Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [21]
Schapiro spoke rapidly, rhythmically, hardly pausing for breath. When he said that with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Picasso had fractured the picture plane, I could hear it crack, like a chiropractor cracking the bones at the base of your neck. As he went on, Schapiro’s sentences became staccato, cubistic, full of overlapping planes. I was so excited that I took Sheri’s hand in mine.
I felt myself gaining confidence. It was such a relief to me to know that art could be explained. If I couldn’t love art for itself, I could love it, like Schapiro, for the explanations. It was better than never to have loved at all.
He was discussing an early still life of Picasso’s, an upended table covered with a white cloth, a bowl of flowers, and a bottle of wine, all paradoxically suspended in space. What we were seeing, Schapiro said, was the conversion of the horizontal plane—the plane of our ordinary daily traversal of life—into an intimate vertical surface of random manipulation.
His voice rose to a cry. He honked like a wild goose. There was delirium in the room. The beam of the projector was a searchlight on the world. The students shifted in their seats and moaned. Schapiro danced to the screen and flung up his arm in a Romanesque gesture. As he spoke, the elements of the picture reassembled themselves into an intelligible scheme. A thrill of gladness ran through me and my hand sweated in Sheri’s.
And then we were hurrying down the aisle, stepping over murmuring bodies in the half-light of the screen. We were in the hallway on the second floor, running up the stairs.
On the roof of the New School, there was a deep purplish glow, a Picasso color, the swarthy light that settles on great cities at night. The wind lifted Sheri’s hair, but it was not cold for October. The world was warmed by art, like fire.
A low skylight rose up out of the roofline. It was dimmed, an empty studio. The near side was perpendicular, and then it sloped away. Sheri leaned over it, so that the upper part of her body, her head, arms, and shoulders, sprawled down the slope and her sex pointed at the sky. I paused to take a breath and allow my heart to beat. It’s a perfect world, I thought, if you understand it. I let the wind pass over us while Sheri gleamed in the dark. When I connected myself to her, we were the chance meeting, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella. We converted the horizontal plane into an intimate vertical surface of random manipulation.
10
When I moved in with Sheri, I assumed that now my adult sexual life would begin. Until then, my experience had been limited to what I thought of as collegiate episodes and wartime acts. Now I imagined myself plunging into sex, diving into a great density of things to do. I felt like a person who is about to go abroad for the first time.
But what actually happened was that Sheri and I began not at the beginning, as I had hoped, but at the end of sex. We arrived immediately at a point where, if we had gone any further, what we did would have had to be called by some other names—yoga, mime, chiropractic, or isometrics. We were like lovers in a sad futuristic novel where sex is subjected to a revolutionary program.
Sex has traditionally been associated with joy, which is an old-fashioned, almost Dickensian notion—but Sheri understood, as we do today, that sex belongs to depression as much as to joy. She knew that it is a place where all sorts of expectations and illusions come to die. Two people making love, she once said, are like one drowned person resuscitating the other.
Sometimes I thought of sex as a flight from art, a regression to instinct, but there was no escaping art when I was in bed with Sheri. She reminded me of some lines Wallace Stevens wrote about Picasso. How should you walk in that space, Stevens asked, and know nothing of the madness of space, nothing of its jocular procreations? For Sheri,