Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  I had a few drinks and crawled over to my friend Sandy Sachs’s place. She lived on Waverley Place not far from Washington Park on the other side of the Cedar Tavern and used to sit naked on the toilet. The bathroom door was always open. The apartment door was also never locked. Her face was daubed with white cream and resembled a mask, her head adorned in a knotted towel that gathered in her damp hair; she made extremely alarming statements in front of her guests who knew she’d be sitting on the toilet and so didn’t bother to knock on the door. She said she’d seen two of my paintings and that I was a phony. She said I must paint the following: a young girl in the arms of an old man. The painting’s character demanded that the girl be a child, but actually she isn’t, she’s an adolescent. The painting’s size wasn’t important and its style must be realistic. Expression depends of course on your talent, but at the same time on the feelings of the viewer. Eyes, say the Chinese, have no tongue. The position of the two figures is most important; this painting is a painted dream. The girl is clearly clutching at the old man. Her face is buried in his chest in innocent desperation. The old man’s arms are around the girl’s shoulders in what appears to be a protective gesture. But it seems that it’s the man who needs the embrace most. Misery must be apparent on the old man’s face and he’s taller and wider than the girl. He’s not really looking at her. His gaze is fixed in space. In his eyes there isn’t even a glimmer of the warmth that might demonstrate some compassion. The moment freezes the old man’s face at the height of a slight nod. His pain is hidden. Were the painting to have a different character, you would put an opaque wash in place of his painted features to symbolize the inwardness of his pain. That’s why it’s impossible to compare the girl’s desperation with the old man’s pain. And yet one can say that the man seems as though he’s waking up to something familiar, like someone who hasn’t lost any of his strength, while the girl is stunned by a sudden blow that you, as her painter, cannot remember having seen delivered. In contrast to the figures the light is soft and limpid. You can add the aura of a summer’s afternoon, the contours must be almost as strong as those in a Rouault painting or the stained glass of a church. The shadows are faint; the corners are sharp. Everything is very lucid or very dark. The white paint becomes grayish as it touches the man’s hair and bluish as it touches the sky. She was perhaps hallucinating. Afterward Sandy told me, rumbling like a madwoman, about a play she was writing. She got off the toilet and put on a kimono, and with her white face and her hair gathered into its towel cone she sat down and read me a few excerpts from the play and then Adele Schwartz arrived.

  I asked Adele and her old gentleman friend who was masquerading as a razorblade peddler in the Bowery but was actually a philosopher who’d left the university to discover what he called “life” to be my models for the painting I wanted to do at Sandy’s suggestion. In the end I painted them from memory. A tall woman who later would also become Gandy’s friend and would be forced to buy a painting from him bought my painting because she thought it was Gandy’s and she’d never seen one of his paintings before, or, as Gandy said at the time, of anybody else’s for that matter. Adele lived in a huge studio apartment on MacDougal Street. We used to drink there because she had a lover who was a Jack Daniels wholesaler who’d leave her free bottles. I stood at her easel, mounted a canvas, and painted Adele. What came out was something that almost touched on what Sandy had ordered me to paint, but modern painting is not an art through which you can really touch life or touch the hell within us or touch forgiveness or redemption, and painting like Dürer or Rembrandt is no longer possible, and so I began hating paintings. People have written about painting but writers have never fully grasped what Chardin really painted or what Matthias Grünewald painted or created or made out of chaos. Adele talked about her own youth with such enthusiasm. With passion. Oh, Adele, Adele, what a titan you were, Adele. Everything about her was tempestuous. She spoke in a booming voice that scared off at least three out of every four men who tried to seduce her. Adele’s eyes carried a perpetual sadness, and behind the exotic curtains of her life she seemed just a frightened woman-child. Adele announced that she’d dumped her Jack Daniels lover, or that he had dumped her, I don’t remember. She wasn’t affected by that in the least. She said that in any case she didn’t trust men. My father, she said, threw me out onto the street when I was only a few months old because his wife died. I finished the painting