There is a woman in this cafe I have been unable to tear my gaze away from for several minutes now. It's *not* that I'm being lecherous, or that she is attractive (although she is). It's her eyes. I have seen those eyes staring down at me from my walls for almost 40 years.
They're the eyes of a woman in the first piece of real art I ever bought. It's a lithograph from 1897 called "Invocation de la Madone à l'onyx," by Marcel Lenoir. I first saw it in a gallery in Westwood when I worked for the TM Regional Office when it was still located at 1015 Gayley. I walked into the gallery one day at lunch, and this woman just stopped me into my tracks. I was transfixed. After I recovered somewhat, I asked the price. I was told it was $250, and at that time of my life, working full time for the TMO as I was, I realized that I couldn't afford it. But I bought it anyway. I talked the owner of the gallery into reserving it for me "on layaway," paying for it in five monthly installments, all I could afford after rent and food. During that time it still hung on the gallery walls, and I went in several times a week to visit "my" lithograph. Ever since -- even though I've bought a great deal more expensive and theoretically impressive art in the meantime -- it's hung in my houses in a place of honor. It's one of the things I would grab and carry out with me if my house was on fire and I had to flee quickly. Yet in all this time I've never seen any woman in real life with eyes quite like that. Until today. The woman in question smokes, and has a boyfriend, but still...she has those eyes. Such a gift from the universe...
