In Which We Ask If He Moves His Mouth

I Wrote This By Hand

by LISA GETTY-FRANCIS

Monday

He is riding the 2 train and getting off four stops before mine. He has that glazed over look. Something has gone terribly wrong.

Tuesday

I think of the right book to be reading, the one that not only piques his interest, but piques his interest in me. My roommate Joann suggests a novelization of the Jim Carrey movie The Cable Guy. My mom suggests a book about training puppies written by a bunch of a monks. "He'll know, on some level, that it is about him," she says without a trace of irony.

Wednesday

Irony is the only thing never in short supply. He is reading now. Well, he is playing a game on his phone also. The object of the game, I can reveal to you all now, is to put a series of frames in sequential order.

When he becomes frustrated or unable to put them in the right order, he pulls out a book. It is a rather tawdry biography of Johnny Carson, who never trusted anyone.

Thursday

I decide on a book that will suggest a variety of nuances about myself. You don't know me, but I am like a parade: you can have brief snippets of fun, but you can also be trampled.

Friday

I notice that when he is reading, his mouth forms some but not all of the words. My roommate Joann says that he is probably learning disabled. My mom says a lot of people do that when they read, which is code for her saying she has been known to mouth a word here or there.

Saturday

I went to the Met. All the paintings seemed woefully inadequate. Why didn't they talk, or dance? Remaining still is only useful in death.

Monday

OK. I have heard his voice. It sounds like when someone who is a bit too much up his own ass says the word 'research.' He talked to a latino girl who admired his shoes (they are gorgeous, they should be in a museum). He told her that they do not feel as good as they look, and turned back to his new book: a paperback copy of Rosemary's Baby. I am ashamed to say I was a little turned on by that.

Tuesday

Some ducks climbed up on an old woman's leg in the park. She was feeding them too much. When they reached for her hand, she said she had to go.

Wednesday

My roommate invited me to the Hamptons, but I can't/don't want to go. The faces of the people there remind me too much of scars.

Thursday

He wore his workout clothes around five, which suggests that he changed into them at the office. He is quite fit, but his arrangement suggests an almost accidental theme. He took out a gym bag and changed his shoes. I would be lying if I said they looked great, but the last time I looked at a pair of feet and felt pleased was in the shower.

Friday

Look-alikes:

Me, Audrey Hepburn's mediocre sister
My mom, Katie Couric
Him, An incredibly handsome velociraptor
Joann, a female birthed from Channing Tatum's embryo

The possibility of being someone else is the rabbit dogs chase around the Aqueduct.

Monday

What a weekend. I did not see him once, and I rode the subway back and forth too much. It used to be that the very first car was always the emptiest, but people caught on, and now it is as crowded as the others. Then a train crashed in Valhalla, and it was only those in the first car who perished in the flames. It goes back and forth like that.

Tuesday

He is back! On an impulse I sat down next to him. He looked up at me and smiled! He was reading The Interestings! (What crap!) I searched for what I would say, and it did not take me very long to come up with something that I believe we can all agree is compelling on the merits: "I'm Lisa. You are? Wait, don't tell me. I don't want to know."

Wednesday

Joann made me go to the Guggenheim. It is like being inside an egg, which leads to us spending most of our time there reading the wikipedia article about eggs. We need something to distract us because the Kandinsky exhibit is so bad.

Joann thinks it is best not to overthink a first date. "A great first date sets up too many unrealistic expectations," she says. She also believes you should always drink on a first date, as a sort of litmus test to find out if he is an alcoholic. Her last boyfriend drank too much, and his skin smelled like Crown Royal Apple.

Thursday

The date is on Saturday, so I just take the bus until then. Buses are full of divorced dads with their kids and seniors wrapping their wrists in gauze. Someone had the not-so-bright idea to put fabric on the seats instead of plastic, and it is all worn down and discolored, like hair dyed too many colors. When someone (a male) first asked me to describe myself, I found I could not do it. Since then I have put some real time into knowing what to say in response to that question. This makes it seem like I know who I am.

Friday

Joann and I cleaned the apartment today. We found three twenty dollar bills in the sofa cushion and paused the mopping for a real meal. She thinks they belonged to her ex-boyfriend. "Don't date a guy who is always losing things," she said. "It's a waste of time." I almost tell her that I lost a pair of earrings she gave me last year, but I decide to wait for a better time. They are probably on the first car of a train somewhere.

Saturday

How did it go? How did it go? How did it go?

He was working in Rhode Island, he tells me. He says the explanation is going to sound weird, and I don a solemn countenance, preparing myself to say, "But that's not weird at all!" (In this restaurant, all the flames shine in candleholders shaped like golden retrievers.)

