Radiant Days (27 page)

I’d made some new friends by then, people I met through the
Atlantis and d.c. space, a nearby bar and artist’s space where a lot of local live acts performed. On my nights off I’d hang out and sketch the regulars—members of Bad Brains and other D.C. acts like Vernon Reid, the Velvet Monkeys, and the Slinkees, a band started by a kid named Ian MacKaye who worked at the Georgetown Häagen-Dazs with another kid named Henry Rollins. I transformed the sketches into oversized canvases that ended up in the Punk Art exhibition by the Washington Project for the Arts, a show that went on to Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts and, the following spring, a gallery in Amsterdam. Two of the paintings sold, one of guitar hero Dale Williams, the other based on my Radiant Days tag. The Williams portrait went to Anna Greenhouse of the Nemo Gallery, and as a result got mentioned in the
SoHo Weekly News
and
Art Scene.
That was when my career really began.

I got even more mileage out of the portrait of Ted Kampfert. About a year after I moved to Adams Morgan, I got a phone call from Rob. That famous integrity must have finally cracked: he and the surviving members of the Deadly Rays had signed with a record company to release a double album. One disc would be devoted to outtakes and rare demos of the Rays’ work, the other to Ted Kampfert’s solo career.

“We’d like to use that picture of yours for the back cover art,” Rob said. “And I’d like to commission you to do the cover.”

He also mentioned the possibility of a Raisins reunion, and said he’d call me if and when that came off. I didn’t make a lot of money for that cover, but I got major street cred.

“You knew Ted Kampfert?” a girl asked one night when I was tending bar. By then the Atlantis had become the 9:30 Club, ground zero for the city’s burgeoning punk and hardcore scene.

I nodded and pushed a beer across the bar. “Yeah.”

“That’s your painting on the new album, right? It’s amazing. Why the hell are you working here?” She shook her head: a slight, dark-haired punk named Felice. She worked at a tattoo parlor—this was back when tattoos were still rare, especially on women—and knew a lot of the younger bands.

“Because working here pays the bills.” I’d stopped doing graffiti by then. I was painting as much as I could, but had yet to sell another canvas.

Felice sipped her beer. “Well, it doesn’t pay anything, but I think you should do gig posters. What you do is a shitload better than most of what I see.”

So I started doing posters. It combined the stuff I loved—portraits, graffiti, music. I learned how to silk-screen and bought time at a studio to produce my work. The bands couldn’t afford to pay me, but after a while some of the clubs did. My posters became ubiquitous, first in the D.C. area, then in NYC, always signed with my tag,
RADIANT DAYS
, and a sun-eye. People stole them from wherever they were posted—telephone poles, bars, clubs—so I decided I’d start selling them. There’s a market for that kind of thing, especially if you’re doing posters for well-known bands.

Which, by that time, I was. I’d run off signed, numbered editions of my prints and sell them at shows. It wasn’t much money, but the posters acted as ads for the few dozen canvases that now
leaned against the walls of my apartment. When that Raisins reunion finally came together as a one-time-only event at the 9:30, I designed the limited-edition posters for it, and the cover art for the live album that followed.

Felice and I started to go out. I was fascinated by the tattoo studio, probably more fascinated than I was by Felice. She had a steady job, and she was calm. You need steady hands and focus to be a good tattoo artist, and Felice had both.

After a year we split up, but amicably. As a parting gift, she tattooed my back with a gorgeous rendition of my tag—azure and violet and turquoise waves, the rayed eye reflected in a sea where, if you looked closely enough, you could just make out a tiny boat. I designed it, but Felice made it part of me.

“There.” She blotted blood from between my shoulder blades. “Now you won’t forget me.”

“Like I would,” I said, and hugged her.

By then the first tremors of the 1980s art boom were being felt. Anna Greenhouse bought another of my paintings. Because I’d started out doing graffiti, my name was mentioned alongside those of New York City painters like Keith Haring and especially Jean-Michel Basquiat, the artist formerly known as SAMO. I moved briefly to New York, squatting in a loft in the meatpacking district, but I felt constrained and slightly repulsed by the amount of money being thrown at the people around me.

