Sea Lovers (9 page)

Paul and I were offered a joint show at a new gallery on the edge of Tribeca, an unpromising location at best. The opening was not a fashionable scene: very cheap wine, plastic cups, a few plates strewn with wedges of rubbery cheese. The meager crowd of celebrants was made up largely of the artists' friends and relatives. The artists themselves, dressed in their best jeans and T-shirts, huddled together near the back, keeping up a pointless conversation in order to avoid overhearing any chance remarks about the paintings. I was naturally surprised when there appeared above the chattering heads of this inelegant crowd the expensively coiffed, unnaturally tan, and generally prosperous-looking head of Meyer Anspach.

“Slumming,” Paul said to me when he spotted Anspach.

I smiled. David Hines, the gallery owner, had come to riveted attention and flashed Paul and me a look of triumph as he stepped out to welcome Anspach. Greta, a friend of Paul's who painted canvases that were too big for most gallery walls and who was, I knew, a great admirer of Anspach, set down her plastic cup on the drinks table and rubbed her eyes hard with her knuckles.

David was ushering Anspach past the paintings, which he scarcely glanced at, to the corner where Paul and I stood openmouthed. Anspach launched into a monologue about how we had all been poor painters together, poor artists in Brooklyn, doing our best work, because we were unknown and had only ourselves to please. This was during his blue period, a long time ago, those paintings were some of his favorites, a turning point, the suffering of that time had liberated him, he couldn't afford to buy back those paintings himself, that's how valuable they had become.

This was the first time I heard Anspach's litany about his blue period.

It was awful standing there, with David practically rubbing his hands together for glee and Paul emanating hostility, while Anspach went on and on about the brave comrade painters of long ago. Cheap wine, free love.
La vie de bohème
, I thought, only Maria didn't die of tuberculosis. I couldn't think of anything to say, or rather my thoughts came in such a rush I couldn't sort one out for delivery, but Paul came to my rescue by pointing out with quiet dignity that he and I still lived in Brooklyn. Then David got the idea of taking a photograph of Anspach, and Anspach said he'd come to see the pictures, which nobody believed, but we all encouraged him to have a look while David ran to his office for his camera. Paul and I stood there for what seemed a long time watching Anspach stand before each painting with his mouth pursed and his eyebrows slightly lifted, thinking God knows what. In spite of my valid personal reasons for despising him, I understood that I still admired Anspach as a painter, and I wanted to know, once and for all, what he saw when he looked at my work. Paul eased his way to the drinks table and tossed back a full glass of the red wine. David appeared with his camera, and after a brief conversation with Anspach, he called Paul and me over to flank Anspach in front of my painting titled
Welfare. Welfare
had an office building in the foreground, from the windows of which floated heavenward a dozen figures of bureaucrats in coats and ties, all wearing shiny black shoes that pointed down as they went up, resembling the wings of black crows. In David's photograph, two of these figures appear to be rising out of Anspach's head, another issues from one of Paul's ears. Anspach is smiling broadly, showing all his teeth. Paul looks diffident, and I look wide-eyed, surprised. When she saw this photo, Yvonne said, “You look like a sheep standing next to a wolf.”

After the photograph session, Anspach stepped away from Paul and me and walked off with David, complaining that he had another important engagement. He did not so much as glance back at the door. He had appeared unexpectedly; now he disappeared in the same way. David returned to us with the bemused, wondering expression of one who has met up with a natural force and miraculously survived. He took from his coat pocket a sheet of red adhesive dots and went around the room carefully affixing them to the frames of various pictures. Anspach had bought four of mine and three of Paul's.

I don't attribute my modest success to Anspach, but I guess there are people who do. I attribute it to the paintings, to the quality of the work. I have to do that or I'd just give up. Still, there's always that nagging anxiety for any artist who actually begins to sell, that he's compromised something, that he's imitating the fashion. I'm not making a fortune, but I like selling a painting; I like the enthusiasm of the new owner, and I particularly like handing the check to Yvonne. It makes me lazy, though, and complacent. Some days I don't paint at all. I go downtown and check out the competition at the various galleries, drink a few espressos, talk with Paul, who isn't doing as well as I am but seems incapable of envy, of wishing me anything but good.

I sometimes wonder what van Gogh's paintings would have been like if he had been unable to turn them out fast enough to satisfy an eager, approving public. Suppose he'd been treated, as Picasso was, as such a consummate master that any little scribble on a notepad was worth enough to buy the hospital where he died. Would that ear still have had to go?

