“You can do it,” Rhys said.
“It’s too hard.”
“You can do it. We’re here with you, Mr. Lowenstein.”
He looked at the place on his shirt where he’d spilled earlier. It was dry now. “What Levette had done,” he said, “well, he’d come to the cottage while I was in class and packed his things, to avoid having to see me. I learned later that he’d moved in with Knute and Colette Heldner, the artists, blocks away on Saint Peter. When I got home that day—it was just after one o’clock—I sat in his empty room with my back against the wall and I stayed there for hours. I got up finally and checked the furniture in his room for anything he might have left behind. I’m not completely sure why I felt compelled to do this, but I think I wanted proof that I’d known this man. Even then I was certain that no experience in my future would equal the one of my time with Levette.”
In the room there was a tall chest with drawers and he combed over it from top to bottom but found nothing. Next he went through the armoire. It was a huge thing, one of those pieces made in the state a hundred years before, with double doors and a drawer on the bottom and moulding fashioned as a cornice on top. Asmore had emptied it out as well. Two years together and there was no trace of the man. It was as though Asmore had never lived there. “I decided to show him,” Lowenstein said. “I would kill myself. I went to the bathroom and took my razor from the medicine cabinet.”
He ran the water in the tub and while it was filling up he used the razor to shave his face—the same razor with which he intended to slit his wrists. How could he be serious about suicide if he was concerned about keeping his face clean? He turned off the water and started to remove his clothes. From outside came the bell of a bicycle passing by and the thud of newspapers against nearby house fronts. It was the delivery boy, making his afternoon rounds. Although he wasn’t a subscriber, Lowenstein went out half-dressed and picked a paper off the ground. It was a beautiful afternoon, the coolest day yet of the season. He would have to remove his winter clothes from storage, he thought. And he would have to pay his neighbor for the paper when he saw him again.
He glanced at the headlines on the front page. Does a man who intends to kill himself care about the news of the world in the last moments of his life? Does he notice the weather? Does he wonder if moths have eaten holes in his favorite sweaters? Does he care that his neighbor is paid for his missing paper?
Lowenstein sat in the living room with a cold cup of coffee. As he read, he could hear the dripping of the tub faucet in the bathroom. It seemed to beckon him to get on with it. The story about Levette’s mural, describing it as an outrage, appeared on the last page.
“I pulled the plug, letting the water out of the tub, and I put the razor away,” Lowenstein said. “At last I had a way to win him back. I could predict the mob that would be awaiting him at the post office in the morning. I would prove myself to Levette by defending him against them.”
“So that was you,” Rhys said.
“Who was I?”
“Levette had a friend who was arrested that morning for coming to his support. I read about it in an old newspaper clipping.”
Lowenstein raised his hand. “Present and accounted for.”
Typical of New Orleans, the crowd that morning was making a party of it, chanting to be let in. There was no one he recognized. They didn’t seem particularly angry until he pushed his way up to the front and yelled for them to go home.
“Jew boy,” someone shouted.
“Lousy queer,” said another.
He was glad he’d decided against killing himself with the razor. He would let them do it. “There was a window in each of the doors, shaped like a star, not very big,” Lowenstein said. “I looked in one and I could see down a short hallway to the lobby where he’d hung the painting. It was up above tiers of scaffolding. At one time Levette had placed tarpaulin all around the mural to keep people from seeing, but now the tarps had been removed. The morning light was on the painting, and the colors were in full riot. I could see Levette and Jacqueline embracing at its center. I also saw others whom I recognized, people from the art school. He had Ninas fondling a girl who wasn’t his wife. He had Alberta Kinsey dressed like a nun. Miss Kinsey was a Quaker, but he’d made her out to be a Catholic Sister of Charity, with a big habit. He’d had fun with them, none more than me.”
“Why do you think he depicted you shooting dice, Mr. Lowenstein?” Rhys said.
