Yellow Mesquite (29 page)

Harley looked out into the hall. “How many people share the bathroom?”

“Three to each floor. You and two others. I clean that every day.”

“What about towels?”

“Fresh towels once a week in your room when I change the linens.”

She stepped across the hall and opened the bathroom door. The fixtures were old-fashioned, rust spots under the taps, white hexagon tiled floors, all reasonably clean. The smell was passable: Clorox and Pine-O-Pine.
 

“Fifteen a week?”

“In advance.”

“Anything else I should know?”

“Where’re you from?”

“Texas.”

The woman shoved forth her hand, smiling. “I thought so. Put ’er there, cuz. I’m Rusty from Amarillo.”

He shook her hand. “Harley Buchanan.”

“You’ll like it here, Harley Buchanan.”
 

He wasn’t so sure of that. He followed her back down and she led him into her apartment where he paid and she made out a receipt.
 

The man on the couch looked sickly, like a painting by Edvard Munch.
The Rifleman
blared on the TV below a shelf of bowling trophies, not ordinary bowling trophies but spectacular ones with figures and curlicues and engravings mounted on marble and polished oak bases, all shapes and sizes.
 

“Who’s the bowler?”

“Lindy here,” said Rusty. “Used to be a world champion.”

Lindy’s gaze fixed on Harley and he began to emerge from the sofa, his eyes growing brighter as his lanky frame unfolded in slow motion. “You bowl?”
 

“Not much.”

The man hung suspended in a moment of disappointment before wilting back into the sofa.
 

“I sure admire anybody who can, though,” Harley said, and made a point of inspecting the trophies. He spotted a glass and a bottle of Gordon’s gin on the floor near the man’s feet.

“I was a world champion. I was that, all right.” Lindy said it as if he couldn’t quite believe it himself.

“Honey, you still are,” said Rusty.
 

She handed Harley his receipt. “Rent’s due every Friday, hon.”

H
E MOVED HIS
few belongings in on Saturday and settled in
.
At ten on Monday, he took his portfolio of drawings up the elevator to the fourteenth floor of the JCPenney building on Avenue of the Americas between Fifty-second and Fifty-third. Mr. Nelson, the executive art director, a steely man in his forties, came out to the reception desk. He appraised Harley with a noncommittal smile, introduced himself and shook hands.

Harley followed Mr. Nelson into a large open space. On the left and up front, facing the Hilton Hotel across the street, were six or eight cubicles where he glimpsed artists working with T-squares on pads of tracing paper. On the right, a dozen or more men and women sat behind desks cluttered with papers, dictionaries, encyclopedias, catalogs… In the very back were two drawing tables. A round, florid-faced older man worked at one, strips of paper hanging off his desk lamp. The other table was empty.
 

He followed Mr. Nelson into his office next to the cubicles. Mr. Nelson looked at his drawings and closed the portfolio without comment. He made small talk: Where was Harley from? What were his immediate plans? What was his draft status? Where did he expect to be in five years? Harley knew where to stretch the facts: He was from Texas; he was starting night classes at the School of Visual Arts in the spring semester; he was married and had a child, which would probably exempt him from the draft, and—smiling—in five years he expected to have Mr. Nelson’s job. Again, he wondered if he was being a bit brash.

But Mr. Nelson smiled too, not unpleasantly. He pointed out that the job was in key-line, which meant pasting down all the small type, the little
A, B, C
letters and the corresponding copy on the various catalog items. It was the grunt job where people in this business started. The idea, Mr. Nelson pointed out, was that after a while he would graduate to the position of layout artist, then senior layout artist, then art director.
 

He was assigned the empty drawing table at the back, issued a T-square, a triangle, X-Acto knife, and a pair of tweezers for picking up and pasting down those little tiny
A
s,
B
s and
C
s. He would start the following Monday. Ninety-five dollars a week.
 

