Virgin and Other Stories

by April Ayers Lawson

  Not only the skill with which the bats had been painted but their placement within the rectangle of the canvas, and the shape of their suspended bodies, the emotional effect of this (the slopes of shoulders in Picasso’s Blue Period paintings came to mind), lingered and even persisted long after I’d gone back home and begun to cut vegetables for dinner. While slicing an onion at the cutting board, I became distinctly aware of the article in my bag, and stopped cutting to move the bag up to my studio, after which, back downstairs, I continued to be aware of the bag as I was sometimes aware of a painting in the midst of its creation, as if by being so attached to it I myself took up two separate areas of space. It was not a pleasant feeling but a source of constant tension; and added to this was my now-watering, irritated eyes that I had on the way back down the stairs rubbed with onion-tainted fingers.

  “Why are you crying?” said my husband, who’d just come in.

  I said that I had gotten onion in my eyes, but at the expression of concern in his face, the softening of his own eyes in their examination of mine, I had for reasons I couldn’t understand (though in retrospect I am aware that we made relatively little eye contact, that while he looked at me a lot he much less often looked directly into my eyes, and that his eyes searching mine like that in itself might have made me emotional) actually begun to cry. Over dinner, I considered telling him how I’d stolen the article, considered making it into a funny story, but then the moment passed, after which I understood that I would not be telling him about it (why?); and then in the evening, after he went out to the shed to “sculpt,” I again found myself drawn to the article, which I this time read on top of our made bed.

  That night, when I awoke for the second time around three in the morning—the first time to see if my husband had come back in the house; he had; he was in his office with the door open, watching porn, and upon hearing me had turned toward me with that ignited, vacant expression he got, steered me back into the bedroom, fucked me (uncharacteristically, in the dark), rolled off of me and patted my thigh reassuringly before falling asleep—I knew that I would not fall back asleep, and, as a result of this feeling, got up to paint but instead found myself sitting down at the computer to type the bat artist’s name into a search engine, where I discovered he had a Facebook page. Because he had not seemed to me like the type of artist to have one, I was stunned by the possibility of contact, which I hadn’t until that moment considered to be possible—and after staring at the screen for what must have been ten minutes, with as much excitement as foreboding I sent him a friendship request.

  * * *

  Then for a couple of hours I worked on the painting of B., a man I’d first spotted in the street, in front of one of the best hotels in town. I had been coming from my favorite coffee shop, and as he’d come from the opposite direction and neared me we’d made eye contact. At the charge of his gaze, I’d looked away first.

  With his dark eyes imprinted in my mind, I turned, headed back in the other direction, keeping a generous distance between us in case he turned around.

  That day in late January, aware of the Christmas decorations having disappeared from the fronts of shops, of the absence of the wreaths that had wrapped the streetlamps, I enjoyed a sense of anticipation that eclipsed what I’d felt as a child awaiting permission to leave my room to go to the tree, and even though I was nervous I grinned and giggled so audibly that a mother holding the hand of her little son turned to smile at me. “What’s she laughing about?” the kid asked. “Something in her head,” the mother responded in an amused tone.

  * * *

  He walked with his hands in his pockets. From behind he might have been anyone—men could be like that in a way women less often were, because of their short haircuts and dark suits—and yet I already knew the back of that head and neck and shoulders well enough to, if the occasion arose, distinguish him from others of his type.

  Inside the restaurant (a steak place) I spotted him at the bar and sat down two stools from him, deciding to wait to see if he talked to me first, because whenever I could afford to let them instigate contact with me, they took in the whole idea of it more comfortably.

  When he first looked over I smiled absentmindedly, not like he was anyone I recognized but like he was someone to whom I meant to be mildly friendly, just because he sat near me at a bar and had happened to glance in my direction.

  “Hey,” he said, a moment after I’d turned away to examine the menu. “Excuse me, but did we just pass on the street, near the Westin?”

  “Oh, maybe,” I said, smiling and making a show of taking him in. “I was just down there. Are you staying there?”

