by Yoram Kaniuk
I tried to move into the other room but she didn’t want me in there yet. There was something pathetic in her attempt to make herself seem like a big deal in the eyes of someone who was an artist and poor, and I remembered that the whores I’d known in Paris were neither dramatic nor tragic. They hadn’t come from homes where their fathers raped them, they simply sold their bodies because they needed money and didn’t make a big deal of it. Mary Lou seemed like an affable but dangerous woman, because she’d conditioned herself far too well. I thought that maybe her way was actually easier, given her profession, since she could despise a client and still relate to him, because he hadn’t chosen some street whore but had come to a penthouse on the Park. She showed me a case of Dewar’s she’d been given that week by a wealthy client who liked bringing gifts. Tina van Haas who was asleep in the round bed woke up and was nice to me right off and didn’t put on a show. She came out of the room, came over to us, and smiled. She had to touch to know and so she touched me as if feeling her way and only then took in my name. She wrapped herself in Mary Lou’s arms and said that her real name was different but she’d been married to a guy who said he was a Dutch aristocrat and who spoke in a cute accent like mine and he loved to suck her nipples and talk like a baby and she’d diaper him until he’d come into her hand and on her belly and then she left, he called her Layla Day. I told her that in Hebrew the name meant night that is day or the other way round and that made her happy. We talked about payment, how much my materials would cost, I said I didn’t have the wherewithal to buy them myself so Mary Lou gave me an advance she called small to buy paint and maybe she meant me to paint Rockefeller Center. We talked about the colors they wanted. Tina wanted pink with gold stripes and said that Lovejoy had said I was an expert on angels and knew most of them by name and had painted angels for churches in Chicago. I want gold in a room filled with angels because it’ll look cute. Mary Lou said she wanted something more conventional and beautiful but she trusted Tina who knew about colors and angels. I had some more coffee from the pot and they gave me breakfast—in the world I’d come from an hour earlier it had been after lunchtime—and we chatted and they said I seemed nice and next day I brought paints and brushes and knives and a ladder and a variety of other tools and began stripping the paint from their walls.
There was a kind of hunger for beauty in those two. They talked about colors the way children do. Tina showed me a box of Crayolas and said it contained sixty-four crayons, and I said they were an ingenious invention. A combination of paraffin wax and industrial paint, an oil-based crayon, an invention that changed the world; and she said that she too liked to learn little facts about things and that it was a good thing she was still such a little girl really, because that way she didn’t have to think about the things she does at night. I just close my eyes and see angels when disgusting people are playing with my body. But no matter how disgusting they are, they can’t penetrate the soul of a little girl. It touched me and she drew an angel in Crayolas and said, See? I can draw an angel too. Mary Lou said, What I like to do most is to put makeup on and hang a pearl or diamond necklace around my neck, smear bright lipstick on my lips and go to a movie on my own in the middle of the day—which isn’t your middle of the day!—and buy popcorn. And when she talked about it, her voice took on a velvety quality. She was happy at the sight of the gold paint I had prepared, everything was ready, buckets of paint, spray paint, palette knives, and I wanted to get down to work. I worked for about an hour before Mary Lou came in, stood behind me, and said that I looked tired and should rest. I said I wasn’t tired but she said, Believe me, if there’s anyone who knows about tiredness it’s me. She led me to the balcony overlooking the Park. There was a big swimming pool there, a barbeque grill, chairs, loungers, rocking chairs, a garden with flowers and vines climbing up the wall. Someone was playing a gleaming grand piano. A tall black man wearing an apron was grilling hamburgers and hot dogs. Small tables were laden with bottles of whiskey, gin, and fruit juice and pickled herring. Miles Davis, whom I hadn’t seen since Bird’s funeral, sat drinking, looking somber, deep in thought.
I said hello and he didn’t respond. He sat there like a bored prince and when he raised his eyes looked lackadaisically at Tina and three other naked women who were swimming in the pool. Tina came out of the water and stood there naked and dripping. Her dripping pudendum was a precise triangle. She saw I was impressed and said proudly: Nice, eh? I have a French hairdresser who fixes everything. Even the insides of my ears. Miles mumbled something in his deep, husky voice and no one understood what he’d said, and as he stared jadedly into the pool he fell asleep sitting up. I was invited to come in for a swim but said that I had a hard time with naked women and Mary Lou said, We’re not women, we’re telephone operators. I said I wanted to get back to work but Tina wanted me to give her a massage because Lovejoy had said that apart from the war and the angels and art, I was also a renowned masseur, famous throughout the Middle East, and that I painted peacocks the way they should be painted. I gave her a massage the way I’d seen it done in the movies and she said that there was divinity in my hands. After that, I’d come every day at about the same time, work for less than an hour, and Tina or Mary Lou would come and have a look and make admiring noises and then announce that I was tired and hungry and call me out to the balcony. I’d eat and listen to jazz played by musicians, some of whom I knew. They started calling me “electric fingers” because of my massages. What they apparently needed was someone who just wasn’t half asleep and full of heroin. From the room where I was working I overheard them saying that you could talk nonsense to me and that I’d answer seriously. They wanted someone who would tell them about Leonardo da Vinci or Shakespeare. This suited me. They knew, as did the rest of their friends, how to lock their shame and sadness away, and I apparently woke some sort of regret in them—not for what they had or hadn’t done but about life in general, Mary Lou said in a moment of melancholy, a trickle escaping from her well-sealed eye. The musicians showed up exhausted from nights of playing and most of them were saturated with drugs. Hairdressers came and fixed the girls up on every part of their bodies. They had delicate skin and they took great care of it. There was a body-wisdom about them that sometimes led to Miles mumbling something about the fucking skin of angels.