“He meant to show I was a gambler, I suppose, Miss Goudeau. There I am with a collection of boys, prepared to lose it all for the sake of some fleeting pleasure.” He hesitated, as another idea seemed to come to him. “Levette had to know. He must have followed me on one of my trips to the house on Toulouse Street.”
Lowenstein could see Asmore huddled on the lobby floor with a group of older people, administrative types. One of them repeatedly pointed a finger in his face. Asmore stood calmly by before finally erupting in anger. He became so animated that two of the men grabbed his arms and pulled him back. When they released him he came striding up the hall toward the entrance, a look of determination fixed on his face. He pushed through the doors and the crowd moved back to let him out. Lowenstein wondered if Asmore was asking for his own death, but then it occurred to him that none of these people knew who he was. The paper hadn’t run his photo with the story. “Let me through,” he said, lowering a shoulder as he made his way into the crowd. “Let me through, please. Let me through…”
Lowenstein wanted to call out to him but he knew better than to speak his name. “Let me help you,” he said instead. “Please let me help you.”
Asmore pushed past him, broke free of the mob and ran across the street to a lot where a house was going up. When he returned he was carrying a five-gallon bucket in each hand. The buckets were filled with a milky paint that slopped against his legs and splashed to the ground. “He’s going to whitewash it,” somebody shouted. The mob responded with wild cheers and let him move forward. Asmore entered the building and locked the doors behind him, and the people realized they were going to be denied a look at the painting. A panic seemed to come over them. Even as Lowenstein shouted for calm they began to press forward and push against the doors.
“Something snapped in me and I started throwing punches, mimicking the motion of a windmill. I struck a few of them before being hit myself. One got me here—” Lowenstein indicated a small, crescent-shaped scar on the side of his head, just above the eye—“and I went down so fast whoever hit me must have thought I was dead. It stopped the crowd. I was conscious but I pretended to be out cold. I lay without moving. The area around the eye is very vascular, and I could feel blood pouring over my face and taste it in my mouth. I was sure I looked a mess, but I wasn’t badly hurt. I could’ve got up and walked away.”
“You wanted to give him time to cover the painting, didn’t you?” Rhys said.
“Yes. That crowd would have ripped the mural to pieces. At the art school they’d taught us how to make our own paints, casein among them. It was popular on house projects because it was inexpensive to produce. People used it more then than they do today. Levette probably knew the carpenters and crew on the construction site. Remember, he’d worked for a time in the building trade himself, and he’d often gone to these workers for materials to use for his easel paintings. I’m sure he’d cadged cigarettes off them, too, during breaks from his work hanging the mural.”
The police arrived and suddenly Lowenstein was being lifted to his feet. As voices nearby argued their innocence and blamed the incident on him, Lowenstein got a final glimpse in the window past a burning film of blood. Asmore was high on the scaffolding now, painting the top of the mural with broad strokes that ran in streaks. “He looked like a god up there. His body glowed in the sunlight. He was absolutely radiant. I experienced something then that might be called a premonition, but it was more profound than that. Would that make it a revelation? Yes, I suppose it could be called a revelation. Becau
se I knew he wouldn’t be with us much longer.” He paused for more whiskey. “What I couldn’t have imagined, however, was the role I would play in his death.”
Lowenstein spent the day at Central Lockup, where a doctor administered to the cut on his face with fourteen stitches. Released the next morning, he returned to the cottage on Saint Philip and the empty room that had been Asmore’s. Once again he searched for evidence that his friend had ever lived there. He would’ve been pleased to find strands of hair in the bristle of a brush. But, as before, there was nothing to be found. He began to wonder if he’d imagined the last two years.
After a few days alone Lowenstein forced himself to put on clean clothes and leave the house. He walked the streets of the French Quarter, hoping that fresh air and exercise might help clear his head. It was useless. Stopping in front of the house on Toulouse Street, he needed only to hear muffled laughter past the door to be lured inside. In minutes it would be his laughter they heard from the street. He stayed for the remainder of the day, drinking whatever was handed to him, only too willing to disclose his identity to anyone who asked for it. He met a colleague of his father’s named Shaw, whose wedding band remained on his finger even as the older man thrust his tongue deep in Lowenstein’s mouth. As he moved from one room to the next, Lowenstein was visited by an echo that seemed to increase in volume the more he tried to convince himself it wasn’t there. “Please, Levette, you are my heart,” a voice kept saying.
