The First Show

The ticket said Look closely, so I did. That was my first mistake.

It had come in a plain brown-paper package eight days earlier. No return address, no note, no name on the customs slip. Just a cream-colored card, stamped with a seat number and a date, and those three words in a printer’s italic.

I’m a curator. I spend my days with women who have been looked at for two hundred years and never complained, and I write the labels that tell the public what to think about them. Looking closely is the one thing I’ve ever been paid for.

Being looked at is another matter. My ex was a photographer, and he told me once, kindly, over a contact sheet of a weekend away, that I never looked like myself in pictures. You never look like you. In every frame I was somebody stiffer and paler, somebody waiting for the shutter to be over. He stopped photographing me after that. I didn’t blame him. I stopped being photographed by anyone.

So I should not have come. I’d known it every day of the eight days I left the card on my counter, and I knew it again when an usher in a black coat took my ticket and bowed.

I was already looking past him at the walls.

It was a Back Bay mansion, on a block I had walked a thousand times without ever seeing the door. The ballroom was Gilded Age, tall as a church and lit like one, and it smelled of old velvet, beeswax, and the cold metal of a very old camera. The walls were hung floor to ceiling with photographs in heavy gold frames. Old plates, brown-toned, each of one woman, standing or posed in the stiff, patient manner of a studio a hundred and forty years gone. I read them the way I read everything, for composition and light.

Then I recognized the first one, and stopped.

A girl floated on her back in a still, dark pool, with reeds behind her and flowers drifting around her hands. Her mouth was a little open. Her white gown was soaked through. Ophelia. Millais, 1852. I’ve stood in front of the original more times than I can count, and Millais gives her a bodice that holds. In the plate it didn’t. The wet cloth had gone nearly clear. It clung to her breasts, and the dark circles of her nipples showed through it as plainly as through water. The painter would have lost his reputation. The girl in the photograph looked perfectly content.

The next one was a swing, a froth of pink skirts, one satin slipper flying through the air. The Swing. Fragonard, 1767, and a famous joke: a lady kicks up her heels and a young man hides in the bushes, gaping at a glimpse of petticoat. Fragonard stopped at the glimpse. This plate hadn’t. Her skirts were all the way up, and under them she was bare. The man in the leaves had seen every inch, and she was laughing.

Third, a woman in a black gown, in profile, with the kind of pale, severe neck that Parisians once whispered about. Madame X. Sargent, 1884. The scandal that made him leave Paris was one jeweled strap, hanging off her shoulder, and he repainted it back in place. Here the second strap was down as well. She held the black gown up against herself with one hand, and above it, her whole upper body was bare.

I stood in front of her longer than I should have.

Something had started in me. It wasn’t wet yet, nothing so crude. It was a hum, low in my stomach and under my skin, the feeling of a sound too quiet to hear, and my nipples had tightened a little against my blouse. I told myself I was cold.

By the fifth plate I understood the pattern, and the understanding made it worse. These weren’t copies. They were famous paintings, each taken a little further than the painter dared. Millais, Fragonard and Sargent had stopped where the Salon, the patron or the priest told them to stop. Somebody here had decided to go on. It was as if someone had asked what the artist would have done with another hour, and a more willing sitter, and no one watching.

I sat down in the ninth row. My knees weren’t quite steady.

The house lights went out at once, and the dark was total. Two hundred people stopped breathing together, and I felt it like a held note. Then a woman in a long gray dress and white gloves walked into the single light at the front of the curtain, her face as smooth and unreadable as a coin.

“Good evening,” she said. “The house reproduces great paintings. The painters had patrons, and priests, and wives. The house has only a camera. The house likes to imagine what each painting would have been without them.” A pause. “Where the painter stopped, the house will go a little further. Please look closely.”

She stepped out of the light, and the curtain drew apart on a frame. Twelve feet of gilt, carved with leaves and ribbons, with a painted garden behind it in a pale, powdery light. Off to one side, under a black cloth, a tall wooden camera on a tripod, a brass lens, a tray for flash powder. My ex had spent a year of weekends photographing cameras like it in flea markets. I’d have known it anywhere.

