Dangerous material, Krieger. Lupi felt along his neck and ear to find if they were warm. He did not want to blush nor did he think it wise to display any sort of emotion at the moment of their parting. He continued to nurse along the idea that the passport might as readily get him through Italian as American customs, and suspected that while the fat man had only provided enough cash to transport them from the airport in New York to the city proper he could exchange both his and the old man’s tickets, and apply them toward a transcontinental flight. It would of course involve abandoning Olid, and Krieger’s confidence that Lupi could never do it was, as ever, reproachful and delicately, surely true. There was no going back now, anyway.
“Hey Lupi?—you ever hear of a guy named Tony Shafrazi?”
“Toni who?”
“Compatriot of yours, right? Shafrazi or something or other? maybe not, but anyway this Tony, you’ve heard of Picasso, right?”
“The artist.”
“Good boy, so Picasso painted this huge canvas when you’re up in New York if you’ve got a few moments in the afternoon tomorrow go by the museum check it out, Guernica, you know the image the town in Spain being bombed those minotaurs and the women and children all running for shelter their faces stretched out into Play-Doh tragedy, real statement this piece of art—but of course Picasso’d long since moved to the foot of Mont St. Michel, Mont Parnasse, whatever it is where Cézanne painted all the time—by the way, he bought half the mountain because he was crazy with envy he could never paint as well as Cézanne he’s got a huge fortress of a mansion there, they buried him there in the mountain and he’s probably still weeping bitter tears into it, etcetera etcetera, so anyway here comes this Tony character waltzes into the Museum of Modern Art past the guards and spray-paints the goddamn Guernica a few years ago and you know what I think?”
“You think that’s a good thing, right?”
Krieger paused. “Lupi, I like you. I tell you one thing it’s not.”
“What,” he said, resistant.
“It’s not Vichy personality.”
3.
THE WHOLE ISLAND had seemed so balmy—something Hannah had dreamed must be West Indian—the afternoon she put down first and last months, and a security deposit on a furnished efficiency not far from those docks where she’d made her first escape from Krieger. The floor overhead was occupied by her landlady, a wispy woman who kept her own counsel and whose movements could never be heard through the overlapped piles of old oriental rugs which covered her floors; beneath was an auto-body repair shop which meted out a constant bouquet of gasoline, oil, diesel and which, in contrast to the other neighbor, was a source of constant noise. Inside the apartment itself the furniture was dated and worn, property the widow had grown tired of and put down here rather than discard. Hannah rearranged the table, chairs, rug but couldn’t dispel the feeling of transitoriness which pervaded the space even into its chintz curtains, its broken cylinder desk, its whistling, iron-black airshaft (her “city-vu”). She told herself that in time the room and its furniture, having absorbed her through routine and touch, would come to feel more permanent, more her own—the photograph of mama Opal holding hands with her very young daughter, standing on the deck of the Staten Island ferry, smiling, which was placed on the mantel (the fireplace had long since been bricked up), threw the first possibilities of this conversion over the walls and floor.
The job she at last found met her criterion but was not what she might ever have expected. As on all her applications she was forced to misrepresent her qualifications.
“You suffer from acrophobia?” she was asked.
She said that she didn’t, and the man gave her the job because she was the first person who had ever applied with the company who didn’t ask what the word meant. She had a good set of worker’s hands, too, had good height, and though she had no portfolio like some of the other applicants she sat down with Conté crayons and pad and could reproduce copies of any image placed before her.
Simon Deutsch was her boss, and the master painter. After Hannah and another painter had fleshed out (to the master’s cartoon) drapery and scenery, Deutsch mounted the ladder along the great cylindric leg of the billboard—himself looking like a worker out of a WPA fresco or a Diego Rivera—with extension rods dangling from his belt, clanging their hollow aluminum ring, muttering, “Eh, Hannah, wenn nämlich die Sonne im Osten steht, ja?” squinting into the dawn out over freeway and highrises, commuter trains and the tangle of television antennas, dead trees and smokestacks, cakes of sooty ice down in the estuary, and set to working up the face and eyes.
“Hannah have you gone and seen Coit Tower?”
Where was it?
“Simon’s never been wester than Piscataway,” the other man said.
“This is true, Hannah, but I seen pictures, I got one of them albums full of the pictures of the great Coit. On the top of the highest hill in San Francisco. My father was one of the last of the Wobblies, you ever heard of the Wobblies?”
“No it’s not,” the man interrupted.
“What’s not?”
“Coit Tower’s not in San Francisco.”
“Nicanor, it is. Cut me some more slack on that left leader, we’re sinking down here. Hannah, pop us that chalk green there.”
“What for the green?” Swarthy, bright-eyed Nicanor was about twenty, Hannah guessed. He wore his hair in a moderate, but proud, Afro.
“You tell me, mister know-it-all, the screwdriver, Hannah.”
Nicanor gave the matter some thought. “You’re changing the guy’s eyes to green.”
“Hannah, the thermos.” The morning wind buffeted the scaffold into the flat surface of the billboard, and Nicanor mildly cursed. “Hannah, I’ve been working here with Nicanor for what five years going on now and he still refuses to learn the basic lesson about skin. It’s why he’s still painting trees, bobsleds, toilets for me, and not the beautiful faces and hands of the people out here. Skin, flesh, Hannah, listen to me, it is green. Okay?”
“Green,” she repeated.
“You know Hannah here doesn’t even know how to clean brushes,” Nicanor offered in his own defense.
“Hannah is brilliant. She’ll learn,” and offered the thermos across to Nicanor, who took it and drank. “But, Hannah. The skin. I learned it must have been forty-five fifty years ago when my father took me back to the Old World. All your medieval painters knew it. Sassetta’s Saint Francis? green. Giotto’s madonnas? green. They all knew—chromium oxide green is absolutely inert, absolutely permanent. It is like god. The tinctorial power of the color, the range of color properties. Goya’s Jesuses? green. They’re all green as grass, I’m telling you. The Old Country is all churches and cathedrals you know and they’re all filled with beautiful pictures. Flesh, first coat, green, this is Deutsch’s cardinal rule. Learn it and you’ll be fine.”
“People ain’t fucking green,” Nicanor finished.
He held the thermos out to Hannah and while she didn’t really want any coffee she took it anyway, seeing it as the chalice it must have been in this communion. She wondered how many times they had run this discussion through, the younger man always gently refusing to give in. It must have been his way of remaining in the position he wanted to hold just under the other, unburdened with business responsibilities, and notions of aesthetics. She held her hand out and looked at its long fingers and rounded knuckles and the tributaries of veins that ran across the back from the wrist, and she saw that he was right, that there was indeed a green cast to the flesh.
“It’s green,” she exclaimed.
“See that.”
“Hannah here is green in many ways but that ain’t one.”
“Hór auf damit,” Deutsch said, seriously. “See the shadows on the face as if they was light. See the reflections as if they was shade. Blend out your green with white and yellow for the shady patches, and just green with yellow for the light. After that we go over it with the color of the race. People don’t under
stand that race-color is only semiopaque scumbling, that the background color, the deep-shade you scumble over, is green. Now here give me that tray, no the deep one, right.”
“You mean you’re gonna let her work on that arm?”
“Nicanor, you’ve got the entire grillwork, the whole front end on this car yet to do, let’s move, it’s cold.” Deutsch turned to Hannah and said, “No one knows chrome and metals like Nica here. He’s the top in that field.” Satisfied, Nicanor moved down to his end of the scaffold, hooked the safety catch to his belt and turned on the portable radio he kept in the pocket of his windjammer. Earplug in, tuned to a lite-rock station, he sat down, legs dangling freely out over the planks, and began to work quickly. Hannah listened to Deutsch and watched each move he made, but caught herself glancing from time to time down at Nicanor to admire how deftly and rapidly the image was coaxed up off the blank surface. Then she looked at Deutsch, a good man of the old school. For the first moment since she had come to New York, the first time in months even, she felt things were going right.
She learned on the job, prepping the masonry stories up, taking the blowtorch to greasy spots, pointing up loose brickwork, checking the porosity of the surfaces they were to work on, leveling mortar joints which protruded beyond the face of the brick, furring and hacking the walls, hosing them after the wire brush had circled the entire area, January wind singing across the rope rigging of the scaffold, the gentlest to-and-fro sway of the planks underfoot, and below the indifference of foreshortened pedestrians and pulsating hum of traffic to gaze up here where image and a few words promoted the purchases of some product.
In the beginning it was daunting, the height. Instructed by Deutsch never to look down, Hannah still felt the sensation like a morbid plastic that the heart passed off throughout the limbs which was only neutralized by concentration on the work. She excelled, however. Within a year she had apprenticed at locations up and down the island and at billboards near the Jersey mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel and past the Triborough Bridge. The advertisements were for cigarettes and cars and liquor, and required backdrops of supernal snow-capped peaks, fresh lakes, autumn leaves, carefree couples.
It was a simple life. She would return to her apartment hands, shoes, face, hair splattered with paint and dust. By the time she cleaned herself up she was too tired to go out, or so she told herself. She sometimes wished she had friends, but she had no way of knowing how to meet anyone. On weekends she would go to see a picture. She read through the discarded books from the library of the widow’s husband, an odd assortment that ran from popular mechanics to bird-watching. She strolled nearly every evening down to the West Side docks to sit in the glow of the chemical sunset and watch the couples lean together and talk in low voices and leave the boardwalk to filter back into the streets and buildings. She missed walking barefoot on the dirt in the fields.
For all her solitariness, however, Hannah explained to herself that yes, well, she felt happy. She could do whatever she wished, whenever she wanted. That in itself was like having come into a wholly different world after the straitened and overdisciplined and what she later came to see as unforgivably perverse life she had led back on her uncle’s farm outside Babylon, on the dry yellow plain of Nebraska.
Also, it was a life from which for a time Peter Krieger seemed to withdraw, and for this she felt a sense of gratitude which was only occasionally broken by the strange caller who telephoned her after midnight irregularly from month to month and said nothing but only played bits of music, recordings, early rock and roll, from albums she was sure she remembered having been in his large collection, songs to which Mona had danced and shaken her hair during Hannah’s brief stay.
An afternoon some years later. Bitter middle of August. The lawn without graduation of color composed of synthetic blades and perfect as a putting green edged in foxglove, golden marguerite, daffodils, day lilies, lupine whose pale pink spikes nodded under the humidity, giving off none of the fragrance of flowers, as each was made of silk and stood on wire stalks wrapped in paper. Above was only a flat gray city sky pierced through with vague bars of white. The soft lamb’s ears, planted in sod tubs sunk into the roof, bobbed exhaustedly as a butterfly faithful as the foliage to the wind’s whim fluttered over it. On the terrace twin pots of leggy geraniums. In the miniature Japanese maple the male cicadas buzzed, pulsating and monotonous, testaments of the friendship of one who had brought them in a jar from a village on the north shore of Long Island, captured there in the garden. Hannah sat for a while, watched the gnats swarm in a furious milky ball over the rose garden, and could almost hear what they reminded her of, the creaking of swings, children flying back and forth in long arcs squealing, as a jet withdrew into the frontier above the rain gutter, rotting finials, tar vats. It was midday. Deutsch was going to be upset that she was so late.
Franz lay there, cottonballs on each of his eyes, dozing on a chaise longue in the sun, and the houseboy had told her not to wake him up. And where, she wondered, was Krieger?
She went inside where the air was drier and cooler, and pulled down a book from a set on a shelf in the living room: Nathaniel Hawthorne. “One afternoon, last summer, while walking along,” she read from the story called “Howe’s Masquerade.” She glanced up at the bookshelves with their rows of volumes fronted by knickknacks, trinkets, and saw in a frame under glass on one of the higher shelves a cut-out silhouette portrait, a profile, its dimensions no greater than a prayerbook. While the artists who produce these works, scissors flying this way and that through the black paper, the ribbons of waste falling away as an outline takes its shape, generally have reduced their science to a pattern they simply repeat—no matter what their sitter looks like—Hannah knew who this was the moment it caught her eye. So, then, where was Krieger, indeed? She put the Hawthorne down and went back out on the roof terrace.
Krieger was somewhere in Belize, was what Franz heard—wherever in the world Belize was, he was obliged to add—and whatever he was doing there Franz did not want to know; it slowly emerged that he had fallen out of love with Peter (Franz volunteering this in just these words). Forbidden and repressed as Franz now painted Krieger to be, that was that. Vulgar, unstable, contentious, were other words he attached to the memory of his former favorite, but Hannah was one who would know all about that; right? contended Franz.
Disquiet was only one of the reasons Hannah didn’t answer that question. Krieger had called so many times before, with news he had seen Nicky near Gramercy, and then proceeded with a perfect description of her father, an older Nicholas to be sure, hair thinned over the scalp, flesh collected under the chin, but Nicholas still. Hannah had, as ever, a difficult time separating one Krieger from another.
“After all, you and he were lovers, weren’t you?” Franz went on, pulling the cottonballs from the shallow dishes of his eyes.
Hannah lied, “No.”
“Of course you were, and you know how I know?”
“You don’t, though.”
“Hannah. Know how I know?”
She tapped the heel of her boot against the floor.
“Because he told me you weren’t and he is terrible at lying.”
“Krieger’s one of the best liars I’ve ever met.”
“You’re wrong. An obfuscator, an operator, maybe, but whenever he lied you could see it, it’d come over him like a panic. But who wants to talk about it?”
“That profile in there, in the library? That’s him, isn’t it.”
“What profile?” Franz frowned, pushed himself up on his elbows, squinted at her. “No, that one? no, that’s somebody else.”
“You’re a pretty bad liar yourself.”
“It’s part of my rehabilitation. Lying poorly, like a bad rug.”
How was she supposed to take that? she wondered; but Franz anticipated the response, since he’d at least in part set it up.
“Everybody changes at some point, don’t they?”
Well, that was true enough. “N
ot for the better, not always, but you were already—”
“Changing? back in the Krieger days?”
“That wasn’t what I was going to say.”
“Well, I was. I’ve been out of all that shit-kicking for years. Who needs it.”
“Hey, just out of curiosity, what was it you were into?”
“Just out of curiosity never mind, main thing is—and you know what, you can thank yourself some, you were partly responsible, the combination of getting rolled that night, and your accident down in wherever it was, down South …”
“What do you mean, rolled?”
“Krieger didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“I Am Curious, you remember—well, they released the blue version and I went to that same theater to see it, I fell asleep again. Little plastic surgery later here I am. You got a man?”
“No.”
“Everybody needs a man.”
“What for?”
“I believe that’s obvious.”
“Right—to destroy things.”
Franz got up, dressed in a swimming suit under a djellaba. It was one of those hot days when the air retreated to another place and what wind there was lolled about like a kind of skeleton, without body or breath. He pushed the gate aside and Hannah followed him through the pavilion and out onto a sandspit under a dome of glass. A long, very narrow swimming pool glittered underneath. Wrynn stripped and slid into the calm green. Hannah watched him, his long back and thin thighs, and the splashes of white he made on passing through the water. The float rocked, then coasted, when he climbed on it out at the far end of the pool. His wrists bobbed along the surface as beads drifted over his chest and face.
“Come on in why don’t you?”
“Oh, no, thanks Franz.”
“Hell, come on.”
“I don’t feel like getting wet.”
He readjusted himself on the float. “Here’s the reason you have no man.”
Come Sunday Page 17