by Becky Aikman
chapter
TEN
dawn was the last to show up. Most people disappear into the bustle of the Metropolitan Museum, but Dawn’s arrival was more of an entrance. Heads didn’t just turn, they swiveled when she strode past, confident in a pair of black suede boots, jacked up on heels that few would venture to wear for two hours of tramping through some of the world’s most cavernous galleries. As we set off, visitors looked away from stupendous frescoes and statuary, Dawn’s flash of blondness too irresistible a distraction. If people come to museums to watch each other as well as the art, Dawn was giving them a helluva show. Her kinetic presence hijacked attention, and she was conscious of all the darting looks. But Dawn paid attention, too. She took in everything, making connections, making them hers. Dawn was a woman both fully engaging and fully engaged.
It was the lotus blossoms that brought her to a full stop.
Locking into those blossoms, Dawn lost any awareness of herself and redirected all her scrutiny to a collection of drawings and watercolors that depicted them. A sound, like a purr from a Persian cat, came from somewhere deep in her throat.
The lotus blossoms were sequestered in their own room away from the crowds, but they were no dainty, ladylike flowers. As depicted by the Chinese artist Xie Zhiliu, they were strong, forceful blooms with palpable erotic power. Their colors, virgin white or red like the lipstick of a whore, emerged with muscular force from some murky depths. They were beautiful, too, of course. But these watercolors weren’t just for show. They had something more, something penetrating to say. Dawn looked at them like someone trying to work something out. Something, something else, was up with Dawn.
“I want to start here,” said our guide, Katie, a slender art history student with long, pre-Raphaelite ringlets of fawn-colored hair, “in part because it’s more peaceful than other galleries on a busy Saturday night, and in part because lotus blossoms are highly symbolic in many cultures.”
We stepped closer. The works captured fleeting moments in the lives of the flowers. Some bowed gracefully. Some stretched toward the sun on tender stems. Withered ones dropped their seeds. “The idea for the artist was that no one of these was the lotus blossom,” Katie said. “It’s necessary to see the various facets of the life cycle to understand the flower itself.”
Everyone in our group moved from one painting to the other, respectfully silent, drinking in the sinuous forms, the bold lines like calligraphy, the showy eruptions of color.
“Lotus blossoms close their petals at night and reopen in the morning, so there is also the idea of perpetual resurgence and renewal, of reinventing themselves,” Katie continued.
“Ahh … renewal,” Tara said, casting a meaningful look toward Dawn, who was still transfixed.
“That red is so vivid,” observed Lesley.
“And they can surge forth and be beautiful and pristine in a muddy, difficult environment.” Katie finished and stepped to the side, leaving us to soak in the essential qualities of the blossoms, their splendor, their drive, their strength.
Dawn could hold her silence no longer. “I can’t believe it,” she blurted out in a croaky rush. “It sits on my desk, that picture.”
“This picture?” I asked, pointing to the one in front of her, the most colorful one in the room.
“No, no, my own picture.” Dawn spun away from the painting toward the rest of us, lit up by the coincidence. “I have a photograph of a beautiful lotus blossom on my desk. I look at it every morning.” It was a gift from her husband, who took the photograph on a trip through the bush in Africa. “Sometimes Andries and I liked to go off and do our separate things. He liked to rough it as though he were in the army. It reminded him that life could be taken away in a minute.”
Dawn didn’t know anything about lotus blossoms when he gave her the photograph six months before he died. She asked him why, of all the glorious sights in the wild, he had chosen this image of a lotus, rooted in an inky swamp, for her. “It is because a lotus blossom will grow and perfume and flower,” he said, “even in the muck.”
Everyone made that same contented sound that Dawn had uttered before. We got it, all right. All of us—Denise, Dawn, Marcia, Lesley, Tara, me—we were blooming in the muck.
