CHAPTER 9
If my treatment of NY has sounded contradictory at times, therein one finds its definition; and so to paint its many sides is to reveal city life in its flush or pale. Not every city proves loving and loveable, or harsh and hate-able, coalesced as the experience of one day or the syntax of a single sentence. NYC holds both these cats in one bag. The closest comparison I can find is the human itself, and by inference human emotions. Humans build cities, humans live in them, humans destroy them — and for these reasons, a city, like a human, has flaws. In love, and in passionate desire, we tend to overlook flaws and hope for equal compensation. Or, if not overlooked, they are kept veiled by opaque focus, to be revealed only when, for example, a sidewalk vent sends a powerful updraft to lift hems and — shock! — show the cracks, discolorations, age & abuse they have suffered and accepted. We only glimpse these because we are certain to quickly look away (as good manners demand). A question is left in memory’s wake: Is to reveal also to revile? The ebb and flow of these winds can come upon you from behind, as well. They run off with your smoothed solitude like a Dickensian pickpocket.
One morning a few weeks after arriving in the great City, I walked up a sun-soaked stairwell from the subterranean shadows of the A Line, beyond which a train’s rumbling out of the station gathered round my feet. At the top of the stairs a man stood with his back against the green railing. He was looking across the small, nearly empty square on this Sunday morning. I saw a flash, sunlight against steel. His laugh slashed into this concentrated moment, and in the next I saw the knife held in his right hand, twin to the cruel smile cut across his red, wet lips. His eyes were not on me. I don’t think he ever noticed me. The knife held all the fascination he needed on the Christian Sabbath. It was a switchblade, the in-out kind, and for each ejaculation and tuck of its polished blade, caused by the pressure of his thumb extended on a grimy hand wrapped around the shaft, the man laughed a tinny voice of triumph. I thought to take his picture, but feared what he might take in return.
I begin to stake out The Parkview. Karen K will show herself.
I use my little dogs for cover to walk CPW from the north past her building. I stay on the opposite sidewalk. I won’t draw Henry’s attention (or the Dick’s) with this floppy straw hat and sunglasses to disguise me, a common enough sight this time of early summer. It’s just past lunchtime, and people crowd the sidewalks. Mrs Cowper, Napoleon, and Rasputin are easily managed. Likewise, they make it easy for me to stop here and there. Henry has not seen me with dogs.
Two women leave The Parkview as we dawdle near a tree up the street, but neither is my prey. At least, I don’t think so. In all truth, I’m not sure I could recognize Karen Kosek dressed in normal clothing. On our way back twenty-minutes later, we veer inside the park where, occasionally and on pretense of following the dogs’ lead, I walk through the small-leafed brush and over broken twigs along the curtain wall. I poke my head over to further reconnoiter The Parkview’s entrance. A man stands beside Henry, smoking a cigar and talking with one hand, to suggest there’s a lot of back and forth to life, weighing arguments or making decisions. Henry executes a snake charmer’s nod at appropriate pauses of the hand, although I imagine he’s wondering how much of his own life has been wasted listening to all the tenants’ nonsense.
Just once in three days do I spot Karen K. I notice her only by her filthy straw hat perched on her head. I spot it bobbing through the angled trunks of border trees. I pick up her trail east of the Wolman Ice Rink, shuttered for the season, and am so elated that I nearly break into a run, a mistake almost certainly to blow my cover. I reign myself in and follow at a safe distance. It’s time I learn Karen’s habits. Here and there she stops: she looks around randomly; rests on a bench; watches children at play; dips her hand into a trash barrel (a discarded apple with two bites taken along its equator; a newspaper folded into thirds; soda bottles she can return for deposit); and she kicks a stray soccer ball back to a group of kids down from the Barrio. On her way home, she crosses at the 77th Street light, not quite making it this time before cars jump and buckle when they get the green, and curse her with the sour blasts of their horns. Karen K doesn’t jump, doesn’t rush to the curb — she wears three coats pulled over her body on a seventy-degree day, the longest so oversized its tail drags on the ground behind her like a wedding train — she answers the car horns with an upturned middle finger, the stout defiance of the marginalized. She shuffles down the sidewalk unhurried, head down, making room for no one, and turns onto The Parkview’s carpet runner where, with Henry’s meager help and raw-meat smile, she disappears through the open door. I note the time in a small student’s diary.
