[Editor’s Note: This illustrated short fiction is moderately NSFW. Also, the illustrations (by Kalyee Srithnam) are enhanced using AI tools. If you wish to avoid NSFW content, or AI-enhanced art, you have our permission to skip this story and move on to the next. No offense taken.]
“Smitten”: New Fiction by Alon Preiss
Let’s say you are an ageing man named Alon Preiss, and that you were born on February 3, 1960, and let’s say that in 2021, after many years working in a dreary office (or, actually, one dreary office after another), you find yourself “retired,” and also “divorced.” The retirement part was expected (although not quite this soon). The divorce part is a complete surprise.
What do you do now?
.
You go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a Tuesday. There are a lot of old people there. You pick up a little single serving bottle of champagne in the Eatery. You ask about the members’ discount.
“No members’ discount for alcohol,” says the Eatery lady. She’s heard this question before. You buy the champagne anyway. But you think that if there is a members’ discount for deep-fried potato chips, there might as well be a members’ discount for alcohol.
And then, just outside the Eatery, intoxicated, bubbly, you see a painting entitled “Apollo and Aurora”, painted by Gerard de Lairesse in 1671.
The Museum’s blurb informs you that Gerard de Lairesse is “largely forgotten today,” although he is remembered enough to warrant a prominent place in the greatest city’s greatest museum 400 years after his death, seen by a million people a year.
We should all be so lucky, to be so forgotten! you think.
So Gerard de Lairesse is not “forgotten” the way that Alon Preiss is likely to be forgotten.
You figure: Your novel, In Love With Alice, is a pretty good book, maybe people will still read it 400 years after you die. Maybe not, though. You feel a little envious of Gerard de Lairesse.
Still, the curators at the Met don’t think much of Gerard de Lairesse. One, in an interview, describes de Lairesse as “kind of bland, kind of generic.” In another exhibit, “In Praise of Painting: Dutch Masterpieces at The Met”, the curators work snarky digs at Gerard de Lairesse into commentary about other painters. The museum owns twenty-nine works by Gerard de Lairesse, and this is the only one on view, and, though you do not know it now, its days are numbered.
There is something about Aurora. Something that shines through, after all these centuries. An energy? A joy? That sounds stupid, you tell yourself. But there is something about this Aurora that you find beguiling.
Who was she? No one knows. She and Apollo “may be disguised portraits of a newly married couple,” says the Met.
And you wonder: What was she like, this Aurora?
You know that if she were alive today, and you saw her, you would feel the same way. If she were in a photograph from the 1920s, you would still be smitten. There is just something about her. You cannot stop thinking about her.
.
Imagine, in 1973, you’re sitting in the 8th grade lunchroom in your Brooklyn middle school, that gloomy place, and you see her a couple of tables away, sitting by herself, looking just like this.
Does she sneak a glance at you, when she looks up from her awful food? Or is she just lost in thought, her disconcerting eyes seeing something no one else sees, not even focusing on your face, just literally looking at her thoughts? Or is she just afraid to look at her awful food for too long?
Still, maybe she looks at you. Maybe she sees you for just a moment.
.
Or imagine that in 1971, when you are 11 years old, she is a woman in her early seventies, completing a career in the sciences. She’s always had to fight. Sometimes men stole her ideas; sometimes they laughed at her, and only decades later was she proven correct.
You see her on television. She speaks in front of the biggest collection of bookshelves you have ever seen.
You admire her steely intelligence. When you think back about her later, you wish you had known her, that in some way you could have defended her, all those years ago. You are certain you would have defended her, if you could have.
The television interviewer asks what she is working on these days.
“There is likely life on Titan,” she replies, “and likely life on Europa. It is not life ‘as we know it,’ but I have detected strong evidence of radio communications between these two moons.”
She holds a pen in one hand, firmly.
“I am in the process of attempting to decipher these radio communications,” she adds.
The interviewer suppresses a smile, and you think, More struggle lies ahead. You wish you could help.
In the years to come, you occasionally mention her, the scientist who discovered radio signals between Europa and Titan, but nobody knows whom you mean. You try to find the interview on YouTube, but maybe no one saved the tape.
.
Or imagine this, instead.
In 1983, you decide to get into shape, to exercise. You work in a lousy job, because of your lousy grades, and your personality is what it is, and you’re not that good-looking, but it occurs to you that, maybe, if your muscles were more defined, maybe you would have better luck with everything.
