My Young Life

by Frederic Tuten

  It was still snowing when I finally got home. I set up the easel in the living room—my bedroom and now also my studio—and spread out the paint and the other equipment on a little piano bench I had found cast away on the street. I began to paint the snow falling outside my window. I used the zinc white mixed with a hint of black. I flecked the brushstrokes to give the impression of falling snow. I loved the feel of the brush as it swirled paint about, loved how the oil paint glistened in the light as it filled the canvas with color. I loved the sharp pine forest smell of the turpentine as I poured it in the little metal cup clipped to my palette: it was clear I was meant to be an artist.

  Everything was falling into place, and I was fast becoming a part of the world I had read about in novels like W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence about Paul Gauguin, who had left his wife and children to paint, and Lust for Life, about Van Gogh, my hero, who suffered rejection and loneliness and poverty to give his life to art. What a great, noble thing, to give your life to art.

  I painted the minute I got home after school, so glad no one was there to break into my concentration, to remind me that I was at home, living with my mother, and not where I dreamed one day of being in my studio in Paris. One day, in Paris, Marilyn would pass by and find me with my model-mistress-muse at my usual café, at my usual table, always reserved for me, and be very surprised to see me and be even more surprised to be invited to my studio, where she would learn from my inspired paintings hanging from and leaning along the walls what a great artist she could have been with and know, like a needle stabbing in her heart, that she had missed her great chance. “Come again, Marilyn,” I’d say, “and bring your friend Eugene along if you like.”

  Tight Pink Sweaters

  The Bronx, Pelham Parkway North, circa 1949

  A LOOK BACKWARD

  My high thoughts of art and fame were frequently accompanied by the burning of lust and the fantasy of sex. Not the sexual act, which was still unclear to my mind, but the idea of what a naked woman looked liked and, most important, what a woman’s bra concealed to make men and boys like me mad with desire. Sweater girls were the rage, and I dreamed of seeing what was beneath the sweater and the armor of the bra that gave women so much power. Breasts held great sway in the American male psyche. Archetypes of this kind of mammary power were the screen divinities Sophia Loren, Jayne Mansfield, and Jane Russell, for whom Howard Hughes had devised a bra to give her breasts a maximum lift and fullness in the film The Outlaw, which was banned by the Catholic Legion of Decency.

  The large-breasted were born lucky and their lives had many advantages; the unlucky ones who came to the world flat as a board stayed handicapped. Less pretty girls with large, full breasts were more desirable than beautiful, flat-chested girls. A girl’s “great personality” hardly made up the difference; no one searched for a woman’s great personality on a summer beach. Biology is fate, someone said, not realizing, perhaps, that fate meant being born to fill or not fill out a sweater. Along with the rest of the straight boys and young men of that time, I was breast-obsessed, sex-obsessed, obsessed.

  When I was thirteen and raging with desire and longing to know the mystery of women, I would concoct some reason to go into my mother’s room once she had retreated to bed and to the escape of her novels. “I forgot to say good night, Mom,” or I used some other lame excuse, hoping she would not understand that what I had wanted, had hoped for, wished for, yearned for, was to see her undressing to her underwear and bra—or, better yet, to see her naked breasts. I tried to be careful and to time my entrance to that moment, and once I was gloriously successful and found her taking off her bra, setting free her pear-shaped white breasts with small beige nipples.

  “Don’t come in again without knocking,” she said, a bit startled and a bit angry.

  I was frightened by her anger, and shamed that she may have understood why I had come into the room. She knew that I knew better than not to knock. But my fear and shame were worth it, because now I knew that a woman’s breasts were as beautiful as I had imagined, more beautiful than the photos of bare-breasted women of Bali that I had come upon in National Geographic magazine. And now I could also, with this new knowledge, suppose what hid behind the bras of older teenage girls in their tight pink sweaters. Teenage girls, for whom I was invisible and who could never dream that this skinny boy dreamed of them, and squirted quarts of hot passionate semen into his hand at night, in the afternoon, at any time of day when he was alone.

  Louie’s Luncheonette

  The Bronx, Christopher Columbus High School, 1951

  Marsha was not beautiful but had huge breasts—the largest of any girl in our high school—and she wore tight sweaters. The boys were crazy for her; some groaned and bit their hand, Italian-style, as she walked by. I was awed by her full lips, by her straight shoulders and her confident walk, head up high, unattainable. I was sure I was not the only boy in school who jerked off at night imagining her.

  Marsha was famous but she did not hang out at the cafeteria table with the cool ones; she sat alone, unapproachable, with an open book or with one of her three less attractive slaves, who by association shared her glory. Since she let no boy walk her home or carry her books, and since it was rumored that she went out with college men, she clearly was an “aloof bitch,” a “cockteaser,” a “cunt.” She was, for me, a goddess.

  I was walking home from school one April day and heard someone behind me say, “You’re the artist.”

  I turned. It was hard to look at her and not focus on her breasts.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Everyone knows that and thinks you’re a fairy.”

  “Well, I’m not,” I said.

  “Not an artist or not a fairy?”

  I was stymied. I had never known that girls talked so boldly or that anyone would think I was a homo.

