In the Night Café (6 page)

My mother loved beauty, she wanted to be around it all the time. That was why she'd set her heart on having me on the stage, so we could always have beauty together. She'd never been able to find it on Queens Boulevard. She never spoke against my father, she just said, “I hope you never throw yourself away on anyone.” So naturally, later, I threw myself away as much as I could and never quite got myself back.

You used to tell me I blamed my mother too much. Other kids didn't have mothers who wanted the best for them. “Look at me,” you'd say. “You could have had someone like Marie.”

I'd say, “Okay. But my mother went to extremes.” I just couldn't let go of the argument.

“So the theater—all of that—it never should have happened?”

“I
loved
the theater. But it was wrong. It wasn't the best start.”

Then you'd ask me, “What would have been right? Who's got the answer to that one?”

“You know where I was when I first knew I was going to paint?”

I said, “Where?”

“Right here. Right here on the Bowery.”

“On this street?” It was one of those days we were searching for lofts. We'd gotten down as far as Rivington.

Tom took a look around, then said, “Yeah. It could have been. That's what I'm trying to figure out. Without the el, it's all different.”

“What were you doing on the Bowery by yourself?”

“I had important business. I was looking for something that belonged to me. You think you were the only little kid with business? I used to get down here from the Bronx on the el, sneak under the turnstiles. I never had the nickel.”

He asked me if I remembered how the el had cast a great shadow all along its route, how the tracks had been held up in some places by walls of blackened stones and how the trains had run at exactly the level of the third stories of houses, so you'd find yourself looking into hundreds of rooms.

He used to keep running away on the el, usually to his grandmother. She'd let him stay with her until the truant officers came around uptown and bothered Marie. His grandmother had a room on Forty-seventh Street where even the bed was covered with feathers and veils that she sewed on hats for people. She had a huge orange cat, Bobbie, that slept all the time on the windowsill. Sometimes she'd stay drunk for days and forget to buy food and he'd even have to help her get out of her corset. “She and I just took care of each other,” he said. One time she told some rich woman she made hats and that she had her grandson with her, and the woman had given her a little child's ring with a bird carved into it. “It was supposed to be the Bluebird of Happiness,” he said, “and I damn near believed it was.”

Marie said the ring was real silver and took it away to keep for him. She said he'd only lose it. He kept asking for it back, and finally she told him she'd hocked it for two dollars. She wouldn't tell him where the pawnshop was, but he'd seen lots of them under the el along the Bowery. He made up his mind to find that ring and steal it back, even if he went to jail.

For weeks he went down there, searching the windows of the pawnshops, staring through the iron gratings at watches and knives and musical instruments. “Finally I knew,” he said. “I wasn't going to see that little bluebird ring. I never believed there was such a thing as Never before that. I stood on a corner and I looked over at the el—the dark, awful stones of the el. That's what Never looked like to me.

“I think it was September,” he said, “and very, very late in the afternoon, and suddenly the stones changed, they turned red as if they were burning deep inside, and light was falling—falling through the tracks—down onto the street in shafts. The el wasn't beautiful, but it was beautiful. I saw something that day,” he said. “You understand?”

“I have to buy me some paint, kiddo,” he told me one morning, looking embarrassed. I lent him fifteen dollars. “As soon as I get my hands on some dough, you're getting it back.”

I had to go to a job that day. When I came home, there was canvas tacked to the wall opposite the bed and he was priming it with gesso. Now and then he'd step aside and give it that quick, sizing-up stare of his as if something that wasn't on there yet had flashed out at him. He seemed like a dancer, so quick and light on his feet with the can of gesso in the crook of his arm and the big brush in his hand that he'd brought all the way from Florida. I couldn't take my eyes off him. I forgot to start dinner or put the groceries away. The truth was, the sight was almost painful because it reminded me I hadn't found my own work yet. I still hadn't entirely given up on the theater.

The gesso had to dry overnight, he said.

He got up so early the next morning, I was still half asleep. I heard the shade go up, then knew he was moving in and out of the room. He came over to the bed and touched my hair. He said, “Stay there, kiddo.”

