by Jill Ciment
Philip made love to me on his Hindoo blue settee. A practiced and precise lover, he believed his sojourns into the subconscious, his experiments with what he called “Surrealism,” had led him to new levels of sensuality. I was hardly prepared to be the judge of that. I was still learning how to kiss.
I stayed with Philip for three nights and two days. He introduced me to the practice of automatic drawing after sex. With him, I tasted my first glass of champagne, my first bite of trayf. But what impressed me most, what trumps all my other memories despite half a century, is that Philip owned a telephone, an elegant black instrument on a fluted pedestal. I’d never seen one in a private house before. Whenever it rang, Philip grew exasperated, but I felt we were at the center of the world.
When I finally returned home, my frantic mother demanded to know where I’d been, and when I shamelessly told her, she called me a nafka, a whore, and wouldn’t speak to me. The logistics of our not talking in a two-room tenement were complex. We had to steal past each other without so much as our breaths mingling. I had to bear witness to her mumbled quips without so much as a snipe back. Only my father, who had begun residing more and more in the bucolic fantasy of his Russian childhood, would speak to me. And only when my mother wasn’t home.
“Sara, do you see that wall?” He had taken to believing that not only our tenement, but the sweatshop, his boss, all of America with its hurry-up life, was only a figment of his dreams. “That wall isn’t a wall. That wall is the inside of my coffin.” He took out his tefillin and prayer shawl, then kissed my cheek. “But you’re not to worry, mein kint, I’ll soon wake up.”
I packed what little I had and left him davening toward the east, an air shaft strung with laundry, singing what must be the most heartrending of prayers, “Thank you God for returning to me my soul, which was in Your keeping.”
I found lodging with six Litvak sisters from my union in a cellar apartment on Ludlow Street. My bed was the board that covered the kitchen tub. All night long, directly under my ear, the faucet leaked in fits and dribbles. My dreams sputtered and raced in time to that watery metronome, save for the nights that I slept beside Philip.
I wasn’t his only lover: he made that unequivocally clear. He also made the conditions of my spending the night in his bed as complicated as a wedding contract. I couldn’t stay for more than three consecutive nights. I couldn’t keep any of my possessions in his closets or drawers. I was never to answer the telephone, though when it trilled, I pined to.
He practiced what he called “free love,” the unrestrained taking of lovers, which he patiently explained to me was the logical culmination of being a freethinker. He believed that sex was one of the few connecting links of the human with the divine. He saw bourgeois marriage as the ultimate subjugation of the spirit, an economic union at best, a form of bondage at worst, having nothing to do with passion. He spoke about idyllic South Seas societies outside Western capitalism, islands of free love, where sex was a form of prayer. Of course, he granted me the same freedom to take as many lovers as I wanted, encouraged me to, in fact, though I couldn’t imagine whom I’d bring home to my tub.
Besides, I didn’t want anyone else. Watching him perform even the most workaday tasks—crushing out a cigarette, the way a tributary of blue veins appeared on his forehead when he was trying to make a point, the sheer dimensions of him as he stooped through a Victorian doorway— absorbed the whole of my attention. His shoes were as large as shoe boxes. He tasted of French tobacco and English port, whereas my buttonhole maker had tasted of herring and cheap vodka. He bought me a vermilion silk turban, which he claimed all the bohemian ladies were sporting. He automatically included me in their number. At five feet tall, even wearing my turban, I barely cleared Philip’s elbow, but he didn’t seem to mind. He had me parade naked before him at the foot of his bed. He had me lie perfectly still while he shut his eyes and touched me all over. He called it “a sexual offering.” Whenever his hands momentarily paused, I felt something within me grow taut. I was still unformed in those years, little more than romantic ectoplasm waiting to be molded, and Philip seemed eager to give me shape. I could sense how intrigued he was by the idea of transforming a shopgirl into a revolutionary, a shtetl meydel into a bohemian. I could feel his excitement. It was as close as I had ever come to having power over someone, and I equated it with love.
