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Nina or Bessie

David Sapp

    I was seduced. Well no, not quite. I don’t know. Just keep in mind she was past thirty and I was only nineteen, a freshman at art school, new to the city. Nina re-named herself Bessie Smith when she arrived from Venezuela. It didn’t fit. I thought, of all the names she could pick. My aunt was a Bessie, but she was toothless, wore a hairnet and played Flinch with my grandmother and her other sisters, Martha, Mabel, Isabelle and Stella, around the farmhouse kitchen table. Aunt Bessie lost her legs to diabetes. Nina was Bessie’s antithesis. Nina was electric, a small, spare woman who vibrated, jolting everyone nearby, her movements naturally and unselfconsciously quick, exotic and sensual. Nina’s gaze made me think I’d never want to see her angry. I’d never seen eyes and hair so decidedly black. There were a few strands of gray, but maybe that was part of my attraction. Her skin was the warm color of coffee with cream. No, that’s too simplistic. She was like sunlight falling on the woods in winter, a blend on the palette of Raw Umber, Burnt Sienna, Alizarin Crimson at her edges, all tempered with Titanium White.
    We were guards at the art museum. I watched over buddhas, Sung ceramics and Zen painting while she paced through the vast Baroque galleries. She could easily walk in and out of any of the large, gilded frames of Velasquez or Ribera. On a day off, between Life Drawing and Design, I surprised and photographed her between Medieval and Renaissance. In one pose, she slowly licked her upper lip. In another, there was an unguarded softening given to me, especially for me. Through the camera I was astonished to find she was not one of the silly girls I dated. She was fascinating, mesmerizing in her complexity, a mystery. My Spanish was non-existent. One year of Latin only caused confusion. Despite her rapidly changeable expressions, there were pauses, searches, in her English sentences, the spaces between her words our conversation. She never spoke her language for me, but I longed to hear her voice flow uninhibited from her throat, my comprehension an intimacy unencumbered by precise articulation or definition.
    Though I fooled around on a few dates and dances, I was a poor lover for Nina that first time after Mama Santa’s pizza in Little Italy. Somehow, we ended up in my dorm room single bed. I don’t recall it being my idea, but she was driving her Chrysler. She balked and pouted at my presentation of and sheepish pitch for a condom, but I was an attentive student in health class. In the morning she surprised the other guys on the floor by brazenly using the men’s showers. This was hilarious; I was smitten. In her Cleveland Heights apartment, somewhere near Cedar and Lee, I only remember a sink heaped with dishes and a single framed photograph. Her walls were surprisingly bare, as if she had enough of Rococo and Impressionism for one day. Out of habit, she’d be compelled to guard the plump, pink women of Boucher and Renoir, glaring allegories of fertility. The photo depicted her family, a very large family, a very happy family ready to burst from the frame. Her loneliness seemed more acute when she refused to speak of Venezuela or how she came to be in drab, rusting Cleveland of all places. I think she missed the light of Caracas.
    After I quit art school, packed up and moved home, I became a much better lover. When Nina came to visit, we didn’t make it to my bed. I amused her with a few newfound skills described in men’s magazines (or perhaps she only feigned delight). This time, my aim was her desire. This time, ferocious in our passion, we discovered an equilibrium. And for a fleeting moment, she was truly Nina, a small sweet girl. I drove this time, around town in my Ford and up and down and around Ohio hills where my family settled more than a hundred years before. At the Danville diner, we didn’t expect the stares from the good-ol-boys, the poor, white farmers, my distant relation. Nina was starkly out of place. All impossible or at least highly unlikely, there wasn’t really a courtship, certainly no romance. The appeal was an understanding: she saw something in me, and I matched her intensity, a thrilling, bewildering adventure. Looking back, I suppose I knew I was an intentional selection: youth, a good chin, a clean-cut young man. Being Catholic was a bonus, as if Catholicism was an integral ingredient of favorable genes, quality DNA. She was a peculiar species seeking a son, not necessarily a husband, her agenda a biological and instinctual imperative, my utility a practical affair.
    Months later, a letter from Nina arrived. She had a boy. Though she left it intentionally ambiguous (and omitted his name, a message, another mystery), I quickly worked out the timing. Was he mine? He was mine. And he wasn’t mine. Still without prospects, unsure of my status, my role seemed fulfilled, quite finished. I wondered. I liked to think Nina was, what, happy? Unwittingly, from a distance, I became a proud surrogate father. I was used, but I was comfortable with the circumstances. When she carried him, when he kicked, did she think of me just a very little bit? When she gazed at her boy, admired him over breakfast, hair tousled and bleary-eyed on a school day, homework half finished, did she recall my features? Where was his lunch? His sneakers needed tying. And who was this young man at nineteen, or now at thirty-five, the same age as his mother when I met her?
    Nearly sixty, on a lark to a Van Gogh exhibition, I inquired. The guard was older and seemed somewhat familiar. He knew of Bessie (not Nina) vaguely, tangentially, much as I’d first known her, and that she may have died of cancer years before. But that was all, and he was uncertain. While viewing Vincent’s scenes from Arles and Saint-Rémy, for the first time I asked, “Where is my son?”

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