Jon set the essay aside and went downstairs with his laptop. He sat before the Portrait of a Gentleman with a Red Cape and wrote.
He started with a formal analysis. Later he would develop an argument, stitch observations together into a narrative, provide a historical context, fill in blanks. He didn’t have much time but he didn’t panic. He wasn’t in graduate school, he wasn’t obliged to ascend to the ethereal realm of theory—he could ignore the transcendental signified, stop trying to recall the concept of the decentered gaze. He wasn’t after difficulty; his goal was comprehensibility, transparency, the lifting of veils. If he shone a light on the paintings, if he helped viewers see them as they were intended, then he would have done his job.
He barely ate. There was no café in the museum and no decent food within a fifteen-minute drive. The secretary, a nice lady with pewter-colored curls, brought him in a piece of a mayonnaise caramel cake she had invented and unselfconsciously named after herself, and when he told her how much he enjoyed “Delia’s cake,” she brought in an entire quarter. He made coffee at the sink when he was tired; he slept, when he had to, in a sleeping bag under his desk. The rest of the time he sat like a supplicant beneath the painting. When his back could no longer be appeased by stretching he sat up against the wall on the other side of the gallery, under a Giorgione; he still had a clear view.
The publications specialist took advantage of Jon’s availability to remind him repeatedly of deadlines. She was a pert young blonde who carried around spreadsheets warning that the catalog wouldn’t be ready for the opening if he didn’t hurry up. He smiled at her and nodded. He had someone more formidable to answer to, and it wasn’t even Adger.
The few visitors—mainly rich-looking women, thankfully none of the Ladies themselves—smiled down on him. On the first day he was asked if it was a school project he was working on. Of course he would be mistaken for a student—he was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, and sitting on the floor. On the second day he was asked if he was an artist himself. He had a day’s worth of stubble now, it was a bad hair day—he supposed he looked like an artist, a twenty-first-century one, sketching with software. On the third day—still thankfully not the weekend—visitors navigated wider circles around him or looked to the guard for explanation.
Changes may have been observable on the outside, but they were nothing compared to what was happening inside him. What socioeconomic circumstances could have coalesced to produce these transvestite pictures that their subjects couldn’t have commissioned, that were destined to hang behind closed doors for one hushed century after another—this was for Gloria Scipi, not Jonathan Weitz, to explain. He knew only what he saw. The painting was full of playful little deceits but what they added up to wasn’t playful at all. Its subject’s taunting arrogance, her self-satisfied smile, her menacing stick—it’s obvious she has a secret. And so what happened to the person who figured it out?
Visions apparently took place at lesser museums than the Louvre. But instead of a room full of Renaissance guys jostling for Adger Boatwright’s attention, it was one person, a young woman with fair hair tucked into a red cap and little breasts hidden behind a great red cape, who stepped out of a painting and moved toward its startled viewer, Jonathan Weitz, associate curator of Atlanta’s Harrington Collection, the first person in centuries who understood. He felt a seizing up just below his chest. He was in that altered state he had hoped for but never attained, as hard as he tried—fasting and swaying those Yom Kippurs of his childhood, he had only ended up starving and faint, once even passing out on the altar, with the Torah in his arms. In college he abandoned religion for art. And still he waited.
Jon exhaled, his body relaxed, he was jelly quivering on the floor.
“Why don’t you go on home?” a voice said.
Funny, it didn’t sound like the woman from the painting. And it was coming from somewhere else. Up and to his right. There was something casting a shadow on his feet. His head turned toward the sound.
“If I had a beautiful boyfriend like that waiting for me at home, do you think I’d be here?”
It was Dinitia Sims, the security guard. You cannot move into a museum without an ally, and she seemed to like him. This had everything to do with Ali. He had come to visit Jon at the Harrington shortly after Jon started there, and Dinitia hadn’t stopped talking about him since. On his way up to the offices Ali had stopped to introduce himself. He had scarcely been to a museum before Jon met him; maybe he thought talking to the security guard was something you did. If Dinitia liked Jon, it was because he had the good taste to have Ali as a partner.
Jon smiled. Words were forming slowly in his brain.
“I mean, y’all are still together, aren’t y’all?” she asked.
He nodded. “He’s great. I’m going to see him tomorrow, don’t worry.”
She seemed relieved. “Out of the two of y’all, who the one cooks?”
He wondered if she was asking who the woman was in their relationship. “He does.”
She nodded knowingly. “Was it his mama that taught him?”
“Yeah.” He was here in this room talking to this person, he got it now. “When we lived in New York we used to eat over there all the time. She makes the most amazing West Indian food.”
“Did she teach him how to make pepper pot? Does he cook you bacalao?”
“Both,” he admitted. “And he makes his own hot sauce.”
“Damn. And what do you do for him?”
“Sometimes I cook.”
“Oh yeah? What do you fix him?”
She had his number, there was no way spaghetti or scrambled eggs would convince. “Saltwater soup,” he conceded. “A porridge of bitter ash.”
“That sounds nasty,” she said, shaking her head.
“I mean I used to.”
He didn’t have time for this. Adger would be back tomorrow. Jon had been staring at the painting during the day and writing through the night and still he wasn’t finished.
