Jacintha

by Lorraine Davies

  She walked over to the slide projector. “I’m starting with a painting by a man, the seventeenth-century Dutch artist Jan Steen. You’ll soon see why. Could someone please turn out the light? … This is Woman at Her Toilet, meaning grooming, of course. Painted between 1665 and 1660. Not exactly pornographic, is it? I chose it precisely for its subtlety. A subtle male gaze, at least to the modern eye.”

  She said nothing as everyone looked at the woman sitting on a bed, one leg crossed high over the other as she took off a red stocking. She wore a blue jacket trimmed with white fur. A dog slept on the pillow on the bed, where the woman had probably recently lain. On the floor were slippers and a chamber pot.

  “Notice how the fur, the dog, the warm tones of her skin, and the sweetness of her face make this a sensual picture. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But where does your gaze go first? Or where does it settle? Connor, where does your gaze go?”

  “Straight to the crotch.”

  Again, almost everyone laughed.

  Carol thought suddenly of Nick Wallinsky, whom she’d seen at his recent art show, and felt a hot pulse between her legs. She had stopped seeing Gabe after her second session with Janet Warren, so he could no longer offer any relief. Meditation, as recommended by the therapist, hadn’t helped much, but masturbation had, a little.

  She pulled her attention back to the class. “Karen, what do you think?”

  “The dark gap is a bit obscure,” Karen said, “like you can’t be sure her leg is raised high enough for you to see anything, but it triggers your imagination. Kind of titillating.”

  “You long for a flashlight,” a student named Owen said.

  The heat between Carol’s legs turned to an ache. Pull yourself together, she thought.

  “In fact,” Carol said, “this is a portrait of a woman of ‘easy virtue.’ The stocking she’s taking off is a kous in Dutch, which is also slang for female genitals. The objects on the floor — the slippers and the chamber pot — are symbols of lust. The Dutch word for ‘chamber pot’ is also the word for ‘slut.’

  “To be fair to Steen, he was a great painter and painted many pictures of respectable families and chaste women, although all his women do tend to have their legs immodestly apart. And it’s worth pointing out that there’s no male equivalent in English, and probably most languages, for the designation ‘of easy virtue.’”

  “What about ‘horndog’?” Owen again.

  “Notice the admiration in Owen’s voice. Enough said. By the way, Owen, you are older than sixteen, aren’t you? Try to act it.

  “The next slide is a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610.” She left the slide on for a full minute, saying nothing, letting the students observe the two elders, fully clothed, leaning over a railing and looking toward the naked Susanna. One elder whispered conspiratorially in the ear of the other, who looked intently at the woman. She leaned her head away at an extreme angle, eyes downcast, both arms raised to protect herself.

  Carol clicked to the next slide, a painting of the same subject by Carracci, a man. In it, Susanna looked directly at the men, appearing relaxed, with the hint of a smile, as though she might be half-willing to accede to the men’s wishes.

  “Did you see the difference? Ellen, what did you see?”

  “In the one by the woman, Susanna is scared. In the other one, she isn’t.”

  “Right. And which one do you think is more in keeping with the Bible story of a woman of great virtue suffering a seduction attempt by two men?”

  Carol showed more slides: paintings by Suzanne Valadon, Mary Cassatt, Frida Kahlo, and Emily Carr, most of them portraits of women, or self-portraits. And she showed some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s flower paintings and Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party flower sculptures, the former said to be suggestive of female genitalia, and the latter definitely so. Then she showed some of the angrier and more rebellious work of feminist artists of the 1970s. One was a performance piece from 1975 in New York: Carolee Schneemann reading naked from a scroll she was slowly pulling out of her vagina.

  “The scroll is more than two feet long and is titled Interior Scroll,” Carol said. Schneemann also wrote a book, Cézanne, She Was a Great Painter, an account of the ways in which women artists were erased from history.”

  “I don’t see what calling Cézanne a woman accomplishes,” Connor said.

  “It shows,” Karen said icily, “that if Cézanne had had a vagina, his work would have been buried in it.”

