Angelo Veneto, painter of young gentlemen, was having his first one-man show. It had taken nearly five hundred years. “Only five hundred years,” Adger Boatwright liked to say. “I guess there’s hope for us all!”
Adger Boatwright was the curator of Atlanta’s Harrington Collection and he tried out the joke on each of the Ladies of the Board. It was the Ladies’ Coca-Cola money that had paid for the Collection’s Twenty Renaissance Gems, which included Angelo’s portrait, circa 1515, of a smooth-cheeked young nobleman with a Mongol cast to his eyes and a dangerous gaze. The tail feathers of the canary are completely stuffed in this cat’s mouth, sealed by a mildly belligerent smile. He’s gripping a fat stick—say anything and he’ll use it on you, though really he’d rather not. The Ladies were famously particular but Portrait of a Gentleman in a Red Cape was an easy sell. “Just look at him,” Adger said to them, one at a time, in the darkness of the Collection’s screening room. Each lady stared at the larger-than-life-size projected image, but Adger never took his eyes off the lady. He could see the fear in her, he could see she couldn’t turn away. “Do you not find him beautiful?” he asked.
His powers of persuasion were such that the director of the Harrington gave him full access to the Ladies. Curators and directors could be water and oil, but Adger’s interest in greasing the machinery that made the Collection run rivaled that of his boss, who complemented his curator’s efforts by spending weekends golfing with the Ladies’ husbands. Even if he could have afforded it, Adger would never have been admitted to the Club.
He was a large doughy man whose parents had met on the assembly line of the fruitcake factory in Claxton. He made it through the trial of high school by spending weekends with “friends” in nearby Savannah, where he was really being educated in pederasty, neoclassical American objets, and the magic of the society portrait. By the time he obtained his degree in art history from Emory, his accent was a liquid Low Country and the fruitcake-assembling parents no longer figured into his family story or his life. (A somewhat ruined but functioning silk plantation on the coast did appear in the boyhood part of the story, and no one ever pointed out that by the end of the eighteenth century the hope in silk had declined; by the end of the nineteenth, the silk plantations had all burned to the ground; and by the middle of the twentieth, the remaining mulberry trees were cut for timber, the dispossessed blue-blood silkworms obliged to fend for themselves.) Pederasty too had fallen away, in favor of innuendo and art. The Ladies loved Adger most especially because he never brought it up. He had a way about him that made it easy for them to agree with a man that yes, the taunting young aristocrat in the painting was, mercy, beautiful. A decade later, when the idea for the one-man show was taking shape and Adger told the joke to the Ladies—there were three more of them by now—they all laughed, and one by one removed their checkbooks from their purses.
Jonathan Weitz had overheard the joke four times already, and he did not think it was funny. For two years he’d been the Collection’s associate curator and still had no office, just a desk outside Adger’s enormous portrait-lined room. Jon sat behind a half wall that revealed his head and yet made him invisible to the director whenever he came to see Adger. The half wall was topped by a ledge that Adger leaned on as he made demands of Jon and fraught small talk. The best Jon could do was fake a laugh when Adger, after escorting out one of his Ladies, tried the joke on him.
It wasn’t the extravagance of Adger Boatwright’s closet that bothered Jon, nor even the fact of it. It hadn’t been so long since that freezing New Haven night when Jon walked around the Old Campus half a dozen times before seeking out the college’s Counselor of Homosexuals, who sat in a former chapel, waiting. As for Adger’s insistence on self-invention, even if he had no talent for it—well, why not? No, what annoyed Jon was that Adger Boatwright, curator of the Harrington Collection, keeper of the Twenty Renaissance Gems, knew nothing about art. Oh, he loved beautiful paintings, especially portraits, especially when hung in a room full of exquisite furniture, preferably in England. But it was this very appreciation of a painting that blinded him to it.
A painting’s provenance—who had owned it, where it had been shown, how much it had sold for at which auction house—fascinated Adger so much that it had given him the idea for his most recent show at the Harrington. Adger had chosen from the Collection the five paintings with the ritziest pasts. Antonio Boltraffio’s Portrait of a Lady with Pearls was displayed alongside a gratuitous and absurd model of the parquet-floored room of the “English treasurehouse” where it had hung until the collection was dispersed after the Second World War. There were fingernail-sized paintings on its walls. Giorgione’s Portrait of a Girl—owned by the Duke of Edinburgh! The show was resolutely anti-intellectual, its tone dizzily self-congratulatory. A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words was coming down just as Jon got there but the museum was still abuzz; it was the most popular show in the history of any similar-sized institution in the country. Adger was golden and insufferable.
Part lightweight travelogue, part flimsy mystery story, part This Old House, the show had so much stuff in it that you could easily overlook the paintings themselves. After an hour alone with his new boss’s show, Jon wondered if this wasn’t the point. Great art was easier not to look at than to truly take in.
In graduate school he had been considered old-fashioned, and in a fusty field like art history this was saying something. Like the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, Jon believed the role of criticism was to illuminate the work of art itself. His doctoral research on Pope Urban VIII was sound, but he used it not to examine the nature of papal patronage but instead to appreciate the marvels the pope had commissioned—the churches, the sculpture, the loggias, the frescoes. The gift of man’s creation to the city—this was the sacred thing, and the pope knew it. Jon was young and at Yale, he was supposed to be interested in poststructuralism, postcolonialism, post-Lacanian psychoanalysis—something current, something French. He could have pretended. Instead he became like an actress who won’t keep herself blond enough or thin enough; his prospects in the academy dried up. He got interviews but not jobs; then he stopped getting interviews.
It was for the best, he reminded himself. Unlike his peers he was not begging for visiting lectureships at poverty wages. He had been spared this particular set of humiliations. He was glad to be working for someone who had never heard of Foucault. And yet he was having a hard time sharing Adger’s vision of the museum of art as a museum of artifacts, a kind of grandmother’s attic full of interesting juxtapositions.
As for the joke—well, the show hadn’t even happened yet and Adger Boatwright was already burying the paintings. Because the joke wasn’t just dumb, it shut out the truth, or at least the pursuit of it. Why had it taken Angelo Veneto five hundred years to get a show together? Never mind that the very idea of a show, a retrospective, was a modern one—presumably Adger knew that. Angelo was no Leonardo but he was as good as his more-famous contemporaries Bellini and Giorgione, who may have invented the modern portrait—the portrait that reveals “character” and “personality”—but never took it as far as Angelo did. Look at a Giorgione portrait and you think This kid’s head is in the clouds. Or: He’s looking at me but he seems very far away. And you feel secure in going further: just as you can’t not read a billboard that suddenly looms before you, you can’t help knowing what Giorgione’s subjects are thinking. How out of sorts I feel today! How life weighs on me in my youth! How strangely nice it feels to have Holofernes’s head under my foot! Captions suggest themselves. But the visual expression of specific thoughts wasn’t the point; introspection itself became the subject of these paintings.
That was enough of an accomplishment for Giorgione—but not for Angelo. You want to shield your face, not guess what his subjects are thinking. Painted in three-quarters view, they stare at you or just beyond—they seem to have a secret they’re daring you to figure out. They stand armed before landscapes; scraps of text hang and curl. You stare until you lose yourself in this labyrinth of symbols, which come into the painting from the usual places—family history, classical myth, the Bible—and emerge as elements of the subject’s psyche. Spend time with the subject of the Collection’s Portrait of a Gentleman in a Red Cape and you suspect his arrogance masks something that he’d rather not confront and that you too should avoid. He knows you’re looking at him, he’ll tolerate that. But if he knew you were focusing on the worn white codpiece appearing in the hole cut out of his black tunic—where the eye is naturally drawn, where it is impossible not to look—he wouldn’t hesitate to use his stick on you.
You’re lured, trapped, threatened, shamed—all at once. At least this was how Jon felt. Caravaggios affected him with their mysterious play of shadow and light, the gorgeous embattled flesh offering itself up to you—but when faced with, say, some street urchin pretending to be St. John the Baptist, Jon could never quite get past responding No, you’re not! The Angelos affected him as no paintings ever had. How could he hold a light up to these paintings, as he was charged to do, when they seemed intent on his submission? It was distracting. It was nuts. No wonder Angelo Veneto had never had a retrospective: the last thing you’d want to do is end up in a room full of these things.
