Cascade (38 page)

Dez glanced around again, grateful for the clack of typewriters. “It was my idea, actually. We just happened to have the same idea at the same time.” As she spoke, she reconsidered. Maybe the pitch for the
Standard
job had been forgivable, what with Abby alone in New York with no prospects, anxious to earn money. You really couldn’t blame her for assuming Dez would never come to New York.

“Well, that’s why we’re friends. And anyway, you were the one they wanted. Obviously. But I’ve got other things going now. Though I did just try to pitch Washburn for some work—no luck.”

“What happened with the W.P.A.?”

“Oh, it’s all up in the air. My credentials didn’t exactly bowl them over. The ones they’re choosing as easel painters are people who’ve already exhibited some. But, if I get my letter of approval from Senator Wagner’s office, which I will, I’ll be put on as an assistant to Stuart Davis, which would be the cat’s meow, don’t you think?” She fished around in her purse and pulled out a pack of Camels. “You want to go to lunch?”

Until that moment, Dez had no idea how good it would be to go to lunch, and with an old friend. Letters from Abby had been her lifeline for so long. What had she been thinking, all these weeks in the city without seeking her out?

They went to Conrad’s on Forty-eighth, where the tables were jammed, the pitch of talk was at a high level, and Abby wanted to know everything. Why was she in New York? Had she actually left Asa? “How long does a divorce take, anyway? Is it a lot of trouble?”

Dez was conscious of the tables on either side of them. In Cascade or Boston, conversation would have paused to discreetly listen. But the women at these tables ignored them. She actually had to raise her voice to be heard over the din as she filled Abby in. “Asa hopes I’m going to change my mind, but at least I don’t have to worry about him sabotaging the playhouse. I don’t think. Though how I’ll ever move it I don’t know. I’ve been hounding the water commissioner. He promised to help, but so far, nothing.”

“And what about your friend? What happened?”

Dez told her everything. She needed to tell someone.

“He’s here and you’re here and you’re not going to see each other? It was okay when you were married but not okay now that he is?”

How cut and dried that sounded, exactly how Dez had felt, but now she found herself wanting to stand up for Jacob, and her confusion made her uncomfortable. She was grateful when the waiter squeezed in, pad in hand. They ordered two herring salads. A Coke for Dez. Coffee for Abby.

“So,” Dez said, “are you still living over near Penn Station?”

“Oh, I’m down in the Village now.” Abby raved about the Village—yes, it was romanticized, but it really was full of poets and artists. “And it’s full, too, of the—how can I say it? It’s full of the
world
. Every kind of immigrant: Italians and Spaniards and Germans and Jews. Oh, you must come down.” She asked where Dez was living and proclaimed it dull. And too far away. “I don’t suppose you’ve any artists living there.”

“Actually, I do,” Dez said, thinking of Walter’s turned wood and Maria’s hand-stitched gowns. “Have you joined the Art Students League? I’ve been meaning to.”

“Oh, do. Go on over. It’s all very informal.” Abby laughed. “You just need an ‘acceptable moral character’ and the means to pay your dues.”

“Which classes are you taking?”

“None. I’m modeling.”

Dez stared. “I didn’t think you were serious about that.”

“Oh, Dez, don’t be a bluenose.” Abby sat back, gratified to see shock on Dez’s face. The women who’d modeled for them in art school had always seemed soft and soiled and not quite real. Women and men had never painted in the same room when a live model was on display. And now here was Abby, proud that she
was
that display. “Listen, Dez, you have to do what you can. No one’s opening up their arms to you down here, I can tell you that. I’m just one more artist with a little bit of talent, a woman artist at that.”

She modeled for students at the League, and privately, she said, for Marco Pineda. She said his name as if Dez should be impressed, and when Dez said she wasn’t familiar with Pineda, she said, “Oh, you will be. Marco makes everyone else look stale and tame. He’s delightfully wicked, and when I model for him—” She closed one eye in a slow wink.

“And you’ve managed to survive all this time on modeling?”

Abby laughed. “I know what you’re thinking.”

