Yellow Mesquite

by John J. Asher

  HE WOKE IN a sweat, his mind jumbled. He showered and dressed, then hung his satchel over his shoulder and went downstairs to the Belmore. The Belmore was cheerless, its vats of food sweating behind steamed glass, cabbies bitching about the Mets and the Jets and fares to Harlem. Here too were gathered the walking wounded, empty gazes, mumbling curses at invisible tormentors.

  Harley took a cheese Danish and coffee and huddled in a booth. The Belmore reminded him of van Gogh’s Night Café, if only in spirit; “painted,” van Gogh wrote, “as a place where one could ruin one’s self, go mad, or commit a crime.”

  Harley had a sudden impulse to do just that, to run amok, to wreck the place in a frenzy of destruction. In self-defense he took his sketchbook out and began to make studies.

  Day broke in planes of gray on the front windows.

  He put the sketchbook away and went out. A sharp wind had come with the first light, chilling him where he stood on the curb near a newsstand.

  The night people were fading with the coming light, the day people clamoring to life, and always, that constant roar of the city, that humming in the asphalt, in the soles of his boots, in his bones, incessant, day after day after day—humming, the only possible escape in some inner room, in the bathroom with the door closed, and even then a faint whisper bled beneath the door. It was no wonder people murdered and maimed and went mad.

  A man stepped off the curb near the newsstand. Tires squealed. A dull thump and an impossible shape twirled above the cab, slammed down on its top, skidded down the back window and bumped off the trunk onto the pavement. The cab braked to a stop. A few people rushed over. Someone ran to call an ambulance.

  The cabby jumped out and bent over the crumpled figure on the pavement. “Hey!” he yelled, looking back at his cab, the rear door standing open. “Sonofabitch… My goddamn fare took off on me…!”

  Harley stood against the wall until an ambulance arrived and took the man away. He and other witnesses gave reports to the police. When he had recovered somewhat, he wandered up Park Avenue South, aimless.

  When Frankie’s cab pulled up to the curb at eleven, his eyes burned; his mouth tasted like rusty scrap iron and coffee.

  Frankie studied him across the seat. “Are you well?”

  He told her about the cab hitting the man.

  “That’s terrible,” she said with feeling.

  They took the cab down to Canal, to a pizza joint where they sat in a booth and ate eggplant grinders.

  “I’m sorry you’re in such a depressed mood,” Frankie said.

  “I’m fine, really.” He didn’t tell her about the dream. That dream made no sense. Even so, he couldn’t help but visualized her, naked, taking wraps around his body.

  “Your family will be here soon. I’m sure things will be better then.”

  “I really owe you,” he said.

  “Owe me?”

  “You’ve done so much for me.”

  Frankie gazed ruefully into her coffee cup. “Oh? I was under the impression I was doing things with you, not for you.”

  “You know what I mean. And I do owe you, no matter how you put it.”

  “You’re so provincially conscientious.”

  “You sore about something?”

  “You’re hard to read sometimes.”

  “Like how?”

  “You’ve got to understand: there’s more to this art game than just making paintings. If you want to succeed, you must make yourself an integral part of the machine. Form alliances, cultivate friendships, see and be seen.”

  “Play the game.”

  “Warhol says the real art of the sixties is publicity.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “It’s what you do if you want to be successful.”

  “You know, in the short time I’ve been here, you’ve introduced me to several big-name artists, and I appreciate that. I really do. But I’ve got to tell you, for the most part I don’t like them and I don’t like their work. It’s all this emphasis on what’s in and what’s out and who’s clever and who’s campy. It all sounds so phony. And nobody’s talking real art.”

  Frankie regarded him across the table.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. They’re all famous and I’m just a hick from the sticks.”

  “Oh, we are feeling touchy, aren’t we.”

  He shrugged, his mood too dark to deal with.

  “At the moment, they’re the best of what’s happening anywhere in the world,” she said.

  “Oh? Says who?”

  “The critics.”

  “That’s not what I expected, either. Art here in New York is just one big incestuous racket, the artists and the critics and the collectors, all feeding off each other.”

  “Of course. Art only becomes art by consensus.”

  “That’s what I just said. You pat my back, I’ll pat yours.”

  “What would you suggest? That we go back to the Abstract Expressionism you love so dearly?”

  “Abstract Expressionism is the modern counterpart of a primitive impulse. Pop is devoid of any impulse at all…except boredom, maybe.”

  Frankie studied him, a bemused smile.

  “I’m with some of those older guys like Rothko and Newman who believe true art must have a spiritual basis.”

  “Yes. I believe you do.”

  “You don’t?”

  “I’m not an artist.”

  “The whole thing with art is raising the ordinary to the extraordinary. This new stuff, it’s just ordinary. Period.”

  “My, my. Aren’t we waxing profound today.”

