In the gallery of eighteenth-century art Mindy squats abruptly, then falls on her rump and lets both legs lie askew on the sleek black marble. Trevor watches, mortified. His fingers drum. Next Mindy tucks one foot up by her crotch, like a runner stretching, and lackadaisically ties a shoe. Her shoes are tattered pink tennies. Around her courses a nattily attired crowd and nearby stands watch a guard. This is not how one behaves! Trevor feels a headache come on.
He takes a step back, then two more, until he comes to a low granite bench. Here he sits staring into middle space. On the floor? This is just like her. After a while Trevor fishes out of his inner coat a pocket watch, toying with the fob, but does not look at it. Patience, he thinks.
They’ve been together two months now, Trevor and Mindy, ever since meeting in a night school ceramics class. Trevor had enrolled strictly for relaxation, while Mindy was serious about throwing clay. All her pots though were lopsided. From the first day Trevor had been drawn to Mindy’s blithe eccentricity, her imperviousness to decorum, which from afar looks charming. It is charming, he tells himself, but there are limits. Of course she is so much younger, almost a child – twenty-two. Trevor is forty.
Trevor is a free-lance writer. It’s haphazard work and ill-paying; debts accumulate. He feels though that he harbors artistic sensibilities. Oils and watercolors, grease rags and brushes litter his garage; his easel he bought on a backpacking trip in Spain. Each year he hangs on the wall an art calendar. Mindy, a recent college graduate, works as a substitute teacher; the grade she likes best is kindergarten. Harry Potter is her favorite book. On their dates she’ll sometimes read aloud a picture book. This aggravates Trevor. Mindy’s ambition, she’s told him, is to write one – a one-hundred word bestseller.
Trevor is obsessive-compulsive. All day he taps a pattern on his belt with his a forefinger: five taps, three, two, then again. He hopes no one notices. When he’s holding hands with Mindy, he taps on the side away from her. They have not yet slept together. What will happen then? He hopes he won’t drum on her bare pink skin. Driving, he taps on the wheel. Stress makes it worse.
This Saturday afternoon he has brought her to the Norton Simon, in Pasadena, because he wants to share with her his favorite painting. It hangs in the nineteenth century gallery, among Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works. The Red Headed Woman in the Garden, by Touilesse-Lautrec. In this gauzy composition a woman stands at a three-quarter angle, her back to the viewer, the brushstrokes rendered with the delicacy of a pastel sketch. Melancholy and muted, it is wholly unlike the artist’s better known canvasses – lurid depictions of clowns, midgets and whores. A sorrowful beauty is what Trevor has always found in this painting; he has not seen it in years. It calms him. And his girlfriend has never been to a museum.
Now Mindy heaves herself up and, penguin-like, swats her wide hips. Tugs on her tie-dyed tee, her fatigues. Her eyes go all over the room as Trevor takes her hand. Her fingers, surprisingly, are tiny. He loves her fingers, her pale untroubled skin, her sweet-smelling auburn hair, all these things he loves, but he does not love her, although he tells Mindy he does. She tells him the same. Lies sustain them.
“I embarrass you,” Mindy says.
This isn’t so, Trevor assures her. But it is so. Mindy’s impetuous zeal does at times make him cringe. When they arrived at the museum, an hour ago, for instance, he asked her where she wanted to go first. Her answer was unsurprising. To the café outside then they hurried to have lunch. Trevor’s girlfriend is chubby.
She nuzzles his shoulder now as they walk. “You smell like vanilla,” Mindy says.
“Deodorant,” he says.
“You put deodorant on your neck? How weird.”
“It feels good,” Trevor says. He’s dressed in a sports coat, jeans, cowboy boots. A bolo tie. And his wavy black hair is shot through with gray.
Mindy nuzzles him again. “Women find baby powder more arousing than anything. It’s a … one of those – ”
“Aphrodisiac.”
“That’s it,” Mindy says, her head bobbing like a dashboard pug’s. “So now you know.”
