What Beauty Read online

CHAPTER 3

  Marshall lives in Sussex House. He takes care of a nice WASP family. His Rhodesian heritage makes him the perfect breed for the task, as the Ameses — Jack & Larissa, little Jack, and the seven-year-old twins, Mary and Christie (born on December 21), own to a busy lifestyle. Larissa is in the back room now, getting Marshall prepped for his walk. What she does to do this, I don’t know.

  I prefer to stand at the Ames’s eighteenth-floor window. It’s a spot that Larissa Ames often chooses herself, she’s told me, to sit propped against the ridgeback’s large, dog-body frame. She likes to scratch his floppy ears while admiring Central Park. From this height, the park is Alice’s wonderland. The trees have a glued-in-place fakery found in diorama and model train landscapes. Bright green circles, the tops of oak and elm trees below, and the small spires of the fir trees, are each clouds in a pre-schooler’s fantasy. They bunch in shady globules over walkways and the bridal path, bridges and people. Whenever I stand here, waiting with leash in hand, I half expect a vintage choo-choo to round the south bend, chugging along, rickety on uneven tracks, sending up iron-gray smoke plumes between the fat trees to pace its progress as the red cowcatcher joggles over the tracks like a divining rod.

  The park is in its springtime flush, and the trees carry their fat-fingered buds like Gargantua does her hands. Walking its lanes, you can’t believe that the park’s grandiose space had few trees in the nineteenth century, when it was (1) a farm, (2) a potters’ field, (3) a military parade ground &etc. Olmstead and Vaux, in their landscape design, manufactured everything, from the hills and the forests and the ponds and the meadows, down to the detail on each bridge’s filigree railing. This was both a mirror held up to Manhattan’s great state of human invention, and how nature could be the assemblage of all things for all people. Works of art composed materialis natura.

  I turn from the window. This living room is not welcoming, despite the million-dollar view. I’ve grown to know it but not admire it. The Ameses’ bookshelf is cluttered with curios, but lacks books. The two leather sofas feel oily beneath your legs, and whatever you do you can’t help but slide down as if the seat has reclined, like a parlor trick. Their television is an enormous square box, too big for this small space, thus swallowing the viewer into its black screen (I can’t imagine what the sensation is like when its gaudy lighted images chase themselves across the screen).

  Today is a good example of how I battle displeasure with the environment. When Larissa disappeared down the hall, I filtered through their glossy magazines, neatly scalloped on the square glass-and-chrome table. Argosy, New York, Mademoiselle, The Economist, National Review, Smithsonian and others — though not one children’s title is in sight. Are the children not allowed magazines? Are they banned from studying in the living room? A saving grace, so to speak, to this array of soporific titles, was one soft-porn couples’ mag, Double Pleasure, that I found shuffled between Golf and Golfing (as if subscribing to one magazine for this most staid-of-staid sports wasn’t enough). I took a fast-and-sly look toward the hallway entrance for signs of advancing shadows (human or canine) or the sounds of readiness. Then I slid the skin-zine out for a quick leer. The cover featured a mature couple kneeling nude on a bed, sandwiching a college co-ed half dressed in a cheerleader outfit. Just the sorts of playful pictures a married couple needs to jump-start their libidos after the long workday, I thought. And how appropriate to find its placement where the post-work cocktails are sipped while the kids have been marched to their bedrooms to finish homework before suppertime. Let the celebrations begin! Before I could properly peruse the finger-smudged pages, noises carried from the hallway rife with suggestion; clattered hangers, dropped shoes, a door closed too hard.

  I slid the porno back in amongst its glossy group. A picture of Larissa pulling on jeans and a T-shirt came to mind. A small part of me wondered if she’d appear at the living room entrance, suddenly and unexpectedly, wearing a cheerleader outfit (and only half of the outfit, at that). It’s my fantasy alone — and a bad one. If I were so brave as to confess its contents to Belinda, she would fold her arms and produce one of her thin-lipped, wondrous looks that question all of men’s sanity, not merely mine, and suggest that I “save it for the bedroom, tiger.” (I trust myself, and her character, that she would say this.) She’d be right, naturally. As for myself, I have but one excuse: my flirtatious nature is tucked into a libidinous fantasia of quasi-controllable images — entirely harmless because I am, if anything, a one-woman man. Case in point; I imagine pilfering the Ameses’ copy of Double Pleasure to surreptitiously place among Belinda’s stack of Workout, Glamour, and Horse & Tack, just for kicks. How long would it take her to notice? What would her reaction be? Would she see it as a gift, a suggestion, or an insult? I don’t know these answers, which makes me wonder if, in fact, I know as much about her as is necessary to marry her, out of desire or pressure or circumstance. Larissa is a mere phantom, a dog owner whom I care less about than her dog. That’s the truth. I only see her when I pick up Marshall, and wouldn’t mind if I never saw her again. The dog is welcome in my life any time.

