Easy Beauty: A Memoir

PROLOGUE

The Neutral Room

I am in a bar in Brooklyn listening as two men, my friends, discuss whether or not my life is worth living. Jay is to my left and Colin to my right. Colin, an ethical philosopher trained in my same doctoral program, argues a vision for a better society, one where a body like mine would not exist. The men debate this theory, speaking through me. This is common, both the argument and the way I’m forgotten in it.

The window in front of me frames scenes from the street. Groups of people, unified in exuberant movement, pass by like rowers on a river, propelling themselves swiftly into their Friday night. I wish for one person to stop and meet my gaze, wave me up from my seat and out to the sidewalk, inviting me to follow them into a more fun future. None do.

I don’t want to be with these men, at this bar, anymore. I think to fake a phone call, to fill my vacant face with false concern, then walk out, slip into the stream of people, disappear. I am not so far from home. I imagine myself already there, leaning to kiss the forehead of my sleeping son, collapsing in my own bed, drawing my hand across my husband’s shoulders. But habit and exhaustion limit me. I am humiliated again.

To speak up, against Colin, would require an energy I don’t have and don’t want to access, not now, not tonight, not after I’ve taught classes all day at school, made dinner at home, read the same book—Cars Go Vroom!—four times to my five-year-old, brushed my teeth, fixed my hair, put on my favorite dress.

It is early May. A month of April rain filtered the atmosphere and the scent of clean spring air, acidic and sweet, reaches me through the bar’s open window. I want to enjoy this warm evening, and I want to think a little less. Simple pleasure is inaccessible to me now, but I know I can have something like it if I stay quiet, let the men talk. I can sit through their conversation from a remove. It won’t last forever. So, I seal myself up, I become a statue, I lean against the wall, am bordered by neon light; I try on, keep on, a fixed expression; I leave the scene and become a surface only. The men bicker over the issue of my unfortunate birth. I search for anger and find only numbness.

I center myself in The Neutral Room, a separated space inside my mind I constructed when I was very young as a method for dissociating from physical pain. There are no doors or windows in the neutral room, nothing but white walls, and on the walls, one at a time, gray numbers flash…

1 2 3 4, 5 6 7 8, 1 2 3 4, 5 6 7 8

… and I count them until everything else fades and I’m lost in a void that nullifies, dulls what needs dulling, and from there the world blurs and the bar is both darker and louder, blunting Colin’s face and voice, and his words reach me weakly, then dissolve, subsumed below the shriek and grind of bar and street noise, which whirrs on and on, black sound blackening the lasting night.

Part One: A Window

1

The Berninis

Three months later

A stranger is staring at me. I drop my shoulder, glimpse him over it. He is tall. He crosses the room, moving toward me with a long stride, smooth and sure. The stranger’s stare fastens, binds me tighter to him as he moves closer. His eyes scrape across my body, then he looks away, back, away, then skips discretion and takes in my length, eyes prowling up and down. Newness incites the eye and I am always a new thing. Once accustomed, he turns from me and looks at the Bernini sculpture in front of us, a scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Now it is my turn to stare.

The stranger is built by blueprint and ruler. Jaw to neck, shoulder to torso, hip to knee: a body of straight lines, design, intention. I’m flushed, too warm, I stink, sweat drips, rivulets of self-reproach; he is near me now, dry and smiling; it unnerves me, his dryness. I’d left my hotel at noon: an error. Heat made the streets shimmer. The air was sticky and humid as a mouth. Dust, rising in fine mists, drifted over me, left me gritty.

Behind us, the Galleria Borghese bursts with tourists; they push in close, pen us in, making a frame around me and the stranger. From a distance we might look like polite people appreciating a famous sculpture, but from where I stand, inside the mass, I can see all the sly, slow glances, flushed faces, dilations, smiles, pulses, and swells, and I am caught in their undertone, washed by their waves of red energy. Our eyes hang on the sculpture at a single juncture, where Pluto’s hand presses deep into Proserpine’s naked leg.

The sculpture depicts a story from Roman mythology. One version goes like this: Pluto offends Venus, the goddess of love. As an act of revenge, she tells Cupid to send his arrow through Pluto’s heart, afflicting him instantly with a love-like madness. Proserpine, the daughter of the goddess Ceres, is nearby picking flowers. Pluto, god of the Underworld, abducts her, forcing her away from nature and toward the safety of the dark and isolated world he rules.

