“I’m going to sleep,” he said. “Get out.”
“I want to talk to you,” the woman said. She had very grey eyes. They were constantly being lost in the shadows.
“Out,” he said, slipping past her on the bed. He lay down, removed his sandals, and placed his street-dirty feet well within range of her.
“I’m Meg’s mother. I want to talk to you.”
For a long time he lay there staring at the water scum on the ceiling. Then he remembered who Meg was. “She isn’t here, go away, I’m tired, I’ve got a painting to finish tomorrow. Scram.”
The woman snubbed out the cigarette on the orange crate serving Ivor Balmi as an end table, and said, very softly, “Either we talk, or I go to the police tomorrow. Meg is only sixteen.”
Ivor Balmi shut his eyes very tightly. The woman did not go away, the evening did not get cooler, the faint smell of kitty litter somewhere in the room did not disperse. “You don’t really think I give a damn, do you?” he said.
“Jail?” the woman offered. Anhors d’oeuvre.
Balmi shrugged. “I’ve been there.”
The woman turned halfway on the bed, looking down at him now. “Mr. Balmi, when my husband died, he left me a great deal of money. I’ve been unable to find things to do with it except to indulge myself and my daughter.” Balmi saw that was so: her suntan was the sort enjoyed only by wealthy women able to afford the time and locale for sun-reflectors behind the ears; an all-over tan; it fitted her like a golden warmth. “I would consider it in the nature of a public service to hire the sort of men who would forever put you out of Meg’s — and anyone else’s — way. Do I make myself clear, Mr. Balmi? I will have you killed.”
“Without compunction, Mr. Balmi.” He considered what she said, weighed it against the expression on her face, and decided it would do no harm to listen. Still, nothing more than a desire to go back to sleep suffused Ivor Balmi.
The capacity to not care is one that must be nurtured in Man (the caring animal), and once full-grown, like milkweed, is hard to kill.
“All right, Meg’s mother,” Ivor said, sitting up, “we’ll talk. You talk first.”
“I want you to stop seeing Meg, I want her to stop coming here, I want — ”
Ivor Balmi threw up a hand. Exceedingly flamboyant, Alfred Drake-poised, the hand silenced the woman instantly. “You want,you want,you want,” he chided her severely. “Meg’s mother, you are a pain in my royal rumper room. Your precious daughter Meg — sixteen and all of her — came jouncing in here one night, made a sloppy mess of herself and proceeded to deposit her can in my bed. While I am not known far and wide as a lofty example to young womanhood of the contemporary knight in shining armor, I am not that depraved that I rob cradles.”
“Your daughter, lady, hadme. I was filled, and still am filled, if you must know, with a monumental disinterest in your daughter, her rutting habits, and such nonsense as her continued appearance at my door. She wakes me when I want to sleep.”
“Very much like her mother.”
“Good night.” He rolled over, sliding down, and closed his eyes.
“You are unbelievable!” the woman cried. She hit him in the back with her fist. Ivor Balmi leaped up and grabbed her wrists before she had a chance to strike again.
“I don’t want to have to heave you down six flights of stairs on your ass, lady, so please get off my bed, out of my studio, and split! ” His voice was still even, unruffled, carrying the message with a tinge of ennui.
“Balmi!” She almost spat the word, watching him with a peculiar coldness. “You are the most amoral animal I have ever met.”
Ivor Balmi released her wrists.
“Do you love Meg?” she asked.
He stared at her amazed. “You’re kidding,” he said simply. “You’ve got to be kidding.” She stared back at him. A tiny tableau, with nuances of deepness. “You don’t seem to get the message. Your daughter paraded herself around here, I was horny and laid her and that,believe me, was that. The half a dozen times she’s been back, I’ve almost had to boot her. I don’t need her, I’m not interested in her and, frankly, the role of enraged parent doesn’t suit you.
“You’re better-looking than your daughter. Probably a better lay, too.”
