Yellow Mesquite

by John J. Asher

  After only a short time in the Big Apple, his mind still reeled with the contrast between the endless miles of nothing in the Permian Basin, and the claustrophobic walls of concrete and glass towering straight up at every turn in Manhattan. He sometimes found it hard to breathe and felt an urge to run, to get out into the open somewhere. But there wasn’t any “open somewhere.” He had read that rats went nuts when too many were confined in a small space.

  As for Frankie showing him around, he knew she was going to all of this trouble out of respect for Mavis. They began the morning with rolls and coffee at a small table crowded into the back of a delicatessen on Eighth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street. Frankie pointed out that this was a neighborhood of Italian grocery stores, and that the residents of the West sides did their food shopping here. Boxes of vegetables and fruits were stacked on the sidewalks in the shade of canvas awnings. Ropes of sausage, hog heads and gutted white rabbits hung in butcher-shop windows.

  “Larry Rivers,” he said. “I’m looking forward to this.”

  “Then you’re familiar with his work?”

  “Oh, sure. He’s in all the art magazines.”

  She smiled. “Yes. I keep forgetting, art does exist outside of New York, doesn’t it.” She arched one brow at him. “Do I sound like a snob? Yes, I suppose I do. Oh, well, you’ll find that whatever you know, you’ll know it more intensely here in the city. There’s something here you won’t get anywhere else. It’s in the air. One seems to absorb it by osmosis.”

  He recalled the epiphany—if that’s what it was—regarding Cézanne’s Sainte-Victoire at the Met. He was thrilled and a little frightened to think that if this was the kind of osmosis she was referring to, his mind might not be able to handle a steady diet.

  “This is very nice of you,” he said, “showing me around like this.”

  FRANKIE STOOD BEFORE a painting of a large nude woman, actually two views of the same woman in one painting, one sitting and one standing. “This is Birdie,” she said. “His mother-in-law.”

  “That’s a little dicey for me.” He was familiar with the series and the fact that Rivers’s mother-in-law had sat for them. He couldn’t imagine painting Sherylynne’s mother in the nude, or for that matter anybody else’s mom he knew. “She looks like Edouard Vuillard’s mother,” he added.

  “Vuillard’s mother?” Frankie gave the painting another look.

  “Just her features.”

  “Vuillard would be furious at the comparison. He adored his mother.”

  “Just physically, not the color or paint handling.”

  “Actually, I can’t recall Vuillard’s paintings of his mother that clearly.”

  “He painted her with that kind of round bald-faced look that Rembrandt used on his peasant women. That’s where the resemblance ends, though. As for color, this Birdie is just raw flesh—reds, yellows and greens. It’s keyed pretty well, though. Vuillard’s color is refined, you know, silvery.”

  Frankie regarded him, the one eyebrow arched. “Silvery?”

  “Vuillard and Vermeer, they both have that same high-keyed silvery light. You know Morandi’s stuff? He used a similar light.” He realized he was getting carried away, overly enthusiastic.

  She fixed her gaze on him. “Morandi? You know Giorgio Morandi?”

  “Uh, I’ve seen him in the magazines.”

  Frankie’s gaze continued to linger on him. “Nobody but nobody knows Morandi.”

  He couldn’t help himself: “You know how Rembrandt’s paintings sort of smolder? That thick yellow light, kind of gold-like? Well, the light in Vermeer is cool. Clean and crisp. Not all that much character to Rivers’s light. Do you think?”

  Frankie observed him at length, a light frown. “How do you know this?”

  “I’m sorry. Just what I’ve seen in the magazines. It’s been a long time since I talked to anybody about art.”

  She gave him an appraising look, then he followed her into a room where Russian Revolution—a big installation consisting of Plexiglas, wooden rifles and painted Photostats—had been assembled along one wall.

  Frankie gestured with a sweep of her hand. “What do you think of it, in general? Other than the light?” She tilted her head at him. He wasn’t sure whether the glint in her eyes was merriment or resentment.

  He withdrew inwardly. “You know I don’t know anything about art.” He shrugged. “He’s good.”

