Yellow Mesquite

by John J. Asher

  “Look,” said Frankie, gesturing toward the outside wall. The wall was slotted with a grid of windows from knee-high to within a few feet of the ceiling for the whole length of the loft, all painted black but for the top row of panes, letting in slits of dirt-filtered light.

  “You paint all this?” Harley asked.

  “Yah, we fixed da place up, put in da fixtures’n stuff.”

  “You have a certificate of occupancy?”

  “Yah. We got a CO aw’right.”

  “What’s all that up there? T-shirts?”

  “We do da shirts. Fix ’em up, silkscreen ’em and sell ’em. Stuff like that. You the one what wants the place?”

  “I’m looking for a place to live and work. But I’ve got to have light.”

  A partition had been built out from the wall near one end of the kitchen area to hide the john, but the bathtub stood in plain view. A folding screen zigzagged out from the wall near the tub and the corner of a mattress was visible on the floor behind. A woman’s leg tangled in a wrap of sheet stuck partway out.

  Jill dragged a flattened pack of Camels out of her back pocket, pried one out and lit up. Through a haze of smoke, she said, “You a ottist?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Ottist. You know, drawr pitchers. Paint’n stuff.”

  “Oh… Yeah, right. Uh, what kind of paint did you use on the windows? Oil Based? Latex?”

  Jill frowned at the windows. A thin ribbon of smoke trailed from between her lips and up into her nostrils. “Jeez, I dunno. Paint. Latex maybe?”

  He saw now that the half-hidden leg behind the folding screen belonged to a naked woman untangling herself from the sheets. He felt himself coloring at the sound behind the screen as she peed in the toilet and then flushed.

  “How long you think it’d take to get all that paint off with remover?” he said to Frankie, mostly for something to say, trying to keep his eyes off the flaming triangle of orange pubic hair on the young woman stepping from behind the screen, pulling on a pair of jeans without the bother of underpants.

  “I’ve no idea,” Frankie said. Her color was up a little, a humorous glint in her eye. “But I should think it would be as bright as day in here with those windows cleaned.”

  “Yah. It was bright before we fixed da place up.”

  The toilet girl came forward, tucking in her T-shirt. The tangle of hair on her head blazed orange, crackling out over her shoulders, down over her low forehead. Her blue eyes were heavily outlined in smears of black. She had a large nose with large nostrils and freckles like rust over the creamy skin of her face and arms.

  “Too fucking bright,” she said without benefit of introduction, giving them a sideways glance as she went past and began digging around in a pile of clothes on the sofa. “I mean, man, you couldn’t see nuttin’ in all that light. Know what I mean?”

  “Lottie don’t like it too bright,” said Jill, a wry grin twisted around the Camel pinched between her lips.

  The girl, Lottie, gave up on the clothes, felt both hands over her back pockets and turned to Jill. “You got the butts?”

  Jill rolled her eyes, but dug the pack out of her back pocket and handed it over.

  “They’re in-trested in da place. They maybe wanna lease it.”

  “Yeah? Jesus, I need some coffee. Nobody make coffee?” Lottie stopped and frowned at the cigarette. “Jesus. Camels. Now I ask you, who the fuck smokes Camels?”

  Jill yawned and stretched. “You don’t want it, gimme it back.”

  Lottie poked about in the dishes. “Jesus, who hid the coffeepot?”

  “Fill da kettle,” Jill said. She screwed her cigarette out in an empty tuna can. She looked toward the loft. “David hear? He come in last night?”

  “How do I know if he came in or not. Where’s all the cups?”

  “Where you left ’em, praw’bly.”

  “And the kettle. Jesus.”

  Jill rolled her eyes. “Go on and look around at da place. I’m gonna make kaka brain some coffee.”

  “Fuck you. You’re a kaka brain yourself.”

  Jill dug a red-enameled kettle out of the sink and began running water into it.

  Harley wandered with Frankie down toward the opposite end of the loft.

  “What do you think?” he asked, out of earshot.

  She smiled her moist Vermeer smile. “Between your accent and theirs? I don’t know how either of you knows what the other is saying.”

  “White,” he said. “I’d want everything off-white. Walls and ceilings. All white. And look at this floor. Oak. I bet it could be refinished pretty nice.”

  The place was black as a tomb, but he could picture it fixed up exactly as he’d imagined the perfect living and working space.

  Frankie nodded. “Do you think your wife… Will Sherylynne like it?”

