In the Night Café (8 page)

11

A
T THE CEDAR
, everyone was talking about a sculptor who was quitting, giving up art. Others had quit, always very quietly, but the way Howard Stricker was going about it was odd and spectacular. He'd been building a boat in his studio, a twenty-five-foot catamaran. He planned to launch it in the East River in a few weeks' time. Then he was going to sail it by himself all the way down to Key West. He said he would live on rice and fresh fish. What he was going to do with his life after he reached Key West he never told anyone. People hadn't paid much attention to Howard Stricker before. They didn't exactly admire him now, but they were awed by his craziness. No one believed the boat would float. A bullet would be faster, one painter said.

Leon said we should definitely look at Howard Stricker's studio, which was downtown on Chrystie Street between Grand and Hester, just around the corner from the Bowery. He said he'd seen it and it was cheap and big and that Howard Stricker was said to be looking for key money so he could finish his pontoons and leave on schedule. Tom called him one evening and he told us to come over.

Howard Stricker had worked in stone and had stubbornly kept sculpting the human figure as if he lived in some century of his own. He was forty years old and it was said he'd never sold one piece. I don't know whether his work was good or bad, because when he'd decided to build his boat, he'd taken a sledgehammer and a power drill and broken up everything he'd done. When we met him, he referred to this with a kind of pride. “It took three days,” he said, “but of course that was much less time than it took to make them.” The broken pieces were all upstairs, so no one who took the studio would have to deal with them. “It seemed better to put them there,” he said, “than out on the street.”

Above the studio were two empty floors where there'd been a fire thirty years ago. Howard Stricker said, “You can use them for storage, burial purposes, plenty of room for whatever.” He got a flashlight and took us up to see them. The windows were gone, he told us, and that tended to make the whole building cold in the winter. Birds had gotten in up there, pigeons, you could hear them chortling in the dark. When Howard Stricker turned his flashlight on, a couple of them got scared and flapped up to the ceiling. I saw piles of white stones like fragments from some ancient ruin. After we started living in the studio, I never went up to those floors myself, though Tom rummaged around there all the time.

The studio was two enormous rooms as gray as a cellar. You could see that at first Howard Stricker had tried to fix the place up, had even been ambitious. He'd constructed a high platform for a bed and built a big stone fireplace and there was a wall outside the bathroom made of dull-colored chunks of marble embedded in cement. At some point, though, he'd lost interest. There was an old three-burner stove and a refrigerator from the forties that hummed loudly above our conversation and a sink encrusted with whatever he was putting on his pontoons.

We saw them that night—long, slender things. They did have a grace. Tom was quite taken with them. He told Howard Stricker they looked like Brancusi birds. But it worried me that you could see each seam in the wood. I thought they had an awfully homemade look.

Howard Stricker said he'd hoped he'd be through by now, but he'd run out of money. He'd been advised to put many coats of some terribly expensive acrylic sealer on his pontoons and he had to buy more wood to make a deck and a small cabin by August. He said he'd seen such boats in the South Pacific when he was in the service, and it was beautiful the way they skimmed the waves; the tension between the pontoons made a perfect balance.

He seemed to like having us there. I had the feeling he never had much company. He drew sketches for Tom of the pontoons' inner structure and made us some muddy coffee that he poured out of a pot through a strainer. He said he'd invite us to the launching.

Finally Tom asked, “Well, what would it take to reimburse you for all the improvements here?”

Howard Stricker thought it over, staring at us. “Four hundred dollars,” he said. “I could get more, but that would be enough. Rent's seventy dollars a month. No one's supposed to live in this building. The health inspectors will come around and bother you, but don't pay them any attention.” He left the room so Tom and I could talk about it.

Tom was tremendously excited. He walked up and down in the front of the studio, trying to measure it off. “There's so much space here, Joanna. Look at the length of those walls. You could paint anything, make something huge. This is our kind of luck, kiddo. Everything from now on is going to happen just like this.” I believed it, too, though I think part of me was skeptical. There was all that grayness. It was almost as if the walls were imbued with Howard Stricker, as if his loneliness and failure had somehow eaten their way inside them. But I believed in our luck.