  (I’m less than perfect, as anyone can see; I’m also nobody’s fool, and know enough never to shit where I eat.)

  Attacking these thoughts are the sounds of frantic, explosive movement far down the hallway and fast approaching me, the thrump tap-tap-tap thrump-ta-thrump of a big dog gaining speed. He rounds the corner at half gallup.

  “Marshall, no!” Larissa Ames commands, but her voice is far behind the dog.

  I brace myself for a collision. If this hundred-pound dog decides to jump at me, we’ll both crash through the window and tumble downward, spinning and clutching air, down-down-down to our deaths on 59th Street among the taxis and pedestrians, the scout group from Philadelphia and the retirees from Cincinnati, for whom rain from the sky never assumes the bodies of man and dog.

  “Stop!” I yell, and thrust out my hand like a lame TV cop. I crouch to absorb the crash. My signal and baritone bark penetrate his doggie enthusiasm in time. Marshall hits the hooks, his nails biting at the carpet runner, and like an Arabian prince he slides into my arms. He whines in greeting and I work his floppy ears between my hands. He’s a red & wheat purebred with thick, wrinkly skin and a pearly disposition.

  “Minus, you’re a life saver.” Larissa Ames stands in the hall entrance, arms folded. Her face is a plaster Minerva. She has on a blue dress and round-cut onyx choker. Bracelets pile up above a pair of thin wrists. Her face is darker than her bare arms because of the makeup she’s applied. Her youthful face is yet smooth, but she’s missing a chin and this damages any ideas of beauty and desirousness. Frosted hair at twenty-eight doesn’t help, either.

  “My own life, this time,” I say. Larissa loves her big dog but Marshall runs her life, as do her children, being mostly nanny raised. In the four months I’ve walked Marshall, Larissa Ames has shown a wonderful courage to indulge her pet. I think her children are jealous, giving further reason for skirting her authority.

  Her chinless face makes her look jowly, which she is not, thus making her head appear oversized, also a misperception. Nevertheless, I’d try my best to avoid a commission to paint her portrait; destined for the empty wall space above the winsome, faux fireplace. Live art subjects (particularly the ones who pay hefty prices) always make self-comparisons afterwards in a mirror. I’ve seen some frightening results, and they always lead to recriminations, animosity, estrangement.

  Larissa looks stricken this morning. That’s one of those phrases you’re not sure has definition until you see it worn on a person. She shows an excessive amount of hip after three children, but she hasn’t otherwise let herself go to the flabby side of motherhood. Her style is atypical of the Yuppie set, even those without children. Mr Ames is pure Wall Street up-and-comer. Larissa is the most bored woman I’ve ever met.

  “What’s on for today?” I ask. “Hospice, Salvation Army, or Bloomingdale’s?”

  She flips me the
bird. “None, smart ass.” Never presume a contemporary is without gumption that rivals your own. She drops her hands across a pouch stomach. “Jack somehow got me on a neighborhood committee. Improvement of the air, or some other impossible bullshit.” Her smile is ironic. “Not so glamorous as the life of an artist.” She sighs through the next breath and her words stretch like gum. “Committees keep me out of trouble.”

  Her eyes shift to her dog. Marshall has found a new place for his nose: my crotch. I grab his snout and steer him to the open window for an eighteenth-floor sniff. His nose dips between the crack and I feel his tail slap my thigh as the scents of New York kindle his brain.

