Vigil for a Stranger

by Kitty Burns Florey

  “Your son who lives in Paris?”

  “That’s the only one I’ve got.”

  “With the man who does those interesting illustrations—is that right? Lucy’s Dog. Did I get it right?”

  Lucy’s Pup. Le Petit Chien de Lucie. Il Canino di Lucia. Das Hund von Lucy. The book that had transported Emile out of my life had been translated into thirteen languages and sold, in America, nearly 400,000 copies. It was incredible to me that a man as insensitive as I considered Emile to be could write such a wonderful book for children. Even I had to admit it was a wonderful book—a classic lost-and-found story of a little Parisian girl’s search for her beloved doggie. Holding that book in my hands, I had wished desperately that I had a small child to read it to—tears came to my eyes with the desire to read that book to a child. Emile had been a moderately successful children’s book illustrator for years; this was his first attempt at writing as well as illustrating, and it seemed to spark something in him: in the books he illustrated for others, the pictures were foggy and dreamy and formless—mysteriously unlike Emile’s uptight personality, and unappealing, I always thought, to children, who tend to be literal-minded. But in his own book the drawings were crisp and charming and humorous, exactly right for the simple, timeless story. The book was an instant success. It came out just before Christmas the year that Denis was six, and it sold like crazy. Shortly after Emile left me, he was a rich man.

  “That book had to make him a bundle,” George said, and chuckled. “I just hope you got a piece of it.”

  “A bit,” I said. Emile had gotten away with Denis, but until I began living with James he had paid me alimony—at Silvie’s insistence, I always suspected. (I never did get a lawyer.) “Enough to allow me to paint on decent paper instead of on grocery bags.”

  “Well, thank heaven for that. I just wish you’d paint more. Here—I want you to see this.” He put a slide in a machine at his elbow and projected it on the wall. It was one of the slides I had sent him—a self-portrait I had done a year ago: a shadow person, almost but not quite faceless, against a window. It was smaller than my usual paintings. George said, “This is the painting that epitomizes your work, Chris. I think it’s a very strong, very dramatic piece, but it’s also an accessible one, if you know what I mean.” I did know what he meant: George was always telling me that my giant watercolors were too unusual for the marketplace. “It’s also incredibly beautiful,” he said. “I mean, even aside from the subject.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder, caressing it lightly while we stood together and looked at the projection. I wondered fleetingly if George had designs on me. He was just my height, and probably my weight—a slight, blond, handsome man with a moustache. In New Haven, I had been friendly with his wife, Eva, a journalist who moved to Seattle after their divorce. “Watch out for George,” she had said to me before she left. “He is never vanquished.”

  “This is such an intimate little thing,” he said. “So warm. And it’s reminiscent, somehow, of those early Georgia O’Keeffes, those little abstract watercolors. Before she got so full of herself. You know the ones I mean? This has the same reckless spirit. God, Christine, I wish you’d do more of this kind of thing.”

  Actually, the portrait made me uncomfortable—all my self-portraits did. Intimate seemed the wrong word: the paintings seemed phony to me, and confused; they revealed a self I didn’t particularly like, one I had been trying for years to put behind me. They also seemed to me inexpressibly bad, and yet I couldn’t stop painting them. The attempt was the important thing.

  George kept right on rhapsodizing. “The delicacy that’s so characteristic of your work is there, along with the incredible strength and vitality. And of course the size is perfect.” He took his hand from my shoulder and pulled out a chair for me. We both sat down at the marble-topped table. “Really, I love it,” he said. “I think it’s this painting, of all of them, that says Christine Ward. That really shows us what you can do with your technique. What do you think?”

  I shrugged. “It’s fine. Sure.” I didn’t have the strength to argue with him, I would argue another time. “Are we really going to do this, then, George?” I asked him—out of a sense that he expected me to ask a practical question.

  “We are most definitely going to do this, Christine,” he said, and then sighed heavily. “But I need to see some more things from you, I don’t want to stick you in a group. You know, when we do this, it’s going to be a very big deal. We just might make you famous. Are you aware of that?”

