Slaves of New York (7 page)

Meanwhile, as I was waiting for the cash machine to excrete my receipt, I could hear snickers coming from behind me on

line. This made me mad. I walked out of the bank in a fury. Who needed this kind of attention? I strolled up the streets like a panther, grimacing and ready for food.

So I stopped off at the restaurant nearby I liked to frequent. This place had been around since the days of J. P. Morgan. Wood-paneled walls redolent with coffee smells, the ceiling blackened by ancient grease and cigar smoke.

I bought the
Times
and sat at the counter, a fudge brownie before me. The counter woman, Marion, was very frisky today. Our acquaintance went back over a few years. But we weren't intimate, normally she spent our conversations racking up complaints against the customers. What a skinny little salamander she was, with a pitted face and eyes the color of lime juice. "How's the painting going?" she said, scouring the counter with a rag held in one clawed hand. "You paint pictures, right?"

"Great," I said. "I've got this idea for a painting—"

"I could tell you a thing or two about artists," she muttered. "You see that man sitting over there?"

On the other side of the counter was a small creature wearing a hearing aid and a binocularlike pair of glasses: a poor denizen crawled up perhaps from the subway. "I see him," I said.

"He's not supposed to drink coffee because of his ulcer," Marion hissed at me. "But does so anyway. Some people have no more sense than a can of peas. He's been married four times, and left every one of them for various complaints. Where does he get off thinking of himself as so desirable that any woman would come running for him?"

She left me to bring the man a plate of cinnamon toast, though I hadn't noticed him ask for it. He gave her the royal nod, and she came back to me, the salamander relegated to the scullery.

Well, that was poor old Marion for you. I could tell she was depressed, each of us has been gifted from birth with our own problems. In her case it was her appearance. But she cheered up when I told her my idea for a painting: I wanted to use her

as a model. Already in my head I could see those salamander thighs topped with a pink pot of geraniums and a cluster of frog's eggs. "Me? Me, a model? That's a joke," she said. Still, she was pleased. She straightened herself up and began smashing the coffee cups with a little Mae West twist of her tail. With a certain neat flick: I half expected she lived at night in some sort of hole beneath the counter, so much a part of the room were her movements.

After this we were best buddies—she slapped an extra goo-brownie on my plate at no charge. I got out my notebook, and would have sketched her, too, right then and there, with her two slabs of breasts like day-old cupcakes on what was otherwise an amphibian physique. Only I remembered. My mother was scheduled to visit me that day. I was late, it was already early afternoon.

When I got back to my building, my mother was waiting in the lobby. More overweight than ever, if such a thing was possible. From the top of head to ankles, one piece of flesh, indisposable. Without joints—nor did I believe there were bones underneath that skin. Then beneath, the tiny feet, little figgys. "I told you yesterday I was coming to visit," she said. "Do you know how long I've been waiting? Where've you been?"

"Aw, Ma," I said. I gave her a smack on the cheek to placate.

So we went upstairs. To distract her from the mess I took her around and showed her the latest frescoes on the wall and ceilings, which I started when I ran out of canvas: goddess and nymph and semitropical vegetation. The God of Baseball, playing a game of billiards with Bacchus. I was proud of the God of Baseball, in his Yankees cap, chipmunk cheek filled with a plump throb of chewing tobacco. One hand fiddling with his crotch. But my mother barely seemed to notice. "How can you live in this pigsty?" she said. "You're twenty-nine years old, Marley. A person can't go on this way. I was hoping you'd be able to support me in my old age."

Listen, with remarks like this I was titled to my irritation. Old Vinnie van Gogh never sold a painting in his life, but at least his brother was there with support. My mother, of all people, should have worshiped the ground I walked on. "A pigsty?" I said. "You call this a pigsty? Who did I learn my housekeeping habits from if not you?"

"Not like this, though," she said.

"Oh, yes," I said. "Like this. Listen, Ma, all your life you've lived in a dream. You haven't had it easy, I'm willing to admit that. This perpetual fog that surrounds you can't be much fun to be in."

"I had a hard life," my mother said.

"That's true," I said, without feeling sorry for her, "Grandfather disowning you when you got knocked up with me. That so-called husband of yours, Marco, running around the world to play the violin, then all of a sudden dying. It wasn't much of a marriage, I guess. But for all these years you've basically ignored me. Now you show up, a stranger—I'm nearly thirty years old—and tell me I live in a pigsty!"

My mother didn't even look surprised. "Yes, yes ..." she muttered. "It's true." She sat heavily on the couch. I noticed she wasn't making any effort to clean the place up, either. Well, at her great weight it took a lot out of her just to rest.

"You were brought up to expect one thing," I told her. "You were a rich little girl, no one told you life wasn't going to be chipped beef on toast forever. If you had married someone from your own background, Grandfather wouldn't have disowned you and things would be different for me today. But you've always done exactly as you pleased. Well, why don't you sell those stocks in Marvel Comics"—for I had discovered this secret wealth she had managed to squirrel away the last time I went home and was looking through some of her papers —"and use the money to help me out?"

"Oh, I don't know, Marley," my mother said. "At one time I thought you'd make these paintings, which seems to be all you're capable of, and make some money, and in this way things would work out for you. A boy like you, from an un-

known background, without connections—what choice did I have but to encourage you? But let's face it, other, younger artists have come along who are by now a big success. Your shows don't even get reviewed. I wish you'd get out of this business, which is making you neither rich nor happy. It's not too late, you could still change. There are schools to learn the computer—"

"I have my own goals, Mother. If you don't want to help me, then say so. But let's not pretend you couldn't do it if you wanted to."

