Set This House on Fire (62 page)

“I think maybe sometimes you’ll be able to see how this figured in with what happened to me there in Sambuco. I remember that morning so well. The nightmare, and the chills running up and down my back—these chills of pure recognition and understanding—and then, after that, just lying there, for the first time in as long as I could remember thinking of Lonnie and his ugly flat mug, and the cabin and the smell, and the picture and those sweet sad proud black faces, like ghosts still haunting me after so many years. And the guilt and the shame half-smothering me there in bed, adding such a burden to the guilt and shame I already felt that I knew that, shown one more dirty face, one more foul and unclean image of myself, I would not be able to support it.

“And then that morning! Staggering out into that lemony spring morning afloat with pollen and bees, and a strumming of music and rich-throated huckstering shouts and cries and a great shrilling choir of birds as if the Lord Himself had turned into a field full of fat larks gone all berserk with beauty and joy. And me adrift in the midst of all this ecstasy—hung-over, hacking up my guts, and feeling about the size of a gnat. That nightmare kept working on me, coming back in sort of fitful flickers. I felt like slitting my throat.

“And then on top of that there was Mason and this damn Kasz business.”

“What was that?”

“Well, this painter fellow Kasz that Mason got me confused with. One thing, I’d never even heard of him, famous as he was. That’s how far I was removed from America and the art world and so on. It was really quite comical—the first part—in a grisly way. What apparently happened, you see, was this. Mason had just landed in Naples with Rosemarie and this cerise Cadillac of his and he came up to Sambuco and became so smitten by the place that he figured this would be just the spot to settle down in and write his play. Well, what I gathered later is that he fell into conversation with Windgasser, who not only sold Mason on taking up quarters in the palace, but also let drop the fact that there was an American painter living downstairs. Now you know that marble-mouthed way of speaking Windgasser had. He says ‘Cass’ in an offhand way probably, and Mason jumps to the conclusion that it’s the famous mad painter of Rimini. I don’t guess it was very sharp of Mason, but it was an honest enough mistake, given Windgasser’s diction, and given Mason’s personality, and you know this kind of letch he had for—well, capital-A art and artists, this Bohemian streak he had. And even someone as coony as Mason could forget that Kasz was a bachelor and lived in Rimini with his mother and so on. Anyway, what he obviously thought was that I was this crazy Polack, this wonder-boy of American art, and he moved right on in upstairs. God only knows what he was really thinking, but it might have been something like: This is it. Man oh man I’m in clover. Me and old Kasz, living it up art wise on the Amalfi coast. Shuck all that phony movie and Broadway world I’ve been in so long and finally get cracking on the
vie artistique.
I think he figured it’d be just him and Kasz, living it up together from then on out. Sort of like all the great historic friendships—you know, Van Gogh and Gauguin—only he’d be the writing end and Kasz’d be the painting and sculpting end and they’d go down through the ages together, hand in hand, as cozy as two burrs on a hound-dog’s ear. Only to really get this good thing going he had to be quite cool and calm and collected about it, if you see what I mean. That is, he couldn’t present himself and go in there with a couple of big paws stuck out and drooling all over like some auxiliary Elk. Especially I guess when he must have heard that this guy was something of an oddball and might take a poke at him if he looked like he was some tourist on the make. No, he had to be real cool and reserved, you see, and all the ass-kissing had to come in very subtly, and that’s just what he done.

“Well anyway, that morning I was standing there on the balcony, trying to get that nightmare out of my system, when I heard this big commotion out in the courtyard. What it was, of course, was a bunch of Fausto’s slaves tramping about and carrying Mason’s junk up to the top part of the palace. Such elegant paraphernalia you never saw—aluminum luggage and leather luggage and golf clubs and a dozen hatboxes and God knows what all. I just stood there blinking for a while in my skivvies, trying to figure out what was going on and who had come to stay, and then just as I started to go back inside, the outer door to the courtyard flung itself open, and there he stood—this loose long lanky Mason, handsome as a Vitalis ad and looking about as American as it’s possible to get, with his huge beautiful Rosemarie clutching at his arm. I can remember it as clearly as I can remember anything in my life—Mason standing there with this sort of expensive white flannel costume on, and sun glasses, and a pleasant inquisitive half-grin on his face, as amiablelooking as you’d ever want to ask, along with this really ingratiating quality of being somewhat lost and confused and being ever so grateful if you’d just point him in the right direction, and with that great blond undulating hunk of sex, that wonderful Rolls-Royce of a humping machine draped over his elbow. And then as I stood there with my mouth hanging open, Mason stepped forward with Rosemarie slinking beside him and came up to me and said, cool but oh so infinitely polite: ‘Cass?’ He was just chock-full of politesse and humanity and good breeding, and he stuck out his hand and without knowing it I stuck out mine and took it, and then he gave a thin well-bred friendly little smile, saying, ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you very, very much,’ and it was all done with such grace and aplomb that it would have melted the heart out of a brass monkey. Well, what do you do in a situation like that? I guess at first it flashed through my mind that this was the beginning of some kind of a con game, yet he really didn’t look like a man who was out to sell me anything—he was too beautifully decked out for that—and I suppose I just figured that if he wanted to call me by my first name it was a little forward and familiar coming from a total stranger, but he was an American, after all, and Americans were glad-handers in general, and that if he wanted to meet me very much it was only because Windgasser had told him I was an old hand, more or less,. and he wanted to get checked out on life in Sambuco. Anyway, I was a real pushover, I’ll tell you.

