When I saw her again a month later, it was spring. She made no comment on my makeover, but after making love she talked about liking sex with older men (and this caused panic: what other older men was she seeing?) because it felt dirty. Alarm bells went off in me.
She stayed the night, and when she left the next morning, I set out to follow her. It was an act of desperation—what else? Of course I was desperate. Wasn’t that what being in love was about?
I had to find out more about her than she would tell me. When she left me, perhaps for weeks, where did she go?
She strolled smoothly west across town to Soho, her short skirt blowing up in the breeze. Her gait was even, but it didn’t respond to the movements of the crowd of pedestrians she walked through. Sometimes she banged into people, or narrowly missed a collision. It was like she was sleep walking. I stayed a block behind, feeling ridiculous—imagining that someone might notice the Big Bad Wolf stalking Little Red Riding Hood.
She stopped often to peer into shop windows. She had her nails done, and then she visited galleries on Spring Street and West Broadway. I waited for her, shivering in a stiff breeze. Black clouds threatened rain.
I got wet waiting for her while she had lunch in a chic health food restaurant. She made a phone call. I could watch her through its huge plate glass window. When she came out I turned away, afraid the intensity of my gaze might alert her.
She went straight to the temporary Museum of Current Art, a hideously designed center of the fashionable art theorist. I could shadow her inside, it was so ill-lit, like a cave. She walked purposefully through rooms full of dirt mounds and string constructions into the director’s office. I lurked in a dark corner, tortured by a dirty mind.
I knew the director. Gavin Kirk was a man my age, very influential, a star in the post-modernist circles in which I was a pariah. He was a pretentious prick.
Jealousy rubbed dry ice on my chest. At first I didn’t recognize my new companion. I thought I was having a heart attack.
9
TRUTH TIME
SO EVOL TURNED into love at the moment of first pain. When I imagined what Rose might be doing with Gavin, muscles clenched around my heart and a black snake made its slithering way up my spine to my brain where it coiled and hissed through my mouth, she’s mine.
I had lived fifty years without ever feeling jealousy. Did that mean I’d never loved? Probably. I felt no pangs when Midge took lovers. When I married I prided myself on evading the bite of the black snake.
I didn’t confront her, which created a distance between us I tried to bridge in bed. I used my penis like a wand to claim her flesh. I rubbed it over her soft skin, over her delicate eyelids and soft cheeks, pressed it to her lips and deep into her mouth.
She knew how to respond. She stuck her index finger into my rectum and squeezed my testicles while she milked me with the muscles of her throat, all the while watching me, her eyes liquid with an emotion I didn’t understand.
When she finished licking me clean I forced my tongue into her mouth and tasted my come. She moaned, and our musky breaths mingled.
“Was that dirty enough for you?” I asked, thinking about her performing the same ritual with Gavin. The snake hissed.
It was three in the morning in her loft. She had made up a futon bed for us to sleep on, but I wasn’t sleepy. Insomnia made me feel hallucinatory.
We were lying side by side in the dark, not touching. She got up to go to the bathroom, and when she came back I felt her small cool hands on my thighs and then a pricking in my penis.
“What are you doing?” I looked down at her hunched over my groin. Another pricking. “Ouch!”
“Truth time.” She switched on a light and held her implements up: safety matches and a big safety pin. She was jabbing me with a red-hot safety pin.
“Get away.”
“Why did you follow me?” Jab.
“I was desperate.” The word seemed too strong, but it was true.
“Why?”
“Because I never know where you go off to.”
“Well, what did you find out?”
I scooted away from her and sat up. “That you like older men who run museums.”
“You’re pathetic.” She got a funny look in her eyes and stabbed herself in the right breast with the hot pin. That hurt. I’d rather have taken the prick myself than be called pathetic, because I knew that’s what I was.
Her intensity was more frightening than the pin. I felt like a voodoo doll she was working her magic on. Soon her breast was bleeding. Tiny drops of blood like child’s tears. I reached out to stop her, and she slapped my hands.
