“You’re not fooling anyone,” she said.
I had decided not to tell her anything about my conversation with J.H. Lucking, Esq., so I just asked if she was all right.
“I’m fine. I’m watching the World Series pregame show, okay? So you’ll have to excuse me.”
I guess that answered my question. I would have liked to have headed home and watched with her—settled down on the sofa next to all those follicles and freckles and the other parts of Sandy Smollett’s anatomy that Danny Fraser had rendered so faithfully, but I had at least one more visit to make before I returned to 12th Street.
I had decided to pay a call on Jilly Poland. These were the days when SoHo was still a third-world ghetto populated by artists and rodents, all of them hungry. Jilly had moved even farther downtown, to a loft building just off Church Street in what much later would become known as Tribeca. Her block was deserted except for a wino sleeping on a loading dock, clutching an empty Thunderbird bottle. I rang the bell and Jilly appeared on the fire escape.
“Come to join the gang?” she called out before tossing down a set of keys.
I had no idea what she was talking about until I got up to her floor. It was a nice loft, not unlike Danny Fraser’s, about a hundred feet long with windows down one side, the walls painted white, and the signature polyurethaned floor that announced to the downtown world that you’d made it. At the far end of the space, a handsome black woman was posing on a sort of raised throne, naked except for a brightly patterned scarf tied around her hair. Clustered around her, on an assortment of chairs and stools, and even a couple of art school “mules,” were a dozen people drawing in sketch pads or on sheets of paper pinned to drawing boards. Some of them were keeping one eye on the nearby television set, which was tuned to the game between the Mets and the Orioles.
This, presumably, was the life class Sandy Smollett had posed for. I had mistakenly assumed that she had been talking about one of the classes Jilly taught at the School of Visual Arts. Some of the people in this group were young enough to be SVA students, but others were considerably older. Some, in fact, were well-known artists. There was Marty Wolfe, one of the second-generation abstract expressionists back when 10th Street was the place to hang out and the Cedar Tavern the place to get smashed while wallowing in the rants of Jackson Pollock and Bill de Kooning. Wolfe wasn’t so young anymore, but his last exhibition had shown that he was gamely trying to keep up with the kids. Also on hand was Myrtle Papadakis, a pioneering conceptual artist whose exhibited work consisted mostly of penciled numerals on large sheets of graph paper organized according to various arcane groupings that she came up with, allegedly through the agency of the I Ching. I recognized Richard Fitzroy, an illustrator who taught drawing at Parsons, and next to him was Matthew Ripley, a second-rate but successful pop artist best known for his paintings of scantily clad pinup girls sitting in cars or astride motorcycles. I knew all of them except for Fitzroy. All of them were seated there making very traditional life drawings—“keeping their hand in,” as they would have described it. A couple of joints were circulating, so I took a hit before getting down to business.
“I imagine,” said Jilly, “that you’re here to pick up things for Sandy? I’ve packed a bag for her.”
She indicated a pink overnight case next to a single bed in a corner. It was presumably where Sandy Smollett had been sleeping. A striking woman who was not shy about making a fashion statement, Jilly was wearing her own take on one of those Courrèges outfits that looked like they were meant for waitresses in an intergalactic ice cream parlor. Her head was shaved to a point just above her ears, leaving just a crown of platinum hair on top of her scalp.
“I can do that for you,” I said.
“Do what?” asked Ripley. “What are you doing here anyway, Novalis?”
“Mind your own business, Matt,” said Jilly.
“Is he here to draw?” asked Ripley. “Let’s see what you can do, Novalis.”
I didn’t know Ripley well, but well enough to know he was a pain in the ass. He was one of those people who don’t mellow with success. He got up from his seat and handed me his sketch pad and a stick of charcoal. Of course, he didn’t know me well either, so I had to presume he had no idea that I’d spent four years at the High School of Music and Art and a year at Cooper Union before I realized I’d never be Pablo Picasso—or even Norman Rockwell—and switched to a life of crime. Ripley stood behind me as I took his place. He looked over my shoulder as I began to sketch the model. Marty Wolfe, who did know my background, allowed himself a little smirk. I was half done with a passable drawing when Ripley snatched the pad away from me.
