Cover

Dedication

For Virginia Tynes
and for Rafael Campo

Epigraph

Where is your Self to be found? Always in the deepest enchantment that you have experienced.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal

PRELUDE

Perspective Box

It seems a sort of peculiar toy at first, this elaborate painted box: a curiosity, almost ugly—what is this weird antique? I’ve been walking through room after room of paintings hung against the museum walls’ deep silks, rainy afternoon light filtering down through the skylights above, galleries full of splendid things. But somehow it’s this dim little side chamber—where a spotlight shines on this unwieldy object, right in the center—which I can’t seem to leave.

Perspective Box with Views of a Dutch Interior was made in the middle years of the seventeenth century, in Antwerp or Amsterdam, by one Samuel Von Hoogstraten, Dutch painter, aficionado of perspective, connoisseur of the complicated effects of light. A man who loved the eye’s involvement in the world. A man who lied with pigment; painting, he wrote, “deceives in a permissible, pleasurable, and praiseworthy manner.”

I’ve been thinking about praise, and the praiseworthy, all day—or rather, trying not to think about them. I’m entirely, irremediably nervous. I’ve come to London because I am among the finalists for a literary award, meeting British poets and publishers, doing some interviews with the press and BBC radio. The event’s surrounded by a hoopla no American poetry award would ever generate; the Independent, reporting on the reading last night, where each finalist read a poem or two, described me as “a whispery beanpole.” I am behaving as though I am a calm and more-or-less balanced adult, but in fact I’m reduced to something distinctly adolescent by the whole thing. Of course I’d like to win the prize, but can’t quite let myself imagine that; I don’t like to imagine the alternative either. Both options make my self-doubt flare, since to win would seem the strangest of flukes, an honor I couldn’t possibly merit, and to lose would confirm my own restless doubts. This is the terrible dilemma of prizes: we cannot believe we deserve them, and we cannot quite believe we don’t.

I am a believer in self-doubt, in my better moments; there’s nothing like an appropriate amount of it to keep us humane, clearheaded, level. But under these circumstances I have no perspective on my doubts, which seem to be mounting and vibrating, slapping against me like the waves I stirred up this morning, swimming furious laps in a public pool in Soho.

Wandering the National Gallery’s cool and formal chambers, I am trying to get as far from myself and my anticipation of the evening as I can get, and perhaps that’s what this strange wooden contraption promises.

I learn from the label on the wall that there are six of these perspectyfkas, as they were called in Dutch, remaining in the world, flowers of a minor artistic tradition. In the fifteenth century, Italian artists enthralled with perspective constructed boxes to experiment with the illusion of depth; their projects exemplified the passionate Renaissance marriage of science and art, their love for the mathematics of vision. French and German painters made “peep shows,” shadowbox assemblages of wax figures and objects, theaters behind glass. But the Dutch perspective boxes contained nothing at all, nothing but paint.

This one’s perched on an elaborate black stand, and embellished on its top and sides with decorative motifs: cherubs, implements of the artist’s work. One wall of the box has been left open, covered now with a sheet of Lucite, so that I can peer into the interior: painted walls and floor and ceiling, all representing the interior of a room. Uncurtained windows, open doors, furniture and books, paintings and mirrors, coats hung on a wall rack, a letter dropped on the floor’s geometric tiles: ordinary life.

But something’s strangely wrong. Some things are too large, others tiny, and nearly all seem bent or misshapen, twisted weirdly around corners or across floors and walls. That shape on the floor? A spaniel, his four paws resting firmly on the ground, but above his legs his body stretches wildly up the wall as though he’d been caught in a carnival mirror. The dizzy pattern of the floor tiles spins, as if in the vertigo of the world’s worst case of astigmatism. This is serenity transmogrified, Vermeer on hallucinogens.

But in the two walls which abut the transparent side are peepholes, little lenses like the eyepieces of telescopes. And when I place my eye to those disks of glass—revelation! The painted room suddenly is a room, each thing in place and in perspective. I can see every key on the virginal, the sharp outlines of the dropped letter (addressed to Von Hoogstraten himself, is this his house?), the boots and jacket in their place, the good dog who has been waiting to be seen.

The painter has rendered distortion so exactly that the lens corrects it perfectly; he paints the world misshapen, and the glass shapes it right again. Which means that he has had to misshape things just so, to bend forms so that light through the lens will bend them back again.

