“This is the guy,” she said. “This is the only male painter I trust. I guess I also don’t mind Corot and his cows. He gets the sadness of being a cow. And Modigliani, too, but that’s only because I used to have a crush on his work and wished he could have painted me. All the rest of them, I swear to you, are telling lies about women. Even when they’re not painting women, even when they’re painting a landscape: it’s lies about women. Even Modigliani, I don’t know why I forgive him, I shouldn’t. I guess because he’s Modigliani. It’s probably good I never met him. Later on, I can show you all the women painters in this collection — oh, wait.” She snorted. “There are no women painters. This entire collection is an illustration of what happens without women on the scene to keep men honest. Except for this guy here. God, he’s honest.”
I took it as a heartening sign that she liked at least one male painter; that she could make an exception. She was a terrible art-history instructor, but if you were going to look at only one artist in that museum, Eakins wasn’t a bad choice. She pointed out the geometry of rower and oar and scull and wake, and how honest Eakins was about the atmospherics of the lower Delaware valley. But the main thing for her was Eakins’s bodies. “People have been depicting the human body for thousands of years,” she said. “You’d think we would have gotten really good at it by now. But it turns out to be the hardest thing in the world to do right. To see it the way it really is. This guy not only saw it, he got it down in paint. Somehow, with everybody else, even photographers, or actually especially with photographers, some idea gets in the way. But not with Eakins.” She turned to me. “You’re a Thomas also, or just plain Tom?”
“Thomas.”
“Am I allowed to say I’m glad I don’t have your last name?”
“Anabel Aberant.”
She thought about this. “Actually, Anabel Aberrant might not be so bad. Kind of my entire story in two words.”
“You’re allowed to pronounce it any way you want.”
As if to dispel any coded allusion to future marriage, she said, “You really are bizarrely young-looking. You know that, don’t you?”
“Sadly, yes.”
“I think it was a character thing with Eakins. I think to paint this honestly, you have to have a good character. He may have had sexual issues, but his heart was pure. People are always saying Vincent had a pure heart, but I don’t believe it. His brain was full of spiders.”
I was beginning to feel like the flavorless kid brother of someone Anabel was doing a favor by seeing me. That she’d called Lucy to ask about me, or that she might be trying to impress me, was hard to credit. As we made our way back outside, I remarked that she and Lucy were very different.
“She has a really fine mind,” Anabel said. “She was the only person at Choate whose ambition I could recognize. She was going to make documentaries and change the face of American cinema. And now her ambition is to make babies with Handyman Bob. I’d be surprised if he has a single good chromosome left after all the psychedelics he’s done.”
“I think she and Bob may be having trouble.”
“Well, I hope they hurry up with that.”
Snowflakes, the first of the season, were slanting across the museum steps. In Denver a day like this would have delivered six to twelve inches, but in Philadelphia I’d learned to expect a turn to rain. As we proceeded down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the most desolate of Philly’s many soul-oppressing avenues, I asked Anabel why she didn’t have a car.
“You mean, where’s my Porsche?” she said. “That’s what you mean, isn’t it. Nobody ever taught me how to drive. And I might as well tell you, in case you have the wrong idea about me, that I’m in the process of weaning myself from the family teat. My father’s paying for my last semester, but that’ll be the end of it.”
“Daughters don’t inherit?”
She ignored this small temerity. “The money is already ruining my brothers. I’m not going to let it ruin me. But that’s not even the reason. The reason is the money has blood on it. I can smell it in my checking account, the blood from a river of meat. That’s what McCaskill is, a river of meat. They trade in grain, too, but even there a lot of it goes to feed the river. You probably had McCaskill meat for breakfast today.”
“They have a thing called scrapple here. It’s said to be made out of organs and eyeballs.”
“That’s the McCaskill way, use everything.”
“I think scrapple is more Pennsylvania Dutch.”
“Have you ever been to a pig factory? Chicken farm? Stockyard? Slaughterhouse?”
“I’ve smelled them from afar.”
“It’s a river of meat. I’m making my thesis film about it.”
“I’d like to see this film.”
“It’s unwatchable. Everybody hates it, except Nola, who’s vegan. Nola thinks I’m a genius.”
“Remind me what vegan is?”
“No animal products of any kind. I know I need to go that way myself, but I basically live on toast and butter, so it’s not easy.”
Everything she said fascinated me. We seemed to be heading toward the train station, and I was afraid that we’d part ways without my having fascinated her at all.
“I can assign a story on scrapple,” I said. “Investigate where it comes from, what it’s made of, how the animals are treated. I could write it myself. Everybody complains about scrapple, nobody knows what it is. That’s the definition of a good story.”
Anabel frowned. “It’s sort of my idea, though. Not yours.”
“I’m trying to make amends here.”
“First I’d need to find out whether McCaskill makes scrapple.”
“I’m telling you, it’s Pennsylvania Dutch. I was the one who brought it up, anyway.”
She stopped on the sidewalk and faced me full-on. “Is this what we’re going to do? Are we going to compete? Because I’m not sure I need that.”
I was happy that she spoke of us as something potentially ongoing; distressed that we might be something she didn’t need. Somehow, already, the decision was hers to make. My interest in her had quietly been assumed.
“You’re the artist,” I said. “I’m just the journalist.”
Her eyes searched my face. “You’re very pretty,” she said, not kindly. “I’m not sure I trust you.”
“Fine,” I said, smarting. “Thank you for showing me Thomas Eakins.”
“I’m sorry.” She pressed a gloved hand to her eyes. “Don’t be hurt. I just suddenly have a bad headache and need to go home.”
When I got back to campus, I thought of calling her to see how she was feeling, but the word pretty was still rankling, and our date had been so unlike what I’d hoped for, so much not the dreamlike continuation of our phone call, that the needle of my sexual compass was swinging back toward Lucy and her plan. My mother had lately taken to warning me not to make the mistake she’d made and fall too hard for a person at too tender an age — to think of my career first, by which she meant that I should first make money and then choose the most expensive house, etc. — and I certainly felt safe from falling too hard for Lucy.
In my Sunday-night call to Denver, I mentioned that I’d been to the art museum with one of the heirs of the McCaskill fortune. This was weak of me, but I felt I’d disappointed my mother by failing to make the right sort of Ivy League friends. I seldom had news that cheered her.
“Did you like her?” my mother asked.
“I did, actually.”
“Your father’s friend Jerry Knox spent his entire career with McCaskill. They’re well known for having the highest ethical principles. Only in America can you find a company like that…”