“The last one,” I said. “Mitzi’s brawl.”
“I don’t like to talk about it, Steve.”
“You’re wasting time. Did you touch her that night? Did she want you to touch her?”
He nodded. “It wasn’t my fault, remember that. I was a little high myself. It couldn’t be helped, it was one of those things that creeps up and bangs you on the head. We were both pretty high. And coming home in the cab—”
We were standing close to the drawing board when the torment struck me. I reached for him and caught him by the throat and he fell back a step and knocked over his tabouret. He did not struggle. I brought up my fist to hit him. But he just stood there waiting for it. And because he waited, I hesitated. The scene was incongruous. He could have fought me off. He was big. Up close, I caught the hopeless wonder in his eyes. The water from a paint pot dripped in the silence. I loosened my grip on his throat.
“You asked for it, Steve,” he said.
My hand jerked a cigarette to my lips. The flame from my match oscillated in the gloom.
“Start talking,” I said. “Tell me what went on—during the day.”
He rubbed at his brow in a vague and drunken gesture. “During the day? Nothing, Steve. Nothing.”
“Did you see anybody? Do you remember anybody coming to visit her?”
“She was out. She was always out during the day. Once in a while in the afternoons—”
“You saw none of her friends, then?”
He stared at me hopelessly. But he was thinking now. He was emerging from his alcoholic dullness. He was trying to remember, working for me. I let him think. After a while, he said, “There was a man, today. In the yard.”
“The yard? How did you happen to see him?”
He pointed to his drawing board near the window. “I was working—just putting the finishing touches on some cartoons, before I left.”
“The time?” I asked. “Can you remember exactly when you saw him?”
“About one.”
“What did he look like?”
“He saw me,” Ken said. “It was one of those things. Our eyes met as he crossed the yard, only for a second. He ran in toward Mrs. Monati’s kitchen shed, out of sight. Jesus—he might have been the murderer!”
“What did he look like?”
“I didn’t study him,” he almost sobbed. “I couldn’t remember any part of him now. He wasn’t important, don’t you understand? He could have been one of the tenants—anybody—a workman.”
“You know all the tenants. You would have waved to him.”
He rubbed at his brow desperately. “It’s all faded out now. He wore glasses. An average guy. Nothing to make him stand out.”
“Would you know him if you saw him again?”
“Maybe.”
I said, “You were here when I came home this morning. You must have heard what went on.”
“I heard.”
“Tell me about it. You recognized my voice?”
“I heard it all,” Ken said. “I was on the couch, reading a book. At first I couldn’t catch you through the wall. But I knew you right away when you said, ‘I could kill you for this, Gwen.’ You were angry and you raised your voice. After that she began to cry. You left while she was crying. You slammed the door and walked out.”
His testimony buoyed me, and yet there were elements in it that could damn me forever. He had heard me threaten Gwen, uttering the classic line that stamped me as a man with a motive, a fledgling murderer who might come back to kill after an appropriate period of brooding, a psychopathic menace who might butcher out of frustration. I thought of my alibi—the dark corner of an uptown bar. I tried to remember whether the waiter had seen me, had talked to me; so that he might tell the world that I was swilling while someone killed my wife. But I hit bottom again when the pieces began to fall in place. I had spent a long time on the prowl. I had walked for an hour or more, and walking breeds no witnesses. I had met nobody on my lonely tour. I had not stopped to talk. My self-inflicted wandering had happened during the gap of time that might brand me with the red badge of murder.
I said, “Tell me about the rest. About Gwen—you and Gwen.”
He avoided my eyes and began to talk.
