Yellow Mesquite

by John J. Asher

  Harley and Frankie moved toward the chairs, then stopped to watch as Martin thumbed through the drawings. Martin looked up. “Darlings, pu-lease, do take a load off your tootsies. I can’t think under your weight. Sit, sit, sit!

  “Now,” said Martin, peering at them over his glasses as they eased into the chairs, “you’re from Tex-as dear boy, a real cowboy?”

  “Well, no sir, I grew up on a kind of farm and ranch but, well, I guess you could say that…maybe, sort of.”

  “Marvelous!” Martin wrapped himself up in his own arms. He turned to Frankie. “Don’t you just a-dore that accent? Divine, simply di-vine!”

  Frankie nodded agreeably, a mischievous light in her eyes.

  “Now, why, dear boy, would you come to New York, this decadent descendant of Sodom and Gomorrah, when you could be a cowboy? Live free and ride the wind?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly like the movies.”

  Martin’s face fell. “Oh, dear. Don’t tell me. Another fantasy crushed. Nothing, I’m afraid, darlings, is ever what it appears. Hmm. Yes. My, my. Too bad, too bad. Fantasy, dear ones, fantasy! Give up the fruitless pursuit of reality. Search instead for the perfect fantasy.” Martin stomped a patent-leather slipper and clutched his arms tighter around himself. He wheeled around at Harley. “Are you saying, dear boy, that cowboys no longer exist? Buffalo no longer roam? No, no, no! Don’t say it!” He pushed his palms out at Harley, tilted his head. “I prefer to think they do. Don’t tell me.”

  Harley grinned in spite of himself. “Well, actually there are some cowboys left. I don’t know about the buffalo. Ollie Cox used to have some on that Double Heart Ranch, but I haven’t seen them in a long time.”

  “Buffalo, oh! Real buffalo? Now that’s ex-ci-ting! Thank you, thank you, thank you! The fantasy is restored! Say no more!” Martin spun around to the paintings propped against the wall. “Now, darling boy, where did you learn to paint?”

  Harley glanced at Frankie, but she only smiled, one eyebrow arched.

  “I studied some in Dallas, and—”

  “Dallas! Oh! What a simply wretched place. I shall never forgive them for what they did to dear John Kennedy. Never, never, never!”

  “I studied with a couple of pretty good people there.”

  “And where else, dear boy?”

  “That’s about it. I came here to go to school.”

  “He’s enrolling at SVA,” said Frankie.

  Martin dipped his chin. “Oh? A student?”

  “Yessir.”

  Martin looked over the rims of his tinted glasses at Frankie. “Did you hear that? ‘Yessir,’ he says. A true gentleman of the South. Ah now, true gentleman of the South, the art world is horrid. Just horrid!” Martin rolled his eyes at Frankie. “Cowboys. Oh dear, oh me.” He turned again to the paintings. “And who are these…these people?”

  “That one there on the end is Maxine. She’s the wife of Wesley Earl, a guy I know in Midland, and—”

  “Does she always wear those…those things in her hair?”

  “Rollers. I like the way they look.”

  “Atrocious.”

  “That’s why I like them.”

  “Marvelous light.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Melancholy. And the space, so empty. Yours is a strange and lonely landscape, dear boy. Peopled with odd beings, I might add. Yes. And this chap?”

  “That’s Mr. Whitehead. He’s sort of a cowboy, I guess, except he’s in oil. I tell you, I never seen anybody like him.”

  “I can believe it, dear boy. Extra-ord-inary.”

  “Does that mean you’re interested?”

  “Of course I’m interested!” Martin wagged a finger. “However, I’m not at all sure about accepting you as one of my patients just yet.”

  “Patients?”

  “Dear boy, all real artists are sickies that need tender loving care.”

  Harley studied him a moment, thinking of Sidney, wondering if it might be true that all artists were “sickies.” Then he stood up from his chair. “Nu-uh. I think you got the wrong guy here.”

  Martin leaped in front of him. “Goodness sakes! You must learn patience! Oh my, you have me all atwitter.”

  “I don’t need care. What I need is a good gallery. If you’re not interested we’ll be hitting it on outta here.”

