The Art Lover

by Carole Maso

  I will go to France, meet Pierre, call myself Colette. I will go to England and be Pru. I will go to Italy and a dark man will purr “Francesca” in my ear. I will paint. I will dance. In America my stage name could be Candace California or maybe Candace Indiana. Yes, Candace Indiana! I practice my signature all the time.

  If I were in New York now I might be at the Pyramid Club or at the Cat Club. I might be at the Palladium. I could build the model city, I bet.

  I change out of my bathing suit and dance naked in my princess room. That’s what Dad calls it. My only adornment a fluorescent Eiffel Tower dangling from my ear. Maybe I could design clothes. I wish I was a little taller, a little more angular, I think, looking in the mirror.

  “Come down,” they call.

  “A performance artist!” I shout, testing it out on them.

  There is so much out the window past my tiny family huddled in the meadow. In the distance sheep dot the field, black and white cows, surely a bobcat. And a wild dog, a wolf perhaps, just beginning to really howl.

  Post-Delirium

  How strange to be working on a novel again after all this time, Max. I haven’t written any fiction since Delirium “burst onto the scene” almost ten years ago. A “smashing debut,” “filled with promise,” “an extraordinary talent,” a child of brilliance, yes, genius, yes, etc. Where did that book come from?

  Afterwards the agents, the editors, the parties, the job offers. I retreated. No more novels, I decided. Why? Do you want the facile explanation? How often I sound like you, Max: “the facile explanation.” Novels seemed just a little too dangerous.

  “Anything you do well is going to be dangerous, Caroline.”

  I tried working for causes for a while. Nuclear disarmament, world hunger. Putting up posters, taking them down. Calling up people, having them hang up. I hated all the chaos, all the disappointment. The broken lives, the fighting. So then I went to film school at NYU where, as you recall, I made one strange little film after another. I don’t know, I thought film would be easier somehow. I wanted to make documentaries. I wanted to gather evidence. I wanted to record the truth. What the bums were saying. I rode the subways alone all night, filming. Talk about dangerous, Max! But what I got down—that didn’t seem to be the truth either.

  Besides, I missed language. I missed words. So I tried poetry, and when I was accepted at an artist colony as a poet, it made me feel like one. Poetry seemed quieter, kinder. Delirium, a book of “complicated sexuality and rage.” “A ravishing account of a girl’s travels in Europe.’’ Too noisy for me.

  “To think you could have complete control, Caroline.’’

  Max, there’s something to it. All these things I’ve collected: directions, maps, photographs, all kinds of odd scraps. Max, I’ve kept everything. Like it might come in handy someday. Maybe it’s a way of having a private life, a life of my own. One no one else could possibly get to or decode.

  “Yes, very touching, Caroline.’’

  Max, my passion for documentation—

  “Please,” he says, “not the facile explanation.”

  A Few More Things About You

  You were at once amused, proud, a little baffled. “This is mein Kind,” you said, “coming out of Columbia with a bachelor’s degree and an entire novel under her arm.” I overheard you tell somebody once, “She always liked to make things. Absurd little animals of clay—whole zoos of animals, entire cities in the sand, postage stamp–sized paintings, plays and ballets, stories for children when she herself was a child.”

  I was determined not to be like Mother, Max.

  “Oh, my dear. To think you could do it through sheer will!”

  Veronica Speaks

  I loved you, but I could not even do the minimum required of a mother—I could not stay alive for you, Caroline. I cried every night as I rocked you to sleep. You must have grown up thinking my sobbing was a song.

  A Letter from Henry

  Dear Maggie,

  I was watching you sitting on the blue blanket in the grass. You looked more lovely than I can remember. Even lovelier than 25 years ago. 25 years! Jesus, where has the time gone? You made it seem like a day—one long, brilliant day. You looked so happy and good and beautiful sitting there that I almost changed my mind for a minute. I looked hard, looked at you and our daughters, radiant in this marvelous place, and still, God forgive me, I loved another woman and made up an excuse to get up and call her.