Adger Boatwright obviously thought otherwise. The Ladies went for that first Angelo because he had them focus on the painting’s beauty to the exclusion of all else. Sure, he looks like he’s going to kill you, but so what? He’s Italian, and hot! Maybe Adger truly thought the sexiness of Angelo’s paintings trumped all else. Whatever his attitude, thinking had little to do with it. The idea of the show had come to him in a vision. At the Louvre—where else? He was standing before the Portrait of a Boy with a Hammer, one of that museum’s two Angelos, and he imagined all the painter’s subjects crowding around him. Their various props—hammer, staff, horse-head sword—clattered and swung.
An Angelo Veneto show. It may have been a good idea—but how to pull it off?
The paintings are difficult, they generate a sense of unease—but there was another problem with mounting an Angelo show: almost nothing is known about him. Where and when he was born: no record. Where and when he died: ditto. His signature, on those paintings he signed, usually includes some reference to Venice, but there’s evidence he was born in Padua and moved to Venice as a child. His signature may simply have indicated his association with the Venetian school of painting. Even the safe bet that some time between birth and death Angelo lived in Venice has been challenged by one art historian’s claim that Angelo’s adult life was spent in Turin. He may have abandoned city life altogether; there was a plague in Italy during his lifetime, and young men who liked to have their portraits painted fled the cities to avoid it. Homosexuals claim Angelo as their own, and certainly history shows no trace of a wife.
Luckily for the Harrington—crucially for it—an art historian at the University of Bologna had devoted her life to reconstructing his life on this foundation of lacunae, her masonry the handful of available facts, her runny mortar a mixture of gossip and guess. Before Gloria Scipi took up the cause there had been no books on Angelo, but over the course of five centuries he did come up from time to time. He had been mentioned in an eighteenth-century diary—writing of Angelo’s Portrait of a Gentleman with Leopard and Lamb, its author, an Englishman on the grand tour, remarked on “an extravagant, almost garish portrait by an unknown painter that nevertheless stirs the sentiments in profound and unusual ways.” An undated photograph of a painting thought to be a copy of a now-lost Angelo turned up at a Paris flea market, showing a young man gripping the head of his sword while three ringless hands, the gender of which cannot be determined from the photograph, reach blindly from behind a maroon curtain. A feminist art historian in the 1970s cited the prettiness of Angelo’s noblemen as evidence of his destabilization of gender roles. In the 1980s various Queer Studies personnel, taking androgyny for homosexuality as Renaissance viewers themselves likely did, hoped that Angelo’s bold work would inspire resistance to the queer-unfriendly Reagan Administration.
Many of the paintings themselves had been effaced—five-hundred-year-old paint smothered by century-old paint, inscriptions on hats and rings abraded and illegible.
Gloria Scipi did not let the absence of hard verifiable data deter her; on the contrary, it empowered her to set straight what little record there was and to make up the rest. Her monograph on Angelo, Angelo Veneto: Painter of the Soul, has a tone of weary authority and nonchalant erudition varnished by the glamour of discovery. She dutifully summarizes the few lesser efforts—so-and-so’s hypothesis that Angelo worked in Brescia, so-and-so’s claim that he was homosexual—and dismisses them all. She was responsible for identifying as Angelo’s work the portrait of a gentleman with a razor-sharp pen that for centuries had been misattributed to Giorgione. Two of the chapters of her book were written as detective stories. In one scene she troops through a field in Fiesole to track down the landscape seen through the little arched window of the misattributed Portrait of a Very Young Gentleman, a landscape that Giorgione could never have seen but that Angelo knew intimately, though he never depicted it in another painting. There is no uncertainty in Angelo Veneto: Painter of the Soul, just Gloria Scipi bearing the truth.
It had occurred to Jon that maybe it was a poor translation that made the book, important as it was, seem so ridiculous. He had wanted to give Gloria Scipi the benefit of the doubt. But now, sitting at his little desk in his nonoffice with her catalog essay, he took it back. No translation could be this bad without some help from the original.
Adger had never liked the essay to begin with, and not just because it was so hard to follow. Gloria Scipi, the world’s leading (and only) expert on Angelo, was never going to produce anything other than a scholarly introduction to the portraits of the great little-known cinquecento painter Angelo Veneto. Adger could edit it by making the Collection’s Gentleman with a Red Cape seem as important as The Last Supper. In a foreword to the catalog he could go on and on about this being the painter’s first one-man show; he could remind readers that it was being mounted not in Italy or New York but right here, in Atlanta, Georgia’s, finest little museum. He could make his joke: there’s hope for us all! But he could never expect Gloria Scipi’s catalog essay to easily support the kind of high-concept blockbuster he wanted. He could never have asked her for that; she had too much dignity. And he had too much respect for her.
He gave the dirty work to Jon, instructing him to edit Gloria Scipi’s catalog essay so that it made Angelo “come alive for the average person.” Adger wanted to see her discussion of the Harrington’s own Angelo, the hunk with the red cape, on page one of the final version of her essay, though it didn’t appear until page three of the original.
Here is how that discussion began:
In the Portrait of a Gentleman with a Red Cape (1515) in the Harrington Collection of Atlanta, this insouciance becomes a brutal male disdain for an unseen person who besides can only be a stand-in for the painter and, by turn, the viewer himself. Gone is Angelo’s lighthearted and surface approach to the male gaze from the first decade of the century. We have penetrated the flesh to find the soul that lies beneath. This will to interiority that manifests itself in Giorgione more often than not as sentimentality, becomes in the Atlanta portrait something deeper and more shocking. Soul is the best word here, despite the grave error of intellectual slippage committed by Jacques Moutard in his unjustly revered essay on the late quattrocento and the early cinquecento, L’Âme et l’esprit de l’age. The concept of the soul—in Italian, anima—could only exist in a religious context at this time, whereas Moutard sees it more generally as meaning “personality” and “interiority” without doing the necessary intellectual work to make the leap. Although its subject is secular, the overt religious context of the Atlanta portrait is clear. This gentleman’s codpiece is crossed by a crease, a thin black line in the white fabric. This is the cross; the spread attitude of the gentleman’s arms gives us the Christ, hanging.
Gloria Scipi was actually not all that bad. For instance, she went on to discuss with great authority a few other appearances around this time of the unusual scarlet color of the gentleman’s cape, proving that the Harrington’s portrait had been misdated by a decade. This was not news—she made this discovery years ago. The date she had assigned to the painting was the one that now appeared on the wall beside it. And yet the personal story she recounted—Gloria Scipi hot on the heels of the color red—still riveted.
Nonetheless—what was he going to do with this dog’s breakfast! Jon had a self-immolating fantasy of opening the essay, as instructed, with the discussion of the Collection’s portrait. Unaltered and unintroduced. The Christ, hanging.
Adger Boatwright waited for a cab to take him to the airport. He was going to Houston with a very young man. (Beat.) Giorgione’s Portrait of a Boy. This was the joke currently being inflicted on the Ladies, as Jon knew from sitting outside his office all day. The Parmann Museum of Art was putting on a show of Renaissance portraits—Every Face Tells a Story—and Adger was the courier for the Giorgione in the Collection. Three blissful days without his boss—Jon would have time to brood and think, he would have space, he would figure this thing out.
The door to Adger’s office was open a crack, and through it Jon could see him at the mirror, an early-nineteenth-century dressing glass of mahogany and white pine supposedly rescued from the ancestral plantation as it burned. Adger straightening his tie, licking his fingers and rubbing them all over his hair, checking his breath with his hand, trying out various faces. Jon knew that before any social engagement his boss also wrote out questions he might be asked, and the answers to them, on little scraps of paper that he stuffed into his pockets.
Adger emerged and leaned on the half wall, his big white head perfectly eclipsing the fluorescent light. His tie was crooked and blond curls shot out at strange angles around his ears. He reached down and said, “Shake my hand.”
“Why?”
“Come on, shake my hand, be a team player, for Christ’s sake.”
Jon took Adger’s big white moist hand, with its clear-polished nails, in his own.
“Come on, shake!” Adger said, squeezing.
“I am.”
“That’s how you shake hands?” Adger asked. “Just kind of flopping it up against somebody’s hand like that, like it’s being beached there? Why didn’t I know that? I must have shaken hands with you in the interview, didn’t I?”
“Uh—”
“I mean nobody wants to shake a hand that they think is dead, do they?”
“I think it’s pretty obvious my hand is alive.”
“Well, you better start showing some conviction if you want to be sure of that.”
“Next time I will,” Jon said, wanting to turn back to his computer screen.
“So what’d you think of mine?” Adger sheepishly asked.
“Your what?”