“So I allowed as how I was me and just as I tried to apologize for being in my underdrawers he introduced me to Rosemarie, and she gave a sort of whinny—I think she must have been as awe-struck at what she thought was the golden boy of art as Mason was, or even more so—and bubbled that she was so pleased to meet me and all, and stuck those beautiful knockers in my face, and said, ‘We’d heard you were ever so unapproach able. Why, there’s nothing stand-offish about you at all!’ I remember that word, stand-offish. Frankly I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about, but if that’s what she had heard about me and I wasn’t that way at all, and if she was willing to come here and parade that beautiful lush body around and give me the impression that she was ready to smother me with it on the spot, then I didn’t care what she was driving at. All that flesh! That tremendous heaving wonderland of a groaning carnal paradise! To think that that great walking Beautyrest of a woman was all wasted on Mason. It’s enough to break your heart, even now.

“Anyway, there wasn’t too much else to do but invite them in. I put on a pair of pants and of course the place looked like an accident ward, but as a matter of fact I imagine that’s just what they were set up to expect from a mad genius. On the way in I remember Mason patting me on the back and saying, ‘somehow I expected a more frail and wiry person.’ Well, I guess it crossed my mind that Fausto had given him a complete if inaccurate rundown on me, and I vaguely wondered why, but I was still in the dark, see—deaf, dumb, and blind—so I shrugged it off and muttered something pleasant and got the conversation switched around to him. Because up until then he hadn’t explained himself at all. So while I was fixing up the coffee on the hot plate and Rosemarie stood at the window ooh-ing and ah-ing at the view, old Mason just plunked himself down in the armchair and rared back and really gave me the works. What a snow job! Said he was doing Europe and all, said he was fed up with the New York rat race, and said he finally realized that here in Sambuco was the place he’d always longed for. And it’s funny, you know, the impression he created while he talked—it was all as charming as hell. These little wry jokes about himself, and funny little puns and sour remarks and so on. And the way he conveyed to me that he was a playwright and a man of talent—it was subtle as hell. Things like saying in a flat, offhand, mildly disgusted voice, “Critical success in the theater, you know, is synonymous with popular success,’ and you must hand it to him, that’s about as cagey and collected as you can get in the fine art of prevarication, because it was in regard to a play of his he said had been produced the year before, and had flopped. I mean, a real clumsy cross-eyed blunderer of a liar would have fallen all over himself trying to snow a person with his success. But not Mason. No, you see, too
fragrant
a lie would get found out. So he works on the premise that Waldo probably don’t keep up with the theater, being so far away and doubtless having little interest in it anyway, so that a nice soft medium-sized lie will do, and he very artfully mentions his play, and says that it flopped, and tags on this kind of embittered but manfully stoical remark about critical and popular success, so that in the end the effect is simply that of a dedicated artist who has been hooted down by the rabble and the dimwitted critics yet has the courage to keep his chin up and struggle on. What an actor Mason was! He could have sold rotgut whiskey to the W.C.T.U. He sure impressed me, all right, so that by the time we’d finished the coffee and he’d dropped a few names—but tastefully, you see, and just the ones anybody might recognize in the theater—we were almost what you might say buddy-buddy—no, not that exactly, but I’d taken a shine to him, in a casual way.

