In a True Light

by John Harvey

  When Sloane ran across him, years later, loud in the bar of some midtown hotel, he was wearing three-button suits and big in margarine.

  Graham was fortunate that the more misogynistic attitudes which had been prevalent a decade earlier, and had impeded the progress of women artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner, Pollock’s wife, were no longer as widespread. So she was able to find acceptance, and flourish, within a community which included, among others, such notable artists as Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher and Joan Mitchell.

  Featured in Time magazine as one of half a dozen exceptional young talents, Graham had her first solo show at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, where, although attacked as over-referential by the formalist critic, Clement Greenberg, her paintings were strongly praised, notably by poet-critics James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara in the pages of ARTnews and Evergreen Review. O’Hara, who was Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, remained a powerful advocate of Graham’s work.

  He had been with Jane once at a party at Joan Mitchell’s and O’Hara had read a poem he’d written for the occasion. All Sloane could remember clearly was the way people had laughed during the reading and cheered and clapped like crazy at the end, and that O’Hara, who had been getting progressively drunker as the evening wore on, finally fell asleep stretched out on Mitchell’s sofa, his head in the lap of a pretty young man in pale blue jeans.

  In common with a number of other artists – Ellsworth Kelly, Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell among them – Graham felt the pull of Paris as an alternative art centre to New York and moved to that city in 1958. Brief visits aside, often made in conjunction with exhibitions of her work, she was never to return to the United States. In the seventies Graham moved to a studio near Montpellier, in the south of France, and although she continued to paint with the same clarity and vigour, her moment had passed. In 1988 she moved again, this time to the small village of Verrucole in northern Tuscany, where she lived and worked alongside her longtime companion, the Italian sculptor, Valentina Ceroni.

  The canvases she produced during the last dozen or so years of her life, while still predominantly abstract, tend increasingly to reflect her natural surroundings, as if the term ‘Abstract Impressionism’, which had been applied, tongue-in-cheek, to her work near the beginning of her career, had finally become valid.

  Jane Graham’s paintings hang in most of the major collections of twentieth-century art, including the recently opened Tate Modern in London, and in 1982 a major retrospective of her work was held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

  Sloane folded the newspaper closed. Through the window the sky was a perfect, untrammelled blue. In another four hours, slightly less, they would be touching down at JFK.

  12

  From the street it looks nothing special: the name, Lucille’s, faded on its awning, the menu in its plastic cover in a wooden frame beside the door. Fine dining. Specialities of the day. Green plants slowly dying on a ledge inside the window. Neon signs for Bud and Miller Light. A handwritten notice, blue print careful on white card, ‘Music Tonite’.

  Once inside, it’s clear this was once two separate buildings, opened up and none too artfully joined. A horseshoe bar dominates the centre, more than half the stools taken by solitary drinkers, men – they are all men – who stopped off after work and have yet to make it home because there’s little if anything to go home to. Spaced out along both sides of the bar are tables in double rows and most of these are occupied. A few families, one with a child who can be no more than two or three; couples in varying stages of relationships, the ones who talk too much, those who scarcely talk at all; a party of women, five in all, celebrating someone’s birthday with Chardonnay and shrill laughter; single men, lighting up between courses, some making a show of reading the sports, the paper; one with a novel propped open as he forks up his spaghetti, a paperback novel; another who flirts automatically with the waitress, a large-hipped, buxom woman of sixty whose grandchildren are entering their teens and whose feet throb. And, yes, there are candles on the tables, candles jammed into the necks of bottles, white folds of solid wax cascading down.

  In the right-hand room, furthest from the door, a dapper man with little hair but all of it neatly brushed in place, cuffs of his shirt rolled evenly back above his wrists, leafs through the selection of sheet music he carries with him in his case, pulling out a dozen or so tunes, the ones he thinks she’ll sing, those for which he needs the notes, the key, the chords. A quarter past nine and already she’s fifteen minutes late. Glancing over his shoulder, he catches the eye of the waitress, who shuffles to the bar and returns with a double measure of Scotch, Macallan, which she sets carefully atop the piano, a large glass of iced water alongside. The pianist nods his thanks, sips the Scotch, lights a small cigar.