I was getting it now. It hurt, but I urged him to talk, to tell me all of it. I listened to him patiently. And soon the hurt left me. I realized that I had asked for the damage, I had forced him to confess. This, then, was the crumb I sought, the small fact, the clue to Gwen’s other life. She had left me a long time ago. I had lost her long before Ken Sisley, long before her first lover. She had been burning with restlessness ever since I met her. She had expected me to carry her into a make-believe world, to live up to the promises I made when I courted her. In those days I dreamed of far-off assignments—a job with adventure, a chance to take her with me into strange places. But I had failed her by falling victim to routine. Jonas Tripp had buried me. And Gwen found her own world, her special world, her day-to-day relief from the boredom of her marriage to me. Ken Sisley had not suited her. He was too close to me, too dangerous for her experiments.
“Why torture yourself with all this?” Ken asked.
“I’m not tortured. And I don’t hate you for telling me what I must know, Ken.” I brought out the matchbox. “What about this place? Do you know it?”
“The Cellar? I’d forgotten about it, Steve. I took Gwen there the day we went to the Modern Museum. We had a few drinks before the show.”
“I found it in her paint box.”
“She must have put it there that night, after school.”
“Last year? Didn’t you say it was last year when you went to the museum?”
“Last November.”
“Six months ago.”
I tore the matchbox in half and dropped the pieces on the floor. I was at a dead end. “How about the school? Did she ever talk about her lessons?”
“Not much.”
“What about Romani’s? Were you ever there? Did you ever see her at school?”
“Never.”
He was telling the truth. He had quieted down completely. We were a couple of men chewing the fat together. We were a comradely bull session. Ken seemed relieved, his cat-like nervousness buried, his talk sincere and uninhibited. Certainly he had never taken her to school. He wouldn’t have dared. I might have seen him from the window, and fool though I was, this might have opened my eyes to Gwen’s skillfully buried alter ego.
I said, “Where is this Romani place?”
“Over on Seventh, near the subway.”
“I’m going over there. Where can I find you if I need you?”
“Mario’s,” Ken said. “I’ll be needing a few more shots after all this.”
“I’ll meet you there at eleven. And don’t let the Scotch unzipper your tongue.”
“I’ll be drinking, not talking,” Ken said.
CHAPTER 5
Romani’s was a light through a long and dirty window, above the brighter lights of Seventh Avenue. Beyond the pane a yellow row of bulbs lit up the window sign: ROMANI SCHOOL OF ART, Painting, Drawing and Design. The street door bore the same message, in large and disorganized letters. A man, dressed in the accepted Village art costume, lounged against the door, making small talk with a girl whose hair was too long. She had on a black skirt and carpet slippers. She held a drawing in her dirty fingers and kept pushing a pencil at it and muttering excitedly. The man answered her slowly, calmly, as though he were talking to a small child with a problem. I watched them from the curb. In the cafeteria on the left, a clock told me it was 7:30. It was too early for Romani’s classes. Gwen usually left the house at 7:45.
I crossed the pavement and approached the couple.
“What time does Romani open up?” I asked.
The talk ended abruptly. The girl stopped, mou
th open, as though I had walked into her bathroom. The man slid his eyes my way. “Which class?” he said.
“The painting.”
“He’s got two of them,” the girl said. “Still life and with the model.”
“I was thinking of miniature painting,” I said.
They exchanged their befuddlement. The man took out a handkerchief and blew his nose violently. He put the handkerchief away with great care, folding it tenderly into his shirt pocket. He lit a cigarette and blew some smoke through his nostrils and then said, “Look, mister—take my advice and don’t go to Romani for miniatures. Romani stinks for miniatures. You want miniature painting, you go down the street to Archie Wilde—Archie has a nice quiet little class, and he knows his stuff. This Romani guy, he’ll tell you he painted the murals in the Sistine Chapel. He’ll tell you he can put naked little women on cocktail glasses. Romani will say anything to get a student. He’s bunk, I tell you. Miniatures are out of his line, but if you walk up there and ask for miniatures, Romani will sell you whatever you want to learn. Ha! The great Romani. Take my advice and go down to Archie Wilde.”
I said, “I heard he was pretty good at miniatures. A student of his told me. Do you know Gwen McGrath?”
