Natalie agreed it sounded like a good idea, and Jana hailed a cab and went over to the main library at 42nd Street. Diego Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural was the most obvious example, so she started gathering information on that. “Think what a Rivera mural would be worth these days,” she thought as she flipped through Rivera’s biography. The hard copy confirmed her suspicions: Rockefeller knew Rivera was a communist; he knew the mural Henry Ford commissioned in Detroit had created a public scandal and was saved only through Edsel’s intervention. Even when Rockefeller paid Rivera in full and prevented him from finishing the predominantly red mural with its distinct face of Lenin among the group of technicians in control of the universe, there was the promise that the work itself would be preserved. And what happened? Six months later construction crews entered the building at midnight and destroyed it. For years the wall remained blank, since no other artist was willing to paint over the wall that should have been Rivera’s. Jana xeroxed the chapter talking about this mural, as well as information about Rivera’s Detroit commission and his mural at the San Francisco Stock Exchange.
A passage in Rivera’s biography led her to research José Clemente Orozco’s work, which she found in a book on the Mexican Muralists. As if to make amends for the destruction of Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural, Nelson Rockefeller was instrumental in saving the mural criticizing higher education that Orozco did at Dartmouth. “Orozco saw it as his moral commitment to criticize his patrons,” the description read. “Painting a mural for the Supreme Court in Mexico, he attacked the concept of justice. He always presented both sides of the issues, making people stop and sort things out for themselves.” Jana highlighted this passage on her xerox, adding a note that Matt Fillmore was doing the same thing in his Power and Light drawing: making people stop and think. Fillmore wasn’t trying to pull a fast one, either; he wasn’t insisting upon working behind a curtain, as Rivera did in Detroit. No matter what the outcome, there would be no surprises in the forthcoming exhibition.
She had to look harder to find more recent examples of the corporate world interfering with art, but she eventually found them. In 1970, the University of Massachusetts took down Chuck Close’s show because it included nudes; Close might have lost the case, but he fought hard, taking it as far as the Supreme Court. Jana chided herself for not having recalled that incident—no self-respecting artist had agreed to exhibit at U. Mass. since then. Searching further, she unearthed a brief newspaper article from the late sixties, relating that the Chicago and Vicinity Show had given a prize to a work which the officials at the museum of the Art Institute considered too obscene to exhibit. That story made her recall there being other incidents involving the Art Institute, and she prowled through various indices until she found references to the story of another artist whose construction depicted a couple having intercourse under the United States flag. Told he had to alter the piece if he wanted to be included in the show, he transformed the flag into a red and white striped blanket. The book where she found that story didn’t bother to mention the artist’s name. Perfect, Jana thought: the artists who sold out were the same ones whose names had long since been forgotten. This was exactly the sort of ammunition she wanted to feed their board.
She was on a roll now. Every reference she found pointed her toward the next, and before she knew it she’d xeroxed a dozen articles referring to ten different incidents. It was after seven o’clock before she realized what time it was. Meanwhile, Ed had come home early, concerned for her. She walked into the apartment to find that he’d become worried when he was unable to reach her at home and at the gallery. He’d changed into a sport shirt, opened a bottle of wine to let it breathe, and sat tensely waiting. He hugged her in silence, then, warned not to touch her in the one spot he could always be counted on to reach for first, he placed a gentle arm on her shoulder. His fingers lost their familiar playfulness. His concern for her made his palm sweaty as he approached her with an innocence that recalled their first nights together. Jana told herself he was looking out for her, trying to comfort her. But she needed love, not comfort.
Bill’s voice was calm and even: “I can’t say I wasn’t concerned about something like this happening.” After making it clear the entire board had shared his concern, Jana told him about the research she’d done. “Sounds like you’re off to a good start,” he said. He glanced at his calendar; unfortunately, he was tied up with meetings all this week, and then was going to his wife’s parents’ in Virginia for Thanksgiving.
