‘But you didn’t.’
‘Guess I figured if there was something important on your mind, you’d either call or turn up here in person.’
‘Can we talk now, or should I come back another time?’
‘Now’s fine,’ she said.
She asked where I was staying and seemed lightly surprised I hadn’t yet settled in. She told me about a woman’s guesthouse several blocks away, called the owner, booked me a room, drew me a little map so I’d have no trouble finding it, then wrote down the name of a small Cuban restaurant not too far away.
‘Rest up,’ she said, ‘then meet me there at seven. They make a good daiquiri, an even better mojito, and a superb Bahama Mama. Good food, too – great ropa vieja with black beans and yellow rice and their lechon asado is to die for!’
I couldn’t get over how friendly she was, how warm and helpful. Perhaps I’d been wrong to think of her as resistant simply because she hadn’t called me back. I decided my best strategy was to conceal my expectation that she’d be difficult.
Let her set the mood. Don’t drill in like you did with Loetz.
The guesthouse, Sue’s, was decent enough. Sue, a stout fifty-something with gray bangs, referred to herself as ‘an old broad.’ She showed me to a pleasant room, told me the pool in back was clothing-optional, and made a point of assuring me that her house catered to both cis- and trans-females of any possible variety and orientation.
‘From girls to xirls – we get all kinds of womyn here. First time in KW?’ she asked. I nodded. ‘I tell people, you can have a good time or a lousy time in Cayo Hueso. You can party it up, get stoned or go into seclusion and write your novel. The only rule in this house is “Conch Republic Rules.” That means respect everybody, don’t impinge or infringe, and you’ll get along fine. You need anything, give me a holler.’
I thanked her, shut my door, unpacked, and lay down to rest.
I knew La Caja China was going to be good even before I came through the door. The arousing aroma of roasted pork surrounded the restaurant like a halo. It was crowded and noisy, filled with a variety of island types – old guys and gals with gray pigtails, gay boys in muscle shirts, college girls in halter tops, a faux-Hemingway type sporting a scrubby beard. I spotted Penny perched at the bar nursing a salty dog. I sat down beside her, ordered a mojito, and listened as she told me how she came to settle in KW.
She’d been living on the Florida panhandle, teaching art to middle schoolers, working on her own stuff when she could. She was married to a chief petty officer named Pepe Ruiz, stationed at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Panama City. They had a good life together, or so she thought, until it turned out to be not so good. She and Pepe were part of a group of sailors and their spouses who worked hard during the week and played hard on the weekends. This weekend play often consisted of partner-swap parties.
‘All of us, guys and gals, were sluts to a fare-thee-well. Predictably, things got tense, folks got jealous, and, as you might expect with warriors, one night our idyllic life turned violent. There was a fight. Pepe got beat up pretty bad. Couple of days later he drowned in a diving accident. I was devastated. I never found out if one of the guys caused it. There was an investigation and our unsavory social life was revealed. So there I was, a twenty-five-year-old widow, and, when the story came out about the parties, fired from my teaching job. So I packed up the car and headed down here, as far away from P City as I could get in Florida. I thought the beaches would be as good as the ones on the panhandle. Not true! The beaches down here are shit. But there’s an arts community – painters, potters and craft folks. I liked it and settled in, waitressed for a while, taught life-drawing classes, then used my naval widow’s settlement money to buy the house on Catherine, set up as a gallery/frame shop, started knocking out the kind of watercolors tourists like to buy, and, when I have the time, work on my own stuff in the back room.’
She grinned when I asked her to tell me about her own stuff. She told me it was pretty far out.
‘Like the murals in the Locust Street house?’
She shook her head. ‘That was a one-time project. For years my personal work’s been abstract. By the way, I notice you keep calling them “the murals.” Court and I never thought of them in such grand terms. To us they were simply “the walls.”’
After half an hour of chit-chat, we took a table in a quiet room off the bar, ordered dinner – big slabs of roast pork cooked in the house style, in a foil-lined plywood box which Cubans call a caja China. I didn’t push her on the murals, but did ask her why they referred to them as ‘the walls.’
