What Beauty Page 12

CHAPTER 12

  Belinda bites into my newest food creation with the gusto of a carnival fat man. Her “Mmm … mmmm!!” tells me I’ve done well, found the right curry-to-chicken ratio. She holds the top half of a round French roll and inquisits, “What do you call this?”

  I’ve scraped out the roll’s inner white bits — the soft stuff — and replaced it with curried-chicken, topped with sliced pickle, brie, and tomato. Where she’s bitten a crescent from the end, steam rises off the meat in its bread boat. Belinda swallows and smacks her lips for another attack.

  “This is ‘toast,’ ” I say. “You must describe it as an idiolect. ‘I toasted the toast in the oven.’ Its success lurks in the preparation. The bread must be crunchy when it’s served.”

  Belinda opens wide for another bite. The bread crunches delightfully between her teeth. I’ve eaten two toasts before she came home. It’s past ten o’clock. I lean back on the barstool to enjoy the sight as Belinda savors her food. A gleeful chuckle escapes me when I catch her eyes wiggling in gustare orgasmus. While she chews, I notice the ox-blood briefcase she laid on the counter beside the day’s discarded newspaper.

  This is new. A self-gift for a milestone accomplishment?

  Its stitching runs tight, uniform, each rib visible in serpentine rows, an upright model with a gape-mouth, and a brass buckle attached to a strap thick enough to repel scissors, or anything less than a Bowie knife.

  She claimed starvation at her entrance to the loft, didn’t bother to take her shoes off because I stood at the island holding the baking tray with two toasts fresh from the oven. The room’s air danced with stomach-bubbling aromas. After another bite and sip from a glass of red, she rests her arms on the island and belches lightly. “Sorry!” She covers her mouth before another belch catches her. “Oi!” she exclaims. “I haven’t eaten in three days. My stomach has shrunk to the size of a dried raisin.”

  The work of an agent has given her something to look forward to, she tells me, besides harnessing Gertrude in the afternoons and brushing her down near midnight. Her descriptions of hours and work have the sound of the taskmaster’s whip: phone calls in the morning from our desk; appointments set that she’s learned will get pushed around or cancelled; the meetings with gallery owners, dealers, and collectors take no more than ten minutes (when they do happen); then she dashes across town.

  I don’t say a word, other than encouraging utterances. But her day sounds like a doctor’s routine, where the price of a prescription can be the cost of your soul (or mine). How she’s found so many people to speak with in three weeks is a mystery I ask her to solve.

  “That’s just it,” she says, “the finding is easy — recommendations and name dropping — but getting them to look at slides or samples –” she points at her new briefcase “– is like striking out Lou Gehrig with bases loaded. I mean, I can understand running around, but not getting the run-around. You’d think they were fronting for the Mafia, the way they avoid a genuine business discussion.” When I open my eyes at her casual assumption, she lifts her hands and says, “It’s not like I’m the artist, Minus. I’ve got station. Half these people know me already.”

  Now I’m confused. I say, “You told me you’d modeled. Was there something more?” The light in her eyes changes to dusk, and it’s not Belinda who is looking at me, but that second being.

  “Oh, Minus Mouse,” says NotBelinda. “We need to have a heart-to-heart.”

  Belinda came to New York as a sophisticated Middle American. She had double-majored in Finance and Psychology, and was Wall Street bound, with two summer internships at Omaha insurance companies on her resumé and a handful of crisp recommendation letters, printed on the highest quality rag bond. Without solid experience, though, she was just another come-to-town-er wearing green-tinted sunglasses. New Yorkers treated her like a wide-eyed farm girl with Okie dust under her nails and who walked barefoot (few NYers make the distinction between Nebraska and Oklahoma; or, for that matter, Ohio and Idaho, Chicago and Memphis, The Blue Ridge Mountains and Okefenokee Swamp).

  Newspaper ads selling stardust dreams, targeting young women who could afford money for head shot photographs, had suckered two of her three roommates. There was a third, Andi, who made $10.50 an hour sitting for figure drawing classes at NYU’s Tisch and Brooklyn’s Pratt academies. The difference, Andi had told her, was that Belinda had to be naked.

  “Really naked. Bottoms, too,” Andi told her. “But don’t worry. They don’t expect to see pink.” Her smile was supposed to be Belinda’s shot of encouragement.

  Belinda blushed at her roomie’s city sophistication (a different rung on the ladder than her Cornhusker polish), but she wasn’t worried. She didn’t expect art students to be anything more than mere boys. Neither school’s department disappointed her. What she was after, unlike what the boys might have thought, were the teachers. And not their cocks, but their contacts. The pseudo-suave student painters wore grunge and listened to Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Sonic Youth, while their teachers played Todd Rundgren albums in class and put their hands on her ass after the school hour had moved to happy hour in a university tavern. This little ass play got her free drinks and a priceless management education: who was “agenting” artists A through Z; how to get on a gallery’s Gala Opening invitation list; and which artists paid the best wages for models while not expecting sex for the privilege.

