Page 8 of The Art of Vanishing

Jean

If Marguerite was the confident one, Pierre the smart one, and my mother the welcoming one, I was the reserved one.

Day in and day out, I sat in the corner of our parlor with my head in a book.

Even before Claire, I had not explored much after the sun had set.

I was comfortable in my chair with my words and my thoughts.

I had rarely wished for anything larger.

But now I did. I wanted to communicate with Claire, and suddenly no chair could possibly be comfortable enough for me to stay seated.

The only thing to interrupt my internal strife was the consistent influx of patrons in the galleries.

We saw everyone from locals to tourists, school groups to private tours, art students to amateurs.

There were two large benches directly in front of our painting, a novelty in these galleries, so we were frequently joined by those who were reaching the weary side of their museum day.

They would take a load off, check their cellphones, close their eyes and ears to the chatter of those they’d come with.

My favorites, of course, were the tour guides.

Full of knowledge, some of it accurate, some of it invented; we almost never heard the same exact thing twice.

There were only a handful of them who worked with the museum or led private tours in the area, so we saw a few dozen guides on a loop, Susie being one of them.

I had come to be familiar with all of them, pinning down which guides knew a lot about art and whose analysis took more artistic liberties.

Today, it was a young woman I’d seen a few times before; she was relatively new to this gig, with a group of students who were around Pierre’s age. Judging by the voices echoing throughout the halls, I guessed they were part of a larger crew, divided up for ease of moving through the museum.

This group clustered around one of the benches and the guide came to stand directly next to my right-hand side. If we weren’t locked in our bifurcated worlds, she would have been close enough for me to reach out and brush her shoulder.

“Okay, here we are! Now, remember Picasso? We talked about him downstairs.” A handful of the kids nodded, enough for the guide to forge ahead.

“Great, well, he and this artist were bitter rivals. They were constantly pushing each other to try new things, new styles, to not get stuck in the past. What do you all notice about the style of this one?” She gestured to us. The kids were silent. “Anyone?”

“They kind of look like cartoons. Like, it’s a cartoony style,” one kid offered up.

“Okay!” The guide grasped at this. “Cartoony. Cool. What do you mean by that? What about the painting makes you think that?”

“They’re not super detailed.”

“Great! Thank you. Anyone notice anything else?”

“There’s instruments there,” another student said.

“Yes! There are! What instruments do you see?”

“Um, those two are playing a piano. And that’s a violin just there.”

“Yes, absolutely, these two characters are engaged in some kind of piano lesson. Can you guess who all these characters are?”

Ah, I thought. Here it comes. The children had no guesses.

“It’s the artist’s family!” the guide squealed.

“This is a family portrait.” She rubbed her hands together.

“Now, let’s make a personal connection here.

Imagine you’re going to paint your own family portrait—tell us about it.

Who’s in it? What kind of objects are there? Musical instruments? Something else?”

As expected, the children were silent. The guide chose a victim and called on him. “What about you? Who is in your portrait?”

After some consideration, he said, “Just me.”

“Just you, that’s great!” Her forced enthusiasm said otherwise. “What are you doing in your portrait?”

“Um, I’d be eating.”

“Amazing, probably eating one of your favorite foods?”

“Yeah, like a sandwich or something.”

“A sandwich! That’s great! Thank you!” She was practically squeaking now, her voice hitting a higher pitch with each sentence. “Anyone else want to share?”

“Mine would be me and my cousin,” someone else said.

“Cool,” the guide encouraged. “Very cool.”

The adult man tagging along with the group, conceivably the teacher, joined in now. Gesturing to me, he said, “Mine would be me, just like that guy. Wearing a three-piece suit but chilling out.”

This made the guide laugh. “I could be into that.” Was she flirting with him? She checked her watch to find that time was up and she was officially off the hook. “Well, thank you all so much for coming along with me today. I hope you found a way to see yourselves in the art here.”

The group muttered their somewhat enthusiastic thanks as the teacher shepherded them out the way they’d come in to meet up with the other groups for a boxed lunch.

He looked back at the guide, tipping an invisible hat in her direction.

She giggled. I wondered if I’d just witnessed the start of a relationship.

The sound of our gallery faded back down to its usual din. The rest of the day passed unremarkably, or at least that’s how I remembered it. Everything about this day was unremarkable in comparison to what was about to happen.

Since my last conversation with Marguerite on the topic of Claire, my family was careful to leave our frame every night as soon as they were able.

They usually left me to my devices, but someone might linger or decide to remain in our living room for the evening.

Not any longer. Where they went, I was not entirely sure, but whether I liked it or not, they would not be witnesses.

I fretted over how best to make my next move and in the wealth of options with no clear direction, I was paralyzed by the potential choice.

I decided to start small—I planned to bring my chair closer to the edge of the frame, just a few inches at a time.

