“Well, the sculpture’s arrived, hasn’t it?” he asked eagerly. “I promised to help you install it.”
“Oh, that’s right.” Sara was finding it hard to sound enthusiastic.
“Should I come back? Is this a bad time?”
“No, it’s fine. I’m just finding it difficult to know exactly where to place the piece. The theme is somewhat dominating, you know, in a domestic setting. Not that there isn’t a place for eros in the domestic, but something so . . . implicit, so . . . intimate . . .” She placed the flowers on a sideboard and turned to find Stephen looking at her quizzically. It was obvious he hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about.
She led him up to the bedroom, feeling his gaze brush across her legs and buttocks. She was trying desperately not to be distracted by his proximity, proximity she found undeniably erotic.
They both stood in front of the piece in silence. Stephen appeared awed, whereas Sara now felt like throwing miniature knickers over all the blossoms. Stephen’s eyes slid down toward the heavy shoehorn now sitting next to the base of the porcelain sculpture. He picked it up, weighing it thoughtfully, then looked over at Sara, eyebrows raised. She shrugged apologetically.
“I wouldn’t actually have . . .”
“But you were thinking about it?”
“I might have got a little carried away, I suppose. I might be having some self-esteem issues and the piece is . . . well . . .”
“A little confrontational?” he asked.
“In the cold light of day, very confrontational.” She took the shoehorn out of his hand. As she did so she had the definite impression that one of the vaginas actually winked at her. Sighing, she dismissed the image from her mind. Stephen walked around the piece slowly.
“I guess the question is, does it belong in the bedroom?”
“I’ve tried everywhere else—the dining room, the hallway, the sitting room . . .”
“It is a statement piece.”
“Sort of in the ‘yes, I am woman’ school.”
“Well, you are female, Sara,” Stephen noted unnecessarily, at which point Sara wished she wasn’t horribly aware of Stephen’s beautiful tanned hands, the fingers of which appeared to be caressing the “petals” of one of the flowers—a disconcerting sight for Sara, who had now surrendered to the notion that she might indeed be on the point of wishful hallucination, perhaps some bizarre side effect of celibacy.
“A female currently suffering from major penis envy,” she announced, abandoning any semblance of etiquette. She collapsed on the ottoman placed at the foot of the bed. Stephen left off caressing the sculpture and walked over to the side ta
ble. He picked up the printout she’d abandoned by the phone and glanced down at it, then grinned. Mortified, Sara felt as if she were suddenly pinned to the ottoman by chagrin.
“Are you sure it’s penis envy?” He held up the image of the porn star’s vagina. “Or am I missing something about your sexuality here?”
Sara leapt up and snatched the printout from him.
“Oh, I’m heterosexual. It’s just that between that bloody thing over there”—here she gestured toward the sculpture—“and all the images of perfectly neat young women, I’m feeling very inadequate.”
To her surprise he burst out laughing. “And all of this because of one small sculpture,” he managed to say between guffaws.
Sara was speechless, then, to her own horror, all of the tension, the loneliness, the humiliating memory of the call to Hugh, her own aching sense of sexual futility mounted up and then collapsed on top of her as she threw herself on the bed. Covering her face, she burst into loud sobbing. Within seconds Stephen was sitting with his arms around her.
“Shh, shh . . . it can’t be that bad,” he murmured, rocking her like she was a child. Sara buried her face into his shoulder; the cashmere of his Ralph Lauren blazer soft against her cheek, the scent of him enveloping her like some delicious blanket.
“It is, it is. . . .” Her voice was ridiculously small between the sobs. “All my life I’ve bought beauty, all because I’ve always known that’s the only way I’ll get close to it. . . . Even my husband, Hugh Lander—”
“You were married to Hugh Lander? My God, now he is gorgeous!” Stephen exclaimed, unable to keep the admiration out of his voice, at which Sara burst into louder sobbing.
“Sara, stop . . . stop, listen to me. . . .” He held her face up to his, holding his gaze steady until gradually she calmed down.
“Look over there, at the piece. If you look carefully, beyond what you think you’re looking at, you’ll see that those . . . flowers are not perfect. Quite the opposite, they are all individual, all flawed. Some of the petals droop, some are longer than the others, some buds are bigger, almost bulbous, some are hardly there at all, but they are all uniquely different. And that’s what beauty is—bespoke, if you like, individually crafted. And beauty doesn’t wither with age. It changes but it doesn’t get less.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“I don’t believe it, I know it. Want to know what my last boyfriend looked like? He was sixty, overweight, and balding, but he was the most captivating man I’ve ever known. And you know what? He left me.”