  “Yeah,” he said amiably.

  I was drawn to them not only for their appearance but for a certain type of loneliness about them, and they typically acted pleased by my being so open to conversation.

  This time, though, things took an unusual turn when he suggested I do the drawing not at the bar but at his hotel.

  “Why not here?” I wanted to know. I could not go back to his hotel room. He had the wrong idea.

  “Honestly, it embarrasses me to have you drawing me in public,” he said. “It’s too intimate. I’m not trying to get you there to come on to you. I see your ring. I’d just rather do it in private.”

  Okay.

  * * *

  In my studio, the trance I went into when I painted was intermittently broken by an awareness of my hair and clothes smelling like smoke (my husband had quit smoking a while back but started up again, complaining that the anxiety “coming off” of me lately “drove” him to it) and a preoccupation with the memory of my husband’s former smell, which I had loved but couldn’t now distinctly remember, except that I had loved it. Coloring the trance itself, seemingly embedded in the strokes I applied to the canvas, was the excitement and fear of accompanying the man back to the Westin that afternoon, all the way thinking that even though he seemed like a nice enough man I should not be entering a hotel room with him alone. Inside the dim, tastefully decorated interior, I had felt relief when he immediately went over to the opposite side of the room, to the picture window there, to draw back the heavy burgundy-and-green curtains, with their dreamy under-veils of ivory muslin.

  Day flooded the room. I exhaled. He turned back toward me. I found myself regarding his shoes—black, plain, well-crafted masculine dress shoes.

  The sudden motion of his hand caused me to jump.

  He covered his mouth as he sneezed.

  “Did I scare you?” he said, entertained, relief flooding my tensed limbs. “For a second there you looked like you thought I was about to kill you.”

  * * *

  Abruptly in painting I reached a stopping place—it would just come over me suddenly, that I had done all I could do at the time, that I couldn’t possibly paint well beyond this point—and went back to check my email, where I found that H., who must also have painted at night or been unable to sleep, had accepted. As the sky lightened, I bled out a message to him, my emotion for his work inseparable from the words used to carry it, so that there was the sense of sending him a vessel (a message in a bottle, so to speak). The room stank of turpentine. I had cracked the window, and could hear a bird chirping in the trees behind the house.

  Quietly, I treaded down the stairs, without a coat went out into the cold of the morning and stared at the filmy yolk of the sun, the words I had written repeating themselves in my head as I walked down the empty street, certain phrases snagging my consciousness, halting the flow of my thoughts, like a stuck zipper that kept me from pulling closed the neck of a jacket against the cold.

  Yet I liked being stuck. I liked the letter juxtaposed with the sunrise and the blue matter-obscuring shadows of what hadn’t yet been illuminated by the rising sun, and the sound of the first cars being started in drives as my neighbors prepared to leave for work.

  A few days later he wrote back to me, as I both expected and didn’t expect, and then I wrote back, and this went on for
a year.

  And so I’d come to New York to see him.

  But when I mentioned my visit to the city to the art dealer, whose interest I’d by then understood to reach beyond my painting, the dealer had asked me out to dinner. Then H. had learned of it. Or in truth I told him; I told him right after the art dealer had asked me because in addition to fearing both the art dealer and H. and wishing to play each against the other (in my mind this rendered them less threatening), I wished to make H. jealous, and I believe he was because he promptly invited himself to our dinner. Immediately I reported this back to the art dealer, who seemed annoyed and suggested we meet an hour early to be alone.

  * * *

  H., with his own pale, nicely shaped bald head, was also, if you will believe it, now bearded, and noticeably older than he’d been in his photo in the magazine article.

  The day before, I’d shown up at his apartment building in Brooklyn. Well, I had called first, of course; from a restaurant down the street where I sat with my friend whom I’d come to New York to visit (though truly to meet this man and his friend), I’d said, “I’m here,” into the phone, after I’d had some clonazepam and wine and french fries; and he’d sounded interested in seeing me but flustered, like a bear who’d forgotten to come out of hibernation and now at two in the afternoon in August was stumbling around in his cave, trying to figure out what was happening. Alone I had walked down some streets to his place and he’d buzzed me up.

