Scumbler

by William Wharton

  Two weeks after he bought my paintings, I went with Bert to Les Amis des Artistes, an art store in Montparnasse, to select frames. Bert doesn’t spare anything; buys the best frames they have. We have one painting with us to get an idea of what’d look good. After he decides, he orders thirty-six frames.

  Old Monsieur Deslanges’s smile almost slips through the floor. He keeps repeating “trente-six” and multiplying the sum out to see if Bert really knows what he’s getting into. I know how he feels.

  I manage to hustle a fifteen-percent reduction for volume and a promise of delivery in ten days. Bert wants me to pocket the fifteen percent, but I need to draw the line somewhere. Now I’m wishing I hadn’t drawn the line so close. Da dum.

  A week later, I come in with Jan, who orders another seven frames of the same kind. Poor old Monsieur Deslanges thinks I’m the biggest man in the Paris painting world.

  A PANG OF REGRET FOR THE PAIN IN

  GETTING. WAITING IS BETTER.

  We see a lot of Bert and Jan after that. They are the nicest damned rich people I’ve ever known, not just because they bought my paintings either. We have great times together and, on top of that, they take us to restaurants we’ve only heard about. And let me say here, you can really pay through the nose for vittles in this town. Some of it’s good, some not so good.

  Generally, the fancy big-name places don’t serve enough food. They pass out what looks like children’s platters. I couldn’t figure it at first, not till I looked around.

  Most people who can afford to eat in those high-class eateries are old. They’ve got old stomachs, worn-out teeth, dried-up bowels, holes in their intestines, flaky livers. They can’t eat a real meal anymore. They eat this super food in tiny portions. It reminds me to eat everything before my own insides start slipping out from under me.

  Kate and I’d come home at night from restaurants where the bill’d been three hundred dollars for four and raid the fridge; we’re still hungry.

  QUANTITY OVERCOMES QUALITY

  YES, INDEED, BUT MY PANTRY

  SEEMS EMPTY, NOT EVEN A BONE.

  When Bert has his paintings framed, he hangs and stacks them all around their apartment. He has them four high along the walls and down the halls. It looks like our place; I feel at home there, could move right in. I show Bert how terrific paintings look through binoculars. They fill the whole field of vision. You’re looking at them up close and there’s nothing else. I always bring binoculars to museums; get truly close and alone with paintings. They become the real world; everything else is cut out. People walking by think you’re super-nearsighted.

  We sit around a lot in their living room passing the binoculars back and forth. It’s almost like looking at somebody else’s paintings. I’m even more in love with them. If I had the money, I’d buy them back. Fat chance. Nicest people in the world to have them, Bert and Jan, almost: we’re the nicest.

  Bert’s still pissed about the New York buyer who got the seven paintings. I have them stored at my place in our bedroom, along with the frames Jan bought. I’ve stacked them in my clothes closet, hanging my own things in Kate’s closet; no place for my shoes. There’s something hurts about having the paintings go all at once; almost as bad as a fire. I don’t imagine there’s any way to satisfy me.

  Bert keeps playing the old game.

  “Look at this one, Jan, the one of the shoemaker. How the hell could that stupid bastard’ve let a painting of that quality get away?”

  He goes on like that: great for my ego; tough on Jan. Once in a while she strikes back.

  “But, Bert, he did get the one with Saint-Sulpice in the background and the lady carrying laundry.”

  Bert mumbles under the binoculars.

  “Bastard!”

  FUN QUIBBLES, LITTLE GAMES TO

  KEEP THE BLAME FROM LIFE.

  We decide to have a surprise birthday party for Bert at our place. Jan plans it all. She’s going to make Bert dress up and she’s going to put on her best finery. She’ll have him take her to Maxim’s, then say she doesn’t want to go there; then the Grand Vefour, same thing. Finally, the plan is she’ll lead him to our place, our little hole high on a wall in the Bastille furniture district.

  A NEST IN A NICHE

  I’M A SON OF A BITCH!

  Kate and Jan shop for two days. Our kitchen begins to look like Fouquet’s. Nothing but the best will do. They buy a luscious venison tenderloin roast; fresh string beans from Africa; Pommard wines, at fifty dollars a bottle, and a cordon bleu cru for champagne. To finish off, she’s having a favorite of Bert’s shipped from Maxim’s, no less than a soufflé Grand Marnier. This will arrive at ten o’clock.