and Gandy didn’t like it. Adele did a series of paintings of birds and announced that she wanted to have a baby. We offered our services but she looked at us with disdain and said she already had brains, she didn’t need any more. What she wanted was the body of a real man. For the father of her son she had no need for puny, flaccid Jews who painted and sat around contemplating Spinoza. Adele went to Jones Beach. She wore her tiniest bathing suit. She spread a blanket near a lifeguard station and lay down. Each day she’d set up near a different station. In one hand she had a notebook and in the other a pen. She assessed the lifeguards and made notes: Object #8. Name: Neil (Irish). Height: 6’1”. Looks: Handsome, 6 out of 10. Strength: High, likely an excellent sexual athlete. Total sexual potential: 8. Remarks: Inefficient. Strong. Swimmer. A fine member, as seen through swimming trunks. Blond. Servile. No freckles. Slight stutter. And that, oh, Adele, Adele, is only one example. After a precise inspection she had nine potential fathers and closed in on one lifeguard whose name, as far as I can remember, was Guy. She wrote about him: Height: 6’3”. Beautiful shoulders. Muscular arms. Not disgusting in the least. Under “remarks” she wrote: Good clean bloodline. No hair on his chest. A healthy goy. No fool. Though not intelligent either. This was followed by: And he can lift a boat. Saved a little girl and an old man from drowning. Keeps his temper. Maintains composure and doesn’t drink lotto much. Has stamina and is patient. Skin doesn’t get very red in the sun. Eats lettuce, yogurt, and steaks. Sexual potential: two hundred thousand orgasms. Excellent potential longevity. Next she witnessed him saving an old lady from drowning. He pulled her ashore. Sweet, she said, and he spoke to her gently, though she always felt the strength in him. She let him notice her and chase after her for about two days and then agreed to go to a motel with him. They were there for two nights and she left before he woke up.

  It was summer and the story of Adele on the beach, taking down notes, made me miss the sea. I went to Jones Beach as well. There were thousands of people there and I stripped down to my bathing suit and swam while an entire white blazing city was swimming around me; the sky was gray, the heat stood like a giant tree, and there was no air. When I came out of the water the heat dried me up. Everybody around me was in bathing suits and it was so hot that I couldn’t help look at the wonderful bodies of the young ladies and then I noticed a man in a business suit sitting on an old deckchair holding a walking stick, wearing a tie, a hat on his head, and he was watching the bathers and smiling a kind of malicious but not evil smile. He looked over at me because I was looking at him and I said it was hot. He said it was hot. I said it was very hot. He said it was very hot. I said the water was cold. He said sure the water’s cold and where are you from, my dear sir. I told him. He said, It’s probably hot there. I said it was. We exchanged a word here and a word there and I finally couldn’t restrain myself and asked him why he was waiting on the beach of all places. He said he wasn’t waiting for anybody. I said, Then why the hat and the suit, this isn’t the opera. He said, See here young man, don’t flaunt your youth. It’s a fleeting matter. I’m eighty-six years old. Don’t ever get old. Old age is a disease. My wife died six years ago. I met her one Sunday in Central Park as she was taking a walk with her nurse and she was wearing a crinoline. All the young men were trying to catch beautiful young ladies and I caught her. I loved her at first sight. She was beautiful and with the permission of the nurse who encouraged me we talked and afterward we met the same way on numerous occasions and to cut a long story short, we decided to marry, her parents agreed, they lived in Rhode Island and we went there to get
married. Anyone who was anybody was there. It was a magnificent wedding. We drank champagne and danced and then they sent us to a lovely building in the park which surrounded the estate and we went inside and what do you know—after we’d been to bed and there was a faint light I discovered she was bowlegged. Do you see? For sixty-three years I lived with a bowlegged woman. I come here every week to envy the young men who can watch their ladies swimming and see who not to marry. But on the other hand, I also come for revenge, because your generation knows nothing about the mystery of a man’s courting a woman. The journey of it. Having to imagine. Having to talk nonsense for a year in order to get her into bed. But it was an exciting sort of mystery and your generation has no mysteries. You’ve lost all your surprises, even the nasty ones, like my wife’s bowlegs. He bought me an ice cream and I ate it and he laughed: Oh, bowlegs.

