MONET'S HAIR
by Brian Katz
In the absurdity of my life and the
depth of my exhaustion, I keep slipping into lifelessness. I say
"lifelessness" and not "death" because of the finality of the
latter and the temporary implication of lack of life in reference to the
former. I mean, it is more likely that one can be lifeless for a period of
time, like autumn, but dead is dead without a sense of recovery. This word
choice may be incorrect, but as I sit here on the hard oak bench in the
European wing of the County Museum trying to break the vicious obsessiveness of breathing as the alarum of nervous energy
lights up the joint, I attain little lifeless moments and I am so relieved to
find myself alive mere seconds after fading out that I want to cease seeming
alive again in order to remember how thrilling it was to be alive.
But really, despite the enormity of these seconds slowly ticking away, I
know I’m in a heap of shit.
I know that when I get off this bench and the full detail of security
guards – Laurel, Hardy, Larry, Moe, Curly, Wayne, and Markus – pounce on me
before I can even try to go about the rest of my evening pulling the last
strands of my life like dry lengths of hair from a balding pate that I'll
forget what it is that I'm doing or not doing and just be sweeping the floors;
or, perhaps, and more likely, they’ll be sweeping the floors with me.
And like I said, I’m in a heap of shit; not because I haven’t been doing
my job well, but because I touched one of the paintings. No, not just touched
one of the paintings, but damaged a significant portion of it.
No, I destroyed the masterpiece.
While sitting here falling in and out of meditative bursts brought about,
uncontrollably, by weeks of sleeplessness, I realize that more than my job has
been lost, but perhaps, a significant portion of my sanity.
My job? I swept, mopped, and dusted floors.
(Note how I am using the past tense here.) Not just any floors, but, like I
said before, the floors of the County Museum, a museum so over-guarded and
neurotic that I almost didn't get the job because I was a visual arts major in
college (for the two and a half years I attended state college) and they feared
that I would be either too experienced to sweep its floors, too distracted to
sweep its floors, or they were suspicious that I would want to sweep its
floors. I just wanted a job that kept me up at night. By being awake at night,
I had less to worry about because it was at night, trying to sleep, that all my
fears manifested into nightmares that were too real to be dreams -- and so,
whatever razor that would leave scars on my forearms, I would dull; and
whatever insomnia plagued my night, I would beat back with a rising sun and
exhausted eyes. The one thing I knew was that I wasn't witty enough to be
subversive enough to steal -- they weren't as sure; but after a background
check, my credentials were certified: I was in no way a threat and certainly
good enough to sweep the floors and smart enough to respect the space that I
was maintaining.
And I needed a job.
In the midst of a bender of sorts for the
duration of two weeks after my interviews with a hoary old dude in union
fatigues and a personnel director and a curator and a security chief, I was
called upon.
I was to sweep the floor of the
After several months of redundant living, comfortably functioning in the
pattern of my mundane life, I punched-in in the bowels of the museum at 9pm
five nights a week in the most diligent manner, I was
deemed responsible and deemed such by being offered a health plan.
I was a janitor with a health plan.
Life was as good as it could be for me.
I came to work and occasionally a security
officer searched my belongings, and by "occasionally" I mean that
when Wayne wasn't on night detail and on Thursdays and Fridays he wasn't on
duty, I anticipated some going-over, but being that it was Wednesday I didn't
plan on being searched but Wayne's mother was sick and Markus was sitting at
the security entrance picking a dinner or two from his teeth. He casually said
hello and shook my backpack. A loud clank against my metal
thermos.
"Metal fork, I'm outta plastic," I
said.
"Yeah, that happened to me last week, but I didn't bring nothing'
and was stuck with a chopstick that I found in the drawer. I had to stab my
food in order to get it into my mouth," he said as he opened my bag to
inspect the contents.
I waved my fingers in his range, “I suppose that’s what we have these
for,” and then he lifted his grubby mits and I got
the gist of his resigned use of a chop stick.
"Well I bet you're glad it wasn't salad," I said.
