Everything and More (28 page)

The walls of three upstairs bedrooms at the institute had been knocked down to form a commodious U-shaped studio where windows of different sizes and shapes gave onto three exposures. On this cool May morning two weeks after VE Day, a fortyish nude lounged on harem pillows, a small electric heater casting a rosy glow on her
pendulous breasts while the unwarmed flesh of her buttocks, thighs, and arms resembled that of a pale plucked chicken.

Fifteen students had showed up for this live-model session. Twelve were female, a not unusual proportion for a wartime classroom; they wore engagement diamonds with or without wedding bands, and a smock to cover their sweater sets and sensible tweed skirts. Althea alone was ringless and had on a man’s shirt over shorts.

One of the three male students had set up his easel to the right of Althea’s. She did not know his name. He had joined the institute only today. The morning session had nearly ended and his canvas remained untouched, pristine. He slumped on the stool in his Army fatigues, squinting at the model with his deep-set dark eyes while his broad, workingman’s fingers played with his brushes.

At first his sullen self-preoccupation had irked Althea, and she had ignored him ostentatiously, but working in oil was new to her, and soon she was absorbed in plotting her composition with a thin wash of turpentine.

Henry Lissauer’s voice broke her concentration. “Yolanda,” said Herr Professor. “Rest, hnn?”

The model pulled on a sleazy, too-short robe. The voices of the student painters rose in a shrill hubbub.

“Got a butt?” The man in fatigues was looking at Althea.

“I don’t smoke,” she replied coolly.

He shrugged and slumped back on his stool, returning to his brooding examination of the empty dais. Althea glanced sideways at him. He had a broad Slavic face with belligerently high cheekbones, a short, blunt nose, and coarse curly brown hair that grew low on his forehead. He was about twenty-five and common as dirt, she decided. But she had to admit to herself that he was attractive.

Henry Lissauer had come to examine her morning’s work. “Very good, Miss Cunningham,” he said. Since their run-in two weeks earlier, he approached her with bashful respect, as if he were the student, not she.

She smiled graciously. “Doesn’t that leg look a mite improbable?”

“May I show you?”

“Please,” she acquiesced.

He picked up one of her thick sable brushes, dipping it in the coffee tin that contained turpentine, and with a few strokes altered and humanized the limb. “There,” he said with a humble smile.

“Thank you, Mr. Lissauer,” she said, touching his arm.

He took little gulps of air, then moved to the next easel.

“Horak, you better commence.”

“What’s the hot rush?”

“The model,” said Henry Lissauer. “After lunch she will be here only one hour.”

The man in fatigues shrugged.

His canvas remained untouched at 12:30, when they broke for lunch.

The institute was across the street from the Tropics, but that watering spot was reserved for expense accounts or leisurely seductions. Several of the students strolled over to Beverly Drive to eat at Nate and Lou’s deli or Jones Health Food, but most brought sandwiches to eat in the big kitchen. Roxanne de Liso, who when not using her metal crutches was confined to a wheelchair, invariably sat at the head of the deal table. Her husband, Henri de Liso, was a set designer, and Roxanne, her face vivid with expression, led conversations about art and artists. At first Althea had been drawn to sit at the table. But one day Mrs. de Liso talked about Joshua Fernauld: “Yes, a baby! Of course he’s absolutely nuts about that gorgeous child he’s married to, but imagine starting a new family when you’re fifty.”

So Mrs. de Liso knew Marylin Wace Fernauld! Althea fled from the too painful reminders of her other life, making it her habit to lunch alone on the back porch.

The door behind her opened and she heard a jabbering rush of women’s voices.

The new student, the common-looking guy in fatigues, emerged, sitting on the step below her to unwrap a pack of Camels.

“Why not join me?” Althea said caustically, and when he didn’t react, she added, “I’m Althea Cunningham.”

“Gerry Horak.” He slid a cigarette between his broad lips. “What gives with you and the head honcho?”

“You mean Mr. Lissauer?”

“You’re pretty cozy with him.”

“Cozy?” She did not mitigate her disdain with a smile.

“He’s eating out of your hand. ‘May I show you, Miss Cunningham?’ “He mimicked Henry Lissauer’s German accent. “Not that I blame him. You’re quite a dish.”

