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Authors: Joyce Johnson

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6

T
HERE WAS A DAIRY
restaurant in those days on Second Avenue where you could sit all night under big yellow globes of light with baskets of fresh rolls and saucers of butter in front of you until the dark turned pale and you could go home. It had the world's gruffest waiters but they understood their customers. They'd forget about you for hours if that was what you wanted. You always knew nothing bad could ever happen to you in Rappaport's.

I went there after Annabel's party. I sat down at one of the long empty tables up front and ordered coffee. There were braids of bread in the window and cheesecakes under a fluorescent light that turned them blue. The wet glass was like a black pool. I could see my transparent self in it marooned behind all the baked goods and occasional ghosts passing through me on the other side, swimming by under umbrellas or with Sunday newspapers above their heads.

I sat there an hour or so watching the rain fall on the avenue. And when I think about it now, it seems that I was waiting, that I even knew who one of the ghosts would be, as if I were somehow dreaming my own life.

I saw the man from the party. He was walking downtown very slowly, still with no coat on, holding up his face like a blind man daring the rain to fall on him. The lights from Rappaport's took him by surprise. He came up to the window and leaned against the wet glass. I put down my coffee cup, almost afraid to breathe.

He didn't see me sitting there. He stared at the cakes, the pasted-up menu, the clock on the rear wall of the restaurant, before he moved on.

That was the week the plasterers came early one morning. They rang my bell, getting me out of bed, two seventy-year-old Ukrainians in stiff white overalls like bakers, carrying buckets and brooms and a ladder. They wanted to know if my mother was home, having the innocent misconception that all young unmarried women in apartments were daughters. I tried to explain that
I
was my mother. They seemed puzzled, but they came in. They whacked at the ceiling with their brooms and the rest of it crumbled like icing. By the end of the day they'd made it solid as a rock. You could hardly see a fault line.

I walked over to the infamous Cedar Bar after they'd gone. The poet, who'd been making himself scarce, would perhaps be there. I thought I'd tell him I had a new ceiling in a lighthearted manner, and thus lure him—or discover he was no longer lurable. The poet and I had never actually
said
we were having an affair, or even that we had some fondness for each other. We came at such matters obliquely. Often he brought along his tape recorder so that we could appreciate his voice for an hour or so giving his latest reading. “You don't mind,” he'd say, switching the thing on. How could you complain about poetry? He was small and jaunty like a bright little warbler, and I think he flew around and visited others with his tape recorder.

He was standing with some strangers at the bar when I came in through the swinging doors—two gloomy, serious men with beards who were there with their wives or girl friends. I noticed he had his tape recorder with him. He saw me right away and I smiled at him and walked forward and paused for a moment, but then he decided he hadn't seen me after all. He made a little quarter turn and kept on talking, and I walked on and sat as far away as I could. I'd wait a bit, then leave, I thought. I'd walk past him and call out good-bye in a loud, arresting voice. I ordered a beer and sat without drinking it, picking at the label on the bottle.

A man came from behind me and put a glass and some cigarettes down on the bar. His hand took a position very close to mine. I remember staring angrily at the ring he wore, a ring of heavy, carved Mexican silver with a square of dull red stone.

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“I already have one.”

“You don't seem to like what you have.”

“It'll do,” I said. I meant to sound completely discouraging. But then I looked up at him for the first time, and it was the man from the party. “Oh, I remember you,” I said in embarrassment.

“Likewise,” he said, and stared at me the way he had that other time. “Do you come here a lot?” he asked me.

I said, “Well … in certain periods,” though the period when I hadn't was at least a year ago.

I had loosened up the label on the beer bottle considerably, and now I peeled off a big strip of it. The man from the party put his hand on the bottle and moved it away.

“Wine would taste better—if you change your mind.”

I said, “All right. I guess I've changed it.” I had a strange thought then:
This is the beginning.
I thought that in a while I'd walk out of there with him, that years would go by, just as I'd known he'd walk down Second Avenue in the rain.

He asked me to tell him my name, then he told me his. Tom Murphy.

“An easy one,” I said.

He told me right away he wasn't
entirely
Irish; there was Norwegian blood on his father's side. He had his father's name, and he'd given his son that name as well.

At that point I felt deflated. My psychic abilities had proven unreliable. So he was married, of course. So that was that. I asked him how old his little boy was just to make conversation.

It took him time to answer. Somehow the question burdened him. “He's only five.” Then he motioned to the bartender and I got my wine.

