Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  In the end the pianist from the barbeque and two friends I didn’t know—and when I took a closer look at them, I didn’t want to know them either—drove to the Village with me to fetch the painting. We brought it for everyone to see, but I knew I was going to lose. After Mary Lou looked at the painting she said in a harsh voice, Name your price, whatever you want. I said I wasn’t selling. But I wavered and left the room because the prices were making me dizzy. She wanted the painting more than I’d ever wanted anything in my entire life. I hadn’t seen such passion in years. I told her angrily that even the thousand men who had fucked her had never sounded so ruthless, so full of lust, and she said, You don’t know anything about it, you stole a painting, the men who fuck me pay and leave, you didn’t get inside me and you’re still not gone. You’re going to give me the painting. Silence again and everyone looked from me to the painting and back. Tina started whimpering like a kitten. I looked at the painting and this was the crucial moment, it was the best of my paintings but I also realized that it wasn’t good enough, that I would never be the painter I wanted to be, would never be more than just another painter. Like a high-speed movie, I saw in my mind all the paintings I liked and knew that I was finished, that like the piano player in the Wild West who hangs a sign that says: “Don’t shoot the pianist, he’s doing his best,” that my talent was meager, I was only doing my best, but my best was shallow and conceited. Each and every one of my paintings could have been different, and a work of art is measured as it is: it’s a work of art because it can’t be other than it is. They all drank and someone brought out a joint that was passed from mouth to mouth and after a while they seemed to be enveloped in fog. The painting became more and more foreign to me. I could already see it through Mary Lou’s eyes. She pulled out a stack of hundred-dollar bills and started throwing them at me one at a time, laughing sardonically. Dozens of bills fluttered toward me and I gathered them from the table or from the gleaming red wooden floor and I looked at them but didn’t drop them or put them into my pockets. I tried to fight but weakened with every hundred-dollar bill she hurled at me. In the end I said, You win. Beggars can’t be choosers. She said, It’s not your money, this money is a payoff. She touched the painting as if it were a Christian icon and then said that she loved me and that my hands had created a miracle and I looked at her. I stood up and kissed her and she pressed her lips onto mine and kissed me hard until my lip started bleeding and she grabbed the painting, threw a few more bills at me, I’d stopped counting by then, my eyes filled with tears of shame, the telephone rang, it started raining buckets outside. I looked at her, went into the bedroom, and looked at the room I had painted. Tina came in and touched me and I went back and said to Mary Lou, It’s just a painting, Mary Lou, it’s not an icon, it’s just a painting I happened to paint, and it doesn’t really belong to me, it belongs to Bird, but Bird’s dead, so take it, and I left.

  It was raining hard and I got soaked to the skin, but I couldn’t stop walking. I was overwhelmed by the thought that what I was most worried about was keeping the money in my pocket dry. I got home and hardly ever painted again. (Years later I tried to find out where the painting was. I enquired about Mary Lou. About Tina. Tried to find out where Lovejoy was. But time and America know how to make people vanish.) I called Avi Shoes and we went to the 21 Club. We had something to eat and I told him what had happened and he said that now he wouldn’t ever leave me. We went for a walk and I told him that I was giving up painting to write, that I couldn’t make painting into just a mistress on the side and didn’t know how to be married to two women at once, and that my gallery owners were furious and collectors were cursing me and that I had begun writing a play about Mira. Avi Shoes took me to a party at Krissoula’s who had returned from Greece from one of her shipping magnates, and I looked at my Icarus hanging on the wall, and Avi Shoes talked about what I’d done in the war and someone sat next to me and said his name was James Jones and that he’d been a soldier too. Not in the navy, in the infantry, though he’d been at Pearl Harbor. He said he’d seen the attack up close and tried to write a book but had given up and had written about his own experiences in Hawaii, From Here to Eternity, and he asked me if I wrote. I told him I’d read his book already, that the book was powerful and moving, and that I used to write but stopped so I could paint but that the painting had died in me and that I felt that I had no choice but to write.

