The Cost of Art
Arik at the Jerusalem Print Workshop shows us something the cost of this month’s mortgage payment. The cost of painting the walls in the two girls’ bedrooms and the accent walls in the kitchen and on the staircase. The cost of my brand-new, full suspension mountain bike, which I cannot afford, but since the truck hit me, I need if I want to continue to share my man’s fondest dreams. For the cost of two blood transfusions or half the cost of a caesarean section.
The print is like a blue whale in the blue sea, like rocks hidden in the waves, like a flag without a country. Its surface is scarred and scratched. It is a limited edition 1 of 12.
I had loved more this artist’s black and white dandelion moon or her scratchy weather or her gossiping wheat, which takes three entire panels to finish its news, but my man says they are too dark for the wall. So we look only at the blue, sea-like, whale-like, mountain-like print with a flag without a country.
My friend Jane has bought giant paintings for half the price of the large leather sofa my man bought with his ex-wife and gave away when I moved in. For half the cost of the rug that he also bought with her that I’m making him sell.
We had come seeking a long, narrow painting to put on the staircase that joins our two floors, but though the space would fit the print Arik shows us, no one could see more than half the print at a time, because of how the staircase slices back and forth.
To pay for a print that no one can see more than half of costs the same as half your new, top-quality refrigerator, I tell my man. He says I am the one paying for it, so I can do what I want. He says he’s just telling me what he thinks. I tell him I agree with what he thinks.
After two years it was clear that if we didn’t act, something would die. This is how a couple acts, he says, they get married. They bike mountains together. They buy art together. Why couldn’t I just say thank you and be happy when someone offers me a home, he asks.
I do agree with what he thinks. That the shape of the wall is most fit for a long, narrow print that no one can see. But the shape of the eye is another thing.
This is a good example of fate, or physical attraction, or love—the meeting of two compatible dysfunctions. And it is why, after we pulled over the car yesterday on the way home to Tel Aviv from the print gallery because we were fighting so hard we could not pay attention to the road, we held each other all night, in sheets that cost 1/8 of the price of the print, and they are polished cotton sheets, 1,000 thread count that I bought severely discounted at Century Twenty-One in New York the summer before I met my man.
We held each other all night. I stroked his face as if it were the stone in the print we hadn’t yet decided to buy and slid my thigh between his thighs, like the hidden whale that I am absolutely certain is shaking its tail through the kelp in that blue print in the Jerusalem workshop, in its long metal tray in the gray cabinet, as the moon rises over the hills through the arched windows.
Marcela Sulak is the author of the lyric memoir Mouth Full of Seeds; her third poetry collection, City of Sky Papers is forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press, where she’s previously published Decency and Immigrant. She’s co-edited Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. A 2019 NEA Translation Fellow, her fourth translation, Twenty Girls to Envy Me. Selected Poems of Orit Gidali was nominated for a 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. She hosts the podcast “Israel in Translation,” edits The Ilanot Review, and is Associate Professor of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University.