“My guess is other board members will find themselves with similar schedules,” he continued. “Right before the holidays is difficult for everyone. Why don’t you send me over copies of those articles, get in touch with the other board members, and arrange a meeting for the week after Thanksgiving? That will give us all time to consider our options.” Jana and Natalie were only too happy to delay things another two weeks. Catalog copy wasn’t due at the typesetter’s until the end of January—they told themselves there would be plenty of time. Even so, Jana would be relieved when the whole board got involved in this mess; doing research over the past few days, she felt as if she’d been collecting stones to hurl at Ed.
Dr. Barbash wasn’t in when Jana called on Tuesday. When Dr. Barbash returned the call, Jana was out. It went back and forth all week. Jana didn’t want to speak with her from work, with Natalie and whoever else was in the gallery overhearing every word, so she left only her home number and Ed’s number. Finally on Tuesday morning, two days before Thanksgiving, they connected.
“There’s one thing I think you’ll be pleased to hear,” Dr. Barbash began. “You don’t have to worry about birth control for the moment—those fibroids are in your uterine tract, blocking your tubes. It’s nothing to worry about—over 20 percent of women of child-bearing age develop them. I’m actually not surprised, in your case. As I said, I think we can leave them alone for now. If you ever want children, they’d have to be surgically removed.
“What concerns me more are those warts,” she continued. “It looks like you have a sexually transmitted wart virus, related to the herpes virus. I’d suggest you have your lover checked out. He might not develop symptoms for another six months, but he’d only reinfect you. You can be successfully treated in the morning and develop them again the same night.” Dr. Barbash’s voice sounded harsh and final—there’s nothing more to discuss; don’t bother me with idiotic questions.
“Wait a second, what about me; how are you going to cure the wart virus in me?” It wasn’t until she’d hung up the phone that Jana realized she’d forgotten to ask.
She walked to the subway quickly and was out of breath by the time she got there. She broke out in a cold sweat. There you go, she thought: the first stages of sickness, the body weakened, subjected to common flu germs. She wasn’t the sort of person who caught a cold easily, but when she did it would take her weeks, sometimes months, to knock it out of her system.
“Late night?” Natalie asked the minute she walked in.
“No. I’m catching a cold or something.”
“You look awful.”
“Thanks.” Jana sat down and opened the folder containing preliminary catalog copy on the artists at the Central Park boat house. Not knowing what the next month would bring, she wanted to get a head start on any work she could. Picking up a pencil, she began making minor changes, shortening sentences, adding a descriptive word here and there, but mostly just shuffling papers.
“You’re not much use today, are you?” Natalie stated gently, standing over Jana’s desk forty minutes later and watching her curator staring off into space. “Why don’t you go home and get to bed? The last thing we need is for you to take sick.”
“Okay, okay, I’m going. You don’t have to tell me twice today.”
“Go home, crawl into bed, make some hot tea with a lot of lemon—or better yet, get some rosehip tea. Rosehips are a natural source of vitamin C, you know. And get Ed to nurse you for a few days—that’s one of th
e advantages of living with someone.”
Jana felt a chill run through her entire being. Leave it to Natalie. If she’d just left well enough alone, told her to take off early, she could probably have gone back to Ed’s and enjoyed being nursed without thinking twice about it. But Natalie had managed to make it sound as if it was her feminine duty to accept Ed’s nurturing, and the last thing she wanted to be right now was a woman.
She had no right to infect Ed with a cold, let alone a wart virus. But maybe she could put off telling him what the doctor said for a day or two. He certainly wouldn’t want her to have sex with him when she was feeling so miserable—the infection wasn’t about to spread any further tonight.
Walking a few blocks to get air, Jana thought about the other warts, moles, and birthmarks on her body. The largest one was on her neck. She vividly remembered being eight or nine years old, but small enough to be propped up on the special seat at the beauty parlor. She wanted a pixie cut, like the other kids had, and a lipsticked hairdresser with long unbitten fingernails was pulling her hair back and sarcastically asking her mother if they wanted that mole to show. “She should never wear her hair above her shoulders.” It was as if Jana wasn’t in the room.