  “I like girls,” I said.

  “Well, I never saw you look at me.”

  “I dream of you,” I said.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “I do,” I stuttered. “Really.”

  “Good-bye,” she said, walking off slowly. I wondered if she had meant for me to catch up or follow her, but I was baffled and stayed in place.

  A week later one of her slaves passed me a note in the cafeteria. It was written in faint blue ink and with almost invisibly thin lines. What kind of pen could do that?

  I will be at Louie’s tomorrow at 4 p.m. Marsha.

  At first I thought it was a prank. And after I sat around waiting long enough, one of the slaves would come over and say, “Waiting for someone?” I would be a fool to go and be humiliated. But supposing she showed up and I didn’t? How could I miss this chance?

  I got to Louie’s early to get a booth. It was empty anyway, the whole stretch of the soda fountain counter with no one there but ketchup bottles and sugar bowls and gleaming napkin dispensers.

  Louie, the luncheonette owner himself, came over. “Lime Rickey?” he asked.

  “Thanks. Later, maybe,” I said, feeling important that he had remembered my favorite drink from the time I was delivering for the butcher the previous summer.

  Marsha slid into the booth exactly at four by the fat clock over the door. She was wearing a powder-blue sweater with a soft-looking pink kerchief; she smelled of something wonderful not in nature; she pulled back her shoulders. Louie’s eyes popped in a cartoony way.

  “I got your message,” I said.

  “What message?”

  “The note you sent.”

  “Why would I send you a note?”

  “It wasn’t you?” I asked, sure now I had been tricked.

  She waited a long time before she said: “Of course it was me, who else?”

  “Oh!”

  “Don’t you know how to play?”

  “No,” I finally said.

  “Well, I guess I’ll go now,” she said, taking from her blue purse a giant pair of sunglasses. She put them on in slow motion.

&nbs
p; “Going already?”

  “Who do I look like in these sunglasses?”

  “Like a movie star.”

  “Sure, but which one?”

  “Betty Grable, I think.”

  “More like Ava Gardner, I think,” she said, rising from the table. “Good-bye.”

  Louie brought over a Lime Rickey. “That’s her story. Talks to a guy a few minutes and walks out.”

  “She’s an old friend,” I said. “She just came by to say hello.”

  “She has a lot of old friends.”

  I hated her. I didn’t go to the cafeteria the next day or the following week. I did not want to see Marsha and her slaves having their laugh over me. I got my lunch at an Italian deli close to the school, where I bought “loosies” for a penny a cigarette. The whole pack of twenty cost eighteen cents, but I liked buying one at a time. It made me feel rich. For two weeks I ate Sicilian salami with mustard sandwiches and drank a bottle of Coke. I sat on a stoop and smoked cigarettes for my dessert and wanted not to think about what had happened and not to think that I was an idiot and not to think of Marsha’s breasts under her powder-blue sweater. I also took another route home after class. It was longer, but I did not want to see her, to ever see her again.

  She found me in the mail. The postcard read: “I like you. Don’t avoid me anymore.”

  I tore it up. But I was happy. Now I no longer had to think of her as a person but as a game I need not play. I returned to the school cafeteria and sat in my usual spot by the window and read. Marsha smiled and waved. I smiled and waved.

  The bell rang, the last of the day and the last of the week. I would soon be home and back to my easel and to my beautiful world of paint and canvas and comforting dreams. In a moment, I was out the school’s heavy doors and among a throng of students rushing to freedom.

  “Don’t be that way,” she said on the school steps. She was holding her books under her breasts, thrusting them forward like an offering.

  I stepped away.

  “I was just teasing you.”

  I nodded.

  She was wearing a powder-pink sweater with a blue scarf and a tight black skirt, and I tried not to look at her for too long.

  I started down the steps.

  “Can’t a girl tease you?”

  “Good-bye,” I said, deliberately echoing her last words to me at Louie’s Luncheonette. I had saved it up and was dreaming, during my salami-with-mustard lunches, of a scene where I could use it.

  “You stole my line,” she said. “And now you owe me.”

  I walked. She walked beside me, leaving her three slaves behind.

  “You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to, but I want to—”

  “Apologize?” I said.

  “I want to make it up to you. I’m not a mean girl.”

  “Make it up to me? How?”

  “Whatever you like.”

  I felt myself blushing. “Oh!”

  “No, not that.”

  “What, then?”

  “What would you like?”

  “Will you model for me?” I heard myself ask.

  “You mean naked.”

  The idea of seeing her naked made me dizzy and blurred the line of trees along the Bronx Parkway.

  “Of course not.”

  “I know I have a bad rep, but I’m not that kind of girl. I write poetry.”

  “OK. Let’s forget the modeling,” I said, amazed by my boldness in ever having asked.

  We had walked to the street where we had last split off before I had gotten her note, before our rendezvous at the luncheonette, before I hated her.

