30 Pieces of a Novel (18 page)

HE
'
S COME TO
like Bolling's painting so much that he wants to get another one. Lots of people have also told him how much they like it. They'd walk into the living room for the first time and see it on the far wall above the piano and say, “My God, that's fantastic!” “Exciting” is another word they've used; “Takes my breath away” a typical expression. “The colors, those lines, the strength. The whole thing looks as if it's about to soar through the ceiling.” “Saw? To cut? I don't understand.” “To rise or fly through it. It has that kind of winged quality, in addition to some mystical or spiritual one where it can go through something without breaking it. I don't know what the painting means or is supposed to be of, but I love it. Is it as good up close?” and whoever was appreciating it this way would approach it and always say it was. “Who did it? Where'd you get it?” “It's a long story.” He didn't like to go into it. “It looks very expensive.” “Maybe it's the way it's framed.” “Do you mind my asking what something like this would go for?” someone once said, not a friend of theirs but someone who came with one. “It was given to me by the artist.” “You're so lucky. You didn't even have to pay for it? I can see why you did such a nice job framing it.” “That was Sally's—my wife's—idea. If it had been up to me I would have done the cheapest job possible, which means the simplest. Four wood strips and that's it, or not even that but just getting it stretched.” “If I was interested in buying one this size, or a little larger, where would I go, to the artist or his gallery or agent?” and he said, “I'm sure the painter's wife would be happy to sell you one, since I don't think the painter had a single sale—you see, he died—but she's in New York. I can get you her phone number, even call her for you to set up a meeting. She's right in the city,” and this person said, “Nah, I hardly ever get up there, and when I do it's always rush rush.”

It had been nailed to his New York apartment wall for about a year after Bolling had given him it: “For all you've done for me, I want you to have any painting of mine you want.” Gould said, “Come on, let me give you something for it. An artist should be paid. But a little painting, one I can afford,” and Bolling said, “Not a cent, and take the biggest if that's the one you pick. I've come this far in not selling one, don't spoil my legacy for the future. Who knows? Maybe being tagged with that—like Van Gogh, minus one, since Theo sold one of his and could have sold others if brother Vincent had been more cooperative or sent him more…. I forget what the circumstances were, or if I meant ‘minus' or ‘plus one' then. I'm losing my memory and figuring-out head, as you can tell. I used to know that art history junk backwards and forwards. But what I think I was saying was that maybe being tagged as a never-ever-seller will help the sale of my paintings after I'm dead.” Gould said, “What're you talking about, you're not dying,” and Bolling said, “Who said I was? I said ‘after I'm dead.' You can say that about anybody alive.” “So you have plenty of time to sell your paintings,” and Bolling said, “Okay, joking's over, we all got a big laugh out of it. Now choose a painting and then give me my pain shot so I can get back to my nap,” and Gould and Bolling's wife unrolled about twenty oil canvases on the furniture and floor—“Don't be afraid to step on them,” Bolling said, “the paint's so thick, nothing could hurt them”—and Gould pointed to the one he liked most. “You sure that's the one? You're not choosing it because it's the second smallest? If you got to know, it's among my three top favorites of those, but I didn't want to say anything to influence your decision against it. Before you change your mind, give me your pen. I'm going to do something usually only reserved for book authors, which you should appreciate,” and with his wife guiding his hand, Bolling wrote an inscription in the right bottom corner.

Gould nailed it to his wall that day. Bolling died a week or two later, and a year after that the painting fell off Gould's wall and he tried nailing it back up and it fell again with even more plaster coming off, and he tried to stick it up with duct tape but the painting was too heavy and he didn't want to put more tape on because the painting's paint came off with it, so he rolled it up and stuck it in a closet. When Sally and he got married and moved to Baltimore four years later, she said she wanted to get the painting framed. He said maybe they could just nail it to the wall—his New York apartment walls weren't made out of the right kind of plaster for that and there were already nail holes in the painting's corners—but she said, “You'll see. It'll look better stretched and with a relatively simple wood frame. It'll also be good for the painting: fewer creases and cracks, things like that.”