  “Sorry. I’ve got a case of the crazies. I don’t even know myself what I think anymore. I used to think I did, but I don’t.”

  “I believe you could develop a Pop style of your own, one that would guarantee you a following, a style with a Southwestern flavor, perhaps? Capitalize on your background? Do with the West what Lichtenstein is doing with comic books.”

  “I’d just as soon sell vacuum cleaners.”

  “Well. Who am I to say whether you’re noble or merely foolish. Since you don’t like Pop and you agree we can’t go back to Abstract Expressionism, do you have an alternative? Some new vision that will keep you out of the vacuum cleaner business?”

  He sighed, cheerless. Other than a few fleeting images on the periphery of his mind, he had no vision at all. Even these “fleeting images” weren’t actual images, but amorphous hints, an occasional vague taunting, flickering, just beyond his grasp.

  Chapter 36

  Rusty

  CHRISTMAS EVE DAWNED. A light snow falling.

  The loft was finished but for a few touchups. He was ready to move in, but still needed to do some serious food shopping. He had picked up a two-wheeled cart—a dolly with spoked wire wheels and a collapsible wire basket for shopping.

  He had packed a few sketchbooks and other odds and ends in the Belmore to take to the loft when Rusty stopped in to say hello. Harley gave her ten bucks in an envelope with “Merry Christmas” written on it. She borrowed ten more and went out. She was back within an hour and repaid the borrowed ten. He showered and was getting dressed to meet Frankie when Rusty knocked and asked to borrow the ten again.

  The sidewalks in mid-Manhattan were crowded with last-minute shoppers; Macy’s and Bloomie’s and E. J. Korvettes churned with people.

  He took the subway downtown and met Frankie in Cicero’s, a basement restaurant in the Village. They had lasagna with garlic bread and a bottle of claret. He gave Frankie a cashmere scarf from Bonwit Teller. The scarf was a soft burgundy with camel and tangerine hues, and cost more than he was comfortable with, but Frankie had gone out of her way to help him, and she had been a good friend of Mavis’s. Frankie gave him an art book, The New York School, which he had admired in Rizzoli.

  “I must go now,” she said.

  He followed her up the steps to the street.

  “I hope you have the best Christmas ever,” he said, flagging a cab.

&n
bsp; She hesitated on the sidewalk, her eyes on him, moist. “I’m so sorry you have to spend Christmas alone,” she said, breath fogging the cold air.

  “I don’t mind. Really.” He opened the cab’s rear door and held it.

  She reached up, put one hand behind his neck, pulled him down, and kissed him on the mouth. She held it longer than what might have passed for simple affection between two very close friends, her lips warm, moist, slightly open. She pulled back then, eyes averted. “Merry Christmas,” she whispered and slipped down into the taxi, still not looking at him.

  He watched as her cab disappeared up Bleeker.

  The kiss shook him. Not only was it sensual, he sensed something final in it, as if she had allowed herself this one moment of intimacy, knowing she would never see him again…

  While he was true to Sherylynne, he was very much aware of Frankie as a desirable woman. He didn’t kid himself that there wasn’t a bond between them beyond normal friendship, and that Sherylynne wouldn’t approve. He tried to shake off the erotic charge that left him weak and shaky.

  HE LAY AROUND his room most of the afternoon, looking at the book. As darkness crept up the brick wall beyond the Belmore’s rooftop, he poured himself a shot of Jack Daniel’s and opened the Christmas box from Sherylynne, and the one from his mom and dad. He called Sherylynne on the hall phone. She wasn’t in.

  Around ten there was a knock on his door. He opened it to find Lindy, the champion bowler, stooped in his doorway, a shine of desperation in his eyes. “You ain’t seen Rusty?”

  “Not since this morning. Why?”

  “She took off on me.”

  “Took off?”

  “The rent money. Everything.”

  Harley recalled the ten dollars she had borrowed.

  “Social security checks. She ain’t coming back.”

  “Social— Whoa. That’s government stuff.”

  “She ain’t coming back. I know she ain’t.”

  “She take Al’s social security check?”

  “Yeah, I dunno. I got to find her.” He made his way out to the staircase and disappeared down the stairwell. Lindy had lost his meal ticket.

  Harley knocked on Al’s door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Hey, Al, it’s me.”

  The door opened no more than an inch. “I’m not feeling too good,” Al said from within.

  “Did Rusty get off with your money?”

  “I’m not feeling too good.”

  “She did, didn’t she.”

  “I gotta get back to bed.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  “Nah. I’m just not feeling too good.”

  “I’m gonna go out and see if I can find her. You get some sleep. Here, I’ve got some Jack Daniel’s in my room. You want a drink?”

  “I don’t drink. Thanks all the same.”

  “Okay, Al. Catch you later.”