“Me and Herr Lissauer. There’s an interesting thought.”

“Look, I’m not trying to insult you. He’s a little old and not exactly handsome, but he’s a decent sort.”

“Does your mind always take these adorable twists?”

“Then there’s nothing between you?”

“Nothing but this mad little love nest up in Benedict Canyon,” she said.

He grinned. “Listen, for a minute there I was positive you two had something going, and I wanted things on the level before we get anything on the burner.”

“What makes you think I’m interested in your burners?” She bit into her sandwich.

Gerry reached over and took the other half. “I can tell.” His grin was uneven and very white.

She surprised herself by grinning back. Though Gerry Horak’s crude cockiness irritated her, she felt easy with him. Why? She shrugged. Who cared? It was simply true. She had no need to measure her words or throw him off with alternate aloofness and intimacy.

“Why didn’t you paint?” she asked.

“Getting what I want in mind first.”

“You shouldn’t let a blank canvas intimidate you.”

“Is that how you figure me? Chicken?”

“Yes. And while we’re on the subject, are you in the service?”

“Yep,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt. A jagged, slick red line cut from his left shoulder, broadening into a bandaged area across his dark-haired, muscular chest, reappearing in a thin line to trickle into his khaki pants.

The mass of fresh scar tissue roused no revulsion, only a pang in her chest that she recognized as admiration. “You
were
careless,” she said. “How did it happen?”

“Going up a hill near Salerno.”

“What did you do before?”

“Bummed around,” he said.

“But never painted.”

He finished the sandwich and picked up his cigarette, which was balanced on the rail. “It’s that obvious?”

“The thing is not to let a blank canvas frighten you.” As the institute’s newest student, she had been on the receiving end of advice for months now, and she enjoyed doling it out. “After lunch, paint. Don’t worry what you get down. The first few times, it’s bound to be rotten.”

“Thanks for the tip.” He grinned, pushing to his feet.

She watched him go inside. She was positive her instincts were correct; Gerry Horak knew nothing of art. How could he? He’s an assembly-line worker or a mechanic, she thought, he’s a laborer through and through. Small tingles of excitement went through her as she visualized the hirsute, scarred chest. Were those battle wounds his admittance ticket to Henry Lissauer’s carefully guarded institute?

She finished her lunch, absently watching a truck driver haul cartons through the back door of the adjacent silverware shop while she ruminated about Gerry Horak.

In the studio, the others were already intently working, except for Gerry, who was cracking his black-haired knuckles.

Taking her place, she glanced at his easel.

She heard her own gasp of surprise.

His canvas jumped with vehemently assertive squares of color that had been slashed on with a palette knife. Though unfinished, the nude’s lavender and blue skin tones showed a body flaccid with use, the head thrown back, the full thighs raised and slightly apart, a Levantine whore sprawled awaiting her next client.

An intimidatingly masterful painting. One that seemed impossible for the most talented professional to have done in less than twenty minutes.

Gerry was watching her, one thick, dark brow raised almost to his low hairline.

She felt the heat on her throat, then suddenly she laughed. “And I was wondering whether Mr. Lissauer was compromising his principles by letting you in! Do you always paint so quickly?”

“Takes me a long time before I start, and then, whammo!” He threw a glob of chrome yellow on the foreground. “Where are we going after we get out of here?”

*   *   *

She drove him to Belvedere. For the first time in her life, she felt no embarrassment about bringing someone to her home. In fact, for some unfathomable reason she wanted Gerry Horak to view the imprint of her matrilineal wealth.

“Well?” she asked as Pedro opened the gates.

“Am I meant to be intimidated?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Sure,” he said, glancing around at the grove of magnificent, fresh-leaved sycamores. “The place gives me a hard-on, I want to throw you into the backseat and hump you. Sex and money have a lot in common, at least if you’re a painter. No good painter is a eunuch, and to clear his mind he needs plenty of poontang. He also needs a sucker to buy his work. That’s the two necessities for a painter, pussy and patrons.”

“And here I am, both,” she said. One of the peacocks preened by the tennis court’s protective green fencing. “If you’re trying to shock me, you aren’t.”

