In the Night Café Page 7

  “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.

  Leon sat there with me and we waited for Tom to come back. “He’s just taking a walk around the block,” Leon said. “He’s always been like this—hotheaded. You could kill him sometimes. Caroline used to give him hell.”

  I asked him to tell me what kind of person Caroline was. He said, “Oh, she’s not so bad.” He told me he was the one, in fact, who’d met her first. She’d run away from some fancy girls’ college in Virginia to study dance with Martha Graham and had just started modeling at the league. Her family had detectives out looking for her. He walked into a life class one day and there was this nervous, skinny blonde who managed to look like a debutante even though she was naked. The teacher kept yelling at her because she couldn’t hold a pose. Later he found her in black from head to toe sitting on the steps outside the league, smoking, looking all red-eyed as if she’d gone into the dressing room and cried. He told her not to let the teacher get her down, and she said it was just that she’d never modeled before and she could see it was going to be terribly boring. He said, “What’s your name,” and she thought a moment and said, “Veronica Christian.”

  “I made her a little speech,” Leon said. “I said, ‘Veronica, I should obviously take you out and raise your spirits, but I happen to be financially embarrassed at the moment, so all I can do is invite you to Brooklyn for filet mignon.’ She said, ‘You can afford that?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I can, if you’re game.’ So I took her to an A&P before we got on the subway. I was wearing a big raincoat from the marines—I slipped a couple of filet mignons under it. She said, ‘Well, really, darling Leon, shouldn’t we have mushrooms and wild rice?’ and stuck them under her sweater. That was how she talked. Classy, like Katharine Hepburn with a southern accent. I was very entranced,” Leon said. “I could hardly wait to get to Brooklyn. I snuck her past the landlady, got her into the room, turned on the hot plate, poured us some wine, and Tom walks in. ‘What’s for dinner, Leon? Who’s this?’ Once she set eyes on him, I could have been a boiled potato. Three weeks later she’s taking the bus with him and eloping to Elkton, Maryland. You know,” he said, “as Veronica, she was sort of great. She should have stayed Veronica. Maybe they’d still be crazy about each other.”

  Then he got all red in the face. “Listen, that was a stupid thing to say. I’d better call it a night.” And he did.

  I cleared the table, washed the dishes, scrubbed out the chili pot. I thought, Tom will be back when these dishes are done. But I finished too soon and the minutes kept dragging by. Even then I didn’t have much faith in fate’s benevolence. Whoever walked out the door could be gone for good. I remember washing the kitchen floor around midnight, the awful speckled brown linoleum where the roaches always danced no matter how many got stamped to death. I kept thinking of Caroline and how he’d left her, how he could just leave me and never even come back for the white painting. I thought if I sat down at the table and did nothing, I’d be just like her.

  The bed shook and when I opened my eyes, the room was full of cold gray light. You were sitting on the edge of the mattress unlacing your boots, very slowly, as if each little hole required thought. You got them unlaced but you couldn’t manage to get them off. You kept bending over them, tugging and tugging. I was so relieved and grateful you were back that if I’d yelled, it wouldn’t have been sincere. I raised myself up on one elbow and said, “I’ll help you.” My voice sounded strange to me, foolish; it seemed to be just trying itself out.

  “Don’t talk to me,” you said. “Don’t help me.” I stayed balanced on my elbow. My eyes filled with tears. “Why can’t I help you?”

  You didn’t want to answer. You mumbled something to yourself. “When hungry, eat. When tired, sleep.” You gave up on your boots and lay down on top of the covers. You’d never kept yourself so far away from me. Every night we slept in each other’s arms, our legs all tangled, your hands holding my breasts.

  It kept getting lighter. I saw the white painting float up from the dimness, the red so dark it could have been black; it was only remembering it that made it red.

  “Put it out on the street,” I heard you say. “It’s yours.”

  Around noon you woke up angry. Like a child I trailed after you, asking you to tell me what I’d done. I went into the kitchen to make coffee and started crying because I’d failed to love you perfectly, and you came in and found me and still said nothing, just took a beer out of the refrigerator.

  Finally you did tell me. You were still pretty drunk—you’d never gotten sober. Maybe I should have discounted everything you ever said to me in that state. But I never did because it always seemed to me you knew things then you didn’t otherwise—things that sometimes seemed unbearable because of the awful truths in them.

  I was trying to explain about the painting, how I’d only wanted to sell it for your sake. You stopped me and said I was one of those people who could love but had no experience in accepting love—I’d never learned a way to do that. “I’m the only one who’s ever loved you. Isn’t that right?” you said.

  I said, “How do you know?” and you said, “Because you’re just like me.”

  But you still hadn’t lost your anger. “I had nothing to give except that painting. You knew that, and you wouldn’t even take it. Am I that poor? Is that what I am now—nothing?”

  When the white painting dried, you took it off the wall and did one that was mostly red. Leon brought the stockbroker around to see it. The stockbroker said it was great, but he’d bought a new couch that was a certain shade of orange, so he didn’t want it. He said it wouldn’t do.<
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  You told him, “Sell the goddam orange couch.”

  The stockbroker thought that idea was outrageous. “You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s Italian.”

  10

  ONE MORNING ON Seventh Street I woke up and looked around that small room. It was already getting crowded with rolled-up canvases. I stared at your brush marks on the walls. The floorboards were dappled with color; the May air smelled of turpentine. We were living inside your painting. I had a thought that took me by surprise, I am in my life. My real life had surrounded me. What I wanted was exactly what I had.

  That was the moment, I think, when I finally gave up on the theater. It wasn’t even painful. It just made sense. I saw it was what I had to do. I just decided to give you what you needed. I wanted to do it so quietly, though, you wouldn’t even catch me at it.

  So I lied to you, I acted. I said I was sick of the theater because I never got to work. But I had to be out in the world more, I wanted some kind of career.

  You were a little hurt. “I thought you liked it here with me.”

  An employment agent sent me to a place called Lester and Leaper, which she said had a very creative atmosphere. Lester and Leaper published illustrated, encyclopedic books on brilliantly inconsequential subjects. The Complete Book of Pickles and Pickling, The Worldwide Toxic Mushroom Guide, Songbirds of the Western Hemisphere. Mr. Leaper was seventy-two. His secretary was leaving him to marry the mushroom expert. I was hired to replace her. Her name was Melanie; I gathered her predecessor had been called Gloria. “You’re not engaged, are you, Gloria?” Mr. Leaper asked me suspiciously. Without a qualm I said I wasn’t. Engaged didn’t seem to exactly apply to me.