  “You do realize he’s one of the most important artists in the country?”

  “Uh…yes. One thing for sure; he can draw like a son of a gun.”

  He wouldn’t tell Frankie, but he thought the way Rivers blended his forms looked a lot like de Kooning. Nor did he care for the way Rivers smudged the one eye on every figure; he had turned that into a gimmick.

  She studied him, a long penetrating moment. “If you’re bored, we can leave.”

  He looked up, surprised. “Bored?”

  “I thought you’d enjoy this show.”

  “No, no. I am enjoying it. There’s a lot to learn here. I’m glad we came. In fact, I’ll prob’ly come back. It’s too much to take in all at once.”

  Frankie’s high-heeled pumps tapped along on the marble floor at his side as they went back into the main exhibition room. “I want to see your paintings,” she said.

  He laughed self-consciously. “I don’t think so. Now that I’ve popped off, you’d just be disappointed, and I’d be embarrassed. Talking art’s a lot easier than doing it.”

  “Let’s have lunch,” she said, unexpectedly hooking her hand in the crook of his elbow. “I’m starved.”

  “Uh, sorry, but I need to get on back. The management informed me that the YMCA’s not a hotel. I got to do some serious looking.”

  “Another time then. I’m sure you’ll find a suitable place.” He suspected she knew he was watching his nickels and dimes, avoiding lunch at some expensive restaurant.

  They walked along East Fifty-seventh, the fall air crisp, sun shining. Frankie pointed out several important galleries: the Sidney Janis, the Marlborough, the Pierre Matisse. They turned down Madison, looking into shops, watching the people coming and going. Women in fashionable dress walked French poodles; men plowed ahead in three-piece suits. The few panhandlers and beatniks looked out of place.

  He stopped for a moment, looking about, grinning a little in spite of himself. “I can’t believe I’m really here.”

  A faint smile kindled in Frankie’s eyes. She took him by the arm again. “Come. We’ll take the subway on Eighty-sixth and Lexington.”

  THAT EVENING HE sat in his claustrophobic little room in the YMCA with a bottle of cheap Merlot, cringing at how pathetic he must have sounded to Frankie—making himself out to be the big art expert. What in the world had he been thinking? He made excuses, told himself that he hadn’t had anyone to talk art to since Sidney, and to a lesser degree, Mavis. He told himself that his brain was overheated with the sudden excitement of so much great art right at his fingertips. But Frankie didn’t know that. This was as every-day to her as getting up and going to bed. He suspected he had heard the last from her.

  THE NEXT DAY, a Thursday, the job placement agency called about an opening in the catalog division of the JCPenney Company. They made an appointment for him on the following Monday.

  EARLY FRIDAY MORNING, he stood in front of the Belmore, an all-night cafeteria and cabby hangout on Twenty-eighth and Park Avenue South. He folded the classified section of the Times under his arm and pushed his way in through the double doors. In the immediate foyer, a turnstile led into the cafeteria. The smell of coffee and steamed kitchen hung heavy on the air. On the right, an index card was taped to a glass door, ROOM FOR RENT lettered on it with a ballpoint pen. He entered, went up a narrow staircase, made a turn, then stepped out onto a landing at the top.

  On a door directly across, a small sign read: SUPER. He knocked and a middle-aged woman with a shock of rust-red hair came to the door in a loose housecoat.

  “Hi. I
’m Harley Buchanan. I called about the room.”

  The woman appraised him, a quick up-and-down. “Let me get the key.” She smelled of booze. Some of her teeth were missing. She stepped back inside where a bone-thin man was visible, slumped in a recliner, awash in the flickering light of a TV.

  The woman took a ring of keys from somewhere, and he followed her up another flight of stairs. She showed him a room roughly ten by sixteen feet. A sink hung on the wall in an alcove near the door, next to a small closet. At the other end, a single window with a paper shade and plastic curtains offered a view of the Belmore’s rooftop below. There was a twin bed, a plain desk and one chair. He was reminded of van Gogh’s room in Arles, though he doubted van Gogh’s window opened onto the air-conditioning exhaust on top of an all-night cafeteria.