She’d gotten her pixie cut by the time she’d gone away to camp, though. Dr. Waters never seemed to care about her mole. Now suddenly Ed cared; Ed cared too much, perhaps. Life had certainly been simpler when there was only herself to think about. Simpler, not better, Jana corrected herself.
Jana lay with her eyes open: Ed was dressing as quietly as he could. She watched him reknot his blue paisley tie three times before he was satisfied. He looked so innocent, so unsuspecting that a wart virus might at this very moment be spreading through his system. Was this the time to tell him? She propped her head up on her arm. “Do you mind if I stay here today?” she asked. “I already warned Natalie not to expect me at the gallery, and I dread the thought of going across town to my place.”
“Stay wherever you’ll be most comfortable.” He bent to kiss her, then remembered she was sick and kissed her forehead. Her sweaty arms clung to his freshly laundered shirt.
Climbing out of bed maybe an hour later, she rummaged through her pocketbook and pulled out Ballet Girl, a teenage romance novel she’d hurriedly thrown in there when she’d stopped at her apartment yesterday. Back in the old days, before Ed, these books had been as much a part of her life as pajamas with feet were. She’d learned from them what it meant to care for another person; she’d learned how not to be put off by gentle touch. Boys and girls held hands, and if the boy’s hand wandered the girl drew away. Writers like Beverly Cleary or Norma Klein would describe two characters hugging, but there were never any indications of how tightly they hugged. They made it seem simple. The one thing none of them mentioned was that bodies might end up wanting more than touch.
Exactly seventy-two minutes after she’d sprawled out on the couch, a cup of tea with lemon cooling next to her, she read the last page. It was only a coincidence, she told herself; she hadn’t even read the cover blurb. And yet the book closely paralleled her own situation—the fear of doctors, real illness bordering on hypochondria. The protagonist states that she’ll never have children, since childbirth is painful. She nearly faints during a film portraying the beauty of natural childbirth. Jana got nauseated reading the description of the film. Back in grammar school, she used to throw up when they showed pictures of the body’s organs during health class.
The book’s ending was simplistic: the protagonist quits ballet school, hides out for a week in her father’s attic, then all of the sudden she’s healthy. She takes a walk around the block, comes back carrying her suitcase as if she’s decided to visit her father unexpectedly. The next fall she goes off to college and lives in a coed dorm like a perfectly normal, well-adjusted teenager.
That’s the difference, Jana thought—in real life, things don’t work out so well. Ed’s apartment wasn’t an attic and there was no point in trying to hide. She decided to walk over to Shakespeare and Co. and find something more intelligent to read.
Standing before half a wall full of health and nutrition books, she glanced past Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, past Headaches and Health. The ones she wanted had been pushed to the back of the shelves, covered by the more popular books. At last she unearthed some books which listed “genital warts” in their indices. The information was sketchy, though; the one thing all the books agreed on was that wart viruses were extremely difficult to treat thoroughly, and tended to recur. “Your lover would only reinfect you,” Dr. Barbash said. “Scientists assume they are caused by a virus similar to that which causes warts on the hand,” she read. Two books on women’s hygiene mentioned the importance of washing and drying thoroughly after intercourse. “Oh great,” Jana muttered. She washed sometimes, but many nights she was so tired she rolled right over and went to sleep.
Feeling suddenly faint, she bought three books, paid for them with her Visa card, hugged them to her chest as if they were an awkward stuffed animal, and caught a cab back to Ed’s. She plopped down on the couch and opened the first book, which began with an illustrated description of the genitalia in men’s and women’s bodies. She picked up a pencil and doodled while she read, extending the man’s limp penis, rounding out his chest. On a sketch of the woman’s crotch she drew a plump hand, the cupped fingers with their finely shaped nails a fraction of an inch away from touching it.
