To see we must forget the name of the thing we are looking at.
—Claude Monet
When your body hits the ground, it’s concrete in the gym and it smells like sweat. It’s the rough, rust-colored carpet of an airplane cabin, on a flight to San Francisco or Marrakech. It’s freshly mown grass in May or a polished hardwood floor in October. It’s concrete in the subway and it smells like piss.
I fainted in all of those scenarios, and then some, starting when I was thirteen. Fainting is a curiosity, a special skill that takes no skill at all. It knocks you out and brings you back to life like a sideshow oddity. One of my Scotch-Canadian ancestors, Angus MacAskill, was a freak, too. The Guinness Book of World Records called him the strongest and largest man who ever lived — a true giant. He could lift a 2,800-pound ship’s anchor. In the 1800s, he measured seven feet, nine inches and toured in P.T. Barnum’s circus with Tom Thumb. MacAskill died in his thirties of brain fever, a condition that Victorians viewed as an acute nervous breakdown, a kind of sudden insanity with no clear cause.
In 1994, at twenty, skinny and shy, I could not lift much at all, but I could fall to my knees, eyes rolling back, eliciting murmurs and gasps from the crowd. The reaction when I woke up was always theatrical. At best, it was shock or concern or a race to find me a glass of juice. At its worst, it was misguided CPR that made my chest ache, the whine of sirens in the distance, a blood pressure cuff and an oxygen mask that I always waved away. But my fainting was never that serious. It was a trick of the eye and I, the magician’s assistant, was wide awake and fully intact. The saw was a fake. The box had a false wall. It was a talent I didn’t want. A simple glitch of the nervous system. Perhaps a fever in the brain.
Fainting is an eyelid snapping shut. Tension, then release. You start vertical and then you’re horizontal. You’re here then gone, no memory of where you went. When you open your eyes, your head or your hip or your elbow hurts, but the moment between the fall and your waking is missing. If you never get it back, did it ever even exist?
One morning in October 1994, I fainted at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The painting I fainted in front of was not Francisco Goya’s “The Third of May 1808.” For decades, I remembered it as such, down to the condemned man kneeling amid bloody corpses, the look of terror — or was it defiance? — in his eyes. But when I Google it now, always the fact checker, I learn that Goya’s painting hangs in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. It was never in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, not in 1994 or any other year.
The painting I fainted in front of was Edouard Manet’s “The Execution of Emperor Maximillian.” It’s the same scenario: Another uniformed firing squad, another brown-skinned man with his arms flung wide. But that’s wrong too. The final, completed Manet painting in the series is in Mannheim, Germany. The painting in the MFA is muddier, unfinished. It lacks the sharp details of the later version. The men seem vague; they are faceless. Both iterations were “heavily influenced” by Goya. You could call them a legacy. Or cheap rip-offs by an artist who lacked Goya’s emotional outrage about war. Some sources say Goya personally witnessed the event he depicted, while Manet painted from an account of a similar incident that he simply read about in a newspaper half a century later. Goya’s memory was strong and unambiguous. Manet had no memory at all.
We were at the museum for a field trip with my art history class, a required college credit that had seemed an easy box to check. Once a week I climbed the stairs to the attic of an old Back Bay brownstone and sat for 90 minutes as the professor clicked through a series of slides showing us famous works of art. Right before she hit the lights to darken the room, I caught a glimpse of my classmates, squinting at them as if they were extras in a play I hadn’t yet seen, shadows on the periphery of a larger story.
Several months earlier, the man I would eventually divorce had asked me on a date. We had been friends for some time, and he had just broken up with his long-term girlfriend. In response, I stopped sleeping with his roommate, a man I had loved obsessively and unrequitedly for two years. The roommate had always seen into and through me without even trying, but he could never give me what I wanted. Now I had a nice, suitable boyfriend. We were a real couple, and everything was perfect, that crisp New England air not hinting at the disappointment to come. In 1994, on the day of my art class field trip, we went to breakfast at a diner near his apartment, then he walked me to the MFA.
