What I Did for Love (4 page)

As the parking guard approached us, Tom hit the automatic release and the trunk lifted. The guard thanked him, greeting us with a “Hello, Mr. Rand,” did a quick check of the trunk and closed it.

“You’re here so often he knows your name.” I smiled.

“Yes.” His eyes twinkled. “You’ll read about it in the Arts section of The Times this Sunday. I’m the newest trustee.”

This news excited me even more. It was a major honor to be a museum trustee. “I’m impressed,” I said, my admiration unmistakable, causing him to grin in that boyish way I already loved. “You’re kind of young for such an honor,” I added, though I did not really know how old he was. And I was reluctant to ask him. And I didn’t care. But I thought all museum trustees were of matriarch and patriarch age, in charge of family fortunes, guardians of good taste, adding prestige to their family names.

“Family money seems to have done the trick,” he said with mock sarcasm. “My father mentioned that he would love to support the museum in a substantial way, but wanted someone he trusted, like his son Rand, on the Board.”

“And they agreed….” I marveled.

“They didn’t seem to mind,” he said, his voice drily humorous. “And it was easier because I went to school with the new Director’s brother. Our families have been close friends for years. We also have a pretty valuable art collection of our own.” He grinned again and looked at me sidewise. “It also helps that my family has been buying up some of the best newer artists.”

I knew Bredon had been doing the same thing, and wondered if they had bid against each other. But none of that mattered. I was so happy to be with Rand, going to a museum I loved, and with one of its trustees! And not a trustee who was old and staid, but a vibrant lion who stirred me wondrously. Aroused by him, I wished I were bolder, wanting to kiss him and touch him. Oh, restraint. I sensed the same commotion in him, though I thought he hid it far better. I used to think I was cold and incapable of this
sort of arousal. My whole thinking had changed with his powerful, magnetic personhood, his him-ness, I suppose the Buddhists would call it.

As we left the car Rand told Tom, “I’ll phone when we’re coming back.” A quick walk, through the revolving glass doors of the garage entrance, up the steps. We were in the anteroom of the great downstairs hall, three guards at a desk, alert and watchful, observing visitors. We showed them our membership cards, and seeing Rand’s card, they directed us to come behind their desks to get on an elevator that was definitely not for the public.

A guard got in with us, a quick trip upward, and the doors opened onto behind-the-scenes workshops. We were in an area off-limits except to the highly skilled artists and artisans who prepared and restored the priceless works that made the museum a world showpiece. High level museum officials worked diplomatically but firmly to keep potentially intrusive donors and trustees away from these work areas. The policy was strictly enforced, defended as a safety and security precaution. The donors could do their dance of power, giving to have wings or collections named for them. The museum only cared about provenance, where the works came from, that they were not stolen, or counterfeit. Major museums and various world governments still struggled with these issues, especially of paintings stolen in the Holocaust, art looted during civil wars and insurgencies. Over the years much stolen art had been returned to rightful owners or their descendants. Still, questions continued to emerge over who owned what, and who had permission to give, to show, and to withhold great works from public view.

There were also collectors who did not want public notice of their holdings, the ‘anonymous lenders’ listed in exhibit catalogues. Fear of theft, insurance rates, the simple desire for privacy, aversion to publicity that cast light on a family’s wealth, all contributed to the desire for anonymity. This Balthus exhibit had quite a few such lenders, I had heard.

So I was even more impressed that we had been admitted to these strictly guarded work areas, and our presence, so unusual, got the workers’ attention too. They looked away and went back to their tasks as Rand and I were joined almost immediately by a young woman who introduced herself as the first assistant for this show. With a friendly but professionally neutral expression, she moved us gracefully but quickly through the work area, past the tools of every sort, aprons covering the workers as they did fine restorations, smells of various paints and glues and chemicals which, despite a good, modern air filtering system, had seemed to embed in the walls and flooring.

“Why are we coming in this way?” I whispered to Rand.

“The exhibit opens tomorrow for members only, then in two weeks for the general public. We’re going into the exhibit the back way.”

“Won’t we be noticed?”

