>>
<<<I'm not going to hang up on you, Arthur. I'd like to help you, if it's humanly possible,"
the grayhaired man said. <<<Actually, you're your own worst-->>>
<<<She doesn't respect me. She doesn't even love me, for God's sake. Basically--in the last analysis--I don't love her any more, either. I don't know. I do and I don't. It varies. It fluctuates. Christ! Every time I get all set to put my foot down, we have dinner out, for some reason, and I meet her somewhere and she comes in with these goddam white gloves on or something. I don't know. Or I start thinking about the first time we drove up to New Haven for the Princeton game. We had a flat right after we got off the Parkway, and it was cold as hell, and she held the flashlight while I fixed the goddam thing--You know what I mean. I don't know. Or I start thinking about--Christ, it's embarrassing--I start thinking about this goddam poem I sent her when we first started goin' around together. `Rose my color is. and white, Pretty mouth and green my eyes.' Christ, it's embarrassing--it used to remind me of her. She doesn't have green eyes--she has eyes like goddam sea shells, for Chrissake--but it reminded me anyway... I don't know. What's the usea talking? I'm losing my mind. Hang up on me, why don't you? I mean it.>>>
The grayhaired man cleared his throat and said, <<<I have no intention of hanging up on you, Arthur. There's just one-->>>
<<<She bought me a suit once. With her own money. I tell you about that?>>>
<<<No, I-->>>
<<<She just went into I think Tripler's and bought it. I didn't even go with her. I mean she has some goddam nice traits. The funny thing was it wasn't a bad fit. I just had to have it taken in a little bit around the seat--the pants--and the length. I mean she has some goddam nice traits.>>>
The grayhaired man listened another moment.
Then, abruptly, he turned toward the girl. The look he gave her, though only glancing, fully informed her what was suddenly going on at the other end of the phone. <<<Now, Arthur. Listen. That isn't going to do any good," he said into the phone. <<<That isn't going to do any good. I mean it. Now, listen. I say this in all sincerity. Willya get undressed and get in bed, like a good guy? And relax? Joanie'll probably be there in about two minutes. You don't want her to see you like that, do ya? The bloody Ellenbogens'll probably barge in with her. You don't want the whole bunch of 'em to see you like that, do ya?>>> He listened. <<<Arthur? You hear me?>>>
<<<God, I'm keeping you awake all night. Everything I do, I-->>>
<<<You're not keeping me awake all night," the grayhaired man said. <<<Don't even think of that. I've already told you, I've been averaging about four hours' sleep a night. What I would like to do, though, if it's at all humanly possible, I'd like to help you, boy.>>> He listened. <<<Arthur? You there?>>>
<<<Yeah. I'm here. Listen. I've kept you awake all night anyway. Could I come over to your place for a drink? Wouldja mind?>>>
The grayhaired man straightened his back and placed the flat of his free hand on the top of his head, and said, <<<Now, do you mean?>>>
<<<Yeah. I mean if it's all right with you. I'll only stay a minute. I'd just like to sit down somewhere and--I don't know. Would it be all right?>>>
<<<Yeah, but the point is I don't think you should, Arthur," the grayhaired man said, lowering his hand from his head. <<<I mean you're more than welcome to come, but I honestly think you should just sit tight and relax till Joanie waltzes in. I honestly do.
What you want to be, you want to be right there on the spot when she waltzes in. Am I right, or not?>>>
<<<Well, I do, I honestly do," the grayhaired man said. <<<Look. Why don't you hop in bed now, and relax, and then later, if you feel like it, give me a ring. I mean if you feel like talking. And don't worry. That's the main thing. Hear me? Willya do that now?>>>
<<<All right.>>>
The grayhaired man continued for a moment to hold the phone to his ear, then lowered it into its cradle.
<<<What did he say?>>> the girl immediately asked him. He picked his cigarette out of the ashtray--that is, selected it from an accumulation of smoked and halfsmoked cigarettes.
He dragged on it and said, <<<He wanted to come over here for a drink.>>>
<<<God! What'd you say?>>> said the girl.
<<<You heard me," the grayhaired man said, and looked at her. <<<You could hear me.
Couldn't you?>>> He squashed out his cigarette.
