Cutter Matlock and the Rembrandt

2007-12-08T14:19:00.000-08:00

The following short story is a long labor of love, written before the author (Heather Funk) graduated high school, rejected in early 2007.

"Cutter" is actually the name of a real guy, not an "emo" reference.

The way the sunlight brings out the green in everything outside sort of reminds him of the words of a poem he read once—just-spring when everything is puddle-wonderful. As he thinks about it, the words fall into an insistent rhythm in his head, the telephone poles flying by the window serving as a sort of visual metronome. just-SPRING when EVE-RY-THING is puddle-WONDERFUL.

He loves the way everything is green and gray and gold, honestly. It gives him a satisfying rush of not being able to breathe. He thinks he might live for this, the first days of discernible twilight, the feeling that everything bad is winding down and soon will work out. Soon, when the sun shines. It's the only time of year when he can listen to old punk rock, feeling like he knows something of the passion that propelled the bands, their members now dead, to play and sneer and sing and want to change the world. Other times, fall and winter and cloudy days, listening to it saddens him, because he can't touch that feeling no matter how badly he wants to.

He wishes he had music now, something to separate him from the noise he knows he is not going to be a part of. There was this moment earlier, when he was halfway up the bus steps, when he realized that he doesn't really have any friends in his Art History class. He feels slightly ashamed, can detect the ghosts of the rest of the class's eyes on him, even when they are not looking, hot and unwaveringly intimidating. He shakes his hair out of his eyes and continues like he doesn't know that this entire day is going to be awkward, and only to him, which has to be the worst kind of awkwardness.

He had found an empty, not-too-torn seat at the inconspicuous part of the bus where the middle turns into the front, and pressed his face against the window. The glass rattles his forehead uncomfortably now. He leans back and closes his eyes instead, straining for nonchalance. He longs for the quiet solitude of the museum, where the rooms will be airily well-lit and he can wander around alone and not feel like an important part of him is missing. After that—lunch, going home—he doesn't know what he will do. But at least then he will have that peace inside of him, still, and maybe an idea will come.

The teacher, the kind of woman who insists on being called Ms. by her students (and is then often forced to explain why), passes out stiff hello-my-name-is stickers to everyone on the bus. He writes CUTTER upside down and sticks it over the embroidery on his polo shirt, feeling like an asshole. The bus hoarsely speeds across familiar roads, made new by the noise and the thrill of 9 a.m. on a weekday, and he closes his eyes and wishes he didn't wish it was over.

"The Dutch painters were renowned for their study of light, as you might notice in this painting," the teacher says to the gathered class. The tour guide, old and sullen, a powdery woman reeking of disdain for public schoolchildren, smiles warmly in cahoots with the teacher. "It's a painting, you guys. Remember that. Never a picture." The cat that licked the cream, he thinks of the expression on her face as she says it.

"Later," she continues, and the kids in all black are already starting to wander, and the girls with orange tans are whispering to the boys with really clean sneakers, and Cutter jiggles his foot a little in his own shoe. "Later, the Impressionists sought to capture light much the same way..."

Light. The way the sun comes in from the skylight a floor above them appeals to him. Here, everything is climate-controlled with cruel precision, and the light is studied, walking a fine line between subtle and artful that goes unnoticed by anyone. Someone, he thinks, must have thought a long time about how to make the light just right—time spent on something people aren't even required by common courtesy to care about. Light. Spotlights, not flourescent. He wonders what a light that is not floursecent is called. Incandescent?

He tries very hard not to listen to what the teacher and the tour guide are saying, like at church. Soon, when he catches just the right tone of voice—something like the preacher's as we stand and as we sing every Sunday at 12:15—they will be free to wander the museum. After that, they will go to the nearby college campus for lunch, which will be much like the bus ride.

He feels self-conscious in anticipation of it. His arms tingle and he doesn't know what to do with his hands. He tries to focus on the time before, which he can spend in the white-gray quiet among the pictures and sculpture and old, old things, alone. He'll have to remember to savor it. Everything after that will surely suck.

