Yellow Mesquite (26 page)

From the Port Authority, he took a cab to the
YMCA
on Thirty-fourth and Ninth Avenue. He had never seen men like those idling about the lobby—men in shorts and T-shirts, with long hair and beards and wire-rimmed glasses. They lazed about, snoozing among piles of gear on the floor. The place smelled of ammonia, a vinegary-sweatlike odor
 

He hadn’t known you had to have a reservation. The registrar sent him to the Le Marquis hotel on East Thirty-first, and told him to come back after one the next afternoon, Wednesday, October 28.
 

A taxi let him out in front of the Le Marquis. A weak neon sign blinked its name in lavender. A dimly lit door in a wall of gray concrete invited him in. Again the tiny lobby smelled of ammonia, or was it pee? He signed the register and paid his money. A high-breasted woman with a thick body and thin, knotty legs appeared and stepped into the elevator with him. She smiled a smeary smile and batted heavily hooded eyes at him. Her dress was short, made of some blue material that shimmered like aluminum foil, its cleavage cut in a low swoop so that her breasts quivered like dammed-up Jell-O. Her perfume ate at the back of his throat like a sweet acid. She stepped out of the elevator when he did, lit a cigarette, and stood before a doorway opposite his, observing him for a moment. “I’m Karen, from Kansas City,” she said.
 

He might be a country bumpkin, but he wasn’t entirely stupid. He grinned. “Goodnight, Karen from Kansas City.” He let himself into his room and closed the door.
 

He dreamed of Sherylynne, her moonlit face beautifully at peace on the pillow at his side.
 

THE NEXT MORNING
he woke at
d
awn to the noise of the city resounding up into his room. He slid out of bed, started to kneel on the floor by the window to look out, but the linoleum didn’t feel all that clean to his bare feet. He parted the plastic curtains and stood looking down onto the street below. Double-parked trucks lined both sides. Men wheeled crates and cartons out of delivery vans on squealing hand trucks, disappearing into doorways and down ramps between open steel doors in the sidewalk. Pigeons, apparently unafraid, strutted among them, their little iridescent blue and green heads bobbing back and forth. Steam hissed from sidewalk grates. A rumble shuddered through the underground, and he felt a fine vibration in the Marquis’s structure. The streets looked bleak, the buildings stark. But there was energy here, and he welcomed the coming light of the new day.

HE WALKED EAST
, taking note of the street signs in order to find his way back. He had breakfast in a little hole in the wall on Park Avenue South—bacon and eggs, and two cups of coffee. He discovered that in New York “regular” coffee was with milk. He watched the people rushing in and out, snatching up English muffins and some doughnut-looking thing called a bagel. The men wore overcoats and carried umbrellas. The women were fashionably dressed, their eyes outlined in black after the Elizabeth Taylor movie
Cleopatra
. While it was near the end of October and only slightly chilly, both men and women wore big Russian-style fur hats. Everybody was in a hurry. He made mental notes of all the sights so he could tell Sherylynne. Because of the expense, they had agreed that he would only call once a week; however, they would write as often as possible.

He needed to call Mavis’s friend, Frankie. It wasn’t something he wanted to do, but he owed it to Mavis. And, he had to admit, he was a little curious.
 

Up ahead on Park Avenue South stood a towering gray building with
PAN AM
lettered across the top in huge blue letters. Taxis wove in and out, horns blasting. City buses huffed clouds of diesel smoke and trash from underneath. He turned off Park back west onto Thirty-fourth, absorbing everything. Vendors hawked hotdogs and pretzels from little carts with umbrellas. Men huddled along the walls behind card tables pushing cheap jewelry, scarves, wallets, belts, watches. The air smelled vaguely of diesel exhaust, of sauerkraut and fried onions. There was something harsh about the light.

Carved into the stone facade above several sets of glass doors on his left were the words E
MPIRE
S
TATE
B
UILDING
.
 