  “Ooooh…” Martin drew his shoulders up and swung around toward Frankie. “Don’t you just a-dore that macho talk?” He spoke out of the side of his mouth in a voice two octaves too low for him. “‘We’ll be hitting it on out of here.’ Ooh. Wild! Cowboys drive me simply wild!”

  Harley could feel himself turning red. He looked at Frankie, but she was laughing and nodding and agreeing with everything.

  Harley said, “You ever sell any paintings in this place?”

  Martin turned to Frankie with sudden starchy indignation. “Sell, he asks? Do I ever sell? Dear boy, I have sold not only art, but the very i-dea of art. When I say I have turned the selling of art into art itself, you may rest assured, yes, I can sell anything, everything, all things. Indeed, I daresay that in the art of turning the selling of art into art, I myself am probably the greatest artist in all of SoHo, in all of New York, even where the buffalos roam!” He turned with a sweep. “So what do you say to that, darling boy?”

  Harley grinned, embarrassed, but impressed by the guy’s delivery. “You sound pretty good.”

  Martin made a face. “I find this fixation with commerce so…so vulgar. Come! Have a sherry, dears. You’re so uptight. Come now!” He held forth his hand and fluttered his fingers at them.

  Frankie stood. Martin swept her chair up and started to the rear. “Come along. You need a drink. I need a drink. Please, dear boy, bring your chair.”

  Harley took up his chair and followed Martin into a back room, where a refrigerator stood near a table with a hot plate. Martin brought out wedges of cheese in foil and a tin of English crackers. He took plastic champagne glasses from a plastic bag, pulled the stopper out of a bottle of sherry and poured.

  “Now, do be dears, won’t you? Piddle around here while I go out and have another look-see. Oh, gracious…” Martin drew his shoulders up again, touched his fingertips to his lips. “I said piddle. I only the other day learned that piddle means the same as pee. I didn’t know. Naughty me!”

  Martin sashayed back out to the gallery. Harley and Frankie sat in the chairs, looking at each other.

  “Boy, that’s one strange bird,” Harley said.

  “He likes your work.”

  Harley got up and stepped to the door.

  “No,” said Frankie, “let’s wait.”

  From behind the door facing, he could see Martin out in the gallery, slumped in a director’s chair, elbows on his knees, his chin resting in the fork of the thumb and forefinger of one hand as he gazed at the four paintings under the track lights.

  A silhouette appeared in the doorway beyond. Another followed. They came in from the sharp light. Harley was jolted, seeing the two women he’d seen in the French gallery yesterday up on Madison.

  Harley impulsively stepped back to where he could just see as Martin rose from the chair.

  “Ah, dear ladies. My, my, my! What a perfectly marvelous fur. Do come in. Do.”

  The woman in the silver fur dropped the sunglasses to the tip of her nose as her eyes came to a stop on his four paintings. She went straight to Maxine, took her sunglasses off, folded them into her pocket and stepped back for another look.

  “This painting,” she said. “What is the price?”

  Martin had been parading around them, doing his dear lady routine. He stopped now, at a loss. “Oh, my…oh, dear me…”

  Harley stepped down into the gallery, carrying his sherry.

  “Well, hello,” he said. “Small world.”

  The two women stared. “What are you doing here?”

  “Uh, this is my gallery. Mr. Baldwin here represents my work in New York.”

  “Dear boy…”
/>
  “You didn’t mention a gallery.”

  “You hardly gave me a chance.”

  “You said the YMCA.”

  “I just moved here. I’m not settled yet.”

  “Dear ladies, let me pour you a touch of sherry. In the meantime, please, look around.” Martin breezed past Frankie, rolling his eyes dramatically as she entered from the rear.

  Harley stepped forward and took Frankie by the hand. “This is Mrs. Mussette,” he said to the two women. “Mrs. Mussette, these ladies are also interested in art. I mentioned them to you last evening.”

  Martin stopped in his tracks, turning. “Mussette? The Mussettes? Cecil Mussette is your husband? Oh, dear God in Heaven…!”

  Frankie blushed. She smiled politely. “How do you do,” she said to the two women.

  Harley smiled at the woman in the silver fur. “Which of these paintings were you interested in?”

  The woman studied him with suspicion. She nodded toward Maxine.

