2.3. MRS. PALOMAR LOOKS AT ART
2.3.3. Still Life With Pearls
One afternoon Mr. and Mrs. Palomar go to a museum. They've spent countless afternoons together in museums, though Mrs. Palomar has never actually thought of them as afternoons "together," since Mr. Palomar is in the habit of engaging himself so intensely with one painting that he forgets entirely that his wife is with him and spends the few hours of their visit in front of one work, eyes barely blinking. Today Mrs. Palomar decides she will make no attempt to dissuade her catatonic husband, and when she notices a line of drool at the corner of his mouth as he contemplates a Caravaggio, she takes off walking rapidly down the museum corridor.
Mrs. Palomar likes ancient art, particularly Greek statuary, whose lines and curves she enjoys in their soft, mathematical humanity. She likes the look of decaying marble and clay, made by the years more beautiful than the artist had imagined it might be. Mrs. Palomar looks at the old stone, its dusty crevices telling innumerable stories of eyes, pale and dark eyes, searching eyes, eyes of children and animals, the paths of which have crossed years apart in the space surrounding this frozen piece of life. Her own eyes vibrate with the knowledge of their shared space, with the voyeuristic communion she feels with the other statuary viewers of the hundreds of years between herself and the artist. Lately Mrs. Palomar has noticed her years slipping away. Now, alone in the museum, she feels suddenly very young.
The statuary corridor leads directly into a room of still life paintings. The marble dust from the statues seems to drift behind Mrs. Palomar in a chalky cloud, as if she herself is the sculptor, unable to leave behind the residue of the studio. A small painting at the far end of the room captures Mrs. Palomar's attention and she walks to it, dust at her heels. It depicts a strand of oversized pearls draped over what appears to be the thin arm of a woman, but which could very well also be the arm of a man or a young boy, since it is clearly the home of a layer of short dark hairs. The pearls appear to Mrs. Palomar to be both startlingly realistic and vaguely otherworldly. Each one is impeccably crafted, with brush strokes so minute they are undetectable even to Mrs. Palomar's keen eye. Notes of pale blues and purples convey an exact spherical shape to each pearl, the sizes of which are graduated towards one large globe at the center of the strand. Where they touch the skin of the arm, the pearls are slightly removed from their perfect single file, and the shadows which they cast against one another are altered accordingly, stretched into tiny ovals or curves.
Mrs. Palomar is particularly interested in the minute spaces which are visible between the pearls, the tiny spots of string the artist has taken care to paint there so that a viewer such as she might not feel cheated or tricked. Mrs. Palomar longs to touch these spots of string. She feels that somehow they are intrinsic to her own body, to every action she has taken throughout her life, from the moment she first spotted Mr. Palomar's bald head in a crowd to the red, wet birth of their first child. Wiping the marble dust from her palms, Mrs. Palomar reaches out with an index finger, inching closer and closer to one of the spots of string, one of the two connecting the largest pearl to the rest of the strand. The skin of her finger is less than a millimeter from that barely perceptible stroke of paint when an alarm sounds, causing Mrs. Palomar to collapse to her knees.