‘Because that’s what they were – walls,’ she said. ‘Blank walls that beckoned to us, dared us to mark them up. There was another reason.’ She smiled. ‘We’d been reading a lot of Sartre. I doubt teenagers are much into him these days, but back then we regarded him as a literary god. At Red Raven I played Inèz in a workshop reading of No Exit. That’s the play with the famous line: “Hell is other people.” We loved that line. Also one from Oscar Wilde: “We are each our own devil and we make the world our hell.” That’s what we were after when we decided to mark up those walls. Other people and hell! That’s what you could say the walls were all about.’
She didn’t want to tell me more, explain what she meant. First, she wanted to hear how I got involved and how much of the story I’d uncovered. I told her I was just one member of a team working on it, then what we’d learned from Cindy Dryansky (‘Yeah, I remember her. Kind of a psycho bitch as I recall’); Loetz (‘Never heard of him’); Elizabeth Schechtner (‘Sure, Doctor Liz!’); Katherine Zevin (‘Terrific teacher! When I taught, I modeled myself after her’).
I described the other members of the team: Jason, famous conflict photographer turned photography teacher at CAI, who’d stumbled on the murals and was bowled over by them; Tally, Jason’s former student, now his assistant; Hannah, a textile artist, Jason’s former girlfriend and colleague at CAI, who also thought the murals were amazing; and me, who’d gotten to know Jason when there was an exhibition of his work, and to whom he turned when he was trying to figure out who’d lived in the Locust Street house and, specifically, who’d created the murals there.
Penny listened attentively, but I sensed her impatience. Finally, she spoke up.
‘You’ve mentioned all these people who I know nothing about. But so far you haven’t told me anything about Doctor Ted and Court.’
Her face fell when I told her Dr Ted had passed away.
‘Oh, crap!’ she said. ‘I really loved the guy. We both did.’ She gazed into my eyes. ‘Court – I hope you’re not going to tell me she’s dead, too?’
I told her Courtney was very much alive, a long-term resident in a psychiatric clinic in Switzerland. I told her we’d IDed her as the mysterious Ragdoll Artist, and showed her some shots of the dolls I had stored on my phone.
She studied them for a long time. I asked her if she saw a connection.
‘The two-sided faces look like her work,’ she said, ‘but Court wasn’t the only one who ever painted doubles. I remember suggesting it to her, based on some paintings I’d seen in a book of Schiele’s portraits. We called them “ghosts.” She painted them like auras hovering above the characters’ heads, reflecting their true nature. Not everyone on the walls rated a ghost aura. Just special people. Another thing, I never knew Court to work with cloth, or that she even knew how to sew. But artists go through stages before they find their voice.’ She paused. ‘Not sure if I’ve found mine yet. Though I may be getting there …’
It was getting late. I offered to pick up the check, but she insisted we split it. She may have felt that if she let me pay, she’d be beholden to me, and it was clear that she was not a woman to be beholden to anyone.
Out on the street, she unlocked a rusty old bike chained to a lamp post.
‘Don’t have a car,’ she told me. ‘Sold mine years ago. Bike’s all I need here on the island.’ She mounted it. ‘Come by tomorrow. Any
time after ten. We’ll talk some more.’
She pedaled off into the gloom.
I phoned Jason soon as I got back to Sue’s, filled him in on all I’d learned. He was impressed at how easy it had been for me to get Penny talking, including that bit about sex parties in Panama City and her husband drowning.
‘For me, the most interesting thing,’ he said, ‘is about the walls daring them to mark them up.’
I agreed; I’d also been struck by her comment that the subject of the walls was Sartre’s notion that hell is other people.
‘Figures. See if you can get her to talk about that.’ He paused. ‘Tell me about her seascapes?’
‘You’d hate them,’ I told him. ‘Kind of stuff you find on a motel room wall.’
‘You’re doing good, Joan,’ he said. ‘Sorry I patronized you with dumb advice.’
