Loving Women (27 page)

There were a few blank pages and then I stopped short. The next three drawings were of me. In one of them I was sitting at my desk, my back to the artist, my face in profile gazing out at the Florida day. My jaw was slack and I seemed lost in thought. In the second, I was swabbing the deck. My body was bent at a violent angle and I was wielding the huge mop as if it were a blunt instrument. The muscles of my back and arms were perfectly drawn, taut and charged with tension. The third was an unfinished portrait. Some tentative overlapping lines defined my cheekbones and jaw. The incomplete nose was gouged with erasures.

But the eyes were my eyes.

And they looked scared.

Suddenly I felt almost sick: the next day I was supposed to draw Eden Santana, but these pictures showed me that I just wasn’t good enough. If this was indeed Miles’s work,
Miles
should be drawing her. She deserved a better artist than I was. And I felt ashamed and envious too. Somehow, in spite of everything, in spite of all the same kind of crap that I had to put up with, Miles found a way to do his work. He even found time to draw me. He was
serious
. In six weeks at Ellyson, I’d made a dozen drawings in a couple of restaurants, showing off to a woman who must have seen me as an amusing amateur; certainly if Eden Santana could see Miles’s drawings, she would know how crude I truly was. I was wasting my life. I was hopelessly behind and could never catch up.

I heard footsteps out in the supply room. Someone grunted and a crate fell. I heard Boswell’s voice. “Shit. Goddamn.” Then another grunt. And then he was walking away. He and Miles were back from Mainside. I heard Harrelson’s voice in the distance, the words unclear, and a door slamming. Boswell was finished for the day.

I should have left then, but I was held by the things I saw and afraid of being spotted sneaking out of the back room. So I waited. Five minutes. Ten. Miles wasn’t coming back. I could stay a while. I felt the way I used to when I showed up early for a Mass and the priest wasn’t there and I touched all of his garments and the chalice and the Hosts, running my hands over the forbidden holy objects. Part of that was defiance; if God existed, then let Him show himself, let Him strike me dead. Part of it was awe of the beauty of the objects. I could play at being a priest. In the same mood, I picked up the tubes of paint. The label said “casein.” I opened one, sniffed it. Almost no smell. Or rather, a milky smell of some kind. Once I’d walked into the lobby of the Art Students League on 57th Street to see if they had courses in cartooning and the smell of oil and turpentine was all through the building. Casein didn’t smell like that. The tins were filled with water, so I knew it must be something you diluted.

For a moment I thought about picking up a brush and leaving a mark on the unfinished painting. Let Miles know that somewhere in the building there was another artist who knew what he was doing.
Just take one little section
, I thought,
paint a brick into the concrete wall, make the sun begin to lift over the horizon
. Then thought:
No. Don’t do that. Suppose someone did that to one of your pictures?
And thought:
Go ahead
. I picked up the largest brush and hefted it, surprised at its weight.

And then heard a door clicked shut. Silence. Then footsteps treading lightly down one of the aisles. The footsteps stopped. A grunt. A shuffling sound. And there before me, shocked and a little scared, was Miles Rayfield.

“What in the
fuck
are you doing here?” he said, looking angry and invaded.

“I was wondering what
this
was doing here,” I said, waving around the tiny studio. “I moved a crate and here it was.”

Miles didn’t budge from the narrow passageway beside the wall. His eyes glanced over the paints, pictures, easel. His voice dropped to a whisper:

“Did you tell anybody?”

“No. I replaced the crate to keep it hidden.”

“The truth. I have to know.”

“Why would I
tell
anybody?”

He stepped into the tiny room, seeming to fill it. He picked up a brush, tapped his thigh with it.

“I could really be in the shit if they found this,” he said. “
Deep
shit.”

“Only if they find it.”

Miles sighed. “That’s inevitable. One fine morning, some asshole like Harrelson or Boswell or Jones will move a crate and it’ll be all over. They’ll arrest me. Arrest the paintings. Send
me
to the god-damned brig and the
pictures
to that fucking
dumpster
you’re always guarding …” He smiled in a trapped way, then looked at me. “Why
didn’t
you tell anybody?”

I struggled to say the words. “Well, I’m kind of an artist, too.”

Miles blinked. “We’d better take a walk.”

We walked around the base in the fading light. I tried to explain about being a cartoonist and Miles said he thought that if I had any talent at all, that was the way to waste it. I told him I was going to meet a woman the following night and make some drawings and he said he’d like to see them and asked me if she was a nude model and I said I didn’t know, she was a woman I knew and he said that was the worst kind of model, because you want to flatter them, make them pretty when they’re not. He wished there was a life class
somewhere in Pensacola, so he could draw from a model again, but there wasn’t ’cause all these goddamned Baptists would raid the place, and I asked him why he didn’t have his wife come down and the two of them could live off the base and he could paint in the apartment and use her as a model and he just shook his head and said, No, that wouldn’t work.

“She’s gone to Jesus,” he said, as we headed for the mess hall. “The last thing the goddamned Christians will let you do is see their bodies.”

“If she’s your wife …”

“She’d sit there thinking of spending eternity in the depths of hell.”

He shifted then, explaining that casein was make of milk products, and you did dilute it with water. He liked the way casein covered a surface, but it was nowhere as subtle or juicy as oil, and you had to treat the boards, which were called Masonite, with a white primer called gesso. Some artists mixed the primer with a little sand to give it a rough texture; Miles preferred it smooth, using the brush to create textures. He mumbled when I asked him what his picture meant, saying he wasn’t really sure. The sailor in the room with the orange obviously thought he was in a jail, with Florida filling the room and crushing him. But he wasn’t sure who the old woman was on that country road and didn’t much care for the picture.

“It’s too simple, too easy,” he said. “Those goddamned trees are stolen right out of
Snow White
.”