Days Four and Five permit sightings of Karen K like those of a rare animal in the wild. She proves to be habitual, however, and by the afternoon of Day Nine I follow her for two hours, always from a safe distance behind or across the street. Twice I lose her, but by guessing her routes I pick up her trail later. From Day 15 I can assemble her schedule: she’s out at nine or ten, back by three or four; she walks the streets of Midtown, the Upper West Side, and Central Park; she loiters on city benches, hunched over like an air-sick passenger; she eats from garbage cans or buys hot pretzels to douse with yellow mustard; she rarely stops longer than a traffic light’s interruption.
My dog-walking duties bring me across her path through simple street maneuvers. Her passes through the park are marked by empty hands or bulging shopping bags, whose contents are still only my guess. Her clothes change, but rarely the shoes — Days 8 & 9: one turtleneck and two cardigans of different colors and sizes; Day 13: what looks like a blue knit skirt but turns out to be a dyed burlap sack. Her disguises are nondescript to what’s found in New York; people remotely looking bum-like are eliminated as solid material. I vary my disguise, too, a fact whose connection to Karen K’s outfit and meanderings is not lost on me.
Following her gives me time to play out questions and a few hypotheses. Anyone who wears a homeless getup in broad daylight can’t be a simple fetishist. It’s far too dangerous, especially for a woman. Nevertheless, I have no idea how long this charade has been going on. That first day I recognized her could have been the first day of her bag lady routine, or the hundred-and-first. On her off days, I imagine, she is simply Karen K the writer and Citizen of New York, living the life of any woman her age and profession. For starters, who otherwise does her shopping? Henry? Doubtful. Therefore, her actions have to be the object of a game! She’s bored; there’s no one in her life; upper middle age pulls at her molars; she has lost life’s vitality — the wrong word, but somehow I find it fits in the crooked space she’s elbowed out for herself.
My intention is not to stalk Karen K. I only want to meet her, as I told Henry and The Dick. How I’ll make that into a chance event is something I’ll work out as this malarkey plays out. If she wants to be alone, she’ll tell me when we finally meet. I have respect for people’s privacy, but I feel like I’m stuck in a Stoppard play — wait, no: Mamet. He’s a head taller when it comes to crazy.
On Day 11 I sketched my idea of what Karen K looks like, twenty-five years older than the book jacket photograph. The result showed little likeness to the woman I see under three coats, matted hair, and skin smeared with theater grease to look like street grime. What I first recognized — polished nails, the educated chin — still screams out to me, “You know this woman!” No one resembling that other Karen K has entered or left The Parkview, at least not when I’ve been watching. Whatever she’s doing, she’s very good at doing it.
One day, after I’d given up my bag lady to The Parkview, I watch the front door from my position behind the wall to see if she will go upstairs for a quick change and return to the world as Karen K, culture critic at large. Henry is street-side, looking for me on orders from his mistress (a premonition that won’t leave my head). He stands at the curb, shining his oversized buttons with his sleeves, down one row and up the other. His head turns with the jittery motion of a suburban
lawn sprinkler. I know his routine as well as the dogs’ bladders: whistling to cabs in the morning, lunch break at noon sharp, picking up cigarette butts with a whisk broom and dustpan, and signing for packages brought by car, bicycle, or commercial truck. This is the job Henry holds out for bonuses at Christmas? I think I’m losing the respect I felt for his gab with the widow Robertson, but especially losing the fear I felt when he breathed that toreador’s breath across my brow to scare me off. Of The Dick, I’ve seen only his shadow; he keeps himself behind the doors, standing tall and unmoving like a hallway clock. He must leave for home through a separate entrance.
This stakeout has given me shin splints from stilting on my tiptoes for long periods; I’ve threaded through the park a hundred miles; both groups of dogs are exhausted, and pull me away from their favorite spots, necks arching behind them to stare at me with pleading eyes, Just take us home already! One day Chief started to bark and refused to walk further, taking a stand, to which Boilermaker and Pan joined in. But Marshall, such a big loveable dope, whined like a baby and dropped down to lick himself in front of an audience of Italian tourists. When the others saw the attention Marshall was getting, their mutiny ended. Likewise, Napoleon and Ms Cowper have nipped at my toes and ankles when they’ve become bored with my fast walks, sudden stops to duck behind trees & bushes, and then long, motionless standing, only to bolt when I spot the author-cum-derelict.
