Lying In Bed (18 page)

“I hope you won’t be upset but I’ve told Tyler Fisk – he’s the owner of the gallery, the man I’m meeting – about your collages.”

“You did?”

“Do you mind?”

I shook my head.

Cole had promised me years ago that he was going to help me find a gallery. He’d had such an easy time of it - with his father’s and my mother’s connections to the photographic community all kinds of doors had opened for him. At twenty he had already been shooting for
Vogue
and
Bazaar
. At 25, he’d seen one of his photographs sold at an auction at Sotheby’s for $25,000. Now at 29, he was having a solo show. Meanwhile, I’d gone nowhere with my work. It didn’t fit into an established area. It couldn’t be categorized. The gallery owners my mother knew handled only photography and said it belonged in a gallery that specialized in the fine arts. Fine art galleries said my work was too photographic and belonged in a gallery that specialized in that.

It had turned into a matter of pride. As much as I wished I had gotten help, I wanted to do this by myself. Needed to prove that my work was of interest to people because of the art itself and not because of who my mother or my stepfather or my stepbrother were.

Now Gideon was offering me help and I felt differently about it. Why?

“That’s extremely nice of you.”

“I know what it’s like to be where you are and how demoralizing it can be. Making art that no one sees. Yes, I know creating what you believe in and doing it for yourself is what matters. But after a while, you need someone to respond to what you do. You need to watch someone looking at your work and see how they react in order to know if you’re communicating what you hope.”

“All that’s important is doing the work. Success isn’t my goal.”

“It’s not success that I’m talking about. It’s interaction. When we paint or sculpt or assemble a collage, we’re using our senses and our souls to make something out of thin air. We’re saying something. And the act of saying it, and the process we go through in presenting it, doesn’t teach us everything we need to know until we can discuss it and argue about it and listen to other people talking about it. It’s like making love versus masturbating.”

I had been nodding vigorously. He was expressing everything I was feeling, had been feeling for the last few years. But when he used the sexual analogy, I stopped. Suddenly he was taking me to a place I didn’t want to go. Making me think thoughts I wasn’t ready for.

I no longer understood the act of making love the way I thought Gideon meant it. Had no idea what it would be like to communicate with someone through the act of fucking. I thought I’d known once, but when I’d found out that man had used me, had tricked me into opening up to him before I realized he was going to take advantage of me,I began to second-guess myself. He’d taken a lot from me. Too much. I hadn’t known that you could give that much of yourself away during sex. Hadn’t know it until it was gone. Until he was gone.

After that I became cautious and held back. Kept my own fantasies in check. I watched. I tried to learn. I listened. I didn’t stay with anyone long because I never could figure out what it was anyone really wanted. Even when it seemed simple and uncomplicated, I questioned it. And they sensed that.

I couldn’t figure out what I wanted either.

So it became easier to want nothing.

With Joshua, my reticence had worked. He’d found it attractive, he said - that I didn’t open up easily meant, to him, that I had not shared how I felt with many men. It was refreshing, he told me. But he’d been too invested in my lack of any commitment to anyone before him. It prevented him from noticing that there was something missing from my emotional commitment to him.

And then we’d had the fight about my past the night before he’d left for Venice.

It was only in the last few months, since I’d been writing letters and stories for Grace’s store that, despite myself, I’d begun to think about my own sexuality. As I wrote about other people and their sexual releases and comminglings, I acknowledged how much I hadn’t allowed myself to experience.

“Where’d you just go?” Gideon asked.

“What?”

“You disappeared on me. Looked like you were far away.”

“I was thinking about what you said. About how much I agreed with it.”

We’d arrived at my destination.

“Am I going to see you in the morning?” he asked. “We have to nail down this smell story.”

I nodded.

For a moment I was overwhelmed with sadness. I didn’t want him to walk away. It made no sense.

“Where?” he asked.

“I’ll call you later. I need to figure out what we should try next,” I said, hearing the harshness in my own voice. I’d retreated already. Reacting to him leaving as if I’d been rejected.

