Warpaint (3 page)

Unlike Liz, both Quiola and C.C. had working obligations at the opening: C.C. had a “shed” full of things her dealer said she couldn't deal, and an installation postponed; meanwhile, Quiola shopped half-heartedly around for someone who might deal her into the humming hub of the art universe. C.C. might have helped, but the older woman thought it would be vulgar to do so, since they'd once been lovers. Liz would let no one take advantage of her belated fame, not even Quiola.

The gallery buzzed with the tense of pitch. Quiola soon ran out of gas. Deflation set in, and she longed for the one sanctuary that Liz's fame made possible, the Plaza suite, full of chintz and silence and a wet bar. She scanned the room and found C.C. standing, alone, before one of the smallest canvases in the gallery.

As a rule, a Moore canvas is big. Sometime in the 1940s Liz went large with minutiae. Yet, unlike O'Keefe, she'd chosen minutia her generation thought unsuited to her sex: no giant genital flowers for her. Instead she'd harkened back to her childhood, when she'd been schooled to sketch bees from her father's apiary, to make the miniature sculpture of insect anatomy into arching, huge but intricate surreal abstraction.

Not everyone's taste, to be sure.

Yet her famous massive miniatures did not mean she'd given up on small. C.C. was standing in front of a sequence of a dozen tiny paintings, called the
Series B
. Liz had done one a year, for a dozen years, as a chronicle of how that particular year had been to live. She'd started the series as something between and joke and a jab in 1945, when her future husband, the sculptor Paul Gaines, complained that she was so often distracted, so unto herself, he wondered if she even knew the War was over. As a response, she painted
Series B One
. In it, a lone figure, thin and dark, dances away from the jagged teeth of a fluid architecture he also grasps in one hand, so it looks as if the figure is a matador, and the architecture his cape. The figure's other arm is bathed in light and reaches to the edge of the canvas and in that light tiny people dance, make love, fly and sing: a satiric and whimsical answer to Paul's irritation. Of course she knew the War was over.

Each of the twelve in
Series B
was painted in the same precise, intense manner, some more complex that
B One
, some less. By the time Quiola made her way across the busy room C.C. was at
Series B Three
, her face tented, unreadable. When she felt Quiola beside her she said, “I haven't seen this one in so long. My parents owned it, you know, but they never hung it. Couldn't bear it.”

“I thought
Series B
belonged to the museum?”

“It does, now. Father donated it, and also his version of
Wirkorgan
, back when the Museum acquired the others in the
Series
. It was a relief to Mom and Dad to have a legitimate reason to get them both out of the house.”

“But why? They're so lovely.”

Wirkorgan
and
Series B Three
are, in fact, lovely, the latter so vital and mystifyingly alive, the former showing a naked white child, fat as a cherub, who gives off a hot, blue light that graduates to rose-gold. The flaming child vaults, a diver defeating gravity, toward a corner of the canvas where stars dot space. Gracefully looped around the child's shoulders and neck is gossamer black lace. It drifts across the figure's back and vanishes off the canvas.

So why did Tom and Nancy Davis find them unbearable?

“It was a bad year,” was all C.C. could say that night in MoMA.

“1947?” asked Quiola, helplessly. “I don't understand.”

“Look at the lace. See?”

Quiola bent forward. “Names? A scarf of names? I never noticed before.”

“You can't see them in reproductions. Liz used a magnifying glass to paint them – the names on the blacklist. She added name after name, until 1952, I think.”

“Were your parents blacklisted?”

C.C. laughed a pleased laugh. “Oh, no, nothing like that. McCarthy outraged them but they had no sympathy for communism. Conservative liberals.”

Quiola glanced over her shoulder. “I wonder how she's doing.”

“She's fine. Look at her. Drinking it in. Who is that man? He looks as if he'd kiss her ass, doesn't he?”

“You'd think we were nothing more than country mice,” said Quiola, folding her arms tight across her chest.

“Ah, but she's waited a long time for this. Let her enjoy it.”

Huffing, Quiola turned away, back to
Series B
. “Her work I can stomach,” she said. “Liz herself is another matter.”

Series B
. Critics will tell you that these Moore paintings are an idiosyncratic take on the post-war years in America.
Series B Three
1947, they say, commemorates both young American daring – Yeager's breaking the sound barrier – and American paranoia – Joe McCarthy's witch-hunt.

But in 1947, there was also Tucker.

