[31]

This Artist’s Life, 1989

Apple Pie screwed up.

He said, “Christ, Becca, you knew I was fucking married.” He stood in her loft.

She said, “The married part is why you’re Apple Pie and not Professor Lord. Your wife’s Betty Crocker. You drive an Alfa. I hate you!” He was Kevin Richfield all grown up, with artistic talent. If she could call it that—talent. “I fell in love with you!”

“We can still be together, but you have to calm down.”

“How will we be together?”

“Like before.”

She said, “I’ll lay it out for you. You’re going to help me.”

He laughed.

“You’re going to help me become a successful artist.”

“Private lessons?”

“Patrons.”

“This isn’t the seventeenth century.”

“I’ll call your wife. I’m not stupid.” She wasn’t. She knew better than to make threats to tell the university. Like they’d do anything. They’d discredit her. She’d talk to Mrs. Apple Pie instead.

He said, “You wouldn’t!”

He didn’t know her.

“Let’s work it out.”

She said, “I’ll tell you how it’s going to work. You’re going to bring wealthy art-loving buyers to see my paintings, and you’re going to tell the truth or lie … I don’t care which … but you’re going to say that I am the most talented upcoming artist you’ve ever had the pleasure to teach.” She said, “Go home now and make some phone calls.”

Apple Pie delivered Roderick Dweizer—art lover, philanthropist—to the student gallery on Twenty-third Street.

Becca had six paintings hanging up, Fish, Number One through Fish, Number Six. None of them was exactly right, but she was too attached to each one to throw any of them away. There was something good in each.

Roderick Dweizer looked at Fish, Number Six. “What is it? Oils and what else?”

“Graphite,” Becca said. “Fish, Number Four’s my favorite.”

“Six is tremendous. The light right here.” He pointed to the upper right corner of the Fish, Number Six canvas.

Apple Pie checked his watch, pacing the floor. “Roderick, we’ll be late for lunch.”

“Nonsense. You’re the one who brought me here.” To Becca, Roderick said, “He thinks you’re quite good, you know? He’s never asked me to look at a student’s work before.” Apple Pie struggled to smile.

Roderick Dweizer said, “I’m quite taken with this one.” Fish, Number Six still. “What do you think, Chris?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re never short on criticism.”

“I think it’s simple.”

Dweizer said, “I like the simplicity.”

“It doesn’t say anything. It’s immature.”

Becca shook her head. He wasn’t following her rules. She asked Mr. Dweizer, “Do you know Mrs. Lord?”

“Quite well. She’s a wonderful woman.”

Becca said, “She must be.”

Looking at her painting, Roderick Dweizer said, “The fish is dying.”

Apple Pie said, “It’s death-obsessed, envisioned by a morose, pouting teenager.”

Dweizer said, “I don’t think so. Note the contrasts here. There’s all this darkness and death, and over here, we’re blinded with light. The light’s almost barren in contrast to the complexity of color here.”

Becca’s work spoke for itself. No matter what Apple Pie said.

No stranger had ever complimented her work. She smiled and stepped back behind Roderick Dweizer, folding her arms at her waist. She did what an artist is supposed to do: step back and wait, answer questions, seem confident. She didn’t care if this man bought Fish, Number Six. It was enough to know that he liked it. It was enough to know that he gained something from it. That he appreciated it. That he could enjoy it. Apple Pie had taught her well. She was nineteen. She knew that Apple Pie expected Dweizer to tear her paintings apart, and he hadn’t.

“Why did you do this?” Dweizer asked Becca, pointing to the red spot of paint, so thick and potent, it rose off the canvas.

“Because I felt like it.” Not what Apple Pie had taught her to say about her art.

“I like it.” He paced the canvas. “I would like to buy this Fish, Number Six for my daughter if it’s for sale. Do you have a price sheet?”

“Do you see the light?” Becca asked.

“The light is why I want to buy it. And the darkness.”

“I’m giving it to you.”

“You don’t give art away.”

Apple Pie said, “I would give it away.”

Dweizer shot him a look of contempt.

Becca said to Dweizer, “It’s yours.”

“Let me write you a check.”

“It’s yours.”

Apple Pie felt sick. Why did you ask me to bring him here? You can stand on the street corner and give your paintings away. “Becca,” he said, “Roderick came to see your work. If he likes something, you don’t have to give it to him.”

“It’s a gift from me to you.”

“Thank you.” Dweizer added, “We should all go to lunch to celebrate your fine student and my fine gift. I’m famished.”

“I am too.”

At lunch, she told Roderick Dweizer the story of the fish on the beach and how during that same vacation her father’s mistress came to the restaurant where they happened to be. She told him that for now she was painting fish exclusively, but one day, when she felt ready, she’d paint something else.

“I have a friend who owns and manages a small gallery in Soho. I want you to go see her. She’s always looking for young talent. I’ll give her a call. Her name’s Sue.”

Apple Pie had three vodka tonics at lunch. How had Becca managed to charm Roderick Dweizer? Then she realized: easily. She had charmed him, and she was the first of Apple Pie’s bevy of special students to get the better of him.

