The bar at twilight, p.3
The Bar at Twilight, page 3
But he quickly turned it back on, thinking again of calling the assistant, thinking that perhaps they could soon become friends. They could go to poetry readings at the Y—Auden and other great poets read there—or take in a movie at the Thalia on Broadway and Ninety-fifth—he was sure she liked foreign films, like Fellini’s La Strada, or Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. Maybe on the weekends they would sit over coffee under the bronze shadow of Rodin’s giant Balzac in MoMA’s tranquil garden and he would read to her his latest work. She would immediately recognize what was excellent and what was not and, with her as his editor and muse, he would write beautiful, original stories and novels. She had already been his champion. Now they would collaborate, nourishing each other on life’s creative adventure and they would never be lonely in Detroit or anywhere else. He tried to remember if he had found her attractive, but she was a blur with a messenger’s voice.
Maybe he had neglected to see that she was desirable. He suspected that she was. He was sure of it. Maybe he’d invite her for a dinner of spaghetti and salad and house red at Lanza’s, where whatever you wanted on the menu they did not have. Maybe at dinner together there, under the frescoes of Sicilian villas grilling in the sun, she would find its prix fixe and soiled menus louche and seductive and thus find him equally, if not more, so. Maybe one morning they would wake together in his bed, the raw light from the window on her beautiful, bare, straight shoulders. Maybe one midnight, after a movie and over coffee and a plate of rolls at Ratner’s on Second Avenue and under the eyes of the shaking old Jewish waiters, retired from the Yiddish Theatre, they would realize they were in love. Maybe they were already in love.
He could hear the scraping of a snow shovel in the distance—maybe on Avenue C. His own street would not be cleared for days. He went to his window. The synagogue across the way had been locked tight for two years, its smashed windows covered with sheets of fading plywood. The grocery three buildings to the east of him was closed—the two brothers who owned it were still on Rikers Island for fencing radios—so the whole way to Avenue D might be snowed over, impeding his walk to the crosstown bus on Tenth and D. The snow was building on his window ledge and he would let it mount, better to gauge how much of it was piling up below in the street he could no longer clearly see. With all this snow, the morning bus might be delayed, and the subway, too. He would have to get up extra early to get to work, and budget himself the time to shovel Kim’s sidewalk. The laundry was still dark; Kim was in the back recovering from a mugging and beating three days earlier. “Where is your gold?” the robbers had demanded. “Chinks always have gold,” one said, giving Kim a whack on the knee with a blackjack. He would have to shovel the snow for him before he went to work, or Kim would get a summons or two. When would he find time to write? Who cared if he did? He would go down in the street and sleep there in the blanketing snow, Céline in hand. Or maybe the Lowry.
He went back to bed, tossing and turning and sleeping a dozen minutes at a time, then waking. He returned to Céline. Ferdinand was still miserable in cold Detroit, but he had no luck in focusing on the Frenchman’s misery and no better luck with Under the Volcano, whose drunken protagonist still reeled about in the hot Mexico sun. He went to the window again. The snow had piled a quarter way up the window and was whirling in the sky like it owned the world. He might be late to work or never get there no matter how early he left his house.
There was a knock at the door, alarming at that hour, but then he thought it was his playboy neighbor or one of his wandering drunk girlfriends, or the one always prowling for drugs. He opened the door to the limit of the chain. It was the neighbor, drink in hand.
“I heard you puttering about and thought it was not too late.” He opened the door, feeling vulnerable in his underwear.
“Just wanted you to know I’m moving out and want to sublet for a year or so. Thought you might like it for your office.” He could not afford two apartments, scraping by on one, but he said, “Thanks, give me a day or so to think about it.”
“The rent’s the same thirty-two a month—I’m not trying to make anything on it.”
“I wouldn’t have thought so.” It was cold in the hallway and he thought to invite him in but was embarrassed that he would see three days’ worth of dishes still piled up in the sink. And then, feeling he was not cordial enough, he added, “Where’re you going?” expecting him to say Ibiza or Paris or San Francisco.
