In the Night Café

by Joyce Johnson

  My trip seemed very real to him—and by this time, to me as well. He was going to look at my apartment, and if it was big enough for him to paint in, maybe he’d take it over while I was gone and I could leave my stuff there. Finally, there in the bar, we talked about being two ships that passed in the night. I even found myself making a fairly fancy statement that maybe those relationships were the most perfect—just that pure first excitement and you said good-bye before things went sour.

  He asked me how long I’d had that belief, and I said, “Just for the last ten minutes.”

  He said, “This is too fast for you, isn’t it? We can’t slow it down, though.”

  I never did make it to Rome.

  My son Nicky passed through there last summer. His wallet was stolen on the Spanish Steps, and he spent a couple of days sitting up in cafés, walking the streets hungry, waiting for me to wire him some money. It wasn’t too bad, he said. Actually it was interesting—being down to nothing in a foreign country.

  You would approve of that attitude. And when I think of Rome, I think of you there too at Nicky’s age, but that was during the war and so you seem much older. It’s as if you never had any adolescence at all. You came into Rome with the troops and everyone was starving and you took everything out of your pockets and gave it away to little kids and drank wine with beggars in the ruins of the Colosseum in the moonlight. You told me you’d been on a minesweeper, and I said, that first night we talked, “But how did a sailor get to Rome?” “Hitched a ride on a tank,” you said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  I keep sorting through the leftover shards, stories with missing pieces that can never be filled in. The route you took from Anzio to Rome and what happened to you along the way—I knew it for one evening but didn’t listen nearly closely enough. It all got drowned in the onrush of love. We were going down the waterfall, and I didn’t eat much of the hamburger either. We can’t slow it down, you said. And there it was—the declaration. But now you seem to have been saying something else—how little time there was going to be.

  7

  I WOKE UP with you the next morning, and I thought, Found. I remember it, Found—as if a string had been plucked in the midst of great silence. I heard the note, then the overtones washed over us, not dying but continuing out there in space. I’ve never heard it that way again with anyone, though God knows I’ve listened for it. The sun was in the window and there was an odd, white film over everything, a fine dust, you could see our footprints in it. I lay there astonished with your arms around me.

  And later we were having breakfast at the kitchen table. I’d somehow made eggs and we were drinking coffee as if we’d been together a million ordinary mornings. Out of the blue you said, “Look, I can’t marry you yet. But I’m going to marry you.”

  That seemed so wildly extravagant that I trusted it. I’d never met anyone so rashly serious, although in the circles I moved in, speed was of the essence, an entire way of being. Men and women came together so quickly they could be said to have collided the way colors collided on canvases, running into each other, merging. Lucky and unlucky convergences.

  Then you told me what I’d guessed. You were still married. You’d left a wife in Florida, a woman you’d stopped loving, Caroline. Who’d been with you in Mexico City in a tiny pink house, where you used to paint on the roof under an awning you’d rigged up and the yard was full of bedsprings and the landlord’s chickens and an avocado tree. You said someday you’d go back to Mexico because you’d been happy there, though there’d been times you and Caroline were so broke you’d actually lived on avocados.

  I heard other things. The story of a car you’d left behind in Palm Beach—an old, white, custom-made MG. You’d traded a large painting for it—you’d never have a car that great again. “I was dying down there in the palms,” you said. You’d kept having accidents, so you knew how it would happen—your death in the MG, skidding off the road one night with too much booze in you and the gas pedal all the way down. “But I never drove like that with the kids,” you told me. “I always looked out for my little babies.”

  All this I took in—the pieces of your particular legend, the circumstances that had miraculously brought you to me, which I was going to learn by heart.

  I had once even dared myself, End it, so I thought I knew all about that, too. It was a game I’d played the night I learned Arnie Raff had left me—Chianti and aspirin, I wasn’t a driver. I lay down on my bed and started swallowing the little tablets, six or seven of them. But suddenly I realized, I don’t mean this, and it seemed quite humiliating to want to die over Arnie Raff.

  But I didn’t tell you about any of this. I didn’t say a word about Arnie, the original occupant of the apartment. My real history had after all begun that moment you spoke to me at Annabel’s party. I asked you, did you happen to remember walking past a place called Rappaport’s on Saturday night?

  You were so surprised. “How do you know that?”

  “I was in there. I saw you. Where were you going?”

  You said, “I was looking for you, kiddo.”

  There was a roll of canvas that had been left downtown and a suitcase and finally it seemed appropriate to get them. By that time it was getting dark outside again. We walked down to Duane Street along Broadway. I remember us radiating light at each other, passing all the decaying iron-columned buildings, the blue-lit upstairs factories where Puerto Rican women sat behind whirring spindles of thread.

  Tom’s friend who had the canvas and the suitcase lived in a studio behind a rag shop that was going out of business. We had to ring his phone twice from the street, so he’d know he wasn’t being raided by building inspectors. He opened the door to let us in. He was a small wiry man with a bristling, flaming red moustache. I’d seen him around the Cedar. A long white scar ran straight from his forehead to a bald spot on top of his head. Tom said very abruptly, “This is Joanna. We’re going to be living together from now on.” It was the first time I heard it as a fact to be communicated to outsiders.

