“Show Gideon your legs, Hartley. I’ve told him about Angie and you, style leaders in the youth movement, two art history time bombs just ticking to go off. —This is Gideon. Gideon is a very good painter, Angie.”
“Do tell.”
He looked adolescent and his jet-black hair grew in garlands of ringlets; his skin was the color of toffee with touches of raw apricots burning in both round cheeks. His looks were so like a Fayum portrait, he did not at first appear either a contemporary or a likely English-speaker.
The youth stood here holding a satchel, one long white silk scarf trailed half out of it. I guessed he had just been wearing the thing but whipped it off before meeting us. He was short and self-possessed within a kind of unblinking innocence he’d somehow smuggled across the border of his recent boyhood. He looked both spoiled and furious. His brown eyes could go the longest time without blinking. That exemption made him seem as worldly as babyish as psychic, all at once.
Robert pointed to a chair and Gideon sat on it, obedient, silent, letting us look him over. We all freely did so. Angie now bent under the table, scoping out his lap. “Come on, Angie,” Robert shook his head. “Don’t be like that.” The strange youth could tell he had not caught her on a good day.
Robert explained that Gideon here had been born in Egypt, then his Sephardic family—Alexandria’s purveyors of the best office and art supplies—moved to New York. They soon misinvested everything through a disappearing relative. So Gideon was banished at age twelve to outer Queens. He had soon won U.S. scholarships; he soon knew Virgil Thomson, he sometimes helped the old man gather comestibles and cook; Gideon now sold Arts and Crafts ceramics as a sideline; he had exquisite taste with the luck to match it; he had found two Fabergé card cases, “the green ones, that Russian imperial pastille pistachioish green that’s somewhere between lime and khaki, with the watered-silk enamel surface, you know those” and at a swapmeet in Swonsett!
Plus Gideon owned six Villon prints, a small early Kline-like Alfred Leslie abstraction, one Lichtenstein comic-book pencil drawing circa 1964, and the best (front facing panels Duncan Grant, verso ones—Vanessa Bell) Omega Workshop folding screen not in a museum.
“No fuckin’ lie,” she said.
“My, we are nearing the end of our month, aren’t we, dollie?—And another thing. Gideon has a painting in his knapsack, show them your painting, babes. One of his. I think he’s very Brahms Intermezzo 118 Number 2. I think his touch is exquisite. I put it somewhere on the Morandi-Milton Avery-Vuillard painter’s painter continuum, I do.”
“No shit.”
Silent, somewhat shaken, this pretty boy now directed his huge brown eyes toward Robert’s crystal blue ones, and met only steadying encouragement. He risked reaching into his leather bag. Now I saw that the silk kerchief mostly wrapped a little landscape. The picture had been painted very fast, it seemed—and on a good wooden panel. It was barely a foot square. The thing got passed from hand to hand, from me, toward Robert, who seemed to view it as for the first time and to evince, as usual, no doubt at all. His angel face—now aimed toward Alabam—grew determined, and, with this side’s nostril flaring, seemed some young god-warrior’s. It showed that today he really meant this.
We all watched Angie take the thing. We watched her consider its paint, the brushwork, its odd color, half-saccharine half-acidic. She tipped it twice, to see light move across it. Her mouth stayed curled to one side, chewing nothing, speculative. She now lifted the panel a jeweler’s distance from her face so she could site along its surface, could study a lush build-up of oil paint forming scalloped clouds. These’d been done all in blues and harsh plums, in vinegar ochres and one strange pink-gray. You could see that he had studied Whistler, a painter we all kept forgetting then remembering, but never knew quite where to “place.”
Gideon’s painting appeared done outdoors—in a gondola on a river just at dusk, and finished only when the daylight left him blind.
Angie at last glanced up from her perusal; she stared across our table toward young Gideon—I saw her mouth half relax. It was such a look she offered him then. There still seemed a first layer of hatred in it. But something fresh had broken through. We noticed actual water resting just along the lower edge of either amber eye. Then, though her mouth, unmoving, still seemed irked and restless, she just nodded once, but with a grudged and certain emphasis.
