Scarlet Night (4 page)

The phone rang. It rang a lot oftener when Jeff was home.

“Mrs. Julie Hayes?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Ralph Abel, the painter. Remember?”

“Of course.” That was only yesterday.

“I mean I wasn’t sure I had the right party. Geoffrey Hayes, the
New York Times
columnist. Right?”

“Yes,” Julie said, but very softly. She was afraid of what might come next.

“I wanted to tell you, Mr. Rubinoff isn’t taking that painting. So if you’d like to take another look, come down this morning and I’ll be here.”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Abel…I’m sorry about Mr. Rubinoff, but…”

“To hell with Rubinoff. I’m sorry, ma’am. I didn’t mean to say that.”

“Of course you did and why not?”

“Look, I’m not trying to rush you, but if you could come down, I’d love to take you to lunch. Understand, I’m not trying to make out with you or anything.”

Julie laughed.

“What?”

“You want to sell a painting, right?”

“It’s more than that.”

“But you’ve got to be realistic. I’m not a good prospect. My husband’s in Washington today so that I can’t bring him to see it. Maybe later in the week.”

“Would you let me bring it to your house? You could just hang it and surprise him. Then…well, we could take it from there.”

“We sure could,” Julie said. “I’ll come down in a couple of hours and we can have a bowl of soup or something and you might show me some of those sketches we talked about.”

Not until she reached the door of the Maude Sloan Gallery and found it locked did she remember that Abel had said the gallery was closed on Tuesdays. While she hesitated, a youngster in shaggy pants came up and pushed the buzzer. She could hear the bray inside.

“Thanks,” Julie said.

A shrug.

Abel opened the door. “I forgot to tell you to ring the bell.”

“Your doorperson did it for me.”

“That’s ‘Silly.’ Her real name’s Sylvia but everybody calls her ‘Silly.’ She hangs out on the street, runs errands…” Julie followed him inside. “It’s pretty depressing in here today. It’s like everything’s done over in ocher from the cigarette smoke.”

He looked pretty sallow himself; the look of boyish wonder was gone. And the one gold star stood out like a good deed in a naughty world. The room, empty of people and fetid with stale smoke, hung with paintings that had not sold—even the gold star was a false front—was bleak and lifeless, the light of day garish and cruel to man and pictures. “How come Mr. Rubinoff dropped his option?”

Actually, the man had said he’d bought the painting. Julie would have thought Mrs. Sloan could hold him to it. If she wanted to. But plainly she wasn’t going to support herself or her gallery selling Ralph Abels. Or holding buyers with rich clients to bad bargains.

The painter moistened his lips. “It wasn’t as though he was buying it for himself.”

Julie walked over to
Scarlet Night.
The light couldn’t hurt it, no more than light much changed the face of a whore. She could not escape that association. “I still like it.”

“Bless you,” Abel said fervently, and pinpoints of pleasure rekindled in his eyes. “Did you really mean it about wanting soup?”

“Why not?”

“Mushroom and barley?”

They talked over the soup and brown bread in a crowded restaurant where you could also get hero sandwiches without meat. Abel kept talking about himself, saying he didn’t mean to, apologizing, and going right back to the same subject. But not about himself the painter. He talked about growing up in the small town named after Indian Chief Keokuk who was buried in the park where they held band concerts on Sunday afternoons. In summers he had worked on the nearby farms, hoeing and husking corn…

Julie tried to slow him down, to get him to eat. He wasn’t high exactly, but it was like that. Maybe he was trying to rise above disaster. Or was he going home, giving up the painter’s dream? He told her about the Iowa State Fair and how he had reached the finals in the corn-husking contest. He stuck his hands out in front of her and they did look like the hands of a corn husker.

“Van Gogh,” Julie said, whom she had always thought of as a farmer.

Abel’s eyes filled with tears.

“Hey.” Julie reached across the table and gave his hand a couple of reassuring pats.

“I’ve been thinking about Van Gogh all morning.” Abel brushed his nose with the cuff of his denim shirt. “He sold one painting, one painting in his whole life, and he wouldn’t have sold that if it wasn’t for his brother.”

“Was
he a farmer?”

