What Beauty Read online

CHAPTER 7

  The freight elevator takes me up to the art cooperative with beast-of-burden dedication. Its space is ideal for over-size canvases, lanky sculptures, wholesale-shopping booty, and one-ton stone blocks. The impedimenta of a busy art studio. When the door slides up, I find the room streaked in slanting sunlight through the skylights. Dust floats on the illuminated air, and the room gives off caustic smells of oil paints and thinner. Under these usual odors I get slapped by a whiff of ozone, peculiarly pungent. I look up, over the cable and canvas framework that divides our separate studios. A white cloud hovers high overhead, up close against the skylights. So then, this can’t be ozone. My next thought is that the room is on fire.

  “What in all hell?” I say, feeling my ready-to-work attitude frazzle.

  “Dats what I’m saying,” answers a voice. I step from the elevator’s metallic echo and find Vendulka lying on a couch.

  “Is there trouble?” I say, ready to help, but more concerned with safety than playing Frank Fireman.

  Vendulka shakes her head. “Some ax’dent. Nothing about to worry, they say. But, you know.” She takes a second, and bites a nail down to the quick. “Hey, where the frick has you been? We wondered if you leaved town for holiday.”

  Her speech makes my brain hurt. “Just around, Vendy. Arting. Dog walking. The usual.” The noxious cloud is staying high and, on second look, I notice someone has opened the skylight windows. Only a mist, or haze, hovers down here on the floor.

  She shrugs a sudden indifference. “Yeah, this is how I thought.”

  Vendulka Drakulikova is a Slavic émigré from the Krkinose Mountains, along the Polish and Czechoslovak border. She takes English language lessons twice a week, night classes, at a Berlitz school on 21st Street. She’s asked me to correct her grammar, but I’m shy to do that over and over and over and over. I don’t want to discourage the conversation we already have.

  She lounges on one of the three leather sofas we’ve shoved close around a television. A game show flickers, casually dressed contestants smile or frown, one gesticulates at the camera, and a sudden eruption of ringing bells brings the audience alive, followed by a buzzer and a loud groan from the losing contestant. The TV sits atop a box refrigerator, its rabbit ears wrapped in foil and wound tight with wire, which sticks out all over, like cattails gone to seed. The set gets decent reception from the broadcast channels, though since the Yankees have signed with a cable station, only a handful of games get played on the local UHF station, WWOR. So few of us hang around, anymore, after the good light has bled away and work becomes pointless. Vendulka is eating cereal from a big cappuccino cup. I’m wondering if it’s Cap’n Crunch, when a thought strikes me. Binny, the co-op co-owner, insists the fridge contents be exorcised once a month. This, at least, I agree with entirely.

  “Who’s on fridge duty this month, Vendy?”

  Vendulka gulps a mounded spoonful of cereal. Milk dribbles down her chin. She chews and swallows, then points the spoon at me.

  “It’s your turn, Minus.” She draws her head in a quick nod that I should come closer. When I squat beside the couch, she whispers, “Queen Bee calls for crash meeting.” I wonder why she’s speaking softly. Crash meetings are a Binny-and-Alfred special. It’s anyone’s guess what “issues” the agenda will list. Vendulka curls a finger to draw me even closer. I’m trapped in the gesture of gossip.

  “Some of us hear that Aspen dealers is coming for a SOHO tour next week.” She nods sharply. A milk droplet falls from her chin and lands between her breasts, quickly disappearing down her cleavage. Vendulka doesn’t seem to mind. My eyes hurt not to follow its path.

  She’s made an odd comment, odder than what I’m used to hearing from her. The cooperative has only six members: Binny and Alfred (Queen Bee and Her Consort), Bert, Vendy, Zeppo, and me. The Honeycomb Drones is my name for this sorry Rock’n’Canvas band (I see myself playing bass).

  “Vendy,” I explain, “ ‘some’ doesn’t really leave anyone out of the loop.”

  Her expression fights through the tribulations of translation. “What does this ‘out of the loop’ mean?”

  “You know,” I say, “like not being in on the info.”

  “This is more difficult. Idioms I don’t know good. You can explain?”

  I heave a sigh. Teaching English is hardly my strong suit. For a second I think about using this idiom, too, just to blow her mind (and why not throw that in). I try to be kind, and informative. “They both have to do with having information, or getting it, and sharing it. Who has info and who doesn’t, and to who you want to give it.”

  She smiles and nods vigorously. “That’s brilliant, Minus! But I think the grammar you want is ‘to whom’.”

  Just what I need. A foreigner entranced by comprehension and guile.

  “Okay,” I say, “I can’t claim to have invented the language. So, now, is this Aspen thing a secret that’s not for sharing?”

  “Fuck that I know,” she says. “I just wanted you to … be on the loop.” She makes a healthy, sexy-mouthed smile, an image that tempts response. I merely nod. I want to get away.

  “Okay. I’ll see you at the powwow table, Ven.”

  Vendulka wiggles her fingers good-bye at me. Slavs must do a lot of this, because her fingers like to point, wag, curl, wiggle, and twirl. Loving this woman would have to be something savor-full. I know who wants this very thing, too, after a long, long, and only half-hidden desire. I step gingerly into the center of our co-op. Down at alley’s end, I see that my tent folds are open, waiting, beckoning. I hear mixed tenors and a soprano voice deep within the room, hushed but furtive; people at work, in conference, a buzz of industrious action, even a cabal discussion may be afoot.

  Alfred and Binny’s art cooperative is on the top floor of an old seamstress sweatshop, a popular business in the early 1900s for the moneyed industrialists, who gladly hired young women newly arrived on steamships docking daily at Ellis Island and Fort Clinton, to sit at sewing machines six days a week. Al and Binny bought this space in the mid-Eighties at rehab prices, and christened their co-op The Beehive at SOHO. Six of us share the “honeycombs” (Binny invented the nomenclature, kitschy but catchy), divided into four-hundred-square-foot studios tucked behind tent canvas strung on guy wires. This leaves a wide, front-to-back alley, used for colossal canvases, installation piece noodling, and free-space to roam and pace and shed anxieties. A long community table sits in the center for our co-op powwows, brown-bag lunches, and after-hours drinking. Eight pyramid skylights follow the alley’s course, helping spread natural light. A half dozen bulb-and-lamp fixtures hang from the ceiling, only now wrapped in a mysterious fog. The Beehive is as close to a commune as one can get on Manhattan Island, inside a converted factory, surrounded by millions of dollar-wise capitalists. It’s a perfect place to work, populated by imperfect people.

  Our honeycombs are neither hexagonal nor made of wax, but we store our honey and raise our larvae in them, if I may be boldly heretical and coin a corny art analogy. I can’t joke like this in front of Binny. She’s a California transplant and misses all its nature and fresh fields and, I can only imagine, those Pacific Ocean sprays that once perfumed her hair.

  My cell is at the end of the alley, for which I must walk the length of the community space before disappearing behind its walls. A Florentine studio of the Renaissance this is not. We work alone, and use each other sparingly. But for the shared craft tools (You got any Cadmium yellow? … Can I borrow a T-square?) or to shoot the breeze to stave off self-doubt from staring at a piece too long, the outsider who drops by for a peek might well think we’re accountants or editors, or else a typing pool on its coffee break. That’s how the work plays out; socially, there are factions, cliques, and a “democratic” junta.