“My handshake. Do you think it showed conviction? But at the same time it wasn’t too macho and bullying, was it?”
Jon smiled. Unlike the Ladies, he was immune to Adger’s charm. But he could be moved by his insecurity, how much rehearsing he did before walking out onto the stage of life. “You’ll be fine.”
Adger reached over and snatched up Gloria Scipi’s essay from Jon’s desk. This was another good thing about his boss. The moment you began to have any troubling human feelings for him, he did something maddening to get you immediately over them.
Jon sighed as Adger shuffled pages.
“How is this coming along?” Adger asked, removing a jeweled fountain pen from his pocket.
“It makes no sense.”
“Well, I know that, that’s what I asked you to do—make sense of it.”
“I’m trying, but first I have to understand what she’s saying.”
“Understand, understand.” Adger was turning pages and scribbling. “This isn’t the fucking Ivy League. Just do it!”
Jon snatched the pages back. The words “seminal masterpiece” now modified the title Portrait of a Gentleman with a Red Cape wherever it appeared.
“Don’t look at me that way,” Adger said. “Lighten up!”
“Go, Adger. Go to Houston.”
“At least give me a title,” Adger implored.
“For the essay? It came with one. ‘Angelo—”
“Not for the essay. The show.”
“Well, once I figure out what the show’s about, I’m sure a title will fall into place.”
“Fall into place? You mean like a silkworm falling out of a mulberry tree and onto your head? Think! You need to come up with the title first. Why do you think anyone goes to a show anyway? No one’s ever heard of Angelo Veneto, you have to sell him. Do you know how I came up with the title A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words?”
“Came up with?”
“It came to me in a dream. And here’s something else. I gave the Parmann the title for their show.” He was speaking in a whisper now, though there was no one else around. Beyond Adger’s window evening sunlight fell through the branches of the oak. “I was having a drink with Elle MacArthur at last year’s Biennale and it just came out. We were getting very cozy, if you know what I mean.” Jon didn’t blink. “Every Face Tells a Story. I told her she could have it.”
“That was big of you.”
“And I don’t regret it. What benefits one benefits us all.”
“I’ll remember that.”
“I have no regrets.”
Adger’s voice seemed to come drifting across a canal, you could hear the water moving in its masonry walls. But when he opened his mouth again the ghostly whisper, tinged with sadness, was gone. “I want a high-concept title by the time I get back,” he barked. “I want you to do what I hired you for and put together a fucking show.”
Jon was eating a bowl of cereal in the dark, staring at the Portrait of a Gentleman in a Red Cape projected against his living-room wall. He had stared too long. The painting had broken down into lurid patches of color; he couldn’t get them to cohere. He couldn’t get his life to cohere either. The challenges of his job were not the only problem. Atlanta was also a problem. If you had to leave New York for the South, you should at least expect consolation from the landscape—magnolia trees, plantation houses, squares with statues of soldiers pointing their weapons north. That would be interesting. But Atlanta had turned out to be a city of suburbs and ring roads. People drove forty minutes for a bagel. For Asian fusion, an hour. In front of every restaurant a squadron of crewcut boys stood waiting to pounce on your car. Jon saw all this but still didn’t despair. He went to the Margaret Mitchell house and asked where the South was. The house itself, with its veranda and white columns, was promising. But the old docent inside shook her head and reminded him that Atlanta had burned in the Civil War—“the woe-uh,” she had called it. He was genuinely sorry about this.
A key turned in the door. He was genuinely sorry about that too. He had moved to Atlanta with a man he was no longer in love with.
Ali came in, put down his shopping bag, and walked over to the couch. Jon’s hand reached up and Ali took it.
“Shoo, what a basket,” Ali said, staring at the wall.
Shoo. He had attended an English elementary school in Guyana, where he was taught to say “shoo” instead of “shit,” “Hollywood” instead of “hell,” as well as baroque ways to insult, including “You, sir, are a pest and a parasite.” (What that was supposed to mean, Jon had no idea.)
“That’s a noncanonical way of reading a painting,” Jon sniffed.
Ali sighed, then in a chipper voice said, “I don’t know about that, but I do know this is a gay painting.”
This was something about Ali—the more miserable and hostile Jon was, the more chipper and sweet Ali became. In anybody else Jon would have considered such relentless good humor passive-aggressive. But Ali was as guileless as a bowl of sherbet. Jon had seen this from the start.
They had met in a West Village bar when Jon was two years from finishing up in New Haven. He had come down to the City to see the Morris Louis show at the Modern, and in Jon’s memory these two events became a single exhilaration. Experiencing the speed of the paintings, the rush of air around the poured stripes of color, led naturally to looking into Ali’s face for the first time. His open expression, the great unpainted spaces at the center of the canvases. When Ali’s face was at rest, his huge dark eyes narrowed as if about to close in sleep, the way a tall person might slouch to avoid calling attention to his height. Ali’s embarrassed smile also seemed like an apology—he was too good-looking. He was the descendant of indentured Indians and Africans with pricetags; you couldn’t help reading his glowing face as a narrative of the spirit triumphing over its enslavement! The long lashes, round face, cherub lips made him as beautiful as a baby. But his square chin was manly and jutted out, and throughout the day he had a five o’clock shadow that he covered craftily with foundation just lighter than his skin.
They had nothing in common, but they were young and soon living together in New York, and it had all been enough.
“A gay painting,” Jon grumbled. “What could that possibly mean?”
Ali, unflappable, explained. “I mean, it’s basically a painting that a man made of a big dick, except you can’t see it, which makes it even sexier.”
“Okay.”
“Plus he’s got a very pretty face.”
“That’s true, but I can’t exactly put that in the catalog.”
“It’s so obvious. In fact, I don’t think that’s a painting of a man at all. He looks like a woman to me, packing a sock or something. What do they call them, drag kings?”
Jon took back his hand and Ali left the room. “I’m starving,” he called from the bedroom. “Maybe I’ll make us a curry. Does that sound okay?”
Jon turned to the figure in the red cape, who stared back. His eyes were rolled back into the left sides of their sockets, so that he seemed to be looking at you while keeping an eye on something just to your right. What was it? Jon walked up to the wall. A portrait of a woman in drag, a drag king—Christ, would he have to listen to this kind of twaddle the rest of his life? He stared deeply into the man’s face. Jon was looking for the courage to leave. But he found something else: the man had no Adam’s apple.
This was an observation that had never been made, or at least never recorded. That didn’t, however, make it a good one. Unless you believed that every young gentleman living in the region between Venice, Ferrara, and Milan in the first decades of the sixteenth century was a total knockout, you wouldn’t consider Angelo Veneto a realist. These are idealized portraits, they make their subjects look good. The guy in this painting has no Adam’s apple, but he also lacks warts, moles, wrinkles, enlarged pores, hairs in his nostrils or along his ears. Angelo’s innovation was working within the constraints of the new genre of the bourgeois portrait and still managing to convey something unseen and, if not unflattering, then disturbingly complex.
Jon projected another image on the wall. The Portrait of a Gentleman with a Sword, soon on its way from Rome, shows a green-eyed young man with a gaze directed somewhere to the left of the viewer. Again, no Adam’s apple. Wisps of brown fuzz collect under the guy’s chin, pointing toward the bright white column of his neck, which sits at the very center of the painting. His face is lit at an angle, the right side in shadow; the neck, under the overhanging jaw, should certainly be shadowed as well. Was Angelo, a faultless technician, deliberately calling attention to the fact that his subject had no Adam’s apple?
One after the other the portraits vanished from the wall and were replaced. Some of the figures confronted you, others dismissed your very existence by looking away. But every subject was painted from the same angle and held his well-lit neck up for your inspection.
“I got some cauliflower at the market.” Ali had changed into shorts and a tank top. His limbs were long and lean, his build boyish. He was pursued by men and women, he had been propositioned by straight couples and gay ones, money had been offered twice. His popularity soared once they moved to Atlanta, where no one had ever seen anything like him before. And still he remained humble and true.
“Gosh,” Ali said, “I haven’t seen you smile in weeks.”
“Oh, come on.” Jon called up the Portrait of a Gentleman with a Red Cape, then said to the wall, “I’m sure I must have smiled by accident every now and then.”
“Not really.”
“Well, no wonder Adger keeps telling me to lighten up.”
“How is he, is he still pudgy and cute?”
“He’s still a closet case and a lunatic. Now, here, come sit down and look at this with me. What you said about this being a woman—was that a joke?”
