Yellow Mesquite (28 page)

“Aw, shit, man. All that work down the drain because you don’t like the nose?”

Mr. Mussette laid the illustration board on the bar, went around behind, and began to rinse his hands in the sink again. “Why didn’t you show me the sketches on these sooner?”
 

“Man, I’ve been trying to catch you for a week. Why do you think I brought them here? Because I can’t catch you at work, that’s why.”

Frankie laughed. It sounded strained. “You
do
still work at your own agency, Cecil?”
 

“I’m not demanding a whole new campaign, Miles. Just change the nose. We’ll discuss it tomorrow. Say nine in my office?”

Miles sighed with resignation.
 

Mr. Mussette smiled easily. “Miles, let me freshen your drink.”
 

Harley side slipped toward the wall to look at the drawings. There were no paintings, just drawings. Drawings by Degas, Vuillard, Bonnard, van Gogh, some of the German Expressionists, a Goya, a Tiepolo. There were a lot of the newer people, too; Elaine de Kooning and Larry Rivers, Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg and others he didn’t know. At first he had thought they might be reproductions, but no, they were the real deal. Whitehead and Mavis had paintings, but they didn’t have drawings, not like this. It struck him that there was an honesty, a directness in drawing that seldom made it through to the conclusion of a painting. He was overwhelmed in the presence of so much talent. And here they were, Frankie and her husband, living right in the middle of it all, arguing over the nose on a Humpty Dumpty.

“Frankie tells me you’re quite the artist,” Mr. Mussette said.
 

He nodded pleasantly to Frankie. “That’s nice, thanks, but, well, I’m afraid that remains to be seen. I came here to go to school.”

Frankie had never seen his work, so if she said anything about his work, it must have come form Mavis. He wondered if Mr. Mussette might offer him a job at the agency, but apparently not. Just as well; he couldn’t visualize himself sitting at a drawing board all day, repairing noses on Humpty Dumpty’s.

The conversation turned to talk of drawings and paintings and artists and art schools, and they all appeared to know a lot about it, especially Cecil. Cecil agreed with Frankie that it would be hard to beat the School of Visual Arts for what he wanted. He wondered about the tuition, whether it was on a par with Pratt, which Sidney had mentioned. Only he had discovered that Pratt was across the East River in Brooklyn.

The election was turning out to be a Lyndon Johnson landslide, and nobody paid much attention to the TV except for the commercials; then the men shushed everybody quiet and leaned forward, mesmerized: “That’s just too much!” they’d say. Or, “Geez, those guys over at
Y and R
are off the wall with that Gulf Oil account!” This was something new: Who ever heard of people who only watched the commercials?

But they knew about art. Real art. And here he was—
him
—Harley Jay Buchanan from Separation, Texas, sitting right here in the big middle of them—right here in the middle of New York City, within a stone’s throw of the Museum of Modern Art, sipping Jack Daniel’s and talking art with people who seemed to really care about such things. Son of a gun.
 

He glanced at the ice melting in his glass; it must be the Jack Daniel’s. How many had he had?
 

“Here, let me freshen that drink for you,” said Mr. Mussette.

Harley took the drink and sat on the sofa alongside Miles. Frankie sat in a chrome and leather chair at an angle nearby. The sound was shut off on the TV, and the charts and graphs of the election results rolled by silently. Frankie had put music on and that new group from England were unobtrusively playing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Mr. Mussette rinsed his hands. There was talk of the sit-ins taking place in the South, the growing unrest in Vietnam, the new Op art, and Larry Poons, whom Harley was unfamiliar with.
 

Soon Harley said goodnight to everyone. Frankie followed him to the foyer and collected his jacket.
 

“Thanks for having me up,” he said. “I had a nice time.”

“The Larry Rivers retrospective is on at the Jewish Museum. If you’re free tomorrow perhaps you’d like to see it?”
 

“Uh, yes, thank you. That’d be good. Real good.”

Frankie smiled her light-infused smile. “If you like I’ll show you around some, afterward, help you get a fix on the city.”

Chapter 31

The Belmore

F
RANKIE SAID
, “First, we’ll go up to the Jewish Museum to see the Larry Rivers exhibition. It’s an important show. Then we’ll take a cab downtown, get an overview of the city so you can find your way around. The city’s pretty simple, really…well, from about Fourteenth up, at least. Downtown can be a little confusing.”
 