I thought I’d do it as soon as she got there the next evening, in the time she normally spent looking at each painting, saying hello, before she jumped into that evening’s work.

But when she showed up that night, I panicked, frozen in my spot like a human icicle.

It wasn’t until hours had passed and she was fully immersed in the mop that I convinced myself to scoot forward a few inches.

The sound of my chair grating along the wood floor was the loudest noise I had ever heard.

Claire did not look up. Twenty minutes later, when she was spraying down the windows, her back to me, I tried again, scooching even closer to the edge. Still no reaction.

She left that night and nothing had changed.

I’d need to go bigger if I wanted her attention.

The night following, after the gallery had emptied out, I immediately stood up from my seat.

I did a few push-ups to get out the nervous energy, a habit I’d picked up in my brief bit of army training, having been drafted only weeks before I was pulled out of that world and into this painting.

I crossed to the other side of the room.

Still afraid to move too much in her presence, I had decided to stand on the opposite side of the frame, to see if that elicited any new response.

I was embarrassed to do any of this in front of my peers, those who were spending the evening in the frames on the walls beside and across from me.

It was funny to develop this self-consciousness now when I’d been on public display every day for a century.

I pushed what they might be thinking from my head and committed to my plan.

Claire was different that night. Her head was elsewhere; she cleaned the way she had when she had first started training. It took her too much time and she had to hurry away to what I now understood to be her other assignments. She’d never even looked at me.

The third night, I was ready for a grand gesture.

I took up my father’s violin, which rested on the end of the piano.

No one had touched it since he had left it there; it felt like it was reserved for him were he ever to come and join us.

I had played as a young boy, though not as well as Pierre did, and hoped a bit of that skill would come back to me in some way.

In a humbling attempt to practice, I tucked the body under my chin and began an initial drag of the bow across a single string.

It let out a terrible whine, like a cat being slowly lowered into a tub of water.

I startled myself, nearly dropping the violin to the ground.

It occurred to me that a violin that had gone unplayed for just over a century probably needed to be tuned.

After taking a moment to do so, I wound myself up to give it another go.

This time, with a more confident hand, I was able to extract a sound that vaguely resembled a musical note.

I’d take it. I moved slowly into the first song that came to mind, a simple minuet from my days in lessons, one Pierre played on the piano frequently.

Right on cue, Claire came into the gallery.

I begged my hands to keep playing, despite the sledgehammer in my chest that had replaced my heart, and they did just that. I lost myself in the music. I cycled through any song I’d memorized in my childhood, abruptly moving on to the next if my memory failed and I could play one no further.

Claire propelled herself across the room to me, leaving her mop and broom in her wake. She stood directly in front of me, about a foot away from the frame that separated her world from mine. She waited as I played, watching me carefully and admiringly.

When I’d finally finished a tune that I could remember in almost its entirety, I lowered my bow and my violin and I looked down at her.

“I can’t hear what you’ve played, but I bet it was beautiful.”

I was speechless—not that she would have been able to hear me even if I had been able to find the words. She gave me a wry smile. We were both in on her secret. The door to the way we were before closed behind us.

“I’d love to watch you play another. If you’d like to, of course. No pressure.”

No pressure, a turn of phrase that felt so Claire. I pushed the violin back in the space between my shoulder and my chin and combed through the options my memory provided. I knew she couldn’t hear me, but I wanted something that suited the moment.

I settled on a waltz, a rhythm that had always felt romantic and heightened to me.

I threw my body into it, knowing now that she might not hear my playing but I wanted her to see it and feel it.

I nodded to the left and the right as the beat came in familiar patterns of threes.

She danced a bit, following my lead, and it was not at all a match to what I was playing but it was perfect.

After I finished, she rewarded me with an enthusiastic round of applause and I took a modest bow, which earned me an extra cheer. I was filled to the brim with joy. She knew I was here for her. I’d been right—she was somehow, some way, special.

We might have passed a whole night like that; I could have been satisfied with an entire lifetime of accompanying her clumsy jig in her janitorial uniform, but something in me called for more.

I dropped the bow to the ground; it fell with a loud clatter that I knew meant nothing but silence on her end.

The noise hardly even registered to me; my body was moving faster than my brain.

My hand was reaching forward, as if of its own accord, extending rapidly toward Claire, toward a world I’d never before touched.

At the edge of where my reality collided with hers, my hand stopped. A force I could not see held me in place. I looked at her and saw in her eyes her shyness, her uncertainty. I waited for her.

She took one step in my direction, and then another, and then another, until she was as close as she could get.

I stood a few feet taller than her, as I was naturally so, and the floor beneath my feet was higher than hers.

I lowered my hand as she stood on her tiptoes and soon it was within her reach.

Slowly, as if the air was as thick as molasses, she pushed her hand up toward mine, through the glossy boundary between my world and hers.

Our palms connected. Her hand was real and warm as our fingers intertwined. Without a second thought, I tightened my grip and pulled her in.