The boy from Tulane who’d recognized Lowenstein on a previous visit appeared in the house. They went into a room already crowded with men. As he was finishing Lowenstein could bear it no longer. He shouted out the words that had been beating around in his head all afternoon. Others in the room began to laugh and point at him. The boy pushed Lowenstein off of him. Lowenstein repeated the words, this time with a sob.
“Crazy goddamned faggot,” the boy said.
Lowenstein spent the next week alone in the cottage, sleeping on a pallet of blankets on the floor of Asmore’s room. One morning he walked to the market for fruit and a meat sandwich but he couldn’t eat more than a few bites before becoming ill. As he napped later that day he heard the front door being opened. He sat up and waited, the wood beneath him vibrating as someone stepped through the house. It was Asmore. He stood in the doorway staring at Lowenstein on the floor. “What in God’s name are you doing?” Asmore walked over and knelt beside him. “You’ve bled all over yourself.”
He helped Lowenstein to the bathroom and wet a cloth and brushed off the scabby black blood on his face. “I’m sorry, Levette,” Lowenstein said.
“You’re sorry, are you?”
“I’m really sorry, Levette.”
“Low, hasn’t anybody told you to clean yourself? Jesus Christ, man, you’re filthy.”
“Will you be coming back? Please come back.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“Come back. Please come back.”
“You can’t share your home with someone like me, now can you, Low? No, that wouldn’t be good.” There was no passion in his voice. He spoke in a direct, matter-of-fact tone. “What would people say?”
It was devastating to hear how casually Asmore dismissed him. “I told you I was sorry,” he said. “I told Jacqueline I was sorry. Why won’t you forgive me?”
“Clean your face, Low.”
“I don’t understand. Why? Why can’t you forgive me?”
Asmore didn’t answer. He returned to the bedroom and opened the double doors of the armoire. Lowenstein, coming in from the bathroom, could hear him whistling a popular song of the day as he stepped up on the floor of the cabinet and reached over the top of the cornice. He removed a rolled-up canvas and tossed it to the floor. He then tossed a second canvas. Lowenstein sat on the floor and spread the first canvas open. It was a portrait of a young woman, signed by the artist in the upper-left corner, and titled Beloved Stephanie. He checked the other paintings. Many of them were Beloved portraits, as well.
“The canvases rained down,” Lowenstein said. “He’d been storing them there all this time. About twenty of them were left over from his show two years before, but most were older than that. I’d pulled the house apart searching for the smallest wisp of the man, and all along about fifty of his paintings lay hidden on top of the armoire. The best of them were portraits, but there were city views as well. One of the last he pulled out was about half-finished. It was on burlap primed with a kind of gelatin he often used. One could see where he’d sketched the image with pencil. It showed a bridge spanning the river. The sky was filled with blackbirds. It was the one he’d come for.”
Asmore stepped down from the armoire and took the painting out of Lowenstein’s hands. “I got a letter yesterday at the school from Will Henry Stevens. You remember Will Henry, Low?”
Stevens was an art instructor. Lowenstein nodded. “Sure.”
“He’s up in North Carolina where he goes to paint the mountains. He says he’ll trade me a mountain picture for this one of the bridge, plus he’ll throw in a hundred dollars. You know what I think, Low? I think somebody told Will Henry about the post office mural and he means to help out a friend.”
“How would he have known about your painting of the bridge?”
“We were out there together when I started it—out there at the bridge. It isn’t bad. It’s sketchy yet, but it’s better than I remembered.”
“Why didn’t you finish it before?”
“It started to rain.” He looked up from the painting. “I’m going out there now.”
