Consent: A Memoir

by Jill Ciment

In both scenes from the memoir, Arnold is passive, either lost in thought or asleep when I appear like a nymph in the forest. There is empowerment in remembering oneself as the sexual aggressor, especially after modeling at Escapades.

Should I be calling it our affair? Wasn’t it his affair? When a seventeen-year-old dated someone exclusively in those days—it was still 1970 until midnight—she wasn’t having an affair; she was going steady.

But that morning after he told me that he had left his wife and wanted us to live together, I realized that jumping my place in line had consequences. Did I really want to live with a middle-aged man?

Interesting choice of words, tame. Did she mean domesticate, or train, or break, as in a young filly must be broken before she is ridden?

She had come out of her divorce certain that our poverty was her fault, but Betty had straightened her out. She had no credit because in 1971 credit cards and mortgages were issued only in the man’s name.

warned me never to become reliant on a man, never to allow myself to get trapped in marriage and have to chew off ...

In writing, negative space is silence, what is not said.

The irony of our landing in a pedophile’s daydream was not lost on me. I found it funny, but it troubled him.

A story stops when the writer doesn’t know what to say next; it ends when there is nothing more to be said.

The models stayed the same age as he grew older.

He was forty-five, disgusted with himself for having wasted a decade. He settled down to one wife and one mistress (age appropriate) and entered psychoanalysis.

lived with a man their age circulated among them, I sensed a subtle—and not so subtle—change in the way they interacted with me. The assistant dean started stopping by my desk in the art office to rub my shoulders while I typed rejection letters to artists who had applied for teaching positions.

My second act of compassion was to never tell him that it had been I who had typed the letter. It finally sank in: To love wasn’t just to feel love, but to act lovingly.

The girl in the painting wasn’t a nymph or a victim or a survivor or a sugar baby or a gold digger or a bimbo or a fatherless girl desperately in need of an older man’s affection. The girl in the painting had a steely confidence in the knowledge that she was loved.

“After so many years, it’s not losing the man that matters,” they had all agreed, “it’s losing the life.” I had taken another woman’s life and I knew it.

The pervading ethos gave her no clues. Was Chuck Berry a pervert for taking a fourteen-year-old lover? Jerry Lee Lewis? Mick Jagger? Wasn’t groupie culture just statutory rape? And what about Gandhi, who replaced his walking stick with two teenage girls he could lean on by day and sleep naked beside at night?

Like his sister before him, he gravitated to any man who paid attention to him.

yet she caught a whiff of something that alarmed her, like the scent of a nearby fire. A moment later, the air smelled clear again, and she assumed she only imagined it.

Color had been introduced. Color is the language of dreams, according to Cézanne.

Earlier that evening, I had instructed him—a little too testily—not to stand beside me during my opening, that when a man stood beside a woman, especially an older man and a younger woman, the woman became invisible, except as an object of acquisition.

Arnold’s drawings normally skewed toward the grotesque. He naturally drew the shadows of the world, not the light.

His unshakable confidence in my intellect quieted my terrors.

Arnold asked me to read aloud from the fledgling story I had been writing. Each time I paused for a beat, he had me insert a comma. He explained that a clause was only the number of words you could string between commas, and I had to be careful not to hang too many words or the string would break.

He was patient and practiced. After all, he had already raised a learning-disabled daughter.

We were now the same height, five foot six. I had still been growing when we met. I had to raise my lips for our first kiss. Now we kissed straight on.

Nudity is different than nakedness. To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others.

Despite Arnold’s assurances, learning to write was not at all like learning to draw. To draw, I needed to open my eyes wide; to write, I needed to shut them tightly and turn the gaze on my naked self. We were both in a fervent state of uncharted creativity—me for the first time, him for the second. We pulled all-nighters and still managed to make love afterward. We critiqued each other’s work—brutally, lavishly, meticulously—not as teacher and pupil, but as collaborators. If I saw something lacking in his painting, I would pick up a brush and make my corrections directly on the canvas. If he read a digression in my story that petered out, he would excise it with a thick pencil stroke. Sometimes I would cry and rip up all my pages, but he would invariably collect the shreds out of the wastebasket and tape them back together.

it was so apparent to me that they were looking for a father themselves. I felt a tinge of jealousy. Was I being replaced?

“He is getting a second chance at sixty-two, have some compassion,” my mother said. “He may be old enough to be your father, but remember, he isn’t your parent. He does not love you unconditionally.”

Had Arnold experienced the sea change of the MeToo era, would he have come to believe that he crossed a line when he first kissed me? Does a story’s ending excuse its beginning?

Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later? Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?

He painted—not the hellscape that was outside his window, but the hellscape that was eternal, the same view that Goya had.

After all, I suspected that my Shangri-la would vanish upon his death and I would become old overnight.

“Do you know what worries me most,” she told Arnold. “That for the remainder of my life, my only thoughts will be about death, that I will no longer be able to wonder what I want for dinner without the death bell tolling.” “I hear that bell all the time. I thought it was the dinner bell,” Arnold said.

I heard him crying in our bedroom for the third time in his life, this time for himself. I gave him his privacy until the sobs subsided. He had every right to cry for what was about to be taken from him. Everything.

I crossed the room and stood over him. He stirred and opened his eyes. There might be a dispute about our first kiss, but there could be none about our last.