by
Jill Ciment
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I had already told them that I was seeing a married man thirty years my senior. To an addict, not one of the boys or girls approved. Despite the messes they had made of their own adolescence, they believed that I had made an even worse choice. The girls in particular found the idea of having an old man kiss them icky.
“You’re not creeped out when he touches you?”
“Does he get boners?”
“Are you ever worried he’s going to have a heart attack or a stroke or something when he’s balling you?”
I wasn’t, until she said that.
I didn’t yet know how to explain to the group that his age was my aphrodisiac, that I needed to be desired by someone older and important so that I could feel special. The fact that he was old enough to be my father was what elevated me above the line of wallflowers, girls who had to wait for boys their own age to ask them to dance.
lol
A friend of his, an art collector, offered a loan—to be paid back in artwork—but only on the condition that he get to meet the teenager who had broken up a marriage. Arnold didn’t say as much, but I sensed I was part of the transaction. The collector owned a steel plant, three homes, had grandchildren and a wife of forty years, and also a mistress not much older than me.
We met at the collector’s version of Ah Fong’s, a Japanese shabu-shabu restaurant with private rooms and servers who looked like geishas. He arrived with his mistress, who dressed her part—black dress, evening bag, heels, which she left by the shoji screen door. I wore bell-bottoms and gladiator sandals with tire-tread soles.
It was the first time I saw our age difference mirrored in another couple. The mistress had to help the collector sit on the tatami floor. When he took her hand, it looked like Father Time clasping onto a new branch. He was only five years older than Arnold.
“The oshibori goes in the basket,” the mistress said. “You weren’t supposed to wash your face with it, just your hands.” Her voice sounded kind, but her look said, You’re an amateur at this. My return look said, I’m not a gold digger like you because mine has no gold.
“I hear you’re applying to art school,” the collector said.
I told him that I had just been accepted by CalArts (Disney’s version of the Bauhaus) and now had to wait to hear if I got a scholarship.
The mistress smiled. The smile said, Mine is paying for the Japanese classes and an apartment.
lol
When the collector couldn’t eat another bite, she surprised me again. She lay back on the pillows and let him massage her feet. She did not close her eyes but watched me instead. I knew that if I stretched out, dropped my feet in Arnold’s lap, he would massage my feet, too. Two Father Times massaging four young feet in a geisha establishment. It was too depressing to contemplate. I let my feet fall painfully asleep rather than give her the satisfaction we were alike.
After the check was paid (by the collector), she easily slipped on her heels while I had difficulty buckling my numb feet into my gladiator sandals.
aaaahhh
He should have waited another semester before summoning her. He realized that only after she had quit her job as a salesgirl, packed her two suitcases’ worth of belongings, slammed the door on her ragpicker father, and moved across the country into his tiny studio apartment at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. The glamour of spotlights sweeping the night sky to announce movie premieres made her feel as if she had just fallen off a turnip truck.
She had never heard of television, and no matter how many times he explained its workings, she didn’t understand how a moving picture could be seen without a projector.
He began to make new friends and she just didn’t fit in. She was both too serious, and not serious enough. His crowd, mostly women and a few lucky fellows with 4Fs, grew up around the movie business. They spoke about the war in a way that upset her. Her war began with the Nazis rounding up the Jews. Their war had begun in Spain six years earlier, after Franco encouraged German war planes to incinerate the town of Guernica and the West did nothing to retaliate. They rallied enthusiastically in favor of a Soviet-American war effort.
He got a job at Warner Bros., as an assistant art director, drawing storyboards for a Tarzan movie, King of the Jungle (a bildungsroman, by the way). Hollywood went on strike a week later, October 5, 1945. The picket line was walked by movie stars and screenwriters and artists—not commercial admen who sucked on capitalism’s tit, but WPA muralists who painted sets by day and studied the Mexican muralists by night. He was invited to go landscape painting with them. He taught himself to paint by imitating their brushstrokes.
He left his wife with their one-year-old son (the daughter my age hadn’t been born) and traveled to Mexico to study at the source, with Rivera and Siqueiros.
He realized he would need more life drawing if he were to paint with any kind of acumen and abandon. He was twenty-eight already. By twenty-eight, Picasso had already finished his Rose and Blue Periods. Arnold had the same artistic aspirations that I would one day have, to get his own slide in an art history carousel, or his version of that ambition—the technology of the slide carousel had not yet been invented.
wow
He began what he believed were his most important paintings to date, the War Series, inspired by the photographs of the concentration camp survivors taken only minutes after they had been liberated. When he first showed his father the photographs in LIFE magazine just after the war, his father spent hours with a magnifying glass looking for his cousins among the living skeletons. Arnold painted eighteen canvases—Celebration of the Survivors, The Raped, The Phoenix Bird, Dance of the Survivors, The Survivors, The Death Cart, to name a few. He painted and drew with a superhuman intensity that artists feel only once or twice in a life, the galloping exhilaration when a story reveals itself faster than you can get it down.
The War Series was exhibited to some fanfare in the inaugural show of a gallery downtown. The press was excellent, a rave in the Los Angeles Times, but nothing sold. Who wants concentration camp survivors, even those dancing in celebration of their freedom, on their living room walls?
The late ’50s were America’s economic boom years. The Red Scare had all but saturated Hollywood. The stars and screenwriters and art directors who had once bought his art were blacklisted. The polemics of social realism were not only out of fashion; they were dangerous. Abstract painting was in. Art was no longer about stirring the masses, but about interiority and process.
He tried his hand at abstraction, but it was lonely in his studio without the models. He found that pushing paint around without the goal of creating imagery felt pointless. He couldn’t let go of the belief that art had something to teach—empathy, humility; otherwise it was only decoration. The more he faltered as an artist, the more he chased women.
He had a constant supply now in his private classes, wives whose husbands played golf or traveled for work or were dead. Someone always wanted to be the teacher’s pet. And the models. They now posed for his students (he had stopped painting), but that only made the assignations in his private studio next door sexier.
The models stayed the same age as he grew older. He put on weight for the first time. Two gray streaks, one under each nostril, appeared in his beard. He let his hair grow long, not hippie long, but artist length. He called women “love” and “sweetheart” so he would not mix up their names. He thought he was in love with a twenty-four-year-old redhead. He had an affair with a director friend’s twenty-year-old stepdaughter. By the time he looked up from his private orgy, abstraction was out. Pop art was in.
He was forty-five, disgusted with himself for having wasted a decade. He settled down to one wife and one mistress (age appropriate) and entered psychoanalysis.
wow
There was a small canvas on the wall, an unimposing size, maybe a square foot. I was the subject matter. He had rendered me naked, in profile, sitting on the edge of our bed, looking over my shoulder at the observer. I had never before seen myself from his point of view.
The girl in the painting wasn’t a nymph or a victim or a survivor or a sugar baby or a gold digger or a bimbo or a fatherless girl desperately in need of an older man’s affection. The girl in the painting had a steely confidence in the knowledge that she was loved.
I had never seen that girl before.
I had seen someone who looked like her in the mirror, but whenever I caught my reflection, I became stiff and my expression turned artificial.
There was nothing artificial about this girl. This girl was loved, and she knew it. But her radiance came from another light source: This girl knew how to love back.
He showed me who I might become.
Later, she would remember asking the man who answered if his wife would be home, and then listening to a convoluted story about divorce and custody that struck her as more tiresome than suspicious, yet she caught a whiff of something that alarmed her, like the scent of a nearby fire. A moment later, the air smelled clear again, and she assumed she only imagined it.
such a typical female intuition experience :(