Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [108]
A hazy late-summer Sunday in Venice. Bells ringing. A scene that Monet might have painted: a scrim of humidity softening the campanili, the sky, the water. No wonder painters flocked here, where the air and water metamorphose moment by moment in a kaleidoscope of light. Venice is the only city in which nearly every view is three-quarters sky. Taking the vaporetto to the Biennale, I suddenly understand the light of Venice, the light that drew Ruskin, Turner, Monet—and before them all the great Venetian painters, from Carpaccio, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese to Guardi and Canaletto. Suddenly I see Venice as if for the first time. Is it sobriety, the triumph of my sane mind? Is it my maenads and crystal? Is it the loss of Dart? I see the motes of light Turner painted. I understand the light as if it were glowing deep in my gut.
In art school I studied with a wonderful old teacher, a figurative painter from Russia named Stoloff. He used to say that the difference between a so-so painting and a great one was tone, the sense that the painter had painted not only the object itself but the air between himself and the object, which transfigured it, made it uniquely his. I had never really understood what he meant, but now I did.
The whole point of painting was to capture the air—the light shimmering in the air between you and your quarry. And why? Because only then were you painting the dance of the molecules, the dance of the molecules that made up what we call “real.”
This was the point—to paint that dance. But first you had to see it. Stoloff also used to say, “You are here to learn not how to paint but how to see. Because if you can see, the painting comes by itself. But most so-called artists are blind.”
He had been dead a decade, but finally I was learning what he had tried to teach me. Removing the alcohol from my system was like getting a new set of senses: eyes, ears, nose—all worked as if they were freshly made. I could tune in to the cosmos without static; I could see without glasses; I could smell the flowers without nose clips on!
What I was learning, above all, is that life goes on. What I was learning was that alone, I was not alone. I would learn to follow my bliss wherever it led. If this night in Venice had brought nothing else, it had brought, at least, this moment of clarity. I had finally learned my old art teacher’s lesson. I could go home now if I liked.
But I didn’t. Instead I went to Cordelia’s at six.
Cordelia lived on the top floor of the Palazzo Barbaro, in whose astonishing library Henry James slept when he was beginning The Wings of the Dove. The apartment was vast, with coffered ceilings, a salotto that faced the Grand Canal, that Jamesian library with painted panels, its view of the tiled roofs and roof gardens of Venice, and a kitchen that was once Sargent’s studio. Cordelia’s paintings—monumental equine forms (like a sort of mad Rosa Bonheur gone abstract)—were everywhere, hung or propped against walls.
Cordelia embraced me. Then she stood back to appraise me as women of a certain age do. Not dead yet. Not over the hill. Still a few good love affairs left. (Odd, the way we measure out our lives in love affairs, as women of another time used to measure theirs in children.)
Cordelia has waist-length blond hair, piercing green eyes, glorious cheekbones. She is tall, with broad shoulders that can make an Armani suit or a denim shirt look equally elegant. We hug.
“You look great,” I say. “Is it still the same Italian—or a new one?”
“Believe it or not, it’s still Guido, honey. I think our relationship survives because we can’t be together. These Italian liaisons go on forever. It must be what Dumas said: ‘The bonds of matrimony are so heavy that it takes two to carry them—sometimes three.’ For certain, if we’d gotten married fifteen years ago, we probably wouldn’t still be together.”
“Still madly in love?”
“Yes, honey. With the accent on madly.”