"These are the last works I'm going to paint on clay, Ginger. So it won't happen again." This seemed to placate her a bit. She took the other two paintings out of the carrier and stood them up against the wall.
"This is gorgeous, Marley. What do you call it?" "'Ode to Hero of the Future #5,' " I said. It was just an old thing I had given to my mother, then later retrieved. In the center was a gray gunsel sitting with a piece of metal in his hand, inside a metal box. In the background were some gray buildings, ominous and filled with gasoline, and some grasses —like the oil refineries outside Newark, New Jersey, voluptuous with sorrow and evil. "It's not finished," I said. "I have to add in a few details. But I thought you would like to see it. You see, in times of antiquity there were real heroes, known for their great achievements. But in today's world, all we have are celebrities, people known for their well-knownness. Creations only of the media. Well, a century ago men were more heroic than people of today; and some guys in antiquity were even more heroic, while people in the times of prehistory were real gods. That's because they didn't have People magazine to create men, but the men created themselves, through their great works. But my feeling is, in the future we will have real heroes once more. Like me."
"How much do you think I should ask for it?" Ginger said. She seemed a little nervous. What a distinguished bottom my dealer had, sizable and with a nice triangular shape. Then she looked at the third painting. "This is the weakest of the three," she said. "Actually, it's no good at all. The center part is all right: but there's too much blue outside it."
I shrugged. I didn't mind that she said something like this, because I had a simple way of dealing with it—I didn't listen. "You're wrong," I said. "This painting is among my best. By the way, are you going to Sherman's opening tonight? You should see the girl who's meeting me there—"
"If I can make it," she said. "I'm going to try." She looked harried. Really, she might have shown a little more interest in my existence. It was not easy being an art dealer, that much I could understand. Oh, well. A fondness for this person washed over me, she seemed about ready to crack into little pieces. Well, she was only a few years older than me, and had for the past five years been operating privately out of her SoHo apartment. It was just now that she was going to open a place at ground level, where street traffic could come in; it had taken her this long to work up the strength. "Ginger, when am I going to get paid for that last piece of mine you sold?" I said. I turned a chair around and sat in it.
Unfortunately I heard a crack. It was only one of those little spindly chairs like those in an ice-cream parlor, nothing I would have allowed into my home. Ginger had a sort of moth- ering way about her, on the whole—still she sighed and grimaced and didn't handle it all that well, at least not as I would have done.
"Goddammit, Marley," she said. "And I just bought these chairs, too. Listen, I'm really very busy right now. This woman is coming over in a little while to look at your paintings, and the men are fixing up the bedroom; my mother is visiting me, and she's eighty, so things are a little hectic."
Well, I got up to leave. But she was ashamed of her abruptness with me, she smiled with an abstract, crispy little smile, and walked me to the door. "Marley, I would advance you the money that you should get from the last sale, but right now I'm totally broke, what with opening a gallery. It's turned out to be terribly expensive. But as soon as I get the check from the buyer, I'll call you up and you can come and pick up your half of the check. All right, honey? I'll speak to you soon." She kissed me on the cheek.
"There's just one thing I want to say," I said.
"What's that?"
"I have a great idea for when I get rich. I'll hire John Lennon, Shakespeare, Puccini, and Jimi Hendrix to write an opera. I've been thinking about this for a while. Isn't that a fabulous idea? Just think about it."
"They're dead, Marley."
"I just want to tell you one more thing," I said.
"I've really got to go, Marley," Ginger said. "Maybe I'll see you at Sherman's opening."
But she had made me morose, and I insisted on speaking. "If I don't get this goddamn grant to build my chapel in Rome, I'm going to give up painting."
"You're not going to give up painting, Marley," Ginger said. "You're a genius. Besides, there's nothing else you can do."
"Do you think so?" I said.
I was pleased. And as there were some hours to kill, but not really enough to accomplish any work in, I decided to cheer myself up. I was nervous about meeting this girl later at Sherman's show. I had to kill hours: I would go to the Museum of Natural History. Nor was it to cheer myself up entirely. I had to examine the stuffed lion group behind their glass wall to see what their fur looked like at close detail. Such details were essential in my work; there was going to be a lion in the "Feast of the Gods" painting.
It was violently cold out, and at the same time raining. It was no better or worse than being in Siberia—the World Trade Center was covered in grim, yellowish fog, and the tops of the buildings disappeared into the gloom. The stuff was pouring down from the yellow sky. I wouldn't have been surprised if it was the end of the world by flood.
Which made me think about old Noah. He was an Armenian, this explained his great love for animals. For some years some guy in New England had been building his own ark; it occurred to me I would be well advised to send him a check when I got rich. In that way I would be assured of a position on the boat if indeed the flood came.
I tried to leap over a puddle: a small lake was more like it, for though I estimated where the lake finished, I was wrong in my misapprehensions—the lake kept going, and I landed in water up to my ankles.
My cowboy boots would be ruined, no doubt, but I trudged onward. The water was a very tricky obstacle, for under it was a sheet of ice. The few other souls who had dared to come out were slipping this way and that; like one big comedy routine from a silent film. What a miasma!
But I made it to the subway. I got on an uptown express train that would stop at Seventy-second Street. Then I planned to get out and walk the ten blocks uptown. But it didn't stop: the conductor announced the next stop would be 125th Street. "Goddammit," I said. And a man sitting across from me said, "You can change trains here." As if I didn't know! So I had to say, "Yes, mister, I know. I'm from the city. But these trains are fucked." After that he didn't speak to me again. But there was no denying I was right.
At 125th Street I saw the downtown train come in: I dashed up the stairs and down the other side and flung myself onto the train, which said it was a local. But it was no local. At Eighty-first Street it didn't stop, nor at Seventy-second—I let out a scream. The other passengers looked up from their newspapers at me. "Goddammit!" I said. "If I was in Rome the goddamn fucking subways wouldn't do this to me. The fucking train says it's a local and it doesn't stop. What kind of shit is this?" I glared at them all. But nobody else even seemed perturbed. They were so resigned about their lot they didn't even utter a fuss.
There was a terrible stink in the car. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from. I looked down to the other end of the car. There was a bum-girl sitting there. This person smelled so bad the entire car stank, and yet they allowed her to ride the subway. She couldn't have been very old, shrouded in wet newspapers and a blanket, which she constantly plucked at to rearrange upon herself. A tremendous smell, not easily cultivated. Did she not notice it on herself? And she was without shoes; God, I was sorry in my heart and yet filled with fury—in Rome there were no bums on the trains. With all this money in the United States, they couldn't find this bum a better place to sit out the winter?