  “Yes,” said Frankie. “Very nice. I was considering that one as well.”

  “Oh, then I wouldn’t dream of—”

  “I haven’t decided between it and this one,” Frankie said, nodding at the painting, Wesley Earl, Wesley Earl looming out from a long flattened horizon.

  “In, uh, what price range are we speaking?” the woman in the fur coat asked.

  “Six-five,” Harley said, recalling the prices in the French gallery. “The other one there is seven-five. Those two are six each. That’s thousand, of course.” He didn’t kid himself that they would pay it, but he determined not to come off as some third-rate hack.

  Martin had hardly moved. He stared at Harley, his Adams apple rising and falling. But he seemed to have lost his voice.

  “Oh, sorry,” Harley said. “I shouldn’t be doing this. After all, it is Mr. Baldwin’s gallery.”

  Martin swallowed again.

  “Actually, I think I prefer this one,” Frankie said of Wesley Earl. “So please, feel free.” She gestured toward Maxine.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure.”

  The woman in the luxurious fur took her sunglasses out and put them on again. “Tina,” she said, “make out a check.”

  “Why do you want this painting?” Harley asked.

  The woman hesitated. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m just curious why you want it.”

  “Oh, dear boy…” Martin began.

  The woman lowered her sunglasses, looked over the rims at Harley. “Prob’ly not for any reason you’d appreciate.”

  He shrugged. “Just curious.”

  The woman studied him a moment longer, then slipped her sunglasses back up. “It reminds me of myself, the way I used to be.”

  Harley looked at her. He looked at Maxine. He saw no resemblance at all.

  The woman regarded him coolly. “My daddy—my father—was a coal miner, that is until the black lung took him. I grew up poor as a church mouse. That picture reminds me of myself back then. That’s just how I felt. That’s the only reason I want it.”

  Harley looked at her. He looked at the painting. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Really. You can have that painting if you want it. I’ll give it to you.”

  “Give it— Dear god in heaven!”

  “Tina,” said the woman, “make out a check to this gentleman.”

  “No, please, if you insist on paying, make it out to Mr. Baldwin here. It’s his gallery.”

  She looked at Martin. “Can you ship to Hammond, Indiana?”

  “Why, yes. Certainly. Dear me, yes.”

  Martin dashed about, lively now, writing receipts, double-checking addresses. He poured from the bottle into two glasses. “Do have a sherry, dear ladies. Do.”

  The woman in the fine fur checked her watch. “I’m sorry, but we have to be going. Tina and I only get to New York every few months and there’s so much to do.”

  She lowered her sunglasses and looked at Harley once more. A touch of humor glinted in her eyes. “Thank you. It has been quite interesting.”

  Harley grinned in turn. “I’ll throw in a couple of drawings.”

  “That’s very generous of you. We’ll drop in the next time we’re in the city.”

  “Wonderful” Martin gushed. “And do have some fun while you’re here!”

  The two women said good-bye and went out, high heels tapping into the distance.

  Silence fell over the threesome as Frankie and Martin stared at Harley.

  “I don’t know that I believe what I just saw,” Frankie said.

  Martin took up one of the glasses of sherry he’d just poured and drank it down. “Dear boy, never, never, never come into my gallery and browbeat my customers like that again.” Martin swiveled toward Frankie. “Heart attacks. Absolute heart attacks. Tell me, did I mention that artists are sickies?”

  Frankie watched Harley with an odd smile, as if she hadn’t entirely seen him until now. “He’s right, you know.”

  “Right?”

  “Don’t try to tell me you’re not a bit crazy.”

  He grinned. “Just trying to keep up with the locals.”

  “Gracious me. I feel ill. Yes, absolutely ill.” He picked up the other sherry and killed it off.

  Frankie continued to watch Harley, bemused. “I saw it with my own eyes. And yet…”

  “Saw it?” Harley said. “What do you mean, saw it? Looked to me like you were right in the big middle of it, bidding those prices up. I can see it now—front page of the New York Times: ‘Frankie Mussette, prominent New York patron of the arts, involved in art scam!’”

  Frankie laughed. “Sounds like fun.”

