Fire Year

by Jason K. Friedman

  “Came up with?”

  “It came to me in a dream. And here’s something else. I gave the Parmann the title for their show.” He was speaking in a whisper now, though there was no one else around. Beyond Adger’s window evening sunlight fell through the branches of the oak. “I was having a drink with Elle MacArthur at last year’s Biennale and it just came out. We were getting very cozy, if you know what I mean.” Jon didn’t blink. “Every Face Tells a Story. I told her she could have it.”

  “That was big of you.”

  “And I don’t regret it. What benefits one benefits us all.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  “I have no regrets.”

  Adger’s voice seemed to come drifting across a canal, you could hear the water moving in its masonry walls. But when he opened his mouth again the ghostly whisper, tinged with sadness, was gone. “I want a high-concept title by the time I get back,” he barked. “I want you to do what I hired you for and put together a fucking show.”

  Jon was eating a bowl of cereal in the dark, staring at the Portrait of a Gentleman in a Red Cape projected against his living-room wall. He had stared too long. The painting had broken down into lurid patches of color; he couldn’t get them to cohere. He couldn’t get his life to cohere either. The challenges of his job were not the only problem. Atlanta was also a problem. If you had to leave New York for the South, you should at least expect consolation from the landscape—magnolia trees, plantation houses, squares with statues of soldiers pointing their weapons north. That would be interesting. But Atlanta had turned out to be a city of suburbs and ring roads. People drove forty minutes for a bagel. For Asian fusion, an hour. In front of every restaurant a squadron of crewcut boys stood waiting to pounce on your car. Jon saw all this but still didn’t despair. He went to the Margaret Mitchell house and asked where the South was. The house itself, with its veranda and white columns, was promising. But the old docent inside shook her head and reminded him that Atlanta had burned in the Civil War—“the woe-uh,” she had called it. He was genuinely sorry about this.

  A key turned in the door. He was genuinely sorry about that too. He had moved to Atlanta with a man he was no longer in love with.

  Ali came in, put down his shopping bag, and walked over to the couch. Jon’s hand reached up and Ali took it.

  “Shoo, what a basket,” Ali said, staring at the wall.

  Shoo. He had attended an English elementary school in Guyana, where he was taught to say “shoo” instead of “shit,” “Hollywood” instead of “hell,” as well as baroque ways to insult, including “You, sir, are a pest and a parasite.” (What that was supposed to mean, Jon had no idea.)

  “That’s a noncanonical way of reading a painting,” Jon sniffed.

  Ali sighed, then in a chipper voice said, “I don’t know about that, but I do know this is a gay painting.”

  This was something about Ali—the more miserable and hostile Jon was, the more chipper and sweet Ali became. In anybody else Jon would have considered such relentless good humor passive-aggressive. But Ali was as guileless as a bowl of sherbet. Jon had seen this from the start.

  They had met in a West Village bar when Jon was two years from finishing up in New Haven. He had come down to the City to see the Morris Louis show at the Modern, and in Jon’s memory these two events became a single exhilaration. Experiencing the speed of the paintings, the rush of air around the poured stripes of color, led naturally to looking into Ali’s face for the first time. His open expression, the great unpainted spaces at the center of the canvases. When Ali’s face was at rest, his huge dark eyes narrowed as if about to close in sleep, the way a tall person might slouch to avoid calling attention to his height. Ali’s embarrassed smile also seemed like an apology—he was too good-looking. He was the descendant of indentured Indians and Africans with pricetags; you couldn’t help reading his glowing face as a narrative of the spirit triumphing over its enslavement! The long lashes, round face, cherub lips made him as beautiful as a baby. But his square chin was manly and jutted out, and throughout the day he had a five o’clock shadow that he covered craftily with foundation just lighter than his skin.

  They had nothing in common, but they were young and soon living together in New York, and it had all been enough.

  “A gay painting,” Jon grumbled. “What could that possibly mean?”

  Ali, unflappable, explained. “I mean, it’s basically a painting that a man made of a big dick, except you can’t see it, which makes it even sexier.”

