Sweet Desserts

by Lucy Ellmann

  I wandered, trembling and furious, back to his bedroom to collect my whimpering child. Mimmo escorted us back to our pensione, pretending that nothing had happened. He asked me to come for lunch the next day. I was too scared to say anything.

  I could no longer cope with Venice. I kept crying. I wept almost continually on the train home. Lily offered me sweets, and waited for me to recover. Back in London, she still wants pink shoes, and I keep seeing Mimmo’s face everywhere.

  Don’t Say YES When You Want To Say NO

  Yes, now you too can break from a self-limiting way of life, as countless graduates of Assertiveness Training can testify, launching yourself on a life-changing program which is easier than you think!

  Satellite Connection

  ‘Each jealous of the other, as the stung

  Are of the adder.’

  Write letters – that’s what sisters who are close are supposed to do, even daily to Australia. Franny phoned, from Vermont. She phoned to tell me she’d broken her self-imposed chastity and was having a wild affair with ironically a British art student. She claimed she’d never had a real orgasm until now. She was overwhelmed by sex and sensuality for the first time in her life.

  ‘What do all your feminist chums make of this?’ I asked, at a loss for anything better to say.

  ‘I guess I’m looking pretty good these days, you know? I’m pretty thin – I was so poor recently. The bank wouldn’t let me have any money, so I was living literally on yoghurts [Boysenberry]. And then this beautiful guy asks me out to dinner. I couldn’t refuse, I was too hungry! So he bought me a huge steak, and after I’d eaten it all, well, he turned out to be this incredible lover.’

  ‘It strikes me I’ve heard that line somewhere before.’

  ‘Aw, Suzy. You’ve got to meet him. When are you going to come visit me anyway?’

  It was the first I’d heard of her wish for me to visit.

  ‘When you pay me the fifty bucks you owe me for meeting a man within five years!’

  Franchipan Fancies

  Fill the boat with franchipan mixing, and then pipe lines across the sweet paste which has been previously thinned with water to piping consistency. When baked, wash over with hot apricot jelly.

  The Private View was in full swing when I got there, a rowdy gathering tucked inconspicuously away in the middle of Cork Street. Nothing like some of the ones I go to, where the dealer looks you up and down to see if you’ve only come for the booze. I followed a large edifice of a man into the gallery, but somehow got ahead of him on our way to the champagne. A man in an ornate tuxedo was pouring eagerly. Most of the people there looked like they’d never done anything else in their lives except go to Cork Street openings, and never done anything else with their hands but gesture listlessly towards paintings. Yet none of them seemed to be talking about art (the last resort of the uninitiated). I noticed several empty wine-glasses atop a small glass case in which a Gaudier-Brzeska sculpture sat – his every work has been treasured since his early death.

  I was not in a good mood. I wanted to down some champagne and see a few pictures. The pictures, from what I could tell, were pink; the champagne was normal. My eyes rested in the end on the abundance of red hair working its way down the back of the girl ahead of me. Not bright tangy red, but like rust dampened with grey or green. It was hard to believe that such a color could last the length of the hair, and I set to wondering what progress had been made in producing children from two women. Genetically, wouldn’t this serve nature’s purposes perfectly well? Of course, genetically, red hair poses some problems. But maybe it was dyed, anyway. Chris Taft’s red hair was flashing at me through pine trees in my mind when I was startled out of my reverie by Alan Fry, who ran D.K. Magazine (short for ‘Detailed Knowledge’), for which I’d written the occasional exhibition review.

  ‘What do you make of them?’ he asked me, flicking his five-o’clock be-shadowed chin towards the pink paintings.

  I mouthed on about idiosyncratic lines, the flatness of the picture plane, and indeterminacy, in an evidently satisfactory manner, for he asked me out to dinner.

  When a scientist is working on experiments he very often needs a container to hold liquids. This piece of apparatus is called a beaker. A beaker has a lip for easy pouring.

  We walked to a pasta place Alan Fry knew. He stopped so abruptly outside it, I sprinkled every single ingredient of my bag on to the pavement. He waited, a little impatiently I thought, while I recovered myself.

