by Tito Perdue
“Still trying?” Philip courteously inquired. “To turn excrement into gold?” He smiled.
“He works too hard.”
“Fine man, your husband. Could I have my magazine, too?”
She passed it over, a copy of the monthly findings of an eminent observatory in northernmost Chile. He had received a number of advertisements as well, which however he allowed the woman to keep.
As it happened, he fell asleep almost at once, never coming awake until the sun had fallen behind the Nathan Forrest Monument at the western edge of the island. But even then he could perceive bits and pieces of the sunrays as they worked their ways into, and out the other side of, the prodigious structure. He had finished the two inches of Amaretto that he allowed himself each day, as also two chocolate-covered cherries that sorted ideally with that beverage. But was that enough to supply the energy he might need over the next twenty-four hours? No. However, he did still have the remains of a mincemeat pie which together with a block of Hungarian cheese ought to see him through the night.
The man was five feet and ten inches tall, and in possession of a physique that called no exceptional attention to itself. Save for his Grecian face, he might have enjoyed a routine life and been let alone to do his thinking and reading, his music and philosophy, his correspondence with Tomislav Sunic and one or two others. Bending nearer to the mirror, he recognized that he was slightly less attractive than just yesterday, a fractional decline that no doubt would come to a conclusion in about ten years’ time, leaving him looking like an ordinary person.
His daily newspaper was at hand, a forward-looking publication stewing with hatred for white people, males in particular. He must leave town, Philip, and soon, provided even ten per-cent of the candidates endorsed by the paper actually came to power.
With no real chance of rain, he repaired to his sofa and picked up where he had left off with Guénon’s best known book. The music for tonight was Palestrina’s, and very soon he could feel himself again slipping back into that spiritual modality that proved how life on earth was but an error and a punishment, something he must endure until such time as he were remanded to the stars.
Four
The day came up bright and cloudless, no chance of rain.
Climbing into his gray suit, his blue tie, and two cufflinks bearing a Byzantine motif, he was halfway to his workplace when he recollected what day — Saturday — this was. He continued on nevertheless, arriving soon after at his favorite stationers, where he invested in a drawing pad and a metal etui holding five brushes, two drawing pencils, and eight pastel inks.
He continued forward, traveling far beyond his wonted boundaries, and by 9:52 had arrived at the slums centered upon Henry Street. To be sure, he was the only well-dressed man in view, a minatory condition inciting him to put on his most cynical and most reckless expression, as if he imagined he could protect himself with such measures. The area was full of vacant buildings and streams of tired-looking people who paid little attention to him. Accordingly, he entered the first reasonable-looking cafeteria and, for want of an easel, set up his pad in a vacant chair. Suddenly he stopped, aware that at least two persons were watching from a nearby table. He smiled.
“Hey! What you got over there white boy? Want to do my picture?”
He began to pack his materials, but was hindered by the larger of the negroes who had come and was standing over him.
“Got him a goddamn little box, too. See it?”
“I seen it.”
“Got him that tie, too. Shit, I ain’t never see a tie like that in my whole fucking life!”
They broke into laughter, all the dozen or so personalities scattered among the tables. He saw a large man with the tattoo of an immense penis extending the length of his arm. As to the women, and there were several of them, they were a slovenly people in lipstick, fat women sitting as on a toilet with their knees far apart. For a long time now he had been living in an egalitarian society, which is to say living in a block of ice. It caused him to think back on his Confederate ancestors, and to blame them for not having fought even more brilliantly than they had.
At some point between 10:15 and 10:37 he managed to break out of the black district and into an ethnic neighborhood he couldn’t immediately classify. Stark and silent, with sepulchral faces, these people referenced him to the statuary on Easter Island. Some, he divined, were armed, and some, members of the same organization, he had to assume, had formed their hair into two thick braids that ran down into their sleeves. He listened keenly, Philip, for their conversation, but despite his linguistic training could decode no word of it. A thousand miles from Alabama, he began to have that queasy feeling that seemed to adhere to this city.
