The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (21 page)

“You seem very young to be a mother,” Palmer said.

Mimi lighted another cigarette. “Last summer, in East Hampton, at a kind of get-together on Sunday afternoon, there were eight painters and fourteen kids in our shack. A madhouse. Everybody’s got kids now.”

“Ah, the 1950s!” Palmer exclaimed.

“I don’t specially want any more,” Mimi said. “People say you shouldn’t raise an only child, but who the hell knows, really? Tommy has a sister, and he hates her and she hates him.”

“She doesn’t hate me,” Frazier said. “She’s a phony I don’t particularly like, and she’s reacted to that by pretending not to like me.”

“Pretending!” Alice said.

“I’m just trying to be accurate,” Frazier insisted. He punched a sofa pillow and smiled at Alice. With the alcohol, a peacefulness had come over him. He sang a few bars to show Alice his style on the jazz trumpet, an instrument by means of which he had paid his college expenses. In a low voice, he reminisced about girls, his eyes wistful and wondering.

“Do you paint also?” Palmer asked Mimi.

“Well, I did, but I haven’t had time since the bimbo arrived,” she answered.

“Were you a good painter?” Palmer asked.

Mimi laughed. “Many people thought I was better than the great Frazier himself.” She looked at the clock on the mantel. “We gotta scoot. A cretin from one of the apartments below us is sitting with the baby.”

“The baby, yes,” Alice said — friendly, and yet accepting their departure.

At the door, Palmer, weakened by gin, Mimi, her child — by art and foolhardiness — said suddenly, “I’ll be in touch with you.”

Frazier slapped him on the shoulder. “I wouldn’t want you and Mrs. Palmer to wake up broke, but if you really like the picture, I’m ready to sell it.”

“Ready to sell it!” Mimi exclaimed. “Boy, I should think you were!”

“Not so fast, babe,” Frazier said. “Seeing it here in the pure light of Park Avenue, I sort of hate to part with it.”

“Plenty more where that came from,” Mimi said as they rang for the elevator.

Palmer had not meant by his “I’ll be in touch with you” to bring up the distasteful subject of the purchase of the painting. The words had been, really, a tender, drunken goodbye to Mimi. That evening, he and Alice decided that they would not buy the picture under any circumstances. “I wish he hadn’t left that damned thing here. It’s blackmail,” Alice said. “I hate to have to telephone him and tell him to come after it, like a piece of forgotten luggage, but we’re not an endowment....”

Frazier’s self-confidence had made Palmer thoughtful. Frazier had little work to his credit, and Palmer had a good deal. His pictures hung in a number of galleries and in the houses of a gratifying number of private collectors (a television announcer owned his Fire Island scene, a dress designer slept beneath the portrait of another moody young girl); he had been in the Whitney show; he had taught briefly at Iowa, and for one year at the Art Students League in New York; he had illustrated a book; he had been received into the Institute of Arts and Letters. He had a career. Alice could tell of his victories with such sureness that Palmer, listening, would be overcome with emotion, remembering all that lay behind him. But the sense of a real vocation, a genuine commitment, seemed every year to be growing weaker. His future was uncertain. Of course, there would be more paintings; a number of hours of work each year produced pictures — not many, perhaps, but some. Still, he acknowledged that he came more and more to find painting painful. How he hated those long afternoons in his studio! More and more, he fled them; he went for a walk, to the movies, to the galleries, to Brentano’s — anywhere.

One brilliant, sunny afternoon, about a week after the Fraziers’ visit, Palmer left his studio early. New York was glorious; he could walk down the open avenues and see all the wonder and possibility of the city as if he had just come from Virginia. He was sometimes gnawed by doubts and regrets, but he was also supported by solid assets: by Alice, by his friends, his charm, his freedom, his delight in a thousand pleasures. Feeling a superb access of energy, he went on past the midtown area, which was his usual destination, and made his way down to the Village.

The Fraziers had refused to leave his mind; they had stayed on, imposing themselves upon his consciousness and his conscience like the troubling memory of a drunken evening. He felt he had not managed to get into the proper relationship with this young couple, sent to him by his oldest and dearest friend; he had failed. Even though the idea of his buying the picture was absurd, he believed that he should have been able to make a gesture of friendship, of approval, of interest.

