The Grass Harp (28 page)

A pause; then, kneeling on the floor, she commenced stripping off the funny-paper wrapping. It originally had been, Vincent noticed, part of the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
. “From the South, aren’t you?” he said. She did not look up, but he saw her shoulders stiffen. “No,” she said. Smiling, he considered a moment, decided it would be tactless to challenge so transparent a lie. Or could she have misunderstood? And all at once he felt an intense longing to touch her head, finger her boyish hair.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and glanced at the window. It was spangled with February frost, and some passer-by had scratched on the glass an obscenity.

“There,” she said.

A headless figure in a monklike robe reclined complacently on top a tacky vaudeville trunk; in one hand she held a fuming blue candle, in the other a miniature gold cage, and her severed head lay bleeding at her feet: it was the girl’s, this head, but here her hair was long, very long, and a snowball kitten with crystal spitfire eyes playfully pawed, as it would a spool of yarn, the sprawling ends. The wings of a hawk, headless, scarlet-breasted, copper-clawed, curtained the background like a nightfall sky. It was a crude painting, the hard pure colors molded with male brutality, and, while there was not technical merit evident, it had that power often seen in something deeply felt, though primitively conveyed. Vincent reacted as he did when occasionally a phrase of music surprised a note of inward recognition, or a cluster of words in a poem revealed to him a secret concerning himself: he felt a powerful chill of pleasure run down his spine. “Mr. Garland is in Florida,” he said cautiously, “but I think he should see it; you couldn’t leave it for, say, a week?”

“I had a ring and I sold it,” she said, and he had the feeling she was talking in a trance. “It was a nice ring, a wedding ring—not mine—with writing on it. I had an overcoat, too.” She twisted one of her shirt buttons, pulled till it popped off and rolled on the carpet like a pearl eye. “I don’t want much—fifty dollars; is that unfair?”

“Too much,” said Vincent, more curtly than he intended. Now he wanted her painting, not for the gallery, but for himself. There are certain works of art which excite more interest in their creators than in what they have created, usually because in this kind of work one is able to identify something which has until that instant seemed a private inexpressible perception,
and you wonder: who is this that knows me, and how? “I’ll give thirty.”

For a moment she gaped at him stupidly, and then, sucking her breath, held out her hand, palm up. This directness, too innocent to be offensive, caught him off guard. Somewhat embarrassed, he said, “I’m most awfully afraid I’ll have to mail a check. Could you …?” The telephone interrupted, and, as he went to answer, she followed, her hand outstretched, a frantic look pinching her face. “Oh, Paul, may I call back? Oh, I see. Well, hold on a sec.” Cupping the mouthpiece against his shoulder, he pushed a pad and pencil across the desk. “Here, write your name and address.”

But she shook her head, the dazed, anxious expression deepening.

“Check,”
said Vincent, “I have to mail a check. Please, your name and address.” He grinned encouragingly when at last she began to write.

“Sorry, Paul … Whose party? Why, the little bitch, she didn’t invite … Hey!” he called, for the girl was moving toward the door. “Please, hey!” Cold air chilled the gallery, and the door slammed with a glassy rattle. Hellohellohello. Vincent did not answer; he stood puzzling over the curious information she’d left printed on his pad: D. J.—Y.W.C.A. Hellohellohello.

