September Song Page 15

  While some expressed a shallow sympathy, others, their patience with her plaint worn thin, told her that if, after a lifetime of freedom, she was saddled with these worries now in her old age, she had only herself to blame.

  Some shook their heads in wonder and said, “Comes on like a choirboy.”

  It was true, for prison had taught him the benefits of good behavior, but it was not said as a compliment, rather as a comment on the deceptiveness of appearances.

  He had inherited his mother’s good looks, blond, blue-eyed, open-faced, and sitting across the table from him, delightedly watching him eat the appetizing things she had cooked, she wondered how he could possibly be suspected of any wrongdoing, or not forgiven if he had.

  One Saturday morning while Evan was lolling about the house still in his pajamas and robe his probation officer arrived unannounced. The man had been there so many times that now he hardly bothered to knock at the door.

  He opened his well-worn Evan casebook and prepared to take down the deposition.

  “Where were you at half past ten last evening?” was his question. His look said, “This time I’ve got the goods on you.”

  Before Evan could frame a response his auntie said, “He was here with me. Straight home from work. We watched Buster Keaton on television and then put out the lights and went to bed at just half past ten.”

  She had been looking forward to an evening of popcorn and laughter with Evan. She had watched Buster Keaton alone.

  The probation officer, a local boy, closed his book.

  “If you say so, Miss Rebecca, I believe it,” he said.

  Corrupted by love, she had sacrificed a long lifetime of honesty.

  When the officer was gone, she said to Evan, who was unable to look her in the face, “Now then. Where were you? You can tell me. I have a right to know. Now.”

  Vissi d’Arte

  IT WAS SATURDAY EVENING. Fun day in the Big Apple. People were returning home at the end of an afternoon of shopping, gallery-going, matinees, exhibitions. It was raining. The only way to have stopped a taxi in mid-Manhattan would have been with a shot. He stood in the flooded street trying to hail one with a hand raised like that of an overlooked auction bidder while Jane sheltered beneath her umbrella on the curb. Behind her a man was trying to steady himself against the wall while taking a shit. The place he had picked, consciously or not, was especially well suited to his purpose, for on the wall in artistic lettering was sprayed, SHIT PISS FUCK NIGGER KIKE WOP.

  The changing of the stoplight down the avenue from red to green released the stampeding herd of traffic as from a pen. Between times he joined Jane. He was worried more even than usual at this hour over her. She looked so forlorn! In furtherance of her career, they too had done their Saturday gallery-going, always an ordeal but this time devastating.

  “Well, Jane, dear,” he said soothingly, “it’s nothing new. We’ve been through it before.”

  But today was something new, a turning point, not just more of the same. He, her weeklong art patron, her weekend agent, he their font of faith, had crumbled and had disclosed to them the depth of their desperation.

  The day had begun unexceptionally, promising to be nothing worse than their usual weekly draught of wormwood and gall. He breakfasted as always on Saturday on sour grapes, that was to say on the art-show reviews in the Friday edition of the New York Times. This he did so as to fortify himself against the snubs and brushoffs awaiting them and to scoff at the trendy world they wooed.

  He finished his reading and made like a chimpanzee with his lip and forefinger. Crumpling the paper, he commented, “Wrap tomorrow’s fish.” Then, “With today’s painting if you’re not insulted you’ve missed the point. The situation has brought me to side with Herman Goering: ‘When I hear the word culture I reach for my pistol.’”

  From his notebook containing page after page of crossed-out names of art galleries he read aloud those on today’s list. Then, color slides in their box, earplugs in place, and after a brief delay on the stoop for the neighborhood thief on his daily rounds to finish ransacking the pockets of the derelicts sleeping there and, finding nothing on any of them, to give the last one searched a kicking for them all, they set forth once again to encounter Saturday and the art world. They were stopped by a young panhandler on the street just long enough for a bill to change hands. It was not necessary to unplug an ear to know that he had said, “Let me hold five for you, buddy.”

  By now refusal could take no form not known to them.

  “Thank you.” (This after a perfunctory glance at half a dozen of the slides.) “Interesting, but not for us, I’m afraid. Now if you will excuse me …”

  Or:

  “Sorry, but we are not able to take on any new artists at this time.”

  Or:

  “We’re booked up with shows for years to come.”

  “But don’t you even want to look at the slides?”

  “Sorry. Now if you will excuse me …”

  He always crowned their Saturday with a visit to one or another of the big-time international galleries. So often had they been to some of them that they were known there by name. She felt this was a waste of time; he did not feel it was a waste of time, he knew it was. She felt it was humiliating to be turned away again and again by the same people. He felt those people were storing up humiliation for themselves. When discovery caught up with her, and the question was asked on all sides, why had it taken so long, they would be flushed from their corners by the searchlight of revelation and stand naked, blinking and stammering in the glare.

  His reading was all but confined now to the biographies of artists. It was like for a Catholic the lives of the saints and martyrs. Van Gogh’s lack of funds for a postage stamp to send his brother one of those precious letters of his, poor Pissarro’s struggles to feed his large family, Sisley dying of malnutrition only to begin selling for thousands while still warm in his grave: all this sustained and uplifted him. Her time would come. Meanwhile, crossing off each gallery in his notebook added another notch to his gunstock.