<<<You were wonderful. Absolutely marvellous," the girl said, watching him. <<<God, I feel like a dog!>>>
<<<Well," the grayhaired man said, <<<it's a tough situation. I don't know how marvellous I was.>>>
<<<You were. You were wonderful," the girl said. <<<I'm limp. I'm absolutely limp. Look at me!>>>
The grayhaired man looked at her. <<<Well, actually, it's an impossible situation," he said. <<<I mean the whole thing's so fantastic it isn't even-->>>
<<<Darling-Excuse me," the girl said quickly, and leaned forward. <<<I think you're on fire.>>> She gave the back of his hand a short, brisk, brushing stroke with the flats of her fingers. <<<No. It was just an ash.>>> She leaned back. <<<No, you were marvellous," she said.
<<<God, I feel like an absolute dog!>>>
<<<Well, it's a very, very tough situation. The guy's obviously going through absolute-->>>
The phone suddenly rang.
The grayhaired man said <<<Christ!>>> but picked it up before the second ring. <<<Hello?>>> he said into it.
<<<Lee? Were you asleep?>>>
<<<No, no.>>>
<<<Listen, I just thought you'd want to know. Joanie just barged in.>>>
<<<What?>>> said the grayhaired man, and bridged his left hand over his eyes, though the light was behind him.
<<<Yeah. She just barged in. About ten seconds after I spoke to you. I just thought I'd give you a ring while she's in the john. Listen, thanks a million, Lee. I mean it--you know what I mean. You weren't asleep, were ya?>>>
<<<No, no. I was just--No, no," the grayhaired man said, leaving his fingers bridged over his eyes. He cleared his throat.
<<<Yeah. What happened was, apparently Leona got stinking and then had a goddam crying jag, and Bob wanted Joanie to go out and grab a drink with them somewhere and iron the thing out. I don't know. You know. Very involved. Anyway, so she's home.
What a rat race. Honest to God, I think it's this goddam New York. What I think maybe we'll do, if everything goes along all right, we'll get ourselves a little place in Connecticut maybe. Not too far out, necessarily, but far enough that we can lead a normal goddam life. I mean she's crazy about plants and all that stuff. She'd probably go mad if she had her own goddam garden and stuff. Know what I mean? I mean--except you--who do we know in New York except a bunch of neurotics? It's bound to undermine even a normal person sooner or later. Know what I mean?>>>
The grayhaired man didn't give an answer. His eyes, behind the bridge of his hand, were closed. <<<Anyway, I'm gonna talk to her about it tonight. Or tomorrow, maybe. She's still a little under the weather. I mean she's a helluva good kid basically, and if we have a chance to straighten ourselves out a little bit, we'd be goddam stupid not to at least have a go at it. While I'm at it, I'm also gonna try to straighten out this lousy bedbug mess, too. I've been thinking. I was just wondering, Lee. You think if I went in and talked to Junior personally, I could-->>>
<<<Arthur, if you don't mind, I'd appreciate-->>>
<<<I mean I don't want you to think I just called you back or anything because I'm worried about my goddam job or anything. I'm not. I mean basically, for Chrissake, I couldn't care less. I just thought if I could straighten Junior out without beating my brains out, I'd be a goddam fool-->>>
<<<Listen, Arthur," the grayhaired man interrupted, taking his hand away from his face, <<<I have a helluva headache all of a sudden. I don't know where I got the bloody thing from. You mind if we cut this short? I'll talk to you in the morning--all right?>>> He listened for another moment, then hung up
.
Again the girl immediately spoke to him, but he didn't answer her. He picked a burning cigarette--the girl's--out of the ashtray and started to bring it to his mouth, but it slipped out of his fingers. The girl tried to help him retrieve it before anything was burned, but he told her to just sit still, for Chrissake, and she pulled back her hand.