Bernini stills, for our consideration, the moment when Pluto sees Proserpine and takes her, holds her roughly. He wraps a hard hand around her thigh, and at that point of contact Bernini has made metamorphic rock soft, impossibly. The way marble fingers sink into marble flesh, the eroticism of this aggression—it makes me uneasy, but I don’t look away and neither does anyone else.

The stranger inches closer. His elbow finds my shoulder and stays. Where we touch becomes a whole sensate world made of heat, weight, a scent like wet leaves. Then his arm parts from mine, just barely, and the world expands to that narrow space that separates us, and through that space the possibility of adventure trembles forth. Fine hairs and ridged red flesh rise to bridge the gap between my body and his. My thoughts crawl along my skin. The stranger and I take breaths in unison, suspended in anticipation of the other’s gesture. I imagine the stranger grasping me as Pluto grasps Proserpine. He leans closer and a budding warmth in me blossoms. A thought toward pleasure: to see him kneel and lick Rome’s dust from my bare leg. Just then the stranger tips forward and inhales sharply as if this would dislodge a tiny particle of the Bernini that he could ingest, something to keep safe inside himself long after he’s left the museum. He sits back on his heels, nods to the statue—an odd gesture of, perhaps, respect—and moves on without me, winding through the crowds. I stand alone a while longer and stare at the goose bumps raised and rippled, carved by a tool onto Proserpine.

In other depictions of this myth, artists paint a weaker heroine. Dürer etches Proserpine (Proserpina to Bernini, Persephone to the Greeks) as a dizzying pinwheel of limbs, the center point of which are her breasts, bulging comically like bugged-out eyes. Alessandro Allori shows her placid and blank, seemingly bored by her kidnapping. Rubens bends her back over the edge of Pluto’s speeding chariot, her will lost in the blur of momentum. Rembrandt’s Proserpine limply claws at Pluto’s face from a vacant state. Theodoor van Thulden leaves her stunned, head tilted up, arms skyward, as if asking for a better god to intervene and save her from her fate.

But Bernini’s Proserpine is alive.

Her body is strong, and she torques it forcefully against the god, trying to free herself. She smashes the hardest part of her palm into Pluto’s face. He grimaces. Bernini leaves Pluto dazed, off-balance, faltering, reminding us that Cupid’s arrow kidnaps his agency, too. Ovid’s myth tells of two forced transformations and Bernini shows us two people in motion, struggling unsuccessfully against their fate. The statue is bright, the brightest thing in the room, and it hums with the energy of the aggrieved—Pluto hurts Venus who hurts Pluto who hurts Proserpine; this circular hurt, placed on Proserpine’s thigh, her stone flesh yielding below the god’s grasp. It is stupefying: I am dimmed by awe, aversion, desire.

I’ve been standing too long and my right hip begins its familiar twinge. If I don’t find a place to lie down, stretch, and rest, my body will start to lock up. The straps of my backpack are slightly uneven, and I can already feel the pressure causing the muscles on the right side of my curved spine to cramp.

I find my neutral room and count 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.

Slowly, I pass by the sculpture. There is other art to see here. I stop for balance and to rest. My back is stiff and stiffens more. Pain transforms the floor’s stubborn slant; reorders it, distorts, unmoors; the plane is changed, both breadth and pitch. The pull of all this art is gone. Everything is just a thing now. Pain breaks my bond with all but it.

I look for an exit sign and walk into a new room and the stranger is there.

He faces away from me, but the line of his shoulder straightens my way, aims. He knows I’m near. I stare a moment too long, and he turns toward me. I flinch, recover, then move to study without attention the nearest painting, anything other than him. He watches me through the room. What a feeling this gives me. It electrifies the experience of looking elsewhere. I track his graceful maneuvering through the crowd. His long consideration of a piece of art, his eyes flicking up to a gilded ceiling—it is all for my benefit. I try to find enough energy to imagine a divergent reality, one in which I become a beautiful body blushing with desire, pain numbed, mind blank, dragged into the present moment by lust and left there, confused and alert. I follow him. He crosses the room, so I do, too; he turns a corner, I turn; he is steps ahead, his scent seeks me, the length of his neck is the length of my name; I am possessed, not by him, but by bloated, ornate reverie, by possibility. A curtain lifts to reveal a new narrative: a lady meets a stranger and now a real story can begin.