“And I’ll let you know what my dealer says.”

I shrugged. “Oh, right.”

“Don’t sound too excited.” His voice was colder than it had been ten seconds ago.

I didn’t know what to say or how to explain why I wasn’t more thankful or enthusiastic.

He’d shown me a wall and where the loose bricks were. He’d even offered to help me pull them out and I hadn’t responded. I didn’t want his help – a man’s help. Not with my personal life, not with my art. Because I knew, I’d learned, that even a man who has your best interests at heart, will, if it comes down to his work, do the selfish thing.

I hadn’t been
sure what else to suggest for smell until I was walking home later that afternoon and passed a man carrying a large bouquet of flowers.

What about focusing not on one smell but an abundance of fragrance?

What would it be like to overwhelm someone with a bouquet of smells and drench them in sensations?

That’s what I suggested to Gideon’s answering machine that night. I gave him the address of where to meet me the next day and told him to call me if he had a problem with that. If I didn’t hear from him, I’d see him there.

Lying in bed a few hours later, I didn’t think about myself, but about the woman I was writing these stories for. I tried to imagine her again but I had nothing to go on except that whoever she was she was attracted to, perhaps even in love with, Gideon.

I’d been in love. In very different ways, with two men. There were others I’d had crushes on, but only those two had aroused a serious depth of emotion in me. Not only were they opposites, but the kind of emotion I’d felt for them was completely opposite too.

The first was a hurricane. I was in its thrall. Incapable of fighting it. It undressed me and stripped me bare. It made me feel every inch of my naked skin and every nerve ending in my body. It took away my want of food, of sleep, of entertainment, of social situations. There was nothing mild or calming about the storm of sensations that swirled in me when I was with Cole. And there was nothing I couldn’t imagine doing for him or with him. And so I did it all. Brazen and shameless, I split open for him, like a tree struck by lightning, shearing down the middle and immodestly showing its core.

He took from me what I offered, never considering if it was for my good or not. Cole wanted what I wanted, I thought. Certainly what he gave back was precisely that: his blatant desire.

I basked in knowing that there was nothing that I could say or do that would disturb him or frighten him away. The deeper I went inside of myself to shock him, the more I delighted him. I spun on him. I rained for him. I lit up the sky giving him everything I had to offer.

Eight years later nothing was the same. Falling in love with Joshua was like skimming a pond in a small but well-tended teak rowboat, bright with brass fittings. Each of us rowing, the oars dipping only lightly into the water. It was feeling sunshine on your face. Looking up and closing your eyes and looking only out, never in. My reflection in the surface of the water was serene. Clear. And the water itself was not dark or murky but a sky blue sparkling. All of my features were distinct in the mirror image that looked up at me.

As time went on, I offered Joshua no more and waited to see how much he would demand, only to find he demanded nothing. It was easy giving. No wrenching pulls, no dragging. If I wondered what I was losing by loving him simply, without the old craving and longing and hunger, I don’t remember it.

Joshua was a relief. I could forget about the girl who had stripped off her clothes and spread her legs and opened her mouth and couldn’t get enough of the lanky, longhaired boy who couldn’t get enough of her.

She faded more and more into a past I didn’t think about. I forgot about her the way you forget about a cut that leaves a scar so thin and so pale it all but disappears. I cherished Joshua for who I was able to be with him - someone who did not suffer passion.

At the time, I didn’t think I was pretending.

After all, we change. We morph. We evolve into who we are based not only on the experiences we have but the ones we realize we are not strong enough to have again. And I was not brave enough to go back to being even a grown up version of that sixteen- year- old who didn’t understand the concept of shame or the idea of betrayal.

I turned over on my side and moved the pillows so that a fresh, cooler one was under my cheek. I tried to think of something that wouldn’t keep me awake but would soothe me to sleep. Instead, my mind went back to Gideon.

What was he like with the woman who was getting my stories? Did she lay herself bare before him and wait to see what he wanted, or did she reach out and take his hand and put it on her breast and show him how desperate she was to have him inside of her?

