CHAPTER 14
On a cold December night, with stars winking their ancient brilliance through Manhattan’s orangey froth, I first met Belinda. I’d lived in New York for three weeks. We had gone to an art thing, separately, held at a gallery crowded with partygoers, politicians, musicians, literati, and lots of your sundry artists-on-the-make. Fairytale moments come lots of times in life, but seldom do we recognize them. At one subtle moment amid this hoopla, we both turned and saw each other standing in the proverbial spotlight.
The spots (for they are true to the story) were this room’s only source of light, a side chamber more in the line of a closet than a proper gallery room. Outside their superb, white beams we hovered in the crepuscular shadows surrounding two paintings hung low in the corner, so close together that their frames made overlapping shadows on the wall. Little did we know that we were both overenthusiastic in our art gazing this night, and when we simultaneously bent our heads for a closer look at the paintings, we bumped butts, turned, and saw a nimbus. Hers was yellow and blue, mine white and red.
This is the official version, the story we’ve sewn together from patched and competing memories. I use sewn because we were both, admittedly, a bit drunk by the time we made “the turn,” having already twice winnowed separate paths through the heavy, happy, intoxicated crowd that overflowed the gallery onto Park Avenue. My poison was champagne; Belinda’s, red wine. Her glass listed a provocative thirty degrees to my corrupted forty-five.
Peter North (before he dropped the o-r-t-h) had only lately returned to NYC from an eight-month tour, having taken paintings, serigraphs, and prints around the country much like a rock band promotes its albums through live shows. On this night he was hosting the finale at his agent’s Gramercy gallery. Belinda wore a livery outfit (black tie and tails, buff riding breeches, knee-length boots, black stovepipe hat) and carried a long whip. I questioned her with what I hoped was not a too-sly grin. Does someone wear this costume for pleasure, for presentation, provocation, or sport? “Work,” she said, her voice an oblique aria beside the costume. She used the woven leather whip handle, thick as a horse cock, to push the brim of her hat up, making a conversational gap through which she looked me up and down. I was the casual Bohemian, new to New York City: suede jacket, navy jeans, western boots, and a loosened red tie over a white shirt. I could have been the Marlboro Man come in from the range, sans cigarette and chiseled chin. Or I could have been Oscar Wilde in America, sampling west Texas barbeque.
Belinda told me she rarely met interesting people at galleries, and had only come tonight to see a friend. Meanwhile, she had turned to see whose small nose and wild hair was casting an inky silhouette across Peter North’s Prussian blue canvas (after our bottoms had touched). My hair was a sort of frappe punk-wave that year; this was before Cobain’s stringy, banana-yellow hangdog fashion became all the rage, calling society’s youth to finally break from the ‘80’s asymmetrical styles (thank the good Christ). I tickled her funny bone by pouring the half glass of champagne onto my hands and using it as a style mousse, ruffling the sugary bubbles into my hair and pulling out the hardened mop to end with, I hoped, a spiky hedgehog look that had lately made it into men’s magazines. She reacted by brandishing her whip, raised it near the white lights, and mildly lashed my haunches, once on each side.
If I were ever able to recognize a sign of good luck, this was my time to act. And so I did, offering her my arm for an escorted walk through the gallery. We wandered the rooms we’d already seen, trading consequential barbs at the reigning fashion in dress, style, and art. I asked the whereabouts of her friend. “She hasn’t showed,” Belinda replied, and made the point (I think) to look at me so I wouldn’t miss how she flashed her eyebrows.
She didn’t reveal that she’d been an artists’ model for her first years in the City, and I didn’t ask further than the carriage-rider’s outfit. She didn’t say anything after my answer of “sculpture” to her “What’s your story?” Since I’d never made a habit of philosophical rhetoric about art or, worse, my art, we both accepted that we’d found a friendly face, figure, and ear. Later, after a second circuit through the crowd (which seemed to have disappeared, though this has no literal sense because elbows and chatter struck us like autumn weather), I offered to walk her home. She accepted.
On the sidewalk outside her apartment building, beneath a black-limbed tree weaving in Polynesian dance on a midnight breeze, I played a most dangerous gambit: “I won’t kiss you tonight. I’m afraid of –” [here she cocked her head, a subtle sign of cautionary interest] “… I’m afraid you might invite me upstairs, and that would be just one happy night. I’ll be pleased to shake your hand instead, and make a promise to call you. Is tomorrow too soon?”
This, Belinda told me a week later (on date #3), had made all the difference.
Courtship is a funny thing. For us, it was literal comedy. We walked New York’s streets throughout that first winter, laughed at the other’s pie-balled cracks about the frivolity of the life-lived-so-seriously by too many people (this included ourselves, as such understanding makes itself known, eventually, although we later insisted our versions approached life from unique angles). We frequented oven-warm bistros whose bread and olive oil and wine were all we ordered; we shared a hash pipe in Central Park under a gathering snowstorm; we crab walked past “fresh art” in SOHO galleries; we kissed at stoplights in the driver’s seat of her hackney cab; and we made a pact outside Madison Square Garden, on the night of the The Who concert, that we’d hold off sex until the time — that moment — when our heads felt right. Very Middle-America Wholesome, was how we described ourselves (not the Urbane Sophisticates we saw in certain friends, who exploited their carefree and care-less attitudes). A pair of couples, also friends, mercilessly teased us one night (“Masturbation lingers in the air!” “You two remind me of a Boy Scout rubbing two wet sticks together to make fire.” “Just do each other, already — make us happy, anyway!”) in the middle of an early February thaw, as we walked along the empty bridal path within sight of Larissa Ames’s high-rise apartment.
