by J. J. Murray
I squint. “And that’s a good thing?” A soap opera with a clumsy waitress? How will that help ratings?
“Yes! They noticed me! I mean, I thought I had blown it big-time, but I got a callback.”
“That’s why we’re home so late,” Ebony adds.
“So, what soap are you on?”
“I’m not on a soap, Daddy.”
“You’re not?”
“No.” She spins around gracefully and doesn’t hurt herself. “I am now the new waitress at Helen and Joe’s Café on Meeting of the Waters.”
I look at Ebony. “Meeting of the Waters?”
“It’s new,” Ebony says. “A sit-com. On cable.”
No wonder I’ve never heard of it. I don’t even watch regular TV anymore.
“It’s like Friends, only more ethnic,” Destiny explains. “It’s only a small part, Daddy, at most one or maybe two appearances per show, but I finally have something other than a high school play to put on my résumé.”
“So you’re in a real show.”
“Yeah.” She smiles. “I am so excited!”
“When will you be on?”
“Well, I start shooting next week, and if the show gets renewed, I’ll be on next fall.”
I catch Ebony rolling her eyes. Evidently, Meeting of the Waters doesn’t have much of a chance for renewal. “Well, that’s cause for celebration. Why don’t we all go out somewhere for dessert or something?”
“That’s what I wanted to do, too, but no, Mama’s got to work on her paintings.”
“I have a show to do,” Ebony says, “and I wasted most of the day in the city.”
I can’t stand to see Destiny pout. “Destiny and I could go out. That would give you some peace and quiet.”
Destiny shakes her head. “No, that’s all right, Daddy. I have a couple million phone calls to make anyway.” She heads up the back stairs, then ducks her head back to us. “But you two owe me a celebration, okay?”
“Okay,” I say.
I sit and pick at my salad, trying to catch Ebony’s eyes, but she seems lost in thought. “Everything okay?” I ask.
“No,” Ebony says. “She’s building up her hopes for a show that might not even make it through this season. An ethnic Friends? Give me a break.”
“Have you seen it?”
“Once. It’s such a rip-off. Six friends living in the same apartment building who don’t work, hang out at a café, and say somewhat funny, mostly nasty things to each other.”
Sounds like Friends, all right.
“The only thing different is the color of the actors and the theme song.”
I take her hand. “Hey, it’s something, right? Even if the show folds, she’ll be able to say she was going to be on it, right?”
“Yeah, I guess it’s better than nothing.” She stands and throws away her trash. “You coming down?”
“You want me down there?”
“Yeah. It’ll be a date.”
“In the basement? How romantic.”
She raises her eyebrows. “I may paint you in the nude.”
“Yeah?” Sounds kinky. “Who’ll be in the nude, me or you?”
“You.”
“Oh.”
“But I don’t have nearly enough bright white paint, so—”
“Ha, ha.”
Watching Ebony paint is like nothing I’ve ever seen or heard. She first puts on some Muddy Waters, some good, old stomp music with heavy harmonica and a thudding drumbeat. Then she lines up all her easels in rows under several banks of track lights, and after bopping around each canvas, she gets to work in time with the music on the canvas in front of her. And she doesn’t stop bopping, her hips swaying, her ass shaking up a storm inside her sweats. That scene from the movie Ghost enters my head, and I almost wish Ebony had a pottery wheel.
“You getting turned on?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
She dabs a streak of gold onto the skyline of one of those depressing self-portraits, and the portrait immediately changes to a happier tone. With one streak of gold, she has added hope. Amazing.
“Picasso said that your work in life is the ultimate seduction.” She dances from side to side, outlining her nose with the tiniest line of gold. “Am I seducing you?”
“You know you are.”
She laughs and darts to another portrait, highlighting a cloud with gold. “Mayhew says he puts jazz on canvas.” She spins around. “I prefer stompin’ on canvas, just stompin’ the blues, just painting all those books I read so long ago as a kid.” She paints a line of gold on the back of her hand. “If you get bored, you could check out all my rave reviews. They’re in that file cabinet over by the water heater in the first drawer in a folder called ‘Clippings.’”
