MUSEUM by Anthony Wallace
Long shot of the MUSEUM late Saturday afternoon. In the park across the street the orange-pop sunlight cut low against the bare trees, dead bark curling on the birch and sycamore trees. December 1. Winter has arrived in Boston, or almost – the seasonal changes have arrived but not the cold. People stand outside the main entrance of the MUSEUM in sweaters and shirtsleeves, holding their coats. Inside, in a room off the first floor lobby, cool shadows and a marble reliquary. The carved face and hands of a woman clutching marble palm fronds, her slender limbs receding into a marble burial gown. Do not touch, the sign cautions. Oils from your hands will permanently disfigure the marble.
A twelve-year-old girl stands in her red coat, looking at the sculpture and pulling at a scratchy pair of mittens. An old woman passes behind her like the rustling of leaves. She says, “That woman is dead,” moving her hand in a smooth circle as if to cast a spell on the room and its contents: dark American oils of the nineteenth century, most notably Winslow Homer and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and a few pieces of furniture from the Aesthetic Period. “All the things in here are dead. That’s what makes them so beautiful.”
The girl’s mother takes her by the hand and pulls her hurriedly from the room. For a moment the girl resists.
“MUSEUM,” a voice says, somebody says, at the other end of the darkly polished hall. “Like a magic box.”
“You put one thing in,” a second voice says, “another comes back out.”
“You put one person in,” the first voice says, “another comes back out.”
* * *
In another room a guard tests the soles of her shoes against the sureness of the wide-planked chestnut floors. For these eight hours the guard will alternately stand still and pace in a room that houses photographs of destruction: the Iraqi desert, a tenement building collapsed by a wrecking ball, a bombed-out storefront in Northern Ireland.
The guard thinks about losing weight, which is what she thinks about most of the time. A desert scene littered with broken tanks; a flight of stairs left standing against the only remaining wall of a razed house with an ocean view.
You should see my house, thinks the guard. You ought to. People like you –
* * *
Behind the MUSEUM a tall, skinny pet sitter walks a cat on a red licorice-whip leash. She looks up at the building, which is composed of gigantic granite blocks, and then down at the cat. She looks back and forth a few more times: cat, MUSEUM, cat, MUSEUM. Then she stalks grimly off, pulling the cat along with her, as if an important choice has just been made.
* * *
In the park behind the MUSEUM people are wandering across the clumps of dead grass and among the fallen leaves. The leaves on the trails are perfectly dry and brittle. In one place they run with lyrical animation into a littered gully. Ducks meanwhile drift on the stagnant pond; in one place, where a beam of light has descended through the bare branches of the willow trees, a turtle breaks the water with its buckled snout. A man stands watching the turtle, his elbows planted on the smooth railing of a little stone footbridge. The man is pleased with himself for spotting the turtle. As a boy he lived in New Jersey, in a little coastal town called Shellpile, down in the inward-curving southern tip of the state, and his father taught him how to watch the water’s surface and distinguish things. His father had been an oysterman on the Delaware Bay before the oyster industry was devastated by parasites.
The man came to Boston to study architecture at Northeastern but dropped out before the end of his first year. That was over twenty years ago. Now the man stands on the stone footbridge, thinking of rape. He watches the pet sitter go off with the leashed cat and thinks disturbing thoughts. Down in the leaves by the stone house no longer used by the Park Service, down in an empty room with stone walls, down in the basement of a ruined place with rusted metal stairs, the cement floor littered with unrecognizable things.
The man walks off, his back to the MUSEUM, and the little scene is filled with long shadows and a shaft of light that splits the bridge in two.
* * *
Back inside the MUSEUM the café is filling up in the waning afternoon. People are eating salads sprinkled with walnuts and dried cranberries and drinking glasses of overpriced wine. A sampling of desserts is displayed on a tiered silver stand: carrot cake and crème brulee and flourless chocolate torte. In the gift shop next to the café you can buy reproductions of some of the paintings that hang in the MUSEUM. You can see a picture you like, you can stand before it as if in front of a fancy mirror, and then you can take a copy of it home with you and hang it on your own wall.
* * *
In the aisle that separates the café from the MUSEUM’s cinema the girl in the red coat and her mother are having a terrible argument. The mother wants to attend a special screening of Nosferatu, complete with piano and violin accompaniment (she recognizes a favorite piece by Bartok on the program), but the girl insists she is afraid of vampires. Perhaps somewhere inside the MUSEUM there is a painting of a woman and a girl in a red coat having a terrible argument. Perhaps also someplace in the world there is a painting of a man standing on a stone footbridge, watching a turtle’s buckled snout break the surface of a greenish-gold pond while having disturbing thoughts. This would somehow be suggested, since in a painting you don’t know what any of the people are thinking, how they got to wherever they are, or what will happen next – there are only suggestions, and it is mostly a matter of interpretation.
