Authors: Susanna Kaysen

Girl, Interrupted (15 page)

I didn’t listen to her. I went out to dinner with my English teacher, and he kissed me, and I went back to Cambridge and failed biology, though I did graduate, and, eventually, I went crazy.

Sixteen years later I was in New York with my new, rich boyfriend. We took many trips, which he paid for, although spending money made him queasy. On our trips, he often attacked my character—that character once diagnosed as disordered. Sometimes I was too emotional, other times too cold and judgmental. Whichever he said, I’d comfort him by telling him it was okay to spend money. Then he would stop attacking me, which meant we could stay together and begin the spending-and-attack cycle on some future trip.

It was a beautiful October day in New York. He had attacked and I had comforted and now we were ready to go out.

“Let’s go to the Frick,” he said.

“I’ve never been there,” I said. Then I thought maybe I had been. I didn’t say anything; I’d learned not to discuss my doubts.

When we got there I recognized it. “Oh,” I said. “There’s a painting I love here.”

“Only one?” he said. “Look at these Fragonards.”

I didn’t like them. I left the Fragonards behind and walked into the hall leading to the courtyard.

She had changed a lot in sixteen years. She was no longer urgent. In fact, she was sad. She was young and distracted, and her teacher was bearing down on her, trying to get her to pay attention. But she was looking out, looking for someone who would see her.

This time I read the title of the painting:
Girl Interrupted at Her Music
.

Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?

I had something to tell her now. “I see you,” I said.

My boyfriend found me crying in the hallway.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked.

“Don’t you see, she’s trying to get out,” I said, pointing at her.

He looked at the painting, he looked at me, and he said, “All you ever think about is yourself. You don’t understand anything about art.” He went off to look at a Rembrandt.

I’ve gone back to the Frick since then to look at her and at the two other Vermeers. Vermeers, after all, are hard to come by, and the one in Boston has been stolen.

The other two are self-contained paintings. The people in them are looking at each other—the lady and her maid, the soldier and his sweetheart. Seeing them is peeking at them through a hole in a wall. And the wall is made of light—that entirely credible yet unreal Vermeer light.

Light like this does not exist, but we wish it did. We wish the sun could make us young and beautiful, we wish our clothes could glisten and ripple against our skins, most of all, we wish that everyone we knew could be brightened simply by our looking at them, as are the maid with the letter and the soldier with the hat.

The girl at her music sits in another sort of light, the fitful, overcast light of life, by which we see ourselves and others only imperfectly, and seldom.

Acknowledgments

My thanks to Jill Ker Conway, Maxine Kumin, and Susan Ware for their early encouragement; to Gerald Berlin for his legal help; and to Julie Grau for her enthusiasm and her good care of both book and author.

I am most grateful to Robin Becker, Robin Desser, Michael Downing, Lyda Kuth, and Jonathan Matson for their insights, humor, and true-blue friendship.

ALSO BY
S
USANNA
K
AYSEN

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Fiction/Literature

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The Camera My Mother Gave Me
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Fiction/Literature