The Burnt Orange Heresy

by Charles Willeford

  They were enormous spectacles, more than twenty-five feet across, steel frames covered with thickly enameled ormolu. The lenses were fashioned from twindex windows, the kind with a vacuum to separate the two panes of glass.

  “The vacuum inside will help keep the lenses from fogging up on cold days,” Wade explained.

  I had taken three black-and-white Polaroid snapshots of Wade and the glasses, and one of the photos was sharp enough to illustrate the item in my column. The spectacles were a superior job of craftsmanship, and I had suggested to Mr. Wade that he might sell them to an optician for advertising purposes. The suggestion made him angry.

  “No, by God,” he said adamantly. “These glasses were made for Mr. Truman, when his bust is finished on Mount Rushmore!”

  The phone rang.

  “Where have you been?” Gloria’s voice asked shrilly. “I’ve been calling you all afternoon. Berenice said you left and that you might never come back.”

  “When did you talk to Berenice?”

  “This morning, about ten thirty.”

  This news hit me hard. If I had returned in twenty-four hours, in forty-eight, or sixty—I’d still have Berenice. My timing had been perfect, but a pang was there.

  “I’ve been in Miami, working. But Berenice has left and won’t be back.”

  “Lovers’ quarrel? Tell Gloria all about it.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Gloria.”

  She laughed. “You’re coming to the preview?”

  “I told you I would. What’s so important about second-hand Haitian art that you’ve had to call me all day?”

  “Westcott’s a good painter, James, he really is, you know. A first-rate draughtsman.”

  “Sure.”

  “You sound funny. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. And I’ll be there.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Joseph Cassidy will be there, and he’s coming because he wants to meet you. He told me so. You know who Mr. Cassidy is, don’t you?”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “No, not everybody. Not everybody needs him!” She laughed. “But he’s invited us—you and me and a few others—to supper at his place after the preview. He has a penthouse at the Royal Palm Towers.”

  “I know where he lives. Why does he want to meet me?”

  “He didn’t say. But he’s the biggest collector to ever visit my little gallery, and if I could land him as a patron I wouldn’t need any others—”

  “Don’t sell him any primitives, then, or Westcotts.”

  “Why not?”

  “He isn’t interested in conventional art. Don’t try to sell him anything. Wait until I talk to him, and then I’ll suggest something to you.”

  “I appreciate this, James.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Are you bringing Berenice?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Gloria.”

  She was laughing as I racked the phone.

  3

  As much as I dislike the term “freeloader,” no other word fits what I had become during my sojourn on the Gold Coast. There are several seasonal societal levels in Palm Beach, and they are all quite different from the social groups, divided uneasily by the Waspish and Jewish groupings found in Miami and Miami Beach. In Lauderdale, of course, the monied class is squarely WASP.

  I belonged to none of the “groups,” but I was on the periphery of all of them by virtue of my calling. I met people at art show previews, where cocktails are usually served, and because I was young, single, and had an acceptable profession, I was frequently invited to dinners, cocktail parties, polo games, boat rides, late suppers, and barbecues. These invitations, which led to introductions to other guests, usually produced additional dinner invitations. And a few of the Gold Coast artists, like Larry Levine, for example, were people I had known in New York.

  After two months in Florida I had many acquaintances, or connections, but no friends. I did not return any of the dinner invitations, and I had to avoid bars, night clubs, and restaurants where I might get stuck with a check. The man who never picks up a check does not acquire friends.

  Nevertheless, I felt that my various hosts and hostesses were recompensed for my presence at their homes. I put up genially with bores, I was an extra man at dinners where single, heterosexual young men were at a premium, and when I was in a good mood, I could tell stories or carry conversation over dead spots.

  I had two dinner jackets, a red silk brocade and a standard white linen. There were lipstick mouthings on the white jacket, where a tipsy Berenice had bitten me on the shoulder while I was driving back from a party. I was forced, then, to wear the red brocade.

