Nine Stories (17 page)

It
took me almost as long to select a pseudonym as it had taken me to
write the whole letter.

I
wrote the letter on overlay tissue paper. However, I sealed it in a
Ritz envelope. Then, after applying a special-delivery stamp I'd
found in Bobby's top drawer, I took the letter down to the main mail
drop in the lobby. I stopped on the way to put the mail clerk (who
unmistakably loathed me) on the alert for de Daumier-Smith's future
incoming mail. Then, around two-thirty, I slipped into my
one-forty-five anatomy class at the art school on Forty-eighth
Street. My classmates seemed, for the first time, like a fairly
decent bunch.

During
the next four days, using all my spare time, plus some time that
didn't quite belong to me, I drew a dozen or more samples of what I
thought were typical examples of American commercial art. Working
mostly in washes, but occasionally, to show off, in line, I drew
people in evening clothes stepping out of limousines on opening
nights--lean, erect, super-chic couples who had obviously never in
their lives inflicted suffering as a result of underarm
carelessness--couples, in fact, who perhaps didn't have any
underarms. I drew suntanned young giants in white dinner jackets,
seated at white tables alongside turquoise swimming pools, toasting
each other, rather excitedly, with highballs made from a cheap but
ostensibly ultrafashionable brand of rye whisky. I drew ruddy,
billboard-genic children, beside themselves with delight and good
health, holding up their empty bowls of breakfast food and pleading,
good-naturedly, for more. I drew laughing, high-breasted girls
aquaplaning without a care in the world, as a result of being amply
protected against such national evils as bleeding gums, facial
blemishes, unsightly hairs, and faulty or inadequate life insurance.
I drew housewives who, until they reached for the right soap flakes,
laid themselves wide open to straggly hair, poor posture, unruly
children, disaffected husbands, rough (but slender) hands, untidy
(but enormous) kitchens.

When
the samples were finished, I mailed them immediately to M. Yoshoto,
along with a half-dozen or so non-commercial paintings of mine that
I'd brought with me from France. I also enclosed what I thought was a
very casual note that only just began to tell the richly human little
story of how, quite alone and variously handicapped, in the purest
romantic tradition, I had reached the cold, white, isolating summits
of my profession.

The
next few days were horribly suspenseful, but before the week was out,
a letter came from M. Yoshoto accepting me as an instructor at Les
Amis Des Vieux Maitres. The letter was written in English, even
though I had written in French. (I later gathered that M. Yoshoto,
who knew French but not English, had, for some reason, assigned the
writing of the letter to Mme. Yoshoto, who had some working knowledge
of English.) M. Yoshoto said that the summer session would probably
be the busiest session of the year, and that it started on 24 June.
This gave me almost five weeks, he pointed out, to settle my affairs.
He offered me his unlimited sympathy for, in effect, my recent
emotional and financial setbacks. He hoped that I would arrange
myself to report at Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres on Sunday, 23 June, in
order to learn of my duties and to become "firm friends"
with the other instructors (who, I later learned, were two in number,
and consisted of M. Yoshoto and Mme. Yoshoto). He deeply regretted
that it was not the school's policy to advance transportation fare to
new instructors. Starting salary was twenty-eight dollars a
week-which was not, M. Yoshoto said he realized, a very large sum of
funds, but since it included bed and nourishing food, and since he
sensed in me the true vocationary spirit, he hoped I would not feel
cast down with vigor. He awaited a telegram of formal acceptance from
me with eagerness and my arrival with a spirit of pleasantness, and
remained, sincerely, my new friend and employer, I. Yoshoto, formerly
of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, Tokyo.

My
telegram of formal acceptance went out within five minutes. Oddly
enough, in my excitement, or quite possibly from a feeling of guilt
because I was using Bobby's phone to send the wire, I deliberately
sat on my prose and kept the message down to ten words.

That
evening when, as usual, I met Bobby for dinner at seven o'clock in
the Oval Room, I was annoyed to see that he'd brought a guest along.
I hadn't said or implied a word to him about my recent,
extracurricular doings, and I was dying to make this final
news-break--to scoop him thoroughly--when we were alone. The guest
was a very attractive young lady, then only a few months divorced,
whom Bobby had been seeing a lot of and whom I'd met on several
occasions. She was an altogether charming person whose every attempt
to be friendly to me, to gently persuade me to take off my armor, or
at least my helmet, I chose to interpret as an implied invitation to
join her in bed at my earliest convenience--that is, as soon as
Bobby, who clearly was too old for her, could be given the slip. I
was hostile and laconic throughout dinner. At length, while we were
having coffee, I tersely outlined my new plans for the summer. When
I'd finished, Bobby put a couple of quite intelligent questions to
me. I answered them coolly, overly briefly, the unimpeachable crown
prince of the situation.

