, Veronica’s saying. Corot and Monet. For the first time in four hundred years paintings are flattening out. Chemical photography begins in 1839. All of a sudden the replication of projected images by hand isn’t such a neat trick anymore. The challenge from here is to paint the world the way the mind sees it, not the eye. Not to capture external objects but the act of perception itself. The monocular tradition—the thumb and the eyeball, the picture plane and the camera lens, the illusion of depth—that’s over. Now it’s all about two eyes and a brain in between. Flat retinas and flat canvases. The eye that tricks itself. This is the beginning of modern art.
Curtis shoots her an uneasy glance, but she’s not looking at him. Her eyes are shifting up and down the walls, chasing a thought, following a story written there. She’s talking to herself. It’s impossible to tell how much she knows about him, how much she might have forgotten.
Eventually her attention lands on the Venus, and she flashes a lupine grin. She’s a real creampuff, isn’t she? she says. Even a hundred years before photography, you can tell people are getting bored. Everybody knows the game. You look at her, she looks at you. Trying to get under your skin through your eyeballs. All the old tricks are almost embarrassing. Joshua Reynolds owned a camera obscura that folded into a book.
Curtis and Veronica stand side by side, very still, for a long time. He can almost feel her quick and steady pulse through the sanitized air.
The Venus’s single eye is all pupil, wide and bottomless. The red curtains painted behind her are billowy, frozen, with a pool of dark tangled in their folds. The position she’s in—right elbow above her head—doesn’t look very comfortable. The blond Cupid that tugs at her sash will never untie it. The hand that hides her face will never fall away.
C’mon, Veronica says after a while. Let’s go upstairs. I’ll buy you a doughnut.
36