Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  He sometimes thought for a long time and then it seemed that the words came from his mouth unintentionally and not the way he’d planned to say them. He talked about his love for girls and for Sal Mineo and Billy Gunn. I said I thought he was stubbing out cigarettes on his soul. He said I was only throwing fancy words around and making a celebration out of bullshit. I said that in the mirror he looked like a whimsical prince, childish but sweet. His expression was sometimes malicious, because in the mirror I could see everything that passed over his face, but the malice was hidden behind a mischievous sense of shame. He fidgeted slightly as he sat, as if trying to catch the rhythm of the painting in his body. He’d wait until I dipped the brush and mixed the paints and then, as I painted, he’d follow the tip of the brush, swaying gently to its rhythm and a smile of joy would appear on his face if the brush managed to capture something that seemed right to him. He looked like someone waiting for something dangerous to happen, as though the brush might set off a fight. He looked like he was preparing to launch into some elegant ceremony in honor of something or other and I honestly didn’t know what he was thinking or thought he was doing, it was a strange feeling to paint with this man behind my back and I tried to talk to him but by and large was unsuccessful. He’d growl some indistinct reply. Every now and then Lee would peek in from her studio and he’d tell me it was hard for him to talk, not because of you, the artist, but that because of the painting—I’m trying to understand you. At times he sounded as though he was listening to himself more than saying anything for my benefit and I realized that he was connecting to the painting, the work, the doing, not to the doer. He said, The doer is a shoemaker, in the end you’ve got shoes or a painting, what interests me is the shoemaking not the shoemaker and not why he’s a shoemaker or whether or not he was beaten as a child.

  One day he asked me to go with him to the swanky 21 Club that was only a few buildings away from where we lived. Outside there were statues of jockeys and when we went in people nodded to him and greeted him and he underwent a transformation. He became a different Dean. Like a chameleon. Uninhibited but meticulous in his movements, as if he was absolutely refined but nonetheless parodying himself. He looked at the people waving to him and feigned revulsion. He spoke sentences that were disjointed and absurd. We sat down and a waiter brought a telephone to the table and Dean said, Take it away, and right now! And the man bowed and took the telephone away. A quiet young woman came over and sat down next to us. He didn’t introduce us. She tried talking to him about some movie she wanted him to play in and he stuck a fork into the steak that had been served in the meantime without him ordering it and stuck a piece of it right into her open mouth. And he laughed. He had an impenetrable, sad laugh. She tried to laugh too but choked. Tears flowed from her eyes and then suddenly stopped as if she’d cut them off with a knife. She chewed the piece of steak until she managed to swallow it. He took no pity on her. She tried to understand exactly who I was but he gave her no help, and I looked around at the wealth and the stars and that beautiful old place steeped in nostalgia, and then she gave him a submissive look and said, I deserve it, James, I deserve it. Yes, he replied, but on the other hand I won’t do it again. She said, Remember not to do it again. I’ll remember, he answered. Jimmy, Jimmy, she said, sounding as though she was pleading, but at the same time there was a kind of threat behind the words and her expression turned less submissive and more hostile. She went on sitting there and he pretended he’d forgotten who she was. He looked at her and asked, You? Yes, me, she replied. She suddenly turned to me like a wildcat and snarled, So you’re the Israeli artist? I nodded. She said to Dean, If you want to be spiteful be spiteful to the artist from Palestine, and I knew immediately that she was Jewish. She smiled and said, I’ve got uncles and aunts there. In Ramla. Pioneers. She used the Hebrew word, chalutzim, and there was derision in her voice. Don’t teach me. You’re all teaching us. We’re the galut, the Diaspora. I said I hadn’t said a word and hadn’t tried teaching her anything and she said, I saw your frowning forehead, and I said I’d had a frowning forehead from childhood and it frowned even more during the Arab-Israeli War and she asked, What do you think, that I’m putting on a performance for you? I told her it had nothing to do with her and don’t involve me in your problems with Jimmy Dean. She got up to leave and said, Don’t tell me I’ve got problems, he’s got problems. I said fine and Jimmy said, She’s a semi-agent of mine, now smile and say good-bye nicely and pick up your feet and get lost. She stood there like a frozen lioness and mumbled good-bye and slowly walked away. We went outside and stood in the street. It was raining and all the neon signs over the clubs on the street were shining and flickering and Dean said, She’s actually a nice girl, let’s go. He dragged me back inside. She was standing with her back to us talking on the phone. He went over to her, got down on all fours and started yowling like a cat. She was holding the phone and turned to him. She wanted to appear surprised but there was something desperate and tough in her. She waited until he finished mewing and he kissed her shoes and she pulled his hair. When he got up he said, You’re not worth it but you and me will get married someday and she told me, Get him out of here, there’s no love here, and Jimmy told her, You’re weak in your strength, you haven’t learned the rules of acting yet, we’re all whores and sell ourselves on the meatmarket and this guy here, my friend, he sells magic in painting and he paints like he’s a dancer. And we left. He said, What a sweet whore!