So I saved my money, got a passport, and moved to London. My plan was to study at the Slade School of Fine Art. I was twenty-two by then, old to be a first-time student, but I wanted
to learn some aspects of my craft that I had been too young and arrogant to understand that I needed to learn, if I was going to become as good as I wanted to be.

And I wanted to be not just good but great.

I had enough money to live on. I found a room in a squat in Crouch End, in North London, with a bunch of anarchists who spent their days screaming about Margaret Thatcher and their nights shooting up. One of them had silk-screening equipment; I started designing T-shirts for bands, and got more work doing gig posters for Dingwalls in Camden Town. I set up a makeshift studio in the basement of the squat, and made money for a while as a messenger, delivering packages to posh addresses in Kensington and Belgravia. Drugs held no romance for me, especially after I found one of my housemates dead in the bathtub, a needle in the crook of her arm like a macabre fishing lure.

I quit the messenger job. I had enough money to buy a roll of canvas, some brushes and acrylics. I spent three weeks painting for fourteen or fifteen hours a day, stopping only to bolt down some boiled eggs and lager. I put together a portfolio and sent my application for the Slade. After a month I received a letter: I had been rejected.

“Screw that,” I said. I got drunk and tore the rejection letter into pieces, glued them onto a canvas and painted around them, slashes of orange and gamboge and fuchsia forming the outline of an ornate building in flames, with my own face peering from one of the windows.

I called the painting
Art School Burnout
. When I had a dozen
completed canvases, I schlepped them around the city. I told gallery owners I’d shown with Anna Greenhouse. I gave them silk-screened T-shirts of Margaret Thatcher dancing with a skeleton, and Jah Wobble as the Mona Lisa with a spliff hanging from his mouth. It took a year, but I finally got into a group show in Farringdon. I was the only artist who sold a painting.

I began to make contacts in the small, closed world of gallery owners and collectors in the city. The 1980s art-grab had made its way to London: I told everyone I was from New York, and that, along with my T-shirts and the fact I lived in a building slated for demolition to make way for council housing, gave me more street cred.

Even though I still couldn’t get a solo show, I continued to sell my paintings, and was invited to gallery openings, where I’d stash hors d’oeuvres in my satchel and drink as much cheap white wine as I could before the crowds thinned.

It was at one of these that I met a tall, sweet-faced blonde who worked for a catering company. After I’d snagged my fourth plastic cup of wine, she sidled up to me with her tray and whispered, “If you come out back afterward, I’ll just give you a fucking bottle, okay?”

I flushed, but she laughed and added, “I mean it. They just chuck this stuff unless someone takes it.”

I hung around till the gallery closed, then slipped out to a catering van idling beside the back door. The waitress stood beside it, still in her work livery of cheap black pants, white blouse, black vest.

“Here.” She held out a half-full bottle, but when I reached for it, she stuck it behind her back. “I have a better offer. How ’bout I buy you dinner?”

“You can afford that?”

She raised an eyebrow, grinning. “Who says it will be an expensive dinner?”

We went to a small bistro in Islington. Her name was Olivia. She had taken ancient Greek at the University of Reading; the catering job was a part-time gig while she worked on her doctorate. When I stood to go to the ladies room, I picked up my satchel and the dog-eared paperback of
Seasons in Hell
fell out.

“Rimbaud, huh?” Olivia picked up the book and handed it to me. “You know he lived near here? Camden Town, on Royal College Street. I’ll show you, it’s just a few blocks from the flat.”

I shook my head. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No, it’s true. He and Verlaine, they had rooms in a house there. There’s a blue plaque on the building, I see it every time I walk past.”

“That’s incredible,” I said, and slid the book back into my bag. I’d long ago stopped listening for Arthur’s footsteps—but without knowing it, I’d been following them.

Dinner turned into drinks after dinner, and then into a hot make-out session outside the Highbury Fields tube station.

