Atlantis: Three Tales (22 page)

“No . . . !”
Debbie laughed.

“Is it going to be a great big shape like this . . . ?” With both hands Gwenny outlined a form even bigger than the paper.

“No!” Debbie protested; she was really a very serious girl. “I won't get it all in!”

“Well, you just look at that outside edge, think about your cat shape. Then you put it down.”

Debbie bit her lip—and looked up, down, sideways. A moment later, she turned her paper around ninety degrees, so that it was the long way, and began to paint a large green tabby.

Soon I learned, though, that despite her formalism, Gwenny would acknowledge talent even when it came in late-romantic terms. I did the required abstract pictures and got a fair amount of praise for them. But a year later, without prelude, I turned to a figurative subject: my own, I thought. But the technique was pure Nagy, supplemented by what I'd learned of color modeling from a thick book that sat on my cousin Boyd's desk in his refinished attic bedroom out in New Jersey.
Illustration
, by Andrew Loomis, was full of color charts and composition diagrams. It was
called Illustration
, but what Loomis really wanted to teach his readers was how to paint pin-up girls and athletes, neither of which, as picture topics, particularly excited me. Still, it was only a step away from the comic book art of Frazetta, Williamson, Krenkel, and Wood that
was
my first, visual love. So, in one corner of the busy art room, with just a little sketching that only one student noticed, I began a picture of a mighty-muscled potentate, seated on his throne, turned three-quarters face—which Loomis had explained was far more dramatic than a full front or full profile—chin on his fist and looking stern. His robes trailed the throne steps. Rising columns and smoking braziers loomed in the foreground.

“What are you drawing it first for?”

“Nothing.” But I was sketching it first because that's what Loomis
said
you should do (emphasizing that you not put in much detail, but only basic forms), though I was sure Gwenny, who by now had also told
us about “love of the materials,” wouldn't have countenanced it.

The setting had come from one of Mr. Loomis's harem scenes, odalisques banished and replaced by a hulking body builder I'd glimpsed inside a newsstand muscle magazine, where, somehow, the focus on the gleaming shoulders and shadowed belly had been sharp enough for me to notice on the great blocky fist that the lowering Hercules bit his nails. From my terror of homoerotic sexual discovery, in this school version I'd clothed him a bit better. But the background was Loomis's arches, windows, and steps, only with his bevy of busty, gauzily-veiled maidens removed. The foreground columns and braziers were Loomis's as well. (Probably he'd swiped both from Parish or Alma Tedema.) Emptied of Loomis's sexual symbols (and replaced, yes, with my own), the picture was one I'd tried in my sketchbook half a dozen times over spring vacation back in Jersey. But now, in the sixth-floor art room, as I painted at my wholly borrowed amalgam of visual clichés, not only did the students crowd around, but finally Gwenny pushed up to see what I was doing and pronounced with some surprise: “That's really very beautiful!”

From then on I was treated as someone talented at art. But I had been as prepared for her to be as dismissive of the whole counterfeit pastiche as she had once been of the horizon lines, the vanishing points, and the basic forms that, now hidden behind layers of gouache, had made that pastiche draftable.

Our science teacher was also an artist. Some years before, he'd married the woman who had been my teacher in the five-year-olds, magically changing her name (I never quite understood how) from Rubins to Robus.

If both last names had not been initial-R trochees, I probably would have understood the process. But for me, it was a transformation, rather than a replacement, and thus remained mysterious.

