On moonlit nights, the grounds of the Villa Montalvo, an Italianate mansion in the foothills above Silicon Valley, looked unreal in the manner of an operatic stage set: trellises of wisteria, stone fountains, a columned pavilion called the Temple of Love, statues of nymphs and demons and even one of Adam and Eve, my favorite. I was allowed to roam freely about on moonlit nights because I had a residency there, one of five artist-residents tucked into the old guest houses, now studios, for the summer season.

Have you ever seen marble in moonlight? Marble gorgeously carved? The first time I saw the statue of Adam and Eve, I circled it again and again and finally gave in and touched it. First I stroked Adam's foot. The toes and toenails, the thin bones, metatarsals, on the top of his foot, the hollow behind the jut of his anklebone, all were completely realistic, more real, when I compared them, than the bones of my own arms and legs, as their structure was revealed so exactly and so permanently. I traced the muscles up Adam's leg to his knee, his well-muscled, anatomically perfect knee. The statue was extraordinary in its attention to how bodies work, which muscles came into play when Adam's arms held Eve's plump body at just that angle, the effect of her weight on the muscles of his powerful thighs. Their bodies transcended their medium, creating an illusion, not that one enormous block of marble had been carved so exquisitely that Adam and Eve appeared to be real, but that their fleshly bodies had been discovered in this pose and only then been transformed, transubstantiated, into marble.

These were giant bodies: upright, they would stand at least ten feet tall. After exploring every body part within reach, I climbed onto the base of the statue, gripping Adam's solid arm to steady myself, and reached up to Eve, stroking her breast, then her nipple. To do this you needed to insert your hand between them, into a gap between their ecstatic marble bodies. In this way I discovered that I wasn't alone. Eve's left nipple was worn completely smooth. Thousands of hands had stroked her through the years, and Adam, too, because they were so beautiful and because you could hardly believe, looking at them, that these gorgeous people allowed you to touch them. But it was Eve's nipple that had received the most attention. It was rubbed slippery smooth, cool and almost watery to the touch, while Adam's nipple, only inches away, was almost the same texture as the surrounding marble.

What attention this sculptor had devoted to their chests and breasts! Ordinary mortals, looking up from the ground, were too small to appreciate the way their bodies met and fused. Out of marble, into marble. The snake—where there is Adam and Eve, there must be a snake—coiled around their feet at the bottom of the statue. It hadn't yet come between them.

The woman in the studio next to mine, a painter, saw me walking in the garden one afternoon and brought up the subject of Eve's smooth nipple, as though letting me in on a great secret. I didn't tell her I already knew. I visited Adam and Eve most afternoons and some nights as well, growing turned on as I entered the surrounding grove of lemon trees in much the way I did every Friday night while driving a highway through the redwoods to visit my boyfriend in Santa Cruz, a drive, now a walk, associated with sex. But listening to her, hearing in her voice that she expected me to be shocked by her debauchery, by her admission that a statue could arouse her, I thought to myself that the erotic smoothness of Eve's nipple was a thing every artist at Villa Montalvo should discover for themselves. Telling was cheating.

I was already annoyed with her. My neighbor's girlfriend visited on Sunday afternoons and screamed, not just moaned but screamed, during their sex. This, in itself, didn't bother me. I've shared walls with many passionate couples, woken to the thumping of headboards and fallen back asleep smiling. What bothered me was that when they had sex, screaming sex, they kept the windows open. Their open window, next to my open window.

That afternoon I was working, so I closed my window.

My drawing table, just under the window, was covered with sketches of Adam and Eve, some in pencil, some charcoal. I selected a pencil drawing I'd started of Eve, color pencils, to see how she looked sculpted of flesh rather than marble. I kept her proportions exactly the same, though marble requires certain forms to be thicker. She would not look human. The tendons in her neck, passionate as marble, looked strained as flesh, as though she was resisting Adam, not melting into him. Her thick curls took on an aspect of snakiness. Was she blonde or brunette? I penciled in a bit of each, decided on blonde. Her eyes, what color?

The sound from my neighbor's studio increased in pitch. Moaning, not yet screaming. As if, I thought, just over half charged. I drew Eve's heavy-lidded eyes, blue, half closed.

My neighbor's girlfriend began to scream. I'd never seen my neighbor's girlfriend, so I invented a form for her, a mechanical form, as her capacity for pleasure so clearly transcended that of mere humans. For her mouth, I drew, in place of Eve's slightly parted lips, a round dial like an old speedometer, its slim black needle indicating green for safe speeds and red for danger, for her screams that now broke the scream limit, the dial straining to move higher, vibrating as if it preferred to break off rather than to limit itself—too much, too much, too much, too much, until she sobbed in relief.

How easily the sublime becomes the ridiculous.


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