The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  His own journey had started in Odessa, in 1935, the third child of six. His father had been a tailor and a flautist. When the Germans came, the family took the clothes they stood in and the father’s flute, and they stowed away on a fishing boat. Halfway across the Black Sea, a storm came up and the boat capsized. Alexei’s mother was drowned; two brothers and a sister perished of exposure. The survivors clung to the debris until they were washed ashore in Turkey, where they were picked up by coastguards and interned. They stayed in the camp for seventeen months. A second sister died of malnutrition. When the camp burned up, the family were shunted off to another, and another. Somewhere in transit the last brother disappeared. That left Alexei, and his father, and the flute.

  By 1944, they were in Algeria, in a camp outside Biskra. Alexei came down with polio. No doctors were available, and the medicines he needed had all been stolen. So he lay down to die. In the absence of a rabbi, a Catholic priest baptized him and gave him the last sacraments. His father played Papageno’s trills from Die Zauberflöte. Next morning, when the guards came around, Alexei was alive and his father lay dead.

  He had stayed Catholic ever since.

  After the war, he had lived in Oran and Meknes, Tangiers, Algeciras and Málaga, Barcelona, Toulon, Marseilles. When he reached Paris, he was seventeen, left-handed, and he made his living by sleeping with men.

  One of the men, a New Yorker, was an archbishop by trade. When the divine returned to America, he took Alexei Alexandrovich with him, bought him a green card, and set him up as a butler at the Swiss Embassy. There Alexei met and married a chambermaid. Her name was Kirsten, she was an earth mother, all buttocks and breasts, and she loved him half to death. There was so much of her, he never knew where to begin. So he never did.

  When Kirsten was not chambermaiding, she doubled as a life model at the Cooper Union. Alexei used to sneak into classes and watch from the back row, a man in a dirty raincoat. He dreamed to draw her, just once, his own wife. But he didn’t dare. Instead, he went out by himself on Good Friday and got blind drunk. When he came back home, Kirsten was sprawled face down and naked across their bed, fast asleep. Alexei took out his sketch pad. He drew what he saw. Then he fell asleep himself, his mouth buried deep in his wife’s round belly.

  In the morning, when he looked at what he had drawn, he found a rear view of Christ crucified, nestled in a julienne of aubergines, zucchini, nails.

  It was the end of a marriage. ‘I went mad, my wife went bowling,’ he said. ‘She found her home in the Broadway Lanes, and me they placed in Creedmore. The booby hatch. Fourteen months of white walls and enemas, no nails allowed. And the vegetables all were canned.’

  When they let him out, Alexei Alexandrovich moved downtown, became a janitor at St Stanislaus Parochial, found the basement on Ludlow Street. In between, he taught himself painting in oils.

  It was the late fifties, the early sixties; nobody on these streets was scared yet. Every night that it did not rain, Alexei would sit out on the doorstoop, sketching. Late one August night, a slate fell off the roof above him and tomahawked his scalp. In return, he took ninety stitches and a lifetime’s compensation.

  The monthly checks had kept him afloat ever since. If you looked long and close, you could just detect the faint white line on his pate where the slate had hit. Even now, he suffered violent headaches, nausea, the occasional fit of self-loathing. But mostly he was at ease. In the long months of his convalescence, shut up in his cellar, he had reached a type of resolution. ‘My skull was bound up in bondage, my mind running wild. So what? I start to ask the questions.’

  ‘What questions?’

  ‘Same questions like any man else: Who am I? How am I get here? So why?’

  ‘And the answers?’

  ‘There was none. Only except,’ said Alexei, ‘once I was some Russian.’

  It wasn’t much to go on: ‘But a start. A commencement,’ he said. As soon as he could climb off his sickbed, he traveled to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, out by Coney Island. Under the B-train el was a neighborhood called Little Odessa. Everything out there – the foodstore signs and the newspapers, the restaurants, the graffiti, the crime – was in Russian. Alexei bought a balalaika in a junkshop, started strumming it on the street. He strummed it down the block and overhead, up the B-train stairwell, on the platform, all the way back to Manhattan. When he got off the subway at Times Square, seven homeless Russians were ranged out behind him.