“Well, along about then began the really touching part. We sat there in the sunlight on the balcony for a while, chatting and admiring the view. About this time Rosemarie looked over and gave a kind of mental nudge to Mason. Then a little flicker passed across his face and he turned and beamed at me and said in the nicest way: ‘I wonder if you’d do us a really extraordinary favor. I know—’ And he paused, then went on: ‘Well, I know how reticent you are about showing your work to strangers. And the Lord knows I don’t want to appear
presumptuous.
But I wonder if you’d do us the great favor of letting us look at some of your work. We’d just—” And then he paused again with this sort of half-flustered and abashed look on his face, as if he felt he was being presumptuous after all. Then Rosemarie clutched her hands together and turned them outwards and tucked them into her crotch like women do, and she leaned forward and chimed in with a ‘Please do! Oh please do!’ Well, you could have dropped me on the spot with a broomstraw. Would I show them my work? Would I show them my
work?
Why, it was like asking some beat-up lifer of a convict if he’d care to have the keys to the front gate. Bleeding God, what a question to ask! In going on close to ten years I could count on my fingers the number of people who had wanted to see my work, or had seen it—outside of maybe Poppy and the kids, and the strays you pick up looking over your shoulder in the park or somewhere, and a couple of goofy dogs or so. Now here comes this nice, clean-cut, charming young American, and he’s not only so engaging and witty but he’s also dying to see my work—can you see how I might have been taken by the guy? Well, I guess I beamed a bit, and blushed, and went through the old gee-whiz routine, and then after a while I relented and said something like: ‘Well, if you really want to.’ And they began to look happy about that, and expectant, you know, and then all of a sudden it occurred to me that maybe all of us, both them and me, had bitten off a little bit more than we could chew. Because the fact of the matter was that—well, I just didn’t have a hell of a lot to show off. In the first place, I simply hadn’t done much in a long, long time. In the second place, practically everything I’d done that I considered halfway decent I’d done in America and had stored at Poppy’s house in New Castle, and all the rest I had with me—this really grim, interior, tight-assed stuff I’d done in Paris and Rome—was work I really couldn’t be proud of at all. But Mason and Rosemarie were still insisting and prodding me, you see, and as I say I was in quite a glow over all this attention—it still hadn’t occurred to me to wonder just who in hell had told them I was reticent—and so finally I got to my feet and gave a sort of boyish grin and said: ‘Well, if you really want to see them, it’s not much but—O.K.’ And I remember them giving these sly, knowing, tickled little looks to each other, pretty much for my benefit, all as if to say, ‘Heavens, how charming this guy is with all his modesty.’

“So I went downstairs to the
guardaroba
where I had everything stored and I drug up all of this miserable, pallid, ineffectual, self-centered stuff I’d done for the past several years: five or six dreary figures and landscapes in oil, and some water colors, and seven or eight ink and crayon sketches—that was about all. And I brought the whole pathetic mess back upstairs and got some books out to prop up the unrolled canvases against the wall, and rummaged around and found some tacks to peg the upper corners to the molding, and set out the water colors and the sketches around the room so that they’d be displayed with the proper delicacy and dignity. And even as I was doing all this—proud and hopeful in a way, see, and just itching and itching for some kind of praise—I began to sweat and tighten up inside, knowing every second that it was all an outrageous disaster from beginning to end. But as you know, Mason was never one to be daunted by the mere realities of a situation, and neither was Rosemarie, for that matter. If this character was the young—the young tycoon of American art, the big wheel, the golden young Leonardo of the mid-twentieth century, well by God you can bet your hat and ass that Mason and Rosemarie were going to make no gaffes in the maestro’s presence. Nossir. They were going to be properly reverent and humble—not abased, see, not inferior or servile or anything like that, because that would be pretty unsophisticated—but just properly reverent about this magic art, and humble, just like anyone should be, after all, who doesn’t know or feel a goddam thing about painting, but is
up
on it, having gotten all the latest poop in
Life
magazine. So in they slunk from the balcony, wreathed in rosy expectation. Godalmighty, you should have seen them. For the life of
me,
I couldn’t figure them out. You couldn’t have asked for more wonderment, for more fatuous credulity, from a pair of beauticians on a pilgrimage to Albert Schweitzer. Or some other Great Soul. Yet still they were playing it cool, you see. They wanted to think about it a bit, to ponder and muse and absorb—to soak it up, if you see what I mean. So they began to pass very slowly around the room, lingering for a long time before each painting or sketch and murmuring to each other in these voices that were almost inaudible, and they were holding hands, and every now and then—with their backs to me, you see—I’d see Rosemarie’s hand clutch his in a kind of convulsion and she’d give a little gasp of wonderment or delight that I could barely hear, and they’d be cocking their heads to one side and another like a couple of parakeets. ‘Aha!’ Mason would say. ‘I see you’re flirting with the representational. Interesting phase.’ And I really mean it—I was snowed for a long while there. Because although I felt deep down that this stuff I had done was pretty feeble, who after all was I to tell? These two certainly didn’t seem to be fakers; if anything they seemed to be more honest and earnest—more genuine, you might say—than almost any young Americans I had seen in Europe. They seemed to really
care,
if you know what I mean, and perhaps I was all wrong about what I’d done. I remember that it passed across my mind with a sense of delight that was almost like rapture that maybe this, after all, was the turning point. I mean, maybe what I had done all this time was really terrific, was basically first-rate stuff, only my own miserable selfloathing had not allowed me to accept the fact or to grant the worth, so that all that had been needed all along was somebody like this guy Mason to hop out of nowhere like a genie from a bottle and put me on the road to acceptance and affirmation—salvation, even. What crap.