So in 1983, you’re doing reps on the bench press, and when you’ve done your third and final set of eight lifts, you kind of get lost in thought. Imagine that Aurora is there, a young woman, about the age she is in the painting. You don’t notice that she’s waiting.
Eventually she says, “Are you done with the machine?”
You grunt that you are.
You are taken with her soft voice, with that faint almost-accent, the voice of someone born here, but who belongs somewhere else.
Then she says, “Don’t forget to wipe off the machine.” Not reproachfully. She doesn’t want anything to do with you, she just wants the machine. She doesn’t dislike you. She isn’t repulsed by you. She just almost doesn’t even notice you, because she was meant to be somewhere else. She doesn’t realize that you are not the sort of person that she would ever speak to, even to ask about a machine in the gym. Her indifference is almost kind.
And so you are smitten, the way you would be smitten with a painting of a woman who once lived long ago, on another continent.
.
In 1978, you stand outside the Thalia movie theater, in the rain. A woman whom you met last week at CBGBs invited you to see a silent film with her, but she has not shown up yet, and the movie will start in four minutes. Cell phones have not been invented yet, and if you try to call her on a payphone, you will miss the movie anyway. So you go in and watch the movie by yourself.
The movie was filmed in 1924, and it involves various romantic entanglements and misunderstandings in Jazz Age Manhattan. About twenty-five minutes into the movie, a speakeasy crowd clears, and a lovely, lively young woman comes into view.
“ZAZZY ZUZA!” the title card reads. “THE RICHEST AND MOST BEAUTIFUL DAME IN TOWN! EVERY MAN DESIRES HER … AND EVERY DAME ENVIES HER!”
“Her arms are too thin,” whispers a woman in the audience, and her friend says, “That was the style for flappers,” and the woman replies, “Her arms are still too thin, style or no style.”
Unfortunately, the film’s Reel 3 is lost, the part of the film that details the misadventures of Zuza, that zazzy dame. So you see just that one enigmatic glimpse. You make a mental note to research her, the actress who played Zuza. She might still be alive, after all, just in her mid-seventies. But you forget.
The next day you call the girl who invited you to the movie, but she isn’t home, and she doesn’t have an answering machine. You never manage to reach her, and you never hear from her again.
You think about Zuza about a year later, but you cannot remember the name of the movie, or the name of the character. You think about calling the Thalia, but you never get around to it. If you had called the Thalia, they would not have been able to tell you. If you had researched the film at the library, you would eventually have learned that Aurora had been quite the big sensation back in 1924 after her appearance as Zuza, signed to a big contract with the studio, but that she had died tragically on-set the first day of her very next film. You would have read all the details of the terrible on-set accident, which would have haunted you. Since Aurora’s reel would later be lost, those few moments, as Zuza, just staring through a smoky Art Deco ballroom, would be all that survived of Aurora and her moving picture career.
But you don’t do all that research, you don’t even remember the name of the movie, and so you remain ignorant of Aurora’s sad fate, and for the rest of your life, you think about Zuza every once in a while, that black and white face, hand-tinted, as was done in the day, and you wonder whatever happened to her.
.
No matter when you might have seen her, no matter the scenario, you would notice her, like a brick to your head, and timelines would converge, split, emerge, retract. No matter where you might see her, when you might see her, she would rattle your universe. What is it about this Aurora?
.
In 1981, you have newly graduated from college, and you have decided to backpack through Europe; you travel to Amsterdam, because at a nightclub in Amsterdam called the Melkveg, you can order hash brownies and get stoned, which you do.
You sit in the Melkveg, and you are stoned. It somehow isn’t everything you’d hoped for.
She isn’t there; you miss her, but you don’t know whom you are missing, because you don’t know her. Her painting doesn’t hang in the Met, because she was born in the wrong century.
Maybe if she were here in Amsterdam, something would make sense for her. She would see a 17th century home, maybe an old mansion, the place she was meant to live, and she would think: Ahah.
It’s too bad that you are here in Amsterdam, and she is not.
You end your Europe trip in the South of France, a place to which you have traveled because you would like to see topless women on the beach.
It makes no sense, this trip to Europe. You have been stoned before. You have seen topless women before. So why exactly did you go to Europe?
But imagine that you arrive here, in the South of France, and you see Aurora, for the first time.
