Alive in Shape and Color

by Lawrence Block

  “I told him you’re sitting on a ledge. And I read him Bern’s review.”

  “Burned by Bern,” said Jimmy, speaking of backstabbers. “I always wondered if Bern would turn on me.”

  Anyone outside the bloodthirsty art business would have tried to console him with naive assurances that one vicious New York Times critic could not wreck a solid career.

  But Abby knew the business. She owned both the Whitlock Gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street and the first uptown-gallery downtown branch in the SoHo district, and she had loved Jimmy too long and hard to sugarcoat what Bern Horne could do to an artist he chose to destroy.

  “Bern can destroy your price,” she admitted. “He cannot destroy your life, unless you let him. He can’t destroy the work you’ve done. He can’t destroy the work you do next.”

  “How can I show the work if I can’t sell it?”

  “Live long, like the man said. Your shot will come around again.”

  They stared down at the empty street, Jimmy on the parapet, Abby safe behind it, and argued. Abby was sunnily hardheaded, Jimmy desperate.

  Clyfford Still suddenly appeared on the sidewalk.

  “What’s he carrying?” asked Abby.

  “Gallon of paint and a wall brush.” The paint was as white as his hair.

  “Your old tools.”

  “Thanks for reminding me I can always go back to house painting.”

  Abby laughed. “I’ll still represent you.”

  “Not for long.”

  She met his eye in silence.

  He was not surprised she could not deny it.

  Still put the paint and brush on the curb, and walked quickly to the phone booth. The light went on when he closed the door. He came out in a minute, hurried back, and picked up his paint.

  Jimmy said, “Even if you did keep representing me, I cannot go back to handouts.”

  Fire Island, the summer of 1965, Abby Whitlock and Bern Horne searched beyond the boardwalk for the studio that they heard Jimmy Camerano had hidden in the empty sand dunes east of the Pines. He had built it of scrap lumber and tar paper that he had begged from the builder who paid him two dollars an hour to paint ceilings in beach houses. A good deal, he claimed, as he only needed a dollar a day for food, plus a little extra for ferry and train fare to New York, and brushes and paint on Canal Street. He had a skylight made of sheet plastic stapled over a hole in the roof, a car radio that ran off a six-volt battery, hurricane lamps, a bottled-gas refrigerator he had found in the dump, and a bedsheet draped over a canvas on an easel.

  Bern—still trying to be a painter back then—asked, “How do you get through the winter?”

  “I rent a loft on the Bowery.”

  “As posh as this?”

  “Not quite.”

  Bern spotted a magazine print of a Clyfford Still painting that Jimmy had cut out of Life and taped to his rusty refrigerator. “PH-129.” Bern knew it well. A jagged snatch of red united a giant field of warring yellows. If Still ever titled a painting, instead of giving it a filing number, he could have named it Blood in the Sun.

  He turned away from it abruptly and homed in on Jimmy’s easel.

  Without asking, he whipped off the bedsheet.

  What jumped from the canvas was like a fist in his face. No wonder this guy living on scraps was sure of himself: he had more talent in his fingernail than Bern could dream of.

  Bern counterpunched without even thinking about it.

  “Just what the art scene needs, another lyrical abstract expressionist.”

  “What do you call it?” asked Abby.

  “Untitled 1.” Jimmy was not sure yet what to make of Bern, and much more interested in Abby-in-hip-huggers. Bern, who seemed disappointed that he didn’t respond to the crack about his work, struck him as bold, rich, educated, and adrift. Abby had glittery blue eyes and black curly hair, the kind of easy walk that came from being sure about something, and a smile that made him feel like it was meant all for him.

  “It’s not bad,” said Bern. “Not bad at all.”

  Abby said, “It’s good.”

  Bern opened the rusty refrigerator. It was marginally cooler inside, he supposed, and held half a bottle of wine.

  “I’ll be back.” He pushed out the screen door.

  “Alone at last,” said Jimmy.

  Abby said. “We will never be friends if I sleep with you.”

  “What? Where did that come from?”

  “I know your kind.”

