Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  Gandy was angry but said he forgave me. He was angrier with Mr. Barr of MoMA and the directors and curators of the other museums and the colossal conspiracy with gallery owners like Kootz or Betty Parsons or Sidney Janis. I said they hadn’t found a way of putting humanity back into painting and humanity was the mother of the arts: All was Man. There was no fear in the new art, no love or envy or hate, there was just decoration, wall illustrations. The next day Gandy and I went to Birdland; Count Basie and his band were playing there. The place was packed. There was a vocalist I’d never heard of, Joe Williams. He had a voice that could shatter glass. We sat there all night listening to him. We regretted that we were no longer twenty-two. Jazz had started to become minimalist, sophisticated, trying to compete with the classics. The members of the Modern Jazz Quartet were all excellent musicians. Bird had said that the greatest pianist alive couldn’t do what Percy Heath did with the bass. They could write a symphony out of improvisations. Tie pieces together with a string that would come out with perfect phrasing and beat. Organized spontaneity. Ordered anarchy. But the new jazz didn’t touch me. It left me cold. I’d lost a good friend. Even the best were only making “some ice queen out of jazz” like Brubeck did, he was the prophet of that sound.

  Meanwhile I was on the outside. No painting. No Lee. No jazz. And then Arthur Brandt, my sweet psychiatrist, called, Arthur who’d bought one of my paintings for ten dollars a month and said he was bringing me the tranquilizers I’d asked for, and he arrived in his station wagon and honked. I went outside. From the car he brought out the pills and a young, dark-skinned girl, with sparse hair, wearing dirty threadbare clothes, and he shouted, I’ve brought you a present, I found her wandering drunk around the railroad station, she’d gotten married by mistake and I helped her get a divorce. My girlfriend at home is jealous, so I had to get rid of Carole, she’s desolate, take her, she wants someone who’ll be nice to her, and Arthur drove off. I was standing outside by the steps down to my basement apartment. Carole looked at me without moving. Standing still as furniture. She looked tired. I told her to come in and she obeyed like an automaton. She looked around, still not saying a word, and then suddenly asked, Where? In bed? What bed? I asked. And she said, Where do you want to do it and come on let’s get it over with, I’m tired. I said that wasn’t what I wanted, we just needed to find her somewhere to stay, and first of all tell me what you feel more: hungry or tired? She looked at me with the first emotion I’d seen in her face and it took her time to take this in and she said, Do whatever you want, my hands are frozen. She stood without moving. I took off her clothes and she stood there naked next to a pile of clothes and filthy underwear. I picked her up, she hardly moved, and put her in the shower. I washed her and soaped her and washed her thin hair with shampoo that the rear admiral’s daughter had left by mistake and I dressed her in an old pair of pants and a pair of panties that the antique furniture restorer from Hartford, Connecticut had left by mistake and a shirt that Avi Shoes had brought from Japan and which looked like a dress. I gave her some milk, she drank the whole bottle, and then I carried her to the bed.

  She was all skin and bones and as light as a baby. She fell onto the bed and slept for two whole days. She didn’t move. I took her clothes to the Chinese laundry and the guy there said, What’s this? What’s this? I was given a dirty present, I said, I don’t know why. He washed and ironed them and on Broadway I bought a bra according to the almost illegible size number I’d seen on the one I’d thrown out. I bought cheese, meat, eggs, bread, butter, sardines, vegetables—I made a salad. As she slept I saw on her face an expression of absolute helplessness, she was lost and adrift. I typed on an Olivetti typewriter with a Hebrew keyboard that I’d bought from an Israeli who had come to New York. I waited. Arthur called to ask about her and I said that everything was fine. She woke up after two days. She looked like she didn’t have the faintest idea of where she was and who I was and what she was doing in bed. She stared at me and asked, a little frightened but without embarrassment, Was I okay? I told her my name and that I hadn’t been with her the way she meant and she asked, You a faggot? No, I replied, and she asked, Aren’t I pretty? You are, I said. She asked how long she’d been asleep and I told