Lying In Bed (13 page)

“So this is not your occult position? No witchcraft? No second sight?”

“I don’t need to look that hard, sweetie. You’re missing your own clues. We all give ourselves clues. We sense things about people we meet. We know better than we give ourselves credit for. You ignoring those intuitions doesn’t make any sense. It’s like turning away a life preserver when you are drowning. Those moments of insight we all have can give us the edge that helps us live more fulfilled lives. But you’re doing the opposite. You’re looking away from every clue and hint. You’ve got blinders on about your own life.” She put down her fork, which she’d been using to reinforce the points she was making. “I’m finished.”

“With the eggs or the lecture?”

“With both.” She pushed away the plate. “No, I’m not.”

“Not finished with the eggs or the lecture?”

“It’s not a random conversation we’re having here–”

“It’s not even a conversation, Grace. It’s your podium and your lecture.”

She looked at me askance and then continued: “There’s something about this man that you need to pay attention to. Him coming into your life right now. It’s not an accident. You’re reacting to him differently. You have to figure out why. Why him? Why now?”

“I don’t understand.”

“No? That’s okay. You don’t need to understand. You need to be aware. To be open. That’s all I’m asking you to do. To take a look at the things you are feeling. To the things you aren’t feeling. To look hard at the work you’re doing and look for what’s under the surface, for what’s brewing.”

“You’re making it sound like sorcery again.”

“No. You’re listening to it like it’s sorcery. You don’t want to hear what I’m saying, do you?”

“What you are saying sounds like something a medium would tell a patient. Or a fairy godmother would whisper to her charge. You except me to start believing in your magic because you’re telling me to?”

“Well, isn’t there magic to how we all relate to each other and what we can give each other?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“No, but it’s what I meant.”

Two days later
, on Tuesday morning, I took a subway uptown and, because I was early, got out on 72nd street, walking west to Fifth avenue and then heading north.

On my left, Central Park was finally all green, and in bloom with so many flowers and blossoming trees they perfumed the air despite the exhaust and fumes from the cars and buses that crowded the street.

Of course I knew I was going to meet Gideon, but when I saw him from a block away, standing on the top of the stone steps, immobile, his hair blowing in the May breeze, I felt a sweep of shock chill me.

It was visceral - my body reacting to the sight of him - sending messages to my nerve endings. Zinging me. Buffeting me. Pushing me to rush towards him. To breathe faster. To swallow larger gulps of air. To be aware of how my breasts felt with the soft fabric of my silk camisole rubbing against them. How my ankles felt cooler where the air hit them. I felt the fabric of my jeans on my hipbones: slightly rough and heavy compared to my silky underwear. I felt the back of my neck, realizing it was warm as if I’d been out in the sun. But I hadn’t. The side of the street I was walking on was in heavy shade from the trees lining the avenue.

The sensations were uncomfortable and surprising enough to make me consciously shift focus off the man waiting for me and instead onto where we were going.

The Metropolitan Museum is an imposing structure. Larger and more impressive than any other museum I’ve ever visited except for the Louvre in Paris. But I love the Met more because it’s my hometown museum. An edifice that others find cold, and a layout that others find unnavigable, is, to me, neither. Rather, I find it a comforting palace where I have always gone for inspiration, education, to be awed and to be consoled.

I never visited the Met with other people. Looking at art is something I need to be alone to do. To walk at my own pace. To rush by something that has no interest and dwell - for what might be an obscenely long time to someone else - in front of a painting, vase or sculpture that moves me.

But this was where I had told Gideon to meet me.

“It’s this way,” I said to Gideon as I led him through the grand and formal lobby of the Metropolitan Museum, looking as I always did at the enormous bouquets of flowers flanking the staircase. That day they were towering apple blossoms, and I silently thanked the benefactress who had left an endowment so that those two giant vases would always be filled with fresh flowers.

I was a member, so we didn’t have to pay for tickets, just collect the small buttons that permitted us entry.

