The Beautiful Room Is Empty (2 page)

I can remember visiting Paul in his studio on a cold winter day that had only brightened for an instant before paling, like a deep sleeper who turns over just once. The street outside the studio was lined with cars buried under snow. Each studio windowpane was frosted along its edges. Paul paced around his cubicle and made coffee for me with the same bemused attentiveness he devoted to everything. He wasn’t big, but the effect was of Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Morally, too, because he gave the impression of being superior to everyone. Not that he was arrogant. On the contrary, his very patience and humility attested to the care he had to bring to the strange expectations of other people. We both sat and looked and looked at his latest painting, which I admitted to myself I would have considered a fraud if I’d seen it a month earlier, before I knew Paul and his reputation, before I’d felt his force. Now I considered his painting to be heroic, an unlikely war waged by this most diffident of men. Ivan suggested that someone should steal Paul’s paintings away from him, since, to save money, he kept painting one masterpiece over another and his whole oeuvre could be found on one thick canvas. Paul laughed at Ivan and said, “It’s student work. I’m just a student.”

At that age (I must have been seventeen) I had no way of classifying or dismissing this encounter. I couldn’t say, as, horribly, I might have said later, “He’s a vigorous but undisciplined abstractionist who’s slightly provincial.” I was so young that I attributed the successes of a whole school to this single marginal member. And I liked him because I felt he liked me, no matter how remotely. Perhaps his remoteness was precisely what I trusted. I brought him some of the poetry I was writing, or rather my verse translations
of Book IV of the
Aeneid
that we were working on in Latin class, and Paul said my version sounded like Milton.

“Is that good?” I asked.

“Very good,” he said. “It’s so big and full and extravagant.”

Every afternoon, from three to five, when the other boys were either playing sports or attending study hall, I’d dart across Academy Row to the art academy. I was probably breaking a rule, but it had never been formulated because no student had ever wanted to infringe it before. I had to wear a coat and tie as the prep school required, but the bohemian painters in their coveralls and work shirts forgave me that; they saw me as a prisoner of a “bourgeois” system I’d soon be escaping.

On Saturday nights, when the boys’ school, the girls’ school, and the art academy convened in the gymnasium for a movie, I filed in with the other boys—but then broke away and, wearing my Brooks Brothers suit, sat in the midst of all those beards and peasant shawls. I sat there blushing because I was afraid to lose my prep school friends—I was a fearful, conservative boy.

A decade later in America, art became a national pastime, and museum-going a cheap weekend date, a sort of Sunday drive without the car, but in the mid-fifties my painters were far from acceptable. That was a time and place where there was little consumption of culture and no dissent, not in appearance, belief, or behavior. There were very few foreign movies, no amused stories in the press about the hijinks of the avant-garde. Everyone ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and people decided whether they were Democrats or Republicans. The three most heinous crimes known to man were Communism, heroin addiction, and homosexuality. Boys played sports, girls planned their trousseaus, parents and children alike read comic strips in the paper and shared a
chuckle. Of course there were the motorcycle-riding, hell-raising, hooky-playing “hoods,” but our school didn’t have any of those.

It felt, at least to me, like a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday, all stuffed in one oversized car and discussing the mileage they were getting and the next restroom stop they’d be making, a country where no one else was like me—or worse, where there was no question of talking about the self and its discontent, isolation, self-hatred, and burning ambition for sex and power.

And yet here were these painters and potters and sculptors. Not just the odd, tormented weirdo I’d known before, the prissy teacher’s pet, the scrawny organ student sneaking into chapel to rehearse, the wimp lurking around after shop to make something pretty for his grandmother—no, here the freaks had banded together, they passed the communal wine cup in the movie’s flickering darkness, they snorted when the hero on the screen pledged to defend America and all it stands for.

They seemed to have bought the right to eccentricity by working very hard. That was the American part. They’d wear layers and layers of sweaters, fleece-lined boots, hats and babushkas, mittens with the fingers missing, and they’d stamp their feet against the cold as they labored late into the night. The wind slipped in through rattling skylights and cold seeped up off stone floors; even at noon the sky never rivaled in brightness the humming neon tubes above them, while their vats of clay grew crystals and the nails they drove into boards seared cold into their naked fingers—but they worked on and on, staring at these big nightmare cakes they never finished icing.

