The Jetsetters by Amanda Eyre Ward

Author:Amanda Eyre Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

THE PAINTER & ME

By Charlotte Perkins

I was a beautiful girl when I first went to his castle. He was gnomelike, but in an attractive way. It’s hard to explain, but I’ll try. From a distance, you’d think, Ugh. He was short, with wispy old-man hair. He wore ridiculous clothing. Horizontal striped shirts matched with dingy plaid pants. And a beret. If you saw him coming toward you on a dim street in Aix, you’d think, Oh dear, I better cross. That homeless elfin man looks drunk and I’m afraid he’ll steal my pocketbook.

He didn’t care how he looked. This was one of the things I admired about him. It was also lucky for him, because his face…Well, his face was cragged, pinched with bovine intensity. His gaze was sort of frightening. You’d never meet his gaze and think, What a kind person. No. When he looked at you, it was as if he was consuming you. Like a tiger. He was sizing you up, deciding how to bring you down, and which piece of you to eat first.

He was SEX PERSONIFIED. He was sex personified as a gnome who shopped at T.J.Maxx.

He had said he wanted to draw me, so there I was, in the enormous dining room of his castle. My parents thought I was taking a day trip to see ruins. (As I told them this fabricated story, I pictured the painter’s wrinkled face and did not feel I was wholly lying.) I looked at the Provençal floor tiles as he poured wine. They were octagonal, brick red. The painter was talking about himself.

“When I first came to this place, they asked me if it was too vast and too severe. But I said it is not too vast, because I will fill it!”

“How interesting,” I said, though he had not paused for my response. He went on:

“I said, ‘It is not too severe, because I am a Spaniard, and I like sadness.’ Ha ha!”

“Ha ha!” I agreed.

I was scared. I was a virgin, and I knew we were going to have sex. I had been taught that sex was absolutely wrong before marriage and would condemn me to Hell. Thus, I was curious. At this time, I didn’t really believe in God or Hell. I was young, and I guess I didn’t have a need to believe there was someone I could pray to, someone who was in charge of everything, even when it seemed that life was a cruel, random mystery.

God—before I needed Him—seemed so vague, and here was the painter, pulling me to him. He smelled like turpentine and dog hair, but I didn’t see a dog.

In his blindingly white studio, we drank more wine. The room was absolutely magnificent, lined with dramatic crown moldings—flowers! Shells! Hounds! Men and women draped in togas! In the center of the studio, an elaborate mantelpiece at least twenty feet tall soared toward the ceiling. Instead of a hearth under the glamorous mantel, there was an empty space with a dirty cowbell inside.

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