“Wear it in good health, Mr. Arkin,” said the student. “Now you’re one of the good guys.”
Arkin was wearing the hat going up the stairs to his office, accompanied by the student who had given it to him, when they encountered the sculptor, who grimaced, then glowered in disgust. Arkin was upset, though he felt at once the force of this uncalled-for reaction indicated that, indeed, the hat remark had been taken by Rubin as an insult. After the bearded student left Arkin, he placed the Stetson on his worktable, it had seemed to him, before going to the men’s room; and when he returned the cowboy hat was gone. The art historian frantically searched for it in his office and even hurried to his seminar room to see whether it could possibly have landed up there, someone having snatched it as a joke. It was not in the seminar room. Smoldering in resentment, Arkin thought of rushing down and confronting Rubin nose to nose in his studio, but could not bear the thought. What if he hadn’t taken it?
Now both of them evaded the other; but after a period of rarely meeting, they began, ironically, Arkin thought, to encounter one another everywhere—even in the streets of various neighborhoods, especially near galleries on Madison or Fifty-seventh or in SoHo, or on entering or leaving movie houses, and on occasion about to go into stores near the art school; each then hastily crossed the street to skirt the other, twice ending up standing close by on the sidewalk. In the art school both refused to serve together on committees. One, if he entered the lavatory and saw the other, stepped outside and remained a distance away till he had left. Each hurried to be first into the basement cafeteria at lunchtime, because when one followed the other in and observed him standing on line at the counter or already eating at a table, alone or in the company of colleagues, invariably he left and had his meal elsewhere. Once, when they came in together they hurriedly departed together. After often losing out to Rubin, who could get to the cafeteria easily from his studio, Arkin began to eat sandwiches in his office. Each had become a greater burden to the other, Arkin felt, than he would have been if only one were doing the shunning. Each was in the other’s mind to a degree and extent that bored him. When they met unexpectedly in the building after turning a corner or opening a door, or had come face to face on the stairs, one glanced at the other’s head to see what, if anything, adorned it; they then hurried by, or away in opposite directions. Arkin as a rule wore no hat unless he had a cold, then he usually wore a black woolen knit hat all day; and Rubin lately affected a railroad engineer’s cap. The art historian felt a growth of repugnance for the other. He hated Rubin for hating him and beheld hatred in Rubin’s eyes.
“It’s your doing,” he heard himself mutter to himself to the other. “You brought me to this, it’s on your head.”
After hatred came coldness. Each froze the other out of his life; or froze him in.
One early morning, neither looking where he was going as he rushed into the building to his first class, they bumped into each other in front of the arched art-school entrance. Angered, insulted, both started shouting. Rubin, his face flushed, called Arkin murderer, and the art historian retaliated by calling the sculptor thief. Rubin smiled in scorn, Arkin in pity; they then fled.
Afterward in imagination Arkin saw them choking one another. He felt faint and had to cancel his class. His weakness became nausea, so he went home and lay in bed, nursing a severe occipital headache. For a week he slept badly, felt tremors in his sleep; he ate next to nothing. “What has this bastard done to me?” he cried aloud. Later he asked, “What have I done to myself?” I’m in this against the will, he thought. It had occurred to him that he found it easier to judge paintings than to judge people. A woman had said this to him once, but he had denied it indignantly. Arkin answered neither question and fought off remorse. Then it went through him again that he ought to apologize, if only because if Rubin couldn’t he could. Yet he feared an apology would cripple his craw.
