Loving Women (28 page)

All through this time, I started to feel odd. Out of it. Weird. You know how I feel about baseball. Well, even then, a kid, I didn’t care for the game, never learned it, never played it with the other kids. I don’t know why. Maybe it was timing. The summer I got scarlet fever, I had to stay home while the other boys were learning and by the time I could go out to the street again, I was already behind. Also, I felt strange, ugly even, with this damned big head, and I couldn’t throw right or something … So I decided I didn’t like the game. But I knew I was ahead in at least one goddamned thing and that was drawing. I had that, and the others didn’t. So when football season came around, I felt the same way as I did about baseball. The same for swimming, too. Mother kept telling me that all the public swimming pools were just filthy breeding grounds for polio, and in some ways she was right. And she warned me that if I played football, I could break my drawing hand, my arm, my shoulder. I wouldn’t be able to do this … thing, this magic thing. This thing of putting marks on paper that made human beings and places and light come to life. She was afraid for me and I was afraid of her being afraid so I never learned any sport. I don’t know how they’re played or how I’m supposed to watch them. Maybe you’re right. Maybe that’s very sad. But I don’t care. I don’t miss sports at all. They’re of no interest to me
.

But I did grow up feeling very strange. No father. No sports. No friends. And this mother who lived to feed me and please me and guide me, this mother who kept a big drafty house just for the two of us
.

That Saturday art class changed everything. For the first time I met people who were something like me. The school was a community of oddballs, loners, kids who stayed home to draw instead of throwing rocks at buses or putting pennies on railroad tracks like every American kid is supposed to do. They were from all over the city and some of them had parents who were divorced and one had a father who was dead and another a father who’d just disappeared. We began to feel that people who didn’t make art or have screwed-up families were the real odd ones in this world
.

My mother slaved to help me. You know all those clichés about wearing your fingers to the bone? They were true about Mother. The most expensive things were art books. They still are. But our public library was truly rotten, because good art books always have nudes in them and the goddamned ignorant Baptist idiots wouldn’t allow nudes to be shown in a public place. Afraid the whole male population of Marietta would whack themselves into a coma. So Mother bought the books for me. There was hardly a week when she didn’t come home with at least one book or an art magazine. Always on payday. I used to get excited when I woke up on a Friday morning wondering what she’d bring me that night. I suppose when most boys my age were reading the sports pages or comic books, I was reading Walter Pater and the journals of Eugène Delacroix and books about Rubens and Leonardo and Degas. I was copying pictures from these books, trying to discover how they had done what they did. And I was drunk on books about Bohemias. Dreaming about the Left Bank in Paris and Greenwich Village in New York and garrets everywhere. I wanted to leave the town of Marietta, the state of Georgia, the whole goddamned backward South, and join the real artists in some country of art
.

When I graduated from high school, I went right into the Art Institute. By then, Mother had saved some money, don’t ask me how. I guess the war changed it. I guess the damned Japanese ended the Depression when they bombed Pearl Harbor. During the war, Mother became the most unlikely goddamned Rosie the Riveter in America, but she did it, working at the Glenn L. Martin plant in Marietta, her hair tied up in a kerchief. When the war ended she was hysterical for days. At first I thought it was just panic, that she was terrified that she was going to lose her job and the Depression would come back with all its goddamned horrors. But it wasn’t that at all. Mother had learned that the Enola Gay was built by Martin and so she was sure she’d helped drop The Bomb on Hiroshima. It was as if she’d killed every one of those people, just by slamming a rivet into a tail section. She cried about taking blood money. She told me that now everything would be different, that The Bomb was something new in the world. And then she cried again
.

But she saved a lot of the blood money, and when I was ready to go to art school full time she had enough for all the extra expenses. I was doing oils, tempera, learning about casein and gouache, and all of that cost a lot. There were some amazing students there, and plenty of fakers, too. Abstract Expressionism had just been given its name, with a big glossy spread in
Life
magazine, and every second painter was talking about space and the picture plane and trying to paint like Jackson Pollock or Franz Kline. I went my own way. I liked faces, bodies, mood, weather, atmosphere. I loved drawing
,
not dripping. Maybe I was just afraid to take risks. But I kept going, doing it the older way. It was strange to be out of fashion at eighteen. Still, it was the South; they didn’t really care about all this newfangled stuff from New York. So I had my first show in June of 1950, while I was a junior at the Institute. At a small gallery in Marietta. The pictures were still hanging when the war started in Korea. I was terrified. And furious. I’d grown up believing that World War II would be the last war in the history of the world. Or at least the last American war. I really believed all that crap. And here on this lovely summer day, with my whole life ahead of me, another war had started. In some goddamned place called Korea. Men were dying again, and soon it would be my turn too
.

That changed everything, I knew it, and I cried myself to sleep that night in late June when the war began. I felt such a goddamned fool. I’d tried to plan my life. The Depression was over, the war was over, and now we’d have peace forever and live like human beings again. I had it all in the plan. I even wrote it down: art school, then Paris for a year or two, then on to Florence, to embrace the work of the Renaissance masters, learning their secrets. I’d get brown in the sun of Rome. Then, around 1962, I’d return in triumph to the Village and the New York galleries and see my pictures in the museums and the art magazines … I had a plan. Only a stupid romantic fool ever does that
.

