Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The androgynous young man looked at her, his face placid, compassionate, transfigured. The fingers of his left hand rested upon his heart; with the index finger of his right hand he pointed toward the heavens. His eyes were widely set apart, and dark. John the Baptist’s left eye seemed to look skyward. The right one looked directly into her soul. After me will come one more powerful than I, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.
Rachel Steinberg felt lightheaded, transfixed. She had seen Leonardo’s St. John the Baptist in the Louvre a half dozen times before; she had written about the painting in the ’80s, as part of her dissertation entitled The Mystery to a Solution: Leonardo and Transfiguration. It was one of her favorite portraits to teach in her class on Italian Renaissance at Haverford College. She’d painted Quentin in this pose, of course, back in college. She still remembered how seriously he took the job of modeling, keeping that one hand raised toward heaven for what seemed like forever. And after, how angry he’d been with the image. That’s not what I look like! he’d shouted.
To see the Leonardo here, in Philadelphia, her hometown, seemed to change the painting yet again, seemed to make it into a thing almost painfully intimate. In Paris, she’d had to share the painting with hundreds of tourists and spectators, in a room where people had been gazing upon it for hundreds of years. Now the painting was on loan for six months in Philly, and she’d been given special permission to enter the museum an hour before opening, so that she could at last have a conversation with Saint John alone.
In the Louvre, the painting lived in a long gallery just outside the crowded chamber where the Mona Lisa hung. A few tourists paused beside it, or took a photograph with their cell phones. There were, sometimes, a few people gathered around it, but this was nothing compared to the hundreds squeezed around the Mona Lisa, a painting that, its smile notwithstanding, Rachel thought of as not Leonardo’s best work. St. John the Baptist was the last painting he’d painted, and it was hard, at this date, to understand how scandalous it had once been. But John was traditionally depicted as a wild-eyed, locust-eating prophet, and there were more than a few medieval paintings that presented John as just this side of a raving lunatic. Instead, here was Leonardo’s version: a gentle, androgynous figure, his soft lips and sexy ringlets drawing the viewer close, his face full of forgiveness and love. Whatever this world is, the saint implored, its heartache shall be quelled. He pointed toward the heavens to urge us toward the kingdom of God. But his other hand was on his heart, as if to show that the wonder of that kingdom lived within us all as well. Love will prevail, John said, and make us both men and women, darkness and light.
It was Rachel’s theory—backed by computer analysis—that the animal skins that cloaked John’s midsection, along with the cross above his left shoulder—had been added later, perhaps by someone scandalized by the image. As if, without the cross, the artist’s intentions might be misconstrued. And what was it the animal skins were meant to obscure? Was it corporeality itself that had had to be concealed, lest the viewer’s attention drift away from redemption and affix on something more carnal instead?
It angered her, even now, that the painting had been altered in this way, that someone who had missed Leonardo’s point so completely had so nearly spoiled it. As if the world of flesh were not part of the world God had made. But for all that, the power of the image remained unsullied.
Oh, John the B, she thought. You sexy hound dog. There’s just no quenching you.
It was the mouth that had attracted the most attention over the years. It was the same mouth he’d given the Mona Lisa, that tight-lipped, mystifying beam. But for Rachel, the haunting thing about John’s face was the dark, soft eyes, and the long, curling hair. It was hard to repress the desire to want to reach out and run one’s fingers through it. It was such a beautiful face, she thought. The forgiveness and the love that radiated out of it was confounding and humbling.
And yet, for all that, the man in the painting was not some otherworldly avenging Messiah, like the Renaissance Jesus. John had no halo. He was a human. The look on his face said, I’m like you. But he’d been transformed through surrender. Love came to him through that upraised finger, as if he were a lightning rod for all the compassion in the universe. Its voltage coursed through him and came out through the fingers of the other hand and consumed his heart. He looked out at Rachel with his deep, forgiving eyes, and said, This is the world we have been given, a world in which all we know, and all we have, is love.
Standing there alone in the chamber with him, something caught in Rachel’s throat, and she cried out loud. For a moment she staggered, and she raised one hand to her temple. “Oh,” she said softly. “I can’t.”
John the Baptist just looked at her with his soft, divine smile. Of course you can.
She turned from the painting and walked out of the room. A guard came toward her. “Is everything all right, Professor?”
She nodded, unable to speak, her eyes moist.
“We’re opening to the public in about five minutes,” he said.
“Okay,” she said, and walked swiftly down the hall and into the ladies’ room. She ran some water in the sink and let it fill her cupped fingers. Then she raised the water to her face.