He rolled the name on his tongue. The girl repeated the gesture. They eyed each other with the intense concentration all artists reserve for great names, unfamiliar contemporaries and lost friends. The girl shook her head and shrugged.
The man said, “She studies with Romani. We wouldn’t know her. Romani must have kept her in a hidden room, a private closet. Maybe Romani gave her special lessons.” He leered at the girl with a sly eye. “Me, I go to Romani only because of Louise here. Louise is my favorite model. Louise comes here to pose—I come here to paint. Come up to Romani’s life class and you will see why, mister.” He kissed his fingers and winked at me.
I said, “Is Romani up there now?”
“He sure is. You can find him in the back room, eating his lousy spaghetti, mister. Don’t take any if he offers it—Romani makes the lousiest spaghetti in the Village. Isn’t that right, Louise?”
I closed the door on her answer. Inside, the hall was a narrow canyon of dust and tired plaster. The stairs were tin covered and vocal under my weight. I had the feeling that this couldn’t have been Gwen’s type of school. She had acquired many of the Village habits, but squalor and dirt never charmed her. I tried to picture her climbing this stairway for her art instruction. I failed. But halfway up the stairs, I changed my mind. Why did I continue to think of Gwen as lily white? How could I plumb the unknown depths of the Gwen I never really knew? It could be that Gwen really liked this school. It would be better for me to cast out the Gwen I’d known. It would be wiser to build her from nothing, for nothing was what I had. She was a stranger to me, I told myself. I was doing research on a new subject, a fresh subject, a woman who walked these stairs with a strange step. She might have come running up these stairs, singing as she ran, bright-eyed with enthusiasm, glad to have dropped her wearisome role of wife to a wage slave. She might have put on a mask of gaiety, pert and pretty and alive. I tried for a mental picture of her. I manufactured her image, building it into something new and different, a girl who burned with a bright fire, a girl who showed a new face to these arty people, radiating an inner joy, a spirited yearning for culture. Or was she only the same Gwen, walking slowly up these stairs in her usual way, sitting in class as cold as marble, eyeing her fellow students with the cool arrogance I knew so well?
On the second floor, Romani’s front classroom was a square of emptiness. The smell of tomatoed garlic hung in the air. It was out of place here. It gave the untidy layout an air of incongruity, a suggestion of stupidity. There was a wire strung across the room from wall to wall, and on the wire an old green drape hung. The chairs and easels seemed pushed in odd positions, as though the class had swept them there in a mad scramble to go downstairs.
I found Romani himself in the back room, behind another drape. He sat at an improvised dining table close to a small gas stove and the rudiments of kitchenware he had gathered about him for the evening meal. He was a short man, round in the stomach and heavy in the head and jowls. His Italian face had the subdued refinement of the Italian royal family. He had greenish gray skin, unshaved on the cheeks. He rose from his chair, plucking delicately at the thin strands of his mustache, favoring me with his eyes, brows up, in the attitude of an over-anxious store clerk who smells a sale.
“Young gentleman,” he said with a nod, “will you sit down for a moment? Perhaps some coffee? I do not consider my meal finished until I have had the coffee.”
“None for me, thanks,” I said. “Go ahead and finish. I’ll wait.”
He poured his coffee and sipped it, making a loud noise through his teeth. He swallowed and looked up at me, birdlike. He had a permanent grin. “You are here about the school? You wish to attend my classes, is that so?”
“Not exactly. I’m just looking around, looking for a friend of mine.”
I showed him one of my pictures of Gwen, the small snapshots I always carried in my wallet. They were close-ups, well taken. She looked out at you in typical poses. Her features were sharp and clear. Her tentative smile identified her. No girl in the world could use a smile that way. It told you that she did not laugh. It told you only that the smile was a decoration, a trick, a device to make her face appeal. Beyond the eyes, you felt the coldness, the incalculable weight of her appraisal.
