Emma Story

Susan Scutti



In the museum one woman watches as another woman views a portrait of a wife. Unknowingly, the women have arranged themselves like points on a scalene triangle. Two are seated while one stands. The standing woman, whose eyes are oblong like eggs, leans forward to inspect the brush strokes in a corner of the painting. Last month she left her longtime girlfriend for a younger man and two years from now her pregnant belly will swell like a sail filled with wind. The woman sitting on a bench studies the seated woman in the portrait as well as the standing woman who abandoned her girlfriend for a man with whom she has no history and so cannot remind her of her failures. (Yet.) The woman in the portrait married a fellow painter at the New York School of Art and after she gave birth to two daughters. Tucked within the mind of the seated woman is an ill-conceived plan to escape the older man she’s involved with, an eccentric banker who is unfailingly kind though he can no longer remain silent while she reads articles on fractal geometry. Three months from now she will board a plane to Helsinki and during the flight her hysterical hand will tremble and spill coffee on a teenager seated beside her. The coffee will leave a rectangular-shaped stain and this is what the boy’s father will notice when he greets him in the airport. Weeks later, the father who is a doctor will detect a lump in the woman’s breast and after she learns it is benign, the woman will return, tearfully, to the banker. In her absence the banker’s love for the woman will have deepened like a teenaged boy’s voice. In the portrait, the wife is seated at a piano, her face turned to look behind her at George Bellows who would die, years later, of appendicitis. Did the series of atonal chords she play that afternoon please him? Did she begin to paint again after his death?