Nine Stories (16 page)

"God,
I'm keeping you awake all night. Everything I do, I--"

"You're
not keeping me awake all night," the grayhaired man said. "Don't
even think of that. I've already told you, I've been averaging about
four hours' sleep a night. What I would like to do, though, if it's
at all humanly possible, I'd like to help you, boy." He
listened. "Arthur? You there?"

"Yeah.
I'm here. Listen. I've kept you awake all night anyway. Could I come
over to your place for a drink? Wouldja mind?"

The
gray-haired man straightened his back and placed the flat of his free
hand on the top of his head, and said, "Now, do you mean?"

"Yeah.
I mean if it's all right with you. I'll only stay a minute. I'd just
like to sit down somewhere and--I don't know. Would it be all right?"

"Yeah,
but the point is I don't think you should, Arthur," the
gray-haired man said, lowering his hand from his head. "I mean
you're more than welcome to come, but I honestly think you should
just sit tight and relax till Joanie waltzes in. I honestly do. What
you want to be, you want to be right there on the spot when she
waltzes in. Am I right, or not?"

"Yeah.
I don't know. I swear to God, I don't know."

"Well,
I do, I honestly do," the gray-haired man said. "Look. Why
don't you hop in bed now, and relax, and then later, if you feel like
it, give me a ring. I mean if you feel like talking. And don't worry.
That's the main thing. Hear me? Willya do that now?"

"All
right."

The
gray-haired man continued for a moment to hold the phone to his ear,
then lowered it into its cradle.

"What
did he say?" the girl immediately asked him. He picked his
cigarette out of the ashtray--that is, selected it from an
accumulation of smoked and halfsmoked cigarettes. He dragged on it
and said, "He wanted to come over here for a drink."

"God!
What'd you say?" said the girl.

"You
heard me," the gray-haired man said, and looked at her. "You
could hear me. Couldn't you?" He squashed out his cigarette.

"You
were wonderful. Absolutely marvellous," the girl said, watching
him. "God, I feel like a dog!"

"Well,"
the gray-haired man said, "it's a tough situation. I don't know
how marvellous I was."

"You
were. You were wonderful," the girl said. "I'm limp. I'm
absolutely limp. Look at me!"

The
gray-haired man looked at her. "Well, actually, it's an
impossible situation," he said. "I mean the whole thing's
so fantastic it isn't even--"

"Darling-
Excuse me," the girl said quickly, and leaned forward. "I
think you're on fire." She gave the back of his hand a short,
brisk, brushing stroke with the flats of her fingers. "No. It
was just an ash." She leaned back. "No, you were
marvellous," she said. "God, I feel like an absolute dog!"

"Well,
it's a very, very tough situation. The guy's obviously going through
absolute--"

The
phone suddenly rang.

The
gray-haired man said "Christ!" but picked it up before the
second ring. "Hello?" he said into it.

"Lee?
Were you asleep?"

"No,
no."

"Listen,
I just thought you'd want to know. Joanie just barged in."

"What?"
said the gray-haired man, and bridged his left hand over his eyes,
though the light was behind him.

"Yeah.
She just barged in. About ten seconds after I spoke to you. I just
thought I'd give you a ring while she's in the john. Listen, thanks a
million, Lee. I mean it--you know what I mean. You weren't asleep,
were ya?"

"No,
no. I was just--No, no," the gray-haired man said, leaving his
fingers bridged over his eyes. He cleared his throat.

"Yeah.
What happened was, apparently Leona got stinking and then had a
goddam crying jag, and Bob wanted Joanie to go out and grab a drink
with them somewhere and iron the thing out. I don't know. You know.
Very involved. Anyway, so she's home. What a rat race. Honest to God,
I think it's this goddam New York. What I think maybe we'll do, if
everything goes along all right, we'll get ourselves a little place
in Connecticut maybe. Not too far out, necessarily, but far enough
that we can lead a normal goddam life. I mean she's crazy about
plants and all that stuff. She'd probably go mad if she had her own
goddam garden and stuff. Know what I mean? I mean--except you--who do
we know in New York except a bunch of neurotics? It's bound to
undermine even a normal person sooner or later. Know what I mean?"