  “What kind?”

  “Italian. I’ve known Italians. You can’t help yourselves.”

  “I’m not Italian. I’m American.”

  “You know what I mean. Didn’t your father have girlfriends?”

  “He did worse. He was a violent criminal. Threw people off buildings.”

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t be. I wonder sometimes did he get the high out of it that I get out of painting?”

  “I shouldn’t have said any of that—but I wasn’t kidding.”

  “Why do you want to be friends?”

  “To help you.”

  “How are you going to help me?”

  Abby Whitlock planted herself in front of Untitled 1.

  She followed one rule when evaluating a painting: if she had trouble breathing, it was good. Bern was marginally right calling it derivative of Clyfford Still, but only marginally. It had its own passion.

  “Who’s going to sell it?”

  “When I get enough work done, I’ll find a gallery.”

  “You just did.”

  “You?”

  “I will own a gallery on Fifty-Seventh Street.”

  Fifty-Seventh Street was Gallery Row, the pinnacle of art selling. She had made him a life-changing offer, and Jimmy Camerano managed to push an “Oh,” out of stunned silence.

  Bern Horne found his way back to the boardwalk, walked a mile to the harbor where they had a grocery and a liquor store, stole someone’s red wagon to trundle his purchases back to the end of the boardwalk, scooped the bags into his arms and slogged through the deep sand, dodging poison ivy. Hot and sweating, job done, he stepped into the shack, only to be staggered by his second fist of the day.

  Abby was mooning at Jimmy Camerano as if the painter, not Untitled 1, was the work of art. Not that she wouldn’t covet the painting too. She was smart enough to see how good it was. But she wanted the whole package.

  Jimmy looked mighty pleased. He had probably made the first move, cast the first look, the opening what-if glance. Abby was a one-man woman, by and large. Jimmy must have made the first move.

  Heart churning, Bern stuffed cold cuts, beer, Coke, and wine into the refrigerator. His hands were shaking. He stacked cans of tuna, fruit and coffee and evaporated milk on a plywood shelf, and poured sugar into the near-empty jar in which Camerano hid it from the ants.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said, at last. He stalked to the easel, which Jimmy had left uncovered. “Here’s your problem.”

  “I don’t have a problem.”

  The son of a bitch was so sure.

  “You don’t think you have a problem. But you’re copying work the man did in 1949.”

  “I am not copying anybody.”

  “Maybe not like carbon paper. But Clyfford Still walks through the snow and you’re trying to squeeze your feet in his footsteps.”

  Jimmy wasn’t having any of that. “Nobody paints alone. You think these idiots doing pop would stand a chance if Edward Hopper didn’t focus them on the Ashcan School?”

  “I agree they’re idiots. But they’re not copying Hopper, or the Ashcan School.”

  “You can follow as long as you add.”

  Bern dragged him back to the refrigerator. “What made you cut this out? Why did you hang it here?”

  “Because nobody can paint like that.”

  “That’s what I’m saying,”said Bern. “The snow around his footsteps is never going to melt.”

  “Yeah? What if I add fi
re?”

  Bern looked at Abby. She looked away. He wasn’t “losing” her. He had already lost her to this talented bastard who was not only stealing his girlfriend, but had a far better chance than Bern ever would of filling Clyfford Still’s footsteps, unless something derailed him.

  He noticed what he hadn’t earlier. Taped under PH-129 it was a little squib scissored from last month’s New York Times, date-lined Los Angeles. June 18, 1965.

  The new Los Angeles County Museum of art opened today a exhibition titled, “The New York School: the First Generation,” the first historical survey of the New York abstract expressionist group. Among artists whose work is represented are Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline and Clyfford Still.

  “Look at the last line,” Bern said to Jimmy. “‘Critics have argued that the museum’s collection has some serious gaps.’ You know what that means? There’s room for your fire.”

  Jimmy puffed up at the flattery, as Bern thought he would. “That’s what I mean,” he said. “Everything doesn’t have to be so-called new. There’s room for great painting. Look at Jon Schueler.”

