a Beauty at the metropolitan

Thea Goodman

Sliding her doll-like hand up the banister to the Met, Helene sees Arthur at the top of the museum steps, standing alert as if on the mast of a ship. He looks just that restless for a spot of land, just that eager and unsure. He had said her hands were a doll’s and she notices that they are small, white, nearly waxy with tapering fingers, but also, that it’s almost impossible to really see one’s own hand. Arthur, lost and free, is looking out in the dark over Fifth Avenue for a park-y, museum girl, a showered princess who studies AP Art History.

Of all his criteria, she is only an art lover. She knows what is the desirable prototype, the kind of face a boy likes (is fooled by, thinks mirrors the soul) and it is not hers. Someone with shiny hair and a good white smile, someone with symmetry in that pieta of eyes nose and mouth. Helene had overheard some girls just like this saying something violent, meant to be heard, “if you could just remove Helene’s hideous face and keep her body…” And the boys, sturdy, athletic, young Republicans proclaimed her body “hot,” her face “something you have to just ignore.” She had begun to imagine herself decapitated, as if her head were only a ten-pound weight balanced on top of the column of her body.

Arthur, she reminded herself as she gained the top step, was not among the cruel. Arthur made the funny, concentration faces, his pointy tongue stuck out over the ridge of his upper lip, his eyes shut tight as if bracing himself for an explosion, as he plays the violin.  In practice he caught her eye while she sang and he tried to move his Adam’s apple around to make her laugh. For this one night he will be her acne genius, she his decapitated siren. Maybe he really likes her. And, if she goes to his house, she will get to see his parent’s collection of paintings. They are famous collectors and own a stodgy gallery of lithographs on Madison Avenue. As she moves up the steps, she hears Arthur’s little dog start to yap, sees the rough thing, the color of toast, starts to jump with anger and joy.

The plan had been made that afternoon at practice. Arthur, it had been decreed by the headless soprano, would go and walk his dog and she would offer to go buy her mother cigarettes. “Your mother smokes?” he sneered because they live in the beginning of the new century when self-destructive, though legal, pleasure is a sin, when the body is a temple. Helene nodded.  Arthur persisted, perhaps unable to believe his good fortune, “But why would it take you so long to find cigarettes? Won’t your mother wonder?” he asked. It would have been a valid question if Helene had a mother with a sense of time, but it passed woozily for her, unaccountably in their boxy white living room perched high above York Avenue. When her mother drank, time was an ocean for her, not a measured thing at all.

“No, it’s fine.” Her mother would not wonder.

They decided they would meet at the steps of the Met. “Right in the middle,” Helene directed (she always chose the same spot) as they stood under the buzz of the music room’s institutional light. The two of them hesitated for a moment as if they might kiss goodbye.

“That works for me,” Arthur said, grinning. The tacit part, the implication in their arrangement--that he would then sneak her into his parent’s apartment and have sex with her-- made Arthur’s hand quiver as he held his bow. But his smile--because he knew, everyone knew, she was a slut—seemed, nonetheless, precipitous.

“You said you thought we should talk some time, Arthur.”

“Yes, I did, but” he blushed deeply, “you’re really brazen.”

“Thank you…I guess.” She could only afford to take this as a compliment. Brazen. She was a brazen slut. The first word, brazen, lent the word, slut, a kind of humor and dignity, implying that being a slut was willful and deliberate and required a certain bravery and daring. Like the head and body on a doll, the words brazenslut pressed together and clicked like they were meant for each other. You couldn’t be a brazen prude, or a timid slut. Arthur lifted a hand up to high five her and in that gesture, she briefly liked who she was.

