Van Gogh's Ear by Michael Lowell Teague

©2007 Revised ©2009

In the name of greater efficiency and progress, the very good and the very bad were mostly banished from the marketplace of the common culture. There were fewer works of rank amateurism to sharpen one’s wits on, fewer noble failures to learn from, and fewer works of genius to awe at and emulate. Thanks to whiz-bang technology, and MBA programs too numerous to list here, the business of culture had been elevated from an imperfect art to an imperfect science, and every inscrutable inclination was well on its way to being heroically bred out of the appetite.

Cameron Palmer had seen firsthand the way the world worked, although he came to appreciate it late. He taught art in the public school system, and entered the profession with all the idealism expected of a twenty-one year old. He had known a few gifted children in his time, but they were by definition self-starters who required little from him beyond encouragement. More typical, of course, were disruptive children. Only one was needed to ruin it for the rest, and there was always more than one in every class. Over the years, an inordinate number of children had been sent his way who preferred taunting classmates with scissors to using them creatively, and in the interest of accomplishing something in his class (no matter how insignificant), the children on either end of the spectrum—the very bad and the very good—were designed around in favor of the broad middle. Every art project was therefore an assembly line affair with rubber cement, glitter, and construction paper. These endeavors were largely idiot-proof in execution, and parents who wanted to believe their otherwise unremarkable child had talent were happy with the results. Despite this time-proven formula, the teacher came to the conclusion some years before this that it was perhaps better not to expose kids to art at all if their only experience of it most closely resembled piecework in a garment factory. To state such misgivings publicly would surely put him out of a job, and the bureaucrat’s oath is unflaggingly: “First do no harm to yourself.”

How Cameron came to be in this place was one of those cruel, untold stories in life, namely how age sneaks up on you, and how you go to sleep in one life only to wake up in another. The passions formed in youth, the very ones that goad you into setting a course in the world, not so much abandon you with age as fade like college friendships. The works of art history that once inspired Cameron as a young painter to equal or surpass their achievement inevitably became albatrosses around his neck. As it turns out, the past is a barrier to every new and daring idea, and admiration for one’s forefathers often becomes bitter recrimination in time.

So it was with some curiosity the schoolteacher read in the paper about a Korean researcher who was claiming to have cloned Vincent Van Gogh from the dead painter’s “lost-but-found” severed ear. The story would have been laughable if not for the cable news networks taking it seriously. It all reached a peculiar climax on a Saturday, when a dazed man (wearing pajamas, no less) was paraded out in front of the world’s cameras for a news conference and a demonstration. The poor fellow was a dead ringer for the famed artist, with blondish, red-tinged hair and pained eyes. The Korean doctor, displaying the panache of a circus showman, prodded the gaunt figure up to an easel and placed a paintbrush in his hand. The artist stood there in a bewildered state, as if waiting for either an electric shock or a food pellet to direct his action. The Korean researcher then barked something at him, like an MC on one of those outlandish Japanese game shows, and, coerced, the man immediately began to dabble paint over a blank canvas. A vase filled with sunflowers was hastily set up for the occasion, and the sight of it, to Cameron’s thinking, reeked of inauthenticity. The idea of ordering a genius about like a performing seal was preposterous. To demand Vincent Van Gogh reenact a “greatest hit” in painting, as if he were Charles Schultz being asked to do a quick sketch of Snoopy, was not only an effrontery to good taste, but showed complete ignorance of what made Van Gogh Van Gogh.

Yet the whole scene was reminiscent of those psychics who reportedly channel dead composers at the piano and play posthumous works in their style. The phoniness of the venture is quickly unmasked when, to the trained ear, the work produced falls short of the deceased artist’s mature masterworks. Why, for example, should Chopin return from the grave only to compose in a style that dated from his formative youth? Would not a long afterlife give him some fresh ideas? Would not he at least pick up where he left off? This Van Gogh was similarly tone deaf. His mark-making did resemble that of the Dutch painter, being a technique more like drawing with paint than drizzling it on the canvas in the manner of a Renoir, but the feeble opus was barely a start—and hardly proved anything. Applause erupted from an unseen audience when the man, being finished or merely needing to use the bathroom, put down his brush. He looked around the room like a deer in headlights just before handlers escorted him offstage. There was very little incredulity on the part of the commentators, who were obviously swept up by the staged event. One man, a distant relation to the famous painter with a ninety-seven percent match on DNA, openly wept; another fellow, a gallery dealer from Paris, profusely praised the scrawny effort on the easel. “A work of genius,” he proclaimed. “But what else would you expect from Vincent Van Gogh?”