The tour guide's lecture, peppered by the teacher's snarky anecdotes, is punctuated with false endings. They move around the exhibition area—the basement of the museum—in fits and starts with no discernible pattern. Sometimes they are close to the door—getting warmer—and then they are in a far corner, staring at another picture of haystacks or women picking apple s, or in the middle staring at smudged scraps of paper covered in charcoal arms, legs, and cramped French. Cold.

Synopsizing the movement will do nothing to make anyone here care, he realizes. He cares, but doesn’t know why. The words that rasp out of the tour guide's pinched mouth are so bare-bones boring. When the artists were alive, he thinks, they were more worried about the color of a fold of cloth, the shadow of a corner of the ripe mouth of their wanton models—weren't they all in love with their models?—whether they were going somewhere later. Not how their work compared to Vermeer's or how the museum takes care to regulate its temperature.

Maybe he cares because he wishes he could paint, and have what that entails—dirty hair, a disheveled studio, strange habits and beautiful, self-conscious women surrounding him. Maybe that is living fast, doing something that one day people will look at and think, "he must have had some crazy ideas in his head." Paintings, like punk rock. The spring air and the people around him have him waxing philosophical, filling empty time with thoughts on what he would do to make the fact that he is not standing next to anyone right now, not matter.

"So feel free to go back and look at this on your own time," the powdery old tour guide says to the congregation with a half-assed smile.

"Yes," their teacher says. "You're free to go."

The silent exhalation of relief is followed by a mass exodus to the bathrooms and gift shop.

"There is a Rembrandt here, in our very own city," he recalls the teacher saying in class the day before. "You might have seen it before." Her tone was slightly worshipful, quietly reverent. He has heard Rembrandt before, other places. Places like Louvre, Holland, hundreds of years ago. He had wondered since then why it was important to have a Rembrandt in your very own city, and had decided to have a look at that thing at which the people in the Louvre, in Holland, people alive hundreds of years ago, had also had their looks at.

It is not on the first floor—Modern Art, which is a lot of plastic and swirls and the faint heat of things that, upon closer inspection, have a lot to do with sex. Neither is it in the Eastern Art wing, nor the solemn white Art of the Ancient world exhibit. (He pauses there briefly to absorb the emptiness and the sun and the faint trickle of a running fountain.) Watching his classmates pass him in threes and fours, unconcerned with his purposeful steps, he ascends the staircase to the dark purple wood-paneled labyrinth that holds Everything Else. He carefully reads the names underneath the frames, which look cheaper than they should be, passing unfinished pictures and faded statues of the Virgin Mary and glass bottles and chairs with purple ropes hung across their arms. In the back corner is a heavy, ornately carved frame with letters, unassuming, white, traced from Microsoft-Word, declaring:

PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN, 1634

REMBRANDT VAN RIJN

The only thing he really notices are that the painting is how dark it is and the solemnity of the woman's eyes. She's in those archaic clothes, the huge collar and the cap, staring out almost kindly, almost sadly. He wonders how many people have stood before this painting—it has been three and a half centuries. So old. So many people, great people, small people like him. And the first person was a man who cared about light, and tragedy, and solemn eyes, and getting the folds in a sleeve just right, and maybe whether people were going to see this painting after he died, and what the weather was going to be like the next day.

Cutter feels impossibly invisible for a moment.

Oil paint, he recalls, never really dries. So the brush strokes are still there, the handprints, maybe, of men hanging the painting, of Rembrandt himself.

Tentatively, he reaches out his own hand, wondering about the museum's security system. His finger barely brushes the bottom of the picture, just above the frame. It's cool, leathery. He withdraws his hand slowly and holds it out to his side, gingerly, while he quickly exits the room.

Soon, lunch. Bus. He knows that this is coming, but for a moment it doesn't matter. He feels the whisper of the painting on his hand, lingering like a brush against something foul or the forbidden accidental softness of a girl's breast. Only this time, he thinks it is eternity that is making its presence known; almost shameful, residual, right in the way that something that never questioned itself is right: quiet.

Fuck the Zephyrus

Cutter Matlock and the Rembrandt