“Well, I just sort of let it go,” H. said to him. They were talking of H.’s correspondence with a woman who had attended a retrospective of his bat paintings. Even though H. had not stopped writing to me but helped and encouraged me, I felt I was her and this had happened to me. As I’d expected—for there had been long periods of silence in which I believed H. had forgotten me, would never speak to me again, periods in which alone, thinking of him, I’d curled into a ball to cry and pray in longing and shame and fear for myself on the floor of my studio at three in the morning, being able to get back up to paint only because I saw painting, painting well, as the only thing that could place me at H.’s side—he’d stopped talking to me and never had and never would love me, and then I looked at him, really looked at him, right into his gray and beautiful and almond-shaped bespectacled eyes, and hated him, hated H. for dooming me to this never-ending longing and separation and pain; hated him for that time he’d called me from the bedroom while his current girlfriend (accompanied by her “little dog,” he told me) sat in the living room waiting for him—for as I was the woman at the show I was also the girlfriend, the girlfriend waiting as H. (who had not yet put on his pants, he told me) spoke to me in a seductive whisper he would apparently never use with me in the flesh, from atop his bed, obviously getting off on talking to one woman while another unknowingly waited, with her “little dog”; and I knew that I would to punish him fuck his friend, with whom I was perhaps in love.
“I think you can just tell,” the dealer was saying now, because, you guessed it, we were again speaking of that thing, of love. H. was speaking of “fixing” my art dealer up with someone he knew (someone in their social circle there in the city), but as my art dealer spoke in answer, dismissing this, saying this person H. spoke of was not someone with whom he felt in love, he was looking at me. “When you are in love, I think you just know,” he said in a spellbound voice.
“Yes,” I said, gazing back into his eyes, “I believe you do.”
* * *
But that night, because of H.’s insistence that he see me back safely to my friend’s apartment, I went back to stay at my friend’s, the friend I’d supposedly come to the city with the main agenda of seeing. “My sister has been writing to a prisoner,” she confided to me in the small, dimmed kitchen—for this was around two or so in the morning, after I’d listened to my husband’s message wanting to know why I hadn’t called him back, beneath the fluorescent light of her blue-and-green-tiled bathroom.
“Really?” I said, aghast. “How does she know him?”
She had been awake when I arrived. She had spoken with her sister earlier that day. They were close.
“She doesn’t,” my friend said. “She’s never met him. She heard about him on the news and began to write to him, and then she went to visit him in jail.”
“Why would she do that?” I said. “That’s so crazy,” I said in an amused voice, an unnecessary number of times. “So crazy,” I found myself repeating as she filled me in on the rest of the story. My friend’s fiancé, who was a woman, was out of town, and then because I understood she was more upset than she’d at first seemed to me in discussing it, I tried to comfort her without seeming to be coming on to her, for I’d never been in the position before of being alone at two o’clock in the morning with a woman who loved women.
* * *
Because you see I wasn’t good at touching people. I mean that I was often afraid of touching people and of being touched without knowing why, except maybe for the thing that had happened to me growing up, with the man, that I’d told my art dealer about over the phone. “The first time I thought I saw him I froze up,” I’d told him. “But then I saw it wasn’t him. I was with a friend at a restaurant, and I had my sketchbook, and with that guy I didn’t ask if I could draw him. I just started drawing him before I even knew what I was doing. It annoyed my friend that I was drawing while she talked to me. Are you listening to me? she kept asking.”
But afterward, in the car, I told her who the man reminded me of and she touched my shoulder as she asked if I was okay. I knew why she’d touched me. And I knew when people needed to be touched by me, why it mattered, and I could do it but when it happened I sort of went somewhere else, even with hugs—or most especially with hugs, from anyone except my husband whom I’d known all of my adult life, whose body was like my own, from whom I couldn’t get enough affection (couldn’t someone please explain to me what I was supposed to be doing during this, a hug?)—but when someone I loved felt pain I could as if from a faraway place smell the need and respond, and earlier, honestly, I had not even been able to meet H.’s eyes in the cab as he’d ridden back with me, having in the street in front of the first floor of the gallery, as he’d hailed the cab, made plans with my art dealer to meet him there the next day. In the cab as H. tried to brush my lips with his I turned my head, so that his kiss got only my hair.
In the dimly lit kitchen I hugged my lesbian friend, who junior year had admitted to me that she was transferring out of the evangelical college because she was gay. (Was I a lesbian? I couldn’t help but wonder, because you see up until that year, up until I began to communicate with H., I hadn’t experienced the desire to touch myself or to be touched there, and still experienced it only when alone, when contemplating H. and his art.)
And anyway as the hug ended I informed her that I was probably in love with my art dealer, whom, at his invitation, I was going back to meet in Manhattan the next day.
“But when you got here you thought you were in love with the artist.”
She made a face at me that I recognized but wasn’t used to having directed at me. Then she rose to make tea. Her body bent over the stove, her face as she looked back over at me sitting at the table in the dim, lamp-lit room caused me to feel as much discomfort over the physical distance between us as I’d felt over our closeness a moment ago.