“I have to get back,” he said.
But as he spoke, something terrible occurred to him: What if he was wrong? He had staked his entire professional future on this insight, which suddenly seemed a possible derangement. Dinitia would say nothing but still Adger would discover Jon had been camping out in the museum. Adger must already have known something was up—Jon hadn’t answered the phone or responded to any of his boss’s messages, which he was leaving more and more frequently. Jon was counting on the ends justifying the means. But what if the ends amounted to nothing more than the end?
There was probably no one in the world who had looked at the Portrait of a Gentleman with a Red Cape more than Dinitia Sims had.
She was on her way back to her post when Jon said, “Wait. Can I ask you something?” She turned around. He took a deep breath. “Have you ever noticed anything funny about this painting?”
“Funny?” she scowled.
He nodded and waited. He didn’t want to ask leading questions.
“That’s a good-looking white boy, that’s all I know.”
“White boy?”
“Yeah.”
“Could it be a woman?” he blurted.
“Could be,” she said. “Never occurred to me.”
Could be!
“No, it never occurred to me,” she went on. “But if I was going out looking like that, you know I’d tote a stick along with me too.”
Adger was leaning against Jon’s ledge. He had had some kind of sunscreen issues in Houston—red blobs swam like goldfish across the broad bowl of his face. “I admit I considered it,” he was saying, to no one in particular. “I talked to Elle and she said I should have known not to hire someone from the Ivy League in the first place. She hired one as a male secretary once and he refused to type.”
Jon smiled. He saw no need to remind Adger that he hadn’t refused to type. The evidence, all fifty pages, was sitting in his chair. Adger had just got in from the airport and apparently hadn’t seen the ess
ay. He sounded wounded by Jon’s silence, betrayed. He was making it known that sparks had flown from his head in Houston and now he was contemplating something grave. Jon, meanwhile, was in a state of quiet well-being, serenaded as he was by the unheard music of his own freshly minted words.
“At least he answered the phone,” Adger went on. “What were you thinking!”
Jon smiled. “I was thinking about art.”
Adger looked down at him suspiciously, then went on. “She said I should let you go. I would have listened to her too. I wanted to give her something. I mean it became clear pretty early on that I didn’t feel the same way about her as she did about me. I don’t know why women are always trying to change you.”
It wasn’t believable that Elle MacArthur, director of one of the foremost small art museums in the country, had embarked on the unsophisticated project of trying to change a gay man, closeted or not, into a straight one. Adger must have been talking about some other change. He seemed to be considering something. There was a strange pleading look in his pale blue eyes. His right hand rose to his mouth, a manicured nail darted toward his lips—vestigial nasty habit, whiff of candied fruits—before dropping out of sight on the other side of the wall.
“I would have listened to her except I decided to give you one last chance and try your home phone. I figured you might be working from home,” Adger sneered. “So I called and talked to Ahmed.”
“Ali.”
“Did he tell you I called?”
Jon nodded. Ali was the only person besides Dinitia he had spoken to in three days. Jon had called home twice, and always Ali sounded fine and wished him good luck in getting his work done.
“We had a nice chat,” Adger said.
“Did he tell you about—” But the question was pointless. Of course Ali had said nothing.
“Did he tell me about what?”
“Did he tell you he handed me the thesis for the catalog essay that’s sitting on your chair?”
“Thesis,” Adger said, frowning.
“Just read it. Don’t worry.”
“That sounded more convincing coming from Ali. He told me not to worry too. Said you were working and”—he made quotation marks in air—“‘mustn’t be disturbed.’”
Jon rushed to his boyfriend’s defense. “They taught him how to speak that way in school.”
“Well, they did a good job. These days everybody talks like they come from the ghetto, have you noticed?”
Random sentences from Jon’s essay read themselves to him. This was the best way to put it—it wasn’t his own voice he heard. Adger sounded far away and Jon had to strain to hear him. Jon leaned forward and cocked his head. Finally, he stood and leaned against the wall behind his desk, trying to muster an attentive look.
Adger didn’t seem to notice anything unusual. He was staring at the framed poster for the Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words show just to the left of Jon’s head. But it was badly lit, and Adger could only be looking at his own reflection.
“An Arab and a Jew together,” Adger said. “What y’all are after I can’t imagine, unless it’s the Nobel Peace Prize.”
It went without saying that Jon had no interest in explaining to his boss what an Arab was. Still, Jon’s ordeal at the museum had somehow changed him. Art, it seemed, could make you a more patient person, if not a better one. He walked around his desk, leaving the protected waters of his cubicle for the seaward channel controlled by Adger Boatwright. But it was Adger who looked panicked. When Jon’s hand reached out his boss flinched. But he didn’t budge. The hand reached up and up, its fingers finally making a gentle landing on Adger’s unevenly broiled cheek.
“Does it hurt?” Jon asked.
Jon returned to his desk and tried to work—there were a hundred things he had been neglecting. Instead he stared at Adger’s door and waited. But when the door finally opened three hours later and Adger came out smiling, it was anticlimactic—not because Jon knew Adger would like his essay but because it no longer mattered to him if he did.