“I’m not bored.”
She dashes to another portrait and spreads gold on the shoreline. “But I want you to read them, Peter.”
“Oh.”
Her reviews are, to say the least, wonderful. “Ebony Mills creates a universal space, a snapshot of tone, mystically hopeful, always searching,” reads one review. “Her work is intense, immediate, simple and direct, subtle, unified, warm, and rhythmic,” reads another. I look up and see Ebony doing a little shimmy in front of a canvas. That reviewer has described what I see in front of me right now. Ebony Mills is her art.
“You read the one about how uninhibited I am yet?” she shouts out.
I flip through to find it, reading, “‘Slithers of paint, entanglements of color, strong, stunningly unexpected, tugs at the heart and mind.’”
“Yeah, that’s the one.” She flattens her brush and fills in a rise of sand with gold. “I do love to do some tugging.” She jumps back and puts a tiny dot of gold on her subject’s eye. “And I have to have color. Colors are my babies.”
Several hours and innumerable slithers of color later, she poses in front of her portraits, spinning her paintbrush like a baton twirler, paint whipping into the air and covering her T-shirt, her hair, and her face, and she is the most beautiful woman on this or any other planet. “What do you think?”
I step close to her. “They…they aren’t depressing anymore.”
She turns and backs into me, wrapping my arms around her. “I know. I’ve just set them all free, and all it took was a little color.”
21
But when it comes to finishing the tapestry, Ebony won’t allow me to watch her work. “It’s going to be a surprise,” she tells me. “Go work on our novels.”
I try, but I can’t. It’s not that I don’t want to. I stare for hours at what I’ve written, but I just can’t seem to find the words to go on. So in addition to insomnia, which mocks the three or four sleeping pills I take every night, I also have writer’s block.
Instead of writing or even revising, I lounge around the house, wash Ebony’s car, walk Seven at the beach, and go clothes shopping with Destiny to pass the time to wear myself out. Ebony comes up for air every few hours for food, drink, and a kiss, and then she disappears into the basement again. And all night long, I hear the sound of the shuttle racing back and forth across the loom in rhythm to some old Robert Johnson blues, sounds that should lull me to sleep. Though I’m dead tired when Ebony does come to bed, I get wired all over again just watching her fall asleep and dream.
I have become a literary zombie.
It rains heavily the night of Ebony’s art show at DC Moore, and though Ebony worries that no one will come, the gallery is packed. I stumble and walk like the living dead from portrait to portrait, watercolor to watercolor, while Candace holds court with an older crowd talking about the bad old days and Destiny flits around networking the glitterati. I hear shouts and see the crowd part on several occasions, local luminaries passing like frosted wheat through the throng. I’m not even sure where Ebony is, but this is her night to shine, not mine. I’m trying to keep a low profile.
I stop and stare at the watercolor in front of me. It’s the Argo at full sail crashing through the waves on th
e open sea. I hope no one offers to buy this one. I’d like to have this one, maybe put it up in the cabin near the Captain’s urn.
“Some boat,” says a man beside me.
I hadn’t even felt his presence. I guess my body must be shutting down or something. I take a sip of my coffee and look—at Robert De Niro, a beautiful black woman on his arm. Whoa. “Sure is.”
He squints his famous squint and points at the watercolor. “Does this say Argo?”
“I think so,” the woman says.
“Good name for a boat.” He looks at me, and he smiles that smile known the whole world over. “See you around.”
And then Robert De Niro drifts away, leaving me blinking. I look back at the Argo. “If he wants you, he can have you.”
I finish my coffee and float over to a landscape, surprised no one else is drinking it in. Ebony rests on the beach in the foreground, her legs shining in the sun, clouds playing and dancing above her.
“Quite a fun fair, yes?”