Liz called Tuck Davis her watching child. His eyes, of no striking color, nevertheless caught you: large, and bright and watching. Photographs show a boy whose head, adorned with hair in long ringlets, seems too big for his nose, and his nose too delicate for those eyes and his eyes too watching for comfort. In that summer of 1947, as Nancy had told Al and Pat Kronen, the Davises had vacationed in Florida. They'd camped near a small lake. Picture this, then: the family eating BBQ, and here comes Tucker up from the lakeside, his wet diapers sagging because he's running as quick as his fat legs can go and right behind him, clumsy swift, a 'gator, jaws widening and then Dr. Davis is there, his big hands slipping under the boy's arms, and Tucker swings in the air. The 'gator, discouraged, stops, snaps his jaws shut and saunters away, safe inside his ancient armor, hungry still.

Thing of it was, Tucker just giggled. When Tom saw his son's bright, laughing eyes, he turned the boy over a knee, right there, in front of everyone, lowered the sodden diaper, and whacked him until his white, new flesh reddened. Standing the half-naked child on his feet, the doctor scolded, but Tucker had become a ball of fury, a fury so fierce Dr. Davis slapped the cheek of it, and astonished, the boy sat down. Yanking his son back up, Dr. Davis carried him by his arms, his chubby legs stiff with surprise, to the screen porch. He sat him on a wicker chair and said,

“Tucker, you will sit here, by yourself, until Father comes for you. And if you so much as move, you will sit here longer. And if you mess yourself, you will get another spanking. Understand me?”

And then Tom Davis made sure that whatever the rest of his family did that day, they did it in front of Tucker's watching eyes. C.C. remembers him vividly on that porch, his face hot, baby-fat hands clutching chubby knees, his cherry red mouth set.

Three months later, that same winter on Long Island: it is a Saturday in late December. Tom leaves the farmhouse after lunch, to chop firewood. After dropping her two older kids at their grandparents' house, Nancy begins canning mint jam. Tucker, now taller, less chubby, has a cold.

“Mama?”

Nancy looks up from the hot, sweet reduction. Her mason jars, lined up like portly glass soldiers, wait to swallow their duty. Tucker, his hair in a tangle, his green flannel pajamas rumpled, stands barefoot at the kitchen door.

“Sweetheart, what are you doing downstairs?” She comes over to him, crouching down, smoothing her skirt under her. She fingers his forehead, which is cool. “Are you feeling better?”

The child nods, sniffling and rubbing his nose with the back of his hand. He reaches out to touch the top of her apron with small, white fingers.

“Well, honey, you don't have a fever.” She stands up, re-ties her apron in the back, and finds him a tissue in its front pocket. “Here, now blow that nose.”

Glancing up over his tissue he says, “Mama, can I get my books?”

“Of course you can. Where did you leave them?”

“In there,” he points down the hall toward the sitting room.

“That's fine.” She takes the used tissue and throws it out. “Tuck? Mind you should take your books back to bed. I know you feel better, but your nose is still runny, and you look flushed. All right, sweetheart?”

He nods, his big watching eyes shining, and trots off to get his sack of baby books, left abandoned on the rug behind the chintz loveseat. The sitting room is dead cold, no fire, no light in the December gloom, no people, now even lacking the artificial warmth of Liz Moore's
Wirkorgan
, which Tom had moved to his office on the promise of another Moore, a Christmas gift. Tucker grabs his sack to drag along behind him, across the braided rug, over the stone of the hearth where he stops, just at the foot of the massive fireplace. He looks around, then out the window: a red and black wool jacket bright against the thin snow, a muffled chop of the ax. Smiling a fierce little smile, Tuck sneaks over to the metal sconce of fireplace matches, and lifts one out to strike against the granite hearthstone, and again, and again before the match ignites with a hiss and flare.

Dr. Davis, being on that side of the house, sees the smoke first. Nancy, still canning, doesn't smell it, doesn't know until a shriek so wild makes her drop a jar.

“What –?” She glances up from broken glass to a mass of smoke rolling fast toward her from the hall.

Without a sound she runs, just as Tom bangs into the kitchen behind her.

“Nancy!” he cries as he too, breasts into the smoke, choking on the acrid bitters of his own house, burning. Coughing, his eyes awash in stinging tears, he moves fast, trying to beat the swift blaze until wham! he trips, down on one knee, almost on top of Nancy, passed out in the hall. Staggering, Tom lifts her up. Limp, she's hunched over Tucker, wrapped in a blanket. Somehow the doctor hoists his wife in the crook of one arm, clutches his son in the other, and staggers back through the kitchen, out into the snow. Frantic and calm, Tom the physician does what he can for Nancy and Tuck, as the entire side of the house roars, a beast, unleashed. By the time the fire engines and ambulance arrive, that side of the house is gone.