FOR OUR MARCH OUTING, I had come up with this excursion, away from the everyday, like cooking, and into the sublime. The roast chicken train wreck had made me leery about my skill at planning activities for our group, so I consulted Camille Wortman, a research psychologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She had kicked off much of the new research about grief with an attention-grabbing paper back in 1989 called The Myths of Coping with Loss, setting the tone for others that followed. She recommended that people who are grieving throw themselves into positive experiences that fully engage their interest, what psychologists call flow. I told her that going with the flow at the cooking class hadn’t been so easy for everyone in our group.
“If I lost my husband, going to a cooking class would be very hard for me,” she told me when I visited her office. “I cook a lot. My husband cooks. It’s something we do together.” For her, she said, “Cooking would be a zinger.”
A zinger, Wortman explained, can be any unexpected reminder of loss, like Denise’s chicken or Dawn’s John Denver song. It can strike a person with spooky intensity, even causing difficulty breathing or heart palpitations. Obviously, we had stumbled onto this third rail of zingers with Denise and food.
I was chagrined, but Wortman was otherwise reassuring. Unlike Bonanno in his Hawaiian shirts, she had that precise appearance that you look for in a scientist, very neutral—short brown hair, pale skin, tan pants, tan shoes, a red and tan paisley blouse. Her work as a research psychologist involved interviewing thousands of couples before and after bereavement, for as many as ten years, to assess their ways of coping, and she had uncovered the benefits of positive experiences. Walking the dog, going shopping, just about any activity that generates some enthusiasm, she said, can break the grip of negative thoughts and offer a respite from depression, anxiety, anger, or guilt. So she was all in favor of our planning these regular outings.
“But if you are sponsoring a group like this, it might be good to screen for zingers,” she advised. “Of course, it would be hard to know what they would be. They could be different for different people. They could be anything.”
WHICH IS WHY I nearly suffered breathing difficulty and heart palpitations when, ten days before our get-together, I found out that the museum had organized what I can only call an all-zinger tour for our group, a tour so lacking in positive engagement that Denise would be begging for roast chicken as an alternative.
Once again, I had come up with a plan deceptive in its simplicity. I heard that for a reasonable sum the Metropolitan Museum of Art would put together a private tour on the subject of one’s choice. I requested a survey of artworks that reflected on the subjects of loss and recovery, a tour for a group of young widows who were intent on remaking themselves; a Saturday night tour that would be positive, even inspiring in tone, revolving around rebirth, renewal, and change. Perhaps naively believing that the Met would understand what I had in mind, I thought my planning was done. I relaxed for a couple of weeks and reflected on how art was the ideal antidote to grief, how art in many forms had served that function for me.
I wanted our group to find the same solace I had found in art during my own low patches, when my life was so stripped of interest and significance that I hungered for the ideal rather than the real, the abstract rather then the actual, when I wanted to see the world filtered through someone else’s interpretation, trusting it more than my own. Art—and I’m using the term broadly here, music or painting, theater or movies, high or low—allowed me to experience emotions I didn’t get to feel in my real life anymore: a good chuckle, the warmth of close connections. I no longer lived in a place where I had a man to love, but I could listen to “O soave fanciulla” from La Bohème or “I Got You Babe” from Sonny a
nd Cher and visit that place, if only for a few minutes.
Art helped me find order and meaning at a time when I couldn’t find them elsewhere. Like religion, I thought, art offered a connection to a world where stuff that happens makes sense. A few weeks after Bernie died, I had seen a reproduction in the newspaper of a painting by the California conceptual artist Ed Ruscha. It depicted an orange vortex on a gray background, and in the center were the words I WAS GASPING FOR CONTACT. Too done in to visit the Whitney Museum to see the painting for myself, I tore the image from the paper, referring to it again and again. At that moment, the painting spoke to me more than the daily details of my life, details like canceling Bernie’s credit cards, pretending to work. Gasping.
So I was primed for a meaningful evening at the museum until ten days before the date, when I realized that I hadn’t heard back yet from anyone there. I called the manager of tours. “We’re having a little trouble,” she said, “putting together your tour on, let me see … death and dying.”
Zing. “Stop right there,” I said. “Death and dying! No! No! I wanted loss and recovery, emphasis on recovery.”
