The Only Good Man

Jack and I spent the better part of the morning at the Prado stroking our egos and sucking off renaissance painters for their use of color and closeness to god.

Wandering between rooms with our hands clasped behind our backs and our brows furrowed, pretending to be intellectuals when really we just play chess and read books and neither of us has anything new to say about the way the world works.

I make a list of all the paintings I like. Notable themes include all the likely suspects. Blood and guts and suffering and women with soft bodies and sad faces and Jesus dying for our sins and death and life and sex and god.

And I burst into tears in front of The Garden of Earthly Delights even though the whole room smelled like sweat and there were too many people and they didn’t even understand how much this moment meant to me and frankly neither did I until it happened.

Jack told me that it is so cute that I get so worked up over stuff like this, and that I am the most passionate person he has ever met and even though both of us know it isn’t true it makes me feel less embarrassed for sobbing over a painting, and I say thank you. To reward him for being the Only Good Man that I have ever met I tell him we can go and see more Goya.

We walk around the museum for another two hours and make jokes about the men I’ve fucked and see five different versions of the women I have tattooed on my abdomen.

On the top floor, there is a room filled with brilliantly detailed rapes. An extraordinarily strange way to organize a room. Wall to wall assaults hung ten feet tall in heavy golden frames. Women contorting like snakes around angry men, trying to escape fate with wide eyes and perfect bodies. They are all in nature scenes or in decadent, velvet-covered bedrooms.

I told Jack that if either of my rapes were condemned to canvas, I would just be surrounded by PBR and cheap sheets. Jeans pulled halfway down bare legs and shoes still on, my face looking blankly at the ceiling and my roommate lulled to sleep by a beer can across from me.

It would probably end up in a contemporary art museum accompanied by a statement about how rape is bad, and we should all stop doing it.

Both of us detest this sort of art. The kind that thinks it is changing the world by making grand generalizations about politics or topical social issues.

But since we are close by- and since we are in Spain -we go to the contemporary art museum anyway. We are greeted by a collection of crudely painted pieces of cardboard suspended from the ceiling, which declare in fluorescent pink letters that “disabled people fuck too” and “lesbians exist” as though this has never before been said out loud, and that by acknowledging these facts we are absolving ourselves for overlooking them before.

Every piece saying, with an egregious lack of subtlety, ”Don’t look at the Art, look at Yourself and give yourself a pat on the back for understanding that the problem is not you but Society.”

Ultimately, the most stimulating part of the experience was a screening of a campy erotic drama, which we discovered just in time to see Benicio Del Toro begging his girl to cum. Spoiler: she did.

I write down the title so we can find it later and we spend the rest of our visit talking about things that seemed important then but are now completely forgotten.

We finish the Benicio movie later. It’s a Javier Bardem movie, actually. And I am surprised and delighted to discover it is completely centered around a construction worker with two girlfriends who has a bit of an ego problem and an archaic view on masculinity.

Javier notes multiple times to his girlfriends that 94 pounds is the perfect weight for a woman, and I instinctively tell Jack that this is wrong, the weight doesn’t matter it’s the measurements.

He doesn’t understand. But because he is the Only Good Man on earth, he tells me I am beautiful and adorable and I do not need to change ever, for anyone. And we both know that this isn’t true but I say thank you anyway.

After he falls asleep, I spend thirty minutes taking nudes in the bathroom. I have been very good lately, I have been eating and drinking and doing all the healthy food and exercise things. But it still makes me disgustingly proud to see my hip bones in the mirror. I know this is a narcissistic, objectively abhorrent thing to admit. But I am nobody’s role model and contrary to the belief of every girl I have ever dated I am not a political statement either.

I take more pictures, put them in the hidden folder on my phone.

If I was a contemporary artist, I could pitch them as a statement on body positivity, or the pressure put on women to stay thin and be pretty. I could say that this is all just a way for me to take back my image from the patriarchy and if anyone called me a slut then they would be wrong, and anti-woman, and ignorant to my art.

And it would probably be so much easier than doing a naked self portrait with oil paints and actual patience, but at least in the renaissance version, I don’t have to lie and say I’m healing when I still get a head rush every time I stand up and I have already punched two new holes in my belt this year.

That version never has to explain that other people can look good fat, but never her, and she’s not fatphobic but probably she is but she’s sorry about it so she’s still a good person.

We talk at length about this expectation as we walk around the neighborhood where Jack’s sister has been living all quarter. And it is quiet except for all the birds and the occasional sound of church bells. And we are so relieved not to hear anyone speak. After a while we go quiet too. An old couple inches home in front of us, the man’s cane clacking against the cobblestone. The street is empty except for the four of us. It is exactly the right hour for the sun to bounce off of everybody’s windows, it is the first sunny day of the year. The last bits of daylight are passing through tendrils of cigarette smoke above my head.

And we sit on the patio at the cafe in front of the cathedral and both of us have almost finished our books. Every once in a while we stop to tell each other what just happened, though mine is usually along the lines of “Henry just boned five women in one day” and Jack’s is more like “this is why humanity is doomed to a life of masochism.”

When the server comes by to take our order, I translate everything. After she leaves, I explain all the words he doesn’t know. I forget momentarily that I have a body, and that I am supposed to have opinions, and that I am somehow both never enough and always too much.

We finish our tiny coffees and take the long way home, and when I go to light my cigarette, the Only Good Man takes the lighter out of my hand and tells me “pretty girls never light their own smokes.” And even though we both know this isn’t true, I cup my hand around the flame and say thank you.