Tracy Chevalier - Girl with a Pearl Earring

“No, no, they’re fine. I’ve just come to visit.”

“Oh.” Frans pulled the cloths from his arms, wiped his face with a rag and gulped beer from a mug. He leaned against the wall and rolled his shoulders the way men do who have finished unloading cargo from a canal boat and are easing and stretching their muscles. I had never seen him make such a gesture before.

“Are you still working the kiln? They have not moved you to something else? Glazing, or painting like those boys in the other building?”

Frans shrugged.

“But those boys are the same age as you. Shouldn’t you be—” I could not finish my sentence when I saw the look on his face.

“It’s punishment,” he said in a low voice.

“Why? Punishment for what?”

Frans did not answer.

“Frans, you must tell me or I’ll tell our parents you’re in trouble.”

“I’m not in trouble,” he said quickly. “I made the owner angry, is all.”

“How?”

“I did something his wife didn’t like.”

“What did you do?”

Frans hesitated. “It was she who started it,” he said softly. “She showed her interest, you see. But when I showed mine she told her husband. He didn’t throw me out because he’s a friend of Father’s. So I’m on the kiln until his humor improves.”

“Frans! How could you be so stupid? You know she’s not for the likes of you. To endanger your place here for something like that?”

“You don’t understand what it’s like,” Frans muttered. “Working here, it’s exhausting, it’s boring. It was something to think about, that’s all. You have no right to judge, you with your butcher that you’ll marry and have a fine life with. Easy for you to say what my life should be like when all I can see are endless tiles and long days. Why shouldn’t I admire a pretty face when I see one?”

I wanted to protest, to tell him that I understood. At night I sometimes dreamed of piles of laundry that never got smaller no matter how much I scrubbed and boiled and ironed.

“Was she the woman at the gate?” I asked instead.

Frans shrugged and drank more beer. I pictured her sour expression and wondered how such a face could ever tempt him.

“Why are you here, anyway?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you be at Papists’ Corner?”

I had prepared an excuse for why I had come, that an errand had taken me to that part of Delft. But I felt so sorry for my brother that I found myself telling him about van Ruijven and the painting. It was a relief to confide in him.

He listened carefully. When I finished he declared, “You see, we’re not so different, with the attentions we’ve had from those above us.”

“But I haven’t responded to van Ruijven, and have no intention to.”

“I didn’t mean van Ruijven,” Frans said, his look suddenly sly. “No, not him. I meant your master.”

“What about my master?” I cried.

Frans smiled. “Now, Griet, don’t work yourself into a state.”

“Stop that! What are you suggesting? He has never—”

“He doesn’t have to. It’s clear from your face. You want him. You can hide it from our parents and your butcher man, but you can’t hide it from me. I know you better than that.”

He did. He did know me better.

I opened my mouth but no words came out.

“You—the wide-eyed maid,” he called, turning towards me. “They told me you were out. I think you’ve been avoiding me. What’s your name, my girl?”

“Griet, sir.” I kept my eyes fixed on my master’s shoes. They were shiny and black—Maertge had polished them under my guidance earlier that day.

“Well, Griet, have you been avoiding me?”

“Oh no, sir. I’ve been on errands.” I held up a pail of things I had been to get for Maria Thins before I visited Frans.

“I hope I will see more of you, then.”

“Yes, sir.” Two women were standing behind the men. I peeked at their faces and guessed they were the daughter and sister who were sitting for the painting. The daughter was staring at me.

“You have not forgotten your promise, I hope,” van Ruijven said to my master.

My master jerked his head like a puppet. “No,” he replied after a moment.

“Good, I expect you’ll want to make a start on that before you ask us to come again.” Van Ruijven’s smile made me shiver.

There was a long silence. I glanced at my master. He was struggling to maintain a calm expression, but I knew he was angry.

“Yes,” he said at last, his eyes on the house opposite. He did not look at me.

I did not understand that conversation in the street, but I knew it was to do with me. The next day I discovered how.

In the morning he asked me to come up in the afternoon. I assumed he wanted me to work with the colors, that he was starting the concert painting. When I got to the studio he was not there. I went straight to the attic. The grinding table was clear—nothing had been laid out for me. I climbed back down the ladder, feeling foolish.

He had come in and was standing in the studio, looking out a window.

“Take a seat, please, Griet,” he said, his back to me.

I sat in the chair by the harpsichord. I did not touch it—I had never touched an instrument except to clean it. As I waited I studied the paintings he had hung on the back wall that would form part of the concert painting. There was a landscape on the left, and on the right a picture of three people—a woman playing a lute, wearing a dress that revealed much of her bosom, a gentleman with his arm around her, and an old woman. The man was buying the young woman’s favors, the old woman reaching to take the coin he held out. Maria Thins owned the painting and had told me it was called The Procuress.

“Not that chair.” He had turned from the window. “That is where van Ruijven’s daughter sits.”

Where I would have sat, I thought, if I were to be in the painting.

He got another of the lion-head chairs and set it close to his easel but sideways so it faced the window. “Sit here.”

