A Paradise for Fools

by Nicholas Kilmer

  “He gets clients then. Arthur.”

  “Word of mouth. He gets them, sure. People don’t have the time, drive up to New Hampshire, into Rhode Island, whatever. Plus the desire. People working? It’s not, I’m not saying he’s got attitude. Some ideas—one girl, young lady—what she wants is Porky Pig on her hip. Well, lower down. Some people, they want to tell the whole story of their life which is not what we are here for. They are gonna talk while you work. What do you say? ‘Shut up, Lady, I’m working’? Arthur doesn’t wanna do it.”

  “Stays away from the women’s butts?” Fred hinted.

  “Hell, that’s no problem. Arthur can do anything he wants. What he stays away from—she says, the lady says, ‘My boyfriend calls me Porky, so next time’—now she’s leaning on the railing here, with one side of her panties hiked up in the crack, out here’s the only place I have to work—‘next time he gets a surprise,’ she says. But to get back to Arthur, as long as I’m here and can do it, what Arthur does not like is Porky Pig. So I get Porky. Fine with me. I grab anything comes my way. Guy’s gotta live.”

  Fred said, “I have a room I’m not using. Not to work in, but you can sleep there. I can’t tell you how long it will be free. Two weeks, I guess, while I’m watching another place. Depending. How much is the booze a problem?”

  “Look at my hands.” Flash held out his hands again.

  “We know you drink,” Fred said. “Early Times before your first meal of the day, and while you wait for your first client? You can’t remember if it’s Wednesday? I have a house in Charlestown with some guys. My room is free. That feels like a crime. I don’t like to eat in front of a hungry person, and I don’t like to know my room is empty when someone can use it.

  “The general run of guys in the place is younger than you, but that doesn’t matter.

  “I don’t want you smoking that cigar in my bed and setting the place on fire. Take a look at the place. You like it, the room is yours until I need it. But don’t smoke in the room. I’ll tell the guys, anyone smells one whiff of smoke coming under your door, you’re out. Otherwise there’s two rules. No women. Don’t ask anybody his business. You interested?”

  “What do I have to…what does it cost me?”

  “It’s my room. You’re my guest. Food you’ll have to figure out. There’s a kitchen, but the guys don’t eat together, not to depend on. Sometimes by accident. It’s a place, not a community. Keep the room clean. Where’s your stuff?”

  Flash motioned to the shoulder bag.

  Fred said, “There’s a box of duds. Ask whoever’s at the front desk. He’ll fix you up. Living rough, you’ve likely picked up unwanted fellow travelers. I’d appreciate, you take care of them before you bunk in. The place has what you need to get comfortable.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Flash said. He thumbed his tools and his scraps of flash, twitching impatiently in his folding chair. “Fact is, there’s something I have’ta…”

  Flash ripped a sheet from a small spiral notebook he had in the bag. “Give me the address.” Fred tore the sheet in half and wrote the coordinates for the place in Charlestown, handing that back, along with a note on the other side for whoever might be awake in the front hall. Nobody there could sleep if there wasn’t someone awake, and watchful, and Flash would need to get past the guard.

  On the other half-page he wrote, Arthur, I like the Piero. I stopped by. Can we talk? Call me. He added his name and the office number at Clay’s. That’s where he’d be. He consolidated the displays on the wall of the landing until he had freed a pushpin he could use to pin the note to Arthur’s door. “I’ll leave this for Arthur,” he told Flash. “If he comes in before you go, do me a favor, would you? Tell him I’m on the up-and-up.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Telephone. Ten-thirty. Fred at his desk with a meatball sub.

  “Fred? Morgan, at the place. Guy with a note. Looks like your handwriting.” Pause while conversation happened at the Charlestown end. “Says his name is Sammy Flash. He OK?”

  “Give Flash what he needs to scrub down and change his clothes,” Fred said. “He sleeps in my room. He wants to smoke those cigars, tell him keep them outside.”

  “Right,” Morgan said. “I can read. Wanted to be sure it was you, that’s all.”

  ***

  Telephone. Murky darkness.

