Any Human Heart (43 page)

Jackson Pollock has killed himself and a girl in a car crash on Long Island. Sadness, but no real surprise in the art world: everyone agrees he would have killed himself one way or another very soon. Ben telephoned me from Paris and told me to buy any Pollock I could lay my hands on. But they’re rubbish, I said. The man was a hopeless artist and he knew it — that’s why he had a death wish. Who cares? Ben said, just buy them. And he was right: prices are already climbing. I picked up two of the appalling later stuff for $3,000 and $2,500. Herman Keller says he knows someone who has a drip painting from 1950 but he wants $5,000. All right, I said, with huge reluctance. Ben is delighted.

I bumped into Marius Leeping on Madison Avenue today. He was coming out of a hotel and looked flushed and unsteady on his feet — too many cocktails. It was 4.00 in the afternoon. I smiled politely, nodded hello and tried to pass by but he grabbed my arm. He called me a ‘petit connard’ and a ‘goddam creep’ who was trying to come between him and his father. I said that if anything was going to come between a son and his father, then the son stealing $30,000 from his father might explain it. He took a swing at me and missed. I pushed him away. I’m fifty years old and can’t be brawling with young men in the streets of New York any more. ‘I’m gonna get you, you fucking prick!’ he yelled at me. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I said and wandered off. A few New Yorkers stopped for a second to smile: no big deal, a couple of crazy foreigners having an argument.

Mystic House. I walked into the girls’ bedroom today and Arlene was standing there naked. Small sharp-pointed breasts, downy shading of pubic hair. Sorry! I said breezily and about-turned. Of course, she’s fourteen, but I still think of them both as the little kids they were when I first met them. I took the precaution of mentioning the incident to Alannah, just in case Arlene did. ‘My, she’s growing,’ I remarked, or something innocuous like that. ‘Just don’t make a habit of it,’ she said. I said I didn’t like her tone or implication. She told me to go fuck myself. I said I’d rather do that than fuck you — though the chance would be a fine thing. And so we had a nasty spiteful little row saying the most wounding words we could think of. What’s going wrong? For one ghastly moment I thought she might have found out about Gloria, but that’s impossible. Gail senses this tension between us: ‘Why are you and Mommy always fighting?’ ‘Oh, we’re just getting old and ornery,’ I say. Arlene can’t look me in the eye since my intrusion.

Curious meeting yesterday with Janet [Felzer]. It was about business, she said, not pleasure, but she didn’t want to meet in either of our offices. All right, I said, how about the steps of the Metropolitan Museum? No, no, she said, too obvious. We eventually plumped for a bookstore on Lexington Avenue.

Janet asked: did I know Caspar Alberti? Yes, I said, he’s a client — he bought a little Vuillard off me. He’s broke, Janet said. How do you know? I just do: he’s going to auction off his entire collection. How do you know? I repeated. A little bird told me, she said — he’s had a valuer round. He needs money fast, she said knowingly, and then, she added coyly, can you raise $100,000? Why? Because if you can, and I can, and someone else I know can, then we can buy Alberti’s collection for $300,000. What do we do then? We sit on it for a year and sell it off, split everything three ways. You’ll double your money — guaranteed.

I telephoned Ben in Paris and he wired me the money right away. I was surprised and vaguely ashamed: somehow I felt I was being brought down to Marius Leeping’s level — as if I occupied a world where the underhand thrived and the dishonest man flourished.

I get up at 7.00 usually — not sleeping so well these days — shower, dress and go through to breakfast. Shirley [the maid] has everything ready for me and the girls. I eat scrambled eggs on toast. The girls arrive, eat their cereals, drink their milkshakes, munch on cookies. I pour some coffee and smoke my first cigarette of the day. Gail is indefatigably chatty; Arlene seems always in some kind of a fuss or crisis to do with clothes or homework. Alannah arrives, prompt at 8.30, looking immaculate, has a coffee and a cigarette before Shirley takes the girls off to school. Sometimes I share a taxi with Alannah but I always like the city at this time of the morning and usually choose to walk a few blocks, buy a newspaper and pick up a cab to the gallery.

