Lion's Share

by Rochelle Rattner

  Jana caught hold of herself just as Ed was selecting a glossy ceramic clown that played “Send in the Clowns.” They took the elevator to the sixth floor and bought a Cuisinart for his mother. They went down to the boys department, where she actually got into the spirit of choosing a Guess sweater for his nephew, then headed for the customer service desk to get their selections wrapped.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Jana said, looking at the line of waiting customers. “Why don’t we take these home and I’ll wrap them. It’ll be my contribution.”

  “Sounds good to me.” Ed didn’t like the prospect of that line any better than she did. “As long as we’re in the area, do you feel like a good German dinner?” he asked as they spun through the doors again.

  “Great. How about the Ideal?”

  “I had in mind someplace a little more relaxing. Kleine Konditorei is just down the street—you helped shop, I can spring for dinner.” Much as he hated to admit it, it did make things easier with Jana paying her own way, but every once in a while he felt it his duty to treat her to someplace special. Kleine Konditorei might not be the most expensive restaurant in town, but it brought back memories he wanted to share with her.

  He dropped some change into the bucket of a Salvation Army Santa Claus, then led her into a bakery near Second Avenue. They walked past the narrow counter, where people were lined up ordering cakes for the holidays, and up a few steps to a nearly empty dining room. “This restaurant does a huge lunch and early-evening business,” Ed said, seeing her look around in dismay. “My first copy-editing job was for a small textbook house on First Avenue and 80th Street. I used to treat myself to lunch here every Friday.”

  “Starting the weekend in style?” Jana teased.

  “More like ending the work week with a sense I’d accomplished something. Line-editing high school history books was not my forte, and the money was ridiculous. But even so, I got into the Christmas spirit—the first Christmas I had that job I spent over a month’s salary on presents. Thank God for credit cards.”

  “At the rate you’re going, you might end up spending a month’s salary this year, too.”

  “Not much chance of that,” Ed laughed. “The only way I’ll overspend this year is if I buy that elephant I’ve had my eye on for you.”

  “Whatever for?” Jana asked, laughing.

  “To help you lug your paintings around, of course. I thought of it the day you came back from Yaddo.”

  “And because of that, you’re going to buy me an elephant?”

  “Either an elephant or a pack mule. The elephant’s cuter, though, and it’s still a baby elephant. It might not grow too large.”

  “You just don’t want to have to help me get home from the bus station.”

  “Did I look like I was complaining that day last summer?”

  Slightly embarrassed thinking about that day, how naive she’d been, and how she’d run out of his apartment the next morning, Jana turned her attention to the five-page menu. “They have the best sauerbraten in the city,” Ed commented, and when the white-haired 150-pound waitress in a ridiculous Dutch-looking blue pinafore finally arrived and took their order in a thick German accent, they both ordered sauerbraten.

  Jana gazed at another waitress walking past with a drink tray. “I remember drinking Shirley Temples,” she commented.

  “I’ve never heard of them.”

  “Shirley Temples were devised to keep kids happy while their parents are ordering real drinks. Mix grenadine and seltzer, top it with a piece of fruit on a parasol toothpick, and the result is juvenile bliss.”

  “They sound horrible, but if that’s what makes children happy, I promise you our children will drink them all the time.”

  Jana’s salad fork hung in midair. “You never mentioned anything about wanting children,” she said when she’d recovered enough to speak.

  “I didn’t say I wanted children—I thought I was getting too old. But a few little girls who resemble you running barefoot around the apartment might be sort of fun.”

  “Please don’t say that.” Jana shook her head, trying to free herself of the tension that had been building all day—first trying to get through the day at work, then Gimbel’s, now this.

  Ed pressed a napkin tightly against his lips. “I know Dr. Barbash said you can’t get pregnant, but that would all change if those tumors were removed. I thought anyone who kept a closet full of stuffed animals must be saving them for her children.”

