“It’s a meditation on feminine virtue,” she announced, with the confidence of a woman who has never been corrected in her own dining room.
I looked up from my plate.
“It’s actually considered a celebration of sensuality.” The words were out before I could stop them.
The table went quiet.
Margaret raised both eyebrows in that mistress-to-servant way—tacitly asking how dare I speak, and that got my back up, so I continued, out of pettiness and a need to show her up.
“Rubens painted full-figured women because he thought that was the ideal female form. It’s essentially the opposite of virtue in the restrained sense—it’s abundance. Pleasure. The body as something to be enjoyed.”
“Oh, who cares why he painted what he painted. I just think it’s an excellent investment. Art always is.” David raised his glass with just enough sneer and snobbery.
Thankfully, after that, the family started to talk about investments and not art.
On our way home, Fox brought it up. “I didn’t know you knew so much about art.” His tone carried both surprise and recognition, as if he’d turned over a stone and found an entire world beneath.
“I almost studied art history,” I said, almost carelessly. “Before culinary school.”
He didn’t probe the matter, and I forgot about it by the time we got home.
Apparently, he didn’t.
We indulge in art for two hours.
The building earns the first few minutes on its own—white marble and Art Deco. Stone eagles over the doors. Fluted pilasters. The bones of a post office that someone decided must have higher ambitions.
“It used to be the main post office,” I tell him, a little thrilled to be coming here after a very long time.
“I know. I read up on it.”
Of course he did!
Fox has always been careful—but this Fox, this new husband I seem to have acquired, is being intentional and thoughtful with me. It’s enough to make a girl feelveryspecial.
Inside, there is an Impressionist exhibition.
Monet, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin—the whole inheritance of light and color and the argument, made in paint, that feeling is a legitimate subject for art.
I stop in front of a small Monet water study early on and don’t move for a while. It’s the kind of painting where the surface of the water and the reflection of the sky become indistinguishable from each other—where you genuinely cannot tell what is real and what is only the image of real.
“He kept painting water his whole life,” I muse. “Hundreds of times. The same subject.”
Fox slides his arm around me.
He does that a lot.
Touches me.
Kisses me.
Never crosses the line.
Drives me insane with longing.
He circles his thumb on my bare arm. “Why do you think he did that?”
I think about it, which isn’t easy, mind you, with his hands on me. “Maybe because water is never the same twice.”