  We spoke a long time that evening. Krissoula danced a Greek dance. Avi Shoes called a catering service and ordered steaks for everyone, and the next day Jones came to visit me in the squalid room I lived in and I told him about Mary Lou, and Avi Shoes came to take us for a drive in the park in a convertible and then Jones said that what I had to say should be written and that he would take me to his publishers and get them to give me an advance. I was too weak to refuse and we went to the office of the editor-in-chief at the legendary Charles Scribner’s Sons publishing house and we sat there and the guy stared at me in bewilderment and Jones finished singing my praises and the man asked what I was actually writing and I said I was writing a play or a story about a woman called Mira, and I told him a bit about her and about her becoming a nun and about Boris and about my war wound and about Pat. He said it sounded interesting but that he had to see something in writing. He must have pressed a concealed button because I could tell by the look he directed at the door that he was waiting for something, and indeed a secretary rushed in and asked Jones to step out with her for a moment because he’d forgotten to initial one of the pages of his new contract. He left and the editor told me quickly, Listen, Jones is naïve. This isn’t the way to sell a book. Jones doesn’t understand business, he’s achieved a huge success and thinks that anyone can do the same, the editor’s voice was arrogant and disdainful, but he said that when I had a book written in good English I could come to him even without going through an agent. We left. Jones was confident that within a week I’d have a contract in my hand. I didn’t argue. He lived comfortably from his book and from the movie that had been made out of it and a little from the other books he’d written that were less successful. There was a beauty in him, he was naïve and wise and pitiful with a million dollars in his pocket and him feeling that he wasn’t worth it. He liked me and I liked him, although we didn’t have very much in common. Jones made me into a character in a book he was writing in his mind, I interested him as a model, not as a person, and neither of us understood the other. In 1976, I would meet him entirely by chance at the Île Saint-Louis in Paris. He looked terrible. He said he was living on this prestigious island. He said that he was just another American in Paris and that everything had fallen apart for him. That women had disappointed him. That he’d forgotten how to laugh, and that he felt like a terrible failure. He’d say that he’d been happy when he read the reviews of my new book and had remembered our meeting at Scribner’s, and I tried to tell him how important he was to me, that there was something childish and beautiful about him, that I loved his naïveté, he was unsure whether he even knew how to write and said that he was fortunate that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor while he was there. He told me he didn’t have anything much worth living for, and two years later I heard he had died and I was sure that he didn’t die of an illness.

  Avi Shoes and I saw a partially demolished building across the street. It was a nine-story building. Avi Shoes said, It looks like a Buchenwald of toilet seats and bathtubs and washbasins. The building was split as if a huge sword had cleaved it in half; the street-side façade had been demolished and only the interior of the building was visible. The toilets and basins and baths from all the apartments were hanging out, decades of toilets and baths. I quoted a line from Natan Alterman for Avi Shoes, It is the fate of buildings to fall, it is not the fate of buildings to stand.

  People were starting to leave the Village. Fancy cafés opened up on MacDougal Street. The rich began moving in to live near the artists. The apartment in Morton Street now cost a thousand dollars a month
. Artists who started getting rich left the city, the poor were shunted aside and started drifting east, to SoHo, to the Lower East Side, and art became commercialized. Larry Rivers who’d combined abstract expressionism with realism had reached maturity, and abstract art began losing its fashionable appeal. People tried to wrap the world in pink paraffin paper to disguise the shame of their disillusionment, and the rich went after all the artists who had left town one after the other and Senator McCarthy was finally defeated after a long struggle. People could go back to work and those who had been arrested came out of the prisons. Artists returned from Europe where they’d lived as refugees, and a new era seemed to be beginning. I moved from the Village to Eighty-seventh Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. The building belonged to Carl Marzani, a communist with a kind face who in his youth had been one of what were then called “Roosevelt’s Whiz Kids.” His secretary had been Ethel Rosenberg. He worked in the Office of Strategic Services’ economic division. During the war against the Reds he was thrown into jail. Following his imprisonment, his wife fell or was beaten up and ended up in wheelchair for the rest of her life. Marzani believed in Ethel Rosenberg’s innocence and when he spoke about it I remembered how Boris claimed that he’d known she was a spy. When Marzani got out of jail he bought a building to support himself but only wanted poor tenants. I still had the money from Mary Lou. I ran into Millard Thomas on the street. He’d been one of Belafonte’s accompanists and lived in Marzani’s building because he was a broken man and poor and couldn’t get over what he called Belafonte’s betrayal and he suggested I come along, and I did, and Marzani was courteous and the rent was low. He was still editor of the Daily Worker, which was the paper of a party that barely existed anymore, and wrote revolutionary articles. He ran the party’s small publishing house too, which had few customers but he was loyal to them and quietly fanatic. He didn’t try to force his opinions on anyone. His wife, a beautiful and sad woman, would smile from her wheelchair and they’d hand-bind the press’s books and prepare invitations to assemblies and demonstrations that usually ended with police beatings because they outnumbered the demonstrators and were not overly inclined to be sympathetic toward Marzani. I got a basement apartment that had a bedroom and another larger room that included a kitchen and even a small refrigerator, and a window that looked out onto a garden was set above my bed. There was another small rectangular window above the kitchen sink through which I could see the legs of passersby on the street, and I used to try to guess things about them from what little I could see. I wrote a lot, erased and discarded and then wrote more. Sandy and Steve Scheuer lived in an adjacent building and I would go up to see them and Steve would be standing, resolute, holding an ironing board as a shield, and I’d rinse bleeding Sandy off with whiskey, just like I used to, and I’d go back down to my apartment so that they could patch things up for another week. The landlord made a habit of pasting notices in the stairwell: “Comrades! Help needed! If you possibly can, please pay your rent.” Millard played a guitar most of the time and two young women lived above him, one of whom wasn’t very pretty and the other had huge breasts and was learning how to tap dance, which had long since gone out of fashion. Once in a while I sold a painting or a drawing, but sales gradually declined. There was a pleasant and pretty woman without breasts; and there was the brilliant daughter of a vice-admiral who came over with a broom and a toothbrush and was sweet and wanted to be my mother; then there was a painter who restored antique furniture in Hartford, Connecticut; and a tall girl I found in the subway; and there was Sally too; and I went to suicidal Sondra Lee’s and lived at her place for a couple of days and came back, and then Oved called from Mexico City using the “Israeli system” said that there was a woman coming to town he wanted me to meet.