One day, after I had painted a gilded angel on a pink background and was playing around with the paint, giving the angel different hues and a kind of shadow with wings beneath it that were more implicit than visible, they came in and applauded, and they were pleased and we drank Cutty Sark because they’d figured out what I liked to drink most, and the black man who tended the barbeque said, Ah, now I remember this guy, I remember him, he used to work at Minton’s Playhouse. He washed dishes. Wore black. Miles woke up and stared at me witheringly and said, Him? He never worked at Minton’s, he doesn’t know what Minton’s is. I said I remembered him from Bird’s funeral though he hadn’t necessarily been standing on the right side. He shot me an evil glare and said, Go to hell. He was working at the Hickory House and I went to listen to him the next day. He saw me, gestured for me to leave but I insisted on staying and he was flattered. He was working on a wild refinement—if you could call it that—of jazz that he’d inherited and he played jazz without a piano. I went with Gandy, whom I hadn’t seen for a long time, and he said to Miles, You come from a good family, not from the ghetto like Bird, you’re a lousy bourgeois but a great one and a sonofabitch, and suddenly Miles, who was always stony-faced, smiled. I realized then that he went to Mary Lou’s to unwind, and there I was, showing up all of a sudden, a white guy with connections to Minton’s Playhouse, Bird, Lady Day, and it annoyed him. It shouldn’t have been me he saw at the funeral, it shouldn’t have been me who’d seen him play with Bird and Ben Webster so long ago, and I was also the only one who’d ever painted Bird and now he was being reminded of it. He didn’t want to talk to me, it was more convenient for him to say that I didn’t know Bird because I’d had no
right to know him. Who are you compared to him? he asked angrily. Mary Lou went quiet for a moment, gulped air, Miles muttered, she dove into the water and waved her arms and Tina showed her the angel she’d drawn and Mary Lou waved her arms like Tina’s angel and sang a song from Texas. I told Miles that when I’d seen him at the Five Spot I’d realized that he wasn’t a decent man but was a greater musician than Ben Webster. But Ben Webster was a better instrumentalist and a decent man into the bargain, and Miles gurgled and whispered in his characteristic rasp that if he was more of a decent man he couldn’t be such a sonofabitch. I said that Bird was a decent man and he said that Bird was a genius and thought for a moment and added, You’re right about one thing, I’m a great artist, and then he fell asleep. I continued painting. Mary Lou drove me crazy with all the enforced breaks. It took a month to paint half the room. I had no life apart from that. I came. I painted. I drank. I ate. I talked to the whores and then went back to the room I rented and I don’t even remember where it was. Mary Lou could see that I was preoccupied about something and she said, It’s written all over your face, she wanted to know what it was. If I said that I’d been thinking about De Kooning or about Dr. Stern, with whom I was having empty conversations about my condition because he bought paintings from me and wanted to delve into and investigate all the emptiness in my life, Mary Lou immediately wanted to know how he, whomever it was, lived too. And I’d tell her that the doctor ate boiled chicken and sat around in dark rooms and she’d want to know why and what the rooms looked like and what he said to me and what I said to him. Once she pressured me for an hour to talk about Spinoza because I’d said something to Miles, who didn’t listen to me, about the line that Boris was always quoting about how will cannot be termed free but necessary and how only God acts from laws stemming from His own nature and is not controlled by external forces. I begged her to let me finish my work because although I was happy there I was thinking about my own work and how I was going to stop painting, something that had been on my mind for a long time, and she said, What’s wrong? The money? Isn’t it enough? I said, More than enough, and she got angry, she said, There’s no such thing as more than enough. Your salary is doubled retroactively as of two weeks ago. And once she told me that she was the greatest moaner in the business, and added, I’m a thousand times more honest than you. You don’t mind making money from a whore. My clients pay me just so I can pay you, so who’s the prostitute here? I said that I hadn’t expressed an opinion one way or the other and that it made no difference to me whether she was a whore or not or whether she fucked over the phone or in a bottle of gin, and she started sobbing bitterly and a few seconds later stopped as quickly as she’d begun. And she saw how the room had progressed and didn’t want me to stop, and to punish me for what she said I was doing to her she brought over an Arab she said she was in love with. And he went into the room at the end of the hall, slept