Jokes like these we easily brushed aside. Ours was a relationship formed on the ruins of the past (where no plaques exist to reconvene memories), those nightmarish blowouts with “fuck-friends” (the agreed-upon term reserved for the exes) on whom we pressed our notions of love. Contrary to the NYC lifestyle and its smorgasbord opportunity, we wanted feelings before action, emotions attached to energy. Love (and sex) could arrive later, on a Valentine carpet, or in a Bunny-delivered Easter egg, even under a Memorial Day stars & stripes hat. Or it could wait till the calendar wound back toward crisp sounds of Jingle Bells while riding in a one-horse open sleigh. Details, details. … Love (and beauty) only blooms by close attention. Likewise, that which surrounds our senses for those who are full of care: I once had a friend whose mother constantly mistook the blue jays & juniper wallpaper (dining room) with that of the pink roses & Spanish ivy (her bedroom).
Back then I walked a dozen different dogs during the day (my best-paying gigs were months away) and sculpted at night in the basement of my Lower East Side apartment building. Belinda worked on marketing her horse carriage business from early daylight to noon, building a corporate client list and word-of-mouth tourist recommendations, before she clip-clopped through the park from one to nine, seldom returning to her Hell’s Kitchen apartment before midnight because she tended to Gretchen at the stables. We did this for seventeen months while dating. We still do it, in a fashion, but now we’re together.
Strivers. Yes, we had to laugh at the rat-racing world, scurrying past our stentorian idealism. Ours was an “other” life; eclectic dress & personality had colored me (NY-influenced); Belinda has colored me (beknownst to her); and in the short time we’ve been together I’ve shed that other self, the one cloying for recognition, and now I’m learning (a lot) from Belinda. Unbeknownst to her.
I love you, Belinda. I want to marry you. Children? Sure-but-can-we-waitawhile? Our car
eers must be given the time, work, and.... I love you because I want to do more for you than I feel you want from me. Does that make sense?
It does to me. Belinda gets it; she’s told me so. It’s why she winked at my feeble answer to her proposal-cum-ultimatum. That’s why I get to sit in this park and make clay figures, and wonder what GumbyDude and ShadowTree do for my imagination instead of putting ass to chair at my honeycomb to work through the problem. Peter N’s ghost voice gooses me so regularly — for spite and for the laughs — that I sometimes wonder if this feeling doesn’t strike from hemorrhoids. (You don’t have a problem, Minus; you’re thinking. I sing this to myself on the melody to a long-forgotten one-hit wonder. Okay, that’s nice; use art-student excuses to ….)
I think of myself as somewhat refined; Belinda says she’s “as refined as milled Kansas wheat.” I’ve not asked for details. Compared to our contemporaries, we’ve been bred on books rather than television, art-on-walls more than flickering images on the silver-screen. Do these make a difference each day? To a lifetime? We think so. We hope they shall.
In another thought, these are platitudes, Besides, New Yorkers think we’re hayseeds from the heartland. “N–Y–C is the sophisticated town.” I’ve said this with a straight face, but the sentiment should be rethought. See here: every third word from the mouths of your average NYer is “fugett’it” “whatev’a” “gimme’a break” “wahhhchit” or “fuck that.” I give multiple choices here because who’s counting, right? Effectively — and effectionately — we Americans are all alike, although hubristically we’re ethno-regional-centric (skin pigmentation not being an issue).
Behind my mental gymnastics, I spot Karen K stop herself flush against the morning crowd. She gets a few lowered shoulders across her arms from passing office workers, because she’s now an interruption instead of just the smelly ghost in soiled pink stretch pants and blue runner’s jacket zipped to the throat, so tightly that neck skin extrudes around the collar. She’s carrying that particular stink eye that was noticeable the last time we squared off.
I didn’t see Karen yesterday, but she might have seen me, as I was focused on sculpting a horse’s head. This morning I’m onto my second head. Equine imagery fired up the other night as a new way to see the human physiognomy. This came following the 95th Street Y episode, of which I’ve since labeled The Debacle. Hide doesn’t cover our skin to warm us in the winter air, but the other features are an identical list. It’s the tomato sauce added to pasta after a year of using only olive oil and fresh basil.
“You’re pissing me off, Minus the artist.”
People veer left and right. It’s an automatic reaction to danger in a city lousy with idiosyncratic defense mechanisms. Karen’s voice is no more or less caustic than what I recognize among her repertoire. She reminds me of a cartoon character, or all cartoon characters in a chorus line. Nevertheless, I’m tired of this game.
“Come sit down!” My voice surprises me, a coronet sound of alarm. Belinda preaches that I should be subjective in my view of our “fucking fucked-over fucked-up fucky world”; but I’m often not sure her own objective-subjective quotient isn’t a bit short of half-baked. I wave for Karen to come near. She doesn’t move. I say, “Okay. Just do whatever you want. Come eat my bagel. Or smash my horsy head. Did you bring oranges with you today? Do you have your chicken-skinning knife in a hidden pocket?” She is multilayered again; God knows what lies within.
At the mention of the knife, some pedestrians pick up their pace, and a second pair turn heel to double-time it back to Central Park West. Karen screws up her face. “You fuck-nut. They’re going for the cops.”
“Shouldn’t they? I’m being threatened by an authentic New York bag lady, a skell. Of course, if you don’t have a knife, the cops will melt into the background. On the other hand, it’s hard to tell with city cops. One look at you might incite them to drag you off behind the bushes and beat you half to death. Shouldn’t you know this already? Naturally, it depends on what they’ve eaten for breakfast, whatever gets them in a jack-booted, stomp-your-face mood.” I look overhead. “Today’s supposed to be a great day. It hasn’t rained in a week. I’m in the park until two if you want to stop back. Art in the Park, I’m calling it. Mostly it’s mothers tethered to their high-strung kids that stop by. But hey, the best time to get them arting is when they’re young, right? Hell, Jesuits hammer their Christian nails into kids’ heads before they’re old enough to reason –”
“Can you shut up?” Karen barks. Her voice has swung back to the normal sound of human irritation. Gone is the water-filled kazoo that bums acquire from a whiskey-and-dumpster-diving diet.
