Scumbler Page 9

  LOVE IN A CIRCLE

  THE TRUE HONEYMOON.

  FULL THAT IS.

  They’re both seriously interested in the painting. The regular customers for this day are no-show. They pull out the note with two five-hundred-franc bills. Private unemployment insurance. They begin by offering the thousand. I only smile and shake my head.

  These girls are like French geishas; seem to get their jollies together, working it off on men. They’re playing to each other, using me. It’s a wonderful lift for my sagging libido, at the same time a bit tough on the old ego.

  WE PLAY AND I’M THE BALL

  NOT SO BAD, AFTER ALL.

  We finish with a flaming Norwegian. The painting is standing on top of a small piano against the wall. I wonder which of them plays it, or is it only decoration? I’d love to hear them play a duet on that little thing, music wrapping itself around me in my golden robe. Maybe I’ll be a Buddhist monk in the next life.

  They both speak reasonably good painting talk; have an idea of what’s going on, ask good questions. They really want the painting. God, I hate talking money about a painting while it’s still hot in my mind. After a painting’s finished and I’m into something else, OK; but not while I’m still painting.

  To tell the truth, I paint every painting for myself. Only later, when we’ve grown a bit apart, can I let go. So I’m uncomfortable. They have good antennae and feel it, but keep after me. I’d actually like them to own my painting. It’d be exciting having one of my paintings, part of me, staring down from a wall here, watching the action, displaced voyeurism; even from the grave. But this one belongs to the Canettes series; who knows, maybe I’ll meet some millionaire and he’ll buy the whole bunch. See, I really am hopelessly hopeful.

  I AM WHAT I CREATE AND I

  CREATE WHAT I AM. ONE

  MORE CIRCLE.

  They begin working on me, promising a wonderful afternoon. They’re on both sides, stroking, petting. They keep darting looks at each other. Colette is definitely the leader. She begins talking in that pursed-lip French way Simone Simon used to use.

  “What can an American man know about what a really good French woman can do for him? Have you ever made love with two girls together; two girls who love each other? We can have a festival of passion.”

  That’s an exact translation of the phrase she uses in French. I’m sinking fast. It’s almost too much; I don’t have vast reserves of resistance in these areas. I also don’t have vast reserves, period!

  The thing that’s bothering me almost as much as the painting is maybe I’ll bomb. It’s bad enough when there’s one woman, but with two to share the joke, I’m not sure my fading flicker of masculinity could survive. I don’t know if it’s age or whatever, but sometimes lately, at the critical moment, I can get to thinking of how ridiculous it all must look and how monotonous it is; then, bump, London Bridge falls down. Poor Kate tries not to take it personally but it’s the kind of thing that’s hard to talk about. A catastrophe under these conditions might eliminate the old libido for good and all.

  Finally, I tighten the strings on my golden bathrobe and tell them I can’t sell it now. Maybe later when I’m into something else, but not yet. I tell them I’ll be working in the quarter and they can always find me. They’re not happy but they simmer down, let me off the hook.

  MY PROSTATE IS PROSTRATE,

  MY COCK IS UN—OR, MAYBE

  THE SAFETY’S STILL ON.

  It turns out they met each other in the conservatory of music. One plays piano, the other violin.

  We finish the afternoon off with a Brahms concerto for piano and violin. They’re really good. I have to ask, how great can life get anyway? I could sure use more of it but I can’t find any for sale or barter. Hey, Mephistopheles, give me a chance, huh? I won’t even dicker the price.

  MAKE A DEAL WITH THE DEVIL.

  DEVIL DEAR, HOW DEAR ARE YOU?

  X

  THE NEW YORK BUYER

  We usually keep the paintings I’m working on hanging all over our place; like to live with the whole thing. My Canettes series is more than forty paintings now. We’ve got paintings everywhere, even in the bathroom; one for standing, another for sitting down. We have them stacked around the living room three high. It looks like the reserve downstairs at the V. and A. Museum. That reserve must be the most discouraging place in the world for a painter. The rooms are filled floor to ceiling with paintings, some bad but mostly good. They’re down there in the dark, suffocating, no air, no eyes; canned vomit, victims of changing times.