  She learned to play all their games while keeping her “honor” intact. They relished her “Lordy, ahm just all flushed with excitement” naivety she threw back to keep their interest. For a twenty-two-year-old woman who’d already had her share of sex, drugs & Rock’n’Roll, the art world soon turned her off: gallery freeloaders made plays on any woman (or gay man) that moved; gallery owners practiced intellectual snobbery on the freeloaders; the dealers played opportunistic games with the galleries; the collectors fingered their money like Jerusalem-temple usurers (anxious to add paintings to their private museums, while gambling on an artist’s rising fame in the art world’s new cache as investment tool.)

  “Business is business,” quipped one dealer, offering my Cornhusker a fluted champagne glass whose sparkling liquid showed like spun gold for a reason.

  Belinda saved her evaluation of artists for last: most were genuinely gifted, sensitive souls, but highly vain and, thusly, vulnerable. “Of course, then I met you, Minus,” was her excuse for me. Us.

  After four years sitting for students, journeymen artists, and a few of New York’s nouveau masters, while never having become an artist’s mistress or girlfriend, she decided it was time to leave, before “the surface tension of a pond” became her only way to negotiate life. By then, she had saved enough money to buy her chestnut mare and a rehabbed hansom cab, and said “toodles” to the SOHO crowd, the Upper East Side hoarders, and all those hands on her ass.

  Nursing a third toast, cold now on a plate, I realize I’m up-to-date, but no less confused. She tells me I should take my time, soak it all in, but she has nothing else to say about that life. Deal, Minus, she says, cuz I have. Remember, I’m the one who was naked in cold rooms under a spotlight.

  What about the new life?

  “The new briefcase makes a statement,” I say, cleaning up the dishes from her second toast. “You’re part of the game now. An ‘operative,’ in the parlance of the art bizz.”

  She points at me. Her finger wags, and she places it perpendicular to her lips: children’s international code for “silence forever.” So there’s to be no new history. Fine.

  I see how Belinda wants to protect me (she thinks) from the Big Bad Art-Wolf. She’s probably wise for this essay. Apart from the FaceCards deal, I try not to think much about business. This has always been my own, very foolish, attitude. But at least I’m aware of it.

  I have only enough room in my mind for art creation and all those things that get me to its threshold which — subtly, lightly — push me through the looking glass. That space-time thingy called business is
a deep-shaft sieve, built to drain every creative impulse from my natural sensibilities. There are also the stories I hear of artists who pour a week’s time into the business end of art and are no better off than if they had taken a desk job in some nameless office behind mirrored windows in yet another forgettable skyscraper.

  I turn on the water and pour sudsy liquid on a sponge.

  “What did you do today?” Belinda asks.

  I think of Chief and Marshall, Pan and Boilermaker, tethered to their leads. I think of the black-and-white art postcards at the museum. I think of my honeycomb at the Beehive, subdued and shadowed and quiet as a monastic cell. I think of clay hands smashed on a folding table. I think of the dust collector gang: GumbyDude and HourGlassWoman and FallenMan. I think of Karen K scratching her head, the hat and hair moving side to side. I think of Henry and a good ass raping if I don’t watch my step. I think of Peter N holding his purple-headed paintbrush. I think of my practice stone, and its chipped Where is it all leading me? … When will everything collide? motif. These questions deserve some sort of answer.

  “Living on the edge,” I say, “I am, therefore I art.”

  Belinda rolls her eyes, one of the intangibles that keeps us together. By this I mean the details not needed to be told day by day, because they stick in you like bits of food between your teeth, which require daily flossing. I now see perfectly her reasoning to squelch shoptalk.

  At the bottom of the sink, the bubbles take a ride around the top of the drain before dropping through. I surprise myself by not being surprised by Belinda’s art world experience. I had my share of mattress muses, a thought I’ve no wish to pull her into (nor fantasize that she was one herself, once upon a time — denials to the contrary). Likewise, there’s little in me that says Care, because you know it matters. No, that’s wrong: for some women, their guys would quickly become self-righteous over a single nude sunbathing episode. I can’t see the fuss over that or this history. The reason is simple and obvious: hers is not my history, and therefore none of my business.

  Deal, Minus, she said. Sure, and then there is the “my end” of that life — our handshake deal. It means something only if I know what’s happening. She describes the meetings she’s had: corner offices; warehouse galleries; a 5th Avenue hotdog stand; the backseat of an uptown-bound taxi. Brief, productive, promising; but nothing is on paper. “Not yet. But there’s potential.” A word that describes my life, any life. She reminds me of the meeting we have with gallery owner and two dealers after the 95th Street Y roundtable event. I balk, but only a little.

  “This is important for you, Minus Mouse. I’m getting … what the hell is that buzzword? … traction — whatever — but I’m getting it. More people than you’d ever guess have heard of you. That includes your sculptures and paintings, Art Man. You’ll see how this works out for you. Us. Listen, there’ll be people at the Y I need you to meet in the days and weeks after. Some of them are to the art world what Triple-A scouts are to the Majors. Are you getting the picture?”

  Her speech is so filled with encouragement, I must say something. “I’m excited.” My voice lacks the punch I’d planned.

  She folds her hands beneath her chin. “You’re going to cause a ruckus tomorrow, is what you’re going to do.” I’m silent. And she growls, “Aren’t you?!”