Why in the world go to this much trouble? Samuel Von Hoogstraten’s compatriots went to astonishing lengths to capture light transfixing a slice of lemon peel, the touch of sun on the lip of a pewter pitcher. All that struggle to get things right, and then he takes evident pleasure in painstakingly getting them wrong. Or at least seeming to, until the correcting lens reveals to us that his chaos is, in fact, art.

I try to walk away, but find myself stopping at the door, turning, walking the perimeter of the little room to view the box from all sides. Then I’m pulled back to it again, unsatisfied, wanting more.

The room where nothing’s clear, even the dog smeared up the side of the wall—that room comes clear, seen through the right glass. The lens corrects, clarifies, puts things in their proper arrangement. The glass lozenge allows me to see that I am looking into not merely one room but a house: there are chambers beyond this one, rooms with people in them—a woman reading, quietly, in a chair beside a window’s wash of cool Northern light. That Dutch glow seems made of both physical light and the lamp-shine of interiority, the polish things acquire in the steady, affectionate illumination of attention. Occupied rooms, lit by our seeing.

He doesn’t believe in darkness, Samuel Von Hoogstraten, doesn’t hold with chiaroscuro; for him clarity is all, and isn’t it possible that clarity might shine into every corner of the house, might bring its resolving certainty to everything, bring each object into right relation with all the other things in this little world: his terrarium, his terrestrial comedy of illusion? Does he mean that even the most distorted form might come true? No matter how deep the trouble, how twisted the form, the rectifying lens of art could set it right?

Or no—does he mean it this way, that art must distort, must bend the shapes of things? If this hellish playhouse weren’t deranged, then the device wouldn’t work, the lens would smear rather than resolve, cripple these figures rather than bring them to life.

But there are two lenses, dual peepholes through which to peer into this little chamber. Is that the point? Always a choice to make, which aperture to put the eye to. From either direction the house goes on and on, and even at the end of the diminishing series of chambers there isn’t an end but a doubt—a slice of room, maybe another door, at least a window that bathes a woman or a man who can’t be seen, a map or a Turkey carpet, in that pearly winter light. Perhaps a mirror’s hung on the wall, and in that way the chain of rooms is infinite, continuous, unknowable.

I try again to move on, into the next, brighter gallery. But it’s no use, it’s Samuel Von Hoogstraten I’m thinking of. What I want to be is alone, in this intimate room, with his box. When anyone else enters I wait in a corner till the intruder passes on, until I can return to my private study.

Maybe he was driven by doubt, too, unable to rest in two dimensions? His rooms and hallways have the almost-depth of stereopticon views, or those 3-D contraptions of my childhood, View-Masters, a sort of plastic binocular in which spun a cardboard disc holding transparent slides; pull the trigger, the disc turned, and the slides told a little story: wonders of the Grand Canyon, the labors of Hercules, the sorrows of Bambi.

What did Von Hoogstraten think he was doing? Who knows what he believed? What’s important is the resonant object, here, now, inviting interpretation and resisting it at once, a physical embodiment not of one idea but of many. It breathes with that odd, cold, long life that some works of art have.

This motionless thing—which has long outlived its moment of fashionable novelty, its unrecapturable context—offers a permanent demonstration, in its deep silence. Here is chaos brought to order and order dissolving again. We think that art makes order out of the unruly, but here chaos is made, too. And so we’re allowed to play, serious children, in Von Hoogstraten’s dialectic: back and forth, between the formless and the formed, worlds of appearance. Disorder resolves into pattern, then dissolves again, back and forth, as long as I stay.

Which might be all afternoon; I have all day, nowhere to be till evening. I don’t know that in a few hours T. S. Eliot’s widow—charming, a bit vague around the edges, a blond blur—will present to my book a prize named for her late husband, and that she and I and my British editor and various luminaries will all head off for a celebratory dinner in some fancy London boîte, where she’ll tell me stories of her life with “Tom” thirty years before. (My favorite: driving through Cape Cod, they tossed martinis out the window, with the intention of intoxicating the squirrels.)

The pressure of the competition seems a world away; I’ve lost myself in the world of this box. And I feel at home here, strangely, though I’m thousands of miles from anything I know; there’s something familiar about this house, something oddly comforting and unsettling at once, hard to resist.