“Don’t touch me, Nick. I mean it.”
I didn’t touch her. But I couldn’t stop myself from asking: “How do you know Gavin?”
She was defiant. “How do I know you?”
“Is what you do with him dirty, too?”
“I’m doing an essay on Duchamp for a German art magazine. Gavin was a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art when Duchamp installed his last piece there”
“You mean Etant Donnes?” I remembered it: You looked through two holes in an ancient wooden door, and saw a nude woman lying on her back, legs spread, her sex explicitly detailed. The old fox did that in 1969. Courbet, Duchamp, and me with my painting of Rose’s cunt. I was in good company.
“Yes. I asked him about it.”
“That’s all?”
She shut her eyes and I could see a delicate vein throbbing in her left eyelid. “My life is my own, Nick.”
She lit another match. It flared and she dropped it on my naked belly. “Now suppose you tell me about Midge.”
I let the match burn. “We’re old friends.”
“What do you do with her? What do you do with your old friend?”
“I don’t see her. All I can think about is you.”
The match went out, but the heat remained. She bent over and kissed the spot, licking the burn.
10
THE FINISHED PORTRAIT
TWO DAYS LATER, Rose showed up at my studio ready to sit for her portrait again. In a week it was finished. I had never felt such control before. I looked, the brush moved, and the dancing fire I saw around her appeared on the canvas.
When I declared it done, she studied the painting as if looking into a mirror for the truth about herself.
“Is that what you see, when you look at me?”
“Yes, of course. Why else would I paint it?” I was pleased at having gotten what I saw right, like any painter.
“Then I pity us both.” She shook her head and turned away.
I looked at the painting. “You don’t like it?” I thought she looked like a goddess, if a modern one made up of ancient contradictions.
“It scares me. I feel like some primitive—you’ve stolen my image. I exist more on your canvas than I do here, right now. I’m a shadow of that.”
“No, you’re not. I’ll show you how real you are. . . . ”
I pulled her down, and we went at it like alley cats in heat, there on the rough studio floor. My scraped knees throbbed. I picked her up and we fucked standing, her arms around my neck, her legs around my hips, her hair whipping; then when I felt my back about to go out—o age!—I bent her over the sofa and pushed my nearly numb erection into her tight anus. She grunted. Just the tip in, I stopped, realizing it must hurt her, and knelt to soothe her with my tongue.
When I stood up she was ready, but she stopped me. “Don’t come.”
She’d gotten me so hot I thought the top of my head would blow off. “Prick teaser, you little. . . . ” I gasped. Don’t come?
“Dirty old man, sucking my asshole.”
I collapsed on the sofa. She was a capricious young goddess.
“Next time it’ll be twice as good,” she whispered, sitting next to me. “Just pretend you were fucking that girl in the painting—not me, but her.”
There was a tone in her voice I didn’t like, even whispered. There was t
rouble in it, like she was jealous of the painting. I remembered what she’d said about destroying portraits at the end of relationships. She read my mind, as she usually could.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to fuck with your portrait. But I want you to put it away where I can’t see it—and no one else, either.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Me, Nick! I’m afraid of what’s in me—and of you, for showing it to me.”
11
THE GIVEN
RELUCTANTLY, I PUT my portrait of Rose away in a safe place. I covered it with a blanket as if it were a murder victim, and placed it tenderly in the back of a storage closet like slipping it into a grave.
Before Rose, painting had been my life, and everyone and everything else just means to one end: my ambition to create work that lived in the perception of the viewer, that wouldn’t fade.
Now that didn’t seem to matter. I had room for only one passion.
But I was eager to show the painting of Rose’s cunt, and she had no objections. I brought it to my dealer, Max, at the Boatwright Gallery. His shrewd eyes narrowed appreciatively. He glanced up at me as if to reassure himself that I hadn’t become some wild-eyed pornographer. “Friend of yours?”