  “Okay.”

  “Plus he’s got a very pretty face.”

  “That’s true, but I can’t exactly put that in the catalog.”

  “It’s so obvious. In fact, I don’t think that’s a painting of a man at all. He looks like a woman to me, packing a sock or something. What do they call them, drag kings?”

  Jon took back his hand and Ali left the room. “I’m starving,” he called from the bedroom. “Maybe I’ll make us a curry. Does that sound okay?”

  Jon turned to the figure in the red cape, who stared back. His eyes were rolled back into the left sides of their sockets, so that he seemed to be looking at you while keeping an eye on something just to your right. What was it? Jon walked up to the wall. A portrait of a woman in drag, a drag king—Christ, would he have to listen to this kind of twaddle the rest of his life? He stared deeply into the man’s face. Jon was looking for the courage to leave. But he found something else: the man had no Adam’s apple.

  This was an observation that had never been made, or at least never recorded. That didn’t, however, make it a good one. Unless you believed that every young gentleman living in the region between Venice, Ferrara, and Milan in the first decades of the sixteenth century was a total knockout, you wouldn’t consider Angelo Veneto a realist. These are idealized portraits, they make their subjects look good. The guy in this painting has no Adam’s apple, but he also lacks warts, moles, wrinkles, enlarged pores, hairs in his nostrils or along his ears. Angelo’s innovation was working within the constraints of the new genre of the bourgeois portrait and still managing to convey something unseen and, if not unflattering, then disturbingly complex.

  Jon projected another image on the wall. The Portrait of a Gentleman with a Sword, soon on its way from Rome, shows a green-eyed young man with a gaze directed somewhere to the left of the viewer. Again, no Adam’s apple. Wisps of brown fuzz collect under the guy’s chin, pointing toward the bright white column of his neck, which sits at the very center of the painting. His face is lit at an angle, the right side in shadow; the neck, under the overhanging jaw, should certainly be shadowed as well. Was Angelo, a faultless technician, deliberately calling attention to the fact that his subject had no Adam’s apple?

  One after the other the portraits vanished from the wall and were replaced. Some of the figures confronted you, others dismissed your very existence by looking away. But every subject was painted from the same angle and held his well-lit neck up for your inspection.

  “I got some cauliflower at the market.” Ali had changed into shorts and a tank top. His limbs were long and lean, his build boyish. He was pursued by men and women, he had been propositioned by straight couples and gay ones, money had been offered twice. His popularity soared once they moved to Atlanta, where no one had ever seen anything like him before. And still he remained humble and true.

  “Gosh,” Ali said, “I haven’t seen you smile in weeks.”

  “Oh, come on.” Jon called up the Portrait of a Gentleman with a Red Cape, then said to the wall, “I’m sure I must have smiled by accident every now and then.”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, no wonder Adger keeps telling me to lighten up.”

  “How is he, is he still pudgy and cute?”

  “He’s still a closet case and a lunatic. Now, here, come sit down and look at this with me. What you said about this being a woman—was that a joke?”

  “How am I supposed to know?”

>   “Look closely.” Ali sat down alongside him. “None of these guys has an Adam’s apple. And you can’t tell from the clothes because they wear so many of them. This one has at least four layers on—there could easily be breasts under there, right?”

  “It’s just a painting,” Ali pointed out.

  “Okay, right, but you were the one who suggested there might be more going on here, so that’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “I better start defrosting that chicken breast.”

  “Just wait. What do you say about the stubble on his chin?”

  “I don’t know. It looks like someone who doesn’t really need to shave yet.”

  Jon turned to him and nodded. Then he called up the next painting, the Portrait of a Youth in Green Velvet.

  “We were selling a vest like that last season,” Ali said.

  This, amazingly, was not a non sequitur. “To women, right?”

  Ali nodded. “I guess everything comes back in fashion if you wait long enough.”

  “This guy has a full beard,” Jon said. “So how can he be a woman?”