  Art isn’t glamorous, I want to inform Larissa. It’s only work of a different sort. The best sort, but also the sort that sees me doing the same work any office-bound chump must do: checking my household account sums; calculating the time it takes to finish the paperwork for an NEA or NY state grant; stealing five extra minutes for lunch; making small-change deals over the phone (while listening to an ex parte deal, somewhere behind the caller, where I’m not the topic of conversation); and, getting stuck in body traffic in the subway commute from dog walking to art studio, stuck shoulder-to-shoulder with Ben-the-Jew, who has recently eaten a sardine and onion sandwich, or Pedro-the-Chicano, who’s just come from a two-hour sweat on the basketball court.

  “Don’t be so sure,” I say.

  Where barbers cut hair for eight hours a day, and lawyers give legal advice, and the bank teller takes money in and pays money out, and the airline pilot punches up vectors before taking off, I too must be technically precise. Creatively, besides. Not so easy a vocation, all the time. Sometimes I just want to be the carpet layer so bad I can smell the size in the fabric. Sometimes, Larissa’s life doesn’t seem so awful to me. At least my fingernails would be clean, not permanently stained by any number of chemical products with their medium-chances for giving me an organ-specific cancer. Still other days, there’s always the dog’s life that Marshall leads. Anyway, “creativity” (something the majority of people “want” in their work, according to a recent study by some Liberal think-tank for workforce stability, whose mindset is on “policy alteration of quantifiable goals”) isn’t all that it’s touted as “fun” and “dynamic.” It can be those, but hardly in synchronicity, whose flow is like the morning piss of an old man with a prostate density equal to granite. Besides that (whine, whine, whine?), critics expect me to be original and unique with every show, for the rest of my life! Of course, that’s all I ask of myself, too. Needless to say (but worth the ink), in any job/career/profession and whatever the work, it is all about you. Don’t let anyone take art away from you, is all I can say to myself each night as the sun fades behind the Jersey skyline.

  “City Hall will love you,” I tell Larissa, addressing her lament. I feel the desire to leave, quickly, with her big dumb dog in tow.

  Her time-worn smirk, the lines cutting forty-five degrees from the corners of her mouth, reaches across the room at me. I wonder if perhaps “bored” cannot correctly describe the youthful Mrs Ames. I hope she doesn’t think about – and this is my vanity – making a play for me. Even though our ages are totally within range, and getting caught is out of the question with Jack gone fourteen hours a day, and we’ve mutually commented on our attractiveness (helpful lies), I wouldn’t want to lose Marshall over a fling with an unwrapped socialite dominated by ennui.

  “I have to run, Minus.”

  “Loud and clear, Mrs A.” I call this out as a soldier responds to rank. She hates this nickname, yet it often makes her laugh because … well, it just does. “Besides which, Charlie is holding the other boys for me downstairs. Marshall!” Marshall yanks his nose from the window and he steadies himself when I grab his collar. “Let’s hit the road, you hound. To the service elevator, mutt!”

  “That mutt cost us two grand,” sneers Larissa. She pats Marshall’s rump with calm affection as we rush past her to the door.

  The hallway’s white walls and dime-store art make me think that Mr & Mrs Ames could use a decorating makeover. But to suggest this would seem like I’m pandering for a sale. The Ameses have never expressed interest in looking at my inventory.

  “Toodles, Minus.”

  “Tweedle-de-dum back at ya’, Larissa.”

  “I met a woman the other day.”

  The four dogs look at me as if I’ve pulled raw bacon from my pockets. I have with me Marshall the Ridgeback, Pan the Samoyed, Boilermaker the Alsatian, and Chief the Chesapeake. A messy color palate and mixed media of barks, dusty paws, dog breath, and wet noses.

  We’ve walked north on the park path near enough to 5th Avenue to hear the rise and fall of morning traffic moving south toward Midtown. At the zoo entrance the foursome take me left through a loamy spring grass patch and all the way across the park to the far side of the Sheep Meadow. They stop for a rest in the sun, tongues out to lap at the warm air, wiggling through panted breaths, saliva dribbling from the edges. Through the trees behind us I can see the top of the carousel.

  “Let me rephrase that. I ‘noticed’ a woman. She doesn’t know I exist. Not yet. What d’ya’ll think’a’dat?” My skip into a West Texas drawl doesn’t faze them.