She is out of your league, but you have seen her, and you are smitten. She stands on the beach alone, and she holds a champagne flute. She waits for someone, and she stares, scans the crowds. You imagine that she doesn’t see you gawk, but of course she does. She just has other things on her mind. Your gawking annoys her, but not much. You are background static.
Eventually, a handsome man joins her, a handsome man who smells rich, even from yards away, and he whispers something to her, and she laughs only a little bit before her face sets again. She takes a sip of the champagne, finally. You know that he is rich, and he is handsome. You hope that he is also intelligent and kind, and that Aurora is happy. But Aurora doesn’t look happy.
You will sort of never forget her, she is a hazy image that you will hold in your mind forever, till you die.
.
Or imagine, instead, that she is a young woman in 2019; by then, you are fifty-nine years old, so she is too young for you, you cannot even be smitten, you would feel guilty about such a thing, but you notice her.
You see her sitting in the park, on the grass. She stares perplexed at her iPhone. You wonder why she is perplexed. You don’t understand that she has realized, for the first time, that she was not meant ever to hold an iPhone. On her iPhone, she sees a painting by Gerard de Lairesse on Instagram, and she knows, suddenly, that she was meant for other things.
.
Or imagine, instead, that in 1978, you see her in Playboy’s “college issue,” in her dorm room.
She attends NYU. You attend CUNY.
So she lives nearby.
“I don’t care about a guy’s looks,” she insists in the magazine. “I want a guy who is nice, funny and smart.”
You think: I could date her! If I were funny and smart. And nicer. But you aren’t good-looking, and that’s one of her requirements, to be not-good-looking, so you are twenty-five percent of the way there.
Why did she decide to pose for this magazine, anyway?
She knows that she is Art. She seeks her Gerard de Lairesse, someone who will put her in the Metropolitan Museum; and, in the late 1970s, this is the best she can do, the closest she will ever get.
.
Or imagine somehow you really meet her, in 1986, when she is at her weakest and most vulnerable. She is a young woman who has always insisted that she doesn’t care about looks at all, and so she decides to fall in love with Alon Preiss, since you have no looks, and because she does not realize that the emptiness inside her is a tug at her heart, a yearning for a young Dutch 17th-century Apollo, and for the genius-painter who might lionize her, not a yearning for Alon Preiss, a self-hating Brooklyn Jew.
One day she sits with you at a café, and you seem momentarily appealing, and she looks at you appraisingly, and she thinks, I guess he could be the one.
But she doesn’t look one hundred percent convinced. She looks away.
.
Or imagine that you just see her on the street, in Manhattan, in 1981. Maybe you see her every few days on the street, when you arrive at work, when you take a coffee break at 3. Not every day, but often enough that you notice.
Sometimes you think you might try to find out where she’s going, where she works, but you don’t. Eventually you get another job, somewhere else, and you never see her again.
.
Imagine that in 1978, you see Aurora in concert, playing a concerto by Alban Berg, and she scowls as she plays.
Not everyone can play Berg, after all. It is not surprising that she might scowl.
You never hear of her again, but you don’t really follow classical music, after all. You dabble, and you pat yourself on the back. “I saw a Berg concert,” you say, a while later, to someone. “Challenging. But you know, I like Berg.” And you may be the only person in history who has ever said it that way, “I like Berg.” But even you do not really “like Berg.” Really, you like Aurora. You buy some LPs of Alban Berg music and listen to them, but something is missing, Aurora is missing.
.
You marry a woman, someone your speed, a woman you knew slightly at CUNY and met again at a reunion, the fifth or tenth. You don’t mention Aurora to her before you wed, that you saw Aurora briefly and her image burned into your mind, and that though you never really met her, you will never forget her, and that in some way, you will always be smitten. As the years pass, you feel guilty for not telling your wife, but you also feel guilty over the sexism of it, being smitten with someone you don’t know at all. But eventually, you feel you must confess, and so you bite the bullet, rip off the band-aid, and you tell her.
Your wife, who is a medical researcher, tells you that this is OK, that men are visual creatures, that it’s all because of the amygdala, and that because of this, because of the amygdala, men fall in love at first sight, and women do not.
“I didn’t say I was in love,” you protest. “I said I was ‘smitten.’ ”
“Do you know what attracts women?” your wife asks. “Smell. Men are visual creatures, women are olfactory.”
“Is that why you love me?” you ask. “My scent?”
Your wife looks startled. She thinks for a moment.
“I guess it must be,” she says finally.
