Ann Levin Susan's Rembrandt

Susan’s Rembrandt

The year I spent training to be a volunteer guide at the Metropolitan Museum was

like being put out to pasture. I’d had a high-pressure job for many years, then took

early retirement, and suddenly I wasn’t working at all—except that I was. In some ways,

harder than ever. But for free, and with no benefits, other than more access than most

people have to some of the greatest art in the world.

At the same time, that year of docent training was like being thrust back to

junior high school, when you ran around with your posse of girlfriends, knew which

lunch table you were supposed to sit at, and spent most of your time talking about the

boys you adored, only in this case, they weren’t boys, they were works of art.

Sometimes both.

One docent I knew was obsessed with John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Dr.

Samuel-Jean Pozzi, a French gynecologist portrayed at home as a darkly handsome

heart-throb in a long crimson dressing gown and Turkish slippers.

“I wish I had a doctor like that,” she sighed. “I’d be sick all the time.”

In our class of eleven trainees, Susan was my BFF. I like to think she still is, even

though we haven’t seen much of each other since the pandemic wreaked havoc on the

guided tour schedule. It’s made me wonder, off and on, what might happen to our

friendship because unlike other kinds of friends, BFFs have to be together in real life.

All the Zoom cocktails in the world can’t approximate the euphoria of standing on a

grimy subway platform at midnight, bitching about the 6 train.

The first time I remember thinking that Susan was unusual, possibly brilliant,

with great, dark stories hidden in the depths of her soul, was listening to her practice in

front of “her” Rembrandt in the Dutch paintings galleries at the Met.

“His gaze is introspective and contemplative,” she’d say in her thick New York

accent, voice laden with emotion, “perhaps meditating on the meaning of his life as it

falls into perpetual shadow.”

One of dozens of self-portraits he made during his lifetime, Rembrandt painted it

in 1660, nine years before he died. It’s a devastating picture of what it means to get

old, unsparing in its detail. We are confronted with what Philip Roth once called the

“massacre” of old age: sagging flesh, mottled skin, furrowed brow, drooping eyelids,

bulbous nose.

Unbelievably, he was only 54 when he made it. By contrast, Susan was 65 when

she started training to be a docent, already two years older than Rembrandt when he

died. But she had no wrinkles and creamy skin, something you could chalk up to

improvements in the material conditions of life over the 350 years since the so-called

Golden Age of Dutch Painting or just the fact that she had kickass genes.

She grew up in a tough, working-class neighborhood of the Bronx, went to City

College, married and dumped a husband after having a couple of kids, joined feminist

consciousness-raising groups in the seventies, and eventually, trained to be a

psychotherapist—because what better profession was there for a smart Jewish girl from

New York? But in her secret life, she wanted to produce plays.

“I never get tired of it,” she told me one night when we were standing in Times

Square after the theaters let out, gazing up at what to me was the soul-crushing display

of LED billboards eight stories high that were turning the night into garish day. “I feel

like I’m in a movie.”

I was friends with other people in our class too, and so was she, but I spent the

most time with her because she was always up for an adventure, even willing to get in

the senior citizen line at seven in the morning outside the Delacorte Theater for free

tickets to Shakespeare in the Park. “I’ve been up since 3,” she said. “I might as well.”

Then she’d bring back hilarious stories about all the other alteh kakers in line,

including the Upper West Side guy who, two years into the Trump administration,

opened up his newspaper and said no one in particular, fully expecting someone to join

in, "So, what did that idiot say today?”

Before I started docent training, I never thought I’d have BFFs again. At the

Associated Press, where I’d worked for 20 years, I’d had assorted bosses and mentors

and colleagues and friends, but everything we did always revolved around work. If a

bunch of us went out to a bar after a huge breaking news story, another plane crash or

a bombing, all we ever talked about was who got it first, whose lead was best, who had

the most colorful background and quotes. Even if we did something outside of work like

go to dinner or a movie, we’d start off the evening by saying, “Let’s not talk about

work”—but of course we always did.