  “That’s gross,” Owen said.

  “The artist is commenting on exactly that opinion,” Carol said. “The vagina isn’t gross to women, but it evokes disdain in a lot of men if it isn’t directly connected, so to speak, to their own sexual needs and fantasies.

  “All right. Your assignment for next class is this: choose a woman artist and analyze one of her paintings or sculptures in terms of a ‘female gaze.’”

  “That’ll be easier for the women,” Owen grumbled.

  “But think how lucky you men are,” Carol said. “You’ll learn the most from the exercise.”

  February 2012

  Richard,

  Thanks for showing me in my professional life, someone who is more than a disappointed wife and apparently sexually voracious. Although you did mention that I was suffering from the horrors of the landslide, you didn’t show that I was screwed up by it! Pun intended.

  Carol

  Dear Carol,

  You’re welcome.

  Richard

  SIXTEEN

  “PEOPLE ALL OVER the world will one day live in floating houses. The water is coming.” The speaker on the radio was quoting a resident of an experimental housing estate on the River Meuse in Holland. The houses, he said, were tall and narrow, resembling a row of toasters, and were moored to poles and set on hollow concrete pontoons so they could rise and fall with the river.

  The water is coming.

  Richard turned off the radio. Rise and fall, indeed. He lived now in a dungeon of a basement suite on Sixteenth Avenue, near the university, as lonely as he would have been in a house on stilts far out in some dark lagoon, with the waters rising all around him, the house bobbing and swaying, about to topple at any moment. The memory of the landslide came crashing back and it took him a few moments to banish it.

  He missed Carol, but he couldn’t bear to be around her now, even if she wanted to be with him. Her unfaithfulness sat like a hard lump of dough in his chest. Sometimes, alone in the evenings, a groan escaped him, a cry of angst. The German word captured it onomatopoeically. Anguish worked, too, as did the good old English word pain, short and stark. He looked the latter up in the dictionary. From the Latin poena, penalty. Pain was a penalty.

  He wanted a word like weltschmerz. “World pain,” literally, although the dictionary defined it as “a vaguely yearning outlook on life.” Vaguely? Not bloody likely.

  He turned on his computer, intending to do some work for his class, checked his email, and found one from Carol:

  Dear Richard,

  I’m so glad you deigned to talk to me on the phone the other day. I’ve tried to reach you again since, but it seems you won’t answer my messages. I went to your office a couple of times, but you weren’t there.

  You said you must start to devote yourself to serious matters. I’m not sure what you mean. It seems to me that teaching young people puts you in a position to do important things. You can be socially relevant. And not just during class hours. You said you’re worried about climate change. You could organize marches against the use of fossil fuels, for example. You could encourage some of your students to become architects and engineers who would build energy-efficient buildings and solar-powered vehicles, and things we’ve not even imagined so far. You could stay in the thick of things, if you wanted to.

  I still love you, Richard, you know that, and I believe, fervently, that we can get back together again after you’ve had time to recover. After both of us have. I didn’t real
ize at first just how shaken I was by Jenny’s death, and I blamed you alone for the rift in our marriage. So I have things to work through, too.

  I don’t even have your apartment address. Please email it to me and I’ll forward your mail to you. There’s a postcard for you from Imogen with a view in Tuscany.

  Much love,

  Carol

  Richard emailed his address at once, a small flicker of hope dancing across the screen. And then guilt: he really must write to Imogen. She’d sent him an email several days ago. He opened it and read it again:

  Dear Daddy,

  Italy is super fabulous, great food, sweet, exuberant people, and all that art and history. Next, back to Spain. Pete and I fell in love with it and will spend some time there in a small apartment near the sea where we stayed earlier. Very cheap.

  We lift a glass of Valpolicella to you.

  Love, Imogen. Love to Carol, too.

  He hadn’t seen Imogen in more than a year. When she was younger, she visited for a month every summer, and he and Carol went to England on four different occasions, twice at Easter, twice at Christmas. But once she started university, she travelled abroad on most vacations, lately with her boyfriend, Pete.