“Listen to this part,” Adger said, staring down at the page. Jon sat there as Adger read aloud, deliberately, presenting Jon’s own essay to him, making sure he got it:
Despite Leonardo’s groundbreaking portrait the Ginevra de’ Benci, which legitimated the three-quarters view and the head-on stare (rather than the profile) for portraits of married women, respectable women at the time Angelo was working generally did not meet men’s eyes. The belligerent stares of Angelo’s travestite shift our focus from the very fact that these women are gazing at us. Because the undisputed “male gaze” at work here belongs to the artist and by extension the viewer, the glares of Angelo’s subjects subvert the convention that women should be looking away in paintings or in life. Angelo, progressive as he was, could not bring himself to paint these women dressed as women and glaring this way. The models themselves may not have felt comfortable with such audaciousness; it was easier to put on a man’s cape and pick up a stick than stare out at a man from under a diadem and a great pile of curled hair. Only through the radical practice of drag could the artist and his subjects make the more radical point that women are not demure possessions, that they are self-possessed. In the Portrait of a Gentleman with a Red Cape Gloria Scipi has found “something deeper and more shocking” than anything in Giorgione. Scipi interprets this something as “soul” and sees this as a religious painting, a representation of a soul; contemporary viewers are more likely to see the painting as an early representation of the workings of the modern mind. Whichever interpretation one accepts, it must be complicated by the fact that Angelo located this inner core in women dressed as men. Soul and mind are hidden away in the body just as these women are hidden in men’s clothes, but our inner selves can be revealed by the strong artist’s hand.
That this artist is male blah blah blah . . .
“Of course it’s going to have to be completely rewritten,” Adger added.
“It is?” Maybe Jon wasn’t completely indifferent.
“It’s too academic. You aren’t at Yale anymore. No normal Southern person thinks drag is a radical practice. I’m not even sure what that means.”
Jon wrote this down.
“And do you know what this reminded me of? Those Calvin Klein models, those androgynous ones—they’re always pouting. There’s just so much you can do with this.”
Jon nodded.
“And what about Madonna, where she wears a suit in that one video?”
He nodded again.
“Why do you keep nodding, you’re making me nervous—I feel like you’re agreeing with me.”
“I am. If you want to know something they do at Yale, writing essays about Madonna videos and Calvin Klein ads is it. If you want to connect it to Angelo—”
“I don’t want to connect it but everyone who comes to this show will.” This was pure Adger—he was the opposite of a populist but he wanted to be popular. “Nobody knows anything about Angelo Veneto, I’ve told you that before. Consider your audience—what do you think I did in A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words? You need to give them something familiar to jump off of. Forget all the theory about drag. Leave that to the queers. Or write an essay yourself and publish it in October. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!”
He had misread Adger’s smile. But Jon wasn’t being entirely ingenuous when he asked, “Is there anything you’d keep in that passage?”
“Obviously these gals in drag themselves, that’s what’s going to bring in the hordes. And this:”—he looked up from the page and solemnly quoted—“‘Our inner selves can be revealed by the strong artist’s hand.’”
“You like that?” Jon beamed.
“I do, and you probably have no idea why. That’s why I’m having this conversation with you.” Jon waited and Adger continued. “You want to help people relate to the pictures. What do people care about more than their own inner selves?”
Jon had no answer for this. If he thought of himself as
Matthew Arnold, keeping a steady eye on the object, then Adger Boatwright was unabashedly Walter Pater, the grandiloquent Victorian appreciator who said that “the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s impression as it really is.” What was looking at art, for Adger, but figuring out how it makes you feel? A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words had included a room full of computers, each displaying a blank page bordered all around with a black line. In this frame visitors were encouraged to type in their own “thousand words, or hundred words, or however many words you feel like writing!” Would-be critics were instructed to take inspiration from the five paintings in the exhibition and give their imaginations free rein. When they were done they clicked Submit and their however-many-words were projected into one of the empty rococo frames alongside reproductions of the masterpieces themselves. Adger didn’t seem to care that soon visitors were spending more time looking at these examples of fin-de-siècle free association, uninformed and un-spell-checked, than at the great paintings of Western Civilization themselves.
Jon had of course been appalled. But was Adger’s idea, then and now, really so wrong? He’d quoted Jon’s own essay to illustrate his Paterian perspective, words that to Jon sounded no less dulcet than anything else there. To discover the work of art as it truly is—this seemed to be the very task Angelo set out for the viewer with his gender-bending, am-I-or-am-I-not paintings. But do his subjects say, Look at me closely and tell me what I am? Or do they say, Look at me closely and tell me how I make you feel? Or simply, Look at me closely and feel?
In the end, it was only by submitting to these paintings—something he had avoided, even dreaded—that Jon was truly able to see them.
“Also,” Adger said, “I like the behind-the-scenes stuff about what the models were thinking.”
“That was kind of speculative,” Jon allowed.
“Keep it!” Adger bellowed. “People are fascinated by models. And we’re still going to have to figure out what to do with Gloria’s essay. She’ll have my fat white ass on a stick if we don’t use it. We’ll have two catalog essays. What’s wrong with that?”
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