  This may be only temporary, but I don’t expect you to forgive me. I’m as shocked as anyone.

  I know it’s cowardly not to tell you to your face, but the last image I wanted was you with your head raised looking up at the night sky.

  I can’t say I’ll ever be back. My only virtue in this whole matter is that I have summoned up the small courage to be truthful with you and myself.

  I will write you from West 4th near Washington Square, where I will be staying until I find a place. The West 11th Street apartment is yours of course. And the summer house.

  Love always,

  Henry

  Summer

  Things That Are Gone

  I am back in your city of fire-eaters, jugglers, magicians, fortune-tellers, three-card montes. I don’t know how you’ve stood it all these summers since the country—unicyclists, parrots—twenty or so years now, in this madness that descends on Greenwich Village each year, soon as the weather turns.

  Oh, I know there was an occasional fling that took you to Montauk or Cape Cod, but it was the exception, just somewhere you found yourself, not something you sought out. I see you puzzled mostly, sitting on a wooden deck high above the sea with a lobster in front of you, and some beautiful woman at your side insisting you wear the lobster bib. She directing your attention to something she found terribly moving: a sunset probably. And you so out of your element.

  Your element: a trip around the corner on a Saturday night for the Sunday Times. A stroll to Dean & DeLuca’s. But this city in summer, Max! It’s preposterous! It’s always shocking, I don’t care how long you’ve been here. The great assault. I walk the same ten blocks—territorial like you—it’s a small town, but a town where absolutely anything can happen.

  I walk to the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. I remember them all, of course, and they me. All still here. The pet-store owners, the dog walkers, the dogs. Dogs are bad enough, but in the summer, in this city!

  “Is that a seeing-eye dog or is that a normal dog?” the deli man asks. “Because we don’t allow normal dogs in here.”

  “It’s a seeing-eye dog.”

  I am back on your lunatic fringe. Two people hand me a small pink card. They want to be my friend. They are trying to talk to me. I hand them a quarter.

  So why do I stay? To put things in order, is that it? I could sublet the place and think about it some other time, but something keeps me here—I’ve been away too long. Deep in the middle of nowhere. This is as good a place as any to write a book, if it’s a book I’m writing. It’s kind of nice to think of writing prose after all this time, Delirium finally out of my system, I think. Besides, there are movies here. And fire-eaters.

  Summers at Cummington were another story, Max. It’s amazing how much you can change in just one year. I became a nature lover! In love with the birds, the plants, the earth. Out my window all that green, and a tractor in the middle of it. Out my farmhouse window my view was of Leon and Olive Thayer, farmers aged eighty-seven and eighty-five. A few sheep. That’s it. I finally understood the Williams poem you liked to recite.

  The one we always laughed at.

  so much depends

  upon

  a red wheel

  barrow

  glazed with rain

  water

  beside the white

  chickens.

  Max, remember that?

  But what to do with this bombardment of images and sounds? Ice cream vendors, torch-song singers, neon, the insane, roses for sale on every corner, evangelists, dr
ug dealers, creeps of every kind, incense sellers, caricaturists, dog walkers.

  A dog named Artemis. A dog named Cindy. Here, Cindy! A black dog named Gustave.

  Everything changing.

  The candlestick maker told me that his partner, the other candlestick maker, is in the hospital with AIDS. Acquired immune deficiency syndrome. “It’s primarily a gay disease now. You get it,” he said, “through the exchange of bodily fluids. Five thousand have already died, and no one has survived.” Where have I been, I wonder? He puts my two white candles into a bag and a free votive candle. He asks me to say a prayer for the candlestick maker.

  Some things are still here.

  Things that are still here:

  The Minetta Tavern

  The Corner Bistro

  The Lion’s Head

  The Figaro

  Aphrodisia

  Beasty Feast

  Some things are new.

  Things that are new:

  Caffe Passione!