Is Mindy cute or ugly? Trevor does not know. Her ebullient personality lights up her looks like neon in a low rent district, making what’s undesirable alluring. But Mindy is good. This too warps homeliness into something close to beauty. And innocence makes her seem china doll fragile. He tells her she’s adorable. Then he’ll spot jiggling jowls or sweat-darkened underarms. Revulsion, for a moment. Then pity. And yes, affection, that too – but always last.
Hand-in-hand they move on, but now Mindy leads them in the wrong direction, toward the twentieth century exhibit. Trevor’s temples ache. Behind his eyes a pressure builds like a summer’s T storm. He’s tapping. And as they pass from one gallery to the next Mindy says goodbye to the guard. Who says nothing.
Mindy has a talent for doing what Trevor wants her not to do. The guard watches them.
Trevor touches with fingertips each doorway as they go from gallery to gallery, three times, then twists his neck around, his compulsion making him paranoid. He’s given up medication to help bankroll his love-life. He knows the risks – irascibility, mania, hallucinations. Another truth he keeps from Mindy. This exchange, then, equilibrium for companionship, is it wrong?
Mindy spots his touching ritual. The doorways. “Maybe you need a pill, I think.”
“What?” Trevor says. “Nonsense. I’ve never been on medication.” How easily lies come to him. The truth is something he shrinks from like finding a moth in a closet. Best to swat it down and shut the door. Anyway a writer trades in falsehoods. His dishonesty, he thinks, is a virtue.
And then Trevor pulls up, startled. Mindy has reached around with her free hand, bracelets jangling, and thumps his breastbone three times. “Okie dokie,” she says, her voice ironical. What does she know?
“Quit it.”
“Touchy,” she says.
Almost immediately they come upon a bronze on a pedestal. Head of a Jester, by Picasso. The piece consists largely of a rough-hewn and extravagant harlequin’s hat. Spiky. Flared. Inviting. Mindy reaches out to touch it.
“No!” Trevor says, afraid she’ll tip the thing over. He’s tightly wound, Trevor. He removes his bifocals and thumbs his eyes, left, right, trying to stamp out the escalating pain. He’s dizzy, nauseous. All he wants is to introduce his girlfriend to the Touilesse-Lautrec.
In here, he thinks, the light has a deafening quality. He blinks, grimaces. Trevor suffers from migraines, which are ignited by noise, stress, light. Arms swinging, Mindy leads him to the exhibit’s far wall where a solitary work hangs. It is enormous. Andy Warhol’s Brillo, an acrylic image of boxes stacked one on top of another pyramid-like.
“It’s idiotic,” Trevor says.
“It’s my favorite,” Mindy says. And she lets go of his hand, withdrawing into herself.
“Ugly too,” he says. “Don’t!” Trevor snatches her hand as it goes toward the canvas.
“Guess I know now how you think of me,” Mindy says.
Trevor tells her not to be ridiculous, his feelings for her have nothing to do with his opinion of the painting. His words have no effect. His words are lies. This again? he thinks. It’s a sore spot with Mindy – intelligence. Early on in their relationship she’d confessed that, because of learning disabilities, her school days had consisted mostly of special ed classrooms. Yes, she’d ridden the little bus. But what to make of this, Trevor was unsure. Retardation? Mindy’s revelation, moreover, had been voiced amid gasping sobs. He’d done his best to comfort her, reassure her. Hadn’t she finished college? And he had promised never to disparage her intellect, even indirectly. A hard vow to keep.
*
The night before they had seen a movie, then gone back to Trevor’s apartment. Kissing and cuddling. “Nobody’s never loved me before,” Mindy had said. Her grammar is quirky. About Mindy is a faint rancid tang since she bathes only once a day, in the early morning, before leaving for work; her shower head spits sand, the pipes rusted and old. Her studio’s in a barrio. And so these intimate moments here Trevor has always found irksome. All he wants is comfort. His neck, his shoulders bunched, he massaged tendons last night and imagined fine needles inserted in vertebra – the knobs, the gaps. Relief. Well past midnight they snuggled on his futon. He tapped on the blankets.