Cameron wanted to howl, thinking if it was so easy to discern genius in the first instance, then why did Van Gogh spend his whole life in poverty and obscurity? Angered, he got up to turn off his television, but then quickly reminded himself he was only an art teacher: someone who taught children with short attention spans how to make crepe paper mosaics.

He returned to work the following Monday and was soon absorbed in his routine. There was a parent/teacher meeting scheduled for that evening, so he ate a light dinner before heading back to school. Beyond the occasional student popping his or her head in through the door to see what a teacher looked like in a nocturnal setting, there were few grownups crossing the threshold. He was about to wrap it up when one of his second graders turned up with her mother in tow. The little girl was named Erin, and she was a quiet, mostly invisible child. It was only in seeing her in relation to her mother that her marked degree of prettiness dawned on the teacher.

The mother prodded the daughter up to the desk and offered a greeting. “My name is Rebecca Mavenbrook.”

The young woman was simply clothed in a vintage store coat with black leggings poking out below; a hint of henna was in her dark cropped hair. Cameron extended a hand. “Mrs. Mavenbrook.”

“Miss Mavenbrook.”

The teacher gestured to the only other adult chair in the room. “Would you care for some coffee?”

Helping her daughter out of her coat she nodded agreeably to the offer.

Cameron heaped a generous portion of instant coffee into a cup. “Cream?”

“Do you have soy?” she asked meekly.

He paused in his deliberation. “How about Coffeemate? It’s mostly corn starch.”

Rebecca averted her eyes with slight embarrassment. “Coffeemate will be fine.”

The dutiful teacher handed her a cup of his powdery concoction. A box of orange juice was simultaneously given to Erin, though with a ringing endorsement attached to it. “Squeezed from only Florida oranges.”

Rebecca smiled on unfurling her scarf.

Cameron went over to his file cabinet and pulled out Erin’s folder. Her art projects were spread over his desk like chest x-rays.

The bohemian mother, opening a large burlap bag at her side, barely acknowledged them. “Can I show you something else of hers?” Several drawings were pulled out and placed on top of the other pieces of art on the desk.

The teacher looked on approvingly. “These are remarkable.”

Rebecca did not so much gloat as seized an opportunity. “Do you think she has talent?”

“Yes,” Cameron said, but then leaned back in his chair to speak plainly. “But as Picasso said, every child is born an artist. The trick is remaining one when you grow up.”

“Then you think she could go either way from here?”

“Are you an artist?”

“I am.”

“Then there is a better chance she will be one as not.”

“I was wondering,” she began tentatively, “if I could pay you to be her private tutor?”

The art teacher was flattered, but instantly mindful of logistics. “At her age, it’s better she follow her muse. I would only mess her up with technique.” He then ventured the obvious. “Surely you can guide her in that regard as she needs it?”

“Yes. Of course.” The mother promptly began to put Erin’s coat back on.

Cameron was at once regretting his chronic practicality. He wanted to delay her leaving. “You’re an artist, then? What’s your medium?”

“I’m a painter. Figurative-Abstract.”

“Do you exhibit in town?”

“Not lately.” She gently tussled to pull one of the child’s arms through a coat sleeve. “Being a single mom, it’s hard.”

“Yes.” The art teacher rose from his chair. “It’s never easy being an artist.”

There was a gesture to urge Erin to finish the juice, though the mother’s words were still seeking. “But at least you teach art,” she observed. “That must give you some comfort.”

Cameron shrugged. “Teaching art to kids is to making art what setting off firecrackers is to rocket science.”

Rebecca retreated further under a blind of amicableness. “I see.” She turned to the door, clasping her daughter’s hand. “Thank you, again. And for the coffee.”

On the woman’s leaving, the art teacher was remised he had allowed his jadedness to darken her spirits. He needed to constantly remind himself it was not his job to disillusion others.