He tried two restaurants before coming to one that seemed likely to tolerate people dressed in suits. He ordered coffee and, although he didn’t need it, a platter of breakfast-class fodder that ought to buy him a hour or more in these good surroundings. Already he had focused on a pleasant-looking woman in the next booth, but after wasting a few minutes on her, folded up the drawing and slipped in into his breast pocket. Pleasant she was, yes, but devoid of anything that might retain a husband’s interest, or even just a transiting boyfriend’s. Philip’s next subject, a withered adult man of sixty years or more, was continually moving in and out of usable view.
The coffee was good, as also the wee little sausages no larger than the linguist’s smallest finger. He needed light for his art, but wanted dark for his mood. He studied a youth wearing an arrogant sneer, and then a defeated-looking waiter shuffling among the tables. This one had given up on life, apparently, and offered Philip an almost perfect model. And then, too, the wretch possessed a nose that greatly resembled one of Philip’s erstwhile sausages.
He sketched the man’s head only, placing it against a starry sky of moons and albatrosses. The subject’s lips were thin, thinner than a hen’s, while his eyes looked as if they had been created by the business end of a cigarette held to a sheet of paper. He drew hurriedly, Philip, lest the fellow come and see what he was doing. Contemptuous of everyone and everything, nevertheless on certain days Philip had to admit that he still had large reserves of pity for nearly all living things. And this: that he knew himself to be just as loathsome as anyone in a city that was notorious for the same.
His next model was the bartender himself, a man both suspicious and suspicious-looking, which is to say that he suspected others and was suspected himself. An atrabilious man, he wore an apron and a blue-green visor that cast an unwholesome hue over his face. Unhappily, the man’s profile varied widely from one perspective to the next, making it quite impossible to paint his authentic nature. Resorting instead to the couple at the next table, Philip sketched the two people conversing quietly about some great problem that seemed to be bearing down on them. Not that he wanted to become sentimental about people. Perhaps they were planning a heist.
It is true that he was usually able to identify a person’s leading quality from his face alone. Continuing down Jeff Davis Street, his pad and paints under one arm and nothing at all under the other, he kept a sharp lookout for greedy people, or those with thoughts of lust, or incipient murderers, based upon the expressions these people unselfconsciously exposed. He saw a man undergoing a divorce, and then a student who had chosen finance for his field of study. Saw a type who looked so much like Leland Pefley that Philip turned suddenly and went the other way.
Noon came and went and he had produced nothing of value. Nor had he ever done so, or not in the field of art certainly. Truth was, his facilities lay primarily in the verbal sciences, in language and thought, not to mention philosophy, philology, physical bibliography and, he liked to claim, Germanic lexicography especially. It was while he was in this mind that he emerged finally from what had probably been a Turanian slum, only then to fall right away into a Slavic neighborhood where all the signs, or most anyway, were in that script that had so fascinated Philip from the beginning. With an al
phabet like that, he had been highly disappointed when first he had actually heard the spoken sounds. A silent people, pale, more dangerous than negroes, he made a detour around those places where they had gathered in outdoor cafes. Drawing off to the far side of the scene, he then sketched the face of a small white girl staring back at him with unalloyed hatred. And if sometimes he might give away his drawings to his models, he declined to do so at this time.
He drew a man with his mouth full of food and then, disgusted beyond endurance with human beings, exited the place and paced forward for something like seventy yards, until his watch showed that it was two o’clock exactly. Disgusted likewise with the noise of traffic, the stench of this district, the faces, he dodged into a rundown department store attended by two or three wasted-looking women of the elderly sort, poorly paid people, he felt sure, who had come to this, that their husbands were dead and their children had flown away. He especially liked the big one, who called to mind the farm wives of his native Alabama. Seeing her, he at once rerouted himself and drew up to within a distance whence he could offer her an appealing smile that seemed rather to astound her than anything else. His instinct, on this his compassionate day, was to buy her a bus ticket and send her home again; instead he again altered course and aimed for the clothing department where few customers could be seen.