“Your tattoo is beautiful,” she murmured. “You want to see mine?”

She drew away from me, tugging at her sleeve to display a symbol inked upon her bicep. I went cold. “What—what is that?”

“Christ, you look like you’ve seen a ghost!” She traced the tattoo’s outline with her finger: an archaic-looking bone crescent with seven lines drawn between its points. “It’s the lyre of Orpheus—that’s what my dissertation is on, Orphic studies. You know Orpheus, right?”

I stared, stunned, at her arm. “Yeah, I mean—vaguely.”

“Ah, the advantages of an American education! Well, in ancient Greek myths, Orpheus is the greatest singer and musician on Earth. He could charm anyone and anything through his music—rocks, birds, gods, and men. His wife was Eurydice, who some sources say was the daughter of Apollo. When she was bitten by a poisonous snake and died, Orpheus was so grief-stricken he went to the Underworld and pleaded with Hades and Persephone, the rulers of the dead, to return Eurydice to him. He played his lyre and sang so beautifully that even Hades wept, and finally agreed that he would allow Eurydice to accompany her husband back to the daylight world—the only time Hades ever permitted one of the dead to leave his kingdom.

“But he set one restriction: Eurydice could follow Orpheus to the overworld—but if Orpheus looked back at her even once, no matter how briefly, she would be doomed to return to the dead.”

I fought to keep my voice calm. “And?”

“They made it as far as the entrance to the Underworld. Orpheus could hear Eurydice a few steps behind him, but as the first light shone into the tunnel he couldn’t bear it anymore: he had to make certain she was still there.

“So he looked back—and lost her forever. She struggled to
reach for him, but her arms clasped empty air; she whispered farewell and died once more, this time for eternity. That’s what Ovid says, anyway.”

“What—what happened to Orpheus?”

“Some say he killed himself out of grief. Afterward he became the patron of artists, and the lyre of Orpheus was the symbol most associated with him. Then the Orphic mystery religions sprang up. Most of them have some sort of ritual in which initiates are forbidden to look behind them. That’s what my dissertation’s about—Orphic survivals in early Coptic texts.”

Something in my face stopped her. Then she laughed. “Merle, you look like your dog just died! It’s only a myth—Orpheus wasn’t a real person.”

“Yeah, sure. Just, you know … it’s so sad.” I gave her a broken smile. “Did he—is there anything in the myth about—well, about him fishing?”

Olivia gave me an odd look. “That’s very strange.”

“What?”

“That you’d ask that. About fishing. It’s what I’m arguing in my dissertation: that early Christians stole that symbol—the fish—from the Orphic mysteries, and attached it to their own religion. It’s fairly obscure, but there’s quite a bit of evidence on vase paintings. The ones I’m studying all have a symbol representing a fish, and many show Orpheus in a boat with a fishing pole. You can see them on some vases in the British Museum. The lyre of Orpheus, too—not the real lyre,” she added. “That doesn’t actually exist. But the symbol does.”

I leaned against the wall of the station. “Holy shit.”

Olivia grinned. “You mean ‘Holy fish.’ Don’t they teach you this stuff in American schools?”

“Not really.”

“But you’ve been to the British Museum, right?”

“Not yet. I haven’t had time.”

“Hmm.” Olivia put her arms around me and leaned forward, until her forehead touched mine. “I can see there are huge gaps in your education, Merle Tappitt. The sort of things that only a worldly Englishwoman with a degree in classics can explain. So I think we’d better start right now, don’t you?”

“Oh yes,” I murmured, and kissed her.

Camden Town, London

DECEMBER 1874 / DECEMBER 1994

HE RETURNED TO
London—he and Verlaine had lived there after they fled Paris. Now Verlaine was in prison in Belgium, sentenced for two years after shooting Arthur in the hand: a lovers’ quarrel that had ended in disaster. The memory twisted Arthur’s insides, guilt and desire and loathing tangled into an inextricable knot that had unraveled into his poetry. While he had taken other lovers since Verlaine’s imprisonment, he knew that there was one knot inside him that would never be undone.