Virgin and Other Stories

by April Ayers Lawson

  He meant it. He stared at me like I was the answer to a question he’d been carrying around forever. I myself had come to New York with that kind of question; I had come especially to meet another man, H., an artist and filmmaker, whose paintings this art dealer sold. H. was the one who’d shown the dealer my work.

  I wasn’t sure I liked this man, though. Whatever I felt went beyond like. I wanted to like him because then whatever I felt about him would make more sense to me.

  No one had talked to me like this before: in the air was the spiritual equivalent of the surface of my eyeball being almost imperceptibly palpated by one of those machines with a chin rest you stare into at the optometrist’s.

  I said I, too, was glad. Then we were back to penises.

  “Zelda complained that Fitzgerald’s penis was too small. He was said to have developed a complex about it.” At this he watched me intently, as if trying to arrive at a decision. “Do you like Fitzgerald?” Before I could answer he cleared his throat, and quickly added, “Do you like literature?” as if that were the real question.

  I nodded yes to Fitzgerald and to literature. “I like to read. Sometimes I write.”

  “What do you write about?”

  “People I run into. Everyday stuff. But I guess really it’s about a path to God.” That was what I felt about my artwork, too, not being comfortable at church but always pursuing a belief in something, trying to close that gap between the something and me, and saying it made me brace myself in the way one sometimes does when she expects she is about to be ridiculed. But he seemed not to mind and explained to me that he, too, was religious, though an atheist, and asked my denomination; when I told him I’d recently considered becoming Catholic but didn’t like their attitude toward gay people, he said he didn’t think I should let that stop me from becoming one. “Really?” I said. “You don’t see that as a problem?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter,” he replied authoritatively.

  The laughter of a woman from a few tables over distracted me. I turned to see that although older she was prettier than me. With my husband I was always aware of such women, addled by the idea of how easily he might replace me with one of them. Women liked him. Occasionally when I returned from the bathroom at a restaurant I’d come back to find him engaged more happily in conversation with the waitress than he ever was with me; with me he claimed he could be himself, which was depressed.

  But if my art dealer noticed the prettier woman he didn’t show it.

  Then we were back to literature.

  “People you run into. Like me?”

  I nodded.

  Again the woman’s laughter rose above the general buzz of the place, teasing my ear. He smiled at it, at me; the distraction had become our amusement. There had been on his face only the briefest flicker of annoyance at my eyes darting away.

  “Oh, please don’t write about me,” he said, as if the thought of it were already irresistible to him.

  “Don’t worry. It’s not the kind of thing I show people,” I replied.

  * * *

  But I wouldn’t have known how to write about him then because he didn’t make sense to me, everything he said seeming to have double or hidden or artfully implied meaning. But then again, possibly it didn’t mean as much as I thought it did. And when I think back on the whole conversation, a lot of what we both said did and didn’t make sense in a way. I mean, we regarded each other as if there were some deep and profound communication happening—he was telling me about his dead sister, about how a Christian friend had called him to check on him every day after her death to tell him he was praying for him, and though the vulnerable look of his face while saying this moved me, something about the way he said it, the way in which the wet green eyes measured my reaction, made me think he spoke of her often, to pick up women, and that this version that included the praying was the version he’d personalized for me. I didn’t mind. At one time I had found my husband’s pain attractive, too (abandoned by his mother, flirted with as a teenager by his stepmother, his failure to find his way as a sculptor, his frustration over his inability to “want to be happy” as he put it), but that pain in its offering had always seemed wrung out or even flung at me; and this pain entered the air between us as light and contained as wrapped candy. “I read that love is what penetrates the shells we’re trapped inside,” I said a few minutes later, already intoxicated, eyeing his gesticulating hands and masculinely slender wrists, unbuttoned sleeves sliding down as his hands moved up. Then I was embarrassed, maybe because I was married and speaking of love to him, or maybe just because I was speaking of love, or because his eyes caught again my eyes on his hands. I sensed something faintly ridiculous about both of us, like children pretending roles (each aware of the other’s true self, the defining characteristic of those selves being their attraction to each other), and when the waiter came by with fresh beer for me, a martini for him, I experienced the rush of having been almost found out—but found out at what?—which added to the sense of absurdity. Around us other patrons were sitting or rising out of chairs, having conversations and eating bread from baskets, the summer light only beginning to dim, the candles in that open-air place just beginning to be lit by the staff, and though I’d been tired and hadn’t really wanted to meet him I was becoming distinctly aware of the sense that we and they existed on separate planes of reality, ours being better. Still, every time I said something it sounded odd to me, and I was surprised that his face staring back at mine seemed to register it as right. At that time, I should add, I was also (perpetually) afraid of saying the wrong thing and had been like this since childhood, believing everything I said revealed too much about me, the problem of me, to other people, the sound of my voice converted to the sound of a pencil scratching white expanse; but this man had expressed interest in the slides of my pieces shown to him by H., told me they were very good—so good in fact they verged on being bad—and admired what he viewed as the “obsession and necessity” underlying my “awkward bravado.”