He (his name is Jeffrey) was in charge of all the lost and found in the entire state of Rhode Island. It was a job his uncle got him after he dropped out of law school, he says. I ask him what things people lost that were recovered.

"Oh anything," he says, and launches into a list that it feels like goes on for the better part of an hour. Honestly I mostly start touching him just to quiet the barrage, but also because I always wanted to.

"I saw you on the train a few weeks ago," I say.

"What made you notice me?"

"Oh, you were reading some trash."

Saturday

His apartment is more meticulously arranged than any museum. I used to like going to those places, the kinds of empty environments you could fill with your own thoughts and turn into a completely idiosyncratic experience. I think that possibility has vanished or is at least seriously diminished. (My youth!)

He applies a full layer of cocoa butter to his body before sleep.

Sunday

An arm and a leg.

Joann met someone, too. His hair is short but oddly covers his ears. She sent me a picture. I asked if he moves his mouth to form the words he is reading, and she says so far, no, but the only books in his apartment are by Jacques Pepin and Foucault.

Monday

In the last car, where you are the least likely to run into anyone you know, a chorus sings, "I Think We're Alone Now." The train breaks down at 96th.

Lisa Getty-Francis is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. She is a writer living in New York.

In Which We Bargain With A Frightened Man

Painting of a Thousand Faces

by MARK ARTURO

We are angry. We are angry with you for what you did.

You further reproach me with having promised you that I would paint your picture with the greatest possible care that I ever could, Dürer wrote. That I certainly said unless I was out of my mind. For my whole lifetime I could hardly finish it. Now with the greatest care I can hardly finish a face in half a year. Now your picture contains fully one hundred faces, not counting the drapery and landscape and other things in it. Besides who ever heard of making such a work for an altarpiece? No one could see it. But I believe that what I wrote to was: to make the painting with great or more than ordinary pains because of the time you spent waiting for me.

We imagine modernity began with the last man to speak, the last man that we recognize. (Or woman.) Did you know that the ancient Egyptians had indoor plumbing? Civilizations are circular, cyclical, and we return to the end of the line.

The central posited fact, that remains through the ages, is an image in my mind. A man sits on the edge of a sunset and bakes himself into a landscape. Perhaps he would rather be with a man or a woman but he is unmoving in the firelight. I want you to know for all my days I have never begun any work that pleased me better than this picture of your which I am painting. Till I finish it I will not to any other work, Albrecht Dürer wrote. I am only sorry that the winter will so soon come upon us. The days grow so short that one cannot do much.

Life at the turn of the sixteenth century was all double entendres and unprotected sex. Man considered visiting the moon before deciding he had other things on his mind. 1503 was the kind of year where you wondered why there had been any other. Dürer had three journeymen on his payroll; all were named Hans. Dürer was the type of guy where a part of him was in the present and a part was in the past.

He felt he had missed out on books of art written by close friends. "Phidias, Praxiteles, Abelles, Polteclus, Parchasias, Lisipus, Protogines." He wondered what they wrote about the thing he loved. There were times in history where mankind thought art was a pejorative, a casting of evil. Maximilian asked Dürer for a design of a knight; it would adorn his tomb at Innsbruck.

Sometimes it seems odd how little Christ is talked about by nonbelievers as a historical figure. He is a character as much as Dürer, although he was not as light in the face as Dürer, and he did not smell of turpentine, bleach, and painting oils. When a man understands the thought of another, he can only understand it on as many levels as he can comprehend at one time. Some, like Dürer, could simply hold many more thoughts. The expression of the additional levels was present, here for example:

We are eight to a side, we are sitting at the table until we fold beneath it, our wings pressed down, facing the ground.

Erasmus writes of Jesus Christ that, He despised the eating of his own flesh and drinking of his own blood, except it were done spiritually. This is an analog for history. The history of our people is different somehow, because there is no longer such thing as flesh and blood.

Dürer's mother gave birth to eighteen children. Her name was Barbara. Dürer wrote, God be merciful to her. On her deathbed he drew her. We had the chance to make peace at the end, but we only stayed away. Mankind, in its infinite wisdom killed something precious, and the only way to move on emotionally was to kill something else precious. A few years later, Dürer began to lose his eyesight. He left Nuremberg for a time, determined to see other surroundings.

Mark Arturo is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Hastily Marry The Wrong Woman

Terrace Woman

by MARK ARTURO

Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrera, had chosen Raphael to paint a canvas for him. It would be a spirited depiction of the intervention of the god Bacchus to defend a woman, Ariadne, left alone on an island to die by her lover Theseus, the founder of Athens.

