Nonfiction by Ann Levin
Sprez·za·tu·ra, noun: studied carelessness, especially as a characteristic quality or style of art or literature.
A year after I started talking to my therapist about taking antidepressants, I went to see a psychiatrist who would be able to prescribe them. Depression has a lot of symptoms, Anya had said to me. I would think of it as affecting the intensity of affect. It took me years of therapy to even understand what she meant by that, but the morning I woke up and couldn’t wait until I had a glass of wine at dinner, I called up the psychiatrist and made an appointment to see her.
I was familiar with her building near 85th Street and Madison. Years before, I’d seen an endocrinologist there. The internet described it as a three-minute walk from the Neue Galerie, which I thought was odd considering that it was four blocks from the Metropolitan Museum, where I was a docent. Did Google Maps think that if you were making an appointment with a shrink, then you’d be interested in looking at art from Freud’s Vienna?
Beyond the doorman station lay a long dim corridor with recessed lighting and polished floors. As I walked down the hall, I noticed a sign for another psychiatrist who had once been married to a very famous writer. It made me think for the first time in a long time about her novel, and how reading it in the seventies, with its description of gleefully uninhibited sex, had immeasurably changed my life for the better.
New York was like that—you’d be walking down the street, not even aware you were depressed, then suddenly you’d see the building in the opening credits of The Odd Couple and improbably your heart would soar. That’s why I loved the city so much—it was filthy and noisy and people were intolerably rude. But it was so much bigger than I was, filled with blocks of brownstones and fleets of buttercup-yellow taxi cabs and fantastical building ornaments that formed a vast and intricate mosaic as dazzling as anything in the Met.
The psychiatrist’s office was spacious, with a dark wooden desk, a wall lined with books, and a large window that looked out on the gray November day. I sat down on her hard, unforgiving, midcentury sofa and noticed the utter absence of family pictures, idiosyncratic artwork, or goofy memorabilia, like my gastroenterologist’s desk set of a reclining figure with a pencil protruding from its butt.
She was just a few years older than I was, but it felt to me like she belonged to my parents’ generation, with her helmet hair and bright green-and-white patterned dress. She reminded me of all the studious, well-behaved girls at Smith College who had studied hard, gone to mixers at Dartmouth, Harvard, or Yale, gotten married, then had kids.
I understood that most people in our generation hadn’t, in fact, tuned in, turned on, and dropped out. But hadn’t she once, I wondered, if for no other reason than out of intellectual curiosity, occupied an administration building, read Steal This Book, then stolen something else, or dropped a tab of acid in the hopes of better understanding the fabric of the universe? Even my parents had smoked a little pot.
Of course, my parents were big on intellectual curiosity; it was the credo and mantra of their upwardly aspirational lives, for them and for us, their five children. Aw, go ahead and try it, one or the other would say about just about anything we didn’t want to do, from eating sweetbreads to seeing a community theater production of a Stephen Sondheim musical. Think of it as a sociological experiment. Years later, I was grateful to them for their adventurous spirit. But not at the time.
The psychiatrist was very brusque, became exasperated when I tried to explain what kind of receipt I needed for my insurance company, and asked me a lot of questions. First, why I thought I needed antidepressants. Second, why I was so afraid to take them—my therapist had told her that. I said that in general, I didn’t like to take prescription medication, and also, I had several pre-existing conditions that might rule out SSRIs.
That led to a discussion of my medical history, which, I must admit, was filled with land mines. Over the years it had been amazing to me to see how doctors responded when I told them the headlines: glaucoma, hepatitis C, gastric cancer, partial gastrectomy. No one was going to blame you for having bad eyes, but as soon as you mentioned hep C, all bets were off.
An internist once said to me, Perhaps you didn’t make the wisest choices. It’s not like it was a horribly mean thing to say, but when you’re practically naked in their examining room, it can come off as a little harsh. One of the reasons I liked and trusted Anya so much was because she’d said, when I told her, Everyone has something. Maybe you shot heroin at age 20 but a lot of other kids wrapped their cars around a tree and aren’t here to talk about it.
This doctor wasn’t that. She thought I was an addict and wondered how I had gotten so involved in drugs. Apparently, even though she’d gone to med school, she believed that if you did narcotics once, the craving would never go away and your life would be ruined, which was a strange thing for a psychiatrist to think since Freud had been addicted to coke.