I found out that he was a painter, that he'd just come back to New York after a long absence. He'd spent a lot of time in Mexico City; the last five years he'd lived in Florida—Palm Beach. He'd looked up a friend from the old days at the Art Students League. That's how he'd heard about Annabel's party and the Cedar. He didn't mention his kid again or say
we
,
as married men did. He drank one beer after another very quickly, gulping each one down like someone enormously thirsty. He had a way of wiping his mouth fast on the back of his wrist the way a boy would, and sometimes, when he did that, I'd want to put my hand against his lips.

I told him a lie I momentarily believed—that I'd be leaving New York very soon. I'd never been to Europe or anywhere much, and it was time. A girl friend of mine had a fabulous apartment in Rome—I remember how suddenly it became “fabulous.” She was an actress like me, and we were going to get work in Italian movies as extras because she had connections.

“So you won't be here very long,” he said.

“I hope not. Just a month or so.”

“You can't count on the movies,” he said.

“I never count on anything.”

“I can tell that,” he said, not smiling the way he should have.

And I said, “Really. How?”

The hand with the Mexican ring came down over mine. I could feel the cool wood of the bar flat against my palm, and that shock of warmth over my fingers. Our hands just remained there like that, quite still, as if they'd been welded together, and I don't think we talked for a while.

Meanwhile I'd naturally forgotten all about the poet. His friends evidently left and then he remembered that he knew me rather well. Suddenly he appeared on the other side of me, saying, “Come and have a drink. I'll get a table.”

He looked down at the bar and saw the hands. It was a somewhat confusing moment. I said, “Carl, a gentleman has bought me a drink,” which I thought had a certain elegance of cadence.

“Catch you later then,” he said, and I felt the little invisible threads between us break and he just dropped away from my life. We often ran into each other after that, but it was over. Many things ended that night—a whole period, a way of living I never really went back to.

I left the Cedar with Tom Murphy and we walked all over the Village and all the way down to Chinatown. He told me he'd been wandering around like that ever since he got back to New York, couldn't seem to get enough of it. We looked at ducks hanging upside down in windows on Mott Street and there was the smell of gunpowder in the air; we were supposed to be deciding on a restaurant. We walked back uptown again to an Italian bar on Houston Street, a place called Googie's where you sat on little barrels and the customers were hoods, not artists. “You never got any dinner,” he said, though I told him I didn't want any, actually. He ordered me a hamburger deluxe with French fries. “I have to take care of you now,” he said. “When you're over there in Rome, you'll remember the inconsiderate guy who made you walk your feet off.”

My trip seemed very real to him—and by this time, to me as well. He was going to look at my apartment, and if it was big enough for him to paint in, maybe he'd take it over while I was gone and I could leave my stuff there. Finally, there in the bar, we talked about being two ships that passed in the night. I even found myself making a fairly fancy statement that maybe those relationships were the most perfect—just that pure first excitement and you said good-bye before things went sour.

He asked me how long I'd had that belief, and I said, “Just for the last ten minutes.”

He said, “This is too fast for you, isn't it? We can't slow it down, though.”

I never did make it to Rome.

My son Nicky passed through there last summer. His wallet was stolen on the Spanish Steps, and he spent a couple of days sitting up in cafés, walking the streets hungry, waiting for me to wire him some money. It wasn't too bad, he said. Actually it was interesting—being down to nothing in a foreign country.

You would approve of that attitude. And when I think of Rome, I think of you there too at Nicky's age, but that was during the war and so you seem much older. It's as if you never had any adolescence at all. You came into Rome with the troops and everyone was starving and you took everything out of your pockets and gave it away to little kids and drank wine with beggars in the ruins of the Colosseum in the moonlight. You told me you'd been on a minesweeper, and I said, that first night we talked, “But how did a sailor get to Rome?” “Hitched a ride on a tank,” you said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

I keep sorting through the leftover shards, stories with missing pieces that can never be filled in. The route you took from Anzio to Rome and what happened to you along the way—I knew it for one evening but didn't listen nearly closely enough. It all got drowned in the onrush of love. We were going down the waterfall, and I didn't eat much of the hamburger either.
We can't slow it down,
you said. And there it was—the declaration. But now you seem to have been saying something else—how little time there was going to be.

7

I
WOKE UP
with you the next morning, and I thought, Found. I remember it,
Found
—as if a string had been plucked in the midst of great silence. I heard the note, then the overtones washed over us, not dying but continuing out there in space. I've never heard it that way again with anyone, though God knows I've listened for it. The sun was in the window and there was an odd, white film over everything, a fine dust, you could see our footprints in it. I lay there astonished with your arms around me.

