Recently Barnaby was dozing through a performance of Japanese imperial court music when he had a dream. In the dream he opened a steel pocketwatch to see the time and noticed that the hands were mounted on the back of an empty case—but still worked, without any gears—and that surrounding the hands, all along the interior circumference, were small houses and other buildings in sandy colors. Then, before he knew it, he was awake and riding the subway home, eating a Häagen-Dazs bar.

The following day, he went to see a show at the Metropolitan Museum. The show was organized around the work of some French pimp—all of the paintings had passed through his hands one way or another. All of the wall labels described the paintings’ relationships to this M. Vollard’s fortunes. One label, for example, mentioned that he had bought a twenty-six room house in the seventh arrondissement of Paris after selling for very high prices two paintings that Paul Cézanne had lent him for a party. No, that is not right—it wasn’t that Cézanne had lent them for a party, it was that Vollard had drugged Cézanne and stolen them from his house. Or had he kidnaped Cézanne’s son, and exacted the paintings as a ransom? No, that isn’t exactly right, either, but you get the idea. But according to the wall labels, Cézanne came from a wealthy family and had no business sense, and he had absolute faith in M. Vollard, and he did not mind that Vollard was getting rich.

But speaking of Cézanne, there was one large room of his paintings, and Barnaby stood in the middle, turning in a slow circle, looking at each one in turn. First he thought about the fact that most paintings are more profitably viewed from across the room, and he pitied all the neophytes edging around the circumference, two feet from every picture, and he lamented the many years he had spent doing the same thing. Why had no one told him? But then he congratulated himself for having done this himself, first, in this room, before moving back, so that he could know that “The Orgy,” while garish and horrible from close up, becomes complex and serene with as little as twelve feet of additional viewing distance. Then Barnaby—still turning, of course—thought about the way Cézanne used color, particularly in his still lifes and portraits. He managed to restrict himself almost entirely to the point of meeting between harmony and discord, so that the paintings have a sort of vibrating tension that persists at any distance. They shock you, they strike the eyes. The tension never resolves. And then turning Barnaby marveled at Cézanne’s range. All of the paintings in that room were clearly the work of one man, the product of a unitary style—but what a man, and what a capacious style! The trees boring up out of the earth and across canvas in the landscapes; the hurricane-like destruction of all obscurity and pretense in the portraits; and then the smooth, lush colors on the other wall! The bodies made like flakes of stone on the one hand, and the bodies like Michelangelo, on the other! The blacks here, the yellow there! In short—Barnaby, still spinning and by now quite dizzy, fell down.

Then there is Gauguin. Gauguin, with his flatness, with his coloring-book black lines, with his sickly, jaundiced palette—Barnaby has a secret weak spot for his green and yellow Christs, but the Tahitian scenes almost without exception make him queasy and nervous. He discussed this with a fellow he met in the museum, an enormously tall man in a black leather vest and wearing a black cowboy hat.

“What is it,” asked Barnaby, “about Gauguin’s paintings that make me want to sit down, close my eyes, and drink a glass of very cold seltzer?”

“Nah, brother, I like them,” said the man in the cowboy hat. “He had a unique vision—look at this one, the women bathing in the river. Don’t you think he captures some sort of ancient, primal otherness?”

“I guess so,” Barnaby answered. Then he actually did sit down, on the floor, steadying himself with one hand. “But I find that primal otherness very narrow and claustrophobic. You know?”

“Yeah,” said his friend, “it is kind of one-note. But what about that rolling grass over their, with the two Breton farmers?”

Barnaby looked over his shoulder and nodded.

“It’s excellent grass,” he agreed. “Very lush. But still, man, with all due respect, there’s something about this guy’s work that seems to me kind of mendacious and fake. Also, I think he was crazy.”

“Oh,” replied the man in the cowboy hat, “dude, I like his stuff, but he was definitely crazy. I mean, look at that!” he said, pointing at the standing yellow figure in Gauguin’s long, mural-like masterwork. “You only need to glance at that chick to tell that the guy was completely fucking froot-loops!”

Barnaby nodded. He was beginning to feel ill.

“Why is that?” he asked. “What is it exactly that we are seeing? How can we—uh—” Barnaby clenched his teeth; sweat poured down his brow. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he said. The enormous man in the cowboy hat scooped him up to his feet and led him into the following room.

“I’ve never been in a whole room full of Gauguins before,” Barnaby muttered.

“It’s not the Gauguins, friend,” said the man in the vest. “It was all that Thelonious dancing you were doing in the Cézannes. What are you, autistic?”

“Maybe,” Barnaby allowed, as his benefactor set him down in a chair at the center of the portrait room. Here he wiped his brow, and took deep breaths, and contemplated half a dozen portraits of Ambroise Vollard with his beloved little dog. He thought about the position of the artist in society, and about his rent, and about his friends getting rich in advertising, and law—not to mention as art dealers—and the ones ensconced cozily if unremuneratively in warm, stable graduate schools. He thought about Gauguin chucking his life over to devote himself to painting flat, yellow people. He thought about Van Gogh writing desperate letters to his brother, preaching to miners, and talking to trees. He thought about Ambroise Vollard’s twenty-six room mansion and his famous dinner parties where he served out chicken curry. (Author’s note: I’m not making that up, either—it was in a fucking wall label.) Barnaby felt lower and lower and lower. But then he stood up, bracing himself to go out and walk through a cold wind across Central Park, and he caught sight of a wall label that proved three things: 1., that curators sometimes have a sense of humor; 2., that there is a God; and 3., that sometimes virtue is rewarded. The label was beside Cézanne’s portrait of Vollard—that’s the Cézanne, remember, who came from a wealthy family, and had no business sense—and it said this:

“Vollard was in his mid-thirties when he commissioned this portrait. He reported having to endure more than one hundred sittings for it. On occasion, he allegedly modeled from eight in the morning until eleven thirty at night and was instructed by the artist to remain silent and completely still, ‘like an apple.’ Although Cézanne did not complete the portrait, he claimed to be ‘not dissatisfied with the shirt front.’”