After thirty minutes I give up on Karen’s return and ease back from the wall, where I hear the soles of my high tops scruff along the dust and twigs. On my way home I force myself to stop at Metropolitan Museum of Art because it’s not too late and I’m tired and bitchy and annoyed that I can’t seem to catch a bag lady today when I need one, and if I don’t relax with some art, I’ll surely take out my frustration on Belinda. After being scolded for that, Belinda would want to know why, and then I’d have to explain what I’ve been doing for two weeks. Better to unwind.
The Met is closing when I walk up the steps. People file out through the massive iron doors alongside the escorting smile of three blue-uniformed guards, walkie-talkies holstered to their hips and earpiece wires clipped to lapels. From this extrusion Peter N strolls past me.
“Pete. Pete!”
I catch up with him halfway down the stairs. He tells me he needed a break, which gives me a natural excuse for my own presence. We both think the other’s lying, so it’s a fair match, with no need to press. But the museum is closing, Pete assures me. I only want ten minutes, and my watch says I have five, I say. Pete’s pleased to follow me to a guard for a laugh, but that’s all. I turn and march up the stairs. The patron exodus is like wasps whose nest is under attack.
I confront an older guard, a porky Chicano whose breathing is asthmatic and makes his face appear suspiciously blue-red, like he’s being strangled. I show him my watch. He shows me his. We make the simultaneous conclusion that no matter how righteous I feel, his watch wins. Only the gift shop is open, I’m told. I huff, look at Peter, he blinks, but there’s at least something for me. He says he’ll tag along.
The gift shop exudes smells of coffee table tomes and tourist perfume. A line of shoppers at the checkout counter leaves hope that I have fifteen minutes to wander. While most people find taking a nap rejuvenating, I feel the same after looking through art books. But now the background noise of foreign voices, Russian and French and a Greekish confabulation, drown my peace. I dart down an aisle that takes me to heaven; a long table has been stacked with exhibition catalogs, from Kandinsky and Calder and Hopper to Delft and the Italian Renaissance.
“I’m going to the paints,” Pete tells me, and wanders off.
“Yeah, yeah. Good hunting,” I say. “See you when they drag me out of here. Kicking and screaming, I hope. I’ll go proselytize the virtues of art at the city jail nut cage until Belinda bails me out.”
Peter flips me the bird. No sense of humor.
The catalogs are beautiful, oversize volumes, hardcovers shiny in their cloth wraps, four-color jackets and glossed pages. I don’t touch anything, but let my eyes kiss the cover art. Deep breaths take me near a yogic state, and with every exhale the tension flows out of my muscles and joints, draining into the white linoleum under my feet. After this renewal I open books at random. The headache I felt coming on recedes. After five minutes I go in search of the postcard racks.
A pre-teen girl in jeans shorts and a Statue of Liberty T-shirt browses through the first rack, slowly rotating it while her head, not her eyes, moves up and down. I scan the cards from over her shoulder, letting her schoolgirl attention span set the rotation pace. There’s no order to the cards’ placement; Greek busts have been set beside Baroque landscapes, Hopper above Gauguin, a Thalia bust amongst Egyptian cats and Giambologna’s Medici Horse, surrounded by twentieth-century black-line sketches and sepia cityscapes. At first I’m put off, but then I begin to like this disorder. Its unplanned blend of browns and reds and creams and blues coaxes a collage of dreams come through the eras and movements.
I step sideways, over to an unattended turnstile I can control. Its theme is self-portraits. Bruegel’s includes, beside his ruffian appearance with wild hair poking out like straw from a tightly fitted pudding-cup hat, a bespectacled woman in a baggy shirt, who looks birdlike; both figures seem brightly caricatured, their eyes full of self-mocking. Warhol’s red and fuchsia silkscreen lets him be mysterious by blotting out half his face, its blackened twin staring into the void of the viewer’s eyes. He’s in the blue flame of his popularity, enjoying the joke he’s played on the art world for at least a decade. Da Vinci has scratched out an old man, his sober mouth corresponding to the fleshy, hooded eyes of resignation.
Norman Rockwell has his own playful qualities sparkling; he looks in a mirror while drawing himself (his back is to the viewer, which presumably he can see through a second mirror, placed just about where we see his face). His ubiquitous pipe-in-mouth expression resembles a Main Street, U.S.A. grandfather hanging about outside the general store. A study of five heads (his own) is pinned to the canvas, upper left, and four other Masters’ self-portraits hang upper right. How original, I think; how American, for its un-self-conscious egotism. I pick one out of the rack, and also a Rembrandt that catches my eye (he’s drawn himself in half-balding, pudgy-faced middle life). I pass up Gustave Corbet’s Desperate Man because he’s imagined a fiercely deranged self (though perhaps true enough for Corbet).
