—the beginning of a story called “Columbarium,” accompanied by a clipping from the New York Times about the accumulation of urns filled with ashes of the patients from a madhouse in Oregon that nobody wants to claim;
—a story by Alston Hughes titled “Salsipuedes”;
—“The Story of Ralph Bates, aka El fantástico”;
—three poems by Gal’s beloved Felipe Alfau, as well as an unsigned poem that seems to be Gal’s (the last thing I bothered to read from all this);
—the “Chronicle of a Voyage to Patagonia,” a document printed in cyclostyle (the first time I had ever heard that term, the librarian at Cooper Union explained to me what it means) signed by Henry Martínez, aka Lord Gin, the permanent secretary of the Order of the Incoherents;
—a semblanza (Spanish for “sketch,” right? I love that word; it’s what Gal calls the piece himself, at the top of the page) on Jimmy Castellano’s gym;
And that’s all as far as literary papers go—so what? The more relevant papers are strictly personal in nature. But I don’t want to elaborate on that till we meet.
Saturday, May 17, 2008, 6:29 P.M.
Chapman, my friend, have mercy on me, I beg you. No, I haven’t looked at the texts nor do I plan to.
Saturday, May 17, 2008, 9:08 P.M.
My dear friend, I’m sorry, but Amanda didn’t show up until just moments ago, and I don’t know much about computer stuff. Well then, I imagine that at this moment you are peacefully asleep. When you wake up tomorrow, you’ll find the story blinking at you from your screen. You’ll have to thank Amanda, eh voilà!
KADDISH
Front page of the New York Times, Thursday, February 26, 1970:
MARK ROTHKO, ARTIST, A SUICIDE HERE AT 66
And then, under the byline:
Mark Rothko, a pioneer of abstract expressionist painting who was widely regarded as one of the greatest artists of his generation, was found dead yesterday, his wrists slashed, in his studio at 157 East 69th Street. He was 66 years old. The Chief Medical Examiner’s office listed the death as a suicide.
The obituary continues on page 39. Next to it, below a photographic reproduction of The Black and the White, a 1956 oil, is a short article titled “A Pure Abstractionist,” which ends with these words:
His passing reminds us that an entire era in the history of American culture is drawing to a close, and thus leaves us all—not only his faithful admirers but even those of us who still had serious questions about his ultimate achievement—a little older and a little emptier.
Painting is something primordial. A scream. It begins in the heels, trembles up the limbs, cuts across the heart, rises up through the heart, and comes out the eyes, bursting the skull open. Very few people understand my last paintings. I expected people to weep when they saw them, as it happens to me with when I hear Beethoven’s last concertos. Black over gray, nuances representing nothingness, pigments buried under a slab of black light. The frames: caskets wherein the vanishing points of the canvas converge, waiting for a signal. Ad, Arshile, Willem, Robert, Jackson, so many others. Shreds of eternity, 60 by 60 inches, cruciform from an unknown region in Reinhardt’s words, paintings pregnant with a mysticism that I didn’t feel.
Upper East Side, one day earlier
19th precinct, 9:36 A.M. Thomas Mulligan and Patrick Lappin walk to a brownstone located a few blocks south of the police station. The removal of the body of a presumed suicide. The detectives enter a cavernous space with very high ceilings and a large skylight. A system of fabrics, strings, and pulleys works to control the light coming in. A century ago, the place was a riding school. There’s still an interior gallery that looks out to a former courtyard in which equestrian exercises took place. Next to Rothko’s is the studio of Arthur Lidov, a commercial painter (though it all depends on how you look at it—according to Lidov’s opinion, Rothko’s paintings are just expensive wallpaper). The two artists’ studios are separated by a very thin partition. Lidov’s work area is right next to Rothko’s bathroom. The wall isn’t thick enough to muffle the sounds of flushing or farting. Lidov has not yet been subjected to the sounds of Rothko fucking, however. Maybe the great artist is just too worn out for that. No, what he heard most often was classical music: Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven, in that order. According to the deceased, the acoustics of the place were superb. The studio was only meant for painting, but on January 1st of last year, Rothko set up house there.