  My sneakers squeak on the cement floor. Voices coil from a center honeycomb. When I come abreast of its open curtain, across from the powwow table, I catch movement in my peripheral vision, the king of fast-quick je
rks that startled insects make. I stop and look in. Binny, Alfred, and Bert stare back at me, standing triangulated in velum light. Their gazes strike a vaguely Gothic motif, or maybe Inquisitional — the Elders meeting with a rat whose finger is poised to accuse the first he sees, all for the price of coins jangling in a leather purse.

  “Hey,” I say. They hey me back. Nothing else.

  I walk on and feel more than see their heads turn back into their huddle. Voices follow me step for step. Fuck this, I think, so I stop, retrace my squeaky footfalls in the unnatural speed of video reverse, come to the same spot beside the powwow table, and peer at the three of them through the lingering haze. This time Binny, Alfred, and Bert turn their heads as a three-necked monster would, with curiosity and a rising temper. No Hey, this time. I’ve overpowered them with suspicion.

  “So …” I pause. “What’s up?”

  No expression from them. Binny wears green surgical pants and a matching top, both two sizes larger than her middle-years girth. I notice her white apron, stained with butcher-blood red paint, is loosely tied at the back, the frayed ends hanging nearly to the floor. She’s pulled her graying hair behind her head into a long, frizzy ponytail. Her eyes show equal amounts of fatigue and alertness, giving her the appearance of a zombie because of her pasty, mottled skin (too many hours in the hive, no doubt). Alfred is in jeans and a button down shirt, patterned in red tartan. His beard is trimmed on the sides, but hangs down in front, pointed, the visage of a nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, I’ve often thought.

  I say, “Should I fear some unnamed toxic syndrome because of this cloud? I might call it a campfire gone awry, but the smoke tastes foul.”

  Their heads rotate toward some center point between them, as though someone behind the back curtain has pressed a button to make the three-headed beast move. Bert’s is the monster’s voice, if the monster is short and slight. He says, “Botched experiment, Minus. No problem. We opened the sky-vents, and plugged in a few fans.” Bert whirls his hand, as if I’m an idiot in need of a gesture to understand the mechanics of twirling blades. When he shrugs a dunce’s non-answer, the leather vest he’s wearing catches the light from above, a sort of glare one sees only from crash victims holding something up for rescuers to see.

  Bert Thong is Vietnamese. He’s five-foot-four and carries stocky shoulders over a porcine body, stuck onto bantam legs. His first name is Bertrand, awarded by Catholic parents who escaped Saigon in 1969 with their six-year-old son. If that isn’t a smile on his face, then he must have just stubbed his toe. Its pattern reminds me that many (I’m not an “all” person) Vietnamese have a similar mannerism, like his Vietnamese friends who come by the co-op to play phaodat. When I told this to Bert a while back, his expression changed: he smiled wider, showing small teeth shaped like a vole’s. I feared he had just labeled me a racist. Instead, he accused me of pulling his chain, and said of my pie-balled question, “We don’t notice our own kind, you moron. Should I suggest you look like you’ve got a pole up your ass just because you’re white? No one wants that shit pointed out to him!” Bert told me that’s what art is for. Of course he’s right. He’s the second most gifted among us drones, Queen & Consort. Only he won’t accept his métier as figure drawing, so he meanders and punishes himself by producing derivative meta-art.

  Bert ogles me from between Binny and Alfred, and begins explaining more about his mishap, as though I’ve asked for details. “I had something cooked up with dried ice to make this super-cool effect on the canvas, actually it’s a panel but – not worth going into. It’s just cee-oh-two fluff dissipating, dude. Sorry. Nothing to call the CDC over.”

  “Hmm,” I say. “I’ll save that for the listeria I’m sure to find bubbling out from one of those leftover cartons in the fridge.”

  Alfred and Binny exchange a look; Al grins, like the shit in his mouth tastes good. Binny clenches a hand and knuckles Bert’s hip sharply. I slowly look at them one at a time. Nothing. There’s nothing here. “We’re sort of busy, Minus,” Alfred says, and for effect (I think this, but wonder if it’s really a marriage-partner thing.) Binny nods, as if Al’s words are exactly what she would have said if he’d just kept his mouth shut and let her speak.

  To let them know their behavior is its own punch line to a bad joke, I grin, but their faces only reassemble into the leers construction workers give female joggers who dare to pass the job site. Behind them, I notice three art pieces standing draped in secrecy by white sheets — fitted bed sheets, whose elastic corners curl at the bottom, exposing shined copper, the angled shape of which is impossible to see the connection with what remains hidden.

  “Then I won’t keep you from your productivity. Good luck,” I say, and walk on.

  When I signed on at this hive, there was, I had felt, a promise of connection to other artists, people who came with different disciplines and had varied backgrounds, opinions, and age-related adventures to tell. A great mix for convivial argument, right? But over the months, after learning about these people — fine as casual friends — any thoughts I had toward serious connection, or collaborative work, lost its appeal.

  I winnowed the problem down to a matter of focus, and its importance for our work (in some cases, its scarcity): those not in one’s field of vision get passed over. This is about as much as I see in myself, is what I made out by comparison, if comparison is of any value. These minor disappointments, along with others in life, I try to take in my stride. To date, I’ve achieved satisfactory results.

  My honeycomb isn’t messy. It shows the clutter of the per se artist-at-work. A wood table with aircraft carrier depth takes up the majority of the floor space. Topside, the table is a dusty mess. Below decks are my supply stores: hammers & files & chisels, plastic tubs of clay, canvas tool bags, and never-to-be-finished experiments. Art books and novels are stacked on block-and-plank shelves along the sailcloth walls, like kinetic building bricks. Nothing newly created lies on the tabletop, a virtual desert in art’s landscape and sense. Maybe this is what Binny, Alfred, and Bert were whispering about: a scheme, one whose hatching finds me relieved of my rented space. The thought is not so silly, but, I admit, unlikely to visit me as more than a ghost image. I can add the admonition, “Get yourself together!” The fact that Cap’n Crunch trips a celluloid memory is something that buries my fears under hope. I whisper to myself, “Okay, you can begin anytime now.”

  It’s dark beneath the tabletop, and peering into these shadows, I smell opportunity coming through the solvent odors overriding the dust mites, hovering like interstellar galaxies. My hands reach deep into the disorder of cans and power tools and hammers, where I feel the prick of a feather (a Tyrolean cap), caress Beethoven’s bust (a gift of “inspiration” from mom), rustle a wooden box filled with hand tools, get caught in the rough chicken wire, rolled and tied with twine, and feel a stack of plywood blanks that, long ago, I cut into small squares (badges of forgotten ideas). I pull out the chicken wire, the box of tools, and the plywood plates.

  I reach across the wide table and draw a big circle, as far as I can stretch my arm. I slap down palm prints for eyes, and a wriggling worm for its mouth. My trepidation has a critic’s face. Karen K wrote about artistic play, and likened it to the writer’s notebook, a personal room in which anything goes. “Just see where it takes you, pally,” she advised.