I asked to speak to someone directly in charge of choosing the art we’d be seeing. Minutes later, she was on the phone.
“I’ve been mulling over your topic,” she said with abrupt authority before I had a chance to speak, “and I think recovery is not something you can show very well in a painting. A painting may bring a sense of recovery to someone who is viewing it, but that is in the eye of the beholder.”
I could see her point: people’s reactions to art might vary. “What are the sorts of pieces you would show us on death and dying?” I wondered.
Roman sarcophagi, she said. Egyptian funerary objects. A sculpture of the antihero in Dante, Ugolino. “He is imprisoned with his children and they are begging him to eat them to save his own life, and he is biting his fingernails and going through questions about what to do.”
I knew how he felt at this point.
“And Christian iconography of, you know, crucifixion, resurrection. We have a sculpture by an American called The Angel of Death. A painting by Homer of a guy on a boat called The Gulf Stream. He’s on a raft, really, in the ocean with sharks circling him. We have the statue The Burghers of Calais, where they’re in chains, about to be put to death. David’s painting of the death of Socrates. It’s pretty monochromatic.”
I was crushed. Graphic depictions of people going to a horrible demise—“this is the opposite of what we’d want to see,” I said. Out of more than two million works in the Metropolitan Museum, she couldn’t come up with subject matter that might be more comforting or inspiring?
“This is not really something an art historian can lead without knowing your group,” the manager said. “I think you need more of a psychological counselor than an art historian, to be totally honest.”
Up to now, I’d been willing to cut her some slack. But did she really think that the death of a loved one was such an unheard-of occurrence that only a mental health professional could address the subject? Was she patronizing us because we were widows?
“Let me explain,” I said. “These women are past the initial stage of grief, and they are remaking their lives.”
“Mm-hmm,” said the voice on the other end.
“This takes strength. It takes optimism. It even takes humor. So what I have in mind is something much more … uplifting.”
“I don’t know how much these widows know about art and appreciate it,” she said. “You might be better off with just a highlights tour. I talked to a few colleagues and they were baffled by this project also.”
“What about images like the phoenix rising from the ashes, or images of strong or beautiful women?”
“There again, our major strong women are more like Salomé with the head of John the Baptist. Or Judith slaying Holofernes.”
Women beheading men. Did she think we’d killed our husbands? “Nasty strong women,” I said.
“Yeah, exactly,” she said. “Look, maybe you just want a tour of women in art and women artists. I mean, that’s pretty attenuated.”
Attenuated—I know what that means, I wanted to say. I know what obtuse means, too. My zinger needle was banging in the red zone. “It doesn’t sound like this is going to come together at the Met,” I sighed. I signed off in despair.
Now I was in trouble. A little over a week until our gathering, and unless I was prepared to brush off my pointillist memories of Art History 101 and guide this jaunt myself, we had nothing prepared. I quickly Googled “private art tours” and came up with a company that employed art history students.
“I ran your idea past some of our guides,” said the head of the company, only four days before the date. “Katie is very young, but she was moved by your request. She proposed some works that you might enjoy.”
“Such as?” I braced for the worst.
“Well, one of them is a beautiful series of Chinese watercolors of lotus blossoms. She chose them because they bloom even in the mud.”
“Stop right there,” I said. “She’s hired.”
chapter
ELEVEN
it took a goddess to stop the show after those lotus blossoms. A gilded statue of Diana glowed high on a plinth made of stone in an interior courtyard flooded with late-day sunlight. Katie held us at a distance, heightening the drama, the better to take in Diana’s golden form. All certitude, she balanced on a single toe, her slender arms aiming a bow and arrow. Her body was strong, not ripped as if she’d been to the gym, but purposeful—a delicate, feminine strength. We felt the tension in her bow, shaped like a pair of lips.
“It’s hard to see her up close, because she’s placed so high,” said Katie. The statue, cast in 1928, was a replica of the scandalous nude weather vane by Augustus Saint-Gaudens that perched atop the old Madison Square Garden. “She is the goddess of the hunt, athletic and strong. The myth is that she assisted in the birth of her twin brother, Apollo. So she is associated with the idea of women helping other women.”