  Akitas of Distinction

  Cafe Cremolata

  The Little Mushroom Cafe

  The K train

  The disciples of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon are still here chanting, “Roses, roses,” vacant-eyed as ever.

  “Dove Bars!” a shy ice cream vendor sings. When you look at him he stops. Then you hear him again. “Dove Bars, Dove Bars,” he sings sweetly. Dove Bars are new.

  “Hey, I know how to grow these!” I shout, pointing at the lettuce at the Korean grocer’s. I am becoming a part of this city again. Its loudness.

  It is loud. A radio goes by. “I’m not lost but I don’t know where I am,” David Byrne sings, “I got a question.”

  “Please help me.”

  “I am recently widowed.”

  “I have no food.”

  “I am unemployed.”

  “I am a blind man.”

  “I need a quarter for the subway.”

  “I need a dollar, sweetheart. God bless you.”

  After a year I’ve forgotten all the ways people beg for money. You forget their different speeches. They’re everywhere, Max. There seem to be more than ever. Thank you. God bless you. Such good manners!

  “I am a Vietnam vet.”

  “My dog needs an eye operation.”

  I hope I don’t dole out money based on the literary merit of each story. I hope I’ve got better standards than that. How, though, to decide on the neediest? Is it the one-legged? Is it the woman with three children in tow? Or the man who mutters to himself in classical craziness: “My brother, the emperor Caesar and I have determined you to be an enemy of the crown and to be executed. Will someone please do something”?

  What is a fifty-cent story then? A seventy-five-cent one? Who is the most convincing? The man who mutters? The guy who made a collage picturing his family, the charred house, the record of all he’s lost? Or the man who says, “Come on, give a dollar to a no-good motherfucker”?

  Bruce in an armchair is parked outside Bloom’s Shoes for the summer, bums being territorial like everyone else. Buy him a beer and he will remember any kindness he can. A man on the street once who gave him a twenty-dollar bill, the day his father took him to a baseball game.

  A man, the same man every day, feeds the pigeons in Father Demo Square. A modern-day Saint Francis. Picture Giotto.

  If you wait it out, the brute heat will clear just about everyone off the streets, I think I remember you saying. All the tourists, all the dogs, everything. But not the homeless, Max. Why were they always invisible to you? And so many more of them in the years since Reagan.

  There are lots of things to see on the street. You can see famous people if you’re sharp. I’m not too good at this. A few times I saw Wendy O. Williams from the Plasmatics in Balducci’s, but who could miss her with her blonde mohawk haircut? And there are always those kind-looking Mafia bosses who touch the melons so tenderly. Also the neighborhood regulars. Grace Paley. Donald Barthelme. Brooke Adams. This one. That one. Stanley Kunitz.

  Lots of your old lovers, Max.

  Some people wish I were famous. “Hey, didn’t you write Delirium?” “Hey, weren’t you in that Amos Poe movie?” “Aren’t you Madonna!?”

  Well, it’s good to be back, in a way. Back to the streets where I’m recognized. Back to civilization.

  To mistake me for Madonna. A singer, Max. Yes, it’s her real name. She’s Italian.

  “To mistake a German French-Canadian American for Madonna.”

  People are desperate to connect. “Weren’t you in that Amos Poe film?” “I could swear I met you at the Cat Club.” “The Lion’s Head.” “The White Horse Tavern.” So many animals, Max. “Didn’t I see you at Arnold’s Turtle?” “Elephant and Castle?”

  “Well, yes, maybe Elephant and Castle, it’s very near the apartment.”

  Someone hands me a pink card.

  I am trying to talk to you.

  Let’s start over. You liked Delirium a lot. I would even say you were proud of it in your way. You defended it, even after your students started asking you if you were the father in the book, the stuffy professor of archeology she goes to visit that wild summer in Greece. To mistake Max Chrysler, distinguished professor of art history, for Arthur Simpson, harsh, a little hateful, the remote archeologist, digging for parts of the world that got lost.