“How am I supposed to know?”
“Look closely.” Ali sat down alongside him. “None of these guys has an Adam’s apple. And you can’t tell from the clothes because they wear so many of them. This one has at least four layers on—there could easily be breasts under there, right?”
“It’s just a painting,” Ali pointed out.
“Okay, right, but you were the one who suggested there might be more going on here, so that’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“I better start defrosting that chicken breast.”
“Just wait. What do you say about the stubble on his chin?”
“I don’t know. It looks like someone who doesn’t really need to shave yet.”
Jon turned to him and nodded. Then he called up the next painting, the Portrait of a Youth in Green Velvet.
“We were selling a vest like that last season,” Ali said.
This, amazingly, was not a non sequitur. “To women, right?”
Ali nodded. “I guess everything comes back in fashion if you wait long enough.”
“This guy has a full beard,” Jon said. “So how can he be a woman?”
“That’s a fake beard,” Ali pointed out with the certainty of Gloria Scipi.
Jon went up to the wall and examined the patches of colored light. “How can you tell?”
“He’s probably too young to even grow a full beard like that.” Ali walked up to the wall and pointed to the subject’s ear. “Also there’s this little line going back here over the ear that looks like a string to me. Too bad we can’t see the other side of his head—he probably had another one holding it up there.”
“Oh, my God,” Jon said. “I thought that was a strand of hair.”
“It’s a totally different color. His hair is dirty blond and the string is somewhere in the burnt ash family. Now, if I don’t eat something—” Ali said and walked away.
“Can I use this?” Jon asked. “I mean, I’ll give you full credit for everything, but can I use this for my show?”
“I don’t mind,” Ali called from the kitchen.
They ate Ali’s delicious curry and drank a bottle of wine and then went to bed. It had never been hard for Jon to conjure the old feelings. He remembered seeing Ali for the first time, sleeping with him for the first time, walking down their block of the East Village with bags of flowers and food. He could remember being in love. But it had been a long time since he felt it.
At first it didn’t matter that they had so little in common. Jon was happy to have things to prove—that a Jew and a Muslim could fall in love, that an art historian and a ladies sportswear salesman could enjoy each other’s company year in and out, that love could transcend all. But Jon found he had a sentimental attachment to Israel; Ali considered religious states scary. Ladies sportswear did nothing for Jon; Ali found papal patronage dry. And as for Love—it could transcend everything but a move to Georgia. Jon didn’t love Ali enough for that. But now, watching Ali sleep, listening to him swallow the cooled air, each inhalation a little gasp, so that he could as easily have been in a state of constant amazement—Jon felt he was wrong. He had been so stressed out about his job that there hadn’t been room for anything else. Now, lightened of his burden, possessed instead of possibly the greatest insight in the history of Angelo scholarship, Jon once again felt his great love for Ali. Who cared that their c.v.’s didn’t overlap?
Jon closed his eyes and watched the darkness gently turn.
The critics—the feminists, the homosexuals—had been on to something. But they never quite got there. Once you accept that the subjects of Angelo’s portraits are women, things more or less add up. You have an answer to questions. Why do these figures stare at you so fiercely? Why do they threaten you with a weapon, if it isn’t the most dangerous and disruptive mystery, the mystery of gender, that they’re challenging you to solve? The layers of fancy-patterned clothes and rich fabrics and feathered caps were men’s fashions of the times, but what dandy dared pose with nosegays, with ribbons and ring cases and birds? Why all the phallic props, the bulging bright codpieces?
These are portraits of women not disguised as men but instead masquerading as them. You aren’t supposed to be fooled. The string that Ali pointed out running over the left ear of the guy with the green vest—look closely and you see the faintest trace of the line continuing across the top of his forehead. Jon was sure that infrared would show what could only be a headband, raising the possibility that this was originally a portrait of a woman. What might have been a woman’s diadem was here a band holding up a beard, which itself becomes, once you know how to look at it, totally fake, the Groucho Marx look of the cinquecento.
You understand these things. And you understand why Angelo’s subjects have never been identified—none of them, ever, unlike Leonardo’s or Bellini’s or Dürer’s, unlike those of his contemporaries Lorenzo Lotto and Andrea Solario. Angelo’s portraits never reveal his sitters’ identities, despite their clutter of accessories and props, despite the specificity of the background landscapes. Only the Louvre’s Portrait of a Boy with a Hammer dares include a name, on a little scroll curled at the subject’s feet, a motif echoed by the sneering curl of his lower lip, as if the scroll is something he’s cast aside or is about to step on. The name is Martino, nothing else, and Gloria Scipi, after producing a list of seventeen Martinos known to have lived in Venice at the time, throws up her hands and hedges her bets by pointing out that a martino pescatore is a kingfisher, symbol of industry and steadfastness, and that its breast is the same color as the arrogant boy’s cap.
Understandably, she preferred to discuss Angelo’s work and life in the context of the new kind of portraiture being produced in the first half of the cinquecento. She focused on what could be known and made up what could not. But she didn’t use what little evidence she found to invent identities for Angelo’s sitters. She scarcely acknowledged that these identities were in question. And she never asked this: how could all of Angelo’s subjects have remained unknown for so long? These are not archetypes. These faces are not the male equivalent of the bella donna; they do not include Christ, despite the religious connotations that Gloria Scipi found here and there. Indeed, if a single thesis could be plucked from the tangled garden of Gloria Scipi’s scholarship, it was that Angelo Veneto invented a new kind of portrait by investing his subjects with specific psychologies (which she insisted on calling souls), thereby making them look like real people (albeit incredibly gorgeous ones). She ignored the absence of contracts or anything else that might have identified them. In her everyday work she gathered clues, she was hot on trails—but when faced with an obstacle she was more demolition expert than detective, and if she couldn’t make a big bang, she didn’t accept the job.
And so it fell to Jonathan Weitz to bestow upon the world the answer to a question that had not yet been posed: why is “Martino” sneering at his name?
An evening of discoveries, a night of love—at six the next morning Jon packed a bag. He was moving into the museum. The Harrington Collection was housed in a refurbished 1927 Coca-Cola bottling factory on a quiet stretch of Peachtree Street. Jon had never seen a peach tree on Peachtree Street or anywhere else in Atlanta—but that didn’t matter to him anymore. The Old South may have been gone with the wind, but here was something new to seize his imagination. Except for the occasional minivan of private school students, nobody visited the Harrington Collection when there wasn’t a show on. Adger’s zeal for the blockbuster exhibition made sense, and Jon had to admit that the execrable Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words was a stroke of marketing genius. The five paintings, like the rest of the Collection, went mostly unseen when they could be viewed for free, but gathered in a single gallery on the other side of a ticket taker, they had patrons lined up around the block. Of course after Jon’s Angelo show opened, Adger’s Picture queues would be remembered as a couple of folks who happened to wander in off the street. But until that day, or at least until Adger’s return, he had the museum mostly to himself; he could sit on the floor in front of the Portrait of a Gentleman with a Red Cape undisturbed for hours. He could sit with his laptop and write; he could look up at the painting and see what could not be seen projected on a wall; he could close his eyes and fantasize about the brilliant curatorial future that would be his.
This was the plan. It was, he knew, ironic that the very morning after rediscovering his love for Ali he took a sabbatical from it. But Adger would be gone only three days and Jon had to make every second count. He had an essay to present to his boss on his return, a fucking show to put together. And what else would he be doing but developing Ali’s revelation into something he could share, something they both could share with the world? What other muse could Jon possibly want?
Ali was still in bed. The white sheet was draped at a provocative slant around his waist, like the Venus de Milo; one of his eyes was open, the other squeezed shut. Jon rubbed the hair on his lover’s tummy. Desire tugged. But Art called. “It’ll be good, I’ll finally be able to get this show together,” he explained. The other eye opened. Jon pressed his lips against Ali’s and said, “It’s all right with you, baby, isn’t it?”
Ali smiled sleepily and said he didn’t mind.
The first thing Jon did when he got to his desk was reread Gloria Scipi’s essay. He’d been through it a dozen times; he’d even read it in the original Italian twice, though he didn’t know the language. He’d been willing to do whatever it took to fix the essay. But now, reading it in light of what he, alone of all art historians, knew, he saw the answer quite clearly—the essay would have to be jettisoned and replaced. Gloria Scipi didn’t just assume these were portraits of men; her analyses of the paintings rested on this premise. Her use of the term “male gaze” to describe the intimidating stare of Angelo’s subjects referred not to a certain way of looking but indeed to a man. Her very focus was on the manliness of Angelo’s subjects; her claim that the gentleman with the red cape was a Christ figure, for example, was supported by the cross she saw in his codpiece.