HALF a year later, on his thirty-sixth birthday, Arkin, thinking of his lost cowboy hat and having heard from the Fine Arts secretary that Rubin was home sitting shivah for his recently deceased mother, was drawn to the sculptor’s studio—a jungle of stone and iron figures—to search for the hat. He found a discarded welder’s helmet but nothing he could call a cowboy hat. Arkin spent hours in the large skylighted studio, minutely inspecting the sculptor’s work in welded triangular iron pieces, set amid broken stone statuary he had been collecting for years—decorative garden figures placed charmingly among iron flowers seeking daylight. Flowers were what Rubin was mostly into now, on long stalks with small corollas, on short stalks with petaled blooms. Some of the flowers were mosaics of triangles fixing white stones and broken pieces of thick colored glass in jewelled forms. Rubin had in the last several years come from abstract driftwood sculptures to figurative objects—the flowers, and some uncompleted, possibly abandoned, busts of men and women colleagues, including one that vaguely resembled Rubin in a cowboy hat. He had also done a lovely sculpture of a dwarf tree. In the far corner of the studio was a place for his welding torch and gas tanks as well as arc-welding apparatus, crowded by open heavy wooden boxes of iron triangles of assorted size and thickness. The art historian slowly studied each sculpture and after a while thought he understood why talk of a new exhibition had threatened Rubin. There was perhaps one fine piece, the dwarf tree, in the whole iron jungle. Was this what he was afraid he might confess if he fully expressed himself?
Several days later, while preparing a lecture on Rembrandt’s self-portraits, Arkin, examining the slides, observed that the portrait of the painter he had remembered as the one he had seen in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was probably hanging in Kenwood House in London. And neither hat the painter wore in either gallery, though both were white, was that much like Rubin’s cap. This observation startled the art historian. The Amsterdam portrait was of Rembrandt in a white turban he had wound around his head; the London portrait was him in a studio cap or beret worn slightly cocked. Rubin’s white thing looked more like an assistant cook’s cap in Sam’s Diner than it did like either of Rembrandt’s hats in the large oils, or in the other self-portraits Arkin showed himself on slides. What those had in common was the unillusioned honesty of his gaze. In his self-created mirror the painter beheld distance, objectivity, painted to stare out of his right eye; but the left looked out of bedrock, beyond quality. Yet the expression of each of the portraits seemed magisterially sad; or was this what life was if, when Rembrandt painted, he did not paint the sadness?
After studying the pictures projected on the small screen in his dark office, Arkin felt he had, in truth, made a referential error, confusing the hats. Even so, what had Rubin, who no doubt was acquainted with the self-portraits, or may have had a recent look at them—at what had he taken offense? Whether I was right or wrong, so what if his white cap made me think of Rembrandt’s hat and I told him so? That’s not throwing rocks at his head, so what bothered him? Arkin felt he ought to be able to figure it out. Therefore suppose Rubin was Arkin and Arkin Rubin—suppose it was me in his hat: “Here I am an aging sculptor with only one show, which I never had confidence in and nobody saw. And, standing close by, making critical pronouncements one way or another, is this art historian Arkin, a big-nosed, gawky, overcurious gent, friendly but no friend of mine because he doesn’t know how to be. That’s not his talent. An interest in art we have in common but not much more. Anyway, Arkin, maybe not because it means anything in particular—who says he knows what he means?—mentions Rembrandt’s hat on my head and wishes me good luck in my work. So say he meant well—it’s still more than I can take. In plain words it irritates me. The mention of Rembrandt, considering the quality of my work and what I am feeling generally about life, is a fat burden on my soul because it makes me ask myself once more—but once too often—why am I going on this way if this is the kind of sculptor I am going to be for the whole rest of my life? And since Arkin makes me think the same unhappy things no matter what he says to me—or even what he doesn’t say, as f
or instance about my driftwood show—who wants to hear more? From then on I avoid the guy—like forever.”
Afterward, after staring at himself in the mirror in the men’s room, Arkin wandered on every floor of the building and then wandered down to Rubin’s studio. He knocked on the door. No one answered. After a moment he tested the knob; it gave, he thrust his head into the room and called Rubin’s name. Night lay on the skylight. The studio was lit with many dusty bulbs but Rubin was not present. The forest of iron sculptures was. Arkin went among the iron flowers and broken stone garden pieces to see if he had been wrong in his judgment. After a while he felt he hadn’t been.
He was staring at the dwarf tree when the door opened and Rubin, wearing his railroad engineer’s cap, in astonishment entered.
“It’s a beautiful sculpture,” Arkin got out, “the best in the room, I’d say.” Rubin stared at him in flushed anger, his face lean; he had grown long reddish sideburns. His eyes were for once green rather than gray. His mouth worked nervously, but he said nothing.