  The guy who’d impregnated Adele had apparently been looking for her but didn’t find her. Her belly swelled and we sat with her like you sit in a house of mourning. According to Reich’s theory the embryo’s character is formed in the womb. So she sang it songs from Westerns. She went to see crime and action movies on Forty-second Street so it wouldn’t hear only Mozart or jazz. Then she gave birth. She brought the baby boy back to the studio and we had a party in her honor. The Jack Daniels was long gone. She put a tin bath in the middle of the studio and said that the baby could do whatever he wanted, because according to Reich a baby should be free. After about eighteen months he was already peeing standing up in the bath and in the other parts of the studio and also on me. She continued visiting her Reichian therapist who’d hit her so she’d have more orgasms. After her two hundred and third orgasm she took the boy and went to the Rockies so he could experience force and vigor and she taught him the names of wildflowers because she loved flowers and understood them and she began planning gardens.

  One day there was a knock at the door. A young woman was standing there with an angry nun’s face and a crucifix dangling from her long smooth neck. I saw that her eyes were almost purple and felt her power, endangered but at the same time dangerous. She didn’t say but rather fired her name: Mary Frances Hagen. She sat down and stood up intermittently. She said she’d come on behalf of the Union Theological Seminary where she was curating an exhibition of religious paintings. Nobody had ever come to me looking for paintings, certainly not religious ones. I told her that I wasn’t exactly a religious painter and she said she’d been told that I was and I asked by whom and she didn’t want to say. Maybe it was one of the dancers I’d painted at Anna Sokolow’s who danced barefoot and moved like Tarzan. She asked, almost demanded to see some paintings. I gave in to her easily and saw that her body was harsh and that she seemed built more like a model of a woman than a woman. She looked at the paintings I pulled out from behind the closet and asked to see the one of the dancer again and exclaimed, albeit joylessly, Ah, now, if that’s not David dancing before the Lord, then David never danced. I asked when David had danced and she said, When he recovered the Holy Ark from the Philistines and Michal, the daughter of Saul, despised him, and then she looked almost happy. I wanted to correct her but thought, she wants David, let her have David. She offered to pay me and I agreed out of the goodness of my heart because if that’s what she wanted then that’s what it would be. Her angry body was still packed into her clothes as if into a reprimand. The painting, she said in a somewhat complaisant tone, will hang in the exhibition, and you, she said, will be paid two hundred dollars, and she left. I looked at the painting, thought about the two hundred dollars, and already believed that it really was David dancing before the Lord. Two days later she showed up again and this time her clothes were tight on her body but in the wrong places. The priest who was organizing the exhibition had decided, based on what she’d explained to him, and I didn’t ask how you explain a painting, that it was indeed David dancing before “a lord,” but not before “The Lord.” She was angry, because in the days of David there was really only the one, but the priest had made his decision and wrote in the introduction to the catalog that the painting expressed both protest and faith. I knew I’d painted a dancer in the form of a modern Astarte, and whether it was a lord or God Himself he was dancing in front of didn’t interest me in the least. I dreamed that Mary Frances Hagen was a nun and I could see her ass. That was the first time one of my paintings was mentioned in the papers. Mary wore purple lipstick and an even bigger crucifix to the opening and emptied a quarter of a bottle of Canadian whiskey without batting an eyelid and I looked at her terrible innocence and like any Jew admired her whorish Puritanism. She came by again at some point, but I don’t remember a thing. Just that we parted in anger and I don’t know why.

