Exodus: A memoir (23 page)

I had never seen or heard of
The Jewish Bride
. It surprised me that Rembrandt would have painted Jews, and I mentioned this. Richard pulled up an image of the painting on his phone. The two people in it did not look especially Jewish to me.

“I think he wanted to show the humanness in oppressed
people. See how they look careworn but they’re dressed in fine fabrics? And the colors—they’re very luscious. It’s an attempt to paint them as the bourgeoisie. So at first glance, the image is of prosperous newlyweds, but on second look, most viewers would notice the finer details, and they’d realize they’d been duped. There was a kind of outrage about it. That was what Rembrandt was aiming for.”

I looked at the image of a woman, not too young, with a sweet, submissive smile, looking up at a middle-aged, balding man who has his hand on her breasts, as if to denote fertility. It felt like an image of me, back when I was a submissive Jewish wife. I didn’t want to be painted like that.

“That’s not the kind of Jewish woman I am,” I said to Richard. “That was back in the day when all Jews lived in ghettos. When they only married each other, and married young. That was me when I was seventeen. But that’s not me now.”

Richard nodded. “Maybe that’s the answer to my problem—maybe that’s the way to make it new. A Jewish bride, but one like you—strong, independent, free.”

I was skeptical. I was also reluctant to pose. I had never thought of myself as a muse or a model. I was the writer, the observer. It was the world’s job to pose for me, in a sense.

But after a while, the idea started to appeal to me. My excruciating self-consciousness was becoming a real problem. In many ways, I had chosen the life of an observer because it made it easier to deal with that painfully self-aware feeling all the time. If I ever wanted to make my way back into the world without having a panic attack, I needed to learn how to get comfortable in my skin.

About a month later, I told Richard I would pose for him. He just had to come up with the idea first.

In the end, we came up with the idea together. I knew that if I could summon the bravery to do it, the painting would strip me of my last defenses and build a sense of self-acceptance in its place. For that reason, I steeled my gut one Sunday morning and dropped my pants.

It was the first time that I had been looked at by anyone, let alone looked at in daylight.

“I’ve seen lots of vaginas before,” Richard said, as if to soothe me.

“Yes, I know, but you’ve never seen one menstruating.”

“That’s true.”

“Couldn’t you have gotten one of your many models to pose like that? They’re so used to being naked.”

“They never would have agreed to be seen that way. They want to be painted at their best, portrayed as idealized versions of themselves. Their modeling is vain; it’s an ego thing for them. None of them would have ever agreed to this.” Richard furiously mixed colors on a palette as he glanced between my legs.

There didn’t seem to be any difference to me between modeling naked and modeling naked while menstruating. I suppose nakedness, in all its forms, had always been made to seem offensive and shameful to me. I remember being told the story of Kimchit, the biblical woman who never allowed the beams of her own house to see her nakedness, that’s how modest she was. She was rewarded with seven sons in the high priesthood. This story would give me goose bumps in the shower. Was I offending God with my body? Was I horrifying the very ceiling beams above me? To this day, I get in the bath and feel a shiver, like I’m being watched.

Where I come from, rabbis believed that menstruation rendered women into unclean beings, who therefore had to be regulated in order to protect the male community from contamination. I had been made to feel dirty and ashamed for the same bodily cycles that were responsible for my most important contribution: life.

I was taking it back.

When Richard showed me the composition sketch, he asked me if I could come up with something that was symbolic of a Hasidic ritual that he could insert into the landscape, something that would speak to my story. But there was nothing ritualistic about my past that felt like a part of my identity now. All the traditions I had once engaged in felt sexist and oppressive to me.

No candles, no prayer shawl, I insisted. Instead, I asked for a blue heron to be in the painting. I had first developed a fascination with white egrets in Louisiana, sitting by the banks of the Mississippi to watch them scavenge their daily repast. I had never been to the South before, and the birds I had grown up around were city pigeons. My grandmother had displayed an unusual love for birds; she left food on the porch for them every morning. So occasionally I was able to see a cardinal, and rarely, a blue jay—if I ran fast enough in response to my grandmother’s urgent call to “come see!”

The egrets were like exotic birds to me. They made me feel as if I had traveled a long way. Perhaps they were the pigeons of the Mississippi, but they might as well have been swans. They were so white and so elegant. Their stick-limbed legs remained perfectly still as the gray water slopped around them, bits of the river’s
surface shining white when it caught the sunlight. Every so often, they’d dip, so fast you could miss it if you blinked, and up they’d come with a gleaming silver fish in their beaks. One gulp, and that was gone, too, and it was back to watching and waiting.

I thought the egrets represented patience. They were very committed to the task of procuring food, but they were also willing to put in the necessary time and effort to do so. I reflected that I had not met many people who could match their life skills. Humans wanted instant gratification; egrets seemed to understand that the reward would be there at the end, if the work was done right. I liked that. I, too, wanted to wade into the Mississippi and wait for treasure to swim by.

