When I was very young, my parents hung Society’s Lady on the wall.

They had won the painting in an auction on KTCA, the Minneapolis/St. Paul PBS channel, during pledge week.  The 4x6 oil on canvas sat in a simple, thick wooden frame and dominated the big bare wall of the foyer.

The painting was abstract; large, almost geometric shapes of solid colors locked together to a sort of stained glass effect, the size of the shapes reducing to a jumble of smaller pieces near the middle.

I spent my early years trying to find the titular lady; sometimes looking up into the shapes as I shook off snowy boots or passed by on the way to and from the kitchen, other times standing in the living room and gazing at the painting from across the expanse of the open stairwell of our split-level house.

There was an undeniable fleshy blob in the upper right quadrant of the painting, but everything else was salmagundi.  Taking abstraction into account, I gave myself considerable leeway and settled on the painting being the portrait of a bosomy woman somewhere between a Baroque merchant’s wife, the sketchy profile that opens Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Count Chocula.

As I grew up, the painting’s permanence on the wall reduced it to a fixture beyond contemplation.  The chandelier, the fireplace, the painting…

When I graduated high school, my parents sold the house and moved to Phoenix.  They gave me a ride to Iowa for college and then kept driving.  I didn’t see much of Society’s Lady after that.

I moved to Los Angeles after college.  I approached my career in a workmanlike fashion.  Others approached theirs as a sycophantic theater stage.  In my professional interactions, I was reticent, observant, effacing.  Others wagged their dicks in everybody’s faces until they got sucked.

And people sucked.

After nearly a decade of hand-to-mouth living, I finally landed a solid job doing what I loved.  Less than a year later, a billionaire bought the company and gutted it.

I was guts.

Then the global economy went to total shit because so many people wanted so much more than they had.

In my fifth month of unemployment, I traveled to Phoenix for Christmas and saw Society’s Lady hanging in my parents’ extra room.  Bemused by the reunion, I snapped a photo with my camera phone and a pocket-sized Society’s Lady became a constant and intimate companion.

I considered her anew, with seasoned eyes.

What I originally construed as Count Chocula’s nose now appeared to be a phallus.  The striated seedpod shape that I’d deemed her eye suddenly looked remarkably vaginal.  And other shapes that had seemed strictly and nonsensically ornamental became the curve of a bustier, hosiery on legs splayed wide and dangling.

I’m not sure how my parents see Society’s Lady, but hanging on the wall opposite in Phoenix is an autographed photo of George W. and Laura Bush.

Society’s whoredom is an unspoken secret my parents keep telling me.