  I met his girlfriend who I think was called April, she worked as a waitress on Fifty-sixth Street. Nobody ever mentioned her. She was a lovely person and we talked a lot when I visited her where she worked at the first café in town, except for the Village, but Jimmy lived with Billy Gunn, a black actor who would later become a director, and we’d go to the movies, Krissoula, Lee, Jimmy, and April. Sal Mineo, who was murdered years later in Los Angeles for drug-related or “homosexual motive[s],” would sometimes go with us, and he liked Jimmy and whenever someone recognized Jimmy in the street Jimmy would pretend he was blind, which wasn’t difficult because he was myopic and knew how to squint pretty convincingly. In the end, April said, Jimmy leaves his heart with me but always goes home to sleep with Billy who knows his prey can’t help but come back to him. April knew how to steer clear of the spotlight and she gave Dean warmth, but his dark side came out both with Gunn and any woman who the studio wanted people to think he was having an affair with. One day, maybe the last day he sat behind me while I painted, he said, I’ve always had a basic feeling of unease, maybe that’s what I’ve found in your paintings. Not in you. You and me are a bit alike. You’ve been, he said, the painter of the paintings that are me. A few weeks later he went to Hollywood for the last time to work on the picture he never completed. It seems today that perhaps death was already in him and was eager to get going. The way he looked at life was basically playful. He said he loved gambling and experimenting, testing the limits he could reach in car races.

  When he talked about cars you could hear the longing in his voice. He said he loved them more than he was capable of loving people, that he trusted them more than he trusted people. The night after that last day, after he’d sat behind me for five hours rocking and mumbling and talking to imaginary cars, we went to the Blue Angel to hear Anita Ellis. Dean listened and flapped his hands like a suffocating fish. Gunn came along and tried to calm him down. When Anita sang Brecht and Weill’s Mahagonny songs he cried. For me she sang “Put the Blame on Mame,” the song she dubbed for Rita Hayworth in Gilda, and I was over the moon. I remembered the sublime Rita’s gloves, the smoldering sex of her, the archness of her false naïveté. Dean said he’d wanted to meet me since he saw my Icarus at Krissoula’s and her sister’s place, the sister who had the Nazi boyfriend. He said he loved the angel and the angel burning and that’s why he’d struck up a conversation with me. I told him I’d noticed that he had no barriers between himself and the world. He said good-bye to me and told me he’d learned a lot, and flew off t
o California. He called from Los Angeles to say he was starting work on a picture and that he missed my back in his eyes and he missed the paintings and asked whether I’d finished the big painting of Isaac’s sacrifice, and I said yes. He asked what I was working on and I said I wanted to do something with the verse “And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb.” He said that in any event he’d prefer to be on the wolf’s side. Then he thought a bit and said he stood no chance of getting in with the wolves. He something that’s stayed stuck in my memory like a dart: I’m looking for the razor’s edge, how far I can go, there’s nothing sexier. I’ve got a new Porsche. I want to reach the speed of thought in it. A few weeks later, at night, Lee was asleep, April called and Krissoula called to tell me that Dean had been killed and they asked me to come to his apartment and that Gunn was waiting there.

  We cleaned up the apartment, got rid of all the filth that Dean had collected and kept. We wanted Dean to be seen as clean and nice and a good American when the police and press got there. We left before dawn, tired and sad, and went to a coffee shop on the corner. We were drinking coffee when we suddenly heard a siren and saw a speeding car. Four in the morning and a patrol car was chasing someone. Back then the cars had running boards and two cops were hanging onto both sides of the car, holding onto the doorframe with one hand and firing at the car outpacing them. Krissoula said, That’s a fitting epitaph for Jimmy Dean.