I turn to see a tall, distinguished-looking man wearing a fine gray suit flipping through the show’s catalogue, an umbrella in the crook of one arm. Is he Australian? “Yes.”
“I had a dickens of a time getting here, what with the roads from the airport so greasy. The meteorological office says we may get snowed up by week’s end.”
Must be English. I doubt the average Australian would use “dickens” and “greasy” in the same sentence. “That’s what I hear.”
“And the queue on the pavement was tediously long. This is truly a city that never sleeps.”
And I am a man who never sleeps. New York City and I are one.
“Are you an aficionado of Miss Mills’s work?”
“Yes.” I extend a hand. “Peter Underhill.”
He shakes it. “John Bevington. Are you of the Sussex Underhills?”
Oh, yeah, I used to be English. “I might be. I don’t know.”
He sizes me up. “Wessex perhaps. Your nose is Wessex. Are you a collector?”
“Not really.”
“Pity. Ebony Mills is simply amazing.” He waves a hand in front of the landscape in front of us. “Notice the clouds. They’re almost like candy floss topped with double cream.”
Candy floss? Double cream?
“Observe their anticlockwise motion, almost as if they’re riding a roundabout.”
I have no idea what this man is saying. “Yes,” I say, just to be polite. I search for Ebony or Destiny to save me from this man, but I can’t see them anywhere. “So, what brings you to the Big Apple?”
“Miss Mills, of course. I’m here more on business than holiday. Investing in the arts is a much better hedge against shares and stocks these days.”
“So you collect Miss Mills’s work?”
“Indeed. I am one of her most loyal patrons.”
I better stick with this guy. He’s probably the one who has funded Ebony’s house. “So you flew all the way from England to see Ebony’s show?”
“Quite. It’s so much better than buying by auction. I wander about and make note of the pieces I’d like to acquire, and then I hand this catalogue to Miss Mills. She does the rest.”
I decide here and now that Ebony will handle any and all negotiations with Olympus. All this makes sense in a roundabout way. American patrons collect European art, and European patrons collect American art. I wonder if English artists have trouble getting shows in London.
“I am most curious about that tapestry, aren’t you?” He points with his umbrella at a huge expanse of wall where the tapestry hides underneath a black velour drape. “She’s left space for the title in the catalogue. You’ve noticed that she only numbers her work.”
I want to say, “Quite,” but decide against it. “Yes.” Every piece of Ebony’s work begins with the number seven and ends with the date she finished it.
“Quite curious, but unique.”
I look over at the draped tapestry, then glance at the catalogue. Sure enough, there is a blank line three inches long. “Intriguing,” I say.
He nods. “She has quite a flair for the dramatic, yes?”
“That she does.”
Ebony appears out of the crowd, walks directly to me, kisses me on the cheek, and whispers, “I missed you.” She turns to Mr. Bevington. “Good to see you here as always, Sir John.”
Mr. Bevington is a knight? Ebony’s main collector is an English knight?
Sir John bows to Ebony. “A magnificent show as always, Miss Mills. When will we have the unveiling of that mysterious tapestry?”
“In due time, Sir John, in due time.” She smiles and puts an arm around me. “This is my fiancé, Sir John.”
Sir John smiles. “I had no idea.”
Ebony winks at Sir John. “Everyone will have an idea soon enough.”
Sir John nods and continues wandering from portrait to portrait, and I can’t contain myself. “Your biggest patron is an English knight?”
“What? Oh, that.” She pulls me through the crowd to a less congested space near the Argo watercolor. “John isn’t really a knight. I think he’s a lawyer or barrister or something like that. I’ve just been calling him ‘Sir John’ since he rescued me and my bank account years ago by buying up most of my earliest works.” She takes a deep breath. “Here comes trouble.”
I turn and see a man fighting through the crowd, his eyes focused on us. He’s a short spectacled man sporting a red bow tie, red suspenders, and an ill-fitting corduroy sport jacket complete with red patches, and he carries a thick press notebook.
“Who’s he?” I ask.
“Morton Papp.”