After only a short time in the Big Apple, his mind still reeled with the contrast between the endless miles of nothing in the Permian Basin, and the claustrophobic walls of concrete and glass towering straight up at every turn in Manhattan. He sometimes found it hard to breathe and felt an urge to run, to get out into the open somewhere. But there wasn’t any “open somewhere.” He had read that rats went nuts when too many were confined in a small space.
 

As for Frankie showing him around, he knew she was going to all of this trouble out of respect for Mavis. They began the morning with rolls and coffee at a small table crowded into the back of a delicatessen on Eighth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street. Frankie pointed out that this was a neighborhood of Italian grocery stores, and that the residents of the West sides did their food shopping here. Boxes of vegetables and fruits were stacked on the sidewalks in the shade of canvas awnings. Ropes of sausage, hog heads and gutted white rabbits hung in butcher-shop windows.
 

“Larry Rivers,” he said. “I’m looking forward to this.”

“Then you’re familiar with his work?”

“Oh, sure. He’s in all the art magazines.”

She smiled. “Yes. I keep forgetting, art does exist outside of New York, doesn’t it.” She arched one brow at him. “Do I sound like a snob? Yes, I suppose I do. Oh, well, you’ll find that whatever you know, you’ll know it more intensely here in the city. There’s something here you won’t get anywhere else. It’s in the air. One seems to absorb it by osmosis.”

He recalled the epiphany—if that’s what it was—regarding Cézanne’s
Sainte-Victoire
at the Met. He was thrilled and a little frightened to think that if this was the kind of osmosis she was referring to, his mind might not be able to handle a steady diet.

“This is very nice of you,” he said, “showing me around like this.”

FRANKIE STOOD BEFORE
a painting of a large nude woman, actually two views of the same woman in one painting, one sitting and one standing. “This is Birdie,” she said. “His mother-in-law.”
 

“That’s a little dicey for me.” He was familiar with the series and the fact that Rivers’s mother-in-law had sat for them. He couldn’t imagine painting Sherylynne’s mother in the nude, or for that matter anybody else’s mom he knew. “She looks like Edouard Vuillard’s mother,” he added.

“Vuillard’s mother?” Frankie gave the painting another look.
 

“Just her features.”

“Vuillard would be furious at the comparison. He adored his mother.”

“Just physically, not the color or paint handling.”

“Actually, I can’t recall Vuillard’s paintings of his mother that clearly.”

“He painted her with that kind of round bald-faced look that Rembrandt used on his peasant women. That’s where the resemblance ends, though. As for color, this
Birdie
is just raw flesh—reds, yellows and greens. It’s keyed pretty well, though. Vuillard’s color is refined, you know, silvery.”

Frankie regarded him, the one eyebrow arched. “Silvery?”

“Vuillard and Vermeer, they both have that same high-keyed silvery light. You know Morandi’s stuff? He used a similar light.” He realized he was getting carried away, overly enthusiastic.

She fixed her gaze on him. “Morandi? You know Giorgio Morandi?”

“Uh, I’ve seen him in the magazines.”
 

Frankie’s gaze continued to linger on him. “Nobody but
nobody
knows Morandi.”
 

He couldn’t help himself: “You know how Rembrandt’s paintings sort of smolder? That thick yellow light, kind of gold-like? Well, the light in Vermeer is cool. Clean and crisp. Not all that much character to Rivers’s light. Do you think?”

Frankie observed him at length, a light frown. “How do you know this?”

“I’m sorry. Just what I’ve seen in the magazines. It’s been a long time since I talked to anybody about art.”

She gave him an appraising look, then he followed her into a room where
Russian Revolution—
a big installation consisting of Plexiglas, wooden rifles and painted Photostats—had been assembled along one wall.

Frankie gestured with a sweep of her hand. “What do you think of it, in general? Other than the light?” She tilted her head at him. He wasn’t sure whether the glint in her eyes was merriment or resentment.

He withdrew inwardly. “You know I don’t know anything about art.” He shrugged. “He’s good.”
 

“You do realize he’s one of the most important artists in the country?”

“Uh…yes. One thing for sure; he can draw like a son of a gun.”