Going out at night, Helene liked the danger of skirting past the kiosks on Eighty-sixth Street, moving past offers to “smoke, smoke” hustling past catcalls and whistles and lingering looks. The city was elating no matter how the street received her. The apartment they lived in seemed to hover, not adjacent to, but in a parallel world from the sprawling apartments of her classmates. Helene’s mother had become a buyer at a department store where Arthur’s mother probably shopped. With her decent alimony and the scholarship and almost all she earned she sent Helene to the elite school. Elite of mythical elite.  School of movie star’s children and standing quotas at Harvard.  But Helene knew herself as poor. A poor, brazenslut. Her mother sometimes called Helene ungrateful. But how could Helene express her gratitude for school with its private twin pleasures: intellect arriving in ninth grade like a heretofore unknown gift and her unaccountable sex. What could she possibly say about these things to her mother? I’m that improbable thing, a brain and a slut. Thank you.

Helene smiled at Arthur as she sat next to him on the steps.  There remained, with each boy a possibility of connection. You never knew. The October chill smelled like pencil lead. Her smile was open, friendlier then the one she used with other boys. His skin was a flat beige, the texture of pickles, his nose, a crooked rudder in the center of his extremely narrow face. She liked his face. It was sculptural and interesting.  She wondered how someone, maybe Picasso, would have painted Arthur’s magnificent nose.

She smiled at his dog, so fierce and happy, and fished a cigarette out of her pocket. “Do you have one of those, another, I mean?”  He had acted so sanctimonious about her mother smoking.

“Anything for you, darling.”

Set up, he held the cigarette away from his squinting eyes and propped his other arm on his knee. It looked as if he were trying to enlarge his chest, to create a wingspan and look bigger than he was. She had seen other boys sit this way, legs spread, dumbly strumming air guitar, but on Arthur it was a pose. She knew from practice that he usually sat with his legs crossed, his long oval head, grimacing as he concentrated on each moan and pierce of his violin.

In the uncomfortable silence between them, the dog sighed as if deflated and then began licking between her fingers in long strokes. Its pink tongue flapped like a piece of bacon. This seemed to embarrass Arthur and he looked away. He was earnest, askew, coiled up in his own song. She knew he was a virgin because of the way she had seen him smiling at her cleavage. She had liked the overextended spread of his thin fingers on his bow and the fact that he appeared friendless.

He stared at the end of his cigarette to make sure it was still lit. “How are you, Arthur?” she said and stared him straight in the face as if to show him, bravely, brazenly her face. One of his eyelids had a tic and fluttered.

“Do you want to just go?” he answered. Even with other boys who really had wide stances there had been more than that: an attempt at conversation, a comment about how to roll a joint, a remark about a strict teacher or a game scaring a flock of pigeons swarming at their ankles.

“I’ll just finish my cigarette first. We could talk for a while,” she said. She looked him in the face one more time closely. See me.  He only inhaled and choked on the smoke. “I don’t even know you,” she said looking at her feet.

“Who do you know?” He snorted a little as if he meant to say that she, too, had no friends, as if he wanted desperately to get out of the league that he was certainly in with her. The question surprised her. Her chest became cold, a barren desert expanding.

“I know The Sphinx.” She had seen it one day in a slide presentation in Art History and felt as if she had been there; she knew its massive sandy beauty, its cool interior chamber and inhabited it. She knew the feeling of the paws stretched out regally on the hot ground, better than she had known anyone.

“Who’s that?” Arthur asked.

“You don’t know the Sphinx?”

Arthur coughed, too nervous to understand the obvious reference.

 “He’s a drug dealer,” she said. “He goes to another school.” A smile curled the corners of her lips. “You wouldn’t know him.” Arthur, she saw, might not deserve to know the truth, that she knew the Egyptian Sphinx, that she felt a comfort and closeness with a Doric column more than she did with any person. He turned his thin neck away from her into the light wind and faced the expanse of dried fountains, flanking the steps. His knee shook frantically. She was mad at him for turning away. “Is that a part of how boys masturbate? By shaking your knee like that?”

“What? Helene, you should know.” She wanted to be angry with him, but liked that he had used her name.

“How would I know?” she asked.

“Never mind,” he said.

She felt bold, fierce and small like the dog. She wanted to bark at him shrilly. His sneakers were so new and white, his stance grew wider and wider as if he had not been waiting for this night, waiting for her all year, all his life. She had been told worse things before: once as she lay in this guy’s single bed together under boyish navy blue sheets, he said, “You have a really nice back.”  Her back was a tawny color and narrowed at the waist. It had no blemishes, folds, or moles. It was dispiriting to hear. Portraits were of faces for a reason. Faces were as meaningful as landscape, as connective as voices. Bodies, even one’s own, seemed sometimes alien. If you looked around in class, you could always catch someone daydreaming, examining their own palm, the webbed sections between their fingers as if they were seeing them for the first time, and the teachers too, pulled their earlobes and their beards, as if checking to see that their billowy essences, all their words and spirit were contained in something solid. When the boy said this about her back she imagined it, skinned, then pinned to his wall like a prize. Her back? It had everything and nothing to do with her.

It was she who suggested they leave. It was, after all, a forgone conclusion. And, she wanted to see the paintings, his parent’s famous collection. He smiled at her in a horny way, and she remembered the apart-ness he had possessed in music, the fierceness of his concentration. He might’ve really been a musical genius. As they rose to leave she wondered why she acted nice when she felt mean. She smiled at little things he said and chuckled even though she wanted to bark and bite.

Getting off the elevator on his floor, four images of the same woman stared out with deep black pansy eyes. A Warhol. The woman was not classically beautiful and had Arthur’s nose. It must have been his mother! She hoped that Arthur would give her a tour but already as he fumbled with the lock, he was tiptoeing in an exaggerated style and whispering, “Don’t say a word, all right?” Terror would stop him from showing her anything. Inside, he immediately slid his finger down the dimmer on the light switch until it was pitch black. When they padded through the foyer, the extinguished lights hummed: he had turned the dimmer all the way down but forgotten to flick the switch off.  Arthur walked in front of her, twisting his sweaty hand out of her grasp as she tried to hold it. The darkness was inky, liquid, and in an instant she lost him. She traced her hands along the walls, trailing her fingers over the bumps and grooves of an oil painting. She might have been touching a Chagall, for God’s sakes. Next she touched smooth glass, edged by a gilt frame but what treasure was inside?

A trickle of sweat curled down her back. The foyer was so dark. She had no idea where she was. Maybe Arthur was playing a trick on her and would soon jump out and say Boo. Soon she lost all sense of direction, of where the front door had been. Her hand trailed over an exceptionally slick picture, giant ovals of paint as smooth as plastic intersected with one another.

She had discovered just recently, during a slide presentation, that this might be the way for her to live: to perceive and not to be seen at all. An invisible receptor, she had shrunk down in the chair in the dark auditorium as the projector clicked ancient images onto the screen. When an image came before her, her own life--self conscious and painful--seemed to melt away. Her body pleasantly hollowed out and hovered just above her seat.

As she stepped cautiously in the dark apartment, green bloomed deeply behind her lids. A rough maroon tickled her palm. A wispy, bright scratch of white paint seared like a small tooth: light on water. Arthur hissed into the blackness.

“Are you coming?” Jostled out of her reverie, she remembered the last time she had asked Alan Jenks the same question because she wanted to pinpoint what it was that made them come, see if there were any correlates between her actions and their explosions.  “Helene!” Arthur whispered vehemently, after her silence.

She reached her arms in the dark to find him, but couldn’t. He was standing too far away. “Where are you?” she said.

“Shhh. Right in front of you,” he said. “Are you coming or not?”

Maybe it was that he had shushed her. Or that he would not take even one step closer to find her. He was not a prodigy; he was no one special. “No,” she answered to her own surprise. She heard his acquired snort of dismay as if he wasn’t Arthur of the violin concentration face at all, but was actually Alan Jenks. He snorted as if he, too, didn’t crave the solace of beauty, the lift and connection through a note, a hue, a word, through harmony. He took it for granted: A Warhol in the vestibule. He lived surrounded by art.