  Not for a moment did he believe that his persistence would wear down or enlighten these art establishment mafiosi. A survey of the smears and daubs on their walls was enough to convince him that they were beyond redemption. It was not their acceptance he sought, it was their unwitting self-condemnation. He relished their fatuous superiority, almost twitched with glee when one of them said, after glancing at the slides, “Not for us, I’m afraid.”

  “Not for you.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “You’re afraid not.”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Well, Jane,” he sighed, “looks like you’ll have to go on starving in your garret for a while yet.”

  He jigged in the street afterwards and sang, “So we’ll put them on the list and they never will be missed. No, they never will be missed. No, they never will be missed.”

  On the sidewalks of New York no nut was noticed.

  Sometimes he fantasized having one of these machers suddenly see the light, say, “Where have I been all this while? Why, these are marvelous! A whole new vision! Just what the world is waiting for! We’ll show them,” and he gathering up the slides and saying, “You’ll lick spit before we let you have them. Come, Jane.”

  After one of these interviews he would say to her, “I wouldn’t want you to be represented by those people.”

  There was a time when she had agreed, but now if she said anything it was a wistful, “I wouldn’t mind.”

  Now on this day in late afternoon she plucked at his sleeve. To hear what she had to say he steered them into a store, for in addition to the pounding of tires in potholes and the rattle of vans a woman was crying, “Shithead motherfuckers,” as though she were vending them.

  When he had removed an earplug Jane said, “Allen, let’s not go to the Melrose today. I’m so tired. And it will only be the same as always.”

  “Oh, yes! We most certainly are going to
the Melrose. It’s their turn. Of course it will be the same as always. That’s the point.”

  It would go like this:

  “But, Mr. Sanford, Ms. Randall (her professional name), we have seen your slides.” (Sigh.) “Many times.”

  “Not these latest ones, you haven’t.”

  “Sorry.”

  “How do you know you’re not overlooking the next Cézanne?”

  “Ah, yes.” (Sigh.) “Every dealer’s nightmare. Chance one must take, I’m afraid. One of the risks of the trade. Now if you will excuse me …”

  These days, what with the astronomical rise in art values—and the consequent rise in thefts—you did not just walk into a picture gallery from off the street. Not those where the likes of Jasper Johns were hung. You rang for admission, and through the thick glass door you were inspected before what he called the Sesame button was pressed. It had not yet gotten to speakeasy ways; you did not have to say through a peephole, “Joe sent me”; you had only to look respectable, or if not respectable, rich. Any art thief with the braces off his teeth would have gotten past this barrier by dressing himself out of Dunhill’s, renting a Rolls-Royce and having his liveried chauffeur and accomplice double-park it as though immune to meter maids and traffic tickets.

  The Melrose Gallery stood high on his hit list and he hit it often. With branches in Dallas, London, Paris, Tokyo, a trendsetter, a weathervane in the winds of artistic fad, it represented all that he despised. Having rung the bell, they stood at the door to be recognized by their old friends Messrs. Taylor and James, the directors. He gave them his gallery smile and his little bow.

  He rang again. Still the buzzer did not sound. He rang again. He could see the two men clearly and could see that they saw him, that in fact they were discussing him. He could almost read their lips, he could certainly read their expressions.

  The accumulated spleen of years rose in him like a clogged drain regurgitating. He beat with his fist on the door.

  “Yes!” he shouted. “That’s right! It’s ‘those two’ again! Open up!”

  He set down the box of slides and, shaking with outrage, pounded with both fists. The door remained locked.

  “You dirty bastards!” he shouted. “You charlatans! You pimps! You supercilious shits! Who do you think you are? Who appointed you to decide what is art, you crappers?”

  It was not the sight of one of them dialing the phone for help that silenced him, nor was it any embarrassment over the public spectacle he had made of himself. He was shaking now not with indignation but from fright at his outburst. Not defiance but defeat was what he had exhibited. He had revealed to himself and to Jane the futility of their long quest.

  Plodding the thirty blocks home after giving up on getting a taxi, fearful of breaking the silence by saying anything, he said only, “Well, Jane, you’re in good company.”

  Having heard that too many times before, she said nothing.

  The next day, Sunday, while Jane went to her studio, he prepared for his annual income tax audit. It was the prospect of this that had contributed to his outburst of the day before. As with chips on a gambling table, he stacked the receipts for the studio rent, canceled checks for models, for the photographer who came monthly to take the color slides. In francs the bills from Lefebure, the Parisian color merchants with whom she had a charge account—last remaining source of broad red sable brushes—ran off the page. Converted by calculator into dollars, the figure was still fingerlength. Not only was she undaunted by the world’s rejection, she defied it. She was challenged to produce even more. Her courage in the face of adversity, her unsparing dedication to her art was a wonder and an inspiration to him. Six days a week, with Saturdays off to make their rounds of the galleries, she was in her studio and at her easel from nine in the morning until six in the evening. (They dined out.) She had held her babies in one arm while she painted. Her prodigious output was proof in itself of her genius. Not even Picasso was more fecund. How could he be disheartened when she was so steadfast? He must be the Théo to her Vincent. Like Philip IV with Velázquez, he was honored to pick up her paintbrush when she dropped it. Yet though pity for himself made him feel disloyal to her and to their common cause, he could not help uttering a plaintive, “Vissi d’arte.” He followed it with Tosca’s, “e d’amor.” And even so, he dared not claim her full expenses for fear of being disallowed them all. That threat had hung over him for years like the blade of a guillotine.