  He had carried them home like trophies. They’d filled his basement with noise, flesh, healthy stink; he had cooked them cabbage soup and pierogi. When one squad was replete, another replaced it. And another: ‘One good thing about Russians. They never run out,’ said Alexei.

  They were his sanity. His own Russian was minimal, a few basic phrases. Still, the sound of his lost language kept him rooted, secured him from flying away.

  It was a needed restraint. Many nights in the dark, he’d feel himself sprout wings and rise up, fluttering. But, of course, he could not fly with a maimed arm; all he could do was hurt himself. That was why he put no glass in his windows, in case he dashed himself against the panes. But it rarely came to that. Before he even got aloft, the dog would growl, or some drunken voice start singing of Lake Baikal, and Alexei would subside.

  Come morning, there was always more soup to be made, a fresh batch of pierogi: ‘So day by day, I remain discrete,’ he said. ‘In tact.’

  As for his paintings, he couldn’t make up his mind. He had never taken lessons, he knew that his technique was crude, and many times he felt absurd. Other times he was swept away. He’d stumble on some canvas he had forgotten, or glimpse another in a strange light, and their force would knock him sideways. It was as if some other hand had painted for him, used him for public transport. Then the crudity didn’t matter, and being absurd was an honor: ‘Only is the living thing. New life created, that was not alive before.’

  On this day in SoHo, his morale was at a peak. The week before, for the first time in years, a professional dealer had shown real interest, had even seemed willing to buy.

  The story went back a month. One of Alexei’s Russians, a retired watch repairer, had died and left him some antique gilt frames. Alexei had used them to set off his latest paintings. And somehow they’d changed his luck. The next time that he struck his pitch in Cooper Square, a smooth man in fawn leather pants and Gucci loafers came strolling by, took one look, and was entranced: ‘Like he seen some vision. Or other,’ said Alexei.

  The smooth man’s name was Harold, he ran a gallery on Cape Cod, and he offered to buy the lot, five paintings and five frames, for five hundred dollars. He would have closed the deal on the spot, only he did not have the right money on him. Still, he swore he’d return that day next week, cash in hand.

  That day was today. Inside Jerry’s, the framed paintings sat propped between Alexei’s feet, neatly done up in Christmas wrapping. Within the hour, he was to meet his man Harold here and be made over, reborn as a gallery artist.

  Sasha was not sanguine. ‘Three to five isn’t kosher. Even Stevens is doing bunk,’ he said.

  ‘Of course,’ said Alexei. ‘Art is dead.’ But he would not permit me to wait and see for myself. When the time appointed drew close, he drove me out in the street. Arguments and pleas got me nowhere. ‘Ill-omen bird, begone,’ said Alexei. So I went. It was time for lunch.

  Lunch, in Soho, was the critical meal. Da Silvano, the trattoria of choice, was crammed with dealers. Leo Castelli ate here. So did Shafrazi, and Larry Gagosian. And here Paul Kasmin brought me to break bread with Donald Baechler.

  ‘What’s he like?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ said Paul, and handed over a critique by the art journalist Robert Pincus-Witten, snappily titled ‘Increments of Inaccessibility.’ ‘He [Baechler] is obsessive,’ it read. ‘Working in isolation and filled with angst he revealed that by moments he fears he may hurl himself through the plate glass wall of his working loft. In a depression marked by an
inability to paint he passed long hours abed watching daytime TV; weeks of this diet ensued. In a fever-dream he imagines that he is hurling the television set through the glass and awakens in terror. The next morning he steels himself with a view to act out the impulse suggested by the dream and, in so doing, be “cured” of the fantasy as well as liberated from the depression. But he reconsiders, thinking of all the waste, and instead gives the television set away – only to regret, even more, the unrealized beauty of the act. It’s a god-myth, of course, life, death, resurrection, allied to Gide’s Acte Gratuit. And now he’s got no TV.’

  ‘No TV at all?’ I asked.

  ‘Only black,’ said Paul, ‘and white.’

  The man who came to lunch had a bland and circular face, milky white, and a voice both sweet and low. Any trace of TV-hurling was kept buried beneath a natty black suit, a spotless white shirt, furled at the cuffs. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ said Baechler. ‘There was a line at the bank.’

  He had large and liquid eyes, a forelock that kept flopping down across his forehead. This gave him the pampered, slightly babyfat look of a fifties’ rock and roll star, a bobby-soxer’s dreamboat. And a star he was. Courteous and smiling when it pleased him, pouty when bored, he had the star’s self-absorption, aloofness from human struggle and mess.

  In his presence, Paul turned hedgehog, pulled his head so deep inside his jacket collar that his face all but vanished. Only the small pink eyes were revealed. ‘Your painting,’ he said.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ said Paul. ‘Not a thing.’

  Da Silvano was full of travelogs. Everyone present, it seemed, had just flown back from Barcelona or Venice, from Rio de Janeiro, New Delhi, Dusseldorf. Baechler himself was lately returned from Holland and had printed up his sketchbook journal: ‘How it all started was, I thought I was on my way to India, but they talked me into going to Amsterdam first,’ the first page kicked off. ‘Two days in the Krasnapolsky with Paul Blanca, ordering room service and drinking the entire contents of the mini-bar, first the beer and the scotch and the vodka, then the sticky shit like Cointreau and Cheery Herring nobody normally touches. I thought about asking him for a blow job, but I saw him beating up his girlfriend once on Bond Street, so I figured he probably didn’t like boys too much.’

  Reading this, I thought of Shafrazi saying, ‘I am Man, I exist, This is my testament.’ But Paul’s mind was elsewhere. Popping up out of his collar, he flicked one glance at Castelli, another at Gagosian. Then he plunged. ‘Your painting,’ he said again.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Describe it.’

  Baechler did not flinch. Breaking off in mid-sip, he put down his wineglass, laid his large white hands palms down on the tablecloth. His forelock fell across his eyes, but he did not brush it back. He sat quite still, he pondered. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘a picture.’

  There was no time for subclauses; the clients were due at five. So Baechler returned to his painting, and Paul sweated over grappa.

  Lunch done, we walked back through the heart of Art World. West Broadway was now given over utterly to galleries and their outcroppings – health-food stores, slimming spas, Italian fashion marts. But every so often, glancing up a side street, one could still catch a glimpse of forklifts and loading bays, broken cobblestones, great looming redbrick warehouses.

  ‘Great stuff,’ said Paul. Away from Da Silvano and the yellowed eyes of the trade, he was full of fervor, a born fan. Every beautiful image stirred him. Confronted by a first-rate Rauschenberg, or even a second-rate Man Ray, his whole body swung back on its axis, a Shetland pony wheeling on its hind hooves. His pink flesh turned pinker; his eyes screwed up so tight they almost vanished. ‘Yes, oh yes,’ he cried. He could look at paintings all his days and not be bored for one beat. ‘If only it wasn’t. I mean, if you didn’t have to,’ he said. His front hooves came back to earth. ‘I mean, words,’ said Paul. ‘Bloody words.’

  We moved up Spring, hemmed in by a thousand canvases. It was a street that held a sacred place in New York mythology. A few blocks to the east, one morning in the 1820s, workmen arriving for the day’s labor had come upon a large group of men and women equipped as if for a long voyage, with wagons and building tools, food supplies, sled dogs. When asked what the fuss was about, the group said that they’d come to saw off Manhattan Island. It was getting too heavy at the Battery end. Too many buildings had made it dangerous. The only solution was to slice it through at Kingsbridge, then swing the whole island around, using sea sweeps, till north was made south.

  The workmen thought this over. Then one spotted a flaw. ‘What about Long Island?’ he asked. ‘Won’t it get in the way?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ a voyager replied. Some experts claimed that the trick could be turned without moving Long Island at all; that the bay and harbor were large enough for the island of New York to swivel round in. Others believed that Long Island must first be detached and floated to sea, held at anchor until Manhattan’s somersault was completed, and only then returned to its former site.

  I told Paul this tale while we peered through a gallery window, transfixed by a blinking TV screen, which endlessly repeated YES IS NO, NO IS YES. Behind us, a large man in an Afghan blanket kept jostling and thrusting, straining for a better view. But when we moved on, the man came trailing behind us. ‘So how did it come out?’ he demanded. ‘Did they saw it off or not?’

  ‘Up to a point,’ said Paul.

