“Not all great art is like that,” she dared.
Yet: what if she honestly didn’t know the unicorn was a symbol of purity, of Christ. Would she just look at the old-fashioned needlepoint and think, Wow, that was a lot of work?
He stepped up close to the Boccioni, almost put his nose on the canvas and Rosie saw the security guard shift and attend. “Some. Yes. There are artists who make you feel, even if you can’t label the feeling, even if the feeling is discomfort. De Chirico, Turner. So much of the rest, it’s just, just —” a dismissive wave of his hands “— decoration.”
“Picasso —”
“Picasso!” He wheeled now to face her. “Perfect example, yes! He was brilliant. He upended all that stuffy realism and opened up a new way of seeing and creating. Art didn’t have to be replication or even representation. Art could be anything. Everything followed on from Picasso — surrealism, dada, modernism, postmodernism, post-postmodernism, Julian Schnabel with his silly broken pots. But Picasso found out he could wipe his ass on a piece of paper, and it would sell for millions. My parents had a Picasso in the dining room, it was crap, and the reverence they held for it infuriated me, it was an altarpiece to all that’s bogus and pretentious, and so when I was 13 I spray-painted a penis on it.”
Rosie gasped and laughed, “What did they do?”
“Didn’t matter, because I was right.”
In front of her, Boccioni’s men, his horses swept on, they were still moving a century later, vibrating ferociously. She knew the futurists were fascists, war was glorious progress to them, yet none of them fought in the trenches. If they had, their art would have certainly become contaminated personal experience. What she loved about Boccioni, even Léger and Giacometti, was their focus on the metaphysical. “Art is an invitation to participate in ideas, not feelings,” she said boldly.
“I’d argue against such didacticism. Our conversation proves the point that good art makes you think, and thinking isn’t the opposite of feeling — merely the opposite of intellectual posturing.” He held out his hand in introduction, “Bennett. Bennett Kinney.”
“Rosie Monroe.”
“Rosie Monroe, why do you know so much about art?”
“I’m at Parsons.”
“Rosie Monroe, you should read less and do more.”
“I like the reading. Art is history, not battles and kings but the history of how people interpret the world. And anyway, I’m not very good at the doing.”
“Who has told you that?”
She looked at him now, and he was looking back, as if peering over a pair of eyeglasses, with sincere expectation. He had beautiful eyes — large like a woman’s with long lashes, and that thick dark blond hair, loosely curled. He was much older than her, he was a grown-up man. “I’m not an artist.” She wanted him to know that she knew her limits, she wasn’t conceited. “I’m a careful drawer, a painter of mediocre still lifes.”
“You don’t know what gifts the angels will bring.” He leaned forward, continued in a low conspiratorial tone: “Listen, Rosie Monroe, I have to go. An auction at Christie’s, I’m bidding for a client. A tea set owned by the Duchess of Devonshire.”
Rosie felt herself nodding like a normal person yet she was suddenly desolate. Her sweater was itchy, the crotch of her tights had sagged to mid-thigh and Bennett Kinney was going to leave her.
Then, as he was walking away, he turned, smiled: “I’ll find you, Rosie Monroe.” And he did.
The sea reflected light into the boathouse, wavering in morning, as if the building was underwater. The wood walls had been painted a deep sea green to amplify this effect. Rosie was a mermaid. A pregnant mermaid. The home-pregnancy test left no doubt. Since starting Parsons, her periods had been irregular, and she couldn’t remember the last one — certainly before she’d come to the boathouse in June with Bennett. She’d been careful, but there had been a couple of times when she’d gone to remove the diaphragm and found it already dislodged. And a few instances when she hadn’t replenished the spermicidal jelly between love-making. She had not anticipated how frequently she and Bennett would have sex. He desired her and it was grown-up to be able to fuck at will, she felt sometimes unsure but Bennett did things with his hands and his mouth and he wanted her to come, and she let herself roll on the waves of her orgasms while he watched and admired. Somewhere inside, Rosie had the idea, like a stone buried deep in the Presbyterian loam of her soul, this pregnancy was punishment for being greedy. Her orgasms were rich as chocolate cake or red velvet. Layers of sweetness and dripping icing.
Gran believed in Fate, a force far more powerful than God because Fate could not be appealed to. Gran’s idea — drawn from the bitter experience of losing her husband and son — was that if you kept your head down and your mouth shut, Fate wouldn’t notice you. You were the dull girl the rapist walked right by, the plain flower that kept its head, the unsmiling mother who kept her child. Fate kept score, like a golfer. Once, Rosie had told this to Bennett and he’d scoffed: “The score sheet is millions of years long and in a language unspoken by humans.”
This was why she loved him. He was wise, he set her free. With him, her blood felt different in her veins, warmer, smoother, just as her hair was blonder from the sun. He told her to stand naked in the window, silhouetted against the sea, and raise up her arms, and slowly turn around.
He had brought her here to this light sea-place for the summer, which she’d otherwise be spending in Lowell, probably working at Dairy Queen and maybe seeing Chris, though she’d heard he was staying out in California. Bennett had given her an expensive set of pastels and charcoals and quality vellum paper because he saw her as an artist.
His mother had been an artist, she’d studied in Paris and been friends with Lee Miller and Man Ray. In her day, in her family, in her marriage, art wasn’t encouraged as a serious endeavor, merely a hobby. “It was a great tragedy.” She’d settled for watercolors, a medium devoid of drama or ambition. “Sail boats,” Bennett said. “Thousands of fucking sail boats.” Rosie wondered if his mother was still alive and when they might meet. But, except in anecdotal form, Bennett never spoke about his family.
An artist was a serious person, someone with visions and unique sensibilities, and every day Rosie aspired to visions, she waited for them through long, barren hours and she sometimes moved the pastels around in their box, rearranged the sequence of colors, and smudged them on her hands so Bennett would think she’d been working. She wanted to make up for his mother.
And now she was pregnant. Which should feel momentous — wondrous or disastrous. But felt, instead, improbable.
Rosie shifted on the bed to see the view out across the sound. The studio apartment perched high above the slips where Hobie and Mitzi kept an Atlantic and a meticulously refurbished lobster boat. She could hear the water below her gently slapping the boats. Elsewhere, in the gardens that sprawled between the boathouse and the main house: the ubiquitous droning of the lawnmower. The gardener was always mowing, the lawn short and thick as a high-quality wool carpet. The morning was breathless and hot, her skin damp with sweat, and the sea sprawled luxurious as Chinese silk, deep jade with hues of gentian further out. The sky was less interesting — a watery blue. Through the haze, she could just make out the distant cigar shape of Long Island.