There was more to it than that, too, although he did not fully realize what it was until, by happenstance, he ran into Rebecca at the Taco Bell a couple of weeks later. The nature of this second meeting put him on one side of the counter and her on the other. She was, surprisingly enough, the day manager at the establishment. The teacher pushed through the initial awkwardness, and with a mind to redeem something of himself.

“I was hoping to run into you again,” he announced boldly. (Having said this, he was stuck for what he had meant by it.)

Rebecca took up the slack. “Erin tells me you’re making bunnies out of dried beans in class now?”

“Yes.” His heels landed on the floor. “Lima beans make for good Easter grass.”

“What do you do for pink? You can’t have Easter bunnies without pink.”

“Pimento beans,” was his disconnected reply. “Although they are a little dark.” He skipped ahead. “When do you get off work?”

Rebecca already had a babysitter, and, as luck would have it, she was nearing the end of her shift. An artsy coffeehouse was an easy walk up the block, and the warm glow on the windows seemed to anticipate their arrival. The sedentary bachelor was seldom forward with women of any age, yet felt drawn to the young mother in a way that was galloping ahead of him. Rebecca stayed in her coat this time, and perhaps to hide a work uniform that somewhat sullied her counterculture credentials. She was more complicated than he first suspected, with one foot in an unsparing, low-pay work-a-day world and the other at home among the earth tones of fair trade coffee. There was a conversation two tables over about the Van Gogh clone, which was immediately distracting. It was impossible to make sense of it, but the urgency of the voices suggested that something had gone horribly awry in Korea.

Rebecca pulled the teacher’s attention back to their table. “Do you still make art, Cameron?”

He was slow to join the question. “Not as much as I should.”

She chided him. “You shouldn’t paint out of duty. But passion.”

He nodded in agreement, but too wearily to escape her notice.

The young woman probed deeper. “Are you one of those artists who has fallen out of love with art?”

Cameron offered a shrug and a clarification. “More with culture than art, I think.”

“Culture?”

He tried to explain. “The problem with having talent is that you tend to develop expectations, and that’s when you begin to take it seriously—even personally. But there’s nothing personal about culture. It’s a many-headed dragon, only you don’t know where to aim the sword to slay it. It’s everywhere and nowhere, but steps on you nonetheless.”

“And you see yourself as one of its casualties?”

“I think every artist is, one way or another.”

“How do you mean?”

He looked over the Bonsai trees in a nearby window box, taking the moment to summon an example. “Do you know Marcel Duchamp, the turn of the century Dadaist?”

“Yes.”

Cameron made his case. “When Duchamp wrote ‘R. Mutt’ on a urinal and called it art, it was in no small part a protest against the whole ideal of culture. But what was intended as an insult became a parody of itself, and every museum was soon clamoring for their own Duchamp urinal—which he readily supplied. At some point, he must have become aware he had turned into the very thing he hated, and no doubt justified his newfound respectability by seeing the purchasers of his work as imbeciles who only proved his original point.”

“Then you at least have integrity in not selling out,” she said.

Cameron shook his head dismissively. “For a while, I saw it that way. But that’s just more counterfeit virtue, and no better than Duchamp’s laughing all the way to the bank. The truth is I’m bitter because I wasn’t given an opportunity to become a hypocrite myself. Culture never gave me the glad-hand—the ‘big offer’.”

Rebecca was struck by his candor. “Then you only became an artist because you wanted to become famous?”

He came at it a different way. “Who are the three most famous artists you can think of in all of Western history?”

The young woman puzzled. “I would never presume to draw up such a list.”

Cameron offered his own. “Let’s take Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Beethoven. Each a towering titan in his respective field, and each driven by status and self-advancement.”

“And you admire them for that?”

Cameron was frank. “When you have talent, you’ve nothing to gain by false modesty. Humility is a wonderful virtue, but it is better to be not only honest about your ability but also about your motives. You can play dumb, or be polite, but when it comes down to just God, you, and the sticking place, it’s better to own everything.”

Rebecca smiled. “But isn’t that virtuous? Not wanting to be phony?”

“I claim no virtue.”

“But you know your own value. I see no false pride in that.”

Cameron looked down at his coffee mug, blushing.