  My left thumb taps across four fingertips, and wiggles itself to make number five. I lay out wood plates in a long row. One, two, three, four, five. Behind the simple math lurks a central, though soft, motif. Five is good. Don’t over-tax your imagination with so many choices; hold to the theme first dreamt.

  I walk around the table and, from the opposite end, unroll the chicken wire and flatten it across the surface. The smiley face gets splintered. Inside the large roll I find wire rods I’d cut from dry-cleaners’ clothes hangers, each about a foot long, bundled with simple twist ties. I spill them out over the chicken wire, where they fall like pixie sticks. Now I hav
e skeletal material. But what shape? Anything human will do, or even human-like. This is only play. My feet shuffle nervously as I stand, belly pressed against the table. I keep my hands moving in the air, molding, figure-modeling, playing.

  Used copy paper lies on my stool. A sculpture, one of my spheres in maquette, dents the pile’s center to keep it all in place. I showed the full-size sculptures a year ago last November, over the Thanksgiving holiday. The gallery sold five, and had me pick up the remaining four a couple months later. Those look at me from across the table, resembling (when I let my mind really fly loose) a group of aliens whose heads have been lopped off and stuck on pikes to warn the indigenous people against collaboration.

  Such was not my intention when I was sculpting them, but critics wanted to interpret the spheres as globes. I also read of “lead balloons,” “mandalas,” “human ova,” “fatty leftovers from a liposuction lab,” and “testicles.” I could only chuckle at their imaginative conclusions, but when they asked me to respond, I told them, plainly — truthfully — that I had only looked for textural shape in a geometry-obsessed world, and that the cycle focused on the medium of sight. One critic referred to the “music of the sphere” — apparently in reference to atomic physics or some higher mathematics few readers caught on to, of which I could not count myself.

  What took the cake was a minor critic writing for the Gallery Guide column in the Arts section of The New York Times. She wondered if I hadn’t had in mind globe enthusiasts who’d gone blind. She floated the term “Cartographic Braille” in her article. Oi!

  I liked the phrase, actually, but felt she’d really missed the intent of the spheres, even though I’d explained it again and again. Globes, sure, if you will, but not worldly, planetary, and never … #!*@&%! …. See here: another critic mentioned “Earthly apocalyptic visions” — a phrase whose triteness I thought showed journalistic and critical inexperience.

  I’ve since stopped reading the criticism of my work. Who am I to believe? The critics who love my work? The critics who hate it? I couldn’t hope to be myself if I heard so many opinions of who I was or thought I wanted to be.

  A word about art explication. I don’t want to explain my art to people, but occasionally I must. Figure it out for yourself! I want to say. That goes for books, too, and films. My stock answer to the question, “So what does it mean?” is a casual (but not effete), “It’s a mirror; stand closer.” Which is another way of saying, “Whatever you see in it, that’s where you’ll find its meaning” (which is effete).

  People must understand that artists are no different, more or less, in intelligence or worldly insight than the next Joe and Jane of a similar age and background (though we artists hold vanity like a torch). Artists know how to make the world look pretty, or desperate, or fun. Therefore, we all should want to find the answers to art, as we must in life, in that sack we all carry over our shoulders, filled with the experiences of living inside a unique personality. I believe in this like few other ideas available. Of course, the critics get their say, too; but watch out, or you’ll begin supplanting your opinions with theirs. The “Cartographic Braille” label is a good example. Recall the difference between the child and the adults in Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

  Tell me, then, how do I explain this to the average viewer? Or to the critic? I could easily hear the answer for my effort: That’s not how I would react! Or the imitable, I don’t see it!

  Yes, I can only wonder, Of course you don’t.

  Within those first NYC weeks after I’d moved from Chicago, where insecurity of position was my only anchor to reality, and provocation to explore my new neighborhood and City, I read many juxtaposed texts to seek wisdom from stories, and entertainment in philosophy. Kierkegaard paired with Tolkien, Aristotle with Kafka, Ayn Rand with Virginia Woolf, The Book of Job with The Tropic of Cancer, to name a few. As I read, exploring the many voices in the texts as well as their clashing themes, I found non-linear, non-axial, non-spheres rising from the cognitive abyss wherein my creativity dwells, a place I enter by sight depth only, like one looks into a cave from a safe distance. From that experience I made oblong balls, out-of-round globes. This had been my first step into abstract sculpture, and there’s no wonder why I jumped back to figurative art, however vague the outcome so far. They are failures, the globes, failures of the sort that reveal the artist must change or quit. Me. Now I’m here.

  I begin work by not working. The paper stack must go because I need my stool. The scratch paper has bothered me for a week. Binny handed them out so she could feel good about recycling, but I use paper tablets, not loose sheets. With no use for them, and having wasted time thinking how I could use scratch paper (Holy Lord!), I can no longer imagine finding another place to move them.

  My hands wad sheets one by one, forming paper balls. CruunchCRUUNCHcrrk crunk crk-krrk. Spherical wads. The sound is stereolab static and popcorn chewing. CRUUNCH CRNK crrrrk, krk k-k-k-k-k. There’s a big, mesh wastebasket shoved into the far corner, its empty mouth mocking me. I toss paper balls one at a time, taking my time between throws, listening to the dis-symphony my hands generate when I crinkle cheap bond into globes. Its shape and texture begins as a geometric plane, with sharp, dangerous edges for which I pity secretaries, editors, and Girl Scouts working on their origami merit badges. Its shape and texture ends in a lightweight, razor-toothed ball, good enough for shooting trash can baskets. Is this what the ancients discovered, too? Impossible, I imagine, because paper wasn’t invented until … I don’t remember which year. The Chinese first, I recall, but they don’t count because their history is far too long, and I’m fundamentally ignorant of its arc, and constantly mix up their dynasties, and refuse to follow their art movements (too much landscape draftsmanship), and I think K’ung Fu-tzu’s analects are lousy with clichéd moralities. After five minutes, the basket — its metal mesh suitable for years of schoolroom abuse — has a full stomach of paper pills. With the last few tosses, it begins to regurgitate its brunch, the little piggy.

  Back to the plywood squares. I find quarter-inch dowels for what I have in mind. Each is nine inches long, and I turn these into the corresponding center hole in the plywood. Against one dowel I place a wooden figurine, about the size of a child’s action figure, the kind artists use for sketches when a live human can’t be found to model. I stand it upright and bend the arms and head down, away from the torso, which I finally kink to the left to help it lean against the dowel. My intention is to let the head, arms, and legs fall linearly, like a hanged man, or a victim of a firing squad. I anchor the body at the waist using thin brown twine.

  For the second dowel I use a pair of tin snips from the tool tray to cut a fourteen-inch circle out of the chicken wire. Wearing leather gloves, I bend the four compass points toward a south polar axis, keeping a rounded shape, and thread these eyelets through the dowel, ending with its top two inches sticking through the North hole. As a last wrinkle, I pinch the wire at the center until its shape resembles an hourglass, or a tailor’s dummy.

