“Probably, yes.”
“Then look at the copyrights index. The ‘previously published’ information.”
He handed the book back to me, two fingers already slipped between the relevant pages. And there it was, right under his index: The Snake-Queen’s Daughter: Wendish Legends & Folklore, privately published . . . 1925. The same year Mrs. Whitcomb was finally declared dead.
The shock—the disappointment, both in this revelation and in myself, for provoking it—was so intense that it really did take me a moment to recover. “I’d still like to see those other films for myself, if I could, later on,” I told him, at last. “The Japery ones, from the museum.”
“And we’d love to show them to you. Just call and set it up.” I nodded, gathering my stuff, while he sighed again, striking a sympathetic pose. “Sorry to end on such a down note. I really wish things could have lined up the way you wanted them to, but sometimes it simply doesn’t work out that way; you’ve done your share of research, after all. You know.”
“Uh huh.”
“You did get a fair deal of background on the Untitled 13 clips, though, yes? So that’s useful.”
“Mmm. And something’s always better than nothing, right?”
“A very good way to think about it, I’ve always found.”
I just nodded again—smiling back, shaking his hand, striking a pose of my own. Thinking, as I did: sure you have. You sanctimonious prick.
That night, Clark sang and sang as he twiddled a clothespin with a piece of wicker stuck in its jaws in front of his eyes, danced up and down while flipping his head back and forth to simulate the world around him being fast-forwarded. He clicked and hooted and made noises like a computer resetting itself over and over and over. He sang “Accidents Will Happen,” from Thomas the Tank Engine. He sang the “Rescue Pack” song from Go, Diego, Go! He sang the title theme from Play With Me Sesame, until I frankly wanted to dig Jim Henson’s corpse up and punch it in the face. It didn’t help that something horrifying was going on with my stomach and bowels at the same time, cramping me as though my guts were trying to shed their lining. Finally, after a half hour on the toilet, I retreated into our bedroom, dry-swallowed a palmful of Robaxacet to numb myself, and cranked my earphones up as high as they’d go, blasting Jocelyn Pook directly into my brain. I spent the bulk of the evening transcribing and collating notes while Clark jigged at the periphery of my vision, desperately trying to get my attention—because much like a cat, my son never wants to be near you when you want him to, but the minute you don’t want him interacting with you it’s all “Come back for Mommy! Mooooommmmy! Mommy, can you dance? Mommy, you have to kiss him!”
Simon dealt with it, mainly, the way he always does when things get really bad. He got Clark out of his clothes and into a bath, fed him Nut-Thins and bacon, and sat on the toilet replaying the same damn scene from Disney’s The Princess and the Frog while Clark laughed like a maniac: Dr. Facilier’s downfall, his patented Friends from the Other Side coming to collect after Tiana breaks their precious blood talisman, triumphantly pointing out that what she’s covered in isn’t slime, it’s mucus. While I sat in front of a screen, refreshing my Tumblr over and over with my eyes starting to cross and my nerve-damaged shoulder humming—I separated it early, in elementary school, then developed a degenerating disc in my neck by the end of college, for which I take anti-inflammatories that cyclically accelerate my digestive ailments—and brooded yet again over just how unqualified I was to be anybody’s mother, let alone this little boy’s. Just how little I obviously had to offer anybody, myself very much included.
Jesus Christ, I thought. You’d think these fucking films were mine, any of them, the way I’m obsessing over this shit.
But they weren’t, of course—no more than they’d been Wrob’s—and equally “of course,” that was the entire goddamn point. Because unlike Wrob, I didn’t even have the chutzpah to “sample” a few bits and pieces, stick some shit of my own around them and claim I’d made something new, let alone the balls . . . or wasn’t that what I’d been trying to do, really, in my own sad way? What Mattheuis had seen, and laughed at, if only to himself?
This basic white girl’s urge to stick a random pin in a map, make up a name, and claim I’d “found” something that’d always existed—to sail someplace and tell the people who’d always lived there that I owned it now, so get the fuck out. Nothing more sad than some bitch who can’t even find something real worth writing about, in a whole world full of forgotten wonders, I thought, grimly, as I finally drifted off next to Simon, knowing my jaw would ache the next morning from grinding my teeth all night.
No dreams that night, thankfully, and when I woke, my eyes looked clearer. I took it as a sign, which, in hindsight, it might well have been . . .