  “The very essence of art,” I say. My eyes fold to sinister slits. “Wit is its own greatest value.”

  In the dead of night, I’m awakened by my steam-engine breathing. Deal, Minus…. (Okay, I get it!) I have. (Only….)

  My fingers find the lamp’s switch in the dark. Its sound is a howitzer in a dead wood; the hundred-watt bulb augers into my eyes. Belinda stirs, groans, and grabs my pillow to cover her head. Through the down I hear, “What the hell, honey. Go make yourself a toddy.”

  I have a question, and when I ask it, she pulls the pillow off her head. Tomorrow. She promises. Yes. I turn off the light, satisfied, but not (not ever) content. Belinda slides my pillow under my head.

  In the morning, over breakfast, she listens again and, only slightly annoyed, takes my face in her hands. “Out with the old, in with the new,” she says, and lets go of my face to return to her grapefruit, which she attacks like a starving fruit bat.

  “You’re twenty-nine! A spring chicken. Once a model, always a model, is what I say. I have ways to use your beauty that’ll peel your stockings off.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.” She makes a fart noise with her lips. “Artists want nubile nineteen-ees, not plumpy twenty-niners. Rubinesque is out, and high tits, a firm ass, and belly buttons with just the hint of shadow (not a cave) are every middle-aged collector’s dream of a water nymph able to rock his world. Or his filthy imagination. Me, I can’t compete these days. I could barely do that six years ago. My tits already show signs of sagging.”

  “Your tits are great,” I implore. Actually, my voice is into the exaltation octave. To complete the effect, I look at her breasts. High, tight, round. Very nice. I thrust my chin at her chest. Belinda lifts her shoulders up and back.

  “Minus, I’m wearing a push-up bra and a light sweater. A goat would find my tits attractive.”

  “Lucky goat,” I mumble. My best wolfish glare (to stay with the animal metaphor) isn’t going to implore Belinda to show me some flesh, though. I switch subjects, sort of: “Artists don’t always paint what they see, and they can –”

  “Please stop,” she says, “because we’re way off the subject. The point is that I made enough contacts four years ago, which I’m using today for just a small price.” She winks like a gangster’s moll.

  I must be blushing, because she takes my hand and puts it over her heart. A plaintive warmth rises along my spine, and it takes me a moment to realize she’s staring at me like I’m a stranger.

  “I’m giving you a chance to cop a feel,” she whispers.

  “Oh!” My hand pulls away, but then I recover. The palm finds the spot beneath which her nipple lies in hibernation, only needing a gentle nudge to awaken it. Her cheeks pull in; she’ll only let me get worked up (to use for later), but I can be persistent, so I say, “I thought we were having a lovers’ moment.”

  “God, you men. Sentimentalists to the last, yet five minutes too early or else asleep before we get back from the bathroom.”

  My pride doesn’t wound so easily. “Shall I extol the virtues (games) of that creature doth God named woman?” This only makes her take my hand from her breast. My hand stays molded to her cup-size. It’s a laugh, so we sit back and become silly with mirth.

  After breakfast, still lingering over coffee, her refusal echos in my mind. I quote her something I read recently. “D.H. Lawrence wrote, ‘The new thing is the death of the old.’ He was writing about countries casting off their colonial minders. Europe versus America. But I think it’s true also of art. Museums hold old things and new things, and without museums, any of the modern societies would, mostly, have only the new. The trade magazines focus on the new, the latest, and the famous — just long enough for them to be taken by what’s the next ‘new.’ Some artists are jeered for what they’d done. Then they are ignored. A bit like old people are treated, these days.”

  Alvin, from the Broadway bus, comes to mind. He sounded lost, confined to a world that had passed him by. Millions stand shrouded behind him.

  I say, “Yet the museum gift shop sells dozens of postcards every day. For fifty cents you can have Van Gogh as a young man (vibrancy of mind and color) and in middle age (disillusionment painted in a muddy patina), or Rembrandt’s self-portrait series (a bookmark of four faces from his life cycle). Both men are the historical and elite masters of their age, now stepped over by artist’s whose sense of color splashes across canvases in primary smudge marks, streaky brush strokes, and the disproportion of the human figure.”

  More examples might be overkill, and this stops me from saying more. Nevertheless, I’m close to being overcome by my own automatic calculation of
any artist’s time limitations (of life itself, but also legacy). If I were to continue speaking, the easy path would be to bring up Karen K, who’s hiding herself in a bag lady’s outfit, aging, forgotten, a stepped-on image; underneath she’s older than her book jacket photo, but I’m sure (want to be sure) she retains beauty, that special middle-aged female winsomeness, the type that has learned to take care of herself. What Beauty? is right. Her argument is really for dis-interpretation of the value judgments leveled by critics at artists, or the public.

  Belinda waits for me to say more. I’m finished though, and a shrug makes this clear.

  “Make great art, Minus. Beauty has always been your guide. Believe in that, at least. I haven’t known you to say or do anything to make me think you stray from that perception. Yours is the only vision you have to uphold.”

  Right, I think. Mine, against the art world of … whatever it becomes next week.