The paint hit the canvas with a sound like rain.

9

I
N THOSE DAYS
, I was a crackerjack typist—one hundred w.p.m. I typed envelopes, theses, just about everything. I'd stick cards up all over the Village:
Speed-of-light satisfaction. No job too big or too small.
If I ran out of clients, I'd be a Kelly Girl and go around to various offices. I didn't mind that too much because it was interesting to work in different parts of the city. I'd eat a tunafish sandwich at my desk and walk around on my lunch hour, learning about places like Varick Street and Coenties Slip. I could usually type faster than any of the other secretaries and sometimes they'd ask me to stay on permanently. I'd say, No, I didn't want a regular job. It was because of the acting—I always had to leave an opening for it—but also I was afraid, afraid offices would get me and I wouldn't be free anymore. I'd somehow be stuck in a role I'd never meant to choose, an office girl who wore nylons all through the hot weather and a dictation pad on her knee, when I wanted so much more for myself, when my real life hadn't even started. As a Kelly Girl I saw things I didn't like in other people's offices—tyrannies, cruelties—but the beauty of being a Kelly Girl was that none of that had to do with me. I could walk out and go to acting class, hang out with artists at the Cedar. I could tell Kelly Girls to send me to a different job. I was temporary, I had no stake in any office.

Now and then on my lunch-hour walks, I'd see something that would make me want to take a picture of it—a mirror high up on a blue-tiled wall that had once been part of someone's bathroom, a high-heeled red satin shoe smashed onto the cobblestones of Canal Street—ghosts that somehow seemed full of meaning I couldn't have expressed in words. I was always a little surprised by such moments. I liked to think my father had looked out for such things on those afternoons he closed the store. In acting class, it was always someone else's thoughts, someone else's imagination, you had to make real, make your own. Something in me resisted that. I often felt I was only acting as if I were acting. I was getting very tired of as-ifness.

My mother still bought copies of
Show Business
every week. She followed the theater the way gamblers followed the racetrack. If she happened to see a casting notice that read:
Blonde, 5'3”-ish, 20-30,
I'd hear from her immediately. My phone would ring and she'd say excitedly, “Now I want you to take this down.” It gave her enormous satisfaction to think I'd probably never hear of these wonderful opportunities if it wasn't for her.

One night she called and got Tom. “That was a man,” she said disapprovingly.

“True enough,” I said. “I'll bring him over sometime. You'll meet him.”

“Well, please don't get yourself all involved.”

“Don't worry,” I said. I had a policy of making light of my involvements.

My mother's explanations for my lack of success in the theater changed from month to month. I didn't have the right clothes, the right hair, know the right people; I was too retiring in my personality to put myself forward. All these failings in her view were correctable. She would gladly bend the world for me. All I had to do was put myself back in her hands. Our old partnership was what she missed, even the hardships she still complained about—how she'd had to collect me right after school and take me to dance lessons, drama lessons, voice lessons, theaters, rehearsals, casting calls. “It was terrible,” she'd say. “I was never home. We were always going, going. I should have had my head examined.”

“Your poor father never got a hot meal,” she'd say. But she'd never taught me how to cook.

In a way, Ma was absolutely right—without her the theater didn't seem to work anymore for me. It was all mixed up in whatever I learned that day she found me dancing so remarkably to the radio in the living room: You had to make yourself into something special, something more. No one could love you for what you really were. I still made the rounds of producers' offices, but Ma had been the audience I'd played to.

I can see myself whirling, whirling, on her red oriental rug, knowing nothing but the music pouring into me. Then all at once someone is watching, and the being watched changes it. I see myself trying to imitate what I had done before, the movements that had been so charming to the grown-ups.