“Fuck you—that’s cheating,” he said. “You know how to draw.”
He was pissed at not being able to take the piss out of me.
Jilly took me aside.
“Thanks for helping out with Sandy,” she said. “She’s a good kid—fucked up, but a good kid.”
“Fucked up how?”
“C’mon, you’ve met her—a stripper who comes on like Mary Poppins?”
“If you say so.”
“Trust me. And she gives off something Mary Poppins doesn’t—I don’t know what you want to call it, but it’s likely to get her into big trouble. I guess it already has.”
“I’ve noticed. How old is she, anyway? She seems like a kid.”
“She says she’s twenty-four. Sure doesn’t look it. Think you can help her?”
“Maybe. If I can figure out what her problem is.”
I asked Jilly how she had met Sandy Smollett.
“Stew Langham brought her here to pose.”
“Stewart Langham? Is he still alive?”
Stewart Langham was one of those artists, like Edward Hopper and Reginald Marsh, who had painted America, and specifically New York, the way it was between the wars. Instead of trying to be modernists, they made paintings and prints of the things that made America modern—skyscrapers, streamlined locomotives, subways, urban crowds and urban loneliness, and the bittersweet sexuality of lonely urban women. All three of them had painted burlesque subjects, and it would be a toss-up between Marsh and Langham as to which of them had been most prolific as a portrayer of burlecue queens.
“Stew’s not even that old,” said Jilly. “Seventy-five or seventy-six. Sharp as a tack. I hear the Whitney’s giving him a retrospective. He has one of those fantastic Beaux-Arts studios on 67th Street, off Central Park West.”
“You think he found Sandy at the strip club?”
“That’s what he told me. He still goes to those places all the time. He’s taken me along a couple of times.”
“Would he talk to me?”
“About Sandy? If I tell him you’re kosher.”
“Would you do that? If I’m going to try to help Sandy, the more I know the better. And the sooner the better.”
Jilly walked over to a wall phone and dialed. She spoke to someone for a couple of minutes, then hung up and beckoned me over.
“He asks if you could stop by now. Don’t forget to take Sandy’s things. And take good care of her.”
SIX
Feeling conspicuous, thanks to the pink overnight case, I got off the subway at Lincoln Center, found a pay phone, and called Sandy Smollett. She picked up on the first ring. I could hear the TV in the background.
“Are you okay?” she said, her voice anxious.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I don’t know. I’m very nervous.”
“I thought you were watching the game.”
“That’s what’s making me nervous. I get nervous when I’m watching. It’s a very close game. The Mets are winning by one. Donn Glendening . . .”
“Clendenon.”
“Anyway—he hit a home run. Someone called Tom Terrific is pitching.”
I told her I’d picked up her clothes from Jil
ly’s.
“I’ll drop them off soon, though I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay.”
“You went to Jilly’s? Thank you so much!”
The sincerity was overwhelming, but I couldn’t think of anything more to say and I didn’t want to mention Stewart Langham until I knew what I might find at his studio. It was located in a grand neo-Gothic pile built as a colony for well-heeled artists and loaded art-world groupies. It was so grand, in fact, that the studios there were referred to as “ateliers.” Stewart Langham had left my name with the flunky downstairs and I was immediately whisked up to the master’s floor. I was greeted by a smallish man with cropped white hair and a ruddy complexion, toffed-up in a lovat tweed suit with a mustard-colored shirt and an emerald-green cravat the exact shade of a T-shirt I had admired on Pete Townshend one Sunday night at Fillmore East. It looked as if Langham was on his way to spend a country weekend with Scott and Zelda. The ensemble was completed with blue suede loafers that seemed incongruous, but which I would not have stepped on for the world.
