My own personal girl with a pearl earring

Tracy Chevalier, who wrote "Girl with a Pearl Earring," a historical novel that speculates on how Vermeer's painting of that name came into existence, was only 13 when I stood in front of that extraordinary work of art in the Autumn of 1975 at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.  She wouldn't write that novel for another 24 years, which I might consider fortunate because it enabled me to tell my own story about the painting.

I didn't have to work at it the way Tracy certainly did, however,  because for me the story flowed directly out of the painting in the instant I turned a corner in the halls and galleries of the museum and saw it shimmering in front of me in perfect illumination that separated it from everything else so that it occupied my full view and attention.  It struck me immediately with the full force of real experience as no other painting has ever done.  It did that because it evoked the unbearable grief I had been feeling in my own life due to the breakup of my first (second?) major relationship, which was with a very pretty girl named Pamela.

The proximity of that pain over-determined my perception of Vermeer's painting.  I saw with perfect clarity and total absence of any doubt that the beautiful young girl with a pearl earring was turning away from me forever and was taking a last brief look over her shoulder at the man she no longer loved.

Pam had just broken up with me after a year of pleasurable dalliance and/or love (complicated by ambiguity and regret that I won't go into because it would interferes with my memory of the sensation in that moment). The scene of our falling apart might have been lifted out of an episode from a weekday afternoon soap opera, and it was accompanied by a kind of axiomatic corollary, which was that, in order to make a clean getaway, Pamela felt it was necessary to provide a justification for her departure by telling me why she was leaving.  For me, the girl with a pearl earring had been caught by Vermeer's photographic portrait in the moment immediately after having spoken the thoughtless and hurtful words.

Compared to the agony of separation, maybe it doesn't matter what Pamela actually said though I remember it with keen precision. Her words would have been all the more unreliable since the next customer of her wonderful charms was already waiting in another tent not far away.

I might now look upon this episode as one of the difficult experiences I had to go through that helped me to change and to grow and become a better person.  People often talk about their early heartbreaks as having been painful at the time but constructive ("positively formative") in the long run.

Antonio Machado, who had a talent for coming up with memorable phrases as a leading light of the "Generation of '98," agrees that such experiences are good for people when they happen early in life:

Eran ayer mis dolores como gusanos de seda
que iban labrando capullos.

(They were yesterday my pains like silk worms
that went making cocoons.)

but it's different if they occur later:

Hoy son mariposas negras.

(Today they are black butterflies.)

I believe I can say with reasonable authority that one such experience is enough to last for a lifetime, though I've lived through enough recurrences to have become a connoisseur of failed relationships and could probably assemble a compendium (given a decent publisher advance).

My experience of Vermeer's painting was all my own.  It has nothing to do with Vermeer's actual intention or Tracy Chevalier's historical interpretation of how it came about.  I try now in vain to re-experience what I felt in the autumn of 1975, but I haven't stood in front of the original painting again either.  Maybe if I did that I would dissolve into a puddle on the floor.

I did run into Pamela sometime in the mid-nineties.  It turned out we'd been living near one another on Bedford Street in the village.  She had long since been divorced from my immediate successor, who had thrown her out after only about a year.  Her current husband was a car mechanic and he was in the process of divorcing her too.   We went out for a couple of weeks, during which time I learned enough about her (while also recalling the aforementioned ambiguities and regrets) to be quite content that she'd broken up with me twenty years before., because the truth is that Pam was an outrageous slut. I think I'm more open-minded than most people and I don't make stern judgments about that sort of thing, but I'd rather not get tangled up with someone like that again either.