I had a dream one night after that in which I saw Howard Stricker's catamaran floating quite nicely on a deep green sea as still and flat as a lake. It was sort of like an oversized sled with its deck high up on runners. People sat on the deck calmly drinking coffee. Then the sea boiled up into enormous waves. The boat was thrown about, tipped over onto its side. All the people on the deck spilled off like toy figurines and I found myself with them in the terrible water.

Tom said what I'd seen in my dream was what sailors called white water. He'd run into it himself on a minesweeper in the Ligurian Sea. “It was like being trapped in a tin can with the hand of God shaking it. There were times you'd get real religious out there. That was only the beginning of the trouble we had. About a week later we hit a mine. That was what we were out there for, that was the deal. A thing like that could happen any minute.”

“What happened to the ship?” I asked.

He was silent for a moment. “Oh, the sweeper went down. For a while everything burned. You'd never think water could burn, would you? I had this life preserver. I floated on my back, just looking up at the sky for hours, waiting, not thinking of anything really. I mean my wonderful youth in the Bronx, and all of that, didn't run through my mind. I just emptied out—ready. Finally a destroyer came along and picked me up. See, it wasn't my turn. I guess I was meant to be here like this, looking out the window at Seventh Street twenty years later.”

Howard Stricker's launching was on a Saturday at the end of June. He'd been working day and night to finish the pontoons; all the rest would have to be done at a boatyard in Coney Island. Tom said he'd help him. He went to the Cedar and rounded up a couple of artists, Bruno and George, who came along not because they knew Howard Stricker but just so they could tell their drinking friends what they'd seen. We all rode down together on the Third Avenue bus.

It was one of those bright blue afternoons that make you think of trees and the seashore and wonder what you're doing in the dust of the Bowery. All the way downtown Bruno kept making wisecracks. “So you can't get a gallery, you jump in the river. Well, I hope that guy has had swimming lessons.” No one laughed, though, so he finally just kept quiet.

When we got off at Grand Street, Tom said, “Let's do this with some wine,” and George said, “Great. This is some far-out opening all right.” I guess it was Howard Stricker's vernissage in a sense.

Howard Stricker didn't have much to say to anyone. He wasn't thinking about anything but protecting his pontoons. He kept lashing rope around them in different ways, then not being satisfied and starting again. They were too long to go around the bends in the stairway, so he was going to lower them out the front windows on some pulleys he'd made. “I'm hoping for the best,” he said, looking up at Tom, wiping some of the sweat off his face. He sent Tom and Bruno downstairs to wait for the pontoons on the sidewalk.

From there you could see how fragile the operation was. The pontoons dangled awkwardly, trussed up in the air three stories above the pavement. They lost their gracefulness when you saw them like that. To me they looked more unreliable than ever. I found myself thinking again about those seams where the water might get in.

Howard Stricker's launching caused a commotion on Chrystie Street. Italian housewives were hanging out their windows and a crowd of sidewalk superintendents gathered, the men from the garage next door and even some bums who stumbled over from the strip of park across the street, where the greenest green was the green of broken bottles. The bums were rubbing their rheumy eyes and poking each other. “Lookit that! What's those wooden things?” If you looked in their direction, they'd shout, “Hey! Got some change?” They gave each other wise, significant glances when they saw Tom's wine. “How about that now?”

Howard Stricker had rented an old flatbed truck. After the pontoons had been loaded on it, and the little platform he'd built out of scrap wood to hold his outboard motor, he ran upstairs for the last time and came down with a duffel bag and a box of tools. I remember seeing him stand very still on the sidewalk, staring up at the windows of his studio before he got on the truck. Then he reached in his pocket and handed Tom the keys. “Well, it's your place now.”

He wouldn't drink the wine. “Nothing for me,” he said in that curt way he had, as if words were just exhalations that got wasted.

