Living on Air

by Anna Shapiro

  Most of all, she could sell it.

  Though the show was months off, it was in many ways as if it had already happened. People somehow knew. Milt got calls from people he hadn’t heard from in years. “It’s Lou Jacoby,” Maude would say, handing Milt the receiver of the clunky black telephone with an ironic look; “It’s Jake Rosenfeld”; “It’s Anton Slack”; “It’s Harry Sigmeister.” And they congratulated him. They’d always already heard, and they congratulated him. It had been believed that some of these old classmates and col-leagues had become successful enough to feel uncomfortable with those who weren’t. It had been received truth in the Pugh household that they were afraid you would ask for a handout or had become too grand for people in tract houses without New York galleries.

  Maude, in the last years before this crowd had dropped away, observed her parents with it and had seen, over tinkling cocktails, her mother’s awe, which translated into an awkward, giggly eagerness to attack. How could they remain friends with someone whose wife asked, “So how’d you end up with Ken-nedy?” (a grand gallery), her shoulders stiff as a cat’s with a dog in sight. Despite Milt’s assured equanimity, Nina’s defensive responses had made friendship impossible.

  Maude did not like to think that these people now regarded Milt as restored to them, free of Nina’s jealousy. Maude would have to prefer the explanation her absent mother would offer. “They only like him because he’s riding high,” she’d snort.

  “Jake! How goes it?” Milton picked up where they’d left off, as if they’d never been out of touch. “It’s marvelous,” he’d gasp to Maude afterward. “You never really lose the connection!” And he’d look happy. Until he looked sad.

  They didn’t seem to have any more money than before. That was mysterious.

  Other old colleagues had also disappeared, but these into abjectness, into an angry obscurity that was as comfortable as a smelly old favorite blanket. One day in November, Milton asked Maude to come with him to visit one of these, who had also renewed contact, Saul Partridge. Saul had a friend who had died, leaving him to deal with his large body of work. “I thought maybe, with you so big these days, one of your fancy connections could help out,” Saul reiterated when father and daughter had arrived at his walk-up in Little Italy.

  Maude could hardly believe a person could address another with such direct yet seemingly undetected, and certainly unac-knowledged, hostility. But it was also oddly familiar to her, and her father took no offense.

  “Whatever I can do.” Milt spread his hands, palms out.

  The apartment was on a narrow street built for carriages and never widened, across which squat tenements netted with fire escapes eyed each other and where, on lines across airshafts, archaic laundry flapped. Heavy women, purple under the eyes, sat on garbage cans in front, looking censoriously at the length of Maude’s legs exposed between boot top and skirt hem, clamorous in yellow tights. But they nodded gravely in response to Milt’s not at all sarcastic bow. He sighed as he and Maude started up the stairs and said the ladies reminded him of the old neighborhood, stories of which had always been like legends of Greek gods and heroes for Maude and Seth, the ur time before they were born.

  The building’s hallways were sour and dark, the black-and-cream ceramic tile in mosaic patterns browned and missing sections, which had been filled in with inappropriate greens. It took a very long time for Saul to answer their knock—the doorbell was rendered static by layers of shiny brown paint—but he finally opened the door. Maude thought of a dog’s mouth opening, releasing bad breath.

  The apartment was three tiny rooms all in a hodgepodge, as if one squareish room had been divided unequally into a rectangle and two tiny squares, but most remarkable was what was in them. Racks to hold paintings had been built into the kitchen, wedged between the bathtub and a chugging yellowed refrigerator, up which a brown stain crept from the chipped linoleum floor, its own color lost beneath ageless films of dirt. But the racks, from which stiff tufts of dust and grease grew, had long since overflowed, and the kitchen cabinets were equally crowded with fungoid wooden stretchers, the wood darkened and brittle-looking, frayed canvas edges furred with dust, poking the flimsy metal doors permanently open and askew.

  There was not a bare surface anywhere, or a clean one. The kitchen was the biggest room but no longer had a place to sit, so they sat in the living room, which had the artist’s pathetic bed in it because the bedroom, which had the two windows not on the airshaft, was the studio. Adding to the sensation of crowding were the paintings on every inch of brownish, peeling wall, not just the Kandinsky-like garish swirls of this artist but the many gifts of pals and lovers collected over the decades. A charcoal nude showed a long-departed wife, its outlines just a little too thick, too insistent, for art.