all day, and took money from her to gamble with and he’d chuckle in front of me and say, There’s a Jew for you. It made her happy. She didn’t say anything about what happened at night and I’d sometimes stay over and in the morning, in the late morning, she’d come back tired, her makeup streaked on her cheeks, and we’d drink Columbian coffee together. Tina said that Mary Lou despised the Arab but swore that she was in love, which was why she didn’t sleep with him but only kissed and then he’d go to a plain, fat whore with the money she gave him. He wore an earring. He asked for more money. He went out and they discovered there was some jewelry missing and Mary Lou called someone and said, Finish that Arab off because he stole jewelry and money, and by the time I left the apartment for good, a tragic episode I haven’t mentioned yet, he had been missing for ages. I worked hard. I fought Mary Lou when she wanted me to come out and relax, and Tina became a bit hostile and claimed that I was offending Mary Lou but I decided I just had to get out of their reality. Finally, the room was finished. A lot of young women came over. Stony-faced people came, musicians came. Miles came. Apart from him, everyone praised the beauty of the room. The huge round bed was put back in the center of the room and Tina and Mary Lou got into bed and embraced and looked at the walls and were also pleased with the white ceiling instead of the purple one they had requested and I said, That’s it. I’m done.
They didn’t go to work that night. Friends came over. We sat in the room rather than on the balcony and drank. The black pianist brought his piano inside and played. He sounded a bit like George Shearing. Miles sat staring at me, an evil look in his eyes. Suddenly he said, That’s the illustrious painter who knows how to milk innocent women like Mary Lou and Tina and who caught Bird stoned one day and painted him and Bird didn’t even remember. His words hit Mary Lou, she collapsed beneath them. She bent over and her hands touched her feet, she stretched up and her expression was both exultant and frightening. Everyone stared. I hated the horrible silence and said, Miles, you’re a liar! And Miles said, I’m not. You’ve got the painting, or you’ve sold it. I said, Yes, I painted him, but you know very well that Bird was clean then, that he couldn’t take any more, that that’s what killed him, and you know that he chewed whole bottles of aspirin to kill the craving, the shakes, the pain, and drank whole bottles of revolting Manischewitz wine, and he liked my paintings and was happy to come and sit and I painted him and he liked the painting and I have it. Mary Lou went pale and glared at me, like a fox looking at me, like a wolf, and she asked, Where’s the painting? Her voice sounded different, perhaps it was her professional side. She got up and stood over me and Miles laughed and fell asleep and woke up and she said in a steely, merciless voice, First he comes to paint my bedroom, takes my money like a pimp, and then it turns out that he has a painting that belongs to me and doesn’t say a word about it. She slapped me and I slapped her back. She said, A painter with the hands of a faggot and the fingernails of a dyke. There was violence in the room now. All the angels in her eyes died when this anger, this malice began to ooze out of them. Why didn’t you tell me you had a painting of Bird? she shouted. I said that no one had asked me and anyway, how come it belongs to you? Miles said, Why did I forget you? Because you’re easy to forget. You came here because that pimp Lovejoy wanted to fix you up with work. Mary Lou was furious. Her face looked like a clam shut tight. Her lips shrank until the gap between them became a thin line. Bring it here, she said quietly. Bring it now. Miles looked at me and grinned. Everyone in the room was against me. She wants it and she’ll get it, Tina whispered. Miles said, Bird wouldn’t have allowed this nobody to paint him. You probably painted from a photograph, Mary Lou said venomously, and lit a cigarette, but the smoke choked her and she coughed and shouted, No Bird by you won’t be mine. You faggot. Mary Lou stubbed out her cigarette, went into the other room, and our silence waited for her to return, and she came back with her purse and said, How much? I said it had no price. She named prices that I didn’t even know existed outside of the movies. Her voice died down to a whisper and the numbers just kept coming out of her. She was determined to have the painting at any price and was oozing hate. Tina tried to calm her down, mama’s little darling, but Mary Lou wouldn’t give in. Her lips remained clenched. Miles was sorry to have to miss the show but he had a gig at Birdland and said, Bird, your nigger, your boy, made music and Benny Goodman leeched money and fame off him. I said that that was nonsense, Bird came after Goodman and he admired Benny Goodman and that now Miles was being anti-Semitic, and as he was leaving he said, You people! You’re always right!