Jon set the essay aside and went downstairs with his laptop. He sat before the Portrait of a Gentleman with a Red Cape and wrote.
He started with a formal analysis. Later he would develop an argument, stitch observations together into a narrative, provide a historical context, fill in blanks. He didn’t have much time but he didn’t panic. He wasn’t in graduate school, he wasn’t obliged to ascend to the ethereal realm of theory—he could ignore the transcendental signified, stop trying to recall the concept of the decentered gaze. He wasn’t after difficulty; his goal was comprehensibility, transparency, the lifting of veils. If he shone a light on the paintings, if he helped viewers see them as they were intended, then he would have done his job.
He barely ate. There was no café in the museum and no decent food within a fifteen-minute drive. The secretary, a nice lady with pewter-colored curls, brought him in a piece of a mayonnaise caramel cake she had invented and unselfconsciously named after herself, and when he told her how much he enjoyed “Delia’s cake,” she brought in an entire quarter. He made coffee at the sink when he was tired; he slept, when he had to, in a sleeping bag under his desk. The rest of the time he sat like a supplicant beneath the painting. When his back could no longer be appeased by stretching he sat up against the wall on the other side of the gallery, under a Giorgione; he still had a clear view.
The publications specialist took advantage of Jon’s availability to remind him repeatedly of deadlines. She was a pert young blonde who carried around spreadsheets warning that the catalog wouldn’t be ready for the opening if he didn’t hurry up. He smiled at her and nodded. He had someone more formidable to answer to, and it wasn’t even Adger.
The few visitors—mainly rich-looking women, thankfully none of the Ladies themselves—smiled down on him. On the first day he was asked if it was a school project he was working on. Of course he would be mistaken for a student—he was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, and sitting on the floor. On the second day he was asked if he was an artist himself. He had a day’s worth of stubble now, it was a bad hair day—he supposed he looked like an artist, a twenty-first-century one, sketching with software. On the third day—still thankfully not the weekend—visitors navigated wider circles around him or looked to the guard for explanation.
Changes may have been observable on the outside, but they were nothing compared to what was happening inside him. What socioeconomic circumstances could have coalesced to produce these transvestite pictures that their subjects couldn’t have commissioned, that were destined to hang behind closed doors for one hushed century after another—this was for Gloria Scipi, not Jonathan Weitz, to explain. He knew only what he saw. The painting was full of playful little deceits but what they added up to wasn’t playful at all. Its subject’s taunting arrogance, her self-satisfied smile, her menacing stick—it’s obvious she has a secret. And so what happened to the person who figured it out?
Visions apparently took place at lesser museums than the Louvre. But instead of a room full of Renaissance guys jostling for Adger Boatwright’s attention, it was one person, a young woman with fair hair tucked into a red cap and little breasts hidden behind a great red cape, who stepped out of a painting and moved toward its startled viewer, Jonathan Weitz, associate curator of Atlanta’s Harrington Collection, the first person in centuries who understood. He felt a seizing up just below his chest. He was in that altered state he had hoped for but never attained, as hard as he tried—fasting and swaying those Yom Kippurs of his childhood, he had only ended up starving and faint, once even passing out on the altar, with the Torah in his arms. In college he abandoned religion for art. And still he waited.
Jon exhaled, his body relaxed, he was jelly quivering on the floor.
“Why don’t you go on home?” a voice said.
Funny, it didn’t sound like the woman from the painting. And it was coming from somewhere else. Up and to his right. There was something casting a shadow on his feet. His head turned toward the sound.
“If I had a beautiful boyfriend like that waiting for me at home, do you think I’d be here?”
It was Dinitia Sims, the security guard. You cannot move into a museum without an ally, and she seemed to like him. This had everything to do with Ali. He had come to visit Jon at the Harrington shortly after Jon started there, and Dinitia hadn’t stopped talking about him since. On his way up to the offices Ali had stopped to introduce himself. He had scarcely been to a museum before Jon met him; maybe he thought talking to the security guard was something you did. If Dinitia liked Jon, it was because he had the good taste to have Ali as a partner.
Jon smiled. Words were forming slowly in his brain.
“I mean, y’all are still together, aren’t y’all?” she asked.
He nodded. “He’s great. I’m going to see him tomorrow, don’t worry.”
She seemed relieved. “Out of the two of y’all, who the one cooks?”
He wondered if she was asking who the woman was in their relationship. “He does.”
She nodded knowingly. “Was it his mama that taught him?”
“Yeah.” He was here in this room talking to this person, he got it now. “When we lived in New York we used to eat over there all the time. She makes the most amazing West Indian food.”
“Did she teach him how to make pepper pot? Does he cook you bacalao?”
“Both,” he admitted. “And he makes his own hot sauce.”
“Damn. And what do you do for him?”
“Sometimes I cook.”
“Oh yeah? What do you fix him?”
She had his number, there was no way spaghetti or scrambled eggs would convince. “Saltwater soup,” he conceded. “A porridge of bitter ash.”
“That sounds nasty,” she said, shaking her head.
“I mean I used to.”
He didn’t have time for this. Adger would be back tomorrow. Jon had been staring at the painting during the day and writing through the night and still he wasn’t finished.
“I have to get back,” he said.
But as he spoke, something terrible occurred to him: What if he was wrong? He had staked his entire professional future on this insight, which suddenly seemed a possible derangement. Dinitia would say nothing but still Adger would discover Jon had been camping out in the museum. Adger must already have known something was up—Jon hadn’t answered the phone or responded to any of his boss’s messages, which he was leaving more and more frequently. Jon was counting on the ends justifying the means. But what if the ends amounted to nothing more than the end?
There was probably no one in the world who had looked at the Portrait of a Gentleman with a Red Cape more than Dinitia Sims had.
She was on her way back to her post when Jon said, “Wait. Can I ask you something?” She turned around. He took a deep breath. “Have you ever noticed anything funny about this painting?”
“Funny?” she scowled.
He nodded and waited. He didn’t want to ask leading questions.
“That’s a good-looking white boy, that’s all I know.”
“White boy?”
“Yeah.”
“Could it be a woman?” he blurted.
“Could be,” she said. “Never occurred to me.”
Could be!
“No, it never occurred to me,” she went on. “But if I was going out looking like that, you know I’d tote a stick along with me too.”
Adger was leaning against Jon’s ledge. He had had some kind of sunscreen issues in Houston—red blobs swam like goldfish across the broad bowl of his face. “I admit I considered it,” he was saying, to no one in particular. “I talked to Elle and she said I should have known not to hire someone from the Ivy League in the first place. She hired one as a male secretary once and he refused to type.”
Jon smiled. He saw no need to remind Adger that he hadn’t refused to type. The evidence, all fifty pages, was sitting in his chair. Adger had just got in from the airport and apparently hadn’t seen the essay. He sounded wounded by Jon’s silence, betrayed. He was making it known that sparks had flown from his head in Houston and now he was contemplating something grave. Jon, meanwhile, was in a state of quiet well-being, serenaded as he was by the unheard music of his own freshly minted words.
“At least he answered the phone,” Adger went on. “What were you thinking!”
Jon smiled. “I was thinking about art.”
Adger looked down at him suspiciously, then went on. “She said I should let you go. I would have listened to her too. I wanted to give her something. I mean it became clear pretty early on that I didn’t feel the same way about her as she did about me. I don’t know why women are always trying to change you.”
It wasn’t believable that Elle MacArthur, director of one of the foremost small art museums in the country, had embarked on the unsophisticated project of trying to change a gay man, closeted or not, into a straight one. Adger must have been talking about some other change. He seemed to be considering something. There was a strange pleading look in his pale blue eyes. His right hand rose to his mouth, a manicured nail darted toward his lips—vestigial nasty habit, whiff of candied fruits—before dropping out of sight on the other side of the wall.
“I would have listened to her except I decided to give you one last chance and try your home phone. I figured you might be working from home,” Adger sneered. “So I called and talked to Ahmed.”
“Ali.”
“Did he tell you I called?”
Jon nodded. Ali was the only person besides Dinitia he had spoken to in three days. Jon had called home twice, and always Ali sounded fine and wished him good luck in getting his work done.
“We had a nice chat,” Adger said.
“Did he tell you about—” But the question was pointless. Of course Ali had said nothing.
