River City Blues: Part IV

River City Blues – Part IV


4. Call me Betsy

I was learning more than I’d ever learned in school—she taught me how to cook, not just how to use a stove and follow recipes, but how to use spices and jazz things up. She never ate what she cooked, though. Sometimes, she’d plop a plate in front of me and watch me eat, wearing a slightly disgusted look, but usually the food went from the pan or pot into the trash. Or she’d forget about it, leave it simmering on the stove until the house filled with acrid smoke while she sat in the living room listening to Billy Holiday albums. She said cooking wasn’t about eating the food; it was about creating a kind of art.

“Art’s not something you can eat?” I asked, but she ignored me.

Some days, I’d show up and she’d lecture me about making her wait, even though we’d never set specific appointment times. Then we’d load up and go to some museum. Her favorite was the Brooks Museum over in Overton Park. Betsy would spend hours looking at the paintings. She liked the more abstract stuff, strips of paper cut into colorful shapes, or drawings that looked like something I could do in study hall. Sometimes, she’d stare at one for 20, 30 minutes with this big grin on her face, tears dripping down her cheek.

“What do you see?” I would ask.

“Look with your eyes and your heart,” she might say. Or, “Look with your soul, not your
brain. What do you see?”

“It’s very pretty,” I would say, and she would scowl.

“Try harder.”

I’d stare. “The colors are very vivid, but dark, so they seem sad, but since they’re vivid, they don’t seem morbid.”

She’d smile and nod. “Good. What else? Look at the brush strokes.”

“There are a lot of them,” I’d say and her smile would falter. “They look really intense, like the guy was really trying to put a lot of paint on the canvas.”

She’d nod with a kind of perplexed look and go to another painting. I liked looking at them, but I didn’t connect on the level she did. I think that’s where I failed her. To me, at best, most of the modern stuff looked like the artists were trying to make fun of art without actually showing their own chops. I explained this to Betsy, once, and she said,

“That’s called nihilism, and I disagree. There’s beauty in abstraction, much more so than in order. This is because the audience isn’t tied down to an interpretation.”

I took that to mean that you could see whatever you wanted to see in it, but in all of Betsy’s favorite paintings and sculptures, I saw the same thing: emptiness. Eventually, I’d get bored and go wander the halls to look at the Baroque stuff, which was vivid and powerful, but easily interpretable. My favorite section was the Italian Renaissance stuff, which was mostly religious iconography. I wasn’t much on religion, but the artist’s passion shone through in these pieces. It was like being in church, looking at the paintings of saints and biblical scenes. After making the rounds, I’d go back to find Betsy still staring at the jumble of colors or some print by Motherwell or a collage by Jasper Johns with a look of beatitude on her face I now recognized.

“Why don’t you swim anymore?” I asked her after we’d been hitting the museums pretty hard.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t feel like it.”

“It was fun,” I said. “I didn’t mind rubbing suntan lotion on you.” I tried to kind of chuckle when I said it, but my throat was dry, so I just coughed.

She smirked at me but didn’t say anything, just took another drink. She’d been drinking a lot that day.

“Why do you drink so much?” I asked. “Did something happen? Is your family okay?”

She nodded but wouldn’t answer more than that.

Later, she announced, “I’m going to go take a nap.” And rose to go upstairs.

“Should I leave?” I asked.

She shrugged. “You could take one too, if you like.”

I followed her upstairs. She had a big, soft bed. She always kept it warm in her bedroom and used a lot of blankets, even in summer. It was kind of like being in a womb, I imagined, being wrapped up in all the blankets and warmth.

She’d been wearing these long white shorts, and she dropped them, stepped out of them, shivered, even though it was warm, and got into bed with her shirt still on. I took off my shoes and stood by the bed, unsure if I should take my pants off, but she had already closed her eyes. I undid my jeans quietly and slipped in under the covers. I slid over beside her, but when my leg touched hers, she yelled out,

“Oh! You’re cold!” and slapped me away.

She curled into a ball, facing away from me, and I slid over until I was beside her, then slipped one arm over her. She grabbed it, and I was terrified until she pulled me closer. She was soft and warm, with a hint of perfume but I could also smell alcohol. I curled my arm over her so I could feel her stomach, which was smooth. I pressed against her, gently, and a thrill rippled through my body as she pressed back. I could smell her hair, which reminded me of the beach, and feel her body against me. I was breathing heavy, and so was she. I rubbed against her, ran my hands over her legs, her stomach, afraid to do anything too serious. I was thinking I could just kind of work my way up to something, as long as I didn’t spook her by going too fast. I was trying to decide what to do next, when she started snoring.

I’m not sure how long I lay there, holding her. She woke and stretched, pressed back against me and felt how excited I was, and laughed a little.

“You should’ve taken me while I was asleep,” she said. “I would’ve let you.”

She used words like that, sometimes, like she was from a book we read in school.

“How about now?” I asked.

“Now I’m awake,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say to that. I started caressing her stomach again, and her legs.

“That’s nice,” she said.

I kept doing it, and she made little moaning sounds like she’d done when I rubbed lotion on her. I made circles on her stomach, my hand slipping further down each time, until I felt hair and paused, unsure. I thought she might yell, or let me keep going. Neither reaction would’ve surprised me.

“I’m an old woman, Adam,” she said, instead.

“No you’re not,” I said. “You’re beautiful.”

She turned over and looked in my eyes and smiled at me. She put her hands on my face, and I felt like those painters must’ve felt. Every part of me was saying please. She touched my cheek. I smiled back and touched hers.

“You’re beautiful,” I said, again.

She let me kiss her, then. Time stopped. Music played. When she drew back, I said, “I just want to make you happy.”

She got a look like she might start crying. I didn’t know what to do with that. I pulled her in close, and she let me. More than anything, I wanted to be inside her, but I just held her until it got late and I had to race home before dad called the cops.

C.L. Bledsoe

Posted over on Troubadour21