Abel shook his head and before Julie knew how it happened, he was off on another talkathon. He had copied the Van Goghs in the Chicago Art Institute when he studied there, something his father had paid the bills for. “Like Van Gogh’s brother, I mean the way he believed in me and worked so I could paint. Then he got sick and I went back and took over the store. Van Gogh wouldn’t have done that. He was a selfish man. But you know, you’ve got to be. Otherwise, no concentration.”

“What about Paris? How did you wind up there?”

“I sold the store and went when my father died. I couldn’t have chosen a worse place. I tried to put it all in
Scarlet Night.”

“It’s there,” Julie said.

His smile was sweet; you had to call it that, gentle and sweet. He said, “I don’t speak French very well and nobody thought I could paint worth a damn except the guy I studied with and he turned out to be a phony. Then this girl I’d met, Ginni, wrote me to come to Naples, and boy did I take off…” He fell silent and stirred up the barley at the bottom of the soup.

“Yes?”

He glanced at Julie and then down into the soup again. “I don’t know how I feel about Ginni now, Mrs. Hayes. The whole thing went sour on me last night.”

“Better call me Julie.”

“Ginni was a kind of patron to a bunch of us. She’s Maude’s daughter, you see. Her father’s an Italian count from a real distinguished family, and when Maude and he got divorced, Ginni decided she wanted to live with him. Anyway, I painted my head off and Ginni sent Maude a couple of transparencies, and the first thing I knew I was heading home to have my first American exhibit in SoHo. Ginni was supposed to be here for the opening. Now I don’t think she ever meant to come. What I can’t figure out…Julie…is why she did so much for me. It almost seems like she was making a present of me to Maude, something I sure fell in with. Or maybe she was just getting rid of me, period. Only I’m not all that hard to get rid of. You ask Maude this morning. She’ll tell you.”

“Eat,” Julie said.

The girl at the next table smeared what was left of her butter on what was left of her bread and put it in a paper bag. She got up and sidled out between the tables. Abel looked grateful for her departure. Julie, in her place, would have nibbled at the bread and stayed to hear the rest of his story.

Abel moistened his lips and said: “Julie, do you have a hundred dollars?”

“Not with me.”

“Don’t you have a check you could cash or a bank card?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what it’s going to cost you to take
Scarlet Night
home with you.”

“I can’t do that. It’d be taking advantage of you.”

The veins were standing out at his temples. “Someday if you still feel that way and I’m still around, I’ll take another hundred. Or you can give me two right now if that’s how you feel.”

“I’ll loan you a hundred dollars,” Julie said.

“No, ma’am. I don’t borrow from ladies.”

Julie was glad not to have been taken up on the impulse to loan Jeff’s money. His being home was going to add a new dimension to her conscience when it came to spending money. “How about those proletarian sketches?”

“Why can’t you take something you like?” he exploded. A direct hit.

“That is a very good question, my friend. You’re not going to eat that soup, so let’s go.” When they reached the street she shook the hair away from the back of her neck. All the heat of the day seemed to have settled there. She had a number of questions, but the more she asked the more involved she got. “All right, a hundred dollars if we can find a Chemical Bank. Or shall I just make out a check to you?”

“I need the cash, Julie.”

“What about Mrs. Sloan? Does she get a cut?”

“No.”

“But what if you’re not around when I come to get the painting?”

“It’s going home with you today. That’s part of the deal.”

“That’s crazy, Ralph. Does she know what you’re doing?”

“Julie…” The veins popped up again. “Maude Sloan and I are through, bed, board, and gallery. Last night she told me what she really thought of me as a painter and I told her what she could do with her hospitality. Now do you understand?”

“It makes things a little clearer.”

“There’s a Chemical Bank on Broadway and Spring Street.”

Julie looked at him but didn’t say anything. They started walking. Then Abel burst out: “How else was I going to pay my own way?”

“Touché,” Julie said, although it didn’t quite fit.

She wrote the check for cash and countersigned it. She would have to cover it at her own bank with traveler’s checks left over from Paris: they were in a different handbag. Money, money, money. It was wild. The more she spent, the further she got from earning it herself. Suppose she had a job now, nine to five, would she be in the present situation? It wasn’t possible.