She softly queried, “Are you being humble now, or prideful, in not challenging my observation?”

The man grinned weakly. “You catch on quick to this dilemma.” He then broadly sighed. “To be honest, I wish I was this smart about things when I was your age, then at least I could have gone into another field that would have been more rewarding.”

“I don’t believe that’s true for a second,” she challenged, leaning forward to put it all in context. “Culture and art may be very different things, but I think you hate the one only because you love the other so much.”

“What you’re saying is I should pick up a paint brush and stop griping. Leave culture behind.”

“No.” She amended his remark. “Leave culture to catch up.”

“Which usually means you have to die first.”

Rebecca was not dimmed. “Then when people stand in front of your paintings, you will have the last word. And it will have nothing to do with culture or any of that stuff. It will be only about the art, because it was never about anything else.”

Cameron was struck by wisdom from one so young, yet sensed that somewhere beneath the surface it was more wisdom than she would have desired. “What are your goals in art, Rebecca?”

She withdrew a little. “I want only to see the world through my daughter’s eyes. When I stand at the easel, I want to see what she sees when she draws.”

“That’s a worthy goal.”

Rebecca darkened. “But I’m afraid the reception is rather poor on both sides of the lens these days.”

“Oh?”

The young woman looked over the table, uttering, “My husband, Erin’s father, died last winter.”

All of Cameron’s talk of urinals and culture suddenly seemed silly. He aimed to make up for the negligence on his end of the conversation. “I’m sorry to hear that, Rebecca.”

She held the details at a distance, as if with practice. “He was an artist, too. But he had personal problems.”

“Then he…?”

“Around Christmas. I believe that’s when a lot of people do it.”

Whatever notion had been turning over in the back of the older man’s mind, it was jettisoned. He sought to recast the encounter. “And Erin? How is she dealing with it?”

“We get by.” Rebecca folded her stained napkin in an absent gesture. “More me than her, I think.”

The art teacher was stuck for a graceful exit. The young woman’s next question spared him a decision.

“Would you like to see my paintings?” she asked.

The drive over to Rebecca’s apartment complex was quieter than their conversation back at the coffeehouse. It was not an awkward silence by any measure, but the silence of artists practiced at the art of quiet, penetrating perception. On arriving at the young woman’s cramped apartment, the babysitter was sent on her way with ten dollars and Erin was prepared for bed. Cameron sat on the couch, though without a third act to the young mother’s second act.

Rebecca soon returned to the front room, which roughly divided between a kitchen and living area. Her fatigue was visible under a light that hung glaringly over the kitchen table. The fellow painter got up to join her, and watched with amazement as color returned to her cheeks in anticipation of something. She bent down to uncover her paintings in the floor, all of which were stacked unpretentiously between a dirty clothes hamper and a lopsided refrigerator. As each canvas was pulled out and held up against the dingy wall, Cameron knew he was looking out windows onto a world more beautiful than the one the young artist presently occupied. Yet seeing her so enthused by her work—so enthused to share it—made him think that she could, if she wanted, escape all her troubles by simply stepping through one like a portal. But there was something keeping her in place: something sleeping in the next room.

His praise of her work was unstinting, and precisely because he could genuinely give it. Though he was curious at the end and thought to ask, “Why don’t you hang these on the walls?”

She re-covered the canvases with a tattered sari. “I can’t nail things up in the apartment. Not without risking the loss of my rent deposit.”

“But you can spackle over the nail holes before you move out,” he told her.

Her turned-down eyes narrowed. “It’s hard to explain. When I put down the brush, it’s as if they no longer belong to me. I don’t want to get too fond of them.”

Cameron understood completely. “It’s a lot like having a child, isn’t it? They have to make their own way in the world, eventually.”

She rose up from the cold floor without saying anything, but clearly approving of his analogy.

With the art once again removed from sight, the claustrophobic walls came rushing back in to scuff at their elbows. The silence was materially different than what they had shared in the car, and it was more than just a smaller distance between them, or the clinical tint of the light. The older man returned his hands to his blazer, minimizing any grappling surfaces that might inadvertently entangle him in more details of her fully exposed life. He fetched around for a clock: his default setting for a third act.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she muttered.