  It is another ten minutes before Connie, chivvied by the management, emerges from the ladies’ room alongside the kitchen where she has been assiduously working her way through a half-bottle of vodka; earlier she has changed from her street clothes into a red and silver dress, the silver a bright slash across from breast to hip, the red the red of drying blood. She wishes she had some cocaine, coke to get her up, but she is new in town and doesn’t know where to score safely and, besides, hasn’t she promised herself she’d call a halt, stop using, give it up? Without it she’s unsure exactly how she’s going to get through this: the next half-hour, first set of three. Lucille’s in Albany, New York, a hundred and fifty miles north of Manhattan, the closest she’s worked to the city in years.

  She walks between the tables, one foot before the other, with exaggerated care. Walking on wire.

  The pianist plays a chord in E.

  Connie touches his shoulder briefly, hesitates as she reaches his side. Glancing up, he nods. The microphone is resting on a stool and she lifts it up, slides the switch down with her thumb and taps the head lightly, making sure it’s on. There is no stage as such, only this, a space she has to fill.

  She looks out into the interior, the tables, waits for a silence that doesn’t come. Her hair has been pulled back from her face and her cheekbones show too clearly through her skin. At slow to medium tempo, the pianist feeds her the first eight bars of ‘Just One of Those Things’. Perhaps she doesn’t hear? Fails to recognise the tune? Eight bars more and then he’s into the release, the bridge. Connie, microphone between both hands, is staring at the floor. With a skip and a hint of stride, he reaches the end of the sequence and as, irrevocably, another begins, Connie, still looking down, starts singing, her head slowly lifting with the words, those fabulous flights, the bells that now and then ring. After a chorus she relinquishes the song to the piano player for his solo, claiming it back with an emphatic note at the beginning of the middle eight, and by the time they arrive, dovetailed, at the end, some part of her has remembered the how if not the why.

  The party of five laughs immoderately at some ribald, indiscreet remark; the child spills ice cream into its lap and cries; from among the scattering of single men, the couples, some of whom may have been drawn there specifically by the music, there is a smattering of applause.

  ‘“Just Friends”,’ Connie says to the pianist, hand covering the microphone. ‘Two flats.’

  Her voice isn’t strong, not the strongest in the world, but there’s a quality to it, a depth in the lower register, a way of phrasing that’s neither showy nor affected, yet claims these words, these lines often heard, some of them, for her own. In the main she sticks to standards, things she first heard on albums her mother would play after work, relaxing, Ella, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan. When the lyric to ‘The Very Thought of You’ eludes her, she knows how to laugh, crack a joke at her own expense, begin again. Someone has sent up an anniversary request, scribbled on a napkin, anything by the Beatles. She finishes her set with ‘In My Life’, slow tempo, her voice wistful and charged with wonder. Applause stutters out of the almost silence and fills out, hold
s. Connie bows her head; the back of her neck is slick with sweat. The pianist raises his glass to her as she steps away.

  She is almost at the back of the room, her refuge, the bottle, when a hand reaches out, fingers tight around her arm.

  ‘Connie,’ Delaney says in his smooth croon. ‘Long time no see.’

  13

  The hotel on West 11th was cheap and clean, each room tailored to fit the basic accommodations, nothing more. Sloane showered and changed and put in a call to his friend, Jake Furman, letting him know he was in town. At the corner of the street he took a window table in the French Roast and thumbed through the listings section of Village Voice, looking for any mention of Connie Graham. Afternoon traffic on Sixth Avenue was light, the sky a mottled grey. His club sandwich, when it arrived, would have satisfied a family of three, but even so, little remained on his plate when the waiter whisked it away and set down his coffee and the check. Ten minutes later Sloane was in a cab heading uptown to MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art.

  The painting was not where Sloane expected and for a moment he was turned around, confused, until he realised everything had been moved from where it had been for so long, the entire collection refocused, rehung.