  The other dowels get the same treatment, of a sort. More playtime. As I work and shape, materials come to mind that I could throw: cereal might work after all, I tease myself — let it harden around a frame, cover the shape with blown latex, and paint it with acrylics. A marrying of figurative art with pop-culture identification. Alternatively, I could make a sand mold for a metal cast using aluminum, bronze, tin, or lead. Lead would be fun, to get that oxymoron-ish piece like – … of course, this has been done. Everything has been done, hasn’t it? No, you bonehead, that’s not the way – …. Move on!

  I can work in cold casting, too. FMG, concrete, Betty Crocker cake mix, maybe Jell-O.

  For two minutes I upbraid myself over pessimistic leanings, and all the synonyms I can think of for vapid and lazy. Building wire shapes to affix to the dowels makes me conscious of my hands at work. Their handy-work helps me focus, become resolute, to scheme the easiest material, and pro
gress from there. Clay is the obvious product for a first test. When I finish the last skeleton, I pull out two plastic tubs from an air-tight rubberized drum in the corner. One tub holds natural claystone, the other a polymer. Yes, playtime.

  The five forms stand with blind obedience to my experimentation. I quickly give them names, a seal to their imagery for the next phase. FallenMan, ShadowTree, HourGlassWoman, GumbyDude, and OrchidBloom. Five skeletons on which muscle and fat and skin can hold a tight bond, or else bulge and sag, to employ some gesture or body language, possibly suggest eroticism, but ultimately define humanness.

  Shadows have subdued the room’s ambient light I’ve been working in. Looking up, I see dark clouds beyond the skylights. The gray tint that’s settled in the hive makes me feel old. I turn on my own photoflood setup (a lá Peter N’s canopy), a four-corner fixture that uses 200-watt Philips “frosted white” light bulbs, mounted behind white umbrellas bought at a Chinese wholesale store on 27th and Broadway. Once I flip the switch, the new light perks me up under its glow, under its growing heat. Age must wait ahead for me. My eyes find new perspective, a way to continue. “Not randomly,” I pronounce. My voice resounds against the cloth walls. Outside the walls, the voices I’ve been hearing — whispers, a laugh and counter laugh — go silent. A hoot suddenly klaxons, and behind that, more whispers follow.

  For the next phase, the throwing, I place the top half of a cardboard refrigerator box on the table. One side has been cut out to make a hood, something I’ve used for spray painting. I pick up GumbyDude and center him in the hood. The skeleton has four wire rods that form its arms and legs. The torso is bent, woven with many rods; the head is a simple zigzag jumble slid onto more upright rods, crimped to hold it in place.

  I begin to pace again, arms folded. What do you see, Minus? I walk from one corner to the next, make a circuit and double back. GumbyDude waits patiently. He doesn’t move; no breeze rattles his wire limbs (handless and footless) to send out false signals. When my pacing becomes volatile and I bang my hip against the table edge, the rods vibrate. I watch the wire until it stops. The sound my feet make, sliding on the dusty floor, takes my eyes off GumbyDude. In the white light’s shadow, I notice a book spine. Van Gogh, the dust jacket announces. My hand finds its edge, pulls it out. With a whoosh, I blow dust off its cover. The Dutch Master’s work is reprinted by permission of dozens of people, so says the index, public and private holders noted in small print. On page 485, I come across Self-Portrait as an Artist. The original hangs in The Art Institute of Chicago. I’ve seen this masterwork a hundred times. Guards have reprimanded me for bringing my face too close to the painting (“I’m only studying his brush strokes.” “I asked you to step back, please, sir.”). Over the years, I’ve sketched dozens of the painting’s details – his tired, blue eyes; the woolen jacket collar; that frighteningly-angular ear; the thin, copper-red mustache – which lie in some portfolio I left in Dad’s attic, its zipper rusted so badly, opening it sounds like tearing leather. Had Van Gogh used only a mirror to see himself? Was it polished, or wiped with a rinsed paint rag? How old was the master when he painted this portrait? I’ve known this answer at some point, but cannot remember now. I remember that he died in his thirty-sixth year. Rembrandt lived to be sixty-three. An old man, for the era, and the transposed age of his impressionist countryman. His own early self-portraits, Rembrandt’s, highlighted his community standing: the dandy, a man-about-town, fond of fashion, prone to excess, possibly a youthful rake. What if Vincent had let himself grow old, and not shot himself in that field behind the Ravoux Inn? Grown to be old man, too, I imagine. Still with the same curious stare, if that is curiosity in the self-portrait of 1888. Fattened cheeks perhaps, if he had gotten on, because old men retain calories. Maybe a smile, finally, for all the work he’d done after deciding death was more pointless than life. I close the book and feel its heft.

  “Knock-knock.” Belinda pokes her head around the canvas drape. “Hi there. I’ve come to interrupt you.” Her arm comes into view, dangling a picnic basket. “Is this a good time?”

  “None better,” I say, wanting to be annoyed but actually I’m relieved. This annoys me. Oh Lord! She pops in and walks around the table, stops, turns, and walks back all the way around, retracing my steps in the dusty floor, her eyes fixed on the skeletons. I put the Van Gough book on a shelf. The picnic basket has released scents of meat and bread and fruit as she’s carried it with her.

  Belinda ends her second go-round at my stool and plops the basket into my lap. “Let’s eat, boyfriend. We’re about to see much less of each other, and a picnic lunch to send me into the storm of industry can only make us want each other more at night.” She extends her hand, which I hold, turn it over, and kiss the soft ridges across the palm. She uses her other to scratch the side of my ear, as if I’m a pet bunny.

  We eat while standing, hips wedged against one corner of the table, the basket open between us, lids off salads, ham & cheese sandwiches unwrapped, one banana peeled and broken into sections, like a fallen Greek column. A few times during this mostly silent lunch, Belinda looks back at my skeletons. When she finally looks my way, her eyebrow arches, but that’s all and it’s good enough; good enough to let me know I’ve made good enough first steps. We close the basket, kiss like we’re in public (a chaste, postage-stamp peck), and she waves to me at the door. As much as I love her, I hope this hasn’t been the best part of my day.

  To prepare the claystone I fill a small, galvanized bucket with water and wet five heavy, square cloths. They’ll keep the clay moist and malleable for hours. Likewise, wetted claystone sticks easily to its separate pieces when pressed together, forming a simple bond, somewhat like sand drippings kids make at the beach. When dry, however, the bond will be as strong as the handle on a ceramic coffee cup. I’m hoping for this effect when I throw it at the wire skeletons.

  Next: my Walkman; songs to calm me. Steely Dan. Boz Scaggs. Zeppelin III. Mellow is the goal. Con-TEM-plative is where I need to be, not Jazz-busy or Techno-irritated. I hook the earpieces over my lobes and click “play.”