I fan my choices out like a card player. Each is beautifully printed on good card stock. I have the idea to use them as bookmarks. But I find this card collection lacking. It has no women on offer, even though Judith Leyster has a fine painting in the Met’s Dutch collection, and she was a member of the Haarlem painters’ guild in 1633. Hers, in fact, is about the happiest self-portrait I’ve ever seen — full of life and smartly colored. Her image silently speaks to the audience with an open-mouthed smile (maybe for her growing reputation?) or perhaps she’s laughing at those contemporaries who see women as models, not artists. A little of both, I can imagine.
A voice through a speaker squawks overhead, informing customers it’s time to bring their souvenirs to the sales counter. I give the turnstile a final spin, and that’s when she catches my eye. My free hand stops the motion, turns it back. I pull out Dod Procter’s Self Portrait, done when she must have been in her thirties. She’s looking to her left, into some middle distance; a neutral expression leaves no lines on her face, although her visible eye has resolution of some sort, while her brown hair is bobbed, flapper style. She wears a modest woolen sweater with a Spanish scarf knotted at her throat.
I get into line behind a middle-aged couple whose mumbled complaints ride on some Southwest ranch twang. A hand pinches my ass (I think it’s a hand) and I jump. Attached to the hand is Pete’s arm, and the arm to the shoulder, and the shoulder to all the rest of him, including a whacky grin.
“Look what I’ve found,” he says, and waves a tube of oil paint in front of my face. I cat
ch a bluish brown color and my guess is a phthalo blend. “I’ve been looking for this tint all over town. The supply houses keep telling my supply guys that it’s on back order. No one knows why. ‘Could have something to do with the Chinese buying up so much raw material’ for some shit or another. Do I believe that? They wouldn’t lie, or at least I hope not. But now where do I find it? And tell me why tourists would want to buy paint here, and this particular color.”
“So they can take a bit of history home with them?”
“I s’pose a cheap-o gift set with plastic bristle brushes isn’t good enough for them. They need a forty-dollar tube of paint the size of their toenail fungus salve.”
“For that price they’ll expect to paint like Titian,” I say. “Maybe they should. Did you check if it comes with an instruction booklet?” This gets a laugh, but there’s a cloudy frown hanging over it.
“Yeah. No.” Pete is unfazed. “Unless they have a good paint-by-numbers kit burning a hole in the rec room cupboard.”
“Does that paint really cost so much?” I ask.
“No, but this tube does. And I need it. So it goes on the ‘travel’ expense sheet for my accountant to sort out.”
“I wish I had an accountant.”
“No, you don’t want that wish to come true. When you see all the taxes you have to pay and the FICA you can’t get out of paying, your past life as a teenage burger flipper doesn’t seem all that bad.”
The couple in front of us get louder. He’s hungry and she’s tired of hearing about it. Pete and I elbow each other, like kids on a field trip. The couple wear too-tight trousers, from which their hips bulge like they’ve been collecting rocks on their journey from ranchlands. As the line shuffles forward, I wonder how these two would draw their self-portraits. What would they reflect of themselves to the world? A Warholian gaze of comfort-of-place, or Corbet’s angst, or Renoir’s confident stare, the pious Botticelli, maybe Durer as unequaled genius? And would they be true to their age and count the lines on their faces (a la da Vinci, Rembrandt, Proctor and Leyster)? My bet is they take Rockwell’s path, whose endless spirit captures American values that say art exists to make us happy, not sad or anxious. Something up-beat and prime time, a gloss on the truth. I pay for my postcards and get a weary but cheerful smile from the blond teenager behind the cash register. Photographs are easy self-portraits today. You only have to learn how to load the camera with film, focus the lens, and don’t forget to pick up the prints at Duane Reade.
Outside once again, we breathe fresh NYC air to flush the canned odors of the Met’s circulated A/C. Pete looks in his bag and rustles the tube, as if he’s bought a live mouse and he wants to transfer it to his breast pocket. I see he’s itching to get home, now that he’s come up sevens. We part on the sidewalk, without me having to lie again about being so far from home without one of the dog teams. I toss Pete a wave and walk off, peeking inside my bag of goodies.