They walked back to Greene Street without much conversation. So many galleries with their signs of welcome out front. She wasn’t sure for whom she felt sadder—Ralph Abel or herself: they’d both lost a little of their sheen in not much more than a day.

“Are you going back to Iowa?”

“Maybe. There’re worse places.”

Like SoHo, New York, the day after yesterday.

A station wagon was parked at the curb alongside the gallery. A man was waiting, his backside on the fender. He was burly and dour-looking with curly gray hair.

“Who’s that?” Julie said under her breath.

“A guy who’s waiting for me.”

Which was pretty obvious.
“Nu?”
he said when they came abreast of him.

“Okay, okay,” Abel said, and then to Julie as he touched her elbow with a kind of urgency. “Look, do you want me to get you a cab?”

“I’ll get one and come back.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m not going to back out now,” she said, which wasn’t much of a compliment, but stated the situation.

Was the hundred dollars to pay a debt? To the character waiting beside the wagon? She thought about how close they were to Mafia country. Which, in turn, reminded her of Sweets Romano, the gentleman-art-collecting gangster—the king of pornography—whom she had gone to see after Pete Mallory was murdered. It hit her that Romano might just dig Ralph Abel’s painting; he might even dig Ralph Abel. Who probably knew how to take care of himself better than she’d thought. The question was if or how to make contact between them without getting herself involved. She didn’t want ever to have to see Sweets Romano again. He was a scary man. Forget it, Julie. Give Abel the hundred bucks and run. In fact, go back and give him the hundred bucks and let the picture go. But she picked up a cab on Houston Street and told the driver to circle the block.

Abel was waiting at the door. He brought the painting and put it in at her feet, face forward. The back was reinforced with plywood and still bore the stamp of U.S. Customs as well as the clasps by which it had hung on the gallery track.

“Don’t give it too much light,” he said, and took the bank envelope from Julie’s hand. Inside were five twenties.

They didn’t even shake hands or wish each other luck. Nor did she look back. Not for anything would she have looked back.

J
ULIE KNEW BEFORE THE
cab turned into Sixteenth Street that she’d been kidding herself.
Scarlet Night
no more belonged in that living room than a bag lady. She kept the cab waiting while she ran upstairs and got the traveler’s checks. And the keys to Forty-fourth Street. Back in the cab again, she wondered just how strong in her subconscious the association between the shop and the painting was. It was something she would have explored in therapy: the one sure thing her doctor would have made her fish for was the reason she had bought
Scarlet Night.
Jeff would ask the same question if she ever got around to telling him about it.

Because I like it. Okay. That would work with Jeff anyway.

“Welcome home,” she said and set the painting against the chair in the front room of the shop. The floor was cluttered with junk mail beneath the letter drop. She scattered it with her foot but let it lie and went out again, having just time to make the bank before it closed. There was no sign of the child, Juanita, no mangled dolls in the hallway when she looked in. She hadn’t thought she would miss her, but she did.

After straightening things out at the bank, she began to feel liberated. Or maybe the word was secure. Which, on Eighth Avenue, was crazy. The street was wretched, the whores and pimps and sex movies, porn shops, massage parlors, the debris on the sidewalk, buildings with their eyes smashed out. Yet in among it all were the hardware shops and delis, Greek restaurants and pizza stands, bars, pawn shops, clothiers, a pet shop…and Bourke’s Electrical Shop, all of them run by decent human beings.

Mr. Bourke came out from behind the counter and shook her hand. “Oo, la, la,” he said, which Julie figured had something to do with Paris. He looked about as healthy as skim milk.

“I went away without returning your spotlights,” Julie said. Mr. Bourke had loaned her two spotlights for the front of her shop when Pete Mallory had decorated it for her. “I ought to pay you a rental on them.”

“We can make some kind of arrangement. Or else I’ll sell them to you at a good price.”

“I don’t expect to need them anymore, Mr. Bourke. I’m going out of the gypsy business. I mean, no more fortune-telling or advising.”

Mr. Bourke approved. “It was not a very good business for such a lovely young lady. I hope you’ll come back and see us now and then.” He pushed his glasses back up his nose. They always seemed ready to dive off.