The Music Lesson by Katharine Weber Page B

questioned, by the way, even though it’s on an oak panel. It’s the only absolutely definitely A-OK Vermeer on a wood panel. So, if anything, that might add to its value, I suppose. Its provenance is impeccable. Vermeer’s widow sold it to a baker to settle a debt the year after Vermeer’s death. It paid for bread. Isn’t that amazing? This painting paid for bread for Vermeer’s widow and eleven children.”
    I had been enjoying the feeling of letting my own expertise out for a canter, given Mickey’s apparent fascination with my knowingness as much as with the subjectunder discussion. But I was suddenly self-conscious, feeling that I was sitting there naked, babbling, making a fool of myself, boring him.
    “Just about every Vermeer is in a museum or public collection, anyway,” I concluded. “So it would be impossible to say what this painting would be worth. How much is priceless on the open market?”
    “Perfect,” he breathed. “You are perfect, and she is perfect. And she’s a Brit to boot, and she’s owned by Betty Windsor herself, which is brilliance on top of brilliance. I am in love with you both.”
    Mickey leaned over and kissed the page, kissed the woman in
The Music Lesson
very softly on the edge of her face, and then he closed the book carefully and put it on the floor beside the bed and lay back on the pillows, pulling me with him. I tugged the covers up, suddenly chilled. He lay on his back contemplatively, with his hands behind his head, as if something momentous had been settled.
    “Uh, Mix, does this conversation have any meaning?” I ventured after another long silence.
    “This conversation will change your life,” he said.
    The first thing I did when I was alone with her—this is something I feel very strongly about and I am not afraid to admit this, though some would think that I risked injuring the painting—was take the panel out of the frame. I did it in order to remove the glass.
    I hate glass. I cannot be more emphatic about it. I hate it. It’s a recent trend in museum management, glazing paintings, because it’s cheaper than hiring enough guards and it protects the merchandise—the work of art people glimpse on their way to the interactive CD-ROM installation—from vandalism or accidental damage. Glass also prevents the painting from being fully present. You just can’t
see
a painting under glass.
    I don’t care what anybody says: The nonreflective glass is even worse; it absolutely embalms paintings. But even under ordinary glass, the texture is blunted, there are all those damned reflections of ugly light fixtures in the gallery or other people or yourself, and the art just doesn’t breathe. No painter I can think of ever intended his paintings to be viewed through a sheet of glass mounted a quarter inch above the paint surface. In most museums, the lighting is so terrible that looking at paintings under glass isn’t much different from looking at reproductions. If anything, it’s worse.
    The public doesn’t know any better. The public, for the most part, probably hasn’t noticed the way glass has become ubiquitous. The public glances at the art and then stampedes to the gift shop anyway. Well, what can I say? It’s the same public that has come to accept sex with condoms. The principles are quite similar. We live in an age of risk, where it is no longer safe for a painting in a public collection to be regarded with the naked eye.
    I set her free of that hateful glass, and then, before Iput the panel back into its frame—an excellent Dutch frame, probably eighteenth century, very severe black wood, it’s precisely the right frame for the painting, not one of those “I am a masterpiece” ornate gilt plaster jobbies in which some museums mistakenly imprison their seventeenth-century Dutch pictures—I just sat with the simple painted panel in my two hands and I looked and I looked and I looked. And anything that might happen to me when this is over, however it