“Uptown, closer to work.”
“Sorry you’re leaving,” he said.
“Well, me, too. But Dad thinks it’s time to put on the harness, and he got me something in publishing.”
“Oh!”
“It should be okay. I’m told editors mostly go to lunch.”
“I’ve heard that,” he said. He wanted to add, “I’ll send you my novel; maybe you’ll like it.” But he felt humiliated and hated himself for the thought that he would ask.
“Come and lunch with me one day!”
“I’d like that,” he said. They shook hands. He shut and locked the door but felt he was on the outside, in the hall, freezing. He checked his Timex. How had it ever become midnight? No wonder he was freezing—at that hour, the boiler was shut off and all the radiators turned to ice. He lit the oven, setting it on low, and left the door open. Maybe he would buy a portable heater and one for the blind woman. Maybe he’d drag out the Yellow Pages from the back of the closet and look up the closest animal shelter, like the ASPCA, which he’d heard was respectable. He would go there on Saturday and would come home that very day with a cat. He wondered what kind of cats they had there. Old ones, sick ones, mean ones, dirty and incontinent ones who would pee on his bed, all ready to be gassed. He would save ten and lead them in a herd to follow him as he went from room to room. He’d circle them around his bed at night and keep away Bad Luck. He had Bad Luck. He’d save fifteen. Seven white ones; seven black ones. The other would be marmalade. Would they let him take that many at one time?
He could not sleep. But he could not stay awake another minute. Better than chancing a morning bus and subway failure, maybe he’d get dressed and start walking to work now, fording the snowdrifts so to be sure to get there on time. He’d show up at first light, half frozen, waiting for the doors to open. He would be exemplary. He would be made permanent. He would be promoted and never have time to write again or wait for rejections in the mail. Or maybe he would be found icy dead at the foot of the Welfare Department’s still-closed doors. The editor of Partisan Review would eventually learn of his heroic death and publish his story, boasting that he had been their promising discovery.
The snow had bullied the streets into silence. The building slept without a snore. Tugboats owlishly hooted in the distance as they felt their way in the blinding snow. He closed his eyes. He stayed that way for several minutes, chilled under his blanket. But then the oven slowly heated, sending him its motherly warmth. He rose and went to the kitchen table and to the gleaming red Olivetti waiting for him there.
The Veranda
SHE’S ON A VERANDA FRONTING A BEACH cut short by the bandit tide. The sea beyond, its mysteries and waves, she’s used to them, but then again, she never is. Those waves pillaging the shore each day. From time to time, she glances at the single white rose on the table. The same crystal vase as always, a different rose each day, but always from the same garden, hers. A Bach partita—winter light in a faded mirror—flows through the open French doors. She’s reading Marcus Aurelius again, and again finds comfort in the obvious: To lessen the pains of living, one must diminish desire for the material world, its promises and illusions.
There is a polite rustle at the door. Michelos, the butler—who else would it be?—with a silver pot of coffee wrapped in a linen napkin. He nods. She smiles for thanks.
Michelos is old. He has seen her through three husbands, two of whom had married her for her money. The first husband died mid-sentence at breakfast—a sentence she had no wish for him to complete, in any case, because it concerned his allowance and the need for its substantial increase.
She was young when she first married and still young when her husband left her, the planet, his bespoke suits, handcrafted shoes, and the beige cashmere socks he so cherished and had kept rolled in ten cedar-lined drawers. She had come to dislike him not only because she had gradually understood that he had married her principally for her wealth but also because she found his sartorial desires, like his lovemaking, so conventional.
The second husband, on understanding that her wealth was not to flow endlessly into the mansion’s garages, flooded with his custom-made cars, and who considered Bentleys and Rolls-Royces mere Fords, left her for an older woman who appreciated the elegant way he mixed cocktails and chattered with her guests at dinner parties, and who was willing to pay for his ever-increasing automotive needs.