Yesterday, as I walked out of a café in Chelsea, I ran straight into Anspach, who was coming in. I greeted him politely enough, I always do, but I haven't exchanged more than a few words with him since Maria's death. He pretends not to notice this, or perhaps he thinks it's the inevitable fate of the great artist to be tirelessly snubbed by his inferiors. He asked me to go back in with him, to have an espresso. “You know, I just sold a painting of yours I've had for five years,” he said. “Your stock is going up.”

It was chilly out, threatening rain, and I'd had an argument with Yvonne that morning. She'd told me that I was lazy, that all I did was sleep and drink coffee, which isn't true, but I had defended myself poorly by accusing her of being obsessed with work, money, getting ahead, and we'd parted heatedly, she to work, I to the café. I was not in the mood to have an espresso with Meyer Anspach. He looked prosperous, expansive, pleased with himself. His breath was warm on my face, and it smelled bitter, as if he'd been chewing some bitter root.

“It must be nice to have an eye for investments,” I said. “It keeps you from having to buy anything you actually care about.”

He laughed. “The only paintings I ever want to keep are my own,” he said. “I'm always trying to find a way around having to sell them.”

“I get it,” I said, trying to push past him. “Happy to be of service.”

“Looks like I'm the one in service,” he observed. “When I sell a painting of yours, it makes everything you do worth more.”

This was an intolerable assertion. “Don't do me any favors, okay, Anspach?” I snapped. I had made it to the sidewalk. “I know perfectly well why you bought my paintings.”

Anspach came out on the sidewalk with me. He looked eager for a fight. “And why is that?” he said. “What is your theory about that?”

“You want me to forgive you for Maria,” I said. “But I never will.”

“You forgive me!” he said. “I think it's the other way around.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“You led her on, Jack, don't tell me you didn't. I was wearing her out and there you were, always ready with the coffee and the bunnies, and trying to feel her up on the subway.”

“That's not true,” I protested.

“She told me,” he said. “She said you were in love with her, and I said, Okay, then go, but by the time she got around to making the decision, you were shut up with Yvonne. You closed her out and she gave up. That's why she went off the roof.”

“If you'd treated her decently, she wouldn't have needed to turn to me,” I said.

“But she did,” he shot back. “You made her think she could, and she did. But you couldn't wait for her. You had to have Yvonne. Well, that's fine, Jack. Maria wouldn't have made you happy. She was always depressed; she was always tired. She was never going to do better than waitressing, and sooner or later she was going to go off the roof. Yvonne is a hard worker, and she makes good money. You made the right choice.”

“What a swine you are,” I said.

He laughed. “You hate me to ease your own conscience,” he said. “I was never fooled by you.”

“Shut up,” I said. I started walking away as fast as I could. I looked back over my shoulder and saw him standing there, smiling at me, as if we were the best of friends. “Shut up,” I shouted, and two young women walking toward me paused in their conversation to look me over warily.

I went straight home, but it took nearly two hours. The subway was backed up; a train had caught fire between Fourteenth Street and Astor Place. I kept thinking of what Anspach had said, and it made my blood pressure soar. What a self-serving bastard, I thought. As crude as a caveman. I particularly hated his remark about feeling Maria up on the subway. I never did. I never would have. He would have done it, certainly, if he had been with her on those long, cold trips across the river, when she rested her head innocently against his arm; he would have taken advantage of that opportunity, so he assumed I had.

I tortured my memory for any recollection of having brushed carelessly against Maria's breasts. It made me anxious to reach in this way, after so many years, for Maria, and to discover that she was not alive in my memory. I couldn't see her face, remember her perfume. I kept having a vision of a skeleton, which was surely all Maria was now, of sitting on the subway next to a skeleton, and of rubbing my arm against the hard, flat blade of her breastbone.

I spent the rest of the morning trying to paint, but I got nowhere. I could see the painting of Maria's hands clutching the edge of a chute, and behind her, that ominous blue, Anspach's blue period, waiting to swallow her up forever. In the afternoon I picked up my daughter, Bridget, from her school, and we spent an hour at the corner library. When we got back home, Yvonne was there, standing at the kitchen counter, chopping something. Was she still mad at me from the morning? I went up beside her on the pretense of washing my hands. “Day okay?” I said.