  “Yeah… I don’t know. I think she’d like it if it were fixed up.” But he wasn’t so sure. It was hard to visualize Sherylynne in this place, even if it was fixed up. Only a couple of weeks ago he’d have known for sure whether she would have liked it or not. But a few weeks ago they shared common experiences. Too, matters of one’s living style back home were pretty much cut and dried: You lived in a house or you lived in an apartment. Or a trailer. You lived in a good neighborhood or a bad one. You had hand-me-down furniture or something vinyl-covered from Sears—unless you were the Whiteheads, in which case you had something in Italian leather from Neiman Marcus.

  “The first thing, before anything else,” Frankie said with a mischievous smile, “is to wall in the bathroom.”

  He laughed and felt himself coloring a little.

  He glanced again at the windows. “Why in the world would anybody want to shut out all the light like that?”

  “I can’t imagine. I’m sure Freud would have something to say about it.”

  “The light in here’s something like inside Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.”

  She gave him a doubtful look.

  “Louise Nevelson would think so,” he said.

  “Louise Nevelson would clean this place up.”

  Jill rinsed cups under the tap. The kettle began to whistle.

  “I don’t mind the rent,” he said to Frankie. “It’s the fifteen hundred fixture money that gets me.” He had already learned that tenants who improved lofts in New York demanded the cost of that improvement—often padded, and often when there had been no improvement at all—when selling or subleasing.

  “Welcome to New York,” Frankie said.

  Jill spooned instant coffee into a couple of cups. “You guys want coffee?” she called.

  “No, thanks. Not for me,” Harley said.

  Frankie smiled. “No, thank you.”

  Lottie sat at the table pinching marijuana from a thirty-five-millimeter film can, carefully crumbling it into the cupped V of a Target cigarette paper.

  “We take a look upstairs?”

  “Sure. Go on up.”

  Frankie followed him up the built-in staircase.

  Lottie struck a match to the twist clamped between her lips. “It’s kinda messy up there, y’know?”

  “ ’At’s where we do da shirts, all ’at kinda stuff.” Jill poked out another Camel butt in a mound of ashes and stood to follow them up.

  Paint cans stood along the walls. Silkscreen frames were piled on the floor and propped against the wall. There were rolls of film, squeegees. A sink hung on the wall with ribbons of color dried down its sides.

  “We do da shirts up there,” Jill said again.

  Frankie followed Harley back downstairs.

  “Fifteen’s too much,” he said. “I’ll give you a thousand.”

  “Nah,” Lottie said. “We done put way too much in the place for that.”

  “Sorry. Too rich for my blood.” He ushered Frankie toward the entrance.

  Lottie hesitated, then let them out. “Change your mind let me know.”

  Icy wind wafted up through he freight elevator.

  �
�That place had real potential,” Frankie said. He could hear the disappointment in her voice.

  Outside the wind was even colder, snapping papers and trash in the gutters.

  “Let’s go somewhere and get coffee,” Frankie said.

  They were almost to Varick when he heard yelling above the wind. They turned to see Jill running toward them, pulling a sweater on over the “Censorship” T-shirt.

  “Okay, okay,” she huffed, out of breath. “It’s a deal.”

  Harley paused. “A deal? You’ll take a thousand?”

  “Yah, yah. A thousan’ll do.”

  “I have to get a cashiers check from the bank. You want me to come back to your place tomorrow?”

  “Sure. That’ll work.”

  “I’ll have a cashier’s check made out for a thousand dollars. You make out a receipt that it’s fixture money. Okay?”

  Jill nodded, shivering in the cold. “Yah, yah. At’s good.”

  “Here, write down the name you want the check made out to. One more thing; how long before you can be out?”

  Jill wrapped her arms around herself, huddled against the wind. “I dunno…”

  “How about the first of January? That’s almost two weeks. Can you be out by the first?”

  “Why not? We got nuttin’ to move mostly but da shirts.”

  “Okay, I’m gonna draw up a paper that states you’ll be out by the first. Otherwise, the deal’s off.”

  “Sure. Why not.”

  Harley held out his hand. “Then I’ll see you in the morning at eleven. I’ll have everything ready.”

  Jill looked at his hand, took it briefly and let go. “We’ll be there.”

  She shivered against the cold and ran back along the wall, knees in, throwing her feet out in the way some women had of running.

  Chapter 35

  Thanksgiving Dreams

  THE TWO WOMEN, Jill and Lottie, vacated the loft almost overnight. As they had gotten out so quickly, he decided to send for Sherylynne and Leah in early January. But it was hectic, still learning a new job and trying to get the loft in shape, too. Where to begin? He remained in the Belmore, but had the utilities turned on and a phone installed in the loft.

