“The what?” I said, stupidly and out loud.
My fellow students shifted around to look at me. We never said that much in class. We were content to be passive vessels, filled by Leslie’s agreeable, lilting voice. But Leslie was happy to stop her lecture for a footnote. “The Woman Taken in Adultery. Dated sixteen forty-four but most probably from the sixteen thirties. It hangs in the National Gallery, London.”
I peered at the slide, which showed what might have been a gloomy, half-ruined church, and a crowd of people in smudgy darkness. And since I felt stupid for saying anything, the only thing to do was to keep right on talking: “My goodness, it looks like a very public sort of adultery.”
Everybody laughed at that, Leslie too. “It’s the aftermath,” she explained. “It’s from the New Testament.”
As she told us more, I began to recollect it, vaguely, from some lost Sunday school time. A woman was discovered being unfaithful to her husband (Caught in the act? Incriminating cell phone records?) and brought before Jesus. Jewish law decreed that she be stoned to death. It was a setup, with the priests in the crowd wanting to see if Jesus would either condemn the woman or go against the law. Instead he knelt in the dust and wrote, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” And everybody slunk away.
“How about the man, you know, there must have been a man involved,” a classmate, another woman, asked. In fact the class was entirely made up of women, matrons like myself. We were the only ones bored enough and hopeful enough to devote one evening a week to culture.
“I bet he was the one who turned her in.”
“He deserved better than some slut.”
“Oh honey,” another woman drawled. “They wrote him a ticket, and if he goes to traffic school, it won’t stay on his record.”
We were all cracking up, even Leslie. It felt liberating, in a witchy kind of way. I squinted at the slide. The figures were tiny and I couldn’t make out much. Leslie recovered herself enough to say, “In fact, a great many artists from that era chose to illustrate this particular text. You must remember, other audiences would have recognized the subject. Maybe they just knew their scriptures better, but they also knew the kinds of things they could expect to find in paintings. Like we know that picture postcards are going to show the Statue of Liberty or the Golden Gate Bridge. Tell you what. Next week, as a bonus, I’ll bring in slides of some other artists’ versions.”
Oh, goody.
The paramour and I were lying in his bed, waiting for the clock to tick down to when I’d have to go. He reached beneath the sheets and found something he liked, a breast. “Sexy,” he murmured.
“Did you know that in biblical times I would have been stoned to death?”
“Whoa. That would be a definite buzz-kill.”
“Do most people get caught doing this? I bet you know. I bet you’ve had experience.”
“Some do. Sure. Law of averages. How come you’re asking, you starting to get bad vibes at home?”
“I don’t have the kind of marriage where you get vibes.”
“Well, that’s a good thing.”
“Yes and no,” I said. I wondered how much longer I would be able to keep the whole affair going, at what point I’d grow bored or sated or scared. I figured that once it was over I’d go back to being a normal wife again. I’d cash in some guilt coupons and cook my husband his favorite meals. I’d overfeed him like a goldfish.
He said, “Marriage just doesn’t seem to be cutting it anymore. Have you noticed? Everybody’s thinking they got a bad deal. So they get married a second or third time and the whole unhappy business starts all over again. Nobody learns a thing.”
“The painter Gauguin,” I said, “left his wife and children and set out on a series of travels to Martinique, Tahiti, and the Marquesas. Although he was in his forties and fifties by then, and ill with syphilis, he took a series of very young girls, thirteen and fourteen, to be his mistresses.”
“That’s the kind of guy who probably should have just stayed home.”
“But he produced sublime paintings. You know. Art.” This was only argument for argument’s sake. After all, fourteen was the age of my youngest daughter.
He shook his head. “I don’t know beans about art. But believe me, not everybody who screws around is an artist.”
“Honey,” my husband said, “I thought you were going out to pick up the dry cleaning last night, and here I can’t find any clean shirts.”
Leslie Valentine was as good as her word. The next week she brought in another ten or twelve representations of The Woman Taken in Adultery. “There were more,” she said, “but this is a pretty good sample.”
It looked like everybody had wanted to paint me back then. Part of the appeal was the ready-made dramatic tableau, sure, but part of it was obviously the lady herself. She was most often shown in fetching dishabille, as was appropriate for someone who’d just been in between the sheets. In a Jobst Harrich painting, there was even an exposed nipple. The woman and Jesus were surrounded by a crowd of men, some of them outright leering (Lorenzo Lotto, Lucas Cranach the Younger). Other artists (Poussin, Polenov) were more interested in rendering movement, all the pointing and arguing. Valentin de Boulogne painted each face as an individual portrait, after the style of Caravaggio. Brueghel’s version was populated by spooky, pallid creatures who seemed to have lived their entire lives underground. Only in the Tintoretto, the Poussin, and the Veronese was there anyone recognizable as the paramour, and he was always being hustled offstage. No stoning for him. The beautiful Veronese was the only one to include numerous female figures, as well as a dog, the symbol of fidelity, and a naked child (Cupid?) hiding in shame.
Leslie Valentine guided us through the slides with her usual skill. After last week’s gigglefest, we were all loosened up and talkative. “Draperies,” a woman said. “It’s too bad we can’t all walk around wearing nice flowing draperies anymore.”
