Young Woman Seated in the Art Museum

Hallway walls of glass let in the afternoon sky, which is gray and ominous with storm clouds. The floor is slick wood, light grain oak, shiny like an ice pond, but not like an ice pond. White. Everything is white. White walls, white benches, white lights above. White and light wood and glass and gray clouds. Voices echo, footsteps echo, perhaps the scratch of my pen echoes. Let me write quickly and listen. Echo? Yes. Echo.

The security guard at his desk, has he read the brochure on this new pavilion “dedicated to showcasing contemporary art”? Does he read behind his desk—something pre-approved like ARTnews or The New Yorker? Or does he read the sports page? A mystery novel? Does he wish he could pull a piece of gum from his pocket, for mint-fresh breath in case a lovely, lonely woman wants to know where the Lichtenstein is?

It is so quiet. Just me. The guard. Nobody else.

Will he allow me the freedom to do what I wish? “Experiments in art.” Will he let me sing loud, very loud, an opera, an aria, something made-up, but believable, words like dolce vita, vibrato, my voice building and rising to meet ceiling, to catch within Calder’s mobile, “painted sheet metal and wire,” to bounce from white walls, from glass, so that the freestanding sculptures might respond, so that, perhaps, the bronze variation on the Venus de Milo might drop to her knees? I might say applaud, but she is armless.

Will the guard call for backup? Or will he continue to draw small spirals on his lunch napkin while I pull a pair of roller skates from my satchel, while I lace and then race, skate on these fabulous wood floors, my hands almost—but not—brushing the walls, the multi-media works, “chrome and wood and fiber,” the Abstract Expressionist paintings with their “intensely emotional and independent spirit.” Will he yell, “All skate, in the opposite direction!” and give me a silent thumbs-up as I whirl, maneuver, find myself skating where I have already been?

Maybe, just maybe, he will help me set up a small display in a corner, on the floor, a colorful shawl, silk patterned and playful, spread out on the ground so I might show my own work, sketches I’ve done on a notepad of the man who recently left me and returned to his wife. I have destroyed many. I have saved some. “Reconfigured materials.”

Does the man with his uniform and his serious stare long for me? For someone to create something “introspective and expressive” in this still-life of a museum? A giggle, it escapes me. It echoes, tumbles, and rolls alongside Venus’ legs. It slides along a series of photographs. A giggle, a misplaced “blurring of boundaries.”

He is watching me, frowning. I must rise now. Go. Skate.