  There was no good-bye this time. She walked away quickly and I did not look after her. I went straight home and reviewed my few canvas-board paintings. One was a study of a bowl of fruit beside a vase of roses that I had copied from an art book; another, the yellow ceramic lamp, two brown chairs, and the fold-up cot in my room, whose window looked on to nothing exciting. The idea for this one came from Van Gogh’s painting of his room with a wood-frame bed and straw-bottom chair, everything yellow, gold, orange, with a wall of light blue. Like Van Gogh’s, my picture was all swirls, with the paint plastered on thick—“impasto” was the word I had learned; “impasto,” like paste, like pasta.

  I saw that my still lives were a dead end: even Cézanne had not stopped at apples. My art needed an infusion of figures, of people, of vibrant human life. What would be the point of living with a model in my Paris studio if I could not draw or paint her and bring her warmth and my love for her onto the canvas—as Modigliani had with his mistress, Jeanne?

  I sat on my cot and tried to summon noble thoughts that would elevate my art. Long ago, it seemed, when we studied the Greek myths in my grade school Special Progress class, my teacher told us about Plato and his idea of ideal forms and how for everything on earth there was its immortal archetype: a kitchen chair had its perfect echo out there in the world of perfect forms. I wondered about Plato until the afternoon darkened and then I thought about Marsha and fled under the sheets and, with my eyes closed, caressed myself to a silent, creamy explosion.

  A Powder-Blue Sweater

  The Bronx, the Bronx Botanical Gardens, circa 1952

  Someone called me from the street and I went to the already open window. Marsha was standing there. She glowed in the sunlight.

  “I was walking my dog and I thought I’d say hello.”

  I almost hadn’t seen the dog; he was so small and white and ugly, with an upturned nose and busy teeth. Perfect, I thought, she has a dog, like her slaves, that gives her no competition.

  “That’s nice of you,” I said blandly, so commonplace for an artist who would one day live in Paris and exchange brilliant words with fellow artists and poets.

  “Do you want to walk with me?”

  “Will your dog bite?”

  “Only if I tell him to.”

  “Maybe another time, I’m painting now.”

  “Sure.” She walked away almost to the corner and turned. I ducked my head in.

  After a few minutes I heard her call out again. I waited before returning to the window. I made a preoccupied frown so she would know how deeply I had been into my work before her interruption.

  “Can I come up and see your paintings?”

  We lived on the ground floor, several feet from the sidewalk. Only a low hedge separated us; I could smell her jasmine perfume and feel the softness of her sweater—powder blue again. The blue held more power over me than her pink.

  “Not today.” I was ashamed of how the apartment looked: the broken-down furniture and the grime from the street coating the walls. Also, I was not sure enough of the quality of my paintings to have her judge and perhaps mock them later with her slaves.

  “Don’t play hard to get,” she said. Her dog quivered and tugged her away with the leash.

  “I’ll take a walk with you,” I said, pretending not to have heard her.

  We walked without speaking into the Botanical Gardens and went off the path up into a hill wild with trees and bushes. The dog sniffed the trees and planted a long stream against a baby elm.

  “You can kiss me if you like,” she said, securing the dog’s leash around a thicket.

  We kissed. I got dizzy in her perfume and dizzier when she raised my hand to her breast.

  “Haven’t you ever kissed a girl before?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “So why is your face so red?”

  On the way back home, and just before we reached my building, the dog, without a warning, growl, or bark, bit deep into my ankle.

  The Artist at Work

  The Bronx, Pelham Parkway North, 1951

  When I was ten, I first heard of the astonishing idea of sexual intercourse, where a man puts his thing into a woman’s thing and moves it about until she makes a baby.

  “You made that up,” I said to my friend Arthur, who, at eleven, already had a faint mustache, which he darkened with his m
other’s eyebrow pencil, and knew all sorts of strange facts.

  “Not only that,” Arthur said. “Sometimes a woman freezes up down there and your prick gets clamped inside her and you both have to go to the hospital stuck together on a stretcher.”

  When I was twelve, I felt the first stirrings of pubic hair. I was too embarrassed to ask my mother what that itchy fuzz was all about, but Arthur knew. “The hair comes first and then you start to get hard-ons.” Then he explained about the hard-ons, how they came over you when you saw a girl naked or even imagined one naked.

  One cold, late November morning, a week before my thirteenth birthday, I woke and found white gooey globs on my pajama bottoms and on the sheet. I knew something unusual had happened during the night when I felt a warm flow and surge in my body, but I had not wakened. I thought I was sick, and I was frightened. I washed my pajamas in the sink and sponged the top sheet as clean as I could and hoped my mother would not see the whitish ring that was left behind.

  “Hey, Fred, that’s great,” Arthur said, crushing my hand. “You had a wet dream. I get them all the time unless I jerk off twice a day.”

  It was only a year later that I learned what he had meant by this and understood its joy and the terrible longing for girls day and night, the fantasy of them that drove me under the sheets whose stains I had to sponge down before my mother woke and discovered my infamia. Sometimes I wondered if my mother, in the next room, had heard my moans as the white stuff spurted and slid into my hand. What would she think of me if she knew? I was already living in shame without her knowing.

  When I was fifteen, it was Marsha I fantasized about under the sheets, and sometimes she was more real and exciting in my dreams than when we met and kissed and fondled and left each other with bruised lips and indefinite longings.

  It was also Arthur who had guided me step by step through the rituals of teenage romance: