“What do you think?” Blumgarten asked eagerly, seeing that this lovely if overly-decked-out and under-corseted young woman was stirred.
He looked just like his photo in Art News: middle-aged, around her height—five feet nine—with light, ascetic bones, his balding head covered by an old tan cap. His lips were full, and he wore black-plastic-framed glasses, behind which his fine brown eyes, his best feature, shone. His eyes caught at you, felt you over, urged you out. They seemed now to beckon the nineteen-year-old Leda.
“I hope you don’t mind my impertinence,” he said. “I ask as one art lover to another, which I sense you are.”
When she finally spoke, her voice quavered. “Yours are the only works with a conscience in the show. And I love the different media—the oil, the charcoal, the collage, the metal … The comment in Art News about your Jewish-merchant looks was an anti-Semitic slur, don’t you think? In my humble opinion, and maybe I’m not being so humble, but you asked for my opinion, you did—well, I think the only reason an artist of your caliber hasn’t had a solo show at the Whitney is that you’re not handsome enough to be photographed for Harper’s Bazaar.” She couldn’t believe she’d said so much. Had she made sense?
Murray grinned.
Was he flattered to be recognized? At least he didn’t seem hurt at her flat-out statement that he wasn’t handsome. He wasn’t handsome, but his quality of attentiveness, so full-on, so direct, stood out like an erection.
So as not to seem a complete toady, she added, “But I do not find your paintings beautiful.”
“No?”
She was surprised at his pained look.
“You don’t see any beauty in them?”
In fact, his paintings were more than beautiful to her. She loved his sense of form, the way the tears in the silkscreen picked up the rips in the canvas, and the paint splatters continued over the edges of the canvas onto the museum wall.
At least no one else had heard her dumb-ass remark: the last visitor had left the room a few moments earlier. Oh, how could she ever make amends?
Seemingly recovering himself, he gestured good-humoredly at the walls. “Show me what you find beautiful. I’m interested to see.”
On an inspiration, she lifted her blouse up over her face.
Sex with Murray: In the beginning she would lock herself into her bathroom and emerge wearing a hooded white terry cloth bathrobe, as if she were a prizefighter, her hair stuffed into the hood. She would take the robe off only under the covers.
“Is this my flasher from the Whitney? Is this my orange bird of paradise?”
“I am actually a very shy person.” She held the bedclothes tight around her, although she felt silly, as if she were a child.
Murray was sitting up in bed wearing his eyeglasses, indifferent to his own naked body, his chest a motley thinning jungle of black and gray and white, the muscles of his arms and legs stringy. “Are you putting your diaphragm in down there?”
“Don’t worry,” she called up through the yellow-checked cover, her voice muffled.
“I’m not worried. I just thought maybe you wanted some help. I’m a dexterous type.”
She shook her head. “I can handle it.”
“I’d like to handle it.” When she didn’t answer, he said, “At least let me watch you handle it.”
“The light’s no good down here.”
“Why don’t you take the pill?” he asked, amused at her fidgeting.
“It’s too new. I don’t like messing with my body.”
“Good for you!” He thrust his skinny arms forward in two triumphant fists.
Later he told her that he’d wondered if, beneath the covers, she was trying to signal him to keep his middle-aged haunches under wraps. But in her bathrobe, she would often undress him, teasing him by throwing his clothes to the not-so-far corners of her studio apartment. It was a slovenly place, art posters torn and taped askew on the walls, here and there dirty dishes and half-empty glasses with cigarette butts floating in them. Murray had an impulse to hold his nose. But the apartment had good light, and on the desk and hanging in the bathroom there were a few original paintings that showed talent—by her? She wouldn’t tell him.
After two weeks, when she still had not shown herself, he roared, “Why do you deny a man who lives by his eyes?”
Arms and legs wrapped tight around him, she held him prisoner with her under the dark bedclothes. Tears tumbled out of her, and she dried them with the sheets. “I’ve only slept with boys … mostly in the backs of cars … I’m sure you’ve had models and mistresses …” She was wailing. “Mature women …”
“Oh my dear, my dear,” he said in that old-fashioned, stilted way he had when he was moved. “I am less experienced than you think. Anyway, you are altogether lovely in my eyes. You need fear comparison with no one—”
“Not with the Maja? Not with the Primavera?” She couldn’t stop wailing.
“But those are works of the imagination! Flesh made luminous by inspiration!”
“What about your daughters?” He had two grown daughters and a son. “What about your wife?” Finally, hot and sweaty but holding him fast, she belted out between sobs, “Your wife when she was young?!”
“Why bring my family into bed with us? Why torture us both?” He tried to lick away her tears, but she pulled her head back. “Who’s been worrying you?” He wanted urgently to know.
“Art News. They said your nudes ‘dizzied’ the viewer, ‘blinded’ him, that they were ‘salvos, starbursts’! I’ll bet it was your wife when you first knew her.” Leda groaned. “I’ve got fat pads over my thighs!”
“You exaggerate! You have what you’re supposed to have. Your thighs are womanly.”