  A few years later I went to Ninety-sixth Street to buy the Israeli weekly Ha-Olam Hazeh that would always arrive a few days late but only to that newsstand and I read there that Mary Frances Hagen had been arrested in Israel for spying on behalf of the Syrians. The article said that she’d acted so ineptly and amateurishly that her sentence would be lenient. It said that she’d fallen for a Syrian diplomat who recruited her to go to Israel and take pictures and that she was caught on her very first day. Seeing her photograph I had no doubts it was the same person. Mary Frances Hagen returned to America three years later and then came to visit me. The Syrian had dumped her. She was angry with the Israelis but she had to see that painting again and to tell me that I could have prevented the whole affair. I’m a whore with a crucifix and a lot of rage, she said. I looked for the painting. This woman who’d spent time in courtrooms, Security Agency interrogation cells, and then a few years in jail, was weeping now. She asked me why I hadn’t loved her. I asked her why it was so important for her to know because after all she hadn’t loved me, and she replied, True, but you could at least have loved me!

  One fine day—the first day of spring, or at least the first day of spring that actually felt like spring—a few of us artists went to Washington Square to draw on the sidewalk. On the low concrete wall surrounding the fishpond that had no fish sat a young man in shorts, his feet in the water that wasn’t there, wearing a Harvard blazer, a tie, the short haircut of someone from a good family. On his lap was a small typewriter, apparently a Hermes, and he was writing a poem. I went up to him. He said he was looking for the fish and spoke exactly like The Catcher in the Rye and I told him that they were already dead and that apparently once there were goldfish there. Something lapped by his feet in the water that wasn’t there, maybe tiny, prehistoric, stylish, sparkling fish, perhaps just ad for the bigger fish, the giant ones to come, about which he was perhaps writing his poem. It broke your heart to see how serious and lonely he was making himself out to be a poet of waterless water and right there of all places in the strange world of the Village surrounded by people he didn’t know, people who seemed to him like enemies.

  We drew on the concrete using colored chalks and three girls appeared and sat on the lawn near our drawings and laughed. One was Marilyn Gennaro, the second Mira Pages, and the third was Lee Becker, who was to become my wife. Lee was laughing but her face had a very old seriousness and she acted like a hired clown and amused her friends. I was drawing not far from them and they tried not to look at us and asked the lonely poet to recite a poem and he did and his face flushed and Lee said he sounded like Charles Laughton. Marilyn Gennaro was as beautiful as a movie star. She didn’t let even the little sunshine that glimmered through the trees touch her. Lee Becker looked at the drawing and asked if I thought it was good. I said I didn’t think, I drew. She said, Its quality can be measured in dance. I said, Go ahead. Mira clapped her hands and Lee danced on my drawing that was quite big, maybe six square feet or so. She didn’t describe it but created it in a dance that completely captivated me. She hopped about puckishly. I was a sad man with nightmares and she touched them with her demonic gaiety. She came from sorrow. From a ghetto. After some time it seemed that no misfortune could break her. I joined them. The beauty of Marilyn and Mira was powerful;
Mira looked like Hedy Lamar, a Russian with Jewish beauty. Her face was the site of much drama: her eyes were filled with sadness, not sadness, grief, while her mouth smiled secrets when her lips met, and the combination of a malicious smile and a deep sorrow hit you like a punch. Lee’s clowning and dancing sparked a tiny flare of happiness in me, from the beginning there was some kind of Russian grace in her and she shifted rapidly between pathos and laughter. She wasn’t beautiful in the sense that Marilyn or Mira were, but she had in her the loveliness of beauty, the expression of a woman-girl who already knew the world, and I was swept away. There was something in her that I needed then. A disconcerting desperation that would meet mine and I knew what she was about to say before she said it. I guessed at her life and her endearing sadness. She said, laughing, that she had no further need of men, that she’d had one, a bastard who’d abused her, all men were bastards. I said I wasn’t interested in her problems with men because she was telling me about them only to annoy or impress me. Mira told me that Lee had fallen for me. They asked where I was from and I told