THE WOMAN FROM A BOTERO PAINTING

The Woman from a Botero Painting 

Harriet headed to the seventh floor as soon as she entered the building. The class was in full swing, with three couples dancing, exuding sensuality, and divining each other’s every move.

At the other end of the room, she spotted a group of men standing beside a slim woman in a dress split on one side right up to the hip. Harriet thought it was Jenny Green, the teacher. They were laughing and talking, but not too loudly, because she could hear the melody from "Scent of a Woman" over the conversation.

Oh, how she loved the movie! The director skillfully created a memorable picture of colorful, heartfelt characters and scenes. The highlight was when Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade asked Dona to dance with him.

"Would you like to learn to tango, darling?" 

"Right now?" 

"I offer you my services. Free of charge."

Harriet had seen it dozens of times, each time imagining that it was her sitting across the restaurant table from the lieutenant and not Dona, whom Al Pacino led by the hand to the dance floor.

She signed up for lessons at the Jenny Green Academy because Lieutenant Frank Slade convinced her that dancing the tango, unlike life, was simple.

"If you make a mistake, get all tangled up, you just tango on..."

She’d taken exceptional care to dress for the occasion: a purple skirt with a darker hem, a white blouse, a black belt around the waist, a pair of beige high-heeled shoes, and in her hand, a tiny patent leather handbag for her keys, the phone, and some spare change for the subway. Purple lipstick, a touch of mascara, and just a hint of Fleur de Rocaille, like Miss Downes, the political science teacher from the movie. 

She felt pretty and confident, which showed in her step as she crossed the hall to the group of people. Her heels clicked on the floor, announcing her approach. They all looked up.

"Hi," Harriet said.

"I was wondering if... I mean, are you new? New… stu…dents?" She stammered slightly on the last word, her initial courage slowly ebbing away. 

"What I mean is, does anyone need a partner?"

No one answered. They all stared at her, assessing the cheap skirt from DXL Stores, the beige peep-toe shoes, the lipstick on her lips, a purple smudge on her teeth, and the sweat that sprouted on her forehead like a pearled bandana.

"She looks like a jam-filled doughnut. Or two doughnuts, one on top of the other. If the belt squeezed her waist a bit more, strawberry jam would leak out of her mouth," one of the men said.

"So, which of you guys wants to dance with the doughnut lady?" he added.

"She could squash my toes, and I have no health insurance. I pass," another one quipped.

"You’ve got it all wrong, Vince," the third man, tall and lean with wire-rimmed spectacles—the kind only businesspeople and intellectuals wear—chuckled.

"She’s not a doughnut lady but a woman from a painting. You know, by the guy who paints monstrously fat people with triple chins and cushions of flesh on their legs and arms. He calls them "voluptuous.” I call them plain fat," he said with the finality of a judge pronouncing a sentence.

"Rubens!" Vince chipped in.

"No, not that one. That one is dead. A Colombian guy obsessed with obesity. Whassiname? Give me a second. Got it! Botero! Yes, she looks like a Botero woman," he said, clapping his hands in delight at remembering the name. He felt important and smart and completely ignored Harriet’s feelings.

Throughout the exchange, the woman in the dress split on one side said nothing. A smirk lifted the left corner of her mouth. She uttered neither condemnation nor encouragement, no sisterly solidarity, smug in the awareness of her slim body. She had never been and never would be called a Botero woman, so she didn’t care. 

Harriet’s face changed from rose pink to carmine to fire engine red. She gradually retreated to her skin. Her clumsy, inflated skin stuffed with unsaturated, polyunsaturated, and monounsaturated fat. Sweat began to flood every crook and cranny of her body, washing every roll of flesh, staining her blouse in the armpits, and dripping down her legs where cushions of flesh hung above her calves, just like the guy had said.

She wanted to run but couldn't—not because of her weight but because of the high heels she’d decided to wear today. She looked down, no longer seeing pretty peep toes but blood-filled sausages.

"Gross," she thought.

"I look gross. "

She picked up a crumb of courage, turned around, shoulders hunched against the rhythm of yet another tango, and walked slowly towards the door as if wading across a swamp so as not to sink under the burden of humiliation.

She could hear them talk and laugh. She wasn’t sure if at her, but it didn’t matter anymore. She was no longer Dona, dressed to kill, waiting for Lieutenant Coronel Slade to ask her to dance, but fat Harriet McCormack, age 28, a librarian by profession, relationship status: single. Forever single. 

