People Collide by Isle McElroy

Author:Isle McElroy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

The museum was blandly enormous, as bright as a burn, the walls stretching predictably to make room for the art. Elizabeth walked ahead of me, though not with a glum sense of indifference or impatience, as I might have. She walked with the caution of a guide in the jungle. She was far more accustomed to my body than I was to hers, and I didn’t mind letting her take the lead. I felt safe with her a few paces ahead, speaking to docents in French like they’d always been friends.

I had never seen myself up close in this way: freely, without the aid of a mirror, without daring my face closer to itself, to pick at my flaws. My pants fit snugly over Elizabeth’s thighs and accentuated her calves, which I normally considered girthy and ugly. Elizabeth claimed to love my legs. They were sturdy, in her words. Walking behind myself, I reluctantly saw how someone might find me impressive. My gait was stern, undeterred. And the jacket added a striking severity to my shoulders. I was a handsome man. Elizabeth hadn’t been lying.

“Are you coming?” she asked. Elizabeth extended my hand.

I locked her fingers with mine.

“I’ve been coming here every day,” she said, her voice impossibly mine. “There is so much I need to show you.”

“Shouldn’t we talk about things?” I asked.

“Talk about what?”

“What happened to us.”

“Do you really think this will be any easier if we know how it happened?” she asked. “Now come, before it gets crowded.”

“It will be easier for me,” I said. I wasn’t sure this was true, but I felt so unmoored; an answer—even a wrong answer—might give me the grounding I needed.

Elizabeth knew better than to waste time looking for solutions that didn’t exist. “I want to show you the Frankenthaler,” she said.

I extracted her hand from my hand—or my hand from her hand—and followed my body through the shocking white hallways of the museum. My interest in art was more enthusiastic than learned. Elizabeth was the scholar; I was the hobbyist. When I walked through museums, I normally attached myself to the plaques next to the paintings before I let my eyes drift to the canvas, searching out the name of the painter, wondering whether I should be impressed.

Elizabeth let her eyes land where they wanted. Joining her in a museum was a scattered experience. Her parents had taught her to appreciate and to see, and she rarely noticed the names, only the paint on the canvas. She had been raised knowing beauty. Often, when the two of us stood before a piece that confounded me, she would reduce it to its most basic elements—the lines, the color, the theme—at once enhancing and puncturing my awe. “This is a middle finger to eighteenth-century portraiture,” she might say, then drift away without explanation.

This day, at the Pompidou, she halted me in front of a Yves Klein sculpture, a large, textured lollipop of a sculpture painted the most perfect blue. “The point of sculpture is to defeat gravity,” she said.

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