  On Saturday morning before Thanksgiving, he found an old twin-bed frame in a junk shop on Canal. He made several trips, carrying it back to the loft in manageable sections. At Walkers, a small builders supply near Broadway and Canal, he ordered enough lumber and sheetrock to wall in the bathroom, enough paint to redo the walls, and had it delivered to the loading dock out front. He replaced the original castors on the bed frame with four-inch industrials, then bolted and strapped eight-foot two-by-fours upright to the corners and cross-braced them for staging. He could slip a two-by-twelve in at any of several levels for standing on.

  From the bulletin board in Walkers, he wrote down a number from a thumb-tacked index card that read: “Odd jobs. Repairs. Painting. No job too big or too small.” The painter, it turned out, roomed with three more men who also did odd jobs. After checking the difficulty of removing the paint on the loft windows, and approving the scaffold, they agreed to strip the windows and paint the loft for three hundred dollars, half due after two days, the balance on completion. He suspected they were Mexican illegals, but discovered later that they were from Honduras. They had no family in New York, and for another fifty dollars agreed to begin work on the following Friday, the twenty-seventh, the day after Thanksgiving.

  He bought a queen-sized bed and a baby bed and had them delivered. Then a few kitchen essentials. He would wait for Sherylynne to pick out whatever furniture they needed.

  It made him weak in the stomach to think of the pickle he’d be in had he not sold the painting. His forty percent came to twenty-four hundred, and after sending Sherylynne a thousand, the remaining fourteen hundred was disappearing fast.

  While coming and going, he met the Indian couple who lived on the floor below. The man was an intern at Mount Sinai Hospital up on Ninety-sixth Street, and seldom home. The woman was a stay-at-home mother with a two-year-old son. Almost daily, the tantalizing smell of spicy food wafted up the through the elevator shaft.

  ALFRED PEARLMAN, an older man, plank-thin and bony as a doorknob, had the room next to Harley’s in the Belmore. Al had retired years before, and now ran deliveries around town for a messenger service. He spent his free time slumped in a recliner in front of his TV, door open, asleep as often as not. He was a solitary man without family, and occasionally Harley invited him for coffee and a Danish downstairs in the cafeteria.

  Harley hadn’t heard from Frankie, but on the twentieth-fifth of November, she called and offered to treat him to Thanksgiving dinner at Mineola’s in the Village.

  “Sorry, but I already told Al I’d go with him to the Governor.” The Governor Bradford was a decent restaurant, located Midtown.

  “Oh.” Frankie’s voice fell.

  “I just assumed you’d be tied up with Cecil.”

  “I should have said something sooner.”

  “You could join us at the Governor. It’s not exactly the Four Seasons, but… How about it?”

  Frankie thought for a second. “Do you think your friend would mind?”

  “I think he’ll be tickled to death. And Cecil?”

  “Cecil won’t be joining us.”

  ALFRED WAS BESIDE himself. Already seated when Harley and Frankie arrived, he almost turned the table over, leaping to his feet, gangly as Ichabod Crane, barely restrained, gesturing over the crowd to get their attention. He danced a half circle around Frankie as he jerked a chair out for her, talking a mile a minute. He detailed the menu as if Frankie couldn’t read it herself: the special turkey dinner of the day, stuffing with giblet gravy, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie. Frankie was attentive, and the old man in his shabby suit and little crooked tie was for the moment transformed.

  Afterward they all agreed: it was the best Thanksgiving they’d ever had.

  That evening Harley called Sherylynne, but there was no answer.

  The next day Frankie had a small gift-wrapped can of English candies and a thank-you note delivered to Alfred for letting her crash the party. Alfred was tearful. He placed it on his dressing table alongside an aged sepia photograph of a young woman wearing a broad-brimmed hat and holding a Japanese fan. The only other photo was of Alfred’s father, ramrod straight in a World War I uniform, wearing leggings and a military cap with a short visor.

  Rusty, the super, looked in on Harley from time to time. She smelled of booze and tried to talk with him about the art he was doing. Twice she borrowed five dollars in the morning and paid him back the same afternoon.

  Harley made a couple of visits to the School of Visual Arts down on Twenty-third Street. Each time he stood across the street and looked at the place and wasn’t much impressed. In fact, he would have walked right on past had he not been looking for it. Inside the front doors, a small foyer exhibited student art. On his third visit, he took a few drawings and applied for admission to two night classes, beginning with the spring semester in January.

