After my girlfriend moved out, I taped a full-sized print of John Singer Sargent's 'Mr and Mrs I. N. Phelps Stokes' to my living room wall. It took a while to get a big enough copy. The Met didn't offer prints, and none of the websites I visited had anything over 48 by 36. My girlfriend had taken the couch when she left — actually she'd taken a lot of the furniture — so I was looking for a print that took up most of the wall, a print that filled space. The Phelps Stokeses were perfect, and had the added advantage of being the sort of thing that my ex would have vetoed when we were together.

I had been going to the Met a lot and walking through the European paintings — Jesus and Mary, Zeus and Europa, Judith and Holofernes — until I got to the American section. I had started doing this before the break-up but my pace picked up afterwards. Mr. and Mrs. Phelps Stokes sit high on the wall in one of the American section's first rooms. She's the focus of the painting: her long legs covered by a starched white dress, her torso by a tuxedo shirt topped with a square-shouldered black jacket and matching black bow tie, the whole thing split along the meridian of her waist by a black belt with a large silver buckle. She's holding a white sun hat at an angle that can only be described as jaunty. Her husband's hidden behind her. He has a slightly apologetic aspect, even as a glare from the room's lights obscures his face.

To get a copy, what I ended up doing was taking a photo of the original on my phone and having Kinkos blow it up. We settled on 96 by 72 because it was the biggest that they could do. I was standing behind the attendant while he worked with the photo — centering and cropping, zooming and enhancing — when I had an idea. "Can you crop out the guy in the back?" I asked.

The attendant gave me a funny look but at the time it seemed like a good idea. The photo I'd taken was blurry at the top. He looked at me while I cycled through possible explanations in my head but after a few seconds of silence he said, "Sure," and the moment passed. When I got home I wondered if he thought I was a creep.

She had, I thought, a perfect face. Or maybe it isn't perfect but it spoke to me. Her cheeks are slightly pink, and she's looking into the distance with what might be a smile. There's something about the way her head sits on her shoulders, or really about the way that it sits on top of the tight collar of her shirt, which pushes up in this sharp little angle like it's trying to reach her ears or her jaw or just somehow touch more of her, that makes me feel like she's about to burst free, not of her clothes or not just of her clothes, but of the painting or the room or something else, of Earth I guess. She might just be happy. She might just be smarter and happier than me. And I would go to the museum, and later I would get home, open the door and walk into my living room and stare at her and think, if only I could meet a woman like that.

So there were some low moments after the break-up. There were nights where I would sit in the living room on one of my few remaining chairs and watch television while talking to her. Nothing involved, nothing major, just lists of things that I had to do at work the next day or errant comments on whatever was on TV. I never took it seriously. 

Then, as things go, I met someone. At work of all places. We flirted in the hallway for a while, by the watercooler, then we flirted at a few professional happy hours before progressing to flirting privately over drinks at an Irish bar down the street from my apartment. "Do you want to come over?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, and I realized I'd forgotten the painting. I worried the whole walk home. I realized that I'd always known that it was weird: this giant modified portrait of a 19th century society lady. I thought about blaming my ex but I was fairly certain that wouldn't be better.

"And this is my original John Singer Sargent," I said to her, to my coworker, as we moved through the living room and into my bedroom.

"I didn't know they made prints that big," she said, and I told her, hustling her out of the room as I did, that I'd had it custom-made.

The next morning I came out of the bathroom to find her staring at the painting. We were on our way to breakfast. "You stole her husband," she said, pointing to the empty space at the top.

"That's just how they made it," I said, but the words stayed with me. For a while after, I was filled with the sense that Mrs. Phelps Stokes was now trapped. She's alone, her companion has been taken away, and she's forced to keep this beatific, confident look on her face. Her expression no longer makes sense, but she can't change it. Inside, she's screaming. 

Thinking about this, I realized I couldn't throw the print out without leaving her in that state. And I couldn't leave her in that state. So I burned it, the print, in my bathtub — a Viking funeral. The smoke detector went off until I pulled out its batteries.


.

Davis MacMillan lives in New York.

"Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes" is a third-place winner for the Mythic Picnic Prize in Fiction.

Read DM's postcard.

Detail of oil painting on main page by John Singer Sargent: "Mr. and Mrs. I.N. Phelps Stokes" (1897).

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