Dez wasn’t thinking anything, but Abby was grinning as if she was dying to be coerced into giving up a secret. “Of course I had it set up. Sort of. He looks after me, and don’t go acting shocked, but he’s married. He’s got a wife and kids in Rutherford, New Jersey. I give him what he wants, and he gives me what I want, and that’s fine with me. He helped me move down to Morton Street.” She lit up a cigarette and tapped it between her fingernails, enjoying Dez’s silent processing of that information.

So both of them had been party to adultery. Dez wanted to believe that her act was somehow more pure, but adultery was adultery, wasn’t it?

“You come to New York,” Abby was saying, “and you kind of see if you have what it takes. I realized I won’t be put on the Easel Project. I accept that. I like modeling well enough, and I’m sure I’ll like being an assistant. This fellow of mine, he’s a collector, and he introduced me to Marco—too bad for him, but if he thinks I hang around on weekends hoping he’ll—anyway, there’s this bash down there tonight. In Sidney Orenthal’s studio. You want to come?”

Dez’s first instinct was to retreat, to say no. But that was shyness. What else did she have to do? This was a chance to meet people, to meet other artists. “What do I wear?”

Abby paused, emphasizing the pause by raising one eyebrow slowly. “Casual, honey. Pajama pants, whatever you like.”

H
er heart dropped at the sight of the square, white envelope in her mail cubby that she knew would not be from Jacob, miraculously telling her that he had made a mistake, that Ruth was not pregnant, that the marriage never took place. The postmark was Athol, the letter from Ethel Smith. Asa or Dwight must have forwarded it to New York. The letter rambled, pointing out that people like Dez always got away with covering things up.
All you had to do was admit you fooled with that dam and that was enough for the bigwigs
.
Now no one cares a fig about finding out how Stan really died.

Upstairs, Dez sat right down and penned a restrained reply.
Stan died because he caught his foot in a rock dam. Stan liked poetry.
He particularly mentioned Longfellow. I suggest you do something that memorializes Stan, something to do with poetry. You’ll find peace that way, Mrs. Smith.

But she was shaken. Would Ethel Smith be her Marley’s ghost, always reminding her of her sins? The incident added to the nervousness she felt about going to the party. A gathering of fellow artists. She had heard stories of wild Village parties, but hoped, like most stories, that they were
exaggerated. Pajama pants, Abby had said. Compared to that kind of thing, her clothes were hopelessly plain, but she wasn’t about to spend money on clothes yet, and she couldn’t imagine that a bunch of artists had much money to spend on them, either. She ended up sticking with the simple pine-green dress she tried on first, and took the Fifth Avenue bus down to Washington Square. Abby had said eight o’clock but she wanted a little time to explore the area beforehand, before dark. Since arriving in the city, she had not ventured farther south than Thirty-fourth Street.

She stepped off the bus into the bustle and confusion of a part of the city that wasn’t ordered into the easily maneuvered grid of streets uptown. After crossing Sixth Avenue, she made her way over to Bleecker Street, where she paused in front of a newsstand. She could never pass a newsstand without stopping to take in the pulpy patchwork beauty: the wall of magazines nestled under a canvas roof, the intoxicating smell of newsprint. There was pleasure to know that her work was there, available to anyone with a dime in his pocket.

A horse pulling a milk wagon passed, maybe on its way home after a long day. The clopping hooves, the sharp smell of horse reminded her of Cascade, and mixed with the smells of bread and newsprint, it made her heartsick a moment, and then glad she had left, glad she had the opportunity to feel heartsick rather than bored and trapped. She followed the smell of bread down the street. In the window of an Italian shop, fat cheeses tied with twine hung from the ceiling. A sign read
ricotta tutta
and
crema,
and she didn’t know exactly what those words meant but knew they had to mean something delicious. In a bakery window, crusty round loaves sat piled on top of one another like stacks of nickels. Five cents a loaf, a sign said. Dez was tempted to buy one and eat it on the sidewalk, but she thought she was going to a proper party. She assumed there would be food.

The party—how to describe it? She would never again in her life feel as intensely lonely as at that first party. She thought that if any of the loose, casual people there had ever overheard Jacob and herself talking, they would have laughed at their seriousness, at the way Jacob so high-mindedly left her.