  As I walked the six blocks from my apartment to Gloria’s Gallery, I speculated on Joseph Cassidy’s invitation to supper. A social invitation wasn’t unusual, but she had said that he wanted to meet me, and I wondered why. Cassidy was not only famous as a collector, he was famous as a criminal lawyer. It was the huge income from his practice in Chicago that had enabled him to build his art collection.

  He had one of the finest private collections of contemporary art in America, and the conclusion I came to, which seemed reasonable at the time, was that he might want to hire me to write a catalogue for it. And if he did not want to see me about that (to my knowledge, no catalogue had been published on his collection), I had a good mind to suggest it to him. The task would pay off for me, as well as for Cassidy, in several ways. I could make some additional money, spend a few months in Chicago, do some writing on midwestern art and artists, and my name on the published catalogue would enhance my career.

  The more I thought about the idea the more enthusiastic I became, but by the time I reached the gallery my enthusiasm was tempered by the knowledge that I could not broach the suggestion to him. If he suggested it, fine, but I could not ask a man for employment at a social affair without a loss of dignity.

  And what else did I have to offer a man in Cassidy’s position? My pride (call it machismo) in myself, which I overrated and which I knew was often phony, was innate, I supposed—a part of my heritage from my Puerto Rican father. But the pride was there, all the same, and I had passed up many opportunities to push myself by considering first, inside my head, what my father would have done in similar circumstances.

  By the time I reached the gallery, I had pushed the idea out of my mind.

  Gloria forced her thin lips over her buck teeth, brushed my right sideburn with her mouth, and, capturing my right arm in a painful armlock, led me to the bar.

  “Do you know this man, Eddy?” she said to the bartender.

  “No,” Eddy shook his head solemnly, “but his drink is familiar.” He poured two ounces of Cutty Sark over two ice cubes and handed me the Dixie cup.

  “Thanks, Eddy.”

  Eddy worked the day shift at Hiram’s Hideaway in South Palm Beach, but he was a popular bartender and was hired by many hostesses during the season for parties at night. I usually ran into him once or twice a week at various places. Everybody, I thought, needs something extra nowadays. A regular job, and something else. Gloria, for example, wouldn’t have been able to pay the high seasonal rent on her gallery if she didn’t occasionally rent it out in the evenings for poetry readings and encounter-group therapy sessions. She detested these groups, too. The people who needed to listen to poetry, or tortured themselves in encounter-group sessions were all chain smokers, she claimed, who didn’t use the ashtrays she provided.

  Eddy worked at a sheet-covered card table. There was scotch, bourbon, gin and vermouth for martinis, and a plastic container of ice cubes behind the table. I moved back to give someone else a chance, and picked up a mimeographed catalogue from the table in the foyer. Gloria was greeting newcomers at the door, bringing them to the table to sign her guest book, and then to the bar.

  Her previews were not exclusive by any means. In addition to her regular guest list for previews, she gave invitations to Palm Beach hotel P.R
. directors to hand out to guests who might be potential buyers. The square hotel guests, “honored” by being given printed preview invitations to a private show, and thrilled by the idea that they were seeing “real” Palm Beach society at an art show preview, occasionally purchased a painting. And when they did, the publicity director of the hotel they came from received a sports jacket or a new pair of Daks from Gloria. As a consequence, the preview crowd at Gloria’s Gallery was often a weird group. There were even a couple of teenaged girls from Palm Beach Junior College peering anxiously at the primitives and writing notes with ballpoints in Blue Horse notebooks.

  Herbert Westcott, I learned from the catalogue, was twenty-seven years old, a graduate of Western Reserve who had also studied at the Art Students League in New York. He had exhibited in Cleveland, the Art Students League, and Toronto, Canada. A Mr. Theodore L. Canavin of Philadelphia had collected some of his work. This exhibit, recent work done in Haiti during the past three months, was Westcott’s first one-man show. I looked up from the catalogue and spotted the artist easily. He was short—about five seven—well tanned, with a skimpy, light brown beard. He wore a six-button, powder blue Palm Beach suit, white shoes, and a pale pink body shirt without a tie. He was eavesdropping on a middle-aged couple examining his largest painting—a Port-au-Prince market scene that was two-thirds lemon sky.