“Did he tell me about what?”
“Did he tell you he handed me the thesis for the catalog essay that’s sitting on your chair?”
“Thesis,” Adger said, frowning.
“Just read it. Don’t worry.”
“That sounded more convincing coming from Ali. He told me not to worry too. Said you were working and”—he made quotation marks in air—“‘mustn’t be disturbed.’”
Jon rushed to his boyfriend’s defense. “They taught him how to speak that way in school.”
“Well, they did a good job. These days everybody talks like they come from the ghetto, have you noticed?”
Random sentences from Jon’s essay read themselves to him. This was the best way to put it—it wasn’t his own voice he heard. Adger sounded far away and Jon had to strain to hear him. Jon leaned forward and cocked his head. Finally, he stood and leaned against the wall behind his desk, trying to muster an attentive look.
Adger didn’t seem to notice anything unusual. He was staring at the framed poster for the Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words show just to the left of Jon’s head. But it was badly lit, and Adger could only be looking at his own reflection.
“An Arab and a Jew together,” Adger said. “What y’all are after I can’t imagine, unless it’s the Nobel Peace Prize.”
It went without saying that Jon had no interest in explaining to his boss what an Arab was. Still, Jon’s ordeal at the museum had somehow changed him. Art, it seemed, could make you a more patient person, if not a better one. He walked around his desk, leaving the protected waters of his cubicle for the seaward channel controlled by Adger Boatwright. But it was Adger who looked panicked. When Jon’s hand reached out his boss flinched. But he didn’t budge. The hand reached up and up, its fingers finally making a gentle landing on Adger’s unevenly broiled cheek.
“Does it hurt?” Jon asked.
Jon returned to his desk and tried to work—there were a hundred things he had been neglecting. Instead he stared at Adger’s door and waited. But when the door finally opened three hours later and Adger came out smiling, it was anticlimactic—not because Jon knew Adger would like his essay but because it no longer mattered to him if he did.
“Listen to this part,” Adger said, staring down at the page. Jon sat there as Adger read aloud, deliberately, presenting Jon’s own essay to him, making sure he got it:
Despite Leonardo’s groundbreaking portrait the Ginevra de’ Benci, which legitimated the three-quarters view and the head-on stare (rather than the profile) for portraits of married women, respectable women at the time Angelo was working generally did not meet men’s eyes. The belligerent stares of Angelo’s travestite shift our focus from the very fact that these women are gazing at us. Because the undisputed “male gaze” at work here belongs to the artist and by extension the viewer, the glares of Angelo’s subjects subvert the convention that women should be looking away in paintings or in life. Angelo, progressive as he was, could not bring himself to paint these women dressed as women and glaring this way. The models themselves may not have felt comfortable with such audaciousness; it was easier to put on a man’s cape and pick up a stick than stare out at a man from under a diadem and a great pile of curled hair. Only through the radical practice of drag could the artist and his subjects make the more radical point that women are not demure possessions, that they are self-possessed. In the Portrait of a Gentleman with a Red Cape Gloria Scipi has found “something deeper and more shocking” than anything in Giorgione. Scipi interprets this something as “soul” and sees this as a religious painting, a representation of a soul; contemporary viewers are more likely to see the painting as an early representation of the workings of the modern mind. Whichever interpretation one accepts, it must be complicated by the fact that Angelo located this inner core in women dressed as men. Soul and mind are hidden away in the body just as these women are hidden in men’s clothes, but our inner selves can be revealed by the strong artist’s hand.
That this artist is male blah blah blah . . .
“Of course it’s going to have to be completely rewritten,” Adger added.
“It is?” Maybe Jon wasn’t completely indifferent.
“It’s too academic. You aren’t at Yale anymore. No normal Southern person thinks drag is a radical practice. I’m not even sure what that means.”
“And do you know what this reminded me of? Those Calvin Klein models, those androgynous ones—they’re always pouting. There’s just so much you can do with this.”
Jon nodded.
“And what about Madonna, where she wears a suit in that one video?”
He nodded again.
“Why do you keep nodding, you’re making me nervous—I feel like you’re agreeing with me.”
“I am. If you want to know something they do at Yale, writing essays about Madonna videos and Calvin Klein ads is it. If you want to connect it to Angelo—”
“I don’t want to connect it but everyone who comes to this show will.” This was pure Adger—he was the opposite of a populist but he wanted to be popular. “Nobody knows anything about Angelo Veneto, I’ve told you that before. Consider your audience—what do you think I did in A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words? You need to give them something familiar to jump off of. Forget all the theory about drag. Leave that to the queers. Or write an essay yourself and publish it in October. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!”
He had misread Adger’s smile. But Jon wasn’t being entirely ingenuous when he asked, “Is there anything you’d keep in that passage?”
“Obviously these gals in drag themselves, that’s what’s going to bring in the hordes. And this:”—he looked up from the page and solemnly quoted—“‘Our inner selves can be revealed by the strong artist’s hand.’”
“You like that?” Jon beamed.
“I do, and you probably have no idea why. That’s why I’m having this conversation with you.” Jon waited and Adger continued. “You want to help people relate to the pictures. What do people care about more than their own inner selves?”
Jon had no answer for this. If he thought of himself as Matthew Arnold, keeping a steady eye on the object, then Adger Boatwright was unabashedly Walter Pater, the grandiloquent Victorian appreciator who said that “the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s impression as it really is.” What was looking at art, for Adger, but figuring out how it makes you feel? A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words had included a room full of computers, each displaying a blank page bordered all around with a black line. In this frame visitors were encouraged to type in their own “thousand words, or hundred words, or however many words you feel like writing!” Would-be critics were instructed to take inspiration from the five paintings in the exhibition and give their imaginations free rein. When they were done they clicked Submit and their however-many-words were projected into one of the empty rococo frames alongside reproductions of the masterpieces themselves. Adger didn’t seem to care that soon visitors were spending more time looking at these examples of fin-de-siècle free association, uninformed and un-spell-checked, than at the great paintings of Western Civilization themselves.
Jon had of course been appalled. But was Adger’s idea, then and now, really so wrong? He’d quoted Jon’s own essay to illustrate his Paterian perspective, words that to Jon sounded no less dulcet than anything else there. To discover the work of art as it truly is—this seemed to be the very task Angelo set out for the viewer with his gender-bending, am-I-or-am-I-not paintings. But do his subjects say, Look at me closely and tell me what I am? Or do they say, Look at me closely and tell me how I make you feel? Or simply, Look at me closely and feel?
In the end, it was only by submitting to these paintings—something he had avoided, even dreaded—that Jon was truly able to see them.
“Also,” Adger said, “I like the behind-the-scenes stuff about what the models were thinking.”
“That was kind of speculative,” Jon allowed.
“Keep it!” Adger bellowed. “People are fascinated by models. And we’re still going to have to figure out what to do with Gloria’s essay. She’ll have my fat white ass on a stick if we don’t use it. We’ll have two catalog essays. What’s wrong with that?”
“Just give me your notes and I’ll rewrite my essay.” Jon reached up and grabbed hold of a few pages.
“And here’s something else.” Adger wouldn’t let go of the pages, no matter how hard Jon tugged. “This part about the Ginevra de’ Benci? Let’s replace that with the Mona Lisa. Everyone knows the Mona Lisa.”
“Uh, okay, but the Mona Lisa comes after the Ginevra. The Mona Lisa can’t be a forerunner to Angelo because it’s contemporary with his early stuff.”
“Well, there’s a great connection between two great painters!”
Jon smiled. His hand dropped. “Sure, Adger, I’ll work in the Mona Lisa somehow.”
Again and again light flooded the foyer of the Harrington, and when it was all over, several images of Adger Boatwright in the center of a kick line of Amazonian drag queens had presumably been captured for posterity. A photographer from Time had been dispatched to the opening of Drag Kings: Angelo Veneto and the Mystery of Gender to illustrate an upcoming cover story that was certain to incense much of its readership and make the Harrington Collection nationally famous.
Jon stood watching over the photographer’s shoulder. He had stared into the paintings and when he looked up he saw this—a museum full of drag queens. It seemed, alarmingly, like cause and effect. Of course the opening was all Adger’s doing. The supposed countercultural phenomenon of drag kings may even have been his invention; drag queens were easy to mobilize but the drag kings he had managed to produce, three clear-skinned young women, had slicked-back hair and shoe-polish sideburns and minimal interest in sustaining a male persona, much less the illusion of being men. Jon was innocent of kings and queens, and the only time he ever glanced at a national newsmagazine was at his shrink’s office. He was responsible only for the show’s scholarship. In the end he’d omitted Madonna from the catalog essay, left out Calvin Klein, and Adger didn’t seem to notice or care, but still, why deny it, none of this would be happening if Jon hadn’t made his bold claim.
