I am too American myself, and lack juices.
—Henry Adams
EXCEPT FOR THIS problem of Roxy’s, Paris was kind of promising. Then, I had no premonitions, no glimpse of the future. Looking back, it must have been at about this same time—when Roxeanne’s troubles began, and when I arrived in Paris to help her—that our mother, Margeeve Walker back in Santa Barbara, got a letter from a Julia Manchevering, resident art historian at the Getty Museum.
Santa Barbara is a city of mythological dimension in the minds of the French because of a soap opera called Santa Barbara, which airs on French television, dubbed in French, involving the lurid social complications usual in soap operas, among uniformly blond, rich Californians, set against scenes of sunny surf and Washingtonia palm and bougainvillea-bright patios. A place not Los Angeles, not northern, quasi-Spanish, old Californian, bland. I actually spent most of my childhood in the Midwest, where my father taught political science at a small college, but we moved to California when I was twelve when he married Margeeve. I loved our new home better.
My father, now a professor at UC–Santa Barbara, and stepmother, with her odd name Margeeve, live in a California-style, that is to say modest forties bungalow in a valuable location on Miramar Avenue, with an ocean view and access to the beach, amid houses that are worth a lot more. Or I should say: our house, because of its situation, is worth a lot more than it’s really worth. Margeeve and Chester had the good fortune or vision to buy during one of the periodic declines in the value of real estate near the beach that follow a particularly destructive storm, and they were aided by a loan from an uncle of my father’s, William Eshrick, a Santa Barbara dealer in moldy European art—paintings dark and indistinct enough to look ancestral in the palatial haciendas of Montecito (a section of Santa Barbara lived in by those movie folk who think themselves too refined to live in L.A.). Tortured saints, especially Saint Sebastian, the one pierced by arrows, and heavily varnished landscapes are favored. Uncle William, now dead, had acquired a warehouse of indifferent Spanish and Italian examples of these gloomy subjects during the thirties, when more brilliant collectors were buying Impressionists and Expressionists, but he knew his market for art that was neither too distressingly religious nor too sentimental, and sufficiently crazed and cracked to look valuable. One of these was Roxy’s favorite painting, of Saint Ursula, the virgin martyr.
Julia Manchevering was asking about one of Uncle William’s paintings (most of which had been sold at his death). In the course of writing a book about the iconography of Saint Ursula, she had been tracking the provenance of a certain painting, perhaps representing Saint Ursula, sold in the thirties by a dealer on the rue du Bac to, possibly, our uncle William Eshrick and still apparently in the inventory of his estate at the time of his death.
Approximately 100 cm by 140 cm, representing a young woman, her hand upraised, sitting at a table. (Saint Ursula 889–891?) The saint (?) is looking to her right, toward the lighted candle, and behind her a treasure, including a royal symbol signification unknown, is barely illuminated in the candlelight.
At this same time, coincidentally, in Margeeve’s art history class they had taken up the study of French seventeenth-century painting—cursorily, for it is not considered to be of much interest, though of more interest lately because the Getty Museum buys French painting, which it seems American museums didn’t used to do. I suppose the gloomy religiosity of Italian painting went better with the neo-Gothic mansions of the nineteenth-century American millionaires, or else the French emphasis on nymphs and people in swings having fun offended our ideas of seriousness, back then. But French painting is in fashion now.
Armed with this new interest in French painting, Margeeve replied to the Getty that their description did indeed sound like the picture Roxeanne had taken to Paris with her, and presumably still had. She noted parenthetically to Dr. Manchevering that they had always thought her daughter Roxeanne resembled the woman in the painting. Daughter Roxeanne had given it to her French husband as a wedding present. A correspondence (unbeknownst to Roxy in Paris) had developed, in which the Getty lady hoped to borrow Saint Ursula, or at least to see it. She mentioned the possibility it was by a student of the French painter Georges de La Tour, and the Getty was planning an exhibition of his works.
The painting was hanging over the fireplace in Roxy’s apartment on the rue Maître Albert, and before that had hung for years in Roxy’s room at home in Santa Barbara, but now has been crated and sent to Drouot, the auction house, for sale, breaking Roxy’s heart, for she loves this saint and used to tell her her secrets. Inside an ornate gold frame, Saint Ursula regards a dark future of proposed matrimony. She would rather be massacred. The painting is listed in the catalogue as “Sainte Ursule(?)” by “un élève de La Tour.”
In physics class (dumbbell physics) I learned about how the displacement of atoms means that the existence of anything affects the existence of everything, and that’s how I imagine the painting of Saint Ursula, dislodging matter, making waves since the unknown seventeenth-century artist painted it.