The Melting Pot

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “Where do you live?” she ventured from the closet, in Paolo’s direction.

  “We have a loft in SoHo. Ancient, but big enough so we can both work. My work needs a lot of space.”

  “I used to live not far from there, on Bleecker Street. Then we lived in Chelsea, but I moved here because my husband took up with a younger woman.” She shocked herself a bit, with that. But why not? She no longer had a rooted social position, she could say anything she pleased. Even “took up with.”

  “That’s too bad. How young?”

  “Thirty-three. Precisely ten years younger than I am.”

  “That’s the age Margie is. I’m thirty-five.”

  “Really? I thought you were both younger. I thought you were kids.”

  Paolo smiled, making the cigarette tremble precariously. “We thought you were younger too. These things are rough, I know. Margie’s husband left her for a man. They were married five years and he discovered, or decided, he was gay.”

  “She seems very innocent, for that.” Paolo said nothing, kept plastering. “Where are you from?”

  “Argentina.”

  “But Paolo is Italian, isn’t it?”

  He gave her a sideways glance. “There are many Italians in Argentina. Some less now, in my family.”

  “Do you mean ... ?” For her work Della had read a book about the military regime in Argentina, she told him. She had designed the jacket. “Is that why you came?”

  “I had to. First they killed my father. My uncle and my brother-in-law disappeared—my sister was left with two babies. I was next. I got here nine years ago, practically crawling up two continents.”

  “That’s terrible. Did you have anybody here, family, friends?”

  “A friend of my father’s, yes, otherwise I’d still be living underground. After I got the green card I worked in the flower market. That’s where I met Margie—she came in to buy a plant. She helped me get back to making sculptures.” He stopped abruptly and climbed down from the ladder. “Time for lunch.”

  “I wish I had something to offer you, but—” She waved vaguely at the emptiness and suddenly felt very hungry herself.

  “Margie brought sandwiches. She made a ham last night. There’s plenty for you too. Anything around to drink, though? Beer, maybe?”

  Della flushed with pleasure at the invitation. Stepping out of the closet, she took off her painter’s hat and shook out her hair. “I’ll run around the corner and get some. It’ll just take a minute.”

  He peered past her. “Beautiful closet, Della. High-class work. If you keep this up we’ll let you prime the bathroom.”

  They settled on the floor in the living room, where the two chairs and the stereo were shrouded in plastic drop cloths. Margie, snapping open a can of beer, said, “Paolo told me what happened. For what it’s worth, it gets better in time. I thought I would never recover, but I did, pretty much.” With the white painter’s hat hiding her cropped hair, with her paint-spattered shorts and bare feet, Margie looked like a twelve-year-old boy.

  “This is a wonderful sandwich,” said Della gravely. “It may be the best sandwich I’ve ever had. I’m not trying to recover. I’m just trying to get the apartment painted. I may keep painting it over and over, even after you both leave. I’ll get fired from my job and go on unemployment and just stay home and paint, till the walls meet each other.”

  “Please don’t paint over our work, Della,” said Paolo. “Who knows, someday you may be able to say, These Walls are the work of Paolo and Margie.”

  Della laughed faintly and sipped some beer. She had never been a beer drinker, but it seemed suitable now, in her new life, sharing an indoor picnic with strangers after working and sweating in the heat.

  “I know how you’re feeling, to talk that way. Can you imagine how I felt, with Bill, when I realized that for five years, every time we were together, my body was not ... that maybe he was wishing or imagining I was something else? God knows what went through his head. And I thought he liked it. I thought that was how men acted when they were liking it. You know?”

  “Please,” said Della, hugging her knees tight. “I do know. But I don’t want to think about any of that. Maybe ever again.”

  “Margie has learned to say everything aloud for her health. Her shrink taught her. She wants me to go too, for my anger.” Paolo gave a grunting laugh. “Maybe to have it removed, like a wart.”