“You haven’t seen them!”
“I’ve felt them!” He grabbed the outsides of her thighs, kneaded them, pinched them affectionately. “Those—and these”—he gave her full breasts two smackeroos of kisses—“are the gracious cushions for my bony self!”
Even when the air conditioner gave out toward the end of that first summer, she would do it only under the covers.
“I’ll cover you with my body,” he told her.
But she clung to him and shook her head.
“My God! Who would have thought!” he exclaimed, when he realized she was still deeply uneasy not only about her shapely body, but about her whole young self. “I’ll imagine you. I have a good imagination.” He winked, then kissed her forehead and her eyelids, and said seriously, “And I’m patient.”
Under the hot covers she was daring, licking him in places only his mother had touched before.
He wanted to reciprocate but was unpracticed, had come of age, he told her, in a sexually unadventurous time. “Is this your clitoris? Is this? Give me a flashlight, for Christ’s sake. Why do you keep me in this dark shroud?”
As the cool weather came in, he got the lay of the land and, for no reason she could think of, she shed her bathrobe aboveground. He wept at her “gift” to him. Afterwards they sat back in the disheveled bed (Murray wanted to smooth and tighten the sheets but she waved him off), she smoking a cigarette and he drinking from a pitcher of ice water she had taken to keeping for him on the night table. He fucked himself dry with her, he told her happily, and, like a sea animal left out in the sun, had to reimmerse himself quickly. He had a golden cock, he announced with delight. He loved her.
Despite the twenty-eight-year difference in their ages, she turned out to have had more sexual partners. He had married early and had had children early and had made love with only five women in his life, and only one at a time, and he was curious and impassioned and grateful to her in his shyly arrogant way, claiming that in his late forties, she’d restored his youth to him. He’d spent his early years painting, always painting, and working to earn money—a necessary waste. “I deserve you,” he said.
Murray was odd for an artist, an orderly, tense person who dressed conventionally if without concern for style, a man who r
ose at six every morning and did exercises out of a Marine Corps pamphlet. “That’s as close as I’ll ever get to the military, if I can help it.” After exercising, he shaved and showered and rode his bicycle on a fixed route from the Upper West Side neighborhood where he and his wife had an apartment to his East Twelfth Street studio. On the way he bought the New York Times and read it over breakfast (a daily grapefruit and dry toast—once a week he permitted himself scrambled eggs) at the Olympia Coffee Shop on East Fourteenth Street. He folded his bicycle and carried it up to his third floor studio, where he unplugged the phone and taped his Do Not Disturb sign beside the doorbell, then worked for the next five hours wearing a large canvas apron over his shorts and undershirt and ever-present tan cap. He lunched out of a paper bag, drank from a small thermos of tea, and relieved himself into a Portosan he had had installed, there being no bathroom on the premises. When he was finished painting for the day, he would leave his studio like a patient emerging from a coma—lost, stumbling, eyes hardly open—and walk around the block, occasionally stopping to lean against one of the street’s undernourished trees. Afterwards Murray went back upstairs and napped and dressed in fresh baggy clothes, then set out to meet his wife at a museum or gallery—and, nowadays, to meet Leda, whom he presented to his wife as a promising student, a new friend.
Murray had a coterie of friends and he expanded in their company after the isolation of his day. There were several other artists in the group, as well as dealers and gallery owners and collectors who came and went and came. One distinguished regular was an art critic who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his book of vignettes on the American art scene.
Leda was elated to be included among these shining men and women, but for her, Murray wore the crown. If they were at a museum, she would sometimes leave his circle to dash into an adjacent room where she’d copy down what Murray had just said. If the group moved on later to his apartment for drinks or dinner, Leda would excuse herself to jot notes in his bathroom. (Once Murray shot her a worried look, as though he feared she might be ill, but she shook her head vigorously, healthily.) His wife, Sigrid, a Norwegian scholar who taught medieval history to graduate students at Columbia University, prepared and endured these impromptu parties several times a week, although she seemed content enough when their grown children came—which was often—and brought friends. Murray presided with relish over these minglings, as if water and minerals were coursing up his roots.
Alone at her apartment afterwards, Leda would pore over her notes. Much to her surprise, at their next tryst she’d often argue with him: “Who cares if William Blake said, ‘The nakedness of woman is the work of God’? Why not the nakedness of man?” In bed she poked at his tendinous thighs.
“Leave my puny person out of this.” Murray laughed at his pale body. “The male physique has always been the glory of artists—all that marvelous Greek statuary, Michelangelo’s slaves, his David. Do you have a book of Renaissance sculpture?” He craned his neck, but she shook her head no. “I can see in my mind’s eye Donatello’s fetching David, slender boy with a jaunty wreathed helmet. God, I’d like to take you to Florence!” He looked suddenly, deeply sad. “You should really be backpacking in Florence with someone your own age. He should take you to the Uffizi, the Bargello. What are you doing lying in bed with an old married man?”
“Middle-aged,” she corrected him. “And I’ll worry about that, if you don’t mind. You just keep on talking.”
