Yellow Mesquite (33 page)

On Saturday morning before Thanksgiving, he found an old twin-bed frame in a junk shop on Canal. He made several trips, carrying it back to the loft in manageable sections. At Walkers, a small builders supply near Broadway and Canal, he ordered enough lumber and sheetrock to wall in the bathroom, enough paint to redo the walls, and had it delivered to the loading dock out front. He replaced the original castors on the bed frame with four-inch industrials, then bolted and strapped eight-foot two-by-fours upright to the corners and cross-braced them for staging. He could slip a two-by-twelve in at any of several levels for standing on.
 

From the bulletin board in Walkers, he wrote down a number from a thumb-tacked index card that read:
 
“Odd jobs. Repairs. Painting. No job too big or too small.” The painter, it turned out, roomed with three more men who also did odd jobs. After checking the difficulty of removing the paint on the loft windows, and approving the scaffold, they agreed to strip the windows and paint the loft for three hundred dollars, half due after two days, the balance on completion. He suspected they were Mexican illegals, but discovered later that they were from Honduras. They had no family in New York, and for another fifty dollars agreed to begin work on the following Friday, the twenty-seventh, the day after Thanksgiving.
 

He bought a queen-sized bed and a baby bed and had them delivered. Then a few kitchen essentials. He would wait for Sherylynne to pick out whatever furniture they needed.
 

It made him weak in the stomach to think of the pickle he’d be in had he not sold the painting. His forty percent came to twenty-four hundred, and after sending Sherylynne a thousand, the remaining fourteen hundred was disappearing fast.

While coming and going, he met the Indian couple who lived on the floor below. The man was an intern at Mount Sinai Hospital up on Ninety-sixth Street, and seldom home. The woman was a stay-at-home mother with a two-year-old son. Almost daily, the tantalizing smell of spicy food wafted up the through the elevator shaft.

ALFRED PEARLMAN
, an older man, plank-thin and bony as a doorknob, had the room next to Harley’s in the Belmore. Al had retired years before, and now ran deliveries around town for a messenger service. He spent his free time slumped in a recliner in front of his TV, door open, asleep as often as not. He was a solitary man without family, and occasionally Harley invited him for coffee and a Danish downstairs in the cafeteria.

Harley hadn’t heard from Frankie, but on the twentieth-fifth of November, she called and offered to treat him to Thanksgiving dinner at Mineola’s in the Village.
 

“Sorry, but I already told Al I’d go with him to the Governor.” The Governor Bradford was a decent restaurant, located Midtown.
 

“Oh.” Frankie’s voice fell.

“I just assumed you’d be tied up with Cecil.”

“I should have said something sooner.”

“You could join us at the Governor. It’s not exactly the Four Seasons, but… How about it?”

Frankie thought for a second. “Do you think your friend would mind?”

“I think he’ll be tickled to death. And Cecil?”
 

“Cecil won’t be joining us.”

ALFRED WAS BESIDE
himself. Already seated when Harley and Frankie arrived, he almost turned the table over, leaping to his feet, gangly as Ichabod Crane, barely restrained, gesturing over the crowd to get their attention. He danced a half circle around Frankie as he jerked a chair out for her, talking a mile a minute. He detailed the menu as if Frankie couldn’t read it herself: the special turkey dinner of the day, stuffing with giblet gravy, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie. Frankie was attentive, and the old man in his shabby suit and little crooked tie was for the moment transformed.
 

Afterward they all agreed: it was the best Thanksgiving they’d ever had.
 

That evening Harley called Sherylynne, but there was no answer.

The next day Frankie had a small gift-wrapped can of English candies and a thank-you note delivered to Alfred for letting her crash the party. Alfred was tearful. He placed it on his dressing table alongside an aged sepia photograph of a young woman wearing a broad-brimmed hat and holding a Japanese fan. The only other photo was of Alfred’s father, ramrod straight in a World War I uniform, wearing leggings and a military cap with a short visor.
 

Rusty, the super, looked in on Harley from time to time. She smelled of booze and tried to talk with him about the art he was doing. Twice she borrowed five dollars in the morning and paid him back the same afternoon.
 