  Saul offered them coffee, which Maude refused, and which he made with instant plus hot water from the faucet. “This freeze-drying, this is wonderful technology, no?” Saul had been a teacher at the art school Milt went to, one of many short-term jobs. He insisted Maude have something and thumped a glass of orange juice before her. She got as far as finding a place on the rim without lipmarks, but when she brought it close a reek of something foul overwhelmed the orange scent, and she set it down.

  “Whatsa matter, you don’t like o.j.?”

  “No, no, it’s fine. I’m just not thirsty.”

  “How about milk? I’ve got Carnation’s right here, for the coffee. It’s sweet, mm—try it.”

  “No, really—”

  “A girl like you, such a skinnymarink! You gotta get some flesh.” He pinched her cheek and turned to Milt. “A beauty. A little beauty. Well, no wonder.” He sighed deeply. “It’s all luck. Everything in life, it’s just luck.”

  Before sitting, Maude had spread her coat on the bed, over the brown blanket. As the men talked—argued, as if contradiction and one-upmanship were an expression of affection—she took in her surroundings in more detail. The blanket wasn’t brown. Or at least it had once been blue. When she took her coat as they at last were to make their way to the dead man’s apartment, she saw that it would have to go to the cleaners, just from lying on the bed. She hoped Saul would not once again notice the undrunk orange juice, separating into liquid and solids, and wished she were capable of noticing less.

  The dead man, Immerman, was a few blocks away, where Little Italy gave way to Chinatown and the lower east side, where the streets were soft with wadded garbage underfoot and no one sat on cans guarding them. Terrifying men looked at the outsiders with calculating, predatory keenness and whistled through their teeth at Maude’s legs and whipping hair. She kept her eyes down.

  Immerman’s place was worse than Saul’s. As he went through the heaps of crumbling, dusty junk, Saul came upon a little volume, its cloth cover cracking, that turned out to be a book of poems he’d written. “Oh, yes, I write poetry too,” he said as if everyone surely knew this, and began declaiming from memory, stumbled, and stopped to turn pages forward and backward to find the line and speak it correctly. Saul held the wafer of dusty poems toward Maude. “Take it. I have enough copies, God knows. Here. It should go to someone new and young.” Maude reluctantly accepted the volume.

  “Here, here, look at this one,” he said, not taking it back but turning pages, knowing from upside-down the spot he was looking for. Maude felt that she herself could be devoured by this hunger to have her see, to hear, to understand, and above all to receive this unappeasable egotism of art, grown monstrous from starvation.

  Immerman’s work was as depressing as his former surroundings. It was meant to be depressing, or at least the subjects were inarguably sad—dead children, mourners at coffins, a grieving mother, or, in a mode that declared the artist’s virtuous condem-nation of lynching, a man hanging from a tree, with red paint at his crotch and another grieving woman. (The title, written in harsh brushstrokes on the back, was “Golgotha.”) Compared to the aesthetic in which, at school at least, T.S. Eliot was a god, Nausée was require
d reading, and the first movie shown in Bay Farm’s film series was Last Year at Marienbad, these paintings were wriggling with irrepressible, unfashionable life. Sorrow suggested a livelier connection to the world than did existential despair and the elegantly presented assurance of the pointlessness of it all. Like the popularly grim works, however, these claimed seriousness by tackling death.

  But there was something about the way it was shown that was too lively, that said “Look at me” and said it with the same neediness as Saul’s declamations, inducing the same cringing. The children, the mourners, the mother, the widow—even though they had nominally different features, all had the same face, and somehow it was Immerman’s face: Immerman’s inner face, the face he was dying for the world to see. To mourn for him. As if, by depicting sorrow, he enacted sympathetic magic that would make the viewer feel how noble he was, how tragic his deeper understanding, and make them beat their own breasts for having misunderstood him.

