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The Naked Man
- University of Georgia Press
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145 Ihadn’talwaysbeenTheNakedMan.Whilehisheadwasmine—dark curly hair, glasses, an earnest, somewhat baffled look on a middleaged face with an almost blue beard line and what I like to think of as a dueling scar on the left cheek (I had a cyst removed there and the doctor botched the job)—the body belonged to my wife’s former boyfriend, a man with the unlikely name of Garth, who taught earth science at a high school in Ohio. Garth had posed for other paintings, too, but this was the last, and the only one he’d done nude. To make him feel better about his slight paunch (he probably had ten pounds on me), she’d exaggerated his private parts, but she hadn’t finished the painting when they split up. The face was still only blocked in, and for various reasons, she didn’t feel right about having it be Garth’s at all anymore. “What do you think?” she asked me. “You’ll impress the world.” And I have to admit, it did enter into my thinking when I agreed. Tina had been accepted for a show at a nonprofit gallery in Virginia , and though we debated going, when the time came, we’d decided to make a trip out of it. It was probably our last as just the two of us, since our baby, Frick, which was what we were still calling him, was due in May, and it was already February. Now we were at this party at a house right out of the pages of Architectural Digest, planted in the middle of horse country, ten miles from town and at least a half mile from the country road we’d followed to get here. Earlier tonight had been the preopening opening, especially for benefactors and supporters. The gallery had used me, in a detail from the painting, for the postcard advertising the show. My head, Garth’s body, this composite naked man standing on a country path holding a shopping bag full of groceries, staring out into space as if TH E N A K E D M A N 146 T H E N A K E D M A N trying to remember some item he’d forgotten to purchase. So that the image would be acceptable to the post office, they’d designed a little sticker in the shape of a pair of red boxers to affix to each card. It was pretty cute. All night, people had been eyeing me, trying to remember where we’d met before. Then it would hit them. They’d look at me, they’d look at Tina, with her swollen belly. They’d look back at me and smile. I rejoined Tina in the living room. I knew she was worried. “You ought to see the bathroom,” I said, placing my wine carefully on the glass coffee table. “One whole wall is see-through.” In fact, there wasn’t a door in the house, other than the ones leading outside. “Just imagine trying to sell this place,” she said. We talked about real estate a lot. We were in a little over our heads in that respect, having bought a row house two years ago, at the top of the market. Our neighbor, an older guy who’d purchased the rental property next door back in the sixties for ten bucks and a carton of Lucky Strikes, was always looking at me like I was Ed McMahon, come to deliver him his Publishers Clearing House check. But I knew—it would be a long while before anything in the neighborhood sold for near what we’d paid. I could hear the value escaping from our walls like air hissing out of a leaky tire. I was upside down on the store, too, and in general, money was keeping me awake nights. “You couldn’t,” I said. “It’s too strange.” “Anyone who bought it would have to change who they were to accommodate the house.” I moved with her to the floor next to the enormous fireplace, which was not part of a wall, but away from it, with a black metal chimney that shot up a good twenty feet before meeting the steeply angled roof. All around us, the partiers were happily chattering away. The two other artists held court in the opposite corners, enjoying their celebrity. One was an older guy who taught at a prestigious college someplace and did small paintings that...