Authors: Jean Thompson
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 Dadâ”
“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.
The paramour nudged me. “She really knows her onions when it comes to this stuff, doesn't she?”
I told him to hush. The group was moving into the next room and I didn't want to miss anything. “So are you going to stick around here for a while?” the paramour asked. “Do you have to look at every single picture?”
“Go away. Go watch sports or something.”
He was standing behind me as I tried to focus on a Corot landscape. I could feel the twitchy heat he was giving off. “You look so damn sexy tonight. I really like this little lace thingie.”
“It's a bra strap. Put it on ice. I'm busy.”
“I can't help myself,” he murmured, pawing at the ground with one foot.
“I think you have me confused with Anita.”
He pulled me backward into the room we'd just left, and started kissing me. “Unngh,” I said, protesting. His teeth felt too big. I didn't even have time to close my eyes. Which is why when my husband appeared in my field of vision, sauntering along, consulting a program, I saw him.
My husband paused in front of us as if we were another exhibit. I attempted to make eloquent facial expressions over the paramour's shoulder. “Oh my!” I tried to convey. “This is certainly one of those absurd situations you wish was happening to someone else.”
The paramour released me from the liplock and I peeled myself away from him. “What are you doing here?” I asked my husband. Which is just about the guiltiest thing you can say.
My husband said, “So I'm guessing this is Frank.”
I introduced them and they shook hands. They were very gentlemanly about it. I guess it was the ultimate guy thing. Keeping your cool. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do. I seemed necessary to what was going on, but not especially important. The paramour said, “I'm afraid there's been a bit of a misunderstanding.”
“That can happen,” my husband said.
“A regrettable lapse of judgment on my part.”
“I appreciate your saying so.”
“Let me assure you, it was a more or less trivial episode.”
“Hey,” I said at that point, but they were ignoring me.
Some of the women from the art appreciation class had drifted in to watch, along with a couple of the security guards. “It's OK,” I said to the assembled group. “We're way past stoning.”
“Personally,” one of the women told me, “I like the husband better.”
“I'd rate it a toss-up,” said another. “Depends on how you feel about unibrows.”
“Looks aren't everything,” a third insisted. “There's a lot to be said for a good sense of humor.”
My husband and the paramour were standing around with their hands in their pockets, giving each other sulky looks. To tell the truth, I wasn't that crazy about either of them at that moment. The paramour's scenes and demands were becoming tiresome. My husband was still pretty much the same old him, with the same old insufficiencies. Neither of them had much of a sense of humor.
I tried to see myself as they must see me. An exasperation, a painful reminder of ancient male failures. A woman who wouldn't stay inside a frame. Then Leslie Valentine came tripping toward us, sweetly awkward in her new shoes. Both men gave her an alert, dazzled glance. She was, after all, a new, unknown woman, a wealth of imaginative possibilities.