Women in Black Velvet

Women in Black Velvet

My father owned a black velvet painting of a young gymnast. The woman in the painting stands on her palms, her body arched like a scorpion's tail.

A few days back my father replaced that painting with another black velvet. This time the woman in the painting was nude, a Pacific Islander who stood surrounded by twists of driftwood on a twilit beach, wet sand clinging to her calves.

I am glad my father discarded the ballerina. She frightened me. Whenever I was in my father's bedroom, I avoided her piercing glance. No matter where in the room you stood, the ballerina's calf-eyed gaze fixed you like a gecko tracking a fly.

The difference between the painting of the ballerina, and the painting of the Tahitian was that I could stare at the Tahitian for hours without being afraid.

At night she sometimes sings. Her voice, accompanied by the steady beat of drums, seeps through the thin walls that separate my father's bedroom from mine. Although I'm not able to understand the words she sings, I feel her longing and sadness.

Listening in the darkness, I sometimes begin to cry.

One morning I built up the courage to ask my father about the Tahitian woman in the painting.

It was the same, though. The same as it was with the ballerina, and the geisha before that.

“What's wrong, Harper?” he replied, staring at me from across the table.

I lowered my head, plunged my fork firmly into my stack of pancakes. “Nothing.”

“Go ahead and tell your father what's bothering you, son.”

Without raising my gaze, I asked, “Is this one my mother?”

And that's when the conversation ground to a halt. My father sat back in his chair and used his fingers to massage small circles against his temples. Then he finished chewing his food in silence, threw his coat on, and stomped angrily out of the house.

That night I watched my father sit in the dark, watched the red glow of his cigarette move from hand to mouth, watched him cry.

Some afternoons while my father was away at work, I sometimes shut his bedroom curtains and sat on the edge of his bed. I closed my eyes and waited. Soon, I heard her move. I snapped my eyes open and glanced up to catch the Tahitian woman leaning out of the canvas, trying to free herself from her velvet cage. When she bent forward, the shark teeth that dangled from her loose necklace clacked. The grass anklets above her feet billow. Her long, black hair – hung with seashells – fell over her breasts. Only then did I notice her lactating breasts, the fragrance filling the room.

But the moment I raised my arms and offered my hands to her, she retreated back into the painting.

This morning the painting on my father's wall has been replaced. The Tahitian nude is no longer there. In its place, a black velvet painting of an Egyptian woman. Her clothes are sheen, light blue. Her hair is tied back in a ponytail. One of her hands palms a castinet, the other is flicking open a wicker fan.

No matter where I go in my father's bedroom, the Egyptian woman's heavily mascaraed eyes track me like a cat tracks a sparrow.

I do not know yet whether to be afraid or not.