  Three months ago the dealer and I had first spoken over the phone.

  His accent had sounded refined and slightly affected. It reminded me of blazer-wearing prep-school boys in movies, as if invisibly stamped with a crest. (I disliked and was fascinated by such boys.)

  “I like how you paint like you’re better than you are and so in a sense become it,” he had said, causing a physical twist of pain that seemed to begin with my clenched stomach and spread with an ache throughout my limbs. “I don’t mean that you aren’t a very good painter, of course,” he said, evoking my self-disgust at the sense of balm being smoothed over a burn. I didn’t want to care what he thought. But then, “You’re a very good painter, obviously.” So I did.

  At home, on the stool in my studio I uncrossed my legs, so that the one that had been on top was now below the other. With the hand not holding the phone, I picked at my bottom lip in the childhood way I’d ceased long ago. Aware of it after the fact, I stopped. I hated and admired him for his ability to cause it.

  But as we discussed individual pieces I began to feel comfortable with him, comprehending the style of his personality, and the paintings and drawings in my studio—technically the guest bedroom—in which I spent the dark insomniac hours of the morning working, began to alter before my very eyes as he violated and revered and defamiliarized them with strange eyes I couldn’t see. His intrusion into my world was at least as upsetting as the week my husband’s stepmother had occupied the room. (“Why are you painting all these ugly-looking men?” She’d called me up the stairs to confront me suspiciously one afternoon, having—against my request—removed the tarp I’d draped over the paintings there.)

  He called me for the second time a few weeks later, and then again a week after that, seeming each time to have some specific question about my art that needed clearing up for reasons of intellectual and/or professional curiosity, each time causing me to wonder if his interest would lead to an offer of representation. But
then abruptly, just when I’d lost track of time or become jarred by the awareness of it, hoping to get off the phone with him before the sound of my husband’s car in the drive (the conversations about painting sounding threateningly intimate, his pauses, his very breath, it seemed, laced with desire), he would hang up.

  The first time, I had thought some technical problem had occurred, or that he’d mistakenly hit the wrong button and would soon call back, but by now I understood that when the conversation in tension and emotion climaxed he shortly afterward ended the call.

  Then, one afternoon, over the phone, around three, I finally told him that the strange men I drew and painted resembled (in one way or another) the man who had abused me as a girl. A couple of the men I’d even at first mistaken for him, I explained, stiffening and failing to breathe as I did when I encountered a potential subject in public; as I became certain of the subject not being that man, a predatory sensation would overtake me and propel me in the man’s direction, where I would surprise and charm him into allowing me to draw and photograph him, the sittings occurring mostly at bars and coffee shops. Excuse me, sir, I know this must sound strange and I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m an artist and has anyone ever told you you have the most amazing face? (Always girlishly and struck, like I didn’t do this often, like I had at great personal risk come out of my comfort zone.) From these I made the paintings. Nine men had posed for me.

  “I suppose you wouldn’t believe me if I said I knew,” he said. “I mean that I suspected something along those lines because of the, well … as I described to H.—who agreed with me—Schiele-like reconciliation of your attraction to…”—he cleared his throat—“and inherent repulsion from your subject. Your repulsion from your subject’s power over you, you could say,” he went on in a dreamy and intimate voice that caused me to find myself absentmindedly touching my breast and requesting, “Could you please not hang up on me this time?”

  “Hang up on you?” he murmured. “I assumed you as well as I understood when our conversations ended.”

  (Had anyone else said this to me I’d have been stunned by his pomposity.)

  Then he told me he was honored to represent me.

  “You’re going to represent me?” I said, staring out my studio window, at the sunny spring afternoon, a pleasurable shiver running down my spine.

  “Yes,” he said, amused. “I had assumed that was understood from the beginning. I don’t waste my time.”

  At which point I pressed my hand against the window glass and wondered if having never met him I could possibly be in love with him. As I admit I wondered about H., so that I wondered if I could be in love with two men (whom I’d never met, who at times, because I’d never met them, seemed even to merge into one mysterious and powerful masculine being) in addition to my husband, who after a day of sales as a pharmaceutical representative spent most of the evening out back drinking scotch in a shed. “It’s not that I don’t want to talk to you,” my husband explained. “It’s that I have to talk to people all day and don’t have anything left by the time I get done. Somebody has to make the money for you to get to stay home and paint,” he said, though he’d been the one to encourage me to stay home and keep house to begin with. We were supposedly trying to have a baby, but that had gone on for a while with nothing happening and the idea of consulting a doctor embarrassed him. If I wanted I could visit the doctor, but he didn’t plan on going. In the privacy of our home he radiated contempt for doctors because he didn’t like sales (though he was good at it) and had to sell them his company’s product, an antidepressant that, when he took a course of it, had absolutely no effect on him, like the others he’d tried.

  Though he claimed to be working on his art in the shed, most of the time he came back inside with clean hands. He usually took his laptop into the shed with him, and I suspected he spent a lot of time drinking and watching porn.