It was pretty much the same at the three newspapers where I worked before I

ended up at the AP, with the major exception being the San Diego Tribune, where I met

my future husband, Stan, who also worked for the paper. We started dating and

eventually moved to New York and got married, but even though he was my boyfriend

and then my partner-for-life, he was never my BFF.

My very first BFF was Judy, the daughter of our housekeeper and Best Friend

Forever from fourth through eighth grade. She used to stay overnight at our house every

Friday, and we’d play Office with my younger sister, Rachel, which consisted of lying on

the rug in Rachel’s room and pretending we were secretaries. We adopted alluring

names like Rebecca and Michelle—nothing as prim or boring as Judy and Ann. Then we’d

turn off the lights and fantasize about falling in love with the boss, who was always tall,

dark, and handsome, Rock Hudson to our Doris Day. That was it. We didn’t have to buy

anything or go anywhere or really do much of anything at all except to dream—of a

sturdy typewriter, sheafs of pristine white typing paper, and all the scotch tape,

staplers, and pens and pencils that a girl could desire.

Next came Priscilla, my roommate in prep school. Unlike Judy, she’d grown up

with money—her dad was a banker, her mom wrote children’s books, and they had a

place on Fishers Island. But she wore her wealth lightly, going home from our boarding

school outside Philadelphia to her parents’ gray stone pile in Westchester with her dirty

laundry in brown paper grocery bags.

Tall and statuesque, with honey blond hair, dark eyebrows, and legs like Ann

Reinking’s that seemed to go on forever, she strode through life leaving a trail of

thunderstruck boys and men behind her. She was extremely close to her mother—they

were almost like sisters—and since I was furious at my own for all the usual Holden

Caulfield-esque reasons, I often wondered if that relationship had given her the

preternatural confidence with which she navigated the world.

Why we got along so well, why we were so fiercely loyal to each other, why we

truly loved one another, I don’t know, except that is the way of BFFs. The bonds, if and

when they form, have the potential to transcend everything from class to religion,

temperament to taste. Especially taste.

The first day I walked into our dorm room, my heart sank. She’d gotten there

first and covered the bunk beds with faux velvet leopard print bedspreads. Then she’d

gone off to meet boys. I’d grown up in a house tastefully decorated with an eclectic mix

of mid-century modern and high-end knockoffs of traditional Yankee furniture, and

those bedspreads struck me as hopelessly tacky. It would take me until college to

realize the truth of what the fashion designer Mary Quant once said: “Good taste is

death; vulgarity is life."

The high point of our relationship was the summer after graduation, when we traveled through Europe on $5 a day. Once, on an overnight train ride to Spain, I

polished off an entire cake, and she didn’t say a thing. Another time, after she’d stayed

out late drinking with some guys she met in Paris, she got so shit-faced that she peed

herself on the way to the bathroom in our hotel. I didn’t say a thing. Why would I? We

were BFFs.

After that summer, I never saw her again, not because we had a falling out but

simply because we went to different colleges, which was where I met Eileen. She lived

down the hall from me my sophomore year at Smith, and like Judy and Priscilla, was the

exact opposite of me, but a different kind of opposite. She’d grown up in inner-city

Newark, the feisty, freckled daughter of an alcoholic dad and a mom who was a cop. A

rabid Knicks fan who ran track in high school, she was the first girl I knew who loved the

NBA.

We used to stay up half the night together, getting high, smoking Kools, and

practicing dance steps for the discos, where we wore each other’s clothes, including

platform shoes, rhinestone belts, and slutty T-shirts that said “10 cents a dance.”

Supposedly, we went out to meet guys, but if we came home alone, well, that was okay

because each of us thought the other one was just about the smartest, funniest girl in

the world—practically the definition of a BFF.

In my experience, BFFs show up in your life when you need them the most and

disappear when your paths diverge. When you’re young, they help you navigate the

treacherous world of boys and men. By the time I met Susan, we were long past needing

to negotiate that particular hazard. Both of us had been married for many years and

enjoyed the exquisite boringness of long-term fidelity. Susan once told me it took her

and her second husband, Ron, an hour and a half to make up a shopping list.

“Should we get green beans?” she’d say, still in her pajamas, reading the paper

at noon.