  He was concerned that the teachers at SVA appeared to be illustrators rather than painters, but from what he could find out that was just as true of Pratt, the Art Students League, Cooper Union, The New School, and all the other schools as well. Maybe Whitehead had been right after all: Maybe he should just look up Rauschenberg and tell him he was here and ready to go to work for him. But at the moment Rauschenberg was on a world tour with the Merce Cunningham dance troupe. Of course, there were other artists, like Bill de Kooning, whom he’d rather study with anyway. But Harley couldn’t bring himself to tackle something like that. Not yet, anyway, in spite of the fact that this was New York and you could do almost anything and get by with it, especially if you called yourself an artist.

  He wrote Sherylynne daily and called once a week, but there seemed to be a space other than distance between them now. She didn’t get as excited as he thought she might over some of the things he told her. The e
nthusiasm she had seen him off with seemed to have faded. She had gotten excited when he sold the painting, and she was downright euphoric over the thousand dollars he sent. However she didn’t understand why he only got forty percent from the gallery, or why his job at JCPenney only paid ninety-five-dollars a week. Actually, he’d gotten raised to one-fifteen. At the same time, she agreed that he was doing the right thing; they should stick it out. The distance he had begun to feel evaporated; she was still the same warm, loving woman as always, still his best friend. She pointed out that the one painting had sold for more than he had made in a whole year working for Whitehead, even if he did only get forty percent. He didn’t say so, but, again, the sale of that painting had been a stroke of unimaginable good luck.

  AN OLD STEAM locomotive whistle rises and falls, mournful, over the long country as he throws bundled sorghum over the stack-lot fence to the horses in a saturation of light too lurid for any hour of the day or night. He knows that train…the engineer playing Lost John on the steam whistle like a blues harmonica. Harley stops. Listens. The wheels clickety-clackety-clicking. He sees the soft folds of the old hat crumpled between the bundles in the feed stack and reaches for it, just as when he was a kid, only now he knows it’s a snake, unlike the first time, when he didn’t know until he had it in hand. He will take it by the tail and pop its head off the way his dad did. But the snake begins to take slow wraps around his arm and he sees it isn’t a snake at all, but Frankie. Frankie, naked under a yellow rain slicker. She begins wrapping herself around him, muscles contracting. The train blows its lonesome whistle. Lost John. Closer. The preacher from Separation, Texas, stands next to Warhol on the subway platform. The preacher begins to preach at Harley. Warhol, arms folded, looks on. Harley struggles to untangle himself from Frankie, feels himself being drawn down, Frankie opening under him like a Georgia O’Keeffe blossom. Sherylynne, a life-size cardboard cutout of a whiskey ad, stands on the platform. She frowns, taps her foot. Help me, he cries. Sherylynne grinds her teeth. The train comes closer, howling, Lost John. Martin sees Harley’s dilemma, rushes down the subway steps. Oh, dear boy. Darlene Delaney sits on the subway bench next to the Buddha-looking Humpty Dumpty. The Humpty Dumpty’s nose begins to glow. Darlene smirks, pops her gum. Sherylynne takes a drink from the glass in her whiskey-ad hand. Frankie moans. Lost John. The Humpty Dumpty’s nose pulses, throbs, lights up. Martin grabs an eraser and begins to erase the nose until there’s nothing left. Smeary streaks. The whistle howls, wheels clickety-clackety-clicking, Frankie pumping, keeping time with the rhythm on the rails. Martin slaps his hands over Sherylynne’s eyes and begins to erase her—smears of color on a cardboard cutout, disappearing. Harley hears the sound of his own cries drowning under the mournful wail of Lost John. The train is upon him. Whitehead, wearing the old doorman’s uniform, stands in the engineer’s window, eagle eyes wet and wild, elbows flapping. Sherylynne—the erased cutout—begins to blister and curl. Only her freckles remain—black pellets, paper mouth agape. I need a drink, she whispers, and peels over, sliding off the platform onto the tracks before the train. It thunders by; behind the windows, in the aisles, a thousand skeletons linked arm in arm soft-shoe to the left, singing in unison: Yea dum do / He d’ do-right man / Yea dum do / He d’ do-right man… They shuffle to the right, bones clanking: Yea dum do / He d’do-right man. Harley nods to Uncle Jay, says hello to Mavis in passing. The caboose rattles by. Sherylynne flutters about in the after-wake—wispy scraps of paper as the clickety-clackety-moaneing harmonica-blues-blowing sound of Lost John fades into the distance. Frankie lies on the platform huddled under her cape, red pimples on the white slabs of her naked butt. She stirs, lifts empty eyes to him in the silence. Are we making art? she asks….