I stop my patter, look away, and put my fingers on the horse. Its neck has dried. I feel the grit in the clay, risen up like five o’clock shadow, a texture that is neither…. She’s curious, and she wants this (not as much as me, but then … who does?). She’s going to come sit after all; her arms have begun to twitch (no bags today; easy to get at her “knife”), knees hitching like a dance novice practicing in place before the music starts.
Then she passes through the crowd and sits on the adjoining bench. She uses the double armrest as sole barrier between us. A casual attitude settles. If she speaks, I’ll hear her. Time begins its measure, in wind currents, animal sounds, the traffic far off to the right, racing and stopping along CPW (horns and tires in desperate battle); jet engines strain as they climb through the atmosphere. There’s no need for transition.
“Say something,” she says.
Okay. Here we go. I tell her, “I didn’t see a profound difference between the third and fourth hand.”
“Naturally you didn’t. You’re the artist. It takes a trained mind to push aside school education to really see quality. Stupid fuck.”
I look askance. “I’m not a stupid fuck. That’s rude. I have talent.”
She lifts an eyebrow.
“Have you kept the hand?” I ask.
The eyebrow drops. Acknowledgment? Not unless it’s short of agreement.
“You’re a rube,” she says, accusingly.
Before I know it, I’ve agreed with her. “We can’t help but live our lives in cycles,” I say. “And do you know, a few modern philosophers would argue (I mean the smart ones) that every life is doomed to rotate on its own particular axis. They must be thinking of the ancients, although I fear the right-true answer. Not sure why. Maybe to support my own theories.”
She uses manicured fingertips to wipe her face. When she takes her fingers away, she checks them, like a monkey checks itself for lice. “Which cycle are you in now?” she asks.
I think easier this time. “The middle one,” I say.
She reaches out and slaps the clay horse from its pedestal.
“Heyheyhey! Hey, now.” I throw up my hands. The fall has flattened one side of the horse’s face. Stones are embedded in the clay. I look closely at the damage. It’s either ruined or it parades its battle scars. I could make a set of chess pieces with similar damage. I almost want to thank Karen for the idea.
“I can make another. I can make ten, but what does –”
“You think so linearly,” she says. “Reach left when you find yourself in this way. See what happens.”
Belinda kissed me first. We took a ride in her hackney cab on New Year’s Day. A fierce wind caused her to hold her hat in place with one hand and the reins in the other. I held her whip. We stopped at the Columbus Circle traffic light on our way back across 59th Street to parade in front of the tourists passing through Grand Army Plaza. She leaned over and kissed me. She took my lips into hers because I hadn’t puckered and her lips were ready and open, the tip of her tongue peeking out. Everybody remembers the first kiss with that one person you want to make your lover and, if luck is to play a part, your mate. Belinda’s warm mouth moistened my lips, bringing a shudder from my core that overrode the cold-weather shivers along my ribs.
We had kissed the night before, at a New Year’s p
arty given by friends in Alphabet City, where in a small apartment with lots of bodies gliding about in slow dance as Dick Clark counted down the hour to midnight, a peck of good tidings let us know what we both were thinking. That was not the moment for passion, when noisemakers screamed their tortured-bird squawks. Our Hackney-Cab Kiss had meaning stamped on it, transferred to me through her heated mouth, and which I sent back with a gift attached: my wonder. She kissed me with her clear eyes open, and they coveted what my face gave up. When she pulled away, I was in love. When you know, you know.
The next week I began my Globes cycle. Work took me away from Belinda for days at a time. Reels of hours were lost to, or for, the sake of art and commerce. I made up those hours by appearing on some street corner, where I would hail her atop the hackney cab. Or she would turn up suddenly, as suddenly as I had, on a Beehive couch, talking in whispers with Vendulka. When I finally came out from behind the tent folds, Belinda would answer the question turning over in my mouth with a throaty, “I’ve been waiting for you.”
There were no arguments between us; we happily agreed on the many compromises new couples make, in our case made silently because we got each other’s drift with only a look, a smile, a nod, a wink, a kiss blown from one hand across a room or between buses across a busy street. The alternative to compromise was unthinkable, and anyway our differences were negligible. We aren’t perfect, only because we don’t try so hard, and we appreciate each other’s flaws and hang-ups.
Where was drama when you needed some? I had the co-op; Belinda had her customers.
Then an old girlfriend from Chicago began sending me letters later that spring, or sometimes a postcard with a Chicago landscape. I think she must have thought this would make me homesick, and to want … exactly what, I left to her imagination. I told Belinda about her, and she wondered how the Chicago Ex knew my New York address. A friend back in Chi-town must have given it to her, was the only explanation I could fathom. What will you do? she asked. Tell her to stop, I said, and that there’s a woman in my life, and that I wasn’t coming back, and it had been over between us before I’d left, and, well, I would be honest and say that she was a disaster. Belinda concentrated on my answer. She suggested I leave out the last part: Why destroy a good memory for the Ex? It would show her, finally — maybe — that whatever she thought you two had, is now and truly over. Be magnanimous, Belinda said, men have that ability when it comes to relationships.
Karen’s breathing works itself roughly, a riffler against kiln-cured poplar. I look to see if she’s asleep, but her eyes flash right and left like the flickers of a candle flame, toward people and nature’s sounds, my hands and a white jet vapor up through the trees, her nails and feet and something that itches her near the crotch. Then she stares at my hands with a special intensity.
“Do you have any education,” she asks, “or does your gumption come from streetwise observation and a precocious sense of beauty?”
“I don’t know how to answer that with you. Are you being sincere or ironic, or only sarcastic? I suppose I could lie, only both lies that come to mind are likely to piss you off.”
