Authors: Roberta Latow
“No! Please. You’ve done enough.” She reached up to unwind his cashmere scarf, wrapped around her head like a
turban. He stopped her with a hand on her wrist.
“I’ll see you to the door. Leave the scarf on at least until you are out of the rain.” It was an emphatic declaration, not meant to be disobeyed.
Neither of them made a move. They kept a silent watch on each other for several seconds. Then Grant Madigan broke the passionless interval, his voice still tinged with annoyance, but now with a softening of kindness to it. “Let a passing stranger throw you a piece of advice. Learn to know when you need someone, and then, if he should drop into your lap as I have, be smart enough to accept all the help on offer.”
The sting in his voice irritated her, she wanted to say something cutting, but, before she could muster the words, he had opened the cab door and she was stepping into a puddle. She had his Burberry in her hands. He took it from her and held it over both their heads, his arm around her shoulders as together they ran through the rain to the door of the gallery.
Sheltered above by a cornice of carved stone, they huddled under it while she fumbled in her handbag for her key. Cheyney opened the door and stepped into the entrance hall of the building. She pulled at the turban and it collapsed into his damp, much-creased cashmere scarf. She watched him slip his arms into the sleeves of his raincoat, button it, secure the belt, and turn to leave. Cheyney stopped him.
“You mean that’s it? I’m not to be given the chance to say thank you? To repay in some way your kindness? Can’t I have your scarf cleaned and pressed and returned to you? At least have a cup of coffee — a drink even?”
He was about to tell her that all he wanted was to get to the airport when something about her, standing there in the stark white emptiness of the entrance hall, stopped him. Something more than a woman: pretty, beautiful even, with a mass of wet, long, black tangled hair. He was caught by her vulnerability. He sensed that here was a tragic figure of a woman who was unaware of her tragedy. And yet, he saw something else as well, a glimmer of a passionate, sensual beauty, that promised much. He hoped so for her sake.
Her jacket had slipped off one of her shoulders. Her still-wet, white silk blouse clung to her, outlining the pale pinkness of her flesh, her breasts, their voluptuous roundness, the nipples
pressing erect from the cold. She was unaware of how ripe she looked, how exposed she was. That was her problem, she had no real vision of herself. He was a lover of women, all kinds of women, but never got involved with complicated ones. They took up too much time.
He caught her jacket as it slipped off the other shoulder and placed it on the hall radiator, then he grasped her waist and pulled her toward him, crushing her in his arms in a hug. His face brushing against hers, he said, “This is thanks enough for me. A hug from a beautiful lady and a promise from her to learn to take care of herself. If you don’t have the good sense to come in from the rain, how much sense do you have? Ask yourself that. It’s a cruel world out there. You think you’re going to conquer it, that you’re a survivor. I hope for your sake you are.”
He could feel her anger as his words pulsated through her body. He released her and at the same time slowly pulled the scarf from her hand. He was so quick she had no time to recover herself. For one brief moment, before he turned on his heel and walked away from her, he caressed her breasts in his large strong hands and ran his thumbs across her nipples. How lovely, the weight of them, the soft yet firm roundness that filled his hands. Too bad she had not been another kind of woman: he would have made love to her.
As Harry pulled away from the curb, Grant Madigan caught a last glimpse of her through the rain-streaked window. She was still standing where he had left her. She had not even closed the front door. He lit a cigar and, as they turned onto Fifth Avenue, he said, aloud, “Well, good luck to us both, kid. We each of us have our war to go to.”
T
he door was ajar. Cheyney pushed it open and stepped into the gallery. Semi-darkness, empty, and silent. She flicked the light switch on the wall. Nothing happened. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed aloud. Irritated, she played the switch several times, then a bank of switches next to it. Still nothing. Filled with frustration she called out, “Max, Morris?” Silence. Just the disturbing echo of her own voice bouncing off the walls. “Dora, Sebastian?” Still nothing. A puzzle, that no one should be there. To have left the door ajar and the gallery unattended, irresponsible. That rainstorm had a lot to answer for.
She walked to the staircase and looked up the graceful curve to the floor above. She shouted, in a voice filled with frustration, “Max, Morris?” Nothing. A forlorn kind of emptiness, accentuated by the hissing sound from a radiator valve somewhere in the gallery.
She draped her jacket over an empty packing case, placed her handbag on the carpeted bottom stair. She stepped out of her soggy shoes and damp stockings and slipped very carefully out of her wet skirt. Not dripping on that newly polished oak floor seemed essential.