There are three girls, for example, in a very large canvas on the first floor, in the room next to the nineteenth-century oils. The girls are well dressed and seem well cared for, the children of the upper middle class, perhaps painted for a fee. Imagine they are your girls. In the next room, you and your wife are having a terrible argument. Then too, they could be waiting for a wonderful party to begin. This is a moment in their childhood, perhaps an important moment, and it hangs in space. Who would not like to own it?
“Changes,” mutters a voice just outside the frame. “Transformations.”
“Your girls,” offers a second voice. “Somebody else’s girls.” Silence, laughter, silence. “The world’s well-dressed, well-cared-for girls.”
* * *
The guard, even now, stands in the room filled with images of destruction. Once in a while a small tour group comes into the room. The guide explains things and takes questions. The guard was happier last month when she was stationed in eighteenth-century American portraits. She would like to have lived back then. She admires the clothes, and the people in general seem to be short and a bit overweight. Sometimes one is born in the wrong time, like a gentle plump woman who is forced to stand in a room filled with images of destruction. On the far wall is a huge black and white silkscreen of a woman’s back, a scar running down her spinal column like an enormous iron zipper. The guard thinks for a moment that she might unzip the woman and see inside her. Then, when she’s finished, she can close the woman back up. That’s what standing in a room like this will do to you, thinking about unzipping human beings instead of dancing the minuet. Some rosy-cheeked man in a powdered wig would give her such good things to eat, everything fresh from the farm.
The guard thinks of ample bellies in snug waistcoats, short legs in white stockings, dusty heads in tricorne hats.
* * *
The hallway between the images of destruction and the eighteenth-century American portraits is lined with black and white photographs. Probably a lot of the people who took the pictures are dead by now, but the people inside the frames all look dead. This is the conclusion the old woman who earlier spoke to the little girl in the red coat has come to. They look out at you like dead people; whatever their expressions might have been at the moment when the film was exposed, they now seem to be engaged in the act of beseeching. That is the word the old woman finally decides on: “beseeching.”
Two sly-faced teenage boys, the older one behind the wheel of a shark-finned convertible, the younger one not quite settled in his seat, the passenger’s-side door still open. “A couple of slick-headed jelly beans,” her father might have said. This picture was taken in 1955. The boys are over sixty by now, if they haven’t run afoul of some fatal violence, together or alone – perhaps just moments after the picture was taken. That is what is suggested by the photograph. It is a picture full of bad choices.
The old woman regrets the bad choices in her own life. The whole crowd of them that night after the senior prom drinking too much and her girlfriend Patsy killed in a car crash. Running around with foolish boys like the ones in the picture. So damn smart.
In the next photo a little boy in a striped polo shirt wanders the bargain basement of a department store, women’s underwear overflowing the display tables. The old woman can see it’s the nineteen sixties by the way the people are dressed, by the hairstyles, by the prices on the hand-printed signs. This moment they had is dead and all the other moments after that right up to the present moment are dead.
The old woman never had any interest in art, but one day she decided to spend an afternoon in the MUSEUM and it struck her, suddenly and with some force, that the MUSEUM is a glorified mausoleum. This idea both thrills and disturbs her, and she always comes back, every Saturday, marveling at the widespread interest in dead things and in moments past and in possibilities lost. As part of the routine she wears the same clothes each time, fixes her hair the same way. She always has someone take her picture next to a Turner of London Bridge at dusk. For this she carries with her an old Polaroid camera, and she waits until the guards aren’t looking. She has them all in an album, every photograph, it’s been about six or seven years since she started. It seems to be something she has to do, a sort of ritual that needs to be acted out. Sooner or later she won’t be able to buy Polaroid film anymore, and she’ll have to stop.
* * *
The girl in the red coat and her mother stand outside the MUSEUM. Twilight and the lighted tops of taxicabs. For a moment the girl and her mother go out of the frame. Twenty minutes later they reappear in a Chinese restaurant on a side street a block away from the MUSEUM. The restaurant is crowded. Mother and daughter sit between two drooping fichus trees in the paneled outer room, waiting for a table. The man on the bridge comes into the restaurant. He walks quickly by them and goes to the counter to pick up a bag of take-out. The girl’s mother tells her about the time she was in a Chinese restaurant with her mother. The place was empty; it was the middle of the day, the middle of the week. The waiter came up to a table next to theirs and found for his tip a neatly stacked pile of pennies. He threw them against the red and gold flocked wallpaper. The pennies made a furious sound like a sudden cloudburst as they hit the wall and then popped and pinged onto empty plates and into tea cups and water glasses.
The woman often thinks of this. She hadn’t wanted to tell the story to her daughter, but she is trying to steer the child’s attention away from a magazine, lying near one of the fichus trees, which offers sex tips to teenage girls. The man on the bridge meanwhile has gotten his dinner and passes them again, pausing for a moment to admire the girl, overheated in her red coat and listening distractedly to her mother.
