Harmony In Flesh and Black

by Nicholas Kilmer

  “Please,” Smykal said, motioning toward a chair. “Make yourself at home. I was about to indulge my taste for sherry. You will join me?”

  Fred shook his head, standing. He didn’t want to put anything in his mouth here. “I can’t stay. I’d like to take the painting. I’m pressed for time.”

  “I assured Mr. Arthurian that with an eye such as his, he must have talent.” He sniffed. It wasn’t just the dust, and fungus, and filth, and cigar smoke. It was nose candy working, eating into the septum. “I thought he might return himself. I teach, as well as being a creative person in my own right,” Smykal said, gesturing toward the walls.

  The photos of female crotches were Smykal’s own work, then, which he justified as art. A pile of it cackled on the floor when Fred brushed against it by accident, as if the man’s buzzards were sharing a private joke in poor taste.

  The cigar trembled in Smykal’s face.

  “I offered him my standard arrangement,” Smykal said. “I provide camera, studio time, instruction, models, everything. Everything is in-house, even my darkroom. Total, total privacy. Such a good eye he has, I was impressed. Amid all this he spotted the painting right away. I sensed his native talent. Like many, he is shy of his indwelling potential. I’ll telephone him. I mislaid his number.”

  Fred thought to himself, Clay, I forgive you, if the painting’s any good. The man, the place, the circumstances were so appalling, anyone could allow intrigue to replace good sense.

  “He’ll be in touch himself,” Fred said. “When he is ready.”

  Smykal sniffed. The blue suit was almost shiny enough to reflect his pitted face.

  Fred said, “I’m in a hurry.”

  “Another time, then,” Smykal said. “For the sherry. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. I’m wrapping it in the studio. Would you care to visit my studio? What may I call you, sir?” He opened a closed door off the sitting room, revealing a brief and surprising expanse of white clarity. Fred shook his head.

  “I’ll wait,” Fred said.

  Smykal closed himself into his studio.

  You don’t need to wrap a painting to carry it, but Smykal wouldn’t understand that. Half the people who own them don’t know about paintings. They have them, but it’s like a gorilla trying to take care of a baby bird. Let the man wrap his painting if he wanted. If the person’s leaning in your direction anyway, don’t push.

  Fred sat in an armchair of abused velour. He listened to Smykal grunting and wrapping in the next room. He’d be later getting to Molly’s, that was all.

  On the gray wall opposite Fred’s chair, over a bookcase crammed with magazines and bottles, was a horizontal stain of absence on faded wallpaper that, between the gynecological displays, was dotted with crimson roses anyone’s granny would enjoy. The disembodied crotches looked wise and solemn, omniscient, indifferent, like visitors from outer space. The velour on his armchair began crawling.

  If that stain was the size of what Clay had bought, the canvas Smykal was wrapping was roughly two by three feet. Fred saw a handy toolbox in red plastic on the floor under the vacancy, and picture hooks lying ready, and several of Smykal’s framed prints waiting to take advantage of the opening.

  “I trust I made the right decision,” Smykal called from the studio. “We artists are not suited to the marketplace. I could undoubtedly have sold it for much more if I had held out. I am an innocent. We artists are. God must care for us.”

  Fred stared at his knees. They were nicer than anything else here: hard knobs in brown twill.

  Smykal stuck his head out of the studio, his mouth, between the hair, making words and pursing between them for emphasis. “Arthurian’s interest in fine art could be so easily extended to the film.”

  Smykal said “the film” the same way some people say “the dance.”

  Fred stood up, looking at his Timex.

  The package, when Smykal brought it out of the uneasy starkness of the back room, was, as Fred had guessed, about two by three feet, bulky at the edges on account of a paste frame that Fred could feel crumbling behind the newspaper. It was bound like a mummy in string and tape. Fred took hold as soon as he could because Smykal was having trouble with it, sliding it along the floor and making tracks in the greasy dust of a rug whose generic color Fred classified as Barbizon, or Blakelock.

  Smykal wagged the stump of his cigar. “Mr. Arthurian must call me. I found him an interesting person. So cultured. But a man of the world. He was taken with my work. We are soul mates. I felt him responding.”

