I stroked her arm. “I’m sorry, Sabrina. It’s a terrible thing to live with.”
She started crying. “And my mother became more cruel to me, keeping me home from high school parties, watching over me like a hawk, not so much to protect me as to make sure that I didn’t seduce my father, the man who she couldn’t accept as doing the things he had done to me.”
“If it’s any solace, I can understand how you feel.”
“No you can’t.”
“I wish I couldn’t, believe me. But the facts of the matter are that I experienced something similar.”
Sabrina stared at me, disbelieving.
“My mother was terribly alone, bringing me up. Oh, she had men friends, men who bought her things and men who simply bought her body.”
“Good Lord,” Sabrina said slowly, “then I’m not alone?”
I touched her gently, not with a hint of sexuality. Our amorous adventure was over for the day, as we lay there, defenseless, having given up our secrets to each other.
Soon, we dressed in silence, close because of the mutual secrets we possessed about each other. Sabrina and I walked to the gallery door with arms around each other’s waists.
She unlocked the door and flipped over the open sign, then turned back to me and held the lapels of my coat. She reached up to kiss me and gave me one that took the last vestige of emotional restraint away from me. I embraced her tightly, bound by something forbidden, not lovers that found each other after a life of innocent searching. We were a couple of misfits that found each other in confessions that we never thought we’d admit to. We were closer, to be sure, but the tales of incest took the breath out of our passion. What do you do, I thought, once your lover has learned about a first romance that was steeped in forbidden and agonizing pleasures? You don’t want to let go of her. You’re young again and want to be attached to each other to make sure that your attraction is sane and normal.
THE POTALA GALLERY
Sane and normal are not the words I’d use to describe myself with Katharine and the birth of the Potala Gallery seventeen years earlier.
We had just come back from Berlin, after Katharine interviewed Hitler and was capitalizing on her journalistic fame. She worked for a German newspaper to cover the 1932 Olympics here in Los Angeles.
Katharine knew people in the organizing committee. She knew people everywhere. I met Werner Miller through Katherine. He was in charge of the arts competition at the games. An immense opportunity for me, I was all ready to submit a work.
In our sumptuous apartment, while Katharine was busy covering Olympic preparations, I sat and stared at the two paintings that I chose as finalists in my mind. They came to life and interacted with me like people.
The first work selling itself was Eva, the painting I had just finished in Berlin, of a girl I had seen in the German countryside. Eva was sixteen years old and dressed like a young lady from the turn of the century. She lay on a field of grass surrounded by trees. Her family was with her, though they were all standing up and peering into the forest. What they were looking at, I didn’t care about, all that mattered to me was that my brushes captured Eva’s smooth skin. She had half a smile as part of her arresting expression and was looking straight at the sun overhead. Though she was in sunshine, I painted her as if she were in the shadows, under a cloudy sky.
Eva had chestnut brown hair, hazel eyes and was my inner impression of what Katharine might look like had she been a virgin when I met her.
The next work that fought for the honor was called “Hideous Heights.” Painted in an expressionistic style, it showed a young man just as he had leapt from a tall bridge. His clothes rustled in the wind and his hands stood out in front of him as if he could hold the air. He had changed his mind about suicide but there was nothing he could do about it. This was an image that came to me as a teenager while I was closing my eyes and reclining in the bath back in my Brooklyn digs.
Hideous Heights was an honest work, imagined when I had no idea who my real father was, when I accepted the story that my mother had told me for so many years, that he was a painter who was killed in a fall from a mountain top when he stepped backwards over a cliff while assessing his work.
Both paintings covered intimate ground. Both paintings came from memories. Both paintings were carved from a place in my mind where I harbored feelings that I couldn’t afford to lose.