“Try the truth then, da Vinci.”
She has a point.
I say, “My life wasn’t so difficult for me to figure out, even as a kid. I’m your typical suburban-raised American. Chicago’s west suburbs — not the Gold Coast or far west corn-crib mansions. There was a post-JKF school I went to, where the teachers pushed math and I guess basic science because I think they wanted to make little astronauts out of us all. I feared worse though: engineers or business managers. Not the girls, of course, who even then were expected to start looking for a husband or secretarial work. Obviously, music and art were side dishes to the scholastic equivalent of meat’n’potatoes stew. I remember my junior high art teacher got fired for sleeping with a student. Fucking, I mean; I’m sure no ZZZZs got spent.”
“Trim the biblical genealogy, will you?” She smiles a mirthless, unwelcoming smile. “Jump forward. College. The art degree.”
“Ah, yes. Always the question: ‘Who did you study under?’ As if the teacher begets the artist through some vocational equivalent of alchemy. Or as the sculptor reveals the horse’s head lurking inside the block of marble he has stared at for a month, or a minute. Question: is the artist the product of his teacher, or is he a true original in need of but the thinnest planing by the teacher’s stormy tutelage? So. And so. I decided, ‘What for?’ That kind of school isn’t for me. Instead I bought a yearly pass to the Art Institute. It proved the better investment. That, and a thousand bucks for paint and brushes, canvas and panels. Clay, plaster, a few knives, spoons, and a set of chisels. Two hammers. Not your typical laundry list of the do-it-yourselfer.”
Karen chews on the inside of her cheek. I want to ask if she was at the panel discussion, if in fact she was the woman in the crowd I’d seen, and then didn’t see. The question would be ridiculous without my ability to prove it. She’s a wily person, I realize, something I hope isn’t too late for her to use as she once had. But I choose to keep my supposition to myself, and only to play along, for now. Maybe I’m … maybe this is … maybe, maybe, maybe….
“I know how to read,” I say. “And I can sign checks and balance the books. Some art teacher’s insolent demonstrations at contrarian views never appealed to me.”
“You make a living?”
“At sculpting? Now you’re trying to be funny.” I say ha-ha and slap my knee. Silence. She expects an answer. This really is a day to shrug. “Sort of. Almost.”
“So let me clarify by way of counterpoint,” she says, having listened to enough of my spiel. “Typical suburban kids attend college. They learn how to smoke cigarettes and finger pussies owned by small-town girls stretching their legs while away from Pentecostal or Catholic parents. Who knows which are worse, prolly the ones who escaped to analysis or its package deal with atheism. You’re white; you speak well. Well enough. You wear clothes that don’t hang below your ass. I know you’re too old for that Vanilla Ice scene, but it fits the nomenclature of our time. Besides all that, I don’t read ‘cock sucker’ written with a lisp.”
“Like I said.” I let the phrase make its own impression.
“You’re holding back,” she says. “There’s something else. I’m no more the idiot than you, and probably a lot less.”
She’s gauging how far she’ll step from the shadow of her protective sanctuary. It strikes me how much her filth helps this mechanism. The world leaves her alone. To do what, though? It shouldn’t matter to me. A line stretches across her forehead, low, just above her eyebrows. Another is built on top of the first. They make me feel like I’m standing on the edge of the abyss.
I begin with ancient history. “I blew a scholarship.”
“To?”
“Chicago born, remember? That same School of the Art Institute, where I let the subscription be my master and tutor. Well, I guess it used to mean something to me … or maybe it’s just starting to mean something. I’ve lost perspective on the artist-as-educated-self-critic movement. Believe me, I didn’t want training in another’s perceptions.”
Karen balks. “Nearly every great artist served tutelage. It’s called learning from someone who knows better. Not best, mind you, but better than what you had coming in. You were too good for that, is what I’m hearing.”
“Have you seen art school shows? Making derivative art was not how I wanted to spend my time. By the way, from what well did you draw water, Karen?”
“Under my belt lie a thousand books read, pulled apart, and recreated as images of possibility in my mind. I also own a degree from Wellesley. But if you’re looking to compare CVs, dear, I suggest you drop in at the library. Non-fiction: P-N eighty-five point something-something-something. I’m in the letter ‘K’ section. So up yours, tint mixer.”
“Try ‘stone cutter.’ I’m a sculptor, remember?”
“And my ass to your mouth.”
She giv
es me another unwelcoming smile.
“What would your mother say to your using such language, Ms Kosek?”
Her hand tosses away my question and all it suggests. “I guess the least that school could have done was buy you the yearly pass as consolation prize. Do they know you even exist? One’s alma mater can be a helpful provider, buying works, giving shows, networking.”
“I’ve never complained of its absence,” I tell her. The added insult is harder to ignore. “I like to work. Work on my own. I don’t argue the price of a ticket. Great art, even good art, deserves conservancy.”
We sit motionless through a quiet interlude.
“So? Why me? I’m the bag lady living in a penthouse apartment, losing my marbles.” Karen says all this in a single breath.
Her admission is treasure. I say quickly, “Maybe that’s enough for me.” Then I slow my thoughts, my words, and find a pace worthy of the audience. “Otherwise, I don’t know. I don’t know yet. Here’s where a bit of the weird gets a nod. I think serendipity has played its part. Synchronicity, too.” I sigh. “Alas, maybe the Fates have spoken.”
“Been shopping around, have you?”
“Maybe I wasn’t ready before, one might say.”
She points her chin at me. “You gave away a scholarship.”
“Someone else got that money. Good for her. Him. Twelve years ago, by-the-by.”
“Not like fine wine — a shit storm of arty change wouldn’t have fazed the statues pontificating at that college of yours.”
“Wasn’t my college, remember?”
“You shelled out food money for a year’s pass, fuck-nut.”
“Jesus!”