  That night, Bert comes in all shook up.

  “Something’s gotten into Jan, damn it! She usually makes up her mind like a knife, but tonight she’s dragged me all over Paris and it’s my birthday. My feet hurt and I’m hungry.”

  I lure him into our back bedroom to show him a new clock I’ve just bought out at the Clignancourt flea market. Kate and Jan are running around madly setting up the party. Jan’s been cooking all day. The paintings are ready to be brought out and put on the walls. Everything’s hot and steaming in the kitchen. We’ve farmed out our kids with good friends on the same block, other Americans. In the back room, Bert’s getting bored; wall clocks aren’t his thing. I get the signal from Jan just in time.

  We start back to the living room. Candles are burning. We all begin singing “Happy Birthday.” I think we really surprise him but you’d never know with a psychiatrist. When he sees the paintings on the walls, his mouth drops open. Jan has a little blue ribbon pinned to each one.

  “Jan, how the hell did you do it?”

  He turns to me.

  “And why the fuck did you give her the name when you wouldn’t tell me?”

  We all laugh. I walk over to Jan.

  “Bert, I’d like you to meet my New York buyer.”

  “You smart bitch.”

  He grabs her, lifts her off the floor and kisses her while swinging her feet out.

  “I’ll be damned!”

  He walks around looking at the paintings. He starts laughing.

  “Jesus, Jan, when I think of all the things I’ve been saying about that ‘New York buyer.’ I must say, he made some good choices.”

  He stares at the paintings. Bert seems to drink paintings. It’s a nice thing to see, especially when they’re your paintings.”

  “You’re still a damned fool, though. You should’ve bought the whole series when you had first shot like that.”

  The meal is terrific, far better than any bought meal we had together. We’re all half crocked from wine when the soufflé arrives in a Maxim’s truck.

  Our concierge can’t believe it. These guys arrive in tuxedos with a little silver table. This is after Bert and Jan have already arrived, dressed to kill, in a taxi. A taxi’s a rare event on our street. The Maxim’s boys are just as astounded by our world, too; but they light the soufflé and serve. We drink champagne and are all beautiful by candlelight. We try offering some champagne and soufflé to the Maxim’s contingent but no go: form and all that, I guess. Jan must’ve paid a fortune to get these sleek cats here to our little passage on a passage in a slum.

  NOT TO BE PASSED, THE

  LAST BASTION OF SNOBBERY.

  When the caterers have left, we get talking about the secrets of being rich. I need to get myself ready: big seller of paintings. Most rich people I’ve known have been miserable. I want to find out what Jan and Bert do to beat the game.

  Jan says the first thing is to remember you can only eat three meals a day and sleep in one bed at a time. That’s a big part of life taken care of. If you try getting around that one, you’re in trouble. Bert says health and freedom to arrange your own life are ten times more important than money. They both agree that privacy, anonymity, is the hardest thing to hold on to when you’re rich.

  They make a big point about being careful of what you buy.
You can physically, mentally invest yourself in only just so much crap. Legal possession is nothing. Jan grew up in an enormous house where the servants truly owned the place. They knew it, loved it, took care of it. Her parents were kept people, always like visitors. They traveled all over the world, running away from their own accumulations.

  Jan says when you start having people living with you to take care of the people who take care of you, you’ve gone over the line; you’re managing a hotel. If you run a house with fifteen bathrooms, you’ll have at least one toilet or sink or bathtub on the blink all the time. Then you need a plumber in the house. If you’re going to have a chauffeur, gardener, houseman, valet, a couple of maids and a cook, then you’re going to need fifteen bathrooms and therefore a plumber. It’s a matter of diminishing returns. The cook is cooking your food and serving it to twenty people, only five of whom are your own family. And they all hate you for having money in the first place. No fun living around people who hate you.

  WE ARE PARTLY WHAT WE HAVE.

  WE HAVE WHAT WE ARE. INVEST

  IN THE OUTSIDE AND BECOME EMPTY.

  The party breaks up at about three. When they’re getting into the taxi, Jan discovers she’s lost an earring. Bert asks the cab to wait. We start searching through our courtyard and up the stairs. Bert takes Jan by the arm.

