Throw Like A Girl (27 page)

“What is it, exactly, that you miss about being married?”

He pushed a hand through his hair. I liked the way he did it, without vanity. His hair was going thin at the temples and the skin beneath was smooth and worn. It wasn't at all attractive, but it was a human thing. “I hate coming home to an empty house. I hate having to make all my own noise. My wife, she was always doing something, running the garbage disposal, talking on the phone. Vacuuming. I'm thinking of getting a parrot. Do you know anything about parrots?”

“There's so much noise where I live, sometimes I pretend it's all in Italian, like opera, and I only have to focus when somebody screams or falls down.”

“So I guess we have that in common,” he said, brightening.

“No offense, but I'm not sure I want to have anything in common with you.”

“Look,” he said. “I'm that guy. The one they come after with the car, or the gun, or the lawyer. But it's also true that they never seem to leave me alone. If you like we can try it a time or two, see how it works for you.”

“Try what?” I said. “Oh.”

We tried it a time or two. And then a few times more. It took some getting used to. I don't mean it wasn't godalmighty pleasurable. It was, especially after the sleepy routines of married sex. I give the man credit. He could have made love to a potted plant. But there were times I felt strangely disassociated from it all. I could never entirely believe what I was doing, at least not in the exact moment I was doing it. It was a failure of the imagination on my part. You catch a glimpse of yourself in some naked and enthusiastic state, and the believing part of you just shuts down. Maybe that's what they used to call conscience.

I'd spend a couple of hours with the paramour, then shower, dress, run back home to unload the dishwasher and find the jeans that one or another daughter couldn't find. My husband would ask me how class was, and I'd say it was OK, or else he'd already be asleep, a familiar lumpy shape beneath the blankets, rather like the famous photograph of the Loch Ness monster, and I wouldn't have to say anything at all.

I decided that maybe this was a workable solution, sex as a kind of Happy Meal, nicely packaged and available at your convenience. Somebody to look at you with honest, if venal, appreciation. Meanwhile, the rest of your life would stumble along as usual, and nobody would ever be the wiser. But of course that was not what happened.

The instructor for the art appreciation class was one of those women who always look like a graduate student, no matter that they have been out of school for a decade or more. Her name was Leslie Valentine, a lovely name that, sadly, didn't fit her. Leslie wore droopy cardigans and corduroy pants and desert boots. She should have done something to her hair. The black-framed glasses were either meant to be funky, or else they were the same kind she'd been wearing since sixth grade and she saw no reason to change. This is all superficial stuff, and it sounds catty as hell, when in fact I liked Leslie. It just seemed that anyone so involved with aesthetics would think to arrange themselves better.

Leslie worked as an assistant curator at one of the big downtown museums. It was an underpaid job of the sort that dooms you to life in an apartment with a cat. The little bit of money the community college teaching paid her probably came in handy. But she really seemed to love coming in with her trays of slides and showing us how to see the things she saw: the elaborate narrative of a Brueghel, the arching patterns of a Bottiicelli, the delicate locket around the neck of the lady in the Renaissance portrait, its inscription reading “Amor.” The course was titled Masterworks of European Art, which suited us all fine. Leslie was an old-school gal, devoted to her cherubs and frescoes, while the rest of us were just simple enough to want a picture to be
about
something, something we could recognize.

Even when I started skulking around and living my secret life, I tried to make it to Leslie's class. She'd rush in with spots on her glasses, and a splash of tomato soup on her front from one of her hurried and inadequate meals, and start talking full-speed about da Vinci's sketchbooks. She was so enthusiastic, and so convinced that her enthusiasm mattered, it halfway convinced you. Why not spend your life endlessly circling museum corridors like a fish in an aquarium, harmlessly gratified?

It was Rembrandt week. Rembrandt loomed pretty large for Leslie Valentine. Rembrandt, one of the truly masterful Old Masters, a really big dude. Rembrandt, the painter of light, he was called, although you couldn't help noticing how many of his pictures were all varnishy dark. That class session we'd worked our way through the self-portraits and
The Night Watch
and
The Anatomy Lesson
and some others. I was drifting a bit in the pleasant half-dark of the classroom as the slides clicked and the projector emitted its comforting bland whir. I was thinking of the last time I'd seen the paramour, and already looking forward to the next time, when Leslie's instructive voice reached me. “…typical of his work from the sixteen thirties in the small scale of the figures and the use of dramatic illumination,
The Woman Taken in Adultery
…”

“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 nastiness, the woman kind of likes being the center of attention.”