Harley made a couple of visits to the School of Visual Arts down on Twenty-third Street. Each time he stood across the street and looked at the place and wasn’t much impressed. In fact, he would have walked right on past had he not been looking for it. Inside the front doors, a small foyer exhibited student art. On his third visit, he took a few drawings and applied for admission to two night classes, beginning with the spring semester in January.
 

He was concerned that the teachers at SVA appeared to be illustrators rather than painters, but from what he could find out that was just as true of Pratt, the Art Students League, Cooper Union, The New School, and all the other schools as well. Maybe Whitehead had been right after all: Maybe he should just look up Rauschenberg and tell him he was here and ready to go to work for him. But at the moment Rauschenberg was on a world tour with the Merce Cunningham dance troupe. Of course, there were other artists, like Bill de Kooning, whom he’d rather study with anyway. But Harley couldn’t bring himself to tackle something like that. Not yet, anyway, in spite of the fact that this was New York and you could do almost anything and get by with it, especially if you called yourself an artist.

He wrote Sherylynne daily and called once a week, but there seemed to be a space other than distance between them now. She didn’t get as excited as he thought she might over some of the things he told her. The enthusiasm she had seen him off with seemed to have faded. She had gotten excited when he sold the painting, and she was downright euphoric over the thousand dollars he sent. However she didn’t understand why he only got forty percent from the gallery, or why his job at JCPenney only paid ninety-five-dollars a week. Actually, he’d gotten raised to one-fifteen. At the same time, she agreed that he was doing the right thing; they should stick it out. The distance he had begun to feel evaporated; she was still the same warm, loving woman as always, still his best friend. She pointed out that the one painting had sold for more than he had made in a whole year working for Whitehead, even if he did only get forty percent. He didn’t say so, but, again, the sale of that painting had been a stroke of unimaginable good luck.
 

AN OLD STEAM
locomotive whistle rises and falls, mournful, over the long country as he throws bundled sorghum over the stack-lot fence to the horses in a saturation of light too lurid for any hour of the day or night. He knows that train…the engineer playing
Lost John
on the steam whistle like a blues harmonica. Harley stops. Listens. The wheels
clickety-clackety-clicking
. He sees the soft folds of the old hat crumpled between the bundles in the feed stack and reaches for it, just as when he was a kid, only now he knows it’s a snake, unlike the first time, when he didn’t know until he had it in hand. He will take it by the tail and pop its head off the way his dad did. But the snake begins to take slow wraps around his arm and he sees it isn’t a snake at all, but Frankie. Frankie, naked under a yellow rain slicker. She begins wrapping herself around him, muscles contracting. The train blows its lonesome whistle.
Lost John.
Closer. The preacher from Separation, Texas, stands next to Warhol on the subway platform. The preacher begins to preach at Harley. Warhol, arms folded, looks on. Harley struggles to untangle himself from Frankie, feels himself being drawn down, Frankie opening under him like a Georgia O’Keeffe blossom. Sherylynne, a life-size cardboard cutout of a whiskey ad, stands on the platform. She frowns, taps her foot. Help me, he cries. Sherylynne grinds her teeth. The train comes closer, howling,
Lost John
. Martin sees Harley’s dilemma, rushes down the subway steps. Oh, dear boy. Darlene Delaney sits on the subway bench next to the Buddha-looking Humpty Dumpty. The Humpty Dumpty’s nose begins to glow. Darlene smirks, pops her gum. Sherylynne takes a drink from the glass in her whiskey-ad hand. Frankie moans.
Lost John
. The Humpty Dumpty’s nose pulses, throbs, lights up. Martin grabs an eraser and begins to erase the nose until there’s nothing left. Smeary streaks. The whistle howls, wheels
clickety-clackety-clicking
, Frankie pumping, keeping time with the rhythm on the rails. Martin slaps his hands over Sherylynne’s eyes and begins to erase her—smears of color on a cardboard cutout, disappearing. Harley hears the sound of his own cries drowning under the mournful wail of
Lost John
. The train is upon him. Whitehead, wearing the old doorman’s uniform, stands in the engineer’s window, eagle eyes wet and wild, elbows flapping. Sherylynne—the erased cutout—begins to blister and curl. Only her freckles remain—black pellets, paper mouth agape. I need a drink, she whispers, and peels over, sliding off the platform onto the tracks before the train. It thunders by; behind the windows, in the aisles, a thousand skeletons linked arm in arm soft-shoe to the left, singing in unison: Yea dum do / He d’ do-right man / Yea dum do / He d’ do-right man… They shuffle to the right, bones clanking: Yea dum do / He d’do-right man. Harley nods to Uncle Jay, says hello to Mavis in passing. The caboose rattles by. Sherylynne flutters about in the after-wake—wispy scraps of paper as the c
lickety-clackety
-moaneing harmonica-blues-blowing sound of
Lost John
fades into the distance. Frankie lies on the platform huddled under her cape, red pimples on the white slabs of her naked butt. She stirs, lifts empty eyes to him in the silence. Are we making art? she asks….

