Page 70 of Life Out of Order

She doesn’t recognize me and gives me a doubtful look. “Here I am,” she agrees and moves along to stand in the coat check line.

I feel unsettled, so instead of proceeding to the Ando Gallery I leave the museum, mulling over the encounter all the way home. I sit on the El staring out the window, unseeing. How strange it is to not know, to be forced to let things just happen. Since Henry died everything feels random. Is this what life is like for everyone else? I want to ask Henry, What does it mean that I keep thinking about her? But of course, if I could ask Henry I wouldn’t need to, because I wouldn’t notice her, because the part of me that notices her would be occupied with Henry.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

A few days after that less-than-satisfactory encounter, I am back at the Art Institute taking a shortcut through the Modern Art galleries on my way to have lunch with my friend Charisse when I spy Charisse through a doorway, standing in the Mary Reynolds gallery. I call her name softly, and Charisse turns away from the glass case full of Duchamp’s La Boîte-en-valise, brightens and gives me a hug.

“Clare, hello. I hope you don’t mind, I brought someone to meet you. Rebecka Charles, meet Clare DeTamble.”

I turn and find myself face-to-face with the mystery woman from the Ando Gallery. I can feel my face go hot, my heart racing.

There is a little spark of recognition. Rebecka smiles. “Oh, there you are,” she says, and she holds out her hand.

“Here I am,” I reply. I take her hand and feel a future fall into place. Does she feel it, too?

At lunch the conversation starts and stops at first, but Charisse tends to it, nudging each of us, asking me about my new exhibition and Rebecka about her coding project until we are all talking almost at once, laughing and finishing each other’s thoughts. “How long have you known each other?” I ask them.

“Just this semester,” says Rebecka.

But Charisse says, “A few years.” They both laugh. “We just met in person in August, when Beck moved here from Detroit to teach at SAIC. But we have known each other for a while online,” Charisse says. “Beck is working on this crazy thing, it’s a virtual museum.”

“What’s in your museum?” I ask.

Beck grins. “Mostly art, but other things, too. Some things I’ve invented, some famous things, some things that are hard to categorize. Because it’s a virtual space, there’s room for everything. I’ve got that dodo from the Museum of Natural History in New York, all those paintings that were stolen from the Gardner Museum in 1990, a lot of houses that used to be in Detroit but now they are just empty lots, the Buddhas of Bamiyan, a pile of unmatched socks, a room full of old love letters.”

“How does it work? If something has disappeared?” I ask Beck.

“Mostly I run around making my own 3D video to work from, but I can also reconstruct things from still photos.” Beck turns to Charisse. “I put in a new feature. My cat Ida B, the one who died right before I came to Chicago? She’s wandering around in there, she sleeps on the art and plays with visitors. It’s pretty amazing, you should check it out.”

“A virtual cat? Excellent.” Charisse seems more impressed by the cat than by the Buddhas or the dodo. “It’s very difficult to make things move naturally in VR,” she says to me. “And fur is a nightmare to render.”

“Oh, well, wow, then.” I’m thinking about Beck’s list. “So, it’s a museum of the past?”

Beck nods. “Very good. I’ve been calling it the Museum of Lost Souls.”

“Are there any people there?” I ask.

“No, but there could be. It feels good right now without people. Did you have anyone in mind?”

“I lost my husband a few years ago. I mean, I didn’t lose him; he died.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Beck says. It’s what everyone says, the ritual response. But she continues, “I sort of know how that is. My husband is lost.” She exchanges glances with Charisse, who gives her an encouraging nod. “He might be schizophrenic. Or maybe not; they haven’t really settled on a diagnosis. He’s having a lot of trouble, and . . . stuff happened. I can’t take care of him, unfortunately. It isn’t safe.”

“Oh, no,” I say. “That’s terrible.”

“Yeah. This all happened a few years ago. I’m just starting to feel right again. It’s one of the reasons I moved here; I thought if I got some distance I could begin my life over.”

“Did it work?” Charisse asks.

“Not yet.”

“I don’t think I want to begin again,” I say. “I want to continue. I have a daughter, so I can’t press the reset button. But I feel as though something has stopped. I can’t seem to make any art that I care about. The work I used to make seems inert, silly.”

“It’s not, Clare,” Charisse says. “I love your work.”

“It’s like it was made by somebody else,” I say. Charisse waits for me to explain. I look at Beck to see if she understands. She nods. She’s waiting, she knows I’m about to tell her a secret. “I’m just imitating my own work. It seems like a kind of sin against art to keep making things I don’t care about. I don’t know why I keep doing it.”

“Habit, most probably. Maybe you have to change,” Beck says. “What would you tell me if I was your student and I said that my work felt dead to me?”