I didn’t have an appointment with Ivan or Paul. I was wearing nothing but khakis and a sports coat despite the freezing winter winds. I darted across Academy Row, skipping
stylistic centuries as I left the fake gothic battlements of the boys’ school for the unadorned, 1930s modernism of the art school. No cars were moving down the road. Everything was silent. Rain had pockmarked the snow before last night’s freeze set in.

In the studio building the radiators knocked slowly and constantly. In each cell someone was working. Here and there the odor of cigarettes or coffee scorched through the blanket smell of oil paint. An atmosphere prevailed of intellectual and manual labor, of frustrated but hopeful solitude—something serious, unrebukable. That was when I had my first look at Maria. I didn’t yet know who she was. I just glanced into a studio and saw her there, paintbrush in hand, eyes closed, waltzing slowly around the room. The radio was playing the waltz from
Der Rosenkavalier
.

Paul greeted me with his Martian approximation of a smile but no handshake.

“Am I disturbing you?” I asked.

“No,” he said, cocking his head to one side as though to test the accuracy of his reply.

And that was that. He pointed to a canvas-backed director’s chair. I slid into it. He pressed a cup of coffee into my cold hands. Then he regained his high stool and we both looked and looked at his painting. People say that painting is an instantaneous not a temporal art, but for me the contemplation of Paul’s work unfolded thickly in time. What does he want me to say? What words of mine would please him, even help him? Should I say nothing? Those were the social questions that alternated with my slighter but quite real curiosity about his work.

Then I’d sneak a glance at him, at his powerful jaw propped up by his hand as though its very weight solicited support, at his smudged glasses, at the tiny spume of blond hair on his Adam’s apple that the razor had missed for several
days. I tried to imagine kissing those dry lips, wrapping my arms around that tall skinny body, but I couldn’t thread that particular loop of film through the projector. As half-consciously I inched toward my desires for men, I clung to my official goal of stifling these desires. I wanted to be a heterosexual—perhaps with a bohemian girl? Back to Paul’s canvas and its lipstick colors crosshatched by charcoal stabs, scene of a crime not yet committed.

I feared Paul attributed powers of observation to me that weren’t there. We listened to an old scratchy recording of a Bach unaccompanied cello suite. The music, so spare, so passionate, seemed at any moment about to break into speech. It cut with precision into the big soft folds of time that nearly smothered us.

In this studio with the bluish light reflected off the late-afternoon snow and the sound of outdoor voices traveling easily as over water, I felt a new form of comfort. Paul was beside me, blinking and thinking, a bird on spindly legs regarding his own gaudily cerebral paintings. A year before I’d wanted to be a Buddhist monk, but now I thought I’d prefer to be an artist of some sort. I wondered what Paul was thinking. Was he busily proposing and rejecting solutions, or was he staring into a void of indecision, of fear about going on with the work? I couldn’t tell, since he did not like to talk.

His silences were enough like my father’s to fill me with grave anticipation. But he himself was completely different—as thin as my father was fat, as deferential as my father was overbearing, as open to new ideas as my father was closed.

On the particle-board partition that separated his cubicle from the next, Paul had thumbtacked things that might inspire him: a reproduction from
Time
of an Arshile Gorky drawing; a
National Geographic
photo of neon-bright tropical fish darting through dun-colored fans of coral; a pencil sketch
he had scrawled on a paper place mat from Howard Johnson’s.

I glanced at my watch and realized I had to hurry back to school for the ringing of the next bell—I was on waiter duty at supper time. “How wonderful it must be to have long hours of freedom,” I said.

Behind the glinting, anarchist’s glasses Paul’s eyes looked exhausted: “Someday you’ll have more freedom than you’ll want.” I could see his freedom was glued to him like a leech. Every day he looked thinner, older, more fragile, almost like someone recently dead who appears in our dreams, unshaved and reproachful.