I’m always the first to arrive. I open up, switch on the lights, collect the mail and then settle down in my office with the binoculars waiting for the girl to show. From the back of our building we have a good view of the rear of a Fifth Avenue apartment block. There’s a girl who lives on the fourth floor who seems to get up between 9.30 and 10.00 most days and draws back her curtains. She must feel she’s not observed from directly opposite but she’s forgotten about those of us who can see into her room obliquely.

Being a part-time voyeur like this has made me develop a concept I call ‘Voyeur’s Luck’. I can sit at my desk, binoculars fixed on her two windows, and the phone will ring and that’s the moment she’ll take her nightdress off. By the time I have dealt with the call, snatched up the binoculars again, she’ll have her bra on. These missed opportunities used to aggravate me cruelly, but now I console myself with my concept. Voyeur’s Luck will see me all right, one way or another.

Such as last Friday, when I was with an early client and so thought I’d miss out completely on the show. But I popped back into the office for a second and there she was, naked in the window, standing in front of her closet, wondering what to wear. I’m now quite reconciled to the role that chance plays in all this. I come in each morning, I check her curtains, I look through my binoculars, I give it a minute or two, and if nothing’s happening I continue with my day. I suppose that over the two years or so I’ve been aware of her I must get a good look at her body once or twice a month.

She’s no beauty this girl: slightly overweight with wiry corkscrew hair, a jutting chin and a weak mouth. I bumped into her once in a deli on Madison Avenue and almost said, ‘Hi.’ It was strange to be standing in line beside her at the checkout, knowing her as I did, watching her make her selection of clothes each day from her wardrobe. I wanted to say, ‘I love the red brassiere.’ She bought some menthol cigarettes, I noticed. I know when she goes on vacation and I know when she returns. She is, in a curious way, ‘my girl’. The relationship is wholly one-sided but that’s how I refer to her when I pick up my binoculars: ‘Wonder if I’ll see my girl today?’ I don’t want to learn her name or anything more about her.

I told my psychiatrist, Dr John Francis Byrne, about the girl. ‘Does she excite you?’ he asked in his flat voice. ‘Do you masturbate afterwards?’ I said no, which is true, and tried to explain what measure of excitement I derived from my casual, opportunistic voyeurism. After all, as I said to Byrne, I don’t creep around spying on women. There I was sitting in my office and this girl across the way opens her curtains and walks around her room with no clothes on. But you bought some binoculars, Byrne said. That was curiosity, I said, I was interested in the details. What I liked about this ritual was that its candour and intimacy provided the frisson rather than anything more overtly sexual — it’s like a Degas or a Bonnard, I tried to explain: you know, ‘Woman Drying Her Hair’, ‘Marthe in the Bath’. Byrne thought about this: ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know what you mean.’

Dr Byrne had been recommended to me by Adam Outridge, but I didn’t make contact until earlier this year — out of boredom rather than neurosis. All was not well between Alannah and me, and I suddenly felt the need for someone to talk to.

Byrne is a sardonic, world-weary fellow in his sixties. Sharp mind, well informed. He’s a tall man who carries his excess weight well. I asked him if he knew he had the same name as the man who was the model for ‘Cranly’ in James Joyce’s novels — J. F. Byrne. I’m aware of that, Byrne said, but so what? It’s not a particularly remarkable coincidence. That’s true, up to a point, I said — I had a tailor in London called Byrne. But to have exactly the same Christian names — that
is
a coincidence. Byrne was unimpressed: look at you, he said, you’ve an unusual surname but it’s the same as the man whom Boswell accompanied on his Grand Tour. Does that make you feel any more different? Any better? But there’s another twist, I said, I’ve met Joyce, I’ve read his books, I’ve read Byrne’s memoir of him and now you’re my psychiatrist. Don’t you think the serendipity is getting a little out of hand? I don’t think this is a fruitful line to explore, Byrne said. Tell me about this girl: is she stacked?

When I first met Byrne I asked him what his professional persuasion was — Freudian, Jungian, Reichian, whatever. None of the above, he said. I’m basically a good, old-fashioned S&M man. S&M? Sex and Money. He explained: in his experience, if you were not clinically ill — like a schizophrenic or a manic depressive — then 99 per cent of his patients’ neuroses were generated by either sex or money, or both. If we get to the bottom of the sex problem or the money problem, then these sessions can be quite productive. He smiled his wan smile: know thyself, sort of thing. So, which category do you fall in? he asked. I think I’m one of your sex-men, I said.

