How did it feel to put my booted foot through one of Husband #1’s paintings? A framed one? One of his favorites (though he was no longer painting that way because he was trying to paint something that would sell)?

A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.

I felt strong and righteous and well within my rights. I felt transgressive and bad and violent, all of which felt good. Really good.

I was putting my foot through that painting in the name of every woman who’d ever fantasized about doing just that (not every woman’s man is a painter, and so I was in something of a privileged position). And there are those who just don’t dare, and then wish they had. Por ejemplo: years later, a friend would tell me a story about her man—also Argentinian; coincidence?—who’d gone back to the homeland for the holidays and returned with a life-sized portrait of his deceased wife, with whom he’d displayed marked symptoms of preoccupation, if not obsession, throughout their short-lived and ill-fated relationship. He then proceeded to hang the portrait above his sofa, claiming that it represented, merely, “Love.” The day I heard that story, I was very glad I’d stuck my foot through that painting. My friend and I drank to it, in fact. A lot.

I was putting my foot through that painting in the name of every single woman who’d ever contemplated throwing her cheating man’s crap out of a third-floor window—I did that, too—ideally, on a busy East Village side-street.

Which ours was. There was a bar—about which you’ll hear more in future episodes, Bad, Bad Love friends; it was to become a favorite of mine—and a video store. Some sort of derelict-looking artists’ collective on one corner (firmly eschewed by Husband #1), a Korean market on the other, and tons of nosy neighbors, a number of whom were holdovers from the old days. Paul and Lizzie, self-righteous adjunct lecturers at the New School in Art History and the Social Science, respectively, whose apartment was inexplicably nice until they told you it was rent-controlled (which made you wonder why yours wasn’t). Fat wives in muumuus with husbands perennially in undershirts, even in the winter, from whose sauna-hot apartments wafted smells of garlic and cabbage. Their English was labored, and limited; they spoke something Slavic with lots of consonant clusters among themselves, and yelled when they fought.

Husband #1 and I had never yelled, which was perhaps one of our relationship’s many problems, and so the neighbors, on that December day—Pearl Harbor Day, to be precise—were surprised. And really, really interested.

They gathered beneath my window, whooping, breaking into a raucous, collective cheer when the ripped canvas, still in its frame, came flying out the window after the last black plastic garbage bag filled with the miscellaneous crap Husband #1 had left lying around the front room. Which, without him in it, was no longer the studio (though there were paint spatters all over the floor, Husband #1 having decided, during the final year we spent together, that he’d become Jackson Pollock redivivus and see if maybe, finally, he could sell some paintings).

The painting I put my foot through was not a Pollock wannabe. Rather, it was among those Husband #1 had shown at the exhibition in the Argentinian Cultural Center in Rome. That eternal city where, as readers who’ve been with me for a while on this here little journey may remember, Husband #1 was determined to woo and to win me. If you’re newer to this party, and are incredulous as to how that could even ever happen (sometimes I am…), just scroll on down a couple months’ worth of Bad, Bad Love entries and be enlightened. Or further confounded.

These were the paintings he’d shown me on that first, fateful flight from Madrid to Rome, after he’d rescued me from the lecherous gaze and folksy, off-key singing of the Italian grandpa in the boarding lounge and bribed the stewardess—or maybe just flashed her a smile, many women found him charming—into moving his seat next to mine. Figurative paintings all, heavily influenced by the Impressionists and those who followed immediately in their footsteps, though with colors leaning toward a Fauvist palette, subject matter with an Argentinian inflection. Café scenes; young, beautiful friends drinking mate in someone’s lush backyard, an asado grill smoking in the background. Evocations of conviviality, ease, relaxed leisure and general bonhomie—idealized, impossible, something Husband #1 chased across the five boroughs for all of the three years I lived with him and claimed never to find.

And images of intimacy. One that particularly haunted me was a nude. A beautiful girl, dark-haired and full-busted (if you’re detecting, across these last few entries, a breast-complex theme, you’re not off the mark: I largely credit Husband #1 with aiding me in the development of said complex: there is absolutely nothing wrong with mine, and there was even less wrong with them twenty years ago). Reclined amid a mound of pillows on a sofa, or maybe a bed, a tree in flower just beyond the open window, she contemplated herself in a hand-mirror. This, I think, pretty much summed up Husband #1’s attitudes toward, and uses for, women (I know, I know…); the girl represented was a real person, about whom we’ll hear in a future post, when I tell you about my trip to Argentina (woo-hoo!), but for now let’s stick with the paintings.

The painting I would really have loved to put my foot through, of course, was the one I’ve just described to you. But, alas, it was not accessible to me, Husband #1 having sold it to one of my girlfriends who lived between the Theater District and Hell’s Kitchen, occupying, at the moment I put my foot through the other painting, pride of place above her sofa (this guy was good, a born salesman).

The image I put my foot through, faute de mieux, was of an old man seated in a chair, in a garden, I think, or maybe on a porch. Wearing a straw hat (again, I think; it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, and it’s not like I can pull up a shot on the internet), smoking a pipe. There was a story attached to the old man, which I can’t recall. A neighbor, maybe. Someone dear to Husband #1, whom he’d visited, especially after his parents died. The painting, too, was dear to Husband #1, which gave me extra, righteous pleasure as I rammed my foot through the old man’s face, though I wonder now why he left that one behind when he’d taken absolutely everything else to do with his paintings.

The crap I tossed out onto the street was clothing, for the most part, and self-help books that had become no longer helpful. He’d taken only what he could fit into the small U-Haul he’d gotten his one friend in the city to rent (a musician who never made it; incidentally, the immature and problematic boyfriend of my friend who’d bought the reclining nude). He knew better than to plan to make a second trip. I’d already threatened to call Immigration Services on his ass, though the threat was more than a little hollow, given that he’d waited until exactly one day after receiving his green card in the mail to take my hand, lead me into the studio, and confess to me that he no longer felt deseo. Desire. And that he wanted to leave.

And I actually pleaded with him to stay. Yes, dear friends of this Bad, Bad Love blog, I did.

The foot-through-the-painting thing was at least as much in punishment of myself as it was of Husband #1, and I cried while I did it.

And then I called my friend, who had the reclining nude above her sofa, and who knew where Husband #1 was, and told her to call her boyfriend and tell him to make Husband #1 come and get his crap off the sidewalk.

It took him three days (during which there was rain, and maybe some snow, and some picking through the garbage bags by homeless people and other scavengers; no one took the busted painting), and then he did, sometime during a night I spent in the bed of some guy I’d picked up in a bar. When I came home, the next morning, too early (it wasn’t the kind of thing where you went to breakfast the morning after), everything was gone.

And that was the moment at which I began the revisionist version of the putting-my-foot-through-it story. The empowering one. The woman-don’-take-no-shit one. The one I’d tell at parties and bars the world over, in several languages, for two decades plus. The one I just told you.

Actually, revisionist is a very kind word: I took a lot of shit from Husband #1. Some of which you’ve heard about; you shall hear about more. Because one of the reasons I’m doing this here little blog of Bad, Bad Love, is to try to understand my own bad self.

Okay, I have just done to you what novelists sometimes do, or short story writers, which I can also claim to be: I’ve fast-forwarded you to the end. The very ugly, messy end. The especially observant among you will have noticed that we’re not even in the Bleecker Street apartment anymore, somehow we’ve wound up in the East Village. That’s because, for some reason, this week, I felt like telling the end. It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.

But now we’ll go back to the middle. It’ll be sad. But also fun, I promise, especially if you, like me, have been party to a Bad, Bad Love. Or maybe just enjoy hearing about it from others less fortunate than yourself.

Catch you next week, Bad, Bad Lovers. Till then, if you see a woman throwing shit out a third-floor window, 99% chance it belongs to her cheatin’ man. Stop, stand, observe. Cheer her on. It’ll help her feel better about her shitty wreck of a life.

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