When I was six, I held my father’s hand as he followed a red-haired woman around a department store. She was a stranger, but regarded my father with a knowledge I didn’t understand. She looked at him until he lowered his eyes. She moved through the aisles, knowing he would follow, and he did. I walked behind my father, hidden from the woman, but she was not hidden from me. She wore a white dress, the precise image of which I can recall as if she were in front of me now in the Galleria Borghese. Delicate, loose, translucent. Often, I’ve fought the urge to buy something similar, wondering what effect a dress like that might have on me. My father had squeezed my hand. He’d whispered, Keep up, keep up.

I watch my stranger in the Galleria. Would I follow him out of the museum and into an imaginary night? He’s ahead of me in the grand hall, keep up, keep up, but I can’t keep up. My hip stops me. I rest against a wall. The pursuit is over, and I am, again, only myself: a tired mom, overheated and unable, unwilling, to keep walking. The stranger pauses in a far-off doorway, maybe waiting for me, but it’s too late, my fantasy deflates, I’m beat, so beat, museums are exhausting, the day is done; the opening through which the unexpected could emerge is now closed, and I want to go home, or at least to the hotel and its air-conditioning.

I stand in the vestibule, just ahead of the exit, to get my fill of free Wi-Fi before leaving. I cycle through my email and social media accounts. A text pops up.

Isn’t it a bit strange (it’s my mother) to go to Italy without telling anyone?

I don’t tell her the truth because I don’t know it. Whatever it is will be embarrassing. If I tell her about Colin and Jay at the bar, what they’d said to me and what I’d said to them and how it had shifted something in me, how it had taken me from my family and put me on a plane to Rome—well, I can already see her rolling her eyes, heavy sighs all lined up and waiting.

Strange how? I text back.

My mother delivers disapproval in the form of questions. What happened to your PhD?

Nothing happened to it, I respond.

Should something have happened? Should work have happened?

Probably.

Dots undulate, bubble up, then dissolve into the depths below my cell phone screen. My mother quits the inquisition. I imagine her frowning at her screen, eyebrow raised. Her silence voices her real concerns: my son, my husband, my new job; the common thread: my abandoned priorities.

I put my phone in the pocket of my dress. I’m ready to leave. I grimace and bend at a drinking fountain. I feel the approach of a body behind me. A voice says, Beautiful.

When I right myself, the stranger is there, staring.

"Bellissimo? Bello? You speak English? the stranger continues. He’s American. I nod and follow the trajectory of his hand as it rises and begins to gesture all around us. Beautiful," he says.

The museum? I ask.

Yes, he says. Did you get in for free? I try, a last hope, to twist this question into a pickup line, but it won’t go.

My father tried one of his many pickup lines on the red-haired woman in the white dress in the department store. She was the physical opposite of my mother, not just because my mother’s skin, eyes, hair were all darker, but also because of the way the red-haired woman moved. She floated as if underwater and she touched things just to touch. She fondled a mattress on display, used her hand to rub its edge, an errant caress to signal something, to put a scent into the air. My mother might have crisply flipped a sale tag or read a warranty, but she would not have engaged in this musky circling. The red-haired woman ran her fingers across the silky threads stitched into the mattress and then, under my father’s careful gaze, she’d turned her hand over, exposing her soft, open palm. And my father stopped her. He held her at the elbow, fingers pressing in on soft, white skin.

The stranger is talking to me. He says, This building itself, right?

Is what? I ask. I’ve missed something.

Is the most beautiful part, more beautiful than anything in it.

I don’t think so, I say.

Do you think only art can be beautiful? I hear a hiss and then a clicking sound, his tongue against his teeth. Ah, ah, ah, he says, scolding me as dogs are scolded.

No, I say.

Only bodies? He looks at me with discomfort for a moment.

Oh, I think, I know what this is now.

He’s got that itch-in-the-brain look, like he’s seen something go askew and he just needs to fix it, to fix something. My disability is obvious, but its details are unclear; to look at me is to feel information both shown and withheld. These ideas in opposition create cognitive dissonance and this makes people uncomfortable in a way not reducible to prejudice alone. There are patterns of reactions to this dissonance. People stare, mostly without realizing it. Some people cannot feel at ease around me until they know what they want to know. Once, at a restaurant, a woman snapped her fingers as I passed by her table and said, Explain yourself.

The stranger needs to talk at me, needs to explain and label. He wants an uncertain thing to yield to a category assigned by his reason.

