"How to Look at a Painting" by Becky Tuch
What do you see? Is there a vanishing point? Are there people? If there are no people, do the shapes look like people, or do the shapes look like the sensation of his hand roughly tugging your shirt from your jeans and the sweet alcohol burn of his tongue against your throat?
Who is the painter? Who is the security guard protecting this painting? Is the security guard a woman? Is the painter of this painting a man?
What colors do you see? Are they hot or cold? Do you know the difference between hot and cold colors? For instance, how cold colors retreat from your eye and make you feel that the world is beyond you, as in you tapping your foot during rush hour inside the over-crowded and once-again-stalled subway car, having left work determined to go to the gym but now, with the deep dark windows around you and the sagging ashen faces of commuters before you, you decide that it is him you want to see, only him, and is that so bad, well, is it?
Or, on the other hand, hot colors, which are the feel and taste of his body, the tangerine skin of his forearms, the sun-yellow smell of his skin, the way he edges you into the bathroom, frames your face with his hands, your red heart pounding against his as you think, How could I go anywhere but here?
What materials were used in the painting? Is it oily? Shiny-slick? Can you see the brushstrokes? Do you want to touch them? Do you want to lick the paint?
Do you understand why, after you two left the bathroom, after he hoisted you up by your hips and set you on that red barstool, after he lifted your hair off the back of your damp neck, then wound it round his fist, and tugged, he whispered, We can’t do this anymore?
Do you know why your first reaction was to laugh, like he was kidding, because wasn’t he? Didn’t he have to be, surely, kidding? Because wasn’t it you, with your degree, your to-do lists, your gym membership, wasn’t it you who was supposed to say that to him? Wasn’t it you who was supposed to be better than this?
When was this painting made? Is there a historical context to consider?
Yet you were so thrown off, spun in circles by what he said, that instead of agreeing, instead of saying, I know, and gathering your things like a self-respecting woman might have done, like your own mother would want you to do, you instead groaned like a just-shot animal and pulled at his shirt collar and said, What? Why the hell not?
Did he smile then? Did you think, in that moment, How well I know that smile!, and did you want, suddenly, to bite his teeth?
Is the painting one single surface or does it have several planes? Is there a sense of perspective?
And did you hate yourself, because you realized that what was happening was that he was breaking up with you, though you were never together in the first place, though you two had only been meeting sporadically here, in the bar, in its bathroom, for nearly a year? That the most committed either of you had ever been was to say, Next round’s on me?
Do your feet hurt? Does your back hurt? Are your eyeballs stinging?
Are you now remembering that time he told you, out of the blue (cold color), about his father, who used to line the children up in their living room and tell them what their flaws were? How he, as a boy of seven, had been woken by his father, dragged into the living room and told, over and over, that he was terrible at baseball, that no matter how much he practiced, he would never ever be good at baseball?
Was that not one of the saddest stories you’d ever heard? Especially sad because of all the whiskey you’d been drinking and because of the way he’d looked down at his suntanned orange (warm color) hands, turning from you as if he couldn’t stand to have you see him just then, so exposed, so vulnerable?
Didn’t you fall in love with him when you heard that story? Or was it that you wanted to be his mother? Have you really not learned by now the difference between loving someone and wanting to be their mother?
But think, did he actually say those words, We can’t do this anymore? Or, then, I mean, where is this going?
Do you wish you’d had a better answer? Do you wish you’d not stared into your whiskey like a mute fool? Do you wish what you had done was kissed him, or slapped him, or told him you had plans, big plans, and you were going lots of places, plenty of places, and he was the fool, him, for not seeing just exactly all these places you were going?
Who is the subject of this painting? Is the subject a woman? Is the subject an object?
What, actually, was your answer, finally? Where does anything go, when you think about it? Time, money, life, where does it all go? Reflecting on this now, does it make you cringe?
Do you think the security guard is accustomed to seeing people cry? Is it common for people to look at paintings in museums and cry? What are they thinking, all those people who go to museums and look at paintings and cry?
Are they thinking about the composition? The tension between positive and negative space?
Are they hashing plans, the penetrating gaze of the sitting subject a bullet ripping a path through their own scattered and discombobulated lives?
Or is it the same for everyone, stunned into feeling at the sight of something so beautiful, so out of reach, so impossibly frozen in time?
Becky Tuch is a fiction and nonfiction writer based in Philadelphia. Her short stories have been honored with awards and fellowships from Moment Magazine, Briar Cliff Review and The MacDowell Colony. Other writing has appeared in a variety of venues including Salon, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Gulf Coast, Post Road, Salt Hill, Literary Mama and Best of the Net. She is the Founding Editor of The Review Review, and now writes the Lit Mag News Roundup. Find her on Twitter @BeckyLTuch or at her website.