  Richard had had, before the disaster, a boxful of photos of her that he’d found painful to look at. One of the few that were bearable was one of her at six, smiling impishly. In most of the other photos, he saw sadness in her face and his throat would ache with what seemed years of his unshed tears. She had a touching seriousness at the best of times, as though she’d seen into the heart of the world and found it wanting. How much of that was his fault?

  He thought, not for the first time, that maybe he should have fought for his marriage to Grace. They’d had eight good years. At least he’d thought they were good.

  A year or so after he and Grace started seeing each other, she’d asked him, “Don’t you think we should get married?” He’d said he wasn’t sure, he’d have to think about it. And Grace had immediately begun to cry copiously, sobbing like a child. She thought he loved her, she’d said, didn’t know how she could go on, and he relented, said he hadn’t meant never, just not right away, but, no, no, he was ready, don’t worry, we’ll set a date.

  Had his reluctance been a premonition, his vision of her as a child accurate? She had had trouble with adult responsibilities like housekeeping and bill paying and making practical decisions once they were married. She’d phoned him at work a little too often to help her sort out some simple problem. And she’d been overwhelmed with caring for Imogen as an infant, barely able to cope sometimes. He suggested she get a part-time job, that they could afford a babysitter a couple of days a week. But the only job she’d ever had was clerking in a clothing store, and she said she’d rather be a full-time mother. I should have helped her with Imogen more.

  Maybe the end had been in the beginning. Maybe his hesitation about marrying her had been lastingly hurtful to her. Had he done and said other things over the years that had made her doubt his love?

  In the months before she left, she said he had put his work and his ambition first and her and Imogen second. She was lonely, she said.

  Her affair with James, the man she later married, had been going on only a short time when he found out. His pain had been terrible, his imaginings of her in James’s sexual embrace almost unbearable. And now Carol. Two wives unfaithful. One might be considered a misfortune, two seems like carelessness, he thought, riffing on Oscar Wilde’s great line. Christ, this isn’t funny.

  Later, though, after the divorce, he thought sex might not have had much to do with it, since he and Grace had never stopped making love. Had he overreacted? He could have pleaded for a reconciliation when she said she was going to live with James, but he’d acted as if divorce were inevitable, withdrew, and left her little choice but to go. If James had fought to keep her, Richard could have threatened to sue for alienation of affection. A colleague had done that and won; his wife’s lover had sloped away and his wife had been impressed with such steadfast love and had stayed.

  How empty the house had been. He’d longed for the old clutter, longed to have Grace phone him at work over some small thing. And Imogen. How many times had he said no to reading her a bedtime story because he was writing a short story or marking papers or preparing a lesson? Oh, Imogen, how could he not have known that time would pass quickly and he’d rarely have the chance again to please her, indulge her, hold her tiny body in his arms?

  At least he and Carol had no children.

  But he’d volunteered to leave Carol. Defeatist again.

  SEVENTEEN

  September 2005

  Richard

  My therapist suggested I write letters to you — a kind of diary, to help me sort out my feelings about you and our marriage. I won’t send subsequent ones, but I felt the need to send this first one. Here it is as an attached file.

  Diary Entry

  I hardly know what to do with myself these evenings since you left, Richard. I have a hard time concentrating on anything and can’t read anything that doesn’t pertain to my classes, and even that is difficult. Sometimes I channel surf, but after a few minutes, I give up.

  Last night, though, I tuned in late to a movie called The Virgin and the Gypsy, and the climactic scene caught my interest. Near the village where the young heroine lives, a dam bursts and floods the village and the heroine’s house. Water rushes in, fast and terrible, and the gypsy and the virgin try to rescue her elderly grandmother, but are too late and she drowns. Then the pair go upstairs. (When I think about this now, I wonder if the whole scene is a fantasy of the girl’s, because they leave the body of the grandmother without a backward glance.)

  Then the gypsy — dark and handsome, of course — removes the virgin’s chaste, white petticoat and makes love to her. The scene is quite lovely, although the camera cuts away before too much happens. Even without seeing the whole movie, you know this was a long time coming, if you’ll pardon the expression.