  Since Tom had just been going uptown for a beer the last time Leon Renfro had seen him, Leon didn’t know what to think. He took off his glasses and wiped them and said, “Well… . ” Then he slapped Tom on the shoulder. “Didn’t I tell you you’d luck out?”

  “There’s all kinds of luck!” Tom said, and I saw him turn fierce in an instant. I think he wanted Leon to know right away that the luck was love.

  “Sure, sure,” Leon said. “Why not?” But he still must have taken a pragmatic view of the situation. Most people would have, I guess.

  He did insist on toasting us, though. He poured the remains of some vodka into a paper cup, and we each took a sip from it as Tom collected his things.

  Leon asked me what kind of place I had and where it was and if I had a shower. “You wouldn’t mind if I came around sometime to use it? I always bring my own soap and towel.”

  I admired people like Leon who had stratagems for everything, who even seemed to relish poverty because it made things hard, kept them alert to possibilities. What I hated about being poor was that it took up so much time, you always had to think about it. If you needed practical advice, Leon was definitely the person to go to. He knew how to vacuum electric meters to make them run backwards. He kept his potbelly stove going with big wooden crates he dragged in from the street. He could tell you what days of the week mattresses got thrown out in classy neighborhoods or where the crashable parties were in the penthouses of collectors. Leon got real enjoyment out of the rich but was down on the bourgeoisie. When he wanted to step out, he’d put on his tuxedo from the Goodwill and take a girl friend uptown to the Hotel Pierre or the Plaza. They’d crash some big wedding reception, where they’d hurriedly consume dozens of canapés, passing themselves off as distant relatives.

  According to Leon, it was only in America that an artist could live the way he did. Yo
u couldn’t do it in Paris, where things were much closer to the bone. The stingy French never threw out anything. “You could starve in Paris,” he said indignantly. “America’s the greatest place for The Artist.” “The Artist,” he kept saying, as if he were an expert conducting objective research on the subject.

  Leon was an ex-marine. The scar on his head was a war wound. Tom had met him at the Art Students League when they were both young guys on the GI Bill. For eight months they’d shared a horrible room with a hot plate in a boardinghouse full of drunks and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Brooklyn. In Reginald Marsh’s class, they did hundreds of sketches of Serena the model, an elderly Follies girl. Once they even got Marsh to have a beer with them. Tom had been drawing all his life, every time his fingers found a pencil, but he’d only started painting after the war. Even so, he was already thinking big, thinking about Mexico, talking about doing murals like Rivera. Leon wanted to paint apples like Cézanne. On the dresser in their room he kept A&P bags filled with apples that turned rotten before he could render them and attracted mice.

  Leon went on to abstract expressionism years before Tom, but never got anywhere with it. Now he was working with chicken wire. So far he alone was on to it. It made a grid, but it was an expressionist grid, and it was also a very cheap material. He had a couple of enormous rolls of it in his studio. He was taking all his old canvases that hadn’t sold and painting them over with deck paint—battleship gray. Pieces of grid were going on top of that. And just lately—one day when his sleeve had caught in the wire—he’d had the inspiration to use rag, bits of rag caught like his sleeve, and maybe thread or even yarn.

  He led me around the studio, turning on lights so I could look at all his new work on the walls. I saw a lot of gray paint and chicken wire. It all sort of hung there mute, not even ugly in a way that might shock someone into staring. “This is just a pre- view,” he said. “The rags go on next week. You see how they’ll work, don’t you, what they’ll do to the space.” I said, Yes, I thought I saw.

  Leon turned off the lights and scrutinized me. “Hey, you should talk more. How’ll I get to know your thoughts? So what do you think?”

  I said, “Leon, they depressed me.”

  “Exactly!” he cried excitedly. “Of course they did!”

  And they had, they’d brought me down, invaded my happiness, reminded me how easily people’s lives got wasted. Even when I was young I knew that life could be destroyed by art, though it was worth it, of course.

  “When the new wave comes,” Leon said, “I’m gonna be up there on the crest.”

  Tom looked up from the corner of the studio where he was stuffing things into his suitcase. “Fuck the new wave! Throw the art magazines in the garbage!”

  “Now Tom,” Leon said patiently, “you don’t understand the situation. You haven’t been here.”

  “Right, I’ve just been painting fifteen years. Out in the sticks. Don’t forget that!”

  “Abstract expressionism is through, finito. You could be Michelangelo and you couldn’t get a gallery.”

  “I paint what I paint. I’m not going to be one of the fish lying on the beach, panting through my gills for the collectors.”

  “This is a good man, but an impossible man,” Leon said to me.

  “Van Gogh was impossible! Pollock was impossible!” Tom yelled.

  “The handwriting is on the walls of the museums, man!” Leon shouted back at him in exasperation. It was the title of an article by a new upstart critic that had made all the abstract expressionists furious. It said there was no such thing as an old revolution. I’d read it myself over someone’s shoulder in the Cedar. “The Handwriting Is on the Walls of the Museums.”