  ‘Where do you come from?’ he asked, when we were finally seated. ‘I imagine you from Minnesota: barn-dances and apple pie.’

  I was not particularly flattered – do people from Minnesota drop a lot of handbags?

  ‘No, not Minnesota,’ I said mysteriously. ‘My mother went there once – a lot of snow.’ Flucked again. Alan Fry was fascinated by Americana, the quainter the better: his speech was littered with semi-assimilated slang, and the occasional attempt at an American accent. And I’d failed him: I was not from Minnesota.

  ‘How long have you lived here anyway?’ he asked somewhat suspiciously.

  ‘Oh, about fifteen years.’

  ‘You haven’t lost your accent.’

  ‘No, I decided not to.’

  ‘You sound like you just got off the boat! You’re not thinking of going back in the near future, are you?’

  ‘Well, I was thinking of going back for a visit,’ I said quickly. ‘My sister’s in Vermont until the end of this year and I’d kind of like to–’

  ‘Oh, Fran! How’s she doing? It really breaks me up she hasn’t been working for us lately.’

  He was presented with penne, I with gnocchi, which always make my heart sink.

  ‘She’s okay,’ I said.

  ‘Well, if you’re going over anyway, you fancy a trip to the Big Apple? Do you know Manhattan?’

  ‘Well, a bit. Why?’ I asked, flustered but hopeful.

  ‘Okay. Call ol’ Fran and tell her you’re coming,’ he said masterfully. ‘We need an article on the New Wave, all these fat-assed East Village guys that’re taking over the art market. You’re perfect for the job: you’re American.’ He pronounced the word with relish. ‘Maybe you can figure them out.’

  ‘I don’t know much–’

  ‘Nobody knows anything about them over here! Though you must’ve heard of Ken Derring?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And who else? Oh, there’s this guy called Gorot. He’s French, and black – or at least one or the other. He’s been collaborating with Warhol.’

  ‘Hasn’t everyone?’ I piped up adroitly, I thought.

  ‘Ha! And there’s Al Pole, and Rob Dole, and Burlo …’

  I hadn’t heard of a single one of them. I bluffed it out by eating gnocchi. Alan Fry talked on, about discourses, and new galleries, and graffiti, and Schlamowitz, and discourses. I tried to follow him, and wished I was anywhere else, except that he was rather good-looking. In fact, by the time we’d finished eating, I found I’d enthusiastically agreed to the proposal that I go to New York for a few weeks, interview the New Wave, and report back to D.K. on the subject.

  Alan Fry wasn’t going to pay me much, since I was going anyway, but he’d pay for a few meals in New York, he said. He also didn’t seem to want to take me to bed, so we parted company on Albemarle Street, a name that has always seemed to me to imitate in sound the contours of a cunt. I didn’t bother saying this to Alan Fry, though – I’d impressed him enough for one evening.

  I felt disgruntled all the way home on the bus, and when I got home, I looked Alan Fry up in the phone-book and peered at his Kensington address and phone-number, wondering if I should call him up and tell him I fancied him. But I was scared of losing what little work D.K. gave me, and especially the New York job. I called Franny instead. She seemed a bit peeved I’d been asked to do a whole article for D.K., and enquired dubiously what I was planning to do with Lily if I came.

  ‘Jeremy can probably take her – he’s not worki
ng at the moment. But where will I stay in New York? Do you know anybody– Oh, I know! I could stay with Melanie.’

  ‘Do you still keep in touch with that dumbo?’ Franny asked.

  ‘How’s it going with John?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, scrumptious. Literally: he’s always buying me nice things to eat!’ She giggled.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Hey, you could do me a favor, Suzy. Would you help me move all my stuff? I’ve decided to come back at Christmas instead of in the summer.’

  ‘Oh.’ (Franny back in town.)

  ‘John is going back at Christmas, you see.’

  ‘Oh.’ (Franny-plus-boyfriend back in town.)

  Continental Drift

  Jeremy had found himself a flat; it had only taken him about nine months. We arranged things so that he could take care of Lily in the house, and then move out on my return. I moved everything out of my Pimlico place to confirm this plan.