Day Nineteen: I get my third chance to get close enough to Karen K that I might speak to her if I have the courage. I don’t even have to follow her to make this happen; she walks right past me. I’m sitting on a bench in Strawberry Fields, nursing my aching legs, without any of the mutts along, writing in a journal and sketching parts of the world in blue ink. One of Karen’s plastic bags brushes my shins, which pulls me from my gaze over the heads of an Asian family performing dreamy Tai-Chi poses while ringed around the John Lennon memorial. Karen stops at the cheesy tribute, elbows her way through the Asians, and kneels on the pavement. Out of one plastic bag she takes a potted plant. The plant’s deep green leaves wiggle when she positions the pot in the center of all the other flowers left as signs of love and lasting sorrow. Most are plastic-wrapped roses with the price tags showing. I lean closer and look for signs of the plant’s purpose or significance, because what she’s laid down is an herb plant, basil I think. She’s wearing a blue jumpsuit, the kind issued to New York sanitation workers, filthy and thread-worn at the knees and elbows like she’s come off an obstacle course, or been dragged behind the garbage truck.
I don’t understand the herb connection, nor her presence. She has caught me unawares because of the time (5:10) and place (touristy & mawkish). When she quickly rises from the half-pious genuflection, I’m still unprepared to follow or interrupt her. Why I want to do the latter is because it’s time I made some move; I can’t follow her forever.
While I’m thinking, making this no-plan, she beats a path through the crowd. I react in the quickness of hurried flight and shove my notebook into one pocket, the fountain pen in another, keeping one eye on Karen parting the crowd with elbows akimbo. But I shove too hard in my haste, and feel the acute pain of pierced flesh as the pen’s needle-sharp nib rips through the pocket and sinks into my inner thigh. I scream.
“Ouch!” The pain rushes across my groin. I shriek. “Fuck!” A dark circle of blood soaks up through my jeans. “Fuck, fuck, fuuuck me!”
People turn and gawk. They’ve discovered a genuine NY-moment: street theater; a kidnapping; mayhem is afoot. My reaction effectuates the perfect plan. A baker’s dozen watch me grope my groin. A billion-plus nerve endings turn my lap into a barbeque. And at the back edge of the crowd, Karen K looks at me from behind the bobble-head tourists. For a long moment she stares; I think she recognizes something in the shape of my face. Her eyes are painted in a smear of blue sparkle eyeshadow, treasure stolen from the purse of a teenager. Then she turns and dips behind the colorful dots of baseball caps and summer hats.
When I lurch from my seat I feel blood flow from my wound, so I drop back onto the slats. Post shock, I wonder if my health plan covers blood poisoning. Post post-shock, I recall the expression on Karen K’s face, the movement of her nose before she fled: she knows that I know who she is.
As I limp home with one hand pressed medically to my wound, I spot a horse carriage entering the park along 59th Street. Its chestnut mare pulls with a steady gait, head held high and straight, no blinders destroying her eyes. Her tail has been braided into thick pleats, and her mane is a pile of narrow cornrows that move like confetti with each step. She’s almost prancing. The carriage is modeled after a nineteenth-century design, with open sides, step-up rails, and a bench seat facing forward. At the reigns sits an equally upright driver in red livery with gold buttons, skin-tight white pants tucked into black leather boots hugging her calves up to the knee. Her boot heels lie solidly on a footboard overhanging the back of the cab. Atop her head is a stovepipe hat. Her hair is braided, too, into pigtails that hang from beneath the hat. The cab is empty of passengers. I hatch another plan, my third (fourth?) in a month.
Gretchen the chestnut mare can easily outpace me if I stay behind her, so I choose an intercepting path across the Heckscher ball fields. I’ll catch her at the feeder lane to Central Park South. I begin to run, but immediately falter into a gangling limp so I don’t bleed to death (overplayed, because the blood stopped almost as soon as it began, but the pain lingers and I’m sure I should get a tetanus shot, and probably won’t because it was just a prick from my Mont Blanc fountain pen, not some cheap Bic with its adulterated inks, which I think makes the real difference between life or death and simple lockjaw, and pages that bleed when they get wet). Nonetheless, I’m certain the limp makes me look like Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy (a movie millions of tourists claim to have watched before visiting the City, thus insuring NY retains its rough edges). At least I have the right city to pull off this look, should a cab stop short from running me over.