“Rose Selavy.”
“Say no more.” He had computed the possible publicity and ensuing profits in a flash, and proposed making it the centerpiece (“So to speak. . . . ”) of a group show of erotic art by other artists in his large stable. He asked its title, and I said The Given.
Fast forward to the opening. It was summer. Once again the crowd was large and noisy. Of course, The Given stood out. The other work—both by veterans and newcomers—was neither dirty fun nor sophisticatedly perverse. It was the kind of abstract stuff that has to be explained in tedious detail, and then when you get the point you smell a repressed fart. My painting made you a voyeur, if you had blood in your veins.
Everyone had an opinion about The Given. (Some even got the reference in the title to Duchamp.) The oh-so-jaded chirped that I was going the way of Jeff Koons, after he married his Italian porn star. Epicene battleaxe feminists groused about the “privileged male gaze” fixed on a woman’s genitals, but some people, of both sexes, got turned on. I could see it on their faces. Gotcha, I thought.
I kept an eye on the door, watching for Rose to appear. She’d promised to come, but she ran on her own schedule. While I waited, I talked with friends. At one point Max took me aside, smiling broadly.
“We’ve got a buyer, Nick.”
“Shit. Who is it?” I’d priced The Given high and Max had upped that—I didn’t really want to sell, but Max was slick.
“None other than Leland Abbott.” The real estate developer collected my work, but I didn’t think The Given would call out to a man talked of as a mayoral candidate. “Here he comes,” Max whispered. “Be polite—I don’t have the check yet.”
The crowd parted for Leland. He was so used to being the center of attention he didn’t notice them move. He was focused on me, his hand out to shake mine. “Nick, you are the best,” he boomed. “That is one hell of a painting.”
Leland was handsome in a way that looks good on television. But I’d done his portrait, and what I saw was a well-fed buzzard. It’s there in the painting, if you look closely: watchful gimlet eyes, carrion on the teeth. But I smiled and shook his hand. His support as a collector had kicked my career up a notch or two.
“You aren’t going to put The Given in the lobby of one of your hotels, are you, Lee?”
He came right back at me: “This goes in my bathroom, Nick. My private bathroom. Where only my intimate friends will ever see it.” He bestowed such kicks in the balls like favors.
“Why did you buy it?”
“I’m a collector, Nick. It’s an integral part of my portfolio of your work.” The glint in his eye anticipated my early death.
“The real reason. Come on.”
“It gave me a hard-on. Wasn’t that your intention?”
One of his assistants whispered in his ear. Leland nodded.
“Jason says it’s time for us to go. I’m having a little dinner party at my place. Why don’t you come? Max, you come too, when you close up shop.” Max knew better. He shook his head.
I begged off: “I’m waiting for someone.”
“Who might that be?”
I told him Rose, but I didn’t tell him it was a picture of her cunt he’d bought. He got the joke about her name, I give him that.
Just then I saw her over his shoulder. She wore her hair up, and something simple, silk and clingy through which her nipples showed. Following my gaze, Leland turned. I introduced them.
He beamed his pleasure.
“Good. We’re all here. Do you want to come in my car?”
“We’ll find our way,” I said, holding Rose’s hand tight, afraid she would bolt. “I’ve got a couple things to do here first.”
“I’ll be expecting you,” he said to Rose. “Don’t disappoint.”
When he was gone I explained the situation, thinking she’d say no and that would be it, but she surprised me.
12
DINING WITH RAPTORS
IT HAD STARTED to rain. We snuggled together against the damp in the taxi to Leland’s. I couldn’t keep my hands off her, and she let me play. Her silk dress was liquid between my fingers, and the smoothness of her inner thighs allowed my fingers easy entrance inside her. We kissed—one of those long essays in pure sensation we got lost in—and she bit my lip. Licking the swelling, I was acutely conscious of my good fortune. Maybe love is gratitude for luck. You don’t want to lose it.