  The leather couch creaked as Fred’s bare arm reached for the noise. Enough light from the half-window. Streetlights. Mountjoy.

  “What time is it?” The reedy male voice was firm.

  “I’ll take a look,” Fred said. He found the lamp. “We’re getting close on two AM,” Fred said. “Happy to help.”

  “You Fred Taylor? You left a note.”

  “Arthur,” Fred said.

  Fred sat up. The room was still a pleasant temperature. There’s an advantage to living underground. The street had been hot last night, even at ten, when he’d gone for food. Young women on the sidewalks, out for a good time, dressed up, had dressed in as little as they could manage.

  “I didn’t understand the note. I don’t know Piero.”

  Fred said, “This is Arthur?”

  “I don’t know any Piero,” the man insisted. That was fear in his voice.

  “Thanks for calling,” Fred said, looking to force some reassurance over the wire. “I appreciate it.”

  “Whoever Piero is, he isn’t here. He hasn’t been here. I don’t know Piero. I never met any Piero. I won’t do it. I can’t help you. I don’t know anything. I don’t…”

  The voice was frantic, the man seemingly on the point of breaking the connection.

  “This will be easier face to face,” Fred said. “To clarify—I was hanging out at your place, wanting to meet you, on the landing, this afternoon, talking with Sammy Flash. Maybe he told you, Flash let me take a leak in your john. That reproduction, the print, the picture on the wall in there—I recognized the picture. That’s the name of the painter, Piero. I recognized it. That’s all.”

  Long pause. Fred scratched the back of his neck. The new haircut.

  “The name of the artist who made that painting is Piero della Francesca. I saw the picture, the original, one time in London. It blew me away.”

  “I love that picture. I’d love to see it,” Arthur said. “That’s where he lives? It’s so clean and so fresh but it still looks, well, old.”

  “That’s where who lives?” Fred was on the point of asking, when it dawned on him—Arthur hadn’t a clue that the print he’d stuck over his toilet represented a painting made by a man whose particles of dust had been reprocessed at least four thousand times in the six centuries since they had been accidentally and temporarily congregated into the configuration of a man within the mess of city-states that was presently assembled into a temporary amalgam known as Italy.

  “What else can you tell me? How big is the picture?” Arthur asked. “Would the artist let me in? If you…it’s a lot to ask.”

  “I’ll drop over,” Fred said. “You going to be up for a while?”

  Pause. The pause was on Arthur’s end, impossible to evaluate. Finally, “You never mentioned what you want,” Arthur said.

  “I saw some of your work. I like it. I know it’s late.”

  “I work at night,” Arthur said. “I’m working now. Taking a break. You know where I am. Bring coffee. You want coffee?” Interruption on Arthur’s end—a muddled jumble of distant voices. “Three coffees, lots of sugar but separate. There’s a…”

  Fred said, “Be there in twenty minutes.”

  ***

  Parking on Green Street was no problem at two-thirty in the morning, any more than there’d been a traffic problem between Boston and Central Square. The four large coffees Fred had picked up before he crossed the bridge were still a good deal warmer than the night. Though
the air outside had become comfortable, the day’s heat was still trapped in the stairwell leading to Arthur’s floor. Not Fred’s business, but why didn’t they open the window on the landing and admit the cool of the evening? Of course. The window was painted shut. The landlord had “improved” the place, and was not obliged to live with the consequences of the improvement.

  Arthur opened immediately to Fred’s knock. A tall guy, skinny, with round glasses and a mess of reddish hair, barefoot, wearing jeans and a yellow T-shirt bearing the slogan Random Law in scarlet across the front. He wiped his hands on a regular white Tee, saying, as if he were already in the middle of the paragraph, “And the reason I happen to know where London is, being from Nashua already, it’s north on 93, then take 89 northwest.” He didn’t move from the doorway, called back over his shoulder, “He looks OK.” He stepped aside. “Come on in. Don’t mind us. Let’s take a minute.”