  The clay bits that I’ll throw need shape. Uniform shape. I can’t tear off chunks and start hurling them willy-nilly at the wire skeletons. That would be as effective as a monkey throwing its shit at a window, the astonished faces of zoo patrons his target. As I listen to guitar rhythms, a jazzy-blues voice, my hand finds the clay and tears a dollop from the mass. I look at the globes across the room and let my hands fondle the clay. My nails begin to separate it into nuggets. (da-da da da dadada da-da-da da da da daaaaaa) The thumb and forefinger press against a dime-size bit. The shape reminds me of … okay … cereal again. Quisp. A small disc — not a Frisbee — more a flying saucer or … dare I say, a prophylactic in silhouette (minus the reservoir tip). This shape is good: lots of surface; an edge to impress; curvaceous. My fingers make saucer discs in time to three songs. I wet a cloth to cover these. It settles over them like creamed porridge.

  Using both hands, I roll clay into six large balls, and the balls into long, thin snakes. I cut the snakes into triangle shapes. Cutting these takes less time than the discs, and by the middle of the third song I cover this batch with another wet cloth, one that’s red like caked blood on a mortal wound. The clay has dried out the skin on the backs of my hands. The tape ends, I flip it, and move on to the next shape.

  Later, while using a canvas spatula to clean beneath my fingernails, I notice the pieces that drop off look like worms. On second thought, larvae, or maggots. I thought I had finished, but these pieces, their shape and size, show possibility. I open a bucket of older clay, scratch my hands across its surf, and use the spatula to scrape out more maggot shapes. For an hour I must repeat this work to fill another wet cloth. Boz sings Lido Shuffle, and plays the riff on Loan Me a Dime (I prefer Duane Allman’s rip’n’er version). How I get to Lynyrd Skynyrd on this tape, I don’t remember, but Tuesday’s Gone gets short-noted by at least twenty seconds. I have five buckets fille
d with clay pieces when I pull off the headphones. Outside the honeycomb, the drones and queen and dickhead are quiet. In quiet’s background, like a memory, a fast laugh peels. Vendulka is still in front of the television, I hope practicing her English.

  Time to throw.

  It’s long past the dinner hour when I finish. I know this by the change in light and color through the windows, from the gray cumulous which forced my refuge under artificial lamplight, to this dull brown that swallows the highwayman’s cupped match. The Beehive rests in a morgue’s silence. This reality has come of a suddenness I was not prepared to find. One’s lost sense of time, of sight and sound, the notes of spatial existence felt in a room, become an ecstatic flush of blood and water and sweat when found again. I wonder if this is what coming out of a coma is like, or what the amnesiac feels upon his rediscovered history.

  I’m not sure of all that sits before me, the effect these sculptures make. Three of the five skeletons are covered in clay, their simple forms now dimensionally complex. Some have got the full treatment, others I lost interest in early, try as I could to let the sculpture find its way as the clay pieces built up — snow crystals on a tree limb (I wanted to believe), or barnacles attached to a ship’s hull — until I recognized body and life within the hardened shapes. I beat back all urges to mix clay shapes on any skeleton. My goal was to see how a uniform shape stuck together in a thousand different angles. The result is something beautiful, I think, lowly intense, or otherwise ugly, and my wrists ache from so steady an exertion. I had begun throwing pieces with one hand only, taking my time, but always and with ease got caught up in the mechanics of throwing, until I found both my hands feeding on pieces from the bucket, firing them at pinwheel speed against their target.

  The textures are radical to the eye’s normal demand for familiar contour and definition. The figures have crevices, spikes & spines, pimples and pits. They’re something between cave paintings chipped from the wall (taking the one-dimensional to three-dimensional in a single bound), and the religious talismans gypsies carried up from the Levant. One likeness makes me chortle: a camper sits on a tree stump, petrified by a million generations of desert winds.

  Buzzing rises from somewhere in the hive: a file rubs across wood. I listen to its rhythm, and then it stops, the sound settling into the white noise that my ears pick out while I continue to listen, too hard. I scratch an itch on the side of my face and feel clay scabs drop away. When I leave my tent to clean up, I notice a light shining between the cracks of Zeppo’s tent. The rising idea to call on him, to ask if he wants a drink, gets pushed down. If he’s here so late, he’s busy. Zeppo said to me once, “When I was young, art moved me. It was physical. Not as much anymore. Still less so later? I fear the graying years.” This statement from a man whom the other day I saw weeping as he washed his brushes after finishing a canvas six months in the making.

  I wash my hands in the cold water, leaving no patience for the hot’s slow flow. I strip down to my skivvies and give myself a sponge bath. After toweling off in my tent, I step into the jeans and socks and shirt I put on this morning at the loft, and stuff my work clothes into a gym bag. On the way past Zeppo’s lair, I resist sneaking a look, or even listening for more signs of human stir.

  At home, Belinda has kept a light on in the bedroom. She likes to sleep in low lamplight when I’m not around. I tiptoe through the kitchen and peek through the open door. A book lies open across her lap. Her head has rolled forward in sleep, and her reading glasses hang from the end of her nose. I take my clothes off and put on pajamas, go to her bedside and slide the book from her hands, and the glasses off her face. These ministrations wake her briefly, through which she pouts and then proffers her puckered lips for a kiss she won’t remember getting. I plant one with a watery smack and ease her body back onto the mattress. Climbing into bed, I roll her onto her side and kiss her temple, where the soft hairs should tickle her face, fanned out, but they merely move minutely in some air current only a hair can detect. In the darkness, I lie in wonder. Not about my sculptures, but what happened to the crash meeting Binny called, and Vendy had warned me about. Had I been left out? Allowed to work? Fat chance, is my estimate.

  The following day, Vendulka sits on the couch again, knees tucked under her chin. Two fingers rest their nails on her front teeth. She’s changed from morning game shows to daytime drama. I hear the click of her teeth snipping off the ends of her nails. I’m just back from taking the small dogs for their walk.

  “How’s your art coming along?” I ask, ducking beneath the glowing screen to open the refrigerator door. Disordered smells ooze out on chilled air.

  “I can say this, dat it’s good,” she says. She’s eating a lemon. The peel sits in torn bits on the sofa arm. Such a perfect still life, the yellow peels atop each other, like flower petals or fallen leaves, on the black leather, grainy and used. Vendy puts a thin lemon wedge between her front teeth and bites down. My mouth puckers in Pavlovian response, and I feel the saliva flow so heavily that I must swallow. She, on the other hand, has the kid’s happy look, the girl on the verge of penetrating the core of an all-day lollipop. She says, “Your T-Vee gives me ideas.”

  “It’s not my television.”

  “The American mind comes out of truth here.”

  Oh, God. I don’t know how to respond. Did she mean to say “comes out through here” as in, coming from the television? Or is it that she thinks the mind of Americans is “true” by showing its philosophy (or whatever!) in the programs she watches? Worse, I’m not sure these two aren’t the same thing! I decide not to respond and instead work on cleaning out the fridge. When I came in, I found a note pinned to my tent from Binny, asking in a precise hand and polite register that I find time for this month’s chore.

  “Vendy,” I say, “whatever happened to that crash powwow?”

  “Fuck that I know,” she says, “maybe the Fate has her.” Her tone overflows with annoyance, but at whom (Binny? Me?) I can’t tell. Vendulka often surprises me, because when I expect to get an earful, or an argument, she suddenly gives a perfect manufactured response.