her. She started hobbling to the bathroom. I helped her sit down on the bowl. She still couldn’t move her hands. When she finished I wiped her. I dressed her and she said, almost pleading, I want to eat. I served her the food I’d prepared and she didn’t look at me. She drank three or four glasses of water, ate voraciously without raising her head from the plate, she wanted to talk but she choked and I told her not to rush and not to worry and she gave me a look that was now lit up with a kind of wild fire that made her beautiful. When she’d finished eating she sank into the armchair I’d found outside a building on Eighty-eighth Street and asked, Now, after all that, maybe you’ll tell me, mister, who you are? What. Where I am. I told her. She said she had a faint recollection of being drunk in the railroad station and had married somebody, she didn’t remember who he was, an old lady had dragged her off and a cop had come and she thought she’d said she was from the Galante family and he’d crossed himself, they’d ridden in a police car with flashing lights, there was a beautiful building near Lexington, she didn’t remember the street, a brownstone, and there’d been a shingle, Dr. Something and the cop said, that’s good, and dropped her off and raced away and she went up, the door was open, there was a bed there, she was so tired that she didn’t notice the man sleeping in it, suddenly a blonde woman had shown up and yelled at her and the man yelled at the woman and then, she didn’t remember but it was morning, the man said he had to go, that he’d had a fight with the woman and they’d hit each other, she thought he’d given her coffee and said, We’ll talk later, she said he’d gone downstairs with her, outside lay the cop who’d brought her, wounded, and there was a paper near him and the paper said: This is what happens when you mess with the Galante family. The cop mumbled something and an ambulance came, she said, They excommunicated me, they threw me out of the family, my father wouldn’t let my grandfather murder me, and then the doctor came down and brought me to his friend who’s you I suppose, and that’s where I suppose I am. I liked the way she said, “I suppose” and said, You put it all beautifully. She said thank you.

  She asked what I did and where I was from and I gave her a five-minute lecture on what I did and what I’d done and where I was from, and then Arthur called, upset, and said he was sorry for causing me all this trouble, he’d heard that a policeman had been badly beaten outside his building and that I should be careful. In the clothes I bought her later, Carole Galante looked good, but there was still a hint of the old emptiness in her dress. She was in her own world and only occasionally brushed against the outside one. She understood things like murder and betrayal but not what you do the day after you’ve woken up from a two-day sleep and when somebody’s not shouting at you or kissing you or talking to somebody who’s brought in money from the numbers, from hookers, from drugs. Right from the beginning I was scared to get too close to her. An intimacy had begun between us that didn’t need closer contact. Carole understood that she didn’t have to fall in love with me and that she didn’t even have to like me. It was easier for her and she said that for the first time in her life, apart from her family, she didn’t have to be anyone’s slave. She felt dizzy from not having any obligations. We slept in the same bed because there wasn’t a couch but I didn’t touch her. She’d sometimes wrap her arms around me and cry as she slept. I told her about Angelina from Naples who’d said she was my dog and barked at me not to leave her and Carole sat enthralled and said that her parents came from a village near Naples, she didn’t know which one, and that now that they’d ostracized her they’d never take her back but that they wouldn’t do me any harm, They said I could live with somebody and be what I want but I just shouldn’t go near policemen or detectives and that’s why they beat up the policeman but they won’t touch you because you don’t look like a detectiv
e and I confirmed that I wasn’t. The secret of Carole’s charm for me was in her dangerous naïveté. She said she was a dancer. That she’d slept with guys her brothers had brought for her and afterward they’d killed one of them. I fed her. I bought her things I’d never bought for Lee, but there was still this barrier of fantasy between us that we nurtured out of the desire not to ruin a relationship that was so complex and layered by turning it into something resembling love or schmaltz. Arthur came and talked to her. She thanked him for bringing her to me.