  But apparently he himself didn’t know that inner face, because what the faces shared above all was generality. They were the generic face of sorrow, not Immerman’s, not anyone’s. He probably thought this made them universal, but it didn’t. They did point at him, but they didn’t express the tragic. What they showed was the artist’s weltschmerz. Self-pity, actually. And that was what he had to give the world; pity was what the world had withheld from him, long before he recognized it as his donnée.

  Even the artist’s bewilderment that others could work in this mode, on these themes, and be blessed for it, but that he was left out, was visible in the paintings’ imitative and calculated grays and reds. His desire for success might have been their real subject.

  “Forget it, Saul. You can’t do anything here.”

  “This one—it just needs a little cleaning. A little patching.” The cheap or badly mixed paints were deteriorating, and the pictures had been treated by the artist with such inconsideration that canvases had been pierced by other pictures jammed in next to and on top of them.

  “Saul. Saul. Forget it.”

  “But—” If Immerman could be legitimized, then Saul too could look forward to redemption.

  “I’m telling you, there isn’t anyone to buy these paintings.”

  Saul’s fingers covered his mouth. “Maybe I’ll make some donations. The Modern. The Whitney.”

  “Sure, Saul. Sure. You do that.”

  3.

  AT THIS TIME of year the accordion sunroof of the van was sealed against a cold, colorless sky. Once they got past the attached pastel houses and litter of stores that was Queens, driving between the cement walls of the sunken roadway, the white sky began to be fretted with bare limbs of trees. Shallow hillsides and fields were torn open for new housing developments, a row of cement foundations appearing in formation, a scaffolding of two-by-fours on one of them, a few filled in with raw plywood, and, on a finished model, sod rolled out but stopping geometrically short to expose the gashed earth. These days the speculating builders varied the houses, so that every third had a gable or picture window or “traditional features,” though their asbestos-brick or asbestos-wood family resemblance couldn’t be disguised. The eye flicked away, seeking relief, again and again deflected by the same ugliness.

  They passed into the more glaring clamor of the commercial strip that heralded the approach to their own manufactured town, one-story buildings you weren’t supposed to register as part of a landscape—to do so was as rude as looking up a girl’s dress when she was trying to smile into your face. Their smiles were in blinking, swooping letters made of ribbons of light, window displays. Or maybe the analogy was of looking at the whole girl when in fact she was flapping her crotch in your face—“3 for $5” or “all you can eat” or the painted statue of a grinning imbecilic boy in chef’s whites on a roof. The Big Boy. Sometimes Maude was exhilarated by the exuberant commercialism, as if it were a welcome and she were one with the people who disdained her and whose tastes she found oppressive; but under the opaque sky, where the streaking reflections along the sides of cars and store windows were the highest lights, and after burrowing into two lives of apparent futility and desperation, she felt nothing but dread at returning to that house from which the other half of her family was so stubbornly missing.

  As if her own inattention were her father’s, the car lurched. A pain spread up Maude’s arm. It was her wrist bracing against the dashboard as the car pulled up short. Their snub-nosed van loomed over the car below. Maude looked for a bloody body. But the car in front was untouched. There was about an inch between them.

  “We’re okay. We’re okay,” said Milt with a belying froggy catch in the middle.

  Maude’s heart wouldn’t stop beating double-time. “Oh, Daddy.” She put her hands over her eyes. Her wrist throbbed.

  “It’s all right. Nothing happened.”

  At home, outside the glass wall of their living room, another redwinged blackbird had fallen onto the cracked patio. Maude went out the back door still feeling the sick dread that wouldn’t go away. As she went toward the bird, she thought of a picture she had loved and been moved by, unlike Immerman’s, though it too was of mournfulness and death. It was an etching, square, mostly blank. It hung on the wall of a friend of her parents who was paralyzed, and that might have been part of its pathos. Down on the lower right corner, as if forgotten and overlooked, was a small black bird, finely rendered—very black—its eyes curled tight, likewise its feet. It could be asleep, but you looked and knew it was a dead bird. And what happened was, you loved the bird. Some small part of your heart curled up. That felt painful—a small pain, like a sting—and the sting was pleasurable. You could look at the picture again and have it all over again. Unlike a real dead thing, the loved object had not gone away or changed, and nothing in your life had changed either. Unless it had deepened a little, or been clarified, a little.