The next morning, when I walked into the Ruiz Gallery, I found Penny working at the big table in the center of the room, framing up a huge French cinema poster for L’Alibi, an old Erich von Stroheim film.
‘We can talk while I work,’ she said. ‘I promised I’d finish this by the end of the day. The client owns Bar Jean Cocteau off Duval.’ She glanced at me. ‘Check out von Stroheim’s expression, so stern and serioso, kinda like those faces Court and I painted on the walls.’
I took it as a promising sign that she’d brought up the murals without my prompting her. I was about to follow up when she started questioning me.
‘Tell me about yourself, Joan. What kind of writing do you do, and how’d you get into journalism?’
OK, fair enough, she wants to know who she’s talking to.
I told her my story: born and brought up in Orange County, daughter of Vietnamese boat people, the youngest of six kids. My dad an architect who specializes in designing public schools, my mom who worked her way up from teller to the vice-presidency of a local bank. Writing for my high-school paper, then at UC Santa Barbara where I wrote for The Daily Nexus.
That was when, I told her, I got interested in investigative reporting, starting with a series I wrote on teacher/student sexual harassment.
‘I ran this ad: “Email Joan if you’ve been harassed.” Lots of responses. Spent months following them up. Campus exploded when my pieces started coming out, leading to the forced resignation of two TAs. That’s when I understood the power of journalism, which led to my going for an MFA.’
She asked how I ended up working on the Times-Dispatch. I told her that decent journalism jobs are hard to come by these days, so when the Times-Dispatch editor said he’d let me work on investigative pieces as long as I understood my main job was to write feature stories for the culture page, I jumped at the chance. I added that I discovered that Calista, despite its reputation as a dead-end rust-belt town, turned out to be a pretty cool place. Finally, I told her about the arson story I was working on.
She glanced at me with a look I took as approving.
‘I’m almost finished with this,’ she said, motioning toward the poster. ‘Give me a couple of minutes, look around the gallery, then we’ll go to the backroom and I’ll show you some of my serious work.’
Nothing could have been further from her slick seascapes than her rigorously executed multi-layered abstract oils. She pulled out half a dozen one by one, then set them up without comment against the walls of her backroom.
The backgrounds of these paintings were orderly and geometric, overlapping flat architectural shapes (squares, triangles, trapezoids, ovals and circles in muted hues), overlaid by rapidly drawn, brilliantly colored expressionist slashes which reminded me of calligraphy, but which Penny assured me were not.
‘They’re just marks,’ she said. ‘They have no meaning. People thought Franz Kline’s black-and-white paintings were calligraphic. They didn’t believe him when he insisted they weren’t. I try to be patient when people ask whether I’ve been influenced by Zen. They shake their heads when I tell them the slashes are spontaneous marks. Do these paintings say something?’ She shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’ She paused. ‘What do you see in them?’
‘After what you just said, I’m timid about saying anything.’
‘Hey, Joan, you write for the culture page, for Christ’s sake!’
She was trying to provoke me. Perhaps she wanted to see if I was worthy to receive her confidences, but then she’d already confessed to participating in swap parties.
OK, I thought, give it a shot.
‘I see paintings by an artist working toward disruption, imposing disorder on what she may regard as a falsely ordered universe. You build up a carefully balanced architectural world, then cut and slice at it hard. It’s as if you’re saying you want to rip away the fabric. These are no-bullshit pictures.’
I turned from the paintings, looked into her eyes and discovered she was gazing back at me. We stared at each other for several seconds, and then she nodded.
‘Like I said,’ she said, ‘your guess is as good as mine.’
I think that was the moment when she decided to accept me, answer my queries as candidly as she could. Sitting side by side on her paint-spattered couch, I repeated what Kathy Zevin had told Tally – that she, Penny, worked inward from concepts, while Courtney worked outward from people’s faces.
Penny said she liked that. ‘Shrewd of Ms Z. I’m flattered she remembers us.’