To an out-of-towner like himself, the Empire State Building was synonymous with all that was New York. He looked up—and up and up and up. Except for a few plane rides, about the highest he had ever been off the ground was on top of a windmill. He went in and bought a ticket, then followed along with a group of tourists to the elevators. It was a long, swaying ride that made his ears pop. Someone in the group giggled nervously. They changed elevators at the eightieth floor, then he and others in the group went on up to eighty-sixth. He stepped out onto the observation deck and pulled the collar of his Levi’s jacket up against a chill of wind sighing through the iron grill work. He eased up to the low concrete wall and peeked over through the bars. Empty space straight down—and down and down and down. Manhattan Island stretched out from under him to the north. Two gray rivers lay dull around either side. Far, far below, beads of traffic jittered on thin ribbons of asphalt. Skyscrapers rose all about, and beyond were “them high-rises and guva’mint projects” Whitehead complained about. Across the rivers tenement buildings stood in rows, one behind another for miles and miles, disappearing into the hazy distance.

He walked around to the downtown side of the observatory. A cluster of skyscrapers huddled together at the lower end of Manhattan. In the bay beyond stood the Statue of Liberty, small and gray, looking as though she had just flatfooted it over the Atlantic and was standing, hesitant now, considering whether she really wanted to venture farther into this mess or not.

He looked out over the city, its towers of glass and concrete, its sounds so far below they were lost on the wind. Just where and how would his life unfold in this surreal dreamscape?
 

Even as he was afraid of the height, he felt an equally terrifying urge to climb up over the guard bars and leap out into space. To fall and fall and fall.

HE CHECKED OUT
of the Marquis at eleven and walked, carrying his suitcase and the crate of paintings, looking, soaking up the sights.
 

Bob Dylan whined from a record shop:
 

“Rambling out of the wild west /

Leaving the towns I love best /

Thought I’d seen some ups and downs /

Till I come into New York town /

People going down to the ground /

Buildings going up to the sky…
 

Well, Harley thought, I can relate to that!

He picked up a map of the city at a newsstand that resembled an oversize outhouse with one side cut away, the inside papered with magazine covers—pictures of half-naked men and women.
 

Soon he stepped into an opening where he had to stand at a counter to order a hamburger, because there were no stools. A man wearing a grubby apron slapped a patty on the grill, let it sizzle, flipped it, swatted it with the spatula and slid it between the two halves of a cold bun. The man fished a slice of limp pickle out of a bowl and pitched it on the paper plate alongside. Harley ordered a glass of milk and wrapped the bottom half of the burger in napkins to soak up the blood and grease. He grinned to himself, thinking of Whitehead’s description of New York hamburgers: “Nothing but a little old patty a-bleedin’ on a biscuit.”

Chapter 29

Museum Fever

H
IS ROOM IN
the
YMCA
was more cubicle than room, narrow with a narrow bed, a window and just space enough to hang a few clothes. There was a seven-day limit on occupancy, meaning you weren’t meant to set up housekeeping.
 

He had hardly parked his belongings before he called Sherylynne from the lobby to let her know he had arrived. She and Leah were fine, but missed him already. Then he was back on the street with his map, headed for the Museum of Modern Art on Fifty-third. He could hardly believe it—New York City, the Museum of Modern Art—him, right here! He sensed Mavis smiling down on him.

He spent the rest of the day going from painting to painting, room to room, floor to floor, looking, absorbing. Within two hours he had a headache, his brain bruised from interaction with so many varied presences—each painting a singular entity with its own psychic energy. He sat on the guest benches, tried to rest his eyes, his mind, but within moments he was looking again, numb with wonder. Eventually he went down to the sculpture garden, the “indoor-outdoor room,” but he was unable to relax here either, taunted by the works of David Smith, Rodin, Alexander Calder….

By the time the museum closed at five thirty, he was shaky from the lack of food and the mental bombardment of so much art. He took a bus back to Thirty-fourth Street, ordered his first pastrami on rye at a delicatessen, and took it and a bag of chips back to his room.
 