What people don’t realize is— He keeps talking and I let him, but I’ve already retreated to the neutral room in my head where I’m having a different conversation with no one. He’s performing a familiar soliloquy about how beauty standards are really made up by marketers and shift with the times and I’m nodding politely, waiting for the moment to pass. I’ve been here before and I know what comes next. In a minute he’ll tell me beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

But this building is objectively beautiful. Don’t you agree? he asks.

No, I say. I can’t think of anything objectively beautiful.

I think it’s stunning. Don’t you think it’s stunning?

No, not this one.

Well, it’s all subjective, isn’t it?

I don’t think so, no.

Isn’t beauty in the eye of the beholder?

I don’t think anyone who says this knows what it means.

No?

Or rather, it has a meaning no one believes. It’s a silencing sentence, one that reduces rather than explores one of the most exhilarating human experiences. The experience of beauty. What a shame.

Of course, my half of the dialogue happens only in my head. I am not a participant in the present moment. I do not want to talk to this guy. I nod and tell him, Sure, the building is fine, it’s great, it’s beautiful, and I wait in the neutral room for this conversation, a repeat of so many others, to end.

The stranger says, My ticket cost a lot. You are lucky.

Sorry? I say.

Don’t tell me you paid? Didn’t you see the sign when you entered? People with your situation get in free to most museums. Next time, I’ll borrow a crutch. I smile and he smiles.

Oh, he says, watching me. "I’m not being offensive. I work with people like you. I work for people like you." The stranger tells me his name is Joel. He’s an acupuncturist from South Florida.

I saw you in there before, he says, looking up and down the length of me again, and I just wanted to ask—

Oh, no thank you—

What is your nomenclature?

My nomenclature?

Look, he says, I’m not going for the three f’s.

I want to know what the three f’s are. I wait. He’s hooked me and he knows it. He waits. We’re at an impasse. His furry eyebrows, which seemed distinctive only moments ago, now look like fat caterpillars stuck in skin. Joel’s black hair, soft as cat fur before, looks brittle and rough. He runs his hands through his hair and bits of skin flake and rain down on his shoulders. His fingernails, oily.

Joel says, Fame, fortune, and favor.

Ah, I say.

You know what I mean?

I don’t, I say.

I’m not trying to sell you something. Not at all. I specialize in malfunction of extremities. I couldn’t help but notice—

No, thank you. I turn my back and drink again from the water fountain.

Sorry, it’s a professional curiosity, if you could just—

No, thank you, I say.

Excuse me, says Joel. He doesn’t want to be interrupted. I just wanted to help. He exhales through his nose. I am offering to help you. I am actually willing to help you. You just have to tell me—

People are quick to assure me that they are not intruders. They insist they are actually willing to help me. There are these oils, strangers tell me, these tinctures, herbs, powders, pills, yoga poses, meditation techniques, mantras, yodels, chants, supplements, hemp seeds, CBDs, drugs, gemstones, crystals, preachers, energy fixers, energy shifters, people who will realign all my energies, line them up just right; or, some will say, Let me lay my hands upon you for I am a vessel of the Lord whose love will heal your body, which is not the part I most want healed.

I’m not a bad guy, says Joel from South Florida. He sees I am uncomfortable and that is making him uncomfortable, and he wants me to absolve him, and he wants me to help him believe, as everyone does, that all is pardoned by good intention.

I understand, I say.

I want a dark room and a cool glass of water. Pain delays anger but it will find me later in the night. I let Joel hand me his business card. He presses it against my palm, leans in; a whisper on the wind, If you’re ever in Florida… We part, the curtain falls. Later, I will replay this conversation over and over, thinking of better things to say, thinking of a better version of myself, a faster, smarter, more certain version. But in that moment in Rome, I was someone whose first and only impulse in the face of discomfort was to retreat, to leave my body nodding while the rest of me, the realest parts of me, waited in the neutral room. I did not see another choice because I was not yet aware I was making one.

I stand alone in the bathroom at the Galleria Borghese. I pat my cheeks with cold water. My face in the mirror: swollen, sweating, and red, and oh god, my awful face, flushed, foul, and confused. This face floated behind the stranger, followed him from room to room. Poor guy, poor Joel, tracked by a troll oozing a crimson, ghoulish lust. I am vibrating, but no, not me, my phone. My mother is texting again. I pull my phone from my pocket to read her text, but it dies in my hand. I am focused on all the wrong problems. For weeks I’d read up on art in Italy like there’d be an exam to pass later but had failed to imagine just physically being present in Rome and needing basic, sustaining things like dinner plans, a water bottle, a European plug adapter.

