Sometimes—when I’m underneath him—I think about how I must look from underneath. I wish I could look at myself from underneath.
I have been sitting here for hours, the top part of my spine stinging as I try to keep my posture straight. Pale yellow light pours through tall loft windows. His apartment is intentionally minimalist. His walls are white and blank and his black furniture has sharp edges. His windows have no blinds or curtains, including his bedroom. I’ve told him I get worried about this, and he has assured me that we can see out but they can’t see in. That doesn’t stop me from picturing someone watching me, even though I’ve looked up from the street and know that yes, he’s right. No one is.
For our honeymoon, he took me to France. He was ill for most of it—airport food poisoning—so I was left to wander Paris by myself. I ended up at the Louvre. Of course, there was a crowd of tourists surrounding the Mona Lisa. The small painting is the only thing on the entire wall. She’s encased in glass, with a wooden barricade surrounding her, preventing anyone from getting too close. Mona Lisa wasn’t anything special. The wife of a merchant that lived a comfortable, deeply ordinary life until Da Vinci decided to paint her. She’s composed to be a perfect triangle, hands lightly clasped on top of the other. Her face is smooth like an ivory egg.
I remember walking into his apartment for the first time and asking him, “Why do you keep everything so blank? Aren’t you an artist?”
He said, “I can’t think if there’s too many things on the walls. This is how we’re supposed to live, I’ve read. Everything’s gotten so maximalist.” He said the word maximalist with heavy stress on the consonants, which gave me the impression that he wanted to be perceived as someone who used Big Words. He maybe even wanted me to ask him what maximalist meant. He didn’t want me to ask where he had read it, because I was quite sure that he hadn’t read it anywhere or maybe saw it in a video. He just wanted me to think that he was the type of person that read things.
Mona Lisa’s name in Italian is La Gioconda, after her husband. Gioconda means “jocund”, or happy. Freud theorized that Mona Lisa’s smile is meant to represent an approving smile from his mother, Caterina. She bears a strong resemblance to the Virgin Mary. I’ve read that she used to have eyebrows and eyelashes, but they’ve faded over time because of excessive cleaning.
We had matched earlier that day. Most of the men that had commented on my carefully curated carousel of images opened with a simple “Hey :)” or “heyyyy” or “hi”. This man had said, “I think you’re beautiful—can I paint you?” He had dark eyes and a Roman nose. I was impressed by his punctuation. I enjoyed his forwardness because no one is forward nowadays. I said yes. I came over to his apartment and he painted me in his empty studio. I said yes more than once, and now we’re married.
An American tourist behind me started talking about how, a couple months back, “some wacko” threw a cake at her. It’s true. While the security guards dragged the vandal away, he shouted, “Artists tell you: think of the Earth. That's why I did this!” Back in 1956, a vandal took a razor blade to her. Many people have had the visceral urge to destroy her. I wonder if Da Vinci wanted us to think of the Earth when he painted her. I wonder if my husband wanted us to think of the Earth when he painted me. His first portrait of me is hung in a gallery space downtown. So far, no one has defaced me.
In that first painting, I’m off-center, nestled in the bottom left corner of the canvas. My hair is short, curling at the nape of my neck. I wore some sort of lacy thing that I’ve since outgrown. The background is off-white. It looks like there’s a flood of natural light coming in, illuminating my face. It was dark out when he painted me. I look like a cherub-faced angel.
The final result is the product of Da Vinci painting over his work over and over again until he achieved his vision. There’s many more versions of her underneath the final coat, versions that Da Vinci deemed not good enough. He’s the master—he knows what is and isn’t good enough. All we see is a happy, smooth-faced virgin. A sexless and pretty young mother encased in glass.
I’m not anything special. I make calls for an insurance company. I used to take cheesy little quizzes in magazines when I was younger that would tell me what type of girl I was. When I was nineteen, he told me what type of girl I was.
After I saw that first portrait, I started to look in the mirror more and adjust my posture until I resembled that girl. I positioned my lamp until the light hit my face just right. I wanted to bridge the gap between me and that girl. I ran a hand over my face, noticing the grooves, bumps, patches of dry skin, small hairs sticking out of my chin. I started picking and plucking. I kneaded in moisturizer until I looked pink and slimy. I started to feel nauseous. I was so good. How could I be that good all the time?
I turned off all the lights and took off all my clothes and sat in the center of the room. The sun had gone down, but light still came in through the windows—from the streetlamps and the cars and the windows across the street. It felt like someone was watching me. No one was.