  I was walking on Broadway towards Seventy-second Street to buy some typewriter paper and bumped into Mira. We went into the lobby of the shabby Broadway Hotel and sat there. She looked beautiful of course, but a kind of gloomy defeat emanated from her face. Stripped of her absolute malevolence, she looked naked. She told me that Avi Shoes had offended her. That he said he’d had enough of her. That she was too capricious and that he’d wasted years on her. And I thought, she added, that I’d given him the joy of being rich and yet knowing I could never be bought. We talked a bit more and I invited her to my apartment. Sandy arrived and I had to go upstairs to help Steve defend himself; Sandy punched her hand through the window and her hand was torn and blood poured out and we smeared her with iodine and cognac and dressed her wounds. I went back to my apartment. Mira and Carole were talking like old friends. I tried to figure out what Mira had been up to. Where she had been all this time and who had she been hanging out with. She said she’d heard that Avi Shoes and I had had Pat committed to a psychiatric hospital and she’d gone to see her and that Pat lay there so peacefully that Mira herself wanted to lose her mind in order to be able to lie there so peacefully too. I told her she had already lost her mind when she decided she had been born to her father without first going through her mother, and she said, You bastard, why didn’t you love me? I said, A sexy spy once asked me the same question and she didn’t like me any more than you do. And I asked, Why is it so important for you to know why I didn’t want you, and she said that all the men who knew her wanted her and I didn’t want her and that I was one of the only men she knew and still hadn’t slept with. I told her that I’d been married to her best friend and she said, Lee forgave me in advance because she was sure that you and I had an affair, and I’ll tell you something, I didn’t deny it and she wasn’t angry. What do you miss most, I asked and Mira said, The convent, it was peaceful there, like Pat. There was this nun there, Sister Camilla, who believed in God, and was pure and chaste, which I never was, and we talked quite a bit. She said to me, Sister Matilda—that was my name—you have no business being here, you’re rebelling against yourself, and here you have to practice absolute obedience and repentance. Constant repentance. And there’s no compassion in you. I told her that there was no love in me either. I’m scared and lonely because I’m not a child anymore and what’s going to become of me in a few years’ time? Then she stood up and kissed me on the lips and left.

  Avi Shoes arrived an hour after Mira left. Carole Galante said it reminded her of a railway station, only no one gets married or fucks here. Avi Shoes knew that Mira had been here. He was following her, apparently. I said perhaps she was lonely enough for him now and he said, I want her but I want to want her more than to have her. She’s jealous. You were taken in thousands of times with all kinds of idiots and missed out on her, he told me, she should have been your wife, not Lee. I introduced Carole to Avi and said that she wasn’t for sale. I said it to earn brownie points with Carole but I knew that she didn’t stand a chance with Avi Shoes in any case. Avi Shoes drank the coffee I poured for him and said, I’ve been to Israel since we last saw each other. Warm regards from home. I asked him how it had been. I remembered that that morning when I read the Bible, as I was inclined to do every few days, I had come to the phrase in Jeremiah: O Lord, Thou hast enticed me, and I was enticed; and I felt a kind of shock, I smelled myself as I was but I could also smell the beach in Tel Aviv. I could smell the fields at Ein Harod after the rain, walking in the mud. I could smell Café Atara in Jerusalem, the Whitman ice cream stand on Allenby Street, a mélange of smells of carob and spices on Levinsky Street, the smell of sea salt in front of our house on Ben-Yehuda Strasse, and the sight of a ship sailing toward Tel Aviv Port, and I drank a glass of brandy and offered one to Avi Shoes. I said, I think I might go back some day because where in America would anyone understand: Thou hast enticed me, and I was enticed. Avi Shoes said: I went to Florentin, Emek Izrael Street. That’s where I grew up. We used to be poor, do you remember? There’s hardly anyone there from the old days. I stopped off at Itzik’s grocery and he recognized me. The sign says “Itzik Grocery Wholesale.” I asked him, Why wholesale? He said that when they made the sign he didn’t know what “wholesale” meant but had seen lots of stores with “Ltd” and “Wholesale” and liked the sound of it, and Dr. Shapiro who used to live there and now lives in Haifa later explained to him what it meant, but it was already a done deal. I looked around, Avi said, and felt like my childhood was gagging me, the barrel of pickled herring in his store, the sacks of rice and flour and beans and the shelf of white and black breads and how he’d cut margarine to measure and weigh it on the scales. How he’d arrange the weights that were lined up, shining bronze, from the smallest to the largest, and how he sliced his cheese. He had sheets of dried apricot, he had carob, and there were bottles of pure olive oil in cans that looked like JNF charity boxes, and Meged oil and Yitzhar oil, and a woman came in and asked for buttermilk and he gave it to her in a jar, and also some toothpaste and sardines. And I asked him to grind me some coffee and he took some Atara coffee and ground it and mixed it with lots of chicory, and the salt was kept in sacks and the rice too, and the blend was strong and Itzik offered me figs and dates and we talked. It was hot, but in the shady store with the ceiling fan, it was nice. And I asked Itzik about the apartment my family used to live in. He told me that some Bulgarians lived there now. Two women. A mother and daughter. You’re very highly spoken of here and every week at the synagogue they set up a match for you with a young woman, but then time passes and when she gets married to someone else here they set up a match with another, but there’s still hope. The Bulgarians are all right. Clean. Polite. Quiet. The daughter’s an actress. At Habima Theater. The mother is a translator for the Ministry of Defense. Later I went up to the apartment and the mother came to the door. It’s not like in America where if you want to talk to your neighbor you call a week in advance and arrange to visit. I told her who I was and she got very excited and said she’d be happy to show me the apartment. I’m not a sentimentalist, as you no doubt know, but I had tears in my eyes. The shutter I had over my bed, though the bed is gone now, the same green shutter, the same slats, with Yehezkel the blacksmith’s house out the window, the same lemon tree in the yard, the same carpenter’s workshop with the half-naked shouting Polish guy, and the cobbler across the way, nails sticking out of his mouth that he spits out in an arc and then hammers them into a sole, and the steeple of the Abu Kabir church. The mother said her name was Irinia and gave me some strong tea. We talked. The daughter came in. She took my breath away. Her name’s Miriam, and you’ll say I was hallucinating, but she’s the spitting image of Mira.