Tom turned to the bums and held out the bottle. “Go on,” he said. “Take it.” They must have been startled by such good fortune, but they grabbed it right away.

The truck took us all the way across Grand Street to the launching place on the East River Howard Stricker had picked out, where it didn't take long at all to attach the three parts of the boat to each other and lower the whole thing into the water.

Then Howard Stricker swung himself down off the pier and crouched over the motor on his little homemade platform as the current began carrying him away from us, ostensibly toward Brooklyn. There was a breeze from the north and the river was running fast. The pontoons skimmed the surface just as he'd said they would.

We all went wild, even wisecracking Bruno, waving our arms, yelling, “Bon voyage, Howard! Bon voyage!” He heard us and scrambled to his feet with a funny, stunned smile on his face. He was a man walking on water who couldn't believe it.

Tom said, “Come on, Joanna,” and we said good-bye to the others and started making our way back across Grand Street. I had the idea he wanted to spend the rest of the afternoon in the studio now that we had the keys, but when I asked him if that was where we were going he said, as if he were tired, “No, kiddo. Not today.”

“Well, I wouldn't really want to go there right now either,” I confessed.

He didn't seem to want to talk, and after we'd walked on a bit I said, “What are his chances?” Which was the question I'd been holding back since the beginning.

We were standing on a corner waiting for the light to change. “In a heavy sea,” Tom said, keeping his eyes on the light, “that boat will snap like a pretzel. If he doesn't leave before September, he'll never make it around Hatteras.”

“But hasn't he thought of that?” I wanted to save Howard Stricker. I wanted someone to talk him out of going, to tell him to be very careful.

“Oh yeah,” Tom said. “He's thought of everything.”

We got rid of Howard Stricker's grayness with whitewash. Even the floors we painted white—we didn't care about its being impractical. We put every dime we had into the place and ate chili every night. There was nothing left over for Tom to spend on canvas for a while.

One night we went out when we were tired of working. We had hot-and-sour soup in Chinatown and wandered all the way down to Wall Street. It was one A.M. Wall Street was deserted, though a light burned here and there. Tom spotted an empty U.S. mailbag that had been left out in front of one of the buildings and bent down to inspect it. He grinned up at me. “What about it, kiddo?” It was made of perfectly good heavy canvas. No one was watching, so we rolled it right up and took it home with us. It was probably a federal offense, but it made us awfully happy. We felt the streets had given us something—that, too, was a sign of our luck. Tom cut up the bag and made two small paintings. They were the first he did in the new studio.

We picked up a round table the same way—another gift from the streets. We found it abandoned outside an old bar in Little Italy that was modernizing itself into green Formica. It had dark rings on the wood from its previous life, and later there was a black spot where a cigarette of Tom's burned into it. I was thrilled to get that piece of furniture. It had a real bohemian chic, I thought. Someone gave us a spider plant and Tom hung it over the table from the ceiling. I can see that table and two blue Mexican chairs half facing each other, set at an angle as if Tom and I have just pushed them back a little and walked away.

I remember whiteness. Whiteness, especially in the mornings, looking down from the high platform bed. Everything seemed afloat, unanchored. The spider plant was singing, trembling toward the light. I wish I'd thought to take a picture.

For years my mother kept the boxes I couldn't open. “Leave them,” I'd say. “I don't need anything.” She said I was being foolish. “You don't remember what's here. We could at least give this stuff to Goodwill.”

So finally I got a knife and cut the tape on one of them. There were some chipped yellow plates wrapped in newspaper—they seemed neutral enough. She was right, I'd forgotten things. I worked my way through the box quite calmly, with curiosity. At the bottom was something round and heavy, also wrapped in newspaper. As I tore away the paper I saw that someone had wrapped a stone. It was an ashtray Howard Stricker had left, made out of a polished piece of granite. Tom used to keep it on our round table. Someone had actually wrapped it, cigarette ashes and all.