De DaumierSmith's Blue Period
IF IT MADE any real sense--and it doesn't even begin to--I think I might be inclined to dedicate this account, for whatever it's worth, especially if it's the least bit ribald in parts, to the memory of my late, ribald stepfather, Robert Agadganian, Jr. Bobby--as everyone, even I, called him--died in 1947, surely with a few regrets, but without a single gripe, of thrombosis. He was an adventurous, extremely magnetic, and generous man. (After having spent so many years laboriously begrudging him those picaresque adjectives, I feel it's a matter of life and death to get them in here.) My mother and father were divorced during the winter of 1928, when I was eight, and mother married Bobby Agadganian late that spring. A year later, in the Wall Street Crash, Bobby lost everything he and mother had, with the exception, apparently, of a magic wand. In any case, practically overnight, Bobby turned himself from a dead stockbroker and incapacitated bon vivant into a live, if somewhat unqualified, agentappraiser for a society of independent American art galleries and fine arts museums. A few weeks later, early in 1930, our rather mixed threesome moved from New York to Paris, the better for Bobby to ply his new trade. Being a cool, not to say an ice-cold, ten at the time, I took the big move, so far as I know, untraumatically. It was the move back to New York, nine years later, three months after my mother died, that threw me, and threw me terribly.
I remember a significant incident that occurred just a day or two after Bobby and I arrived in New York. I was standing up in a very crowded Lexington Avenue bus, holding on to the enamel pole near the driver's seat, buttocks to buttocks with the chap behind me. For a number of blocks the driver had repeatedly given those of us bunched up near the front door a curt order to <<<step to the rear of the vehicle.>>> Some of us had tried to oblige him. Some of us hadn't. At length, with a red light in his favor, the harassed man swung around in his seat and looked up at me, just behind him. At nineteen, I was a hatless type, with a flat, black, not particularly clean, Continentaltype pompadour over a badly broken-out inch of forehead. He addressed me in a lowered, an almost prudent tone of voice. <<<All right, buddy," he said, <<<let's move that ass.>>> It was the <<<buddy," I think, that did it. Without even bothering to bend over a little--that is, to keep the conversation at least as private, as de bon gout, as he'd kept it--I informed him, in French, that he was a rude, stupid, overbearing imbecile, and that he'd never know how much I detested him. Then, rather elated, I stepped to the rear of the vehicle.
Things got much worse. One afternoon, a week or so later, as I was coming out of the Ritz Hotel, where Bobby and I were indefinitely stopping, it seemed to me that all the seats from all the buses in New York had been unscrewed and taken out and set up in the street, where a monstrous game of Musical Chairs was in full swing. I think I might have been willing to join the game if I had been granted a special dispensation from the Church of Manhattan guaranteeing that all the other players would remain respectfully standing till I was seated. When it became clear that nothing of the kind was forthcoming, I took more direct action. I prayed for the city to be cleared of people, for the gift of being alone--a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness. Mornings and early afternoons, I attended--bodily--an art school on Fortyeighth and Lexington Avenue, which I loathed. (The week before Bobby and I had left Paris, I had won three first-prize awards at the National Junior Exhibition, held at the Freiburg Galleries. Throughout the voyage to America, I used our stateroom mirror to note my uncanny physical resemblance to El Greco.) Three late afternoons a week I spent in a dentist's chair, where, within a period of a few months, I had eight teeth extracted, three of them front ones. The other two afternoons I usually spent wandering through art galleries, mostly on Fifty-seventh Street, where I did all but hiss at the American entries. Evenings, I generally read. I bought a complete set of the Harvard Classics--chiefly because Bobby said we didn't have room for them in our suite--and [56] rather perversely read all fifty volumes. Nights, I almost invariably set up my easel between the twin beds in the room I shared with Bobby, and painted. In one month alone, according to my diary for 1939, I completed eighteen oil paintings. Noteworthily enough, seventeen of them were self-portraits. Sometimes, however, possibly when my Muse was being capricious, I set aside my paints and drew cartoons. One of them I still have. It shows a cavernous view of the mouth of a man being attended by his dentist.
The man's tongue is a simple, U. S. Treasury hundred dollar bill, and the dentist is saying, sadly, in French, <<<I think we can save the molar, but I'm afraid that tongue will have to come out.>>> It was an enormous favorite of mine.
As roommates, Bobby and I were neither more nor less compatible than would be, say, an exceptionally live-and-let-live Harvard senior, and an exceptionally unpleasant Cambridge newsboy. And when, as the weeks went by, we gradually discovered that we were both in love with the same deceased woman, it was no help at all. In fact, a ghastly little after-you-Alphonse relationship grew out of the discovery. We began to exchange vivacious smiles when we bumped into each other on the threshold of the bathroom.