The name means nothing to me. “And he is…”
“Art critic from the Times.”
“Oh.” She seems so tense! “I love the way he dresses.”
“It’s his trademark. I’ve never seen him at any of my shows before, so maybe I’m about to hit the big time.”
“Aren’t you excited?”
“A little. He can make or break a show with just one column.” She squeezes my hand. “He’s big, Peter, so be good.”
“How can someone so big be so short?”
She smiles. “Stop.”
As Mr. Papp approaches, I see beads of sweat teeming on the bridge of his nose. “Miss Mills, do you have a minute?”
“Yes, Mr. Papp,” Ebony says.
He flips through several pages of notes. “I’m not, uh, familiar with you, so, uh, is this show representative of your work?”
“For the most part,” Ebony says.
“Hmm.” He flips a few more pages and makes a notation. “It’s not exactly ‘black art,’ is it?”
Ebony nearly squeezes all the blood out of my hand. “No, Mr. Papp, it’s art by a black woman—there’s a difference.”
“Hmm” is all Mr. Papp can reply.
What a prick! I’ll bet he doesn’t ask white artists, “It’s not exactly ‘white art,’ is it?”
“Let’s see, uh, where are you from?” He adjusts his glasses, releasing that blob of sweat down his face. If I had a handkerchief, I wouldn’t give it to him.
“I’m from Brooklyn, Mr. Papp.”
Mr. Papp blinks twice slowly. “As in, uh, Brooklyn, New York?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Papp looks as if he’s going to swallow his bow tie.
He makes another notation and shakes his head. “I see.”
“Do you, Mr. Papp?”
He looks up. “Pardon me?”
“Do you really see the art around you?”
Yes! Ebony is on the offensive, and Mr. Papp is in for it.
Mr. Papp removes his glasses and shines them on a sleeve. “Miss Mills, I have been doing this for much longer than you’ve been an artist, so, yes, I do see the art around me.”
“Do you see art, or do you want to see ‘black art,’ whatever ‘black art’ is?”
He replaces his glasses. “You are black, are you not?”
“Since birth, but my art isn’t.
Art is art, Mr. Papp.”
He smiles at me. “Is it? Hmm.”
“Does it bother you, Mr. Papp, that I’m a young, attractive, African-American woman from Brooklyn?”
“Um, er, uh, no, of course not, but I was under the impression that—”
“Under what impression, Mr. Papp?”
He rudely flips through more pages. “Never mind. Uh, where did you study?”
“Hofstra.”
He looks up sharply. “Hofstra?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm. Really.” He scribbles more notes. “So you’re basically self-taught.”
“No, Mr. Papp. I studied under several local artists.”
“Such as?”
“Laszlo Tar, for example.”
“The Laszlo Tar?”
“Yes. We spent many days painting watercolors in Huntington.” She winks at me. “That’s out on Long Island, Mr. Papp.”
If this weren’t so important for Ebony’s career, I would be letting this guy have it. What a putz!
“I know where Huntington is, Miss Mills.” He shuts his notebook and stows it inside his jacket.
“Are you staying for the unveiling of the tapestry, Mr. Papp?” Ebony asks.
“No. I’ve seen all I need to see.”
Uh-oh. He’s going to skip the grand finale?
“Oh, Mr. Papp, I think you see only what you want to see,” Ebony says. My thoughts exactly. “Before you go, Mr. Papp, I’d like to ask you a question.”
He turns, but doesn’t speak.
“Mr. Papp, can you name the last African-American female artist to have her own show anywhere in New York City?”
“Hmm.” Mr. Papp seems on the verge of giving an answer several times, but he only shines his glasses once again.
“You can’t, can you? Well, from now on, you’ll remember this moment, so that when anyone asks you that question, you’ll be able to say that the last African-American female artist to have her own show anywhere in New York City was Ebony Mills of Brooklyn, New York, who was educated at Hofstra University and studied under Laszlo Tar.”
Mr. Papp leaves us without so much as a good-bye.