“I think you’re just a phase of Boris’s,” she said. “When you dump him or become too difficult, this will all be a dream, the thing that Boris and I fight about.”
“Ann,” I said, “I don’t understand you at all.”
I heard a clatter on the stairs followed by a dull thumping on the door. I knew this meant that Boris’s hands were full and that he was knocking with his head.
“You’ll stay for dinner?” I said.
“What are we having?”
“I don’t know. There’s an eggplant in the refrigerator. Will you stay?”
“Sure,” said Ann. “I suppose you want me to cook. Unless you have something you do with eggplant?”
I shook my head, not as threatened as I should have been, then went for the door.
Outside in the hallway, Boris was embracing a large package wrapped in brown paper.
“What have you got there?” I asked.
“It’s a portrait.” Boris caught Ann’s back disappearing into the kitchen. “So what’s Ann doing here?”
“Ann,” I said, stepping back from the door, “is cooking us dinner.”
“That’s very sporting of her.”
“Yes, it is,” I said.
He gave me a look, not pleased but curious, then walked over to the dining room table to set his package on the table.
“Katherine, you will love this,” he said and began to tear at the crinkled brown paper.
Boris had been wandering around Little Italy in search of a reasonably priced can of extra-virgin olive oil when he was struck by a picture hanging in the window of Agnellino’s Catholic Supply. According to Boris, it was a picture of me. Boris did not hesitate. He went inside and bought the print, framed, for thirty dollars.
“Where’s the olive oil?” I asked.
“I couldn’t carry them both,” he said.
We looked at his Madonna, which was lying in the center of the dining room table in its crumpled sheath of paper, like a rosette radish on a lettuce leaf.
“It sort of looks like me,” I said.
“It’s a perfect likeness.” Boris looked around the walls deep in concentration. He set his hands into his field of vision with the thumbs tugged down into right angles. “No,” he said. He turned to another wall. “No,” he said again, and then he framed the living room wall that set the kitchen off from the rest of the apartment. There was already a painting hanging there, a self-portrait of Ann. Boris held the picture with its cheery gilt plastic frame. He set the print into the space in front of him.
“Yes,” he said.
Boris removed Ann’s painting and set it on the floor. He hung the Madonna with great care. He stepped back to look at the print, straightened it, and then poured himself a glass of wine. Ann had wandered out from the kitchen and was standing in the doorway running her hand through her hair. She contemplated her self-portrait.
“Symbolism?” she said, gesturing to her picture.
“I don’t resort to such bald statements,” said Boris.
Ann stood back to study the print. “Is this new religious fervor?” she asked. She squinted over at Boris. “I remember you telling me that the only good thing about the Communists is that they torched all the Christians.”
Boris didn’t hear. “It’s Katherine,” he said. “Striking resemblance, don’t you think?” He turned to me. “Madonna della Katerina, as if the artist saw her and painted her.”
“Unlikely. This painting is Renaissance.” Ann looked at some small print beneath the picture. “Perugino, and it’s not even a Madonna. It’s a Magdalena.”
“What’s a Magdalena?” asked Boris.
“Mary Magdalene,” said Ann.
“The prostitute?”
“The saint,” I said. Ann and Boris looked at me, their faces impassive. “She dried Christ’s feet with her hair,” I added.
“Why were they wet?” said Ann.
“Why were what wet?” asked Boris.
I said nothing.
“I like it hanging there,” said Boris. “It adds a touch of humor to the apartment.”
Ann was a good cook. There was only the eggplant in the house, but somehow she managed to make it suffice—with pasta—for all three of us. I’d set the table with candles, which threw long shadows up on the white walls of the apartment. I made shadow puppets with my hands, a vague rabbit, something that looked like a rottweiler, or maybe a crocodile. Ann and Boris were talking about her new manager. Her manager, as far as I could tell, was someone who managed to sell Ann’s paintings to people who didn’t want them.
“Sang froid: Arctic Landscape that I did last spring? He sold it to someone as ‘Autumn Sunset.’ He said they could put it in their dining room. He sold it because the dimensions were perfect for above the sideboard.”
“Didn’t that have a skull floating in the foreground?” asked Boris, half-interested.
“A skeletal hand. If you don’t look that close, it’s not noticeable. I have some white light on the water in another part of the painting…”
“How much did you get for it?”
“That’s not the point, Boris. It’s in someone’s dining room.”
“It must be nice to make a living as an artist,” I said. I was thinking this and stated it by accident.
Ann’s eyes narrowed. “Does art interest you?”
“Yes, I suppose it does.”
“What artists do you like?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I like Goya.”
“Goya,” said Ann. She shook her head.
“How can you dismiss Goya?”
“I’m not dismissing Goya,” she said. “What do you know about Goya?”
“I didn’t say I knew Goya. I said I liked Goya.” I drained my glass of wine. “That picture of the donkeyman and the eagleman and they’re sitting on the shoulders of two bear-bodied donkey-headed things? I like that. It’s a good illustration of human nature.”
“That ‘picture’ is The Caprices of the late seventeen-hundreds, and has nothing to do with human nature. ‘Fantasy without reason produces monsters; but together, they beget true artists and may give rise to wonderful things.’”
“Bonus point for Ann,” I said. I poured myself more wine. “Lovely bullshit.”
“It’s a quote from Goya.”
“Well, I think he’s bullshitting. People did that, even in the late seventeen-hundreds.” I looked over at Boris, who was trying not to laugh. “I think he drew them in a moment of madness, then came up with some sort of discourse to cover his artistic ass.”
“You have absolutely nothing to support that theory.”
“No? Goya’s always depicting various forms of rage, madness. Don’t you think that implies that he had some sort of inside track?”
“To insanity? No. Not at all.” Ann said, inclined to disagree with anything I had to say.
“I think Goya drew his creatures in a moment of madness that frightened him, that his ability to draw such ugly creatures disturbed him. I think he felt possessed by his art. Who moved his hands if not he?” I rapped my fingers on the table. “Goya tries to make sense out of this accidental creation, the product of his madness. He still wonders whose picture it is.”
Boris chuckled and Ann glared at him. “The half-creatures are allegorical, not madness wedded to reason,” she said, and then to prove this conclusively she added, “Disasters of War. 1810.”
“Ah,” I said, “The Carnivorous Vulture.”
“Girls,” said Boris, “this has been amusing, but my knowledge of Goya is now exhausted and the discussion has become dull.”
Ann looked at me victoriously. “Forget the Carnivorous Vulture,” I said. “The only thing we have to deal with is the critical vulture, just as good at going after corpses. Goya’s dead and can’t speak for himself.” I got up from the table and went to sit by myself on the couch.