She was later arriving than she’d planned, making a wrong turn off Bleecker Street and misreading a street sign in the gathering dusk. Carmine Street, when she found it, was mangy-looking, lined with rickety buildings and overflowing trash cans. She located number 45, four stone steps leading up to a tired-looking door in need of paint. Inside the cramped vestibule, she searched the tenant listing—Abby had said that the party was at Sidney Orenthal’s, but there was no such name, so she climbed a narrow, sour-smelling stairway, following the sound of a faint din until she reached the fifth floor, where a raucous party was obviously going on behind an unnumbered door. She knocked timidly and stepped back. When no one answered, she knocked again, louder, wishing she’d arranged to go with Abby. She shifted her weight, trying to fix a nonchalant, relaxed look on her face. Someone inside laughed uproariously, and she pictured her apartment with sharp longing. She could catch an uptown bus, pick up a magazine, get something to eat at the Automat, and be home, all within an hour.

The door opened and a grizzled man barreled through, his eyes bleary and unseeing. He grabbed the railing and half-stumbled, half-slid down the stairs before lurching to a stop on the fourth floor. As Dez watched in alarm, afraid he would pitch over the railing, he swayed from side to side, then doubled over and vomited all over his shoes.

Dez shrank back against the wall. It wasn’t even eight thirty. What kind of a party had someone blind-drunk so early? She didn’t want to go in, but the smell was disgusting; she burst inside. The apartment was one large room with high ceilings, scarred, smudged walls, and a heady smell of paint. Thirty or forty people stood around drinking and smoking and talking and laughing. Abby was nowhere in sight, but Dez pretended to look for her, edging her way through the crowd to keep herself moving, feeling both invisible and awkward. A tall, lanky man with wild curly hair that was far too long did a double-take as she walked by, but no one else seemed to notice her and she did what people who were uncomfortable at parties do—pretend great interest in their surroundings. In this case, she didn’t have to do too much pretending. Two large paintings leaned
against the back wall. They were big, urban landscapes, uncontained as the studio itself, populated with hobos and bread lines. Nearby, a ratty sofa sat in a corner, two people sprawled on it, all over each other, and she couldn’t tell if they were two men, two women, or one of each.

She paused at the drinks table. There were bottles of gin and a pitcher of water, but nothing else, so she filled a small juice glass with gin and stood sipping it slowly, resisting the urge to make a face at the unpleasant fizzy juniper-berry taste. It didn’t matter. She could have made all kinds of faces. No one looked at her, no one even noticed her; everyone seemed to be in the middle of some boisterous group. She would slip out, she decided, even though that would mean somehow sidestepping the horrible vomit. She was about to put down her glass and edge away when a woman, the kind who invaded personal space by standing a little too close, sidled up beside her. “You going to drink that down or just look at the glass all night?”

The woman stuck a cigarette between her lips to free her hands so she could pour herself more gin, speaking through the cigarette. “You were at the Museum School in Boston, weren’t you?”

Dez scanned the woman’s face. She couldn’t place her. “Yes,” she said, aware that the gin had gone instantly to her head. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a drink.

“Maxie Eisenberg.”

“Maxie,” Dez said. She didn’t remember anyone named Maxie, and didn’t recognize the woman, even though she didn’t seem to be the kind of woman you could forget. Her hair was bottle black, her eyeliner thick, her lips slick and red. Although maybe all that was new, put on. Dez tried to look past the makeup to the original face.

“You won the Cabot Prize,” Maxie said. “I was so jealous.”

“Sorry,” Dez said tentatively.

Maxie just laughed. “Those were the days before I resigned myself to facing what I wasn’t. I wouldn’t be jealous now. Now I would just try to sell that painting. Did you, ever?”

Dez’s head buzzed pleasantly. “I did, actually. Do you work at a gallery?”

Judging from the reaction on Maxie’s face, she had revealed her ignorance of the state of the art scene in New York City. Maxie was obviously somebody.

“I own a gallery. And aren’t you refreshing. Here you are being nice to me and you don’t even know who I am.”

Dez’s brain clicked.
Maxie
,
Maxie.
Then it came: Maxie Eisenberg. Ran the New New York Gallery. In school, she must have been that older girl, Maxine, known for having her own place on Commonwealth Avenue. Her father was rumored to own half of New York. Maxine had been homely, devoid of the makeup that made her face so arresting now. They had never spoken.