“What do you want, sir?” I asked, sitting. I was puzzled—we never sat together. I shivered, although I was not cold.

“Don’t talk.” He opened a shutter so that the light fell directly on my face. “Look out the window.” He sat down in his chair by the easel.

I gazed at the New Church tower and swallowed. I could feel my jaw tightening and my eyes widening.

“Now look at me.”

I turned my head and looked at him over my left shoulder.

His eyes locked with mine. I could think of nothing except how their grey was like the inside of an oyster shell.

He seemed to be waiting for something. My face began to strain with the fear that I was not giving him what he wanted.

“Griet,” he said softly. It was all he had to say. My eyes filled with tears I did not shed. I knew now.

“Yes. Don’t move.”

He was going to paint me.

My father spoke in a baffled tone. He did not believe that simply cleaning a painter’s studio would make the smell linger on my clothes, my skin, my hair. He was right. It was as if he guessed that I now slept with the oil in my room, that I sat for hours being painted and absorbing the scent. He guessed and yet he could not say. His blindness took away his confidence so that he did not trust the thoughts in his mind.

A year before I might have tried to help him, suggest what he was thinking, humor him into speaking his mind. Now, however, I simply watched him struggle silently, like a beetle that has fallen onto its back and cannot turn itself over.

My mother had also guessed, though she did not know what she had guessed. Sometimes I could not meet her eye. When I did her look was a puzzle of anger held back, of curiosity, of hurt. She was trying to understand what had happened to her daughter.

I had grown used to the smell of linseed oil. I even kept a small bottle of it by my bed. In the mornings when I was getting dressed I held it up to the window to admire the color, which was like lemon juice with a drop of lead-tin yellow in it.

I wear that color now, I wanted to say. He is painting me in that color.

Instead, to take my father’s mind off the smell, I described the other painting my master was working on. “A young woman sits at a harpsichord, playing. She is wearing a yellow and black bodice—the same the baker’s daughter wore for her painting—a white satin skirt and white ribbons in her hair. Standing in the curve of the harpsichord is another woman, who is holding music and singing. She wears a green, fur-trimmed housecoat and a blue dress. In between the women is a man sitting with his back to us—”

“Van Ruijven,” my father interrupted.

“Yes, van Ruijven. All that can be seen of him is his back, his hair, and one hand on the neck of a lute.”

“He plays the lute badly,” my father added eagerly.

“Very badly. That’s why his back is to us—so we won’t see that he can’t even hold his lute properly.”

My father chuckled, his good mood restored. He was always pleased to hear that a rich man could be a poor musician.

It was not always so easy to bring him back into good humor. Sundays had become so uncomfortable with my parents that I began to welcome those times when Pieter the son ate with us. He must have noted the troubled looks my mother gave me, my father’s querulous comments, the awkward silences so unexpected between parent and child. He never said anything about them, never winced or stared or became tongue-tied himself. Instead he gently teased my father, flattered my mother, smiled at me.

Pieter did not ask why I smelled of linseed oil. He did not seem to worry about what I might be hiding. He had decided to trust me.

He was a good man.

I could not help it, though—I always looked to see if there was blood under his fingernails.

He should soak them in salted water, I thought. One day I will tell him so.

He was a good man, but he was becoming impatient. He did not say so, but sometimes on Sundays in the alley off the Rietveld Canal, I could feel the impatience in his hands. He would grip my thighs harder than he needed, press his palm into my back so that I was glued in his groin and would know its bulge, even under many layers of cloth. It was so cold that we did not touch each other’s skin—only the bumps and textures of wool, the rough outlines of our limbs.

Pieter’s touch did not always repel me. Sometimes, if I looked over his shoulder at the sky, and found the colors besides white in a cloud, or thought of grinding lead white or massicot, my breasts and belly tingled, and I pressed against him. He was always pleased when I responded. He did not notice that I avoided looking at his face and hands.

That Sunday of the linseed oil, when my father and mother looked so puzzled and unhappy, Pieter led me to the alley later. There he began squeezing my breasts and pulling at their nipples through the cloth of my dress. Then he stopped suddenly, gave me a sly look, and ran his hands over my shoulders and up my neck. Before I could stop him his hands were up under my cap and tangled in my hair.

I held my cap down with both hands. “No!”

Pieter smiled at me, his eyes glazed as if he had looked too long at the sun. He had managed to pull loose a strand of my hair, and tugged it now with his fingers. “Some day soon, Griet, I will see all of this. You will not always be a secret to me.” He let a hand drop to the lower curve of my belly and pushed against me. “You will be eighteen next month. I’ll speak to your father then.”

I stepped back from him—I felt as if I were in a hot, dark room and could not breathe. “I am still so young. Too young for that.”

Pieter shrugged. “Not everyone waits until they’re older. And your family needs me.” It was the first time he had referred to my parents’ poverty, and their dependence on him—their dependence which became my dependence as well. Because of it they were content to take the gifts of meat and have me stand in an alley with him on a Sunday.