Becca walked home from Randy Lee’s fish market on Bayard Street at five-thirty in the morning, carrying a dead fish wrapped in newspaper. Later that morning, her fingers smattered and sparkling with fish scales in the first light of day, she dotted Fish, Number Fourteen with red snapper scales and cerulean blue oil paint. Her apartment reeked of dead fish and turpentine. Rolling her jeans’ pant legs up and slipping off her sandals, she dirtied her calves with oil paints and fish scales, but like most artists, if she noticed the filth, she didn’t care. She took off the lemon yellow blouse she’d worn out to Blondie’s Bar and Grill the night before and pulled on one of her painting T-shirts.

She didn’t sleep anymore at night. She hardly slept at all. She’d read in The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors that insomnia was a typical side effect for lightning strike victims. How could there be anything typical about being struck by lightning? She soaked a rag with linseed oil and wiped at the canvas’s edge. She thought about Chris, a no-last-namer (she didn’t want to know his last name) she’d met at Blondie’s Bar and Grill last night. She remembered he kept pushing down on the top of her head in his bathroom on Broome Street in Soho, and her knee dug into the edges of the small white tiles until it bled, but she kept going because she wasn’t letting him off that easy. When he took his hands from her head, she grabbed the backs of his knees and he almost fell on top of her. He said, “I want to see you again,” and she said, “I can’t do that.”

They had sat on his bed, and he brushed the underside of her forearm with his fingertips and she felt this warmth, this tingling heat, spread up her spine and through her gut. She pulled her arm away. She had to leave him wanting more. Always leave them wanting more. Always leave when you’re in control.

Now she was out of control, her red hair bristly and curled in the rising humidity and sunlight. The back of her neck and her thighs sweating. Her fingers were Prussian blue and cerulean blue, smelly and sticky with fish and linseed oil. The balls and heels of her bare feet stomped the drops of paint splotching the polished oak floor as she moved from palette to canvas to palette to canvas to oil to rag. Fish, Number Twenty-two. Fish, Number Eighteen.

She dipped her brush in turpentine, which she kept in an old Maxwell House coffee can, and then into the cadmium red. She kept her palette on a cherry table she bought secondhand in the Bowery. The table was the perfect size because she could fit two Maxwell House coffee cans, one filled with turpentine, the other filled with linseed oil, her tubes of paint, her palette, and her graphite pencils, and there was still room for her sketchbook, which she sometimes needed when she was uncertain what to do next, what color to use—or some new idea.

That morning at five a.m., she’d walked from Chris’s to Randy Lee’s fish market in sandals and blue jeans, her mascara smudged black under her green eyes, thinking, It isn’t so bad not to sleep. Thinking, I’ll try and finish number fourteen. Thinking, I need to buy another tube of titanium white. It’s not so bad not to sleep. The sun wasn’t yet up, but the shop keep ers were busy with the rattle and clamor of opening their front gates and shutters and hanging their scales. The street cleaners droned past, churning water that spilled into the gutters. Becca yawned. She didn’t understand Randy Lee and he didn’t understand her. She didn’t speak Chinese and he didn’t speak English. It was always the same. She said, “I want this fish.” She picked the fish for their colors, for their scales, for their eyes and their fins, not for their taste. Sometimes the fish were still barely alive and flopped at her sandaled feet. “Not that fish. No. No. This one.” Becca didn’t want a fish that was alive. She’d have to walk to the river to set it free.

“Tuna? Tuna?” he asked. “Tuna?” and held the fish that was clearly not a tuna in front of her before dropping the barely dead fish onto the scale.

Every fish at Randy Lee’s, from snapper to grouper to dolphin, was a tuna if you didn’t speak Chinese.

As she started painting that morning, she thought about her father and his photographs. She couldn’t believe he was having such success. She wiped her hands on her jeans before wiping the sweat from her nose. “It’s just a hobby,” he’d said on the telephone last month.

“You should be really proud, Dad.”

“It’s just a hobby, Becca. I take pictures. That’s all. Don’t make it a big deal.”

But it was a big deal. Becca envied her father’s success. She thought, I could be happy for him if he appreciated—even a little—what he has. Here she was living this artist’s life, unable to sleep, unable to concentrate, frustrated with her painting workshops, feeling overwhelmed, and her father, the millionaire tobacco chemist, took a few pictures and showed them to a few of the right people.

He doesn’t need the money, she thought, dabbing the canvas with her blue finger. He’s no artist. He doesn’t care. She rattled her brush in the can of turpentine. Yet he’s had a show in Boston and three in North Carolina. Four exhibitions. I should probably try and finish Fish, Number Fourteen or maybe Fish, Number Twenty. It’s your first solo show, she thought. It’s important. Just keep working. May, June, July—the oils never dry. May, June, July—the oils never dry. Roderick Dweizer’s friend Sue of Sue’s Gallery telephoned in May. They met briefly. Sue scheduled Becca’s first solo show. It was unheard of. Becca was excited, but sick. What if she failed? I should think less about things. People. My dad. He sold the Yeatesville picture of me for two hundred and fifty dollars and he wouldn’t buy a fucking watermelon from that woman. My show is going to suck. I’ll be washed up at twenty.