Romani concentrated on the picture. His grin dropped away. His face, without the smile, seemed to sag into sudden flabbiness. It was as though another man took over. He clucked at the picture.
I said, “You teach miniature painting?”
Romani wiped his lips with a Latin hand. “To be sure. I have been teaching the miniatures for many years. You know Lucalmo? He was my student. You know Flack? Also a student of mine. A man cannot have better students than these. Through them the fame of Romani has spread.”
“How about this girl? Do you know where I can reach her?”
“Reach her?” His little eyes examined my tie, carefully, as though searching for the key to some hidden mystery. He picked at his teeth. “You want to reach one of my students, is that it? If, as you say, you know this lady, why do you come to me for information?”
He was playing a little game with me, as obvious as the large ochre stain on his shirt. I stabbed out at his Italian intellect.
I said, “Look, Mr. Romani, I’m her boyfriend, do you see? Gwen’s left home and I’m trying to locate her. You can help me find her.”
“Ho ha!” he laughed, suddenly, enjoying the development of my plot, savoring the pleasure of his importance to me now. His expressive eyebrows worked well with the laughter, but beyond his fit of hilarity I saw that I had him.
“It isn’t funny, Mr. Romani. I’m in love with her.”
“Of course, of course,” said Romani, and leaned forward on his table, adjusting his elbows so that they missed the tomatoed plate. “Romani understands. I recollect your girl, my friend.” He threw out his hands and grimaced at the ceiling. “Ah, the women, the women, the women. Who can estimate these creatures? It is the Bible that says, ‘Women in mischief are wiser than men.’ Isn’t that so? And your girl, she told you, I suppose, that she studied with me?”
“Since November.”
He nodded violently. “That is correct, but it is only the date that is true, my friend.” He got up and went to a battered desk at the side of the room. He riffled through a large red ledger. His finger came down, finally. Then he turned to me with a sigh. “November is the time, as she told you. But I have not seen her for a long period since then. For two weeks she came here to me. I watched her work and saw that she had much talent. Here in this book I have written that down. But after the sixteenth of November, this Gwen of yours does not come to me anymore. That happens with the women. They find th
ings to take them away from art—distractions of one sort or another perhaps, outside things, little things, big things; one never knows with women.”
I said. “She came alone?”
He closed his eyes and thumbed his lip and shut himself into his memory.
“She came alone,” he said.
“And she left alone?”
“Always.”
“Then there were no men up here—nobody who—?”
“No, no,” said Romani, holding up a hand. “Let me think, my friend. Let me recall this girl of yours. I am reminded of another woman. Why does she affect my mind this way? There was a queerness about the way your girl left. And after her, Consuelo. Yes, that was it.” He walked back to his desk and riffled the pages of his ledger, rapidly now, his head bent for ward, a small turtle after a fly. “Consuelo Frugi with the yellow hair. It was Consuelo who had the fight with your girl.”
“Why did they fight?”
Romani rubbed his brow and made thoughtful faces. “Why do women fight? Who can say, except that they do not argue over the same things as men. A man will seat his brother because of politics, or hard words. But a woman—ah—they do not pull at the hair for such trivialities as these. And such a fight it was, my friend. I was obliged to slap them, both of them, in order to end the struggle. It was in the ladies’ locker room, during class time, when I heard them. One of them could have been hurt, for they were very mad, those two. It is not fists they use, the women, but the teeth and nails. They argue over their jealousies like animals, clawing and biting. They were two cats, those two, but I must say your girl got the best of the bargain. She left a long red scratch, bloody and evil, along the Frugi girl’s cheek.”
“All of this happened in November?”
“Oh, yes, in November.”
“And they were fighting over a man?”
Romani shrugged. “You must draw your own conclusions, my friend. For what other reason do two beautiful women fight?”
“I don’t know, but I’m going to find out. Have you got the address of the Frugi girl?”
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