Palmer was always attracted by the wives of his fellow-painters. Of this he was only partly conscious; when the attraction came upon him, he took a humorous attitude toward it, smiling tolerantly at his own habit. He would find such-and-such a wife interesting, another touching, another unusual in some fashion, another fantastic. This uncontrollable pull had led him into gallant behavior toward some very dull women. He did not lay siege to the wives, did not undertake seductions, or even make dates — at least, not often. Loyalty and good taste disciplined, in most cases, his ardent feelings about these particular women. In twenty years, he had had affairs with three painters’ wives, but he had been gallant and charming and attentive to three dozen. Sometimes Alice would say, “How could a brilliant artist like Alex marry such a homely little pill as Janet?” and Palmer, taken aback, would say, with great curiosity, “Did you find her homely? Odd, I hadn’t noticed that.” These wives had the imprimatur of a royal academy upon them; he accepted them as an old masterpiece is accepted by a tourist. And women liked Palmer very much — all kinds of women. They recognized his nearly infinite appreciation of them. He fell into situations with an almost innocent naturalness.

The Fraziers lived on Hudson Street, where a dingy, unkempt, transient quality still clung to the neglected alleys. Elsewhere, opulent, long-lease new apartment houses, redone blocks, private brownstones with brightly painted doors were devouring the squalid, youthful Village of Palmer’s early days in New York. He had time to mourn this as he adjusted his tie, waited for the buzzer to release the lock on the street door of the Fraziers’ house, and climbed five flights of dusty steps that led up to dark halls where only a yellow low-watt bulb hung in a corner at each landing. Upstairs, in a loft, he found Mimi Frazier. As Palmer had deserted his easel to walk downtown, so Frazier had abandoned his own art to walk uptown.

Mimi was wearing black slacks and one of Frazier’s shirts. “Oh — you, huh?” she exclaimed when she admitted Palmer.

“I want to write Buck Sampson in a day or so, and I thought I’d look over Frazier’s work more thoroughly, so that I’d be able to tell him more,” Palmer said.

Without another word, Mimi disappeared, and came back wearing a white sweater instead of the shirt. In her arms she carried a smudgy little boy, nearly a year old, who had, Palmer thought, the pure, aggressive stare of his father. Palmer winced before the glance of this chubby, muscular baby. “He wouldn’t like God Almighty at this moment,” Mimi explained. “It’s time for his nap.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Palmer said.

“
You’re
glad!” Mimi said, sighing. She disappeared without comment once more, leaving Palmer to think of her sandaled feet, her flat hips in the black pants, her pert nose. In the next room, her breezy voice commanded the baby, “Cut the comedy and get to sleep. Mummy is entertaining her boyfriend.” When she returned, she had smoothed her streaked hair and put the copper loops through her ears. “Kids are murder,” she said. “They don’t give you a minute, honestly.”

Palmer received these announcements with a polite, remote smile. He had no wish to encourage conversation about the baby; the topic dismayed him.

Mimi hesitated, chewed a fingernail, and coughed nervously, while Palmer stood awkwardly leaning on the mantel above a walled-up fireplace. “Want some Nescafé?” she asked.

“Oh, not particularly,” Palmer answered. A wet diaper lay at his feet; an uncomfortable sensation of absurdity nagged at his heart. He would have liked a drink, even though he usually preferred not to drink in the early afternoon. The studio was alive with the clear, full light of the brilliant day. Dust was visible on the windowsill. The baby’s fingerprints were smeared on the windows, above a tray of dried-up plants set over pebbles but not recently watered. Yet there was nothing dispiriting about the apartment; it was, indeed, gay and lively. Frazier’s rawhide shoes stood in a corner, his corduroy coat hung over a chair. Palmer felt he had been indiscreet to make the call.

“I’d love
something
,” Mimi said, smiling, “but I’m afraid I don’t know what I can offer if you don’t want coffee.” Then, mischievously, she added, with such relaxation that Palmer immediately felt that his scruples had been pointless, “You’re terribly handsome, you know, and I think I’ll just sit and look at you.”

“God!” he said.