“Szank you,” Gideon said, lowering his gaze in the way a small animal shows respect before a larger one. She’d handed him his own picture, which was a very beautiful painting, we all now knew, now she’d said so and on such a Grumpy Angie day. Then he did something very simple. He passed her his white silk scarf. After seeking Angie’s visual permission, Gideon bent across our table and looped his silk around her lovely neck.
Robert and I watched these two; we observed Angie’s atypical surprise. Now, riveted, right in front of us, young Gideon seemed to be giving her such a look of true sexual urgency. It was such a pleading boyish “help me with this thing of mine” look, that it resembled snake charming. It was, come to think of it.
Robert, caught off guard, laughed. Then I did, but one boy and one girl kept studying each other.
Our Robert could appear with a gent one day, a lady the next. It kept Angie guessing, and kept me. But to find that this latest male of his could paint like a young master and might also like women, it seemed to’ve shocked Robert, and improved Angelina’s day.
As if Robert and myself were not present, while ignoring Robert’s chuckle—Gideon now said only to her, and in a French Arabic accent that was lavish as some young man eating a pomegranate in the public market and not caring how much pink juice ran down his stubbled chin and smooth neck, “In the lower left corner of a picture name of Bossman IV you showed at group show on Broome last spring? c’est ca? was a shape, not un triangle, but more like …” and here he held up both brown hands, long ones for a young boy so rounded. Hands formed a parallelogram through which he stared at her a second. If he had licked the air within that form, he could not have been more explicit.
“Shape like … this, shape. And it was half of it of the plum color, ripe almost to ze color of a man blood? Other half the orange from the tomato soup, in the red can, soup that Warhol … and over it one blue splash, very wet. Flaa, like ‘flaa,’ jus flung, you know? You paint so wet, Miss Angelina-bama Byrnes, stays wet. How you paint it? I told my friend, said this is the best four square inches of paint outside of captivity of Louvre. I don’t know how you know so much and can forget it to let de paint jest happen so and …”
“I think Ima gonna to be sick,” Robert kicked me under our table.
“You?” I said, “I fink I’m about to projectile ‘flaaa.’ You know from ‘flaaa’?”
“Boys my boys, do quick go fuck yourselves.” Angie’s eyes had not left his. “The child can paint. The child has eyelashes for miles. And God knows, dis chile gots taste.”
“Come on, Hartley.” Robert stood. “Hoist up your Molly Brown nightshirt and bring along your short-story masterpiece. We’re out of here. Unless they want us to follow them to her place and just let us watch it happen, wet. I mean I’ve got ten minutes between appointments. This bored, I wouldn’t really half mind.”
“You fuckin’ wish. I don’t given lessons, except”—she turned Robert’s way with the loathing only long-thwarted desire can hatch—“directly.”
We left. We had to pick up dry cleaning. We both suspected Gideon was in.
Target: Heart
upid masochistic acupuncturist, his former quiverful of arrows now just rattling with needles to porcupine his own chubby legs and arms, but, oh, just look how his little pink mouth is smiling!
I loved Robert and we both really sort of worshipped Angie. But Angie only truly loved Robert while seeking aspects of him in many others. She considered herself a proto-feminist despite being the almost-deb from Savannah, but she still washed Robert’s clothes for him, she actually ironed his jockey shorts.
He said he preferred “roughing it,” preferred not. “I don’t need this from you,” he said, bailing up his dirty towels. She loved only Robert who—while bringing Angie sundry Gideons—was just then seeing a Brazilian stewardess and, soon afterward, her identical twin brother, a Delta air host whose last idea had been to get out of their mother’s womb, but only after his smarter sister showed him the emergency hatch; but God was he ever brown and beautiful.
Angie was drawn briefly to Gideon who, once he knew her, turned back to his first interest, Robert, who later admitted that our gifted Egyptian-born landscape painter (while enlisting many hundreds of others to join him in it) seemed to mainly love Gideon. Gideon seduced, not unwillingly, me, too. Because I was there. Because I liked his work. Because Robert’s carry-over love lit me to advantage: moonlight merely being sunlight on the rebound.