“Like hell I’m not. Nobody’s ever talked to you like this, have they, you proper little rich debutante?”

“Let’s get one thing straight. I am not a debutante, I never will be. I’m an artist.”

“Not yet you aren’t, baby, not by a long shot,” he said. “Maybe you could be if you set your mind to it. We’re alike, you and me. Both hard-minded as nails.”

“I’m tougher than you.”

“Like hell.”

“Oh yes I am. Nails aren’t hard, they bend. Me, I’m a diamond. You’ll find out.” Althea brimming with vital energy, pressed on the accelerator, and the wagon skimmed over gravel. It seemed to her she had spoken the truth. At this minute it was beyond belief that she had ever in her life not been confident.

“What does your old man do?”

“Nothing.”

They were approaching the house, and he glanced expressively up at the expanse of rose-hued bricks for which a Georgian house in Kent had been torn down. “In a pig’s ass, nothing. Men cut off their left ball for a joint like this.”

“You really think the crude talk is adorable, don’t you?” she said. “He performed his life’s labors in a single day. He married a Coyne.”

He jerked around to stare at her, his eyes goggling with surprise gratifyingly akin to hers when she’d first seen his painting. “Your mother’s a Coyne?”

“Grover T.’s daughter,” she said.

“Jesus! But didn’t the old buzzard die in the 1800’s?”

“Nineteen-eleven. Mother’s out of his third wife.”

She led Gerry through the big, silent rooms, showing him the dining room’s Beaton mural, the drawing room with its Danilova portrait of Gertrude as dowdy Madonna, the study lined with da Vinci sketches taken from the Coyne Fifth Avenue mansion before it was razed. She took him upstairs to view the delectable Sargent of her voluptuous grandmother at twenty.

When they entered Althea’s room, Gerry reached out for her, grasping her upper arms, pressing her against the wall, thrusting his leg between hers. He was her height, but stocky, broad-boned, resilient of flesh—and amazingly warm. His hard penis thrust against her pelvic bone, opening a wildly incandescent tingling in her moist vagina. A passion she had never before experienced enveloped her, and she put her arms around him, his mouth met hers, and she opened her lips, returning his kiss. Suddenly all her newfound confidence
evaporated and she was a small, helpless animal, as trapped as she’d ever been with her drunken father. But this was infinitely worse, for at those times she retained a sense of integrity because the act was being done to her, against her will.

She jerked away, her breath coming fast.

He examined her with the same intense squint he had focused on the model this morning. “What gives?”

“I just don’t care for the caveman approach,” she said, pinning her cool, pale hair back in its knot, feeling a modicum of self-possession return to her.

“You wanted it as much as I did.”

“Of course. With Gerry Horak, what woman wouldn’t?”

“I’ll wait. You’ll come begging for it.”

She laughed. “Modest, aren’t you?”

“Baby, that was
me
kissing you. The chemistry went clear off the scale.” He spoke without gloating, his dark-stubbled face impassive. “Don’t worry, I’m not about to push you. It’s up to you to set the time.”

She took another composing breath and sat on the window seat. “What lies beneath this tough-he-man exterior? Tell me about yourself.”

“I’m not one for going into the personal past, or hearing anybody else do it, either.”

“Thank God. I meant your career.”

Before the war Gerry had been represented by Longman’s on Madison Avenue, the most prestigious gallery in the country. He was their youngest artist and had been bought by important private collectors, including her Aunt Edna. When he talked about the sales, faint sweat glossed his face—he had not lied about equating sex with money. Yet this equation, she understood, came not from warping meretriciousness but from the quixotic innocence of a true artist: as he had told her, his two needs were women and the acceptance of his work that money proved.

She had guessed correctly about the laboring background.

“In case you’re thinking I’m some kind of highfalutin guy who puts on a tough act, my grandfather came from Bohemia as a contract laborer—that’s a good deal lower than a slave—to Lackawanna Steel. He was killed in a routine accident.”

“My grandfather owned Lackawanna before it was absorbed into U.S. Steel.”

“Probably some flunky of his refused to pay for the rail that would have saved my grandfather from falling into the blooming pit. What’s one more Hunkie more or less?” He leaned back in the window
seat, both amused and bitter. “My brothers still work for the Lackawanna division.”