"Salad?" he seemed to ask as he handed me my bag after the
cursory search.
"Yup, that's part of my lunch," I said; and I said, “lunch”
after having embraced my imbalanced day. At midnight I ate lunch and at 7am I
ate dinner.
My routine was a matter of widening and shrinking concentric circles:
Took the elevator up with my cart to the third floor, my supplies – a light
chemical cleaner in a spray bottle, a durable plastic container of industrial
cleaner for the bathrooms, air freshener, urinal chips, floor wax, rags, push
broom, feather duster, mop, and bucket --, my security keys, my walkie-talkie,
my awareness of all the cameras on me, and my backpack – everything on me and
in my canvass and plastic cart. I started in the middle on the third floor of
the West building and worked from the inside out to the far stairways,
sweeping, mopping, and dusting the floors, the benches, the doorways -- wasn't
to go near the frames or pedestals (they had specialists for that) – and
scoured the bathrooms with chemicals and took the stairway, carefully lowering
my janitorial cart one step at a time, from the third to the second floor and
worked into the elevator to the first floor. My route was carefully monitored
by the various security cameras robotically searching the rooms, the halls, and
the nooks in their mechanical autism; and despite the lack of life in the
reverberating halls – for art doesn’t seem to absorb sound – I also knew that
any of my janitorial fellows, including my shift supervisor, could roll
through, a mobile bucket brigade, at any moment; or one of the madcap menaces
of hall monitors in near slap-stick perfection and in sufficiently stained
uniforms could pass en route to their check-points – a timed passage from
security box to security box to lunch break.
And then there’s the legion of stiffs, the Shade, Eve, Balzac, Hugo all
looking down at me, following me, as I leave their room to enter my respite
room, the one with the most aggressively invasive forms of surveillance from
the customary corner cameras to infrared walls of secrecy, and heat sensitive
shields; and then there are the pinprick camera holes interspersed throughout
the room where nary a centimeter of space is forsaken by several angles. It’s
here, on the first floor, that I use my walkie-talkie and request clearance.
It’s also here, in the Impressionist room of the European collection, that I
take my break in front of Monet’s “Nympheas,” a
painting of two water lilies and nine lily pads all merging into each other --
gray and green sludge. Believe me, it was not an intentional pause in my duty;
it was just that there was a fine wooden bench that I polished once a week and
situated, by my estimation, in the exact middle of my evening travels from West
building to the adjoining, smaller East building. Initially, I would’ve thought
that eating in the museum would be against regulations, but the theory behind
allowing this respite was that returning to the locker room would take more
time and possibly lead to overtime. So, aware that I had one hour in a room
that would take 20 minutes to tidy, I was allowed, as were the other three
night janitors, to break the rules.
On this one particular night, just over one month ago, “Nympheas” was replaced by another of the Museum’s Monets, “In the Woods at Giverny:
Blanche Hoschedé at Her Easel with Suzanne Hoschedé Reading.” Paintings sometimes shifted locals due
to various curatorial needs or maintenances. I welcomed the new backdrop.
Here I sat at a distance comparable to Monet’s distance from his
subjects and drank a few sips of water and ate my lunch, the aforementioned
salad with cheese and bread and my treat of the day – usually an on sale
granola bar or sports bar from Trader Joes.
My mop, haphazardly placed in my bucket attached to the front of my
cart, slid, without any coaxing, from its position and passed through the
invisible wall between spectator’s space, my space, and the wall, yet, I’m
sure, still a foot or two away from the frame of the painting. The shade of evening
brightened and I could hear and feel the many artificial lenses wide-eyed in
accusation. Almost a false alarm; but there have been genuinely false alarms:
About a month before, in the Japanese collection in the North building, old man
Marty's wing, a clump of dust fell from an exit sign he was feathering and
unexplainably set off a blitzkrieg of alarms, none of which I heard from my
distant position in the West building, but I could sense the shifting focus of
the many ghosts throughout my complex.
