Patron of the Arts

“Oh, those are interesting enough, but what I’d really like to do is go back to, oh, 1888, 1889. Probably to a field of sunflowers in Arles. I would go buy a few paintings from a mad and wonderful painter. I wouldn’t tell him how famous he would get, or how valuable his work would be, in effect, and even in money. That might ruin him faster than absinthe and madness, faster than loneliness. But I’d like to talk to him and encourage him in the only way artists need encouragement, by buying his work.

“All artists have more than enough words given them, what they need is some tangible, pragmatic help. Maybe van Gogh wouldn’t go insane so quickly, or even at all. Think of the paintings we would have!”

“You might go to Tahiti,” Nova said, “and save the Gauguins that were burned. Or the library at Alexandria.”

“Yes, true. But van Gogh is . . . my friend. He has touched me across the years as few others have, the poor, mad, son-of-a-bitch.”

“He is always the example people use to point out how misunderstood their work is,” Nova said. “He sold one painting in his lifetime, and on top of that they thought him mad, he thought himself mad, he went mad. They shut him away in the funny place, too. All that.”

I smiled and said, “Oh, I know it is very selfish of me, but I don’t care. Imagine spending a few weeks in Arles, seeing Vincent go out at dawn and come back at dusk with a painting, two paintings! My god, what a thrill! Talking art all evening with Gauguin and van Gogh, watching Vincent paint at night, making the stars like those out there, come into swirling life!”

“Fantasy time,” Nova grinned.

“Maybe I could take those broke bastards up to Paris and we could see what the others are doing. Poor, broken, drunk Lautrec, who used to walk with his fellow painters, then stop to point out some sight with his cane, and discourse on it, because his stunted, pain-spiked legs needed the rest. Cezanne once cut out a bowl of fruit from a larger painting and traded it for food because that is the only part someone wanted.”

“Maybe helping them would be the worst thing you could do,”

Nova said.

“Yes, I know that. People like Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, that drunk Utrillo, they don’t really need help, not enough to screw around with history. But van Gogh . . . to add a year to his life would have added perhaps a hundred paintings! What a treasure! For that I would meddle. Probably along near the end, where if I did something wrong, the loss in paintings wouldn’t be too much. But, oh, how I would love to do it!”

“Romantic!”

“Yea verily and say it thrice!” I sighed. “Sorry, Vincent,” I said to the stars, “I was born a bit too late to help.”

We were in her bunk, with Nova turned away from me, quietly resting from a rather prolonged period of loving exploration. I put my hand on her hip, feeling the bone beneath the flesh, and the curve of the waist. I moved my hand and took a full-handed feel of her buttock and really felt the great dome of flesh, the texture of skin, the flex and movement of the underlying muscle. It felt different now than it had a few minutes before, as I cupped both hemispheres in the frenzy of orgasm. The skin there was different, different from the skin of her lower leg or her breasts.

I ran my fingers up the long groove of her spine, feeling the knobs beneath. then down again to lightly touch the dimples that flaked the spine at the top of her rounded buttocks.

My hand cupped a full breast and she snuggled back against me, murmuring softly, pressing her body to mine. I felt the weight and curving richness within my hand, and I felt the intimacy of it and her nipples, slowly hardening in my palm.

My hand slid down the flat, taut stomach to caress the warm furrow below and she tilted her head back with a sigh, her eyes closed and her lips parted. She smiled and said, “Strike while the mind is hot.”

“I love you,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

The first thing I had noticed about Nova was her beauty. Then I saw her beauty. The carriage, the awareness of self and others, the alertness, the poise, even in one so young, was phenomenal. Granted, beautiful women can more easily come to poise when they see, directly, how insecure most people are.

But noticing her physical beauty first and her second does not make me a shallow person. It means that was her most obvious asset, and the facet I saw first. Unless we know something of a person in advance, that is always the thing we notice first, the way they look and act. I often meet beautiful women and have discarded perfectly fine ladies that others might die for. It doesn’t mean that I am insensitive or strange, it just means they were not the right woman for me, or the right woman at the right time. Searching for and hopefully finding the right person with whom