Becca remembered the Yeatesville picture. Her head lit up by the sun, by the lightning—kind of how she was all lit up now. She mixed the Prussian and cerulean blues with the cadmium yellows, stroking the canvas with her sable brush—a beautiful oily green. Remembering patience. She couldn’t rush it.

She remembered Jacob Lawrence telling the rapt audience at the Museum of Modern Art that he painted each of his series, all forty paintings, simultaneously, one color at a time, moving from canvas to canvas.

Becca worked in much the same way. Not because she worked with bright acrylics, not because she worked for uniformity like Lawrence, but because she couldn’t wait for the oils to dry. She couldn’t wait to wash the burnt umbers and Naples yellow onto the gesso. The cobalt blues and cadmium reds mixed with linseed oil onto the Mars black. She couldn’t wait for the layers to dry. She couldn’t wait to finish the ocean struck by lightning and the beach strewn with thousands of fish all waiting for some miracle. For some god to save them. The whole world, every canvas, lit up with blasts of titanium white and ringed hard with graphite, then smudged.

Becca’s calloused thumbs and index fingers dotted the canvases with fish scales and fins. Two months ago, her friend Paulo, a guy she’d met through Jack, had said, “You’re mad with the paint.”

Becca pretended innocence. “Is that a good thing?”

“That is the best thing.”

Today she moved from one canvas to the next, the sun rising higher in the sky, flooding the loft. A light breeze blew through the open windows. Her ware house fan whirred. She sprayed the quickly rotting fish with water to keep the scales bright. The eyes had already begun to sink, cavernous, into the fish’s head. She rattled her brush in the linseed oil can and then it came. The quiet. She was on the beach with the fish in her hands. The rattle of brush in coffee can, the whisper of brush on canvas. The summer blue sky. The sound of the ocean. The sun on her back.

In the Bronx, Mia chain-smoked Marlboro 100s and felt sick to her stomach. Paulo told Mia about this painter with a lot of money who paints little fishes with scales. Real scales. “She is mad with the paint. She paints lightning too. You should see it. You would like it. You would hate her.”

“Why would I hate her?” Mia asked.

“You hate everyone who is pretty and talented. She is both.”

“And she’s rich?”

“We all hate the rich.”

Becca got lost in Fish, Number Fourteen, painting until she collapsed on the hardwood floor, both hands smeared with fish scales and yellow ochre, her forearms and face smudged with graphite. Despite what Apple Pie thought, Becca was the real thing: an artist. She painted because she liked the buttery texture of the oils between her fingers. Because she liked the smell of turpentine, and the sound the brush made tapping the edge of the coffee can. Because she went somewhere else when she painted and she forgot who she was, sometimes for half an hour, sometimes for hours. Once, for a whole day. Becca painted because she needed to paint. She had to paint. Becca was an artist.

The loft smelled of rotten fish, linseed oil, and turpentine, and as Becca slept into the evening, she felt Chris-with-no-last-name, who could be anybody, kiss her neck. At first she tried to crawl away but then sank into the nuzzling, her head resting on his head. She awoke at six-thirty that evening. Lucy and Jack were knocking on her door, Lucy holding a bottle of champagne. Jack said, “What the fuck, Bec?”

“What the fuck to you.”

“Lucy got a part in the new Mercer film.”

“No shit.” Becca was sleepy and dirty and turned her back on her neighbors standing in the doorway—waiting for their invitation to join her. She said, “I need to clean up. Grab some glasses.” While she showered, Jack and Lucy walked around the big room, looking at the wet canvases perched on easels and secondhand tables. There was paint splattered on the glossy hardwood floors, and when Becca came back into the main room, her white robe tied about her waist, her hair black cherry in the fading light, Jack said, “They’re going to freak when they see the floors.”

“I know it sounds fucked up, but my dad will pay for it. That’s what he does. He pays for things. He pays for love and he pays for art and he pays when his only daughter destroys things. It’s only right I give him something to pay for.” She laughed and took a glass of champagne from Lucy. “That’s so cool about the movie. What kind of role is it?”

“It’s nothing big. I’m in this department store. Okay, but it’s still pretty cool. Really cool. I mean it’s a speaking part and everything. I’m in this department store, and the main character … Okay, get this. Get this! Played by Johnny Depp! He comes in and says, ‘Excuse me, miss,’ or something, and then, ‘Where’s the women’s department?’ and I say, ‘Upstairs,’ and I point and smile and maybe they’re going to let me spray him with some men’s cologne. I don’t know yet, but it’s a speaking role and I got it! I got it!”

Becca’s phone rang. Her father was calling from San Francisco. He said, “I miss you,” and she thought he sounded strange. There was something in his voice that she had never heard before, and it sounded like insecurity. She said, “I miss you too, Dad. Is everything okay?”