  Tom yelled that the critics could go on practicing their handwriting as well as their typing. It was all right with him as long as they didn’t take up the brush.

  Then they both started laughing and Tom said it was just like the old days, they still liked to shout at each other, they could still get excited enough to fight. “Yeah,” Leon said gloomily. “But now it’s about survival.”

  “It always was,” Tom said.

  Afterwards, out on the street, when Tom and I were waiting for a taxi with all his stuff, he said suddenly, “There’s only one way to think about all this art critical shit.”

  I said, “Which way is that?”

  He pulled me close to him and put his mouth against my ear. “Red, white and black. Red, white and black.”

  Next morning you opened the suitcase out on the bed. It was the suitcase of someone who had packed too fast, full of light-colored clothes, not really right for the last days of winter. There was a brown leather cigarette case with the initials T.M. and a knife you’d bought in Mexico City that you used for fishing. “This knife will last forever,” you said and showed me the places on the handle where the black stain had worn away. You’d thrown in your staple gun too and a big expensive brush that had never been used.

  It alarmed me, that suitcase. What wasn’t in it. It seemed that someone who could take so little with him could walk away from anywhere very fast.

  I said, “You’re going to need an overcoat.”

  You said, “It’ll get warmer.”

  You picked up the brush and showed how smoothly the bristles flexed against the back of your hand. “Look how they bend. That’s what a good brush does.”

  8

  NO MATTER WHERE we shoved the furniture, my place was too small to paint in. We moved the bed anyhow and made a wall, clear all the way to the window. “You could do a really big canvas there,” I said. “You could roll it up when it’s finished and start another.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I could always do that—roll ’em up like a rug. We’d be painted out of here in a month. Maybe I’ll get me an easel and do nice little paintings. That’s about what you could do in this place.”

  “Would that be so bad for a while?”

  He laughed and shook his head. “Oh kiddo, you don’t know what I do. You haven’t seen anything. Maybe you won’t even like it.”

  “Of course I’m going to like it.”

  He stared at me thoughtfully for a moment. “Yeah, maybe you will. Because the work is me. You could even write me off—and there’d still be the work.”

  “How could I write you off? What are you talking about?”

  I don’t remember what he answered.

  Those early days were best, when we still lived on Seventh Street. I hardly remember anything but happiness. It’s funny to think how we rushed to get through them, as if they didn’t quite count, as if our real life wouldn’t begin till we’d moved, found a studio, brought all Tom’s paintings up from Florida in a truck, then we’d be happy. The future was like that wall we’d cleared, which we’d stare at from bed when our eyes opened, blank and not blank, nothing there but morning rippling across it or stripes of shadow. Soon we’d wake up somewhere else, see a different wall.

  Leon said we should try to get a place on the Bowery. The Bowery was our best bet. Who would want to live there but an artist? We searched for the lucky sign everywhere we walked—Loft for Rent on some gray upstairs window, maybe our loft. We’d write down the addresses of vacancies, whitening their walls in our minds, filling them with paintings, talking about how great the dusty old glass would look after it was scrubbed down with newspapers—that was the best way to clean windows, Tom said. We’d walk east or west, turning corners at random, ending up in odd neighborhoods without possibilities—old red brick projects down by the river, a market on Ludlow Street with bins of used eyeglasses, forsaken parks where winos lay out on benches under dusty sycamores. I’d suddenly feel my arm being gripped and hear Tom say, very quietly, “You didn’t see that—but you don’t have to,” and I’d know he was steering us out of the way of something. He told me he’d learned to walk like that when he was a kid, to see everything. He said n
ow that he was in New York, all his old alertness was coming back to him.

  We didn’t have nearly enough money to move. Tom had just started looking for work. I knew you had to buy large, expensive things for a loft—stoves, refrigerators, water heaters. How could we afford them? I had my Rome fund—three hundred dollars—and my various part-time typing jobs. Tom hocked his watch and his silver ring and got fifty-nine dollars. “Well, that’s it,” he said, putting all the bills on the table. He was proud he’d come away from Florida with so little, left everything behind for his kids, all the money from his last show, where he’d sold a painting for seven hundred dollars. He said, “It’ll happen again, you know, only better because it’ll happen in New York.” It was always New York that made meaning.

  Meanwhile he sometimes felt his life had been rolled back. He said it was like being in Mexico City after the GI Bill ran out and he’d no longer had pesos in his pockets. Still, back then he’d gotten by for a couple of years doing little water colors of churches and marketplaces; he’d sign them with a Spanish name and take them to a shop that sold them to American tourists. Caroline gave lessons in ballroom dancing at a girls’ school. Then the tourist shop burned down and that was the beginning of the end. The end of Mexico, the end of the good times in the marriage. Caroline was pregnant with Tommy—she was so anemic the doctor told her she’d probably lose the baby. He borrowed money from everyone they knew and put her on a plane, sent her back to her family in Florida. For six years she hadn’t spoken or written to her father. Tom had remained behind in the empty pink house, waiting for her to come back to him with the kid, wondering how they’d all survive.