Page 34 of The Art of Vanishing

Jean

I should not have been as surprised as I was to hear a familiar voice first thing the next morning.

In hindsight, of course it made sense that a special group would be the first to experience the new installation.

Jamie had silently slipped into the gallery in the early hours of the morning.

Ever so gently, she turned a single page.

She’d read what was there before leaving just as silently as she’d come.

In cacophonous contrast, the recognizable peal of Susie’s voice came bouncing in from down the hall.

“Now,” she commanded, “please make sure your mask covers both your nose and your mouth the entire time you are inside the museum.” Ironically, I would later notice that Susie’s own mask slid beneath her nose every time she opened her mouth a bit too animatedly, which was nearly every time she spoke.

She shepherded her flock of patrons into the room like it was second nature, as if she’d never stopped doing it, careening about the room as if she owned the place. The group was on the smaller side and they entered the gallery timidly, standing apart from one another in awkward clumps.

Susie positioned herself next to the new podium, as close as she could possibly be without stepping over the guard bar.

“Come closer, come closer!” she encouraged as she waved the group in.

No one moved. “Not too close, of course, you know what I mean. No need to get me in trouble.” She laughed boisterously as the group tittered nervously back at her.

Susie radiated a here making history energy today.

“All right.” She turned to face the journal for the first time.

Whatever words she was about to say evaporated in her mouth.

She was, for the first time in my knowing her, silent, staring dumbstruck at what lay before her.

Time passed—so much time that the group began to stir and even I felt some discomfort on their behalf.

Finally, she snapped herself out of it. As she turned back to the intimate crowd, small tears dotted the corners of her eyes.

“Wow,” she gasped. “I knew this was going to be a big one, but I didn’t expect this reaction!

I’m so embarrassed!” Susie exclaimed. “I guess maybe I should have come in here by myself first, but when they gave me the chance to be part of the first group, I couldn’t say no.

Anyway! Okay! Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, what do you know about what we’re looking at here? ”

The group was coming more clearly into focus for me now. I realized I recognized a handful of its members as our regulars, visitors in their sixties and seventies who came together every few months, who knew the museum well enough to have favorites they liked to check in on occasionally.

One of the women in the group raised her hand, and Susie encouraged her with an enthusiastic nod. “It’s, um, a journal that no one knew existed until lockdown.”

“Precisely,” Susie said. “A woman in Massachusetts discovered it this spring as she cleared out an old attic full of her deceased relatives’ personal effects.

She chose our museum specifically to donate it to—there was no auction.

She has reason to believe its author might be represented here, in one of these galleries.

It was then delivered to the museum this week with strict instructions—turn one page a day, each day that the museum is open, until we reach the end. ”

“Do you know if the museum is expecting people to come in every day? Like, to keep coming back, to read the entire thing?” another member of the group asked.

“I don’t know,” Susie admitted. “I’m just an independent contractor, but I’d imagine no one really has any idea what to expect, given the unprecedented times. Now, where was I?”

“You were about to tell us what’s so special about this little thing,” whined a man I recognized as the husband of one of my favorite regulars (a favorite because I had oft heard her describe us as her favorite work in the collection). His wife covered her already obscured face in embarrassment.

“Right you are.” Susie was unbothered by his snark. “As Elise Durand was sorting through all her grandparents’ belongings, she found this singular journal tucked in a trunk. The pages were full from cover to cover.” Susie was picking up steam now. She continued.

“Written in a mash-up of English and French, the pages supposedly detail a handful of years of the grandmother’s young life, spent between Paris and Nice at the end of the 1910s.

She had a myriad of artistic talents, it would appear, including a penchant for painting.

But successful women artists were few and far between in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—not from a lack of talent but from a lack of opportunity.

Unless they had a wealthy father or husband who approved of the pursuits, for most women, art was not a viable career.

“The author of this journal supported herself through her career as a musician, but still craved a life full of painting. So she moved to Nice with as much savings as she could set aside, and she sat as a model for the great male painters of the era, offering them her time in return for access to canvases and paints. In the journal, she names a dozen of the men whom she modeled for, many of whom are featured in this very museum.”

“Now,” one of the men interrupted, “how, if it’s nearly a century later, can any of this be substantiated?”

“I had the same question,” someone else in the crowd said. “How do you know this isn’t all made up? A lady’s clever pandemic project?”

“The foundation has, of course,” Susie supplied a scripted answer, “substantiated everything to the best of their abilities.” This was followed by a predictable scoff from the skeptical member of the audience.

“With modern technology, we are able to know mostly everything about when the paper was created, how old the ink is, if the handwriting matches from page to page, et cetera. Plus, the journal is not being presented as a research document; rather, it’s another work in the museum.

Apparently, the pages include her artwork as well: sketches, doodles, smaller pieces of her larger projects.

If it is real, and we believe it is, this journal gives us a new window into the lives of a handful of great artists and —more important, in my opinion—it reveals a female compatriot of theirs who may have been just as great, were it not for her unfortunate luck of being born a woman and thus lost to history. ”

“I’m sure the museum only agreed to it because they were worried about attendance numbers and wanted to ensure they’d be able to get people in here after reopening,” the snarky member of the audience responded.

“What do you think it says in there?” a woman asked.

“I don’t even know where to begin.” Susie exhaled.

“I can’t tell if I want it to be a revelation, maybe a brand-new way of looking at art, or if I’d just prefer something more quotidian.

I think my internal monologue feels that if it’s quiet, interesting to only us, no one else will want to take it away from us.

If it’s something larger, history changing, there could be historians, journalists, who knows who, people who might want this for a larger posterity effort.

It could get out of our control. So, I don’t know what I think is in there, but I hope it’s something comfortable that gives us small hints as to what the lives of these artists, these men, looked like through her eyes. ”

“I’m most excited,” the woman who asked the question said, “to see the small pieces of her art as well. What if her modeling is featured somewhere on these walls? The art is finally being reunited with its artist.”

“I never would have thought of it like that,” the snide man said. Susie and the woman shared a glance.

“Well.” Susie clapped her hands together. “Get after it! One at a time, come up and have your moment to look before the museum opens to the public for the day. Plus, I know it’s everyone’s first time back in so long, so I’m sure we have some favorites we need to visit.”

The sound in the room faded into the dull hum of a few pockets of conversation melding together indistinguishably.

The regulars stepped up one at a time, as Susie had instructed, some staying for a full minute or even two, others giddily walking away after just a handful of seconds.

One woman drifted our way after her turn had ended.

She looked us over like she was trying to memorize every nook and cranny, like a child who had been gifted a detective’s magnifying glass and only wanted to look at things as closely as possible.

I felt Marguerite and Pierre sit up a little straighter, and knew I was basking in the glow of her attention too. After so long, it felt so good.

She was called away by her partner as Susie moved them on to other rooms to visit other paintings.

Not long after they’d left, our first unaccompanied patrons arrived, two young men in shorts and the bright shirts of American summer, their faces covered with cloth masks someone must have stitched by hand.

They walked quickly into the gallery, striding confidently, but they stopped still when they realized they were alone in here.

The leader gently took the other by the hand, peering toward the journal before he led him over to it. They looked together, hand in hand.

The visitors continued to arrive, the crowd never rising at that of a popular day before the hiatus but ebbing and flowing comfortably as the hours moved along. It felt so good to have people to watch; I wondered how I’d ever before taken this for granted.