The Art Lesson

© Jenean McBrearty

“You know, I don't know why religious women were always pictured in the throes of ecstasy during the Renaissance – they were so sexually repressed. Their fathers, uncles, brothers and parish priests all conspired to make them saintly on earth and only succeeded in making them frustrated old maids.” Rachel twirled a ringlet of her raven hair around a well-manicured nail and cocked her head to one side. “What do you think, Professor McArdle?”

Skylar hadn't been paying her any attention as she sat, cross-legged, in the chair next to his desk. Even when she started swinging the dangling one slowly back and forth so that her foot tapped his shin ever so slightly, he ignored her. Now, he looked away from his computer screen and rested his eyes on her mouth. Her lips were smiling – lips plumped by collagen injections he assumed - but her eyes smoldered beneath thick mascara. Would Pygmalion have created her, he wondered, or Any Warhol?

“I think you've been reading your textbook, and I approve, Mizz Adler. Now I think it's time you started thinking for yourself. People are generally imprisoned by time and space, so these women might have been socialized to equate pain with holiness, or … they might have been true believers. They might have known god in a far different way than we think of him today.”

Rachel stopped fiddling with her hair, and shaking her leg, and leaned towards him, displaying her youthful cleavage. “Oh, you mean like the pagan people who had sex with their gods?”

“Every man wants to be a god to the woman he loves. Certainly sex makes him feel like a god. But, what I mean is, suppose god isn't the nice old gent in the sky, but a virile young man who really can turn himself into a swan for Leda or a bullock for Europa? Maybe god's agenda isn't feeding the hungry, but feeding his own ego with the adoration and surrender of nubile young women. Imagine dying and finding out that all one's self-sacrifice doesn't impress god at all.”

“That would suck,” Rachel observed. She wasn't sure if Professor McArdle was making a joke or trying to shock her with a little sophomore year blasphemy. His eyes were emotionless stones that peeked from behind a clump of his thick red hair. Yet, she couldn't look away. McArdle wasn't your average community college art teacher. He had a reputation.

“Let me guess. Your favorite sculpture is Bernini's Ecstasy of St.Teresa. High Roman Baroque. Is that angel about to martyr her with his arrow of fire, or is he about to rape her with it - thrusting his arrow into her entrails? Well, Bernini couldn't let us know by calling his masterpiece the Orgasm of St. Teresa, now could he? Perhaps her veil tells us more than we realize.” Skylar stood up and leaned over his desk, straightening one of the golden arrows he'd mounted on the wall.

Rachel was suddenly aware of her surroundings: the quiet of the office suite, the cramped quarters, and the dusk that had once dimly lit the narrow hallways created by half-to-ceiling partitions that had now faded into night. They were alone. Most students hurried to their cars after their night classes, but tonight she had decided to make a play for the Professor who women swooned over and flirted with, the one of whom it was said none had seduced. “It's getting late, Sir,” she said, trying to establish some distance between them. “I'd better go.” She stood up too, and noticed how powerful he was. Her body seemed to shrink along with the confidence in her voice, and she felt weak, unable to resist even the brief, softest wind when he closed the door.

“You see, Mizz Adler, the whole history of man's art is nothing more than representations of his expectations of this world and what he believes about the next one. Women of antiquity may have been repressed, but they were safer that way. Perhaps they were smarter too, in their own way.” McArdle raised his hand and brushed away his disobedient hair. Some of his students said of him that he was devil - the few of them that even swore they'd seen his horns. “It is man who transforms himself to a conqueror? Or is it woman who transforms him into whatever cloaks her desire?”