The next day he visited the Guggenheim, his attendance only a slight variation on the day before, except this time he smuggled in one of those bagel things with cream cheese and lox stuffed in a baggie. By the time he took it from the brown paper sandwich bag in his pocket, it was beginning to smell a little fishy.

The next morning he walked three blocks over to Macy’s on Thirty-fourth and bought a plain David Cole men’s shoulder bag of good leather, just big enough to carry a couple of six-by-nine-inch sketch books, pencils and kneaded erasers. It was also just right for carrying two ham-and-cheese sandwiches and a couple of bagged Fig Newton bars.
 

Of course, it was essential that he find a job, and soon, but he had determined beforehand to allow a few days for visiting museums in order to see firsthand works that until now he had seen only in print.

Following the Guggenheim, he spent three full days at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, the first day with the Impressionists and Abstract Expressionists. On the second day, he began systematically on the ground floor with the Egyptians, then the Romans, the Greeks.…
 

By midafternoon of the third day, he had a fairly good take on the museum, its layout by periods—not detailed, of course—he could spend a month and still not see everything. But he had noted the Byzantines, Islamic art, Early American art, even European armor. It all clashed about in his head, this tour through the history of the world with babbling crowds filling the museum at times, moments of reverent silence at others. His eyes teared up in gratitude as Sidney’s required-reading list took on a whole new dimension. Again he had a headache from looking, analyzing, thinking; a backache from standing.
 

He left the section on European sculpture, and was about to enter a new exhibition titled “The New York Collection,” a group of paintings on loan from private collectors the public seldom got to see, when he spotted one of Paul Cézanne’s paintings mounted on a big easel just outside the entrance to the exhibition room. The painting—titled
Sainte-Victoire
, one of many Cézanne had done of the mountain in southern France—announced the show. Harley realized he wasn’t actually
looking
at the painting so much as seeing it slowly materialize, as if in a trance, coming into being inside his head, a vision beyond mere sight.
 

What emerged was a two-dimensional structure predicated on a loose patchwork grid of warm and cool colors—the sky, light in overall value, predominantly blue but with pale hues of every other color in the painting—the greens of the foreground trees, the oranges of the rooftops, the pale lavenders of the mountainside—harmonized into every other color. He had never fully appreciated Cézanne, but now he was stunned. The painting was structured like a fine piece of classical music—a harmony achieved through the repetition of form, a tension within the harmony, pushing it to barely acceptable limits….
 

Dazed, he left the museum quickly so as not to dilute the epiphany with further visual stimuli.

THE NEXT MORNING,
a Monday, he found a Chinese laundry on Ninth Avenue and wearing his last semi-clean shirt for the second time, dropped his clothes off for overnight service. He had breakfast at a tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant, then picked up the
Times
at a newsstand.
 

He had deposited a cashiers check with a good chunk of his savings in the First National City Bank on Avenue of the Americas, but it was high time he got serious about a job and a more permanent address.

He spent the morning browsing the classifieds,
beginning with jobs in the graphic arts section. Afterward, he looked up the locations of apartments and room rentals on his city map, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the exhibit, the Cézanne painting. He made a couple of drawings of his room, forcing them into loose, broken grids.
 

He forgot about lunch until evening. He found a Chock full o’Nuts and had a sandwich of cream cheese with walnuts on date bread, a bowl of split-pea soup, and then returned to the
YMCA
.
 

In the lobby
, he
sat for few minutes, building up his courage. Then, visualizing Mavis at his side, he took Frankie’s card out of his wallet and stepped into one of the five phone booths banked against the lobby wall.
 

The phone rang on the other end. A second time. A third. He was beginning to hope she might be out when a man picked up.

“Hello. Mussette residence.”

“Oh…hi. This is Harley Buchanan. I was a friend of Mavis Whitehead back in Midland, Texas. I met Mrs. Mussette at Mavis’s memorial. She gave me her card and asked me to call when I was in New York.”

“I’m sorry, but she isn’t here at the moment. This is Mr. Mussette. May I take a message?”

“Thanks. You can tell her I called if you will.”

“Surely. Is there a number where she can reach you?”