  Miriam took me to see a performance of Three Sisters that she was appearing in and we went to Café Kassit where people were shouting and drinking their fancy instant coffee and eating hot dogs with Kartoffelsalat. I came back the next day, I can’t explain what came over me, I put on overalls and brought paint and brushes and all the rest and I painted their apartment for them. They didn’t know who I was apart from the fact that I used to live there. And after I painted the place, and I didn’t even know that I knew how to paint because you’re the painter who paints for the whores from Texas, not me, I repaired the shutters and bought a new bathtub and sink and faucets and lamps and closets, and they sat there and cried. And I’m carrying wood and hammering nails, I’d never done anything like that before, and it was great to work, and I drank
coffee that the mother made, Turkish, and for two weeks we hardly talked. I just came and worked and in the evening went back to the Dan Hotel. One day I realized that I was running late and I came with the car and driver I’d hired and they saw me and said, Who’s that? And Itzik shouted, That’s him, the Brazilian ambassador, because that’s as far as that “wholesale” guy’s imagination could go, and they asked questions and I got confused and there was Mira’s beauty on the face of a sweet Bulgarian. I arranged for them to have a telephone installed, it takes years in Israel, but I paid whoever had to be paid and now they’ve got a telephone and a Frigidaire and a radio and I call them and they tell me how much they miss me and no one has ever missed me before, except for you maybe. And Irina says that Miriam wants me and she sings a Bulgarian song to me over the phone, and I sit there and don’t know what to do. The Hauser woman is still bugging me and I come to you and tell you all this, and I don’t know why. Friendship, maybe, but perhaps too because I followed Mira and waited and watched until she came out of your house.

  Carole gave me a pedicure because she said I needed it, and I discovered I’d run out of money. I thought about the no-money. Carole was a fatalist and so said there was no point worrying about it. We sat and drank beer and I remembered that six months ago I’d promised Gwen Verdon, a dancer who’d once seen one of my paintings, that I’d paint her. She was no longer married to Bob Fosse. She was a Broadway star and was appearing in Damn Yankees and singing a song that was then at the top of the charts, “Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets.” Although I’d already decided to give up painting, now, in view of my difficult circumstances, I called Gwen and left a message with her answering service. Gwen called me back and suggested that I bring paints and canvas and everything to her dressing room at the theater and on Wednesday, between performances, I could paint, and apart from that she only had free time here and there because she was rehearsing for something else during the day. I went to the theater on Wednesday and started working. I’m a meticulous woman, she said. I’m calm. But she was actually very jumpy. You look miserable, she said, I’m also miserable and I want a painting without my or your misery in it, like the ancient queen you painted in your last exhibition, and don’t make me prettier or uglier than I really am, and if you can get my dancing in, like the dancer you painted that I once saw, I’ll pay you well. I told her that the truth was that I’d stopped painting and was now writing and that it was hard to make a living, But you’re a woman who’s inspiring, you’re dancing even when you’re just sitting here wondering, What can this guy do that all my photographs hanging here can’t, but I promise I’ll try my best. I hung my canvas on the wall with nails, as I had with most of the paintings I’d done in the last years of my painting days, and I worked with a large sheet spread beneath so as not to make a mess. I brought along the tools that had served me in my last painting years and told her she could do what she wanted, because I wanted to capture her in motion, not posed, and sooner or later there would be a moment in which I would capture her face the way her face wanted to be captured in the painting, so she didn’t have to sit still like a model but I did need her next to me for at least part of the time. She liked the idea. She told stories about plays she’d appeared in and actors and dancers and her husband Bob Fosse and showed me movements he liked recently and tried to stretch her body into those movements and I saw that they were present in her even when she fell asleep in the middle of her rest period, which was in fact my