The Duke used a go-between to deal with his artists, Jacopo Tebaldi. Raphael died in 1522, and Bellini was right behind him, so the Duke wanted Titian to paint the canvas. This was a problem, since Titian had no intention of doing this.

After no sign of Bacchus and Ariadne, which he had already paid for, the Duke wrote a letter to Jacopo Tebaldi:

Take care to speak immediately to Titian and tell him to do me a portrait as soon as possible and as though it were alive of an animal called gazelle, which is in the house of the most honorable Giovanni Cornaro. It should fill the entire canvas. Attend to this matter diligently and then send it to us immediately advising us of the cost. And remember to send those spice jars, which were supposed to be sent to us some days ago.

By the time Titian made it to Giovanni Cornaro's, the gazelle was dead and its body had been tossed in the canal.

Titian kept his girlfriend/housekeeper, Cecilia, in a small house near his studio. She was the daughter of the barber from the country, and she bore him three children, losing the last to a miscarriage. Titian named his first son Pompeo.

It so happened that Bellini had once painted a gazelle. Titian went to see it, and pretended he would paint another for the Duke. He never did, and Giovanni Cornaro's house burned down in a fire a few years later.

The Duke got progressively more impatient:

See to it that you speak to Titian, and tell him from us that when he left Ferrera he promised us many things, and up to now we have not seen that he has kept any of them, and among others he promised to do for us that canvas which we especially expect from him: and because it does not seem to us worthy of him that he should fail to keep his promises, urge him to behave in a way that will not give us cause to be saddened and angered with him, and to make sure above all that we have the above-mentioned canvas quickly.

Ariadne was King Minos' daughter. She was left on the beach because Athena appeared to Theseus and told him to leave Ariadne and her sister, who had been married to Theseus but preferred her stepson. Theseus left Ariadne even though she had given him the clue that led him out of the labyrinth.

Titian could not concern himself with these events of the distant past. He was distracted by an altarpiece he was preparing for the local legate. Alfonso considered demanding this piece, and the artist was willing to comply for a price. But it was really Bacchus and Ariadne that the Duke wanted. The Duke invited Titian to spend the Christmas holidays with him: would he perhaps consider bringing Bacchus and Ariadne? Titian went to Treviso instead.

The Duke was irritated, but it's not like there was another master painter handy. On Tebaldi's suggestion he invited Titian to come with him to Rome and meet with the pope:

Please advise Titian that if he wants to come he must come quickly. We would dearly like his company, but tell him he must not speak of this matter to anyone. And perhaps he should dispatch our picture at his earliest opportunity because there will be no question of his doing any work on our journey.

I myself recently broke off a relationship. I had been thinking about it for awhile, but recently I was at the Museum of Modern Art, and it didn't feel quite right. Actually, nothing did. I guess that's why I am thinking about how Bacchus and Ariadne and how art used to be, even if the conclusion is that the profession is not terribly different now from how it was then.

When Theseus returned to Athens, they left his ship in the docks. Ariadne had given him a ball of yarn to find his way out of the labyrinth. He missed her a lot, but he didn't go back for her.

Neither the Duke nor Titian went to Rome to see the pope. The heat was now on Tebaldi, who began making excuses for the artist. Most were unflattering - Titian spent too much of his time whoring, he spent money too freely and the like. The first part was maybe partially true. The artist loved the attention of women, but he was not known for consummating the delicate pleasure of flirtation. It was actual work that prevented him from doing what the Duke asked, as well as, perhaps, a lack of inspiration.

At this point the Duke was apoplectic and Titian knew it. He told Tebaldi that "if Christ were to offer him work he would not accept anything if he had not finished your canvas first."

Ariadne waited on the island called Naxos for some time. Bacchus took pity on her and when he married her, he gave the woman a golden crown. (Better to be married to a god than a man.) The way she looks at him when he saves her lets you know that she is actually the one saving him, a concept that is integrated into the various majority of wedding toasts I have heard recently. By the time Titian had his first daughter, he was married to Cecilia.

When Cecilia was critically ill and in labor with Titian's fourth child, he hastily married her so that his sons would be acknowledged as his own. She recovered and lived five more years. The Duke married himself, his second such arrangement, to Lucrezia Borgia.

After Bacchus and Ariadne, Titian spent the vast majority of time working on portraits for his wealthy patrons. According to his closest friend Aretino, he could finish them "as quickly as another could scratch the ornament on a chest." I have always hated Titian's portraits. The Duke may have been impatient, but he did wait. If the painting wasn't worth the time it took, he would not have waited.

Mark Arturo is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. Visit our mobile site at thisrecording.wordpress.com.