  “I change the bed and clean the room once a week,” said the woman. “No cooking in the room and no partying.” She smiled a gap-toothed smile and winked. “You wanna bring in women, that’s your business. But you gotta keep ’em quiet.”

  Harley looked out into the hall. “How many people share the bathroom?”

  “Three to each floor. You and two others. I clean that every day.”

  “What about towels?”

  “Fresh towels once a week in your room when I change the linens.”

  She stepped across the hall and opened the bathroom door. The fixtures were old-fashioned, rust spots under the taps, white hexagon tiled floors, all reasonably clean. The smell was passable: Clorox and Pine-O-Pine.

  “Fifteen a week?”

  “In advance.”

  “Anything else I should know?”

  “Where’re you from?”

  “Texas.”

  The woman shoved forth her hand, smiling. “I thought so. Put ’er there, cuz. I’m Rusty from Amarillo.”

  He shook her hand. “Harley Buchanan.”

  “You’ll like it here, Harley Buchanan.”

  He wasn’t so sure of that. He followed her back down and she led him into her apartment where he paid and she made out a receipt.

  The man on the couch looked sickly, like a painting by Edvard Munch. The Rifleman blared on the TV below a shelf of bowling trophies, not ordinary bowling trophies but spectacular ones with figures and curlicues and engravings mounted on marble and polished oak bases, all shapes and sizes.

  “Who’s the bowler?”

  “Lindy here,” said Rusty. “Used to be a world champion.”

  Lindy’s gaze fixed on Harley and he began to emerge from the sofa, his eyes growing brighter as his lanky frame unfolded in slow motion. “You bowl?”

  “Not much.”

  The man hung suspended in a moment of disappointment before wilting back into the sofa.

  “I sure admire anybody who can, though,” Harley said, and made a point of inspecting the trophies. He spotted a glass and a bottle of Gordon’s gin on the floor near the man’s feet.

  “I was a world champion. I was that, all right.” Lindy said it as if he couldn’t quite believe it himself.

  “Honey, you still are,” said Rusty.

  She handed Harley his receipt. “Rent’s due every Friday, hon.”

  HE MOVED HIS few belongings in on Saturday and settled in. At ten on Monday, he took his portfolio of drawings up the elevator to the fourteenth floor of the JCPenney building on Avenue of the Americas between Fifty-second and Fifty-third. Mr. Nelson, the executive art director, a steely man in his forties, came out to the reception desk. He appraised Harley with a noncommittal smile, introduced himself and shook hands.

  Harley followed Mr. Nelson into a large open space. On the left and up front, facing the Hilton Hotel across the street, were six or eight cubicles where he glimpsed artists working with T-squares on pads of tracing paper. On the right, a dozen or more men and women sat behind desks cluttered with papers, dictionaries, encyclopedias, catalogs… In the very back were two drawing tables. A round, florid-faced older man worked at one, strips of paper hanging off his desk lamp. The other table was empty.

  He followed Mr. Nelson into his office next to the cubicles. Mr. Nelson looked at his drawings and closed the portfolio without comment. He made small talk: Where was Harley from? What were his immediate plans? What was his draft status? Where did he expect to be in five years? Harley knew where to stretch the facts: He was from Texas; he was starting night classes at the School of Visual Arts in the spring semester; he was married and had a child, which would probably exempt him from the draft, and—smiling—in five years he expected to have Mr. Nelson’s job. Again, he wondered if he was being a bit brash.

  But Mr. Nelson smiled too, not unpleasantly. He pointed out that the job was in key-line, which meant pasting down all the small type, the little A, B, C letters and the corresponding copy on the various catalog items. It was the grunt job where people in this business started. The idea, Mr. Nelson pointed out, was that after a while he would graduate to the position of layout artist, then senior layout artist, then art director.

  He was assigned the empty drawing table at the back, issued a T-square, a triangle, X-Acto knife, and a pair of tweezers for picking up and pasting down those little tiny As, Bs and Cs. He would start the following Monday. Ninety-five dollars a week.