And suddenly I want to lift off the lid of the box, want to break all the rules and grab hold of it, rip off the roof so I can peer down into those rooms…. Though it wouldn’t work even if I could do it; there’s no choice but to look through a lens.

Maybe around some corner—at some angle I’ll finally discover, if I lean into the eyepiece, if my eye works hard enough to probe the hidden recesses—I’ll find them, not Samuel Von Hoogstraten’s hidden people but my own, the family I can’t seem to see through any more direct means. They are hard to approach; they don’t want to be known.

Memory confounds and veils them, and were they ever clear to begin with? They were hidden from each other by a distorting rage, by sorrow, by the plain nameless gulf that comes between people. Whatever became of their kindness? Hard to see them even now, years later, far away from them, years away. Can I find them in these phantom rooms (only paint, only light on a screen) whose entrances and exits bend and shadow, diminish and vanish?

I look deeper into the dreamed house: sonorous old clock marking the shadowy hour. Sad objects: ancient blue pitcher with a stag in high relief, cracked blue-and-white cups, photographs of the dead, faces cooling as they travel on into their seclusion. Who knows their names now? Sway of the old clock’s golden pendulum. Sepia print of hunting dogs pointing to unseen prey. Glasses chill with gleaming distillates: vodka, turpentine. And here is the woman, weeping beside a painting she’s made, a bruised-looking bowl of lilacs, their cloud of dark panicles seething anger or sorrow. If I came upon her when she didn’t expect anyone, mightn’t I see something that would help me to understand her, and the obliterating gesture she’ll make toward her son?

The museum vanishes.

Cool black pistol dreaming in a drawer. A folding wooden yardstick edged in brass, precise case of drafting tools, a man also seething: resentment, loneliness? Though he’s well hidden, attempting to disappear in my dollhouse mirrors. A lace-paper doily folded into a little fan, a souvenir: here the daughter who’s already gone, smart girl, run as far and fast as she can. In this room—so far back in the house you wonder that you could ever find him!—a boy lost in a book, which is itself a tiny box. He’s dreaming into its unseen rooms, rooms he’ll travel all his life. Somewhere in the air above him a strange bird flashes by, flutter and hurry, bright turbulence. The book he’s reading configures this space: house and mother, sister and closet and father, endless hallway, tumult of wings. His book angles and skews them by artifice, and then tries to use artifice to set them right.

PART ONE

1

Rainbow Girls

In 1959, in Memphis, Tennessee, my sister, Sally, became a Rainbow Girl. She’d been initiated, she told me, into a secret society. What did it mean? What were they not allowed to tell? It was my family’s year for the sororal; my mother joined the Order of the Eastern Star and wore around her neck a little golden symbol which indicated her membership. I liked their name—ceremonial, vaguely Egyptian—but the simple necklace was far less interesting than the florid ephemera of the Rainbow Girls, the things Sally hid in the treasury of her lowest dresser drawer, mementos of every one of their occasions.

I am not allowed in her room, but I adore secrets, or rather secrecy’s trappings, especially the hidden souvenirs of my sister’s beauty, her unseen evenings.

Memory (stage designer, costumer, expert in theatrical lighting) orchestrates the scene like this: my sister’s darkened room, a little summer twilight bluing the window and the chest of drawers. Chifferobe, my grandmother calls it, rich old word that seems itself to smell like a closed drawer; bureau, my father says, polished word, waxy, tobacco colored. This one isn’t dark and varnished like my grandparents’ stuff, or the hodgepodge of old furniture in the other houses we’ve lived in; this new blond suite, angular, forward looking, seems a physical expression of my sister’s grownupness and privacy. My parents never buy anything new, so who knows where it’s come from; they must have had some little flourish of money as well as some burst of interest in style. Or did Sally choose it? She is almost sixteen, I am newly six; she will leave home soon, but we don’t know that yet. For now the important thing for me is that she has become a Rainbow Girl. Is that where she is tonight, off with her new sisters? My parents are down the hall in the living room, watching television, far away, absorbed in something that does not concern me, so I am free to pursue my investigations.

