Artist's Proof (8 page)

Maybe
bothered
was the wrong word. Miss Clavell popped into my head—Madeleine's custodian in the Bemelmans classic I must have read to my children a hundred times. Miss Clavell, who woke in the middle of the night and said, “Something is not right.”

Something was not right here, and I didn't know what it was. It couldn't be much, and if I took the time to try to figure it out I wasn't going to get any work done. And I had acres to fill on
Large.

I climbed the scaffold and wet my roller.

S
IX

E
VEN UNDER FAVORABLE
conditions the trip to the city on the Long Island Expressway sometimes made me feel like a medieval knight on a quest. There would be the dragon of the overturned trailer truck, the black knight in the careening Porsche, the malevolent road gangs with their ever-narrowing construction lanes, and at the end of the journey the dreaded city that held the fair princess. Well, not quite. The city held Lonnie Morgenstern.

I hadn't seen Lonnie in months, and I filled the endless drive by reviewing, as I did every second or third trip to Soho, our troubled history. An exercise in masochism.

When Leona Morgenstern and I met in 1977 I had been going to the Art Students League for years. On my first evening in a life drawing class that semester I spotted her opposite me through the model's arched leg, intent on her work. Her eyes, Jewish and blue, were set in an oval face of flawless alabaster ringed with unruly dark curls. My heart—there is no better word for it—sang.

After class a few students gathered on the ASL's shallow front steps facing the trundling buses on West Fifty-seventh Street and talked art. Art theory talk was the kind of gasbagging that set my teeth on edge, but I wanted to get to know this beauty, so I hung around the periphery of the group, contributing just enough platitudes so that I didn't seem a mere voyeur. On the third such evening I was able to position myself next to her on the second step.

We made small talk. She had a voice somewhere between sultry and smoky. But liquid. Not so liquid as to pour too easily; slightly viscous. She was taking just the one class, she told me, but as soon as she had some savings she'd be adding another, under a well-known painter whose work she admired. Luckily, so did I.

Her name was Leona, but she had been called Lonnie since she was six months old. I figured her for twenty; I was twenty-one. She worked for a department store chain as a buyer-trainee in sleepwear, but she didn't think of herself as on a career track; all she was looking for right now was to earn enough money to further her ambition to paint seriously. The alabaster face turned full on me, like a newly risen moon. And what was my day job?

“I'm a cop.”

She laughed. “No, seriously.”

“Seriously. I'm a New York City police officer.”

She stared. “Sid Shale…” She was tasting the name.

“Yes, I'm Jewish. It was Shalkowitz. My father shortened it to speed passengers' complaints against him with the Hack Bureau, but then there never were any. And yes, there are lots of Jewish cops. But not nearly as many as Irish or Italian cops. Too many Jews get suckered into physics and microbiology.”

“Still…,” she said doubtfully.

“Think of the Tel Aviv police force. A hundred percent Jewish.”

“The firemen too, I suppose,” she said earnestly. At barely twenty she had not yet fashioned her razorlike sense of humor. There was something endearing in her helping me make my points.

It took another six weeks to persuade her to go out for a cup of coffee after class. She was heavily booked. She had boyfriends by the job lot, and a waiting list. Doctors, lawyers, microbiologists. Nobody, so far as I could tell, on the civil service rolls. What finally got my toe in the door was my drawings. She locked on, and she said the right things—almost the same things I would have said about them. Then I showed her a small painting, and that was the clincher. Her instincts were nearly infallible. She knew where I was good, and true, and where I was faking.

She started fitting me in on Tuesdays, after class. Not all Tuesdays, but most. Eventually, as my paintings improved, I got an occasional Friday. It wasn't easy for me to manage the more important Fridays. I was working out of a busy precinct in the east Bronx, and Lonnie lived with her parents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. We weren't sleeping together. Someone significant had been in the picture for a while, and she was one man at a time. I would have described us as moving tentatively in the direction of becoming an item.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I was wild about her. So far as I could tell, only one thing stood in the way of my being hopelessly in love: I hated the way she drew. There was strength in her line, and conviction; she drew what she thought she saw. The trouble was, she looked, but she didn't see. Her superb critical eye failed her totally when it came to her own work. Not uncommon.