Marco seemed mainly political—barely sexual at all. Our group’s lascivious conversations made him uneasy. That gave him far more weight at our table, since we loved making some dear one sense how good we were getting at being real real baaaaad. Then Marco himself turned up at Ossorio’s with a bruised lip, not self-inflicted, and we figured he had tried something ineptly erotic with the very person least interested in him, but the person he felt most for, politically. (A Russian ship with many sailors was in port just then.) Poor Marco confused conscience with desire. To each his own.
Even beautiful Tony Wu had it bad. I’d continued tutoring him in finer points of Southern grammar and English Lit. After his eventful visit to my dive, I worried about our first chaperoned lesson. But Tony himself seemed calm, even drugged. As usual, Madam Wu audited. She offered me crystallized ginger and Moravian sugar cookies. Now I’d touched her son’s secret beauties, I found her presence less censorious; to me, her skin looked very beautiful.
“I have obtained,” Tony told me, midsession, “an interesting scrapbook containing many photographs concerning the personal effects of the poet John Keats. May I show you it, Mr. Hartley?” While his mother proofread his latest essay assignment, Tony led me twelve paces away. He opened the expensive book. There, tucked atop a lovely drawing of Keats as a boy, I found one of those photobooth strips, four dimestore pictures. They featured young Tony seated in the lap of Juan. Juan wore his hard hat and Tony seemed to be demonstrating, for Woolworth’s camera, through a huge toothy smile, the vowel sounds O, A, and U.
“Yes, Tony, John Keats here has been widely translated but one does wonder how effectively he might communicate with others who speak many differing languages.” (I was starting to sound like my pupil.)
“Perhaps, Mr. Hartley, he talked the Tongue International!” And Tony gave me a look of such gratitude, such love, but gratitude, of course, to me for the love of Juan, probably a married father of four. God knows what confessions Juan’s own priest was hearing and what the priest was doing during. “But … returning to your mother and our nest of split-infinitives waiting over here …”
As usual, it seemed that none of us loved the one that adored him/her back freely and so might’ve offered boring kindness in return. But it was certainly all very busy, yes. Being so young, we had energy to spare for this much wasted lovely spinning, the humping, the losing half-on-purpose, dates broken, screaming scenes in restaurants, all in exchange for the Drama and its limitless funding-source: Our very own Adrenaline. The drug of choice.
It was, after all, tailor-made for us IN us, and came free.
I never saw Angie at a party where she didn’t greet me first thing, not with my own name or a simple courtesy hello—but always, “Is he here yet?” “Am I?” I asked. The joke was lost on her.
At one such opening Angiebama, drunkish, wearing blue cigarette smoke like a veiled hat, called me aside. “No, he’s not here yet,” I, testy, answered in advance.
“It’s not that tonight,” she said. “Listen, I have read your work. You at least know what a sentence is. Till Alzheimer’s, through Alzheimer’s, that’ll keep you busy. You have seen my paintings and Gideon’s, and we know that Marco is respected in that one-language-to-another-world of his. But how much have we heard of his music, really? I mean, I ask you, ‘Bicycle Built for Two’? And do we even know enough to judge?”
I took her by the shoulders and shook her, hoping to gauge just how drunk she was. “You are doubting Robert?”
“But I mean, how can we be sure? And it’s so frustrating that he hasn’t fucked either one of us. Don’t you find?” And then she hugged me, sobbing and sobbing, burning a cigarette hole in my lapel. “He’s ruined my evening and he’s not even in it yet. Did you see him wearing that faded cerulean blue T-shirt last Thursday? With his eyes. It’s not fair, Hartley. Angie needs a dildo discount. About thirty would hit the spot.”
What drawbacks did our four-star sex drive court? Certain Braille-sized body lice called Crabs (we kept insecticide in our medicine chest alongside the toothpaste). A urinary irritation we found was tided The Clap. (This was a complaint that serious penicillin most always quelled [see same medicine cabinet].) Such sex-life disadvantages seemed as giddy and essentially polite as we were, and maybe just as slightly beside the point. The few by-product problems sex offered seemed, like most of ours then—the woes of over-carbonation.
And, naturally, we risked the standard peril: Having your Heart Broken. That old malady, like another impending sickness nearly as clever, even today has no known cure.
