Cézanne’s Apples Cheryl Hindrichs

Cheryl Hindrichs

“Your head’s too small.” I looked up from the open pages balanced on my lap into marvelously wide eyes. She sat perched expectantly, her knees very close to my own, waiting, I suppose, for an explanation. Which was easy enough, but a rejoinder ripped across my mind—“Your legs don’t work.” I swallowed it down. Her mother glanced up with latent hostility from her phone. A fouryear old, a treasure, I smiled at her, they say what we won’t, don’t they? See what we no longer can because we have strangled too many thoughts. Her phone dinged. The girl wheeled herself adroitly around my island of waiting room chairs. After a serpentine tour, she sped back, leaning far over my knees. I hoped she would ask about the book in my lap, comment on its bigness perhaps. But, here it came again, insistent now, a note of concern, “But… your head. It’s too small.” I could smile now, “Yes, it’s rather small. But I’m rather small altogether.” She looked at my legs, skeletal knobs sheathed in jeans, looked at my gloved hands and heavily muffled torso. She fixed her eyes again on me with a look of consternation. A woman that was tall, quite tall, but also small somehow, and so there was something not quite right—perhaps it was the head that didn’t quite fit? The nurse called my name. The girl had wheeled away like a shot, and I followed Mustafa into the hospital’s bowels, sharing in a certain rue familiarity as we passed the apprehensive first-timers—their wide eyes, sudden yawns, clutched phones, and fretful tossing of magazine pages. “I’ve got – full head CT, sound right to you?” In the room with the massive machine like a humming portal, Mustafa arranged blankets and pillows as best he could on the plank, a kindness that would dull the bones of my pelvis and spine against the unforgiving plastic. Now there would be time to think, during the rituals of the CT scanner. The whooping of the ghost in the machine’s ring began circling my head furiously, then stillness, then the ferocious knocking and rapping—flaunting the civilized disembodied voice, “Please hold your breath.” A poltergeist, it would pierce the veil, tell the truth beneath the flesh of the skull which, for two years now, began to appear, clearer and clearer in my bathroom mirror. 15

I arrive to the classroom early, to set up a video slide ostensibly. But I sit in dimness, check my email and open the hospital account with the results of the morning’s test. My eyes skim a jagged paragraph of diagnostic language (complete mandible resorption right, severe resorption advancing left mandible, osseous skull incursions) and skip down to the conclusion. “Acute degeneration. CVID comorbidity with Gorham’s Disease suggested.” I Google the latter, having lived, or rather foundered under CVID for the past six years. My fingers trace the interrupted bone of my jaw as I read, “Vanishing Bone Disease,” and my graduate students begin to filter in with a subdued merriness. To my delight, they have purloined the upholstered hallway chairs again. For the next three hours, at least, I will not recall the skull beneath the flesh, the trap of it, the existential vertigo I’m teetering on. Here are twelve young, intelligent, creative minds passionately hungry to think and to feel. I project the slide, one of the four Cézannes that John Maynard Keynes bought in 1918 and brought home to Bloomsbury, where Roger Fry was “intoxicated” by them along with Vanessa Woolf and her sister Virginia—the subject of our class. The students had read Woolf’s short fiction for today, essaystories that offended with the same degree of outrageousness as this postimpressionist art. But how had the unconventional stories struck them? Had they rebelled? Having realized there wouldn’t be a finished portrait at the end, had they attempted to see something for themselves? Cézanne’s apples filled the screen in the darkening room that smelled, pleasantly, of chalk and dust. I let the silence deepen, widen, make a space. Finally I asked, “Is that what an apple looks like?” The silence charged. An answer was compelled.