  Harley put on the navy pea coat he had bought for winter and went out. The snow had stopped earlier and was turning gray where it banked against the curbs. He turned back on Twenty-eighth toward Third and Second avenues, where there were half a dozen cheap bars. The blocks were long, the streets empty. Here and there a lone figure hurried from one bar to another. The bars were unexceptional—typically a doorway and one small window with a blinking beer sign. He stepped inside the first to the smell of stale beer, cigarettes, and soured humanity. He did a quick scan in the glow of neon: Schlitz, Pabst, Rheingold. The bars and their inhabitants reminded him of the painters, Lautrec, Node, Ensor.

  In one of the bars, he spotted Lindy moving stiffly, craning his neck, searching the crowd. Harley moved on to another bar and then another. No Rusty.

  He got back to his room a little after midnight. He tried to ring Sherylynne on the hall phone, but she still wasn’t in. When he finally did get through, it was after one. She was breathless with excitement. She and Whitehead had gone to a wonderful Christmas party. She loved the bracelet Harley sent her, and of course Leah liked the Playskool toys and the little Pooh Bear. Sherylynne was obviously tipsy. He told her how much he liked the new wallet and the funny handwritten note she had put inside: “Please Feed.”

  He hung up the phone, went back inside and poured himself a Jack Daniel’s. He thought about Sherylynne and Whitehead going to a party together, and though Whitehead had to be around fifty years old to Sherylynne’s twenty-one, he suffered a little pang of jealousy. At the same time, he felt guilt that he had left Sherylynne alone, her and Leah, out there in the middle of nowhere—and he had the gall to begrudge her a night out on Christmas Eve?

  He felt equal guilt when he thought of Frankie, the kiss. He was torn between dwelling on it, and wishing it hadn’t happened at all.

  He visualized Sherylynne—her smiling eyes, the girlish freckles, the sexy swing in her disjointed walk. He recalled when in the late evenings, she sometimes lit candles in their little bedroom on Chaparral, stepped out of her clothes and into his oversize boots, and then, pulling on his straw Stetson, she’d put one of the little forty-five records on the turntable—Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman,” or, if she was feeling particularly ardent, a Jerry Lee Louis, or Elvis; and she’d dance for him like that, her taut body swaying, twirling, her breasts with their prominent nipples jiggling, the flat of her stomach writhing above the little mound of pubic hair in the candlelight, the compact half-globes of her butt shifting against each other, her entire body shimmying to the beat. All the while watching him with expectation from coy, soft-lidded eyes, until finally she’d step out of his boots and up onto the bed; and she’d stand astraddle him, dancing in place, lowering herself in a gyrating grand finale.

  Thinking about it, he grew weak with longing, a little flutter in his stomach. It was another two weeks before she was to arrive, but it seemed forever. He declared to himself that once she got here, they would never be separated again.

  EARLY CHRISTMAS MORNING. The Belmore was practically empty, its scrambled eggs in vats behind the glass wet with steam. Nevertheless, he had an order with bacon and coffee, then sat alone in a booth.

  Alfred entered, looked neither left or right, but took his coffee and a Danish and slumped at a table, staring into his cup.

  Harley finished his breakfast, then got up with his satchel and went over to Al’s table. He removed an envelope and dropped it on the table at Al’s elbow.

  Alfred looked up. Looked at the envelope. Looked back at Harley. “What? What?”

  “Got some of your money back.”

  Alfred stared, his eyes big and round behind the thick lens of his glasses. He looked again at the envelope.

  “It’s all she had left,” Harley said.

  Alfred looked at him, quizzical.

  Harley said, “You want to go out for lunch? Say one o’clock? My treat.”

  Alfred looked again at the envelope on the table, touched it with the tips of his bony fingers.

  “Take it,” Harley said. “It’s yours.”

  Alfred pulled the flap out and counted out twenty dollars. A slow grin broke across his old angular face. “How’d you get it?”

  “I went back over there close to Second Avenue where all those bars are. I’d seen her there before.”

  Alfred craned toward him across the table, lively all of a sudden. “Yah? Yah? Then what?”

  “Then what? Then I saw her in there and I went in and told her I wanted that money. She took ten bucks of mine, too.”

  “Yah? She gave it to you? Yah? Just like that?”

  “Well…no. Not exactly.”

  “Yah, yah? What then? What?”

  “I told her I was gonna stomp her old redheaded butt right through the floorboards.”

  Alfred reared back, slapped his bony knees and laughed out loud. “Yah? You told her that? Then what? Then what?”

  “I dumped her purse out on the bar. That’s all she had.”

  Alfred slapped his knees again. “Jeez! You did? I’d liked to’ve seen that!”


  “So what do you say? Lunch? My treat.”

  “No, no. My treat. My treat.”

  “I know you’ve got to be running short, Rusty getting off with all your money and—”

  “No, no. I’m way ahead. She only got me for ten bucks.” Alfred laughed his cackling laugh, slapped his knees again.