Girl with a Pearl Earring

The woman looked as if she had been blown about by the wind, although it was a calm day. Her cap was askew so that tiny blond curls escaped and hung about her forehead like bees which she swatted at impatiently several times. Her collar needed straightening and was not as crisp as it could be. She pushed her gray mantle back from her shoulders, and I saw then that under her dark blue dress a baby was growing. It would arrive by the year’s end, or before.

The woman’s face was like an oval serving plate, flashing at times, dull at others. Her eyes were two light brown buttons, a color I had rarely seen coupled with blond hair. She made a show of watching me hard, but could not fix her attention on me, her eyes darting about the room.

I always laid vegetables out in a circle, each with its own section like a slice of pie. There were five slices: red cabbage, onions, leeks, carrots, and turnips. […]

The man tapped his finger on the table. “Are they laid out in the order in which they will go into the soup?” […]

“No, sir.” I hesitated. I could not say why I had laid out the vegetables as I did. I simply set them out as I felt they should be, but I was too frightened to say so to a gentleman.

“I see you have separated the whites […] And then the orange and purple, they do not sit together. Why is that?”

[…]

“The colors fight when they are side by side, sir.”

He arched his eyebrows, as if he had not expected such a response. “And do you spend much time setting out the vegetables before you make the soup?”

The Guild looks after its own, as best it can. Remember the box your father gave money to every week for years? That money goes to masters in need, as we are now. But it only goes so far, you see, especially now with Frans in his apprenticeship and no money coming in. We have no choice. We won’t take public charity, not if we can manage without. Then your father heard that your new master was looking for a maid who could clean his studio without moving anything, and he put forward your name, thinking that as headman, and knowing our circumstances, Vermeer would be likely to try to help.

The woman standing in the doorway had a broad face, pockmarked form an earlier illness. Her nose was bulbous and irregular, and her thick lips were pushed together to form a small mouth. Her eyes were light blue, as if she had caught the sky in them. She wore a grey-brown dress with a white chemise, a cap tied tight around her head, and an apron that was not as clean as mine. She stood blocking the doorway, so that Maertge and Cornelia had to push their way out round her, and she looked at me with crossed arms as if waiting for a challenge.

Already she feels threatened by me, I thought. She will bully me if I let her.

“My name is Griet,” I said, gazing at her levelly. “I am the new maid.”

I was about to blow out the candle when I noticed the painting hanging at the foot of my bed. I sat up, wide awake now. It was another picture of Christ on the Cross, smaller than the one upstairs but even more disturbing. Christ had thrown his head back in pain, and Mary Magdalene’s eyes were rolling. I lay back gingerly, unable to take my eyes off it. I could not imagine sleeping in the room with the painting. Finally I blew out the candle—I could not afford to waste candles on my first day in the new house. I lay back again, my eyes fixed to the place where I knew the painting hung.

Maria Thins seemed content to stand with me and contemplate the painting. It was odd to look at it with the setting just behind it. Already from my dusting I knew all of the objects on the table, and their relation to one another—the letter by the corner, the powder-brush lying casually next to the pewter bowl, the blue cloth bunched around the dark pot. Everything seemed to be exactly the same, except cleaner and purer. It made a mockery of my own cleaning.

Then I saw a difference. I drew in my breath.

“What is it, girl?”

“In the painting there are no lion heads on the chair next to the woman.”

“No. There was once a lute sitting on that chair as well. He makes plenty of changes. He doesn’t paint just what he sees, but what will suit.”

“But you have been in his studio— [but] you told us […] nothing about the painting he is working on. Describe it to me.”

“I don’t know if I can in such a way that you will be able to see it.”

“Try. […] It will give me pleasure to imagine a painting by a master, even if my mind creates a poor imitation.”

So I tried to describe the woman tying pearls around her neck, her hands suspended, gazing at herself in the mirror, the light from the window bating her face and her yellow mantle, the dark foreground that separated her from us.

My father listened intently, but his own face was not illuminated until I said, “The light on the back wall is so warm that looking at it feels the way the sun feels on your face.”

He nodded and smiled, please now that he understood.

“But why do you look at it, sir, when you can look at your own painting?”

“You do not understand. […] This is a tool. I use it to help me see, so that I am able to make the painting.”

“But—you use your eyes to see.”

“True, but my eyes do not always see everything […] Tell me, Griet,” he continued, “do you think I simply paint what is there in that corner? […] The camera obscura helps me to see in a different way,” he explained. “To see more of what is there.”

When he saw the baffled expression on my face he must have regretted saying so much to someone like me. He turned and snapped the box shut. […]

“Sir—”

“Thank you, Griet,” he said as he took it from me. “Have you finished with the cleaning here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You may go, then.”