  “Oh, dear me. My, my, my.” Martin composed himself with effort. “Now,” he said. “I’ll just hold these other three and see what the response is. Here, dear boy, I’ll give you a receipt for work received. Standard commission, sixty-forty. Yes. Oh, my. Dear god in heaven. Ill, absolutely ill.”

  Chapter 34

  Loft

  THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, two weeks before Thanksgiving, a taxi carried them down Seventh Avenue. Seventh morphed into Varick. Varick crossed Canal, and after a few more blocks they got out on Franklin where it doglegged across West Broadway. Gusting winds whipped thin flurries of snow and trash beneath a troublesome sky.

  They got out and stood, their backs to the wind, looking west into a redbrick canyon, a labyrinthian mass of black-iron fire escapes hanging off the walls. The occasional Christmas wreath on a steel door was somehow touching.

  “Frankie on Franklin,” Harley said. “Might be an omen.”

  They skirted a ring of yellow sawhorses roped around a manhole, a Con Edison pipe protruding, spewing steam. On their left, the sidewalk lifted and became a loading ramp with industrial garage doors. A truck was loading at one of the bays. Two men stood huddled in a doorway alongside, sharing a bottle in a brown paper bag.

  “You sure this isn’t the Bowery?”

  “That’s a few blocks east of here,” Frankie said. She walked in the street, stepping carefully over the rough paving, searching for the number. “Some of these places will fool you. They don’t look very inviting from the outside, but they can be deceiving.”

  Maybe, but he wasn’t very hopeful. From what he’d seen, a nice loft cost a lot of money.

  “There,” Frankie said, coming toward him from the street. “Number one-fifty.”

  He turned his collar up and stood back, looking at the building. Frankie drew a strand of windblown hair from her mouth with a gloved finger. “Had you rather not look at it?”

  “Sure.” He tried to sound optimistic for her sake, since she had found the place and he didn’t want to appear ungrateful. But he had little hope for this grim-looking prospect.

  He drew open one side of the double metal doors and they stepped into a foyerlike space with four mailboxes grouped in the wall.

  “Number three,” Frankie said, and punched the corresponding button in a second wall alongside a se
cond door.

  After a moment, a metallic voice said, “Yah? Who’zit?”

  “Frankie Mussette. I called about leasing the loft.”

  “Yah, yah. C’mon up.” The door buzzed open to reveal a landing before a freight elevator. An ordinary steel door with a grilled window was visible on the right.

  He raised the gate in the freight elevator and Frankie followed him into the cage. He punched the third button on an industrial-grade switch box and the cage rattled up. They rose through the ceiling and the second floor came into view, similar to the ground floor, and then they ascended through to the third floor and the cage stopped. The third floor was much like the other two: A steel door with a wire-imbedded window faced them on the landing. He raised the gate and they stepped out.

  He knocked. He was about to knock again when a young woman’s face appeared in the gloom behind the grille. He heard two locks being thrown inside. The door opened a couple of inches. The woman squinted through the crack.

  “Frankie Mussette. I called about the loft.”

  “Yah.” The woman unhooked the chain latch, then stepped back to let them into what at first looked like a darkened warehouse.

  The woman was thin, dressed in dirty jeans and a T-shirt with FUCK CENSORSHIP printed across the front in block letters. Her head hung forward on her shoulders, a tangle of frizzy blond hair.

  “Hi. I’m Frankie. This is Harley Buchanan.”

  “Jill,” said the girl, squinting through sleep-swollen eyes. “C’mon in, take a look around at da place.”

  “Da place” smelled of cigarette smoke and something sour.

  It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust. The room was at least fifty feet long and thirty wide. A staircase ascended to a balcony that looked to be fifteen feet wide by thirty long. A forest of multicolored T-shirts hung on wires strung across the balcony.

  A kitchen of sorts ran beneath the balcony, dishes piled along the countertop and in the sink. A cluttered Formica dining table and a few mismatched chairs. Two platter-size ashtrays mounded with butts and flattened beer cans rose like volcanoes on a coffee table wedged between a broken-down sofa and a rump-sprung recliner.

  He took it in with a glance—the dinginess, the dirt, and the fact that everything had been painted black—the floors, the walls, the ceilings—all black. Two Casablanca-style fans hung from the ceiling on six-foot lengths of one-inch conduit pipe.