At the party in Jim Coburn’s studio (he made stained glass) I started talking to Maria. I’d never before been to a grown-up party as a grown-up and I’m sure I took it more seriously than anyone else there—I must be the only one alive who still remembers that casual event, a birthday drink in the middle of the afternoon.

Maria was wearing a man’s shirt of white Oxford cloth; the button-down collar was unbuttoned and tipped up in back, so that it framed her long pale neck. In the hollow of her neck there was a smudge of red paint, just where a grandmother in a play might have worn a cameo on a black ribbon.

She was talking to a young man who seemed all hair, a haystack of hair; his shoulder-length hair merged into a russet-highlighted beard, which in turn seemed to grow into his brown poncho, to be its father. Maria was wielding a cigarette unconvincingly, sipping wine, and squinting. But when I glanced back a moment later, she was wide-eyed and laughing. Her smile looked so clean, as white as the whites of her eyes. She was really laughing in an almost soundless quake, but her eyes were blind with tears of amusement. When Ivan introduced us, she wiped away the tears and dialed down the brilliance of her smile.

“You’re the one!” she said, very kindly. “Everyone’s talking about the Boy Who Dared to Cross the Street.” And she laughed in the softest, most reassuring way to invite me to see myself as a droll rebel. “Let me get you some more wine,” she said, and a second later she was pushing past dangling panels of colored glass.

We found ourselves in her dormitory room. Like everything else in the art academy, her room had a distinctive odor I’ve never encountered since except once, recently, in the Chanel boutique of a Paris department store. I almost asked the saleswoman what the smell could be, but the most important things in our intimate lives can’t be discussed with strangers, except in books.

I was flushed from the wine, which, like an old-fashioned movie director, had edited out the entrances and exits and now was tracing a halo around the starlet’s profile. Everything in the common room had been chosen by the great Finnish architect who’d built the school, from the molded blond plywood chair I was sitting in to the unbleached muslin curtains. Outside, saltimbanques of snow were leaping up and flipping backward.

That first visit I noticed several things about Maria that don’t usually go together—her hard intellectual zeal, for she was telling me about John Dewey’s
Art and Experience
, and her motherly kindness and love of coziness, for she’d tucked a down comforter over my legs, something she called a “bleemo” and that years later I realized must be a funny German-American pronunciation of
plumeau
. She did have a sharp way of arguing ideas, of saying “Nonsense!” or “What rubbish!” which reminded me of our English exchange student, who, despite his shingles and shyness, was intellectually combative. Of course, Maria was sufficiently American to smile every time she called me a “total idiot.”

She worried I might find her room drafty.

“You should try
our
dorms,” I said. “Deep freeze. Their tribute to Merrie Olde England.”

She poured out a cup of tea to sober me up for my return to school. “I picture your school as far more decadent than ours.”

“No such luck,” I said.

Because they were both men, I was more drawn to Ivan and Paul than to Maria, at least at first. I was always trying to figure out their schedules, to find them in, to visit them without troubling them. I spaced out my visits.

When I ran into Maria a week later, she was standing beside a broken-down old station wagon and talking to a tall woman in coveralls. When introduced, the woman shook my hand with a hot hand she drew out of a rawhide workman’s glove.

Maria invited me to climb in beside her and drive into town. During my three years at school I’d been downtown only twice; it was strictly against the rules.

It was snowing. The wipers slowly and noisily creaked against the dirty windows. We peered out of the portholes they cleared as the car crept down suburban lanes past the distant yellow lights of mansions. The bald tires slid on the ice. Maria said, “Shit,” and flashed me a tiny smile at her daring, for young ladies did not say such words. Nor did anyone in that rich Detroit suburb, the home of the “auto-mobility,” drive a ten-year-old station wagon with a rusting fender and just one new door, which was painted a different color. Everything was cozy inside the car, with its blasting heat, its tinny radio, and, in the back, a can of turpentine and the rack for paintings. Outside, the snow was draping the luxuriant black pines in white.