By winter, men were dying by the thousands and I was ready to be drafted. I started to think about the Navy. I’m not sure why. Probably from looking at all those paintings by Winslow Homer and Turner. Once the notion got into my head, I couldn’t leave it alone. I would lie awake in Marietta, and hear my mother playing the piano (for herself now, the students gone, the money not a problem) and start creating seascapes in my mind. Out at sea, on the bridge of some sleek ship, I would examine the architecture of waves. I would memorize the tones and colors of the sky. Miles Rayfield: on the deck of a great ship
.

But it wasn’t just fear of the infantry and the Yalu that pushed me to the Navy. There were other things going on. Some trouble with people at school. And my wife. The details are none of your goddamned business. But one morning I joined the Navy, thinking that it was better than the infantry. Thinking it would get me out of the goddamned South. Thinking I would end up on the bridge of that great ship. It was the stupidest fucking thing I ever did. Now I paint like a pack rat. Hiding in a dark hole. I don’t think I’ll ever see the sun of Rome
.

Chapter

31

A
bout four o’clock that afternoon, it started to rain. The sky darkened, all helicopters were grounded. I wrapped my pad and the chalks in some butcher paper and sealed the package with masking tape, and then hitched a ride to the locker club with Larry Parsons. He was big and blond and friendless; he was married and lived off the base and seemed always to be about three beats behind everybody else.

“Where you going with the package?” he said.

“A friend’s house.”

“You have
friends
down here?”

“Sure, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah, I guess I do,” he said, in a puzzled way. “To tell the truth, my wife has more friends than I do. She’s real active in the church, so there’s always something doing. Baking contests and clambakes and stuff like that.”

“Sounds great,” I said, and hurried away from him when he stopped at the locker club. I changed clothes quickly and combed my hair in front of the mirror above the sink. I waited inside the door, watching the rain come in from the Gulf in great slanting sheets. Across the highway, Billy’s neon sign seemed to sizzle.
Eden Santana
. I started rehearsing what I would say to her and what I would do. And then cut myself off. I couldn’t come to her with a lot of rehearsed lines and moves. She’d know. She’d been around longer than I had and she was just too damned smart for me to play-act with her. I remember thinking then about drawing, and how it might make her just an object of my skill, and therefore less
scary and unpredictable. I think Miles had shown me how to use the side of the chalk to create form and volume, how to lay out the figure. But I’m really not sure. Had he told me those things before I went to meet Eden? Or was it after? Now: years later: sitting in a parked car, watching the sky darken and older trees heaving and settling in a wet Gulf wind: am I remembering the feeling of that young man standing inside the locker club, or am I inventing him?

There was a sudden honk. Of that I’m certain. I peered out through the rain, and Eden Santana was waving at me through the steamy windows of the Ford. That sight of her still thrills me. She had kept her word. I held the pad close to my body and ran through the spattering mud.

“I didn’t really expect you to be here,” she said, smiling as she opened the door. “This kind of weather … But I decided to come on by anyways. No way to call you. No way for you to call me.”

“I’m glad you came.”

She drove up onto the highway, heading away from the city. It was hard to see. Out beyond the city limits there were no lights on the road and the car’s high beams seemed to bounce off the rain. The Ford’s engine coughed, stammered, but kept going. Eden was smoking hard, and in the gray light her face looked tired. She was wearing the black turtleneck she’d worn in the bus on New Year’s Eve.

“My hair must look like I stuck a finger in an electric socket,” she said, and glanced at me and smiled. When she smiled, she didn’t look tired. Her hair was all wiry and curly.

“It looks great.”

“I always wanted hair like that actress? Lizabeth Scott? Know her? Hair like that. But I guess I lost the hair lottery and there’s nothing’ I can do about it. And when it rains, this damned hair shoots all over the place. Doesn’t matter if I cut it long or short. It just ups and shoots off my head.”

She laughed (and now I hear the nervous trill in her).

“Dumbest damn thing,” she said.
“Hair.”

We crossed a bridge over a dark river and then she made a right and the car started kicking up gravel and we were between trees on a one-lane road. The car jerked, rose, fell, slowed, spun its wheels, then moved again, Eden Santana setting her mouth grimly, her hands tight on the wheel. “Son of a bitch,” she said. “Son of a goddamn bitch.” Then glanced at me and said, “Sorry.” And
pulled into a cleared place, with tall trees rising high about us. “I’ll get as close as I can,” she said, pulling around to the left, then jerking gears, backing up. “This is the best we can do.”

She turned off the engine, and I could see better now. We were in front of a long house trailer. The body of the trailer was blue, the trim silver. Flowers sprouted in pots out front, bending under the rain.

“Come on,” she said, “we’ll make a run for it.”

She ran through the mud to the trailer, the Sears jacket over her head, stood on a step and unlocked the door. We went in, and she reached behind me to slam it shut, then turned the lock and flicked on a light.

“It’s not much,” she said, “but it’s cozy.”

There were flowers everywhere: in dirt-filled earthen pots, in ceramic jars, in glass milk bottles filled with water. They were on the counter beside the sink, and on top of the small regrigerator and on the window shelves, pressed against drawn blinds. There were geraniums in a jar on top of a small table that jutted out from the wall. The smell in the trailer was sweet and close, full of the rain.

“Some sailor bought the trailer after the war and then got sent to sea duty when Korea happened and he’s been rentin’ it out ever since,” she said. “Only thirty-five dollars a month. They wanted more but I got it cheap ’cause this is, well, mostly a colored neighborhood out here.” I felt thick, large, as I watched her take a hanger from a shallow closet, slip the wet Sears jacket on it, then carry it into a small john and hang it up to dry. I thought
If I try to help, if I dare to move, I will knock down a flowerpot and make a mess
.

“Hey, almost forgot …”