  Margie moved closer to him, till their shoulders were touching. “I wish I could make you see,” she said softly. Then to Della, “Paolo is an extraordinary artist. Everything he does is huge and powerful and ... larger than life. But there are still some things he refuses to understand. I grew up on a farm in Montana. I drove a tractor and pulled turkeys in out of the rain. I hardly knew, when I got married, about people like Bill. But how could I go so long and not see what was right in front of me? I have to understand.”

  “But I understand perfectly what happened to me,” Paolo said sullenly. “Only I don’t make peace with it, like you do. It’s not a private thing. I don’t want to make peace with it.”

  She had been right at the start, Della thought. They were too different, and the difference made her uneasy. She wanted the new apartment pure and free of conflict. “How about another beer?” They sat silent, like petulant children. “Does either of you know anything about wiring? I have a lamp I’d like to hang in that spare room.”

  “Why not?” Paolo shrugged again. “I’ll bring the manual along tomorrow, just in case. I can also hook up the washing machine that sits there idle.”

  The telephone woke Della out of thick sleep the next morning. She reached out but found nothing; when she reached to nudge Ezra there was only a grainy wall. She opened her eyes: new apartment, new life. Telephone on the floor, six feet away.

  “Hi. I want to know what’s going on. You haven’t written in weeks and Dad said you moved out.”

  She had forgotten all about Frank, or at least about telling Frank. On the day Ezra pronounced their marriage over, Della had said he didn’t have to know yet, far off as he was in Costa Rica. On that day Costa Rica had seemed an imaginary place and Frank an imaginary son. Now his voice restored him to physical existence. She recalled stuffing his body into snowsuits and grabbing him away from open windows, but with more alacrity than the woman across the street.

  “Don’t worry, we’re both fine. We’re living separately, that’s all.”

  In his relentless way, Frank questioned her until she told him how Ezra had decided that their marriage was stunting his personal growth, whereas with his new woman he explored undreamed-of depths and heights. There was a silence; she wondered if they had been disconnected.

  “I don’t know what to say. Maybe it’s just a phase.”

  “I doubt it. For me it’s no phase. I have a wonderful new apartment”—and new painters, she almost added. “Never mind. Tell me how you’re doing. How is the hospital coming along?”

  It was a school, after all. “I have some good news, at least I hope you’ll think so. I’m going to bring Milagros back with me at the end of the two years. We’re going to get married. We’ve been—”

  “Milagros?” It sounded like a man’s name.

  “I wrote you about her in my last two letters, remember? She’s one of the architectural students assigned to our project.” He paused and Della scanned her memory. “Don’t you read my letters?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that I was sleeping soundly. That’s ... wonderful.”

  “You’re not bothered that she’s Costa Rican, I hope. Part Indian, actually. I mean, people can think they’re very sophisticated, but when—”

  “Oh, she’s Costa Rican?”

  “I wrote you! She speaks very good English, though.”

  “No, why should that bother me? Only a Nazi would bother me. But they’ve mostly gone to Argentina, haven’t they?”

  “Mom, go back to sleep. I’ve got to go anyway, they’re calling me. Give me your new add
ress. But I won’t be able to write for a while—we’re going on a field trip. I wish you and Dad could work things out. That’s really some shock.”

  Milagros, thought Della as she hung up. She remembered dimly the lightweight air letters lying on the hall table. Yes, two had arrived after the day Ezra came into the kitchen, where she was measuring out coffee, and told her that their marriage had been a gross error of long duration, that he needed an entirely different kind of woman, only he hadn’t known it till a few months ago, when she materialized in the studio. Della tried to remember what she had done about the coffee. She tried to remember reading Frank’s letters, but could retrieve nothing at all since that day except finding the apartment and packing. Not even a movie, though she had liked movies, in her old life. Nor could she recall anything happening in the world. No information from the past three weeks seemed to have adhered, except for the facts about Paolo and Margie: Argentina, the sister left with two children, crawling up two continents, the flower market; Montana, turkeys in the rain, Bill the homosexual.