  “Now, look, Jan, if we find this, will you promise to get your ears pierced? I guarantee a total anesthetic.”

  “OK, Bert. OK, I promise.”

  It turns out Bert designed these earrings and had them made for Jan as a twentieth-anniversary gift.

  We search for more than ten minutes; find it slid down in the back of our couch. We dash for the taxi. On the way down, Bert reminds Jan she promised to have her ears pierced. She’s backing off now. Bert turns to me and says in a low voice, “Those damned things cost forty thousand dollars and this has to be the tenth time she’s almost lost one of them.”

  What a numbing idea, a twenty-thousand-dollar earring caught inside the fifteen-franc couch I got at the flea market. It’s all crazy. Christ, forty thousand dollars jangling on your ears.

  That’s what I’d call a piercing thought.

  XX

  MIRACLE OF THE BELLS

  Another-thing-I-do-in-Paris-besides-rats’-nest and paint is collect clocks. The French were crazy for clocks back in the nineteenth century. A home then wasn’t really alive unless there was a big clock somewhere, ticking away seconds, minutes; ringing away hours. Now everybody’s switched to digital wristwatches and digital clock radios: easy time, fast time.

  I’m a nineteenth-century Frenchman that way; I like to have a clock running in our home. I especially like what the French call a “Westminster.” These clocks ring on the quarter hour: bong, bong, bong, bong. They add four bongs each quarter hour, different order, different tune, till at the hour there’s a regular symphony. I like to hear this in the middle of the night. All’s well, nest safe; I’m listening to everyone breathing.

  I keep a low amber light burning twenty-four hours a day in the middle of our home: vigil light. I like to think of our home as alive at night, only sleeping; heat down, heart beating, vigil light burning away the darkness.

  A SMALL PULSATION, INVISIBLE,

  SIXTY TIMES A SECOND, A PROOF OF LIGHT,

  OF A SUN TO RISE AGAIN.

  I’ve been keeping my clocks in a loft I rent up on Vaugirard, near Métro Convention, almost out to the Porte de Versailles. Vaugirard is the longest street in Paris. It’s one way the wrong way going there. Going up, I need to jockey around with all kinds of little streets and I’m usually carrying a couple clocks on the rack of my Honda. Coming back is easy, just straight down a long street. Paris is that way; some places are easy to get to, hard to come back. I decide I’ll convert that loft into a few nests—make up for the burned-down studio.

  I talked to old Sasha the week after the fire. He was insured and he’s truly sorry about the paintings and the sculpture. Great guy, I hope he lives a hundred years, has five more kids; fill up the world with life lovers.

  RECAST A LIFE, BRING THE CRUNCH

  OF SPRING INTO THE SLUSH OF WINTER.

  MAKE ICE CONES WITH COLORED FLAVORS.

  I’ll move my clocks into the big room in my tunnel under Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I’ve got that place fixed up fine now. I ran electricity along the tunnel and into that room to light it up. I went in, swept and dusted off all those coffins. I found a gigantic seven-by-nine-meter fake Persian rug at the flea market in Montreuil for two hundred francs. I spread that in there, along with a table and some chairs. The rug has a deep worn spot in the middle but I put the table over that part.

  This’ll make a terrific place to store clocks. There’s a constant temperature and it’s not damp like a cellar at all. I’ve even built a trapdoor and a ship’s ladder down into the hole from Lotte’s place.

  She’s still hanging in there on the ground floor. I’ve built a vestibule and a wall where I come in, so she has privacy. Women can get me to do anything. Lotte knows she has a good deal and isn’t about to move. It surprises me how she isn’t interested in my tunnel.

  VARYING INTERESTS. LIFE DIFFERENT

  FOR EACH. WE SEARCH SPECIAL SHELLS

  AND STONES ON PRIVATE BEACHES.

  I rig a harness and pull my cart over to that loft with my Honda. I’m using it to move the clocks. This is a good trick; slowing down and stopping are rough. I have a stiff tongue nailed to the deck of my cart and tied to the rack on my bike. It’s hard maneuvering through traffic on those back streets. Two flics stare at me as I roll past the Gare Montparnasse but they don’t stop me. Moving takes a whole day, eleven trips. It’s the first time I’ve counted my loot. I own seventeen grandfather jobs, twenty-seven wall clocks and fifteen mantel clocks. And I’ve got them all in working condition; mostly eight-day, windup. I haul the whole bunch down the steps and into my tunnel room. I store them helter-skelter down there, except I stand my grandfathers between coffins.