“No? What’s that supposed to mean, Helene?” This voice was just barely his again, vulnerable and nearly shrill as if he needed her.

“I’ll let myself out,” she said, even though she knew she would have trouble finding the door on her own.

“Whatever,” he said still with a twinge of a whine. Her eyes had adjusted a bit to the dark and she could barely make out the rectangular edges of canvases, the contours of his impossibly narrow face. In the dark, she supposed, Arthur felt he could be who he wanted to be: numb and large and deaf to the sublime, motionless in the face of concertos. What qualities had she attributed to him because of his weird face? Beauty maker Arthur was gone, was perhaps only an illusion.  Sadly, she pictured him drowning in a huge ocean.  “The door locks automatically.”

“You wouldn’t even hold my hand,” she said, her sympathy vanishing. She would clobber him. She would push him under the water.

“What?”

“When we came in—you twisted--you pulled your hand away.”

He was silent.

“I should go. I just think my mother is probably wondering where I am by now.” Her throat grew full and hard with this lie. She opened the door and slipped out into the hallway, holding it slightly ajar. She looked back inside:  Was she giving him another chance? Would he give her one? But she saw Arthur’s back walking away from her.

The foyer was empty.  Instead of pressing the elevator button she crept back into the apartment and let the heavy door click shut.

She was trespassing. She just wanted to see the paintings; it would be like stealing something that she truly deserved. It seemed fair: This was how Arthur might have felt had they slept together. Helene traced her hands back on the wall, sliding them over the patches of buffed shiny paint and glassed frames. She was following a sound she was barely aware of, a sound she had become accustomed to. She moved toward the buzz. She would find the dimmer and flood the foyer with light.

Her ears pricked with the needling electric buzz. Black wet cotton darkness surrounded her. Arthur’s home had no distinguishing scent. The shadowy room vibrated with the sound of the light.

Her fingers traced the perimeter of the door moving out in foot wide sweeps away from its edges. Surfaces seemed to grow under her searching hand and despair settled again in her throat. She thought of her mother, probably in the deepest sleep by now on the white sofa. Did she dream of her daughter? Her hand found the dimmer and slid it up.

The buzz ceased as the light seeped on and the color red, like an ocean, clear in parts and denser, saturated, in others, faced her. Bands of red and dark purple seemed to move out into a distant horizon and also inched towards her at the same time. An encompassing surround color glowed off the edges of the square canvas where it was frayed and blended with brown. There were no separations there. It was impossible to locate a point where the brown ended and the red began yet on their furthest edges they were discrete. Her mother might have seen Helene in her dreams. She might have loved her because Helene was hers. She leaned against the opposite wall and, bending her knees, slid down to the floor, resting as the color soaked her brain like a healing bright serum. She had found it. A beauty so unlike the fakeness of the world. Or the inept word, beauty itself, with all its jammed up vowels.

But the painting was beautiful, more than any sweater or face could be. She found it until she was inside it, until she was that inimitable word. The doll’s dismemberment, the separation of her head and her body was gone. Footsteps came softly down the hall then stopped. The tentative steps began again, and then rushed against the carpet.  The condom in her back pocket crackled as Helene stood up and froze.  Arthur appeared and held up two fingers in the peace sign before he turned out the light. The electric buzz of the light switch coursed through her brain--a mere vessel--in living color.

Thea Goodman is the author of THE SUNSHINE WHEN SHE’S GONE (Henry Holt 2013,) a novel about a marital crisis that ensues upon the birth of a first child. The New York Public Library chose her short story, “Evidence,” the title story of a collection in-progress, for Stories on the MTA, a Digital Archive 2019. Other stories, essays and poems appeared in New England Review, Columbia, The Rumpus, The Coachella Review and The Huffington Post among other publications and are forthcoming in Arrowsmith. She lives in Chicago, was a visiting faculty member at The University of Chicago and is at work on a new novel and poems.