  The-Canettes-series-is-built-around-five-streets-between-Saint-Sulpice and the Rue du Four. Two of my nests are right there; I can work, keep things up and collect rent money in one trip. It’s an incredible place for painting. There are carpenters, tinkers, plumbers—all mixed in with fancy boites and boutiques. The buildings lean toward each other, trying to hold up under the press of time.

  I’ve concentrated on the Rue Saint-Sulpice, Rue Guisarde, Rue Princesse, the Rue des Canettes and some of the Rue Mabillon. I’ve painted straight on at façades; I’ve painted inside courtyards; painted people in streets and in bars; painted inside rooms like Sweik’s; painted portraits of the people. I even painted a dog that hangs outside an Italian restaurant on the Rue des Canettes: Mafia or Corsican dog, bites and barks.

  A series like this says something about Paris by getting up close to a small part. It also says something about me, my unreal aspirations and nit-picking desire to tell all; to burrow into things like some kind of magic tick.

  PULLING IN THE WORLD AROUND ME, SOUNDING

  DEPTHS TO THE SINGED CORE. I NEED TO SCRAPE

  FOR MORE, THE EDGE TO SIDES OF ENDINGS.

  A few nights ago, I decided it’s complete. I pushed all the paintings around under a light. I put them up chronologically. I put them up according to street, then according to subject. I spent four hours wallowing around in my own filth. God, it’s hard to let go but this series is definitely finished. The last paintings are beginning to smell afterbirthy.

  I hate like hell breaking them up. I’ll probably never see them all together like this again, but we’ve got to eat. The painting money isn’t big but we need it anyway. Five kids cost money, especially with those enormous American university fees; greatest way I can think to spend money, but tough to keep up with.

  We eat meat every night in our house. For me, not eating meat is like not getting a night’s sleep; I’m a real dog. Hamburger costs seven bucks a kilo in this town; that’s about three-fifty a pound. And then there’s my own personal time running out on me and my forty acres slipping away. I’m needing income.

  TIME QUAGMIRE, SLIPPERY AND

  LIKE QUICK-MUD, SUCKING DOWN.

  I’ve broken up other series before, but it’s always painful. It’s a chunk of my life; every painting’s wrapped with good experience. Looking at them is like hearing an old song, or smelling a smell and having a space of time come to life again. They represent the prime part of a year in my life, a vintage year.

  Yesterday, I’m down working in the Marais. The Marais’s different, different from Canettes, different from me. Either I’ll change it or it’ll change me. Something’s got to give, probably the old Scum.

  Goddamned kids there drive me to the wall. They want to know about everything. Why do I do this, or that; how much does the canvas cost, the paint; how much do I get for a painting? I tell them they cost five thousand dollars apiece. Shock. Two men come over; street men of the Marais, well dressed; they change money illegally, any kind of money.

  “Do your paintings really cost five thousand American dollars each?”

  “Yes, but I’ll let you have this one for only three thousand Canadian dollars because I don’t like it.”

  I come home tired. I’ve been laying in a whole street down the Rue des Rosiers from the corner of Ferdinand Duval. Duval used to be called Jew Street. Rue des Rosiers comes from when the whores had red flowers, roses, in the windows. Everybo
dy’s priming me with gratuitous information about everything.

  I’m building up a large complicated painting and it knocks me out. I’m worn down from trying to hold all my ideas in one place and see them at the same time. I’m making space out of nothing from an abstraction of something. It’s hard keeping the faith when there isn’t much to go on yet; I keep falling back onto the canvas. The deal is I’ve got to stay inside it, not on it.

  HOLDING TIGHT WITH BOTH HANDS, SCRABBLING

  TO STAY IN THERE, MAKING THE SEEMING SEEMLY,

  A DREAM SEWN WITH INVISIBLE SEAMS.

