Loving Women (38 page)

Chapter

42

T
hat night, I couldn’t sleep. Around midnight I went outside and sat on the stairs, breathing in the warm air, looking out at the thick clusters of stars. Then I saw Miles Rayfield coming around the side of the Supply Shack, walking fast, his head down. He didn’t see me until he reached the stairs.

“Oh,” he said, surprised, his manner oddly stiff. “Oh,
hello
. What are you doing
here
?”

“Can’t sleep. Nice night.”

He relaxed and took out his Pall Malls and lit up. “I thought maybe you were waiting for Lavrenti Beria to take over the base.”

“Who’s he?”

He told me and I laughed (too hard) at his little joke and felt stupid again. There were at least five hundred names of people in this world that were known by everyone except me. My head was filled with useless knowledge. But I didn’t know Lavrenti Beria was the head of the Russian secret police. I didn’t know a lot of things. I asked Miles if he’d just finished painting. He hesitated, then went rushing ahead.

“Hell, no,” he said. “If there was ever a day they’d catch me, it’s today. Imagine getting caught doing something
secret
on the day Stalin died? Oh, hey, I wanted to show you something.”

I followed him into the barracks. The racks were full of sleeping men. Miles Rayfield went to his locker and I met him in the head, where the lights were still burning. He handed me a folder crammed with reproductions of paintings torn from magazines. “Study these,” he said. “Copy them if you want.” A lot of the
pictures were by his own favorite, a Japanese-American named Yasuo Kuniyoshi. At first (conditioned by Caniff and Noel Sickles and Crane) I thought the drawing was clumsy, the postures awkward, the heads too big or the hands too small. Sometimes Kuniyoshi’s people seemed to be falling out of the picture. But standing with Miles in the head, looking at the pictures while Miles smoked, I began to see in a new way. There was one painting of a fat big-headed kid with crazy eyes holding a banana in one hand, reaching with the other for a peach in a white bowl. The table was a dark orange and tilted so that we saw it from the top. A window was open to an empty landscape: two buildings, two clouds, the view empty and scary like the desolate buildings I’d seen in Renaissance paintings.

“Look at that kid’s eyes,” Miles whispered, pointing at Kuniyoshi’s fat boy. “He’s a monster. All appetite, all need, all want. Look at the way his hair is parted down the middle.… And see, he’s got a little sailor boy’s
shirt
on, but it’s not
blue
. It’s the color of dried blood. And the blue walls, the blue dead sky, you know he’s living in a cold bleak world and eats to make himself feel
alive
.…”

Suddenly a door behind us opened and closed. And Harrelson was there, drunk, his eyes small and glittery. He looked at Miles and then at me.

“Well, looka this.”

“Fuck off, Harrelson,” Miles said. “The Russians are coming.”

“
Two
of you … in the shithouse. In the middle of the goddamn
night
. Ain’t
that
cute.”

I stepped forward. “What’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“You and honeybunch here,” he said and grinned. “Couple of the year.”

I grabbed him by his jumper and slammed him against the wall. I came within an inch of his face, smelling the souring booze on his breath.

“You say another word,” I whispered, “and I’ll break your fuckin head.”

Someone yelled from the darkness of the barracks. “Knock it off!” And another: “Go to fucking bed!”

I waited for them to be quiet and released my grip on Harrelson. I was trembling. Not in fear of Harrelson. I was afraid of my own sudden rage. I might punch myself into the brig.

“You’re a real fresh boy,” Harrelson said coldly.

“And you’re a sick bastard,” I said. “Make any more remarks, to me or Miles and I’ll knock your dick stiff. He’s my
friend
, got it? Friend.”

Harrelson said, sarcastically, “Excuse me.” He swished past me to the urinals and pissed for a long time, humming “I Can’t Help It if You’re Still in Love With Me.” I almost laughed. He was such a relentless bastard. And the fury seeped out of me. Harrelson was mean, and I’d just slammed him around; but I had to love him for this. Hank Williams all the way. When he was finished, he looked at us in an offended way, and walked into the dark slumbering barracks. I exhaled a little too loudly. And then chuckled in a forced way. Miles Rayfield wasn’t laughing.

“Thanks,” he said, and walked quickly to his bunk.

Afterward it was even harder to sleep. Harrelson was now my enemy and I didn’t want enemies. Not here. Not anywhere. I didn’t want to have to watch my back. I didn’t want anyone working against me in secret. I’d defended myself: yes. And I had defended Miles Rayfield. But suppose Harrelson was
right
about Miles? What did that mean about
me
? Miles was my friend. He didn’t hoard what he knew about painting and drawing; he shared it with me, and nobody in the world had ever done that before. And he was pushing me to be better, to grow out of comics and childhood, to look at real art, to try it myself. His friendship was a challenge. He’d already showed me how to make money. In a way, he had turned me pro. But if I liked him and he was
queer
, did that make
me
queer too? It was so goddamned confusing.

I got up again and went back into the head and studied the other pictures in Miles’s folder. Painters named Adolph Dehn and Aaron Bohrod, Anton Refrigier and Arnold Blanch. Maybe Miles had handed me his folder of painters whose first names started with A. None of them were in the same league with Kuniyoshi.