The four ball fields are crowded with spectators and ballplayers. Teams playing 14-inch softball stand on the scrubby outfield grass or pebble-strewn infields. Some players crouch zealously whenever a new pitch arcs toward home plate. Cheers from different fields erupt after batters hit balls. Hits sound like the echoes of wooden mallets driving stakes into the hearts of vampires. Umpires yell OUT! and SAFE! with equal intensity. Teams wear makeshift pants and cleat shoes, but their shirts are uniformly colo
red: cadmium orange; cerulean blue; brown ochre; cinnabar green; English red. I dodge through spectators wolfing hot dogs dressed in mustard and pickle relish, who hardly stop to chew before yelling something unintelligible through the chain link fences. It could be encouragement or criticism, and doesn’t seem to make a difference either way. Chunks of sticky white bread and green offal hang on the metal wire.
At the bend along West Drive, I come around broadleaf bushes just as Belinda and Gretchen clip-clop along. My thumb shoots out and both horse and coach-woman angle their heads toward a chest-heaving lump of manhood, hunched at the waist like he’s nursing a hernia. Belinda slows Gretchen with a practiced tug on the reigns, and the carriage comes to a stop at the curb.
“Can I ride up front?” I ask, and in a child’s voice, “Please, lady, pleeeeezzzz!”
“Will you shut up?” murmurs Belinda. “We’re in public.”
I give Gretchen’s shoulder a rub while I walk to the cab to hoist myself up. Belinda is watching me and I’m trying not to wince, but this fails. When I sit, she sees me adjusting.
“Have you peed in your pants?”
“I stabbed myself,” I tell her, and in a huff explain what happened. Fast admission is the best tack here. “I saw someone in the park. When I made a bit of a scramble to catch up and say hello, I injected the nib into my crotch. I guess I didn’t have it capped.”
Belinda frowns. “I don’t like fountain pens. I’m surprised airlines allow passengers on board with such weaponry. You know you’re going to have to buy new jeans.”
“I can sew up the hole, or iron a patch. I’m sure the blood will wash out.”
“And the ink from your blood? We need to get you to your doctor –”
“Dog walkers don’t have health plans. I don’t have a doctor. I know a few vets, though. Perhaps –”
“Then the free clinic will take you. Get a tetanus shot, at the least. Have you ever heard of lock jaw?”
“I’m a sculptor, not an actor. Muteness can only help my career.”
“Minus!”
“Hey, I’m liable to come out of a clinic with something that’s more deadly than tetanus. Like a methadone addiction.”
“Don’t be an ass, honey.”
“It’s not a worry, B. I bled out the ink.”
“In the park? Did you take down your pants with a crowd watching? Pay a five-dollar hooker to suck out all that nasty poison?”
“You’re worse than I am,” I say. Her crudeness is no blandishment, but I can play the game. “But that’s not a half-bad ide-er there, cuz-in Mary-Jo.”
“Jesus, boyfriend, if I didn’t love you, I’d use this whip across your back.”
“I think that kind of love is called S&M — in’it?”
“Only if I hog-tie you before administering the punishment.” Belinda shakes her head, but through her new, friendly frown, she smiles and I see the light of love in her eyes. For some measure, good or bad, she whacks me across the shins with the crop. Then she picks up the reigns and snickers at Gretchen, who chivvies the cab into motion. The mare’s hoof clops are immediately soporific to me.
“It’s nearly six,” says Belinda. “I thought you’d be at the co-op.”
“Change of plans,” I tell her. “Research. Colors and forms. People watching. The young and old and the middle-aged found in New York, wherever they’ve come from across the globe.” I’m rambling through a half-truth. “It’s quite the mix, unlike flipping through mug shots at the post office.”
New York’s pot doesn’t so much melt as it stews: groups walk in their unified races: white with white; black with black; Asian with Asian (a whole subculture with its many strata); Puerto Ricans hand in hand; Mexicans finding their niche; and God forbid, don’t forget the Hassidic Jews dressed like Wild West undertakers. Cross-pollination for the purpose of business is everywhere, naturally (NY is the cosmopolitan city), but that’s the exception regarding friendship, not the norm. Following Karen K wasn’t all that I had my eyes peeled for, otherwise how could I call myself an artist. I pull out the museum postcards to show Belinda. The names, their masterworks, imply the ultimate achievement of artisans through history. We have a laugh at their vanity, a justified and honored tradition among painters.
“I think I’m ready to make maquettes,” I say. “Something’s coming, sweetheart. I need to play in the studio some more and … noodle.”
“Okay,” says Belinda in a concerned-mother tone. I know what she’s thinking: it’s been weeks since the throwing experiment, all through which I’ve said little about work, while she has filled our dinner conversation with descriptions of collectors and dealers, meetings and negotiations. I’m finding it harder to get food down for all the guilt, rising like bile, at producing ideas whose butterfly flutters get caught in a storm. Belinda, though, is my rock of encouragement. “That’s good, honey. See, not so bad. Two or three weeks. A month. I believe you when you say you need to let ideas percolate. By the way, I’m glad you didn’t say ‘fiddle.’ Too much like Nero and the destruction of Rome and a black day for civilization.”