  I arrived in New York in late November. Melanie’s husband, just back from a three-month stay in Java researching a seventeenth-century sculptor for his Ph.D., remained in his Study most of the time, laughing to himself. Melanie intermittently urged him to go to a psychiatrist, and made him cookies, which he ate in huge quantities and then berated her for making him fat. He was considering divorce – not a bad idea I thought, under the circumstances, though part of me envied them. After all, they still had sex, and cookies.

  What you are about to read

  is stranger than fiction and

  concerns two ordinary

  looking objects.

  ‘Guess who I saw in a book-shop the other day,’ Melanie said, as we sat in her kitchen eating Molasses Bread soon after my arrival.

  ‘Who?’ I asked, not expecting to have ever heard of whoever it was.

  ‘Christopher Taft!’

  ‘Are you kidding?!’

  ‘No. And you should see him! He’s a banker.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’

  ‘He’s living in Brooklyn Heights.’

  ‘What, is that expensive or something?’

  ‘Oh, very chi-chi!’

  ‘Huh!’

  I ruminated over this information while I plodded around the East Village the next day, looking hesitantly into dumpy little galleries. I bought a cheap tape-recorder on 47th Street and with it interviewed all the wrong people.

  I love you, and you’re not just a

  sex object to me, though I was real

  turned on in the chapel when my

  hand was on your breast and we were

  kissing, I don’t want to use the word

  tit because it sounds slummy.

  I wandered down Avenues A, B and C, past junkies sleeping in the snow, and thought of my own emptiness. I thought how nobody had loved me since Christopher Taft. I thought how little I liked neo-graffiti artists and New York in the cold. When I got back to Melanie’s apartment, I phoned Franny and asked her to get me Chris’ number in Brooklyn Heights. Franny reluctantly phoned Kate Taft in Oklahoma, who turned out to be recovering from a debilitating disease she’d caught in Africa five years before – the disease had a seven-year span. Inbetween bouts, Kate was working in a dog kennel. Nonetheless, she managed to give Franny Chris’ number. Three or four days later Franny called me with it. I’d already looked him up in the phone-book by then and called him.

  ‘Suzy Schwarz!’ he said. His voice affected me as it always had. Terrible that I’d been without him for so long.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, fine. How are you?’

  ‘Okay. Uh, Melanie tells me you’re in banking now?’

  ‘Yeah. What are you doing? What are you doing in New York?!’

  ‘Oh, well, I’m trying to write an article about the new East Village art scene. Hey, Chris, um, did you ever get a letter a few years ago by any chance, I mean, a letter from me? It’s just, you never replied.’ I held the receiver away from my wavering voice.

  ‘A letter? No, I haven’t had a letter from you as far as I know for about fifteen years!’

  ‘Oh, well, maybe I forgot to send it.’ (Saved.)

  ‘Maybe my parents didn’t forward it. Hey, you know, I have a small Ken Derring picture!’

  ‘Really? What of?’ (His parents had opened it!?)

  ‘Oh, a barking dog and a crawling baby,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I must admit I’ve seen a lot of those! Though not small ones.’

  It was all very polite. We arranged to meet at the Yale Club that Thursday. Meanwhile, I pursued my study of New York culture. I had a huge breakfast with a vague friend of Franny’s who was into mysticism and meditation herself but claimed to know a lot about the current scene.

  ‘They have no particular aims, except painting to make money. Start a competition for a picture called “Shit in a Trash-can” and they’ll all paint pictures for it,’ she told me. ‘And there’s a whole other bunch of them that paint only pictures of TV aerials, pylons, and telegraph poles.’

  The galleries were called things like Scum, Hard-On, Brackish Water, 52-J, and Fun, and everybody was indeed talking about Warhol all over again. He was publishing a gigantic magazine that I made good use of one day, to keep the snow off practically my whole body. In his honor, Tickle-Two-Tums, a subway graffiti artist, had painted a series of Brillo-pad boxes across several trains. I decided to write the article about appropriation: people running around stealing stuff and calling themselves artists. My theme was really the absent artist, as per usual.