. . . though probably not the kind I thought it was at the time.
Writing up the interview with Wrob took an hour and a half, maybe two. I did it while sitting in my favourite coffee place, Balzac’s, down the side of the St. Lawrence Market; had to cut around the Mrs. Whitcomb angle entirely, obviously, given the way my conversation with Mattheuis had ended, though I did make sure to mention just how much Wrob owed the “unknown Canadian filmmaker” whose work lent Untitled 13 so much of its mysterious allure. “He won’t like that,” I remember muttering, under my breath—then thinking, almost immediately adding: Which probably makes it a good thing I don’t give all too much of a shit.
Pressing PUBLISH, I closed out and accessed my email, compulsively checking to see if anybody had left new comments on my previous review. A tone told me I had mail, which proved to be from the NFA: that link Mattheuis had promised me, the one to Knauff’s painting. I clicked on it, revealing a gaudily odd-coloured interior (mainly blue and grey, rich navy for the shadows with details rendered in teal-touched argent) full of angular figures that was half Toulouse-Lautrec, half Jan Toorop—the famous Café Brumaire, I could only assume. Layered in shafts of light and darkness, its background characters reduced to mere smears and haphazard pixilation, the scene shared some of the same feeling as Belgian symbolist Jean Delville’s “occult” portraits, with their narrow, glowing features and ecstatically upturned eyes: a veiled woman in green sat just off-centre from the close-packet dance floor, playing solitaire at a rickety little table with one hand hidden inside a fur muff dyed the same shade, the other dealing out, its naked fingers tipped with delicately hooked black nails.
In the bottom right, meanwhile, sat a couple I could only assume to be Mr. and Mrs. Whitcomb: he was tall, broad-shouldered, and slightly stooped, visibly older, arm thrown protectively across hers in the light from a single, slightly smoking oil-lamp; she was also tall, and stately, enough so that her shoulders and his sat almost level. She was dressed all in white, with an unfashionably modest lace snood or cap pinned over the coiled wealth of her heavy, honey-cream hair, a filmy shawl wrapped up high to mask the bottom of her face, and her narrowed eyes, too pale to hold any one particular shade, though her pupils stood out like pinpricks. She appeared to angle her head—seen in three-quarter profile—as though listening to some off-canvas conversationalist.
What’s he telling you? I wondered. Something you want to hear? Or the exact opposite?
Acknowledged as his most well-known work besides the infamous “Black Annunciation,” the few lines of text beneath the .jpg began, Knauff’s “Réunion de Nuit” recalls both the nighttime Impressionism of Manet and the thematic obscurity of Jean Delville. The May-December romance featured in the foreground may depict two Canadian admirers Knauff corresponded with briefly throughout 1908, while critics have attempted to draw a parallel between the striking “green lady” of the middle field and contemporary advertisements anthropomorphizing absinthe (Knauff’s drug of choice) as
a seductive yet toxic lover. As Henrique L’Hiverneux points out in her 1997 paper on Decadence in Bruges, however, an almost identical figure can be found in Degouve de Nuncques’s “Au Café Brumaire,” sitting next to a smearily rendered man sometimes identified as Knauff himself.
Later, I picked Clark up and took him over to my mom’s, a process that took far longer than it should have, mainly because he kept stopping to twirl in the middle of the sidewalk every five steps. It’s not as though he was unhappy, or being deliberately obstreperous; he’d virtually bounced off the school bus, yelling “Bye, thank you for helping, see you next time!” to the bemused driver, and dived straight into the (in)convenience store at our building’s base, as is his wont, where I paused to get money out of the ATM only to hear him call: “Mommy! Do you want to kiss him?”
“Yes I do,” I said, keying my PIN number. “Just a minute, bubba.”
“Moooooommmmmy!”
“Just a minute, bun.”
But Clark likes what he likes, and he has a very specific schedule for post-school decompression: run upstairs, strip to his underwear, plop down in front of Daddy’s computer, put on his frog-face headphones, and surf YouTube till he’s so jacked up he can’t stop himself from laughing inanely and singing along, which sort of negates the whole headphones concept. At which point I’ll say: “Time to stop, log off, go do something else,” and he usually will, albeit under protest.
“You don’t have to log off!”
“Yeah, you kinda do, actually.”