 
He wouldn’t tell Frankie, but he thought the way Rivers blended his forms looked a lot like de Kooning. Nor did he care for the way Rivers smudged the one eye on every figure; he had turned that into a gimmick.

She studied him, a long penetrating moment. “If you’re bored, we can leave.”

He looked up, surprised. “Bored?”

“I thought you’d enjoy this show.”

“No, no. I am enjoying it. There’s a lot to learn here. I’m glad we came. In fact, I’ll prob’ly come back. It’s too much to take in all at once.”

Frankie’s high-heeled pumps tapped along on the marble floor at his side as they went back into the main exhibition room. “I want to see your paintings,” she said.

He laughed self-consciously. “I don’t think so. Now that I’ve popped off, you’d just be disappointed, and I’d be embarrassed. Talking art’s a lot easier than doing it.”

“Let’s have lunch,” she said, unexpectedly hooking her hand in the crook of his elbow. “I’m starved.”
 

“Uh, sorry, but I need to get on back. The management informed me that the
YMCA’s not
a hotel. I got to do some serious looking.”
 

“Another time then. I’m sure you’ll find a suitable place.” He suspected she knew he was watching his nickels and dimes, avoiding lunch at some expensive restaurant.

They walked along East Fifty-seventh, the fall air crisp, sun shining. Frankie pointed out several important galleries: the Sidney Janis, the Marlborough, the Pierre Matisse. They turned down Madison, looking into shops, watching the people coming and going. Women in fashionable dress walked French poodles; men plowed ahead in three-piece suits. The few panhandlers and beatniks looked out of place.

He stopped for a moment, looking about, grinning a little in spite of himself. “I can’t believe I’m really here.”
 

A faint smile kindled in Frankie’s eyes. She took him by the arm again. “Come. We’ll take the subway on Eighty-sixth and Lexington.”

THAT EVENING HE
sat in his claustrophobic little room in the
YMCA
with a bottle of cheap Merlot, cringing at how pathetic he must have sounded to Frankie—making himself out to be the big art expert. What in the world had he been thinking? He made excuses, told himself that he hadn’t had anyone to talk art to since Sidney, and to a lesser degree, Mavis. He told himself that his brain was overheated with the sudden excitement of so much great art right at his fingertips. But Frankie didn’t know that. This was as every-day to her as getting up and going to bed. He suspected he had heard the last from her.

THE NEXT DAY
, a Thursday, the job placement agency called about an opening in the catalog division of the JCPenney Company. They made an appointment for him on the following Monday.

EARLY FRIDAY MORNING,
he stood in front of the Belmore, an all-night cafeteria and cabby hangout on Twenty-eighth and Park Avenue South. He folded the classified section of the
Times
under his arm and pushed his way in through the double doors. In the immediate foyer, a turnstile led into the cafeteria. The smell of coffee and steamed kitchen hung heavy on the air. On the right, an index card was taped to a glass door, R
OOM
F
OR
R
ENT
lettered on it with a ballpoint pen. He entered, went up a narrow staircase, made a turn, then stepped out onto a landing at the top.

On a door directly across, a small sign read:
S
UPER
. He knocked and a middle-aged woman with a shock of rust-red hair came to the door in a loose housecoat.
 

“Hi. I’m Harley Buchanan. I called about the room.”

The woman appraised him, a quick up-and-down. “Let me get the key.” She smelled of booze. Some of her teeth were missing. She stepped back inside where a bone-thin man was visible, slumped in a recliner, awash in the flickering light of a TV
.
 

The woman took a ring of keys from somewhere, and he followed her up another flight of stairs. She showed him a room roughly ten by sixteen feet. A sink hung on the wall in an alcove near the door, next to a small closet. At the other end, a single window with a paper shade and plastic curtains offered a view of the Belmore’s rooftop below. There was a twin bed, a plain desk and one chair. He was reminded of van Gogh’s room in Arles, though he doubted van Gogh’s window opened onto the air-conditioning exhaust on top of an all-night cafeteria.

“I change the bed and clean the room once a week,” said the woman. “No cooking in the room and no partying.” She smiled a gap-toothed smile and winked. “You wanna bring in women, that’s your business. But you gotta keep ’em quiet.”