That day you let me watch you paint, you said, “Stay there,” because you knew I wanted to. But then you forgot me, there was no one in the room for you at all. Nothing but the bare white field. You were alone with it, you had always been. No mother or father had ever put a crayon in your hand, taken an interest. I lay there in bed. I saw the whole thing. How the field changed with the first red sweep of the brush, how black obliterated red, how white obliterated black, how white could disguise itself as pinks and grays that had no name. A hundred paintings bloomed before you found what was hidden in that field.

You stood back and wiped your eyes with your sleeve. You laughed and lit a cigarette. Time flowed on before you returned to me.

“This one's yours, kiddo. You want it?”

You dipped the smallest brush in black and painted
Thomas Murphy
on the lower right-hand corner. “The name always finishes it,” you said.

Leon dropped over to take a shower. He brought his own washcloth and bar of soap and a towel from the Plaza Hotel. He sang loudly under the water, “I went down to the St. James Infirmary/I saw my bay-uh-bee there… . ” Tom went running to Second Avenue for beer and I opened another can of Progresso kidney beans and added it to the chili he'd taught me how to make. Kelly Girls hadn't called me for a couple of weeks. Whenever we were broke, we'd enter a Mexican period.

The three of us sat around drinking Millers at the ugly table with the green enamel top that had been left behind in the kitchen when I moved into the apartment with Arnie Raff. I remember Leon kept getting up, walking into the bedroom. He was the only one besides me who'd seen the new painting. He'd go in there and take another look at it and come back and thump his beer down and say in a very dry, critical voice, “Yes, well, that white
still
knocks me out.” The table was in a delicate condition. It trembled on its loose leg when we laughed. We were all a little smashed, excited. Leon and Tom kept talking about red and white. The white was a force—it rushed in, wiping out everything. But the red did get through, you couldn't subtract the red. “It's that little red,” Tom said, “that makes it. I was going to take it out but I left it in.”

Leon wanted to hear about the paintings down in Florida, how many of them were like this white one. He acted as if he'd forgotten everything he'd said before about the galleries being hopeless. He said Tom had to take slides around to the galleries right away. “Get them to everyone. Just walk in there. Fuck 'em!”

Tom was quiet. “Yeah, Leon. I know.” He got up out of his chair and walked to the refrigerator for another beer. When he sat down again, he said, not looking at Leon, “I guess I should have stopped as I was leaving to find a guy with a camera.”

Leon was horrified. “You mean you didn't come up here with slides! You left everything you've done down there!”

Tom said he was going to get all the slides made after he'd had Caroline ship the paintings up to him. “You have to be sure the lighting is perfect,” he said. But I could tell he didn't want to talk about it.

“We don't even know where we're moving yet, Leon,” I said.

“In other words, you got nothing. Ain't it romantic?” Leon reached for the beer and poured it slowly into his glass, watching it foam against the sides. “What about the wife, Tom? What if the wife won't let them go?”

We'd had that part of it all figured out, of course. How we'd find a place and Tom would write Caroline and tell her when a truck would be coming. Once the work started selling, he'd be sending checks for the kids all the time. He was going to tell her in that letter that he wanted a divorce and that he hoped it would be a positive relief to her. She was always saying how much she wanted peace and he'd certainly never brought her that.

Whenever I thought of Caroline in those days, I'd see a sort of Florida postcard on which a woman in a two-piece bathing suit was stretched out beside an aquamarine pool as if permanently on vacation. When the letter came, she'd prop herself up a little to read it, scanning it through her dark glasses almost indifferently.

I know I believed in Caroline's indifference. I was actually quite grateful for it, since it had brought Tom and me together. “Marriages wear out,” he'd said. “One day you look around and find there's nothing left.” Though such a thing could never happen to us.

Just before the end, he'd told me, Caroline had been spending a great deal of her time doing crossword puzzles—not just the ones in the paper, she'd send away for books of them. It would be two A.M. and he'd find her still sitting up in the living room with her dictionary and Roget's thesaurus and her little teak bowls of peanuts. He'd come in drunk from God knows where and she'd be filling in the blanks and hardly look up. Once he'd shouted at her, “Don't you want to know where I've been?” He'd been with another woman and he was going to tell her. He had the crazy notion that maybe a fight would save them, because nothing else would. He said she'd actually looked back down at the page and asked if he knew a six-letter word for something. Now no one was shouting in Caroline's house; no one came in drunk and disturbed her “golden silence,” which was a term she started using against him after she'd read one of his books on Zen.

