from the tyranny of stratigraphy
“It is so fresh to be back,” she said as she came around the corner and found him standing there frozen in front of three large oil paintings. Then she said, “My God.” And she was frozen also with her hand extending as if out of instinct and separate from the rest of her body and finding his. They had been married for thirty years. She was now a handsome if somewhat stout woman for having birthed and raised eight children. He was thin and gray.
Their fingers intertwined and she said, “Is that me?”
“Naked,” he said. He smiled slightly in a fearful way, continuing to look at the pictures.
“Who?” she said while leaning forward to look at the small white cards which hung below each of the pictures.
“Anonymous,” he said. “Anonymous,” he said again.
“Anonymous,” she said.
“Who?” he said.
“Anonymous.”
“You must know.”
“I don’t. I did model for money early on.”
“For money.”
“To help with tuition.”
“For money.”
“I was in school only that one semester. No one. My parents didn’t know about the modeling. My father sent me with only the tuition for the one semester. He knew…”
“He expected that I’d come back unable to afford a second. It was a gesture to mother. I was determined to make it work. Determined. I tried so hard. Ended up modeling for art classes but didn’t do it for long. I didn’t feel right doing it.”
“You don’t know who?”
“Could have been one of several, I suppose.”
“Oh, one of several.”
He paused for quite a long while, looking at the paintings and looking back at her. He looked at her from head to toe and back again in a way that she’d seen him look at other women but rarely, recently, at her.
“When?” he said at last.
“I don’t know the year after high school of course. Two years before us.”
“Oh.”
A young trim black man, balding, with very short hair and wearing a worn tweed jacket approached them.
“You’ve noticed these,” the black man said. “Can you believe they just found them laying around the storage room at the Whittleson? My wife Britta works there and …”
“How much?” interrupted the husband, without looking at the black man.
“One thousand.”
“One thousand for the three? Together?”
The woman frowned discretely covering her mouth with her hand.
“One thousand for each.”
The husband stared silently at the paintings while the black man looked first at the paintings and then at the woman slowly from toe to head and back again.
The woman smiled, turned and walked slowly away, fully conscious of the two sets of eyes which followed her in a long lost, new found way.