“Oh, it’s just art-school talk,” Mimi said blandly. “You know, we’re just surgeons, really, when it comes to the human form. Isn’t that the pitch?” She laughed, and gave Palmer an appraising look that he could not interpret. Both she and her husband were opposed to “stuffiness,” even if they did not admire sincerity. Frazier would have fought a duel rather than put on a dinner jacket. In Mimi’s thin face Palmer now saw, for the first time, something tartish, anarchic, and careless. She was like an acrobat, in her tight black pants, with her flat stomach, her flat chest, and the thin, long, beautiful stalk of her neck. She was small, but she gave the impression of having strength and endurance — an impression backed up by her anarchic grin, her disregarding laugh.

“Did you really come to see lover-man’s paintings?” she demanded suddenly.

“Well — ”

“You mean you came to see me?” Mimi said, shrugging.

“No, I came to see the paintings. But I feel I can find the strength to forgo them and talk to you instead. I expected your husband to be slaving away at his easel.”

“All you painters do is fool around, when any other man would be trying to make a buck or two,” she said. Nevertheless, she brought out three large canvases and propped them up on a side drawing table. A judicial expression came over her face, which then sank into a brooding look. The canvases were a trilogy, she said, without any particular emphasis. One was painted in the brown, orange, and yellow hues of autumn, and the second in blue, green, and a flowery mixture. The third was an icy winter scene, with lines like iron grillwork high up in the cold air. “I detect subject matter when these works are seen side by side,” Palmer said lightly.

“Well, there you are, now,” Mimi said. “It gives Tommy a bang to have it both ways, so to speak....You put in the damned content everyone is always yapping about and then the squares don’t even see it.” Palmer did not know which offended his feelings more — the ugly “bang” or the demure “so to speak.”

“They are quite impressive,” he said, finally.

“I can’t see them any more,” Mimi said. “A lot of people think they’re just great.”

The Fraziers’ apartment was as cluttered as the Palmers’ was bare. Here, on every surface and wall, objects stood and hung — African masks, straw baskets, old bottles, shells, clocks, a decoy duck, toy soldiers, piles of
Art News
, a turkey feather, a peacock’s tail. A Mexican rug was thrown over a worn hole in the sofa; a Victorian rosewood settee nearly blocked the doorway. Discomfort and coziness crowded together. “Easy maintenance, low down payment,” Mimi said when she saw Palmer’s eyes going about the studio. “Did you come to see the pictures or to see me?”

“Young ladies are not supposed to ask such questions,” Palmer said, smiling, and added, “You leave me nothing but these worn, feeble retorts.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you had come to see me, you know. Honestly I wouldn’t. I’d like the idea of an older admirer, not just the usual jerks.”

“Older admirer. Ugh!” Palmer said.

“Not real old, just older,” Mimi said. “I’m not dying to be chased by Albert Schweitzer, or someone like that.”

Palmer winced. The baby cried out in the next room. “Sh-h-h! Maybe he’ll go back to sleep,” Mimi said.

“And maybe he won’t,” Palmer said, once more looking over the canvases Mimi had set on the drawing table.

“I’ll get him up and put him in the carriage, and the three of us could go out for a walk,” Mimi suggested.

“Grotesque idea,” Palmer said, pretending great interest in the paintings before him.

“How do you like ’em?”

“Very interesting,” he answered dryly.

The baby yelled insistently, and Palmer soon said goodbye. He went down the dusty stairs, and started to leave the neighborhood as fast as possible. Just a block or so from the door, fortune deserted him and he saw Frazier coming toward him. Frazier was wearing a leather jacket, his hair was uncombed, and there was an expression of concentrated self-pity on his face. When the two men met, it seemed to Palmer that Frazier’s booming, bullish happiness had given way to disillusion. He did not call out Palmer’s name, or in any way appear surprised to see him. Instead, he began a lament. “If I could only do people, portraits, heads, or scenes — the ocean, and all that bull! Anybody who can has his material cut out for him. You can just crawl out of bed and start at it. One more girl, one more clown, one more damned distant mountain, one more tenement scene! But when you’re handling
ideas
, like I am, the thing is tough!”

Frazier’s heavy eyes besought Palmer, and then he shook his head mournfully. Palmer hoped that perhaps Frazier had confused him with some person of the neighborhood — that the memory of their meeting had been blurred by martinis and the passage of a week’s time. He did not reply to the analysis of Frazier’s difficulty, but sheepishly said a vague “So long.” He had taken a few steps when he heard Frazier whistle and call out. “Hey! You’re pretty cautious, aren’t you? Did you come all the way down here rather than mail the check?”

“What check, for God’s sake?” Palmer asked.