Her room is full of things that might invite my attention: a luscious satin pillow a boyfriend won for her at a fair, with verses written on it in stiff gold cursive and a border of irresistible yellow fringe. An autograph hound, a stuffed dachshund with a lean body of white cloth on which her friends have written salutations and verses and names. A record case made just for 45s, an object that seems feminine and precise, exactly suited to its purpose: beige vinyl fabric, fabric hinges, and when you lift the lid her favorites are revealed, black and glossy. I could pull out the matching phonograph and plug it in, but that wouldn’t really interest me much. I like to hear the openings of the songs she likes—“You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog,” “Love Me Tender,” something by Brenda Lee—but I don’t feel like sitting still for the rest of the song; I don’t believe I will be rewarded for sustained attention. As I will be, I know with all my heart, the full certainty of my six-year-old power of belief, when I look into the drawer.

To recollect: that verb’s exact, since here in the haze are elements of a collection, an assemblage of things so long unseen they might as well be the stuff of someone else’s life. That fringed carnival pillow: I haven’t seen that for forty years! And there it is, in sharp focus, weirdly noisy, the fabric crunching slightly when leaned into, its texture unpleasant but also fascinating, as you run a finger across the roughish print of the text and the satin interstices: scribble of a sentimental poem of devotion. And though the devoted and the devotee have long moved on, and the physical pillow vanished decades ago, its texture is precisely available to my fingertips now. Am I a repository of vanished things which float to the surface, slowly, one at a time, each with invisible links to another?

My raggedy stuffed tiger, for instance, with its green glass eyes—little fragments of the divine fire, alert, energetic, like something out of Blake, though of course I don’t think that then. He has long been put away, in the attic of our house on Ramses Street (the front porch has wide columns which taper at the top, a watered-down reference to Luxor). On some excursion with my mother into that hot, sequestered place, reached only by a mysterious collapsing stair that folds down from the ceiling, I’ve found him again and have taken pleasure in the recognition, a pleasure more complicated than mere affection. The nicely battered tiger is of a time which I think of as the past—of, as it were, childhood’s childhood. Now, at six, I have a past; I have an object which refers to who I used to be.

But the drawer, precious and hermetic, refers to who I am now. And to something else, something veiled, and perhaps there’s even a veil inside it, among these scraps of sheer and sparkled treasure. Sally must have shown them to me, proud of her new sense of belonging, though what they meant to her and what they mean to me are quite different things. For her they’re evidence of a common bond, proof of sisterhood; for me they are alluring artifacts of difference.

On my knees in the half dark, I slip the drawer open, and it’s like a pirate chest opened in a movie, little glimmers brilliant on the faceted surfaces of the treasures, little musical chimes sounding as if these were audible jewels. No light in the room except the glow emanating from these things, which include: a fan made from stiff folded net fabric—did Sally call it chiffon? No, that was the filmy beige stuff on her prom dress; this is tulle, striped, one watery hue merging into another, a skyey spectrum like the prisms in the air in my ViewMaster slides of Niagara Falls, rainbows over a lucky boat named Maid of the Mist. Glittery ribbons, carnations made from Kleenex clipped with a bobby pin and fringed, just so, then unfolded into a burst of imitation blossom, one drop of cologne fragrant at the center. Scents, powders, delicious nail colors, an album into which she’s pressed Rainbow invitations: the night all the new girls dressed as pickaninnies, required to do their faces from this round tin of blackface. They put their hair in one hundred—count them—little pigtails. Better: the invitation to the Rainbow Cotillion, inside whose stiff engraved fold of paper floats a perfect bit of aurora, like a ripple of colored atmosphere. Aurora: undulation of three vowels moving like heat-shimmer up off the Memphis pavement. Cotillion: I fall into the warm haze of the word, which contains crepe-paper flowers pinned to wrists and sashes, arbors made from twisted bits of tissue paper, and somewhere there are bells, reverberant as though the cotillion were held underwater, and bell-shaped dresses—tulle and chiffon and the stiff gold-printed satin of the pillow, the lovely whiplike tentacles of the fringe—all circling forever, almost untouchable, in a sphere of their own. In the album are ticket stubs and place cards and flattened decorated nut cups, party favors, beside which the familiar daily world of our house and things, the plain navy and dull scarred brown of my school seem dun, workaday—unseasoned, a tired old broth redolent of nothing but necessity.

Something about this pleasure feels entirely private. How do I know this is something to hide? Partly it’s just that this room and its thrilling stuff are hers, but something runs deeper than that: my fetishism isn’t about Sally but about beauty itself, about wrappings and presentation and display, about artifice and its perfection.

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