Down the street, nearly thirty years earlier, my father slipped my mother a note during class at the Massachusetts College of Art. Marion, it read, will you come out to play? Today it might seem creepy, even the stuff of #MeToo. But this was the mid-1960s, and the note was sweetly crafted with the sort of stylized typography only an art student with a slightly shaggy Beatles haircut could master. And how could she resist my father, a shy, dark-haired boy with the trademark Cerretani eyes: long-lashed cocker spaniel orbs that could appear woeful, pleading, or sensual depending on the mood? And how could he stop himself from writing that note? She was the kind of beautiful woman who believed she was ugly, despite her slim figure, aquiline nose, and dark brown hair that turned fiery in summer. He was the grandson of Italian immigrants who had opened a small chain of supermarkets. She was the daughter of a successful appliance salesman who hadn’t lived at home in a decade. Both saw themselves as unworthy.
The summer before I fainted, my future ex-husband drew a picture of me in colored pencil. He was an architecture student and as talented as my parents, if more rigid in his style. The drawing was based on a photo he took of me at the beach from a distance. I was looking down, searching for shells. The girl in the picture looked like me, her thin body bowed like a storm-spun tree, in too-loose jeans and a t-shirt. But something was missing: The girl in the picture had no eyes. The face was not my face. It was as blank as those of the men in the Manet painting. It could be anyone and no one at all. He framed the picture and gave it to me for Christmas that year. Everyone said it was a perfect rendering.
In the Museum of Fine Arts, I peered about the lobby, trying to recognize my classmates and professor in the bright light. They might as well have been as faceless as me. We were there to view the museum’s collection of Manets. MAN-ay, not MOAN-ay, the professor liked to remind us. It was not my first time at the MFA.
My favorite exhibit was the one that held ship figureheads and gallery ornaments. I had a special affinity for “Neptune & Sea Nymph on Shell,” an 18th century stern ornament that I had written a poem about. Carved from beechwood, Neptune holds the nude sea nymph, one hand splayed possessively across her belly, the other at the small of her back. Maybe he is embracing her. Maybe he is about to push her back into the sea. The ornament looks ordinary to me now, but back then it seemed the height of tortured romance — not with my future ex-husband, but with his roommate, who had once held me close in the dark of his bedroom, who had once shoved me into a snowbank and laughed.
But I was at the museum that day to see the Manets, and you are here for the fainting. Everyone always is.
Before we gathered by the Manets, our professor stopped in front of another painting. In my recollection, it is called “After the Hunt” and depicts a hound, a bugle, and a rabbit corpse, the lines of the dog’s nose sniffing at its legs. But again, I am mistaken. The internet tells me that there are three paintings at the MFA called “After the Hunt,” none of which resemble what I remember. There are several other works on hunting: “Boar Hunt,” “Lion Hunt,” “Dead Birds and Hunting Equipment in a Landscape.” These, too, are wrong. The painting was likely Gustave Courbet’s “The Quarry,” a portrait of two hunting dogs, a horn-blower, and a dead roe deer hanging by its hind legs, its head resting in the grass of a forest clearing. Courbet inserted himself in the painting, leaning against a tree next to a rifle, eyes closed, a satisfied expression on his face.
That morning, my future ex-husband and I feasted on eggs and bacon, stacks of diner pancakes soaked in syrup. I arrived at the museum as sated as Courbet, stomach full, heart smug. But as my class walked slowly from one exhibit hall to the next, I felt a niggling itch at the base of my skull. The familiarity of the sensation nagged at me: Where did I know it from? By the time I remembered—an unseasonably hot day in late May six years earlier, my polyester marching band uniform, the overwhelming need to sit down—it was too late. I tried to make my way to a nearby bench. I didn’t reach it. My vision blurred into a dizzying blizzard of tiny, pixelated dots. The kind you’d find at an exhibit one room over, in “Waterlilies” or “Grainstack (Sunset),” evoking “presence through shadow and the whole through the part.” MOAN-ay, not MAN-ay.