The
gray-haired man didn't give an answer. His eyes, behind the bridge of
his hand, were closed. "Anyway, I'm gonna talk to her about it
tonight. Or tomorrow, maybe. She's still a little under the weather.
I mean she's a helluva good kid basically, and if we have a chance to
straighten ourselves out a little bit, we'd be goddam stupid not to
at least have a go at it. While I'm at it, I'm also gonna try to
straighten out this lousy bedbug mess, too. I've been thinking. I was
just wondering, Lee. You think if I went in and talked to Junior
personally, I could--"

"Arthur,
if you don't mind, I'd appreciate--"

"I
mean I don't want you to think I just called you back or anything
because I'm worried about my goddam job or anything. I'm not. I mean
basically, for Chrissake, I couldn't care less. I just thought if I
could straighten Junior out without beating my brains out, I'd be a
goddam fool--"

"Listen,
Arthur," the gray-haired man interrupted, taking his hand away
from his face, "I have a helluva headache all of a sudden. I
don't know where I got the bloody thing from. You mind if we cut this
short? I'll talk to you in the morning--all right?" He listened
for another moment, then hung up.

Again
the girl immediately spoke to him, but he didn't answer her. He
picked a burning cigarette--the girl's--out of the ashtray and
started to bring it to his mouth, but it slipped out of his fingers.
The girl tried to help him retrieve it before anything was burned,
but he told her to just sit still, for Chrissake, and she pulled back
her hand.

De
Daumier-Smith's Blue Period

IF
IT MADE any real sense--and it doesn't even begin to--I think I might
be inclined to dedicate this account, for whatever it's worth,
especially if it's the least bit ribald in parts, to the memory of my
late, ribald stepfather, Robert Agadganian, Jr. Bobby--as everyone,
even I, called him--died in 1947, surely with a few regrets, but
without a single gripe, of thrombosis. He was an adventurous,
extremely magnetic, and generous man. (After having spent so many
years laboriously begrudging him those picaresque adjectives, I feel
it's a matter of life and death to get them in here.)

My
mother and father were divorced during the winter of 1928, when I was
eight, and mother married Bobby Agadganian late that spring. A year
later, in the Wall Street Crash, Bobby lost everything he and mother
had, with the exception, apparently, of a magic wand. In any case,
practically overnight, Bobby turned himself from a dead stockbroker
and incapacitated bon vivant into a live, if somewhat unqualified,
agent-appraiser for a society of independent American art galleries
and fine arts museums. A few weeks later, early in 1930, our rather
mixed threesome moved from New York to Paris, the better for Bobby to
ply his new trade. Being a cool, not to say an ice-cold, ten at the
time, I took the big move, so far as I know, untraumatically. It was
the move back to New York, nine years later, three months after my
mother died, that threw me, and threw me terribly.

I
remember a significant incident that occurred just a day or two after
Bobby and I arrived in New York. I was standing up in a very crowded
Lexington Avenue bus, holding on to the enamel pole near the driver's
seat, buttocks to buttocks with the chap behind me. For a number of
blocks the driver had repeatedly given those of us bunched up near
the front door a curt order to "step to the rear of the
vehicle." Some of us had tried to oblige him. Some of us hadn't.
At length, with a red light in his favor, the harassed man swung
around in his seat and looked up at me, just behind him. At nineteen,
I was a hatless type, with a flat, black, not particularly clean,
Continental-type pompadour over a badly broken-out inch of forehead.
He addressed me in a lowered, an almost prudent tone of voice. "All
right, buddy," he said, "let's move that ass." It was
the "buddy," I think, that did it. Without even bothering
to bend over a little--that is, to keep the conversation at least as
private, as de bon gout, as he'd kept it--I informed him, in French,
that he was a rude, stupid, overbearing imbecile, and that he'd never
know how much I detested him. Then, rather elated, I stepped to the
rear of the vehicle.