“Yeah. That’s me: helping out eternity.” I ponder regretfully my nineteen-day stakeout, and Karen K’s blue-corona stare. “Time to work now.”
Belinda becomes animated. “Me, too, Minus Mouse. I’ve got news about you.”
I wait for this news, good or bad. Her tone makes it sound good.
“So?”
“No, not now. Too much to tell, and I have two reserved rides. I see my first fare waiting for me up ahead.”
Under the street lamps of 59th Street, where other horse carriages stand idle, and some coachmen bird-dog tourists on their way to an early dinner, I spot two couples dressed to the nines standing beside Belinda’s sandwich board advert.
“Okay, then I’ll jump off,” I say.
“Fine, ArtGuy. But you know….” She looks at me like I’m the man of her dreams.
“Yes?”
“I’m sure I’ll be famished when I get home.”
I do love a woman who can eat, and for a second I look at her riding crop. Her hand gets there before mine. We laugh. I rub her knee and make a promise. She kisses me on the cheek and I vanish from the driver’s perch. The drop to the ground makes me grit my teeth. The things we do for love.
Belinda gets home at nine-forty to find me behind the kitchen island. Three silver serving trays gleam atop the white tile & black grout countertop. Their dome covers promise caloric-rich temptations inside. She lets out a sharp O! and points. “Numbers one, two, and three.” She has changed out of her driver’s costume, her legs sheathed in faded denim. A red sweatshirt holds snugly above her belt loops. “Shall I let out my belt a notch right now?” she teases.
I come around the island and lift the lids one at a time. “A Caesar’s salad to start. Then we have … curried meatballs with grilled eggplant and carrot stalks. And finally, to make your stomach gurgle later on …” my hand pulls the lid off the final tray “… chocolate tartlets.”
Belinda drops her bag, which hits the floor with a salty spank, and runs toward me, arms out. I put the lid down and step up to catch her. She floats right on by, hikes her knees onto the barstool and hovers above the food, smelling the aromas with her eyes closed. Her nose works the air in a rodent’s precocious curiosity at the whiff of food.
“You’re a madman, Minus. A diabolical culinary wizard. An artist with a palate.”
“Careful,” I say, dispensing with modesty. “Words like that will ruin a man.”
“Food like this will ruin my figure,” she says. “So we’ll be even.”
Belinda’s roots in Nebraska have a few Midwest clichés attached: two sisters (one prissy and one rebel) and one brother (BOMC jock); a doting father who gushed over ‘daddy’s girl’; a mother who seasoned each dinner with sacrilegious gossip from the corner church, and intrusive questions about personal diaries, male dominance in business, and what the neighborhood kids did on dates. The stereotypes e
nded on the road separating city and farm. Belinda grew up in the suburbs, just like me (on finding out we both knew the movie No Down Payment from late-night reruns, our friendship was sealed — who could forget Tony Randall as the drunken neighbor looking for extra-marital action on the dance carpet, while all the husbands and wives looked on?). Belinda’s idea of farm life comes from watching those schlock Seventies’ sitcoms Green Acres and Petticoat Junction. The nearest she got to farm work was dating a dairy mogul’s near-do-well son, who tried to talk her into hooking her tits up to the industrial milking machine. When her father died in a head-on collision (a hit-and-run by a local cop, off duty and a known boozer; found three days later in a Colorado jail for, you guessed it, hit and run), Alice was left with four kids yet in the nest. They sold the six-bedroom home, moved to the seedier side of town into a middle-scale housing complex (just like Tony!), and Mom got a job at a doctor’s office in a nearby, tawnier suburb. Alice began to sleep with heart surgeons — “auditioning them” was Belinda’s description (Or they her? Belinda was unclear on this). Meanwhile, fifteen-year-old Belinda hung out at the town pool that first full summer of her depressing life change, to escape the heat (of Nebraska’s summer sun and mom’s mid-life lust), sunning herself in a bikini that — oops! — Alice seemed to have forgotten on her own way to hell was two years too small for a developing teen. “The white polka dots looked nice,” Belinda remembered. “It took me three minutes to figure out why I was so popular.” One day while waiting in line at the poolside concession stand to buy a Dreamcicle, avoiding stares from middle-aged men whose pot-bellies protruded like pregnancies over their Speedos, Belinda dreamed up a real life for herself, a vision to trade in the amber waves of heat rising off suburban asphalt for a real city. First stage: don’t lose your virginity to a