them and Lee said, A kibbutz? The Haganah? The Exodus? Marilyn smiled at me, perhaps scornfully. She was brimming with sex. I realized later that there was a soul of shattered glass inside her. She looked like she didn’t belong to this world. And eventually I found myself sitting with Lee in a small restaurant on Waverley Place. She lit the candle on the table and burned my hand by mistake. I quickly applied some ice the waiter brought. Lee laughed because she’d seen who she was dealing with and I realized that nothing would break this girl. She turned serious. She hardly spoke. She said that she and Marilyn were dancing in The King and I. I said that was impressive. She said it wasn’t. We started whispering. My hand unintentionally touched hers. She looked at me ruefully and across the table I sensed our hearts beating in harmony, a phrase suiting our youth. She wanted a life partner back then. I didn’t know what I wanted. She had a somewhat broken but brave strength, a profound and enduring beauty that remained gentle, and she had a wonderful smile too. We ate. We were already holding hands like children. She invited me to the show. I went backstage and Yul Brynner, the star of the show, asked Lee who I was and she said, The man I love, and he shook my hand and asked me where I was from and I told him, and he asked where my parents were from and I said that my mother was from Odessa and he started speaking to me in Russian and we drank whiskey, and I don’t remember how we got to my room. I think it was only there that we started talking again. Her name had been Leah and was changed to Lia and then to Lee. She was a ballet dancer but also danced in musicals and did concerts with jazz musicians. She was one of the funniest people I’d ever met and maybe that was the secret, because I was a snob about beauty and plain women made me angry and I was ashamed of it, but people know something about what they need and want and Lee, who was less beautiful than most of her friends, exuded warmth and I needed her so I could love her and she demanded that I promise not to leave her and in the end we each became the other’s retribution. We moved in together to an apartment on Morton Street that cost sixty dollars a month. She was well paid and I painted and thought I made her proud. Our relationship was tense and full of pleasure at the same time. We understood something buried deep inside each other. Each of us wanted to be something we weren’t. She was a great dancer but what she danced was before its time. Back then jazz and Nijinsky didn’t go together. We both searched for the betrayal that would bring love with it. We both perceived infidelity as a common denominator. She provided for me and although I wanted to work I needed the humiliation of her working while I wasn’t, because she was afraid of the freedom I’d have if I made my own living. I’d wait for her at the stage door at eleven-thirty at night, ten minutes after the curtain came down. We’d have a bite at a cafeteria or the Stage Delicatessen. We’d set ambushes for one another, like enemies, and end up in bed. Neither of us believed in love but we wanted to love. But whatever it was between us, it never managed to become love. We were each other’s punching bags, but still, we were good friends. We were incapable of really loving, but at the same time we both didn’t want it to end. We were scared of remaining alone. She danced in shows and was on the road a lot. I slept with most of her girlfriends. One day I met her brother who was married to a beautiful Jewish princess. I went to visit them in upstate New York and tried to make out with her. She was furious and her husband outraged. I left their house and walked down the street. I met a woman. She took me into her house. I told her how my sister-in-law’s husband had gotten angry and how she’d rejected me and how I’d told my sister-in-law that I’d come to their town looking for Dr. Mengele because I worked for the Israeli Mossad, which was like their CIA. The night was sad but satisfying. Cold. And it snowed. I can’t remember exactly, but I wanted to go someplace and kill myself. I walked the streets and slipped because the cold was bad for my leg wound. A woman stopped her car and helped me in. She said she lived in the neighborhood and took me home to care for me. I liked her and we spent a nice night together despite the pain in my leg. Next morning she saw I was still in pain and took me to the hospital. They put me into bed and a young intern with fantastic legs and devious-looking eyes came to see me and I fell for her. She said she liked me. She asked who the woman was who’d brought me in. I told her she was my lover. The doctor turned jealous and said she wouldn’t come between lovers. I wanted to explain but they