“If I give no thought to your situation, what am I worth?”
“Don’t patronize me. Don’t start in with the moral shtick.”
He seemed to think about that, as if she might have a point.
“I’m getting plenty out of this relationship,” she went on. “And you’ll be the first to know when I’m not. Now tell me about Blake.”
He looked uneasy, but after a moment kissed her nipple. “Anyway, I just think women were more Blake’s type. Mine, too.”
She pulled her breast back. “And where did you come up with the idea that Picasso painted the families of clowns and circus folks because he wanted to ‘ennoble the forgotten, accompany the lonely’? Maybe he just wanted to sleep with the clowns’ wives.”
“You really pay attention to me!” Murray grinned, settling himself against the headboard, an arm around her shoulder.
Leda shrugged. “You admire Van Gogh for not shooting himself sooner, you admire Monet for painting his water lilies even when he was nearly blind …”
He stuck his nose into her cleavage and breathed in deep, pressing her breasts against his nostrils. “I smell his water lilies everywhere.”
“Would you know if something stank?”
He turned her over on her belly and ran his nose down her backbone toward her ass.
She giggled, and talked into the mattress. “No, seriously, you have a hearts-and-flowers view of the world.”
Yet he was the first to admit they lived in a stinking century. One day he took her into the big downtown Barnes and Noble and bought her (besides many art books, one of them on Renaissance sculpture) Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex … They lugged two heavy bags to her apartment, where Murray, all the while talking enthusiastically, placed each book in alphabetical order by author in her cinderblock bookcase. As they undressed, he was saying that the civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement were the brightest glories of their black times.
“You’re really into educating me, aren’t you?” She was standing naked beside the bed.
“Do you mind?”
She kissed him with feeling. “I appreciate it.”
He stepped away to look at her. “How I appreciate you!” He closed his eyes. “Your whole lovely self.”
She knew she got ornery with him, practically kicked him in the shins. Kicking, arguing, she kept herself from feeling scared. Her longing for him scared her, as well as her gratitude for that longing. It scared her that she kept buying him presents—she who’d never bought a gift for a man in her young life. Men gave her presents. She bought him a brush now and again, a print by an unknown artist, and once a pair of gold cuff links, although he could never take her to openings, the only dressy affairs he attended. Murray begged her to stop spending her nothing earnings on him. (Although the print was good, the girl had an eye. And the cuff links, he didn’t go in for jewelry, but these cuff links were wafer-thin, elegantly shaped, like a musical instrument, a piano, maybe, or a harpsichord, or some piano-harpsichord that had never existed before.)
His biking around the city scared her—in one dream a yellow cab hit him, in another a subway car, or maybe it was a cattle car—and she begged him to cut it out. (He wouldn’t.) It scared her that the bony sight of him thrilled her, him just shambling down the street wearing that battered cap of his. Listening to Murray art-talk, she regularly creamed her underpants; in a taxi he’d felt her wet crotch once and couldn’t believe the “generosity” of her body. Then she started worrying he’d kill himself fucking her—he was getting so little sleep—and even suggested, as a lifesaving measure, that they cut back. But he laughed in her face, which calmed her: making love she was (almost) sure that he loved her.
Two summers after the year Leda got her degree, the NYU art department was planning to show the work of recent graduates, and she wanted very much to participate. In the belief that his concentration and focus would focus her, Leda asked Murray to let her share his studio. She knew she had a tendency to get sidetracked easily—a friend needed a model for the morning and Leda would oblige, or someone asked her to help hang a show. Even buying a dress or finding a book might consume several hours of priceless daylight.
“No,” Murray said.
“Why not?”
“It’s my privacy, my solitude. My domain.” He felt uneasy, knew he sounded pretentious.
Leda could not keep her eyes from filling up.
On the Friday of a week during which she’d
showed up only once—Murray had acceded to a two-month trial—Leda arrived at the studio at twelve thirty in the afternoon. Letting herself in quietly with her key, she waved once guiltily at his busy back (they made it a rule not to speak if either was working), and then several times defiantly, as though she would break his concentration by perturbing the air. He did not turn around, and, almost relieved—she had nothing in particular to say to him—she changed into the dungarees and smock she kept on the chair in the corner curtained off for models.
Leda began squeezing paint out of tubes. With a palette knife she mixed several colors together, then tried out the new combinations on an old canvas with some ratty brushes. Pouring fresh turpentine into little pots to clean the brushes, she thought, what the hell, she might as well re-clean and soften up all her brushes—they had maybe stiffened some during their hard lonely week. Her hands reddened with her ablutions and seemed even to grow a bit puffy, but she kept on. From the neat pile Murray had stacked beneath the sink, Leda took clean folded rags and wiped the brushes down. She tried not to think of the good hour she had spent at these preliminaries.
At last she took the cloth cover off her canvas and stepped back. She shaded her eyes with her hand, then looked out through her spread fingers. She felt the canvas with her palms and fingertips. She went into the Portosan and sat down on the toilet.
Scary Old Sex Page 3