Mere seconds away from the sonic thunder of my
mop handle, I reported the slip as per regulations – “Sorry, my mop fell from
my bucket” -- and received a “Check.” As I leaned over to retrieve my natty
maid, I came in close to the painting, closer than audience close, and I
noticed a thumbprint-sized wound and the space of joining pieces of frame
meeting at a corner unprofessionally adjoined. And then I leaned in a little
closer, drawn by the shoddy framing, and I noticed a small tuft near the right
corner in the grass, a reflective rust between blades; a patch of bristles,
Monet’s brush, perhaps, or a foreign substance of filaments simply incorporated
for the sake of it. The idea that something so unrefined and modern in the
content of the master’s strokes and gestures struck me as odd and out of
character. I leaned even closer and the mark clearly extended into
three-dimensional space, not just illusion; and the hairs seemed curlier upon
closer inspection, pubic or beard, and colored intentionally, adorned, and
bolder than the painting.
How could I be the only one to see this violation, this perverted
addition?
I stood staring, eyes everywhere, and then a
voice came over the static, “______ is everything
okay?”
“Yeah, fine, just noticed something in this painting.”
“Okay, but I’m arming the room in five minutes. Time
to push off. Over.”
“Fair enough. Sorry.”
I raced through the remainder of my shift desperate to form some
conclusion about the curly bristles poking from Monet’s painting, a painting of
a painter painting, Monet’s daughter-in-law painting her own sister – strokes
like feathery, primary colored scars on a vellum of flesh. And then there was
Blanche, too far from her canvas on a grey day; and then there is the heft of her
bust and the too much revealed flesh of a modest woman’s neck.
The next night I bee-lined to the European wing and the Impressionists
room and could scarcely eat having a limited time to contemplate the scene and
the tuft. Surprisingly, the hair in the corner seemed longer and more abundant
and the colors masking the lengths were more vibrant and new in comparison to
the rest, almost as if someone touched up the paint in the hours since last
night. Of course, my rational side did not allow for the ardent interference of
fancy. But I would be completely damned to some mental institute if that hair
in the lower right corner, beneath and to the right of Monet’s signature,
wasn’t longer and more obvious than last I looked.
Searching the painting for other clues, I settled on Blanche’s sister,
Suzanne. She seemed more exposed, more revealed, than when I saw her with a
parasol in a book I had at home. Here, reading in the grass, she seemed bottom
heavy, her jacket too short on her arms and her hair casually unkempt. I knew
that something was on the horizon of my thoughts, and the following day, my
night, I spent researching on the internet in a public library a few blocks
from my apartment Monet’s familial connections and everything came into perspective
among those busy strokes.
As I’ve probably alluded to, Blanche, the painter in the painting, is
Jean’s wife and Jean is Monet’s son; the subject of the second painting within
the painting is Suzanne who happens to be Blanche’s sister and Jean’s sister-in-law.
Suzanne, the subject of several other of Monet’s
paintings, is the daughter of Monet’s second wife, Alice Hoschede.
Both women are his stepchildren. And to make matters more complicated, Suzanne,
in my stilted opinion, reminded Monet of his first wife, Camille, who died
giving birth to his second son.
The scene of the painting and the history behind the piece became
unintentionally incestuous.
Without any sleep, I returned to work, passed inspection -- “Packing a
small load tonight,” Markus said while still sitting-in for Wayne whose
mother’s condition had worsened; I hadn’t even bothered to bring a bag and I
hadn’t really eaten since the night before – and completely ignored the first
half of my duties as I went straight for my painting and sure enough, the hair
was there, more pronounced than ever, and beginning to bend, due to length and
weight of paint, around the inner edge of the frame.
“_________, are you okay?” my shift supervisor asked as he came
strolling into the hall. “I just spoke to security and they’ve reported that
you skipped the entire third floor.”
“Working backwards tonight,” I said.
“Fine, but you need to notify the uniforms beforehand; you’ve already
set-off two sensors.”
“No one paged me,” I said and he handed over my walkie-talkie.