  “The idea seems pretty unreal to me,” I said. This was true. I had had some success, mostly in various Connecticut galleries and with a rep I had had for years who managed to sell my larger pieces to corporations: bank lobbies, particularly, had a weakness for the large watercolors George said the gallery-going public wasn’t ready for. I didn’t really care what George thought. I wasn’t ambitious. I painted because I liked to paint, and I couldn’t imagine what else to do with my life. If I hadn’t been able to pick up my brush and paint every day, I would have had nothing to live for.

  “Are you okay, Christine?” George asked me. I could see why Eva had warned me, and why George was such a success with women. He was as attentive as a father. I could imagine that he was a skillful lover.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  George reached out and covered one of my hands with his. “You seem a little—” He shrugged. “Something.” He turned my hand over and held it, smiling. “I worry about people who keep saying things are fine.”

  I let him hold my hand. I said, “I had an odd experience today. Two, actually. Twice I thought I had come into contact with someone I used to know. Someone dead.”

  “Someone you once loved?”

  I nodded.

  “That must mean you’re unhappy in your personal life—now, today.”

  “I don’t think I am, not really.”

  “But if your unconscious is so anxious to bring back the past—”

  “It could just mean he’s not really dead.”

  George frowned, squeezing my hand. “Be careful now, Christine. Don’t get carried away. You hear what I’m seeing, sweetie? Let the dead rest in peace, don’t dig them up.”

  His gruesome image recalled the movie The Night of the Living Dead, in which people who had recently died rose from their embalming tables to menace the living—eat their flesh, I seemed to remember. The movie was remarkable for the fact that there were no survivors, all the good guys were killed in the end.

  “You think I’m imagining things,” I said.

  “Christine, if this person died, he died. There’s no room for opinion here.”

  I wondered if he knew about my breakdown. No, that wasn’t possible. I said, “He died out in New Mexico. It was so far away. I had a lot of trouble believing it.”

  “You didn’t go to the funeral?”

  “No—I never heard anything about it. I just buried myself at my parents’ house and went around like a zombie for a whole summer.”

  He made a sympathetic noise. “It’s like children, when their parents die,” he said. “They say it’s important that they go to the wake or whatever and actually see their parent dead, so that they can accept the reality of it.”

  “Yes,” I said. I thought of Robbie in his closed coffin. “I suppose that would have helped.”

  We sat there in silence for a few moments, and somehow (I don’t know how it happened, it was George’s particular genius) the feeling between us changed from morbidity to lust. He rubbed my palm thoughtfully, absently, with his thumb. “You poor thing,” he murmured. “You’ve had a rough day, haven’t you?”

  It was tempting to throw myself into his arms and say yes, yes, George, I’ve had a very rough day, and to let him take me out for a drink, dinner, and then to his apartment. I imagined the taxi ride there, frantic kissing, his hand between my legs, and then stumbling, pressed together, to the elevator, and attacking each other the minute we were inside his door.
It would be different from what I had with James.

  He rubbed my palm. I took a shaky breath and pulled my hand away. “It wasn’t that bad,” I said, standing up. “Actually, it’s been a lovely day. The weather is incredible, and I had a very pleasant lunch with my ex-mother-in-law, and I got to see your gorgeous gallery.” I gathered up my things—purse, Swann’s Way, the bag of tangerines Silvie’s friend had brought her from Florida and she had insisted on giving me half of. “And now I’ll go home and eat one of James’s fabulous pizzas for dinner.”

  George gave me a kind, knowing smile. Implied in it was: you don’t know what you’re missing, but also: I respect your wishes, and your flawed personal life that is making you unhappy, epitomized by your insane commitment to a weird pizza-maker.

  “There are only two things I miss about New Haven,” George said. “The pizzas at Jimmy Luigi’s and you.” He took my hand again and gazed into my eyes. “Go home and paint, Christine. Send me more slides. I want you in my gallery.”