  He drew well, as Gloria had said, but he had let his colors overlap by dripping to give the effect of fortuitous accident to his compositions. The drips—a messy heritage from Jackson Pollock—were injudicious. He had talent, of course, but talent is where a painter starts. His Haitian men and women were in tints and shades of chocolate instead of black, something I might not have noticed if it had not been for the Haitian paintings on the opposite wall, where the figures were black indeed.

  The dozen Haitian paintings Gloria had rounded up were all surprisingly good. She even had an early Marcel, circa 1900, so modestly different from the contemporary primitives with their bold reds and yellows, it riveted one’s attention. The scene was typically Haitian, some thirty people engaged in voodoo rites, with a bored, comical goat as a central focusing point, but the picture was painted in gray, black, and white—no primary colors at all. Marcel, as I recalled, was an early primitive who had painted his canvases with chicken feathers because he could not afford brushes. It was priced at only fifteen hundred dollars, and someone would get a bargain if he purchased the Marcel . . .

  “James,” Gloria clutched my elbow, “I want you to meet Herb Westcott. Herb, this is Mr. Figueras.”

  “How do you do?” I said. “Gloria, where did you get the Marcel?”

  “Later,” she said. “Talk to Herb.” She turned away, with her long freckled right arm outstretched to a tottering old man with rouged cheeks.

  Westcott fingered his skimpy beard. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you before, Mr. Figueras—Gloria told me you were coming—but I thought you wore a beard. . . .”

  “It’s the picture in my column. I should replace the photo, I suppose, but it’s a good one and I haven’t got another one yet. I had my beard for about a year before I shaved it. You shouldn’t tug at your beard, Mr. Westcott . . .”

  He dropped his hand quickly and shuffled his feet.

  “I worked it all out, Mr. Westcott, and found that a beard would add about six weeks to my life, that is, six full weeks of shaving time saved in a lifetime, seven weeks if one uses an electric razor. But it wasn’t worth it. Like you, I could hardly keep my fingers off the damned thing, and my neck itched all the time. The secret, they say, is never to touch your beard. And if you’ve already got that habit, Mr. Westcott, your beard is doomed.”

  “I see,” he said shyly. “Thanks for the advice.”

  “Don’t worry,” I added, “you probably look handsomer without one.”

  “That’s what Gloria said. Here,” he took my empty Dixie cup—“let me get you a fresh drink. What are you drinking?”

  “Eddy knows.”

  I turned back to examine the Marcel again. I wanted to leave. The small high-ceilinged room, which seemed smaller now as it began to get crowded, was jammed with loud-voiced people, and I did not want to talk to Westcott about his paintings. That’s why I got off onto the beard gambit. They were all derivative, which he knew without my telling him. The entire show, including the Marcel, wasn’t worth more than one column inch (I folded the catalogue and shoved it into my hip pocket), unless I got desperate for more filler to make the column come out to an even two thousand words.

  Gloria was standing by the bar, together with a dozen other thirsty guests. Poor Westcott, who was paying for the liquor, hovered on the outskirts trying to get Eddy’s attention. I took the opportunity to slip into the foyer and then out the door. I was on Worth Avenue in the late twilight, and heading for home. If Mr. Cassidy wanted to meet me, he could get my telephone number from Gloria and call for an appointment.

  Twilight doesn’t last very long in Florida. By the time I reached my ocherous predepression stucco apartment house—a mansion in the twenties, now cut up into small apartments—my depression was so bad I had a headache. I took off my jacket and sat on a concrete bench beneath a tamarisk tree in the patio and smoked a cigarette. The ocean wind was warm and soft. A few late birds twittered angrily as they tried to find roosting places in the crowded tree above my head. I was filled with emptiness up to my eyes, but not to the point of overflowing. Old Mrs. Weissberg, who lived in No. 2, was limping down the flagstone path toward my bench. To avoid talking to her I got up abruptly, climbed the stairs, heated a Patio Mexican Dinner for thirty minutes in the oven, ate half of it, and went to bed. I fell asleep at once and slept without dreams.