“They hide so many figure flaws,” someone else agreed.
Leslie Valentine said, “They were a showing-off thing for painters. How well they could render all the folds and creases.” Leslie seemed to be enjoying herself too. She’d freshened up her look and was wearing a pink blouse with a red fabric rose in the lapel. I wondered if it wouldn’t be a kindness to suggest some new glasses, maybe contact lenses.
“Are you supposed to feel sorry for the woman?” somebody asked. “I mean, the story’s all about Christian charity and forgiveness, but there seems to be so much ogling going on.”
“Ah,” Leslie said, nodding so hard that her flower quivered. “That’s the thing about artists. It’s all showing off. You’re meant to ogle the whole painting.”
I was trying to envision me in a painting. It would never happen, I was too plump and saggy. The women in Leslie’s slide show were young and sweet and rosy, even in their shamed and artistically rumpled conditions. Nobody ever thought or wanted to think about the middle-aged, the unpretty, the fair-
to-middling among us doing interesting carnal things. Maybe a more updated approach was called for, something more abstract and nonrepresentational. Here was a streak of vermilion shading into dismal brown, and that was the arc of passion and its inevitable flaming out, here were green questions and blue doubts, and a lot of stippled blank gray that represented the future…
“There’s no specific mention of the husband in the biblical account,” Leslie was saying. “If he’s one of the accusers, the pictures don’t distinguish him.”
“He’s been playing golf all weekend. He doesn’t even know what’s going on.”
“All along he’d been telling his girlfriend he was divorced.”
“He didn’t start to suspect until he began running out of clean shirts.”
“Ladies, ladies,” said Leslie, laughing along with everyone else, except, of course, me, “you are such perceptive critics tonight.”
I raised my hand. “I think that in spite of all the shouting and the threats and the na
stiness, the woman kind of likes being the center of attention.”
My oldest daughter and her boyfriend were sitting in his car, parked in front of the house. The engine was running and shreds of vicious music leaked past the closed windows. I pulled in the driveway and my daughter rolled her window down to wave. “Hi, Mom.”
I walked over to them. “Hi sweetie. Hi Josh.” I nodded at the boyfriend, who was busy rearranging his shirt. There was a hard-on in there somewhere. “Don’t stay out too long, OK?”
“We were just talking about, you know, school, stuff at school.” My daughter looked over at the boyfriend, who tried to assume an expression of detached scholastic inquiry.
“If that’s your story and you’re sticking to it, fine.”
“Ha ha.” The boyfriend laughed gamely. He wasn’t a bad kid. Just too full of sperm.
When my daughter came in the house, I observed her closely for evidence of violation. But she merely looked pensive. “So, how’s Josh tonight?”
“Boys are like the aliens in old sci-fi movies, aren’t they? The ones who try to invade the earth by covering it with giant pods or something. All that swarming and spawning. Oh relax. I’m just talking.”
“Not really relaxed yet.”
“Mom? Does sex come naturally?”
“Really not relaxed now.”
“I’m asking a serious question here. Is there something wrong with you if it all seems kind of icky? I mean, penises. What’s the big deal? Yuck.”
What to tell my good girl? Close her eyes and think of England? “There’s definitely an ick factor involved.” I considered remarking on the high ick ratings among fumbling teenage boys. “But there’s a wow factor too. The whole concept takes some time to process. And there’s really no rush.”
“I guess.” She looked unconvinced. “So did you and Dad—”
“Please. Not now. Maybe in about thirty years.”
“All right, never mind. Thanks.” She stooped to hug me. She was a couple of inches taller than I was, and the flood of her hair enveloped me. I could smell her shampoo, a meadow full of synthetic flowers. Then she stepped back. We were both a little teary. “By the way,” she said, “your blouse is buttoned wrong.”
The paramour and I were having an argument. In bed, of course. He said that someone was calling him and not answering when he picked up. No heavy breathing or anything, just dead air, and the certainty that somebody else was on the other end. “It’s Marianne. She’s stalking me.”
“You have no idea who it is. It could be random. It could be anybody else you’ve pissed off. The usual suspects.”
“I know it’s Marianne,” he insisted. “I know what she sounds like not talking. There were whole months when she didn’t talk to me.”
“Hang up. Call the police.”
“You don’t understand. It’s a test of wills, to see who cracks first. I have to get her to talk. She has to get me to admit I know it’s her. So I say things like, ’Anita honey, speak up, I can’t hear you.’”
“Who’s Anita?”
“Nobody. It’s just a name. Then I start telling ’Anita’ how hot she is, and how I can’t wait to see her again, and all the things I’m going to do to her. It’s practically phone sex.”
“Maybe it really is Anita,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing. You should call Marianne. Tell her you’ve been thinking about her. Say any old thing. Ask how she’s doing these days.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because she’s still trying to get you to pay attention to her. How about some normal, human, civilized conversation.”
“I don’t have to pay attention to her. That’s the whole point of divorce.”
“She didn’t get her money’s worth. She thinks you still owe her.”
