Story: Gallery

It’s no wonder people hate looking at paintings. Stand in front of one and let it talk to you, my art teacher used to say during museum excursions, waving a hand down a gallery as though her wand-like fingers would magically give the paintings voices. What she didn’t say, of course, was that most pictures already do talk, but they don’t say anything. They exhibit themselves in all their multi-colored glory, flaunting their seeming openness, inviting you to share in their secrets, but behind their whispered temptations is an impenetrable wall, a blank canvas. Perhaps it is because they have been forced into a surface-deep existence, or perhaps it is because of their innately superficial natures, but paintings have perfected the most cunning form of evasion – of hiding in plain sight.

I first fell in love when I was 15. I didn’t call it love, of course. I called it friendship. Friendship allowed me a much wider latitude in his company. Friendship allowed me to mask a tender caress with force. Friendship allowed, where love restricted. But to use one word where another is meant, even if the effect you mean to produce is the same, is to pay the price of blankness. I loved, but I was impenetrable, a portrait of shaded words and actions that conveyed the most brilliant of nothings to all but the most discerning of people.

My mother, however, was one of those people. She never had to worry about me as I grew up, because I never gave her cause to, and yet she worried all the same. She understood what I was doing, because she did the same things herself. We acted as if we were angry, when in actual fact we were. We used the palette of emotions at our disposal to paint a veneer that refracted almost perfectly ourselves, because deception is at its most beguiling when the lies it breathes are closest to truth. And so she worried, because she looked at me and all she could see was my veneer, a crafted thing of manners, and she could not know whether I was an innocent person or a person who was innocent.

She did not worry too long about this, though. Like the boys before and after her, she learned not to look too closely. Part of me wants to reach through the likeness of me to grab her, to pull her into this rarely visited place I occupy, where I mix my colors, but I can’t, because to do that I would have to reach through her likeness as well, and only if she was willing to be caught would she not slip away from my grasping hands.

But of course, there is another obstacle to this meeting, a voluntary one on my side. Part of me wants our facades to be cracked, yes, but a greater part of me shrinks from the exposure for the same reason onlookers fear paintings – the terror that knowledge will not only be revealed to and reveal us, but will warp us as well, transform us in some intrinsic way into messy stains of hues, unrecognizable even to ourselves. And as we fear, so we hide behind our reproductions, not only acknowledging the opaque nature of the paintings everywhere around us, but hating them as well, the hatred our second layer of protection.