At the hospital, Nancy is put on a respirator and heavy sedation because Tom can see what she must not, yet: Tucker – his burnt, lacerated, swollen flesh, his tender lungs seared. Swaddled in bandages, tiny and inhuman behind the oxygen mask, unconscious, Tuck struggles. Tom Davis sits down on a bare wooden chair beside his son and holds one somehow whole, unaffected hand, a cruel fluke of the fire. He caresses the small fingers, the tiny, perfect fingernails, then gently sets that promising hand down upon the hospital blanket. Reaching over to the metal bedside cabinet, he picks up a bottle and needle, tapping out a double dose of morphine because nothing else can be done, now, and nothing else matters, so he does not weep as he eases the needle in. Leaning over, he kisses a damp forehead and whispers for the last time, “Good night, my son.”

Later, in January, the Davises sold the property of that old, lost Montauk home, that farmhouse where a woman was first named a witch, and where a child caught fire. The new house they built for the family, they build without a hearth.

“She was unlike any other adult I ever knew when I was a kid,” C.C. would say, if asked. “Utterly unlike. She went barefoot in summer, sat cross-legged on the pavestones with you, or ate honey right out of the jar! Other adults would say don't, watch out, be quiet, be careful. With Liz it was yes, let's not tell, wait 'til I show you, no, I won't lie, cross my heart and hope to die. It was a good thing – a fine thing, for a hellion like me. She was different. She didn't believe that the right shade of lipstick would solve everything. Certainly did not believe in the power of powder or paint, unless it came from a tube and ended up on canvas.”

She was also in a foul humor, after the MoMA opening. As soon as the three women got settled in the limo for the ride back to the Plaza, Liz said, “Where the hell have you two been? How could you leave me like that, fair game for the vultures?”

“Vultures? Please,” said C.C.

“Since when do I enjoy flunkies?”

“They weren't flunkies,” said Quiola. “You're admired.”

“My foot. I'm hungry is what I am.”

Quiola thought:
by the time I reach Liz's age, the Creator willing, I hope all the childish petulance I now control by the force of knowing better won't simply break through the firewall and go on a spree
. Coaxed through the excellent dinner MoMA had ordered at the Plaza, Liz subjected everyone in range – from clerk to room service and particularly C.C. – to bitter, non-stop complaint, until she went to bed, by then mollified.

“She
will
be like that,” C.C. muttered, staring out at the ceaseless street, and the play of evening neon. “Shoot me, if I never get like that.”

“Yes,” said Quiola, pulling her XXL t-shirt on. “I mean, no. No, I don't want to get like that.” She sat on one of the single beds.

C.C. turned from the window. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing. Why?”

“You sound about a million miles away.”

“Oh? Oh. I suppose I am.” She laid her head on the pillow.

“Where? Back in Paris?”

“Oh, no,” said Quiola, brushing off that idea as if swatting an insect. “I know you and Liz love the city but, to be honest, after these last six months, I don't. I told you. I want to come home – I wish I could go back up to Lutsen.”

“Lutsen? To Lizzie's Treetops, you mean?”

“Yeah. I know it's odd, since I've only been there once. But I was born by that lake, and on our visit with Liz, I don't know, I was captivated by the land. I still dream about the river otters we saw, and the horses we rode.”

C.C. laughed. “We were there in May, sweetie, the loveliest month of the year. You've never been through black fly season – at least not as you'd remember. Or survived a winter. Trust me, its no paradise. Didn't your mother say anything about it?”

“Mother left,” said Quiola, her dark eyes going matte. “I know there are good reasons to leave. Weather is one of them.”

“See?”

“But that spring, it was so beautiful. Truly. Don't you remember?”

“Of course I remember. Daydreaming a Lutsen spring, then?”

“No. Actually, I was thinking about Luke.”

“Oh.” C.C. bit the side of her lip and looked away. “Do you – often?”

“No. Not so often. Not as often as I should – as he would, of me. Do you mind if I turn out the light, now?”

“Quiola?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Good night,” but C.C. did not drift off easily. She lay in her hotel bed, listening to Quiola snore – she sighed and folded her arms under her head as the city murmured and beeped. Her thoughts moved over that night's celebration. Nobody had wanted, really, to talk to her. They all wanted to talk to History. Eventually, snoring melded with the ambient street noise enough to lull C.C. to sleep. But she felt lousy in the morning, and when Quiola bounced out of bed, all kinetic energy, a few tears came.