  Bern groaned theatrically. “Another derivative lyrical abstract expressionist.”

  “Jon Schueler can paint circles around Rothko.”

  “I agree,” said Bern. “But he’ll never get the chance to.”

  “We’re all derivative. Schueler derives from Turner. The pop idiots derive from Hopper. Hopper derives from Sloan. Even Still is derivative.”

  “Who is Clyfford Still derivative of?”

  “Still is derivative of Still.”

  Bern laughed. “Touché, Jimmy.”

  He found a church key and opened a couple beers. Abby drank wine.

  They talked. The Vietnam War was heating up, but Jimmy had been drafted years before, straight out of high school, and Bern had 4-F knees, which made them immune to interruption.

  “I’m getting out of painting,” Bern said, suddenly.

  Jimmy sounded appalled. “Stop painting?”

  “Just in time. Pop art, kinetics, land art, op, photorealism are sweeping away ordinary painters. You don’t have to worry, Jimmy. But all except the best are goners, they just don’t know it, yet. I envy you, but I don’t have the talent to stave off the inevitable.”

  “What will you do?”

  Bern grinned. “I can always be a critic. Abby says I have a clever tongue, don’t you, dear?”

  Abby asked, “Is there a . . .” She gestured around the shack.

  “Outhouse around back. It’s clean.”

  As soon as she left, Jimmy asked, “Does Abby really own a Fifty-Seventh Street gallery?”

  “She will.”

  “Wow. She offered to represent me.”

  “I’m not surprised. She has a terrific eye for what sells.”

  “Are you two . . . ?”

  Bern had a sudden burst of hope, but it was false hope and he no choice but to swallow it. Abby was smitten and would do exactly what she wanted to. No matter how hard he fought for her, it wasn’t his fight to win. All he could do was grieve and rage. He said, “Just on-and-off friends kind of forever.”

  “Can she afford to open her own gallery?”

  “Show me a New York painter’s girlfriend and I will show you a rich man’s daughter whose mother died in childbirth or was a hopeless alcoholic.” Bern rattled off names of girls Jimmy had been introduced to at exhibits, or heard about, or, in two cases, had things with too brief to know about their mothers.

  “Which was Abby’s mother?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Bern smiled, acting the part of the sophisticate delighting in the wonderful vagaries of New York art. “Same result. Artists’ bills get paid. Fathers freak out. A good time is had by everyone else, for a while. And paintings get made.”

  He wondered which of them tore him up worse—Jimmy for taking her, or Abby for being taken. Happily, he wouldn’t have to chose. What he did to one would be suffered by both.

  A year later Abby opened shop on Fifty-Seventh Street. With a head for business, a gift for making friends, and taste that matched New Yorks’ hunger for things that seemed new, she did well. A year after that, she opened Whitlock SoHo downtown on Greene Street. Her father, a Cincinnati industrialist, blustered in one day and, instead of admiring the work for sale, demanded of the airy space, “What kind of business is this? Where are your assets?”

  “Fifty artists who count on me.”

  “They’re not an asset. They’re a liability.”

  Abby said, “If they’re a liability, they are a lucrative liability.” She showed him the deed to the building, and told him she no longer needed her allowance. It had to be the greatest moment in her life, even though they both knew that certain funds had passed directly to her from her grandmother.

  She watched Bern find a place in the world, too, converting slickly from almost-painter to freelance writer for ARTnews, Art in America, Art International, Esquire, and the Partisan Review. She cheered him on—one hand would wash the other—and tipped things his way with a dinner party that included an editor at the Paris Review. Bern’s piece for that “in-est of in” magazines lauding “the raw joy” of pop art while skewering its existence got his photograph in the first issue of New York magazine: “Bern Horne, the charming young independent critic with an art dealer’s flair for picking winners, an art historian’s knowledge of why, and an essayist’s razor-sharp pen to explain it all in compelling prose.”

  When Abby caught wind that New York was going to offer him a regular column, she informed a friend at the Times, and the Times gave him a desk, which included a regular paycheck and expenses. The other New York papers printing art columns went bankrupt, and Bern was suddenly empowered to turn the winners he picked into rich celebrities.