  Two young women were in the room, one standing, wearing a beaten-up blue terry-cloth bathrobe, the other naked, rising from the long couch (or bench) where she’d been lying on her stomach under the lights. Her back, sides, buttocks, and in front, the shoulders, stomach and chest, were outlined in a swirling rush of what looked to be folds of fabric dotted with floral sprigs. Suggestion of a full female figure, reaching…. The standing woman handed her a second robe, once tan, which she put on gingerly. Small dancer’s breasts, thick pubic thatch of auburn—her mass of flowing hair was auburn also. Once she was clothed that fact was notable.

  “Eva. Beth,” Arthur said. It was Beth, in blue, who had been standing. Heavy set, brunette, with hair as short as Fred’s had been before his morning visit to Cut - Rate - Cuts. Fred put the cardboard tray on a table and pried the cups out. “Fred,” he told everyone, nodding to each woman as he passed the cups.

  “It’s OK if I sit?” Eva asked.

  “Not a problem. You can’t hurt it. It might hurt you some,” Arthur said.

  “I guess I’ll stand,” Eva decided. She began tearing open sugar packets and dumping the contents into her coffee. The room was arid and mostly empty, but far from sterile. The only light came from the gathering of hot lamps that played over the bench where Arthur had been working. A rolling metal table held his equipment: inks, tools, a couple of machines with cords that led to a surge protector.

  Fred said, “It’s an ambitious piece you’re working on. You don’t mind me saying…I don’t want to be rude.”

  “We’ll get the outlines done tonight,” Arthur said. “The black lines. Dark blue. Dark green.”

  “I don’t see what you’re working from,” Fred said.

  “It’s in here,” Arthur pointed at the left side of his head. He motioned to chairs that sat here and there around the room. Arthur, Beth, and Fred gathered three of them into a loose confederation not far from the working pool of lights, and sat. Eva continued standing, back of Beth, her free hand resting on Beth’s shoulder.

  Arthur said, “You mentioned on the phone you like my work.” He waited.

  “Kim, at Cut - Rate - Cuts,” Fred said, “was showing off the work in progress.”

  “Kim,” Arthur said. “Kim sent you?”

  “Not exactly,” Fred admitted. “But we were talking…”

  “Kim.” Eva seemed to nod her head vaguely. The name didn’t raise a ripple from the other woman, Beth, who was looking Fred over.

  “He’s the right size,” Beth said. “What’s he got, eight inches on Eva, about six on me? He’s broad, but not fat. That’s good so far.” Her look removed Fred’s clothes.

  “And you’ve seen the baptism picture for real,” Arthur said, disregarding Beth and concentrating on Fred. “You know the guy? Piero, you said? What I always wanted to know, reproduction doesn’t give you a clue. How big is that painting? The real one? That’s the first thing I want to know.”

  “Stands about six feet tall,” Fred said. “If I remember, and I do. Four feet wide. The figures come out about half life size.”

  Arthur said, “Take out that crazy tree. That’s easy. I always wanted to do a back piece, those three characters on the left, there’s a guy with his arm leaning on his chick’s shoulder, I think it’s a chick, and the both of them talking to an angel. It would go perfect. You take out the tree? If it isn’t a chick in the middle, I’d make her a chick. So you get one of everything: a man, a chick, an angel. The bases are covered.”

  “Do a devil on the front,” Eva suggested. “Or lower down, in back, where he belongs.”

  “Or she,” Beth said.

  Fred said, “The picture’s in England. You’re right, it’s old. I wasn’t clear. London, England. In a museum.”

  “Shit,” Arthur said. “A museum? Those places give me the creeps.”

  “Me, too,” Fred said.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Guy your age, you’ve already got a lot of your work done,” Arthur said. He sipped coffee. Beth lit a cigarette. “I don’t see anything. On your arms.” Arthur glared at Beth and shook his head, but he was talking to Fred, intent. “You’ve been in the service?”

  “That’s the quickest way to describe it,” Fred said. “To answer your question, I never had work done.”

  “Hey, Arthur, I know where you got that picture,” Eva said. She laughed. “Every time I go in there, take a leak, I think, I remember that picture. I do. I saw it before. With Mr. Z. You ripped it off from Mr. Z. Mr. Z. Art appreciation and driver’s ed.”