I caught a fever one night and couldn’t go home. When I tried to get up, Philip’s bedroom floor seesawed, his hallway folded up like the bellows of an accordion. I could hardly navigate my way to the bathroom, let alone through the streets of New York. Philip made me lie down again and sponged me with alcohol. He used cotton swabs to cool the whorls of my ears. He insisted I drink tea laced with whiskey.
When I started to shiver, he made love to me. He gave me pen and paper, and asked me to draw my fever dreams. Even racked with chills, even under the sway of Philip’s unshakable belief that the future of art lay with the masses, I didn’t think my shopgirl visions were worthy of depiction. So I drew my father’s visions instead. I drew a city of coffins—coffin skyscrapers, coffin sweatshops, coffin els streaking past coffin tenements— and within each and every coffin room, I drew my poor, davening father with shekels taped over his eyes. When I finally put away the pen, Philip looked down at my drawing with the same rapt awe he bestowed on his mask collection, on his Gauguin. He said, or I hallucinated that he said, “If I could draw like you, mein lieb, I’d will myself a fever every second of my life.”
My temperature spiked and troughed for a week. When it finally abated, Philip cooked me soft-boiled eggs and rice. He insisted I remain in his bed for another few days, lest my fever come roaring back. He bathed me in a concoction of rose water, lemon, and soap, then changed my damp bedding for the tenth time. I luxuriated in his fastidious caretaking. I was in no rush to recuperate. Without so much as a word spoken between us, I simply never left.
On the bottom of my right foot is tattooed a plain wooden coffin. Jews do not believe in extravagant death rites. Thou shalt not be shamed, no matter how poor, by the simplicity of the shroud or box in which thou is buried. The coffin, however, is not for my father, who died that winter in the great 1918–1919 influenza pandemic, nor is it for my bereaved mother, who followed him shortly afterward. The coffin, the plain wooden vessel of a coffin, is reserved for my own voyage home.
CHAPTER TWO
he body provides such a limited canvas that the tattoo artist can’t afford to squander even an inch of flesh to commemorate the trivial. That is, of course, provided that the artist can distinguish between the trivial and the important. At eighteen, had I been offered my body as a canvas, I might have covered myself with the lovesick doodling of a shopgirl. This is why the Ta’un’uuans don’t allow their young to be tattooed, why they insist that the soul must be marked before the body.
Philip had grandiose plans for us, for me. He orchestrated my initiation into the fledgling New York art scene with the bohemian equivalent of a debutante’s coming out. He persuaded Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, champion of the avant-garde and heiress to the Vanderbilt fortune, to exhibit my coffin drawings at her Eighth Street salon, then invited everybody who was anybody to attend. When I arrived at my own reception on Philip’s arm, wearing the clothes he had picked out for me (including a feather boa just vulgar enough to suggest my working-class origins), I saw what looked like marble goddesses in ropes of diamonds and financiers in pince-nez scrutinizing my poor davening father.
“Don’t let them intimidate you,” Philip whispered. “Diamonds can’t buy what you have.” In tails and scarlet cummerbund, he ushered me through the crowd. “Besides, they want to be provoked, Sara,” he assured me. “That’s why they’ve ventured downtown.”
Then, in his hobnail boots (Philip always wore workingmen’s boots with formal attire), he climbed up onto Mrs. Vanderbilt’s Chippendale table to the shock and titillation of the ladies, and the contempt of their husbands, and gave an impassioned lectur
e that shoehorned me into art history. He said I was the next enfant terrible. He said I was America’s great avant-garde hope. He left boot marks on the cherry inlays. He tossed back his long hair so fervently that it almost got caught on the chandelier. By evening’s end, he had managed to wedge me into Modernity between Picasso and Duchamp.
Why would such an ambitious young man be so willing to subjugate his own strivings for a shopgirl like me?
The only child of a wealthy banker, Philip had been raised to expect the full assortment of life’s possibilities, and from that glut of opportunity, he had chosen, to his father’s disdain and his mother’s alarm, the life of a revolutionary artist.
Philip revered art as other men revere money, or war.
