He's really thin. He's naked. He's two-dimensional. If it weren't for the fact that he's lacking a head, he would be six-foot-one. My height. He looks just like me.
My girlfriend, Gabriela, takes a drag of her cigarette, blows the smoke across her Greenpoint studio, turns to look at the real Ryan and asks,
"Do you like it?"
"It looks like me," I say. But I'm lying just a little bit, because while this painting — entitled "White Bread" — has my chest, arms, legs and neck, his penis is bigger than mine.
promotion
Dating an artist is tricky. On the one hand, this proportional aberration could be a compliment — maybe this is how Gabriela really sees me. Or it might not mean anything at all, just benign artistic license. Gabriela wore the pants in our relationship and my old, dirty dress shirts to her studio. She would wake up at 8:30 every morning with her short black hair sticking straight up, giving her the appearance of a sexy mad scientist. Without adjusting her coiffure, she would march out of her apartment, mount her bicycle and pedal toward her studio. If it weren't socially frowned upon, I think Gabriela would have left the house naked.
In her past, she'd done nude modeling for art photography. She'd painted abstract canvases depicting the backs of eighteen-wheelers. She was raised in Israel, travels constantly and speaks three languages. I don't need to tell you she's into a lot of bands you've never heard of.
I speak English. I've never left the continental United States. I love Ray Bradbury, and my favorite band is the Beatles. The "White Bread" painting conveys the message that one could surmise all these things just by looking at my skinny white body: this guy might be an okay lover, it says, but he'll start talking about Star Trek as soon as the sex is over. Eventually, Gabriela decided not to render this message as abstractly as she had in "White Bread." Why imply that I talked about Star Trek in bed, or that I cried more than she did, when she could make a whole series of drawings illustrating it explicitly? So she did, and now the story of our romance is forever preserved in a group of gallery-exhibited drawings collectively titled The Ryan Series.
The Ryan Series is twenty-two monochromatic drawings, each depicting a moment from our relationship. Accompanying each piece is a prominent title at the top of the drawing. And while I had my favorites, like "Ryan in the Shower Telling Me He Loves Me Too," the really good ones were less complimentary: "Ryan Crying on the Subway Platform," "Ryan Crying on the L Train," "Ryan Crying on My Couch."
We'd almost broken up several times before she drew "White Bread" and The Ryan Series.
Why imply that I talked about Star Trek in bed when she could make a whole series of drawings illustrating it explicitly?
During one of these breaks, Gabriela revealed she'd started making drawings about our relationship as a farewell present, a way of preserving her feelings for me within her own craft. But as it turned out, this first group of drawings was the beginning of a burst of productivity. I had become a muse, so we stayed together.
About some of the drawings: "Ryan in the Shower Telling Me He Loves Me Too" was fairly romantic, even though Gabriela's opinion of American romance was extremely low. She once told me she thought of Americans as emotionally infantilized, always afraid to say it when we love someone. She was infuriated by the fact that couples could be together for months or years without saying "I love you." I began to suspect her assessment of American romance was correct — at twenty-five, having weathered a few blows from the Ryan-I-don't-know-what-to-say monster, I'd become reluctant to say "I love you" first. And though I did whisper it once into Gabriela's ear as we passed out in her loft bed after a night of whiskey and billiards, I'm forced to conclude she doesn't remember, or chose not to remember, when she created this drawing. It's a faithful rendering of her shower floor, depicted from a skewed angle, like a shot of the Riddler's lair. Integral to this title was, of course, the word "too," indicating that she'd said it first.