  Thursday arrived. I dressed casually – in several layers of my sexiest clothing – and went to the Yale Club, near Grand Central Station. I walked in at the appointed hour and sat down in the foyer (which was as far as unaccompanied women could go). Across from me sat three old men, reading their papers. One got up and approached me. I still didn’t recognize him.

  ‘You look just the same,’ he said.

  It was Chris Taft. He had allowed his red hair to thin and turn brown.

  We tried to find somewhere else to have tea, but in the end gave up and just sat in the lounge of some hotel. He asked me why I’d wanted to see him.

  Put a blackboard on the ground

  and get someone to sit on it.

  Try to push the blackboard along.

  Will it move?

  Put some soapy water on your

  hand. Now try to open the door.

  My New Found Land

  You will need an empty shoe polish tin.

  Telephones are an important feature of New York life, and one with which New Yorkers seem strangely comfortable. Everyone has an answering machine so with any luck you never have to talk to the real person, but there’s also an intimidating service that allows you to talk to two real people at the same time. You’re talking to Party No 1 and you hear a distinctive click. So you say, wait a sec, somebody else on the line, and you press down the receiver button and thereby get hold of Party No 2. After discovering who Party No 2 happens to be, you’re then faced with this awful dilemma, a nightmare for those of us without social aplomb: you decide who you’d rather speak to and tell the other one you’ll call them back. People pay the phone company for this privilege.

  ‘Just a sec, Franny, there’s someone else on the line,’ I said with some satisfaction, and switched into the air waves of an artist I’d been referred to by somebody or other. I then clicked back to Franny and told her I’d call her later.

  ‘Well, when would you like to come?’ the artist asked me.

  ‘Tomorrow, if that’s convenient for you. I don’t have much time to spend in New York – I’m supposed to be in Vermont.’

  ‘Fine. Third floor.’

  ‘Oh, but what time, please?’

  ‘Any time.’

  I set out the next day without much enthusiasm. Not more with-it artists. At the shop belonging to Scum Gallery, I decided to check out the bargains I’d heard that the gallery’s artists made specially to be sold there. The small plastic decapitated babies wer
e cheap. In fact their only real competition for rock-bottom prices were some cone-shaped objects you were supposed to wear on your nose in order to gouge people’s eyes out.

  I was pretty tired of New York, too tired to try to figure out exactly where the artist lived, so I took a taxi. I was dreading the sight of more terrible paintings, the need to be polite and to think up intelligent questions. The taxi-driver was clearly psychotic. He weaved through Houston Street as if he were trying to evade a barrage of snipers’ bullets. I was almost in tears when he finally let me out, still alive, into the beginnings of a snowstorm.

  No one answered the front door of Jim Carlucci’s apartment building. The third-floor windows were too high for me to throw a stone, if I could have found one. I was beginning to think about taking another taxi straight back to Melanie’s, when a scruffy guy came up and went into the building. I squeezed through the door with him just in time. He snorted. I asked him if this was where Jim Carlucci lived. He said nothing and disappeared surprisingly fast up the stairs. I went up two flights and knocked on the first door I came to. A beautiful man, somewhat pudgy with rumpled yellow hair, answered it.

  ‘Sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for Jim Carlucci.’

  ‘That’s me. Come on in. Want some tea?’

  I asked him a lot of dumb questions, receiving replies like ‘Nope’ and ‘Yep’ and ‘So what?’ I stirred honey into my tea feeling increasingly hopeless, until he brought out a joint and showed me his paintings. No collage, no violence. As if nature were welcome here in the heart, or ass, of Manhattan, his pictures were of big trees, striving hard for the light of the orange or yellow sky behind them, filling the canvas with a mass of botanical groins.

  ‘Pretty sexy,’ I suggested.

  ‘Really? I’ve forgotten sex. That’s why I’m making such a play for you.’

  I cheered up.

  He went off to have a shower. I sat there, feeling hunger of various kinds. For a long time there was the sound of water running. Finally, I went into the little bathroom that was covered in tiny white tiles. He was there, his naked body behind the textured glass, as if preserved in ice for me.