Tara and Dawn cut each other knowing glances, while the rest of us nodded approvingly.
“She is also associated with anyplace where three roads meet, helping travelers find direction. So the idea of Diana on a weather vane is beautiful and special.”
“She’s got a normal body, which is kind of nice.” Lesley craned her neck toward the goddess. “She’s in good shape.”
“All that running around and cavorting with her nymphs,” Katie said.
We laughed, appreciating more than the humor. It was uncanny—Katie had a precocious ability to know what would speak to us, to understand that we might have been widowed, but that our interests were defined by life rather than death, that we were at a crossroads, seeking whatever guidance Diana might provide. Katie’s first two choices were so spot-on that even money said we would follow her anywhere.
Denise, to my relief, had joined us again, and I noticed she was more cheerful this time, her expression less strained. I was grateful that she was giving us another chance. Art seemed to grant her a more comfortable distance from her troubles than food had, and she had changed out of her perpetual yoga getup into a belted black dress with a loose swinging skirt. I was glad that Tara had returned, too. She and Dawn trailed behind, deep in conversation about whatever was on Dawn’s mind. She talked up a storm, something about a man in her life, and Tara nodded thoughtfully, interjecting measured bits of advice. I was happy to see them forming a bond.
Katie, divining that romance was on our minds, brought us to a voluptuous Titian nude of Venus, goddess of love, painted in 1565. Recumbent before a lush landscape, languidly receiving a crown of flowers from a cherubic Cupid, Venus directed her gaze outside the frame, contemplating, what?—her own fabulousness, it seemed. She didn’t engage the viewer. Like Dawn, she didn’t need to work to attract admiration. Venus would never deign to wink at someone on Match.com.
Being women past the age of puberty, we couldn’t
help evaluating the state of Venus’s pearly flesh.
“She’s got perky boobs,” Lesley said.
“If only we lived in an era when big hips were considered ideal,” I lamented. “Think how easy it would be.”
Having shown us a strong woman and a beautiful woman, Katie introduced us to an accomplished one, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, a painter admitted to the French Academy in the eighteenth century, when membership for women was limited to four. In a self-portrait, she captured herself in the act of painting, gripping a palette and brush while sporting a shiny silk dress in aquamarine, the color of Lesley’s silk blouse, that set off creamy skin, pillowy décolletage, and a killer stare. Adélaïde’s dainty embellished shoe looked like one I’d seen at Miu Miu, and her audacious hat could blindside the paparazzi at a royal wedding.
“She’s saying it’s okay to be feminine and frilly and still be creative,” noted Lesley. She sized up the dress the way Holly Golightly sized up the baubles at Tiffany’s.
“Absolutely,” Katie agreed. “She maintained all her feminine charms while having a prominent and important career. She’s based the composition on a fashion plate.”
I would have thought that Dawn, a businesswoman and a fashion plate in her own right, would have felt an affinity for Adélaïde, but when I looked around, Dawn lagged several yards behind. She had waylaid Tara in front of a sculpture, gesturing toward it with flamboyant flourishes. We scuttled over to form a crescent around her.
“Why are you blushing?” Lesley asked. It didn’t take a keen eye to see how deeply Dawn was affected.
She actually fanned her fevered face. “This kind of thing always happens to me.” She gestured toward the life-sized statue. “I have a replica of this sitting on the mantel in my bedroom. Andries gave this to me, too.”
The sculpture was blushworthy all right. Blatantly erotic, Cupid and Psyche, sculpted by Antonio Canova around 1800, depicted love of the most rapturous sort. Cupid, portrayed as a winged adult, whooshed into his lover’s yielding arms, cradling her face. Talk about sexual heat, all soft surfaces and entwined limbs. But I couldn’t help noticing the tender look on Cupid’s face. He treasured her. Any woman on the receiving end of that look would never have to doubt. His love was certain. Their love was certain.