Travels in Vermeer by Michael White Page B

it’s a long drive. On our way out to tour the buildings, she opens a door on the far side of the main room, opening on whiteness, emptiness, and the mirror twin to the space where she lives.
    â€œI haven’t decided what to do with this. Everyone tells me I should use it as a painting studio … But I don’t paint any more. This is my art now,” she says, gesturing around and above. She closes the door gently, as if on a sleeping ghost.
    I follow her around to see the lobby, the pool, the gym, and here or there, she points out strategically preserved vestiges of the former school. For instance, she leads me down a long, strangely angled corridor full of apartments. Over the doorway at the end is a fragment of the old proscenium arch—complete with the original plaster comedy-and-tragedy masks—that would have crowned the peak of the “fourth wall.” The rest has been filled in with sheetrock and carpeting and elevators.
    â€œ Oklahoma ,” I say, half-singing the syllables.
    She smiles once more, a sudden flash. “ Saturday Night Fever , more likely.”
    â€œHa, you’re right,” I say.
    Flash-forward a couple of hours, past the delicate “nouvelle” dinner (some sort of medallions, in some sort of sauce, with pale stalks of asparagus) in her restaurant, where the music—an excellent Blue Ridge folk duet—is too loud for relaxed conversation. I’m never quite comfortable, my back to the light, my elbows constantly in the path of the waitresses.
    We’re back at her place again. I’m sitting on a velvety black sofa. She’s boiling water again, more a formality than anything else. I become conscious, with a sudden chill, there are virtually no books in her house. Yet on the wall before me is a full-scale reproduction of one of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings—the two pristine white calla lilies, each with its fingerlike yellow spadix, on a bright pink ground.
    â€œIt’s my favorite painting,” she says, setting down my cup on the end table, along with a dish of enormous, buttery, oatmeal-raisin cookies.
    â€œI love it, too,” I say.
    â€œI have it on my back.”
    â€œYou what?”
    â€œTattooed. On my back. That painting.”
    I nibble a cookie for a moment. “Curiouser and curiouser,” I say…“May I see it?”
    â€œSure,” she says. She turns without rising from the sofa, unbuttons her long-sleeved white shirt, slips out of it, and then, in a moment, reaches back to unclasp her black bra, and slips that off her shoulders as well. She remains sitting; back sinuously turned toward me, arms lightly crossed, unashamedly, over her small breasts.
    It isn’t a detail from the canvas, but the canvas itself—the vertical rectangle, reduced in size to cover the field of her back. There is a heightened vividness to the colors—white and yellow and green and pink—as a result of being translated from oil to needle-and-ink, and it is impressive, if unsettling.
    â€œWow,” I say.
    â€œI don’t regret it,” she says. She stands, slips the shirt back on without the bra, and buttons it halfway up.
    She opens up, in a rush, it seems, about the period after her divorce. Her father’s death that same year. How she’d inherited the corporation, and had had a crisis, partly because she didn’t really want to retire from teaching. And yet, she wasn’t teaching at the time—and the demands of being principal had been too stressful, anyway. She tells me how she’d done it, taken the property on, out of the blue, as an experiment, as part of a slew of midlife changes, and had discovered she liked it, had a knack for it—her head filled with a million projects, every day, these days. The vision, then the satisfaction of seeing the actual results. And the skydiving, the tattoo. “These things are a part of me now.” Still, it’s her