The Gift of Asher Lev (16 page)

Douglas Schaeffer sat behind a small, pale lacquered wood desk that had belonged to a French nobleman who had lost his head to the guillotine. Douglas was peering at papers on the desk through Benjamin Franklin glasses. On a long table behind him stood a computer, a fax machine, and a telephone in a transparent box through which intricate wiring, like a network of veins and arteries, was intriguingly visible. The walls were covered with the works of his artists. One of my smaller paintings was there:
The Artist’s Son and His Samson.
Dapper, of medium height, trim, dressed in a dark-blue blazer, gray trousers, a pale-blue shirt and red bow tie, with a light-green handkerchief in the breast pocket of the blazer, Douglas had about him the grace and old-world elegance of his mother. He was in his mid-forties and had Anna’s
cool searching eyes. His smooth face was tanned; his straight light-brown hair was combed back and parted; his nails were manicured. The air in the room was faintly scented with his cologne.

He looked up as I entered, came quickly around the desk, and took my proffered right hand in both his hands. “It is so good to see you, Asher. How are you? How are the children? Rocheleh is well?” It had taken him a while to learn how to pronounce the guttural in her name. “And Devorah? Sit down, dear boy, please. Sorry about your loss. Your only uncle. Sad. Very sad. Did you see the Matisses outside? They are splendid, aren’t they? What a noise the show is making, especially among the critics and scholars. When do you return to France?”

He loved the atmospherics of high art: exhibitions, critics, scholars, the media, private collectors, museum and corporation curators. He was a Harvard graduate, with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. He had gone on to Oxford for a master’s degree in art history, and had naturally and successfully taken over his mother’s gallery during her last illness, about ten years before. Three years back, he had opened branches of the gallery in Los Angeles and Tokyo, both now highly successful ventures. He had been the executor of Jacob Kahn’s estate. Three of the largest paintings in my last show had gone to museums; the fourth he had acquired for his own collection. It hung on a wall in his Upper East Side home. He possessed his mother’s genteel haughtiness and elegance of manner, and every time I saw him he reminded me of her and, by immediate association, of Jacob Kahn, my teacher and his mother’s closest friend.

I told him I would be in Brooklyn with my family for another week or two. I told him it would be good for the children to get to know their grandparents; it would be especially good for Avrumel, who had taken a liking to his grandfather. Devorah and my mother were getting along fine. It made sense to stay on awhile longer. But as I said it, there seemed attached to the words an aura of darkness. Had my father known that the Rebbe would ask me to stay? Had he urged the Rebbe to ask me? That knowing look in my father’s eyes at breakfast this morning.

“What about you, dear boy? What will you be doing?”

I told him I would be taking long walks and from time to time resting amid the creations in my uncle’s collection.

“What collection is that?”

I proceeded to describe my Uncle Yitzchok’s art collection: the paintings that made up its cornerstone; the drawings; the prints; the Jewish artists; my own works; the magazine articles and monographs and vernissage announcements. As I went on, I saw him remove his glasses and place them in the pocket of his jacket behind the green handkerchief. He stared at me. When I was done, there was a pause. He touched his bow tie with a manicured finger and coughed lightly.

“It seems an estimable collection.”

“I would say so, yes.”

“Isn’t it rather an odd thing for a man like your uncle to have done?”

“He started it as an investment. Then I think it became something he admired. He may even have come to love it.”

“What will your uncle’s heirs do with it?”

“Oh, they’ll sell it off. They can’t wait to get their hands on it. Especially one of my cousins, whose middle name is greed. They’ll open a dozen stores with the money they make from it.”

“A shame, dear boy. If you are at all interested, I would be happy to handle part or all of the sales for your family.”

“I’ll certainly suggest it to them. Doug, to change the subject, I wanted to ask you if any copies of my first Paris print have surfaced?”

“The one you made with Jacob Kahn? Dear boy, no collector in his right mind would divest himself of that print. Not with your market the way it is now.”

“I need a copy of it.”

“Where are your artist’s proofs, Ash? Didn’t you receive artist’s proofs?”

“They were in that truck that was robbed when we moved south.”

“Ah, yes, I remember. Bad luck, that.”

“I saw one in my uncle’s collection, and I suddenly remembered
I had promised someone a copy years ago and forgotten completely about it. What do I do?”