The last husband, who was fifty-eight when they married and who made her happy well into her mid-forties, drowned in the same ocean she was now regarding with tenderness and fear. At breakfast one morning together, as every summer morning, he kissed her, a deep kiss on the mouth and not just a husbandly peck. Then he was off for his usual swim. He waved to her from far away in the ocean and then he was gone. He was the love of her life.
He was an artist. Not very famous but not unrecognized. He was appreciated, respected, living modestly on the sale of his paintings, which unabashedly had roots in Poussin and Cézanne. Like them, he searched for the immortal structure beneath and underlying the painting in whatever subject it represented. Like them, his life was a consecration to art and a daily presence to its fulfillment. (He, however, would have been shy about such words as consecration.) “You cannot know what the work will look like unless you show up for it” was the way he put it. He made no fuss about being dedicated to his art and he did not feel superior to those artists without similar devotion. But he did not spend time in their company, either.
He lived decently and did not require much to do so—a small loft that he had bought for a song in the early sixties, in a building now a condo and a warren of billionaires, was all he needed and wanted for shelter and work. He had no retreat by the sea or elsewhere as had many of his colleagues. I say colleagues because he did not have friends in the full sense of the word, though he believed in the idea of friendship as found in the essays of Montaigne. He liked the idea so much that he did not attempt to injure it through experience. He stayed in the city through the hottest summers on the deadest weekends, when no one but tourists and the homeless roamed the burning streets. In the spring and into the late fall, he walked to the park on the lower East River and read on a bench fronting the watery traffic of tugs and barges. A white yacht on its way to Florida or the Caribbean might pass by and someone might wave. In winter, he kept in, breakfasted on Irish oatmeal and coffee and then more coffee; he often skipped lunch and ate bread in torn hunks and drank coffee: two sugars, three ounces of milk. At night, he dined at an Italian restaurant with so-so food on the corner of his street. It had a green awning in summer, and you could sit under it in the rain.
Sometimes one of the young female assistants from his gallery found a pretext to visit him. He was friendly, solicitous, but did not mix business with sex. He imagined the resulting complications, the discomfort of going to his gallery and facing a woman he had slept with a few times but in whom he had no deeper interest. And he did not welcome the discomfort he imagined for her or the awkwardness of his circumspect dealer of fifteen years, who never mixed business with anything if he could help it.
He liked the city, he liked solitude, he liked going and coming when he wished; he liked sleeping and waking in his own bed. He liked women, but mostly on a certain basis: that they did not want to live with him, did not want to have children, did not want to call him at any hour they chose to chat; that they did not like or affect to like sports; that they did not buy or urge him to buy new clothes, to get a haircut, a shave, or have his nails trimmed, though he always kept them trimmed and his face shaved and hair cut short. The women he liked did not or needed not to work. This excluded many women, even those women of leisure married to wealth, because he considered their marriage a job, a fancy one without regular hours or a visible paycheck, but a job nonetheless. In any case, he did not sleep with married women, first out of principle—the one that has to do with not hurting people—and the other because he was selfish about his time and did not wish to squander it on clandestine arrangements and their inevitable time-consuming and emotional complications.
He liked women who read books he honored: He was snobbish about that but did not care that he might be thought so. The books one read were as telling as the friends one chose. You could be fooled or betrayed by friends but never by books. Plato, for example, always stayed faithful and always gave more than he received. Proust could be relied on for his nature descriptions, especially flowers bordering paths through luxuriant gardens. He loved gardens because of Proust but felt he need not visit any because he had seen and walked through enough of them in the Frenchman’s world. He used this as an excuse to get out of visiting his collectors in Connecticut, who prided themselves on their gardens, their endless yards of rose beds, especially.
