Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  One day I saw a young woman who looked like Ava Gardner and I followed her. She tried to give me the slip and I caught up with her at Nedick’s. She was drinking coffee and I told her whom I thought she resembled and that was enough for her to spend a few days with me. She was an assistant to a photographer who photographed film beauties who were blessed with that elusive sort of allure that reads as innocent cruelty, a closed door, unattainable depths. One day Avi Shoes came to me and said he was fed up with life. No challenge, like what had happened to poor Mr. Hauser whom he’d killed. He said he got up in the morning, had a cup of coffee, got into his Packard, drove to the office he’d only rented because he wanted to prove to the Hauser daughter that he was a real businessman, or so he said, and then he smoked a cigarette, drank more coffee, and ruminated on the fact that, between the time he’d woken up and this very moment—nine o’clock in the morning!—he’d earned more money than most people make in a whole year of hard work.

  While we were sitting there a guy we didn’t know came in and said he was from the NYPD and wanted to know which of us was Mr. Kaniuk. I said it was me. Avi Shoes, who went to a lot of movies, and since the guy wasn’t in uniform, asked him, Can you show us some ID? Detective Keenan knew all about people who see a lot of movies and showed us his ID. He said he’d found a woman in a really bad state. There was a chain around her neck with a medallion on it and on the medallion was engraved “Sarah Kaniuk.” He said he’d only found one Kaniuk in the telephone directory and had come to me to find out who Sarah Kaniuk was. I was pretty scared. I said my mother’s name was Sarah Kaniuk and asked him for more details. He sat down, had some coffee, and told me that a woman had been found wandering by the river not far from the East End and had collapsed. An ambulance had been called. They took her to the Beth Israel Hospital and they’d found the medallion and hadn’t found a Sarah Kaniuk in the phone book but since there was only one other Kaniuk they’d called the police and asked for me to come. He drove me to the hospital. We went up in the elevator and into the emergency room and at the far end there was Pat. She didn’t recognize me. Her face was more serene than ever. It wore a small smile; there was a sense of peace about her. I told the policeman and the doctor who came to see us who I was and I told them a condensed version of Pat’s story, with some deliberate erasures. I explained that I wasn’t the father and didn’t have a daughter called Sarah but a mother called Sarah, and that Pat, who was not Jewish, had perhaps wanted her daughter to be Jewish, and that there was a Chinese guy called Chao Li who maybe knew the rest of the story. We drove to see him. He recognized me right away and smiled. I told him what had happened and he didn’t move a muscle. Not even the tiniest twitch marred his features. He spoke laconically and said that she was his sex slave. He added that he was busy and wanted to conclude this unpleasant conversation. We went back to the hospital. I tried to talk to her. She was in another world and was elated, perhaps even happy for the first time in her life.

  Avi Shoes arranged her transfer to a psychiatric hospital not far away and paid a huge sum so that she would have a good room and would be treated well the whole time she was there, however long it might be, with additional payments to be made regularly. We signed an affidavit supported by the Hebrew bookseller from Division Street who was hardly breathing at this point and seemed likely to drop dead at any minute but he was more than happy to talk to me now because almost all the Hebrew writers in New York had died, all the ones who had waged the long war between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Hebrew, including the editor of the Hebrew-language paper he called “the big-shot” the prestigious journal Hadoar, whose importance, I explained to the detective, lay in that it was read by even fewer people than wrote for it. I went to see Pat a few times afterward. She never came back to us. The bookseller died. I was invited to his funeral by the woman in black from the Forward—which, as mentioned earlier, had become a weekly and whose pages were now somewhat smaller—and his son, perhaps, said Kaddish. I knew everybody. They seemed frightened and lonely. They held onto one another. I saw too who hadn’t come, I thought of my aunt, who at her husband’s funeral had counted not only those who attended but mainly those who hadn’t, even if they’d already died. Avi Shoes said that Pat had found herself a better world. She looked a bit older than her true age but beautiful and enveloped in a serene happiness and I visited her again and again until I stopped.