  GRANDFATHER COFFINS, TELLING NOTHING,

  TOLLING LOST TIME IN THE DARKNESS.

  I need to fix up the Vaugirard place before I can really arrange things. I’ve got to start some cash flow moving; tuition time is coming soon.

  The Vaugirard place is in the mansard of a five-story building; used to be a row of chambres des bonnes, maids’ rooms, an artist friend of mine bought. He tore down the walls between rooms and put together a studio. He only stayed a year, then went back to the States. He sculpts in plastic; makes molds of things in plaster, molds of old shoes or a radio or somebody’s face, then pours fiberglass into the molds, sticks these together in different arrangements and paints them. He makes a reasonable living that way; has a fair-to-middling name in the Middle West as a Paris painter-sculptor.

  When I found he was leaving, I rented his place from him for practically nothing. I’ll have to give it back if he ever shows up again, but he’s been gone three years now; got himself married to a rich widow, a little girl thrown in with the deal. I’d like to buy his place, but not if I don’t have to.

  This loft has three different hall doors left over from the chambres des bonnes. I divide it back into three sections, back to the old maids’ rooms. I use a frame system with light fiberboard. I rig a plastic hose from a water faucet at the head of the stairs and divide this line into two parts. On one I put a butane water heater and run that line to an outlet in each room. I run the other line straight in as cold water. I get three sinks at Montreux for fifty francs apiece and hook those in. I need to hang them high because the drains come out into rain gutters running along an edge of the roof. It’s illegal as hell but only somebody cruising along in a helicopter could ever see it. The concierge hasn’t been up these stairs in ten years. I give her a hundred francs every Christmas. There’s a john at the end of the hall, so that takes care of that. In an emergency, on a cold dark middle-of-the-night, you could stand on a chair and pee in the sink. My mother always suspected male bachelors of
doing that anyway, even when there is a toilet. I’ll bet women do, too: pee in sinks; OK, suspect, too.

  MUTUALITY OF CONFESSION, SOME THINGS

  TRANSCEND AGE, SEX, RACE OR PROFESSION.

  I’m off to the flea market again. I buy some used beds—without fleas, I hope—a gaggle of little tables and chairs. I carry these upstairs, spread them around and I’m in business.

  I go down and put notices up at the Alliance Française and the Institut Catholique. I’ll rent them out for six hundred francs per month.

  I have the three places filled by the end of the week. One’s a Swede; there’s an English girl and a little American with much Southern accent. They’re all cute as bugs, unbelievably young. I could spend my days talking to them, fixing up the nests, playing father-grandfather. These are like three little birds’ nests up against the sky.

  SWOOPING AROUND, BACK AND

  FORTH, IN AND OUT, LIVING IN

  THE BRIGHT NEW SKIES OF NEW EYES.

  I go back to my Rue du Four tunnel place. Lotte’s home and stops me as I’m going down the steps. She’s wondering what I’ve been doing; what’s the running back and forth? I talk her into coming down my stairway and through the tunnel to my new clock room. I love showing people my clocks, and now I have a great place to store them. Lotte’s never been down before. With electric lights all along the tunnel, it’s like a miniature Métro correspondance. Maybe I can sell advertising space on the walls.

  Lotte’s impressed with the clock room but she’s fascinated by the coffins. I’ve pried one open, just to check, and there’s a skeleton inside all right, skull and all. This turns Lotte on. She’s holding on tight, leaning into me. I’m getting worked up a bit myself. There’s something about this entire situation: the skeleton, the clocks, the deep quiet; dark, frozen time.

  It makes me want to lie with Lotte on that Persian rug, surrounded by clocks, coffins, stones and darkness; to share the only truly life-making, death-defying act; the one and only.

  I know if we do it, Lotte’ll get pregnant for sure; probably have twins, triplets, bunches of babies like bananas. I exert my last vestiges of willpower. I feel, I know, Lotte would do it with me, mother those babies. Sometimes humans will do impossible things just to prove the unprovable. We need to do something drastic, break the black-magic spell.