Be With Me Always: Essays by Randon Billings Noble

Author:Randon Billings Noble [Noble, Randon Billings]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Literary Collections, Essays
ISBN: 9781496205049
Google: Vn8LtwEACAAJ
Amazon: B07JQHL97M
Goodreads: 40168047
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2019-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

On Looking

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On Looking

We are looking at a Siberian camel. It is lying on top of its folded

legs, long- lashed eyes blinking slowly, wobbly lips frosted with green, contentedly chewing its cud.

“Look at her eyelashes,” a woman says to her friend. “She doesn’t

need mascara.”

“Look at his lips,” a man says with faint disgust.

The camel lumbers to its feet and sways gently. Its expression

doesn’t change, and it doesn’t look away as—

“It’s pooping!” a boy yells. “Look at its poop!”

The camel strolls along the fence, moving toward a woman who

calls to it. “That’s it. Come to me. Come to me,” she croons. The camel stops near her, murmurs its lips over a few strands of hay, swings its

head to look at some unknown movement, some object of interest

only to camels.

“He knows, he knows,” the woman chants. “He walks with the

people.”

In the museum it is much more quiet. The rooms are high ceilinged,

the floors bare, the light cool and controlled. So are the people, mostly.

I stop in front of Domenichino’s The Rebuke of Adam and Eve and look. Adam is half- shrugging, half- gesturing to a cringing Eve, while God swoops down to them, reclining on a couch of angels, a red silk

canopy flaring above him.

“Driving them out of the garden,” a middle- aged woman narrates

to her friend.

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The friend plays God: “Get out. You screwed up— now get out.”

They laugh and move on, their hard heels echoing on the bare floor.

A man looks for a moment, pauses, says: “Adam’s like, ‘I don’t know.

Don’t look at me— look at her.’” Another brief laugh.

A child reads the title out loud: “The Rebuke of Adam and Eve.

Mom, what’s rebuke?”

When the model walks in the classroom, we are all disappointed. Too

old, too fat, and— for half the class this too is a disappointment—

male. His thinning blond hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and a

thick handlebar goatee obscures his mouth. He has crow’s- feet and

sloping shoulders, and his deeply cut tank top shows the curve of

his hanging stomach. When he shakes hands with the teacher and

leaves to change, I imagine him either riding a Harley- Davidson or

sweeping a metal detector over a beach.

The other students, most of them barely in their twenties, all of

them at least ten years younger than me, exchange glances. I look

down at my block of clay.

When the model returns, he is wearing a thin teal terry cloth robe

and black plastic flip- flops. He climbs onto the turntable in the center of the room, adjusts a cushion, and sits on a wooden cube.

He shrugs out of the robe, which drops to the floor.

The room is silent.

“Mouna is not a shy woman,” the presenter says. “But she is not used

to standing up in front of a crowd and being looked at.” I am in the

crowd at the Adornment Pavilion at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

looking at Mouna. Mouna stands onstage, not used to being looked at.

When prompted, Mouna holds out her palms so that we can see

the henna designs intricately stained into her skin.

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