“Women,” he said, making one of those unfortunate faces, the kind that moves you to thoughts of smacking them with something heavy or maybe not heavy but merely disgusting, like a whole trout. “You’re never satisfied until a guy totally capitulates. You don’t understand that men are warriors. Our natural instinct is to fight back. Steer our own course. Scratch where we itch. Seek the far horizon. Roam free.”
“Sounds like a job for Animal Control,” I said.
“Honey?” my husband said. “We’ve been getting all these calls for Frank. Do we know anybody named Frank?”
We were coming to the end of the term in art appreciation class, and since we’d all been having so much fun, Leslie Valentine suggested an outing to the museum where she worked. She’d get off a little early and show us around, a special guided tour, then we could go out for drinks. It sounded great. An evening of Art with the girls. I told the paramour I’d have to skip our regular session. I told my husband there was a special occasion planned and I’d be away most of the afternoon and evening. He seemed surly, even suspicious, and I felt an actual sense of injury, of being unjustly accused. This was purely innocent, no fornication involved, though of course I couldn’t say that.
“Since when did you get so interested in Art?”
“It’s one of those things that sneaks up on you.”
The paramour wasn’t very happy either. “It’s a bunch of paintings. They aren’t going anywhere. Can’t you see them some other time?”
“Don’t be such a big baby.”
“Well maybe I’ll just find something else to do,” he said, all injured and snotty. “Or someone.”
“Like you need an excuse for that,” I said, in my own nasty tone. We seemed to have reached that phase of things.
On the appointed evening I drove downtown and entered the echoey marble precincts of the museum. We had been told to meet at the Mary Cassatt, and several of my classmates were already there. Everybody had dressed up. We admired each other, we admired the paintings behind their velvet ropes, each with its halo of light, its beautiful frame and informative label. We were too excited to pay them any real attention at first. They were only bright windows of color, letting Art into the room. Then we settled down and our talk quieted and we began to look in earnest.
Here was the brushwork that gave the little landscape its depth. And some notable foreshortening in the portrait of the Spanish gentleman. An impressionist’s sunny dream of light on water. We had learned to see things. The windows had opened for us. As we took our slow promenade there was a sense of other audiences, the ones who had viewed these same paintings in this or other rooms. Powdered ladies with fans, men with swords. Bustles and furs, canes and slouch hats.
Leslie Valentine had dressed up also, in rather remarkable fashion. She came tripping toward us, wearing real, grown-up shoes. The heels made a light, scattered sound on the tile floors. “Hey guys!” She had on a short little skirt. Her glasses were still in evidence, but swinging on a long chain. She’d slicked her hair back into a gleaming knot. She looked smart and knowing and artsy-chic.
“Wow, Leslie,” we all said. “Makeover city.”
“Oh come on,” she said, self-conscious now. “It’s all just stuff I already had in the closet. Are you ready for your tour?”
I’d checked and the museum didn’t have even one incarnation of The Woman Taken in Adultery. So I felt serene and detached, ready to give myself over to the pleasures of the occasion without any melodramatic personal thoughts. There was a small Gauguin, and that got me going for a moment, but it was only from his Sythetist period, not one of the dangerous tropical visions. I wandered in and out of the range of Leslie’s voice, contented, serene, the temporary owner of all I surveyed, by virtue of my discerning eye.
Someone fell into step beside me. I looked up. “Oh crap.”
“It’s a public place,” said the paramour. “Anybody can pay their money and walk right in.”
“Apparently so.”
“All this is Art, huh?” He swiveled his head from side to side, bunching up his face as if trying to sniff out the source of a smell. “It looks pretty much the way I imagined it. Old.
”
“The moderns are in another wing.” I couldn’t believe he’d shown up here. It was juvenile and stalkerish, more of the same old inevitable messy romantic wreckage.
At the same time, it was kind of cool.
Several of my classmates had already noticed him. He was the kind of man you noticed. I said, “I’m going to go on about my business and pretend you aren’t here.”
“That’s fine. Don’t mind me.” He trailed after me a little distance as I stood in front of an eighteenth-century portrait. “Who’s this?”
“A lady who had her portrait painted.”
“Is she supposed to be hot or something? Because she looks pretty average to me.”
“I want to go listen to my teacher. Either go somewhere else or don’t say anything.”
“You won’t even know I’m here,” he promised.
We made our way over to where Leslie was standing next to a Crucifixion scene labeled School of Giotto. Everyone moved over so as to make space for us. Of course they’d been watching. I could tell from the overpolite way they averted their gaze that they assumed the worst about us. If the crowds in the adultery paintings had been all women, no one would be making eye contact.
The Crucifixion featured solid gold halos, like platters, and flat-faced saints. Even Christ on the cross had an expression that was barely sketched in. He looked like somebody who might be having a bad day. Leslie was talking about the difference between realism and representation, how it had never even been a goal of these earlier artists to reproduce what the eye saw. How painting progressed, if that was the right word, to the near-photographic quality of, say, Vermeer, and how over time it had gone in other directions entirely. How realism was consigned to illustrators. How Christ on the cross might be represented by a congruence of shapes or of colors.
Throw Like A Girl Page 22
