Understanding Marriage and Art Through His Eyes and Learning To Be Seen
There was something about the way that he asked me. Even in the dark, I knew his request was serious, more than a boyish tease. I imagined his face, his blue eyes locked with mine, and I knew that I wouldn’t deny him.
“I want her to paint you, just like this,” he said as he traced the curve of me.
We had been married long enough to know the shape of each other but not yet long enough for me to fully trust what he saw in me.
One of the great wonders of love is to feel safe with another. Safe to ask for what one desires. Safe to be fully seen. I could have refused. But I wanted to do it. And this was the beginning of the wonder of it all—that I had moved from childish ways and thoughts.
Years earlier, when I first became aware of my body, I believed it was something to hide; obedient to the hush-hush of shaking heads that spoke in broken syllables. My parents were modest. My first images of adult bodies were surprises that jumped out at me from the gleam of ceramic white when the bathroom door was left ajar. I stripped the body of its wonder and saw it as being dirty. The intimate parts were purely utilitarian: vessels of waste and excrement.
Perhaps now you may understand why our first attempts at lovemaking were a bit nerve-racking for me.
At best, I wanted to stay underneath the covers. I wanted to rush things. He wanted to linger and gaze— sometimes with the lights on. I had thought of this act as touching and a way of entering into my physical space, but he showed me more. And in doing so, I became uninhibited.
First, I began sleeping naked. Then one night, without a thought, I got out of bed and did not immediately grab the clothes I’d left on the floor. I tip-toed downstairs naked to get a little snack in the middle of the night. Still, my growing lack of inhibition did not seem enough; I lacked confidence.
But when he whispered, “It’ll be my Christmas present,” as we each rolled over to our side of the bed, ready for sleep, I said, “Yes.”
The next day I called our friend Bonnie Goldberg, the painter, and we set the date. Midafternoon, next Thursday. My husband would be away at work. Bonnie and I would be alone in the house when I posed nude. I was nervous when the day arrived; self-conscious that the neighbors would somehow know what was planned.
I was watching for her arrival and greeted her at the backdoor before she had a chance to ring the doorbell. As I led her through our home, she coaxed my resolve with simple directions. She told me to change into a robe, suggested where I might lay, and asked permission to use her camera. Her method was to take photos and use them to paint from later in her studio.
We chose our bedroom. I undressed in the master bath, robed up and came out to find her smoothing the duvet cover.
“Why don’t you face laying away from me …” she suggested.
I lost the robe and climbed awkwardly onto the bed before finally stretching myself out to try a pose. Bonnie noticed the place, right at the top of my hip, the very spot Andy had traced playfully when he asked me to do this very thing. His nightly tease was meant as a compliment, but I heard it as a reminder that I was not hip-curvy voluptuous.
“He’ll know it’s you,” she said confidently, promising the slope of me that dropped sharply would be prominent in the painting. I couldn’t see it, but I felt her smile.
All the while that she was taking photographs, she kept saying this word: “Beautiful.” Again and again she repeated it. It was still a bit foreign to me. But I began listening.
“Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.”
And I began to understand. Like my husband, my ever-attentive lover, she seemed to believe this too; that I was beautiful. And in those quiet moments of vulnerability, with a camera clicking away, that belief entered me.
It was the perfect gift for my husband, Andy, that Christmas. But it was more than that; it was a gift for me. I think now of how rarely we allow ourselves to be seen this way. Not just by artists, but by the people we have chosen to love.
The painting still hangs in the same room where I posed, a reminder of the time I first dared to love this flesh of mine—and to trust the one who had seen it all along. When I forget, I gaze at it now, allowing beauty to settle deep within me again.