“We had them last week.”

“How about broccoli?”

No, we were facing something even more terrifying than romantic love,

something so scary that we rarely ever talked about it. Tried, in fact, to ignore it, or, if

absolutely necessary, joke about it. And that, of course, was getting old and falling

apart. Losing your mind—to Alzheimer’s, dementia or some other long-term,

degenerative illness—then life itself.

Sometimes I thought the frenzied activity of the docents, or at least those of us

at or near the age of retirement—all the endless hours spent researching new objects,

memorizing our tours, going to lectures, taking in exhibitions—was merely a hedge

against mortality. A reminder to ourselves that even if we no longer had a corner office

and fancy job, we still mattered. For my part, I knew I was irrelevant, superannuated,

nonessential. Otherwise, what was I doing in a dark auditorium at ten in the morning,

watching a slide show about Caravaggio?

That’s why I think Susan picked Rembrandt’s self-portrait for her highlights tour—

to help her deal with the difficulties of getting old. Just to stand in front of it and

calmly talk about it bore witness to the stamina and fortitude it sometimes takes to be

alive. Of course, you can’t go wrong with Rembrandt. He’s one of the top two or three

draws at the Met, right up there with his fellow Dutchmen Van Gogh and Vermeer. A lot

of the docents included one of his works on their tours, but more often Aristotle with a

Bust of Homer, with its flashy white sleeves and gold medallion.

I didn’t know anyone else who did the self-portrait, which is all muddy browns

and blacks except for the famous “Rembrandt light” coming down from the upper left

corner, casting his lumpy face in enigmatic shadow. By the time he made it, he’d lost a

wife and three children, known success and scandal, been wealthy and bankrupt, and

may have sensed he was entering the last decade of his life. Susan described his

expression as introspective and contemplative; to me, he looked like the men you see at

last call in dark, smoke-stained taverns, their faces filled with alcoholic regret.

Once, while she was talking about the painting, an older woman in her group

burst into tears. Afterward, she came up to Susan, clasped her hands and thanked her,

and said she’d come all the way from Scotland and had always wanted to see it.

The objects we talked about had that effect. The art critic Jerry Saltz once

described a similar experience while looking at a different Rembrandt, Portrait of an

Elderly Man, which Rembrandt made just two years before he died. “This painting

didn’t sweep me off my feet,” he wrote. “It swept through me, a crack of existential

thunder.”

Susan hated getting old. I wasn’t happy about it, but she took it personally. It

just pissed her off that anything, the coronavirus or death itself, could interfere with

her voracious consumption of life. When Bill de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, said

during the lockdown that people over 65 should just stay home, she was incredulous.

“Just stay home?” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Really, de Blasio?

Really?”

A few years earlier, she’d told me with indignation that a man on the crosstown

86 bus had offered her his seat.

“What’s the big deal?” I said. “I would have taken it.”

To her, that was inconceivable.

“Just wait until it starts happening to you,” she said bitterly. “The first time is

mind-bending and often life-changing, like when you get your first period. Only sadder.”

I didn’t agree. In fact, it already had started happening to me, and I was ten

years younger than she was. I’d been treated for cancer when I was 50, and ever since,

I’d been happy to take any proffered seat on a subway or bus, depending on how I read

the intention. If a young person offered, I was secretly pleased to discover that good

manners still existed. If a man offered, especially one who wasn’t that much younger

than me, then I became incensed, reading it as yet another dreary sign of the

patriarchy.

“Fuck you,” I’d want to say, although of course I’d restrain myself, planting my

sneakered feet more firmly in the aisle and gripping the overhead bar a little tighter. In

his defense—and that of all the others who have ever made the gallant gesture—I don’t

think I truly grasped the disconnect between the way I looked and the way I felt. Day to

day, nothing seemed that different at 55 than it had at 45, and 35 was just a dream.

Then I’d catch a reflection of myself in the subway window—the wispy hair,

disappearing brows, and fading light in my eyes—and I’d understand.