“Sure you want to go to Leland’s? Why don’t we just go back to my place and suck each other’s blood or something?”
She giggled. “We can always do that. But right now, I’m hungry for some real food, and servants to present it to me.”
“It’ll probably be the usual baby lamb chops and unborn vegetables, not very satisfying.”
“Truth is, I’m curious. He scares me. His eyes are so frozen.” She was excited, oozing over my fingers.
“You just want to see that bathroom he talked about, where he’s going to hang The Given.”
“He is? I mean, he bought it?”
She tightened herself around my fingers, really wet now.
“I think it turned him on.”
“I don’t want him to own that painting.”
“Why not? It’s just a painting.”
“You don’t understand. I like the idea of him standing in his bathroom shaving, and not being able to take his eyes off my cunt. I do like that.” She paused and thought about her objection.
“Maybe I think it’s like voodoo. If he owns it he owns. . . . ”
She closed her eyes and came. The back of the taxi smelled like raw girl musk.
Leland’s duplex on Central Park West was guarded by three dour doormen. They called up, checked my name off a list, and waved us into an elevator. I noticed they were all armed.
We stepped out into a foyer the size of New Jersey, and walked through it to a living room no smaller than Pennsylvania. Leland broke off from talking with three other men and practically ran across that expanse to welcome us. I watched his eyes, looking for what Rose saw. They were focused on her nipples and the front of her dress, which was wrinkled and wet from her juices. He smiled and licked his chops. I felt like a father who’d brought his daughter as a virgin sacrifice to a barbarian king.
Rose looked down, and—without missing a beat—covered the spot with her handbag. “It’s raining out,” she said.
“It’s rain if you say it is.” Leland smiled and held out his hand in welcome. “If you’d like to go freshen up, I can have one of my people show you where.” He held up his hand and a black maid in a black uniform appeared.
“Just go with Manette, she’ll take care of you. Manette, show Mademoiselle Selavy the wardrobe, too. There’s something there that will fit you, my dear. There’s bound
to be.”
Rose followed the maid. Leland took my arm and steered me across Pennsylvania to a cozy masculine corner of the expanse. There around a giant fire stood three men smoking cigars, man my age whose faces showed up in smart magazines more often than mine did. They were flanked by floor to ceiling bookshelves. My portrait of Leland loomed over them. The other paintings and drawings were the usual investment choices. Two carved wooden raptors, an owl, and a hawk, guarded a drinks table. Leland flashed his buzzard grin.
“I think you know Gavin Kirk, Nick. And this is. . . . ” he named the other collectors. “We were just chatting about you, and your young model. She is sensational. We’re all envious.”
I recognized them as envious men all. Each of them had trophy twenty-something girlfriends. They were rich and powerful old birds with hard eyes. As a class, I needed their support; individually, I could ignore them.
I couldn’t ignore Gavin Kirk. I despised the fraud. As director of the Museum of Current Art he never met a trend he couldn’t ride, or an art biz ass he didn’t oscultate in the French manner. He looked younger than me, which was enough reason to hate him. His patrician good looks had aged like old glass. But I hated him for another reason than jealousy. He’d written a review for Art News slicing and dicing my work just at the point ten years ago when collectors like Leland Abbott were taking me up.
We glared at each other and frowned. We took each other’s measure like old bucks rattling antlers. It was Maker versus Shaker, as it always would be. Leland stepped between us and held up his hand. A servant appeared with a tray of hors d’oeuvres. Another servant poured champagne. The air was rank with cigar smoke, that expensive odor of rich men burning hundred dollar bills.
Leland was amused. That’s why he had invited Gavin; so our inevitable clash would provide the distraction he required. What I knew about Leland was that collecting art was only a pretext. His real interest was collecting people in the art world. It was more fun than hanging out with his fellow real estate barons.
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