Adger had arrived on the arm of one of the Ladies, and it didn’t matter that since then she had busied herself elsewhere in the museum, advising wannabes with checkbooks on how to become Ladies. To watch Adger making like a Rockette with towering transvestites was to see a man convinced of the inviolability of his closet. He seemed unaware that when the photograph appeared in Time, the pale chunky blond in the center would be universally assumed to be homosexual. He had become as secure as his old tormentors from Claxton High. This was a great event, and no one could possibly think anything funny was going on.
Jon had one of those moments of wistful affection for his boss that punctuated his general exasperation with him. Ever since Adger had given the thumbs-up on the transvestite angle, these moments had become more frequent, starting to seem less like punctuation than like the relationship itself—dashes got longer, periods piled up and turned into ellipses, great gaps in which Jon felt Adger was actually a pretty decent guy. Once, Adger invited him into his office, something he’d never done, and the two of them sat together at Adger’s desk—a pecanwood door, supported by sawhorses, that had been rescued from the silkworm plantation and was believably charred at one end. Jon’s arm had rubbed against Adger’s, and Jon felt a rush of hot blood.
Jon snapped out of it when the photographer asked everyone to form a conga line. Jon went to find Ali, who had gone to get drinks. The bar was on the other side of the crowded main gallery and Jon plunged in. Connoisseurs and critics turned away from the paintings and toward one another, pretending not to notice two CNN anchors, a man and a woman, who had shown up together—a double surprise, for nobody knew they were a couple, and they were dressed in black, a color they were contractually prohibited from wearing on air. Jon pressed through. Several drag queens had gone for a severe bohemian look and these had not been asked to pose for Time. They stood there exchanging furious barbs and didn’t notice Jon as he maneuvered past them. He ran into the museum director, who did not mar his perfect record of silence toward Jon but did nod at him, an acknowledgment of his existence and, Jon believed, his achievement.
When Jon was near the bar one of the three Ladies standing in front of the Portrait of a Very Young Gentleman caught his eye and waved. He pointed to the bar but she gestured for him to come to her. The Ladies were dressed in taffeta ballgowns, in wraps and pearls and diamond tiaras. Wonderfully, the one who beckoned with a tan bony finger was wearing a crimson cape, a duplicate of the one worn by the catalog cover model, the gentleman in the red cape.
“I told my husband, I said, ‘Honey, we’ve been duped!’” she was saying as Jon approached. She grabbed his arm and held him there. Kisses flew but the conversation continued.
“And what’d he say?” another asked.
“He said, if it’d make his hourly rate go up, he’d go drag too!”
“I’d enjoy seeing your husband in a dress,” the third remarked.
The second one seemed scandalized but the first, wife of the husband in question, did not. “Funny you should say that,” she said, “because I declare, I think he liked the idea of a woman dressed as a man.”
“Honestly,” the second one said, “there’s nothing radical about a woman wearing pants. I don’t see what all the fuss is about.”
“You mean in the paintings?” the third one asked.
“It’s not the clothes per se,” the first lady explained, “it’s just that gals didn’t dress that way back then.”
“These ones here could very well have been common whores,” the third one said.
The second lady raised an eyebrow but the first chose to ignore this remark. “Do y’all know what I think about sometimes? There was no reason on God’s green earth why someone like Leonardo da Vinci couldn’t have painted two colored rectangles on canvas the way Mark Rothko did.”
“He had the talent,” the second one confirmed.
“Well, exactly,” the first one said. “But there was just something keeping him from doing that. Or what about painting a canvas black? Could Leonardo da Vinci have physically picked up his brush and painted a canvas solid black? I’m fascinated by that.”
The third, taking her revenge on the first for letting the subject of whores drop, said, “For goodness’ sake, why don’t we ask Jon. I mean, he did go to Yale.” She turned to him. “What do you think, dear?”
“Jonathan Weitz,” the first lady, undaunted, said, “you haven’t said a word to us all evening.”
He smiled apologetically, then said, “I think I know what you mean—that whole narrative of quote-unquote progress in the history of painting is just so overdetermined.”
The Ladies stared at him.
“With what you figured out,” the second one finally said, “you should be the belle of the ball tonight.”
“Actually,” Jon said, pointing toward the bar, “my boyfriend should be.”
“He was the one who noticed these were paintings of women,” Jon said.
The third lady put on her glasses. “I recognize that boy. He sold me the cutest top. It had a sequined Stars and Bars on it. It was a hot top.”
Jon grinned and the second lady turned back to him. “Well, I had no idea.”
The first lady glared at her, then politely asked, “How long have y’all been friends?”
“Not long enough,” Jon replied, and the Ladies smiled an uncomfortable smile.
Ali had reached the front of the line at the bar. He was wearing a black suit with white frills coming out of the arms and neck. The barman, a pretty Filipino in a green bellman’s outfit, said something to Ali, whose shy embarrassed smile stretched from ear to ear, his face full of light as he turned away and stared at the floor. That smile seemed to buoy him over the crowd, above the catty queens and rivalrous Ladies, the posers and pretenders.
“Hey, baby,” Jon said, kissing him on the ear.
“Hey!” Ali said, as if he were surprised to see him here.
They took their drinks and stood flanking the Portrait of a Youth in Green Velvet. “This party is fabulous,” Ali said. “I just saw Chad Rockman a minute ago.”
“He was standing in front of the Milan portrait,” Jon said, “with Estelle Dulaney.”
“I know, I can’t believe it. I wonder when they see each other—they’re in totally different timeslots.”
Jon stuck his nose against the back of Ali’s neck and inhaled his citrusy cologne. Ali, a good sport, tolerated it for a while. “Wait till we get home,” he finally said.
Adger appeared with a wild look in his eye and a gin and tonic in his hand. “Hey,” he said, sticking out the other hand in Ali’s direction. “There’s the man with the eye.”
“Oh, please.” Ali held his drink up in the direction of the hand. “I think I have an eye for fashion, but that’s about it.”
“You were working at a boutique in Buckhead when I met you at the Christmas party,” Adger said.
“Yeah, and I was telling Jon”—Ali gestured with his drink to the painting—“we were selling a vest like that just last season.”
Jon turned in Adger’s direction and smiled apologetically—a reflex.
Adger’s sensibilities, however, did not seem offended. “I’ll have to come visit.”
“I had no idea you were into ladies clothing,” Ali said.
“What, didn’t you see me up there with those drag queens? Your friend did.” He turned to Jon. “Because I could see you standing there smirking when they were taking a picture of me.”
Interesting—Adger had posed with drag queens for what he believed to be a portrait of himself.
“I know that look,” Ali said.
“I wasn’t smirking,” said Jon, feeling very ganged up on. “I was smiling. That’s going to be a cute picture.”
“Jon disapproves of all this,” Adger informed Ali. “Well, I say what’s wrong with getting people into the museum? Get the drag queens in here, bring them on! Angelo would have loved this party.”
“I don’t disapprove,” Jon said. Were we, he wondered, always found out?
“It’s all right, you’re a big shot now,” Adger said. “You can get any job you want in academia, you’re cut out for that.”
“Here’s something they don’t teach you in the academy,” Adger declared. “If there ain’t no money for the gold leaf, there ain’t gonna be no halo round the Virgin’s head!” He broke into song: “Money makes the world go around, the world go around, the world—”
“Jon hates retail,” Ali put in.
“That’s ironic,” Adger let slip.
“We were just leaving,” Jon said.
But not quite yet. A tall thin creature in crocodile pumps and belted black minidress strode toward them, her hair a medusa’s black coils, her face a carved mask of fury. Classical, but in Prada.
The blood rushed out of Adger’s flushed face but he soon recovered. “Gloria!” he cried. His arms shot out, as if he were doing calisthenics or pointing out emergency exits. He kissed her on one cheek and was heading toward the other when she pushed him away. Regaining his footing, he said, “What an unexpected honor you’ve graced us with!”
“Why unexpected? I have the invitation.” She reached into her enormous black purse and held it up for Adger’s inspection, then let it drop. It was printed on good stock and fell straight to the floor. “For what you invited me I do not know.”
