She had parted her long, black hair down the middle — a habit she must have adopted years earlier, because the part had widened to reveal a stripe of scalp. She had a substantial, commanding nose and a wide, tight-lipped mouth. She looked like someone who’d never spent a day lying on a couch eating ice cream in her entire life. Also, there was one other thing: she was unquestionably, enormously pregnant, but she didn’t carry herself like any pregnant woman I’d ever seen, at least anyone who was that far along. She didn’t have her hands clasped beneath her belly or resting above it, wasn’t sitting down or leaning back to compensate for the additional weight. Instead she was leaning forward, rather daintily, and frowning at the lithograph, ignoring the two men beside her, a cigarette burning in her right hand.
I sat for a while looking at the picture, turning possible events over in my mind. Eva Kent had a child, then painted the reverse pietà. As a portrait of motherhood, it was less than idealized, that picture of hers. From The Wilderness Kiss to The Ball and Chain wasn’t exactly a sentimental journey, and I couldn’t help wondering what had happened to her later. Since there were no other references to her after that opening in 1978, it occurred to me that maybe she’d stopped painting after having the child. I could do something with that, though it would be better, for what I had in mind, if something really bad had happened to her — a greater tragedy than the feminine mystique, that is. This was cynical, but no less true. Suzanne’s surrealist had died young of his brain tumor, whose side effects supposedly accounted for the more egregious imagery in his work.
I thought back to the night Michael and I wrote the abstract for my dissertation. The artists I was researching showed in alternative spaces and staged performance art, embracing the female body in all its sexuality and powers. They celebrated the vaginal imagery in O’Keeffe’s flowers and made a heroine out of Frida Kahlo. My project was supposed to reexamine this time period using the very modernist terms these women had worked so hard to defy. Michael thought it would make a big splash, but felt that I had to find the right kind of artists, and not performance artists, to elevate and promote.
“You need a Georgia,” he’d said. “You need a cult of personality.”
“Greeting cards in the making,” I’d answered lazily, trying not to fall asleep. “Coffee mugs and calendars.” We were in bed in his apartment, on a quiet Saturday evening, and Marianna was at a conference in Denmark. Those were the most peaceful nights I ever spent in New York: half-asleep and half-awake, books on the blankets, the noise of the city far away below us.
As I looked back on it, that conversation seemed a long way from staring at mediocre paintings in Albuquerque, and I asked myself how I’d gotten from one place to the other. I’d started studying women artists in college, once I’d gotten through the basics of art history and noticed how male-dominated it was. I thought I could understand their anger and defiance; by dealing boldly with their own bodies, they were taking control, asserting their presence. For a while I adopted an angry attitude myself, toward men and especially my father, whose quiet conventionality I saw as a patriarchal crime.
“I have cramps, Dad!” I’d make sure to tell him. “I’m bleeding.” I wanted to make him uncomfortable, which was never hard. He’d offer me an aspirin and quickly exit the room. During these years we had few easy conversations, and only when I was starting grad school did I stop attacking him — too busy, I guess, defending myself against the onslaught of life in New York. We’d begun, then, to talk about other things, news, weather, anything, like ordinary adults; but he died before things could get fully normal again.
In the library I went downstairs and sat at a computer terminal, hesitating only a moment before I started to write.
Dear Michael,
How’s France? I have exciting news. I believe I have stumbled upon exactly the necessary material for my project. Thank you so much for pushing me into more active research. There is a set of paintings here that I believe to be quite extraordinary, and I feel with them the strong personal engagement you always said was required for the best scholarship. I have come across a female painter who deals with issues of the body with a remarkable mixture of formal skill and ideological heft. Her name is Eva Kent, and I’m researching her other work right now. I think you’ll be pleased. Thoughts on how I should proceed?
Cheers,
Lynn
Whether I really thought the paintings were extraordinary was beside the point; I wanted Michael to think so. I knew him well enough to tell him what he needed to hear.
I made a photocopy of the picture and left the library. It was almost noon, and at the coffee shop across the street I ordered a chicken burrito with green chile and listened to the fresh-faced students at the table next to mine debate the various merits, as hangover remedies, of bacon and eggs, French fries, and Tabasco sauce. On the other side of me a pointyfaced girl in a peasant skirt was writing furiously in a cloth-bound journal.
Outside, traffic moved sluggishly from block to block and light to light. A woman with a baby strapped to her chest was jaywalking in between the cars, lightly brushing their hoods and trunks and fenders as she passed; it looked like some ritual benediction, her head canted to one side and a dreamy laxness in her gait. Traffic was slow but it had not in fact stopped, and people were honking. Still, she kept to her serene, peculiar route, and when she got to my side of the street I realized it was Irina.
I ran outside and caught her by her arm, and she said, “Sister of Wylie!”
“Hi,” I said.
“I am so sorry to tell you I have forgotten your name,” she said.
“That’s okay. It’s Lynn. I’m having lunch, would you like to join me?”
“But I couldn’t impose.”
“Please. It’s my treat.”
“I would like to, then.”
Inside, she sat down at my table and immediately started nursing the baby, who pulled at her nipple with loud, aggravated sucking sounds. The hungover students, repulsed, cleared their trays in a hurry. I ordered a cheeseburger and a Coke, at her request, and brought them to the table.
“So, Irina. How’s everything going? Have you seen Wylie?”
She shook her head and looked as if she were about to say more, but then became distracted by the cheeseburger. She ate faster than anybody I’d ever seen. Her round, pretty face shone with sweat and happiness, and she kept nodding rhythmically as she chewed. In between bites she licked the juice from all her fingers in turn. The baby also seemed happier, sucking quietly, one little hand curving around her exposed breast. Irina put her hand on the back of the baby’s head. I finished the rest of my burrito and asked if she wanted dessert.
“Oh, no thank you! But I would happily eat one of those burritos.”
So I watched her demolish a whole other plate of food, nodding and smiling at me all the while. Her appetite was both impressive and off-putting, like an Olympic event you weren’t sure should actually be a sport. The baby went to sleep, and Irina tucked her breast back into her dress and kept eating. At the end of the burrito I held my breath, but she just picked up the Coke and leaned back, sipping on it with a contented air.