"Oh,
it sounds very exciting!" said Bobby's guest, and waited,
wantonly, for me to slip her my Montreal address under the table.

"I
thought you were going to Rhode Island with me," Bobby said.

"Oh,
darling, don't be a horrible wet blanket," Mrs. X said to him.

"I'm
not, but I wouldn't mind knowing a little more about it," Bobby
said. But I thought I could tell from his manner that he was already
mentally exchanging his train reservations for Rhode Island from a
compartment to a lower berth.

"I
think it's the sweetest, most complimentary thing I ever heard in my
life," Mrs. X said warmly to me. Her eyes sparkled with
depravity.

The
Sunday that I stepped on to the platform at Windsor Station in
Montreal, I was wearing a doublebreasted, beige gabardine suit (that
I had a damned high opinion of), a navy-blue flannel shirt, a solid
yellow, cotton tie, brown-and-white shoes, a Panama hat (that
belonged to Bobby and was rather too small for me), and a
reddish-brown moustache, aged three weeks. M. Yoshoto was there to
meet me. He was a tiny man, not more than five feet tall, wearing a
rather soiled linen suit, black shoes, and a black felt hat with the
brim turned up all around. He neither smiled, nor, as I remember,
said anything to me as we shook hands. His expression--and my word
for it came straight out of a French edition of Sax Rohmer's Fu
Manchu books--was inscrutable. For some reason, I was smiling from
ear to ear. I couldn't even turn it down, let alone off.

It
was a bus ride of several miles from Windsor Station to the school. I
doubt if M. Yoshoto said five words the whole way. Either in spite,
or because, of his silence, I talked incessantly, with my legs
crossed, ankle on knee, and constantly using my sock as an absorber
for the perspiration on my palm. It seemed urgent to me not only to
reiterate my earlier lies--about my kinship with Daumier, about my
deceased wife, about my small estate in the South of France--but to
elaborate on them. At length, in effect to spare myself from dwelling
on these painful reminiscences (and they were beginning to feel a
little painful), I swung over to the subject of my parents' oldest
and dearest friend: Pablo Picasso. Le pauvre Picasso, as I referred
to him. (I picked Picasso, I might mention, because he seemed to me
the French painter who was best-known in America. I roundly
considered Canada part of America.) For M. Yoshoto's benefit, I
recalled, with a showy amount of natural compassion for a fallen
giant, how many times I had said to him, "M. Picasso, ofi allez
vous?" and how, in response to this all-penetrating question,
the master had never failed to walk slowly, leadenly, across his
studio to look at a small reproduction of his "Les
Saltimbanques" and the glory, long forfeited, that had been his.
The trouble with Picasso, I explained to M. Yoshoto as we got out of
the bus, was that he never listened to anybody--even his closest
friends.

In
1939, Les Amis Des Vieux Maitres occupied the second floor of a
small, highly unendowed-looking, three-story building--a tenement
building, really--in the Verdun, or least attractive, section of
Montreal. The school was directly over an orthopedic appliances shop.
One large room and a tiny, boltless latrine were all there was to Les
Amis Des Vieux Maitres itself. Nonetheless, the moment I was inside,
the place seemed wondrously presentable to me. There was a very good
reason. The walls of the "instructors' room" were hung with
many framed pictures--all water colors--done by M. Yoshoto.
Occasionally, I still dream of a certain white goose flying through
an extremely pale-blue sky, with--and it was one of the most daring
and accomplished feats of craftsmanship I've ever seen--the blueness
of the sky, or an ethos of the blueness of the sky, reflected in the
bird's feathers. The picture was hung just behind Mme. Yoshoto's
desk. It made the room--it and one or two other pictures close to it
in quality.