  With those exceptions, thought Della, she had become like H.M. She had read about the case of H.M. a while ago at work, in a book about brain malfunctioning for which she had designed the jacket. H.M. had undergone brain surgery to control epilepsy and afterwards was incapable of learning anything new. Whatever part of him kept new information had been sliced out. H.M. could remember everything he had known before his lobotomy, and he could still understand what was said to him but could not retain it for more than a minute. He was told that his father had died, but immediately forgot it. Well, there was no danger of that happening to her; her father had been dead for many years and she knew it. H.M. had to be reminded again and again. And so it was with every single thing. He could not remember a new face, a new room, a new tune, a movie, or even what had occurred in the movie five minutes earlier. He could not grow past the moment when they cut out parts of his brain. That was quite different from Ezra’s lamenting his stunted growth—Ezra was capable of learning new things, he was learning them right now, every day and every night. Only she was stuck in the moment when he told her their long mistake was ending, the nerves linking them were being snipped. Della had designed a very successful jacket for that book: a pane of shattered glass against the bars of a luminous rainbow. Every crack and filigree in the shattered pane was clearly delineated. Light from the colors behind the glass bled through in glimmers. The border of the design was black as night.

  She rose and walked to the window. Ah yes, the babies—that she remembered well. They were at it again, stretching their bodies over the iron bars and opening their hands to send tissues skimming on the wind. The tissues looked like a regatta of sailboats seen from far off. Della shielded her eyes and shivered in the heat. She felt she could not bear her life or the terror that the babies would fall to their death as she watched. When she looked again the dark-haired woman appeared, pulled them from the windowsill, and lowered the window halfway. The doorbell rang—Paolo and Margie, come to continue painting.

  While Margie finished the ceiling in the spare room, Paolo hooked up the washing machine and Della did a load of wash. Paolo hung the lamp: they all exclaimed on how sinister the color of the walls—gun metal—seemed in the artificial light, then cheered as Della applied the first stroke of chastening white. Paolo scraped and plastered in the bedroom and Margie began spraying the metal kitchen cabinets white. They worked steadily till almost three o’clock, when Della went out for barbecued ribs which they gnawed lazily on the living room floor, listening to the rock music on Margie’s radio, punctuated by weather reports. Ninety-six degrees.

  “Too hot to work,” said Della. “Let’s call it a day.”

  “I want to be air-conditioned,” Margie said, rolling a beer can on her forehead. “Let’s go to a movie.”

  They took turns in the shower, where Della had not yet hung a shower curtain. As Paolo emerged with his hair slicked back, apologizing for taking so long—he had had to mop up the whole floor—Della was reminded of the men in her life, Ezra and Frank, her former life, who also flung themselves about in the shower. Neither she nor Margie had that problem, but Margie emerged saying she would be glad to install a new shower head; a sharper, more tingly flow would do wonders for Della’s skin and spirit. They laughed at two Marx Brothers films at a revival house, then Paolo and Margie drove Della home in the pickup and she fell quickly into a deep, long sleep.

  Painting in the kitchen the next day, while Paolo was out at the hardware store, Della said, “You always talk about Paolo’s work, how big and powerful it is, what wonderful compositions he makes out of junk. What about yours? What’s it like?”

  “Well, it’s small and I guess you would say delicate, in comparison to Paolo’s. But then most things are. I work with light. How light hits surfaces and refracts. I build things, little models, and when they’re set in various kinds of light, the light and shadows become part of the piece. It changes according to where it’s put.”

  “But when do you get a chance to do it, if you do this kind of work all day?”

  “We only do this about half the year, the warm months usually, because, you know, people like to keep the windows open. The rest of the year we mostly do our own work. Sometimes we hang shows for galleries downtown, for extra money. Paolo can work at night, but I’m too tired after a day of this, and anyway, I need daylight. I work on Sundays. That’s when he sleeps.”

  “Do you think you’ll go on this way indefinitely, or—” Della didn’t know what she wanted to say after “or.” Simply, the life Margie described did not sound like a life she could imagine living except for a short period, before embarking on “real” life. Like Frank in the Peace Corps, or herself dancing in the corps of the Joffrey at nineteen. Yet why on earth not? Thousands lived such lives, and no doubt had done so all the years she spent with Ezra.