  Time was when he had had to undergo not one but two annual audits, the first in rehearsal for the second, like being crammed by a tutor for an exam. This was with his accountant. Charley’s patience with him had worn almost as thin as that of the Internal Revenue Service.

  “All that imported Belgian linen canvas!” Charley lamented. “Those expensive Block colors! Does she have to paint so big?”

  This stung him because he had once timidly ventured the same question himself, when the storage bill for the nine hundred canvases in the warehouse in Yonkers reached four figures. Perhaps, he suggested to her, gallery owners were put off by their size. Most apartment-dwellers did not have that much wall space. This was met with the scorn it merited. She was not painting pictures the size of doily cloths like those to be bought at supermarkets. Did Monet think of petit-bourgeois locataires when doing his water lilies? Did—though in no other respect would she ever compare herself with them—did Pollack have in mind mobile homes, or Stella? Her eyes were set on the dimensions of the Marlborough Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art. Even they—the snots!—would see the light in time—or if not in time, in time to come. Then she would have her vindication! Meanwhile in defiance she painted more and more monumentally.

  “Look, Al,” said Charley, “you’re in a position now where you could afford to retire if you sold out and got out of the city and away from these ruinous expenses. You hate it here anyway.”

  “You don’t understand the art world, Charley. Here,” he said, quoting Jane, “is where it’s at.”

  “This may be where it’s at but you’re still knocking on the door.”

  This sort of thing he had to put up with from the IRS. Did he have to pay for it too?

  “Move up to Woodstock. How long is it since you went fishing? Woodstock: that’s the ideal place for both your interests. It’s an artists’ colony. There’s art all over the place. In banks, cafes. Up there she might even get a show in one of the local galleries.”

  He shuddered to think of Jane’s reaction to the suggestion of a show in some “local” small-town gallery.

  “For not much more than you’re paying in yearly rent on the apartment and the studio you could make a down payment on a home up there. A nice old farmhouse. Hell, you could get a place with a barn big enough even to store all Jane’s … stuff.”

  It was that “stuff,” and the pause preceding it, that cost Charley his longtime job.

  Shy of having another accountant see into his private affairs, he now prepared his tax return himself, and went unaccompanied by counsel to his annual audit.

  “According to our records,” said the IRS official, “it is now——years that you have been claiming business expense deductions for your wife’s painting.” As on television when someone uttered an obscenity, his mind had blipped out the number. “In all that period of time just four pictures have been sold.”

  Actually they had not. He had falsified those sales, thereby diminishing his claim, in hopes of making it look as if her efforts to sell were earnest.

  “We do not insist that a business show a profit every year,” the man continued. “But the government can no longer subsidize you in what is, we submit, a hobby. An expensive hobby.”

  Had Jane heard that she would have choked with indignation. Shades of Cézanne! Holy Vincent!

  Onto the screen of his mind flashed a set of figures:

  Item: “Portrait of Dr. Gachet”

  Income: $82,500,000.00

  Expenses:

  canvas $20.00

 
Paint $10.00

  Studio rent (1 hr.) $1.00

  Total $31.00

  Net profit: $82,499,069.00

  “Your deductions are disallowed.”

  Although this was what he had anticipated with dread for years, and more with each year, it came nonetheless as a blow. Without those allowances there was no way for him to make ends meet.

  Shaking his head incredulously, as though dealing with someone deluded, the IRS man had read off the figures for the studio rent, the supplies, the models, the storage bill on the nine hundred pictures in Yonkers, etc. Each wove a strand in the web he was tangled in like one of those hapless insects injected with anesthesia by its captor and slowly sucked dry of its juices.

  A sensation as though he were grappling with an octopus assailed him as he waited for the elevator in her studio building. When he opened her door, fearful that his disloyal thoughts might have left telltale traces on his face, he eased himself out without being seen. She was on a stepladder working on her current canvas. Hobby! He likened her heroism to that of Michelangelo lying on the scaffold and painting over his head for ten years.

  Without telling Jane, he took a day off from work and, slides in hand, made his own round of galleries. New ones opened weekly in the SoHo district—and just as often closed. It was both of these factors he was counting on now, for in this lone foray of his he had in mind an opposite approach from their usual one. Turned away repeatedly at the front door, he was going now to try the back one. Jane would die of shame if she knew what he was up to, would disavow him, would divorce him, but he was desperate. The ruling of the IRS to disallow his deductions for her was not his only worry. The other was his mounting concern over her. As though he had a thermometer and a chart at the foot of her bed, he could see that her fever was peaking. It was not that she was painting any less determinedly than before. On the contrary. What was alarming was that she was painting with both hands, like a mariner trying to bail out a sinking boat.