And later we were having breakfast at the kitchen table. I'd somehow made eggs and we were drinking coffee as if we'd been together a million ordinary mornings. Out of the blue you said, “Look, I can't marry you yet. But I'm going to marry you.”

That seemed so wildly extravagant that I trusted it. I'd never met anyone so rashly serious, although in the circles I moved in, speed was of the essence, an entire way of being. Men and women came together so quickly they could be said to have collided the way colors collided on canvases, running into each other, merging. Lucky and unlucky convergences.

Then you told me what I'd guessed. You were still married. You'd left a wife in Florida, a woman you'd stopped loving, Caroline. Who'd been with you in Mexico City in a tiny pink house, where you used to paint on the roof under an awning you'd rigged up and the yard was full of bedsprings and the landlord's chickens and an avocado tree. You said someday you'd go back to Mexico because you'd been happy there, though there'd been times you and Caroline were so broke you'd actually lived on avocados.

I heard other things. The story of a car you'd left behind in Palm Beach—an old, white, custom-made MG. You'd traded a large painting for it—you'd never have a car that great again. “I was dying down there in the palms,” you said. You'd kept having accidents, so you knew how it would happen—your death in the MG, skidding off the road one night with too much booze in you and the gas pedal all the way down. “But I never drove like that with the kids,” you told me. “I always looked out for my little babies.”

All this I took in—the pieces of your particular legend, the circumstances that had miraculously brought you to me, which I was going to learn by heart.

I had once even dared myself,
End it,
so I thought I knew all about that, too. It was a game I'd played the night I learned Arnie Raff had left me—Chianti and aspirin, I wasn't a driver. I lay down on my bed and started swallowing the little tablets, six or seven of them. But suddenly I realized, I don't mean this, and it seemed quite humiliating to want to die over Arnie Raff.

But I didn't tell you about any of this. I didn't say a word about Arnie, the original occupant of the apartment. My real history had after all begun that moment you spoke to me at Annabel's party. I asked you, did you happen to remember walking past a place called Rappaport's on Saturday night?

You were so surprised. “How do you know that?”

“I was in there. I saw you. Where were you going?”

You said, “I was looking for you, kiddo.”

There was a roll of canvas that had been left downtown and a suitcase and finally it seemed appropriate to get them. By that time it was getting dark outside again. We walked down to Duane Street along Broadway. I remember us radiating light at each other, passing all the decaying iron-columned buildings, the blue-lit upstairs factories where Puerto Rican women sat behind whirring spindles of thread.

Tom's friend who had the canvas and the suitcase lived in a studio behind a rag shop that was going out of business. We had to ring his phone twice from the street, so he'd know he wasn't being raided by building inspectors. He opened the door to let us in. He was a small wiry man with a bristling, flaming red moustache. I'd seen him around the Cedar. A long white scar ran straight from his forehead to a bald spot on top of his head. Tom said very abruptly, “This is Joanna. We're going to be living together from now on.” It was the first time I heard it as a fact to be communicated to outsiders.

Since Tom had just been going uptown for a beer the last time Leon Renfro had seen him, Leon didn't know what to think. He took off his glasses and wiped them and said, “Well… . ” Then he slapped Tom on the shoulder. “Didn't I tell you you'd luck out?”

“There's all kinds of luck!” Tom said, and I saw him turn fierce in an instant. I think he wanted Leon to know right away that the luck was love.

“Sure, sure,” Leon said. “Why not?” But he still must have taken a pragmatic view of the situation. Most people would have, I guess.

He did insist on toasting us, though. He poured the remains of some vodka into a paper cup, and we each took a sip from it as Tom collected his things.

Leon asked me what kind of place I had and where it was and if I had a shower. “You wouldn't mind if I came around sometime to use it? I always bring my own soap and towel.”

I admired people like Leon who had stratagems for everything, who even seemed to relish poverty because it made things hard, kept them alert to possibilities. What I hated about being poor was that it took up so much time, you always had to think about it. If you needed practical advice, Leon was definitely the person to go to. He knew how to vacuum electric meters to make them run backwards. He kept his potbelly stove going with big wooden crates he dragged in from the street. He could tell you what days of the week mattresses got thrown out in classy neighborhoods or where the crashable parties were in the penthouses of collectors. Leon got real enjoyment out of the rich but was down on the bourgeoisie. When he wanted to step out, he'd put on his tuxedo from the Goodwill and take a girl friend uptown to the Hotel Pierre or the Plaza. They'd crash some big wedding reception, where they'd hurriedly consume dozens of canapés, passing themselves off as distant relatives.