  I come home and there’re guests. Just what we need. I put down the box, smile around and duck into our bathroom to wash up. I take my time; I’m dying for a good hot soaking bath. I hold my head as long as I can in a full sink of cold water. Maybe I’ll slip into oxygen conservation and it’ll all go away. I can’t make it. I dry off; comb my few hairs; pull them into a thin pigtail; brush my Santa Claus beard out fluffy and put on my salesman smile. I go back to the living room.

  These people look more interesting than the usual creeps who come visiting us. Mostly, it’s some old friends from the States with tight assholes and loose mouths. Or, worse yet, their kids with loose assholes and tight mouths. The kids hate us because we’re friends of their parents and because they want something from us. They want to sleep in our house, or borrow money, or both. Sometimes they want me to tell them in fifteen minutes how they can sell their work and start making fifty grand a year beginning next week. Most often the “work” is an outgrowth to an “art project” they learned in junior high school. When I try telling something of the realities, they hate me even more. I don’t like being hated.

  Their parents usually hate us because our assholes aren’t sufficiently bunged up yet and we refuse to play pecking-order games. They give out reams of hooey about how lucky we are to live this wonderful free life while Jack’s staring into dirty mouths all day at his Beverly Hills dental office, or Walter is forced to teach eight hours of class a week and is so underpaid at thirty or forty thou a year.

  I’m tired of hearing it; maybe that’s why they hate me.

  But these people look different: loose, breezy, Kate’s age, quite a bit younger than me; in the saddle and with a good grip. They look like Fitzgerald people, could be the Gerald Murphys. The man has gray, wavy hair, white-blue eyes, smooth tan; he’s tall. More like Dick Diver. Right on, Dick Diver, living, breathing there in front of me. The woman’s almost as tall, boyish-looking, powerful arms, tennis or swimming arms; powerful. These look like exciting people, worth getting close to.

  It turns out Kate met this woman in the Luxembourg Gardens, where the kids sail boats. They have a kid the same age as Tim. I tell you, second families are fun—thirds, too, in my case. This woman’s name is Jan; does sculpture, she says; has big enough hands but they’re not dented up. For sure it’s not stone or wood sculpture.

  The husband’s named Bert. He’s not saying much. He’s walking around looking at the wall-to-wall paintings. He stays and looks at each one quite a while. He gets up close; knows how to look.

  People should look at paintings from arm’s length, not across a hat-hung-far-flung room. They should look from the distance the artist painted them. These are subjects, not objects. This man’s doing it that way; having a private conversation with my work.

  It’s amazing how some people don’t see paintings. They can walk in and not even look at the walls. There could be dead people hanging in every corner and they wouldn’t notice. They live in private tunnels; only use their eyes to keep from bumping into things, the way bats use sonar.

  Other people come in and scan the whole room but don’t pick up paintings. Maybe they’ll remark on the nice drapes, or how clean the windows are, or notice some spider’s building a web in one corner.

  Others come in, look briefly at my paintings, the way they would at a pile of carrots or potatoes, and say, “Oh, you paint?”

  “No, Goddamn it, I cut them out of soap!”

  Or they put one finger against their chin or hold out an index finger like a measuring worm, or start boxing a painting between their hands, squinting down one arm and saying things like “Hmmmm,” or “Lovely,” or “Do you use acrylics?”

  A curse on them all.

  THE CURSE OF INSENSITIVE KINDNESS,

  A BLUSH OF AN INGRATIATING HUSH,

  I SLINK INTO A CORNER UNDER THE STAIR.

  But I love this man; the man with wavy gray hair, a man who looks like Dick Diver and is called Bert. He’s truly looking. I have the feeling he’s both taking them apart and putting them together with himself in his own mind. I begin sneaking around behind him. Even with a good viewer, it’s a crummy position to be in. I’m so deep into my own work, no matter what anybody says, it’s never enough.

  Finally he stops and I follow him back to the big table where Kate’s serving tea. She and Jan are gabbing away. Jan’s been watching Bert, I think, and looking at the paintings a bit, too. Bert sits down.

  “You see, Jan, these are what you could call subjective reality. They’re more than real; true surrealism.”