Then, shortly after I moved up to the little dead-end street in New England, a bird I had never glimpsed before moved into the small pond at the entrance to our road, fed through a stream coming from the lake. All summer long, this blue heron stood at the edge, barely protruding from dense shrubbery, waiting patiently for his meals. As I walked or drove past every day, there he was, so still you might mistake him for part of the foliage, so beautiful it made me wonder what he was doing in this ordinary corner of the world when I had thought that there would never be anything beautiful to see again. It was only after I looked it up online that I realized blue herons and egrets were one species.

In my local coffee shop I met a man who carried
The
Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
and a handmade pot of ink to fill his quill with. He told me that the blue heron was a totem animal, speaking to self-sufficiency and multi-capability.

“I thought it was about being patient,” I said.

“That fits, too! It’s what it says to you that matters. Do you identify with the heron?”

One late summer day I had witnessed the heron ascending into flight. It had lifted itself awkwardly and fitfully into the air, seeming to struggle against something. When it finally leveled out, it climbed ever so slowly into the sky, its wings working with visible effort. But after achieving the necessary momentum, the bird relaxed into a graceful and deliberate stroke, flying the way I had expected it to fly. It looked free.

“I identify with the fact that getting up there is tough, and should look it,” I said.

I walked out of the coffee shop feeling heavy with the desire to get off the ground, just like a heron. It felt as if I had been beating my wings in vain for years.

The heron returned again this spring, to my little floating dock, where it paced all afternoon, catching perch and sunfish. It was a solitary creature, concerned with providing for itself, never once allowing for play. After gazing at it for a few hours, I suddenly realized I had been wrong. The heron was afraid. It was anxious. The egret stood in the Mississippi and fished all day because it was afraid it would run out of food, that the river would someday stop being a bounty of meals. It gorged on fish as if each one were its last. I felt sorry for the heron on my dock, maintaining such a vigilant watch all day. He could not simply have faith that his needs would be provided for.

When Richard showed me the final sketch of the painting, in which the heron’s leg was grasped in my outstretched hand, I saw it. Had it been a coincidence or a subconscious rendering of the split I felt in my own identity? The image was so clear that I
couldn’t unsee it if I tried. The heron was the
kaparah
, the bird sacrificed by Hasidic Jews once a year before Yom Kippur. The ritual was designed to confer one’s sins on the bird; with the subsequent murder of the animal, the sins were erased, compensated for by the sacrifice.

Every year I had visited the
kaparah
vendor and grasped a chicken by its legs as I swung it over my head while reciting the prayer of guilt and repentance. When I had been pregnant with Isaac, I had swung three chickens over my head at once, one for my sins, and one female and one male chicken for the sins of my fetus. Sin was something taken for granted; the human being growing in my uterus was sinful just for existing.

Looking at the painting, I saw myself grasping the heron as if to lift myself up along with it. The image carried a dual interpretation of atonement for guilt and a struggle to break free. It was the most truthful depiction of myself that I had ever encountered. I would always be struggling between my past and my future, between my roots and my potential for self-fulfillment. But looking at myself, frozen in that struggle, didn’t seem like a terrible thing. It was beautiful.
I
was beautiful.

After the painting debuted at a gallery in New York City in early spring 2013, I helped Richard take it off its stretcher and roll it up in bubble wrap. We packed it into a cardboard cylinder, and with Richard this time, I again headed to Paris, where Odd was having one last vernissage in his house in Maisons-Laffitte. Odd would want to see the painting, offer his advice on how to improve it. Then it would be hung in Richard’s gallery in Paris.

Paris felt even more exciting this time around. I enjoyed the sunlight at an outdoor café on avenue Carnot, gazed at the Arc de Triomphe, looked forward to a weekend full of adventure. Then I descended into the cool tunnels of the RER station, where I boarded the commuter train that would take me to Maisons-Laffitte. Richard was already there, no doubt helping with the last-minute setup for the exhibition. I was wearing jeans and a blazer, and I felt pleasantly attractive, as if I’d have no problem fitting in with the crowd. I emerged into the downtown area of this famous horse-racing suburb, the place where Hemingway went to gamble in his memoir,
A Moveable Feast
. Here there were no sidewalks, only unpaved ground; horses hooves marked the depressions in the grass. Magpies pranced fearlessly in the green, and dandelions grew at the borders of gated estates.

Odd’s estate was on a beautiful street, from which one could see across the Seine to the hills on the other side. Only his self-portrait, overlaid on a ceramic tile, marked the address—there was no name on the bell. The gates swung open slowly for me, and I walked down a path bordered by lush trees, into a small clearing from which I could finally see the house, in typical grand chateau style, with shrubs and trees growing with wild abandon all around.