He invited me in. I found myself in an interior packed with art that would have passed muster in any halfway-decent museum. The walls were hung with paintings by Hopper, Marsh, John Sloan, Isabel Bishop, Stuart Davis, Ben Shahn, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, and others—including of course Langham’s own. I stopped in front of a full-length portrait I’d seen reproduced many times—of a burlesque stripper with long blonde hair.
“That’s Lili St. Cyr at the Gaiety in Montreal,” he said. “She invited me up there to paint her. I would make pencil or charcoal sketches at the theater, then she would come back to my hotel suite and I would do oil sketches. The final painting I made here.”
As he spoke, I looked around. I noticed that one corner of the studio was lined with bookshelves, floor to ceiling—just like the bookshelves in what I had taken to be the library of a ritzy manse in Yari’s photograph. I tried to figure out if the picture could have been taken right there. The conclusion I came to was: very likely with a bullet.
Langham led me to a large pedestal table on which a dozen or more drawings were scattered. Some were in charcoal, some in ink and wash—all were of Sandy Smollett. Except for one, they were nudes—conventional art school poses probably made at one of Jilly’s drawing groups. They were examples of effortless draftsmanship, but none of them captured that indescribable quality that made Sandy Smollett so hard to shake out of my hair. The other one was different. Tinted with watercolor, it showed her fully clothed in a pinafore dress and looking like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. If Lana Turner had gotten the part, that is.
“Which do you like?” he asked.
I pointed to the pinafore dress.
“Of course,” he said. “That’s the sexiest by far. That’s what makes her so special, isn’t it? All she has to do is walk down the street.”
I pictured her on the sidewalk in the bloodstained dress.
“That seems to be her problem,” I said.
“Of course it is,” said Langham, “and you understand that because you’re in love with her.”
I could have done without this crap, but I went along with it and dutifully said, “I am?”
“Of course you are. You can’t help but be in love with her—just as I am. But then, I fall in love three or four times a day. I fall in love with the waitress in the coffee shop. I fall in love with the teller at the bank. You can’t make the paintings I make without constantly falling in love. It’s an occupational hazard. But Sandy’s special, and I think she likes you.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I spoke to her half an hour ago. She calls me every day. I told her you were coming over. She didn’t say much, but I could tell.”
That would mean that when she called Langham I was on a train somewhere between Canal Street and Lincoln Center, several minutes before I spoke to her from the station. Yet she hadn’t mentioned that she knew where I was going. She would have some explaining to do.
“So how did you discover Sandy Smollett?” I asked, just like a real detective. “Did you simply drift into Aladdin’s Alibi one evening and find her on stage flaunting her artistry? How did you get involved with that world, anyway?”
Langham took me by the arm and led me over to an art deco bar built into one corner of the studio.
“It’s early in the day for me, dear boy,” he said, “but name anything you fancy.”
I could have done with a Scotch, but I said it was early in the day for me too. He opened a miniature refrigerator to reveal a selection of Dr. Brown’s sodas and fancy French and Italian limonades. I chose one of the imports, he opened a celery soda for himself, and we sat down in a pair of matched leather chairs. They were not dissimilar, it occurred to me, to the one Yari Mendelssohn had photographed Sandy Smollett sprawled in.
“After the Great War,” Langham began, “I migrated to New York to study at the Art Students League. Prohibition had just commenced its lugubrious reign, which meant that you had to find an obliging entrepreneur who could supply you with plausible alcohol—we weren’t in Bible school, after all—and you had to know endroits pour boire where you could ply a likely lass with a cocktail or two. That meant you were obliged to rub shoulders with denizens of the underworld—the plight of Orpheus. It didn’t mean you had to shoot craps with these people, but that helped.