If art is nothing more than the shadow of humanity, then Philip could divine life where others saw only a blur of abstract shapes. He could recognize art in the tiniest mote of being, intuit it in the mundane. He could proselytize until even the dullest cretin would feel the shock of art’s intimacy. Philip could do everything but create art. Next to the Gauguin in his house, his own attempts at painting looked like feeble carbon copies, the visions of a man who is hopelessly gazing in the wrong direction when the spectacle occurs. When Philip drew the human figure, the result looked like a manikin. When he tried his hand at Cubism, the outcome was a dime-store jigsaw puzzle.
For a man who could patiently spend hours tracing with his fingertip the contours of my body, he rendered the female nude without subtlety.
In the foyer of his Mews home hung a small gallery of his early landscapes—Cubist forests, Futurist utopias, Fauvist seascapes. Over the years, Philip had changed isms as often as other men change socks. To walk past these paintings was like walking past a row of foggy windows through which the outside world is reduced to conjecture and theory. It was as if Philip could only render the massive shapes of art history, whereas painting requires the particulars.
By the time Philip and I met, he called himself a Dadaist, but in truth, he hadn’t been able to get himself to go into his studio in more than a year, hadn’t been able to get himself to produce so much as a single drawing in more than two.
The Ta’un’uuans have taught me that one’s ability to create beauty is only commensurate with one’s knowledge and acceptance of suffering, that art and pain are wed. If the islanders are even partially right, then at eighteen, I knew nothing about Philip’s suffering, and even less about why he was unable to make art.
My exhibition was, in the rarefied world of Greenwich Village, 1920, a success. I sold work to . . . really, does it matter? Suffice it to say, with Philip’s help, my drawings now hung beside Matisse and Sargent in the parlors of Park Avenue. By the time the exhibit came down, I fancied myself an artiste, and Philip fancied himself my collaborator.
He called us “conspirators in art’s revolution against bourgeois rationality.” He said, “Sara, you’ll make the bombs, and I’ll plant them in the houses of the rich.”
Under his tutelage, we experimented with what he called “psychic automatism” by having me—us—drink absinthe as if it were tea, smoke “tea” as if it were tobacco. When the milky green liqueur had tugged us both into the netherworld, I would get down on the floor in Philip’s studio and kneel over an enormous piece of paper that he had laid out for me, while Philip handed me supplies—a bamboo pen, or a piece of Pitt charcoal, or a camel-hair brush. Then, hunkering down beside me, he would place his hand lightly over mine, in the fashion of a hand on a Ouija pointer, and whisper softly into my ear, in the fashion of a hypnotist, the symbols that were to spin out of my pen. His hand was huge and concealed mine so completely that it often looked as if it were he who was drawing.
“Mein lieb, draw for me an egg in a birdcage.” “A child’s nightmare.” “Convulsive beauty.”
And I would render, with hallucinatory precision, the imagery I saw on the backside of my lids.
When the drug induced a state of hyperbolic eroticism, he would make love to me on top of the paper, all the while urging me not to cease drawing. And I would draw self-portraits—the convoluted path his hands took on my pelvis, say, or the pelvic bone itself as it resisted the weight of his body.
In the wake of these frenzied states, I’d lie stupefied in his arms, while he read aloud to me from Marx or Freud or Trotsky or Emma Goldman or Apollinaire. Philip was evangelical with his knowledge.
At some point during my radical education, though, I must have grasped the idea that Marx was trying to make, that if I did the actual labor, I should rule the means of production. At some point during my artistic awakening, I must have gleaned Apollinaire’s heartfelt appeal to pursue my own version of reason. One evening, I instinctively wrenched my drawing hand free of Philip’s grasp when he wouldn’t quit trying to guide it.
He shot me a look of genuine bewilderment. “What are you doing?”
I pretended it was a mistake, but he knew it wasn’t.
He got up, poured himself another absinthe, knocked it back. “What we have together is perfect. Why would you jeopardize it?”
Then he grabbed his coat and left. He didn’t return until the next morning, and even then, he acted . . . if not cold, then numb. When we next attempted a “collaboration,” I took my absinthe as if it were medicine, knelt over the paper, and feigned fervor and innocence, but Philip wasn’t fooled. He remained on his feet, looking down at me from his enormous height. He didn’t touch his drink, nor did he touch me.