work period. A frustrating intimacy developed between us; I didn’t give up, I knew this was the last painting I’d be doing as an artist and not as a writer who paints just because he feels like playing around with paints, and I hated myself for going back and doing something that had departed from me and I from it and I felt that I was cheating her and myself and doing everything just for the money and I told her so and didn’t deny it. She said she would rather be fishing in Maine, but instead of sitting in a beautiful wooden house on the magnificent coast of Maine she had to come to the heat of New York, somehow get refreshed at seven o’clock in the evening, put on her makeup, get dressed, dance and sing from eight-thirty in the evening until twenty after eleven just because someone from New Jersey and his little bourgeois wife had bought tickets. And paid a lot of money. And waited six months. And hired a babysitter for their kids and drove for an hour in heavy traffic and parked in a distant parking lot or traveled for an hour on the train, and came to the Forty-sixth Street Theatre. They come especially to see and hear me and I don’t even know them. I cost them a fortune and I wouldn’t pay five cents to hear me or see myself dance nowhere near as good as I really can, because maybe today of all days I have a headache, maybe I’m having my period, maybe my husband nagged me about something, maybe a neighbor bugged me, but I have to think of the poor idiot who paid a fortune for two tickets for him and his wife, and waited six months, and there’s the cost of gas, and the depreciating value of his car, and his new tires wearing out, the price of motor oil, a sandwich before the show, a glass of soda, maybe a small whiskey, and everything wears out, she said, but it’s also appealing and somehow hypnotic to perform for five years straight, six nights a week and once a week twice on the same day, always the same role, singing the same song at fourteen minutes after nine, dancing the same dance at ten after ten. She laughed and then became serious and thought about what she’d said and added that she always—and that was the trouble—spoke before thinking; and meanwhile I painted, I tried to paint like an ex-painter. I didn’t care whether I was doing a good painting. As long as it came from within me. Was I putting on a show for myself? I was a whore. Nothing was expected of me. I expected nothing. I didn’t have to think about gallery owners, curators, friends, about Gandy Brodie. I wasn’t making anything new. I wasn’t making something secret or mysterious. I just had to please one woman, a woman who would always love herself more than a painting someone painted of her, but perhaps a certain aura would remain in the painting, or a moment’s untruth would stay on the canvas, only on the canvas, and so become a part of her lasting image, part of her immortality. Perhaps she would think: I may not—or certainly won’t—be around forever, but at least this painting of me will remain. And that’s different than some old photograph. In old photos the passing of time is evident. But paintings don’t die, they don’t get sick, they preserve a perpetual present. A woman painted by Rembrandt is alive. I painted as if the Flood was coming tomorrow. I watched her with ten eyes. I saw her from every possible angle and combined the angles and their contradictions, I wanted a painting of motion but I also wanted the face in the painting to really resemble her, so she would recognize herself even though no person really knows himself or realizes what he looks like, he walks around without ever seeing his head, just looking and seeing other heads all around. I worked for about ten days, perhaps more, and spoke little if at all. She saw me looked at me like she would a wall or a pillar or a cab driver and dressed in front of me without being embarrassed that I was seeing her half-naked, and she occasionally giggled and posed like an Egyptian dancer, or like Martha Graham, movements from a tomb wall and her stomach always contracting because of the terrible constipation she had suffered in her youth. She danced in front of me like a vaudevillian and said everything that came into her head. She gossiped about herself, laughed at herself, pretended to be naïve, and wallowed a little in some charming kindness that she dredged out of somewhere so that it would also go into the painting. She didn’t look at the work until I was done and asked that I cover the painting with cloth when I finished working. When I was done I covered it. I went back the next day. She brought a bottle of champagne. I unveiled the painting in slow motion, like in the movies.