  Today I have no idea how I met Mina Metzger. She was fragile and beautiful and was eighty-five without a single wrinkle on her face. She did tiny paintings that looked liked bright lights winking out of a dimness painted by Chardin, as if he had joined Mina at the window from which she looked out over the world. She lived on Madison Avenue in the old building where she was born. Her father and mother lived in the building as well, but only her father was born there. And she lived alone and had no children. She walked like cotton wool, she’d been married for forty years and her husband died of a heart attack. When she was a child they still bought their produce and milk from farms on Madison Avenue and the apartment was splendid but frugal and classic in form and always pleasant to visit. She would talk about New York at the turn of the century, not the artists, not the stars, but the honest bourgeoisie, though deep inside her nested the demon of painting and it frightened her and she eventually submitted to it and did such tiny paintings so as not to compete with anyone, hiding her light under a bushel as they say, and years before we met she had been a close friend of the artist Arshile Gorky who committed suicide. She had discovered him and supported him and his family and bought a few of his paintings and taken care of him even when he was sick, even when things were at their worst, and then cared for his family after he took his own life. She said that Gorky had brought Miró and Kandinsky with him from Europe and had managed to insert their ways of seeing into the tissue of American painting. Gorky had also been a friend and teacher of De Kooning, with whom he had shared an apartment in their youth, and there were family resemblances to Frank Stella and Rothko in his work as well. I loved her human gentleness and I loved her paintings, and although De Kooning was a star, I called him up and I asked him to help me organize a show for her. There had already been some tentative steps out of abstractionism and the price of a Hopper had doubled, but Rothko and Pollock and Motherwell and De Kooning and Newman were still the art.

  One evening Mina had Gorky’s family over, as well as Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife, who herself was a fine artist in her own right. We ate together and drank wine. After the Gorky family left, Mina, Lee Krasner, and I stayed on to sit in the big room and Lee Krasner was looking for somebody not involved in her life and who she didn’t know and who didn’t know her, and since I was handy she told me something about her relationship with her husband, who in her eyes was the great genius of American painting, and how they had fought, and how they drank, she told the story in a kind of restrained and quiet continuous weeping that was strong even in its restraint and Mina urged her to go on painting because she recognized her talent, she said it was great and I kept quiet. I hadn’t liked Pollock’s paintings from the first moment to the last, though I had gotten a kick I suppose out of Picasso’s statement that Pollock was the Franco of contemporary art, but Gandy always cut me off before I really laid into Pollock’s work and one night in a bar with Gandy and De Kooning there was a real argument, I spoke disrespectfully and enviously about Rothko’s work. The figures on the subway. The daring play of colors but within a human framework, though that of course was before he took all the beauty out of his work and did his renowned wallpaper, and he said, Jews, always arguing, and I said he should give some thought as to how an artist like him had become a decorator of tapestries.

  I wasn’t painting but painting was still my home. Like Lee’s dancing. Back then everything was unfocused and people came and went and there was no money because I sold my last drawings but their value on what was called “the market” had plummeted as a result of my decision not to paint. Museums and galleries took down my
paintings. I wasn’t worth anything. I painted an apartment for girl who invited me into her bath and said she admired Schopenhauer and wanted loud garish color and I didn’t know which and at last I found a combination and she waited for me in the bath and suddenly I was invited, me of all people, to a party at the apartment of Clem Greenberg’s latest protégé, Helen Frankenthaler—tall, a little De Kooning, a little Hans Hoffman, a little Pollock, a little Gorky, a little Newman, a little Rothko, a little Motherwell. Greenberg, the father of contemporary painting, had discovered all those artists and had Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art in his pocket, and Barr held the purse strings of the whole world of modern art, because Penny Guggenheim and Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis and Kootz were all connected. Greenberg found a woman. He wanted her. He wrote about her. He got her. Prices soared. Barr bought for the museum. Parsons hiked up the prices. Janis paid attention to who Greenberg liked on a given day. People got rich and people were broken and artists became like sheep and out of nowhere the man I’d insulted in the Cedar Bar and who hated me and hated what I painted and hated what I presented in my paintings and with whom I quarreled at every opening I ever bothered to attend, he of all people invited me to a party at the home of his new love and I wasn’t about to miss out on this opportunity.