Rachel dried off, tried to shake off some of the emotion that had engulfed her. She looked in the mirror. There she was—fifty-seven years old, her hair still long and curly but now nearly all gray. She wore no makeup. Rachel wasn’t even sure she still owned any makeup, although she suspected there might have been a ten-year-old tube of mascara in the back of one of the drawers at her apartment across from campus. Her life, over the years, had attained a simplicity that gave her peace. She’d largely given up dating, owned an old Subaru wagon that spent most of its days in her driveway. She planted flowers in her window boxes, put birdseed in her feeder, and watched the black-capped chickadees and the finches as they landed and fed, and flew.
She left the bathroom, checked her watch. Her hope had been to head over to the Rodin Museum after taking in the Leonardo, but she wasn’t sure she was up to it now—all that robust stone. She was a little embarrassed by her emotional reaction to Saint John—what was all that really about? There had been something intimidating about him, as if he were asking her questions he had no right to ask. Really, John the B, she thought. There had been no reason to be rude.
What can I tell you, Rachel, the saint replied. If you’re not going to hear it from me, then who? Come on. I’m one of your oldest friends. You need the people who love you, once in a while, to tell you the truth.
Yeah? she thought. Well, I don’t know about that, Johnny B. People always say that—“I’m just telling you the truth,” like they have some access to the truth that eludes other mortals. Over the years she’d known lots and lots of people who styled themselves as “truth-tellers,” and the one thing they all had in common was the fact that they were actually less interested in telling you the truth than in hurting you as badly as they possibly could.
I’m not trying to hurt you, the saint replied. I just want you to become yourself.
That’s the issue here, John? That I’m somehow not myself?
Not your self in full, Rachel.
Myself in full. I’m not even sure I know what that means.
Of course you do.
This full self you’re advocating. Do lots of people achieve it? You need to tell me, because it feels to me you’re asking for more than most people can attain.
I’m not talking about most people. I’m talking about you.
John the Baptist? she thought. You know what you can do for me now? You can shut the fuck up.
She saw those deep, liquid, loving eyes burning at her. I can be silent. But the question remains.
Walking away, Rachel shrugged in exasperation at this awkward conversation. She had a pretty good sense of why she found John the Baptist haunting: she associated him with poor, doomed Quentin, of course, whom she’d loved with a passion that seemed in inverse proportion to his interest in her. She’d spent her college years hurling herself against his invisible force field, again and again—a protective boundary that was just permeable enough to let her conclude, falsely, that she was actually getting through to him now and again. There was something in Quentin that truly seemed to understand her, almost as well as she understood herself. She had never felt so safe with a man before. He was astonishingly gentle and kind to her, less interested in sex, apparently, than in intimacy.
That had been the great thing about being in love with him, of course—but it had also been the chief frustration, in the long run. They never did actually sleep together, which seemed odd in retrospect. And he could shut down just as swiftly as he opened, like some kind of flower that clamped its petals closed at sundown.
It was that last, tragic visit he’d paid to her that haunted her now. After not hearing from him for almost half a dozen years, there he was on the threshold of her place in Dorchester, down on one knee in the middle of the street, proposing marriage as Bobby Trachtenberg looked on. We’re soul mates! he cried. For all the world he resembled nothing so much at that moment as a drowning man.
She couldn’t remember the words she’d said, although she did recall asking, What’s happened to you?, which, given the circumstances, wasn’t a bad question. Later, she fell forward into Bobby’s arms, after the man had done one of his backflips in the street. Or had the backflip come before? It was hard to remember.
Maisie Lenfest had been the one to call her, two weeks later, after they found the car. Rachel, she said. He drove straight off a cliff.
Rachel had just made love to Bobby. She was lying in their big bed naked, her head resting upon the man’s hairy chest. Wait, what? she’d said. Who?
But before Maisie had time to explain, she already knew who it was Maisie was describing.
Quentin’s death had been a hinge in her life. For the rest of her days, there would be a time after, and a time before. It was the moment she finally gave up on painting, and resolved to finish her PhD. That hadn’t been an especially hard decision—her shows had gone nowhere, and the dreary landscapes she’d been doing since Wesleyan seemed to bore everyone, including herself. As it turned out, she had a real talent for the kind of scholarly writing about art that she’d always loathed as a painter. Even before she finished her dissertation she’d published a half a dozen articles in good journals. She’d been snapped up by Haverford College, tenured early, became chair of her department at the age of thirty-two. Now and again she’d look at one of her paintings, which even before she got out of grad school seemed sophomoric, pompous, needlessly self-involved, and think, Ugh. She only had one in her apartment, the portrait of Quentin. Looking at it, she’d think, When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But when I became a woman, I put away childish things.