The painting's of the sea, sky, mountains, and a huge waterfall, or that's what the plunging blue and white looks like, of one of the Balearic Islands. Or one of the Canaries. He'd have to look at an atlas. But how could he find which group of islands it is if he also doesn't know the island's name or the name of the town the scene was painted from? It starts with an
N
, the town, or a D, and he thinks it ends with an
A
. It's the one Robert Graves lived on for many years. So he supposes he could get the names of the island and the town from a book about Graves. Anyway, Bolling lived there with his wife for two years, same time Graves did but he didn't know him, he said, small as the town was, or know him enough to say more than a passing hello when he saw him out walking or in a store or café, “and by then the man may have been demented, or that's what some people said, though he was living with, and no doubt screwing—because you could see by his swagger and look what a lusty guy he was—some young attractive American gal. So of course all the expatriate male writers on the island, no matter what nationality or how they felt towards him, wanted to screw her too because she'd done it with Graves. And if he won a Nobel, which some literary chiefs were predicting, an even greater feather in your cap and maybe more luck in your writing….

“One story, though, I can tell you firsthand,” Bolling said, a few weeks before he died, when Gould was wheeling him across Central Park to the Met. “It's a good example of the moronic, worshipful following Graves had attracted to the town and which ruined it for us, to tell you the truth, even if most of them had got there before us. We came for artistic stimulation and intelligent communality (besides cheap living), but these louts just hung around, drinking and soaking up the sun and waiting for some new sign from the great man or duty to do for him, like accompanying him to the local bar. They never produced art or letters the way Graves had and which he was still doing in abundance. I know from the island's telegrapher that he was sending out reviews and articles once a week, so how demented could he have been? Now it's too late, but why didn't I think that then and say something to those loafers and spongers who claimed he was addled? But this neighbor of ours came running into our little cottage, waving a pair of men's Jockey briefs. You guessed it: ‘They belong to Graves,' he said. ‘I was walking past his house, peered through his bedroom window, hoping to catch him humping his newest concubine, and saw these lying on his bed. I climbed through the window and swiped them. One day they'll be worth a bundle. They even have
R.R.G
. written on the label in laundry marker. You'll see, a collector will buy this from me and frame it behind glass and hang it on his most visible library wall. Bob had probably taken them off,' this guy goes on, ‘tossed them on the bed, and put on a fresh pair before he left the house, or maybe he took them off to put on swimming trunks. I'm thinking if I should wash them, since they have a shit stain on them'—toilet paper was a precious commodity on the island, I want you to know—‘or keep them as is,' he continued, ‘because they'd be more of-the-person and so more valuable that way.' I told him to get them back to the bedroom without Graves knowing they'd been stolen, but he wouldn't hear of it. Of course this idiot probably forgot whose underpants they were a week later and either put them on himself without washing them or his wife, after wondering where they had come from, used them to swab the kitchen floor.”

Fifteen years after Gould was given the painting, he says to his wife, “This thing's really grown on me since you got it framed. And Bolling had a lot of them, and I'm sure his wife—” and she says, “You want to buy one?” and he says, “If it's all right with you, since you'll have to live with it too,” and she says, “I like the idea, so long as it doesn't cost a fortune.” “No chance. They were very fair and modest-living and ungreedy people. It's even possible she'll want me to have it for nothing because of what I did for them then, but which I won't let her do. Anyway, good, settled, I'm about to purchase a painting for the first time in my life; before, they were always given to me by the artist, and that lobsterman drawing from you,” and she says, “Won't it be odd, though, phoning her after so many years, but to buy something rather than to ask about her and her son and maybe even, after so long, to invite her out for lunch?” and he says, “How do you think I know she's still in the city in her old apartment? When I've gone up to see my mother—same neighborhood—so I bumped into her on the street a number of times.” “You never told me,” and he says, “I'm sure I have. Or else I forgot by the time I got back or didn't think it worth mentioning, since you never met her,” and she says, “Of course I have. In a restaurant once, when we were with your mother, or right outside it on the street, and then at the memorial for Bolling a year after he died,” and he says, “Six months,” and she says, “Six months, not that she'd remember me from that, she was so distraught,” and he says, “Funny, but I can't remember her as ever being even a little emotionally upset,” and she says, “Crying her eyes out. Just crying them out. Though you were pretty shaken up too,” and he says, “That I think I recall, which I guess is why I don't remember how she was at that particular event.”