I’d not thought about practicality because I don’t want practical things to happen. I want an event, something like a bar behind a phone booth, a séance at a village festival, a lever to pull, a secret revealed, a mountain guide to guide me, a mystic in the alley, a mystery to solve, a man on the run, anything, anything at all, but I am not of the ilk who discover such things. I am neither sensible nor adventurous. I am someone who can assemble an excellent bibliography and call it knowledge. I’d prepared for Rome by reading fat biographies of Bernini, accumulating piles of facts about the past, none of which would lead me to an experience in the present.

The afternoon sun pummels the façade of the Galleria. The tourists and I stand outside on the lawn and take pictures. A woman in a green hat, heavy camera in hand, breaks from her family, gestures to me, asks if I’d like her to take my picture in front of the museum. I shake my head no. I find a shady spot in the surrounding gardens and I lie down flat on my back and begin my stretches, crossing my right leg over my torso until a warm and relieving ache radiates through my hip. I stare at the sky. Something darkens the space above, the same woman in the hat leans over me and asks if I’m OK. I nod my head. Yes, I’m fine.

Sitting up, I see Joel standing in front of the Galleria Borghese, admiring it below a sun that bleaches them both. Perhaps Joel sees himself reflected. Two bodies, the Galleria and Joel, ivory and grand; two testaments to the enduring idea from the ancient Greeks and Romans that beauty is rooted in symmetry, measure, order. Perfect circles, straight lines, squares. Joel and the building, inscribed in the same circle of thought, no, the same repeating circles of thought, concentric, emanating out, over and over.

The Galleria’s columns, its strict Palladian proportions, come from classical formalism, from the temples erected by the ancient Greeks, and from Vitruvius, whose De architectura is the only extant instructional architecture text from antiquity. Vitruvius tells us that man and building are best built in accordance with mathematical principles. Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man displays man’s ideal proportions, perfectly inscribable within circle and square. The Vitruvian Man is a descendant of the Doryphoros, the masterpiece of Polykleitos, a beloved sculptor from fifth-century BCE Athens. Polykleitos’s statue is of a spear bearer who is shown stepping forward, torso curved, his weight on the right leg, his left at ease, one hand curled around a phantom weapon.

In The Canon, a companion treatise, Polykleitos detailed the exact measurements of each part of the spear bearer’s body as well as the precise distances between them. Such perfection in proportion, wrote the physician Galen of the sculpture seven hundred years later, comes about via an exact commensurability of all the body’s parts to one another: of finger to finger and of these to the hand and wrist, of these to the forearm, of the forearm to the upper arm; of the equivalent parts of the leg; and to everything else.

Both the treatise and sculpture are lost, although there exists—in various stages of deterioration and imperfection—Roman copies remade in marble. The most famous copy was pulled from the ashes of Pompeii.

For the Greeks, these perfect proportions were not random but were drawn from an intricate and holy design observable in the natural world. So, orderliness in the human body was proof of that person’s innate, divine harmony; to be beautiful was to have one’s parts function together in perfect relation to a whole, just as parts of nature function together. Temple, torso, tree, leaf, wing, rose, all lined up by the eye of God; His patterns repeating everywhere: buildings built by the golden ratio; fractal branching in the trees above me; on the skin of the fruit that falls from the tree; on Joel’s skin; and on the wings of the dragonfly that passes overhead: Voronoi tessellation.

Beauty could be caught and pinned by the regulating forces of design, measurement, order. Beauty could be whittled down to principles. Measure and proportion are everywhere identified with beauty and virtue; Plato wrote, Beauty, proportion, and truth… considered as one.

But my eye gets bored traveling from one end of the Galleria to the other. Halfway through, I’ve seen all there is to see. Symmetry is predictable; I am soothed but not surprised. To say that beauty was merely the result of definite measurement deflated the mystery of the aesthetic experience: that bodily recognition, an ancient sense tuned to beauty, a physical seizing of beauty and of beauty’s dissonance; a welcome fever, a palpitant thrill, pleasure ill at ease, a turned stomach, a chill, prickling hairs, goose bumps, high attention. And I have felt that high attention in the presence of art, people, ideas, sounds, storms, sentences, sunsets, streams and rivers and oceans, colors, efforts, failures, loss, pain, and how much of this can be measured? It is both there and not, neither subjective nor objective. I like the vastness. I want to keep the idea of beauty like a stone in my hand, turning it over and over.

But maybe I am dismissing the ancient ideals because they don’t fit the story