  I squint at the fridge’s contents. The hive is not going to get a “Last Call” on what’s in here; the smell has only become stronger in the warm room. The bottles of staples — ketchup & mustard, one jelly jar with blue goop and one with yellow-orange goop, sauces of soy, Worcestershire, hoisin, and duck, a plastic lemon and lime about equally half full, and Liquid Smoke — I place on the table next to the fridge. Containers with yellow lids belong to Binny, blue to Alfred; Bert likes red. (Do these correspond to mood, or personality? My sense tells me the latter.) Color coordination notwithstanding, everything is labeled with either its owner’s initials or name. A half dozen of these survive my wrath. The rest of the stuff I pitch into the trash. In the small freezer compartment, I find two ice cream bars. Binny and Alfred are printed neatly in black ink across the length of the plastic wrapper. I turn them over to discover they’ve added their last names. Good grief.

  “Powwow! Powwow!! Powwww … woooooooow.”

  “What da hell,” Vendulka says. “These two are about to screw.”

  My eyes lift and spot Vendy round-eye at the screen, where a white teenage girl is about to go down on a middle-aged black man, his shirt buttons undone and pulled wide, exposing his molded black chest. His blue and white power tie hangs from his neck, pointing south. There is more than the typical cut-away clues of sex. The girl’s head has slid down his chest, her nude back facing the camera, while her lover sits on the edge of the bed, when — there she goes! The camera pulls back as the focus softens, then blurs as her head covers his groin. Vendulka claps her hands.

  So when has daytime drama gone soft-porn, I wonder. In our post-sex-rev generation, there’s nothing new about white girls blowing black guys. But at two-thirty in the afternoon? This is what advertising dollars feed Americans? Seems to me, television has changed since Archie Bunker condescended to the country’s prodi
gious but nearly unscreened black audience. Now Mandingo gets to diddle the white neighbor’s barely legal daughter.

  The camera pans to the left for us to see a mirror, an ottoman, a woman’s vanity. Finally, the focus draws in to a ballerina music box, whose ceramic figurine pirouettes to the notes of Tchaikovsky. The shot holds for three seconds, then fades to black, replaced in two heartbeats by a toothpaste commercial. How appropriate.

  Vendy is incredulous. “They don’t show nothing!”

  A screech fills the hall. “Powwow, powwow. Everyone to the community table, please.”

  “Be right there!” I call over my shoulder, although I see no one at the table or in the alley other than Binny. I ask Vendy, “Did Czech television show porn in the afternoon?”

  “Noooo,” she says, all hush-hush and startled. She thinks I’m serious. “Communists never give us that. I come to America with expected ideas. How you suppose I learn from you this language? I known I’m not much good on grammar, but TV helps. Those two talked for long time before taking the clothes off.”

  “Powwow time, Minus. Vendulka Drakulikova! You’re not waiting for a special invitation, are you? Come to the table, please.” When I look over this time, Alfred and Bert are staring at me from behind her, Bert peaking around the taller Al. Zeppo has come out of his canvas cave, too. He’s in coveralls and a Met’s cap, everything streaked in black dots and spattered paint lines. Finger smudges of fireplug red mar the cap’s bill where he adjusts it on his head.

  I tell Vendy, “America’s freedom-call doesn’t exactly reach as far as giving kids sex-ed on soap operas.” I watch the toothpaste ad fade, replaced by a red minivan with laughing kids in the back seat. “Not when I was a teen, anyway.”

  “But they don’t show nothing. Not even nipples.”

  “I admit nipples would have been good. But you saw the guy’s bare chest. And the tie. Suggestive.” She merely glares at me. Is this sarcasm, or does she not know the definition of “suggestive”? I try to encourage her. “Wait until the commercial break is over. It’s why American TV has commercials every six minutes, to keep you interested. Don’t you think they showed enough, though? I mean, kids are getting home from school soon.”

  “Don’t be so conserve, Minus. After our revolution, boys and girls got to be horny on trams and inside metro. I think they was showing off freedoms they not have ever. You saw lots of tits grabbing and cocks rubbing. This is all what I expect in America.”

  If I focus on imagery that matches her language, I might confuse the sexuality preferences that young Slavs carried themselves into after throwing down the yoke of communism.

  “I’m sorry for your disappointment,” I say, truthfully, and start loading the fridge again with salvaged jars and containers. “Just finishing up!” I yell at the Queen & Consort, although we’re separated by twenty feet of funky fridge odors. “Vendy, we should –”

  “Wait!” she hollers. “They’s back!”

  Indeed, the couple reappear on screen, lying shoulder to shoulder in bed, a sheet pulled to their necks. She’s very white and very young, with a nice figure outlined by the silk sheet. He’s very black and not so young, but still a fine specimen of manhood. Abruptly, the picture blinks away, leaving a white spot in the center of the tube. Vendulka drops the remote onto the table. She pushes herself upright and gathers her lemon peel for the trash.

  “Fuck,” she says. “That’s bad. I think I need new opera serial.”

  Alfred passes me the agenda. There’s one copy to circulate among the six of us. Scribbled in Al’s handwriting are Group Show, Sculpture Sympossium, The Beehive T-shirts, and Aspen Dealers. I feel waves behind my eyeballs lapping at the sides of my head. We’re seated against the plank timber community table, its matching benches able to accommodate eight across. Sometimes we feel like we’re teenagers at camp. At least, the circumstances often make me feel this way. I pass the agenda to Vendulka, seated at my right. Zeppo sits across the table and down at the end. He looks to be sleeping, although his eyes are open and fixed on the beeswax pillar candle rising from the table’s centerpiece of twisted branches and dried leaves.

  If we need to write down the agenda topics, Alfred tells us, he can get some scratch paper. Binny emits a confirmation syllable. She’s seated in the CEO position at table-head. “Does anyone need a pen?” asks Al. Binny takes her pen from the breast pocket of her smock, and holds it out to each of us, one by one. No takers, but Bert picks up a pencil he’d placed on the table next to a notebook, to show her he’s come prepared.

  Bert sits on Binny’s left, directly across from me. Vendulka is deftly positioned at an angle to Bert’s hunting eyes, allowing him only infrequent glances at her. Bert thinks he’s in love, and thinks no one knows this, not even Vendulka, who in fact knew this five minutes after meeting him. Three minutes after that, the rest of us knew.

  Vendulka basks in Bert’s foolish attentions, and plays off his sophomoric shyness. Her role as the coquettish, dark-haired, high-tits foreigner-slut beats Sophia Loren’s in her day, and Penelope Cruz’s today. Vendulka’s favorite ploy is to lick her lips, using the tip of her tongue, as she stares at Bert in a way that makes him follow her every move. (I’m reminded of offering my dogs liver snaps.) She slides her tongue from corner to corner, wetting the top lip to show the underside of her tongue, which has a fat blue vein bisecting the glistening muscle. She also likes to stretch her back, exposing her navel and the pudgy flesh around that sensual cavity. She pouts at him a lot, too, something I notice her doing now. The table hears Bert take in breath like he’s been stabbed. No one will pull out that knife. We’re always far too interested in what could happen next.