“Excuse me, Rubin, I came in to tell you I got those hats I mentioned to you some time ago mixed up.”
“Damn right you did.”
“Also for letting things get out of hand for a while.”
“Damn right.”
Rubin, though he tried not to, then began to cry. He wept silently, his shoulders shaking, tears seeping through his coarse fingers on his face. Arkin had taken off.
They stopped avoiding each other and spoke pleasantly when they met, which wasn’t often. One day Arkin, when he went into the men’s room, saw Rubin regarding himself in the mirror in his white cap, the one that seemed to resemble Rembrandt’s hat. He wore it like a crown of failure and hope.
[1973]
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
SHOT: A NEW YORK STORY
SHE, ZONA, WENT ALONG the avenues of the East Side of Manhattan, turned up the brownstone side streets of the Seventies and the Nineties on the way to the houses of her group. Once there, she would iron shirts, untangle the vacuum, and at times would be called to put on her black uniform and pass the smoked salmon curling on squares of pumpernickel at cocktail parties. Occasionally, one of the group might see Zona racing up Madison Avenue in the late evening, passing swiftly by the windows where the dresses and scarves and jewelry stood or lay immobile in the anxious night glitter of the high-priced. Zona would, of course, be making her way home, although not one of her people was certain just where that home might be. Somewhere in the grainy, indivisible out-there: area code 718, and what did that signify—the Bronx, Queens? She was tall, very thin; in her black coat, her thick black hair topping her black face, she seemed to be flying with the migratory certainty of some wide-winged black bird.
Her rushing movements were also noticeable about the house. She flew with the dust cloth—swish, swish, swish over the tabletops and a swipe at the windowsills; a splash here and there in the sink; a dash to recover the coat of a not quite sober cocktail guest. Yet, for all this interesting quickness of hand and foot, she was imperturbable, courteous, not given to chatter. And she was impressive; yes, impressive—that was said about Zona. A bit of the nunnery about her, black virgin from some sandy Christian village on the Ivory Coast. So you might say, in a stretch.
A decorator; a partner in an old-print shop; a flute player, female; and a retired classics professor, who liked to sit reading in a wheelchair. To him, Zona would say: Up, up, move, move, and he might spring to his feet or he might not. Such was Zona’s group. She had been passed along to them by some forgotten homesteader, perhaps the now dead photographer from Life, who took her picture and used it in a spread on Somalia. These random dwellers did not see much of each other, but each had passed through the sponge of Manhattan, where even a more or less reclusive person like the professor had a bulky address book filled with friends, relatives, window-washers, foot doctors, whatever—a tattered memorial with so many weird scratches and revisions it might have been in Sanskrit.
It was at the decorator’s apartment that the messenger first stopped. Tony’s was a place on the first floor of a brownstone in the Seventies—a more or less rent-controlled arrangement, since the owner, an old lady, did not want to sell and did not want to fix anything: a standoff. Except for leaks and such matters, Tony was content to do up his own place in his own manner. And a neat number it was, if always in transition, since he bought at auction, tarted the stuff up with a bit of fabric, and sold to his clients, when he had clients. Freelance, that’s what he was. A roving knight available for hire. But, even if his sofa had disappeared, Tony had his rosy walls in a six-coat glaze, and a handsome Englishy telescope that stood in a corner, a tôle chandelier done in a leaf design of faded greens and reds, and lots of things here and there. But not too many.
It was near the end of a nice autumn day when his doorbell rang. Lovely September air, and gather it while ye may, for tomorrow in New York a smoky heat could move across the two rivers and hang heavy as leather on your eyebrows. Tony, at the sound of the bell, looked through the peephole and saw before him a young black face, not very black, almost yellow. His mind rushed to accommodate the vision, and, talking to himself, even doing a little dance, he went through his inner dialogue. Ring the bell, open the door. You-have-got-to-be-kidding. This is New York, fella . . . . And so on. Nevertheless, curiosity had its power, and when a finger from the great city touched the bell once more, Tony called out in as surly and as confident a tone as he could summon, What’s up?