I told her that I’d taken hard drugs for a brief, unhappy period of my life, and that it likely would have been just another unfortunate episode on the road to adulthood except that 25 years later, I discovered I’d contracted a blood-borne disease from the needles and to get rid of it, had to go through two rounds of grueling treatment with interferon and ribavirin, the two worst drugs I’ve ever taken in my life, even worse than the subsequent chemo for cancer. She knew nothing about interferon or ribavirin.
Then she asked me if I had trouble sleeping, suicidal thoughts, got pleasure from anything, had a poor appetite. When I said no trouble sleeping, no suicidal thoughts, got pleasure from many things, including art, movies, books, and husband, and had a better-than-good appetite, she wondered why I wanted to take antidepressants and said it would be hard to make the case to prescribe them. Since my therapist and I had both told her I was a bit of a hypochondriac, she also worried that I’d worry about the side effects and not have the patience to endure the tinkering necessary to get the dose right.
It was probably a mistake for Anya and me to label myself that way since a lot of bad stuff had actually happened to me. A friend of mine once told me you can’t be a hypochondriac after you’ve had cancer. But to be honest, long before there was anything physically the matter with me, I always felt that there was. It was purely an intuition, a hunch, a sensitivity that never went away, that was just as much a part of me as my black hair and brown eyes.
“What do you want the drugs to do?” she asked.
“To stop feeling too much.”
“How do you feel as you go through the day?”
I told her preoccupied, slightly anxious, worried what people would think of me, afraid of people getting mad at me. I told her I didn’t like myself very much, that I felt like a failure, and that I was constantly comparing myself to everyone and deciding I was a piece of shit.
“Well, you need to stop doing that,” she said abruptly. “No medicine can take away your not liking yourself.”
As I sat there, I marveled at the fact that I was paying $400 to have someone tell me, you need to stop doing that. Then she said I’d be a nightmare to treat for the reasons she’d already mentioned—that I wouldn’t be able to tolerate the side effects to get the larger benefit or have the patience to try out different drugs at different doses until I got the right one.
And that was it. I pulled on my jacket, gathered up my things and got ready to go. Then she said to me, almost as an afterthought, “Are you mad at your parents for sending you away to school?”
The question made no sense to me. A million reasons why I’d been not just mad but furious at them when I was younger flashed through my brain—chief among them, that I thought they were obsessed with appearances and shallow and superficial. But sending me away to boarding school and then to college wasn’t one of them. They believed in education—and I did too.
“Of course not,” I said. “How could I be? That was so long ago.”
Then I left. I was due at the Met in ten minutes for a lecture. Weirdly enough, I felt better. There was a sense of resolve in my step as I walked to the museum, pulling up my collar against the gusty wind. Her yelling at me had had a bracing effect. What choice did I have but to suck it up and stand a little taller?
Ever since I’d quit my job in journalism and become a docent, going to lectures in the late morning had become a major part of my life. Sometimes it was a reward to myself for getting a lot of writing done earlier in the day. Other times I thought it was my duty to go as a responsible citizen of the world because there were just certain things that a person should know. It had been the same way with drugs in college. Did I want to take them? No. I was terrified. But I did. I thought one should have the experience, just as one should read the music criticism in Rolling Stone—to be well-informed.
That day I was going to hear the last in a series of talks about Mannerism, a style of painting perhaps best expressed in Michelangelo’s frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, executed with his characteristic sprezzatura, or “deceptive ease.” Over the course of the lectures, I’d become obsessed with the concept—even the word itself. It sounded like a fizzy, fruity cocktail, a new type of pasta, or the latest trendy mineral water from Italy.
The lecturer, a brilliant art historian on the faculty of an exclusive college, was a stellar example of sprezzatura herself, a woman seemingly put on this earth to give TED Talks. She strode back and forth on the stage, slide clicker in hand, in a smart pair of stacked heels that conveyed both authority and sex appeal.
She had titled the series “Mannerism’s Perverse Beauty,” by which she meant—not classical, not High Renaissance, not harmony, balance, and the geometrical ideal. Rather, all sense of balance and proportion was gone. Figures were contorted. There was an edginess to the work, a sense of the unexpected, of jarring, dramatic transformations.
Ah, transformations! That was what had lifted me out of my misery time and time again when I was a moody, despondent teenager and made me glad, at least in the moment, to be alive. For many years, I had to get stoned to find those moments. When I aged out of smoking pot first thing in the morning, I turned to exercise, books, movies, art.
The lecturer put up a slide on the screen—a Michelangelo drawing of the Libyan Sibyl, which was a study for one of the figures he would paint in the Sistine Chapel. She was an oracle, a prophetess, a teller of truths. He drew her with the lovely, pensive face of a woman rightly worried about the fate of humanity but with the fierce, rippling back muscles of someone who’s spent some serious time in the gym—which made sense because his model was a young man.
I wondered if Michelangelo cared that from the rear, the Sibyl didn’t look the least bit like a woman—or was that the point? “Bodies becoming other bodies”—the opening lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the central fact of the crucifixion and resurrection, the sentiment that had been the constant refrain of my life. For as long as I can remember, even before my parents sent me away to school, I wanted to be smarter, I wanted to be thinner, I wanted to be prettier, I wanted to be the kind of girl, then the kind of woman, that the Beatles would fall in love with. “Bodies becoming other bodies”—Ovid nailed it. That’s all I ever wanted.
She threw up another slide—this time, Agnolo Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man, the poster boy for sprezzatura at the Met. He was a handsome young man from Florence in the 1530s, gazing out of the picture with a disdainful, supercilious look on his face, his fingers jammed into the pages of a book, as if to say, Hurry up and make your picture! I’d really rather not be disturbed! Bronzino painted him in a black, slashed-fabric doublet worthy of Commes des Garcons and a tiny gold ring on one of his puffy, pre-arthritic fingers.
As soon as I saw him, I felt transformed, yet I had no idea why. Maybe it was the way he epitomized the elegance, invention, and play of light and shadow of the Mannerist painters. Style ruled. Or maybe it was how he conveyed the preening cruelty of a youthful Mick Jagger, prancing around the stage at Madison Square Garden—New York City, you talk a lot! Let’s take a look at you!—which was so tiresome, even offensive, to me now, but had thrilled me when I was a teenager.
I never knew when such transformative moments were coming, but their arrival, unheralded and unbidden, was like a reprieve. I remembered coming home once from seeing a heartbreakingly beautiful foreign movie, maybe Babette’s Feast or Wings of Desire, and all the suffocating rage I felt toward my mother softened and disappeared like a puff of smoke.
I thought again about my father—Go, go! Think of it a sociological experiment!—and remembered the way he used to wander around the house in his bathrobe, reciting snippets of barely recalled poetry like a character in a Virginia Woolf novel. There will be time … time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet …
Then I walked under the soaring arches of the Great Hall and up the Grand Staircase to European Paintings, feeling as though I was embarked on a great adventure. No one else was in the gallery with the Bronzino. I tried to remember everything I knew about Florence in the 1500s—PBS had done a special. I thought about the Medici dynasty, how cold and drafty their palazzos must have been. And how, unless you were very rich, there was nothing warm or soft about your life. If you were a woman, then you had to have babies. If you didn’t want them, the only option was a convent, where a sadistic Mother Superior might very well be in charge. So, how had this young man managed not just to survive but to prosper? Was it his sex or his wit or his devastating good looks? Or all three? Clearly, he had prepared a face to meet the faces he would meet—and a hot, dishy one at that.
The longer I looked, the more he reminded me of a friend in college. His name was Ken, though he sometimes went by Carlotta, especially when we went out dancing with Mark and Eileen on tender, auspicious spring nights instead of studying for finals. It took him twice as long as us to get ready, but when he stepped off the curb to open the door of Eileen’s car, he was the picture of sprezzatura, in platform shoes, high-waisted pants that flared at the bottom, and a floral-patterned polyester shirt unbuttoned almost to his waist. Also, a touch of makeup. Though most of the college boys still wore long, shaggy hair back then, Ken’s was cut short, every strand in place.
I remembered, too, how he carried himself on the dance floor underneath the sparkling disco ball—his movements small and precise, his eyes never quite making contact with mine because, of course, he was hopelessly in love with Mark, a Renaissance angel if ever there was one, with big blue eyes and a heart-shaped mouth, who was too Catholic, too repressed, too much the former altar boy to ever return Ken’s undying love. That was the essence of sprezzatura, according to Castiglione’s 1528 The Book of the Courtier—the ability to disguise what one really desires behind a mask of nonchalance.
Just then I sensed someone standing beside me. There were always a handful of people who went straight to the galleries after a program to see the works of art that had been discussed. I turned to look—it was a docent I knew who attended even more lectures than I did. She also took the best notes I’d ever seen, written in complete, grammatical sentences that flowed across the page in unwavering horizontal lines, an amazing feat since we had to do it in the dark.
“Wasn’t that an incredible lecture?” I said, unable to stop myself from noticing how great she looked in her slim black trousers, cashmere sweater, and tasteful gold jewelry, or to stop hating myself for looking like a schlumpy character in a Roz Chast cartoon. I firmly believed it was a moral weakness to focus unduly—or at all—on a woman’s appearance but I did it all the same, just as my mother had done. When she was alive, she was always looking us up and down, me and my two sisters, policing our bodies, making sure we never gained an ounce, and if we did, that we had a strict regimen to get rid of it.
She nodded emphatically. “I love her too! I go to all her talks!”
Then she asked me if I had notes from the previous week’s lecture because unfortunately, she was out of town and missed it. I did, but I was too embarrassed to share them. Compared to hers, mine were like the haphazard scribbles of a kindergartner. When I said no, a stricken look crossed her face.
“I’ll check the Volunteer Office,” she said tersely. “Maybe it was recorded.” Then she scurried off.
For a minute, I felt terrible because I’d let her down. I sympathized with her nerdy anguish. Then I got pissed. I wanted to say, Show some sprezzatura! It’s only one lecture! She reminded me, in bad ways, of all those studious good girls in college, who showed up unironically for afternoon tea, which even in the rabble-rousing seventies was still being served in bone china cups with tiny pink and blue flowers. The girls who maintained good relations with their parents, who played well with others, who knew how to walk into an Eileen Fisher store and figure out what to buy.
Even worse, she reminded me, in equally bad ways, of my father, who had lived his whole life in a constant state of anxiety about, well, just about everything, but especially keeping up with the Joneses, if the Joneses were New Yorker– and New York Review of Books-reading connoisseurs of food and wine. After I crashed and burned in prep school, due in part to the crushing realization that I could never, ever keep up with all the Joneses there, I assumed a persona of flamboyant disregard as a kind of defense. Like Hey, there are times when Kraft American cheese slices taste great!
This docent, like the psychiatrist, seemed to belong to that older order where women got married, acquired Dansk flatware, then children, then hosted an endless succession of elaborate dinner parties—and sweated all the details. I was pretty sure that all three of us had been born into relative privilege, each of us on a glide path to a decorous but vaguely unsatisfying bourgeois life, but for one brief, shining moment in the late sixties and early seventies, when we had the chance to blow it all up, to partake in the dream of a different kind of future, one that was more open and more just, where the highest goal was not to make money but to fulfill one’s human potential, as it was quaintly referred to back then.
In the long run, of course, it didn’t turn out well—but hadn’t they at least felt the obligation to try? How many times did that happen in human history, when you got the chance to throw over norms and do everything differently than your parents? When you could choose not to have children, not to get married, and if you did get married, not to take your husband’s name?
I used to wonder the same thing about a few of my cousins, who were raised in secular Jewish households like mine but took a sharp turn into orthodoxy. Why, when absolutely no one would have looked askance if they had eaten shrimp and pork to their heart’s content and opted not to be hoisted in a chair on their wedding day and paraded around a ballroom, why, oh why, would they embrace all that mishegoss? Or any of the other countless rules of an ancient, patriarchal religion that developed in a forbidding desert landscape for a people that rode camels and herded sheep? Weren’t the late sixties the moment we’d been waiting for, as women and as Jews, to say Fuck the establishment! and resolve to wear army boots and flannel shirts and jeans for the rest of our lives?
After I got my fill of Bronzino, I wandered through the maze of immaculately cared for galleries. The polished floors gleamed! The display cases shone! The white-coated conservators thought nothing of spending eleven years piecing back together a shattered sculpture! Everyone in the building, from the curators to the guards, showered these objects with more love and affection than I could muster for the real humans in my life—or for that matter, myself.
Eventually, I made my way back to the Italian Renaissance gallery to find the Tintoretto that the lecturer had talked about—The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, a painting that illustrated the New Testament parable of Christ feeding a crowd of five thousand with five barley loaves and two fishes. It’s completely nuts. Jesus and his disciple Andrew are dancing and prancing along the Sea of Galilee, surrounded not by ragged hordes of barefoot, starving Semites but by elegantly dressed Venetian women with pearls braided through their blond hair, their chubby, cherubic children and statesmanlike husbands—precisely the kind of wealthy people who hired Tintoretto to decorate their palaces.
I never knew what I would find affecting about an artwork—a body or face, the color or composition, or sometimes just the artists’ stories and their struggle to be heard and understood. With Tintoretto, I was more drawn to his burning ambition than to the pictures themselves. He wanted to draw like Michelangelo and handle color like Titian, the lecturer had said. Jesus, I thought, talk about the pressure! And his insane work ethic! He built little 3D dioramas with wax figures to study how the light fell on them so he could make the figures in his paintings look like sculptures. Plus, he loved dogs! He put a somber one at the center of a tragic painting of Christ washing the feet of the disciples and a playful one in Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan. In the latter, Mars is hiding under the bed when Vulcan barges in on his wife and her hunky lover, but the alert little dog sees him. His wagging tail tells us that whatever else you think about this famous mythological scene, it’s also a sitcom about extra-marital sex.
I thought about all those churches in Italy and all the great museums around the world where Tintoretto’s paintings were hanging and suddenly, I was seized by a desire to fly to Munich to see the Mars and Venus in the Alte Pinakothek and to Madrid to see The Washing of the Feet at the Prado. I wanted to linger in the Met and its still almost-empty galleries forever, revisiting my old friends.
In that respect, I was lucky. My parents had dragged me to enough museums when I was a kid—there are just certain things that a person should know—that I felt completely at ease in these grand opulent spaces reeking of privilege.
Then I remembered an incident from years before, when I was supposed to meet a friend at a fancy hotel. He had gotten there first and was sitting on the far side of the lobby underneath a splendid crystal chandelier, looking small and frightened on a hideous designer sofa, even though he was a big man with a big career. But he had come from nothing whereas my parents used to take me to La Grenouille or Lutèce when I was still in my teens. Try the frogs’ legs! they’d say. What do you have to lose?
I strode across the marble floor to where he was sitting, engulfed in oversized cushions, and said, with a tinge of annoyance, Why did you make me come the whole way over here? And he said, I wanted to watch you walk across the lobby. You looked like you owned the place. Even then, I knew it was only because of my anxious, status-obsessed parents that I was able to walk through that space, which was garish and vulgar in a 1980s Ronnie-and-Nancy-Reagan kind of way, without being intimidated or afraid.
For better or worse, these hotel lobbies—and also museums and great libraries and five-star restaurants and spas—were my natural milieu, and I was consumed with remorse that when I was younger and smarter, I hadn’t paid enough attention. I had squandered all the opportunities that my parents had showered on me, and now, here I was at the Met, engaged in a desperate, last-ditch, late-in-life effort to reclaim what they had always understood to be the good life.
For as long as I could remember, I had an eerie sense of another, alternative me: someone who didn’t melt down in prep school then rebel. Someone who never contracted hep C. Someone who wore pastel sweater sets through high school and college, drank tea out of tiny bone china cups with pink and blue flowers, married a doctor or lawyer, had a couple kids, and lived in a big colonial house in the suburbs with a Japanese maple on the lawn. My parents would have loved her! The only hitch was, this other me in my fantasy was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer in her thirties.
No matter how much I fantasized about this doppelganger of mine, her fate put my dilemma in the starkest possible terms. If I hadn’t strayed from the straight and narrow, if I hadn’t squandered all that opportunity, if I hadn’t, as my mother once put it, totally fucked up my life, then I would already be dead.
As I descended the staircase into the Great Hall, rewrapping myself in layers of fleece, I thought about what I’d say to my therapist the following week, and why it was highly unlikely that I was going to follow up with the psychiatrist even though Anya thought I was a good candidate for antidepressants. Depression has a lot of symptoms, stamina is one of them, your energy level might increase.
I would tell her about the lecture on Mannerism and how I sought out the paintings, then felt gloriously, mysteriously uplifted and transformed. About running into my docent frenemy and being stricken with shame about the schlumpy way that I looked and what it implied about who I was—that at this late stage of the game, I was still stuck in the 1960s, unable or unwilling to buy myself a nicely fitting pair of black pants.
Then she’d say to me what she always said when I compared myself to the other docents in disparaging ways: But you aren’t all that different. You all ended up in more or less the same place. Living on the Upper East Side. Belonging to the same book groups. Volunteering at the Met.
And I’d say to her: No, no, no, you don’t understand. It might seem like we’re all the same, but we’re not. Look! I’m still wearing sneakers and jeans!
Ann Levin is a writer, book reviewer, and former editor at The Associated Press. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Sensitive Skin, Southeast Review, Hunger Mountain, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, The Main Street Rag, Bloom, and many other literary magazines. She has also read her personal essays on stage with the New York-based writers group Writers Read. You can find her at annlevinwriter.com and follow her on X @annlevinnyc.
Photo by Daryan Shamkhali on Unsplash
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