Hugo, as we called Mr. Robus, had a sculpture—
Woman Washing Her Hair—
in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. I had pleaded to have him as my homeroom teacher (“to be put into his
House,” in the school's idiosyncratic jargon), and, with my friend Robert, I
had
been. In a way, Gwenny was too much a total surround for me to think of her as a favorite teacher—though she was certainly my most influential. But the title of favorite went to Hugo. He didn't look in the least like John Nagy. He was clean shaven. When he taught, he always wore a white shirt and, usually, a tie. If the lab, with its wooden tables, glass-cased cupboards, and chrome gas jets, was warm, sometimes he left his sports jacket off. Whenever I came physically near him, I always thought of (but never once mentioned)
Woman Washing Her Hair
. Yet the little electric lights, the single-pole/double-throw switches, and the voltmeters and ampmeters Hugo taught us to wire up, the Lyden jars and Bunsen burners he taught us to operate, the test tubes, retorts, and pipettes he showed us how to fill and empty to precise measure, were all he ever spoke of. For me he was a scientist, and when I was around him, that's what I wanted to be, too.

Oh, maybe, like Hugo, I'd have something in a museum somewhere, or a novel that you could buy in a bookstore, or a concerto that, while I was working with a hydrogen bubble chamber in an atomic lab someplace, was, even that same evening, being performed by a major symphony orchestra.

But science was my center.

Robert was among my best school friends—often my
very
best. Blond and round faced (yes, the strawberry custard confection),
he
was an inveterate nail biter and a general oddball. He tended to become splutteringly overexcited about things, and in many ways he was an immature and, often, an awkward boy. An early motor difficulty, which had caused him to clutch his pencil or pen in both hands when he wrote or to steady one hand with the other when he pointed at something, had settled into a slight clumsiness, most of the time unnoticeable. And he was as goodhearted a friend as you could want.
Freddy the Pig
books had been our early shared enthusiasm. Now it was Heinlein's science fiction juveniles and amateur electronics. Our friendship dated from our first weeks together in the five-year-olds, when, on the first day of school,
Robert had been the object of some truly vicious teasing. Sometimes I would pull away from him, but when I had been betrayed by Jeff or bullied by Jonathan (and Robert's and my friendship had survived its own betrayals), Robert was whom I came back to.

In Robert's penthouse apartment, just a block down from the school, a year before we got our own, I saw my first television set. The show we watched that evening was Burr Tillstrom's
Kukla
,
Fran and Ollie
.

Then, a few months later, we were
on
television—together!

It was a cowboy show, where three or four children sat around on a corral fence, while, for five minutes at the beginning and five minutes at the end of the program, the chapped and Stetsoned star talked about the ancient Republic Pictures serial that filled the bulk of the airtime. Robert's mother had arranged it and was to take the two of us to the studio. Robert wore jeans and sneakers, as we always did at school. But in light of my public appearance, Mom had sent me in that day in a suit and tie. As we didn't have a
TV
yet, she didn't know what the other kids on the show usually wore—and certainly wasn't about to let me tell her: “But Mom, it's a
cowboy
show—”

“Just because it's a cowboy show doesn't mean you can't look nice. You put on your tie, now!”

At the studio, the director's assistant, a young woman in a purple blouse, slacks (not that common on women in the '50s), and glasses, frowned at me, then told me to take off my suit jacket, in order to “dress me down.” Then someone said I'd have to put it back on, since my white shirt, even
with
the jacket covering most of it, would glare. (More than anything else,
TV
was responsible, during the '50s, for the ascendancy of the Oxford blue shirt.) They asked me to take my tie off. I did; and decided they were really nice people. Then they opened my shirt collar as wide as they could under my tightly buttoned-up suit coat—and gave me a ten-gallon hat to make me look “more informal.”

Several times my mother had taken me to see radio programs. Although I'd been disappointed that the shows were not really acted, but simply read out from sheaves of flimsy paper by ordinary men and women standing around on an empty stage, one had been in a full-sized
theater with balconies and the other in a hangar-like space that had seated at least three hundred. But this was a one-camera show, done live, in a studio only a hair's breadth bigger than our bathroom at home. In his soiled white shirt, the cameraman chain smoked (like my father), and when I asked, “Won't his cigarette smoke get in front of the lens and make it cloudy?” the assistant laughed and said, “If his cigarette bothers you, I'll ask him to put it out. He's not supposed to be smoking in here, anyway.”