  Calm now, he moved through the interconnecting spaces, pausing here and there, until he turned the shoulder of one white wall and there it was, facing him, Jane’s painting, and the blood stopped somewhere between his heart and his brain.

  A large canvas, exhilarating, clusters of orange, magenta and blue tumbling through white space, one over another, the edges indistinct, slippery, moving, the eye caught up, sent scuttling; each slab of colour in harmony, in collision, filaments of paint that spring up, spray out, finally drip and dribble and trickle down between.

  Trinkle Tinkle (for Monk). Jane Graham. 1957.

  Sloane, skinny in Levis and a plaid shirt, had stood on line at the Five Spot for the best part of an hour and missed most of the first set. Inside, the only seat he was able to find squashed him close to several others on a table right up against the stage. Monk soloing against the rhythm, fingers held stiff above the keyboard then jabbing down, the bright percussive sound chiming through the buzz of conversation, clink of glasses, the occasional shout of laughter from the back of the crowded room.

  Monk wearing a pale jacket loose across the shoulders, pale green, silver and grey striped tie knotted snug against the collar of his white shirt, dark hair neatly, recently trimmed, no hat tonight, no hat, goatee beard and moustache, dark glasses shielding his eyes. Fingers rolling a little, feeling for a rhythm in the bottom hand, rocking back upon the piano stool and then thrusting forward, elbows angled out, playing with his whole body, and the drummer, seated at Monk’s back, following each movement, listening to each new shift and shuffle, quick and careful as a hawk. Monk’s foot, his right foot, skewed wide and stomping down, punctuating the broken line as, stationed in the piano’s curve, the bassist, eyes closed, feels for the underlying pulse. And Coltrane, John Coltrane, horn hooked over his shoulder, head down, fingers fluttering from time to time over imaginary keys, stands mute, focused, waiting his time.

  Stuart Hazel had brought Sloane here first, only the second or third night he’d been in New York. ‘This cat you gotta dig. Monk. Thelonious Sphere Monk, can you believe that name?’

  Sloane’s early years labouring over piano exercises, learning music, listening to his father practise, had been enough for him to know most things Monk was doing were foolhardy, next to impossible, kicking out against the commonplace, the rules.

  Sitting, that first evening, fascinated, filtering out Hazel’s incessant conversation as his friend chattered, gossiped, pointed out each and every celebrity in the club. ‘Hey, Kenneth! How’s it goin’?’

  After that he had returned alone. The same riffs, the same themes torn this way and that.

  ‘Ruby, My Dear’.

  ‘Round Midnight’.

  ‘Blue Monk’.

  And that evening, Sloane shifting in his seat, half rising awkwardly to let somebody squeeze past and hearing a shout from a table near the side wall – ‘Jane! Hey, Jane!’ – turning his head in time to see a woman near the entrance, dark-haired and smiling at the sound of her name, a hand raised towards her friends in recognition, in greeting; time enough to see that she is beautiful, before Monk launches himself along the keyboard in a clattering arpeggio which calls to mind a man stumbling headlong down a flight of stairs, never quite losing his balance, not falling, saving himself, miraculously, with an upward swoop and final, ringing double-handed chord.

  ‘I Mean You’.

  September 1957: the first time Sloane laid eyes on Jane Graham.

  14

  Jake Furman had seen the writing on the wall. In sixty-one, when rents in the Village had risen way beyond what most artists could afford and when even the Lower East Side was becoming inflated out of all proportion, he had used a small legacy from doting spinster aunts in Tennessee to purchase – not rent, but purchase – a semi-derelict, fire-damaged warehouse building overlooking the Hudson River. Since which time real estate prices all over the city had escalated steadily, and Chelsea, the area into which he had bought, had become the smart, hip area where lofts were luxury items and where all the big art dealers wanted to be. So Furman had gradually leased out the ground floor in separate units, two of which were gallery spaces capable of housing the largest installations, the third a café bar in which Furman himself had a ten per cent stake. The middle floor was given over to a video workshop and several small photographic galleries, and Furman had kept the entire top floor to himself, a vast studio-come-living space with wooden floors, rough plaster walls and high arched windows on all four sides.