.
Imagine Aurora marries you! Your wedding is in a valley festooned with flowers, an impressionist tableau. She musters a smile, sort of, but her eyes are somewhere else; she thinks of her Apollo, the man she should have met and married, three hundred fifteen years ago and 3640 miles away. She knows that she has made a mistake; you realize it too, though you try to ignore that. You feel blessed that she is marrying you, because you love her, even if she doesn’t love you.
.
What was her life like in Amsterdam? You don’t know, but you have a guess.
When she was to marry her Apollo, and his family engaged Gerard de Lairesse to paint a portrait of the lovely young couple, the painter envisioned a heroic, normative tableau, but Apollo disagreed, and he ceded the spotlight to Aurora; Apollo chose to stand in the background.
When the initial sketches were complete, Aurora provided Gerard de Lairesse with copious comments, and so the final painting is her vision. To thank him, she wrote Gerard de Lairesse an epic poem based on the painting, which he kept till his death, but which has been lost to time. Some of the poems that she wrote for him were found among his possessions upon his death, and falsely credited to him.
She spent more time in Gerard de Lairesse’s studio, and many of the paintings once attributed to the artist’s students were in fact products of Aurora’s imagination; for each, she wrote at least a couplet, and often more, sometimes a verse narrative.
Many of the paintings have vanished; some are in attics, they wait to be discovered. During her lifetime, her family and friends, and a few of their associates, knew of her genius. Aurora appreciated the praise. She knew she deserved it.
Gerard de Lairesse was born disfigured. Not hideous. Disfigured. Not so unusual for that time and place. He went blind young, and he spent the rest of his life lecturing, not really painting. Aurora stood by him, never abandoned him. One evening, after a lecture, de Lairesse could not find his usual attendant. Where had the young woman gone? Dead, it would turn out later. But no one knew that yet. De Lairesse knew only that his attendant had not shown up to escort him from the lecture to his studio, where he was to sleep.
Instead Aurora escorted him to his studio. He was grateful. He was vulnerable. Today, we would say “it just happened.” Or “one thing led to another.” We might add, “No one planned it.” Back then, they didn’t use those words, because they didn’t talk about it. But Aurora and de Lairesse had the same idea. Stars collided, in the heavens.
Their geneology will be lost in the passage of years, but the artistic gene is planted in the child they conceive when those stars collide in the heavens. Aurora’s child, a daughter, paints alone, secretly. But her descendants transcend. The painter whose exhibit you see in Soho, in 1979; that painting that hangs, anonymously, in a piazza art show, in Rome in 1981. Those dots, which you don’t understand, on the fourth floor at MOMA, on loan in 1992, and the photographer at the Guggenheim a year later. They are all cousins. They are all Aurora and they are all de Lairesse. That poem, on page 52 of the Norton Anthology. Aurora, and de Lairesse.
In the painting, Aurora’s loving eyes ponder de Lairesse’s disfigured face.
She sees something there, something beautiful.
.
Maybe that was her life. Maybe that was what you saw in the painting, in her eyes; a bit of justified pride, and the joy of knowing who she is. Her love for de Lairesse, mostly platonic, until, briefly, it wasn’t.
You aren’t sure; but this is what you think likely, just because you looked into her eyes, in Gerard de Lairesse’s painting.
.
Imagine, instead, that she, like you, were born in the 20th century, and, because she does not care about handsomeness, she has married you.
Imagine that decades pass, and she sits in her robe in the kitchen, and she looks at you, her husband.
This is the look on her face, just ineffable weariness and disappointment that she was born in the wrong century and married the wrong man, even though she doesn’t know it, she doesn’t know why she is disappointed and ineffably weary, she doesn’t know that her Apollo was once out there, in Holland, that he lived a life that she would have liked to share, and that her de Lairesse was once out there as well.
You could never make Aurora happy. The 21st century would never make Aurora happy.
.
As you wake the day after you visited the Met, your head weirdly throbs from the champagne, even though you drank only one little cup from a little bottle. You hope that Aurora lived a happy life, whoever she was.
^^^
Alon Preiss is the author of In Love With Alice and A Flash of Blue Sky, which are now out of print.
Kalyee Srithnam is a writer/artist/filmmaker whose stories have appeared frequently in Oblivioni and Audere Magazine. She is the author of the upcoming book, A Kalyee Srithnam Film, and she wrote, directed and starred in the film, Nobbled.