  I stare at him. Holy cow, it’s like listening to myself! I’m ready to jump on the damned table and do a wild dance!

  Instead, I start talking. I talk about everything I’m trying to do. I tell how I want to be the people’s painter, trying to be a part of life, making living things, trying to make life seem more worth living. I tell how I want to let people know how close they are to experience, open up their stuffed emotion passages with sharp, clean breaths of beautiful images, break the first or second commandment depending on whether you’re Jew, Protestant or Catholic. I roll on and on. I’m not even thinking of selling paintings; just so damned excited having somebody who can listen and understand. I even begin to feel she’s listening. Artists hardly ever listen to each other: too much static.

  We have a fine time—at least I do. We invite them to stay on for dinner but they can’t. We agree we’ll get together soon. I go to bed that night feeling warm, inside thoughts.

  Today, I come home by accident. I forgot to bring money and then got hungry. I left the box at Goldenberg’s and biked home to raid our refrigerator, best and cheapest place to eat in Paris.

  I’m going upstairs when I see Jan coming down. She’s a bit embarrassed; says she wants to see the paintings again. Sure, come up and see my itchings, young lady.

  Maybe I won’t get back to painting this afternoon. The box is safe at Goldenberg’s. Everybody down there’s convinced I’m a big American painter doing twenty paintings of the Marais on commission for a rich American Jew who’s going to donate them to the Guggenheim. It stops the crazy questions; gives me big-man status, the new Messiah; going to make real-estate values shoot up.

  I’m having all these fun kinds of rootless fantasies while I’m following Jan up the stairs. My mind can just run away with me sometimes. I think I have a slipping clutch somewhere in there; gets worse every year, silent erosion. Jan’s walking ahead of me. She’s wearing jogging shoes and those little socks with tiny pom-poms sticking out the heel.

  I open our door and we go in. I walk into the kitchen, put on water for tea, turn on the heater. I peek in our fridge. I’m not usually so hungry at lunch, because I eat liver, orange juice and parsley for breakfast. But there was no liver this morning.

  Jan’s walking around staring at my paintings now. I almost expect her to put a finger to her chin. She rocks back on one foot.

  “Bert really likes your things, you know. He talked about them last night at dinner and then some more in bed. I thought he’d never shut up and let me sleep. I’ve never seen him so crazy about paintings. Psychiatrists don’t usually get turned on by art; Freudians don’t, anyway. They think artists have no choice, that kind of crap.”

  She’s talking away, I’m listening, wondering. Is she doing a put-down on the old man? That’s almost always a come-on. Most American women give the high sign by runnin
g down the husband. I’m starting to figure how I can get out of this without embarrassing anybody, especially me.

  I bring out tea, some radishes and leftover pizza; slim pickings. She’s already eaten. I still don’t feel anything of sex. Holy mackerel, maybe she’s actually interested in paintings. It sure would help the cause if I could sell one; haven’t sold anything for too long. The rent’s coming up on our place in ten days; comes every three months. It’d be great to sell a painting.

  “I’d like to buy Bert something for his birthday. It’s terribly hard finding anything for him. If I bought a painting, could I keep it here till October?”

  Could she ever keep it here? Wow! Sure she could. I’d have the rent money and still hold the series intact a little longer. I try not smiling too much.

  Then we start the choosing process. Stand this one here, that one there. I can’t take it. We move this one into the reject pile, that one into the “good” pile. It’s going to take all day. I’ve gone through this hundreds of times but still can’t handle it; baby slave auction. Finally, she gets down to seven paintings in the “good” pile. I take a deep breath, preparing myself for the last, long stretch.

  “I’ll take these,” she says.

  Jesus! We haven’t even talked price!

  “You mean all seven?”

  “That’s right.”

  Then I notice the rock on her finger. I don’t know if she was wearing it all the time or not. Maybe she kept it in her pocket and slipped it on just now to show me she can really pay out that kind of money. The thing runs about halfway down her finger, greenish color, but a diamond sure enough; not big as the Ritz but big as the rich all right.