  The reason I’ve told you all this is that it brought back memories of our time in Venice, when we stayed in a hotel overlooking the Grand Canal. (Whenever I utter or write that sentence, it feels like I’m making it up, it’s so impossibly romantic, and yet we were there.) I suppose it’s the wateriness of it that triggered the memory. But of water rising, not roaring down a hillside, freighted with mud. I don’t think I could watch a minute of that.

  It was in April, remember, before the smells of Venice ripened, and the gauzy white curtains billowed in the window, and noises came in, too — people talking below on the promenade, vaporettos on the canal — but the sounds were exciting rather than intrusive. They seemed like a soundtrack we’d chosen for our own movie. It was hot and we’d thrown the covers off the bed and the sheets were cool and pure white and we made love while almost a foot of water covered St. Mark’s Square.

  But there was nothing to fear. We walked barefoot later, remember? And laughed and splashed our way to a restaurant where we ate the most delicious meal, one of my most memorable ever, of fritto misto — scallops and sole and clams and shrimp. They were so succulent, weren’t they — gently infused with lemon and rosemary and olive oil.

  The delicate juiciness of the scallops as I bit into them reminded me of your mouth on me such a short time before. And I looked at you and smiled and I believe you were thinking of the same thing, the way you smiled, too, your fork poised in front of your lips.

  Can we have it that good again, do you think?

  Richard, I’m still not going to tell you who I slept with. I have my reasons — mainly that it would do no good, and also I want you to forgive me without demanding that, because your withholding yourself from me for so long was partly why it happened. I know that was because of the trauma of the landslide and Jenny’s death, so you weren’t really to blame. But I wasn’t myself, either.

  What I do blame myself for is not being more understanding of your pain, and more patient. If I had been, I neve
r would have told you about my affair. So forgive me for that, please. You need never have known.

  Have you looked for Emily, and if so, did you find her? I feel bad about how I acted. I know you had a sincere desire to help her. My interest in this has nothing to do with my jewellery. I’ve let it go. Anyway, she probably traded it for drugs, and some dealer’s girlfriend or mother is wearing it now.

  Love, Carol

  I don’t think I’ll send you any other entries, but I will keep in touch. Is your place all right — livable and not depressing? I’ll come and see you there soon, bring your mail and a couple of other things you left behind.

  xo

  Carol

  Richard still felt the pain of her affair, the fact of it, but he could, he would forgive her. He started to write a reply saying so, but ended up deleting it. Nothing he said rang true to him. In most of what he did these days, he was just going through the motions.

  He wrote a short email back, avoiding questions of forgiveness.

  Dear Carol,

  Thanks for the memories of Venice. It was certainly a wonderful time.

  I like the idea of a momma’s boy drug dealer — the stuff of TV crime drama!

  No, I haven’t looked for Emily. Partly it’s because the thought of scouring the Downtown Eastside with so few clues is depressing and a bit daunting. The other thing is that I don’t think she wants to be found. Damn, that does sound cowardly. Maybe I will look for her in the near future, when my energy level rises. I’m still kind of dragging myself around.

  xxoo

  Richard

  He read it over. Was it enough? Should he reword it? Add something? No. Let it stand. It was all he could manage.

  Richard thought too much about death these days. Not every third thought, like Prospero, but episodes, chunks of time carved with hallucinatory sharpness out of otherwise ordinary days. Everyone around him would look hollowed out, soulless, but apparently unaware of their state.

  Today, as he walked along Tenth Avenue to the grocery store, he looked at each person for a spark of life and saw only a blank. You don’t know you’ve died and are now only going through the motions, he said in his mind to a woman as she walked toward him. He laughed out loud, startling her, and she was for a moment alive again. A baby in a stroller looked into his eyes and seemed to be saying, Yes, I see it, too, but we have to go on pretending. It reminded him of the children in the film Wings of Desire, the only ones who could see the angels — so much better than seeing the dead.