“He can’t help you, either, dildo face.”
“You’re a piece of work, lady.”
“Not even in moments of hysterical paroxysm. Instead you want an apprenticeship in … I don’t know. Enlighten me! Something else.”
“Like I said: maybe.” I want to ask if she’s offering, but a ‘fuck-nut’ lurks behind that question.
“Very Mark Twain of you, but …”
I wait for her to finish. It never comes in words. She stares a while at my unwavering eyes, and I look at the small wrinkles around hers. They are the same size and texture of the eggshell cracks on a Vermeer — strike that: Vermeer painted pretty young things; so like crazing on Rembrandt’s “Self Portrait as Woman of Fallen Virtue.” I realize Karen has no design for me. She gets up and walks down the path toward the park’s interior, not home.
Something that she wrote has been on my mind for days. I make my second most dangerous gambit. “Are you content with all creation, Karen?”
One of Belinda’s ex-boyfriends followed her to the City. He turned up on her doorstep, the same steps on which I had pledged no sex until “we were right.” We’d been right for months by then, and at the boyfriend’s appearance, were set to move in together. Belinda didn’t ask him into her apartment. She did, however, sit with him on the steps and explain that he was welcome to a complimentary carriage ride in her newly restored 18th century wooden-wheeled jobbie. “Some British Tory left it behind when he escaped the colonies,” she told her ex. After the carriage ride, he was to leave her alone. She was not right for him, she explained. She would spoil if she ever set foot in Nebraska again. He needed a wholesome woman from Four Corners.
I had to tease her. “So you didn’t have a torrid affair before sending him back to Nebraska?”
“I thought about it, but I’d just showered.” She’s a better tease than I can ever hope to be. “Besides, it turns out he really wanted the carriage ride.”
“That was nice of you.”
“Hell yes, it was.” Then she became reflective. “Back in Nebraska – when we dated – I could be a bitch. This is fact. He called me his Little Lemur. It was meant to be a joke because he raised lemurs as a kid, took them to 4-H shows and everything, and he always talked about how much they fought, had this pecking order, the females slapping down the male so bad he sometimes cowered in the corner, didn’t eat, even starved to death because the females denied him food. But they made the male have sex with them.”
“Really?”
“Sure. I wouldn’t lie.”
Karen stops, turns to confront me. Lugubrious lines shadow her face.
“What did you say to me?”
I don’t answer. She waits with Job’s patience. I fold my arms. She looks like she’ll stand there awhile, but suddenly her head jerks, in a gesture for me to follow her. When she quickly walks down the path, leaving me to make haste or lose everything, I gather my canvas bag and leave the table behind.
Out on the open path, under the mustard sun and paper-doll clouds, I catch up with her. We walk together. People stare. I stay quiet, aware that to break her concentration, some unwritten-unspeakable protocol, will break the spell she is under (or that we’re both under — or maybe it’s just me), thus rendering the moment to more fairytale musings. I concede that I’m right about something, but willing to wait for its own sign to touch me, however the Moira has spun her thread. Karen K takes us out of the park onto 5th Avenue and up to 89th Street. She leads us east for a block. In under two minutes we’re there.
“Go in,” she tells me.
I look at the building. Its Space Age design is yet another of Frank Lloyd Wright’s beat-off sessions, to my mind. The Guggenheim in NYC has only lately become the much-loved pantheon to modern art. No surprise then that it has franchised, and of all places to Bilbao, Spain (!)
“I don’t want to go in,” I tell her flatly.
She nods. “Good.”
We stand here awhile and try not to look at each other. Karen has the presence of waiting on something, a bus or a fly ball. I begin my own reconnoiter, at the people walking past the museum, and those on the curb, always weary of the walk/don’t-walk light on busy Madison Avenue. I spy people through the windows of the museum lobby, and college kids shouldering backpacks in the sun along the curved wall. Over at the nearby taxi stand a man sits idle in a wheelchair. He’s dressed in a tweed jacket, gold over brown, and matching brown pants. The pants seem baggy on his legs, likely covering atrophied muscles from years of disuse. A soft yellow tie on a white field completes his look of dapper indifference or happy solitude. I figure he’s eighty years old, but he could be sixty. Where’s his nurse? Or wife? (The wife is dead, so he lives alone; no use for a nurse because he’s agile and, nowadays, mini-van taxis have automatic lifts.) He’s into a smile now, the whites of his eyes lit saffron by a sun well past it zenith. Off to the opera, I suppose. Maybe he’s performing in one, an entire opera staged by a wheelchair troupe. Can you see La Bohéme staged this way, and what’s-her-name wheeling herself along Paris’s snow-covered streets? Her T.B. would yet kill her, sure, but that dramatic death scene would make a vastly different impact. This dapper gent at the taxi stand, he’s got a jocular twinkle set above two dimples in his sun-browned cheeks; his hands tap a tune on the wheelchair’s armrests, then move to his knees. His is the nervous gesticulation of a drummer who can’t turn off the music in his head once the song has ended on stage. He’s spiffed up his silver hair, has it combed back in a sort of wave, a modern pompadour, long hair he’s tucked behind the ears, only it unfurls into grassy fringe below his collar. Back in the Forties he’d be described as dashing. While today he’s old and crippled, his body and life-soul claim an unwillingness to let those problems spoil whatever lies ahead. By contrast, some kid just now has sat on the bench next to him. This one is definitely waiting on the bus; he has no car, and by scruffy looks, little future; he’s twenty-five if he’s a day, but he looks older than the dapper gent because his shoulders sag and a two-day beard makes his face a dirty rag rather than simply an unshaven actor “in character.” His hair is a mess, zigzag fly-aways and knots the bane of decent care. Lots more guys and dolls pushing seventy show better self-regard, despite class or status. Such as … there, that couple, coming out the doors. My guess is
