The Longest Ride

set up by the lake.

“Yes,” I say. “The art that I bought.”

“You know what you did, yes?”

I choose my words carefully. “I made you happy?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “But you know what I am talking about.”

“That wasn’t why I bought the paintings. I bought them because you were passionate about them.”

“And yet…,” she says, trying to make me say it.

“And yet, it didn’t cost me all that much,” I say firmly. “They weren’t who they later became, back then. They were simply young artists.”

She leans toward me, daring me to continue. “And…”

I relent with a sigh, knowing what she wants to hear.

“I bought them,” I say, “because I’m selfish.”
     

     
    I’m not lying about this. Though I bought them for Ruth because I loved her, though I bought them because she’d loved the paintings, I also bought them for me.

Quite simply, the exhibition changed Ruth that week. I had been to countless galleries with Ruth, but during our time at Black Mountain College something inside her was awakened. In a strange way, it magnified a sensual aspect of her personality, amplifying her natural charisma. As she studied a canvas, her gaze would sharpen and her skin would flush, her whole body reflecting a pose of such intense focus and engagement that others couldn’t fail to notice her. For her part, she was completely unaware of how transformed she appeared in those moments. It was why, I became convinced, the artists responded so strongly to her. Like me, they were simply drawn to her, and it was also the reason they had been willing to part with the work I purchased.

This electric, intensely sensual aura would linger long after we left the exhibition and returned to the hotel. Over dinner, her gaze seemed to glitter with heightened awareness, and there was a marked grace to her movements that I hadn’t seen before. I could barely wait to get her back to the room, where she proved especially adventurous and passionate. All I remember thinking is that whatever it was that had stimulated her this way, I wanted it never to end.

In other words, as I’d just told her, I was selfish.
     

     
    “You are not selfish,” she says to me. “You are the least selfish man I have ever known.”

To my eyes, she looks as stunning as she did on that last morning of the honeymoon, as we stood near the lake. “It’s a good thing I’ve never allowed you to meet another man or you might think differently.”

She laughs. “Yes, you can make a joke. You always liked to play the joker. But I tell you, it was not the art that changed me.”

“You don’t know that. You couldn’t see yourself.”

She laughs again before growing quiet. Suddenly serious, she wills me to pay attention to her words. “This is what I think. Yes, I loved the artwork. But more than the work, I loved that you were willing to spend so much time doing what I loved. Can you understand why that meant so much to me? To know that I had married a man who would do such things? You think it is nothing, but I will tell you this: There are not many men who would spend five or six hours a day on their honeymoon talking to strangers and looking at art, especially if they knew almost nothing about it.”

“And your point is?”

“I am trying to tell you that it was not the art. It was the way you looked at me while I looked at the art that changed me. It is you, in other words, who changed.”

We have had this discussion many times over the years, and obviously we are of different opinions on the matter. I will not change her mind, nor will she change mine, but I suppose it makes no difference. Either way, the honeymoon set in motion a summer tradition that would remain with us for nearly all our lives. And in the end, after that fateful article appeared in the New Yorker , the collection would, in many ways, define us as a couple.

Those six paintings – which I casually rolled and stored in the backseat of the car for the ride back home – were the first of dozens, then hundreds, then more than a thousand paintings that we would eventually collect. Though everyone knows of Van Gogh and Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci, Ruth and I focused on twentieth-century American modern art, and many of the artists we met over the years created work that museums and other collectors later coveted. Artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock gradually became household names, but other, then less