  Jimmy Camerano painted summers in his shack and winters on the Bowery. Abby waited until she had the clout to steer her bravest clients his way, and chose his best for a show at the Whitlock SoHo. The first sentence of Bern’s Times review read, “Just what art needs, another lyrical abstract expressionist.”

  Jimmy dropped the paper on the floor and raised his fist to punch the wall.

  “Keep reading!” said Abby.

  “It’s revenge. That son of a bitch is getting back for you coming with me.”

  Abby said, “I would have thought so. I was really worried he would. But for some reason he didn’t. I’m amazed, but wait until you hear the rest of it.” She did not bother picking up the paper. She had memorized it.

  “‘Why, you might ask, do we need another Clyfford Still when we already have a perfectly splendid Clyfford Still? Good question. But you won’t ask it when you see Jimmy Camerano’s new show at Whitlock SoHo downtown on Greene Street. With emphasis on new. What a painter! The only question you will ask is how does he do it? How does he imbue a thirty-year-old movement with the freshness of a summer morning?’

  “You’re made, Jimmy.”

  He had always been a worker. Now, not having to scramble for food and rent, his output soared. In less than a year he had finished enough paintings for Abby to pick from for a new show. Bern Horne loved it and said so in memorable prose in both the Times and the magazines. He included the next exhibition, which Jimmy turned out a year and a half later, in a roundup of top-selling young painters for ARTnews. When the Fire Island National Seashore condemned his shack in the dunes, Jimmy commissioned Horace Gifford to build a sleek studio-house farther out on the beach at remote Water Island. And when the landlord tried to jack up his rent on the Bowery, he bought the building.

  After the renovation party, when everyone else had staggered home, and Abby had gone to bed, Bern asked, “Have you found time to work?”

  “Not a lot. Renovating and building the house at the same time ate a lot of energy.”

  “Haven’t you painted anything?”

  “Some. But I’m not ready to show it.”

  “Do I have to beg?”

  Jimmy flipped an electri
cal switch. The wall that cordoned off his studio glided magically open and lights flooded down his easels. Jimmy didn’t know it, but Bern had already talked Abby into sneaking him an early look. He stalked among them, quickly.

  “I see why you need a wall.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not quite party fare, are they?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Bern shoved his hands in his pockets, pivoted from painting to painting. “What the hell is this?”

  “I’m stepping out.”

  “You’re stepping in it. In my humble opinion.”

  “You’re wrong,” said Jimmy.

  “And you’re stepping backward. This is not you. This is not Jimmy Camerano. This is . . . I don’t know what this is.”

  “Call it realistic,” said Jimmy. “Figurative? Representational?”

  “What made you think to go in this direction?”

  ”There’s a bar on Avenue C. It’s got a huge cellar, must have been a swimming pool, or something.”

  “I heard about it.”

  “Monday nights, three hundred representational painters show their stuff. Everyone has an opinion. I’ve seen it turn into fistfights.”

  “Representational is so old.”

  “It’s so old, it’s new.”

  “But you don’t need this. You’re made. You’re loved. You’re rich. You can sell every painting you ever make for the rest of your life.”

  Jimmy said, “You once told me don’t step in Still’s footprints. Remember? In the long run you were right. I can’t keep doing the same stuff. This is what is coming out of me now.”

  “I would put it back if I were you. . . .” Bern looked around again. “Well, as you yourself said, at least there isn’t a lot of it.” Suddenly, his expression softened. “Oh, Jesus, Jimmy. I’m sorry. Don’t listen to me. You have to follow your own . . . I don’t know—gut, muse, instinct—you’re a fine painter. You’ll figure it out. . . .”

  When he got to the door he could not resist turning around to say, “Kiss Abby good night for me, would you?”

  He doubted Jimmy even heard him, so deep was the confusion gathering on his face.

  Clyfford Still stepped off the curb, dipped his wall brush in the gallon can, bent his knees, lowered the brush to the street, and started walking.