“I knew a gangster called Vido Arracci who would blow away a rival without so much as a ‘scusi,’ but who loved opera, loved to quote Dante and Petrarch, and loved Old Master paintings. I used to drink with friends at a little speak that he owned called the Trolley Lounge, and I would make sketches of some of the gals who entertained there. Vido saw them and bought a couple, then one day he said, ‘Hey, bub, you paint too?’ He asked me to paint his girlfriend, a lusty-looking contralto named Mae Monte. He told me he wanted the picture to be ‘kinda intimate, you know whad I mean? Like Titian did ’em, an’ Rubens. An’ you can look all you like, so long as you don’t get too pally—get my drift?’ Mae was a girl who loved to take her clothes off. I painted her twice—once for Vido and once for myself. It also turned out that Vido had quite a few girlfriends, and he wanted me to paint them all.
“By then I knew a lot of Vido’s—let’s call them his ‘associates.’ One of them was a tough little character called Tony Peanuts—at least that’s what people called him behind his back—and he controlled a couple of burlesque houses. I had free run of those places. I could sketch in the wings, paint the girls in their dressing rooms. It was a swell time. The girls would ask me to make drawings in return for favors. The kids these days think they invented sex, but you don’t know what sex is till you’ve enjoyed a roundelay with a couple of exotic dancers.”
This was all very interesting, but I wasn’t there to do archival research into the priapic habits of modern American masters, and I was getting more and more curious about the chairs we were sitting on and the walls of books.
“So, if we wanted to bring this story up to date,” I asked, “what would that tell us about Aladdin’s Alibi, and what would it tell us about Sandy Smollett?”
“Well,” said Langham, who was on a roll and wasn’t about to apply the brakes without a fight, “I made the mistake of marrying this woman named Cynthia Cutteridge—a ball bearing heiress from Cincinnati who turned out to be a hardcore ball breaker. She didn’t approve of me spending time with strippers and chorus girls . . .”
I saw that I would have to bide my time, and eventually we got round to Aladdin’s Alibi, by way of Palm Beach and other landscaped parking lots for the mink bikini set. At last he arrived at the point.
“From Cynthia’s funeral I went directly to the airport. From La Guardia I took a cab directly to 42nd Street and the first place I saw was the Alibi. I was immediately at home. The place is vulgar, if you like, but I’ve always liked vulgar.”
Looking around at the tasteful furnish
ings of the atelier, and photographs of tennis parties and tango teas, presumably taken during his society period, I thought that they didn’t quite add up with his last statement. But lately nothing did. He took me over to a big studio easel that held a large canvas. It had been facing away from me till then. The painting was almost finished. It showed a predominantly male audience seated at tables around an apron stage, scantily dressed cocktail waitresses moving among the tables, and caricatured faces of customers leering toward the performer on stage. She was the one part of the painting that was unfinished—no more than a ghostly presence suggested by a few quick brushstrokes. Her almost insolent pose was already discernible, and I could imagine the woman looking down at the gawking faces below with a disdainful expression that I had become familiar with.
“What do you think, dear boy?” Langham asked.
It was an over-elaborate, overworked parody of his early paintings, but I told him it was swell.
“Is this your first look at the Alibi?” he asked.
I admitted it was.
“But you can guess who will be adorning the stage?”
“So can we talk about her?” I asked.
“Shoot,” he said.
“How did you get to meet her?”
“I asked. That’s my modus operandi. The Alibi is run by a lovely man named Joey Garofolo.”
“Otherwise known as ‘the Shiv.’ ”
“So I’ve been told. I’ve known Joey since he was a child. Vido was his godfather. Anyway, I saw this girl perform—she was remarkable—and I told Joey I wanted to meet her. After the show, he brought her to my table and informed her that I was a great artist. I told her I’d love to paint her, and later I introduced her to Jilly. That’s all there is to it. I’m too old for the other business, alas.”
“Where did Joey find her—did he ever tell you that?”
“He said he saw her on a shopping trip to Paris.”
“Stripping?”
The Girl From Nowhere Page 5
