What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [76]
Naomi told Siggi about her venture. While curious, he feared it would ruin his reputation to be seen among nudists and he never joined her.
It was against that backdrop that Ivan had asked Naomi if she would pick out a piece of erotic art for him while she was antiquing. But Naomi had not completely outgrown her ingrained modesty. She came by it naturally. Her Orthodox Jewish mother was so strictly observant that she did not permit graven images in their home. Naomi was still too embarrassed to ask antiques and art dealers about erotic art directly. Instead, for months she silently marched up and down the aisles of stores and shows in New York, New Jersey, and near her home in Florida, hoping that she would know what she was looking for when she saw it as she shopped for conventional antiques: Art Deco jewelry, Royal Worchester porcelain, English card cases, and giftware for friends.
She was browsing in an art store in the Willowbrook Mall in New Jersey, of all unlikely places, when she came across a dreamy pastel-colored oil painting of a nude Euroasian woman ascending from a giant rose. She thought it was beautiful and readily paid $500 for it. She confidently brought it to Ivan. He rejected it on sight. “She still didn’t get it at all,” he said. “She thought because it had a nude, it was erotic.”
Naomi returned to the trenches and bought more of what she thought was erotic, mostly nudes. Her son continued to reject her offerings. As far as he was concerned, they lacked eroticism. Finally, Naomi became frustrated enough that she summoned the nerve to ask an antiques dealer directly if he had any erotic art. “It’s everywhere and it’s nowhere,” he said. Mystified, she asked what he meant. “We all have it, but none of us display it,” he continued. “It’s under the table, and only if someone specifically says, ‘Show me the erotic art that you have,’ do we take it out. We don’t want to offend religious people or parents with children. So we just don’t leave it out.”
Naomi was more than a year into her quest when the proprietor of a store in St. Petersburg, Florida, approached her and asked what she was after. Still self-conscious about being “Mrs. Wilzig, the banker’s wife,” she answered by listing her respectable quarry. Just before she stopped speaking, she spit out, “And erotic art.”
The owner shrank back. He glowered at his young assistant. “Did you tell her that we have it?”
“No,” the young man responded, “you must have told her.”
“I didn’t tell her, you . . .”
Offended accusations shot back and forth between the two men until Naomi interrupted the squabbling. “Gentleman,” she said, “stop arguing and tell me what it is that you have!”
“Go get it,” the owner ordered his assistant. The young man walked to the back of the store and emerged with a seven-foot ladder. He leaned it against a tall breakfront. After climbing as high up as he could, he reached behind the molding and descended clutching something to his chest. The owner of the store took it and carefully presented a Japanese shunga, or pillow book, to Naomi. “It was amazingly beautiful. I had never seen anything like it. I knew it was old and rare, and I felt a rush. Don’t let this get away from you, I told myself,” Naomi said.
The book, a gift to newlyweds in the late 1800s, contained twenty-five hand-painted pictures illustrating the ways a man and a woman might give each other sexual pleasure. At $2,500, the shunga book was more than Naomi had guessed she would have to pay for erotic art, but she did not flinch at the price.
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