Inside the front hall, the staircase ahead, I led Gideon to the left. Passing quickly through galleries of ancient middle-eastern jewelry, we entered the medieval church - or at least that was what I’d always called the high-ceilinged, darkened room that housed dozens of medieval church sculptures and elaborate gates aquired from a cathedral in Spain.

We walked in silence. Spending so much time in the museum on my own, it was natural not to speak in much the same way that one keeps reverentially silent in a library or house of worship. I don’t know if Gideon felt it too or if he was respectful of my quietude. I didn’t ask.

Continuing on, we took another right and went through two rooms of more church artifacts. Ahead was the brightly lit Knights and Armor exhibition hall. This wasn’t an area of the museum that’d I’d visited in years and I wasn’t sure that what I wanted to show Gideon was even mounted there. At the entrance to the gallery of gleaming silver men sitting atop their mounted steeds, I turned left into an almost hidden hallway. Even though the museum was crowded, this corner was empty.

We were in a small anteroom. Before us was a palatial bedroom. In the center was a bed covered with ancient red silk damask. Its headboard rose up, ornate and intricate, carved by artisans hundreds of years before.

It was a luxurious bed. A bed to crawl into and stay for days. You could live in that bed, have your food brought to you there. Get drunk on sweet wine, eat figs and fresh strawberries, take naps, make love, wake up, sip hot melted chocolate out of gold demitasse cups. It was a bed that you came to dressed in peignoirs and silk robes that were handmade with rolled edges. A bed that invited you to stay as long as you wanted, that promised you there was no better place to be; a bed where you created a world away from the world of hard edges and harsh lights. Where there was nothing but physical pleasure or sweet slumber. Your head would lay against those pillows and there would be nothing more important than feeling someone’s lips on yours.

“I always wanted to hide out in the ladies room at closing time, so that I could sneak in here and sleep in this bed for one night,” I said.

“I can see you doing that,” he laughed.

That surprised me. It meant he’d spent time forming an impression of me. But what puzzled me even more than that was that I hadn’t done the same. Since the day we’d spent at the beach I’d avoided thinking about him. Even focusing on the project made me slightly nervous. I’d been worried if I thought about it too much, or thought about Gideon at all, I might change my mind and pass up the job.

To the right of the bed was a window so well lit by an artificial light source that you were sure if you walked over to it, you’d be able to see beyond it to the street below. Not the New York City street, but the Italian passageway from another century.

To the left of the bed was a hanging gilt-framed, spotted mirror, the mercury so old it had begun to flake off. The way it was positioned, I could see a reflection of not just the bed and the rest of the room, but Gideon and I, standing there.

What would anyone think if they saw us there?

I was curious. What image did we present? Did
I
present. Who was inside of the shell that was reflected in the ancient mirror? How much about me was revealed to anyone looking? How much of our deeper selves are expressed in the lines in our foreheads or the light in our eyes?

I’ve always believed we can hide who we are when we need to. That anyone looking at my mother’s photographs of me, or Cole’s photos of me, would not know me any better for having seen the portraits. I would remain unknown to them.

But suddenly I wasn’t sure.

And that made me concerned.

Gideon’s eyes moved from the bed to the mirror to the ceiling. A small contented sigh escaped his lips.

I craned my neck, too. I had been here so long ago that it was like seeing the carving for the first time. There were dozens and dozens of fat cherubs flying around the room. The three-dimensional
putti
, celebrating the idea of both sacred and profane love were fat and joyful.

Behind us, a mother and a child walked in, hand in hand. The mother told the child to look up, and the little girl’s mouth opened. “Oh mommy,” she said. “I never saw so many babies without any diapers before.”

I smiled at the woman, who was clearly proud of her little darling’s ability to be so observant. Gideon was still enthralled by the ceiling and seemed to be studying it intensely.

After another minute or two, the pair left and we were alone again.

I stole a glance back at the mirror and watched the two of us, him looking up, me looking ahead. We were side by side, his dark to my light, his tall to my lack of height.

“Can you imagine making love in this room?” he asked without turning to me, eyes still on the sculptured cherubs.