  Al and Bin are no less a pair. Given their names, you’d think Alfred was the older man, gone west to pluck Binny, a child bride, from a California beach community, or a post-FlowerPower commune gone to seed. Binny is eleven years older than Al, and the authentic hippy girl of her drug-deluded generation. She has pictures of herself from the Sixties: long blond hair, frizzed by sea and sun, dangling over the shoulders of a tie-die shirt emblazoned with cat’s eyes in rainbow colors; the shirt is two sizes too small and shows her braless breasts like fresh melons, their stems raised and knobby; beads surround her neck, with bangles stacked up her wrists like notches on bedposts; her eyes hold that eternal freaked-out quality that makes you wonder how fast her heart was beating with all the party juice racing through her veins.

  When I compare Binny-of-today to her Kodachrome mementos, I see the mother of that pot-enthused teen. While her hair is the same length, and nearly as frizzy, its sandy tinge of youth has gone to zebra streaks. Sadly, her skin matches the hair. Too much sunbathing using PABA during that product’s heyday of the Seventies, is my guess, before warnings against its use had flummoxed her and other California-Sunshine women. Nevertheless, Binny looks happier now than she does in most of those old photos, which seem to mark for her days of regret rather than remembrance. “I’ve had enough of that shit,” is a line I hear her repeat when the past comes up — any past, any history. All these contradictions appear, in some form, every day.

  Counterpoint: Alfred is a former stockbroker turned onto an arts sensibility (an urge he had as a child, but was beat out of him by Pentecostal parents whose work-work-work for the idolatrous dollar won him over at fourteen). By the middle eighties, Alfred had forged a mini-fortune buying short every time Ronald Reagan opened his mouth with optimism. “I got out too early for a Fortune 250 listing,” Al once confided. He left Wall Street after meeting Binny at a Santa Fe corporate retreat, where she had been working her third season as the on-staff art teacher. “It was love at third sight,” Alfred likes to joke to party guests. “I looked at her, then she looked at her boyfriend, and then back at me.” You can imagine the laughs this gets.

  Al puts serious effort into his art, but that doesn’t mean the work achieves purpose, or even his goal; his money allows him to experiment without finding a vision from an inner
eye, something to reflect on to himself, and, therefore, the subjective object, etcetera, etcetera. He has talent but no heart, and zero discipline. His beard makes him look harassed.

  Binny is the true artist of the duo. She has a dynamic vision for her “cadaver prints” — staged photos using dead bodies posed as living beings in at-home portraiture, dressed in period costumes (frock coats; pinafores; buckle shoes) with Alfred always the only “live human” standing somewhere at frame’s edge. When I walk away from seeing a Binny piece, I wonder if Al is representative of The Last Man on Earth. I’ve wanted to suggest to her this title, but I don’t think she’d see my angle — … let me put it this way: I believe she would find the suggestion an insult.

  Zeppo lifts the agenda close to his face. He’s tucked two of his Canadian cigarettes behind his ears, and they stick out like the tusks of some prehistoric animal. “May I borrow your pen, Binny?” he says in his soft tenor, almost a murmur. Binny seems triumphant and celebrates “the note taker.” Zeppo licks the ballpoint tip and circles something on the page, draws out a line to the margin that ends in an upside-down e. “You misspelled ‘symposium’,” he says, before sliding the pen back to Binny, and the agenda on to Alfred. He says, “Thanks for the pen. I think I’ll remember the list without prompt.” His scratched-vinyl voice is an unusual timbre for him.

  Suddenly, from beyond the table, a moan escapes one of the honeycombs. A womanly moan. Sexual release drifts into the air and over the tent canvas walls, only to descend on us all. Zeppo knits his right eyebrow. The voice, the moan, the orgasmus, has come from his honeycomb.

  Binny tilts her head toward the sound. Her lips compress, until she realizes what she’s just heard. “By the way,” she says. “Thanks for coming in today, everyone. Minus has cleaned out the refrigerator, I believe. The smoke has cleared –” (She stops to laugh at her own falsely placed wordplay; Zeppo stares more fiercely at the candle.) “– after Bert’s little mistake yesterday, but we’re sure nothing has been damaged.”

  “Such as my health,” I want to say. I let my eyes say it — to her, to Alfred, and especially to Bert, who sits with hands folded in front of him, playing the schoolboy.

  Alfred clears his throat. “Bert has an announcement for us.”

  Bert says quickly, “I can’t attend the sculpture symposium in July,” having decided, apparently, there is no point to preamble. He keeps his eyes on the table. “Sorry, Minus.”

  I stare at him, and continue to stare until he lifts his head. I say, “All I asked for was a simple hour of your time to get my equipment into the park and set up. What’s happened?”

  “Sorry,” he says. “I just can’t do it.” He turns to Alfred. “Is that really your ice cream bar in the freezer?”

  Alfred smiles. “My name is on it, Bert. That’s why you’re asking, but…. The answer to your question is Y-E-S. Leave it alone, please.”

  Vendulka pinches my thigh beneath the table. She rolls her eyes and pinches me again. She mouths what I take as, “I’ll go with you.” I lower my head in an Elizabethan thank you, but I know she’ll forget unless I remind her. I may forget to remind her.

  “Moving on,” says Binny. “I know you’re all busy.”

  Zeppo sighs. Bert pouts at Alfred. Vendy clicks her teeth, a call to Bert, which works. She makes a slow, long lick across her upper lip. Bert shifts in his seat. His hands unfold themselves, and one disappears from the top of the table, diving beneath, while its mate digs a nail into the wood.

  “Excuse me,” I say. “What do you mean, ‘Moving on’? The symposium gives this co-op a chance — maybe THE chance — to get a little recognition. But to you it’s a simple moving on. I had planned on going there to represent the co-op, even though I’m the chiseler working all twenty-four hours of glory. And now none of you is going to be there?”

  “I’m going,” says Vendy. She sneers at Bert.

  “Ah, there you go!” says Binny. “See? Problem solved. Besides, Minus, we have The Beehive T-shirt for you to wear. And now, well … everything seems to be copacetic. You’re not going to pout, are you?”

  “That’s a poor attitude to take, Binny,” I say. “It’s also not the promotion you need. I’m not the billboard your shirt’s to be pasted on. Yeah, no thanks. Jesus, are you people members of a co-op, or –”

  “Art is individualistic work,” Binny says.

  “Why the T-shirts, then, Bin?” My voice no longer hides its anger in sarcasm. What I really want is to punch her instead of educating her.

  Silence covers the table. Zeppo might have said something, once upon a time, but he’s removed himself from hive politics. I bare him no grudge. The man comes here to make art. Alfred and Binny exchange a look that I catch. I won’t let this pass, either, and clear my throat. “By the by. Next month I’m going to be on the panel at the 95th Street Y. If I recall, the topic is City Art and its Reflection of the Art Community. Something like that. Perhaps I’ll have something to say about community spirit.”

  Bert chuckles. “We’re all going, Minus.”

  “Wearing the team colors, I imagine?”

  Alfred says, “The shirts are black and white. Devoid of color. Or containing all colors. Whichever you choose. We’re trying to reflect the Yin-Yang principles.” He smiles to himself, and to us, like a middle school art teacher.