He calls and says, “Grace, hi, it's Gould Bookbinder, how you doing?” and she says, “Hello, Gould Bookbinder,” and they talk about her and her son and his family and mother and then he says, “Listen, another reason I'm calling is because of Bolling's paintings. I have one, you might remember, and I'd like to get another, but to buy it this time,” and she says, “I'd be delighted. But what was the arrangement before—he gave it to you?” and he says, “And inscribed it. It's almost as if you both did, since you held his writing hand.” “Your memory's too good,” and he says, “I'm sorry,” and she says, “No, no, but I haven't sold one since he died and I've tried like the dickens, believe me, and I could use the extra money. How's the one you have doing?” and he says, “I got it framed. Looks great. People are always marveling at it. It's above our upright piano at the far end of this long living room, the perfect place for it, as you can see it from about twenty feet away when you enter the connecting dining room.” “Which one did you get again?” and he says, “It's hard to describe. If it has a title, I don't know it,” and she says, “All of them did,” and he says, “Then if you told me, I either forgot it or never heard it. But it's kind of small, first of all—one of the smallest of the I-don't-know-how-many you spread out for me there—maybe three feet by two, but three feet across. It's of the mountains—you know, the Spanish island—and lots of dramatic sky and sea, very bright colors—the blues and yellows, anyway—and I think a waterfall in it,” and she says, “Couldn't be. None on the island, and I don't think Bolling ever saw one in his life. He lived there, and here in different boroughs, and two years in the army on an ice cap, and before that at an army base in New Jersey not far from here.” “He must have traveled around Europe or just Spain before he got to the island,” and she says, “Both times he went it was by ship from New York to a large Spanish port and from there a ferry or small craft of some kind to the island, and the same when he returned to the States. That island was everything to him—in imagery, inspiration, ties to a particular spot on earth, you name it—which he knew before he got there, and he didn't want any other setting interfering in his memory of it. He used to say—actually, he said he thought along these lines way before he went to the island. It was a movie theater travelogue of the island when he was a young man that first prompted him to think this and eventually bore him to the island—that he only needed this one landscape and he'd paint it and dream of it and be reminded of and recharged by it for the rest of his life.” “Then I don't know. Because how do you explain this plunging blue-and-white thing and what looks like raging water foam at the bottom of it?” and she says, “More crashing sea, probably, or a stormy sky. You sure you hung the painting right side up?” and he says, “Yeah, the mountains. It wouldn't look like anything recognizable upside down, and I never thought of him as a pure abstractionist.” “Now the painting's coming back to me. Does it have two large pointy mounds that are unmistakably mountains as you said but could also be mistaken for a woman's enormous breasts?” and he says, “Right, two, of equal size just about, but I never saw them as anything but mountains,” and she says, “That's what they are, but breastlike mountains, and what he called the painting, in a way:
New Peaks
. He was fascinated with the idea of taking old mountains and turning them into young breasts. He loved breasts more than any other part of the woman's body, just as he loved mountains more than any other part of the land, so it all fits, and naturally the younger the developed breasts the better,” and he says, “By the way, what was the name of that Spanish island town where he did all those paintings?” and she gives it, and he says, “And the name of the group of islands it was part of?” and she says, “What group? It was just an island, Majorca, and near it were a couple of smaller islands, but no big group and certainly not a chain,” and he says, “That's what I meant, and I actually knew but just wanted to make sure. But the town I always forget the name of, though knew it started with a D, and I bet I forget it again next time someone asks what place the painting's of or where the painter lived on Majorca and so on. My mind … I don't know: drink, age, something scarier? But I once wanted to—let me see: thirty-five, almost forty years ago?