In her probing new memoir, “Consent,” the novelist Jill Ciment is right to wonder whether the painter Arnold Mesches, who died in 2016 at 93, was her husband or her teacher. When they met, she was a 16-year-old naif enrolled in his art class, and he was an established painter with a mortgage, a wife and two children. “What do I call him?” Ciment asks on the first page of “Consent.” “My husband? Arnold? I would if the story were about how we met and married, shared meals for forty-five years, raised a puppy, endured illness. But if the story is about an older man preying on a teenager, shouldn’t I call him ‘the artist’ or, better still, ‘the art teacher?’”
For the most part, she opts for the neutral “Arnold,” not the sinister “art teacher” or the implausibly innocuous “my husband,” perhaps in recognition of a potent paradox: Arnold taught Ciment, but he also managed to adore her. Despite her feminist convictions, despite her agonized awareness of the lechery of his initial overtures, despite her disgust at the cliché of an older man chasing after a youthful ingenue, she cannot deny that Arnold played two contradictory parts successfully.
Ciment has written about her knotty romance with Arnold before, both in her fiction and in her colorful romp of a memoir “Half a Life,” published in 1996. That earlier book is mostly a portrait of her fraying family — her turbulent and explosive father, her long-suffering mother, the humiliations of their poverty — and her wayward youth in Los Angeles, and Arnold makes his brief appearance only near the end. “I always assumed that art, real art, was the exclusive work of the museumed dead,” Ciment wrote, but one day she glimpsed a striking painting in a gallery window and was shocked to learn that its creator was among the living — although he was, in her eyes, an antique. (He was all of 45.) Naturally, she tripped over herself to take his painting class, where she fell hopelessly in love with him. The rest is history.
The first three-quarters of “Half a Life” are vividly novelistic, but its ending fades into an imprecise fairy tale, with hazy suggestions of happily ever after. Ciment schemes her way into a prestigious art school by getting a studious friend to take the SAT for her, then coaxes Arnold to leave his wife so that they can run off together. The details — and the inevitable frictions — are elided. An untroubled and vaguely sketched cohabitation ensues.
“Consent” documents the second half of the life, but it is not quite a sequel. Instead, it is a renegotiation, even a rebuke. In “Half a Life,” Ciment recalls, she characterized a letter that Arnold wrote to her when she was 17 as “a missive between star-crossed lovers”; now she acknowledges that the note was “creepy, sinister.” In the initial seduction scene, Ciment dissolved into Arnold’s arms; now she admits that she shuddered with revulsion at his “newly exposed middle-aged neck.”
“Half a Life” elegantly evaded the question of its own veracity; “Consent” is at pains to remind us that memoirs can easily lapse into mythology. Ciment explains that she now uses the word “scene” rather than “memory” for the vignettes that appear in “Half a Life,” because “scenes in a memoir are no more accurate than reenactments on Forensic Files.” Later, she muses, “a memoir is closer to historical fiction than it is to biography. And as with historical fiction, the reader often learns more about the period in which the book was written than the period that is being written about.” What, then, do we learn about the period during which “Consent” was written — that is, now?
Ours is evidently an age of reappraisals, but this latest reappraisal itself invites reappraisal, for it is eager to undermine its own authority. In “Half a Life,” Ciment kisses Arnold first; in “Consent,” Arnold is the instigator of the affair. Ciment assures us that the latter account is more accurate, but why should we trust her any more this time around? After all, she is the one who adamantly insists that every memoir is, at heart, an invention.
Whoever kissed whomever first, the kiss occurred, and it was a prelude to a marriage that lasted 45 years. Soon after Arnold left his “age-appropriate” wife, Ciment found herself unable to sustain her impractical romantic fantasies. In place of her former adulation came love “without the nagging dreaminess.” She met Arnold’s developmentally challenged daughter, sympathized when Arnold did not receive a much-needed grant and, eventually, nursed him through cataract surgery. The Pygmalion narrative, in which a male artist fashions the ideal woman and is shocked to find she has come to life, is flipped on its head. “I had sculpted my own version of the ideal man,” Ciment writes, “and he was turning into a human being in front of me.”
She, too, was becoming a human being, in large part thanks to Arnold, who could see her as an agent before she understood herself in such liberated terms. The steely painting that graces the cover of the book is a portrait he painted of Ciment when she was 18, a work that afforded her an early glimpse of a stronger self. “I had never seen myself from his point of view,” she realized when she first saw the portrait. “The girl in the painting wasn’t a nymph or a victim or a survivor or a sugar baby or a gold digger or a bimbo or a fatherless girl desperately in need of an older man’s affection.” Ciment freely admits to having been some of these things, but Arnold demonstrated that she was also something more: “He showed me who I might become.” And showing us what we might become is a project common to both teachers and lovers.
Early in “Consent,” Ciment asks whether her marriage was all “fruit from the poisonous tree.” It is a daring question, and she is unsentimental and unflinching enough to answer it convincingly, which is to say, complexly. She shrinks from nothing in her accounting: not from Arnold’s sordid advances, not from her teenage naiveté, not from the many indignities of her situation. Nor does she shrink from the most scandalous surprise of all: the possibility of a love forceful enough to overturn the habitual hierarchies.
Of course, Ciment’s marriage was informed to some extent by its dubious origins. Arnold “had not only taught me how to draw,” she writes, “he had taught me how to see. I would forever perceive the physical world through the veneer of his interpretation.” But then, love is often a matter of learning to look through an alien lens, and there can be little doubt that Ciment altered Arnold’s vision in exchange. By the end, she writes, “we critiqued each other’s work — brutally, lavishly, meticulously — not as teacher and pupil, but as collaborators.” In the mornings, she read him her writing, and he showed her his paintings. “He was my first audience, as I was his first viewer.”
Ciment’s thesis at art school reimagined pornographic scenes from the female perspective, and “Consent” makes an analogous intervention, rewriting the classic seduction plot from the younger woman’s point of view. Ciment wonders what would have happened to Lolita if she had cared for Humbert as he aged. Perhaps both characters would have escaped their mutual idealization and grown into true equals.
In all likelihood, this is a consoling fiction, but as Ciment stresses, memoirs are fictions, too. And aren’t relationships the most powerful fictions of all? Like Arnold’s portrait, they show us possibilities that we could never have dreamed up alone, and like all works of art, they admit of emendation. Revision — even redemption — is possible. We are never consigned to the first or the ugliest draft.
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post and the author of “All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess.”