  Fantasizing about this moment, I’d imagined we might be irresistibly drawn to each other.

  But from the second he opened the door to take me in, it was pretty much terrifying. We didn’t know each other. We had been passionately writing to each other about art, over the Internet, and had talked a few times on the phone, but I’d never even heard him cough or seen him settle into a chair.

  He was no longer a voice but a man regarding me, me not only a voice but a body. I was afraid, not of him—not physically; I had the sense that he would never intentionally hurt me—but of something else obscure to me. For a moment the world seemed leached of air. I was a bee caught inside an overturned cup, throwing myself against the glass only to bounce off of it; trapped. He regarded me with mystified and anxious gray eyes behind glasses of the type my father wore. He was closer to my father’s age than my own. This had been known to me technically but not felt, not real until now. Complication radiated off of him in a way that I’d up until that time been unfamiliar with. (Until then my husband’s silence had possessed the most depth and texture I’d known.) I have known only a couple of men like that since. Men whose powers of observation and inner tension suffuse the air; who make me feel as if my presence is as much a problem as my potential absence.

  His parents had been deaf. Scenes from his film about the deaf boy flickered vividly, hauntingly, in my memory. Though I had associated him with that deaf-mute boy—no doubt his alter ego, who he might have been, had he been born with his parents’ disability—his hyperawareness suggested the opposite, a man who heard everything.

  Blind bats. Deaf boy. His subjects fascinated me.

  Why had I interested him?

  But when for a moment, from his position on the couch, he seemed to withdraw into himself without warning, to forget me, I worried that he’d already become bored.

  Because he was a genius I became apprehensive about saying things to him I hadn’t had time to work out in writing, not-good-enough things, and as I sat on a low-slung sort of mini-sofa thing across from where he sat on the couch I shifted my legs in such a way that made it possible for him to see up my skirt. This skirt was black and tiered and also made for a shorter woman—then I didn’t most of the time have an appetite, but was five-nine in height and had found on sale this size-zero skirt in a petite department at the mall—and while I didn’t feel confident about much, I knew I had nice legs, and unable to think of anything funny or intelligent to say, my mind sludgy with the clonazepam I chewed like candy and alcohol and the dregs of crumbling fantasy, I shifted them about in hopes that he’d forgive me for not being as smart and inspired and bold as I thought I’d managed to seem in the emails. Did he like me or not? I couldn’t tell. Glancing around at the photos in his living room I froze at what I understood to be a photo of H. in his late twenties, with a full head of dark hair. A cold sweat broke out above my upper lip and beneath my armpits. Outside the sky had gone overcast, it was raining, and in his living room the muted blue light of the afternoon faded into the golden penumbras of the lamps and there was a kind of tearing sensation in the air—this had been happening to me for almost a year, this kind of tearing or sometimes narrow rushing feeling in the air, as though I might’ve been dragged at high speed through a dark tunnel—and then H. smiled at something I’d said to him, and the feeling lifted as I became aware of myself inside the golden light.

  A few moments later though, he appeared intensely frustrated. Something was wrong. (Was it my fault? Something I’d said?) He suggested we step outside for a walk.

  Out on the sidewalk as we moved forward, down the unfamiliar street, past colored rows of apartment houses like the ones he lived in, he sometimes glanced over at me as he spoke and sometimes stared straight ahead, and at the corner, seeming unsure of what to do next, of what to do with me, acted as if he had suddenly been hit with the perfect idea—like in a cartoon, I could imagine a lightning bolt striking over his head—and inquired as to whether or not I might like to visit the zoo.

  Sure, I said.

  So we went to the zoo.