  Maude bent in her high suede boots and lifted the glossy creature. Its head dropped and one exquisite, scarlet-marked wing fell open like a fan. A bird’s eye, closed, has a look of illness and struggle, of inadequate defense. The body still had warmth, like a table on which a cup of tea has been sitting. She should bury it, she thought, surveying the matted grass that surrounded the garden. Her parents always just dropped the corpses in the garbage, which was collected from beneath a hinged metal lid set into the front lawn. But the dead bird was so beautiful. Maybe she would paint it. Not in the corner of the canvas, but whatever way it filled it, in its ringing scarlet and shiny black.

  As she came back into the house, she could hear her father already at work upstairs, in his white, overlit studio, tapping and clanking with his brushes to opera oleaginously broadcast on QXR. How could he be so happy and unaffected? Did he not feel in danger? It might be that failure and desperation could rub off. (She had quietly left the cracked volume of dusty poems behind.) In the lifeless kitchen, she set the limp animal on the table, lurid against the light wood, and sat in one of the chairs as though, if she waited, her mother might come in and wonder what she should do for dinner.

  When the music stopped and Milton Cross came on indistinctly, Maude, as if excusing herself from the table, got up and went into Seth’s light-blue room. She sat on the bed with her knees bunched up and the olive army blanket pulled up around her. The same pictures cut from magazines covered the walls—Bob Dylan looking surly and about fifteen, demonstrators being firehosed, an Indian miniature with a blue elephant head on a dancing man, a torn reproduction of a painting of Judith holding Holofernes’ head. (She hoped Seth didn’t think of Judith as date material, though she was beautiful; it was more likely that some Judy had turned him down and he thought of her that way, as a killer. He had not been a forgiving boy.) There was a picture of Georgia O’Keefe’s breasts from the Museum of Modern Art, and a picture of Lyndon Johnson wearing ass’s ears.

  Seth had a piano in his room, an old upright someone had been giving away, on which he used to pound out blues progressions. She wondered if he got
to play piano where he was now. She’d gone through his papers for some clue as to why or where, but they were just old math assignments and things like his satin-stitched Cub Scout merit badges in the drawers.

  Because Nina couldn’t sew (and Milt, who could, wasn’t asked), Seth used to pin them to his uniform with safety pins. The pins were still stuck through the badges’ cloth, browning and spotted by corrosion. Maude ritually went through the embroidered circlets before huddling again on the bed, feeling, as always, that if she’d known how to sew then, she could have kept him from leaving, though he had left so many years later. He had grown raspberry-colored, screaming at Nina, screaming, when she admitted she couldn’t help him attach the badges, Maude looking on, an astonished four-year-old.

  Sitting on the bed, she remembered lying on the black couch later that day, when she had started feeling there was a veil between her and everything. She had never been able to throw this feeling off, and she thought of it just that way, as an endless net of filmy dark chiffon over her face and body, transparent but interfering, that caught and clung when she tried to pull it away.

  She was startled from these dreamy reflections and mysteries by a loud squawk from her father, come downstairs. Not, she hoped, where he would see that she emerged from Seth’s room rather than her own across the hall.

  “What?”

  Milt stood with a broom raised overhead, thrashing at the ceiling. There was a frenzied sound like towels being snapped. Then it stopped. Milt was breathing heavily. He pointed.

  The redwinged blackbird, with a somehow baleful expression, huddled against the glass back wall, flatfooted, looking back over his shoulder at the giant and giantess.

  “Oh, Daddy—I thought he was dead. The heat must have revived him!”

  “Ugh! It’s disgusting, a bird in the house.”

  Maude looked at her father in wonder that he felt disgust where she saw a miracle. The bird began fluttering along the window again, scratching against the glass with its spiny, futile feet, trapped within the modernistic square of the lowest pane. Milt came over, paddling with his broom. Maude cried, “Daddy, stop, no, you’re terrifying it.” She achieved a second time-out, and the bird once again settled, visibly palpitating, a picture of rumpled misery.