“You forgot to take this. Are you sure you’re okay? There’s no water in
your bucket,” and then he looked at me and then at my subject. The old goat
seemed to know something. “Why don’t you go downstairs and prep again; I’ll do
the first floor tonight,” he instructed and offered in a fatherly manner.
Looking back at the piece, I wanted to point out my discovery, but then
again I wanted to keep this to myself. I mean, no one else among the throng of
museum visitors and cabal of curators, art historians, and preservationist had
noticed this before and I, in a sudden burst of selfishness, wanted the
My supervisor looked at the painting again and I, must’ve appeared like
a beggar as I backed into my cart.
I followed a new routine and night after night I carefully managed my
job and its responsibilities to leave little room for suspicion; and night
after night I took my break in front of Blanche and Suzanne. It wasn’t until
“Man, you’ve lost a lot of weight,” he said to
me as I checked-in and he offered half of his first sandwich of the evening – a
messy affair that looked and smelled like the Sloppy Joes I ate in grade
school.
I didn’t know how to respond to his observation and with a nod of my
head and an extended hand waving off the pile of meat and bread, I instead
offered my condolences.
“Ah, thanks man,” he said. “She was old, she was really sick, but it was
for the best. I mean, it might be better that she’s dead. All that pain, all
that miserable pain.”
By now the patch of painted green and brown hair had grown so long it
draped a full three inches beyond the frame, a goatee from the corner. The
painting, garishly scarred by Monet’s hair, lost the quaint and quixotic appeal
it once had. Both women frowned and everything in spring took on a more
autumnal hue; but the goatee remained vibrant in its greens and browns,
seemingly freshly painted moments before my arrival.
That tuft! That tuft drained the picture of its luster, absorbing all
the colors and good vibrations and pastoral peace into its strands.
For the sake of preserving the last bit of life in the painting, I
needed to remove the hair.
Doing so would be no easy matter; but the growing desperation to do so
outweighed my need to plot. Having secured my fate, it took several nights
before I actually mustered up the courage to go through with it.
When I committed to releasing the painting from the scourge of the
growth, I decided to pack a lunch, a fake lunch – a bag full of empty
containers and a thermos full of water. Most importantly, I placed the longest
scissors I could find in my apartment -- you know, the ones with the orange
plastic handles -- and tossed them in my bag along with my props.
When I arrived at the security check-point,
“Finally decided to take care of yourself,” he
said. “My mother would be appalled to see how thin you are. She hated anyone
who didn’t eat… anyone who didn’t eat a lot. That’s why I’m so fat.”
I
changed into my cleaning fatigues, visited the cavernous closet to retrieve my
cart, and charged through the third and second floors in a desperate attempt to
seem responsible while also being driven to complete my task while being
derided by the hair… the hair… the hair!
When I reached Blanche and Suzanne, the painting almost depicted a
midwinter scene. Both women were drained of life, pallid and blank, and held
their poses in frigid reluctance on the frozen tundra of the matte.
The hair, the garish hair, grew a foot since the previous night and
almost touched the floor. Ignoring the many eyes, I parked myself in striking
distance and retrieved my scissors from my bag.
I crossed the haze of sensors and heard my walkie-talkie buzz with
excitement. Knowing that the guards, any of them, could be within a room’s
distance, I attacked the hair and cut it as close to the surface of the
painting as possible. Grabbing the handful, I dropped the strands into my
portable wastebasket.
But the last remnant of color, the subtle reflective tones of sun on
white, dripped from the wounded corner like many mini faucets bleeding rapid
drops of water. The women began to deflate. In marked desperation, I took a
blade of my scissor and carved the whole corner out like a massive splotch of
skin cancer.
After disposing the growth and slice of rooted canvass, I sat back on
the bench and closed my eyes. It felt like forever and I purposefully slipped
in and out of awareness, but the full team of Laurel, Hardy, Larry, Moe, Curly,
Wayne and Marcus finally arrive as I am about to fall asleep, a real, prolonged
sleep, once and for all.
Brian P. Katz has been a creative writing
teacher at several colleges, including