  Artistic license, you told them. “It’s called taking liberties.” A pause. “Fiction,” you said, “have you heard of it?” “Are you calling your daughter an artist, then?” the NYU faculty asked you. “Yes, I am,” you said. And when I went on the Johnny Carson show, you, for the first time in your life, rented a television.

  I’m really back, Max. You were there for me, but where was I when you cried out in the night against the jugglers? I did not get to you in time. I pass the Film Forum. The Vandam Theater is now called the Thalia Downtown. Remember? It’s where we sat all weekend, eight hours Saturday, eight hours Sunday, to watch Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. “Yes,” you whispered to me. “A masterpiece. Undeniably. A work of art,” you said with reverence.

  I was out of film school by then. I had realized that making films was dangerous too. “Anything you do with your heart is dangerous,” you said. “It comes with the territory.”

  My ambitions were not great, though. I liked best talking the language of film with you: f-stop, room tone, Nagra, wild sound.

  How many New York Film Festivals did we go to together? Twenty-three? All of them except last year’s, because I was away at Cummington. I was only four hours away. Why didn’t I come?

  How we loved looking up at where the director and actors sat. When I was a little girl, I dreamt of sitting up there. Maybe that’s why I went to film school, so that someday we might sit up in the director’s box together. I should have come last year. I never learned to read the signs right. Or rather I never learned to read the signs fast enough.

  All of New England cracking open like a sunburst. Yes, even last summer and fall.

  I see that the Antonocci apartment, the site of my first love affair with Anthony Antonocci on Carmine Street, is now the Caffe Passione! (Exclamation point theirs.)

  Categorizing helps. Putting things in columns helps.

  Hand the bum on Eighth Street a quarter. He’ll say: “Thank you for keeping me employed another day. It is the only job I will never be fired from.”

  Many things have changed in the year I’ve been away. Many things are new. Fashions, I notice, have changed. At Cummington fashion stood still, along with almost everything else, except the seasons and, hopefully, art.

  Can you hear me, Max? Shall I speak louder?

  Lists help. Columns. Especially when keeping track of things that are gone.

  Some things thought to be gone have only moved.

  And then, of course, there are the things that are lost. Lots of things are lost. Torn from a lamppost on Seventh Avenue:

  “Taxi,” someone shrieks. Sirens. A symphony of sounds. A fire truck goes by. �
�I saw the figure five in gold,” you used to say dreamily whenever a fire truck passed. A mutter. A sigh. “Roses, roses.” Dogs wheezing on their leashes. Rap music. Imagine hearing all the interior monologues going on in all those people’s heads in the Street.

  “No.”

  Imagine. Each of these people has a name, most have addresses. What if they all said them out loud in unison? The cacophony.

  “Please, Caroline, it’s bad enough out here already.”

  Another fire engine. An ambulance. A police car. A fire engine. I think of the Williams poem he loved.

  Among the rain

  and lights

  I saw the figure 5

  in gold

  on a red

  firetruck

  A siren. A St. Vincent’s Hospital ambulance.

  I pass a newsstand. I haven’t seen a magazine in ages. This bright one calls to me. On a field of red, black letters say AIDS and there’s a small picture of a gaunt Rock Hudson. I am here in your city of AIDS. At Cummington I kept dying at bay for an entire year. At arm’s length, until you, Max. And now suddenly here in the West Village people are dying everywhere around me. I look from one person to the next.

  I pass the new cafes. The invariable parrot on the shoulder of some modern-day pirate. The poseurs, with notebooks, looking up with cigarettes. The earnest aspiring actresses with their thimblefuls of talent.

  Note on the Bird Jungle door: Meg who found bird, we located owner, PLEASE CALL!

  Today I saw a conventioneer of some sort lost on the subway, Max.

  “How did you know he was from a convention, my dear?”

  Blue jacket, checked pants, white patent leather shoes, straw hat, name tag.

  “Yes, I see now.”

  “Where are you going, little conventioneer?” I asked him.