  He leered. The cigar had gone out between his lips. Anything would. “Perhaps you yourself, even,” he suggested. “You won’t believe how easy and releasing it is. I am arranged for total privacy.…”

  “For God’s sake, give it up,” Fred said. “Arthurian knows how to reach you if he wants to make prints from your hired vaginas.”

  Smykal gulped and blushed, spluttered, looked from side to side, said, “For goodness’ sake, we don’t think of it like that…,” and saw it was no use, Fred was moving. Smykal waved forlornly. “Farewell, then, little one,” he said. Fred gave a start. Then he understood that Smykal was talking to the package, the painting, telling it good-bye.

  As Smykal opened the door to the landing, he looked as if he might try to snatch the package back. “Why should we even think of money? God must take care of us,” he said. “Like the birds of the field, or the lilies of, the lilies of—” He hesitated.

  Fred said, “I’m off.”

  He reached the sidewalk and breathed in again, but the smell followed. It was embedded in the package Smykal had made, a crumpled oblong wrapped in newspaper that smelled of bacon grease and old dust, crotches and cigars.

  * * *

  Fred, being a lapsed bachelor right now, was living outside Boston, in Arlington, with his friend Molly Riley and two children. The house and children were Molly’s. Fred was liking being there, despite it being a big change for him, and they seemed to be glad to have him around. Molly, alert and protective of her children and her turf, was fond of him, and Fred thought he was getting somewhere with the eight-year-old girl, Terry. Terry would take his hand, even, sometimes, without thinking. The boy, Sam, twelve, was harder.

  Fred hadn’t thought to be attached to anyone, to anything, again. If he looked at it, he couldn’t understand it, nor could he trace how this had come about from the first pleasure he had found, more than a year ago, joking with the nice woman behind the reference desk at the Cambridge Public Library before going back to sleep on the mat in Charlestown in the bare room in the house he had bought—was still buying—with the other guys.

  Fred saw the guys still. He occasionally played chess there in the evening. And he paid his share of the mortgage though he wasn’t using his room now and he knew someone else was sleeping there regularly. All he needed the place for now, it seemed, was for somewhere to keep a locked box of things he didn’t want at Molly’s. And it made a home base to return to if it came to that in the future. He paid more than his share since he was making money and others could not. The guys could use the help, and there wasn’t much coming from anywhere else, whether out of the Veterans Administration or from the alumni association of unmentionable clandestine activities.

  He was late, and he was getting to like the feeling of being expected by a woman and two children. Fred had his own primary objective, and he wasn’t going to let Clay’s business crowd in front of anything as fragile as what he was working on with Molly and the kids. It was going to be tough to find a safe corner at Molly’s to keep a picture, what with bicycles, hair dryers, fishing rods, the portable TV, and the rest of it; and he didn’t really like mixing Clay’s business into that part of his life. But Clayton would have to take his chances.

  Fred turned right at the river and then headed west on Route 2.

  He’d thought for a long time that he was destined always to be a loner. He was changing. His prime objective now was not being a loner. He didn’t have men to
watch out for anymore; so let it be Molly and the kids, if they would let him.

  He was eager to see Molly. Molly was a very pretty woman. Fred told her that she could be found in paintings from the school of Fontainebleau, and that she’d been prefigured by Italians working for French royal taste—though she was pinker, on the whole.

  Molly said that didn’t keep her, with her short brown curls—and especially when she was wearing an apron—from looking like the kid sister of the rosy farmer’s wife in children’s books from the thirties. If she didn’t watch it, she’d get fat.

  Traffic was slow and heavy. The green and pink dresses of spring were ruffled across the trees along his route, making him think with extra pleasure of Molly waiting for him.

  The thought of Clayton Reed in Smykal’s place was amazing, interesting, and most spectacularly odd. What devious twist of fate or research had brought him there? Whatever it was, Clayton had been seduced by the package now in the trunk of Fred’s car. Out in the air, with the close reek of Smykal’s nest of slime receding, Fred’s appetite began emerging cautiously. He was anxious to see the painting Clay had discovered in such unpleasant surroundings.