  Beth said, “Take off your shirt.”

  “Sure,” Fred stood and peeled off the blue polo shirt.

  “Turn around,” Beth directed. When Fred complied the silence behind him was broken by Eva’s voice, “The scars would make it kinky.”

  Beth said, “Arthur can work them in.”

  “No hair to notice,” Eva added. “Buttloads of hair would be worse. It grows out again, that poor girl’s a gorilla.”

  Fred put his shirt on again and sat. Beth and Eva’s shared speculative looks verged on the conspiratorial.

  “Mr. Z.,” Arthur explained. “Back in Nashua Central. King of the art room. He’d pass a picture around from a pile he had in a drawer, tell us to write our idea what the story is, while he stood in the corridor and smoked. Too good for the jerks in the room. Whatever a person wrote, he doesn’t read it.”

  “Mr. Smooth. Mr. Cool,” Eva said. “Most of us, we called his class Waiting for Lunch. Some of the pictures—he had a stack of them—I liked. ”

  Arthur said, almost in reverie, “I’d look at them and remember them and look again at them at night, in my mind, project them onto my bedroom wall, remembering all the lines, the colors. Because I can do that. Fuck Mr. Z. The beautiful things he had, he didn’t care, as long as he got them back. Fuck him. I own them all. Listen, Fred, I have to get back to work. You have a design in mind? What you want?”

  “No,” Fred said.

  “I do. He’s right for it. I’ve decided. Show him the back piece,” Beth demanded. She went to Arthur’s work table and rooted out a clip board on which was a tablet of white paper. She handed him a pen, one of those throw-away fountain pens. With lightning strokes, the two women now standing behind him, Arthur sketched out a sinuous, standing, naked female figure, facing front, poised in an S-curve, one arm and hand raised to conceal a breast, the other modestly clothing her genitals with a swirl of her riotously blown and curling hair. Arthur finished by drawing, under her feet, the suggestion of a scallop shell.

  “This is the plan,” Beth said. “Her feet go over either side of your butt crack. Her head comes to your neck, some of the hair blowing around it to the front. Arthur’s plan, tell you the truth. Or it’s mine, or maybe Eva’s. The whole thing’s in three parts. Turn around, Eva, so we show Fred the idea. It’s cool. One side, that’s Eva,” she lifted the robe from her partner, “has this girl.”

 
Fred now could see what he had interrupted. In outline, only. The woman on Eva’s back was facing forward, standing half-turned toward her left (therefore Eva’s left), her own voluminous garments roiled by the same wind that whipped her own hair, which seemed an extension of Eva’s. One foot, on tiptoe, rode low on either haunch. She was reaching out with a blowing garment whose folds wrapped around Eva’s sides and shoulder. The woman’s head, in profile, rested between Eva’s shoulders. Her upper arm had been cleverly modified from the original in order to cross Eva’s shoulder, offering the leading edge of the fabric above Eva’s left breast, in front.

  “OK. That’s one side,” Beth said. She dropped her robe and stood in miniscule black underpants, turning quickly to put herself next to Eva. Her own, broader, back decoration seemed finished unless there were details unresolved. Two naked youths, both male, in air, entwined, winged, floated on a diagonal that left their confusion of feet extending around Beth’s left hip—she pulled down the waistband of the underpants on that side so as to disentangle them—and their heads conjoined over her right shoulder blade. Wings extended from their shoulders and wrapped across Beth’s side and front, even her neck. The clothing of the floating youths was blown in the opposite direction to the fabrics Eva’s passenger wore or carried. The youths appeared to be blowing flowers that scattered here and there on the rest of Beth, front and back. When Beth and Eva stood next to each other, with Eva on the right, it was clear how Arthur’s drawn figure belonged between them. The Birth of Venus.

  Fred said, “It damned near takes my breath away.”

  “Our plan,” Beth said, readjusting her pants and getting into the robe again, “and we love this idea. The piece Arthur drew for you? We want to know that’s on a guy we don’t know, out in the world, going its own way. The guy going his own way. Meanwhile it’s part of what we have. We, Eva and I—we stay together. Do you love it?”