  That was a month or two after Lee and I got back from Israel. Bird died in March and then Avi Shoes made an unsuccessful attempt at suicide. He came over and sat in silence all night. Avi Shoes, I told him, with all your millions you can buy anything, even death, and he replied, But not Mira. He said he’d been with her, that he’d sworn not to tell anyone where she was. That she was searching for something, that she was raising cats and loved him, he said, but she felt it was forbidden, and I’ve had it, he said.

  Then Lee was invited to dance in a show called John Murray Anderson’s Almanac, an attempt to recreate the Ziegfeld Follies. She didn’t explain why she wanted to dance in it. I asked her if it was the need to stand onstage with all those amazing women, all of whom were six foot two and sculpted like goddesses, and show them who was really important, but she didn’t answer. Belafonte sang. There were a few comics. There was an old woman who played the cello and looked like Yom Kippur and told dirty jokes with the cello between her legs, and there were a few funny pieces and some less funny and the usual filth and of course there were girls. They came down a staircase. They wore beautiful costumes. They took off the beautiful costumes. They really did look like the sirens. They walked around and all looked like they’d been made in a factory. Lee competed with them. It was brave of her said Belafonte when we went to the Waldorf-Astoria after the show.

  Among the sirens there was one woman who was especially stunning, Monique van Vooren. She had a body that only comes along once in a very long time, but inside the body was a woman that no man really needed. She had a distinct and calculated corruption about her but she had self-respect because she sold only what she actually had, not what she didn’t. She had a head on her shoulders. We talked one day. I was embarrassed at looking at her half naked and she pointed at her breasts and said, They’re just tools, like your brushes. She said she knew exactly what she had and what she didn’t have. She looked in the mirror and studied her face and said, This will all pass one day and I’ve got an idea exactly when, and then what will I do? I didn’t go to Harvard. I’ve gotten used to the good life. There’s no good life in old age. And then what? Stand in line for a pension? I’ve got to think about that day because I won’t do any modeling if I’m not just as beautiful as I am now. I was standing at her side at the fiftieth performance party for the show and she was watching Lee dancing. Monique admired dance and said she envied Lee and me. Nobody cheats, she said. There were two performances on Wednesdays, a matinee and an evening show. Every Wednesday Monique would put on her fur coat—which, once, she took the trouble, grinning, to open up and show me she wasn’t wearing anything underneath—and go to the stage door where a limo awaited her, and drive off. Sitting in the limo was the man who was to become President Kennedy. Once a week, she told me, I get to sit in a senator’s lap, and that’s something to think about when I get old.

  Lee and I went back to the Village, to a lovely apartment on Sullivan Street, and she went to her shows and one day a friend of hers came to pick up something Lee had promised her and of course, before I’d even taken in her features, I looked into her eyes—I was shy as usual but desire always wins out—and she agreed with her eyes that I was almost too shy to look into, and it was business as usual, and I touched her by mistake and she didn’t bat an eyelid and then another brief episode began on Lee’s and my bed, but when I got to opening the zipper on her jeans I saw the word “Lee” shining on a metal button and I just couldn’t. After all your cheating, said Lee later, poor boy, your conscience got in the way, and on her sweet clown-like face there was an expression I suppose of schaden-freude. Sandy Sachs heard about the Lee jeans story and wrote a radio sketch that was adapted into a short play for the Philco Television Playhouse, because she occasionally wrote scripts for them and made a melodrama out of the Lee story; not funny, not sad, quite dirty. It was broadcast, and let me tell you, it didn’t do me much good. Sandy took me aside for a talk in which she made herself sound like pretty hot stuff and announced that masturbation was an excellent way to kill time if you were too lazy to go out and work for a living so maybe I should stay at home more often and not open the door to every woman who might or might not have a button on her jeans. Afterward Sandy swallowed a pill and started going wild and climbing the walls and cut herself and fainted and some friends came and we took her to the mental hospital she’d already been in a few times before.