That she was beginning to worry I might be crazy bothered me less than I’d have expected.
II
But when by the light of day I stood in front of the darkened gallery window (the place closed for business on Sunday), it seemed as if I were not crazy at all but simply meeting a man I worked with for coffee, and the sense of destiny I’d felt in the taxi all the way there, as through the window I peered out at pedestrians in sunglasses and shorts, more leisurely congesting the sidewalk to wander and browse on a Saturday afternoon, had no more hold on me than a racked dress I might’ve noticed but not bought, had I been one of the ones to wander aimlessly about the city rather than arrive here, dreamily expecting my life to change.
Daunted by the set of buttons at the side of the door (some of their labels were missing), I worried I was pressing the wrong button, or that even if I was pressing the right one he’d changed his mind, wasn’t there, and when I look back on this moment years later, the shadow of my other life, the one in which he didn’t answer, or in which I didn’t even press the button but instead walked away, begins.
Another mechanical sound, a click and release, answered my buzz.
And through the intercom, momentarily shrill with static, the voice I’d known long before I’d ever seen its owner: “Take the elevator to the second floor.”
* * *
When, after stepping off the elevator and being buzzed through yet another set of doors, I find him standing in the gallery, he looks less than happy to see me. Except for my own footsteps against the hardwood floor and the faint hum of the air conditioner switching on, there is only silence, him acknowledging me with a curt hello and a bothered expression—like I’m interrupting him rather than responding to an invitation he himself made—then striding away from me, back to the painting he seemed to have been studying before I came in. This puts his back to me. I feel snubbed, dumbfounded. Maybe because he doesn’t seem to like me anymore, or maybe just because the afternoon doesn’t have the magic of the night of our meeting, he looks less appealing to me. His jean cuffs, turned up above his ankles in the st
yle I’ve noticed with cosmopolite men in their twenties and thirties on the street, and in recent issues of the fashion magazines my husband subscribes to, irritate me, seeming feminine somehow.
I do like his shirt—a worn white button-down, untucked—and in the bad air of his mysterious upset with me and my fickle assessment of him, I think how stupid infatuation is, how silly I am, how we probably won’t even have time to go out for coffee before I find myself back in a cab, heading toward LaGuardia.
But then:
“I’d begun to think you weren’t coming.”
And maybe because I hear in his tone that I’ve hurt him—that I can hurt him—everything changes.
“I’m sorry. I misestimated the travel time. I’m not used to taking cabs.”
I was only fifteen minutes late, I consider, and this just for coffee on a Sunday afternoon.
Yet the feeling that I’ve committed the unforgivable persists. Is it my imagination?
“I may have to get away soon,” he says, rather dismissively, as if some part of him were already gone. “There’s something important I might have to attend to this evening.”
Something in me drops. Quietly I panic. While at first my outrush of questions—about what he does, about how things work at the gallery, about my situation with him—seems practical, I realize as I’m speaking that the questions themselves don’t much matter to me, that they are secondary to my reason for asking them, which is to draw him back to me. The sound of this, of my voice in the otherwise silent gallery, saturated with interest, disturbs me because I think he might be able to hear its disjointed (and desperate) relationship to the words.
But no, he believes we’re really having a conversation and is in fact delighted by the questions, my naïveté. Gradually he warms to me again. We discuss the problem of value. He must create a sense of the value he sees in the paintings for other people, he explains, and the people in whom he creates this sense of value must be the right ones.
“We can’t let just anyone buy them,” he says of my pieces. “Do you understand how it works?”
There on the second floor, he stands in front of large-scale oil paintings of what appear to be lower-class Southerners engaged in domestic dramas. In one of them a woman clutches a yowling infant to her chest while a man in jeans and a soiled white undershirt yells at her, his hands thrown out, his face taut with fury and pain. And in another, a woman in cutoffs and a tank top holds a pool stick javelin-style, at the threshold of a bedroom, pointed at a nude woman with a deer-caught-in-headlights expression standing in front of a bed where a man (whom they both obviously desire) sits also nude, the navy sheet cast over one luminously rendered bare leg only partially obscuring his groin.
That painting is in fact titled Deer Caught in Headlights, and I suspect he directed me here, to this floor, to see it.
“But what do you mean?” I want to know. “Don’t you have to let whoever offers the price have them?” I say.
“No. Of course not. It’s good I got ahold of you before you started throwing it away. The wrong collectors would devalue your work.”
“But it seems unfair to be so exclusive about it,” I argue, for by the light of his returning attraction to me—palpable in the way his eyes cling to my movements, follow my hand reaching down to adjust the strap of the flimsy sandals I’m wearing that day—I’ve begun to feel the beginnings of obstinacy, of the casual resistance a woman can assume around the man to whom she by instinct already knows herself bound.
“Ah, but it’d be unfair the other way too, wouldn’t it?” he replies. “Do you think some dumb trader yuppie is going to understand what you’re doing? That there’s no difference between someone like that and L [a name I don’t recognize] having your work? Knowing how to display it? To whom to lend it? By what context to interpret its necessity?”