But being with the docents was an antidote to all of that, like drinking a magic

potion that made me feel young again, inducing the delirium of junior high, when I

couldn’t get over the good fortune of being named to the committee to decorate the

gym for the Sadie Hawkins dance.

After our year of training was over, four of us in the class—Susan, Sheila,

Barbara, and I—would meet for lunch in the ground-floor cafeteria of the Met after our

tours. We’d get our food and gravitate toward the back of the long room, where all the

docents sat.

First, we’d talk about all the strange and funny things that had happened on our

tours. The visitors who wanted to know if the art was real. The high school kid on a

class trip who awkwardly asked me where in the museum he could see more paintings

like Modigliani’s Reclining Nude. And his class chaperone, a harried, friendly woman

with a strong Southern accent, who walked beside me through the galleries of French

decorative art, telling me about her hot flashes.

Then we’d move on to what everyone was reading and watching. All the docents I

knew subscribed to the theater, opera, symphony, or dance; belonged to one or more

book groups; were experts at cross-stitch, knitting, embroidery, or all three, executing

their intricate designs while binge-watching the latest series on Amazon, Netflix, or

HBO. They took classes, taught classes, learned foreign languages, even volunteered at

other institutions. Among them all, none was more passionate about the dance than

Susan, who’d been a season ticket holder to American Ballet Theatre and New York City

Ballet for so long that she knew everyone in her section on a first-name basis.

The year she turned 75, she told me she’d seen a performance by Alvin Ailey that

was so thrilling it made her glad to still be alive. I took note of the “still” and

understood it to mean that there were times when she wasn’t. And it was moments like

that that set her apart from Sheila and Barbara, who were weirdly cheerful and

optimistic about life.

During those meals, we also spent time dishing on other docents, particularly the

Ladies Who Lunch, also known as the Park Avenue Ladies. All of us were privileged—you

had to be to devote untold hours of your life to a volunteer gig—but some were more so

than others. At a minimum, we all had a house or apartment within commuting distance

of the city. The Park Avenue Ladies had a lot more than that: the beach house in the

Hamptons, the ranch outside Taos, the mountain aerie in Aspen, the Learjet to get

there—and for the most elite of the elite, an art collection good enough to someday

bequeath to the Met.

At a certain point in the lunch, the pictures of the grandchildren would inevitably

appear, and that was when I knew it was time for me to go. Stan and I didn’t have kids,

so we didn’t have grandkids, and while in theory I understood their appeal, I didn’t find

them nearly as interesting as my friends did.

Susan had grandchildren too, but she was as unsentimental about them as she’d

been about her own children, as unsentimental as my parents had been about us. When

her daughter’s first child was born, Barbara was more excited than she was.

“Is the baby adorable?” she said eagerly, leaning into the table to see the

pictures.

Susan shrugged. “She’s okay.”

“All babies are cute,” Barbara admonished her sternly.

“I guess. But she’s not going to be a beauty.”

Even I was taken slightly aback by the lack of enthusiasm, but Barbara simply

refused to accept it. Again, she insisted that all babies are precious.

“Not really,” Susan said. “Not all babies.”

Barbara kept at it, even tried a few more feints, but when Susan refused to

budge, she uncharacteristically gave up.

“Still, she’s a baby for them to love,” she said quietly.

“Yes, they love her.”

I was with Susan. To me, the real girls’ talk was never about the grandchildren—it

was about truth, justice, and whether mercy shall prevail. One of the things I loved

about her most was that she never outgrew the radical politics of her youth, which

overlapped with mine. It killed her when her daughter, whom she’d dragged to

countless Planned Parenthood marches as a child, started wavering on a woman’s right

to a legal abortion. Her son, meanwhile, had taken a turn toward Orthodox Judaism,

despite having grown up in her fiercely secular house. She agonized about having to

wear a skirt and sit in the women’s section of the synagogue when his son was bar

mitzvahed. I told her to just say no, but she wisely ignored me and went.

A couple years after we started giving tours, Susan and I signed up for a class at

MoMA on feminism and modern art, which met in the evenings after the museum was

closed. The instructor, a grad student in art history with a mop of dark curly hair, who

showed up for class in black leggings, lace bodysuits, and high-heeled leather boots,

would take us into the solemn galleries and point out great works of feminist art from

the sixties and seventies.