  So I felt only a little guilty about looking forward to and obsessing over the calls from the art dealer.

  Sitting now before me at the restaurant he was nodding, nodding.

  In my hometown my work had been dismissed by the cursory once-overs of local gallerists who seemed offended I’d have the gall to even solicit their attention, their spaces inferior to his in size and design and prestige.

  And here he was, their obvious better, in the flesh, eyeing me with at least as much interest as he had given my paintings.

  The restaurant we sat in was open-air and outside the partitions that enclosed it the sun was setting, the streets dimming to the blue of dusk, and I got up to accompany him as he smoked a cigarette. I hated smoking—my husband smoked—and also I was envious of the manner smokers had with each other, the way another man happened by us standing outside the restaurant and bummed a cigarette, the understanding, the knowingness, passing between them as smokers. As the cigarette moved to his lips, then away, his thin lips framed with beard hair, he explained to me, unnecessarily, “I have started smoking again,” and I said, “Yes, I see, you’re smoking,” and people passed up and down the street, and we said some other things to each other that didn’t matter, and again he smiled at me with that sort of private delight.

  “You keep looking at my hands,” he said.

  * * *

  At which point H., whom I’d met in person only yesterday, after having corresponded with him for a year, arrived.

  * * *

  I should say that at that time H. no longer thought of himself as a filmmaker and that his idea of himself as a failed filmmaker, to which he alluded in our correspondence, seemed evident in the way he carried himself that evening from the dark of the night toward the golden ambience of the dining area. Though he would later go on to make another experimental film for which he would receive a prestigious award, at that time he had lost his confidence and had in his posture—in his shoulders and neck—the faint but noticeable quality of a man still bracing himself from mixed reviews and financial disaster. Just before he crossed the threshold into the light of the dining area, he paused for no apparent reason and seemed to me to be hearing something from a distance (though I might have imagined this, his face cast in shadow). When he finally crossed into the dining area and neared our table, he projected the opposite air of my art dealer; the former seeming to give off the impression of not being sure he was in the right place while the latter might easily have been able to convince one of the other patrons he owned it.

  As H. settled into his chair he made an expression of discomfort, began sliding the chair at an angle to the right, toward the table, but then—apparently having bumped the knees of his long legs into the table’s foundation—sighed, scooted back, and somehow in the process knocked over a glass of water.

  “How did you even do that?” said my art dealer, because to move his chair, H. had not needed to have his arm anywhere near the water glass. “Every time he and I go out something like this happens.”

  With his napkin, H. wiped the wet spot on the table, and with the one I handed him he daubed at his shirtsleeve.

  As one of the waiters rushed in to help with the glass and ice on the floor, I saw H. throw our art dealer a look that he’d give him again later, that seemed to be an acceptance of the playfully bullying tone he took with H., of his delight at H.’s humiliation; and I found myself pained on H.’s behalf.

  “His legs are long,” I said in his defense. “The tables are a bit cramped and he’s much taller than average.”

  “Yes,” our dealer said. “But as you see, so am I.”

  * * *

  I should say also that I then already had what you might call the arrogant conviction that I possess the capacity to recognize true genius, and even though H.’s silent film about the coming-of-age of a deaf and dumb adolescent boy had been criticized for being pretentious and self-indulgent, and had lost money—a noticeable percentage of audience members at a screening in L.A. had walked out during what some would refer to as pointless and tedious dream sequences—I believed (li
ke a few of the really authentic and brave critics whose reviews I’d read when I Google-stalked H.) it to be extraordinary and misunderstood.

  But I thought of him as more of a painter than a filmmaker, and it was his paintings that had a year ago, in the musty basement of a library, in an old issue of Art Forum, attracted my attention.

  I had in fact become so taken with H.’s paintings of bats that, from a hunched-over position in a library carrel, I’d cut out the whole article, not fully admitting that I’d stolen it until out in the parking lot.

  That the paintings in the article I’d stolen were of bats surprised me at least as much as my taking them, and my feelings about the bats surprised me even more. In their two-dimensional plane, the hyperrealistically painted bats hung from above, their wings wrapped around their bodies. The artist had rendered them so hauntingly (with velvety bruise-colored shadows and ephemeral blue-silver highlights) and tactilely (a pinkish flesh tone peeked out from beneath where the light hit a thin spot near the base of a bat’s furry head) that for the first time in my life I fantasized about stroking one. Before, I’d been revolted by them, had in fact upon flipping through the magazine felt a flicker of that revulsion; but I’d then developed this other feeling that led me to turn back to the beginning of the article to study the photograph of the artist, a middle-aged man. While this too at first seemed unremarkable (being bald, he was not like the man, the abuser, from my youth, and neither slight nor classically handsome, like my husband), upon closer inspection he transfixed me: the generous, well-meaning expression in his gray eyes coupled with a slight but distinctive frown, as if he were simultaneously appealing to me to come closer even as he waved me away, struck me as mysteriously and disarmingly familiar, like a face from a dream.