late sixties, both of them, white hair for him, a bit of a frosty mix for her (Vanity whispering at her ear). Their hands clasp as they walk, talking about what they’ve just seen in the Guggenheim, liking the day, liking the exit and the fresh air and the light, the end of the tour, and now they’re off to dinner or to have a drink first (something with a bite to it) and then dinner, maybe even a Broadway show later still, a fine way to fill out the evening. All these possibilities, and they match, too: earthy greens and yellows and browns, buffed leather shoes, hers patent and glowing with a golden edge against the sunlight. I can see them in younger times, still hand-holding (different partners? Okay, but so what, life spreads lots of sorrow along with its sunshine, just to remind you that life someday ends, so enjoy it in every year; the young don’t get this — look at the bus stop clown, now he’s picking his nose; if he cleaned up, he could look good, there’s something to work with in him, the nose and chin are straight and cut well, no jug-ears; and he’s slim, with a decent build under his wrinkled shirt) and this couple still hanging onto their museum smiles, all marquee happiness and love, yeah that right kind of love, ready for a night on the town and not even knowing that in forty years they’ll be doing the very same thing. This idea struck Rembrandt (this repetition of Van Rijn has hold of me, and I need to know why), so he began his cycle of occasional self-portraits. He must have intended early in his career to capture himself throughout life, taking all the eras into account: pulling goofy faces, wearing the dandy’s clothes of a successful painter-about-town; he changes how he wears his beard, and opts for days where a clean-shave means a new me; but he’s always true to the nature of his skin, and over the years he adds the wrinkles to the new etching, and then the paunchy cheeks, the shadows cut into the lines across his face’s terrain, from that ripe peach of youth to the pocked citrus rind of middle age. Yet, true to his self, the light in his eyes is always there — the mischief, the artist’s mystique, always watching, examining, taking notes, measuring himself for the canvas, or otherwise the myth behind all of that. I must remember as a proof, though, that Rembrandt’s reputation wasn’t based on myth. His work speaks for itself. Myths and heroes in art? Sure. Look at Hemingway’s self-defined myth-making as “Papa” and sportsman, the Great White Hunter; all that he couldn’t live up to later; Grace Under Pressure, a myth, the myth he created for himself as Machismo This and Nobelist That … and then he snuck into a bedroom and killed himself. You wouldn’t find Odysseus committing suicide; he was far too wily a Greek for the fickle gods and goddesses he had to outwit for survival — Poseidon and Zeus — along with their mythical minions, including the Cyclops and Calypso, who did silly bidding that messed with mortal lives. What’s become of them? Well, they’re dead, of course, yes … although not really dead as we mortals know death, not exactly, but where do –
Karen has waved a hand in front of my face. I realize she’s been looking at me for a long time. I start to talk because now I want to hear my thoughts aloud.
“GumbyDude has that frame of the slain one, along the theme of ‘The Dying Gaul’. You know that sculpture. The tree, my tree I just threw together, its shape is yogic; who was the first? I dunno — a Vedic deity. Yeah … she looks celestial. Vendy has shown me photos of Prague. Some castle garden sculptures is what I remember. Someone had slain another…. No, no. I won’t retrod those visions, youthful gods in battle told as motifs to fan a king’s vanity. That can’t be where my mind goes!”
I slap my hands in a single clap and walk around in a circle. Karen stays put. I stop and spread my arms. The need to follow these ideas is a palpable feeling of covetousness. I start in again.
“But thematically … the history, our use of deities (no), gods (NO!). No. Wait. Older than that. Or just — old. Wait now … … … How about older gods? They get old, they change — their ideas change. But that’s not right. It’s more Man’s idea of how gods have changed: the words, His laws. Hold on, wait-wait. The face of God is unseen, and Jesus just forms to every race that believes … and then there’s Mohammed and Abraham. Prophets, not gods. Capital-G God. Fuck, these are religious icons. I can’t.… Anyway, that God doesn’t have a face. That’s anthropomorphizing. The Jews didn’t even say his name. The Muslims, they … shit, these days they’ll kill you if Allah’s image isn’t just so. Or is that Mohammed? Whatever. Fuck them. Free publicity is no excuse for bad art.”
I wonder where my mind wants to go. It needs to eat from this boiling soup of images. Karen folds her arms. Her face beams thought, aim, resolve. Questions answered, but … Forget Karen K! Or at least use her as your audience, since she’s picked a good time to go mute. Good. Fine. Maybe for the better.
“Which gods get old, Karen? Whose gods? Ancient gods or the ancients behind their need and invention — Hold on! Rembrandt painted himself as John the Baptist. He was older when he did that. He had to be. And so was John the Baptist, I presume, the aging John before Salome demanded his head. Perhaps Rembrandt knew the age of the disciple and … no, no, I can’t seriously think of these religious ancients as viable work. Art has passed them over for good.
“Rembrandt sketched his life, all the changes he experienced from a simple look in the mirror each morning. A Dutch Master is not an ancient, though, so where does that take me? He’s been on my mind for weeks and it can’t be because I own one of his prints!”
Karen unfolds her arms. She’s listening; wants to listen. I’ve begun to parade back and forth, not quite pacing, but delivering my rant to an audience of one (because all others on this evening sidewalk have ignored me). Karen is a poster on a wall, a window through which I see someone so plainly they become the white noise of our vision.