“What’ll you do with it?”

“Burn it,” he said. “Or give it to Red Cannon. He’ll think it’s his mother and love it to death.”

I told him I’d bought a newsprint pad and the chalks, and he said newsprint was all right for sketching, but the paper was so frail you couldn’t work it, couldn’t erase or manipulate the chalk very much. “You’ve got to be right the first time,” he said, “and almost nobody is.” We went into the mess hall and sat down with slabs of gray pot roast. “You see, you couldn’t
draw
this piece of dead animal,” Miles said. “You have to
paint
it. To get the revolting dead color exactly right. If a
man
had this color, you’d rush him to the hospital.”

I laughed and he ate slowly, cutting the pieces small, and chewing with the front of his mouth. “Fuel,” he murmured, “just think of it as fuel.”

There were some books about art that I should read, and he could loan them to me, he said. But if I were
serious
, I had to draw every day. It didn’t matter how many books I read or how many pictures I saw in museums. You learned to draw by drawing. Scribble drawings, doodle them, go off and make pictures. And look at everything. “You’d better
feel
something about what you see, too,” he said. “If you don’t feel anything about your drawings, they’ll be as dead as this disgusting pot roast.”

After a while, I said: “Could you show me how to make paintings?”

“Sure,” Miles said, as I felt myself swelling with new ideas, images, ambitions, and the sense that I’d made a friend and met a master. “If you don’t try to teach me about that fucking baseball.”

Chapter

30

What Miles Told Me

I
became an artist to keep from going crazy. It was as simple as that. My father killed himself in 1930, leaving my mother to take care of me. I was fourteen months old. We lived in Marietta, Georgia, a boring little suburb just outside of Atlanta, and my father was in the furniture business. I don’t remember anything about him. The son of a bitch. After he killed himself, Mother hid all the photographs of him, all his letters, the documents that made up his shitty little life. She put them away in an old steamer trunk that she’d never taken anywhere (poor Mother) and I didn’t see them until I was what is laughingly called Grown Up. By then, I could have been looking at pictures of George Washington
.

Mother did her best. I give her that. This was the Depression, and it was hard on everyone, I suppose, but even harder in the South. The furniture company was gone before Father died; that’s why he died (or so Mother said, telling me about him later, in bits and pieces, and stopping always at the part where she found him in the chair with his thumb in the trigger guard of the shotgun and his face blown off, stopping there until the last time she started the story and then, saying it, telling me, she was rid of it and never told about it again). His relatives stayed away from Mother, afraid, I suppose, that they’d remind her of him, or she would ask for money, or maybe they blamed her in some way, the miserable shits. I just don’t know why they stayed away and I don’t give a goddamn. The fact is they treated us like lepers. I wish them painful deaths. There’s a blur there somewhere. Even now. Mother and I lived in a house where some things were never said
.

But we had that house, bought and paid for when Father was alive. He
left her that, paid for when he and the country were riding high. A great gabled house, with porticoes and parquet floors and a piano in the living room and bad pictures hanging everywhere. I always had my own room, and after I started drawing (I was seven and the pictures always showed me with a father and mother, O Sigmund Freud, please do not puke!). Mother outfitted one of the other rooms as a little studio. I had my own table and lots of paper and crayons and watercolors. I would sit up there and draw and listen to Mother downstairs, giving her goddamned piano lessons. When she played, the music was nice. When the others played, I hated it; they couldn’t do it right; they were flat or off-key, and this made me draw in the same way, losing whatever it was that I had
.

Mother did more than give piano lessons. She had to, to survive, to feed us both, to heat the house, to keep from losing it to the tax collectors. So she took in sewing too, although I don’t know where she went to get it. She certainly didn’t pick it up in the neighborhood. Not Mother. She was too proud for that. Right through the Depression, she still had a colored woman come in once a week to clean. A thin bony woman named Mahalia, who would come to the house when Mother was out and play the colored stations on the radio and dance around. Thin as she was, she had the eyes of a fat woman. Just scared hell out of me. Maybe outside every thin woman there’s a fat one trying to get in. Those damned eyes were greedy, defiant, alarming. You couldn’t make our Mahalia do anything she didn’t want to do and once when I used the word nigger to describe someone else, she slapped my face. Good and hard. I cried and cried, not knowing what I’d done, and then knowing, slowly, when our Mahalia said that she was a woman, a person, colored, but not some damned nigger. I was about ten then, and I didn’t tell my mother ’cause I knew Mahalia was right. I didn’t want Mother taking my side
.

Mother kept saying the Depression would be over soon, and then we’d be all right again, but I still don’t know what she meant. It didn’t matter. The Depression never ended, and all she talked about was how hopeless it was, and how even Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal couldn’t end it. Finally, when I was oh, twelve, she took a job in a restaurant. With a pink uniform. Five nights a week. I knew she thought this was a comedown, but she never talked about it; it was as if the humiliation wouldn’t be real if she didn’t mention it. She supported us with the waitress job and the sewing and the piano lessons, although as the Depression went on and on, fewer and fewer little bastards came over to assault the piano. That was good news to me, but terrible for Mother. She even thought it was an aesthetic judgment of some goddamned kind
.

She took that waitress job because of me. She was convinced that I had talent, thought I was the greatest artist since Leonardo, or at least since Norman Rockwell. She saved all my drawings and made me date them and framed some of them. She bought me supplies. Nothing was too good for her darling little Miles. And then she enrolled me at the Art Institute in Atlanta, in the kiddie class every Saturday morning. She had to come up with bus money and charcoal and paint money and lunch money. That’s why she started waiting on tables, just telling them at the restaurant (which I never saw, another mystery to be imagined and not touched, smelled, felt or seen) that she could work any day except Saturday
.