Mme.
Yoshoto, in a beautiful, black and cerise silk kimono, was sweeping
the floor with a short-handled broom when M. Yoshoto and I entered
the instructors' room. She was a gray-haired woman, surely a head
taller than her husband, with features that looked rather more
Malayan than Japanese. She left off sweeping and came forward, and M.
Yoshoto briefly introduced us. She seemed to me every bit as
inscrutable as M. Yoshoto, if not more so. M. Yoshoto then offered to
show me to my room, which, he explained (in French) had recently been
vacated by his son, who had gone to British Columbia to work on a
farm. (After his long silence in the bus, I was grateful to hear him
speak with any continuity, and I listened rather vivaciously.) He
started to apologize for the fact that there were no chairs in his
son's room--only floor cushions--but I quickly gave him to believe
that for me this was little short of a godsend. (In fact, I think I
said I hated chairs. I was so nervous that if he had informed me that
his son's room was flooded, night and day, with a foot of water, I
probably would have let out a little cry of pleasure. I probably
would have said I had a rare foot disease, one that required my
keeping my feet wet eight hours daily.) Then he led me up a creaky
wooden staircase to my room. I told him on the way, pointedly enough,
that I was a student of Buddhism. I later found out that both he and
Mme. Yoshoto were Presbyterians.

Late
that night, as I lay awake in bed, with Mme. Yoshoto's
Japanese-Malayan dinner still en masse and riding my sternum like an
elevator, one or the other of the Yoshotos began to moan in his or
her sleep, just the other side of my wall. It was a high, thin,
broken moan, and it seemed to come less from an adult than from
either a tragic, subnormal infant or a small malformed animal. (It
became a regular nightly performance. I never did find out which of
the Yoshotos it came from, let alone why.) When it became quite
unendurable to listen to from a supine position, I got out of bed,
put on my slippers, and went over in the dark and sat down on one of
the floor cushions. I sat crosslegged for a couple of hours and
smoked cigarettes, squashing them out on the instep of my slipper and
putting the stubs in the breast pocket of my pyjamas. (The Yoshotos
didn't smoke, and there were no ashtrays anywhere on the premises.) I
got to sleep around five in the morning.

At
six-thirty, M. Yoshoto knocked on my door and advised me that
breakfast would be served at six-forty-five. He asked me, through the
door, if I'd slept well, and I answered, "Oui!" I then
dressed--putting on my blue suit, which I thought appropriate for an
instructor on the opening day of school, and a red Sulka tie my
mother had given me--and, without washing, hurried down the hall to
the Yoshotos' kitchen.

Mme.
Yoshoto was at the stove, preparing a fish breakfast. M. Yoshoto, in
his B.V.D.'s and trousers, was seated at the kitchen table, reading a
Japanese newspaper. He nodded to me, non-committally. Neither of them
had ever looked more inscrutable. Presently, some sort of fish was
served to me on a plate with a small but noticeable trace of
coagulated catsup along the border. Mme. Yoshoto asked me, in
English--and her accent was unexpectedly charming--if I would prefer
an egg, but I said, "Non, non, madame--merci!" I said I
never ate eggs. M. Yoshoto leaned his newspaper against my water
glass, and the three of us ate in silence; that is, they ate and I
systematically swallowed in silence.

After
breakfast, without having to leave the kitchen, M. Yoshoto put on a
collarless shirt and Mme. Yoshoto took off her apron, and the three
of us filed rather awkwardly downstairs to the instructors' room.
There, in an untidy pile on M. Yoshoto's broad desk, lay some dozen
or more unopened, enormous, bulging, Manilla envelopes. To me, they
had an almost freshly brushed-and-combed look, like new pupils. M.
Yoshoto assigned me to my desk, which was on the far, isolated side
of the room, and asked me to be seated. Then, with Mme. Yoshoto at
his side, he broke open a few of the envelopes. He and Mme. Yoshoto
seemed to examine the assorted contents with some sort of method,
consulting each other, now and then, in Japanese, while I sat across
the room, in my blue suit and Sulka tie, trying to look
simultaneously alert and patient and, somehow, indispensable to the
organization. I took out a handful of soft-lead drawing pencils, from
my inside jacket pocket, that I'd brought from New York with me, and
laid them out, as noiselessly as possible, on the surface of my desk.
Once, M. Yoshoto glanced over at me for some reason, and I flashed
him an excessively winning smile. Then, suddenly, without a word or a
look in my direction, the two of them sat down at their respective
desks and went to work. It was about seven-thirty.