  I went to the small café on MacDougal Street and had an espresso and Robert De Niro Sr. came in with his young son, and he asked how I was and I asked how he was. I liked the softness of his speech, the modest melodiousness, he was looking for the good in things. I paid and we walked slowly and talked and wandered over to Little Italy. He suggested we go into a restaurant and invited me for a meal. We went inside. It was quite dark. The tables were mostly empty at that hour, and at the far end was a table that stood apart from the others, and there was a man seated at it dressed like a banker with a wide face and a heavy jaw, and next to him were a few energetic young men and two older men who seemed scared. In the corner sat a police officer who had removed his cap and was drinking coffee and the banker tossed him a few twenty dollar bills. De Niro went over and the man got up and hugged him and kissed the boy and asked who I was and De Niro answered in Italian and the man said, Israel poof-poof and fired into the air with an imaginary pistol and shook hands and invited us to eat with him.

  The table piled with salads, small fish dishes, and then beans and cannelloni and what I called noodles and they laughed and said, Pasta, pasta, and the man sat down with us and for a few minutes stopped throwing twenties to the cop who sat there hunched over and I couldn’t see any sort of happiness on his face, he just grabbed the money, didn’t look at it, and stuffed the bills into his pocket. The man said he was a friend of De Niro’s. We were suddenly surrounded by young men whose guns could be seen a week’s drive away, and the Don sent them away and asked me about Israel. I told him that a few years ago I’d been a deckhand on a boat and I’d visited Naples, Rome, and Sicily. This pleased him, he ordered glasses of a fine liqueur and we drank to the health of the survivors we’d brought on the boat that he said had come from the greatest calamity known to mankind since God created the universe in seven days. Six, I said. On the seventh even God had to rest. Two young guys went for me, I’d insulted the Don, but he smiled and sent them away. Afterward De Niro and I talked about art, about white on white, black on black, Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie, which had always bothered me and that De Niro praised, and I mentioned the names of artists I liked and said that Hopper was the greatest. And W
yeth. Who looks at Hopper today? I do. Painters and critics don’t. He’s passé. He’s the greatest American artist today, I said. And he said maybe and that I could buy a Hopper for only a few hundred dollars and I said I didn’t have the money and then he said, Maybe they’ll go back to him one day, and I said I hoped that would come to pass. Hopper’s city. The lonely houses. The play of light. The distance. The subdued scene of the man at the bar or the reclining woman, the sad, empty, dejected city, like Vermeer, in a light that came, with both artists, from some unknown, unexpected source. We left and it started raining. He put up his umbrella over me and we returned to America.

  Adele Schwartz called and said that somebody called Gilbert had said he’d seen Pat in Yonkers. She’d buried what she called her daughter in Yonkers. I went there. In the cemetery, on her stone, was a wreath, but she’d left no other trace. At the time I met by chance a Jewish detective whose surname was the same as my mother’s maiden name. He was a sergeant in the NYPD and was following someone when I met him at Washington Square and West Broadway. Suddenly there was a commotion not far away on MacDougal Street. I went over to see what was happening, bumped into the sergeant who was running and we saw a guy dressed like an English lord with two good looking girls being driven in an open Chrysler by a Chinese chauffeur wearing a tux, and he was shouting: Anyone who can sing a Hebrew or Jewish song wins a TV set and electrical appliances. The open car was filled with TV sets, radios, toasters, and people began clustering around it: young blacks, artists, and all kinds of bums, and they all tried to sing. Some sang “Hava Nagila” and “Shalom Chaverim” and they got a TV set or a toaster or a phonograph, one guy seemed to be avidly slicing the air with his hands and then suddenly burst out with, “Tse-na, tse-na ha-banot ure’ena…” and another ran up and yelled, “Hevenu shoilem oleichem,” and another, red-faced with effort, sang “Bei Mir Bistu Shein,” and others tried other songs, not strictly accurate, but close. The guy looked pleased and handed out expensive gifts to whoever sang first, and the girls giggled. Somebody sang the Israeli national anthem and “Mein Yiddishe Mama,” one guy who’d heard Ilka on the radio sang “Eretz zafa halaf udegash” in broken Hebrew and the man yelled, Wonderful, and gave him a TV set. He threw the gifts at them, they had to hold out their hands to catch them, and the guy said, Remember that the Jews have got a state with pioneers and soldiers—despite the fact that most New Yorkers had never heard of it back then. Now they very much wanted to hear about it. Two young Jews knew a couple of prayers from the Yom Kippur service and the guy was happy, the people blew him kisses and I looked at him in wonder and asked who he was but nobody knew. And there, on that spot, the sergeant and I met. We were both moved by the same thing: fear of a pogrom.