This Close to Okay(32)
“Gustav Klimt.”
“The Kiss,” he said, looking away, refocusing on the TV.
“I love art history, even though I know that particular Klimt is everywhere. Loving that piece doesn’t make me all that original. I also love Dana?,” Tallie said, pointing to another shimmery Klimt she had framed on a shelf. “One of my favorite things to do is go to the art museum alone and share space with the work. In the quiet. Sometimes I cry there,” she said. She knew talking about her own feelings helped others to be able to talk about theirs, and sharing her pure love for the art museum was an easy thing to gush about. “I don’t know why I do it—I just get…overwhelmed by my own feelings and everyone else’s and all the history of the world.”
Years ago she’d made an important connection with one of Lionel’s fancy friends who had helped Joel—unhappy with his marketing job—get the curator of contemporary art position at the museum. Joel and Odette had met working there, but that museum was Tallie’s, not Joel’s. It meant too much to her. It was the one she’d grown up going to, the one where she fell in love with sculptures and light installations and Dutch Golden Age paintings, especially the flowers. All of it! And now that Joel and Odette were gone, Tallie had reclaimed the space completely by re-upping her membership and going every Sunday after church.
“It’s popular for a reason. It’s beautiful. And you’re plenty original, trust me,” he said.
Her face warmed at the compliment. “You are, too.”
“I like Frida, Basquiat, Andy Warhol, too,” Emmett said, motioning to a stack of books by the table that included Frida’s journals, a Basquiat hardback, a thick book of Warhol Polaroids, and a biography of Augusta Savage. “Awesome. Augusta Savage. I really love sculptures. It blows my mind how someone can take a block of marble and make it look soft or like someone standing in the wind. An exact replica of the human form,” he said, lying back on her couch like he was her boyfriend.
“Right, like Michelangelo’s David or Winged Victory of Samothrace. They’re two of the most popular sculptures on earth, but it knocks me out if I imagine seeing them for the first time. I don’t ever want to get over it! I never want to get tired or bored of beauty and goodness. That would worry me,” she said. “I don’t like to use the word obsession lightly because obsessiveness is a real problem for some people, but I’m so in love with David’s right hand, down on his thigh. I love looking at it! You’re going to think I’m a weirdo, but I have an entire section of my secret art history Pinterest board dedicated just to close-ups of his oversized right hand.”
Photos of David’s right hand soothed Tallie—the tip of his middle finger touching his thigh, the snaking veins—imagining how the cool marble would feel. She liked thinking about holding David’s hand. She also loved his nose, his entire face, those haunting eyes holding hearts. That taut torso, perfect ass, and glorious contrapposto. Some nights when she couldn’t sleep, she listened to music and scrolled through her Pinterest. It was one way she took care of herself.
“We’ve already established you’re the best possible kind of weirdo,” Emmett said.
“Oh, have we, now?”
“Definitely,” he said before continuing. “Yeah, I’ve been overseas once. Paris for a short time when I was in high school, so I got to go to the Louvre and see the Nike, the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo.”
“That sounds lovely. I want to go to the Louvre someday and the Accademia Gallery in Florence to see David, although I’m afraid seeing it in real life would make me get Stendhal syndrome or…what’s it called?…hyperkulturemia? Seeing something like that in person can cause some people to have an art panic attack. Art attacks…art palpitations. I’d be the one to faint. It’s seventeen feet tall. Thinking about seeing it in real life wears me out.” Tallie put the back of her hand to her forehead, mimed a fainting spell.
She let her hand slide to her heart, racing a little faster from the conversation, which often happened when she talked about art. Her face got hot, and she wanted to burst out of her skin. Rubens syndrome. She had erotic postcards tacked to the wall next to her bed; they’d been hanging there for years, held above the lamp with flat metal pushpins, the gloss glowing every time the wide triangle of light shone up and out. In the past, they’d reminded her not only of romance and dreams but also of fantasies of a steamy anniversary vacation with Joel. The two of them going overseas to spend mornings in bed and entire days visiting art museums, dining al fresco, completely immersed in another culture and language. Perhaps a second honeymoon. Tallie had accepted that fantasy as bust but had recently surprised herself by considering going alone.
“Whenever I’m in an art museum, I feel like that scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the one when Cameron is staring at Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and it keeps zooming in and in and all meaning disappears. I like how nothing else matters when you’re looking at a painting…you can just forget the world completely,” he said. He’d curled his hands into loose fists and held them up together to one eye, closed the other, and looked through to Tallie.
“Absolutely. I love that scene…let’s watch it.”
She pulled up the movie from her digital library, clicking to the art museum scene: the instrumental cover of the Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want.” Flashes of Hopper, Picasso. Cassatt. Gauguin. Pollock, Matisse. Cameron melting into the Seurat while Ferris and Sloane kiss in front of the night-blue stained glass of Marc Chagall’s America Windows.