The weather had grown increasingly colder as January progressed, and one morning, as he walked into the violent wind blowing up Fortieth Street from the river, he knew that this day, the first truly cold day on his new job, would be astonishingly cruel. And so it was.
His marriage had been steadily disintegrating, even though it was barely more than a year old. His wife looked at him, or so he thought, with a passive, almost friendly, benign contempt, although he had no idea why: perhaps he was wrong. He certainly could not have furnished any “proof” or examples of this contempt, but it was there, he knew. It was there. He believed that one day soon he’d be given a sign of some sort to prove, to his satisfaction, that his wife happily despised him, and always had, that their marriage was teetering on the edge of collapse, and that she was ready to take advantage of any catalyst to give it a careless push.
Al, the foreman, took a look at him in his absurdly inadequate clothing, and gave him a woollen watch cap to pull over his ears, his ears and his stupid head, the head of what Al had, on this bitter day, called, dismissively, a “college boy.” The cap kept his head from freezing, but did nothing for his body or his feet, numbed into two chunks of icy flesh from the frigid concrete floor of the platform. This was his true initiation into the world of brutally hard work, “honest,” as they say, work.
The sign would arrive and he would see it or feel it deeply; there would be no doubt of it. Then, only then, armed with this certainty, he could confront his wife and ask her to tell him the truth. The truth. Perhaps, he occasionally thought, she wasn’t aware of how she treated him, how she talked to him with equal measures of impatience and patronization, wasn’t aware of how she was to him. His candor would awaken her own, and perhaps something would be made clear between them, and “things” might then be brought cleanly to a conclusion, before both of them were drained of their youth and what was left of their honesty. It never occurred to him that if his wife consciously acted toward him in the manner he thought — he knew — she did, that she might like it, that she might like doing this to him, that she had married him so that he would always be near, waiting patiently to be insulted and demeaned.
On the following day he would wear long underwear, put a few sheets of newspaper between two sweaters, and don a scarf, the cap that Al had given him, heavy gloves, and two pairs of socks under his old low quarters. He would be a worker instead of a chump, sad in his chump’s ignorance.
On the evening of that first bleak and bitter day, when he took himself home, a core of terrible ice sat solid inside his body; all the way home on the subway, the bus, the three-block walk to the small apartment that he and his wife were slowly fading away in, he shook with the cold. A glass of straight bourbon couldn’t get him warm, nor could the spaghetti, of which he had seconds and then thirds. It did nothing. He trembled and shook at the table and while he watched television and, undressing for bed, shook even more fiercely as the cool air of the bedroom touched his bare flesh. And then he realized that this was the sign, this frozen center of his body, his pitiful, stupid body was her body, too: they were both dead or dying. His wife asked him, for the first time, what the matter was. She smiled as if vaguely annoyed by the intolerable ague that possessed him. Are you sick? she asked. Oh yes, he was indeed.
— XXXVIII —
He was a third-rate painter, who believed, because he had started painting as a ten-year-old in England, that he had been born a kind of prodigy, of the sort that simply could not blossom in the United States. When he came to America at fifteen, with his mother and father, he was enrolled in public high school, where his meager talents impressed his teachers, whose knowledge of painting had been gleaned from worn postcards from the Met and Modern, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Frick, and so on. They knew that their pupil was — what was he? — he was far more talented and knowledgeable than anyone else in their classes or in the school, for that matter. All this praise and blather enforced his fantastic conception of himself. So his adolescence and young manhood passed, and at twenty-two or so he was turning out canvases that were banal parodies of de Kooning. In this, it must be said, he was not alone. He was quite insufferable in every way, suffused, as he was, with monstrous illusions of his restless and iconoclastic genius, although one had to know him for a time before these aberrations showed themselves plain.
It so happened that he met a beautiful and funny and intelligent girl at one of the scores of parties that tended to erupt, acne-like, in the downtown “scene” of the mid-fifties, those carnival days. To the astonishment of everyone, he and this girl began an affair, and, six months later, married. It seemed clear that she married him because of what she took to be his genius and because of her devotion to this genius; and he married her because she — only properly — flattered him and, well, she was beautiful. “See?” he seemed to say to his peers, all of them peering out enviously from behind their inert versions of “Bill” and “Franz” and “Jackson.” She was, as noted, intelligent and educated, but basically ignorant of art when she married the whiz. But. Ah, but.
But her marriage to him brought her, quite naturally, into contact with many artists on an almost daily basis — dinners, shows, openings, parties, weekends in the Hamptons before the sands had turned to gold dust, raucous and drunken Provincetown softball games, and so on. And these painters, as well as their wives and lovers, said enough, usually obliquely and glancingly, but enough, to let her know that they thought of her man as, well, not much of an artist, and a bit of a bore. Even more damaging to the connubial partnership, she began to: 1) see the work of good, sometimes very good, painters who were her husband’s peers; and 2) develop a critical eye, a set of aesthetic measures, a way of thinking about painting that was independent of her husband’s essentially envy-tainted remarks. And so she began to see clearly his work, and to battle with herself over what she thought to be her growing, silent betrayal of him. But he was, well, he was, really, not very good. Not very good at all.
Slowly, softly, and as they say, as quietly as the famous little cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, she began to think of him differently and then to treat him differently; she moved from a kind of genial tolerance to vague patronizing denigrations to blunt contempt. After two years, she left him. He continued to paint, of course, but his anger and unhappiness did nothing for his work, which, in point of fact, got worse. This was the period in which he did a series of what he called “Suburb” paintings, about which even his friends were uncomfortably silent. Some of these daubs were hung on the walls of new restaurants in the newly named SoHo; later, he moved to England, where his career foundered and collapsed.
— XXXIX —
TO THE EDITOR:
Sheldon Dufoy’s letter to last week’s “Faith Base” section was in very poor taste and lacking of good sense and education in the Christian religion field. The Bible tells all Christians who are true Christians that there is no way of entering Heaven unless you are born again and accepting Jesus Christ in your heart as the only true Lord of the Universe, be it vast or otherwise, it does not matter for the Lord God is all Supreme.
There is no other god or gods, and Mohammed (or Allah), Moses, Talmud, Buddha, Zen, Hindu Deity, and others, for instance, of the Eskimos, Africans, Bushmen, Pygmies, and so on are, are all false gods that lead nowhere but to everlasting torture in the fiery flames of Hell forever in eternity, Mr. Dufoy’s secular humanistic beliefs and fashionable liberal ideas are not based on the Holy Bible, which alone, he might not be aware of, is the Word of God.