  “I collect the animals,” she said flatly, without meeting his eyes.

  The corners of Ed’s mouth tensed. Jana could see his lips straining against cigarette-yellow teeth. Collecting stuffed animals is a hell of a lot better than Kathe and her dogs, he reminded himself. The plates arrived. Ed took two bites of food, then asked if she used the animals as models.

  “No. I liked to cuddle them sometimes—before you were around,” she mumbled.

  “There’s nothing wrong with cuddling animals. But if they’re an important part of your life, I’d expect them to appear in your paintings as well.”

  “I can’t paint to order,” Jana protested, losing more patience with each word. She recalled those first meetings with APL, when Ed suggested she work on drawings to include in the exhibition. “I don’t choose my subjects, they choose me. And I’m working hard to get my work less figurative. When I do work with the figure, I concentrate on muscle tension. Stuffed, flaccid bodies offer no resistance—you can form stuffed animals into any shape you want, make them fit your body, that’s why children love them. Translate that into painting, and it would be like working with watercolors.”

  “What about the rigid bodies on Steiff animals?”

  “Ed, please, I know what I’m doing.” Ed was as bad as Harriman, trying to force her into working with oil. Harriman, at least, based his arguments on experience. Were she having this conversation with Marilyn or Gary, they’d get into a discussion about foreshortening and developing tension in the figure—talking with other artists helped her workout the process, even if they didn’t have any answers. But Ed wasn’t familiar with artistic terminology, and explaining things to him wasn’t worth the effort.

  No, it wasn’t a question of effort. Being with Ed still felt strange to her. She was accustomed to hiding behind her art, talking about technique to avoid more personal subjects, especially with men. Avoidance, tonight, was bordering on calamity. Ed’s face was as red as that Santa Claus.

  She ran her eyes over the Christmas presents piled up on the chair next to him, recalling one present she’d gotten as a child—a painting of Lady and the Tramp. The only uncle who’d encouraged her art, a butcher cum Sunday painter, painted that for her eighth birthday. He set the two gold dogs on a dark red background, painted white borders to save her parents the expense of a frame. She’d tacked it on her wall with a nail, and never again felt close to him. Five years later, when she was painting more seriously than he was, he gave her his stamp collection. Neither gift was appropriate, but at least he’d tried, which was more than her other aunts and uncles had done. She had the frightening vision of Ed trying too, spending $100 on a Steiff animal to give her for Christmas. Assuming we’re still together this Christmas, she thought, remembering that tomorrow was the board meeting scheduled to discuss Matt Fillmore’s drawing.

  “Getting back to the subject,” she said calmly, almost as if she were making peace with her uncle, “I used to think about adopting a child, but I’d never want the responsibility of creating life.”

  “As I said, a family isn’t my main objective. If that’s how you feel about children, then I promise never to bring up the subject again.” Ed signaled for the check and a refill on coffee. His gaze wandered the room as he found himself thinking about how, with Kathe, there was always her craziness to use as a cover. Half the time, Kathe wasn’t even aware of what he was doing or saying; she just wanted someone there to support her. His conversations with Kathe never got out of hand, as this one had. �
��Maybe it’s just hypertension,” he thought, glancing up at Jana waiting impatiently for him to finish eating.

  On the way home, Jana insisted they stop at the discount drug store on Broadway and pick up some wrapping paper. Yet when they got to the apartment, instead of opening the new paper, she went into the kitchen and came back with a roll of Reynolds Wrap. Ed turned on the television and watched silently while Jana sat cross-legged on the floor, folding the corners of the foil carefully around the box holding the ceramic clown. He wanted to stop her, to remind her that his niece was important to him, that as long as she’d bought the wrapping paper she ought to use it. But something in Jana’s movements, the energy with which she set to wrapping, warned him not to speak.