You need me, is what he seems to be saying. And, I saved you. I read between the words. In his green eyes. In the pregnant pause in which I feel his continuing awareness of the painting behind him, the painting he wishes for me to admire.
“It’s by a Swiss painter,” he tells me. “He has never been to the South but is obsessed with American country music videos. This is what he imagines the American South to be like. These are his fantasies. Aren’t they fascinating?”
Nodding, I think I might hate them but am fascinated by his fascination, by how he sees. I say something about the use of color in them, and in a manner I’d identify as pretentious, had someone else been talking, go on about the biblical implications of the use of purple throughout. The knowledge that I need to pull my phone from my purse to check the time distracts me; I sense if I do this he’ll take even that brief loss of attention as a slight, so I go for the direct approach, bring up that it’s almost time for my flight; and what about those contracts he mentioned when asking me to meet him, the paperwork I could sign here instead of receiving through the mail?
“Ah, contracts,” he says, eyes sweeping to take in my ringed left hand. “I use them because it makes everyone feel better, but personally I think they’re silly. Don’t you?”
Realizing I am not going to answer, he begins to describe the hanging system, and as he does this he reaches for me, his hand lightly encircling my wrist to draw me closer, where he then positions me between his chest and the painting affixed to the wall.
His hands at either side of my bare upper arms, he directs my focus straight ahead, toward the middle of the work. The rush this gives me causes a backlash of helplessness; I try to will myself into feeling nothing, worried he’ll know.
The work is such-and-such dimensions, which is x number of inches from the floor, meaning the center of the work is at x inches, and that sort of thing—all very specific and logical but nothing more than nonsense being murmured into my hair, into my ear, in comparison with the explicit thrill of his touch and breath; of the laundered scent rising from the shirt he must have owned for years, must have worn thin and soft with the heat and exertion of his upper body and put on again and again.
“Before, this one was there and that one was here,” he explains. “But I called my assistant to come in and help me switch them. I told him they were in the wrong order. He put them like this because he thinks the one with the baby belongs after the one with sex. But this one is better, so I think it should be viewed after the other one. Because of its excellent handling of jealousy. I am a very jealous person. It radiates off this one, doesn’t it?” He pauses, seems to be considering whether or not he should say what he’s thinking. “My assistant is very good-looking. Everyone notices. I rushed him out of here before you came in because I didn’t want you to see him.”
That he’s made this confession seems to surprise him as much as me.
“He was irritated with me,” says my art dealer. “I think he was with his girlfriend when I called him to come in earlier.” He makes a face suggesting the whole idea of this, of his assistant having a girlfriend, is humorous to him. “They hate when I call them in on the weekends we’re closed, but they’ve come to expect it because they know it’s when I most like to work. Usually I’d be working now,” he says. “And I suppose I am,” he observes, it seeming to have only just now dawned on him that his switching the paintings had coincided with this. With us.
“But I suppose you wouldn’t be, would you? Because you work late at night,” he added, surprising me by remembering it. “I suppose at home around this time you’d be about to make dinner for your husband, yes?”
This last part is put to me in a falsely light tone, undercut with accusation, but is quickly followed by his saying how sad he is to see me leave.
“I am too,” I reply.
“Yes, it’s too bad you have to go now. I feel like we could’ve talked for hours and hours.”
“Yes,” I agree. “Me too.”
* * *
When in front of the yellow cab he’s hailed for me, he—burdened with my luggage, having only just set down on the sidewalk my suitcase that
he instead of wheeling (as I would’ve) carried, my backpack still flung over his shoulder—asks me to spend another night in town with him, to let him pay for another flight home the next day, I have the sensation of this all having happened before; of my existing in a reality in which I’ve already even before I answer said yes; and so at the same time I make a choice there is the other feeling—that there isn’t one.
Yet, even then, as the annoyed driver pulls away and we head back in the opposite direction from which we’ve come, I tell myself I am not going to fuck him but am staying over just to talk with him, to get to know him, and that if we do not stay up talking through the night we will certainly sleep apart.
* * *
The late afternoon is humid. Damp patches of shirt cling to my back. The prematurely darkening sky insinuates a storm that except for the briefest, lightest spray of drops that will fall later before dinner—so insignificant as to cause us to disagree over their existence (it’s raining; no, it’s not)—will never come.
Walking beside him I’m reminded of a girl following a boy who’s asked her to dance, and he, peacock-style, suspecting but not certain I’ll sleep with him, tells little stories of famous and wealthy people I’ve read about only in magazines, hoping to further impress me. “He had a tantrum with Henry once, screamed at him,” he tells me of a famous artist who is known for his meek and childlike manner. “He acts guileless to keep people from being turned off by how monstrously arrogant he is. But he’s a very good host. He likes taking in abandoned dogs. He has one of the ugliest dogs I have ever seen—the thing was a burn victim—and dotes on it, kisses it on the mouth, in front of everyone who comes over, and I’ve never been able to figure out if it’s genuine or part of his act.” Despite the criticism, the dealer’s voice glows with something close to reverence. “Though to suggest they’re distinguishable even to him is maybe just wishful thinking on my part.”
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