  I called Avi Shoes—who only that day had bought an Italian hat company and had started producing gold-colored laces because laces had remained the love of his life—and persuaded him to join me. He insisted on buying me some nice clothes so I’d look important. It was cold. It had begun snowing heavily. We went up in the elevator. A top floor, I don’t remember which one. A big apartment, hordes of people talking in loud voices, kissing, drinking, eating. Burning hot. New York was snow-covered through the windows and from above the whipping snow looked like a vast down quilt that had ripped apart. Greenberg, hand in hand or hand in pocket with Barr from MoMA and somebody from the Carnegie whom I’d met when he showed one of my paintings at the Biennial that looked so prominent in its nothingness because it had come from life and myth and when he saw me he told me I was right, that painting had no future. He was drunk as a lord and Greenberg welcomed me winningly, hugging me like we were brothers, it was important for him that everybody liked him, he hated the abhorrence I held for him because it’s a well-known fact that kings don’t like children who yell the king is naked. He asked me and Avi into the big room. I passed through an empty hall. From a distance we could hear the tumult of the people milling about the infinite apartment as they drank. There were four Ming vases standing in the hall; the emptiness was frightening. I tapped one of them gently and a loud tone that rose and fell reverberated around the room. A waiter wearing a swimsuit ran toward me in panic. A mistake, I said, but the echo continued to reverberate and he said, Be careful, sir, and I told him I was Helen’s cousin, and he said, You don’t look like her cousin, but somebody rescued me, and my friend Avi Shoes who looked happy in the arms of some woman artist was circulating through the room and laughing. People were walking around like shadows in the heat haze. Artists could be seen squirming like worms in the maze of the mass of people all looking for something they weren’t sure about. In the next room somebody I didn’t know was standing dressed in a diaper and pontificating about his sex life, and artists and critics were standing around laughing. Fastidious museum directors were trying to mingle and use vulgar expressions they’d picked up from somewhere and didn’t know how to say properly and coming from them it all sounded ludicrous. I saw Mr. Kootz from the gallery walking around bent over from the heat, trying to hear what Greenberg and Betty Parsons were saying. And then we reached the designated room. Maybe forty people. We took off our shoes and socks as Helen requested, via megaphone. We rolled up our pants, those of us who were wearing pants, because there were also girls in skirts and men in diapers. A huge sheet was spread out on the floor, fifteen by twenty yards. First Helen daubed a few layers of paint over it and then sprayed another layer of metallic paint and gave everybody crayons and we were all asked to get onto the huge sheet and walk around. Dip our feet and hands into the paint. Color with the crayons. If possible, we were supposed to dance as well. A TV cameraman shot the event. Helen stood on a high dais and with the megaphone clamped to her mouth issued further instructions; You there, Eric, draw in the corner, Yoram, sit and push yourself inward, Dorothy, write out some names; and some people sat on the sheet—I refused—and daubed their bodies on it. One guy put his face into it and then his face looked etched in paint. Helen invited some guy who liked to copy entire Shakespeare plays onto eggshells to take small squares in the corner of the painting and write on them in his delicate hand—poems and curses, whatever he wanted. After half an hour of walking on the sheet and drawing with crayons and fingers and hands and feet, with everybody listening attentively to Helen’s monotonous voice as she stood shouting and correcting, changing, warning, directing, we all walked off. Avi Shoes hadn’t lowered himself and remained in the embrace of some woman far away in another room. Waiters in swimsuits came in and washed our feet in turpentine and warm water and soap and cleaned our hands and also the face of the man who had stuck it into the painting, and they even cleaned between our toes and managed to remove the paint from the women’s fingernails and helped us back into our shoes, and I heard somebody in front of me say, Michelangelo was a mediocre sculptor. Leonardo was an illustrator at best. Dürer was a street artist.