In 1979, my mother, pregnant with my younger sister, lovingly crafted a 20-inch scene in watercolor pencil. The drawing was shaped like a figure eight, or an hourglass. At the bottom, as if nestled in an underground bulb, a man resembling my father cradled a blonde girl of about five. At the top, a nude, heavily pregnant woman held her swollen belly as if blooming from a flower. Like the picture of me at the beach, none of us had a face. We were any standard family, and although we didn’t yet realize it, the hourglass was running out. In another year, my parents would be divorced, my father’s art-school note relegated to a box of wedding photos my mother kept at the back of her closet behind a fake-fur coat and an envelope of my baby teeth and other items she no longer needed but couldn’t part with.
The note was proof that they had once been happy, that the court appearances and child support and tense phone calls weren’t all they were left with. Decades later, they could both remember much of their twelve-year marriage, the highs and lows. When we divorced, my now ex-husband and I had been together nearly ten years, but aside from those first jubilant months, I could remember little. There were brief flashes: The time we rode a rollercoaster, screaming and laughing as the velocity pushed us against each other, first in one direction and then the next. The time he cut his thumb with a circular saw and almost fainted himself. The way we danced to the Bee Gees, spinning dizzily, at a friend’s wedding. And, when it came, the end.
But what was our day-to-day life? I hadn’t learned to cook yet; what did we eat? What did we do on weekends? All of it has disappeared like those moments at the museum, the missing pieces between start, finish, and restart. Yet somehow, I can still recall the nights I spent with the old roommate in rich, exquisite detail, a never-ending loop of a movie in my head: his bedroom, the snowbank. Only two years of fifty now, but as vivid as if it were yesterday. There is no pause, nothing is missing. I remember every brushstroke of the painting exactly.
But what was our day-to-day life? I hadn’t learned to cook yet; what did we eat? What did we do on weekends? All of it has disappeared like those moments at the museum, the missing pieces between start, finish, and restart. Yet somehow, I can still recall the nights I spent with the old roommate in rich, exquisite detail, a never-ending loop of a movie in my head: his bedroom, the snowbank. Only two years of fifty now, but as vivid as if it were yesterday. There is no pause, nothing is missing. I remember every brushstroke of the painting exactly.
When you faint, the blood rushes from your brain. It sinks to your feet, weighing you down like the one-ton anchor my ancestor once lifted in a feat of strength. When he set it down, one of the anchor’s flukes caught him in the shoulder. The giant was injured, momentarily stunned, forever crippled, but not dead. The fainting didn’t kill or cripple me, of course, although later my chin was sore from where it hit the polished floor with a dull thud, my head resting there like Courbet’s dead roe deer. That was the pain and the beauty of it: a brief if humiliating respite, a shade pulled closed, a curtain falling before the next act. When I came to, everything was new again and yet the same.
In the museum, the professor ran to find me a bottle of apple juice at the café. My classmates crowded over me in awkward fascination. Just as I hadn’t known their names, they hadn’t known mine; like them, I had just been background scenery. Now they knew me as the girl who passed out at the Manet exhibit, a story for their friends over drinks. Soon they would not remember my name, or even what I looked like. By the next semester, they would forget.
Angus MacAskill hoisted the anchor, the story goes, not to boast, but after being taunted by a gang of sailors. When someone doubts you, you want to prove them wrong. You are pushed into the snow and marry someone else because they are nice to you. A fever in the brain, or in the heart. Your eyes snap shut and you fall to the floor; your eyes fly open, and you get up again. You yearn to be invisible; you long to be seen. Your memory is as incomplete as the pictures someone once drew, as faded as an old love note, as dusty as the diamond wedding band in the recesses of your jewelry box, now far too small to fit.
You pick up the anchor, intent on showing what you’re capable of. You don’t see the sharp edge of the fluke.