  Boiler makes a sound like he’s clearing his throat. He has smart eyes and an active jaw. He won’t “speak” for me on command, but I’m teaching him. The Petersons pay me extra money for each new trick Boiler brings home. I’ve been averaging twenty dollars tip per month. Already he’s as nimble and sly as the Artful Dodger, or a Chinese acrobat. If he had hands, I’m sure he could juggle four balls by now. The end of this road is in sight, however, because even the smartest dog can learn just so much.

  Marshall, meanwhile, is sniffing Pan’s ass. Pan suddenly thinks a fly is trying to get some action, and his hips buckle. His snout moves around, teeth bared to warn. There’s a scuffle, but my own low bark is enough to make them separate like shy fighters in the ring. Chief still thinks I’m holding bacon.

  “She’s disguised as a homeless woman. I have to find out why. She’s this great writer – I think she’s great, and was bold – and here she is, pretending to be an indigent scab. Beats me why.”

  The canine quartet starts to dance in place, showing me their angst. I click my tongue and they turn as a team down the path. I give the leads a double tug that keeps them from dragging me like a bucked charioteer. A half-block later Boiler and Pan pull up. They’re in opposite hands to my leash arrangement, so while they sniff the ground in preparation to dump, I do a quick bracelet change with the leads. Marshall and Chief separate from the squatters. They come next to me, panting, tongues flapping like streamer flags in the wind.

  The sunshine has brought dozens of people out to the Sheep Meadow. Blankets dot the scrabble lawn like a lot of dropped postage stamps. Girls have shed tops and sit in shorts, spaghetti straps, and sandals, while their boyfriends have gone topless but leave jeans on. A lot of white skin is on display, smelling of the Caribbean beach and coconut cocktails. Music rides the air. I hear a country tune, some hip-hop, and a slice of a Top 40 love ballad.

  Pan and Boiler pinch off and start scratching at the earth. I let them clean their paws a moment, then tug them to my side and issue a command to the crew to sit tight. I carry pooh bags in my back pocket. Double-volume sandwich bags work best with these dogs; their dumps are twice the mass a human can drop. Marshall, Boiler, Pan, and Chief watch me while I crouch to clean up. Strolling tourists stop on the path to see what they see. I twist the bag ends into knots and grab the dog leads.

  I say, “Let’s go, boys!” and they leap into a trot. I follow at a dead run because they deserve a bit of a jog, even if New York’s leash laws have become so punitive that big dogs rarely get the chance to run full stride without risking triple-digit fines.

  Half of what I save on health club fees for all the exercise I get goes to treats and gifts for all my mutts (I’ve got three little dogs to walk in the afternoons). Th
ey all deserve the love. Extra love, by my estimation, because I’ve seen how their owners trouble themselves over their pets: kisses and neck rubs and rough-house play and dinner scraps hand-fed beneath the table. Their children see the dogs as friends, mostly, although I’ve noticed a couple of the kids couldn’t care less. These miscreant igits walk past their pet without a glance, while its tail wags in happy anticipation, only to be ignored. I’ve asked myself, “Who does this to a friend?” I can’t account for that kind of personality. Sometimes I don’t understand a kid’s world anymore.

  With our bounding pace the crap bags dance in my hand. The smell becomes overpowering. I draw the leads to the right, towards a Dog Do-Do trash can near the Mall’s entrance. The boys bear right like they’re harnessed to a prairie schooner. I’m hardly a vision of athletic excellence, but I don’t fear a heart attack. This is despite the thumping I feel in my chest, accentuated by the backpack slapping my spine with each footfall. My knees want to buckle.

  “Whoa up there!” Another tug on the leads encourages the mutts to slow down on sunny side of the Sheep Meadow’s tree line. The quartet looks at me with their sun-glazed eyes. “You’re going to kill me,” I tell them. I’m sure they want to answer. I lean over to hold my knees for support. Their chests heave like bellows. They nose in and I can smell meat breath and a pitter whiff of ass. “Good boys. Good dogs. Chief, I think you still owe me a dump.” I deposit the bags in the trash and stand to the side. We’re on the grass, the five of us. The sun is overhead and strong, which makes the shadows dark along the timberline. The fifty-foot Dutch elms arch across the Literary Walk, where life-size statues of dead white poets line a wide path leading to the Bethesda Fountain. Tourists are surprised to find Shakespeare and Byron keeping them company, along with other lesser-known Europeans.