There was a pause, and the young caller answered in a fading voice. He said: From Zona.
Whoa. Come again. Not in a million years could anyone make up the name of Zona and present it on Tony’s doorstep under a rare blue-pink sky. Tony looked again through the opening. From Zona was wearing a tangerine-colored jacket, he noticed. Not bad. The latchkey lay near at hand, and with it in his pocket Tony stepped out on the stoop, closing the door behind him, and there they were, the two of them.
The young man shifted uneasily and it fell to Tony to proceed like a busy interpreter at court. From Zona, are you? And there was a nod. Zona? Now here’s a coincidence. I had a few friends in the other night. Not many—about six, nothing special. But I could have used a little class in the presentation, you know how it is, and that made me think of Zona right away, but no answer from her. Tony took in the handsome, young, light-skinned face, with its black, black eyes and black, black oily curls. So what is your errand?
Zona passed away. That was the message from the slim youth, about fifteen in Tony’s arithmetic.
Zona passed away. You mean dead?
Passed away, the young man repeated, leaving Tony to meet the challenge of whatever was in order—information, emotion? I call that downright horrible news, he said. Such a wonderful person, a gem of a person, Zona. You sure have my sympathy, for what it’s worth.
And then, as they stood on the steps, Tony now braced on the iron railing, a car alarm went off. A loud, oppressive, rhythmical whine, urging, Help, help! When at last it came to an abrupt, electronic end, Tony said: Be my witness. There’s not a soul on that side of the street, not a soul when it went off and not a soul there now.
It’s like the wind sets them off, the boy offered.
Very good, Tony said. Very good. They remind me of a screaming brat, spoiled, nothing wrong, just wanting attention. Something like that. Rotten, screeching Dodge or Plymouth or whatever it is.
The young man gave a hesitant smile before settling back into silence.
Well, business is business, and Tony gathered himself together and asked with true sweetness: What can I do for you, sir?
Were not able to make arrangements for Zona. The young man shifted and brought his doleful countenance up to meet Tony’s eyes, with their flashing curiosity blinking bright in the pleasant sun.
Tony held fast to the railing. I want very much to do something for Zona, he said. And he found himself adding, like a parson, Zona who did so much for us.
&n
bsp; The afternoon was retreating; schoolboys and schoolgirls, women with groceries, nurses with prams. Family life and double-parked maintenance trucks of electricians, pipe fitters, floor sanders taking off for the boroughs. Such sad news you have brought to my door, Tony said. And unfortunately I cannot meet the news as I would like. Consolation, all that. I don’t have any cash around just now . . . . Maybe I could write you a check somehow or send something later.
Checks are hard to handle, the caller said, to which Tony replied with emphasis: You are telling me.
In truth, Tony didn’t have any money. As he often expressed it: I don’t have any money to speak of, and have you ever thought what a silly phrase that “to speak of” is? Tony didn’t have any money. What he had were debts, piling up as they always did, month after month after month. Nothing ever seemed to place him ahead. Ahead? Not even in balance. When he got paid for a job or sold something, by the time the payment came through he owed most of it.
He borrowed from his friends, had borrowed from his sister until that source dried up in a ferocious finale. When reproached or reminded of a default, Tony was something grand to see and to hear. He attacked the lender and carried on with tremendous effrontery, often weeping in his rage. I don’t need you to tell me that I owe you money. Don’t you think I know that? Do I have to sit here and tell you that damned money is on my mind day and night? And then, in a change of pace, he would crumble, or appear to do so. Listen. I’ve been having a really rough time. Just now. This wonderful United States economy is in a god-awful mess. Right down there in the mud, as I see it. Or haven’t you had reason to notice? You have no idea what borrowing is like, Tony would go on in an aggrieved tone. I hope you never have to go through it yourself, believe me. Borrowing from friends is the worst of it. Sheer hell on earth. Better Con Ed and the phone company after you every day, better than a friend out there waiting . . . . With the utilities and all that, there are thousands in the same shitty hole. Those companies don’t know you, wouldn’t know you on the street, thank God. But with pals, it’s torture on the rack.
Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker Page 60