  “Well, I know what you mean, sure. I think I’d like to be married again, even after what happened with Bill. Maybe have a baby. More than maybe. I mean, I’m not going to be able to do that forever. And we’ve been together four years. But Paolo’s not ready, he says. You’ve heard about the new man, afraid of commitment and all that garbage.”

  “He seems already committed.”

  “That’s exactly what I tell him, but ...”

  “Isn’t that a very American syndrome?”

  “He picks things up fast.”

  They heard the key in the door. Paolo returned with magnets so the kitchen cabinet doors would close properly, and a special bit for his drill so that he could put up standards for bookshelves. Margie, turning on her radio, suggested that when Della finished the kitchen door she might prepare all the windows to be painted. Mesmerized by the heat and a remote blank contentment, Della moved slowly from room to room, dusting the window frames and sills and sticking masking tape around the edges of every pane, until Paolo shouted to them with excitement—come see what he had unearthed in the bathroom. She had to laugh as she confronted the bizarre mottled walls. Dismally faded browns and blues and grays lay bared: bulbous masses assembling for a thunderstorm, strata of history in the form of successive paint jobs.

  “Found art!” he cried. “This should be preserved for posterity. It’s almost like a de Kooning, if only the colors would be brighter.”

  Margie gave her clever chuckle. “Beyond New Wave. But you didn’t have to scrape down that far. I mean, Della is paying for this.”

  “I wouldn’t charge for anything in the service of art! Even the degree of scraping is a creative act. You should put it under glass, Della. It’s a statement about the past, the juxtaposition of eras, like archaeology. You could charge admission. One wall at least.”

  “Come off it. It’s so ugly it hurts,” said Della.

  “So straight! Where’s your nerve? Wait—we have to add something contemporary.” He grabbed the can of white spray paint from Margie’s hand and sprayed a small heart on the wall above the bathtub. Inside the heart he sprayed
the letters P and M, linked by curlicues. “There!”

  “Don’t mind him,” said Margie. “It must be the heat.”

  Della went back to taping windowpanes, grateful that the babies across the street were nowhere in sight. Dreamily she mused about the near future, when Paolo would outgrow this childish phase and marry Margie and they would have the baby she craved. Margie would stay home and not work so hard, and Paolo would ... Get a job, she almost continued. But that was absurd—she was molding them into something other than they were. Paolo would be discovered and sell his work to rich collectors. Margie would work too, when she wasn’t taking care of the baby, and maybe she too would be famous, with her smaller and more delicate pieces. It was a naive fantasy, Della knew; it might even be objectionable. Yet it made her happy.

  Later that afternoon Margie went out for pizza and beer, and as they ate on the living room floor Della asked Paolo to tell her something about Costa Rica.

  “What does that mean, ‘something’ about Costa Rica? It’s an entire country. What parts do you want to know about?”

  “I’m not sure. You could start with the government, like they used to do in school, then the products and resources, the mountains and rivers, remember? Well, maybe you didn’t do that. Anyway, start. I’ll remember what’s important to me.”

  With a mild jab at the insularity of North Americans, Paolo obliged, and what Della remembered mostly, after he and Margie left for the weekend, was that Costa Rica was one of the few Latin American countries with a democratic government and not under the rule of the military. Actually, Frank must have mentioned that; the fact did not strike her as entirely new. Costa Rica did not even possess a standing army, Paolo said. The United States, however, considered Costa Rica little more than a satellite and had recently proposed to send military advisers there as part of the effort to aid Nicaraguan contras. Paolo was surprised Della knew nothing about this, or about Costa Rica’s enormous national debt, since both had been in the papers, but she explained she had not been reading the papers much lately, and even if she had been, she would probably have forgotten what she’d read. Paolo had looked confused by her explanation, but Margie understood and said all of that would pass in time.