He was affected by the shoes and ties, low-cost items imported — no one knew more about imports than he — from one of the more hellish countries of southeast Asia. These three old women, did they rely on commissions? Working with care, he sketched a pair of shoes made of patent leather, but gave it up when he proved unable to represent the gloss possessed by those objects. He saw a dress that was forty years out of style, and then a woman’s hat of such outstanding strangeness that he felt justified in repositioning the bust to a more convenient site for his purposes. The thing had a veil, almost impossible to draw. Just then a customer walked by, giving Philip a brief opportunity to sketch her face.
He wandered to the end of the aisle, arriving there at 2:27. The toy department was full of things, including a rubber dinosaur dangling from the ceiling by a thread. Philip sketched the creature in haste and then filled it in with yellow ink. Suddenly he turned and gave yet another smile to the largest of the women, who, however, wanted nothing to do with it.
In his absence the sky had darkened somewhat, bringing forth dun-colored clouds that might, but probably did not, contain the ingredients of rain. In any case, he didn’t care so much for rain when he was far from home. Meantime up ahead he could see the outskirts of the same negro neighborhood that he had explored already. An ambulance raced past, the two drivers grinning madly. Two steps away, a dog was defecating on the sidewalk while overhead an airplane was releasing a species of confetti that washed away on the wind. He could see a person framed in the fifth-storey window of an apartment house. He came to a sidewalk vendor offering little plastic homunculi walking hurriedly in all directions. Charmed by the stupidity of the scene, Philip had begun to draft a portrait of the fellow, which is to say until he was warned away with hard glances.
It is true that a benefactor of great wealth had financed an art museum in these surroundings. With his pad and pencil and a sandwich in wax paper (left over from the restaurant), Philip climbed the marble steps and entered a darkened and somewhat sanctified area very like a church. He nodded to the guard, a stern man, very tall, who looked down upon him with an unfavorable expression. There was a water fountain, but Philip didn’t like the looks of the people using it. He almost made the mistake of sitting on a bench, before recognizing just in time that in fact it was a sculpture with a ferocious-looking guard all of its own. Smiling, he strode past the exhibition of a stick canted against the wall, an aluminum ball, and finally a concrete block with a hole in it.
The paintings, some of them famous, were protected by laser beams. He paused in front of an important picture of a line and two spots, and then moved on to an arrangement of frames without canvases, a boundary-breaking representation of the plight of “the other” in post-industrial America. He was tempted (not really) to contribute some of his own art to these displays. That was when he observed an art student — he knew art students when he saw them — an art student watching him with unnecessary attention. Philip turned away. The last he wanted was to be asked to pose for the bitch. On the other hand, he wouldn’t mind causing the girl to fall in love with him — nothing could be easier — and in that way set up a situation in which he could abandon her even as she was getting undressed, a far greater pleasure than sex.
Not worth the effort! Instead he proceeded to the concession stand where a Chinese in a baseball cap was selling reproductions of some of the more in-demand art works. There was a lot of demand for van Gogh by people who would have gone a mile out of their ways to avoid the man in real life. They loved the work, however, having very frequently been told how good it was.
By 3:09 he had found a water fountain that he was willing to try. He passed through a crowd of advanced people in pigtails and odd-looking glasses and then reentered the outside world with its pedestrians and ambulances and some of the same cauliflower clouds he had seen last week. He reminded himself that money was more quickly got in this place than in Alabama, a recognition that alone could explain why he was here.
“What, you plan on going back down there and buying yourself a plantation?” one of his colleagues had asked him.
“Yes! 5,000 acres of bottom land, a good library, and about 200 negroes,” he should have replied.