How could I tell this object of all my desires that she drew lousy? I couldn't. Neither could I lie. I found myself saying about the drawings she showed me, “I see what you're trying to do here,” and “I like that one better than this one” and, when I ran out of ideas, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” Weaseling was not easy, but it was the only difficult part of our times together.

As my work improved—my paintings were becoming looser, more fluid—so did our relationship. And art finally won out over commerce, or was it science? The commodities trader or heart specialist, or whoever—I never did find out—faded from the picture, and Lonnie and I became lovers.

I was intensely happy. We were perfect for each other. This was the woman I wanted to be my life's companion, my critic and inspiration, and also the mother of my children.

She wasn't as sure. She never said so, but I had the sense that she was still shopping. I didn't feel we had a permanent deal until, a couple of months into our sleeping together, she said two things. The first, after a particularly steamy session of lovemaking, was, “Nobody's ever made me feel like that before.” It was a naked admission more intimate than the lovemaking.

The second, the next day, was more like thinking out loud than speaking. She was lying on her back after sex and it was addressed, dreamily, to the ceiling. “If you become a famous painter—and I believe you will—attention would have to be paid to whoever was painting at your side. Wouldn't it?”

We were married three months later.

*   *   *

T
HE FIRST FIVE
years couldn't have gone better. We were crazy in love, and everything in our lives looked good—our jobs, the dirt-cheap loft space for painting we found above a Colombian restaurant next to the el on ethnic Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, even our so-so apartment on Queens Boulevard. When the kids came along—Sarah and then Alan—we were still able to manage long painting sessions together because we set up a corner of the loft for the kids' play and nap space.

The bad times began, as I suspected they might, when Lonnie realized she was not going to make it as an artist. To her credit, she figured it out by herself. It was a long time coming, but when it did, everything turned to ashes. Her job became unbearable, she hated the apartment, everything. It was about then, during our increasingly nasty arguments, that the sultry, smoky, semiliquid quality went out of her voice. You could have used her voice to slice salami.

The marriage was on the skids and would have soon crashed but for a small miracle. Lonnie's grandfather died and left her a small inheritance, just enough to do what her superb critical sense suited her for: She opened an art gallery. She already had her eye on three or four promising artists (including her husband), and she found a space in SoHo far enough off West Broadway so that the rent didn't hurt.

The Leona Morgenstern Gallery lost money its first year but never again. Two years later she moved it to better quarters. She had more than a superb eye: She knew how to sell. If she had stayed in sleepwear she would have had the whole country in her pajamas. She found her way to the moneyed “collectors” the way a dowser finds his way to water, and they bought. I myself was a hard sell despite respectful, or better, notices from the critics, but they even bought me; not often enough, but Lonnie fetched me some handsome prices.

She began to wear designer clothes, and why not? She was earning big bucks. Her dark hair no longer ringed her alabaster face in wild curls but was pulled back into a sleek French knot. We had an apartment in Manhattan now and a sleep-in Jamaican woman Lonnie referred to as “the nanny.” Okay.

The collectors invited her to charity events and cocktail parties, and if I wasn't working or painting I tagged along. Sometimes she had to remind me to change out of my cop shoes. A couple of times someone at these events asked what I did, and before I could answer Lonnie said, “Sid is with the city.” She said it as if I had the mayor's ear.

When I called her on that she said, “Sid, it isn't easy to sell paintings by a cop at serious prices.” But I told her to cut it out. So the next time a collector asked what I did, Lonnie piped up, “Sid is in counseling.”

When we were alone I said, “Counseling? What the hell did that mean?”

“‘Put down the gun.' Isn't that counseling? ‘You have the right to remain silent.'
That's
counseling.”