  And then there was the train ride home, and one of Silvie’s tangerines, and Swann’s Way—just a few more pages, into the Combray section that sprang from Marcel’s fateful cup of tea. I read a bit, looked out the window at the nothingness along the tracks in the dark, read a bit more. I took out Denis’s photo and looked at it again, and I brought into my mind the self-portrait George had projected on the wall, and I compared our two round, high-nosed, freckled faces. I thought of the Bellini St. Francis at the Frick, and the skull, and the odd and unpleasant sensation of actually feeling faint, of feeling your knees buckle and having to sit down quickly before you sink to the floor in a heap. I thought about Denis’s chances of getting into Yale, and about Lucy’s Pup, and about having a show at the Aurora. At Stamford, I thought about the yuppie, Alison Kaye of Haver & Schmidt, and her appointment with Olive Pounce, and I thought about the man in the trenchcoat and his squashed hat that was unlike anything Pierce would ever wear. I read some more Swann’s Way, about Françhise gossiping with Marcel’s aunt, and about the old church where Marcel went to Mass with his parents.

  Then I was in New Haven, and James was there to meet me. I was so glad to see him, I couldn’t be angry about his talk with Silvie, and at Jimmy Luigi’s I swore to myself, I swore that I would keep myself from going crazy if it was the last and hardest thing I did.

  Chapter Three

  I’d been living with James for almost three years, and during that time Jimmy Luigi’s had prospered. James had taken a chance, just before he moved in with me, and relocated his place from out in Westville to downtown New Haven. New Haven was dying, everyone knew that; the politicians said it could be saved if people would just do their civic duty and go downtown and shop until they drop; the editorial writers said it could be saved if the politicians were more responsible; some said it could be saved if the media didn’t give it such a bad rep. Everybody thought Yale should pitch in. James thought all it needed was a really good downtown pizza parlor.

  James Lewis, a WASP accountant from Baltimore, was reborn into Jimmy Luigi, a New Haven pizzateur (his word). I wasn’t even clear about how the transition came about. It had something to do with a woman he followed to New Haven (she taught at Yale Law School) and her eventual spurning of him, but there was much more to it than that—James was too unusual to change his life for anything so straightforward as unrequited love. He became disillusioned with what he called the raving idiocy of his work (he claimed he turned against accountants from watching Monty Python) and ran a soup kitchen for a while, and then he tutored inner-city kids in math, and then he worked in a pizza place that was cooperatively run as a socialist experiment, and then he worked in a regular pizza place, and then he decided to open his own out in Westville, and then he relocated to downtown New Haven and the rest is history.

  I met him because I got addicted to white clam pizzas during the winter after Denis’s last visit to me. Denis spent Christmas with me in New Haven, and I was so depressed when he went back to France that all I could do was eat: nothing but food gave me any comfort. But I couldn’t cook for myself. It wasn’t that I couldn’t be bothered, like Silvie. I love to cook, even when I’m depressed—in fact, nothing cheers me up like getting into the kitchen with my sleeves rolled up-but I kept burning everything. I couldn’t keep my mind on what I was doing. I couldn’t stop thinking about Denis’s cheerful leave-taking, about how clear it was that he might be fond of me but he was crazy about Emile and his life with him in Paris. About how French he was, how so many things in America had aroused his scorn or amusement. (He was fourteen, a scornful, amused age.) I burned rice, I burned eggs, I burned oatmeal and broccoli and frozen Italian dinners. My smoke detector kept going off. My neighbors kept either complaining about me or worrying about me, until finally I stripped my kitchen down to apples and milk and cold cereal, and went out every night for dinner.

  I was living in Westville then, in an apartment house on Alden Avenue—three gloomy rooms and a very sad bathroom. I was working as a receptionist in a dentist’s office, where I had to wear a white uniform and white stockings like the ones the perky half-my-age hygienists wore. Dr. Mankoff liked us to keep our skirts at knee-length. (I once heard him say to someone on the phone, “I pick my girls for brains first, legs a close second.”)

  My cat, Mabel, had died of kidney failure just before Denis came for Christmas. She had been our cat when Denis was little. He didn’t remember her very well, but I always associated Mabel with Denis’s childhood. He had learned to crawl by lunging across the rug after her, and one of his first words was “teetat.” When he left, and Mabel wasn’t there either, I was hit hard by the loss.