“Who was the printer? I forget.”

I told him.

“Well, write to him or call him and ask if he still has the bon à tirer. They usually save them, because sometimes they become valuable.” He was talking about the final test print, on which the artist writes “bon à tirer”—ready for the press—and signs his name. “I must say, dear boy, I cannot get over the news of your Hasidic uncle’s art collection. It is quite astonishing.”

“My uncle’s family can’t get over it, either.”

“I can imagine.” He regarded me closely. “You don’t look well, Ash. Are you recovered from Paris? How do you feel, really?”

“So-so.”

“You must not let them affect you this way. You must get on with your work.”

“That’s what I came here to talk to you about. I’m going to stop painting for a while, Doug. There’s been too much light these last years, and I need to rest awhile in the shade.”

He looked shocked. “No painting at all? You are not thinking of ending your career simply because the Paris critics showed you a bad time.”

“Not ending. Resting. Just resting.”

“For how long, dear boy?”

“I don’t know. Whenever it starts up again.”

“This is most disconcerting. I had hoped we would have something from you for the fall season.”

“Not this fall, Doug. Give my place to Max. Max always has something ready.”

“Well, this is distressing. I do hope you are not quitting. Not doing the Duchamp thing, are you?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Think? You are upsetting me, dear boy.”

We talked for a few more minutes about business matters and then shook hands. Normally he accompanied me to the elevator, but I told him I wanted to see the sculptures, and he went with me as far as the door to his office, a look of consternation on his face.

“You must take care of yourself. The art world cannot afford to
lose an Asher Lev. There is too much ersatz work being done now, calculated gestures everywhere, cultural entertainment. Bear that in mind as you bask in your shade. Please give my very best wishes to Devorah and the children.”

I went past the receptionist and walked slowly through the gallery. It was a little before noon, and there were about twenty people inside. Plush light-gray carpeting, inviting creamy white walls, soft lights, sensuous sculptures. A handsome woman moving among the sculptures looked at me for a moment and then said quietly to the man who was with her, “I think that’s Asher Lev.” I moved away from them. The two crucifixion paintings had first been shown in this gallery. This was where my parents had seen them, on the huge wall before the turn to the elevator. The look of horror on my mother’s face; the frozen grimace of disbelief and shock on the face of my father. The murmuring of the crowd: “It’s their faces on the paintings.” Then my parents’ raging departure from the gallery. The paintings were in a New York museum now, where they hung side by side in a vast gallery. On occasion people would come over to me: “We saw your crucifixions, Mr. Lev. Stunning.” Or: “We saw your crucifixion paintings. What, exactly, were you trying to say? How does someone raised as a Ladover Hasid come to paint crucifixions?” In the early years I tried to answer their questions: I wanted to paint suffering, and there are no motifs in Jewish art that I could use as an instantly recognizable aesthetic vessel for the depiction of my mother’s anguish during all the years my father traveled for the Rebbe and I journeyed for my art. I wanted to put her pain into my painting. I needed an aesthetic mold that immediately said:
Body and soul in protracted solitary torment.
I wanted … I needed … I required …

Some nodded as if they understood. Most looked at me glassy-eyed. After a while I stopped answering their questions. It seemed to harden people’s anger, those attempts of mine to explain, justify, rectify, elucidate, make amends. Who really understood the mysterious clockwork of the artist? I wished I had never needed to paint those crucifixions. I wished I hadn’t caused all that pain. I wished they weren’t in that museum for everyone to see. I wished … I wished …

I went out of the gallery and rode the elevator down to the street and walked quickly to the subway.

I got out at Ninety-sixth Street and Broadway. A haze of brownish dust and gasoline fumes hung over the dense traffic and crowded sidewalks. I walked along Broadway for a while, then turned down a side street that sloped toward a parklike spread of hillside studded with trees and bordered by a low stone wall. Beyond the wall lay a highway and the wide slate-gray expanse of the Hudson River.