  “Maybe some of us will wear one,” Bert says.

  “I’ll be on the panel, Bert. You’re welcome to come with questions about what artists do for each other. I’ll gladly have a story or two for the crowd.”

  Zeppo laughs. He holds his hands high over the table: thumbs up.

  “You’re on the panel?” Alfred asks. “You’re on the panel? How did you get chosen?” He looks at Binny for a sign he’s heard wrong. She tries to shush him. “We’ve been talking with the ARTFORUM people for six months. They haven’t got back to us yet.”

  “Actually, Al,” I say, digging my hands in my pockets, “they simply DID NOT respond. Notice the tense I’ve used. There’s nothing coming from them to you, not to Binny, not to Bert, or this co-op. Tell me why, Al.” My callowness comes through as sour as the refrigerator odors, but I’m pissed and there’s no way I’m letting this asshole make the symposium or the roundtable a topic for group-speak. I say, “This co-op is laughed at by the New York arts community, that’s why you didn’t get a response to your plea, just as you didn’t get a response to last year’s New York Parks council call for –”

  “We put together a good plan for that! Their competition was fierce!”

  Bert says, “The parks council fixed the voting against non-minority members.”

  Everyone looks at Bert, who blanches. Does he know, finally, that that is why Binny and Alfred brought him on, to be eligible for minority-sponsored projects? That had been my guess, when he showed up in the elevator one day, without a vote being cast by Vendy or Zeppo, or me.

  Accusations fly up and down the table. Name-calling comes with biting spite. Binny stands. Alfred follows. The bench is too close to the table, however, which throws him off balance and his arm whacks Binny across the shoulder, sending her back into the chair. Purely accidental, but Binny didn’t see him lose his balance and thinks he’s cuffed her. Binny rockets up from her seat to counter attack.

  I laugh, because this is John Cleese farce, escaped from the telly. Binny, looking at me and looking for a scapegoat, winds up and throws a left hook. It’s a good one. I’m expecting to see stars because my hands are still deep into my pockets, with no way to block her fist meeting the side of my head. Bert saves me by his own aggression when he leans across the table to stick his swamp rat sneer in my face, and Binny’s haymaker labels him, dead center, in the temple.

  It’s now that I remember why such a punch is called a haymaker. Bert’s out cold before his knees have the chance to buckle. And then they buckle. He drops face first across the powwow table. Too bad there isn’t hay laid down. His head bounces on the blanks.

 
; Binny cries out, “Jesus Lord On High Mountain! My hand my hand my hand!”

  Alfred is yelling, “Don’t cry Bin — Bin don’t cry!”

  She screams at him, “I’m not crying, shit-face, I’m in pain!”

  With Vendulka’s help, I drag Bert to the couch and lay him out on his back, arms folded across his chest. Bert has a smile on his face like the baby Jesus in all those Christian paintings. An Asian baby Jesus.

  “Let him see me when he opens the eyes,” Vendy commands. She undoes the top two buttons on her blouse. “He might tink he’s in heaven.”

  “In that case,” I suggest, “we should tie his hands to the couch legs, unless you want your breasts groped.”

  Bert was always little match for her. Vendy has that strength of womanhood meshed tightly with her communist upbringing. She would rout him, in fact, in such a way that he would go home and weep at this failure, and at himself. Not at himself as a man, but at himself as a human. I stand back to give her room for Bert’s pearly-gate welcome, that view of her fleshy Slavic cleavage jiggling in its D-cups.

  “Go to Binny,” Vendulka says. “She’s into psycho.” She thrusts her hand into her blouse, pulling at her breasts to show more cleavage than I thought possible without the wink of a nipple.

  Back at the powwow table, Binny holds her hand against her chest while Alfred stands behind her. His palms cup her shoulders. Tears streak her face. Her hand is no longer the threatening fist speeding at my head, but a crumpled lump of gimpy flesh. I wonder how I can capture this tender moment in a future piece: Al standing over his mate, she in nude repose, acne marking his concern, and triumphant pain in the wrinkles flowing down the sides of her mouth; the nudity would give an Adam & Eve complex escrivein “the apple is eaten and God has sent a telegram.” Guggenheim worthy, I ponder, tongue pressed firmly against my cheek. But I don’t do oils well, anymore, and the guy who does lies knocked out on a sofa, with a harlot bent over him to administer a sexual coup de grâce when he wakes up with a clanger of a headache and a black eye.

  Binny looks up and finds her voice. “Minus, you’re out! Leave the hive. I want you gone by sundown.” Surprisingly, she has whimpered through this threat.

  “Calm yourself, Binny,” I say, “we’re not in a Western.”

  “Binny, calm down,” says Alfred. Surprise surprise, I think, just as Binny whirls on him. “Don’t traitor me, Al! He needs to –”

  “I need to do nothing, Binny,” I say. “But I hope you can understand one thing. What’s happened is a mess, but it’s nobody’s fault.” My voice is calm, leaving no wake of nervousness. I glance at Zeppo. He hasn’t moved, and seems bored. I say, to Binny and Al, “Let’s paint this over and then, later, we can talk. When we’re all able to talk.” I nod toward the couch. “We can paint a whole new picture. Together, eh?”

  Binny looks hurt, but more from the pain in her hand, now. Nevertheless, she can’t retract her words (I imagine she’d rather not) but doesn’t have the votes to win (which must hurt). I harbor no guilt for either of these problems, of course. Zeppo looks up from the candle, fixing his eyes on something beyond all our sight. Alfred’s hands are massaging Binny’s shoulders, working the tension out. He doesn’t second my suggestion, not verbally, but his body language and soft, ready attention to his mate show acquiescence to a bury-the-hatchet pact.

  Binny has visibly mellowed, from my words or Al’s hands I can’t be sure, but her neck muscles are no longer a bundle of twigs wrapped in wet tissue. Her smock has slipped down in the tussle and (with Alfred’s massaging hands) has exposed the tops of her freckled breasts, two quivering fillets of meat. Not quite up to the ranks of Vendulka, I must admit. Alfred starts really giving her the works, his fingers all over her shoulders and neck and nape and clavicle and upper chest and behind her ears. And she is into this, a sleepy hound at the hearth that offers herself, belly up, for a pet and a pat and scratch and tickle. She rotates her shoulders and her hips follow, making the bench squeak and groan. Zeppo smiles. Alfred hitches his legs, which catch my eye. I look down and … Holy of Holies! … he’s tenting right here at the powwow table. Zeppo winks at me. I stay stone-faced, but feel my bowels churn as I hold hilarity from spewing across the table.

  “Yeah, okay, Minus,” Binny says through a sigh, very throaty and sensual. “You don’t have to –” Her hips roll again, Al’s hands are at her sides, fingers poking from between her arms. I’m waiting for his hands to slide around, like a fog, and envelop her quaking breasts. But Al shakes his head at me; he helps up our Queen Bee and they disappear into their honeycomb. The flap closes. Rustling behind the canvas turns to moans.

  Zeppo stands and lifts a cigarette from behind his ear to put between his lips, then steps his legs carefully over the bench and leaves.