  The woman called two days later. She said she was visiting relatives in Brooklyn and would be coming to New York on Sunday morning and would I meet her. I said I would. She said, I’ll be arriving at the station on Lexington and Fourteenth Street, or perhaps she said Twenty-third, and if you really can, wait for me on the platform because I don’t know the city. I asked how I would recognize her and she said, Don’t worry, I’ll recognize you. I went to the deserted station on Sunday morning. A train pulled in. A lone woman alighted. Six foot two in her stocking feet, but she was in heels. She was wearing a red dress, and walked toward me. I came up to her chest and she said how pleased she was to meet me and that we should go for a walk, and after a while she bent down to tell me that she was wild about short intellectual Jewish types like Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, John Garfield, Chaplin, Einstein, all short men. She wanted to walk along Fifth Avenue and feast her eyes on the store windows. We walked. Children laughed at us. I kept trying to shove her onto buses and get her to sit down so that we’d be the same height, but she wanted to see things up close, and people stared and we talked almost as though we were on the phone, first floor calling third floor and vice versa. It was difficult to communicate with her, and then the nightmare ended. We agreed that she’d call and she did and said that she’d found a big bed that would suit her dimensions with a mattress to match and had rented an apartment, and I asked whether the ceiling was sufficiently high, and she said that it was an old building with a high ceiling. I invented excuses but so as not to offend her I said that most of my women had been taller than me but at least we’d been able to meet midway for talking and listening. And I went over to visit her and her robed body seemed endless, she sat with a dramatic air, a glass of wine in her hand, and said, Wouldn’t it be nice to jump into bed. I did my best. Lying down, her head was so far away that I had to take it on faith that it was there in the first place and that it was a proper head, but it wasn’t easy. I felt like a Lilliputian walking along Gulliver’s nose. I got off her, said I’d remembered that I was sick and fled. And there was a whole string of girls to come; there was the sweet black girl who danced at Katherine Dunham’s and who I swore I was in love with, and I was, but then I cheated on her and she ran out on me, hating me; and there was the Israeli girl who had come to New York to lose her virginity. I was shy and the women could all see that I fell in love easily, but my love affairs lasted two or three days at most before the remorse and the guilt came that both distressed and delighted me; and then there were the women who rejected me and laughed, Why should I be interested in your youth in some youth movement and that you were a soldier and that your father is the director of some museum and how much you like Faulkner?

  A guy we knew in the war came to see Avi Shoes and me. He’d lost his entire family in Germany, and after the war went back to Germany and dismantled every church and every grand building he could find and used his Jewishness as a weapon and spoke Yiddish and acquired palaces from frightened Germans and brought them to America piece by piece, and renovated and sold the old furniture and the tapestries and the crystal chandeliers and the ovens and brought them in ships and there was terrible hunger in Germany in those days, while he bought and sold in America and made a fortune. He came to see me with a blonde girl, and we were talking when he suddenly stopped in mid-sentence and froze. I’d never seen anything like it. He froze in mid-laugh, his mouth remained open, and after a few minutes of frozen alarm he snapped out of it and said to me, You’re a dreamer and you’ll never amount to anything. Painting and writing, you haven’t got what it takes, but if you come to work with me in my store on Third Avenue you’ll make money. I asked him why he’d frozen like that and he asked, Who froze, we were talking, weren’t we? I tried working with him for two days and sold a magnificent crystal chandelier and the customer haggled with me and I sold it cheap and the boss, Nachman was his name, said, My friend, if you want to save the world, don’t do it with my rebbe gelt, because he was angry with me for not sufficiently believing in the World of Tomorrow and the peace movement but he also liked me despite the fact that I told him that someone had said that over-simplicity is a sign of tyranny. And maybe he was right to think I was criticizing him. I bo
ught a small television. Those were the days of Amos ’n’ Andy, Jackie Gleeson, I Love Lucy, Ernie Kovacs, Jack Benny on the violin, John Garfield and Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice on the late movie, and they started broadcasting You’ll Never Get Rich with Phil Silvers, my favorite show.