“Well. Sort of.” “Is it a very good picture of an apple?” More silence, what agenda did I have? Their thoughts flicker, dart ahead, but they hold the silence waiting for cues. “Say you were marketing for Albertson’s, would this be a nice advert for apples?” “Maybe at the bourgeoise Albertsons.” A happy rout of laughter, and off we go—into Kantian philosophy and Plato, and how Woolf and her group debated these philosophies, the subject and object and nature of reality. We take up our own debate of whether a table, the one before you let’s say, is real when we are not here. After voices have 16

deliberated from both sides and a table thumped for emphasis, I declare an impasse. Answering the truth of the nature of reality is less important than asking after that truth, I say, in continually unsettling our perception of it, of making us see our perception so that we can see otherwise. That is the artist’s work. Cézanne wants us to see something in an apple that we do not see when we look at a glossy image. How is Woolf doing something similar?

Students begin to comment on the painting’s perspective, how its use of color and form correlate with Woolf’s lyrical sentences. I ask for lights, put them in pairs and ask them to brainstorm on examples from Woolf’s stories of such attempts to get at the subject and object and nature of reality. And, further, what do they take away from what they see there? The students turn their desks inward toward each other and a warming murmur fills the room. I move between the binary stars in the glancing arc of a comet, listening, affirming, then fade into the space at the front of the classroom, half sitting on a table; the ghostly image of Cézanne’s apples persists on the screen behind me. It is six thirty, and Bailey dips into her satchel for two items, as she has in every evening class. She is hungry; she has taught elementary children all day, brightly, smartly, in outfits that tend to evoke the 1940s. She arranges on her small desk an apple and a small Tupperware container of some rabbity mix. The mix changes; the apple is infallible. A flutter of amusement ripples through the groups as the sudden presence of a real apple, the ding an sich, becomes known. We are all now looking at the apple, which Bailey sits over with a proud parent’s half smile. I suggest a break after which we can discuss what the pairs have found. Several students depart for coffee or water, a few stretch, mill. My eyes fall on Bailey, just as she bites into the apple. This action, the fact of it, seen innumerable times, now seems to have happened in slow motion, or cubist fractals. The apple’s skin, a polished red with a warm golden blush at its hips, is neatly pierced in a clean, deeply satisfying bite—two sets of perfectly white, straight teeth that excavate a little hollow into the flesh. I break my gaze as overwhelming desire lances my cheeks. It is as if I have been struck, so out of proportion is my physical reaction to the sight. I rest my eyes on Noah and Lillian who are scrolling through internet images of Cézannes, and question the distinct taint of envy making a bitter, phantom

ache in what should be my jaw. Until today I’d observed others biting into all manner of things impossible for me now— sandwiches, oranges, bruschetta—with a kind of rationalized, detached amusement, one based on my secret knowledge of the fallibility of the bone, the inconstancy of pleasure. The apple seems to defy either, and perhaps that is why we consume it with a mirrored righteous defiance. Note any first bite of an apple, you’ll see it. But the nature of an apple, however it may appear in all its promise and the satisfaction of its roundness in the palm, is not so different from the nature of a body. I see, in memory, the kitchen witch that hung above my grandmother’s cellar door. Its straw body straddled a wee broom, but its head was chillingly real—a wizened old woman’s face, deeply creased and peering from a Slovenian wood. Granny claimed it was a good witch; it guards us from hunger and greed. My four-year old self stood beneath it, peering into the puckered-up face, uncertain. “The head,” she explained, fishing out russets, “is really an apple.” “An apple?” “In the old country, a good carver would peel an apple into a beautiful woman’s face, and then hang it from string, and after a year… there she’d be.” “The head gets smaller.” “Right. But wiser.”

Noah and Lillian have turned their heads from a laptop to look at me, “Look at this ‘Still Life with Skull’,” says Noah. They have been looking at other Cézannes. “What’s wrong with the skull?” he challenges me. I feint, “it’s missing a lower jaw.” He dismisses that offering. “Jaws often go missing. What

else?”

I wait. Lillian murmurs, “the skull is too small.” “It’s difficult to say,” I pause. “The flesh deceives.”