I don’t remember what, if anything, Susan or I said during class discussions, but it

must have been nostalgic, or even wistful, or possibly angry that nothing much had

changed in forty years, because on the last night of class, two young women seated

across the table from us spoke up in unison. “We just want to thank you for your

contributions,” they said sincerely.

Susan and I were speechless. The implication was clear: Your time is over. No

gold watch but we’re grateful for your service. Neither of us had the presence of mind

to say, “Wait a minute! We’re not done yet!”

I never asked Susan what was going through her mind when she practiced for all

those hours in front of her Rembrandt—I just listened to her talk and heard the pathos

in her voice. I think a lot of us used to work out our issues in front of the objects we

loved in the museum—I certainly did.

For me, it was always Bruegel’s The Harvesters—there was nothing like those

miniature figures of Dutch farmers circa 1565, the golden fields of grain and tiny ships

bobbing in the distant harbor, to get my old empathy machine cranked up again. I often

sat on the bench in front of that painting, feeling as though my heart was about to

burst.

During the long months of the lockdown, when the country was convulsed by

protests over the killing of George Floyd, I read an essay by Hilton Als about the casual

racism in the supposedly liberal bastions of publishing and the arts, and how it

manifests itself as a smug feeling of cultural superiority. He summarized it like this:

“You may have blackness, but we have Rembrandt,” then suggested that white people

might benefit from asking themselves, “Who is this man to you?” So I did.

I considered the possibility that Rembrandt wasn’t as great as he was cracked up

to be—even curators in Amsterdam have been rethinking the use of the phrase “Golden

Age of Dutch Painting” to refer to the cultural heritage of the 17th century Netherlands

because it glosses over the role of colonialism and slavery in creating the wealth that

supported Rembrandt and his ilk.

If I looked at the painting from that perspective—shorn of its assumed greatness,

asking myself the simple question, “Who is this man to me?”—I realized that it didn’t

have to contain any universal truth, and that not every person, from every place, at

every moment in world history, would have to agree that it was a masterpiece.

For me, it was enough that Rembrandt had depicted a man circumspect and a

trifle weary, whose time-worn face suggested that he’d had his fair share of joy and

sorrow, his own version of excruciating bar mitzvahs, ugly babies, and humiliating rides

on the crosstown bus. And now, that life was nearly over. There were blobs and slashes

of paint on the canvas, and there was suffering, and the fact that the first could show

the second was absolutely incredible to me.

Susan saw all that right away—she was always a quicker study than I was. In all

the years I’ve known her—and it’s been almost twelve since we first met in docent

training—I’ve never stopped being amazed at our late-blooming friendship, and the fact

that after so many years, I had a BFF again. And because she loved the Rembrandt, and

I loved her, I loved the Rembrandt, too.

Ann Levin

Ann Levin is a writer, editor, and journalist whose book reviews and articles have been published by the Associated Press, USA Today, and many other newspapers and magazines. Her memoir writing has appeared in Sensitive Skin and Southeast Review. She has also performed on stage with the writers’ group Read650.

Fenceless

A gate squared to frame April’s carpet, leaf duff sifted through winters. Nautilus curls meet at their foreheads, filigreed along the top rail. The shouldering fence has absconded.

Tan weeds flicked with first leaf buds flank both iron posts. Tangles flail out of sleepy thaw, trace curved paths like firework trails in long exposure light.

Chance evergreens cluster behind where a house’s wing once stretched. One branch swoops to knock trespassers. So forgo the latch, tromp the vegetation either side. There’s your permission.

See those first neighbors, inclined to visit over the rail. Gate swung to admit a first visitor across flagstones now buried under the crumble. That owner on the sidewalk, admiring the welcome before his front door.

David P Miller

David P Miller has poetry published in Meat for Tea, Hawaii Pacific Review, Turtle Island Quarterly and others. Collections in print include Sprawled Asleep (2019) and Bend in the Stair (2021). A librarian at Curry College in Massachusetts, David retired from that position in June 2018.