Don’t burden me with bourgeois morality. I’m going where excitement is, Lucian Freud’s London studio, and don’t pretend he’d respect mine if I had one and the door was open. Tonight’s perfect. I hear the rascal’s out of town. Walking up six flights of stairs I tinker with the lock and saunter in.

I shan’t dally. There’s the one I most want, Girl with a White Dog, Freud’s first wife, exquisite but lonely and naked inside a yellow robe revealing a succulent white breast. I’ll take her right there on the striped sofa. She extends her left hand I accept with my right, agitating the wicked white dog whose sharp face rests on one of her robe-covered thighs. He barks. He snaps. I grasp a ball of ground round from my coat pocket, bowl it into the next room, and close the door behind the canine. Madame, let me help you with that robe.

Over there await three delights, portraits all of Freud’s second wife, luscious Lady Caroline Blackwood. In the first, Girl in Bed, blonde Caroline and her enormous blue eyes invite, rather naively, a husband who paints his bride, age twenty-one, as if she were a girl of fifteen. In Girl Reading the same year she’s already embracing books and dreaming of escape. A few years later Girl by the Sea won’t show us her frontal face, she’s but a profile, her once-luxuriant blonde hair now unwashed and askew. She’s crying for she knows what she must do. She must leave the lout. That’s right. Break his heart as he’s torn others. Ignore his pleas for reconciliation. All three of you, make life new in my embrace.

What sort of man sires children with three women in a single calendar year? A lucky man, some would say, and that I can’t refute but imagine how the ladies feel, one day discovering they and others have borne the artist fourteen children. I see one of the mothers, Smiling Woman, made during a period of quite active procreation, and note Freud now appreciates a woman of fuller body and less-chiseled features he accentuates with thick paint. He won’t find her tonight.

Turning, I spot a righteous painting: Self-Portrait with a Black Eye. Freud could have declined to paint it, give him that. He could’ve painted and destroyed it, but restrained himself. He didn’t publicize it, though, and sold it into a private collection where it hung in obscurity until debuting at auction to reveal a puffy and blackened left eye, the right-cross handiwork of a man said to be a taxi driver. I accept the man drove a taxi only if it’s confirmed he had a girlfriend the artist invited to his studio, this very one, for an intimate portrait. Hah, I say, and left hook Freud’s right eye.

Quite carefully, indeed, I approach one of the finest portraits from any century, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping. She’s also known as Big Sue and I tiptoe close as I dare to examine a lady of more than three hundred pounds, boasting the thighs and bulging belly of a sumo wrestler and the mammary glands of four stacked women. Do I tickle the wooden floor or breathe a bit too hard? I only know Big Sue opens her eyes, envelopes me in massive arms, twists me underneath her on the sofa, and pounds me to the point of suffocation.

This story also appears in the collection “Tales of Romance”