  I looked at Helen. She knew that Greenberg wanted her. Her eyes looked like fish eyes but she wasn’t drinking. She was the sanest person in the place. The coldest. She didn’t touch the champagne. Greenberg came up behind me and said, You don’t understand that she’s the Goya of our time, it’s war, generation against generation, it’s conciliation and antagonism and love and a struggle for the future and there’s nothing sexier than war. I told him he hadn’t the faintest idea about painting or war either, but he was too drunk to reply. About six months later she hung “our” painting in a show. It was bought for a huge sum by Barr from MoMA. Helen was ecstatic. Greenberg wrote about this great breakthrough in the history of art. The last and ultimate word: Stain Painting. Two days later in the Cedar Bar, as I was having a drink with Gandy, and William Steig was there too, he lived near the Cedar Bar and did trenchant and hilarious cartoons for the New Yorker, and Gandy was fresh in from Vermont and hated that he’d missed Helen’s party, and I got up, little old me, and I began to orate and everybody listened because they were all drunker than hell, and Gandy, who had a sketch pad and a pencil, jotted down some of what I said and gave it to me and years later I lost it though I still repeat my speech in my dreams:

  Painting is the most ancient art. People painted in caves to drive out demons. To understand where they were going. Death. There weren’t any words yet. The elder of the tribe painted the animals lurking in wait for him and the members of his tribe. The Etruscans begat the Renaissance that begat Giotto who begat Paolo Uccello who painted The Battle of San Romano: the horses, the spears, the banners, the colors, the hats, the movement, the composition, the prince, the officers, the knights; and he begat Hieronymus Bosch or was born of him in turn, who begat Dürer and Van Eyck who begat Holbein who was surely divinely inspired and Matthias Grünewald who brought down from the stars the miracle of the Isenheim Altarpiece and he begat Rembrandt who begat Goya and Velásquez and, from Greece, defeated by Titian in Italy, El Greco went to Spain and was reborn there. And Cranach, Vermeer, and Van Dyck and Monet and Van Gogh and Homer and Munch who begat Nolde and Soutine who brought trees from the forest of Poland and planted them upside-down in the landscapes of the south of France and begat Ryder and Bonnard and they begat Hopper and Wyeth and were murdered in turn by Picasso who was art’s greatest tactician and technician, likewise Matisse and Cézanne and Renoir whose paintings are not as good as they seem, and he begat Pollock and Hans Hoffman and De Kooning whose work degenerated to the level of tapestry decoration with the exception of his Marilyn Monroe paintings which were the greatest
of our time and he begat Rothko who after his beautiful New York works prostituted himself. Art left the churches because God didn’t pay. Barons competed to purchase important paintings because they wanted to make themselves look beautiful. There was a longing for beauty in them. At their side sprang up a wealthy middle class that was sufficiently rich to show that it was as rich as the barons even if it wasn’t. And they had estates. Yachts. Summer homes. Palaces. Then art began to be what it has become. A man who owns a De Kooning is the only one who’s got it. And that’s why it’s worth a lot of money. Because art has become a marketplace. Owning original work shows that you’ve got money; money creates a painting anew. Instead of hanging ten thousand one thousand dollar bills, it’s cheaper to hang a Motherwell. A Pollock is worth more than the all the Renaissance artists put together earned in their lifetimes. During his life, Van Gogh sold in total what Rothko sells in a thousandth of every second. Art that aspires to comprehend and reveal Man, art that brings him pleasure, touches him, art that investigates the human condition and connects Man with God, is finished. Over. And then I collapsed. I was drunk out of my head.