In the frame, a woman.

She wore a pale satin gown the color of pearl and a wide straw hat tipped back, and in her right hand, held at her waist, a single pink rose. Lace at the neckline, and above the lace, the high, smooth swell of her breasts in the stays. Powdered hair. An expression of perfect, inherited calm.

I knew her at once. Marie Antoinette with a Rose. Vigée Le Brun, 1783. I could have recited the entry.

The Salon had thrown out the first version. The queen had sat for it in a plain muslin chemise, the kind of thing a woman wears in her own rooms, and Paris decided it was obscene: a queen in her underwear, hung where anyone could see. Vigée Le Brun painted her again in satin and stays and a hat, with a rose for something to do with her hands. That was the respectable version. That was the one that hung.

Of course, I thought, and the coldness in me was already failing. Of course they’d start there.

Nobody moved. From under the black cloth, a man’s voice spoke, low and even, and carried to every row.

It wasn’t my ex’s. I’d braced for that, I’m ashamed to say, from the moment I saw the camera, and the relief was so complete that it felt like being let off something.

“Hold.”

The powder flashed white. The ballroom went blind, and in the afterimage, burned green on the inside of my eyelids, I saw her exactly as she’d been: the queen, the rose, the lace, the calm.

Then the room came back and the model lifted her free hand to the front of her gown.

She hooked two fingers into the lace and didn’t hurry. She drew the bodice down, slowly, with the awful grace of someone for whom this was the most ordinary thing in the world. The satin gave. The stays gave. And her breasts came free into the lamplight, round and pale and a little flushed, the nipples already tight in the air.

A sound moved through the room, a long soft intake. I think I made it too.

She laid the rose against her chest, the stem in the valley between her breasts and the pink head at her collarbone, and tipped her chin up. The pose was the painting’s, except for everything that mattered.

“Hold,” said the voice. White.

My nipples had gone hard, so hard they ached against my silk. I pressed my thighs together, and the seam of my panties pulled tight against me, and that was when I felt how wet I’d become. A slow, shameful slickness, and my clit began to pulse against the fabric, a small steady throb in time with my heart.

I wanted it to be me.

I was horrified, and I’d like that on the record. I wanted the cold air on my own breasts and the weight of two hundred strangers’ eyes. I wanted to stand in the powdery light with a rose against my skin and be told exactly how to hold myself. I wanted the camera to see me. I wanted it so much that my mouth had gone dry and my palms were damp on the ticket, and I understood, with the part of my mind still capable of understanding anything, that nothing in my life had ever made me want anything this fast.

The model breathed. Her chest rose and fell, and the stem lifted with every breath.

“Hold.”

White. Green. Her, again, perfectly, forever.

The curtain fell. I thought it was over. It wasn’t.

It rose again on a girl in a drifting boat, and I knew her by her hair before I knew her by her name: The Lady of Shalott, Waterhouse, 1888. The painter keeps her gown decorous. Here the boat rocked, and the white gown slid off one shoulder and kept going.

Then Madame Récamier, David, 1800, reclined on a chaise in a gown so thin it was nearly a rumor. Here it fell open from the collar to the navel, and she lay there with her chin up as if she’d been asked about the weather.

Then La Loge, Renoir, 1874: a woman in a low black-and-white gown in an opera box, with opera glasses, looked at by the whole house. Renoir’s neckline is bold. Here someone lowered it to her waist, and she raised the glasses and looked back at us.

Then Lady Godiva, Collier, 1898, nude on a pale horse that stood so still I decided it was wooden, her only covering the long fall of her hair. In the painting the hair does all the work. Here the model lifted it over one shoulder, slowly, and let us see what it had been guarding.

Each time the powder flashed white, a man’s voice said “Hold,” and the curtain fell. By the third I’d crossed and uncrossed my legs so often that the woman beside me had stopped pretending not to notice. By the fourth my blouse was stuck to me, and I was breathing as if I’d climbed the stairs.