HE WOKE IN
a sweat, his mind jumbled. He showered and dressed, then hung his satchel over his shoulder and went downstairs to the Belmore. The Belmore was cheerless, its vats of food sweating behind steamed glass, cabbies bitching about the Mets and the Jets and fares to Harlem. Here too were gathered the walking wounded, empty gazes, mumbling curses at invisible tormentors.
 

Harley took a cheese Danish and coffee and huddled in a booth. The Belmore reminded him of van Gogh’s
Night Café
, if only
in spirit; “painted,” van Gogh wrote, “as a place where one could ruin one’s self, go mad, or commit a crime.”

Harley had a sudden impulse to do just that, to run amok, to wreck the place in a frenzy of destruction. In self-defense he took his sketchbook out and began to make studies.

Day broke in planes of gray on the front windows.

He put the sketchbook away and went out. A sharp wind had come with the first light, chilling him where he stood on the curb near a newsstand.

The night people were fading with the coming light, the day people clamoring to life, and always, that constant roar of the city, that humming in the asphalt, in the soles of his boots, in his bones, incessant, day after day after day—
humming
, the only possible escape in some inner room, in the bathroom with the door closed, and even then a faint whisper bled beneath the door. It was no wonder people murdered and maimed and went mad.

A man stepped off the curb near the newsstand. Tires squealed. A dull
thump
and an impossible shape twirled above the cab, slammed down on its top, skidded down the back window and bumped off the trunk onto the pavement. The cab braked to a stop. A few people rushed over. Someone ran to call an ambulance.
 

The cabby jumped out and bent over the crumpled figure on the pavement. “Hey!” he yelled, looking back at his cab, the rear door standing open. “Sonofabitch… My goddamn fare took off on me…!”

Harley stood against the wall until an ambulance arrived and took the man away. He and other witnesses gave reports to the police. When he had recovered somewhat, he wandered up Park Avenue South, aimless.

When Frankie’s cab pulled up to the curb at eleven, his eyes burned; his mouth tasted like rusty scrap iron and coffee.
 

Frankie studied him across the seat. “Are you well?”

He told her about the cab hitting the man.
 

“That’s terrible,” she said with feeling.

They took the cab down to Canal, to a pizza joint where they sat in a booth and ate eggplant grinders.
 

“I’m sorry you’re in such a depressed mood,” Frankie said.

“I’m fine, really.” He didn’t tell her about the dream. That dream made no sense. Even so, he couldn’t help but visualized her, naked, taking wraps around his body.
 

“Your family will be here soon. I’m sure things will be better then.”

“I really owe you,” he said.

“Owe me?”

“You’ve done so much for me.”

Frankie gazed ruefully into her coffee cup. “Oh? I was under the impression I was doing things
with
you, not
for
you.”

“You know what I mean. And I do owe you, no matter how you put it.”

“You’re so provincially conscientious.”
 

“You sore about something?”

“You’re hard to read sometimes.”

“Like how?”

“You’ve got to understand: there’s more to this art game than just making paintings. If you want to succeed, you must make yourself an integral part of the machine. Form alliances, cultivate friendships, see and be seen.”

“Play the game.”

“Warhol says the real art of the sixties is publicity.”

“That sounds about right.”

“It’s what you do if you want to be successful.”

“You know, in the short time I’ve been here, you’ve introduced me to several big-name artists, and I appreciate that. I really do. But I’ve got to tell you, for the most part I don’t like them and I don’t like their work. It’s all this emphasis on what’s in and what’s out and who’s clever and who’s campy. It all sounds so phony. And nobody’s talking real art.”