He had traveled a good quarter of a mile or more when his watch showed it was 4:02. He passed a man with a horrible disease, and then two homosexual queers holding hands. Moving around them in his discreet fashion, he continued on to an outlet for plumbing supplies, and after evaluating the artistic potential of the items on display (pipes and bathroom sinks), entered the place and “set up his easel,” so to speak, in the most unobtrusive available place.
He had not been wrong about the aesthetics of tools and manufactured products, or the character of the man who presided over this disorganized place. Philip made three hasty sketches that exposed the underlying character of the store’s proprietor, who stood glaring back at him. He had a wart on his nose and his glasses had been formulated to make one eye five times larger than it was. He knew, of course, Philip, that the man would inevitably come over to him and either expel him from the place, or else open a conversation that Philip would have preferred to evade.
“You get paid for that?”
“What? No, no, it’s just for fun.” Philip laughed pleasantly in the way that made him so attractive to people.
“Fun? Let me see what you got here.”
He came around, took up a position, and stared for a long time at Philip’s work.
“I can see why you don’t get paid. Maybe I should ought to charge you rent for loitering here all day.”
“All day? Fact is, I’ve been here just exactly…” He examined his watch. “… seventeen minutes.”
“More like eighteen. What, you some kind of movie actor or something? You look like one.”
“No, no. I was just born this way.”
“Born, he says. Want to swap with me? Faces? Hell, I’ll even throw in a new kitchen sink.”
Both men laughed. Philip however laughed the most. He was not a bad sort, this particular New Yorker, and Philip was able to make a quick rendition of the back of his head as he walked away.
He toiled till 4:52, the linguist, and then offered his drawing to the man who courteously refused it.
“Burn it! Anyway, I don’t look like that.”
But in fact he did. In any case the day and the traffic and the odors had ameliorated perceptibly over the past three-quarters of an hour, and Philip was able to make better progress among and between the humans marching back and forth. He smiled at a little girl who was much too young to be paying such attention to his appearance. Pregnant by the age of fi
fteen, he anticipated no very great future for such as her. He spotted what appeared to be a courier with a briefcase connected to his wrist, but after following for half a block, he lost most of his interest in these people and came back to his original position. The city had no dearth of corrupt people viewing one another suspiciously through narrowed lids, though Philip hadn’t time nor life enough to portray them all.
How long, O Lord, before the effects of democracy will have benefited human nature? Already it was past four in the afternoon, a perilous moment owing to the office thralls scattering to the subways. In his eyes, the city had become a freeze of people frozen in mid-step, their expressions showing that only just now had they come to realize how useless their lives had been. It was still another two hours before his favorite part of day, which is to say that crepuscular moment when the entire world goes completely silent for a few seconds. The “gloaming,” he called it, a word stolen by him from an old gospel song. “Twilight,” a word almost as beautiful, he also sometimes called it.
But instead of waiting for that time, he turned and jumped into the nearest shop, an “antique” store, improperly so-called. In fact the building couldn’t have been more than ten years old. Here the clerk was a well-groomed individual, very thin, who looked like an European of some kind. Philip smiled at him (getting nothing in return), and then gravitated to a piece of polished furniture with half a dozen drawers in it. How painful it was, not to be allowed to go exploring into those recesses that might contain all sorts of revelations about the one-time owners of the thing. Next he gazed into a very old-fashioned beveled mirror of about the size of a television screen, disturbed to find that it had congealed over with the image of an elderly man brushing his teeth.
The place offered all sorts of personal items, including a bejeweled snuffbox with an inlay on the lid of Queen Victoria in a four-horse carriage. He found a kit of shaving equipment, a saxophone remodeled into an outsized smoking pipe, a manikin in a blue tuxedo, silk flowers, and a faded photograph in a lavish frame of an exuberant couple grinning back at him from out of the nineteenth century. This last-named object he lifted from its place and studied for an extended period. Cursed as he was with the gift of reading faces, he recognized love when he saw it, love, loyalty, farm and home, and two good lives that had proved all too short. For a second he actually thought of buying the thing and setting it up in some propitious place in his apartment.