I say, “That takes me to the ancients again. I must reach backwards. This is whom I’ve been talking to all along! Age. Eras. No, epochs! Epics? Both. The ancients. Epic heroes of the epochal ages: ancient heroes. Knights. Wait, they’re not ancient enough. Not like Homer-ancient. Well, he wrote about the mythological gods. But were they gods? No. They were fictions: Odysseus, Paris, Agamemnon — and the gods they prayed to, the mythological gods. Only, those gods were as much real to them as ours are to us. The ancient Greeks held belief in their gods as well as their … Poseidon, Zeus, the-the … who were the Titans? … wasn’t there just a movie out with fighting Greek gods? — Clash of the Titans or something like that, right? I could be a few years off. I don’t go to see movies anymore. Yet, there were those, like Calypso – no, she – she’s the Siren that held Odysseus captive so she could fuck his brains out for all eternity, or else until he died, anyway, because his lot was as a mortal. That was on some island; Crete or Naxos, maybe Lesbos? Now that doesn’t sound right. Tough luck for Odysseus, though. He only wanted to get home, not sit around some cave waiting to be called down to Calypso’s beach hut for torrid sex. Did she have the looks of some hottie goddess? Something to keep Odysseus from wanting to get home? Or had her face crinkled into an old bag by then? I mean, wasn’t he captive for seven years? How old was she when she took him captive? There’s no saying, that’s why it’s Myth. Or just a blind man’s story. Hmmm, sure, but yet – Odysseus must have been forty, his wife is back at home, their grown son leaves to hunt down the old man lost at sea. That’s how the story begins. Yeah, forty-ish if he’s got a grown son who’s able to scare up a crew to sail off in search of dad. And Calypso – what? – she’s gotta be nineteen, the perfect age-lust female in heat for a man like Odysseus. But that’s too young, and too green for all that cunning Siren stuff of lore. Athenians didn’t go for inexperienced myth figures; not her variety, anyway. They wanted decisive myth makers. The Nymphs would have been different; just the name gives you an image of youth and beauty and distraction — the death of many a young sailor or half-god, right? Calypso: she had to be in her forties, then, too, like Odysseus; and if that age, then, why not into her sixties? Why not two-hundred sixty?
“Odysseus hadn’t been her first captive. She lured such men to their fates before.
A nymph, not one of the Sirens. So she could be thirty and perpetually beautiful, or a hag of sixty-three trying to restore her youth by bagging sailors who’ve crashed on her shores when they followed her voice to the reefs, one after the other, bam-bam-bammm. For years, even decades. Perpetual beauty? That’s a myth if I ever heard one. But how about perpetual beauty through sex? From the body of a worthy sailor-soldier? It’s worth a try.
“If I can’t picture her as a nymph of late teenage years, that means her image can change with time, along with the human curse that says time ravages the body, its youthful suppleness slackens, the hair thins, thins and grays, turns brittle; muscles hang from the bone in skin bags slack with disuse and feebleness. Or else the gods could change with their own era — not as age-less time on this mortal Earth. Yeah.
“And … What does a nymph look like when she reaches sixty? Not like she does at sixteen, I bet. That’s a mortal’s lot, to know age and feel it, at least vicariously, in others. Even in their gods.”
I feel my throat, dry and scratchy. I’m dying for a drink, something cold. There’s no hotdog cart in sight. A whiskey would be better, anyway. Would Karen have a bottle stashed beneath all those nasty clothes? I’m afraid to ask. I fear the truth, within which yet lies the possibility that she is a stew bum and has been all along, and I’ve only fed my inflamed imagination by following her, or getting her to follow me, and then to lead me somewhere else. To where, though? No matter; I don’t want to be led. My throat is dry. I feel older — but I don’t look as old as Karen K looks in that filthy get-up. Regardless, time does it to us all. In the end, it does it to everything.
It occurs to me that my rant is not an epiphany. None of this has charged as an out-of-the-blue idea. I’ve been musing on this theme for months! But if I don’t get them into some word-visual form, a line, a group, a mob, right now, I’ll lose them. My urgency is to find what they mean, which can make all the difference. What they mean to me.
“The ages sink us all,” I say. I hear in my voice a want of sober logic. Karen waits for more. It’s not hard for me to take up that path. I think she wants me to tell her something I haven’t told her already, even something she’s never heard before. “Even the mythological gods get old, and tire out. Their skin loses its elasticity, bones ache in whatever morning they find themselves that is not our own. We, the mortals. They once played a role in mortals’ lives, their everyday doings and the goings on in society. They were often like humans — human Eros and Fury, for sure — meaning they changed over time because their stories showed their lives to those mortals over which they made mischief. The story of life is the story of change, even for the gods: growth from boyhood to manhood’s maturity, onward into old age. Theirs are the stories that often don’t have a grand finish, only death. Aging, old, and finally so retired and decrepit as to … a retired god?”
I feel the silence of my mind pull these ideas together, into the image of new shadows and lines.
“Why not this? There’s no reason why gods don’t age; gods retired and sent away to usher in the new. The religion, the … pantheism, that belief system changed. The Jews and their One God were over there, somewhere, waiting. Finally the pagan gods fell out of favor, and only then had they died. Almost died, that is. While the ancient myths, the mytholo- … mythologicals? The Mythos. Is that a word? When the Mythos lost out to the One God idea, they died off. But that’s not exactly true. The monotheistic God had only finally supplanted the old gods of Rome, of course, which had themselves supplanted the Greek gods, some by name only.
“All those pagan deities … they didn’t die off completely, they didn’t disappear; they lived in folklore, the stories, the epic tales, and later, in new paganism and – … they lived on through art. As celebrated figures for all ages, was the idea. Still is. They’ve held up as the Virtuous and the Just. Metaphors for our own time, and the faults that lie in us all.
“Exalted by kings and queens and their anointed courtiers for the next thousand years, painted on ceilings and sewn into tapestry, carved in stone, cast in bronze, committed to song, then resurged in print, verse and story. That’s all true. Or accurate enough, I suppose, because along with the art, people regularly put themselves in place of the ancients and the biblical (Rembrandt again!), as honorary or in self-delusion. Look at the Medicis. Look at Napoleon! The Mythos are still with us because they’re remembered through art: idealized, sometimes eulogized if their story ended in death, like Achilles. That means they are older. Older by centuries and by conception of who they were and what creed, what power, they lived by. The new religions took their place, eased them out to pasture to settle outside the city, in the green fields, to be celebrated not in death but in and of life itself by being passed over, pushed aside, sent to The Old Hero’s Home. Pushed aside, yes, like old people are today. With each new generation of artists to come along, their images changed, too. And what image do we, the young, have of them?”