  “That’s a fake beard,” Ali pointed out with the certainty of Gloria Scipi.

  Jon went up to the wall and examined the patches of colored light. “How can you tell?”

  “He’s probably too young to even grow a full beard like that.” Ali walked up to the wall and pointed to the subject’s ear. “Also there’s this little line going back here over the ear that looks like a string to me. Too bad we can’t see the other side of his head—he probably had another one holding it up there.”

  “Oh, my God,” Jon said. “I thought that was a strand of hair.”

  “It’s a totally different color. His hair is dirty blond and the string is somewhere in the burnt ash family. Now, if I don’t eat something—” Ali said and walked away.

  “Can I use this?” Jon asked. “I mean, I’ll give you full credit for everything, but can I use this for my show?”

  “I don’t mind,” Ali called from the kitchen.

  They ate Ali’s delicious curry and drank a bottle of wine and then went to bed. It had never been hard for Jon to conjure the old feelings. He remembered seeing Ali for the first time, sleeping with him for the first time, walking down their block of the East Village with bags of flowers and food. He could remember being in love. But it had been a long time since he felt it.

  At first it didn’t matter that they had so little in common. Jon was happy to have things to prove—that a Jew and a Muslim could fall in love, that an art historian and a ladies sportswear salesman could enjoy each other’s company year in and out, that love could transcend all. But Jon found he had a sentimental attachment to Israel; Ali considered religious states scary. Ladies sportswear did nothing for Jon; Ali found papal patronage dry. And as for Love—it could transcend everything but a move to Georgia. Jon didn’t love Ali enough for that. But now, watching Ali sleep, listening to him swallow the cooled air, each inhalation a little gasp, so that he could as easily have been in a state of constant amazement—Jon felt he was wrong. He had been so stressed out about his job that there hadn’t been room for anything else. Now, lightened of his burden, possessed instead of possibly the greatest insight in the history of Angelo scholarship, Jon once again felt his great love for Ali. Who cared that their c.v.’s didn’t overlap?

  Jon closed his eyes and watched the darkness gently turn.

  The critics—the feminists, the homosexuals—had been on to something. But they never quite got there. Once you accept that the subjects of Angelo’s portraits are women, things more or less add up. You have an answer to questions. Why do these figures stare at you so fiercely? Why do they threaten you with a weapon, if it isn’t the most dangerous and disruptive mystery, the mystery of gender, that they’re challenging you to solve? The layers of fancy-patterned clothes and rich fabrics and feathered caps were men’s fashions of the times, but what dandy dared pose with nosegays, with ribbons and ring cases and birds? Why all the phallic props, the bulging bright codpieces?

  These are portraits of women not disguised as men but instead masquerading as them. You aren’t supposed to be fooled. The string that Ali pointed out running over the left ear of the guy with the green vest—look closely and you see the faintest trace of the line continuing across the top of his forehead. Jon was sure that infrared would show what could only be a headband, raising the possibility that this was originally a portrait of a woman. What might have been a woman’s diadem was here a band holding up a beard, which itself becomes, once you know how to look at it, totally fake, the Groucho Marx look of the cinquecento.

  You understand these things. And you understand why Angelo’s subjects have never been identified—none of them, ever, unlike Leonardo’s or Bellini’s or Dürer’s, unlike those of his contemporaries Lorenzo Lotto and Andrea Solario. Angelo’s portraits never reveal his sitters’ identities, despite their clutter of accessories and props, despite the specificity of the background landscapes. Only the Louvre’s Portrait of a Boy with a Hammer dares include a name, on a little scroll curled at the subject’s feet, a motif echoed by the sneering curl of his lower lip, as if the scroll is something he’s cast aside or is about to step on. The name is Martino, nothing else, and Gloria Scipi, after producing a list of seventeen Martinos known to have lived in Venice at the time, throws up her hands and hedges her bets by pointing out that a martino pescatore is a kingfisher, symbol of industry and steadfastness, and that its breast is the same color as the arrogant boy’s cap.