Rachel Steinberg suffered from a not uncommon affliction: the thing that she actually loved—painting—was something for which, as it turned out, she had no actual talent. And the thing at which she was something of a virtuoso—academic writing and critical theory—was the thing she loathed. And so success had come to her, as it comes to so many people, not by doing the thing she loved, which she did ineptly, but by doing the thing she hated, at which she was a genius.
This, sadly, had turned out to be the case in her love life as well. There had really only been two men in her life—Quentin and Bobby—and her passion and her talent for these two loves had mirrored the same heartbreaking mismatch she’d experienced in her professional life. She’d adored Quentin, just as she’d adored being a painter—but outside of the adoration itself, every aspect of this one great love of hers had been a disaster, ending in a collection of ugly canvases, ending in a suicide.
Bobby Trachtenberg hadn’t seemed like a natural boyfriend at first, what with the backflips and the beer belly. But in a strange way, Quentin’s death had touched him too, even though he’d only met the man the one time. In the weeks after, he kept turning to Rachel and asking her things like, Do you think I could have helped him if I hadn’t been such a jerk? Rachel had assured him that whatever Quentin had been haunted by, it wasn’t the gymnastics of Backflip Bob, but there were times she asked herself variations on the same question, blaming herself for not pulling Quentin back, somehow, from the cliff that waited for him.
Bobby went into therapy, stopped drinking, and eventually wound up getting a master’s in social work. When Rachel got the job at Haverford, he’d found a job in the Dean of Students Office, eventually becoming the dean in charge of the sophomores. Slowly, inevitably, they started talking about marriage, a union they kept strictly theoretical until after Rachel’s tenure decision. Then, the morning after the college president told her the good news, she felt a strange hollowness. She poured herself a whiskey at eleven in the morning, and stared out the window at their backyard in Bryn Mawr, where there was a rusted swing set left by the house’s previous owners.
The dean of sophomores gave her a perfunctory kiss. Then he said, “We’re not going to make it, are we?”
Within two years, he’d married someone else, another one of the deans, a girl with the ridiculous name of Bronwen. They’d even invited her to the wedding, there in the Bryn Mawr Presbyterian Church. But Rachel didn’t go. She was in Paris, gazing upon Saint John in the Louvre.
Now she walked through the museum toward the Impressionists. You know what you never told me, John the B. You never told me that the one whose coming you foretold would also turn out to be a man whose love I could not keep.
There was a time when all of this had made her angry, that the love she wanted she had lost, and the love she could have kept was one she did not desire. She’d kept her eyes open in the years after she and Bobby broke up, on the off chance that there was a third love waiting for her. Who knows? It was possible that the one whose coming had been foretold had, even now, not yet arrived.
But so what, Rachel thought. If the love of her life arrived now, it would still be too goddamned late. Fifty-seven was not ancient, but it was old enough for her to have settled into a life that revolved around academic research, around the Times crossword, around her old dog Moogus. Uptown Spinsterville, she thought. The likelihood that her life would alter much from what it had become was pretty small. From here on out, what she had to look forward to was mostly diminishment.
Starting with Moogus, a Springer spaniel well beyond her sell-by date. The week before, Moogus had lacked the energy to even climb out of her dog bed, and just looked at Rachel with her wet, disappointed eyes. Rachel should have had the dog put down by now. But she lacked the courage to take the dog for that last ride.
Now and again she’d make eye contact with someone—a young man in a museum, a stranger at a conference—and wonder whether this was the person she was still supposed to be waiting for. She read them all like clues leading her toward her real life, a life that after all these years still felt to her as if it had not yet begun. A life still frozen at the moment Wailer disappeared.
Died. Not disappeared. She supposed she’d have to start saying it now. Until they’d found the body, there’d been the possibility, remote as it was, that Wailer had given them all the slip. That had been Casey’s theory anyhow, and she’d been too kind—or cruel—to tell him any different.
Rachel stopped in her tracks. Before her, taking up an entire wall, was Cézanne’s The Large Bathers. She sighed. Perfect, she thought. Now this day’s complete.
Tell me what you see, said John the B.
They’ve changed, she thought. Even those big bathers are not what they once were.
It’s not the bathers that have changed, Rachel Steinberg.
Oh, John. When I was young, I thought these enormous women were eternal. The embodiment of the feminine sublime.
And now?
Now I see them for what they are.
Which is?
Oh, there’s nothing eternal about any of us anymore.
Rachel, John said, looking at her with his sweet, forgiving eyes. His hand on his heart. The other one pointing toward the heavens. We are here for more than this.
“More?” Rachel said out loud, angrily. She stamped her foot. “What more exactly?”