brought a phone to my bed and the woman who’d saved me warned me that I shouldn’t go back to her because her boyfriend had returned, and she was in love. I tried to find the intern but she’d disappeared. I didn’t have any money for the return journey. I called my brother-in-law collect and asked for a loan. He came to the hospital. He was livid and threw fifty one-dollar bills on the floor at my feet. I picked up the bills and took a Greyhound back to New York. Back in New York my wife and her family had already heard everything, and Lee went to bed with Ed Jameson who was gay but who’d always wanted her because gay guys loved her and one had even proposed marriage to her and Ed wanted her to knock him up, what he called a phantom pregnancy. Lee was mad at her brother and gave him back the money he’d given me for bus fare and said, I’m the one who’s paying for the ticket. Her aunt Raya gave me a heart-to-heart. A sweet woman who told me about the family’s life as communists in America. Lee went to Houston, Texas with a show. Her father came to see me and told me that his wife’s cancer had taken a turn for the worse and that Lee didn’t know about it and that her mother was dying. That night Lee went to a fortune-teller in Houston who told her that her mother had died. She called and asked about her mother, wept, said that I’d deceived her. I calmed her down and told her that everything was fine because that was what her father had asked me to say. She came back to find her mother dying. She went for me kicking and punching and then her mother announced from her sick-bed that if we didn’t get married she wouldn’t be able to die peacefully. We had blood tests, took Mira, Marilyn, Jerry Tallmer, and Gandy to City Hall and got married. It was no party. No rice. No singing. A pigeon shat on my head as we left City Hall and the justice who married us and was just leaving the building laughed, and I told him, You should be so lucky. We went back to Lee’s parents’ house on 107th Street. Her father stood there bleak and dismal but at the same time was trying his luck with the chubby nurse. Our friend Al Brown—one of the best viola players in town, who was later the New York Philharmonic’s first black musician—came and Lee’s father took him aside and asked him what they should play at the funeral and Al said, But she hasn’t died and you can’t plan it like that, and Lee’s father said, But when she goes I want you to play, and Al didn’t want to upset him so they agreed on what Al would play at the funeral. Lee’s mother died a month later. At the cemetery her father stood despairing at the graveside and when he saw Al and me standing a reasonable distance behind him he jumped in the air, he shouted Oy, oy, how can I go on without you! And when he was about to fall into the freshly dug grave, Al and me, who were both ready for it, caught him; he struggled but only
weakly and the ones who really wept were Lee, Marilyn, and Mira. Before that, Lee had gone away with a ballet show where she had a painful and tragic affair with a Japanese man and she came back having forgiven me but I didn’t forgive her. We went to hear Bird and he asked her to dance to his music and she gave a concert at the Henry Street Playhouse, south of the apartment where I’d lived with Pat, and danced to Gerry Mulligan playing “Makin’ Whoopee.” At the time he was living with Judy Holliday. She was captive to the persona she’d created: she was the woman who really established the image of the dumb blonde that was later taken up by Marilyn Monroe and many others. But not one of them was an actress like she was. She won an Oscar and acted in the theater and one of her movies was It Should Happen to You where she played Gladys Glover. I loved it. Holliday played a naïve secretary who wants to be famous and sees the huge wall facing her in Columbus Square, and for many years there really was a huge wall there like an empty five-story-high billboard. Gladys Glover looks at the wall and dreams that one day her name will be up there. She’s saved a little money during her years in New York so she rents the wall and a poster artist puts her name up in giant letters and she sits there loving it. People start asking who Gladys Glover is and of course the world of illusions bubbles over, the gossip columnists, reporters—she’s discovered, gives interviews at the drop of a hat, becomes a star and talks nonsense that becomes truth because next to her the wise are fools and she’s practically elected President of the United States. 1952 was the first year that the presidential campaign made a lot of use of television. We all gathered at Jerry Tallmer’s who together with two friends founded the Village Voice. I was sure that the race was between Wallace, the socialist, and Adlai Stevenson.