I, PRECARIOUS

It’s late when I hear Jackson come in. He pauses on his way through the kitchen to pour himself a glass of milk and make a sandwich. After a few minutes, he comes down the hallway, heading for the living room. As he passes the open door of the study, I can tell by the hesitation in his stride the exact moment he sees me in front of my computer. He comes into the room and stands behind me, bringing a hint of spring aftershave with him. “What are you  doing?” he asks.

“Researching a painter we’re planning to feature at the museum.”

He sets his milk and sandwich beside the keyboard, drapes his arm across my shoulder, and leans closer to the screen. “I can see why,” he says, his breath warm on my neck. “That’s one seriously hot dude.”

“You date yourself,” I tell him. “The current term is ‘righteous.’ He’s one righteous dude.”

He grins that impish grin. “Whatever,” he says.

The picture on the screen is of the painting Daedalus and Icarus by Leighton. It shows father and son standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. The boy gazes toward the horizon, his white wings raised, eager for flight. He wears nothing, though a slim orange ribbon flutters around him, coyly hiding his genitalia. As the man bends beneath his son’s upraised arm, making some final adjustment, his dark robes billow and swirl in the wind, obscuring one of the boy’s wings. Such heavy-handed foreshadowing.

“Lord Frederic Leighton,” I say. “1869.”

Jackson shrugs. “Never heard of him.”

“He isn’t widely known,” I admit. “Which is why we’re having the retrospective.”

When I look at the screen, I see the thought, the composition that went into the picture. I see a bleak landscape with a beautiful young man and a dark, older fellow. “Leighton never married, and even though there are rumors about a child by one of his models, speculation persists about his relations with men.”

Jackson glances at me. “That,” he says with a smirk, “is my kind of fellow.” He nips my ear.

“Leighton has the honor of holding the shortest peerage in British history,” I say. “A day after being given his title, he died of angina pectoris.”

Jackson raises his eyebrows. “What’s that?”

“A disease of the arteries which feed the heart.”

“A heart attack?” He turns back to the picture of the painting.

I shake my head. “Not exactly.” I shift a bit, leaning closer to him, but keep my eyes on the screen. I gaze at the mosaic of phosphorous dots which represent the painting of the artist’s conception of a scene that never existed.

When I look at Leighton’s painting, I can choose to see the dried pigment of the paint he used. Or I can see the associations of the colors and shapes to each other. Or I can see the relationship of the figures presented – the father expectant and hopeful, the son caught up in the romance of adventure. Or I can see the longing of the artist, his desire to capture the essence of paternal care or juvenile ambition or of history or myth or of ambition or lust.

Jackson thinks I don’t know about his boyfriend, a graduate assistant in his physics lab at the school, but I’ve overheard snatches of their conversation. I’ve noticed the glance that lingers a moment too long between the two of them. I look at Jackson now, and a sepia feeling washes over me.

I turn back to the screen.

Wherein lies the reality of the painting? Is it in the oils? The canvas? The colors and their relationships? The intent of the painter? Is it the artist’s love of the subject or the subject’s love – the father for his son or the son for his freedom?

If the painting were burned, would the desire of the artist that gave rise to the painting still exist, if only in history, at a precise moment in the past? But if it were buried instead, wouldn’t the artist’s intention remain in the world, somehow still in the present? Is an oil-dappled canvas art only when it’s viewed?

If Jackson were to analyze the work with the cutting-edge technology in his lab, what would he find? Paint? Molecules? Atoms? The electron cloud? Quarks? At what level would he find the picture?

If he were to analyze my heart – the blood and tissue and cells – at what level would he find my love?

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