tuxedoed stable hand, no matter how deep his daddy’s pockets were. Next: get a college degree, something useful, which meant stay away from the Humanities Department. Finally: New York, here I come! She bought her Dreamcicle and ate it in the shade of an elm tree overhanging the pool’s perimeter fence, where she decided that anything — anything-anything-anything — was better than middle-America mediocrity. Business would take her somewhere. Management. Of what? Well, what did she like to do? The answers tumbled out as fast as the Dreamcicle melted Orange Dye No. 3 down her hand: I like to listen to records; I like to ride horses; I like to ditch math class; and organize meetings of French Club; and lie to mom; and haggle prices at the Saturday Bazaar flea market; read books by Henry Kissinger and other Watergate conspirators; write letters to the editor of the local paper in the persona of an eighty-year-old Russian émigré (and ex-POW); go to the art gallery and choose what she would buy based on which room of her imaginary house the painting would look best in (e.g., Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” in the nursery; Modigliani’s “Nude in a Cushion” above the guest room bed; Bruegel’s (the Elder) “The Slaughter of the Innocents” in the dining room). She also liked to ice skate on a frozen pond, not at an indoor rink.
Belinda’s hand dives knuckles deep into the curry sauce. She pulls it out and two meatballs drip from her fingers. And my dear-heart woman offers me one. I take it between my lips, hold it there, and suck it in with a plop. “Plump Belinda or not,” she says, “I don’t mean you should stop cooking.”
“There are two stomachs in this house,” I tell her. “You won’t see mine ever shrink.”
We munch the meatballs loudly and lick our fingers like cave people at the hunt feast. Then I offer her a plate, and we start with the salad. Later, over coffee and a tartlet, Belinda spills the beans about her news, earlier dished out as a headline on the carriage seat.
“I have two collectors coming in from the Hamptons to see your sculptures, here at the loft, and then listen to you on the arts panel. They might want to see sketches of what’s in store for the future. Just sketches, mind you, but something you can tease them with. You can refuse, which might work to our advantage.”
It doesn’t matter that there are no sketches, I tell her, but she explains that I can simply describe something to them. Meanwhile, whatever it is I’ll create in the next year will “be like found money to these guys.” Belinda smacks her lips on a bite of the tartlet. She says, “The best play, Minus Mouse, is not a Hail Mary pass or a bunt to the third base side. You want to let these people use you, in a good way. No-no, don’t worry; never worry. Later, we’ll turn the tables. It’s possible.” It’s possible I blink in response.
Her phrase makes me shudder, although “use” is a fact of business. Anyone who tells you that art dealers are there to always help you – no, I can’t think this way, not yet; these are the thoughts of disgruntlement. To step into that bath shall be to drown.
“By the way.” Belinda has stopped her fork from entering her mouth, holding the last bite of chocolate. “How’s your self-inflicted wound?”
“Fine,” I say. “Just before you got home, I had another expert blood-sucker come in for the five-dollar routine.” I wink. Belinda arches an eyebrow, but eats the chocolate and lets me get away with nothing because she doesn’t bother to respond to my frat-house humor this time.
“I thought you were giving galleries the cold shoulder,” I say, somewhat dumbfounded by all this new information. The pressure on me to make art feels like a hair shirt. “That other kind of ‘turn the tables’ thing.”
“Eh-heh!” she says, like a belch. “They come with the price of admission, sometimes. If I’m introduced, I shan’t be intentionally rude. That’s not worth the sentimentality it would bring us thirty years from now, but anyway, there’s more where these people come from. Do you know they like to call themselves ‘gallerists’?”
I did know.
“Well I never heard such a word when I was modeling. Sounds made up, if you ask me. So much pretension in this business. Worse than artists themselves. I don’t mean you, sweetie.” She winks, in case I hadn’t heard the playful irony. “You’re one of the few lucky ones. On the other hand, I suppose ego and pushiness and – what’s the word I’m looking for?”
“Confidence?” I say, confidently. There’s no sarcasm or irony laced between the syllables.
“Come on, Mighty Minus, give me some credit. You tell me all the time how full of shit so many artists are. My god, the only person you hang out with who’s ‘one of them’ is Peter. Even he’s a bit of a stretch, for my money, but hey, no one can bat a thousand, right?”