THE JOB TURNED
out to be easy enough, if exacting and tedious. His fellow workers were friendly. The layout artists and most of the copyreaders introduced themselves. He realized he was a bit of a curiosity. When Fred and Steve, two senior layout artists, discovered he was attending SVA, they invited him to lunch. Fred was a graduate of Pratt, and Steve was attending Cooper Union, nights. They knew where to grab cheap lunches, and the talk was of art and artists.
 

Harley figured the job was about as good as any for somebody with no training in anything except keeping a donkey engine running in an oil patch.

Chapter 32

Madison Avenue Art

H
E HAD MADE
a mental note of the exceptional number of art galleries on Madison Avenue, and the following Saturday, his first day off, he lugged his paintings and drawings all the way up one side, from Forty-second to Eighty-sixth, and was working his way back down the other side.

But no one was interested in his work:
Your drawings are full of melancholy. Your perspective is disconcerting.
Several offered advice:
Paint light, bright paintings. Copy the Impressionists. Paint impasto.
At Far Gallery he had looked in the window at a painting of a ladybug big as a basketball on an oak leaf the size of a tabletop. It looked like a blowup from a Burpee seed catalog. But they practically threw him out when he showed his own work.

He had been in and out of galleries whose walls were framed rectangles of confectioner’s icing—women in flowing dresses reposing in fields of pastel flowers beneath Victorian parasols and whipped-cream clouds. In and out of galleries hung with abstractions—thick slabs of paint minus any semblance of unity or harmony. In and out of galleries with yet one more wall of cats, clowns, boats, barns, covered bridges, seagulls. And none of them wanted him. What if he had been kidding himself that he had talent? It didn’t escape him that Sidney had claimed to be disappointed, ultimately.
 

He had his eye on a gallery, L’Atelier de France, on the corner. He took note of the paintings in the window—again, sweet Impressionist imitations and a couple of butter-knife abstractions. He told himself he would dig ditches before he resorted to that kind of crap.

He opened and then held the door back for a polished woman who swept through before him trailing a wake of perfume like some exotic incense—without so much as a thank-you, as though he were the doorman.
 

Across the room, a stick-thin woman with large glasses and eyes like an owl rose from behind a desk and greeted her—French accent, a glance at Harley over the woman’s shoulder.

“My friend is outside in the car,” said the newly arrived customer. “She would like to know if you have something by Jacques François? Something with a figure, perhaps?”
 

Harley prowled along the wall, looked at the paintings, thumbed through the four-color brochures on the tables. Rich old lady out in the car, he said to himself. Too old to get out and look for herself. Sad.

“René,” the gallery woman called, and a frail young man with narrow shoulders and a mop of curly hair appeared from behind a maze of petitions hung with paintings. The gallery woman smiled with her tiny mouth and big eyes. “René, bring up something by Jacques François, something with a figure, perhaps.”

“
Bien certainement, mesdames.
”
Rene disappeared among the petitions, then reappeared holding a painting about three by five feet in size. Harley stole a look at it: another glop job, big smears of paint spread with a palette knife. He studied the work, trying to determine if he was missing something…like the Cézanne’s he had overlooked.
 

“Lovely,” said the customer. And after a respectable moment, “The price?”

The gallery woman puckered her lips. “This one is six.”
 

“Ah, yes. Six?”

The gallery woman turned mildly tragic. “Six thousand.”

Harley’s head swiveled toward the painting of its own accord.
 

“Of course,” said the customer.
 

“Ah,
madame
, Jacques François is in demand. His price, they go up—poof!—like this. You see?” She threw both hands delicately upward, enlarged her eyes.
 

“Yes, of course.”
 

“Oui
.
Monsieur François’s price, zay have double in one year. An excellent investment.”

“The price is no problem. However, I think my friend might like something more figurative.”

Curly-haired Rene had already propped the painting against the wall under the track lights and was bringing out another.
 

“Oh, that’s lovely, yes, indeed. I think she might like this one.” The customer cocked one eyebrow at the gallery woman.

The woman stood regally behind her desk, hands clasped beneath her breasts. “This one is seven-five.”

“Yes. Yes, indeed. I think she might like it. Do you have others?”

Rene was already dashing behind the partitions.

“And this one is six-five.”
 

