Sage. Wendy Anne
today. Sometimes the way you look can truly wear on your mood as well—my current mood being exhausted and irritable.
“Rough night?” Rose squeaks at me in the elevator. Of all potentially unruffled and soft-spoken people in the world, I had to run into her high-pitch, well-intended, early-bird screech first this morning.
“I did not sleep very well last night, must have been this ongoing kink in my back, and I’m a bit off today,” I say in a voice indicating that it is not to be discussed any further.
Rose is dressed stunningly today, in a beautiful tightly fastened burgundy suede skirt suit, complimenting her light hair and complexion. Her skirt ends just below her upper thighs, exposing her petite, toned legs. Black stilettos, creating a deceitful couple of extra inches, carve her round calves. The perfect image you would expect a male to have working in his office, the cliché secretary who would be expected to “work late nights.” She makes an intriguing display for my clients and coworkers, and with her ability to follow directions, she has plenty of job security. Rose, like most of my employees, is a longtimer. She dumbfounds me with her ability to find the tiniest things fascinating. Also, when treated kindly, she is content with her subservient position, and in this predictability, I trust her. Although I find Rose attractive, I’m not sexually aroused by her in any way. Naturally, I do not entertain the idea of cheating on Bruce, but I sometimes fantasize about being with certain women. Bruce is well aware of this and has questioned me about Rose before spending enough quality time with her to know better. I have more of an attraction to the wiser, sophisticated, independent, and exotic types. Women such as Angelina Jolie and Lana Del Rey are more my style if I am to name a couple of prototypes I’d consider “my type.” In the case of Angelina Jolie, she is well-refined eloquence on a perfect skeletal structure, and her face has large exquisite features on perfectly proportioned contours. Her eyes are both bright and deep, and her individuality leaks into her life performance in the shape of exotic eccentricity. Whereas Lana Del Rey is closer to my age, and though there is youthful eloquence found in the softer parts of her demeanor, her soul seems ancient and lovely. More than this, her voice is soothing poetic sex. I have even sexualized Rihanna in my mind on many occasions.
Nevertheless, I have a thing for untouchable goddesses; I am married, Rose wouldn’t satisfy my sexual palate, and mostly because of the fact she is too childlike to arouse me. Just the same, I love Rose, and I’m very protective of her. Even while her energy, like now, can sometimes equate the sound of nails scratching hard against a chalkboard.
What a gloomy day. Even my office, surrounded by windows, seems to be dark and dreary and I don’t want to be here. My to-do list, I have decided, consists of preparation for other days when I will be making closings. My leads can wait until I am a bit sharper. I grab all of my contact guide sheets and hand them over to my phone solicitors. It is that simple. Sometimes being the boss means passing my responsibilities onto the people I pay and hope that they achieve as much as they would in my presence. Thus, I am going to organize and retreat; besides, I work more hours than most of them.
Grabbing my purse, I step out of my office. Eyes follow me from around the room, astonished by my early appearance and even more taken back by the fact I appear to be leaving.
“I am out!” I exclaim. “You know what you have to get done, and I expect everything on my desk tomorrow morning.” I hand a pile of papers to Rose and motion her to distribute them to the appropriate employees with a cunning wink.
Before I head home, I decide to devote some time to exploring my interests to break myself out of this mental coma. Boston is full of museums, but my favorites are the art museums. I have always admired artists’ interpretations of the world, but mostly their talent to exploit it. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, ranging in date from the seventh century to the late twentieth, has an assembly of over twenty-one thousand masterpieces by some of the greatest artists in history.
This is a promise of tranquility, an escape from my mind and into theirs. This is why we read, write, paint, or, in the crudest sense, even watch television as a means of artistic interpretation. I find that the people who have been through the most in their lives and have managed to succeed despite it all have a wealth of knowledge in this area. Many endowed artists have tortured souls because the depth of a painful lesson can sometimes inspire the most beautiful art. A wonderfully insane artist can speak scores of layers in their work and create deeper ways to understand the commonplace of our mind’s elucidation while bringing attention to details that tell a story, and those are my favorite kinds of artists. Art can sometimes have esoteric layers woven into the deeper messages that few can read, and those tend to be my favorite pieces of art. I cannot pick a single artist who I favor above the rest, save for the earth goddess, as she is beautiful, ever-changing, and mysteriously magical with an enchanting story hidden beneath her beautiful layers. Therefore, nature in raw form is far more enchanting than any piece of art found in a museum, but humans are pretty good at capturing her beauty and all stories abode.
Elliot once asked me why I felt the urge to continuously go to museums when all art can be experienced on the Internet. I simply told him that going to a museum versus Google image is the difference between listening to music on a set of speakers rather than experiencing the immense energy a concert provides. An empath truly understands that, but he professes to jack off to online porn, is content locked in a VR game, and has joked about buying a robotic lover, so the point is probably moot.
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts is well maintained, extremely attractive, wonderfully organized, and offers more art than one could relish properly in a single day.
While I enjoy the constant flow of visitors that satisfy a temporary need to people-watch, it is far more interesting to discover something new in a piece of art I have already seen many times. Many paintings awaken previous interpretations, and sometimes a fresh one is born. I wonder if the Rorschach test was developed by an art enthusiast, though based on my personal experience, and taking certain paintings into account, a different day is a different depiction of my perception. It is fortunate nobody has given me identical inkblot tests on separate occasions because I’d probably be committed to a psych ward.
At the museum, I can overlook being locked behind the lost generation of the twenty-first century. I can also forget about last night’s dream and my worries of the office falling apart at my departure. Staring into 1765 Boucher oil on canvas, I lose myself. Boucher was a true revolutionary. He painted major decorative ensembles, representations of mythological prospects, and scenery. He also did tasteful erotic paintings. Halt at the Spring is one of my favorite paintings by this brilliant French artist. It was originally a smaller religious painting portraying The Rest on the Flight into Egypt with Mary, Joseph, and Christ as a child. Between 1761 and 1765, the painting was enlarged (the strips of added canvas are visible to the trained eye) and reworked into a perfect depiction of how he viewed peasant life. The images are as clean as a twenty-first-century photograph, but an eighteenth-century painting of its kind harbors more energy than a photograph, especially this one, because there is so much chaos in the story and the color textures bring the story to life. In my opinion, though the history of the camera traced back to the seventeenth century, and photography has taken off since the nineteenth century, a high-quality painting will always be superior to a photograph. More time goes into a painting than a photo, and each detail manifesting in the artist’s creative flow is carefully depicted from the artist’s perspective, whereas a photograph, captured by a camera’s ability to mirror, is virtually effortless in comparison.
The art transfixes my thoughts, and while completely spellbound by my inner monologue deciphering Boucher’s potential thoughts, it takes a minute to notice my body was preventing other spectators from viewing the painting. They fire hot stares into my back while attempting to get me to move, but I refuse. Maybe this is their favorite masterpiece, and at this very moment, no other painting will suffice. However, most paintings at present are empty of visitors, there are plenty of stunning pieces to choose from, I’m not finished, and first come first serve. Also, there is always potential that they do not love this piece, and that their eyes will merely glaze over the work without appreciation, so they can move from one to the next. Yes, the people who take pride in the mere idea that they have visited the museum, and skim over the art as if it were nothing more than a short-lived experience to mention