When the last curtain fell, nobody applauded. Nobody said anything at all. The house lights came up, soft and yellow, and the room breathed out, and two hundred people began to gather their coats with the dazed, careful movements of people who’d been somewhere else.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t have said how long I sat there. The attendants came out in black and carried the gowns off the stage, one over each arm, and I found that I was watching the steps at the side, the three narrow wooden steps that led up into the wings. I was memorizing them. I was counting the strides it would take to walk from my seat to the bottom of them. I had no idea why, and I knew exactly why.

When the room had mostly emptied I stood up, and my legs had no opinion about it. I walked the length of the walls one more time, slowly, and stopped in front of the woman with the swing, and stood there until my face was hot.

At the door the usher in the black coat was waiting. He said nothing. He put a card into my hand, a cream-colored card, the twin of the first, and the date on it was a week away.

I took it. I’d like to say I hesitated.

I don’t remember the cab back across the Public Garden. I remember my apartment, the key sticking, the lamp I didn’t turn on. I remember standing in my coat over the first ticket on the counter, my heart going, saying aloud to nobody, “You are being ridiculous.”

Then I was on the bed with my blouse open and my skirt shoved up around my waist, and my hand was already between my legs, and I was thinking of the rose.

I was so wet that my fingers slid straight over my clit, and the first touch made my whole body jump. I rubbed hard and fast and badly, like I was nineteen, one hand over my mouth. I thought of the lace coming down. I thought of the satin giving. I thought of the voice from under the cloth, Hold, and my hips locked and came off the mattress, and I came with a short, wrecked cry that I smothered in my wrist, shaking, my thighs jammed tight on my own hand.

It wasn’t enough. That was the worst of it. When it was over, I lay there with my breath tearing in and out of me and my pussy still clenching on nothing, and the want was exactly as big as before.

I thought: You never look like you.

And I thought, very clearly, the way you think the first sentence of a label: I would like to see what I look like.

On the nightstand the second card lay face up in the dark. I could just make out the italic.

Look closely.

The Second Show

For six days I told myself I wouldn’t go, and for six days I was lying so badly that I could hear it.

I went to work. I wrote a label for a Corot that nobody had asked for. I stood in front of a gallery of Pre-Raphaelites on Wednesday and found that I was looking at their mouths. At night I lay in the dark with the second card on the nightstand, and my hand went where it went, and the want didn’t shrink. It grew. I’d have said it was impossible, and then I’d have said that someone ought to study it.

I went on Friday. I wore the same silk blouse, and under it a bra I’d bought for the occasion, and I told no one anything.

The usher took my card and bowed, and I walked past him toward the walls.

They had changed. I’m certain of it. The women had been rehung, or I was seeing more, and the ones on the left were further along than I remembered. A collar I’d thought was closed was open. A skirt I’d thought was whole had a slit in it. There were plates I’d have sworn weren’t there before: a woman standing on a low pedestal with iron rings at her wrists, her eyes shut, and another with her head and hands through a wooden board, her hair loose against the grain. Both were smiling, like women who had just been told they looked wonderful.

I took the ninth row again, the same seat. The lights went down. The woman in gray came out and said the same words, where the painter stopped, the house will go a little further, and I mouthed them, and the curtain went up.

There were five pictures. I won’t give them all. A girl in blue velvet leaned back in a long, aching arch, her hands on her hips: Mariana, Millais, 1851, a woman waiting for someone who isn’t coming. In the painting she stretches, tired. Here she was undone from the throat to the waist, and she wasn’t tired at all. A woman with her head thrown back and her lips parted, in a rapture so complete that I knew it before I could have said her name: Beata Beatrix, Rossetti, 1870. In the painting it’s religious. Here the gown had been peeled from her until it was nothing but a pale band around her hips, and no one in the room thought she was praying.

After each one the powder flashed, the man said Hold, the curtain fell, and I sat a little lower in my seat. By the fourth I’d given up pretending about the woman beside me. By the fifth my fingers were twisted in the hem of my coat.

Then the curtain came down, and the woman in gray stepped out in front of it into the single light.