I told her that Ms Zevin regarded the two of them as the most talented and interesting students she’d ever taught.
‘So was it that way with the walls?’ I asked. ‘You thought up the idea, and then Courtney painted in the faces?’
She smiled. She said it was hard to remember exactly how they’d gotten started. Dr Ted had encouraged them to create something together, and had offered the attic walls as their canvas.
‘He had them boarded up for us – windows too. He wanted us to really let loose on them, express our fears, our demons. We three discussed it for a while, then Courtney and I continued after he left us alone. I say “discussed,” but you should know Courtney wasn’t much of a talker. She listened to what people said, but rarely spoke herself. When she did, it was in short staccato whispers. I doubt, in all the time we spent together, she ever said more than a sentence at a time. But oh! – that girl could draw! Far, far better than me. She wasn’t happy unless she was wielding a pencil, stick of charcoal, pastel, crayon or brush. She could have been a very successful caricaturist if she wanted.’
Penny said they believed Dr Ted was expecting them to execute violent action paintings, but once they were alone, they decided to create something rigorous.
‘We were a couple of angry girls. I suggested that we not let loose like Doctor Ted seemed to want, but that we express our anger coolly. You know the phrase – “revenge is a dish best served cold.”’
She also recalled being the one who came up with the idea of covering all four walls. She wanted, she said, to turn the room into what the Germans call Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art.
‘I didn’t know the word back then,’ she said. ‘I learned it at SFAI. But intuitively I understood the concept, and it struck me that the room was small enough that we’d be able to create something that would totally envelop us, something we couldn’t escape. Which, I think, goes back to No Exit – turning that little room into a kind of hell.’
When they told Dr Ted their plan, he said he loved it and again urged them not to hold back.
‘So the figures you two painted – were they your demons?’
‘Some. Most of them were Court’s. She had serious family issues. She thought her parents were arrogant and unfeeling. I had family issues too, so we sort of combined them. I think our being so much in sync is what made the project so exciting.’
She paused.
‘You know, I think the Walls – or the Murals as you call them – was the most exciting project I’ve ever undertaken. Teens are like that – passionate and not afraid to throw themselves into something bigger than their trifling
adolescent selves. Man, did we throw ourselves into it! Total commitment! There was nothing we weren’t prepared to do to get those four walls covered. Nothing else mattered to us. We were in “the flow,” as they say, caught up in our rage, which we somehow knew how to shape and discipline. The harder we worked, the more energized we felt. It was like we were on fire. We’d work for hours without a break. Just as you speak about discovering the power of investigative reporting, we were in the process of discovering the power of art. Not so much the power that art can have on viewers, but the power of being possessed by a vision, then striving to bring it to life. Pouring our confusion and angst into something totalizing and powerful. I often wish I could get back into that state of madness.’ She paused. ‘You see, Joan, we truly believed in the redemptive power of art, and that what we were painting on those walls … could be our redemption.’
She looked around at her paintings. ‘Guess I still believe that, though not with the same intensity. These pieces – they’re my attempts to say something I can’t put into words. I think you may have been right about my trying to rip the fabric. I like that. It might even be true. Did you know there was an Italian painter, Lucio Fontana, who stabbed and slashed his paintings with a scalpel? We artists speak of “making marks.” Fontana’s cuts were the ultimate in mark-making. I think my paint slashes are my way of doing that. Whether there’s any kind of redemption that goes beyond self-expression …’ She threw up her hands. ‘Who can say? All I know is that if I was restricted to the kind of work you see out in the gallery, I’d feel terrible about myself. These paintings, the ones in here – if I couldn’t make them, I’m certain I’d fall apart.’
A bell tinkled. People had entered the gallery. Penny excused herself, went out to meet them. I heard the muffled sounds of conversation. After a while she popped her head back in.
‘There’s a couple interested in buying watercolors. This may take a while. Can you stay?’
‘Of course!’
It took her a good half-hour to seal the deal, which, it turned out, led to her selling three of her seascapes. She was pleased.
The Murals Page 20