“No. The regular entrance is closed, and we’re avoiding having to deal with the security locks. But we’ll have a guard with us.” Rand waved to a uniformed man whom I now saw had been walking behind us. I nodded to the guard, who gave a bare return nod, his demeanor very serious, the sober faced and vigilant behavior I always saw in museum guards. “He’s with us for insurance and security’s sake, Dray.”

I understood the museum’s concerns. Art was a thief’s precious commodity these days, when surplus cash from great corporations and private fortunes was parked in ever more expensive paintings and antiques. “It’s fine,” I said, looking back at the guard, “it’s as it should be.” At which Rand gave me an appreciative look.

The assistant led us to a door, opening it and using a control panel to light the exhibit. “You can begin here, and just loop around,” she said. “I’ll leave you to enjoy it on your own. Please come back the same way you came in, and the guard will bring you back out.”

Rand nodded, and we both thanked her. I was grateful for her polished, unobtrusive guidance, her obvious control over this rare situation. She gave us a pleasant, formal smile and was gone.

Now it was Rand and me, our attentive but discreet guard following behind us, and the surrounding works of the phenomenal artist in all his enigmatic art. I was struck by the paintings and drawings gathered into this show, to see them so close, these originals like a musical vibration that no reproduction, however fine, could capture. The nearness of Rand was thrilling my body, but so was the art, making me feel overwhelmed with sensation.

The first drawing was before us, the strange threesome; two women with a man. He was leaning against a chair, and I wondered if the man was a Balthus self-portrait. He was looking at the two women. One woman was holding and restraining the other, keeping her from running out the door. Both women had dresses on, but from the prominence of their breasts I thought they might as well be naked. Breasts, breasts, breasts; here it was again. The artist liked high, small, often pointy breasts, and open legs. In the drawings and paintings, the women seemed all to have their legs open.

Next we came to his drawing of a girl presumably getting dressed, but she looked like she was lifting her skirt up, showing her belly, her crotch, her legs, all bare. Does one put on a dress first and
then
put on panties?

I must have said that last question aloud, in my fascination with the interspersed oils and drawings, wonderfully set at eye-level. I caught myself as Rand moved forward to look at me, obviously wondering whether I had been talking to him.

“Thinking out loud,” I confessed.

“I would think the underwear goes on first,” he said, attempting seriousness and trying not to laugh. And with that, he had all my attention again, warmth returning. The strange and skewed eroticism of the art all around us was making me
somehow more aroused by Rand’s touch. His arm had come to encircle me, his fantastic cologne a hint on the air as he moved.

We came to the iconic Balthus painting, the young girl Thérèse, her head turned to her right, eyes closed, presumably dreaming, her legs apart, one foot on the floor, the other leg lifted on the stool, her skirt and slip falling back from her thighs, her crotch revealed, narrowly covered by the white panties of a young girl. Beside the stool, beyond her feet and closer to the viewer was the cat, its eyes also closed in the pleasure of the cream it was lapping from the saucer before it. The seated girl looked thoughtful, without shame, indifferent to or unconscious of the artist’s gaze. Her head was turned away from him, yes, but also from us. I wondered what she had been thinking.

Next came the most troubling and darkly erotic of the paintings, the guitar lesson. The instrument lay on the floor. The presumptive “teacher” sat in a wide curved-back armchair. Her “pupil” was a girl lying face-up across her lap, her skirt pushed above her navel, naked hips, naked pre-pubescent sex, its lips close together, tight. Her thighs were bare, and she had what looked to me like bruised knees above knee-high white stockings and shoes in place. The teacher’s left hand was on the girl’s left thigh, as though both holding her and preparing to masturbate her. The teacher’s other hand was grasping a handful of the girl’s long hair, holding her head down, and the girl was seeking balance by holding her right hand against the floor. She pinched her teacher’s exposed naked right breast with her left hand.

This was a stop-in-one’s-tracks painting, the girl’s jutting hip bones, her flat stomach, and those bruised knees that made me think she had been kneeling in another sexual posture just before now.

I must have been so totally absorbed by the paintings that I seemed to drift into them, the way only such art can do to the viewer. I was undone by this strange genius, each work suggesting so many sexual stories to me as I felt the warmth of
my own sexual arousal and desire.