“Why we invited you! You, Gloria Scipi, the number one scholar of Angelo Veneto in the world! You are the guest of honor. I just wished you’d called us and let us handle your arrangements.” He wagged a finger. “I don’t want to be hearing now that you’re staying at the No-Tell Motel.”
“I make my own arrangements. I was not going to come. I decided finally to come for one reason.”
“And we’re so fortunate and honored you did,” Adger said. “Isn’t this marvelous?” he added, gesturing to the walls.
“Menzogne,” Gloria Scipi spat. “Perfidia. Tradimento.”
“Who is Jonathan Weitz?” she demanded, pronouncing it Vites.
“Allow me to introduce him,” Adger said with delight. Apparently, Jon’s job description included taking heat. “Signora Scipi, this is my assistant, Jonathan Weitz. I think he did such marvelous work with the catalog, don’t you? And this is his friend, Ali.”
“You look fabulous,” Ali said, but Gloria Scipi made no sign of hearing.
She and Jon sized each other up. She started at his shoes (scuffed, from Macy’s) and worked her way up. He kept his gaze fixed on her fierce face; he was frightened but had enough presence of mind not to be the first to look away. He’d never met her; they hadn’t exchanged email or spoken by phone. Adger had said he’d “handle” Gloria’s essay, by salvaging the biographical sketch of Angelo and the survey of the scholarship, and Jon happily turned it over. When Jon finished his own essay, it was Adger who sent it to Gloria, presumably with “Ciao Bella!” and some florid pidgin Italian equivalent of “FYI” scribbled across the front page. Weeks passed, and Adger and Jon had both been relieved when they heard nothing back.
“I want that you understand what you have done,” she said.
Jon’s heart leapt into his throat but he managed to say, “It’s an honor to meet you, Professor Scipi.”
He didn’t realize he had extended a hand until she took it and began leading him away. Her hand was hot. He glanced over his shoulder at Ali, who was saying something to Adger.
Gloria Scipi and Jon stopped in front of the Portrait of a Gentleman in a Red Cape. She smelled of hyacinth powder and new leather and a recent cigarette. Their arms were so close, he could feel them straining toward each other. They shared the same space before the painting, their essays were side by side in the catalog. Couldn’t their critical positions be reconciled? He had opened a door wide enough for the juggernaut Gloria Scipi to charge through. He would gladly let her! But Gloria Scipi wasn’t going through that door. She stared at the Angelo, her eyes filled with tears.
“This,” she said, “is a man. A real man.”
The subject of the painting looked like such a ponce in his red velvet cape that Jon was tempted to make a joke. Real men don’t wear red capes! Instead he said, “Yes, I know that’s the canonical interpretation and—”
“This is not an interpretation!” she cried.
Jon wished it could be their two essays having this conversation. In writing he was articulate and sometimes elegant; in person, neither, never.
Like Milton’s Satan, like Jon’s mother, Gloria Scipi could see the chink in the armor and wasn’t afraid to needle it. “Say it,” she said. “Look at this painting and tell me your thesis, say it so that I can hear it, so that we can all hear it, a voce alta!”
“Professor Scipi,” Jon pleaded, “this is just my interpretation and—”
“Do you go to the psychiatrist?” she asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Do you?”
He didn’t see what this had to do with anything, but what could he do but, miserably, answer? “I do, I go to a psychiatrist.”
“And do you tell him your interpretations of your symptoms?”
“It’s a she, and as a matter of fact I do.”
“And how does she respond?”
For the first time since Gloria Scipi appeared Jon felt like laughing, though under these circumstances he couldn’t even smile. “She’s never impressed, no matter how clever I think they are. But I keep trying.”
“Do not bother. You will never impress this woman of intelligence and you will never be cured. And do you know why?”
“— —”
“She is not interested in your clever theories, because interpretation is not the point.”
“Maybe not in therapy,” Jon conceded, “but—”
“Not in anything! Interpretation kills!” Gloria Scipi turned back to the painting and said, sadly, “You killed this painting. You killed Angelo.”
Upstairs, Jon sat at his desk in the dark. His hands out of habit came to rest on his keyboard, but they were trembling.
His instinct was to try to pass the blame back to Adger, who had so gleefully passed it on to him. Had he been seduced by Adger’s tabloid vision of the museum, his shameless appeal to the public’s baser instincts as a way of drawing them in? Had it all been a temporary aberration, the product of which Jon could disown, as if this were just a way to make money that anyone would understand and excuse, one of those degrading jobs that you take as a young person and that confer an odd dignity on you when you recount them in your memoirs, like pole-dancing in Reno or writing for the National Enquirer?
No, his catalog essay was passionate, and he believed every word. The world had only the paintings as evidence. Gloria Scipi looked at them and saw men; Jon looked and saw women. So sue him!
I want that you understand what you have done.
Jon had turned the five Angelo portraits into a show. This was what he had done. He had allowed himself neither the time nor the luxury to dream about the rewards of his work before Gloria Scipi materialized in Atlanta to demonstrate the costs. She publicly attacked him and would no doubt lead the assault against him in print; she had the power to destroy him in various arenas, he supposed. But these costs were small change compared to what he had had to do to the art to get the show to cohere. Jon hadn’t killed Angelo, he hadn’t even killed the paintings, as la profesora, that drama queen, had charged. Jon hadn’t even explained them away. But with his revelation he had opened the door to more scholars with more explanations. The paintings would survive this crush or they would not. He hoped they would.
Jon needed to go home, but the only way out was through the gallery. From up here the white noise of the party was almost soothing, the way the ocean at night can sound if you aren’t in it. But the only person who could lead him safely between Scylla and Charybdis—Adger Boatwright and Gloria Scipi—was Ali. Where was he? Ali would console him. He would take him away from all this.
A sound came from Adger’s office. Jon stepped out of his cubicle. Adger’s door was closed and there was no light coming through the crack underneath. Something fell, the impact muffled by the Persian rug—a small object, maybe a book. Whispers ensued. Jon pressed his ear to the door and held his breath. He could hear cars speeding down Peachtree below Adger’s window, he could hear the party below. Adger’s office by comparison was not just quiet but free of sound.
“You are so exotic,” Jon heard Adger say, finally. “You turn me on!”
“I thought you were just interested in me for my idea,” Ali teased. “I mean, it was no big deal. I just noticed they were women.”
“Shh, shh,” Adger said.
“I mean, hello, what man would wear a green velvet tunic like that, unless he was a drag queen,” Ali said. He always got very talky when he was drinking.
“It was the Renaissance,” Adger snapped. “That’s what men wore. Now shut up and give me a little sugar.”
“I don’t care if it was the Renaissance or whatever,” Ali said, giggling but adamant. “Those aren’t men, they’re women.”
“Well, you don’t have to convince me,” Adger said. “I don’t give a damn.”
“You mean you don’t think they’re women?” Ali asked.
Again that terrible, total quiet.
“I think we sold it, that’s what I think,” Adger finally said. “And a good time was had by all. Now shut up or I’ll shut you up with this. You’re prettier than a striped snake and you’re turning out to be double the trouble.”
“Don’t say ‘Shut up,’” Ali giggled. “Say ‘Show some silence, sir.’”
“Shh,” Adger said, “I think I hear something.”
The door cracked open, the weather balloon of Adger’s head squeezed out. Jon pitched forward. Adger screamed. He tried to shut the door but Jon’s legs were in the way—now it was Jon crying out as the door slammed into him again and again. When the door swung free of his legs he shot forward, then crawled to relative safety under Adger’s coatrack. Did they have coatracks on plantations? was the dangerously irrelevant thought that came into Jon’s head. Adger loomed over him. Jon squirmed away and rolled against the wall, rubbing his throbbing shins.
Adger stood by the closed door with his head bent, his long arms hanging straight down, pulled by the weight of his clasped hands. A streetlamp rose in a window across the room, a sickly pinkish-yellow light slanted in, casting a nimbus around a figure on top of Adger’s desk. Its face was dark and featureless but it appeared to be naked, all thin limbs and sharp angles, and just above the level of the desk, something jutted out—Jon and Gloria Scipi could easily agree on the gender of this one. He could have been modeling for a portrait or carved from stone. He must have sat in perfect stillness and perfect arousal as all hell broke loose on the other side of the room, and he continued to sit this way as Jon and Adger caught their breath.
Jon’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. The look in his lover’s doe eyes was a little sad but didn’t waver, and Jon understood he had not seen more than he was meant to see.