But I was still in a transgressive haze — that, frankly, if it had come down to it, I’d have traded my after-swim pleasures for any day.
“I told you Eric was a great guy,” Robert said, while his mother waved after the rattling tailgate.
All I could do was nod, and remember Eric’s big hands, his dirty boots, his cap — and his wondrous cussedness.
I never saw him again.
A few days later, I was back in the city.
And at school.
Robert wanted to be a scientist.
I wanted to be a scientist.
In Hugo’s classes we worked wonderfully hard at it. Or at least Robert did. I wanted to work hard. But it was so easy, especially with Robert around, in the midst of some lab experiment to get into talking about some fancified possibility, some speculative what-if…
Hugo’s assessment of me, once our first year together was over? In one of his biannual reports to my parents, he wrote:
“Sam is bone lazy.”
He was right.
I still am.
That’s probably why I’ve never been able to work at more than one thing at a time. And while — sometimes — I worked at my science, in those years art was something I didn’t work at but merely imitated from other people, other books, other pictures — even if, because of an imitative knack, occasionally, in or out of Gwenny’s class, I got more than my share of praise for it.
A year or so after my father’s death, I, my wife, some cousins, and some friends all went for a last weekend to our own country house — just before Mom sold it. In the attic’s evening nostalgia, from a small green table set up against the chimney brick, I picked up some dusty sheet music: “September Song”—though when and why my father had brought it up here, I didn’t know. But this time, what I saw was not a contested progression of notes. As I turned back through the gritty pages to the opening, what I noticed now was that the French lyrics, running between the speckled staves in italic type, were by the poet Jacques Prévert, whose little volume Paroles had been published in part by the Pocket Poets series and, back during my high school years, had joined, along with Ginsberg’s Howl, Corso’s Gasoline, Ponsot’s True Minds, and Williams’ Kora in Hell, my most cherished volumes.
“Les feuilles mortes qui nous ressembles…” Prévert had written; just as surprising, the translator and crafter of the American lyrics had been (I read at the music’s top) the humorist poet Ogden Nash: “The autumn leaves drift by my window, the autumn leaves of red and gold…”
The piece of music beneath it on the table, that showed the yellowed right angle where, a bit askew (for how many years), “September Song” had lain, was as great a surprise: a frothy tune, wildly popular during some season of my childhood, it was, “If I Knew You Were Coming, I’d Have Baked a Cake!” The writer of this, I learned for the first time from the name at the top, was the playwright and popular essayist, William Saroyan.
Had my father been aware of any of this? And how, now, could I ever know?
But — as I said — that was later.
Gwen had been our art teacher for several years.
What goes into a picture?
Shape, Line, and Color…
How are they put together?
In relationship to the outside edge.
By the time I reached the Eighth Grade we’d repeated it so often it had almost no meaning. As happens with all dogmas, sometimes we’d laughed at it. Frequently we’d mocked and made fun of it. But, as dogmas will, sometimes it had astonished me with its explanatory force. There were even moments when it seemed to relate as much to music (Mrs. Wallace had only that week handed me the solo score to the Mendelssohn Concerto: “This is probably hopelessly outside the realistic frame of your abilities. But there’re parts in it I’d just like to hear what you did with…”) as to the most functional architecture, to theater, to dance (Wendy was already telling me all about Martha Graham, José Lamon, and that there was a wonderful choreographer at the City Center Ballet named Balanchine, some of whose works a few people liked to say they couldn’t understand, though they certainly made sense to me!) — as to sculpture (the easy transition) and to art.
Then there were those odd moments down in the third floor library — which, with permission, the Eighth Graders were allowed to use. The world globe stood beside me in one corner and the scrolled dictionary stand sat across from me in the other. (The dictionary did not contain, I knew because I’d looked them up, a number of the words Eric had used three springs ago — though some surprising others it did.) I looked over the analytic geometry and calculus text I was pursuing on my own, and for seconds Gwen’s dictum seemed to explain the more amazing parts of mathematics and science as well… though that insight I could only hold in my mind for a heartbeat.
That must have been the year, when we were working in the art room one April afternoon, that Robert became wholly, intently, and surprisingly involved in one of his pictures. He painted with his brush held in both hands, the way he used to hold his pencil when he was six or seven, and he seemed to fight the paper — rather than paint it. Blues and reds and grays swirled around each other, the colors getting angrier and darker as he got closer to the center, where, in his energy, he’d already torn the paper — and was still painting at it.
We used the tops of the old paint cans for our colors. Robert’s brush swept down across the one, licking up red, the other, lapping up blue. Then brush hairs smashed again into the saturated paper.
Gwenny happened to walk by in her paint-speckled smock. She looked over Robert’s shoulder — and made a sound as though she’d been hit. Recovering herself, she let out a breath: “Pure sex!”
The six of us — Priscilla and Richard and Kathy and Nicky and Mary — watching or whispering from our own projects, went into mindless, paralyzed silence (except Robert, obliviously at work). If Eric had stepped from springtime, through the door, and into the art room to call out some innocent and astonishing excoriation, it couldn’t have been more shocking. Teachers didn’t say things like that in those years. After another moment, however, we laughed.
Because Gwenny had always been a very different teacher.
Robert looked around, gave a sheepish smile.
Gwenny blinked at him — at us. “Well, it is!” she exclaimed. “Pure sex — that’s just what it is! You may not see it now — but you will, eventually. It’s quite marvelous. Go on!”
When school let out that afternoon, I went back up to the art room, let myself in, and spent a couple of minutes looking at Robert’s painting, still drying on the wall. Robert — who, while the rest of us had gotten taller, leaner, and stronger, had just gotten bigger and pudgier, and was mad about science fiction and amateur radio, and was still, on any scale I could read, the least sexual of children — had painted a picture in which no single shape, line, or color had retained its identity over an entire brush stroke. Rather it was all process, energy, movement… Was that, I wondered, what “pure sex” was? I don’t know whether it was beautiful. If anything, it seemed just a breadth away from a truly troubling ugliness — a quality that no figurative painting could have manifested without having been deformed, distorted, grotesque. Nor was it particularly sexy — to me. But it was powerful. Was “pure sex,” I wondered, something that ought to inhabit a painting (though Gwenny clearly thought it should), since its purity seemed to subvert the very esthetic — of shape, of line, of color — that allowed it to manifest itself in the first place? And how did it relate to the outside edge? Robert’s paint over-spilled all four sides and corners. The edge contained his painting no more than a photograph’s edge contains the whole of the reality around the camera. Arbitrarily, it delimited only a fragment of that roiling energy. Pure sex? And how did the “pure” variety differ from the tentative, frightened, half-hidden (and presumably impure) sort I’d tried to sneak into paint years ago with my borrowed muscle-builder hulking on his borrowed throne in his borrowed, orientalized throne room? With a lot of questions in my mind, I went home.