  And it was there, in front of a flock of flamingos (“Do you like flamingos?” he asked me, to which I replied, “I guess. Do you?” to which he replied, “They smell horrible, don’t they? I don’t think about how bad this place smells when I’m alone but when someone’s with me, I become aware of how much it stinks”), that I realized we were not going to fall madly in love, that it had been a fantasy and that I would go home, back to my husband, realizing whatever had possessed me had not been love but a more vague unrest that had propelled me to fixate on him, a man I barely knew, as a love object.

  They are beautiful, though, H. added hopefully, of the flamingos, just before one of the males mounted the back of a female, his wings flapping hysterically as he went about having her.

  Hey, the flamingos are doing it! someone said, as H. and I continued to watch them intently, avoiding looking at each other.

  I had known, anyway, that he was a great artist and would only love me until someone else, someone prettier and younger, came along, at which point he’d abandon me. This man didn’t have a problem attracting women. He had one, I knew, only two years older than me.

  But now that I’d fallen in love with his friend, I admit I had some trouble making eye contact with him there in the restaurant.

  He did prints, too. And at the restaurant as my art dealer turned his attention to his iPhone, I observed for the second time the long stained fingernail of H.’s pinkie finger, which he used to dig out flecks of fiber caught in the ink of plates. Leathery and rough with use, his hands didn’t match the rest of him and by candlelight had a mittenlike appearance. When he caught me studying them, he looked down at them himself and said, “Don’t go into intaglio.” The flicker of a smile that followed caused me to wonder if I’d too hastily dismissed the idea of us falling for each other, and possibly, were I not already falling for my art dealer, something might have happened that night with him and me; and yet even now as I say this, I suspect that both of us were able to relax now from our muted and mysterious mutual terror of each other only because of the presence of a third party.

  My dealer had apparently been scrolling through his contact list. For he was now calling women. (Though at the time I understood him to be trying to find a woman for H. so that he could be with me, later I’d discover he was calling women he’d recently slept with, hoping, I believe, like some biblical king or gangster, to assemble a table of females to which he had access.)

  But the women e
ither didn’t answer or couldn’t come. Outside, darkness fell around us and the men spoke to me, each vying for my attention, my art dealer occasionally trying to embarrass H. (“You called everyone constantly,” he said, speaking of H.’s last breakup and throwing me a look); and fleetingly I thought of my husband, whom I worried—impossibly, confoundingly—I would never see again, the thought seeming not like a choice but like something that had already happened, him and me on opposite sides of a glass wall; and then my art dealer, who earlier, in an irritable tone, had complained to the waiter that the music was too loud, received another profuse apology from the manager, who presented him with his card and assured him that the next time he dined there it would be to his liking, and then we finished our dinners and made plans to play pool that evening in the third-floor office of the gallery over which my art dealer reigned.

  * * *

  There my art dealer said I was a natural. “You’re a natural,” he said, as I leaned forward over the expanse of green ground, sent a red numbered ball clinking into a green one, which shot down inside a hole. Though I hadn’t expected a pool table inside the office of a gallery, this seemed natural, too; this pool table and lobby with a couch and individual offices behind it, the space in which my work would hang two floors below, beneath our feet. H., holding his stick, hung back, waiting his turn, and I was afraid to look at him even, or maybe especially, when I felt him looking at me. I was just aware of him, really, aware of the complexity of his presence that I knew and did not know in the way one admiring a drawing senses a way of being from the style of a line. And my art dealer, quick, jumpy really, a strange mix of restlessness and long-bodied grace, seemed to be everywhere, all eyes and hands and wrists bare in rolled-up shirtsleeves, and then after a while we finished the game—“It seems I’ve won,” my art dealer announced, fake apologetically and pleased with himself, like a young boy who’d burped at the dinner table; “It seems you have,” H. had replied irritably, giving him a long, pointed, mildly shaming look—and sat down on the couch. Or they sat on the couch, H. down at the left and my art dealer at the right, and I was posed with a choice of where to sit on the opposite couch and after a fraction of a second found myself seated directly across from my art dealer.