“No!” I said, abashed at not being taken seriously. “It doesn't
bother
me! I was just wondering about the camera, that's all!”

But my greatest, silent astonishment there was that the desert background which, on Robert's television only the night before, had stretched infinitely far behind the length of corral fence, with a couple of cactuses standing among distant dunes and sagebrush, was only painted cloth, a foot higher than the star's head, and with a sag along the top! The whole desert (not to mention the prop fence before it) was not as wide as Robert and I laid together, toe to head!

But the very bright lights were already on.

Already we were more or less positioned.

My next surprise was one that has surprised me all over, every time I've been on a talk show or guest interview since: the unruptured continuity from non-air time to air time.

We four kids had been on monitor for fifteen minutes now and had gotten used to it. (Or would never get used to it: the other boy, who'd come with his father, kept staring back and forth from the
TV
screen in the studio corner to the camera in the middle of the room, unable to understand why, when he turned to look at himself, his image on the screen looked away, so that he could never get his screen self to look directly at his own face.) Standing beside the camera, wearing earphones and a green, open-necked shirt, dark as the sea, the director gave all his attention to his clipboard.

Only the red light coming on above the camera lens told us that the studio had changed from a cramped cell with flaking gray paint on the walls and a very shiny clock with a red second-hand jerking about it
above the door, to a dream presentation vaster than Arizona and replicated unto gray thousands. It was a transition wholly without emotional weight, thoroughly technological, hidden within some nacelle of wires and timed to a clock in another room we couldn't see.

In the same voice with which he'd been asking us if we were comfortable, was I secure on the rail there, if the party dress of the girl who sat beside me was caught under her leg (“No sir! It's fine!”), the star in his chaps and cowboy hat said, as though he were continuing to talk to us or to people like us who, for some reason, weren't quite there: “Well, boys and girls, it's good to see you all back again. This evening, as our guests, we have Billy and Suzy and Bobby and Sammy . . .”

I'd never heard anyone call Robert “Bobby” before. And I loathed the name “Sammy.” Yet, before the metallic lights like white-hot holes in the walls, in almost no time he was saying (in the same voice in which he'd been addressing uncountable ghost children), “All right, that's all there is to it. For now, anyway. Or at least for the next fifteen minutes.”

The red light was off.

The dream was on hold—or had switched beyond us to another of its infinitely malleable, endlessly linkable segments.

“You can get down. Just don't go too far, so we can all get back together for the closing part of the show.”

Suzy (if she was any more “Suzy” than I was “Sammy” or Robert was “Bobby”) climbed down from the fence. I got down too. Billy was still staring from camera to monitor. Robert just jumped. “Can we go watch the movie now?”

“
Aw
 . . . !” The star leaned back and folded his large, clean hands before his silver buckle, as though this were the single sadness in his generally joyful job. “I'm sorry! But that's done from an entirely different building, way over on the other side of town. And we aren't hooked up to that cable. But we'll be back on the air in just a while . . .”

I took off my ten gallon hat and looked for the director's assistant to give it to. She was at my elbow a moment later. “Don't you want to keep that,” she said as I turned to her, “till the show's over?”

* * *

Though my family did not yet have a
TV
, the Hunts, who lived in a cramped apartment on the second floor in the building next door to our private house, did. (Their daughter, Laura, a girl six months older than I, was supposed to be “engaged” to me, so ran the joke among the other black children along the Harlem block.) Dad and Mom and my sister were all going over there to watch.

Robert's mother stopped in with us at a coffee shop after the show and we got hamburgers. So we didn't get back to my house till about seven.

“What in the world happened to your
tie?
” Mom demanded when I walked in.

“I've got it on . . . ?” I looked down at myself in conscientious bewilderment. (How carefully I'd knotted it again before the mirror above the sink in the studio's blue phonebooth of a bathroom.)

“But you didn't have it on the show!”

And I was surprised all over: I actually
had
been on television! Thousands of people really
had
seen me!