Katharine was in the room as I was making my decision. She was already on the bed, her legs were already spread, her left leg was up and her dress had fallen down to her crotch. She had work papers on the bed in front of her but they could easily be put aside or crumpled by lovemaking. I crossed the room, sat on the bed. Katharine looked to me, pretending to wonder what I wanted. Then, she smiled like a kitty and reached her arms out. I fell into my comfortable spot. As the sheets were pulled down, my mind soared in the direction of the Hideous Heights. I could feel myself in the exhilarating wind as I fell off my safe outpost and into Katharine. We were flying, as if in the air, and promiscuous anxiety bore into my pleasure zones. I couldn’t trust a woman this permissive and flamboyant. She was always ready to engorge herself on the love that was passed to her, be it mild and comforting or violent and frightening.
We made love until dawn, until the traffic from our fourth floor window expressed, in the blowing of its horns, the orgasms that titillated Katharine and me. She dispelled the notion of choice when it came to my canvases. Katharine made everything preordained. Katharine pointed at Hideous Heights with her liquefied eyes. There was no doubt that I was psychically falling, unalterably gaining speed as the ground rose up to greet me.
The man who had leaped might have done so because of an impossible love affair. Hideous Heights was like a citadel that defended me from Katharine and whatever threat I made Michel out to be.
I submitted Hideous Heights. Its sense of tragic action made it to the finals but I didn’t win. Some Swedish painting won the gold medal, At the seaside of Arild, a work that may have beautifully portrayed the indulgence of people at the oceanside but not a painting that seemed to bear the mark of the times.
The road to success in Potala Gallery started on the night that Katharine and I went to Salka Viertel’s house, where there was always a coterie of lost émigrés who were trying to make a living in Los Angeles after the Third Reich forced them from their European homes. It was on that night that I met a man named Walter Serbinski, an art teacher at UCLA, someone with many links to these struggling artists.
Walter and I got along quite well, and within a few days I was in his home with Hideous Heights. When he saw my painting, he told me that it showed a ‘freedom of movement.’ In other words, it was uncontrolled. The artist didn’t know what he was trying to say. He never said these words because he took a liking to me, such a liking that he introduced me to Bertold Leger, the younger brother of the artist, Fernand Leger. Bertold was more blunt and I liked him for that. He explained that there was a good future in becoming an art dealer, that I should stick with the gallery I opened, that my knowledge and my conviviality, and the aura of my father would attract men of money, investors who wanted to take advantage of the influx of European émigrés that were fleeing Hitler and needed representation.
Soon, I acquired some promising new clients. Among them were Ben Shahn and his collection of 23 paintings depicting the celebrated Sacco-Vanzetti case of the 1920’s. His work, based upon newspaper photographs of the anarchists’ trial and their subsequent execution, became famous enough to jump-start my career as an art dealer and make Potala known. I made good commissions but the best part of the experience was the other artists I met who trusted and employed me as their agent.
Thomas Hart Benton was one of the new clients for whom I arranged several mural commissions. Then there was George Roualt, Emil Nolde and Ernest Kirchner. I traveled between Europe and Los Angeles and became a respected dealer. At that time, the Potala Gallery was much smaller than it is now. But my material success is no
t what I appreciated, it was my part in popularizing the works of many talented artists who, otherwise, might have fallen to the wayside after names like Picasso, Dali and Modigliani garnered most of the art buying public’s support.
After a few years of discovering new artists who were transforming the art world, I discovered one who transformed me. His art had the earthy nature of Gauguin and the transcendent appeal of the work of Grace Albee. The only problem was that by the time I discovered the artist’s name, I wanted to kill him as much as I wanted to represent his work. The painter was Michel Lumiere, my half-brother and former lover of my wife. “Former” though was just something I told myself. Katharine traveled a lot. So did Michel. Their paths could easily cross and, for a while, I was almost certain she was seeing him again. It was Katharine who showed me Michel’s paintings.
The evening after she showed me Michel’s work, Katharine had another surprise for me, something she wanted to share with me at the pond in Salka’s backyard where we first met. Katharine and I shared a love for romantic rituals.