  THE JOB TURNED out to be easy enough, if exacting and tedious. His fellow workers were friendly. The layout artists and most of the copyreaders introduced themselves. He realized he was a bit of a curiosity. When Fred and Steve, two senior layout artists, discovered he was attending SVA, they invited him to lunch. Fred was a graduate of Pratt, and Steve was attending Cooper Union, nights. They knew where to grab cheap lunches, and the talk was of art and artists.

  Harley figured the job was about as good as any for somebody with no training in anything except keeping a donkey engine running in an oil patch.

  Chapter 32

  Madison Avenue Art

  HE HAD MADE a mental note of the exceptional number of art galleries on Madison Avenue, and the following Saturday, his first day off, he lugged his paintings and drawings all the way up one side, from Forty-second to Eighty-sixth, and was working his way back down the other side.

  But no one was interested in his work: Your drawings are full of melancholy. Your perspective is disconcerting. Several offered advice: Paint light, bright paintings. Copy the Impressionists. Paint impasto. At Far Gallery he had looked in the window at a painting of a ladybug big as a basketball on an oak leaf the size of a tabletop. It looked like a blowup from a Burpee seed catalog. But they practically threw him out when he showed his own work.

  He had been in and out of galleries whose walls were framed rectangles of confectioner’s icing—women in flowing dresses reposing in fields of pastel flowers beneath Victorian parasols and whipped-cream clouds. In and out of galleries hung with abstractions—thick slabs of paint minus any semblance of unity or harmony. In and out of galleries with yet one more wall of cats, clowns, boats, barns, covered bridges, seagulls. And none of them wanted him. What if he had been kidding himself that he had talent? It didn’t escape him that Sidney had claimed to be disappointed, ultimately.

  He had his eye on a gallery, L’Atelier de France, on the corner. He took note of the paintings in the window—again, sweet Impressionist imitations and a couple of butter-knife abstractions. He told himself he would dig ditches before he resorted to that kind of crap.

  He opened and then held the door back for a polished woman who swept through before him trailing a wake of perfume like some exotic incense—without so much as a thank-you, as though he were the doorman.

  Across the room, a stick-thin woman with large glasses and eyes like an owl rose from behind a desk and greeted her—French accent, a glance at Harley over the woman’s shoulder.

  “My friend is outside in the car,” said the newly arrived customer. “She would like to know if you have something by Jacques François? Something with a figure, perhaps?”

  Harley prowled along the wall, looked at the paintings, thumbed t
hrough the four-color brochures on the tables. Rich old lady out in the car, he said to himself. Too old to get out and look for herself. Sad.

  “René,” the gallery woman called, and a frail young man with narrow shoulders and a mop of curly hair appeared from behind a maze of petitions hung with paintings. The gallery woman smiled with her tiny mouth and big eyes. “René, bring up something by Jacques François, something with a figure, perhaps.”

  “Bien certainement, mesdames.” Rene disappeared among the petitions, then reappeared holding a painting about three by five feet in size. Harley stole a look at it: another glop job, big smears of paint spread with a palette knife. He studied the work, trying to determine if he was missing something…like the Cézanne’s he had overlooked.

  “Lovely,” said the customer. And after a respectable moment, “The price?”

  The gallery woman puckered her lips. “This one is six.”

  “Ah, yes. Six?”

  The gallery woman turned mildly tragic. “Six thousand.”

  Harley’s head swiveled toward the painting of its own accord.

  “Of course,” said the customer.

  “Ah, madame, Jacques François is in demand. His price, they go up—poof!—like this. You see?” She threw both hands delicately upward, enlarged her eyes.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Oui. Monsieur François’s price, zay have double in one year. An excellent investment.”

  “The price is no problem. However, I think my friend might like something more figurative.”

  Curly-haired Rene had already propped the painting against the wall under the track lights and was bringing out another.

  “Oh, that’s lovely, yes, indeed. I think she might like this one.” The customer cocked one eyebrow at the gallery woman.