Except of course, the usual. Time.
How Shall We Mainly Live? Who to Mostly Be?
n memory, from this cliff overlooking fifty, the thousand parties meld into a single auction, one catered emergency. Robert’s friends alerted him to bashes, he included Angie and me. I arrived in the neighborhood first. You could usually hear it. The disco bass so loud, an aquarium half a block away could experience total fishkill in forty minutes flat. You found the rental chromium coatracks in the hall; fur coats swooned over it, black sequined evening bags lay under mink hems like startled eggs just laid there. You heard three Romance languages being shouted. You smelled the hemp and tobacco smoke, colognes in jousting competitions. You let yourself in, head held aside to fend off volume and the crush of strangers checking you out before you found a secure planting place to stand still, to gather strength, and glare back, seeming invincible because bored preemptively. Not “on the make” but “made.” Not “new here,” “known here.”
These rooms of dancers with too little space to wave their arms, of talkers with ideas too subtle to express above rock this loud, they register in memory less as festivals than firesales. Odd, the emergencies themselves emerge in retinal memory as discrete parties—arrivals, drama-middles, exit lines—with hot foods served, dress themes observed, a young English film actor throwing porch furniture off somebody’s terrace down onto cabs below and no one stopping him but everybody watching.
In this citadel of overstimulation, you can be cut off from your funding source and, for a good while, not quite notice. Reeling home one dawn, thick-mouthed and weak-eyed but somehow spiked with a sense that this was real life I lived among the doors and windows and dicks and names and streets, I came upon a flower vendor setting out his wares.
The Korean boy’s bouquets were wrapped in colored cones of tissue paper. Each clump of daisies and roses was plopped into a green caddy-holder that’d supported ten thousand other such profitable decapitations. I heard a sound long forgotten, and only then did I see the bees. Had their fore-bees lived right here since Chelsea was the name of a local farm? Had they shifted their hives from hollow trees to thriving back alleys as time condensed their honeyed choices?
City bees now plundered the last nectar that such bartered blooms would offer. Bees’ hive, where? Some alley chimney of East 57th Street? Maybe Fort Lee, New Jersey, across the river. These flowers, airlifted in, wouldn’t last four days. But insects still fed on them. And helpless not to, flowers seemed ready for last fun, last rites. New York.
Could I call myself grounded in Manhattan, or was
I, severed as cut flowers, just pretty enough to still sell myself as vital? I pulled the overcoat around me, I plundered pockets but found I lacked the cash for posies.
Oh well. Leave them to the bees and memory.
Night Class
e read the same novel then met at our table to discuss it, urgent. Márquez and Middlemarch were all we could agree on. We convened most nights at six. Ossorio himself presided over his homemade expresso machine, copper piping and antique spigots; it seemed the creation of a drunk Navy welder, Alexander Calder, and Jules Verne. Ossorio’s prices had advanced again. He still welcomed us with a phrase I learned too late was Spanish for “Ah, here they hop in once more, my white and wounded fluffy baby birds.”
One night, Robert, the boy so often called a lookalike for the archangel Gabriel that ten minutes later he didn’t recall if you’d said that or griped about this recent wet weather, brought our meeting to relative order: “Have you ever considered Heaven? I don’t mean as a travel option. I can’t credit it as an actual place, though hearing that would kill my believing parents. I mean as a subject. We mustn’t let this cynical age Novocaine all our better Christian iconography. There’s still gold in them there hills. Let’s hog it. We’re already out of fashion, none of us is Minimal; but the trend’ll change. They’re already hungry for emotion, our wetness, what Gideon calls our “flaa.”—Can we each agree to do a short work on this topic (a small one in the cases of you, Angie and Gideon)? I want to know now what your tides’ll be, and when you’ll have your masterworks finished. We can throw a recital, reading, and studio visit one night next week. I’m partied out since that eighteenth-century Masked Ball thingum. This will be something real, something new to look forward to. No powdered wigs and beauty marks, umkay? Just ‘chez moi, pour nous,’ Our Blue Heaven, what say?” He sensed an unenthusiasm. “You’re so bossy,” Angie said. Both she and he were “only” children.
Plays Well With Others Page 18