  * * *

  But he had to wait. Molly had invited her sister, Ophelia, for dinner. It was to be the year’s first backyard barbecue. Molly flagged him down as he turned into the driveway, and leaned into his car window to give him a kiss and warn him about what was impending in the backyard. Molly had been doing something with mint, whose crushed scent greeted Fred with her kiss.

  She was dressed in a blue skirt and cardigan over a white blouse, and her skin was flushed with a Dutch color, rose: the color Renoir had goosed up and made monumental in those late nudes. Her green eyes glowed.

  “I’m just home from the library,” Molly said. “Ophelia’s back there trying to start the picnic by herself. Don’t let her come into the kitchen and help, you ugly man.”

  Fred left Clayton’s package in the car, locked the car in the garage, and headed around the house to Molly’s backyard, where the pear tree bloomed against the house and sea gulls, if there was no competition, liked to walk on the twenty-foot square of lawn next to the brick patio where Ophelia was prepared to receive.

  “You make the yard smaller,” Ophelia said when Fred appeared. “We have been waiting for you. Where have you been, great hunter?”

  “Bagging a virgin for Clayton Reed,” Fred said. “Where’s the kids?”

  Ophelia shrugged, gesturing toward the house. She was in an aluminum chair, wrapped in a pink blanket, drinking gin and tonic from a tall glass. Although the sun was almost gone, she had on the shades with the bangled corners. She was the perfect blond; she looked as if someone had reached into a Hockney painting and jerked her across the country from Hollywood. She should have palm trees around her, and a blue pool—not Molly’s tiny yard, which, as Ophelia said, Fred made smaller.

  Fred was never sure if Ophelia was making a play for him, or was making fun of Molly, or liked him, or was pretending to like him on Molly’s account, or was pretending not to like him (also on Molly’s account), or had something else on her mind. Molly’s sister, Ophelia Finger, had kept her first husband’s last name, a rock of stability as she blew from the reef of one marriage to the storm of another. Married three times, Ophelia was presently between marriages. She operated in the world at a success level that amounted to a public nuisance. Ophelia’s achievement was based on the fashion of faith healing that disregarded any system requiring either more or fewer than twelve steps. She sold people what already belonged to them: the American Dream.

  Her best-selling book, a pamphlet fleshed out with photographs, Learning to Love the Body You Have, was the offshoot of seminars she had done around the country before large audiences. The lectures led to a TV series that featured Molly’s sister, pert and chic and fit in a skintight golden gown, addressing the limps, bulges, and goiters of a crowd of persons of both sexes whom she had persuaded into white leotards. They were learning to love, under Ophelia’s direction and amid the lights and cameras, those parts of themselves and each other that all the other seminars told them they should get rid of with exercise or starvation.

  “Tell me about the virgin,” Ophelia said, licking her lips and making her eyes bright for the cameras.

  Fred looked around for Sam to see if he wanted to light the fire, but Sam was lying low, as was Terry. They had a program on TV that they depended on about this time, Fred knew, and it drew them as urgently as their aunt repelled them.

  “I can’t imagine Clayton Reed’s knowing what to do with a virgin even if she were completely bagged,” Ophelia said.

  Molly had insisted on introducing Ophelia to Clay, and it hadn’t worked.

  “‘Virgin’ is a figure of speech,” Fred said, brushing dust and charred grease from the grill. “It’s what the collector likes best, a painting no one’s seen for ages. Everyone wants to find and buy a picture before it’s offered. Anything that’s marked For Sale, already tagged with chalk marks and price stickers, has lost value in the collector’s eye.

  “Eliminate the middleman. The collector, if he relies on his own judgment, as Clayton does, loves to take the first fruit straight from the tree. You should have seen the tree this one was on.”

  “The virgin you’re talking about is a painting,” Ophelia said. “I get it. How interesting.” She yawned and took a long, elaborate sip from her glass. It seemed to Fred that Molly was taking her time cutting carrot and celery sticks inside.

  “I want your opinion, Fred,” Ophelia said as he began shaking charcoal into the grill.

  Ophelia never wanted anyone’s opinion. It was her opening gambit when she had something to brag about, such as a fabulous honor or a large sum of money.

  “It’s a new series I’m starting, and I can see the book in it already, though I don’t want to crowd my first best-seller prematurely. What do you think of the title Finding the Me in You?”

  Fred could see it right away. Another winner, guaranteed. Molly’s sister, the genius.

  3

  After dinner Ophelia drove off toward her home in Lincoln in her Mercedes of subdued maroon. Molly and Fred washed up together in the kitchen while Sam and Terry, enjoying freedom from homework at the kitchen table since it was Friday, rode their bikes outside in the dusk with friends from down the street.

  They played Hearts together after that, before Molly sent the kids up to pretend to sleep, as they were permitted to do on Friday and Saturday nights—they could read or do whatever they wanted that sounded like sleeping.

  In the evenings the phone at Molly’s house rang frequently and was for Molly or Sam or Terry. Fred was surprised when Sam called down at around 10:45.

  “It’s for you, Fred. It’s Clayton. Mr. Reed.”

  Fred picked up the kitchen extension.

  “That creature cheated me,” Clay said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You have my painting?” Clay asked.

  “I guess so,” Fred told him. “I haven’t had a chance to look at it. He wrapped it. Smykal did.”

  He had clean forgotten the painting. That was one of the problems with Clay’s having kept him out of the foreplay. It hadn’t been Fred’s business, and he’d not had the scent of the quarry in his nostrils. But he recalled the stink of Smykal’s place now and regretted it.

  Clay said, “Unwrap it. I’ll call back.”

  Fred said, “What do you mean, he cheated you?”

  “Hurry, Fred, would you?” Clay urged. “Open the package, look at the painting, see if a letter’s in with it, and call me back? I’m at the Ritz bar.”

  “What’s that about?” Molly asked, drying her hands after washing the coffee cups she and Fred had been using.

  “What that’s about,” Fred told her, “is what made me late getting back: a picture I picked up for Clayton that sounds like a problem. A virgin, Clay said. Let’s take a look. Rare bird where it came from, if true.”
>
  They went through the kitchen into the garage, turning lights on. Fred got the package out of the car, and they worked on Smykal’s string and tape together, using scissors, going carefully.

  “It stinks,” Molly said, her nose wrinkling at the greasy package.

  “Clay sounds like he’s been conned,” Fred said. “Which is what happens to your average paranoid. He digs his own trap, playing games, then tiptoes in.”

  “If that’s a virgin,” Molly said, standing back and looking at the picture with her hands on her hips, “if that’s a virgin, no wonder it’s an endangered breed.”

  Fred was behind the unwrapped picture, looking without success for anything resembling a letter, perhaps taped to the back of the frame, or caught in the wrapping. But Molly’s tone brought him around front.

  “Don’t she make the Rokeby Venus look like a sick pig?” Molly went on. Molly was a direct, no-nonsense critic.

  It was a nude of shocking elegance: a female figure reclining, her back toward you, her rotundities fully realized. The figure made a startling white diagonal of flesh against black draperies with red and gold accents in luscious, loaded slabs of paint: a fan, the carved gilt edge of the couch she lay on. A mirror in front of the figure, reflecting head and breasts, held painted gestures that suggested the striding legs—in black trousers—of a man entering the room in back of the viewer. The subject looked at you out of the mirror, surprised but pleased that you had found her. It did a strange thing with space, even in Molly’s garage, because the viewer was eliminated. Molly and Fred couldn’t exist if the reflected entrant was as present as they felt him to be. The garage, the bicycles, the lawnmower, Fred’s car couldn’t exist since they didn’t reflect.

  It was a painting of alarming intimacy.

  “You’re right,” Fred said. “The Velázquez is an image that stays with you. Whoever did this young lady spent an awed afternoon beforehand standing with his mouth open at Rokeby Hall—unless Agnew’s had it already, off H. E. Morritt. The National Gallery in London didn’t get it until after nineteen hundred, and this painting’s earlier.”