  At Jerry’s, I left him again, went back to Sasha and Alexei. They sat in the same booth, fixed in the same postures, as though they’d never moved. But the Christmas wrapping had vanished from between Alexei’s feet, and his iced milk had changed to wine. ‘I am a happy man,’ he said.

  He did not seem it. His white tufts of the morning now looked murky gray; his blue beak sagged on his breast. Clenched tight in his twisted hand, however, was five hundred dollars in crisp new bills.

  His man Harold had shown up spot on time, glorious in jodhpurs and a yellow silk cravat. He stood drinks, slapped backs, and paid up with no murmur. Then he took his leave.

  It had all happened in such a rush; Alexei did not want it to end. To draw out the moment, he offered help in carrying out the paintings. But Harold had said no need, he was parked right down the block. ‘Your work is done. God bless you,’ Harold said. ‘Paint well.’ And he was gone.

  Without him, the restaurant had seemed dimmed, somehow flat. Instead of exultation, Alexei had felt oddly deprived. So long he had ached for this. Now Harold had left him dangling, his thirst only halfway slaked. Though he did his best to jubilate, his stomach felt bound in coils. He must have air or be sick. So he’d run out in the street, set sail for an art-supply store.

  The spring air had felt good. At the corner of Prince and Broadway, he stopped in a shaft of sunlight, let it wash out the throbbing and ache. When Sasha caught him up, he stood sniffing with face upraised, beatific, breathing deep. ‘What is?’ Sasha asked.

  ‘Fresh paint,’ said Alexei.

  Together they walked towards the smell. But they did not reach it. Ten yards down the block, they passed a large oilcan filled with trash. Inside were Alexei’s five paintings, cleanly ripped from their antique frames.

  Upstairs at the Kasmin, promptly at five, the Pelletiers arrived to view the Donald Baechler.

  Both were tanned to a crisp. Laurent was a short, plump, and fussy sort, big with self-importance, who looked like the mayor of Clochemerle. Apparently, he had made many millions in Club Med-style resorts, then turned in his first wife for Gaby, who was an ex-model, and looked it. Blonde and statuesque, almost dressed in a white crochet miniskirt, she was newly flown in from Aspen, where she’d broasted herself the color of a Frank Perdue oven-stuffer. As she stood getting kissed, she kept flexing her nude thighs, flashing her bright teeth. Girlishly giggling, she twirled and pirouetted, showing off her pantyline.

  The Pelletiers, it was understood, were not to be shown the painting itself. For t
he moment, they must be content to glimpse a Polaroid. Afterwards, they’d have twenty-four hours to make up their minds. And they were lucky, as Marina had reminded Paul in a pregame note, to be granted even that: ‘Donald Baechler is a MAJOR artist,’ the note read, ‘and this is a MAJOR work.’

  The major work in question, titled Forest, showed a blank face in profile, a green Christmas tree. ‘Not one of his best,’ Paul confessed, though not to Laurent and Gaby, ‘but big, you know. It really is quite big.’

  The price was only fifty thousand dollars. But something was not quite right; the Pelletiers failed to exult. ‘I don’t find it quite howyousay,’ Gaby said. ‘It is the tree, I think. Too green.’

  ‘Trees are green,’ Laurent pointed out.

  ‘You would say that,’ said Gaby.

  Bending over the Polaroid, she kept her face rapt, most solemn, in artistic contemplation. Below the countertop, however, her buttocks and bare thighs did not cease to flex, clench, flex, clench, unwearying in their fight against cellulite. ‘I like it. I do,’ she sighed. ‘But then.’

  ‘But then?’

  ‘But then.’

  Forgotten, Paul slumped lower and lower in his chair, his pink head almost buried between his shoulder blades. He stared out through his window at the blank walls across the airshaft. He gazed at the David Hockney drawing of himself, aged six, that hung beside his desk. He lit a cigarette, stubbed it out. And at that moment, out of some forgotten deposit box of memory, he himself could not later say what, a lost phrase came back to him, bore him away. ‘Ironic obliquity,’ he said.

  Gaby’s buttocks froze in mid-flex, wobbled like blancmanges before a storm. ‘Ironic?’ she queried.

  ‘Obliquity.’

  The words hung in the air, a lightbulb. Green trees, however one cut them, were only trees. But obliquely ironic green trees? ‘Of course,’ Gaby said.