Karen nods. There’s a half-smile on her mouth. I think she wants to be sardonic, but it doesn’t work this time. She has heard something she likes. If I’m wrong on facts, what does it matter? Artists have never been quite right. The beauty is first, then symbolism: these are our ends. Let the historians iron smooth the facts. Karen grunts, but I don’t think I’m going to hear “fuck-nuts” now.
“It’s there, Karen, I see them. All of them. The Mythos and the gods and goddesses get old, but the old timers have things over the young, like attitude, wiliness, cunning, wisdom, sagacity, savoir faire. You’ve never seen attitude in someone before you’ve seen some codger with a bug up his ass.”
She blinks. I do want a drink now. A pencil, too. And paper, a pad of it, a big pad, ten-by-twelve and a thick bond that’ll take a narrow gold nib and wet black India. Zeppo has some whiskey. Good stuff, too, and he’ll share! He knows I’m good for it. I can feel its edge already sluicing down my throat. Eighteen-year-old scotch. Even good whiskey is an aged spirit. Mellowed by time, refined, good, still strong. And it finishes well.
“I’ll see you again,” I tell Karen, and pick up my bag to dash with down the street, wind-milling my free arm and whistling for a cab.
“I’ve been looking all over for you.”
Silence.
“Minus?”
Belinda.
I look up from the page. Yes. The voice is real, not another imagined body that wants to join the crowd so busily moving across my vision. She stands in the receding glow of candlelight I have had to make. The overhead lights went out on me when I flipped the switches, fizzled by a bad fuse. Her narrow-set eyes stare at me, fearful, disbelieving, furious.
“Hi.” I whisper softly enough to see the sound float across the room. The image of Medusa reaches up from my page to catch hold, but the word slips through her fingers. The loft is quiet. I hear the wax burning through the candle wicks. Beside me is the canvas bag, draped halfway off the bench. White pages spread out around me, their corners curled, lying as if dropped from a great height. Penciled figures stare from each sheet. Hands and chins and shoulders and noses push from the static page to confront you. I’ve sketched dozens of fast-forming images through the last hours. What time is it? Belinda will know.
She holds her arms out, questioning. Her purse dangles from one hand, its weight pulling the arm lower than the other, while her mouth agitates in the ghostly light. She becomes a Gerrit Dou figure, someone from an age before electricity.
“It’s nearly midnight,” she says. Worry has stretched her voice thin. “I’ve looked everywhere. Why –”
Her hands cover her face. Her shoulders turn in and hiccup with sobs. She starts to cry. Why? I drop the pencil on the sheet and it settles across Zeus’s eyes, how they peer at our modern world with subdued humor held onto calm amusement. I could not find my pink-fish pencil holder, so I picked up whatever I could find. The no. 2’s have given up gray, watery lines from their hard lead. I hear Belinda whimper and my legs move so quickly that I fa
ll off the bench trying to get out from beneath the table. The crash to the floor brings me from my state.
“I lost track of time,” I say. My voice is a clear sound in this room, a TV voice. I run to her, which takes but four steps. We collide. She grabs at my shirt collar and pulls me, pulls her head into my neck, and then she hammers her fists against my chest. The pounding is furious, a release of frustration. Her fists feel like stone-filled snowballs.
“This is the last place I looked. I thought everything imaginable. You should have called, you should have let me know. I don’t see why but I thought the worst had happened. I don’t know why! I didn’t know where you were.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. Her tear-dewed eyes berate my soul.
She shakes her head. Either this is good enough, or there is no excuse and I’ve failed her, or none of that matters now that I’ve been found alive and not gutted in some alley. I should be very sorry. This does matter. I can do nothing for the moment but hear Ovid’s words, “If you would marry suitably, marry your equal.” No, my friend. Fuck that. Give me my better, in emotion and virtue.
Belinda catches her breath and takes a tissue from her purse. Blowing her nose, she looks around my shoulder at the candles, and at what’s on the table. She says, in an iced voice, “What are you doing?”
I look at the sketchpad and the curled sheets. Smudged prints have dusted their edges. She pulls my head around and holds my face between her tear-moistened hands. I feel her wet tissue pressed against my ear. I hope she sees the power that I’ve felt all my life, when an idea has taken me away from that part of the world in which people wander with no regard for the beauty within reach, their beauty. Now I can smile.
“Look!” I take her hand and feel the bubbles of mania flow from my heart to my extremities. The underside of my skin tingles. I lead her to the table. “Look at what I’ve found.” I need a gulp of air after I’ve said so little for these hours. “This is Alvin the bus rider. He slings his lightning bolts at the world because that’s all he has left. Here’s Zeppo’s Medusa-haired model, who stares into a mirror in a vain appeal to kill herself. And this, this one, he’s the taxi-stand cripple that holds up the world, his wheelchair bending from the strain. Look at this bag lady singing a sailor’s siren.” Belinda doesn’t know whom I speak of, but the sketches interpret my verbal splurge for her. “They’re here, Belinda. All of them, and they’ve been in me for weeks. They’re all here.”
Many other Mythos ask more of me as I stand looking over her shoulder. The sketches lie like a half-completed game of solitaire. They speak to me from their wispy gray lines and thick, black shadows and hair and every fold and line in their skin. They ask that my hands sculpt them into the life that is their liberty. I am full of euphoria. The possibilities hang in ripe bud. I feel Belinda beside me, and look to her for the sign that this is alive. She touches my hand; I think she has touched my hand.