Things
got much worse. One afternoon, a week or so later, as I was coming
out of the Ritz Hotel, where Bobby and I were indefinitely stopping,
it seemed to me that all the seats from all the buses in New York had
been unscrewed and taken out and set up in the street, where a
monstrous game of Musical Chairs was in full swing. I think I might
have been willing to join the game if I had been granted a special
dispensation from the Church of Manhattan guaranteeing that all the
other players would remain respectfully standing till I was seated.
When it became clear that nothing of the kind was forthcoming, I took
more direct action. I prayed for the city to be cleared of people,
for the gift of being alone--a-l-o-n-e: which is the one New York
prayer that rarely gets lost or delayed in channels, and in no time
at all everything I touched turned to solid loneliness. Mornings and
early afternoons, I attended--bodily--an art school on Forty-eighth
and Lexington Avenue, which I loathed. (The week before Bobby and I
had left Paris, I had won three first-prize awards at the National
Junior Exhibition, held at the Freiburg Galleries. Throughout the
voyage to America, I used our stateroom mirror to note my uncanny
physical resemblance to El Greco.) Three late afternoons a week I
spent in a dentist's chair, where, within a period of a few months, I
had eight teeth extracted, three of them front ones. The other two
afternoons I usually spent wandering through art galleries, mostly on
Fifty-seventh Street, where I did all but hiss at the American
entries. Evenings, I generally read. I bought a complete set of the
Harvard Classics--chiefly because Bobby said we didn't have room for
them in our suite--and rather perversely read all fifty volumes.
Nights, I almost invariably set up my easel between the twin beds in
the room I shared with Bobby, and painted. In one month alone,
according to my diary for 1939, I completed eighteen oil paintings.
Noteworthily enough, seventeen of them were self-portraits.
Sometimes, however, possibly when my Muse was being capricious, I set
aside my paints and drew cartoons. One of them I still have. It shows
a cavernous view of the mouth of a man being attended by his dentist.
The man's tongue is a simple, U.S. Treasury hundred dollar bill, and
the dentist is saying, sadly, in French, "I think we can save
the molar, but I'm afraid that tongue will have to come out." It
was an enormous favorite of mine.

As
roommates, Bobby and I were neither more nor less compatible than
would be, say, an exceptionally live-and-let-live Harvard senior, and
an exceptionally unpleasant Cambridge newsboy. And when, as the weeks
went by, we gradually discovered that we were both in love with the
same deceased woman, it was no help at all. In fact, a ghastly little
after-you-Alphonse relationship grew out of the discovery. We began
to exchange vivacious smiles when we bumped into each other on the
threshold of the bathroom.

One
week in May of 1939, about ten months after Bobby and I checked into
the Ritz, I saw in a Quebec newspaper (one of sixteen French-language
newspapers and periodicals I had blown myself a subscription to) a
quarter-column advertisement that had been placed by the direction of
a Montreal correspondence art school. It advised all qualified
instructors--it as much as said, in fact, that it couldn't advise
them fortenwnt enough--to apply immediately for employment at the
newest, most progressive, correspondence art school in Canada.
Candidate instructors, it stipulated, were to have a fluent knowledge
of both the French and English languages, and only those of temperate
habits and unquestionable character need apply. The summer session at
Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres was officially to open on 10 June. Samples
of work, it said, should represent both the academic and commercial
fields of art, and were to be submitted to Monsieur I. Yoshoto,
directeur, formerly of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, Tokyo.

Instantly,
feeling almost insupportably qualified, I got out Bobby's Hermes-Baby
typewriter from under his bed and wrote, in French, a long,
intemperate letter to M. Yoshoto--cutting all my morning classes at
the art school on Lexington Avenue to do it. My opening paragraph ran
some three pages, and very nearly smoked. I said I was twenty-nine
and a great-nephew of Honore Daumier. I said I had just left my small
estate in the South of France, following the death of my wife, to
come to America to stay--temporarily, I made it clear--with an
invalid relative. I had been painting, I said, since early childhood,
but that, following the advice of Pablo Picasso, who was one of the
oldest and dearest friends of my parents, I had never exhibited.
However, a number of my oil paintings and water colors were now
hanging in some of the finest, and by no means nouveau riche, homes
in Paris, where they had gagne considerable attention from some of
the most formidable critics of our day. Following, I said, my wife's
untimely and tragic death, of an ulceration cancgreuse, I had
earnestly thought I would never again set brush to canvas. But recent
financial losses had led me to alter my earnest resolution. I said I
would be most honored to submit samples of my work to Les Amis Des
Vieux Maitres, just as soon as they were sent to me by my agent in
Paris, to whom I would write, of course, tres presse. I remained,
most respectfully, Jean de Daumier-Smith.