  Aware of his eyes on her, she selected a sheet of wrapping paper, spread it on the floor, and set the foil-covered box in the center of it. She double-folded a piece of tape and stuck the center of the box securely to the paper, then folded the paper around the rest loosely. She pinned a bow in the center of the top, then asked to borrow his penknife.

  She pulled out a small blade and began making quick, narrow slits in the wrapping paper, along all four sides. She unpinned the top bow, fluffed out the sides, and pinned the bow again, then sprayed the whole thing with hairspray until the paper became stiff. Finally she held it up for his examination.

  Ed stared in wonderment. It looked like a Chinese lantern. The sides ballooned out, and the silver paper glittered between the slits. “It’s fabulous!” he said.

  “You’ll have to be careful shipping it. These sides will crush easily.”

  “More than worth the effort. That wrapping looks like a present in itself.”

  “It’s based on the same concept as those string decorations we used to make in arts and crafts. The ones where you blew up a balloon, pasted different colored wool around it, then popped the balloon.”

  “I remember those. They never looked that great, though. Leave it to an artist to be creative,” he teased.

  “Resourceful, not creative,” Jana said. “It comes from wanting to give presents and being broke. The first few years I was living in the city, I didn’t have a steady job and couldn’t even get a charge card. I remember one year I took a lot of my old sketches and watercolors, practice pieces. I cut them up and sewed them into handmade books, then gave them to friends as Christmas presents.”

  “I wish I’d known you then,” Ed mused. “I’ll bet they were something else.”

  “Be nice, and maybe I’ll make you one this year.” Jana smiled up at him, then devoted all her attention to his sister’s jewelbox, trying to decide how it might be wrapped.

  Ed could have spent the rest of the evening entranced by her movements. Was this the same woman who, two hours ago, had gotten hysterical over the mere mention of children? Jana’s ability to bounce back from her little episodes was as much a marvel as her creatively wrapped presents were. He might envy his friends in relationships with calm, secure women, but that very stability would more than likely put him off. His mother’s outbursts had set a pattern he all but expected in women. And hysterical or not, Jana’s self-assurance was clear to him; the more she fought against admitting it the clearer it became. He could be supportive and responsive to her moods, but he didn’t have to carry the world’s weight on his shoulders.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Not Your Decision or Mine

  THE MEETING had been called for two o’clock, but people began drifting in fifteen minutes early. Pretending to busy herself with last-minute arrangements, Jana watched out of a corner of her eye while Natalie chatted away. They’d attempted, in choosing their board, to achieve a balance of arts supporters and business expertise, but this would be the first time their values were put to a test.

  Jana and Natalie had been over this a hundred times in the past two weeks. Jana took a steadfast position: we invited an artist whose work we respect; he submitted pieces which are entirely appropriate to the theme of the exhibition. Yes, Power and Light raises issues the exhibition’s sponsor would prefer to avoid; it’s also an extremely strong work. We cannot, under any circumstances, ask Matt Fillmore to substitute another piece. And Natalie’s position was: that’s not your decision or mine. The board will decide. She might hope they’d agree with Jana, but she wasn’t about to tell them what to do.

  Much as she hated to admit it, Jana knew Natalie was right: they couldn’t act without their board. More importantly, they needed the board’s corporate jockeying for position if they were going to have a leg to stand on with APL.

  And where did she stand with Ed? All of the sudden there was more than her job, more than one exhibition, more than art-world prestige at stake. If they could get the board behind them, then even if worst came to worst and APL refused to permit that work in the show, they could conceivably come up with last-minute backing. The exhibition might not be on as grand a scale, but that would only make it closer to their original proposal. Even if APL retained sponsorship, Jana was beginning to wonder if her relationship with Ed could stand the strain. If there was strain; for all she knew, APL’s board might readily agree to show the work. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch, she reminded herself, glancing up as the final two board members walked in. But also: don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

  Natalie passed out prints of all six slides Matt Fillmore had sent them, checked to make sure everyone had received copies of the articles Jana gathered, then turned the meeting over to their board president.