  4

  Gloria shook me awake and switched on the lamp beside the Murphy bed. She had let herself in with the extra key I kept hidden in the potted geranium on the porch. She had either witnessed Berenice using the key or heard her mention that one was there. I blinked at Gloria in the sudden light, trying to pull myself together. My heart was still fluttering, but the burbling fear of being wakened in the dark was gradually going away.

  “I’m sorry, James,” Gloria said briskly, “but I knocked and you didn’t answer. You really ought to get a doorbell, you know.”

  “Try phoning next time. I almost always get up to answer the phone, in case it might be something unimportant.” I didn’t try to conceal the irritation in my voice.

  My cigarettes were in my trousers, which were hanging over the back of the straight chair by the coffee table. I slept nude, with just a sheet over me, but because I was angry as well as in need of a smoke, I threw the sheet off, got up and fumbled in the pockets of my trousers for my cigarettes. I lit one and tossed the match into the stoneware ashtray on the coffee table.

  “This is important to me, James. Mr. Cassidy came and you weren’t there. He asked about you and I told him you had a headache and left early—”

  “True.”

  Gloria wasn’t embarrassed by my nakedness, but now I felt self-conscious, standing bare assed in the center of the room, smoking and carrying on a moronic conversation. Gloria was in her late forties, and had been married for about six months to a hardware-store owner in Atlanta, so it wasn’t her first time to see a man without any clothes on. Nevertheless, I took a terry-cloth robe out of the closet and slipped into it.

  “He wants you to come to supper, James. And here I am, ready to take you.”

  “What time is it, anyway?”

  “About ten forty.” She squinted at the tiny hands on her platinum wristwatch. “Not quite ten forty-five.”

  I felt refreshed and wide-awake, although I had only slept two hours. Being awakened that way, so unexpectedly, had stirred up my adrenalin.

  “I think you’re overstating the case, Gloria. What, precisely, did Mr. Cassidy say to make you so positive he wanted me—in particular—to come to his little gathering?”

  She rubbed her beaky nose with a skinny forefinger and frowned
. “He said, ‘I hope that Mr. Figueras’ headache won’t keep him from coming over this evening for a drink.’ And I said, ‘Oh, no. He asked me to pick him up later at his apartment. James is very anxious to meet you.’”

  “I see. You turned a lukewarm chunk of small talk into a big deal. And now I have to go with you to get you off the hook.”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way. He bought a picture from me, James, one of the primitives—the big one with the huge pile of different kinds of fruit. For his colored cook to hang in the kitchen.”

  “No Westcotts?”

  “He didn’t like Herb’s pictures very well. I could tell, although he didn’t say anything one way or another.”

  “I think he did. Buying a Haitian primitive for his cook says something, don’t you think? Do I need another shave?”

  She felt my chin with the tips of her fingers. “I don’t think so. Brush your teeth, though. Your breath is simply awful.”

  “That’s from the Mexican dinner I had earlier.”

  I dressed in gray slacks, a white shirt, and brown leather tie, dark brown loafers, and a gray-and-white striped seer-sucker jacket, resolving to take my soiled dinner jacket to the cleaner’s in the morning. I remember how calm I was, and how well my mind seemed to be functioning after only two hours of sleep. All of my muscles were loose and stretchy. There was a spring to my step, as though I were wearing cushioned soles. I was in a pleasant mood, so much so that I pinched old Gloria through her girdle as we left the apartment.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, James!”

  As we drove toward the Royal Palm Towers, a seven-story horror of poured concrete, in Gloria’s white Pontiac, I found myself looking forward to meeting Mr. Cassidy and to seeing his paintings. He was bound to have a few pictures in his apartment, although his famous collection was safe in Chicago. I wondered, as well, why he had elected to live in the Royal Palm Towers, which overlooked Lake Worth instead of the Atlantic. He would be able to see the Atlantic from his rooftop patio, but only from a distance, and that wasn’t the same as being on the beach.