The woman’s face went white. His words had been delivered as a necrologist would gather details for his obituary column — dispassionately, analytically. She slapped his face. He hauled back after a moment and rammed his fist into her jaw. The woman sprawled off the bed.
“Lady,one you get for free, the second has to cost.”
She lay at the side of the bed, her skirt disarrayed about her thighs, and as the red spot began to swell, she began to cry. Ivor Balmi, cursing softly, stepped over her, marched into the living room, through it, and into the plywood-partitioned studio beyond. He snapped on the light over the easel and stood staring at the painting in progress.
Black rocks flew up into a mourning sky. Birds, whose eyes had seen the ash of solemn hopelessness, age and despair wrought, wheeled in that mourning sky. The world was a mass of turquoise pulsation, bordering and verging on the assimilation of air by darkness. A stricken man, arms flung Earthward with crying need, carried a hump of peat guilt on his warped back. He made for a city whose structure was Mondrian-as-a-psychopath. It was a very bad painting.
For twenty minutes he worked at it, striking it as a desert wanderer strikes a snake, smiting it with color in broad, insensitive strokes. He worked with a fervor, a fury of touching brush to canvas that was more gymnastic than artistic. He lunged at the painting, he deployed his strength and hurled it shotlike at the work already there. Sweat glinted brightly across his upper lip, caught up by the light over the easel, by the insane reds, the deranged oranges, the lunatic yellows of the fire raging in his city-there-in-paint.
After twenty minutes, he threw down the palette, let the brushes sink exhausted into their jelly jar of turpentine.
When he turned, he realized at once that she had been watching him. He had no idea how long she had been there. For the first time since he had struck his father in the face with the volume of Spinoza, that forenoon so long ago, his fury built, stoked, flamed, blazed, consumed him. “You dizzy bitch ,” he snarled, starting for her, “what the hell do you mean watching me — ”
“Are all your paintings as bad as that?”
It stopped him frozen tight cold hard empty there
What was this woman? Some sort of Punch-and-Judy clown half-filled with idiocies (“Do you love Meg?”), half-filled with ice-water realities too true, too penetrating to be expressed? He was stopped, and she knew it. There, at that point, his observation of her altered.
He nodded slowly, with resignation, “Yes, they’re all that bad. I’m a very bad artist … consequently all my paintings are worthless.”
She came into the room, studied the canvas. “That isn’t so. It isn’t worthless.”
Her jaw was swollen where he had hit her. It would soon turn black and blue. But the outside beauty was still present. He wanted to say something to her, but had said it all in silence many times before.
He turned away from her and went back to the bedroom. She followed him, and now there was not the disinterested, bothered detachment that was Ivor Balmi, but a feeling of becoming terribly, inextricably involved with her. Meg’s mother, who are you? What do you want from me …
(My name is Ivor Balmi, I have black dead eyes. My soul is a heap of autumn leaves ready to be burned. I wait only the long match of the burner to come. I am alone, I have always been alone, I like being alone. Once I loved a girl, for a very short time, and when I no longer loved her, or she no longer loved me — what does it matter, it’s all the same, really — I looked again at her face and saw only a shadow of someone I had once known. It was easy to walk away from this stranger. Strangers, I decided then, can never hurt you. So I know only strangers, and care nothing for them. My name is Ivor Balmi, I am alone, I live with my sadness and my self-pity and I like them, love them, adore them for they give me the way to go, the way to see, the way to work. They are the status quo and with that bland, egocentric sameness I can never feel pain, can never feel the frustration of frustration and inadequacy, the terror of wanting to do things but not being quite good enough to know them as they should be known, but always flawed, error-filled like reject socks sold by a greasy man on a street corner in bundles of eight packed with a butcher’s paper band. I am Ivor Balmi and you will let me cling tightly, cuddling, to my ways. No one will touch me, and I will paint badly if I want to paint badly, and that way I do not have to struggle.) (My name is Ivor Balmi. Let me sleep! )