Katharine was leaning against the waterfall pond, holding a martini glass in her hand, sipping slowly and staring at me intently.
“’What is it?’”
“’It’s something unexpected,’” she told me.
“At first, I thought it was her leaving me for Michel but when she told me the news, that she was pregnant with my child, the music coming from Salka’s parlor enveloped me. I was reminded of the music I had heard the night we met. Then, as if on some psychic cue, the pianist for the night, a younger version of Arthur Rubinstein, started playing it again, Elgar’s ‘Salute D’Amour.’”
“’We’re so young,’” I told Katharine.
“’Don’t you want me to have your child,’” she asked.
I thought about that, and in a moment, I felt a power in my loins. My first hint of trust began to seep in. This could be just the thing to merge us together again. I put my arms around Katharine. She dropped her martini in the pond, and then gave me the most devout kiss that I ever experienced. My thoughts turned to having a family, what that would be like, how it would tame Katharine and add something between us that would be permanent.
’I’m only twenty-three,’ I told Katharine. ’This will be a real adventure. But won’t this mean you’ll have to give up your journalistic excursions?’
‘I’ll train our daughter to travel.’
‘We know that we’re going to have a daughter?’
Her look of certainty answered the question.
A miniature Katharine, I thought, a girl I could love without jealousy, a purer more lasting version of my feelings for her mother. While Mara became my joy and anchor to home, the taming of Katharine’s adventurous spirit never took place.
The image that I had of Katharine and I together in a park, watching our baby as she began to walk, holding hands with each other as we pushed forward the perambulator was just so much wishful thinking. To the world, we were respectable and bourgeois but Katharine’s wanderlust had her hire a Nanny while she was out on assignments and I stayed home to build up the gallery and focus on my private life, the delightful and intimate burden that Mara placed on me.
OLD FLAMES
Lightning and thunder struck simultaneously. I was in the center of the storm on Westwood Boulevard as I parked in front of my shrink’s office building. I got out of my car and used an umbrella to shield me from the rain. Once in Alice’s office, I was queried about my activities, my intake of alcohol, my dreams, the general condition of my body and mind. I told her about my continuing hallucinations and she upped the dosage of my medication. I was then on the maximum advisable dose and she assured me that I wouldn’t be bothered by things that weren’t there.
By the time I got to the set, the sky had cleared and the sun shone through on the studio lot and my mind. I didn’t have a thought about Katharine or the past; I was focused, intensely, on what my work would be that day.
We were shooting the scene where Gillis reads Norma Desmond’s handwritten screenplay in her living room, page by arduous page. It was enough for seven screenplays and Norma sat there with a constant and guileful eye on Gillis as he read her work. She was dressed in a black stretch suit, gazing behind her dark glasses. I got some wonderful shots of the superior look on her face, her leopard-like stance, always ready to defend the work that Gillis was reading.
When he finished reviewing a generous portion of her script, Gillis had devised a little plot of his own. He’d compliment Norma on the tripe she had presented him and bait her into hiring him to do a rewrite.
“I will not have it butchered,” she said.
“Of course not, but it ought to be organized. Just an editing job, you can find somebody.”
“Who? I’d have to have somebody I could trust.”
She gazes at Gillis. “When were you born? I mean, what sign of the Zodiac?”
“I don’t know.”
“What month?”
“December 21st.”
“Sagittarius. I like Sagittarians, you can trust them.”
“Thank you.”
“I want you to do this work.”
Within no time, Gillis found himself agreeing to stay at her place for the night. It was cozy if you liked cemeteries and the job was interesting and would be profitable. Gillis was sure he could lengthen his job into a considerable period of time, gaining money for the back payments on his car, for rent on his apartment, for regaining control over his life.