  Financially, Furman had no need to work, supervising his building and collecting rent aside, but he continued most days as before, rising early and painting for several hours in the realist style he had clung to stubbornly when most artists his age were still in the throes of abstraction; and now, with an irony that only Furman and his close friends enjoyed, his flat, high-gloss, brightly coloured canvases – mostly portraits or still lifes – were highly collectable and fetched prices that were, Furman at his most mellow would confess, way beyond their true worth.

  ‘But what,’ he would ask, grinning, ‘can a poor guy do? I mean, I can’t exactly give them away now, can I? Start doing that and the whole system’ll collapse round our ears.’

  Sloane had first met Jake Furman when he was twenty, twenty-one, the beginning of the sixties, Furman some five or six years older and, buoyed up by a small allowance, learning his way around the edges of the scene. Shorter than Sloane by a head, round-faced and barrel-chested, Jake, in those days, was a serious drinker, a devotee of marijuana, a party-goer of legendary stamina. He had friends and acquaintances who were artists, friends who were poets, musicians. You were as likely to find him hanging out with broke but hopeful avant-garde film makers on the Lower East Side as indulging in in-depth conversations about the nature of art with Franz Kline in the Cedar Tavern, or listening to some young white guitarist faking black blues at Gerde’s Folk City or The Bitter End. Furman played a little guitar himself, some rudimentary piano; when, as much for a joke as anything else, he put down his hat and busked in Washington Square, he had earned insults and small change in equal measure.

  The two men had kept in touch down the years and, most times when Sloane was in the city, they would meet in a bar and listen to music or eat in Little Italy, Furman soft-peddling the alcohol now, keeping himself in pretty good shape.

  When Furman opened the door he enveloped Sloane in a bear-like hug, then stepped back to usher him inside. Bright, thick pile rugs on the floor, matching settees, Furman’s own paintings on the walls, the neat clutter of his workspace away to one side, a sound system that was playing Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. Furman’s hair, Sloane noticed, still thick and wiry, was now firmly grey.

  ‘Al and Zoot,’ Furman said. ‘Some time, I don’t know, late fifties. Stuf
f they cut for Coral. Here, listen there, Mose Allison on piano before anyone knew who the hell Mose Allison was.’ Furman picked up the CD case and put it in Sloane’s hand. ‘This is pretty much the band we saw at the Vanguard, you remember that?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Sloane recalled seeing Cohn and Sims, but that had been in London, surely? Ronnie Scott’s. He had been living in a squat in Wood Green, still nursing a crush on Jane.

  ‘Take the weight off,’ Furman said. ‘Have a seat. I’ll put on something a tad more conducive to talk.’ He silenced the two tenor players as they chased through ‘Just You, Just Me’, and settled for Bill Evans’s piano instead.

  ‘You want a drink? Wine? Coffee? Beer?’

  Sloane shook his head. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Okay. We’ll go downstairs later. Catch a bite to eat.’

  Sloane sat in the corner of one settee, Furman centred on the other, a low pale wood table between them. ‘You look pretty good,’ Furman said. ‘Fit and lean.’ He reached for a handful of cashews and popped one into his mouth and then a second. ‘I heard about your spot of trouble. Spending time inside. I’m sorry.’

  Sloane shrugged.

  ‘The time you got caught, it wasn’t the first?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘You were good at it then, what you did?’

  ‘I was okay.’

  Furman nodded towards the nearest of his own paintings, a couple in profile, woman and man, facing one another against a vibrant green background. ‘I’d best take care, you’ll be copying me.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Why not? They fetch more’n you might think.’

  ‘Let’s say, money aside, I like more of a challenge.’

  Furman’s face tightened and he sat upright, fist clenched, until Sloane’s face leaked a slow smile. ‘You bastard!’ Furman laughed.

  ‘Hard to resist.’