According to Leon, it was only in America that an artist could live the way he did. You couldn't do it in Paris, where things were much closer to the bone. The stingy French never threw out anything. “You could starve in Paris,” he said indignantly. “America's the greatest place for The Artist.” “The Artist,” he kept saying, as if he were an expert conducting objective research on the subject.

Leon was an ex-marine. The scar on his head was a war wound. Tom had met him at the Art Students League when they were both young guys on the GI Bill. For eight months they'd shared a horrible room with a hot plate in a boardinghouse full of drunks and Jehovah's Witnesses in Brooklyn. In Reginald Marsh's class, they did hundreds of sketches of Serena the model, an elderly Follies girl. Once they even got Marsh to have a beer with them. Tom had been drawing all his life, every time his fingers found a pencil, but he'd only started painting after the war. Even so, he was already thinking big, thinking about Mexico, talking about doing murals like Rivera. Leon wanted to paint apples like Cézanne. On the dresser in their room he kept A&P bags filled with apples that turned rotten before he could render them and attracted mice.

Leon went on to abstract expressionism years before Tom, but never got anywhere with it. Now he was working with chicken wire. So far he alone was on to it. It made a grid, but it was an expressionist grid, and it was also a very cheap material. He had a couple of enormous rolls of it in his studio. He was taking all his old canvases that hadn't sold and painting them over with deck paint—battleship gray. Pieces of grid were going on top of that. And just lately—one day when his sleeve had caught in the wire—he'd had the inspiration to use rag, bits of rag caught like his sleeve, and maybe thread or even yarn.

He led me around the studio, turning on lights so I could look at all his new work on the walls. I saw a lot of gray paint and chicken wire. It all sort of hung there mute, not even ugly in a way that might shock someone into staring. “This is just a pre- view,” he said. “The rags go on next week. You see how they'll work, don't you, what they'll do to the space.” I said, Yes, I thought I saw.

Leon turned off the lights and scrutinized me. “Hey, you should talk more. How'll I get to know your thoughts? So what do you think?”

I said, “Leon, they depressed me.”

“Exactly!” he cried excitedly. “Of course they did!”

And they had, they'd brought me down, invaded my happiness, reminded me how easily people's lives got wasted. Even when I was young I knew that life could be destroyed by art, though it was worth it, of course.

“When the new wave comes,” Leon said, “I'm gonna be up there on the crest.”

Tom looked up from the corner of the studio where he was stuffing things into his suitcase. “Fuck the new wave! Throw the art magazines in the garbage!”

“Now Tom,” Leon said patiently, “you don't understand the situation. You haven't been
here.”

“Right, I've just been painting fifteen years. Out in the sticks. Don't forget that!”

“Abstract expressionism is through,
finito
.
You could be Michelangelo and you couldn't get a gallery.”

“I paint what I paint. I'm not going to be one of the fish lying on the beach, panting through my gills for the collectors.”

“This is a good man, but an impossible man,” Leon said to me.

“Van Gogh was impossible! Pollock was impossible!” Tom yelled.

“The handwriting is on the walls of the museums, man!” Leon shouted back at him in exasperation. It was the title of an article by a new upstart critic that had made all the abstract expressionists furious. It said there was no such thing as an old revolution. I'd read it myself over someone's shoulder in the Cedar. “
The Handwriting Is on the Walls of the Museums.

Tom yelled that the critics could go on practicing their handwriting as well as their typing. It was all right with him as long as they didn't take up the brush.

Then they both started laughing and Tom said it was just like the old days, they still liked to shout at each other, they could still get excited enough to fight. “Yeah,” Leon said gloomily. “But now it's about survival.”

“It always was,” Tom said.

Afterwards, out on the street, when Tom and I were waiting for a taxi with all his stuff, he said suddenly, “There's only one way to think about all this art critical shit.”

I said, “Which way is that?”

He pulled me close to him and put his mouth against my ear. “Red, white and black. Red, white and black.”

Next morning you opened the suitcase out on the bed. It was the suitcase of someone who had packed too fast, full of light-colored clothes, not really right for the last days of winter. There was a brown leather cigarette case with the initials T.M. and a knife you'd bought in Mexico City that you used for fishing. “This knife will last forever,” you said and showed me the places on the handle where the black stain had worn away. You'd thrown in your staple gun too and a big expensive brush that had never been used.

It alarmed me, that suitcase. What wasn't in it. It seemed that someone who could take so little with him could walk away from anywhere very fast.

I said, “You're going to need an overcoat.”

You said, “It'll get warmer.”

You picked up the brush and showed how smoothly the bristles flexed against the back of your hand. “Look how they bend. That's what a good brush does.”

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