Before, as I was arranging the bottles of pigments in rows, I remembered helping my father to put away the poisons in his pharmacy. I can see you now fixing the flasks of Death, Jacob Rothkowitz. You were always so critical of me, you old tyrant. Still, when you died in Portland, Oregon, I had trouble imagining a life without you. You never took me seriously when I told you that I wanted to be a painter. I had to do it without help. But you were right about one thing: painting wasn’t sufficient unto itself. No, it’s not an end, but a journey. Mell, my love, my companion for twenty-three years, mother of my children, how did we come to such desolation? I liked drinking till my senses left me, in your company. It made me feel we were getting closer to the gods. I remember you too, Kate. You’re gone away from home too. You live in Brooklyn now. Kate Lynn, my daughter; we never got along. You’ve already turned nineteen. And then that boy, whom I love with all my heart, Christopher, my son, I’m sorry. I’m going to abandon you, I’m going to leave you on your own. I was more than sixty when you were born, an unexpected gift, a shower of light, a luminous joy, but there was already too much mud in the water, flowing down the river. I have to leave you. I’m doing to you what old man Jacob did to us when he left Vitebsk. Rothkowitz the pharmacist left for Portland with his two oldest sons, leaving behind his wife and younger children, Sonia and me. By the time we finally joined him in Portland, it took him exactly seven months to die. Well, forgive me. You’ll have to grow up without me. I wonder what you’re dreaming now; am I part of your dream? I wonder what your life will be like. I only hope you’ll find a way to rid yourself of my shadow.
After having dinner with Rita Reinhardt in a deli on Madison Avenue, Mark heads home. It’s a very cold night. He secures all the entrances to the studio, locking doors he would normally not even close. There’s an LP of Schubert’s sonatas on the turntable. He goes into the bathroom and fondles the barbiturate bottles, opens and closes his shaving razor, perfect in its smooth pliability. The phone rings. He looks at the clock. Nine. It’s his brother
Albert calling from California. The words come out of the receiver, expand in the spaciousness of the studio, and dissolve. He doesn’t remember hanging up. He takes off his shoes, his pants, his shirt. He puts his glasses on the night table and lies down. He is wearing an undershirt, long underwear down to his ankles, and black socks pulled up to his knees.
The minute they discover my dead body, the dollars will start to dance around my legacy—oh, the incessant gush of capital. Do you remember, Willem, when we couldn’t sell a thing? Now everybody wants their cut. The future is very clear to the dead, and I’m already gone. One day you’ll have Alzheimer’s, de Kooning, but they won’t give a damn. Indifferent to your angelic transparency, the translucence of someone who’s begun to let go of life, they will sit you down in front of a canvas, surrounded by brushes and paints. You won’t know who they are, you won’t know your own children, your wives. They gabble at you from the world of the living. Paint, you wretched old man, make more money, they’ll tell you. You keep quiet, because you see what they can’t. On the canvas you’ll call forth bodies, women’s bodies, eyes and teeth, grim smiles, the shapes and colors that so unsettled everyone once but which they’ve all learned to love because of the delirious amount of money they can make from it. They’ll get nervous when the time comes to sign the canvas. Oh, it’s all done very tastefully, very meticulously. They only come for the money, now. See what you get for bothering to stay alive so long? Me, I’m taking Nietzsche’s advice: I’m getting out of the way before it�
��s too late.
A cockroach peeks out from behind the glass ashtray, climbs up onto the edge, lowers its antennae, reading whatever’s been written in those dunes of ash, and moves on toward the book near the lamp; it crosses between the first and last names of the author, William Gibson, and disappears behind the power cord. Rothko shuts off the light. A dim glow hovers in the studio. Hours later, the siren of a patrol car shakes him out of his stupor. He gets up, numb. He paces around the studio a few times. He sees the pack of Chesterfields but doesn’t feel like smoking. He glances toward the kitchen and then goes in, turns the tap on, and continues to the bathroom. He sees his reflection in the mirror, a fat, old man, balding, his remaining hairs adhering to the skin on the sides of his skull, quivering like the legs of insects. Behind the thick glasses, swollen eyelids lower to narrow his myopic stare.
I can’t stand my body. Yours is so young and beautiful, Rita. I don’t understand why you let me touch it. After the aneurysm, I can hardly make love to you. I’m rotting away inside; I’ve already started to stink like old people, a nauseating smell that sticks to the sheets, the walls . . . just a whiff reaches out and stuns your pituitary gland as soon as you open the door. What do you know—it’s the smell of death.
Thanks to the Sinequan, when the moment of truth arrives, he’ll keep relatively calm. No pain, anyway. A brand new, shiny, double-edged barber’s blade. He wraps one edge in Kleenex to get a better grip. With his right hand, he makes a test cut. A whitish line appears on his skin and is immediately filled with the redness of blood. He presses down hard on the blade, making a deep cut in the fold of his arm. Abundant blood, but he doesn’t feel a thing. A single tick of the clock, and like a musketeer gamely tossing his foil from one hand to another, he passes the blade to his left hand and makes a second cut, making good use of his remaining and not insignificant strength. Two streams of blood fall simultaneously and symmetrically from the folds of his arms, filling the hollow of the sink. Before his sight begins to cloud, he lies on the floor face up and extends his arms.
I feel that I’m getting close to my mother. We’re on an ocean liner, headed for the New World. When the boat rocks so violently that I think we’re going to sink, she rests her hand on my head and sings. I had no idea it would be like this, but who understands death? I’d begun to miss her so much that I thought in death I would become a black arrow shooting right back into the womb. She’s waiting for me somewhere, and when I plunge back into her belly and hear again her heart beating through the strings of her veins, floating in that interstellar space within her, I’ll be able to look at the world through her eyes, and I will see him, the pharmacist who abandoned us, my mother’s husband. Who will say Kaddish for him, for you, mother, for me, for all of us? Yisborach, v’yistabach, v’yispa-ar, v’yisromam, v’yisnaseh, v’ysadar, v’yis’halleh, v’yis’hallal sh’meh d’kudsha, baruch hu. I liked listening to you, Rita, but I went numb when you talked about your mother, your father, your little sister, all of them dead in the camps. Sometimes you called for them in your sleep. And I would watch you, your white skin in its milky light. I woke you up to rescue you from your pain, and we made love. I heard echoes in your panting and gasping—other times, other men. Your lips covered with my foam, and the birds announcing the arrival of the morning in an unseasonably cold late June.
At 9:02, the painter’s assistant, Oliver Steindecker, enters the studio. A good kid, Oliver, if a bit shy. He uses his key to open the first door and is surprised to find the second door locked. He can’t hear anything from inside. He calls out, but no one responds. He hesitates before deciding to go in anyway. He sees the unmade bed from across the room. When he reaches the space that serves both as kitchen and bathroom, he discovers Mark Rothko’s body. He runs into Lidov’s studio and talks to Frank Ventgen, Lidov’s assistant, his voice faltering. They make two phone calls, one to the police and another for an ambulance. Not that the latter was really necessary. An intern from nearby Lenox Hill Hospital pronounces the old man dead. The first person to arrive at the death scene is Theodoros Stamos, a painter friend of Rothko. Stamos is trembling. His spine like an antenna picks up the waves of force emanating from the corpse. He asks Lidov for a camera. He knows the guy has some very sophisticated photographic equipment in his studio. And it’s the right moment, before the police arrive. It would have been an unforgettable photograph. Think of it. An illustrious stiff for all seasons. But Lidov refuses. Anne Marie had arrived and she and Steindecker call Rothko’s wife, Mell, and she takes a taxi to the studio. The detectives don’t have much to do here. They’re normal folk—that is, they have no part in the art world. They’re Irish, probably, neighborhood kids who do their jobs as well as they can, and who learned what they needed to learn about life in the streets of Brooklyn. Here, they’re superfluous—just like the ambulance. And, for them, the day’s only begun. A reporter named Paul Wilkes had already been doing a ride-along with the two detectives for a New York Times Magazine piece, so he gets an inside line on the story—though he isn’t actually there, that morning, by all accounts, for whatever reason, which is a real shame: a missed opportunity, in a literary-journalistic sense. When his article gets published on April 19, the writer will condense the weeks he spent with the two detectives into a single day, and when he gets to Rothko’s suicide, he won’t bother to make it clear that his account of the scene isn’t first hand. Speaking of literature, Lappin likes to read, a detail that Wilkes finds interesting. In his piece, he will report that during those days the detective was reading The Godfather. A while ago he had read House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday, which had won the Pulitzer, and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Lappin glances at the scattered books all over the place. On the night table is a copy of A Mass for the Dead by William Gibson. The title catches his attention and he opens it. The book’s structure is based on that of the Requiem Mass. Introit. Offertory. Rite of Darkness. A strange book, a meditation on death interspersed with personal memories and poems. He begins to read a poem but stops after a few lines. In the living room, there’s a book, a biography of Arshile Gorky. He leafs through it, examining the color reproductions. He pays particular attention to a portrait of the artist as a young man, then continues to look through the book. He glimpses a sentence stating that the painter was Armenian. More pictures. Strange stuff. He decides that he doesn’t like the book and closes it. Then, on top of a low table, he sees a novel titled The Fixer by Bernard Malamud. Guy sounds familiar. On a nearby shelf, a copy of a book by Joseph Roth. Name means nothing to him.
I read it in one sitting, as though it were a long poem. It filled me with a pungent mix of pleasure and grief. I identified with the bum who comes into a fortune, then drinks through it all in order to be in the presence of God as soon as possible—God, who appears to the drunk as a young prostitute, a little girl almost, Thérése, a saint just like him. I cried when I finished it. The docks of the Seine, the bars and brothels of Paris. Miracles that don’t need angels. Swells who need to give their money away so that others can benefit from it. It was the last thing you wrote, Joseph Roth. It was published the year of your death: 1939. You were spared the events to come. That was also the year the Spanish Republic was brought down. Which makes me think of those paintings by Bob Motherwell. Strange we never talked about it. I may have had nothing to do with it, but everyone I knew in those days lived through the events of the Spanish Civil War with the same anxiety, as though we already knew it was only a prelude to the horrors that awaited us. After I saw the series of paintings that Bob titled Elegy for the Spanish Republic, a terrible sorrow got its hooks into me and I went home rattled . . . still hearing the screams buried in the canvases.
Mark Rothko’s body rests face up on the kitchen floor, arms outstretched, in a puddle of congealed blood six feet wide by seven and a quarter feet long. The tap in the sink is open, the water has been running for hours. Lappin takes a quick look around and sees that one of the sides of the double-edged razor blade is p
rotected by a piece of Kleenex. Suicides are amazingly careful not to cut their fingers as they slash their forearms, Wilkes has one of the detectives say in his article, even though, as reported above, he wasn’t actually there. Rothko left the tap running because he didn’t want to leave a mess. He opened his veins in the kitchen sink after a little practice: some hesitant cuts on his forearms. Hesitation marks. Small incisions to test the sharpness of the blade. An open-and-shut suicide, Lappin says. Wilkes loves that bit. Everyone else who writes about the suicide will repeat it. Rothko’s wallet is intact and there is no sign of rifling in the studio, which contains scores of the artist’s works, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (and in a few years will be worth millions). Once money enters the picture, Mulligan and Lappin, who till this moment hadn’t had the slightest idea who Rothko was, exchange a look. Now they’ll have to station a policeman at the door twenty-four hours a day, till things are squared away. For all the good this will do. It’s not burglars they should be worried about, but criminals of the white-collar variety. The struggle for the artist’s legacy, which is to say earnings, will end up being one of the great art-world scandals of the century. Corrupt critics, gallery owners, legal advisors, foundations . . . If tomorrow the art market determined that their mothers were all masterpieces, they’d sell them without hesitation. (And, speaking of hesitation, the autopsy determined that there was in fact only one hesitant cut in Rothko’s arm.)
Call Me Brooklyn Page 29
