Read Online Love's Little Instruction Book by Mary Gorman - Free Book Online

to earth, easy going, and had a wicked sense of humor. He hadn’t done much talking himself. He was unsure of what to say to her, and afraid that he might say the wrong thing, but his reticence wasn’t a problem with Presley to fill in the silence.
    The best part of the day had been when O’Connor had gone off to use the men’s room and Presley had gone off blanket-hopping, and it had been just him and Denise. He’d asked her shyly how she’d liked being back in Boston and she’d talked to him at length about living in Europe. He’d loved the way her eyes lit up when she told him about her adventures riding the Metro in Paris, navigating by the sight of the Eiffel Tower, and how she could get into the Louvre free on Wednesday afternoons and just spend hours strolling around studying the masterworks.
    “What’s your favorite work of art?” he asked, hoping that she wouldn’t say something so obscure that he wouldn’t have any clue as to what she was talking about.
    “In the Louvre or of all time?” she asked.
    He shrugged. “All time,” he replied.
    “I suppose it depends on my mood,” she said. “But I’ve always been partial to sculpture. Classical — not the abstract stuff you see around now. I saw a lot of Rodin when I was in France. You know — The Thinker, The Kiss. Did you know that if you walk all around The Kiss that the couple’s lips aren’t actually touching? He has them just a hair’s breath away, but you can’t tell that until you’re right up to it and looking at it at exactly the right angle.” She blinked at him. “I think that you can sense the sexual tension in the piece, though, even if you don’t know their lips aren’t touching. Don’t you?”
    “Oh, definitely,” he said, actually feeling quite pleased that he knew the sculpture she was referring to. “Although I never knew that they actually weren’t kissing until just now.”
    “What’s your favorite?” she asked, seeming to enjoy the conversation.
    “Nudes,” he replied promptly, then nearly whacked himself in the head when it occurred to him just what he’d said.
    Her smile slipped just a bit. “Nudes, huh? You mean like photographs?”
    He knew then that he had just blown it big time. Now she was going to think he was some sort of lecher. “No,” he replied coolly, “although I’ve seen some nude photography that’s really blown me away. I saw a book of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs once and just couldn’t believe — ” He hesitated, trying to find the words to express himself properly. This was her field, not his, and he didn’t want to come off as a fool. “I guess I tend to think of photography as a sort of back-door art — after all, the camera is just recording what’s there, right? It’s not like the artist really created what he’s showing. He just arranged it, set up the machine, and pushed the button. But with Mapplethorpe, even an idiot like me could see the line and the composition, the contrasts in black and white and the absolute beauty of the image as it was laid out before me. That was ingenious, and it kind of pissed me off that in the end he’s mostly known for what got interpreted as his ‘obscene’ works — you know, the interracial, sexually explicit stuff.”
    She looked intrigued. “Did you think it was obscene?” she asked.
    He shrugged. “There’s a difference between art and pornography. It’s kind of like when you look at the pictures in a smut magazine — they look like pictures of genitalia with a person attached to them, whereas in art, you look at the picture and you see the person, and the lack of clothing is almost secondary to what you see in the person.” He paused and felt suddenly unsure. He didn’t think he should be talking about pornography if he wanted to make a good impression, and he was afraid that she — a woman with a degree in art history — would realize that he was a blithering fool. “Do you know what I mean?”
    She nodded