—wanted to live there too when I fashioned myself a would-be painter and writer. I heard it was dirt cheap, lots of wonderful free-thinking and -living women of various European nationalities, and it just seemed like the best thing to do for a while right out of college … sun, beaches, jug wine, all of which I stay away from today,” and she says, “You should have gone. That was the time. Now the island's expensive, overcrowded, with rich tourists, grand hotels, and topless beaches—though I hear Deja hasn't been touched as much—so the natives probably aren't as hospitable and pleasant to you in a genuine way as they were then, but imagine what Bolling would have done in his work with the nudie scene. He was there with his first wife around the time you said you wanted to be, and it was such a small English-speaking community you almost certainly would have known them and become fast friends. She was supposed to be very nice.” “Wait a second. I thought you were the wife he was with there,” and she says, “I only went for a month about ten years after, a sort of rekindling-the-memory trip for him. But I can remember Bolling telling you of his years there with her and even, I think, you saying how you had once wanted to go there to paint or write, and he saying how you then would have met him and Sally there,” and he says, “Sally? That's my wife's name,” and she says, “I know. In fact you came over for coffee with her once—this was another time, much later—and Bolling pointed out the coincidence of the names. He also said he hoped that your Sally—you were talking of getting married and I'm not sure if he said this more for my benefit than yours, since he had eight good years with her before he deserted her when he somehow got hooked on me—anyhow, that your Sally would be your first and only wife. He really liked her and it had nothing to do with her large breasts, since by that time, with all the painkillers and pain and the tumor behind his eyes fouling up his vision, none of that meant anything to him.” “I don't remember taking Sally to your place. On the street, yes, you and she met, but after Bolling's death, and she also came to the memorial, though which of those was the first time you saw her I don't know.” “Gould, believe me, I can even remember where we all sat: you two on the love seat, I was in the rocker across from it, at an angle, and Bolling was directly across from you in his wheelchair, to my left. You ended up switching from coffee to wine and Sally stuck with her herb tea, and after a while I not only had cookies out but crackers and cheese. But I'll tell you, if you had gone to Deja it's possible you would have written or painted something but more likely have become a terrific young wino, café habitué, and wife swapper—or girlfriend swapper, in your case—as that's what almost all of them did. Bolling said that most of them were big fools, or became ones there, when before they had been responsible family men and executives or staff writers or chief graphic artists on magazines like
Time
and
Business Week
or some oil company newsletter, et cetera. There to paint the great Mediterranean painting or the literary equivalent with the three-act domestic drama or thousand-page novel or epic poem. But in a year or two, once their funds had run out, they were back in their old high-rolling jobs and cushy living. Bolling was the anomaly, eschewing most of the fun and games to get some real work in while he had the chance and which he had depleted his savings for, and only sleeping with his wife. Did he tell you the story of Robert Graves's underwear?” and he says, “That someone stole a pair and he told this guy to put it back?” “One person stealing one pair? Please, it became the principal recreation of the expatriate community there; even friends visiting for a week tried to land a pair. For years people were sneaking into Graves's home for one or ripping one off his washline or out of the maid's laundry washtub while she was siesta-ing, and one jerk even got a week of dirty underwear out of his bathroom hamper. Word was that Graves was unamused by all this but had boxer shorts shipped in by the dozens to keep the thieves supplied so they wouldn't steal more valuable things like letters and manuscripts and books and works in progress.” “It's funny but I never took the story quite seriously, and I also had heard it was a pair of Jockey briefs that were stolen,” and she says, “Boxer shorts. Bolling was there and he told me. And in all his time on the island he never found the activity anything but deplorable, and anonymously he returned by mail a pair to Graves that had been given to him as a birthday gift.”