She wondered why it still hurt so much. By now, she should have gotten used to it. Been immune even. She had never been a cool kid and, later, an attractive woman. Always pudgy, she’d been fed to bursting by her mother because a fat child was a healthy child when she was growing up. 

Like other women, she wanted to feel good about herself. But she never did because she was told she was fat everywhere she went. On a plane, when passengers found out, they had to sit next to her all the way to Atlanta. On the subway, posters of thin and beautiful women advertised the latest smartphones.

Yes, when you were as thin and beautiful as they were, you could afford that kind of smartphone and join dating sites and left-swipe men on Tinder just because you were thin and beautiful. Until they found someone as thin and beautiful as they were, they right-swiped, met, fell in love, married, and bought a house in the suburbia and a black Buick Lacrosse. Because that was what thin and beautiful people did.

She was reminded of her heaviness everywhere and constantly. Summers were the worst because everybody posted diet tips and weight loss stories on social media. 

"I wrestled with food addiction for over a decade, but now I feel like a new woman. Hell, I feel like HALF the woman I used to be!"

When Harriet was sad, she ate to banish the oracles of heartbreak. She had an acute understanding of her relationship with food: if she didn’t eat, she knew her soul would fall apart into a thousand pieces, like a bag of confetti, and no one would help her assemble the parts again. Because despite her size, or maybe because of it, she was fragile, and her self-esteem, or whatever remained of it, could be pulverized by harsh words just as easily as bulldozers crushed bricks. 

And that was what she would do now. Eat. She would devour doughnuts—a whole box of six. No, a box of twelve, all filled with strawberry jam. She would eat so much that if anyone squeezed her, she would vomit the jam in one gigantic strawberry-colored cascade.

On Sunday, when she could not zip up the dress she had bought only a month before, she didn’t cry. Instead, she ate a massive bag of salt and vinegar crisps, two XL steak quesadillas from Taco Bell, and a tub of vanilla and chocolate chip ice cream washed down by two liters of orange juice. She would have eaten some jellybeans, too, but none were left in the jar where she usually keeps them. 

It was dark when she left the hall, the moon nothing but a tiny slit in the velvet of the sky. The empty at this hour alley growled at her like an empty stomach. The next day it must have been garbage day because bloated black bags sat on the sidewalk outside the Academy as pious widows would crouch in a church nave.

There were at least three streets to the nearest Krispy Kreme. By now, her feet were killing her. But she would walk because she needed her fix. Her hypothalamus was yelling at her, and the doughnuts were more than food; they were a filler for her emotional demands, not just her gut, a pick-me-up for trying to do something she knew would be a flop.

She was about to cross the street when she sensed rather than saw a pair of headlights. Her left shoe got stuck in the gap between two cobbles, and she fell to her knees, letting go of her handbag. 

The car was gone as fast as it appeared. She was down and in pain, with little nibbles like persistent mosquitoes stabbing her right ankle. Her phone, the loose change, and keys were next to her. The bag was by the curb.

As she tried to get up, collect her things, and think of what to do next all at once, a shadow blocked the weak beam from the moon, submerging her in darkness. 

The shadow belonged to a tall man bending and smiling at her. And incredibly, still down on her knees, scrambling for her belongings, she smiled back. There was something familiar about him. She must have known him or at least seen him before. Maybe at Uncle Tim’s funeral because he was dressed in black—from his slightly wrinkled suit to the strange hat on his head—the kind London bankers used to wear in the ’50s. Only the white shirt peeking between the lapels looked like a bleached bone. 

He helped her stand up, his nostrils brushing her hair as it unfurled in the cool breeze. He took a deep breath of the aroma and said:

"Fleurs de Rocaille, isn’t it?"

She looked up sharply.

"How do you know?"

"The scent of a beautiful woman."

She laughed as she brushed the dirt off her hands and her bruised knees, which were now as purple as the skirt.

"Beautiful? You are either too kind or a liar. And not even a good liar." 

"But my child, you are beautiful! Maybe not according to common standards, but we, the connoisseurs, recognize it when we see it. And my eyes see nothing but beauty. Well, perhaps a bit of sadness, an air of loneliness that does not take away but only adds to your charm."

She hung her head. He was reading her right—lonely and sad, that’s what she was. 

"Again – how do you know?"

"Oh, but I know quite a few things about you! You are a natural brunette. You use wrinkle cream, although you don’t need to, and you have a sensitive soul."

His answer made her laugh.

"All correct! What are you? Some sort of a diviner?"

"I could be whatever you want me to be. I could be a diviner or your father confessor. I could also be your teacher and show you how to dance the tango."