He was thrown by the question. “Do I know you?”

Rebecca divulged her secret. “When you first started teaching at Benton, I was in your first third grade class.”

His eyes darted over her face, yet he could not place it.

She continued, “Back then, you didn’t have construction paper projects. You told us we were all geniuses, and I believed you.”

His voice was fainter. “That sounds like something I might have said.”

The young woman unexpectedly leaned into his body with a tender embrace, as though thanking him. Yet he could not say whether it was for inspiring her as a child, or for coming to her dank hole-of-an-apartment to share in her art. Her hair smelled of hamburger grease and chili powder from her job, and it was the unlikeliest of perfumes at such a moment. The young woman’s limbs were levers moving in contrary ways to his, while her warm breath rose like a poking thought to swirl under his chin.

“Will you stay a little longer?” she quietly pleaded. “Until I fall asleep?”

Her shoulder hovered below his as a kind of dull-edged precipice, but he could not say if it was an invitation to jump or fate pulling a rug out from under him.

Rebecca pulled the dumbstruck man along to a bedroom, though more in the manner of a daughter than a prospective lover. On taking off her shoes, she curled up on the bed without wile or calculation. Cameron was not sure what to do, so pulled up a chair at the bedside. He searched her eyes for some clue as to her youthful turn of mind, but her blissful smile was as opaque as it was freely given.

She stuck out her hand to take hold of a few of his fingers, whispering, “It’s been so long since I’ve been able to sleep. Been happy enough to close my eyes.”

The older man was content to accept the ambiguity of it—content to watch her slip away into the shadows holding his hand. It was so easy to forget what being young was like. What having hope, even in the face of adversity, was like. He had offered her the barest of ledges, and she had embraced it as a new lease on life.

Her grip soon loosened to release some part of him, and with the assurance he had seen her safely off, a blanket was retrieved from the foot of the bed to cover her.

The teacher wandered back into the dark front room with thoughts of leaving, but dropped down onto a toy-covered sofa, instead. He was not so much crowded by his inanimate company as was looking for a way deeper into the alien landscape. A small portable television was clicked on quietly with a remote, and a late-hour newscast offered a few intermediate steps down.

All hell had broken loose in Korea. The man purported to be Vincent Van Gogh had, like his namesake, committed suicide by shooting himself. His body was found in a park across the street from the hotel were he was being kept under wraps. On hearing the news, the clone doctor had barricaded himself in his research facility and destroyed all the data pertaining to the case.

The comedy-turned-tragedy was predictable after a fashion, but what struck Cameron most personally was the suicide note left by the distraught painter. It was reported as saying, “The world belongs to the living. Leave the dead to their peace.”

The teacher turned off the television and got up, whereupon his eyes swiftly adapted to the diminished light. He found himself gravitating more by need than design to the only other large room in the apartment: Erin’s open bedroom. The walls were bathed in the mercury glow of a streetlight that poured in through the windowpanes, and from baseboard to crown molding, every square inch of the little girl’s room was covered with taped-up artwork. Moved by the sheer conviction of it, the painter swept his fingers over the varied surfaces of paper: The grit of dried watercolor became the waxiness of crayon, and the beaded edges of glued collage became the slickness of graphite. He circled around to the head of the bed to find the child wrapped up in a little shadow. He knelt beside her, and with something akin to love welling up in his chest. His hand lifted to brush away a wisp of hair from her cheek, and, half-asleep, Erin reflexively latched onto his thumb. He was at once suspended in the few threads of light, and willingly accepted the brief role reversal of teacher and student.

Looking out the window, Cameron imagined more stars than he could actually see. It had been some time since he thought of Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’, or any work of art for that matter. He recalled the painting’s deep blues and greens, and the way the sky resonated with the stroke and form of the trees. There had also been a tiny hamlet, if his memory was correct, and lights burning in windows to mimic those circling in the heavens.

Nietzsche once said culture is the act of the dead burying the living. Van Gogh, for his part, had left a sky full of stars for others to paint. There were enough Van Gogh paintings in the world, even by his reckoning. For every artist says exactly what he or she wants to say, and no more. Cameron, graced by the truth of it, understood that he still had a few more things to say, and so resolved to keep faith with the living a while longer.