I didn’t answer him. I’d noticed a placard to my right and chose that moment to start to read it. The room, it said, had come from a sixteenth century palazzo in Venice. Then there was a short history about the family who owned the palazzo and the customs of the day: enough to make anyone who bothered to read it, feel that they were now duly informed.

“In the mirror,” I began almost without realizing that I had indeed begun, “he would undress her in the mirror. He would watch her watching herself as she began to take off her clothes, while the sun set beyond the window, casting both of them in a warm orange glow.”

Gideon turned to me. I felt his eyes but didn’t look at him. I remained where I was, staring into the mottled mirror. The idea of this second assignment – to create an erotic story about sight – was coming together in my mind in a series of disparate images. One overlapping the other.

To get through this I had to hold on to what I’d learned at the beach: that making up a story for Gideon was no different than creating a collage. It took the same mental action. An ability to let go of following a rational line of thinking and let the random visuals tell their own story. Not to impose structure on it until the internal logic revealed itself. Yes, it was a three-dimensional manifestation of the imagery that I ordinarily would have created, with papers and scissors and glue. But it was still the same process. And that gave me courage and some – well at least a little - self-confidence.

“She wouldn’t turn away from the mirror, no matter how much she wanted to…” I said a little braver and at the same time more nervous than I’d been at the beach. I knew what to expect this time. I wanted it for the thrill of creating it. I just wished Gideon wasn’t there. That he wasn’t so real.

“She would watch herself undressing. Not look up or out the window or even at the bed. She knows that her goal is to seduce him and she knows how to do that. All her energy and enthusiasm is for that. Her power will be in being powerless. He wants her to undress for him, and that’s enough. She can obey. Because the act will excite her too. Knowing his eyes are on her, that he is completely riveted by her disrobing is all the incentive she needs.”

“Why are they here?” Gideon asked, almost in a whisper as if he was afraid to break the mood.

“He has brought her to show her this room. He had it built and designed for her. This secret room where she can come and go from a separate entrance. A secret entrance to a secret room.

“She is his mistress. For far longer than any of the others were. And he has rewarded her with this clandestine bedchamber to keep her happy. To give them a trysting place that is both comfortable, opulent, and convenient for him.

“It makes him almost deliriously happy that now he can leave a dinner or a meeting in his residence, where he lives with his wife, children, and many servants, and walk through a bookcase, down a short hall, then up a hidden staircase to their place. The rest of the house can carry on around them and no one can know, will know, ever, where they are.

“There is also a second exit and entrance to the room. This one can be accessed from the canal. A small door next to the servants’ door, in the back. He has apologized to her for this, but she doesn’t mind coming to him from near the servants’ entrance. It is safer for her, because she is married, too.

“Marriages are arranged for financial and political reasons and so it is the custom of the city at this time, that affairs of the heart are acceptable and engaged in frequently but still conducted clandestinely.

“He’s proud of the room. It’s the most beautiful in Venice. He imported a sculptor, from Rome who arrived with three apprentices, to create a magical, heavenly place. And while she does think it’s beautiful, and appreciates the effort he went to, she is most mesmerized by the mirror: the finest she has ever looked into. She can’t take her eyes off of it. Or off the two of them, facing each other in the reflective glass. She has never seen her own face flushed by any kind of desire before, so it comes as something of a shock to her…”

I stopped. Took a breath. Closed my eyes. I could tell Gideon was waiting for more. But I didn’t say anything else. I couldn’t.

“Don’t–”

“What?”

“Don’t stop. You’re really seeing it. Seeing them. You disappeared the way you did at the ocean.”

“It was getting complicated.”

“You mean it was getting too erotic too quickly?”

I shrugged.

“It was. It was even easier for you this time.” He wasn’t asking, he was telling. I could feel his eyes on me but I didn’t turn. I kept facing the mirror. Looking at the two of us. At his fingers flexed beside his thighs. At the dark hair falling into his eyes. He was watching, waiting for me to go on or explain more about why I didn’t want to.