My mother, however, wasn't listening. Yet even though I was mad, I still adored her. I happen to think my mother is a brilliant woman who has not let modern civilization or the twentieth century disturb her in any way. That mass of Valkyr-ien hair, mostly gray. Those washed-out blue eyes, always looking at a person who wasn't in the room. The thin lines just beginning to form around her mouth.

It gave me an idea for painting Athena after she reached middle age. No longer interested in getting her own way as much as being left alone. Standing in the middle of a nightclub, filled with baubles. Tired out, overweight.

But because I adored her, my fury was greater. "Hello!" I said, waving my hand in front of her face. "Anybody home?" But my mother was still in her trance. "Listen, Ma, you've got to understand what I'm trying to do! After all, you did marry my father, who, from what I can gather, was an artist."

"An artist," my mother said, blinking. "Oh, well . . . if you want to look at it that way. I married him because he could play the violin and I was fed up with Vassar. At the time he was playing with Django Reinhardt ... I met him during Christmas vacation in Paris."

"I don't care to hear this story again," I said.

"I was supposed to be studying French. All the girls fell for him, though physically he wasn't a paragon of beauty, with his large nose and shock of dirty blond hair, a Northern Italian who smelled of garlic. Actually, you take after him."

"Mother, what are you talking about," I said. I was insulted.

"Lay off trying to tease me at this time. You know I don't have much of a sense of humor when it comes to myself. Ten years ago I could have been a male model. What a different life I would have been leading now. But you always encouraged me in my artistic ambition."

"I think I'm pregnant," my mother said, looking at the ceiling. "I don't know what to do. I've always had a healthy appetite, but this is different. ..."

"Once again you're changing the subject on me!" I said. "Well, Mother, I've told you for years to go on a diet."

"This is a different kind of fatness," my mother said. "This is the kind of weight gain due to something being alive inside my stomach."

"Did you see a doctor?"

"At my age I'm embarrassed to go to a doctor."

That's the kind of logic my mother always thought was acceptable. "Ma, what makes you think you're pregnant?" I said.

"A few months ago, visiting Andrea at her summer place in Maine, I had an affair with a young man. He was an instructor at Berkeley in the politics of television, and we had sexual intercourse twice, without using birth control. Neither time was very much fun."

"I thought, Ma, that you said you had been through the menopause."

"I never paid much attention to that sort of thing."

For a few minutes neither of us said anything, each occupied with our own thoughts. I supposed, if she went ahead and actually had this baby, that I would offer to take care of it and raise it as my own child. Would she have done the same for me? This was doubtful; besides, I would never let any child of mine fall into her hands. It wouldn't be so bad. My brother, my son. I would name the kid Achilles, it could talk to me while I painted.

And I might have opened my mouth to make my offer had not my mother opened her mouth to insult me once again.

"I can't go on worrying about you forever, Marley," she said.

"You're twenty-nine years old and haven't gotten any more mature since you were ten. I wonder if I should have given you more vitamins."

"Crazy old bat!" I said. "Old cow! Who asked you to worry about me? You're the one who screwed up your life and mine!"

My mother was like a little kid with a lot of toys, and I was just a toy she had forgotten about a long time ago. Once in a while she saw me up on the back of the shelf. When I was a kid, I waited for the times when she would dust me off. Then it was great, it made up for all the rest.

But I thought I had worked through all this. I hadn't meant to snarl at her; I really didn't want her bucks, nor did I need them. I didn't mind not eating, it was part of what I had chosen for myself. "Oh, that's not to say, Ma," I added guiltily, "that you didn't always make me feel capable of doing anything. I have to hand it to you for that. You had confidence in me— and look how I turned out, a genius of the first degree!"

This was a compliment of the highest order. But all my mother said, looking at the floor and not at my paintings, was, "You've always sounded so pompous to me, Marley. I wonder if other people feel the same way about you that I do? Or is it just because I'm your mother that you come across as pretentious. . . ."

Let's face it, my mother was in outer space. She made me mad. There was no use in my trying to talk to her. I got up and walked out, leaving my mother alone in the loft.

Well, I really just went up the street to buy some beer. I only wanted to get away from her for a couple of minutes. But when I got back with the Rheingold, she was gone. This made me feel even worse. Because the neighborhood was not exactly safe, and it was already past dark. All the Cuban fritter joints had closed up for the evening and there was nobody out on the street but a bunch of men standing around drinking. Which was okay for me, because though I'm a skinny guy, I've always been tough. But for my mother, wandering around pregnant with my brother . . .

I cracked open the quart of beer and there on the table my

mother had scribbled a little note. It was lucky I found it, the table was so covered with old paint rags, napkins, telephone numbers, and unopened bills. The note was short: "As long as you have confidence in yourself, Marley, I suppose that's what's important. I'm leaving you five dollars, buy yourself something to eat."

My mother had never outgrown a certain girlish style of writing, at least in her personal correspondence. And yet her monthly pet column, appearing in various women's magazines, which she churned out with regularity, was highly professional, though the subject matter was generally quite deranged. Articles on homosexuality in the household pet; hookworm; rabies, and other lurid topics.

I was so mad at myself I went over to the sink and smashed the three plates I hadn't yet broken. I'm a very volatile type of guy. Why had I spoken to my mother that way, calling her an old bat? Maybe it was the cold, my apartment was without heat. I have never done well in the cold, nor in the heat either, for that matter. The cold hadn't seemed to affect the cockroaches, however, they were more active than ever. I figured the least I could do would be to poison the roaches, a task I thoroughly enjoyed. In this way I supposed I would be pleasing my mother. I would use the money she had left me to go buy roach poison and some ice cream. If my mother thought I was looking skinny, she who had never before paid the slightest attention to my appearance, then I really must be looking frail. So I threw my coat on and went back out.