Harley watched as Rene deposited yet one more badly buttered canvas against the wall.

“Lovely. Just lovely. I’m sure she would like this one.” The customer’s forehead wrinkled like a bloodhound’s. “But, oh, dear, I’m double-parked and someone must sit the car. You know these dreadful tow trucks. Do you have someone who could sit the car while my friend has a look?”

Gallery woman cut her owl eyes at René. He nodded meekly. “Merci beaucoup,” the gallery woman said to him.

René followed the customer out. The gallery woman turned to Harley, a quick look of disapproval at the crate of paintings under his arm. “Oui, monsieur, may I help you?”

“Yes, please. I’m an artist, a painter, and I’m looking for a gallery.”
 

Her expression changed from disapproval to defense. “Oh? And where are you from?”

“From? Texas. I’m from Texas.”

Her chin dipped. “Oh. I am so sorry. We represent only French artists here at L’Atelier de France.”

“Um. Just French artists, huh? Well…okay, thanks anyway.”

The woman clasped her hands under her breasts again and gave him her best owl-eyed smile of regret.

Harley went out and stood at the curb, waiting for the light. On the other side of the cross-street, René hovered alongside a limo. A woman with dark sunglasses and platinum hair that matched her fur popped out of the rear door, obviously the customer’s “friend.” She said something to René; then she and her companion came tapping across the pavement in their heels. The friend couldn’t have been more than thirty.

“ ’Scuse me,” Harley said.

They skirted aside, wary.

“ ’Scuse me, but I was inside there. I couldn’t help hearing. You’re really gonna buy a painting by that Jock-what’s-his-name?”

The pair came to a hesitant stop. “I beg your pardon?” said the woman in the silver fur.
 

“It’s none of my business, but that’s some sorry work.”

They stared.
 

“You could get something good, really good, for that kind of money.”

“Something good?”

“I saw some de Kooning lithographs the other day at Sidney Janis for three hundred bucks. Now, there’s some real art. And reasonable.”
 

The companion’s bloodhound face wrinkled. Her friend in the silver fox remained stoic behind her sunglasses.

“I know it’s none of my business,” he said in the silence.

“Who
are
you?”
 

“Harley Buchanan. I’m a painter.”

“Oh-ho! I suppose we should buy one of your paintings instead. Correct?”

“You should buy just about anybody’s paintings instead.”

The companion drew herself up. “You’re quite a brash young man.”

“Sorry. But I’d go look at those lithographs.”

“Where is your gallery?” Said the woman in the silver fur. Her voice was low and gravelly. A whiskey voice.

“Well…”

“I want to see your work.”

He nodded at the crate propped against his thigh. “I’ve got a couple here, but…well, I can’t open them up on the sidewalk.”

“No, no. We’ll make an appointment. Where do we find your gallery?” Her tone was authoritative, commanding.

“Uh, you’ll have to come to my place.”

The companion whipped out a notebook. “And where is that?”

“Uh, I just moved out of the
YMCA into a room down on Park Avenue South and Twenty-eight
.”

The women exchanged a look. The friend turned on her heel toward the gallery. Her companion closed her notebook and tapped after her. They paused at the door of L’Atelier de France, mumbling between themselves, then both looked back at him and snickered.

“Hey,” he yelled. “Laugh all you want, but you hang that painting on your wall, you’re gonna be the laughingstock of all New York.”

They swished inside. Then the lustrous friend reappeared behind the glass door, her platinum hair and silver fur pearlescent. She lowered her sunglasses, looked at him over the rims.
 

The few pedestrians on the sidewalk scooted around him as he made a sweeping theatrical bow. He hauled the crate up by its rope handle and went clomp-stomping off down Madison Avenue in his boots.
 

It wasn’t like him to do something like that. Not at all. But this was New York City. And New York City brewed its own reality. Shoot, you could be any way you wanted to be in New York City. It was exhilarating. Liberating, actually. Still, he was a little surprised at himself.

WHEN HE GOT
back to the
Belmore,
there was a note in a small envelope under his door.