“When I touch you,” Mindy had said, “you flinch.” Something’s amiss in their relationship. Trevor took pleasure, though, in removing Mindy’s top and fondling her small upturned breasts, stroking her thighs, investing her hair with soft quick kisses, but he was hesitant about going farther. Mindy yearned for it. What then is the problem?
“My butt’s gotten so big,” Mindy said, “I can’t sleep no more on my back.”
He wished she hadn’t shared this knowledge. Is it wrong to date a girl half his age?
Mindy said, “I wish I had your life.”
My life? he thought. Twenty thousand dollars in debt, unhappy editors, headaches. His best years gone. No retirement savings. Half-a-dozen unfinished novels, a hundred unsold canvases. Regrets.
Then Trevor pressed the heel of his hand, a thumb into his eye socket. A nervous tic. “How gross!” Mindy said, rolling away. “Would you like it if I picked my nose?” Not long afterward they rose and Trevor drove her home. He was aware he was sabotaging their time together.
Self-employed, Trevor has no health insurance. Viagra’s a budget-buster! Besides, it’s his nature to let problems go until they’ve become crises. Until it’s too late. Until nothing’s left but trouble and remorse.
*
“Let’s see my painting now, okay?” Trevor says. Mindy starts to slink away, out of the hall, and toward the museum’s exit. Trevor follows her.
“I thought I understood you,” she says over her shoulder, “but I don’t.”
In the lobby he takes her arm and asks what’s wrong. There’s no answer. Then Trevor has an idea. He clasps her hand and guides Mindy to the gift shop. Inside are posters, books, stationery. Trevor spots a magnet embossed with a reproduction of the Touilesse-Lautrec. He buys it and gives it to Mindy. But she refuses the gift, then turns and clomps to the exit.
And so alone he steps back into the museum’s interior and finds the nineteenth century gallery. Monet. Pissarro. Degas. He takes his time. Such opulent colors, such subtle lines, everywhere light transfigured into life. At last he finds the work he’s longed to see, the one that’s always acted on him like a sedative. He has a migraine. To be one with the red-headed woman in the garden, this he longs for, a longing clarified by pain.
In the painting the woman’s hands are unseen. He remembers his own caked in sculpting clay, weeks ago, kneading and thumbing the gray-green dough, lifting it into the shape of a vase. The night he and Mindy shared a pottery wheel. In the wet clay between them their fingers met, shyly, playfully. They laughed. Then the vase quavered, bent, collapsed. And their groping, desperate hands could not keep the thing upright. Later he asked her out.
Trevor stands now before the canvas and lets his eyes listen to the dreamy, diaphanous image, rustling gently in lavender, moss, ivory, sunlight warm and diffuse, brushstrokes mere shadows. The woman’s roseate bun, pale skin, generous bosom. Sumptuous yet understated. The woman is not old, is forever on the cusp of youth and age, awash in filtered garden light, earth-bound, ethereal, a memory. There is no glass.
Trevor knows now he is no longer young. Such pain!
A Keatsian quality, Trevor thinks, inheres in the Touilesse-Lautrec, a wistful grace preserved for all time in an illusion of color and line. His mind reels. What Trevor wants is to be young – now, always. It’s why he’s involved himself with a love interest eighteen years his junior. To have what she is. Mindy, he realizes, is the ideal age, just past adolescence. Twenty-two!
And then a compulsion takes hold. To touch the painting, to tap a prime number pattern on a canvas that’s survived so far three centuries. How old is it? To press onto the oils the identity whorled on his fingertips – the idea has a pain-born logic. In the throes of a migraine, then, off his meds, Trevor drifts a while in a hallucinatory fugue, here but not here, inward and outward one. Then, now. He is the artist laying on paint, he is the vandal smudging the work; both acts sublime.
He reaches.
THE END