“What are you going to draw tonight?” he asked.
I said I wasn’t sure. I said, “Isn’t the point of psychic automatism not knowing what you’re going to draw.”
“If you say so.”
I picked up a pen. “All right, what should I draw, Philip?”
He didn’t answer me.
“I said, what would you like me to draw?”
“I suppose whatever comes to your mind, Sara.”
I dipped the pen into the inkwell and started spinning out my own visions. In no time, I covered the entire surface, saturating the paper with a deluge of imagery that I’d been saving up for months.
When I finally looked up, Philip hadn’t moved. He was staring down at my drawing, like an acrophobic at a sheer drop. You see, all this time, Philip had honestly believed himself to be my daemon, the spirit that enters the body and guides the mortal to genius. I was the medium through whom he was finally able to create beauty, and here I’d filled up the whole sheet of paper without him.
He strode out of the studio, but I followed him this time. I said, “I thought you didn’t believe in the bourgeois propaganda that art is created by lone individuals.” I grabbed hold of his shirttail. I said, “I thought we were collaborators. Why should it matter which one of us does the grunt work?”
He reeled around and looked at me with such patent amazement that I was silenced. “You have no idea how much it matters,” he said, and left.
Next day, we tried to act as if nothing had changed, but, of course, everything had changed. It was then that Philip started bringing home the women. At first, it was under the auspices of “varietism,” the practice bohemian couples engaged in in order to overcome bourgeois jealousy and increase mental hygiene. We couldn’t have been together more than six months when he brought the first one home. It wasn’t to share, mind you. He brought her home to punish me for having completed a folio of etchings, etchings I made all on my own.
He showed up with her around midnight as I was pulling the last plate. She was mock society, nouveau riche, probably married to some shop boss turned millionaire. I think she was as surprised to see me as I was her.
She called me “missy” when Philip introduced us.
I called her “ma’am” and offered her my ink-stained hand.
Philip tried to steer her away from me and into the bedroom as quickly as possible, but I blocked their way. I hadn’t grown up in the slums for nothing; I could steel myself when I needed to, rally bluster to conceal woe. I said, �
�Oh, Philip, don’t hide your guest in the bedroom. Why don’t you do it on the settee (I pronounced it “sah-teah”) and let me paint you?”
Mrs. Nouveau Vanderbilt wasn’t quite into practicing the mental hygiene she thought she’d wanted. She gave me a look of unabashed superiority, whispered something in Philip’s ear, then left.
I think Philip was relieved to see her go. He feigned disappointment, but he could hardly conceal his excitement with the startling ramifications of my—how should I put it?—my offer. Next morning, he nonchalantly asked if I would have really gone through with it? Next evening, he wanted to know if I thought Munch’s Jealousy was the quintessential painting about sexual madness, if I viewed Picasso’s Les Demoiselles to be the final word on voyeurism? He worked on my burgeoning competitiveness. “Be honest with me, Sara. Do you actually believe Stieglitz’s pretentious spiel about O’Keeffe’s little water-colors being the sole voice of female sexuality?” By week’s end, he had talked me into it.
Over the next three months, he brought home six different women and I produced six paintings. Five of the women were prostitutes, but the last one was a game socialite who had ventured downtown for the thrill.
As for the working girls, I instructed Philip to bed them, missionary style, on his Persian carpet. I myself was up on a stepladder, sketching. I wanted an omnipotent point of view, God’s haughty and neutral angle. I wanted to eliminate deep space, vanishing points, all allusions to, and illusions of, reality.
The question, of course, is how could I bear to witness my love—and despite everything, Philip was my love in both eros and charity—bed another?
On the one hand, it was like watching Philip eat, or more specifically, masticate his food, swallow, shovel in another spoonful, chew, swallow, and so on and so forth. On the other hand, it was like watching all my illusions of being uniquely desired end.
As for the socialite, Mrs. Blanche “Binky” Whiting IV, I broke down and joined in.