A light rap on the door and “C.C.? Quiola? You two up yet?” asked Liz.

“No,” said C.C., violently, wiping her face clean of tears with both hands.

Quiola poked her head out of the bathroom, her short hair a mess and her mouth full of toothpaste. She frowned at C.C. who shrugged. Quiola turned away to spit.

“Give us a few, Liz. I slept badly,” C.C. called through the door.

“Coffee's here.”

“All right, all right, hold your horses. Damn.”

“What?” said Quiola, still in the bathroom.

“Room service. Liz knows I can't stand cold coffee.” She peeled herself out of bed like she'd been glued to the sheets.

“Neither can I,” said Quiola, pulling on sweats. “You ready?”

C.C. smiled wanly. “As I'll ever be.”

The weather, as it turned out, still had not broken – the heat bore a drape of humidity, hanging over the city like a drunkard. Instead of driving around the park, Liz asked to go to the Metropolitan. It took the three of them what seemed an eternity to climb the vast stone stairs, and once inside the cool foyer, Liz had to sit down to recover. People milled about while C.C. and Liz found a wooden bench.

“I used to come here as a kid,” said C.C. “With Mom.”

“I know,” said Liz. “I took you, once.”

“
You
did? When? I don't remember –”

“You wouldn't, you were not even eight. Anyway, Ted had gone to camp, and you were home and bored and Nancy was busy so I whisked you off to the city for the day, and we ended up here. You made a beeline –”

“– for the mummies. I always did,” said C.C.

“And I have always hated this place,” said Liz, serenely. “It's a tomb.”

“You
hate
this place? Why did you drag us up here, then?”

“The garden room has a nice lunch.”

“The garden room? The garden room is gone. It no longer exists. They've replaced it with a cafeteria.”

“My God, a cafeteria. Blasphemy. Does your mother know?”

“Liz, Mother doesn't recall much of anything.”

“She barely remembers C.C.,” added Quiola.

Liz shook her head, and sighed. “My poor Nancy, it's so awful. Things like that shouldn't happen. She was so generous.”

“She was,” said C.C., stoic. “So. Is there some other place we can go for lunch?”

 

♦

 

Liz Moore was utterly unlike any woman Nancy Davis had ever met, either. Women, according to Nancy, were rivals. They worried about everything, fought over husbands, homes, shoes and children. But Liz seemed… “so – free,” is how Nancy put it, when anyone asked her why she'd befriended someone who could wander shoeless into a cocktail party.

April 1934. Even at the height of the Depression, New York City was a busy, bustling place, the opposite of Nancy's quiet, rhythmic life out on Montauk Point. April Fool's day in 1934 found her on the LIRR, three months pregnant, uncomfortable and yet happy to be on the train into town. She was to meet Tom at the Algonquin, and they'd take in dinner and a play, stay overnight. Young, pregnant and comparatively well off, Nancy Davis felt her privilege and tried to accept it without guilt, which became harder as the train headed into a city full of thin, hungry people, many of them ragged or filthy. To distract herself, she browsed over the
Atlantic Monthly
, to linger over three poems by Mrs. Morrow. The poetry both cheered and saddened her, for what mother, or mother to be, could forget the gruesome, unresolved death of the Lindbergh Eaglet?

Poor, brave Betty Morrow!
she thought.
Poor, brave Anne
.

Nancy set the magazine aside as the train came into Penn station. Walking briskly along on moderate high heels up from the steamy, smelly tracks to the equally aromatic streets above, she headed not for the hotel, but to the gallery An American Place. Stieglitz was showing O'Keefe again, and even if Nancy was disgusted by the Stieglitz-O'Keefe May–December romance – so outrageous – she still wanted to see the new work.

Such a bold vision, and a woman's vision, too
, Nancy thought and was not disappointed. But as she wandered from one magnificent, lurid flower to the next, she found herself watching this tall, odd-looking girl with a boy's haircut, tears running down her dark face. She kept mopping them away on a coat sleeve that had seen better days. The tears were so genuine, the coat so torn, that Nancy said, “Can I help you?” before she could wonder whether the offer was wise.

And Lizzie Moore, at twenty-six not much more a girl than Nancy herself, but looking younger in her outgrown clothes, turned to the stranger and said, “I'm hungry.”

“Then let's get you something to eat. I'm buying.”

And so they left together just like that, and found a coffee shop where Liz ordered scrambled eggs and Nancy drank coffee to keep her new friend company; she was a painter, this girl-woman, and O'Keefe had made her furious.