What did she write to him in her letters that had made him decide to embark on this campaign of his own? How long had he known her? How well did he know her? Did he know the inside of her? Were the taste and smell of her in his memory? Or was he one step removed? Was he simply responding to her wanting him?

Which one of them had opened their mouth first during that kiss that is the first marker of how things will progress? When a simple movement turns into an invitation.

I could see him, facing someone, his hair falling into his face, his green-black eyes focused on her, putting his hands on either side of her face, holding back a moment so he could study her even more closely, set her features in his mind, catch her eye and tease her with what was going to happen.

I knew – how did I know? – that for him the anticipation was as important as the act. That his wanting was as pleasurable as his release.

It made me feel something I hadn’t remembered for a long time.

Not what want is. But what
craving
is.

How much I had savored every second of it and played with it and shared it and used it with my first lover. And how it flavored all of our time together.

We were bitter and sweet, dark rich chocolate perfumed with oranges. The kind of chocolate that you don’t eat quickly, but hold on your tongue, almost like a communion wafer, and let dissolve, your mouth alive with subtle bursting flavors too complicated to identify.

Who was she?

What did she write to Gideon?

What would he add to the end of the stories I wrote for to make the letters more personal, more wicked, more promising, more salacious, sweeter, more loving?

And then, as I was finally falling asleep, I realized none of those questions were the ones that mattered. There was only one I needed to understand before morning.

Why did any of this matter to me?

The flower district
opens early, before other businesses do. In midtown Manhattan, on the west side, is where hoards of small florists, restaurant owners, and retailers come to pore over the day’s offerings and choose from among the hundreds of thousands of flowers that are delivered fresh each morning.

By the time I got there, at 9 a.m., the foot traffic was slowing down. To be standing on a street corner in the middle of midtown Manhattan, with traffic whizzing by and bus fumes filling the air, and yet have the overwhelming scent of flowers waft over you is incongruous.

The late May day was unusually warm and I’d taken off my black sweater and tied it around my waist. My crisp white shirt, and khakis were already starting to stick to me.

I saw Gideon across the street before he saw me and I watched him cross: his long strides, his observant eye taking in everything around him as if absorbing it into his consciousness. It was an artist’s trick. My mother and Cole and my stepdad did it, but through the lens of a camera. My mentor and teacher, Kim Cassidy, did it by making tiny drawings in a sketchbook that she always kept with her. No matter what other kind of art she created, it was those minute observations she drew in a flurry of movement in less than a sixty seconds that were her best work. I had a notebook, too. But my drawings were mediocre. I don’t have the patience to draw well. I wondered how Gideon stored his impressions.

“This place is amazing,” Gideon said as he handed me a steaming Styrofoam cup. “Black, right?” he asked.

I took the coffee. “That was really nice of you.”

He shook his head. “That’s me, courteous to the core.”

“What about that bothers you?”

Now it was his turn to be surprised by something
I’d
said. “In everything but my work, I can be far too accommodating.”

“Do you know why?”

“Yes, I do. But it doesn’t help that I know.”

“So why?”

“I just feel so damn grateful that I get to do what I do with my life. I almost lost my hand once. In an auto accident.” He pushed up his shirt cuff and showed me the old scars on his wrist and arm. More scars. “I was in the hospital for a long time. I couldn’t work. Missing it, worrying about whether or not I’d still be able to sculpt… it changed me.”

I nodded. “What did you mean about not being accommodating when it comes to your work?”

“I’m too stubborn for my own good. I won’t bend. That’s why I left Cornell. Me and my damn principles.”

I sipped the coffee. It was good and strong. “What happened?”

He laughed sardonically. “The dean of the art school relaxed the requirement of figure drawing for students majoring in fine arts. I went crazy. How can you break the rules if you don’t know the rules? I refused to teach unless the figure drawing requirements were reinstated. They weren’t. So, I’m here.” Then he shrugged as if the conversation were irrelevant. “Now where are all these flowers?”