And then I saw Ben Shahn for the first time and I said out loud,
Jesus Christ
. These were pictures I understood. Ben Shahn. He had to come from the kind of places I came from. Here was a picture called
Handball
. A high handball court with four players in front of it, one of them a Negro wearing a hat. There were two men watching in the foreground. One in a cap, his hands jammed deep into his baggy trousers. The other’s hands were folded. Beyond the handball court stood a row of tenements. I felt as if I’d played on
that court, stood on that street. I was certain I knew the guy with the cap. In another Ben Shahn picture called
Vacant Lot
there was a boy in a sweater and knickers just like those I wore until I was eleven. A white shirt collar rose above the sweater and he was playing ball alone against a brick wall in a vacant lot. The boy was totally isolated. Sitting there in the john, in Pensacola, Florida, on the day Stalin died, I thought of long Saturday mornings in Brooklyn, up early to serve Mass at Holy Name and how it felt when Mass was finished and it was still early and the neighborhood was silent because the men weren’t up yet and I would go down to the Ansonia Clock Factory and play ball alone against its dirty brick walls. I looked at the picture thinking:
This could be me
.

Then I heard a door open and slam and someone bouncing off a wall and a giggle and a new stirring in the barracks. I got up. It was Sal. He saw me and excused himself and went past me and pissed in the sink.

“Had to do that since I left the Dirt Bar,” he said.

“I thought all leave and liberty was canceled,” I said.

“Nah, just a rumor. Stalin’s still dead.”

“Where’s Sam?”

“Blow job.”

“What about you?”

“Too broke up about Joe,” he said, and went off to bed. One of these nights, I thought, I have to really talk to Sal.

And I did.

Chapter

43

What Sal Told Me

M
y father is
a baker, I like to say: he bakes cars. He owns a body shop in the South Bronx and fixes cars from all over the borough
. He never
asks anyone for registration papers. A guy wants a black car painted pink? Why not? You want certain numbers filed off the engine block? Step right up. The old man does good work. He has a good eye for color, and he can do anything with his hands. He could’ve been a sculptor in another life. I guess when he was young he didn’t have the choices a lot of people get in this world. Before he got the body shop he worked in a gas station, and before that he fought World War II
.

But in a weird way I always thought that my father’s father was my real father. He lived three blocks away from us, in a tiny apartment packed with books and magazines and old brown photographs. Their family was from Florence, in Tuscany, and they were always Reds. They didn’t mean what we mean by a Red. Grandpa was some kind of socialist anarchist. He thought everything in the country should be shared by the people. Food, the ports, oil, big industry, every fucking thing. Nobody should starve. Nobody should be unemployed. Everybody should have a doctor. You know, real terrible disgusting stuff that would destroy the United States if we had it. But then Grandpa also felt that if there was a government, he was against it
. “Ideas
are wonderful,” he would shout, in the apartment, with his books everywhere, pulling on his white beard, his arms flying around
. “Abstractions
are wonderful. Love is wonderful and justice is wonderful and the
common good?
Most wonderful of all. But the son of a bitching politicians will always sell you out or put you in the dungeon
.”

He married a woman from Siena. I don’t remember her. She died in the early thirties, after my father was born. There were pictures of her around, though, and she seemed thin and a little afraid, standing in Coney Island or out at the Statue of Liberty, her eyes looking at you like she didn’t know what the fuck she was doing in this country. Grandpa himself would never say exactly why he came to New York. There was some trouble in the Old Country, he’d say, that’s all. I could never find out what it was, but it must’ve had something to do with him being a Red
.

He had beautiful handwriting when he was young. They call it calligraphy now. Just beautiful, done with goose feathers, he said, and with special black inks he bought from some Chinaman on Chatham Square. When he and his wife first came here, he worked in a horse-and-buggy place during the day, and at night he would write these beautiful business cards for rich people—wedding invitations and diplomas, all that kind of thing. His wife was always mad at him because he spent all the extra money on books instead of clothes or things for the house. I’ve seen a few of them, on cardboard that’s yellow now, ones he did for his sample case, that he’d take around to these mansions on Fifth Avenue, him with his lousy English, and they’d laugh and say hey, a Wop who can write!

Then he got hurt in an accident and his hand, the one he used to write with, was all smashed up and the doctors amputated his forefinger. It must of broke his fuckin heart. Just telling you this, it almost breaks mine. But when he told me about it, a half a century later almost, he just shrugged. It was meant to be, he said. If it wasn’t one thing, it would have been another. I guess he was what they call a fatalist. But I didn’t really believe him when he just shrugged it off. I used to see him sometimes in a corner of the apartment, just staring at the hand
.

He worked in a garage during the twenties; I guess that’s where my father got his thing for cars. But when the Depression came, Grandpa opened a grocery store in The Bronx, moved from the Lower East Side to Pleasant Avenue uptown and finally to the Bronx. “With the store, I knew we would always eat,” he said. “In the Depression, nobody drove cars.” After my grandmother died, the heart went out of him (everybody said) but he kept the store going. He lived upstairs and he always had something for me when I went over there, ice cream, tea, little pastries. And he would tell me about the books. Most of them were in Italian, but he told me I had to read them, that nobody who claimed to be civilized could live without these books: Dante, Machiavelli (The Discourses, he said, read them, the plans for a republic, and remember that The Prince was really a job application) and Leopardi and Manzoni and Guicciardini. He talked about these guys as if they were his personal friends. “Like Dante said once …” He knew Latin, and when I went to Cardinal Hayes he would get me to read Caesar and Cicero and Virgil out loud, telling me how to pronounce the words with passion, as if they were written by living breathing men, not dead guys, not professors. He made me love Latin. When it was my turn to read, the brothers and the priests didn’t know what the fuck I was up to. They were used to Latin sounding like a chant from the mass and not like a language that people used for giving orders and fucking women. I was good at it but I could never get the hang of Tacitus. Even Grandpa bitched about the man’s style
.