No! What did she think she could do, show Ed this drawing and expect him to imagine the conflicting emotions she felt every time he touched her? She needed to understand whatever was going on inside her, not transform it. She tossed the pencil across the room, sat back and read slowly, absorbing every word into her body until the fever broke and she sat there almost catatonic.
“There’s no use pretending I’m still gathering facts at the library,” Jana realized, coming out of her trance. These books could only give general information, and what she needed were specifics about her own case. The more specifics she knew, the easier it would be to explain to Ed.
She knew what Ed would do if he were her. He’d do what any intelligent adult would do: call the doctor back. He would make himself a list of questions he wanted Dr. Barbash to answer: how could she have gotten the virus if it wasn’t sexually transmitted? What else could it be? Could these be simple warts on her genitals, like she had on the rest of her body? If she loved Ed, then she had to make herself behave the way he would want her to.
“I said the infection looks like a wart virus. I’m not going to rule out other possibilities. They could be normal, uninfectious warts. I’ve discovered warts in other patients whose mothers took DES, and the cell changes looked almost identical. Wart virus is the logical assumption, and we’re safest to treat it as such.” Jana stressed how seldom they’d had intercourse, and Dr. Barbash explained that a wart virus could sometimes spread through rubbing the genital area, especially if the woman became stimulated. “Moisture aids the growth of warts,” she added.
When Jana asked what sort of treatment she recommended, Dr. Barbash talked about burning it out. “That is, assuming it is a wart virus. I suggest we wait a month or two, then take another biopsy. If there are no further cell changes, then it’s more than likely caused by the DES.” She suggested Jana and Ed take precautions, but continue a normal sex life. “As your vagina enlarges you’ll be easier to examine. It’s important that all the warts be burnt out at the same time. Even after supposedly thorough treatment, the virus will be certain to recur if there are any that weren’t spotted.”
“I know. I was just reading about that in Our Bodies, Ourselves.”
“Then there’s obviously nothing more you need me to tell you.”
It took all Jana’s energy to slam the phone down.
Ed would have kept Dr. Barbash on the phone until she’d explained everything. He would have asked her how dangerous the treatment was, what side effects it had. He would have inquired about other possible treatme
nts. He would have found out how long treatment could be safely postponed. But she wasn’t Ed. She needed Ed to hold her and talk to her. For a moment she even toyed with the idea of calling her parents. Not to torment them, not to throw it up to them the way she might have a few years ago, not to ask for their help even, just to have someone to talk to. Instead she folded her arms on the chair’s arm, buried her head in her arms, and let the tears come out. There seemed to be no stopping them. She was terrified that she’d infect Ed with the wart virus. Terrified that if he found out about it he’d no longer love her.
She got up and washed the pile of dishes in the sink, trying to keep her mind occupied. Like most men, Ed usually stacked the dishes after eating, as if expecting them to wash and dry themselves. She finished the saucers and reached for one of the cups, taking care that lifting it wouldn’t tumble the others. The sink was small, and there wasn’t another basin to rinse things in. On top of that the drain had been clogged for the last two weeks and Ed insisted upon waiting for the super to fix it, which seemed to be taking forever. Maybe she’d have been better off going back to her apartment after all.
Usually Ed was home by seven, seven-thirty at the latest. By six-thirty Jana was working herself into a frenzy practicing the words she would say when he arrived: “Ed, sweetheart, I’m scared for you. There’s a good chance you have a wart virus.” Way too direct; she didn’t want to send him into a panic. “Would you believe it, we’ve killed ourselves taking precautions against pregnancy, and all for nothing. You’ll never guess what Dr. Barbash found.” No, that was too casual, like her father returning from a business trip, hiding a present behind his back. She gave up and rehearsed Ed’s possible reactions—anger, concern, fear, confusion—and how she would try to respond to each one calmly, lovingly. She went over their hypothetical conversations so many times in her congested mind that whatever happened had to be a letdown. Fantasy was phasing out reality.
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