It hung above his mantel, the painting, and on those nights when he could not sleep he would pour a glass of whiskey and talk to the headless hawk, tell it the stuff of his life: he was, he said, a poet who had never written poetry, a painter who had never painted, a lover who had never loved (absolutely)—someone, in short, without direction, and quite headless. Oh, it wasn’t that he hadn’t tried—good beginnings, always, bad endings, always. Vincent, white, male, age 36, college graduate: a man in the sea, fifty miles from shore; a victim, born to be murdered, either by himself or another; an actor unemployed.
It was there, all of it, in the painting, everything disconnected and cockeyed, and who was she that she should know so much? Inquiries, those he’d made, had led nowhere, not another dealer knew of her, and to search for a D. J. living in, presumably, a Y.W.C.A. seemed absurd. Then, too, he’d quite expected she would reappear, but February passed, and March. One evening, crossing the square which fronts the Plaza, he had a queer thing happen. The archaic hansom drivers who line that location were lighting their carriage lamps, for it was dusk, and lamplight traced through moving leaves. A hansom pulled from the curb and rolled past in the twilight. There was a single occupant, and this passenger, whose face he could not see, was a girl with chopped fawn-colored hair. So he settled on a bench, and whiled away time talking with a soldier, and a fairy colored boy who quoted poetry, and a man out airing a dachshund: night characters with whom he waited—but the carriage, with the one for whom he waited, never came back. Again he saw her (or supposed he did) descending subway stairs, and this time lost her in the tiled tunnels of painted arrows and Spearmint machines. It was as if her face were imposèd upon his mind; he could no more dispossess it than could, for example, a dead man rid his legendary eyes of the last image seen. Around the middle of April he went up to Connecticut to spend a weekend with his married sister; keyed-up, caustic, he wasn’t, as she complained, at all like himself. “What is it, Vinny, darling—if you need money …” “Oh, shut up!” he said. “Must be love,” teased his brother-in-law. “Come on, Vinny, ’fess up; what’s she like?” And all this so annoyed him he caught the next train home. From a booth in Grand Central he called to apologize, but a sick nervousness hummed inside him, and he hung up while the operator was still trying to make a connection. He wanted a drink. At the Commodore Bar he spent an hour or so drowning four daiquiris—it was Saturday, it was nine, there was nothing
to do unless he did it alone, he was feeling sad for himself. Now in the park behind the Public Library sweethearts moved whisperingly under trees, and drinking-fountain water bubbled softly, like their voices, but for all the white April evening meant to him, Vincent, drunk a little and wandering, might as well have been old, like the old bench-sitters rasping phlegm.

In the country, spring is a time of small happenings happening quietly, hyacinth shoots thrusting in a garden, willows burning with a sudden frosty fire of green, lengthening afternoons of long flowing dusk, and midnight rain opening lilac; but in the city there is the fanfare of organ-grinders, and odors, undiluted by winter wind, clog the air; windows long closed go up, and conversation, drifting beyond a room, collides with the jangle of a peddler’s bell. It is the crazy season of toy balloons and roller skates, of courtyard baritones and men of freakish enterprise, like the one who jumped up now like a jack-in-the-box. He was old, he had a telescope and a sign: 25c See the Moon! See the Stars! 25c! No stars could penetrate a city’s glare, but Vincent saw the moon, a round, shadowed whiteness, and then a blaze of electric bulbs: Four Roses, Bing Cro——he was moving through caramel-scented staleness, swimming through oceans of cheese-pale faces, neon, and darkness. Above the blasting of a jukebox, bulletfire boomed, a cardboard duck fell plop, and somebody screeched: “Yay Iggy!” It was a Broadway funhouse, a penny arcade, and jammed from wall to wall with Saturday splurgers. He watched a penny movie (
What The Bootblack Saw
,) and had his fortune told by a wax witch leering behind glass: “Yours is an affectionate nature” … but he read no further, for up near the jukebox there was an attractive commotion. A crowd of kids, clapping in time to jazz music, had formed a circle around two dancers. These dancers were both colored, both girls. They swayed together slow and easy, like lovers, rocked and stamped and rolled serious savage eyes, their muscles rhythmically
attuned to the ripple of a clarinet, the rising harangue of a drum. Vincent’s gaze traveled round the audience, and when he saw her a bright shiver went through him, for something of the dance’s violence was reflected in her face. Standing there beside a tall ugly boy, it was as if she were the sleeper and the Negroes a dream. Trumpet-drum-piano, bawling on behind a black girl’s froggy voice, wailed toward a rocking finale. The clapping ended, the dancers parted. She was alone now; though Vincent’s instinct was to leave before she noticed, he advanced, and, as one would gently waken a sleeper, lightly touched her shoulder. “Hello,” he said, his voice too loud. Turning, she stared at him, and her eyes were clear-blank. First terror, then puzzlement replaced the dead lost look. She took a step backward, and, just as the jukebox commenced hollering again, he seized her wrist: “You remember me,” he prompted, “the gallery? Your painting?” She blinked, let the lids sink sleepily over those eyes, and he could feel the slow relaxing of tension in her arm. She was thinner than he recalled, prettier, too, and her hair, grown out somewhat, hung in casual disorder. A little silver Christmas ribbon dangled sadly from a stray lock. He started to say, “Can I buy you a drink?” but she leaned against him, her head resting on his chest like a child’s, and he said: “Will you come home with me?” She lifted her face; the answer, when it came, was a breath, a whisper: “Please,” she said.