“I wish you’d let me go with you,” Lowenstein said. “I don’t want to impose or interfere, but I would really like that. We can go in my car.”
“Thanks.” And he shook his head. “I’ve already arranged to borrow a car.”
“I’m going mad in this house. Let me drive you. I won’t be in the way.” Even as he spoke, Lowenstein could sense how he must’ve sounded to Asmore: the pathetic, mortally wounded victim of his own bad behavior trying to put a good face on a situation from which he would never recover.
Somehow, after more pleading, he got Asmore to agree. As they motored west from the city Asmore sat with the painting unfurled in his lap, running his fingers over the blue streak of paint that represented the river. He also had a whiskey flask from which he took long drinks. He showed no interest in the passing scenery and kept his head down as they traveled from Orleans to neighboring Jefferson Parish. “He seemed mildly irritated with himself for being alone with me again,” Lowenstein said. “I didn’t dare speak. I was afraid the sound of my voice would trigger a memory and prompt him to order me to turn back around.”
They parked near the bridge’s approach and walked to a spot on the riverbank. He’d brought his toolbox packed with supplies, but he’d neglected to stretch the burlap or to bring materials with which to do so now. Asmore laid the material flat on a piece of packed, sandy ground and bent over it and worked on the painting in this fashion, Lowenstein watching from nearby.
When Asmore was done Lowenstein held the finished painting out in front of him and studied it as he walked back to the car. Lowenstein laid the burlap on the backseat and it occurred to him that Asmore could import meaning to a picture without trying to, so great was his power as an artist. By now he realized that Asmore hadn’t followed him to the car. Lowenstein scanned the riverbank but he wasn’t there. Eventually he spotted him walking up the side of the bridge.
“I started up after him, but it wasn’t easy going. It wasn’t a walkway built to encourage pedestrian use. It was extremely narrow, only a few feet wide at most. I guess the bridge builders had emergencies in mind when they included it, but I can tell it wasn’t there to invite sightseeing. It seemed every other car that whooshed by me blew its horn. The draft from a couple of tractor-trailer trucks was so strong I almost went over the guardrail, which came up to only about waist-high. I was scared out of my wits and hoping the police would arrive and arrest us both.�
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Until now Lowenstein had carefully avoided peering over the side, afraid that he’d get dizzy or lose his courage to continue. But presently he allowed himself to look and he saw the full sweep of the Louisiana low country, the nearby woods thick with old-growth cypress, tupelo and hardwood trees and the distant plantations etching geometric patterns in the earth. But most impressive of all was the river itself. Huge and dark, it seemed to Lowenstein to have no concern but for its own slow journey. Lowenstein opened his mouth and the cool air belled out his cheeks and made his eyes water. Asmore was standing a few paces ahead of him, with his hands on the rail, the wind blowing his clothes tight against his body and throwing his hair back. “I should’ve come up here a long time ago,” he said. “Why didn’t I come up here before, Low?”
“Why?” Like Asmore, he had to shout to be heard above the buffeting roar of the wind. “Because it’s crazy to be up here. People don’t do this.”
Asmore took the flask out of his pocket and drank from it. “You don’t see that?” he said, looking over at his friend.
“Don’t see what?”
“You don’t see how beautiful it is? Damn, Low, it’s beautiful.”
Lowenstein looked out again and it truly was beautiful, but it was hard to appreciate the beauty because he was so terrified. He began to see things he hadn’t seen the first time he looked. Ships docked at a port, for instance. And in the near distance in front of them great clouds of blackbirds moving in the sky. The blackbirds seemed to hover effortlessly in the wind.
“How do they fly like that?” Asmore said, gazing out at them, too, and drinking. “I just wish somebody would answer me that. How do they do it?” He took another swallow from the flask and set it on the pavement at his feet.
“I think we should be getting down from here,” Lowenstein said.
Asmore kicked the flask with his boot and sent it past the guardrail, tumbling out a ways and then dropping toward the water. “It’s beautiful. All of it is.”
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