The girl’s mother tried to make the story funny by imitating the waiter hurling the pennies and cursing in Chinese, but the image fell flat. The girl doesn’t care, though, because she’s thinking (and for the rest of her life will continue to think) of a painting she saw in a room on the second floor devoted to French Impressionism, a Gauguin of a topless Polynesian girl holding an idol that looks like a little golden monkey. The girl in the red coat thinks of the Polynesian girl’s breasts, exotic browns and greens shot through with different shades of orange and pink, a few crosshatchings of purplish-blue, the Polynesian girl’s face impassive behind the screen of black hair, the idol-monkey’s luminous face simultaneously terrifying and beautiful.
* * *
The old woman goes back to her apartment and tapes another snapshot into the book she keeps of her Saturdays at the MUSEUM. She lies on her bed without turning the covers down, switches off the light by the bedside, folds her hands atop her chest, steeple-like. She was going to read something but has decided not to. The man in the apartment beneath hers has his television on too loud, as usual, and it spoils things.
* * *
The man on the bridge returns to his apartment. Thumb-tacked and Scotch-taped to the cinderblock walls are images of women bound and gagged in different ways: ropes, chains, cloth, electrical tape, sex toys, household objects. The man locks the door and then places a six-foot iron bar into the brass fixture in the center of the door, one end in the door and one end in the corresponding brass fixture countersunk into the scuffed oak floor – a device called “the Strangler Lock” in honor of the Boston Strangler, whom it was designed to keep out. The man sits down at his kitchen table and opens each white carton, slowly, carefully, one after the other. The scent of Chinese cooking comes steaming into the cluttered room. He plucks a shrimp dripping with black bean sauce from one of the cartons and drops it to the waiting cat.
* * *
In the evening the MUSEUM closes down, and all the images are sent for a time into darkness. On the third floor a suit of Japanese armor in a glass case stands next to a dim security light. The metal horns of the helmet hold the faintest glimmer. A little man on his rounds as a night watchman comes into the room, looks into the black distorted face of the Japanese mask. The mask was meant to inspire terror in an enemy. The mask does not, however, inspire terror in the little man. “Hello there,” he says, shuffling the soles of his shoes on the polished floor and gently tapping the glass with the knuckles of his right hand. “Hello, my brother.”
* * *
Just down the hall, the head of a four-thousand-year-old mummy rests face‑up inside a backlit display case. Part of the neck also remains. Grave robbers broke into the tomb sometime around the birth of Christ, decapitating the mummy and setting its body on fire. Displayed in other cases are the few household objects found when the tomb was discovered at the turn of the last century, and also recreations of artifacts that probably would have been in the tomb but which were stolen by the grave-robbers: tables and chairs, wooden staffs, foodbowls, coarsely woven sacks of grain and dried fish; also miniature wooden figures in the act of planting and boatbuilding and cattle-tending, to represent not just things the inhabitants of the tomb wanted to take with them into the next world but an entire way of life. The figures have the reddish-brown complexion of river mud and wear the plain white shifts and bowl-cut hairdos that anyone who has seen Hollywood movies of ancient Egypt would recognize.
The head survives, the ragged bit of neck like a tattered scarf, the face with its inscrutable expression, the recreated nose and mouth, built up with layers of gauzy fabric and then painted on, the painted surface almost completely eroded, the padded nose and lips still full and conveying a sense of proportion, recreation of the face part of the technique of preserving and honoring the dead body, of making it presentable in the next world. The final step would be the placement of the funeral mask, a painted face to place over a painted face; the grave robbers took the mask away with them, but a reproduction hangs in another case close by the head.
The magistrate of the province and his wife were buried inside this tomb, but scientists do not know whether this is the head of the magistrate or of his wife. It is the mummified head of a human being. Its face is not so different from our face, its expression not so different from our own. It has been robbed of its body, and of most of its possessions. The head remains, its funerary cap still in place, a darker shade of brown and tight-fitting like the leather caps of pioneering motorcyclists, one painted eyebrow a vivid caterpillar-green with black cross-hatchings, startling but not entirely incongruous, the only piece of cloth that remains of the painted top layer, the cap and the eyebrow suggesting surface, everything else suggesting what lies beneath, the mud-colored strips of fabric used to wrap the face causing the head itself to seem grainy, fibrous, the features melting into a dizzying maze of pinholes and striations, one of those sights that always reminds us of the complexity of nature even in the most commonplace objects, like something pulled casually from the trunk of an old tree, a cankerous growth perhaps, something bulbous, half-rotten, not the painted face of nature but its underside, the unsurprising and inevitable decay of things, structure but also the annihilation of it, some fundamental reality encoded here for anyone to see, intelligible and mysterious, ordinary and shockingly singular, the proof of its veracity that we can’t stop staring. Its true home has always been the MUSEUM.
Anthony Wallace is the author of the short story collection The Old Priest (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013).