Janet and I have restarted our affair in a desultory way. I wonder why? Perhaps because I rather miss Gloria and the fun we had. I drove Janet back from Windrose the other day (we’d been out to see Tate) and she asked me in for a drink and what with one thing and another… We were celebrating, anyway, partners in crime. We look set to more than triple our money on the Alberti collection. So easy.

Went to meet Charlie Zemsche [a client] at the Plaza. It was a warm day and the stink of horse-piss and horse-shit from the ponies and traps on Central Park South was as thick as felt. I never come by here in summer because of the stench but had thought I was safe in October. It is an interesting history lesson: if three dozen horses can make this stink, imagine what the pungent reek of a nineteenth-century city must have been. Not to mention the thousands of tons of horse manure deposited on the streets each day. I find my gorge rising as I skirt round — how would I have survived in Dickens’s London?

Charlie is as engagingly morose as ever: he hates New York, hates his new house. ‘I’m through with contractors, architects. You don’t lead a life. You got to live in a hotel — I’m selling all my houses. You live in a hotel, it’s another person’s problem, not yours.’ Charlie’s theory is that if you minimize the fuss and hassle in your life, you appreciate life all the more. I asked him how he could abandon New York for Miami.’ A bad day there is better than a good day here.’ All the same, he’s interested in my little Bonnard. It’ll fit in a suitcase, I told him, take it from hotel to hotel.

A weekend at the Ginsberg house in Southampton. Todd Heuber was there with his sister Martha, also a painter: a redhead with odd slanting blue eyes. She paints crude stripey abstracts like Barnett Newman’s. Todd is quite keen for Leeping Fils to take her. ‘Marius is very interested,’ he said, to spur me on.

Gail spends all evening until her bedtime ‘looking for the Sputnik’. I join her on the lawn, a bit stoned, on a perfect night and stand with her peering up at the stars looking for the moving point of light. I feel empty-headed, vertiginous, and lose my balance. Gail helps me up off the lawn. ‘Why did you fall over, silly Daddy?’ she says, then adds, ‘Silly Logan.’ I was glad she couldn’t see the tears in my eyes.

Mystic House. Watching Alannah, naked, shaving her armpits this morning, brought on a little quiver of lust, like the old days. I slipped out of bed and went into the bathroom and let my hardening cock nudge against her buttocks. ‘Honey, it’s my period,’ she said. But I know it’s not.

I slug gin direct from the bottle at 10.00 in the morning, just wanting that buzz, that little kick. The fog burns off to leave a day of hazy blue, the water in the Sound oddly opaque, like milk. I’m bored, which is why I reach so early for the bottle: Alannah is in the city for three days. Shirley has come up to help with the girls and their two friends. Four young girls in the house — they’re either fighting or giggling together, there seems no other form of behaviour available to them.

Looking at my face in the shaving mirror, I note its roughening texture: the nodules and pigment shadows, the burst capillaries, the lines and the slackening skin, all the small accruing damage of ageing. My hair seems to be receding, the promontory of my widow’s peak very marked. I experiment with different ways of combing my hair but don’t like the result. I’m fifty-two for God’s sake, no point in pretending.

NYC. Todd called, very excited, asking me to come and see Martha’s new paintings. It’s strange being in the apartment on my own. It seems so big without the girls and Alannah. I have a couple of extra meetings and so have decided to stay on over the weekend till Monday.

I went to Martha’s studio. Peculiar, haunting work. The paintings are big — eight feet by four, ten by five — charged, Turneresque swirls of colour. Light and shade, impressionistic brush work. But they seem to be flawed by marks, as if tiny drops of dark paint have been spilled or the weave of the canvas is showing in some way. Then when you peer very closely — very close, just inches — you can see that these dots are in fact minute figures or animals — I would say never more than a tenth of an inch high. The sudden change of scale this brings about when you step back is startling. Perceptual gears change automatically, almost audibly, in your head. You look again at the picture and it’s altered. Suddenly these vague, misty coronas and supernovas of colour are vast unearthly wildernesses with tiny people moving through them, beneath astonishing weather and light effects. I sign Martha up for a show. We had a boozy lunch in the Village to celebrate.