  The Bard’s sculpture is an odd piece for me. It shows a forty-ish man of letters – book in hand, fingers keeping place as the writer contemplates the world, his art, &etc – dressed in padded trunk breeches, galley hose, a straight trim jerkin, and a leather overcoat with plenty of sleeve and collar. Quite the urbane gentleman, we are to believe. Now this is significant. He’s neither young nor old; no wrinkles mar his male comeliness, though he owns to a half-bald pate that shines in bronze under the porous boughs. For me, this Shakespeare lacks resemblance to those few woodcuts attributing his historical appearance. The statue looks more like an actor who has played Shakespeare’s repertoire of characters. An ageless man standing testament to those timeless plays.

  People pass through the arched trees, lots of smiling walkers, couples hand in hand, children gripping string-tied balloons bobbing above their heads. Their clothes remind me of the time I opened my first ten-tub watercolor kit.

  Someone walking hurriedly sideswipes me even though I’m standing well onto the grass. It’s a woman. She makes no apology, doesn’t turn around, but continues her march around a group of halted tourists taking up the center of the path. I see her from the back, a vagrant, wearing two overcoats. The tails of the inner coat hang lower than the green pea coat squeezed over the top of multiple layers. The stink she leaves behind putrefies the air. This can’t be Karen Kosek, whose gray hair and upright walk I’d recognize again. Unless she has a wardrobe the likes of the Bard’s oeuvre, which I doubt. There’s something off in this one’s stink, though, because it’s nasty. Her shoes, too; some type of military boot with undone laces that drag along the ground. I look past her, out across the far side of the park, above the trees, at the windows in those high rises crowding Central Park West. Somewhere thereabouts, from one-in-ten-thousand chromium-reflected windows, I imagine Karen K stares down at all of us in the park. She laughs inside her charade, thinking she has fooled us. “Not all of us,” I say aloud. Chief and Boilermaker look up, noses twitching leftrightleft in flex-O-snout agility to sniff out fear and food morsels, or just a hand to lick. I give them my palms and they start in with rough-tongued laps.

  “That’s right, boys,” I tell them. “Mizzz Kosek can’t fool everyone all the time. And I wonder if she can be fooled.” I see a route to a plan. Silver buttons shine from its center. My watch reads ten-thirty. If we walk the winding paths and clear out through Artisan’s Gate, where I can spray-wash their paws before heading across 59th Street, the boys will have gotten their money’s worth. “Here, you guys. Come – come now. Let’s go look at the big birds and then start on home. Sorry, boys. We’ll pick it up another day.”

  They lead me toward Christophe Fratin’s Eagles and Prey. Fratin sculpted in sand-cast bronze. He made his career on animal sculpture, and often humanized his models. His Ape with Basket looks a lot like Bigfoot, out picking berries. By contrast, Eagles and Prey is a grand, enormous sculpture of the late animalier style. Two eagles with spread wings have pounced on a horned sheep. Talons tear through hide. The sheep’s face is the classic portrait of resignation to death’s struggle, all the fight sapped from its terrified eyes, its mouth agape for the approaching release. To what release, the animal is probably more certain than most humans sneaking up on retirement. Score one for America’s manifest destiny: an imperialist motif from a French artist.

  I walk around the statue and wonder, in this brief moment of intellectual repose, if I should try sculpting animals. Hell, I already have a pack of models who would gladly, I think, hang around nibbling on kibble while I sketched them in various states of agitation. These mutts might look terribly sporting in bronze cast, frozen for all time on the heels of a rabbit, teeth bared and eyes flaring, tails curled with the strain of imminent capture. I can almost hear the rabbit’s heart thumping like raindrops on a corrugated awning. The reverie of imagination is enough for me, though, to the point where I’m already drained of enthusiasm. I’m not even sure if I like animalier, to speak the truth. Which is different, I feel certain, from admiring what beauty the work portrays.

  I corral the dogs and chorus, “Look at the boyds, pups, look at the boyds.” My cobbled New Jersey accent isn’t something I use amongst my Jersey friends. Chief looks back for a moment. The others have their snouts to the ground. The dogs aren’t in the mood for more stopping. They know they’re headed home for a long day in a small room, closed off from their favored society. My backpack straps dig into my shoulders like harness ropes.