Virgin and Other Stories by April Ayers Lawson

Author:April Ayers Lawson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

VULNERABILITY

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them.

Women are afraid that men will kill them.

—MARGARET ATWOOD

I

Once I fell for my art dealer. He is a semi-famous gallery owner you might have heard of—the rumor that he discovered his love of art history as a bedridden teenager, recovering from a series of surgeries he won’t specify, is true—and though I can’t say his name here, I’ll add that he’s bearded, green-eyed, and tall, with a pale, nicely shaped head, and aware of whether or not you’re watching his hands as he speaks. I think this is because when he was a teenager he believed no woman would ever desire him, and so even though lots of women like him now, part of him can’t really accept it, and there he is having many brilliant thoughts about art and vision or business or insights into whatever it is you’re telling him about, but all the while he’s also paying attention to whether or not you’re watching his hands.

As a teenager he read in one of those books socially awkward boys read in hopes of learning to relate to females that this is a sign that one human being desires another.

But I didn’t know that then, about watching hands. And so I’ll say that ten minutes into knowing him in person, I was. I was. (Though I can’t say how much this had to do with his moving them a lot as he spoke, probably trying to get me to look at them.)

Sitting across from me in the restaurant where we met, with a very pleased, bright-eyed expression, he announced to me, “You’re looking at my hands.”

“Well, yes. I guess I am.”

* * *

And he kept looking at me like that, in private delight, like something important had happened. I thought he might be crazy. I thought he was possibly the strangest person I’d ever met, and why were the buttons of his shirt unbuttoned so far down his chest? I could see a lot of chest hair (men where I lived in the South didn’t do this with their shirts), and he was wearing, I think, a green shirt with thin pink stripes or a pink shirt with thin green stripes that was a bit too tight (and nothing like the plain white button-downs, no tie, in which he perpetually appeared in articles and interviews for art and culture and business magazines). I wore a pink lace miniskirt that had been designed for a shorter woman and which, when I sat, barely covered the areas that required covering—and he kept looking at me like he was in love with me, his green eyes all wide and bright and wet-looking, as he asked if I masturbated a lot, like most artists did.

“Do they?”

I didn’t know many artists. At the evangelical college, those in the arts were steered toward teaching and graphic design and away from being what our department chair contemptuously and dismissively referred to as “the gallery idol.”

He seemed to take my indirect answer as affirmation and then began to speak of penises in art.

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