  Understandably, she preferred to discuss Angelo’s work and life in the context of the new kind of portraiture being produced in the first half of the cinquecento. She focused on what could be known and made up what could not. But she didn’t use what little evidence she found to invent identities for Angelo’s sitters. She scarcely acknowledged that these identities were in question. And she never asked this: how could all of Angelo’s subjects have remained unknown for so long? These are not archetypes. These faces are not the male equivalent of the bella donna; they do not include Christ, despite the religious connotations that Gloria Scipi found here and there. Indeed, if a single thesis could be plucked from the tangled garden of Gloria Scipi’s scholarship, it was that Angelo Veneto invented a new kind of portrait by investing his subjects with specific psychologies (which she insisted on calling souls), thereby making them look like real people (albeit incredibly gorgeous ones). She ignored the absence of contracts or anything else that might have identified them. In her everyday work she gathered clues, she was hot on trails—but when faced with an obstacle she was more demolition expert than detective, and if she couldn’t make a big bang, she didn’t accept the job.

  And so it fell to Jonathan Weitz to bestow upon the world the answer to a question that had not yet been posed: why is “Martino” sneering at his name?

  An evening of discoveries, a night of love—at six the next morning Jon packed a bag. He was moving into the museum. The Harrington Collection was housed in a refurbished 1927 Coca-Cola bottling factory on a quiet stretch of Peachtree Street. Jon had never seen a peach tree on Peachtree Street or anywhere else in Atlanta—but that didn’t matter to him anymore. The Old South may have been gone with the wind, but here was something new to seize his imagination. Except for the occasional minivan of private school students, nobody visited the Harrington Collection when there wasn’t a show on. Adger’s zeal for the blockbuster exhibition made sense, and Jon had to admit that the execrable Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words was a stroke of marketing genius. The five paintings, like the rest of the Collection, went mostly unseen when they could be viewed for free, but gathered in a single gallery on the other side of a ticket taker, they had patrons lined up around the block. Of course after Jon’s Angelo show opened, Adger’s Picture queues would be remembered as a couple of folks who happened to wander in off the street. But until that day, or at least until Adger’s return, he had the museum mostly to himself; he could sit on the fl
oor in front of the Portrait of a Gentleman with a Red Cape undisturbed for hours. He could sit with his laptop and write; he could look up at the painting and see what could not be seen projected on a wall; he could close his eyes and fantasize about the brilliant curatorial future that would be his.

  This was the plan. It was, he knew, ironic that the very morning after rediscovering his love for Ali he took a sabbatical from it. But Adger would be gone only three days and Jon had to make every second count. He had an essay to present to his boss on his return, a fucking show to put together. And what else would he be doing but developing Ali’s revelation into something he could share, something they both could share with the world? What other muse could Jon possibly want?

  Ali was still in bed. The white sheet was draped at a provocative slant around his waist, like the Venus de Milo; one of his eyes was open, the other squeezed shut. Jon rubbed the hair on his lover’s tummy. Desire tugged. But Art called. “It’ll be good, I’ll finally be able to get this show together,” he explained. The other eye opened. Jon pressed his lips against Ali’s and said, “It’s all right with you, baby, isn’t it?”

  Ali smiled sleepily and said he didn’t mind.

  The first thing Jon did when he got to his desk was reread Gloria Scipi’s essay. He’d been through it a dozen times; he’d even read it in the original Italian twice, though he didn’t know the language. He’d been willing to do whatever it took to fix the essay. But now, reading it in light of what he, alone of all art historians, knew, he saw the answer quite clearly—the essay would have to be jettisoned and replaced. Gloria Scipi didn’t just assume these were portraits of men; her analyses of the paintings rested on this premise. Her use of the term “male gaze” to describe the intimidating stare of Angelo’s subjects referred not to a certain way of looking but indeed to a man. Her very focus was on the manliness of Angelo’s subjects; her claim that the gentleman with the red cape was a Christ figure, for example, was supported by the cross she saw in his codpiece.