The vista which then opened was one I never
could’ve anticipated in the Nineties— the PAFA
campus was set as a series of jeweled buildings
smack in the center of Center City Philadelphia,
a few blocks from City Hall. Mary was then still
in enough good standing to maintain her own
studio on campus. I had to sign in as a guest on
the ground floor every time I visited. The room
was a large rectangle, & the elongated back wall
was one big window, looking out on the western
progression of Cherry Street, towards Broad. Until
Mary & Abby, I had no fixed notions of painting;
now, I dived in with the frisson of one let loose in
a wonderland. Everything about Mary was magical
to me, & the canvases arrayed around the studio,
largely male nudes, recumbent or not, plugged into
Mary’s fascination with classical mythology, & made
a case for Mary as a Don Juana, a seducer of men.
Heady stuff, & often Mary’s tales were about men
who had posed for her. Vertiginous, but I was on
the verge, nonetheless, of a full-on love affair, maybe
marriage, to a women powerful enough to be called
a Creatrix, a female goddess in the world, & I knew
it. Sleeping with Mary meant something it never could
with others; rather than a mere palliative, if you could
get her to put out in the studio, you were plugging into
a mythological web, glistening & intricate, stitching
yourself, possibly, into history, & the come was in color—
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