Regan, however, remained a series of unknown qualities, and also seemed to be popping into Aldo’s brain uninvited. He was frustrated to find that her Impressionism tour, which was certainly informative enough, wasn’t particularly enlightening. She was filling the role of Art Historian, which was like a coat she’d shrugged on rather than any recognizable version of herself. There was nothing introspective about the way she spoke about art; from time to time Aldo thought she might reveal some personal connection to the art or the artist, but even Regan’s most enthusiastic observations stopped just shy of passion.
“Hi, excuse me,” he said, raising a hand and startling her. “I have a question.”
“About Degas?” she asked doubtfully, gesturing to the painting of the dancers behind her.
“No,” he said, “about you.”
She gave him a prim look of impatience.
“You can have one question,” she allowed.
“What’s your favorite painting in the museum?” he asked her.
“Sir, this is the Impressionism tour,” she said. “You’ll have to limit the scope of your question.”
“Fine,” he said. “Your favorite painting on this tour, then.”
She hesitated a moment, then conceded, summoning their group further into the room. “This one,” she said, gesturing to a rendition of a sunset over a water channel; even to Aldo, who knew nothing about art, the colors suggested it had been painted at dusk. “This is Nocturne: Blue and Gold, by James McNeill Whistler. It’s part of a series he painted in the evenings and named after musical pieces,” Regan explained. “It’s considered a forerunner of Modernism’s abstractions.”
“Why?” Aldo said, startling her before she could move on.
“Well,” Regan said, “because it isn’t illustrative or narrative so much as—”
“No, sorry. I meant why this painting?” he clarified.
“I said one question,” she reminded him.
“Hardly seems fair,” he replied. “This is just a subset of the initial question.”
“Are you saying my first answer wasn’t complete?”
“Not especially,” he said. “Not satisfactorily, anyway.”
She bit down on something. Possibly a smile, or a shake of her head.
“Sir,” she said sternly, “this is a tour, not a private conversation.”
“Why does it need to be private?” he countered, waving a hand. “It’s a conversation you’re having with us. You know, publicly. Pseudo-publicly,” he amended.
“All art is private,” she said. “The first question was about the collection, but now you’re asking me to reveal something personal about myself.”
“If all art is private, then it’s the same question,” Aldo argued.
“That’s a very loose interpretation,” she replied.
“Most of art is a loose interpretation.”
She seemed to disapprove. “You think there’s no precision to art?”
“Certainly not to Impressionism,” he said, which he felt was obvious.
“Only if you’re looking for the truth in an object,” she said. “But if you want to identify an emotion, or a sensation, then there is nothing more precise than art.”
“What’s the precision in this painting?” he asked her.
“Well, that assumes I like it for its precision, doesn’t it?” she replied.
“Do you?”
“Absolutely not,” she said, and he blinked.
“Then what do you—”
“Whistler intentionally did not paint specifics,” she said, appearing to have incidentally tripped and fallen into an answer. “Many people mocked his work. They thought his pieces lacked emotion because he told no story. But he wasn’t trying to tell a story—according to Whistler, art should stand alone from context. Art was simply art,” Regan explained, “with inconsequential specifics. The year? Unimportant,” she answered herself. “The place? Close to irrelevant. What you’re seeing before you is a single intake of breath—one moment. It is the beauty of the world in its most objective state, because the artist isn’t expressing any meaning. He isn’t trying to define you or teach you or tell you what space to occupy, he’s just—”
She exhaled sharply, turning to look at the slowly fading sun behind her.
“Look at the colors,” she said, her voice less insistent now and more imploring. “Look how somber it is, how lonely. He named his paintings after music so that none of the senses would go unsatisfied. You can see the lights,” she added, gesturing to them, “to prove he’s not alone in the world. It’s going on around him in a slow, incoherent fade, but there’s nothing to connect you, the observer, to this moment. Nothing rooting you to anything except for this single intake of breath, sitting over the English Channel just before the sun goes down. It’s art because it’s art, which is circular in its way,” she said, and then blinked, that same half-smile lingering at the edges of her mouth when she turned to face him. “A perfect circle, if you will,” she said, “because it is and it was and it will be, all at once.”