Her heart skipped a bit. She was a little scared now. The brunette thing and the sensitive soul—that was just a lucky guess, but the tango? 

"So, what do you say? I offer you my services. Free of charge."

And now she knew! It was Lt. Coronel Slade. Not Al Pacino, the actor, but the one she had been waiting for all her life. 

She took the professed hand and let him lead her out of the dark alley onto the bright lights of Madison, then 5^th Avenue. And there, in the middle of West 53^rd Street, they stopped in front of the Museum of Modern Art, which she knew was closed. She had never visited it before and imagined it was big and dark inside, with hefty bars in the windows to deter robbers and other unwanted visitors.

She followed him trustingly, and to her surprise, it was still open; all the chandeliers were on, soft music filtering through from hidden speakers. There was not one single bar in the windows.

"They must have installed an alarm system here," she thought, worrying they would set one off and get arrested. She could see tomorrow’s headlines: "Librarian and partner apprehended breaking into the MoMA. Warhol’s "Campbell’s Soup Cans missing. Reward offered for information." 

As they entered, they laughed at the same time. At something. At nothing. Or perhaps he guessed her thoughts and found them amusing. Just like he’d guessed her wish to learn the tango.

She followed him to the second floor, her feet no longer cramped in the shoes as she nearly floated up the two flights of stairs. They entered a well-lit room full of paintings. She was no expert, but she recognized a sombre-colored Dali, a Frida Kahlo with cropped hair, a Picasso nude, and... a framed canvas with no smudge of paint on it. She wondered what it meant. Modern art was full of surprises!

Her companion put his left hand on her shoulder and the right one on her waist, in that indentation where the belt bit into the rolls of flesh she used to detest and now ignored completely. She felt a wild sense of freedom and was as light as if she were filled with helium, about to glide. Then, the music began.

They began to soar, emerging like a bright butterfly from a drab chrysalis, no longer two individuals with different thoughts and bodies but one two-winged entity that moved, breathed, and felt in unison. His hands knew the topography of her curves as if they had danced a thousand times before. They zig-zagged across the wooden floor, their steps hot, passionate, and precise, their heads tilted, yet their eyes communicating. 

She thought she could understand how melted chocolate, her favorite snack, must feel because that was precisely what she experienced inside. The interior heat dissolved all previous hurt, erasing all the taunts and sneers from her memory. It spilled over from her brain to her heart and finally solidified like hot chocolate did when it touched a cold plate. 

The whole floor was theirs. She thought she could hear clapping, but maybe it was just the pulse in her temples. As the last accords faded, they floated past the blank, framed canvas. Her partner pulled her closer. They both ascended, flew up, drifted, and levitated; she was unsure how to describe the actions of their bodies. He entered first, as if the canvas were made of mist, and beckoned her to follow. She hesitated momentarily, gazed back at the hall and the other paintings, then shrugged and stepped in, where he grabbed her waist again.

All of a sudden, the music stopped. She could hear the soft click of the door as it closed. The lights dimmed and then went off one by one, leaving only the little lamps above the paintings. The Picasso nude stretched and rubbed her cramped shoulders. Dali’s melted clocks began to tick. Frida Kahlo, her hair shorn nearly to the skin, stood up from her chair and wailed loudly: "If he loved me, it was because of my hair. Now that I have none, he doesn’t love me anymore". Harriet knew she was referring to Rivera, her wayward lover.

One more glance, and then she took up her position on the canvas. She wished she could have said goodbye to her mother and sent her a Robert Rauschenberg postcard from the museum shop, telling her not to weep because her daughter was finally in perfect harmony of body and soul, framed forever in a Botero painting.

         ****

The following day, the garbage van passing through the alley to collect the constellation of bags stopped at the curb. The new guy, whom the driver called Jean Claude because of his uncanny resemblance to Van Damme, jumped down, picked up a patent leather handbag from the pavement, and opened it. It was empty. 

"Hey, look what I’ve found!" He shouted to the driver, who yawned disinterestedly.

"It looks like someone got mugged here last night."

"Not the first one and not the last one. It’s New York, man." the driver said.

"Now hurry up. We still have plenty of work to do." 

Jean-Claude threw the handbag onto the back of the truck. They drove off.

At 10:30 a.m., the doors to the MoMA opened. A stream of visitors with discount tickets hurried to the second floor to witness the launch of a new exhibition and look at "The Tango," oil on canvas by Fernando Botero, retail price: 2 million dollars.