The relationship wasn't working on any level and all that kept us from a divorce at that point was my father's death. And then, less than a year later, Lonnie called off her lawyer again when my mother died. So it took us three years to unwind from our marriage. By then we were more worn out than angry and we declared a civilized peace.

I had moved back to Queens. That was that.

*   *   *

T
HE LEONA MORGENSTERN
Gallery was a spare, high-ceilinged space, cool in tone but not as cool as Jackie, who always reminded me of a vanilla frozen custard. She greeted me near the door with, “Officer Shale. Ms. Morgenstern is expecting you in the office.” Subtext: I can't imagine why.

I tried not to look at the walls as I made my way back through the gallery. They were hung with recent works by two of Lonnie's favorite artists, neither of them half bad, and I didn't need that. The office door was open and I went straight in. I said, “Officer Shale reporting for duty.”

Lonnie took off her glasses—since when had she started wearing glasses?—and rose from behind the paperwork on her desk to come and greet me. She looked good; she usually looked good, even with that slicked-back hair.

She said, “Is Jackie still calling you that? What can I do with her? Sid, you're on time. How nice.”

She had allowed some of the old smokiness to creep into her voice, and when she touched her cheek against mine it was smooth and warm, and her hair smelled bedroom-y. I felt the lick of desire that still brushed me once in a while when I was with her. This time I chalked it up to a record dry period; I had been up on that scaffold too long wrestling
Large.

Lonnie had stepped back to lamp my wardrobe; I could see an instructional lecture coming. I wasn't going to let her go down that street, so I shortcut her with, “I don't hear the jangle of spurs. Where's your Texan?”

“They should be here any minute. They're coming separately.”

“They?”

“A father and daughter. They're darling. You'll like them.”

“I will, if they buy. And Alan and I will go for steak instead of pasta.”

“About Alan.” She made a face. “Turns out he has a date. With a girl, if you please. You want him to cancel?”

I said, “And make me the heavy? Bad enough I'm the absentee father.” But I was disappointed.

“You'll see him soon enough. He expects to go out to the beach when school ends.”

“For as long as he likes.” The kid painted better than I did at his age. “I'll put him to work on
Large.
” Of course I was looking to needle her; I didn't know why, except that she was so goddam serene. “There's an acre of canvas on the west border that'll take less skill than painting a back fence.”

“Oh, God,” she exploded, “then you
are
still on that kick.”
Touché.
“Sid, will you please grow up? You're not functioning in the real world.”

“Because I'm painting big? There are tapestries in European castles that make my piece look like a commemorative postage stamp.”

“Because the
rooms
in European castles make this gallery look like a broom closet,” she snapped. “It's bad enough that your work fails to communicate to most of my clientele—”

“Not my problem,” I cut in. “Did I forget to tell you? I'm not in the communications business.” I was losing it.

“Sid, Sid,” she said wearily. “You really are a spoiled, contrary child.”

The arrival of Jackie at the door saved us from taking each other apart like boosted Caddies in a chop shop. “Your Ms. Turkinton is here,” she announced in a hushed voice.

Before leaving the office we took twenty seconds to breathe deeply and come off the boil.

*   *   *

M
S. TURKINTON
—“
TESS
,” as she insisted I call her—didn't look like Texas cattle money, and if she was oil money she lived closer to Neiman Marcus than to “Daddy's” wells. Turkinton Senior hadn't shown yet, but Tess had called him “Daddy” at least four times in her first three minutes with us, clicking her tongue smartly against the roof of her mouth with each
d,
giving the word a certain spring. Daddy seemed to be a kind of god—the patron saint, I hoped, of filthy lucre.

Tess was in her late twenties, pretty, auburn-haired, and very slim; she only had it where it counted. Her generous smile, I decided, had been designed to excuse frequent excesses in her behavior; she was used to seeing people jump when she made known her whims. After the briefest of introductions she had announced that Daddy would want to see a representative sampling of my paintings, so she had ordered that a spread of them be set up in a viewing room next to the office before his arrival. Daddy was not to be kept waiting.