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Nude Descending Staircase

Alexandra Geiger Morgan

    One day in my early twenties, when I am in college in Santa Barbara and living with my boyfriend, I receive a photo from my mother, Lorraine. She is still living in New York City with my father. When I turn the photo over, I see that she has scrawled on the back Nude Descending Staircase.
    A note enclosed with the photo explains, Here is a photo I took of your father. I stare at the nude photo of my father, his eyes gleaming out at me with that impish expression of insatiable emotional hunger that has always penetrated me and will continue to consume me, along with everyone around him. No one is safe from his hunger. My mother has positioned him on the spiral stairway in their combined bedroom-living room.
    My eyes rove down to meet the generously-endowed, flaccid penis draped over the long testicles dangling between my father’s legs. I am overcome by the familiar, involuntary combination of sexual arousal and disgust. For years I keep the photo around, trying to accept it as normal and acclimate myself to what it represents, including all those years seeking love and attention and the ways only he reciprocated my desires. After all, I am a nude model for studio art classes at my college and feel totally comfortable posing nude. My job carries with it the added bonus that everyone must focus their gaze on me, making me the center of attention for hours. The need for attention as a way to love is something I have learned from Dad.
    It takes many years of therapy for me to register the rage that stirs under the chronic nausea plaguing my stomach, the nausea I always believed came from my own unworthiness and basic wrongness. It takes years for me to write a letter to my mother with the photo enclosed, saying, Mom, this photo is for you. It’s yours and Dad’s. He is your husband, so you should keep nude photos of him for yourself. A nude photo of her father is not something to send your daughter.
    I post the letter to their New York City address and tuck it into the mailbox. In our unspoken contract, she allows me to be as close to my Dad as I can come, but in return, the burden of his misplaced sexual energy has been mine. She never acknowledges my effort to send it back to her.

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