“Furious?” said Nancy. “Or jealous?”

“Both.”

“She is startling.”

“She's pornographic,” Liz shot back. “But what can you expect? All the critics who rave about O'Keefe, they're all men, aren't they? And they need Stieglitz, don't they? They aren't about to insult his whore in public. They do it when they think he can't hear them. But I've heard them. Some of them, anyhow.”

“Like who?”

Lizzie hesitated. “Like Paul Gaines.”

“Oh, Gaines,” said Nancy, smiling. “Such a strange little man. Anyway, you must come and meet my husband. You, he and Paul together can decide the fate of O'Keefe.”

Lizzie wiped up the last of her eggs with a corner of toast. “Oh, she'll be around forever. The talent is too great. The question is: what's left for the rest of us to do?”

“Something else,” said Nancy. “Come meet Tom.”

“All right.”

And so the two women, now no longer strangers, went to the Algonquin. In the hotel lobby they were waylaid by a set of wild sketches: distorted limbs, club-footed dancers with staring eyes, a small, eerie exhibit. Nancy was repelled, but Liz called them joyous monsters, and that's how Tom found his wife and Liz Moore together, arguing about elephant-footed ballerinas.

It wasn't until many, many years later, as C.C. was going through household things with her mother, paring down after Dr. Davis's death, that she re-discovered whose paintings her mother and Liz had seen in the Algonquin lobby: Zelda Fitzgerald's. Zelda, too, had gone to the O'Keefe exhibit that spring, and had come away thinking O'Keefe's flowers “lovely and magnificent and heart-breaking,” a counter-point to Lizzie's succinct judgment of pornography, while Nancy thought them merely rowdy.

And then the years passed, years in which people like the Fitzgeralds, or Stieglitz and O'Keefe or later, even Liz Moore, were presented to Nancy not in the flesh, but in words: in biographies, retrospectives, history. Nancy retreated. All those words about people she'd known, making them over into people she had never met or did not recognize, until, slowly, she forgot them all.

 

♦

“August in New York,” sang Liz in an uncertain, gravelly tenor. “It feels so enervati–ing.” She smiled.

“That's autumn,” said Quiola, “which is exciting. Or embracing. Something cool, at any rate. Here we are –” The cabbie braked. Abandoning the Metropolitan, the three women had caught a cab, which Quiola directed to Prince Street, to a bistro in NoLita. C.C. stepped out first, helping Liz, who complained under her breath about the sagging of car seats making it hard on old bones, while Quiola paid the tab.

The bistro, a long narrow nook of a place with a pebbled outdoor garden in the back, wasn't busy. The hostess led them to a table that overlooked the garden.

“Does it feel like autumn to you?” said Lizzie as they marched down the narrow aisle of floor between the tables. “No, it feels like August, in April. Disgusting. I'd much rather be sitting out there –” she pointed to the empty garden, “– but we would roast.”

“This place reminds me of the Left Bank – I thought you didn't like Paris,” said C.C. to Quiola as the host handed around menus.

“Impossible!” said Liz. “Not to like Paris.”

“But true,” said Quiola. “I hate Paris.”

Liz stared, as if Quiola had sprouted horns.

“Okay, so I do love the food. That, I miss.
Où est ma boulangerie
? That's what I want to know when I come home.”

“
Ici
,” said the waitress.

“Of course. Right here. How've you been, Carol?”

The girl smiled. “Fine. Can't wait for the fall. My last semester.”

And so the three chatted to Carol for a moment about college, her plans, the menu. When they were through with the order, C.C. excused herself to the restroom.

As soon as she was out of earshot, Liz bore down. “Quiola. I know C.C.'s lying to me. Don't lie to me.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Nothing. You tell. Quick. Before that little liar gets back.”

“If C.C. –”

Liz gripped the younger woman's wrist with one bony hand as if the two women were teenagers, or sisters, with secrets between them. “Don't. I have a right to know.”

“Do you? Let go of me.”

But Liz had other plans, and her blanched green stare make that clear. “She will die of it, won't she?”

Quiola stared back, her own gaze black and inward. “I don't know.”

“Bullshit.” Liz let go of Quiola's wrist. “So?” she said, as if settling a bet. “That's that, then. Tell me –”

The soup arrived, and so did C.C. and all questions were left to glitter in Liz's eyes each time she caught Quiola's gaze.

“Ah,” said C.C. “Cold white wine, creamy pea soup, piping hot
pommes frites
and chicken roasted with red peppers – what more could a person ask for?”