  After work, when the bus let me off on Whalley Avenue, I almost always ate dinner at one of the restaurants there, and my favorite place was Jimmy Luigi’s. I would go there three or four times a week, order a small white clam special, and have a beer while I waited and another beer while I ate. The pizza made a good cheap dinner, with a couple of extra pieces to take home for the next day’s cold lunch, and the two beers were just the right amount to dull my various griefs and put me to sleep at night.

  James was usually behind the counter making the pizzas. I was vaguely aware that he was Jimmy Luigi himself, though I never heard anyone call him anything but James, and I liked him a lot, instinctively, before I fell in love with him or really knew him. Even then, before he made a lot of money, he was overweight—not grossly, not unattractively (he’s big and heavy-boned, like me, and he can stand a few extra pounds), but definitely overweight. I assumed he was Italian: the pizzas, the name, the big black moustache. I could see him growing up in East Haven. I could see his wife, probably a petite dark-eyed schoolteacher named Joanne, and his two clean-cut kids (Jimmy Jr. and Jennifer), a nice old matriarchal mother, half a dozen brothers and sisters all living in the same neighborhood, and a pool table and built-in bar in the basement of his split level.

  I’m not totally unperceptive: that’s the guy James would have been in an ideal world. Instead, he was an only child and an orphan and a burned-out C.P.A. His ex-wife Nona was a pediatrician in Baltimore. They had no children, which was one reason they split up. He lived on Avon Street in a third-floor apartment huddled so closely under the eaves that all the rooms were triangular. He was almost as lonely as I was.

  I didn’t actually meet him until I showed up one night for dinner and saw a big sign in the window that said Jimmy Luigi’s was closed for a month and would reopen downtown on Chapel Street. I couldn’t believe it: not only was my neighborhood pizza parlor deserting me for good, but I had been looking forward all day to my white clam special and two beers. Rituals were important to me. I didn’t have a lot of friends, I had almost no time to paint, my feelings about my job ranged from boredom to loathing, my only child lived three thousand miles away and spoke a foreign language, my cat was dead. Jimmy Luigi’s was one of the few stable, positive elements in my life. I went up the street to the Chinese place and had a greasy egg roll,
vegetable fried rice that tasted canned, and so much tea that I couldn’t sleep at all that night.

  In those days, I was just getting into the oversized watercolors that would eventually become my trademark, if I had a trademark, and painting was more real to me than anything. The weekends would fly by while I worked. I had my rituals. Friday night, no matter how tired I was, I prepared the large surfaces on which I would work: I cut the paper from the huge roll I had bought instead of winter boots, soaked it in the tub, made stretchers and stapled the paper tight, like a white rectangular drum. By Saturday morning, when it was dry, I could start. Often, I hadn’t had enough sleep—the excitement and anticipation would keep me awake—and I would enter the sparse morning light of the room where I worked, impatient to get going, and be paralyzed by the perfection of that expanse of white. How could I possibly improve it? What could I bring to this rare purity? And then the reluctance would pass and I would feel the adrenalin course through me, and I would squeeze out my colors, fill the two Mason jars with water, sketch in the outlines, and begin the initial wash. Time would pass, and the next thing I knew it was dark out, I was faint with hunger, and before me there was the rough beginning of a painting that filled me with a combination of rapture and dread. Sunday would be the same. I discovered that it was possible to finish a 40 × 60 inch painting in a weekend if I worked fourteen hours at a stretch.

  Getting into my white uniform and stockings every Monday morning was like putting on prison garb, but all day Monday I would remain in a state of exhilaration. This wore off by the evening, and for the rest of the week things were at the point where my nightly beer and pizza were the high point of my life. I began to anticipate them around 2:00 every day.

  The day after I saw the sign in the window of Jimmy Luigi’s, I went down to the new place on Chapel Street and looked in the window. It was an unpromising little ex-shoe store a couple of blocks up from the Green. The windows were still filthy, but inside I could see men working. I thought I caught a glimpse of James, so I banged on the window. One man looked up from what he was doing and motioned me irritably away, but I banged again, and James finally came over, peered through the window, and came outside to see what I wanted.