make a deal right there; no papers. I pay six hundred francs every three months; that’s about forty bucks a month. I promise I’ll paint a portrait of his wife from a tiny photo. It’s the only picture he has of her, one of those five-and-dime automat photos.
A FACE AS STILL LIFE
BUT STILL LIFE LEFT.
I get in there and clean things up. This is grim corruption. I haul most of the furniture up into the attic; chop the worst, stack it up for firewood.
First I put in big beams so the whole place won’t fall down on me with a strong wind; then I cut a hole through the roof to let in light. I put plastic panels in this hole and line underneath with thin-roll plastic for insulation. I cover all the walls and ceiling with Styrofoam panels and paint the floors white.
Sasha lets me tie in to his electric line; I’ll pay a set amount every month. Then I buy two potbelly stoves at the flea market, put in long pipes to radiate the heat. I haul back down some of the furniture and spread it around. The place is light, great, looks like something between a cheap whorehouse and a surgical theater.
ANOTHER NEST, NOT MY BEST
YET MEETS THE FINAL TEST.
The first thing I do there is paint the portrait of Sasha’s wife. I let myself drift, float into it, hardly looking at the photo. I’m painting her as Sasha described her to me, the way he felt about her, her soul.
A FACE I DON’T KNOW, A MIND ECHOING ME.
I’M INFUSED WITH ANOTHER. MOTHER, SISTER, BROTHER.
I do this in an afternoon. Sasha says the painting looks more like his wife than the photo. He cries.
I’m a bit psychic; it’s a nick of woman in me, I think. I might be part male witch. I’ve met two true witches in my life so far: exciting women.
A WOMAN LIVES INSIDE ME, CONTENT
TO PULL THE REINS OF MY CLUMSY CART.
Next, I rent out the ground floor to a sculptor. He’s a rich young French aristocrat, pays me six hundred francs per month, cash. Everything cash. French officials are very uptight about people like me.
I keep the middle floor for myself. The stairs come straight up from the door, so I wall off my stairs and put in another door for the sculptor.
To bring water in, I run a line from the street spigot across the alley – strictly illegal. I bootleg this in at night using a plastic hose going under the cobblestones.
I’m out there in the dark, working with a flashlight, digging up cobblestones, when the concierge catches me. I tell her I’m looking for some money I lost. She stares but isn’t willing to call me an outright liar. The French are nice that way.
I bring water into the downstairs and up to the first-floor studio, but can’t rig a drain system for the very top floor.
This third floor isn’t much; the ceiling’s low and it’s dark. I figure I’ll use it for storage. To get up there, you need to go through my studio, up a ladder and through a trapdoor.
A TRAP NEST, SPIDER NEST, PULL IT IN BEHIND YOU, HIDE AND ABIDE.
Just shows how you never know. Three months later, I have a Dutch woman in for some modeling. She has a nice body and is only charging me ten francs an hour. Great, beautiful, solid, rounded tits meant for having kids sucking on them, one kid on each tit. It gets me all hot and bothered for nothing just looking at her. I’d give anything to have big working tits like that; feel like the fountain of life. I’d rent myself out as a wet nurse and learn to eat grass – regular green grass, that is.
She starts telling how she doesn’t have a place to live; hints about staying in the studio, doing free modeling – that kind of business. To turn her off, I tell her I’ll rent the upstairs room for two hundred fifty francs a month.
She’s one of these new, rugged, live-on-a-sewer-cover kind of wonderful women; takes me right up, moves in, money on the barrel two months in advance.
I squirm three days hoarding enough nerve to tell Kate, my wife, about it. Kate is not enthusiastic; knows how vulnerable I am. We have a good working relationship, Kate and I, based on respect for the way each of us is. Still, despite all, sometimes it gets hard. No two people so close could be so different. I wouldn’t have it any other way myself, but easy it ain’t sometimes.
This Traude turns out to be a neat, clean hamster of a woman; no trouble at all. I don’t know she’s there most of the time.
She gets herself a Primus stove, cooks her meals; invites me for lunch once in a while – very domestic. She usually stays in bed mornings on cold days till I get the fires going. Some heat must move up to her place, but she comes down and dresses next to the glowing stove; has a nice, round, almost heavy body, wide hips, beautiful glutes. I get some fine drawings; good deal all around. But I’m not showing these drawings to Kate; no sense pushing the edges. I’ve fooled myself into thinking that sometimes honesty can be a cruel hypocrisy.
The big mistake was renting to the blue-blood sculptor. First, he has the most active social life I’ve ever seen. He’s a stone sculptor, cutting gigantic five-, six-ton blocks of marble or granite. He works hard when he gets the chance but that’s not often. Most times, there are French dukes driving up the alley in limousines, tooling over to watch Claude play at being sculptor. They can’t believe he’s trying to work; only peasants work. They’re titillated seeing Claude, sledge-hammer in hand, goggled, genuine stone dust whitening his face like a clown, staggering around in piles of stone chips.
Maybe the one thing worse than not having enough money is having too much. You get caught up with rich friends and relatives. Then how the hell can you get anything done?
But my big problem is stone dust. Joseph P. Baloney, it gets into everything. Thin, light, like soap powder, it rises from his studio into mine. I run around with pieces of glass wool, putty, plaster, trying to plug holes. Nothing stops this dust. Mornings, it looks as if it’s snowed; all day long there’s a haze. It gets into my paint and into the paintings.
My way of painting involves slow-drying varnish; this floating stone dust is deadly. Altogether – with what’s in the air, what settles on my eyeglasses and what’s getting ground into the varnish – I’m working in deep cream of wheat. My white beard gets so white it glows.
THE BLINDING LIGHT OF NO WHITENESS
DARK LOST IN MEMORY: A DULL CLUMPING
OF FRAGMENTED IDEA CLUTTER GROWS.
Finally I give up. I rent my studio to another painter, a friend of Claude’s. This guy works abstractly, sort of white bumps on white flats; sometimes light purple or green squiggles over these large white canvases, different shades of white, all very subtle. He says stone dust won’t matter.
He’s a social type, too, won’t mind dancing bear to the royalty. I sign him on at eight hundred francs a month. I tell Traude about it; she asks if he’s married. It’s OK with her. Traude’s money almost covers my outgo and the other fourteen hundred francs a month is pure gravy. We definitely have use for the extra money. Trying to paint truly personal paintings, make some kind of a living and be a good husband-father can be almost too much sometimes. All that’s beside living some kind of life for yourself.
So