He liked above all women who loved painting. He did not care for them as much if they liked sculpture, because he did not care for sculpture, except for smallish items such as Mycenaean heads and masks from Côte d’Ivoire, very abstract and synthetic. In short, he liked sculpture the starker and the more minimal the better. He disliked mostly everything else ever deconstructed or assembled and felt antipathy for the grand posture and thus disdained Rodin’s figures in particular among the moderns. Everything, in fact, after the time of Pericles he found dreary and dead, the stuff to fill old movie palace lobbies. He once wrote in his notebook that we need not bother to fill empty space with sculpture—any natural rock formation is better than any sculpture, so, too, trees. Deserts do not need sculpture; emptiness is their point and their beauty.
About painting he had no illusions. He did not believe in its social or psychological or spiritual transformative powers. He did not believe that there is progress in art or in civilization. All great, significant art was timeless and equal in value—in beauty. Beauty was the end and reason for all art, period.
He had few extravagances. But he would travel long distances to revisit paintings he loved and he would make, with great planning, expeditions to places holding paintings he admired. He spent two weeks alone at the Ritz Hotel in Madrid so that he could walk across the road after breakfast and before dinner to look at Velazquez’s Las Meninas, which he considered the greatest painting ever made after the sixteenth century. His certainty about this annoyed other artists, who saw in it an inflexibility of taste that might be applied to his judging their own work. They were also put off by his unwillingness to consider that no single work of art is the “greatest.” Sometimes, for fun, he would seem to concede the point and say, “Well, it is the first greatest among equals.”
He once trailed a beautiful woman after seeing her studying with great intensity a painting by Picasso in a hall at the Louvre. He followed her into a room of Poussins and was pleased to see her fixed on one painting, Echo and Narcissus, for several full minutes. That she might have seen the affinity between the two artists intrigued him and she increased in stature and thus grew more and more interesting by the minute. Then she seemed to take a different track altogether when she went into other rooms and gave her attention to a canvas by Perugino and then later focused on a painting by Parmigianino. He was a bit let down. It occurred to him that she was progressing or governed along no aesthetic insight or principle but merely visiting artists whose surnames began with the letter P.
He followed her to the museum’s café, where she sat alone by the window facing a vast courtyard and Paris beyond. He sat at the table closest to her and took his time ordering un grand crème and a tartine with butter—exactly what she had requested and what finally was brought to them both. She spoke to the waiter in a French from an earlier day, when words were sounded in their fullness. She would have made a great actress on the seventeenth-century stage, reciting Racine or Corneille. For all that, he wasn’t sure he liked the elevated, rich, overeducated, worldly, superior tone of her voice. But then he liked it—he supposed her to be French and thus she could sound as fancy and superior as she wished, or why else be French? He glanced her way, hoping to make eye contact, but she had pulled a book out of her bag—expensive, smooth, trim, no frills, oxblood red, with a narrow strap—and engaged herself in its lines.
He was shy except with women, from whom he would gamble rebuff, even rebuke, to meet. His theory was that the chance of knowing an interesting woman was more important than any rejection, and since his advances were soft-spoken and courteous, his politeness was met with the like or, at worst, with a little coldness born of natural suspicion and wariness.
“Look,” he said, taking the chance that she knew English. “I understand your interest in the connection between Poussin and Picasso, but I don’t see your leap to Parmigianino, a fine artist but irrelevant to what connects the other two.”
She gave him a long look. Almost scientific in its disinterestedness. Then in a pleasant but firm voice and in an English more beautiful than her French, she said, “I’m married. Happily or unhappily is another matter, but married and obedient to all its obligations and injunctions and oaths.”
“Lamentably so,” he replied, not sure exactly what he meant.
She drank her coffee slowly, looking at the sea, its thick swell and sullen heaviness. It covered the world. It raided its shores, carrying trees and husbands in its teeth. One day the sea would gallop over the dunes and drag her into its watery camp. But if she chose, she would not wait for it to come to carry her away and she would take a long swim from which she would never again step onshore.