[H]e was standing in the doorway. […] The girls ran up to him and tried to snatch off the paternity cape he wore […] He looked both proud and embarrassed. I was surprised—he had become a father five times before, and I thought he would be used to it. There was no reason for him to feel embarrassed.

It is Catharina who wants many children, I thought then. He would rather be alone in his studio.

But […] I knew how babies were made. […] And as difficult as Catharina could be, I had often seen him look at her, touch her shoulder, speak to her in a low voice laced with honey.

I did not like to think of him that way, with his wife and children. I preferred to think of him alone in his studio. Or not alone, but with only me.

“What color are the clouds?”

“Why, white, sir.”

He raised his eyebrows slightly. “Are they?”

I glanced at them. “And grey. Perhaps it will snow.”

“Come, Griet, you can do better than that. Think of your vegetables […] Think of how you separated the whites. Your turnips and your onions. Were they the same white?”

Suddenly I understood. “No. The turnip had green in it, the onion yellow.”

“Exactly. Now, what colors do you see in the clouds?”

“There is some blue in them,” I said after studying them for a few minutes. “And—yellow as well. And there is some green!” I became so excited I actually pointed. I had been looking at clouds all my life, but I felt as if I saw them for the first time that moment.

He smiled. “You will find there is little pure white in clouds, yet people say they are white.”

Sleeping in the attic made it easier for me to work there, but I still had little time to do so. I could get up earlier and go to bed later, but sometimes he gave me so much work that I had to find a way to go up in the afternoons […]I began to complain of not being able to see my stitching in the dim kitchen, and needing the light of my bright attic room. […]

I began to get used to lying.

Once he had suggested that I sleep in the attic he left it to me to arrange my duties so that I could work for him. He never helped me by lying for me, or asking me if I had time to spare for him. He gave me instructions in the morning and expected them to be done by the next day.

“Oh yes, that story went all around the Meat Hall,” he answered, chuckling. […] “It was several years ago now. It seems van Ruijven wanted one of his kitchen maids to sit for a painting with him. They dressed her in one of his wife’s gowns, a red one, and van Ruijven made sure there was wine in the painting so he could get her to drink every time they sat together. Sure enough, before the painting was finished she was carrying van Ruijven’s child.”

“What happened to her?”

Pieter shrugged, “What happens to girls like that?”

His words froze my blood. Of course I had heard such stories before, but never one so close to me. I thought about my dreams of wearing Catharina’s clothes, of van Ruijven grasping my chin in the hallway, of him saying “You should paint her” to my master.

When I was done I looked up at him.

“Tell me, Griet, why did you change the tablecloth?” His tone was the same as when he had asked me about the vegetables at my parents’ house.

I thought for a moment. “There needs to be some disorder in the scene, to contrast with her tranquility,” I explained. “Something to tease the eye. And yet it must be something pleasing to the eye as well, and it is, because the cloth and her arm are in a similar position.”

There was a long pause. He was gazing at the table. I waited, wiping my hands on my apron.

“I had not thought I would learn something from a maid,” he said at last.

“Please, madam, what did he say? About me?”

Maria Thins gave me a knowing look. “Don’t flatter yourself, girl. He said very little about you. But it was clear enough. That he came downstairs at all and concerned himself—my daughter knew then that he was taking your side. No, he charged her with failing to raise her children properly. Much cleverer, you see, to criticize her than to praise you.”

“Did he explain that I was—assisting him?”

“No.”

I tried not to let my face show what I felt, but the very question must have made my feelings clear.

“But I told her, once he had gone,” Maria Thins added. “It’s nonsense, you sneaking around, keeping secrets from her in her own house. […] I would have thought better of him.” She stopped, looking as if she wished she hadn’t revealed so much of her own mind.

He did not treat me differently after the affair of the comb. When I thanked him for speaking up for me, he shook his head as if shooing away a fly that buzzed about him.

It was I who felt differently about him. I felt indebted. I felt that if he asked me to do something I could not say no. I did not know what he would ask that I would want to say no to, but nonetheless I did not like the position I had come to be in.

I was disappointed in him as well, though I did not like to think about it. I had wanted him to tell Catharina himself about my assisting him, to show that he was not afraid to tell her, that he supported me.

That is what I wanted.

He listened carefully. When I finished he declared, “You see, we’re not so different, with the attentions we’ve had from those above us.”

“But I haven’t responded to van Ruijven, and have no intentions to.”

“I didn’t mean van Ruijven,” Frans said, his look suddenly sly. “No, not him. I meant your master.”

“What about my master?” I cried.