  “I think it’s fairly obvious from reading these articles, and the passages Jana has highlighted, what position our curator takes,” Bill began. “And I’ll be the first to concede that the articles are extremely articulate at addressing the dangers involved in corporate censorship. But what’s the other side of the coin?”

  “The Paperworks Space loses its credibility,” Jana said. “We could get all the sponsorship in the world, but if we can’t convince the artists we respect to show with us, what good does it do?”

  “I was thinking more of our sponsor’s predicament,” Bill said with a good-natured chuckle.

  “APL has gotten off easy so far with this new generating plant,” another board member began. “There was a bit of negative publicity when they were first granted the land, but even at the time the incident was overshadowed by the government’s takeover of reservation land in the Allegheny Mountains so they could build the Kinzua Dam. If APL leaves the work in the show, some people will notice, but it will also go over the heads of many viewers. If they attempt to censor the work, they’re risking an onset of negative publicity once again—not only for censorship, but for the generating plant itself.”

  “In other words, our job would be to convince them they don’t want that publicity?” someone asked.

  “And to convince them The Paperworks Space has the power to start such publicity in motion,” Natalie added somewhat doubtfully.

  “Don’t forget, we’re not dealing with a show at the gallery here, but with a city-wide exhibition,” Gary pointed out. “We might be in a much stronger position than you realize.”

  “There’s another aspect to all this,” Jana said. She pulled a few pages out of her folder and passed copies around. “This is an excerpt from our original proposal to APL. Most of you have seen it before. It’s the section discussing the work of artists we’re intending to include in the exhibition. I recall writing those descriptions, and how careful I was to allay APL’s fears that the works might be controversial.” She recalled that day when Ed had driven her down to the gallery, how she’d watched him looking closely at Lou Daniels’ drawings, and silently imagined him putting any fears of controversy to rest once and for all. “To get to the point,” she continued, pushing such thoughts aside, “it wasn’t until APL insisted upon more prestigious artists that we came up with Matt Fillmore.”

  “Whew,” someone exclaimed. “You’re really trying to pass the buck, aren’t you?” Another board member pointed out that there
were any number of prestigious artists around, and it had still been a decision of The Paperworks Space to include Matt Fillmore.

  Bill sat quietly, taking it all in. “Your point is well made, Jana,” he said after a ten-minute discussion. “I’d say that, if worst came to worst, we might remind APL of their insistence on name artists, but the purpose would be to emphasize Matt Fillmore’s prestige. Frankly, I’d prefer to find other ways of convincing them to leave the work in the exhibition.”

  “Assuming that ‘leaving the work in the exhibition’ is our ultimate objective,” another board member said. “It seems to me that hasn’t been decided yet. Among other things, this piece doesn’t accurately depict Indian life. I did a little research also, and discovered that no Indians in New York State, or anywhere in the Northeast, ever lived in teepees. It was far too cold. So, if we wanted to ask that the work be withdrawn, we would have an aesthetic basis as well.”

  “We’re talking about art, not history,” Jana said, fighting to keep her voice level.

  “I don’t think there’s any question that the teepee image immediately identifies Native American life to the general public,” Natalie cut in before Jana said something they’d all regret.

  “Okay,” Bill said. “I think the first order of business is to make up our minds: do we stick to our guns about including this drawing or is the matter up for discussion and possible compromise?”

  Jana noticeably tensed as board members began discussing the pros and cons. Gary, Larry Rivers, and luckily, Bill Fitch all strongly supported her position that the work had to stay. She found herself wondering what position Ed would take. At least no one was suggesting she get him involved. She had feared the worst, had pictured Natalie rattling off all the little extras Ed had done for them last spring when he’d first been interested in her. And when she refused to speak to him, Natalie would comment that she didn’t care enough about what happened at The Paperworks Space, the relationship was the only thing that seemed to matter. The whole board would end up attacking her for not caring enough about her job.