“Kiddo, the paintings are me,” he'd say. “She knows they're my life. That's why Caroline's not going to want any part of them.”

It would make no sense for her to hang on to his work, he told Leon.

Leon sighed. I remember what he said. “Things don't have to make sense, man.”

But then they even started joking about it. “So what'll she do? Keep them on the chance I'll die famous?”

“Yeah,” Leon said. “Maybe she'll do that.”

A million schemes always ticked away in Leon's brain. He loved to put them in action, even for others, because he had so many. He said, “Listen, I'm going to sell that white painting for you. I know a guy … ” And he really did—a young stockbroker just starting a collection. Leon had run into this wealthy young man at some opening, introduced him to a few artists and had twice been taken out to fancy dinners. “Leon, is it okay if I come to you if I need advice on my art investments?” the stockbroker had asked. “Well, naturally I told him, ‘Feel free—as long as it doesn't distract me from my work.' I'll call him,” Leon said. “I'll bring him over. We could even get him here tonight.”

I had a quick glance from Tom, as sharp as a poke in the ribs.

“How about it?” Leon was saying.

I still hadn't spoken up, so Tom told him. “The painting's Joanna's.”

“A
nice gift, Joanna.” I was sure Leon thought it was a dumb gift, not a nice one.

“That's right,” Tom said, in a tone that meant, Okay, that's the end of it.

Leon wouldn't give up, though. “Big shot, giving away paintings! I see it's steak we're having tonight, not beans.” When anyone did something deliberately impractical, it threatened Leon's whole system.

“Eat your beans,” Tom said in a dangerous voice. “We can all see what's on the plate.” I saw him take a tremendous gulp of beer.

Leon held up his hands. “Hey,” he said, smiling. “I'm trying to get you a thousand bucks.”

“I told you whose painting it is.”

“Let Joanna decide if she wants to sell it then,” Leon said patiently. “Women are the ones who've got sense.”

“Thanks a lot, Leon.” I was looking at Tom, trying to read him. Finally I appealed. “What do you want me to do?” He just shook his head with a funny, bitter smile and I knew he wasn't going to tell me.

I wasn't used to being given things. Arnie Raff gave me a frying pan for my twenty-fourth birthday. French-red enamel. I said, “This is beautiful, Arnie,” and didn't even know why I felt disappointed. But that white painting—to be given something like that was almost too much, almost a burden. Tom told me he wanted me to have it because it was the first one he'd done in New York and he didn't have anything else to give me. “You'll always have this,” he said, as if even then he was thinking it was going to outlast him. I remember feeling I was too young to own something that was going to last forever.

Really that white painting seemed to belong to itself, as if it were something live that had been born into the world, something totally unownable. Of course the world doesn't work that way. Paintings are owned by people like Leon's stockbroker. A very distinct picture of him came into my mind. He was sitting at our kitchen table, plump in his gray suit, prematurely bald. A light shone on his scalp as he wrote a check; he felt pleased with himself, important. It seemed inconceivable that I could prevent his arrival. I couldn't help thinking of that thousand dollars Leon had mentioned and what it would mean to us, how Tom could even get his studio. I had the idea maybe he really wanted me to say yes but hated to admit it, so it really was left up to me.

I put my hand on his arm, bunched up his blue sleeve a little in my fingers. I said, “Listen, maybe we should.”

“Oh,” he said coldly, “you think so?”

“But if we could get a thousand—”

He jerked his arm away. “You keep the money then—for yourself.”

All of a sudden he was on his feet. “Go on! Tell Leon to make the fucking call.” He turned and walked out of the kitchen. I heard the front door close before I even knew he was leaving.

All our later fights would start that way, come to a boil very fast. Something would set him off, something I wouldn't even think of.