Frans smiled, “Now, Griet, don’t work yourself into a state.”

“Stop that! What are you suggesting? He has never—”

“He doesn’t have to. It’s clear from your face. You want him. You can hide it from our parents and your butcher man, but you can’t hide it from me. I know you better than that.”

He did. He did know me better.

I opened my mouth but no words came out.

Pieter led me to the alley later. There he began squeezing my breasts and pulling at their nipples through the cloth of my dress. Then he stopped suddenly, gave me a sly look, and ran his hands over my shoulder and up my neck. Before I could stop him his hands were under my cap and tangled in my hair.

I held my cap down with both hands. “No!”

Pieter smiled at me […] He had managed to pull loose a strand of my hair and tugged it now with his fingers. “Some day soon, Griet, I will see all of this. You will not always be a secret to me. […] You will be eighteen next month. I’ll speak to your father then.”

[…] “I am still so young. Too young for that.”

Pieter shrugged, “Not everyone waits until they’re older. And your family needs me.”

“You watch out for yourself, my dear.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“You must know that he’s painting you to satisfy van Ruijven. Van Ruijven’s interest in you has made your master protective of you.”

I nodded, secretly pleased to hear what I had suspected.

“Do not get caught in their battle. You could be hurt.”

[…] “I do not think he would ever hurt me, sir.”

“Tell me, my dear, how much do you know of men?”

[…] I did not answer.

“He is an exceptional man,” van Leeuwenhoek continued. “His eyes are worth a roomful of gold. But sometimes he sees the world only as he wants it to be, not as it is. He does not understand the consequences for others of his point of view. He thinks only of himself and his work, not of you.”

Now that he had seen my hair, now that he had seen me revealed, I no longer felt I had something precious to hide and keep to myself. I could be freer, if not with him, then with someone else. It no longer mattered what I did and did not do.

That evening I slipped from the house and found Pieter the son at one of the taverns […] I went up to him and asked him to come with me. […] I took his hand and led him to a nearby alley. There I pulled up my skirt and let him do as he liked. Clasping my hands around his neck, I held on while he found his way into me and began to push rhythmically. He gave me pain, but when I remembered my hair loose around my shoulders in the studio, I felt something like pleasure too.

He sat for a long time, mixing colors on his palette with his palette knife. There was red and ocher there, but the paint he was mixing was mostly white, to which he added daubs of black, working them together slowly and carefully, the silver diamond of the knife flashing in the grey paint.

“Sir?” I began.

He looked up at me, his knife stilled.

“I have seen you paint sometimes without the model being here. Could you not paint the earring without me wearing it?”

The palette knife remained still. “You would like me to imagine you wearing the pearl, and paint what I imagine?”

“Yes, sir.”

He looked down at the paint, the palette knife moving again. I think he smiled a little. “I want to see you wear the earring.”

“But you know what will happen then, sir.”

“I know the painting will be complete.”

“I want you to do it.” I had not thought I could ever be so bold.

Nor had he. He raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth to speak, but did not say anything.

He stepped up to my chair. My jaw tightened but I managed to hold my head steady. He reached over and gently touched my earlobe.

[…]

He rubbed the swollen lobe between his thumb and finger, then pulled it taut. With his other hand he inserted the earring wire in the hole and pushed it through. A pain like fire jolted through me and brought tears to my eyes.

He did not remove his hand. His fingers brushed against my neck and along my jaw. He traced the side of my face up to my cheek, then blotted the tears that spilled from my eyes with his thumb. He ran his thumb over my lower lip. I licked it and tasted salt.

I did not pick up the knife. I turned and walked from the room, down the stairs and through the doorway, pushing past Tanneke. When I reached the street I did not look back at the children I knew must be sitting on the bench, nor at Tanneke, who would be frowning because I had pushed her, nor up at the windows where he might be standing. I got to the street and I began to run. I ran down the Oude Langendijck and across the bridge into Market Square […] I reached the center of the square and stopped in the circle of tiles with the eight-pointed star in the middle. Each point indicated a direction I could take. […] When I made my choice, the choice I knew I had to make, I set my feet carefully along the edge of the point and wen the way it told me, walking steadily.

At first it was very hard for me. When I saw him I froze wherever I was, my chest tightened, and I could not get my breath. I had to hide my response from Pieter the father and son, from my mother, from the curious market gossips.

For a long time I thought I might still matter to him.

After a while, though, I admitted to myself that he had always cared more for the painting of me than for me.

It grew easier to accept when Jan was born. My son made me turn inward to my family, as I had done when I was a child, before I became a maid. I was so busy with him that I did not have time to look out and around me. […] When I saw my old master across the square my heart no longer squeezed itself like a fist.