I stood in front of a tall old building and was barely able to recognize it. The once grimy façade had been sand-blasted clean and the graystone exterior glistened in the sunlight. It had been a building of high deep lofts, with a front door of rusting metal and dirty glass, and a dim and cavernous interior hall. Now a green awning led from polished glass entrance doors to the curb. The interior was of light-gray marble veined with branching bluish lines. A thin man in a dark suit sat at a desk near the elevator, and on the wall behind him was a bank of television monitors. Where the lumbering and clanking elevator had once been, with its ancient folding iron gate and sliding door, there was now a glistening brass door with a small window in its upper section.

A uniformed doorman stood at the entrance under the canopy, heavy-shouldered, olive-skinned, dark-eyed, muscular. I saw him looking at me.

“Help you?”

“Someone I knew had a studio in this building once, on the fifth floor.”

“Yeah? When was that?”

“Back in the fifties and sixties. I used to work with him.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s all condos now. The ones that owned the building, they made apartments out of the lofts.”

“When did they do that?”

“About ten years ago. Who’d you say had a studio here?”

“An artist named Jacob Kahn.”

“He didn’t buy in?”

“No. He moved to France.”

“Jacob Kahn. Don’t know as I heard of him. What does he paint?”

“He’s dead. He was a great sculptor. And also an Abstract Expressionist painter.”

“I don’t know anything about—what you call it. Is that the stuff with the paint all over the place? Yeah, I know about that. Lots of people couldn’t buy in when they went condo. All the artists left. The owners fixed it up real good and sold it and made a pile. You should see it inside. Nice. But I can’t let you in unless you got an appointment or know someone.”

“Well, thanks.”

“Sure. Don’t mention it.”

I walked down to the end of the street. It sloped steeply toward the river. Like the street I had lived on in Paris, where I had worked that first year and painted the crucifixions and met Max and Devorah: the narrow cobblestone street that ran into the boulevard. Max climbing to the top floor of the five-floor walk-up with Devorah that first time, bringing her to me because I had just completed the crucifixion paintings and would not answer the telephone and was oblivious to the world; telling her she could do a story on me for the magazine she wrote for; me answering the door naked to the waist and in my underpants and scurrying to put on jeans and a shirt, the two of them standing in the doorway, Devorah astonished and red-faced and Max laughing.

The urban highway beyond the wall was thick with speeding cars. A Circle Line tourist boat glided past on the water, going north, its passengers crowding the rails. River birds wheeled over a passing barge, white in the sunlight, calling. In a nearby playground children played in sandboxes and on monkey bars and swings, closely watched by mothers and maids. A young woman in a yellow sweater and jeans walked past me, wheeling a baby carriage. What did she see when she glanced at me? A middle-aged man, red hair and red beard going gray, a pale face, a windbreaker, baggy pants, a fisherman’s cap. How startled Anna Schaeffer had been the first time she met me in Jacob Kahn’s studio in that loft building now turned condominium! She had stared at my skullcap, my dangling sidecurls, which I no longer wear, my thin pale face. “You did not tell me,” she said to Jacob Kahn. And Jacob Kahn
replied, “He is a prodigy, Anna. A prodigy in payos.” The glorious enormity of that studio. Its magnificent clutter. A tall wall of windows facing a cloudy sky that seemed to press down upon the sheets of glass; a skylight set in a slanted roof; bronze, stone, and wood sculptures scattered about everywhere; easels and canvases and worktables on trestles; and the heady smells of pigments and linseed oil and turpentine and raw stone and wood—the luscious perfumes of art. For five years I worked in that studio, traveling from our apartment in Brooklyn, once, sometimes twice a week, some weeks every day. Starting at the age of thirteen. Thirteen from forty-five. Thirty-two years. Do people see in my eyes the sense of rushing time that sometimes leaves me hollow with dread?

There was a wooden bench under a tree near the stone wall, and I sat down and raised my face to the sun that filtered through the bare branches. A warm and comforting caress, that sun on my face. A wind blew across my eyes; the branches softly stirred. Were those buds on that lacy canopy? In Saint-Paul the spring was in full riot, our terrace an Eden of flowers. Max Lobe would be going to terrace parties in Nice; John Dorman would be wandering among the flowers in his garden. He liked peering into a flower’s heart. “The heart of brightness,” he called it. “A peek into the mystery of being.” Once I heard him refer to it as “the only opening worth thinking about anymore,” and immediately apologize. “I’m a drunken old man,” he said. “And a writer. What the hell can you expect from a writer?”