Rand had been watching me. I came back to myself, finding myself leaning ever more tightly against him, excited by the perverse eroticism of this painting, not lewd, but brutal in the way it both drew and repelled me.

“You remind me of her.” Rand bent to whisper into my ear, gazing at the painting.

“Not the teacher, I assume,” I whispered back, feeling aroused again by his breath and the tone of his whisper, a lover’s flirtation.

“Not the teacher,” he agreed, his whisper holding laughter.

“Am I as plain as Thérèse, or even Georgette?” I whispered, naming two of the models the artist had used. I wanted to hear Rand flatter and praise me. I wanted him to find me beautiful, I who had always scorned men’s come-ons when they complimented my looks. I, who had always dismissed beauty, because the world had found me beautiful. I would say, “I had nothing to do with it. It’s genetics, the luck of the draw,” my cloak of humility. How cavalier I had been! And now I wanted affirmation, I wanted this man to want me the way my body wanted him. I could hardly think except how sexual desire kept growing in me, and was this my comeuppance for the indifferent way I had treated all the other men who had courted me? What a way to pay for my sins!

“You are
so
not plain,” he laughed, “and surely everyone has told you that all your life.” A man used to dealing with privileged women, confident. But then he seemed afraid he had offended me and quickly added, “And that’s
not
something I’m just saying.” Ernest. His arm around me seemed to tighten by microns, but I felt the enclosing sweetness of it.

“Merci.”
Was I, who was never coy, thanking him in
French
? Was I crazy? Any other time I would have thought, “get hold of yourself.” Now I did not care, even if I seemed like a fool in my own eyes. Bimbo-giggly French. Holy cow indeed.

I had no more emotional energy to linger here, and my look told him that I was ready to leave. He steered us back to the entry door, the guard hurrying ahead of us to open it, and then locking it behind him, joining us as we rapidly crossed the workrooms and back to the elevator.

“Let’s go out the front way,” I told Rand, and the guard, hearing me, pushed the button for the main lobby rather than the garage level. I needed time to cool down after my major internal foray into the wonder of slutty lust. I was still caught by my own reserve, that internal struggle between passion and control that can lead to surrender or to parting.

The elevator door opened in a small recess on the main floor. We thanked the guard for his help, receiving his solemn-faced nod as we exited. We walked, not talking, past the gorgeous Greek statuary and urns, turning to the main lobby. The guards there looked at us quizzically because we did not have the little entry decals on us showing we had formally entered the museum. No one had thought of this, but we passed the guards quickly into the neutral great lobby where you could sit with no decal.

As usual, large numbers of visitors were milling around, some seated on the benches opposite the gift shops, some taking brochures from the slotted outer counter of the great central desk. Within the desk’s enclosure were the multi-lingual staff and volunteers for the polyglot crowd visiting New York. The great dinosaur skeletons were across the park on the West Side, but here along Fifth Avenue was “Museum Mile,” the Jewish Museum a glory in the upper reaches of the magical area, coming southward to pass the Guggenheim and other breath-stopping landmarks. These were interspersed with embassies and impossibly expensive residences, and concluded with this magnificent museum.

We exited the main doors, descending the steps to Fifth Avenue. Rand had sent some kind of signal to Tom, because he
stood waiting outside Rand’s car at the curb beneath us. The day was too beautiful and my body too heated and wild for me to want to be driven anywhere just yet. The late afternoon breeze made the air sweet and bright and cool. The beauty of the coming evening, Rand’s scent, and my new-found lust for a man, so surprising and wonderful, made me reluctant to do anything but be with him.

I was thinking, I wish he would kiss me, embrace me, I want to kiss him, where did this come from; I was lost in my heat and happiness. Outwardly I still drew upon the disciplined manners I had learned long ago but my body had its own agenda. Heat traveled from my navel downward, and it was all I could do not to touch myself, to feel whether that heat was coming through my panties, whether I would feel the pulsing of desire with my hand. Unthinkingly I had started walking south, along the Park wall, and Rand fell into step beside me, signaling Tom who jumped back into the car and managed, in all the traffic, to trawl slowly behind us, watching us, pacing the car to our steps.