One week in May of 1939, about ten months after Bobby and I checked into the Ritz, I saw in a Quebec newspaper (one of sixteen French-language newspapers and periodicals I had blown myself a subscription to) a quarter-column advertisement that had been placed by the direction of a Montreal correspondence art school. It advised all qualified instructors--it as much as said, in fact, that it couldn't advise them fortenwnt enough--to apply immediately for employment at the newest, most progressive, correspondence art school in Canada. Candidate instructors, it stipulated, were to have a fluent knowledge of both the French and English languages, and only those of temperate habits and unquestionable character need apply. The summer session at Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres was officially to open on 10 June. Samples of work, it said, should represent both the academic and commercial fields of art, and were to be submitted to Monsieur I. Yoshoto, directeur, formerly of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, Tokyo.
Instantly, feeling almost insupportably qualified, I got out Bobby's Hermes-Baby typewriter from under his bed and wrote, in French, a long, intemperate letter to M.
Yoshoto--cutting all my morning classes at the art school on Lexington Avenue to do it.
My opening paragraph ran some three pages, and very nearly smoked. I said I was twenty-nine and a great-nephew of Honore Daumier. I said I had just left my small estate in the South of France, following the death of my wife, to come to America to stay--temporarily, I made it clear--with an invalid relative. I had been painting, I said, since early childhood, but that, following the advice of Pablo Picasso, who was one of the oldest and dearest friends of my parents, I had never exhibited. However, a number of my oil paintings and water colors were now hanging in some of the finest, and by no means nouveau riche, homes in Paris, where they had gagne considerable attention from some of the most formidable critics of our day. Following, I said, my wife's untimely and tragic death, of an ulceration cancgreuse, I had earnestly thought I would never again set brush to canvas. But recent financial losses had led me to alter my earnest resolution. I said I would be most honored to submit samples of my work to Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres, just as soon as they were sent to me by my agent in Paris, to whom I would write, of course, tres presse. I remained, most respectfully, Jean de DaumierSmith.
It took me almost as long to select a pseudonym as it had taken me to write the whole letter.
I wrote the letter on overlay tissue paper. However, I sealed it in a Ritz envelope. Then, after applying a special-delivery stamp I'd found
in Bobby's top drawer, I took the letter down to the main mail drop in the lobby. I stopped on the way to put the mail clerk (who unmistakably loathed me) on the alert for de DaumierSmith's future incoming mail. Then, around two-thirty, I slipped into my one-forty-five anatomy class at the art school on Fortyeighth Street. My classmates seemed, for the first time, like a fairly decent bunch.
During the next four days, using all my spare time, plus some time that didn't quite belong to me, I drew a dozen or more samples of what I thought were typical examples of American commercial art. Working mostly in washes, but occasionally, to show off, in line, I drew people in evening clothes stepping out of limousines on opening nights--lean, erect, super-chic couples who had obviously never in their lives inflicted suffering as a result of underarm carelessness--couples, in fact, who perhaps didn't have any underarms. I drew suntanned young giants in white dinner jackets, seated at white tables alongside turquoise swimming pools, toasting each other, rather excitedly, with highballs made from a cheap but ostensibly ultrafashionable brand of rye whisky. I drew ruddy, billboard-genic children, beside themselves with delight and good health, holding up their empty bowls of breakfast food and pleading, good-naturedly, for more. I drew laughing, high-breasted girls aquaplaning without a care in the world, as a result of being amply protected against such national evils as bleeding gums, facial blemishes, unsightly hairs, and faulty or inadequate life insurance. I drew housewives who, until they reached for the right soap flakes, laid themselves wide open to straggly hair, poor posture, unruly children, disaffected husbands, rough (but slender) hands, untidy (but enormous) kitchens.
When the samples were finished, I mailed them immediately to M. Yoshoto, along with a half-dozen or so non-commercial paintings of mine that I'd brought with me from France. I also enclosed what I thought was a very casual note that only just began to tell the richly human little story of how, quite alone and variously handicapped, in the purest romantic tradition, I had reached the cold, white, isolating summits of my profession.
The next few days were horribly suspenseful, but before the week was out, a letter came from M. Yoshoto accepting me as an instructor at Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres.