That they might understand my love.
She is the one who has stolen my heart—
When she looks at me it is refreshment.
That piece of limestone was the only thing I took with me from Egypt, when I left.
IGREW UPknowing that love came at a price. My mother would tell me the story of Tristan, who journeyed to Ireland to bring back beautiful Iseult to his uncle, the king, only to fall in love with her himself. His uncle sentenced them to death—Tristan by hanging, Iseult by burning. Tristan escaped and rescued her, and brought her back to the king out of honor. Years later, when Tristan was married to another and was struck by a poisoned lance, he sent for his first love. He didn’t know if she would come. If she said yes, the ship bearing her response would have white sails. If she said no, they were to be black. Iseult rushed to be with her old love, and the sails flew white. But Tristan, too weak to leave his bed, couldn’t see the ship. He asked his wife what color the sails were, and jealous, she lied and said black. He died of grief, and when Iseult saw his body, she died of a broken heart. After they were buried, a hazel tree grew from Tristan’s grave, and a honeysuckle from Iseult’s, and they twined so tight they couldn’t be pulled apart.
The moral of this story, my mother told me, was to plant your honeysuckle far from your hazel.
—
IN FRONT OFMeret, Brian and I act as if nothing has changed. And there are moments where, when we are together, I forget that we ever argued. But then, there are times I am furious at him for being stupid enough to upset the balance of our relationship. At night, I sleep in my office, and sometimes I wake up with the memory clenched between my teeth.
The truth is that it is easier to spend time with a woman who is dying than in a relationship that I am struggling to bring back to life. Win quickly becomes my primary client. I visit her three times that first week, and four times the next, and I tell myself that spending so much time with Win has nothing to do with the fact that it means spending that much less time at home with Brian.
One day, Win and I take the T to the MFA. A collection of Manet paintings is on loan from the Met, and she wants to see them. We wander through the exhibit, stopping to sit when she gets tired. Eventually we end up in a room full of contemporary art.
“I don’t understand modern art,” I tell her, when we are standing in front of Picasso’sRape of the Sabine Women.I tilt my head, looking at the geometric warping of figures, the distorted bodies being trampled by horses, the eye of the naked soldier painted on his sword.
Win laughs. “You’re not supposed to understand it. You’re supposed to feel it.”
“They don’t even look human,” I say.
“That’s the point. That’s what war does to people. It makes them into killing machines, where a weapon might as well be a body part. And it makes the victims bleed into each other, indistinguishable.”
I stare at her, blinking. “Did you ever teach?”
She laughs. “No. I just listened really well in class.” Win fumbles for her phone and pulls up a picture of a beautifully rendered painting. A woman reclines naked on a bed, while a Black servant brings her a bouquet of flowers. “This is Manet’sOlympia,” she says. “It’s widely considered the start of modern art. See how she’s staring right at you? That was so upsetting to people that when Manet displayed it in Paris in 1865, he was critically crucified. The painting had to be guarded so it wouldn’t be destroyed. He wasn’t glorifying a goddess or a religious icon. He was showing you a real woman—asex worker—who was daring the viewer to look her in the eye instead of pretending she didn’t exist.” Win shrugs. “All those fancy rich dudes at the salon were screwing prostitutes, but they sure as hell didn’t want to be reminded of it.”
I take the phone from her hands, touching the image to enlarge it. I look right into the woman’s eyes. I look at how her hand presses down on her thigh, the dimple in the flesh. “I’d like to see this one in person.”
“Go to the Musée d’Orsay,” Win says. “It’s glorious.”
I try to imagine traveling with Brian to Paris, spending time wandering around a museum. I can see myself doing it. But beside me is just an empty space. Brian is wary of art, of film, of anything meant to manipulate emotions. If it can’t be quantified, it isn’t legitimate.
We have turned the corner into a room full of canvases that remind me of the paintings Meret used to bring home from nursery school: drips of paint that look like they belong on a drop cloth, giant blocks of gray and brown sitting on top of each other. “This is what I mean,” I tell Win, gesturing to a Rothko. “Even I can do that.”
“Ah, this is abstract art,” she explains. “It’s all about universal expression. And believe it or not these artists were influenced by the Renaissance masters, too.”
“I’m not seeing it.”
“They knew that a great painting could pull emotion out of a viewer. But the world’s different from how it was during the Renaissance, when beauty was as necessary as oxygen, and when religion was an entry point for art. So they tried to figure out what it would take to inspire that same flood of joy or grief or awe today. It’s what feeling would look like, on canvas, if it was in its most raw form.”
I stand in front of the Rothko—the dark, muted blocks of color. “This just depresses me,” I say.
“Yup. How you react tells you something about your emotional state, and you can unpack where that comes from.”
“Canvas as therapist,” I muse.
“Exactly.”
“What’s your favorite painting?”
“Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,”Win says without hesitation. “By Georges Seurat.”
“Isn’t that the one made up of dots?”
