“Hm.”
“Really.”
“So how is that painting of you—Persephone—how is that even a thing that exists?” I ask.
“I modeled for him,” she says. “I was in college.”
“It’s a famous piece of art, though. Right? The internet thinks it’s famous.”
“Um-hm.”
“So you just never told me? Or mentioned it in front of me?”
“I didn’t even want you to know he was your father. I don’t like to talk about Kingsley Cello. You know our family is just the two of us.”
I can hardly believe she’s saying “just the two of us” when she lives in Mexico City and I live in LA, but I don’t want to fight with her. She’s already made her choice. “It’s in the Saint Louis Museum of Art,” I say.
“I know. Listen, I don’t think you should visit him. He’s a difficult person. Is he sending you a plane ticket?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t think so.”
“How did he find you?”
“I askedyouthat. But it’s MatildaAvalonKlein at gmail. He probably just guessed.”
She clucks her tongue. “You’re not some plaything he can just pick up when he decides he’s bored.”
“Please. Will you just tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“What happened with you and Kingsley.”
5
Isadora was nineteenwhen she met my father. And he was forty-three. Or maybe he was even older. She isn’t certain.
She was a student at Fordham University in New York. She made money posing for classes at the Cooper Union art school, downtown. Kingsley was a friend of the painting teacher. One evening, he dropped in at the end of class. The students clustered around the famous man, asking questions, eager to bask in his light.
Kingsley didn’t see my mother nude, but he did see fifteen paintings of her around the room in various stages of completion. As she was putting on her coat, he told her he could make a “real painting” of her, if she was willing.
She was. She tells me it was because she was broke. But I think she liked the idea of being immortalized, liked being worth this great man’s attention. Her beauty interested a man who famously specialized in beauty.
She went to his studio, which was in a warehouse neighborhood in Brooklyn. Upstairs was a loft apartment where Kingsley lived in haphazard splendor. Isadora had imagined he’d pay her for posing, but money was never discussed. Instead, she moved in with him for three months and shared his bed. She found herself pregnant several days after he told her to pack her things.
Insert angry phone calls, hateful arguments, and the revelation that Kingsley was seeing another woman. He refused to help with the pregnancy or the baby, and before I was even born, Kingsley had disappeared from that Williamsburg loft.
He was impossible to find. Isadora never heard from him again. She sent a birth announcement to his old address.
She moved back home with her parents temporarily, but the Kleins told her she was a stupid, lazy dropout and unfit to be a mother, so Isadora moved out to live with another single mom and share childcare. Soon after that, she met a different artist—a sculptor this time. We moved to Santa Fe to live with him.
Later my mother learned that Kingsley’s painting of her,Persephone Escapes the Underworld,sold for upwards of four million dollars to a private collector who eventually donated it to that museum in St.Louis. It’s now used to advertise their twenty-first-century art collection.
She never made a penny from it.
6
I haven’t explainedwhy I don’t live with my mother anymore. It’s because she’s a muse. Or, you could say, a groupie. That’s her calling.