VINCENT STRIPPED OFF HIS CLOTHES
, arranged them neatly in the closet, and admired his nakedness before a mirrored door. He was not so handsome as he supposed, but handsome all the same. For his moderate height he was excellently proportioned; his hair was dark yellow, and his delicate, rather snub-nosed face had a fine, ruddy coloring. The rumble of running water broke the quiet; she was in the bathroom preparing
to bathe. He dressed in loose-fitting flannel pajamas, lit a cigarette, said, “Everything all right?” The water went off, a long silence, then: “Yes, thank you.” On the way home in a cab he’d made an attempt at conversation, but she had said nothing, not even when they entered the apartment—and this last offended him, for, taking rather female pride in his quarters, he’d expected a complimentary remark. It was one enormously high-ceilinged room, a bath and kitchenette, a backyard garden. In the furnishings he’d combined modern with antique and produced a distinguished result. Decorating the walls were a trio of Toulouse-Lautrec prints, a framed circus poster, D. J.’s painting, photographs of Rilke, Nijinsky and Duse. A candelabra of lean blue candles burned on a desk; the room, washed in their delirious light, wavered. French doors led into the yard. He never used it much, for it was a place impossible to keep clean. There were a few dead tulip stalks dark in the moonshine, a puny heaven tree, and an old weather-worn chair left by the last tenant. He paced back and forth over the cold flagstones, hoping that in the cool air the drugged drunk sensation he felt would wear off. Nearby a piano was being badly mauled, and in a window above there was a child’s face. He was thumbing a blade of grass when her shadow fell long across the yard. She was in the doorway. “You mustn’t come out,” he said, moving toward her. “It’s turned a little cold.”

There was about her now an appealing softness; she seemed somehow less angular, less out of tune with the average, and Vincent, offering a glass of sherry, was delighted at the delicacy with which she touched it to her lips. She was wearing his terrycloth robe; it was by yards too large. Her feet were bare, and she tucked them up beside her on the couch. “It’s like Glass Hill, the candlelight,” she said, and smiled. “My Granny lived at Glass Hill. We had lovely times, sometimes; do you know what she
used to say? She used to say, ‘Candles are magic wands; light one and the world is a story book.’ ”

“What a dreary old lady she must’ve been,” said Vincent, quite drunk. “We should probably have hated each other.”

“Granny would’ve loved you,” she said. “She loved any kind of man, every man she ever met, even Mr. Destronelli.”

“Destronelli?” It was a name he’d heard before.

Her eyes slid slyly sideways, and this look seemed to say: There must be no subterfuge between us, we who understand each other have no need of it. “Oh, you know,” she said with a conviction that, under more commonplace circumstances, would have been surprising. It was, however, as if he’d abandoned temporarily the faculty of surprise. “Everybody knows him.”

He curved an arm around her, and brought her nearer. “Not me, I don’t,” he said, kissing her mouth, neck; she was not responsive especially, but he said—and his voice had gone adolescently shaky—“Never met Mr. Whoozits.” He slipped a hand inside her robe, loosening it away from her shoulders. Above one breast she had a birthmark, small and star-shaped. He glanced at the mirrored door where uncertain light rippled their reflections, made them pale and incomplete. She was smiling. “Mr. Whoozits,” he said, “what does he look like?” The suggestion of a smile faded, a small monkeylike frown flickered on her face. She looked above the mantel at her painting, and he realized that this was the first notice she’d shown it; she appeared to study in the picture a particular object, but whether hawk or head he could not say. “Well,” she said quietly, pressing closer to him, “he looks like you, like me, like most anybody.”

IT WAS RAINING; IN THE
wet noon light two nubs of candle still burned, and at an open window gray curtains tossed forlornly. Vincent extricated his arm; it was numb from the weight
of her body. Careful not to make a noise, he eased out of bed, blew out the candles, tiptoed into the bathroom, and doused his face with cold water. On the way to the kitchenette he flexed his arms, feeling, as he hadn’t for a long time, an intensely male pleasure in his strength, a healthy wholeness of person. He made and put on a tray orange juice, raisin-bread toast, a pot of tea; then, so inexpertly that everything on the tray rattled, he brought the breakfast in and placed it on a table beside the bed.

She had not moved; her ruffled hair spread fanwise across the pillow, and one hand rested in the hollow where his head had lain. He leaned over and kissed her lips, and her eyelids, blue with sleep, trembled. “Yes, yes, I’m awake,” she murmured, and rain, lifting in the wind, sprayed against the window like surf. He somehow knew that with her there would be none of the usual artifice: no avoidance of eyes, no shamefaced, accusing pause. She raised herself on her elbow; she looked at him, Vincent thought, as if he were her husband, and, handing her the orange juice, he smiled his gratitude.