When the day was over, I was in a hurry to leave. I had a dinner date with my paramour, in the house that seemed so much like the set I had just left. Eerily, Margaret was waiting for me in a black jump suit much the same as Norma Desmond had been wearing that day. At least she wasn’t wearing dark glasses. I could see the curiosity in her eyes, the possessiveness that was like Norma’s for Joe. She wanted to know how the day was, what the scenes were that we were shooting and, of course, whether or not her friend, Gloria, was doing a good job of being the deranged movie Queen. I was thinking to myself that Margaret could play the role as well as Gloria Swanson, maybe better. She was really experiencing the kind of relationship that Norma was hoping to have with Joe at this point in the script.
“You look nervous, Alexander,” Margaret said as I stepped into her living room. I was nervous, the dosage of drugs that I’d been on had me dashing through the day like a racing train, and yet, I saw everything in great detail. I was focusing on Margaret’s living room, the disguised movie screen, the out of style furniture, distressed about the passage of time that faded the fabrics - Margaret’s house had the same feeling about it that the work Hans Drier had created on the set.
“I’m not nervous,” I told Margaret, “just excited. I think this is going to be a great picture.”
Margaret sneered at the topic, put out her cigarette. “We’ll see,” she said, “but I don’t put that much hope in the picture’s outcome. The script is so fake.” This comment from the woman that it could be about.
Margaret sat back. Despite myself, I felt compassion for her. With all her wealth, she had such an empty life, relying on someone like me for her pleasure seemed quite sad.
I moved right next to her and while a waltz played on the radio, I cupped my hands around her face and brought her closer to me. I kissed her like I meant it, because I did – not with any of the passion that I might have for Katharine or Sabrina but with a gentle appreciation of all that she had done for me. Margaret felt that kiss in another way and was soon all over me on the couch. Before I knew it, she was half naked and leading me up to her bedroom.
When the door closed behind us, I thought of Norma Desmond and Joe Gillis. Margaret’s bed wasn’t as ornate as the one in Norma’s bedroom but it was just as elegant; just as inviting to imbibe in a restful pleasure if not a heartfelt passion.
KEEPING THE DEAD ALIVE
I made my way back home before sunrise, woke up Mara to get her ready for school, and then I opened t
he door to go out to the car when I saw him walking up the path. It was DeColette and he had a search warrant with him. He was looking for that iron-handled umbrella that witnesses had seen me with before the murder of Michel.
I got my housekeeper to drive Mara to school and followed DeColette around my house as he raped my past with his investigation, as he scrounged around pain-filled memories in my office and garage, searching for the evidence that he believed would damn me.
When he found an umbrella at the back of my sofa in my study, a smile, a satisfied certainty that he could arrest me on the spot, came over his young, ambitious face. But the umbrella had a wooden handle. It was not the kind of evidence that would put me where DeColette wanted me - behind bars.
By the time he finished his search, dissatisfied, he left with a nervous smile of disappointment, a reflection of the anger that accurately sized up his sadistic nature. If he had found the umbrella, I might want to kill him with it right then and there.
As DeColette left, he turned to me. “I’m sorry to disturb you with this search,” he said but his expression told another story – that he would be back again and again, that he would follow me until he proved his gut feeling, that I was the man responsible for the death of my half-brother.
When he left, I took a ladder, then went up into the attic and pulled the evidence from its hiding place. The iron handled umbrella was resting peacefully there, unaware of its importance, not realizing that I would soon take it where no one would discover it.
I left for work, placing the umbrella under a blanket in my trunk.
On the set that day, we were shooting in the room above Norma Desmond’s garage, the place where corpses must have been doing the Charleston about ten thousand midnights before, the place where Gillis had been sent to live once he agreed to be Norma’s rewrite man. But the things he’d write about weren’t half as melodramatic as the life he’d live there for the next six months. He learned a lot about Norma from Max when he was being introduced to his new digs, about the mysterious powers she held over men of all positions in life – a Maharajah had come from India to beg her for one of her silk stockings. A few months later, he had used it to strangle himself.
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