She walked barefoot across the gallery to stand in the main exhibition hall. Cheyney felt herself sliding toward despair, lonely to the very core of her being, and she couldn’t understand why. Because her electricians had not waited for her? Her staff had left the place unattended? Her supreme effort to get to the gallery on time had been in vain? Max and Morris had gone, without finishing the job as promised? Hardly reasons to feel
herself spiraling down, down, down, as if pulled by some dark and dangerous vortex. Or was it because Christopher was not there to support her, love her? She steadied herself in the momentary void by grabbing for a rationalization.
“Goddammit!” she said aloud, unable to hold back her frustration. “This is definitely not my day.”
The door from the entrance hall swung open, and the gallery lit up. “When Max and Morris Abrams make a promise, Max and Morris Abrams keep a promise. You were already crossing us off, no?
A mistake
. Oy, a drowned rat she looks like!” said Max.
Morris gave his brother a poke in the ribs. Max pressed his lips tight together, screwed up his face, and quickly added, “Mmmm, well, maybe not a rat. That’s just a phrase to be going on with, you understand. No offense meant. You shouldn’t take it personal. Let’s just say, it’s
some
cold you’re gonna catch.”
Cheyney, as if riding the golden disc of a pendulum, swung from despair to delight. For an instant the white of the gallery walls stung her eyes. Then it receded in deference to the paintings. She caught her breath and clapped her hands together. Everything but the gallery and the paintings ceased to exist for Cheyney.
It was always that way when she looked at paintings, sculpture, or architecture. At any art form that had vestiges of greatness in it. And it had always been that way for her. Often she was asked what were the first works of art she could remember — those primal encounters? Several times she had told, and then she stopped telling. Art people sought a rather more erudite and sophisticated answer than the green-and-white Rinso box that was on permanent exhibition on the draining board of her mother’s kitchen, mealtimes included. To Cheyney at the age of three, it had been as impressive as the Mona Lisa had been, when, at twenty-three, she had seen it in the Louvre. When other children had been running around being cutely precocious and reciting, in baby whines: cat, C-A-T, dog, D-O-G, little Cheyney Fox was saying and spelling Rinso, R-I-N-S-O. Her very first word.
This object of her earliest appreciation just never satisfied her art-world friends. They would have found it more accept
able had she dredged up a memory of a Matisse, a Braque, a Botticelli,
The Birth Of Venus
, say? Surely there had been a toddler’s assignation with a Duchamp, a Kandinsky? Or was it a nice, straightforward Picasso — any title or period — that had got to her first? Rinso was just no dice.
A big smile on Cheyney’s face. “Max, Morris, the lighting is great! Just brilliant! Exactly the way I wanted the recessed spotlights fitted, and the surface-mounted fixtures are not at all offensive as I feared. They wash the walls with just the right subtlety of light. Oh, God, it works! Does it ever work!” She clapped her hands together once more and walked around the gallery viewing the exhibition as a whole. It almost sang to her. Every painting hung in perfect harmony with the others.
“Max, Morris,” she said as she went up to them and hugged them both at the same time. “Thanks, thanks for everything.”
The two men watched her walk barefoot over to one of the several stacks of paintings leaning against the walls waiting to be hung. She began looking through them. So much work yet to be done, two more rooms without a painting on the walls. Max and Morris looked at each other and then decided to do something about Cheyney Fox.
“How would you like to catch pneumonia instead of opening an art gallery? ’Cause that’s what you’re gonna do, standing barefoot in a damp blouse and your underwear,” announced Max.
She looked down in surprise at her silk-and-lace slip. “Oh, I got so carried away I forgot it was my lingerie you’d just illuminated.”
“Look, don’t blush for us,” said Morris. “You’re decent enough. You wouldn’t believe the things we’ve seen, the chances we’ve had with some of our customers.”
“The chances we’ve taken,” bubbled Max. A twinkle in his eye, a faint smile of remembrance on his lips.
Morris poked him in the ribs and gave him a disapproving look. Cheyney sneezed, but she had wanted to laugh. The brothers did a takeover. Each an arm to march her up the stairs, picking up her discarded clothing and handbag en route.
“It always begins with a sneeze,” said Max.
“Or a cough,” Morris confirmed.
“You can’t afford it. Pneumonia,” said Max.
“No, not pneumonia,
and
the Abrams brothers.” That was Morris.
“So, since you got the Abrams brothers’ bill to pick up, you’d better take a hot bath, a schnapps, and go to bed.”
“Hey, fellas, it’s only four o’clock,” she managed to get in.
Morris ignored four o’clock, “A schnapps and hot tea is better.”
Max didn’t. “So is there some law says you can’t go to bed at four o’clock in the afternoon? I never heard of such a law. You, Morris?”
“Not me.”
“Guys, guys, I only sneezed once. You’ll be prescribing chicken soup next.”
“And why not? It’s the best medicine. The other day I heard somebody say, ‘If I just had some Jewish penicillin, I could shake this cold in a day.’ ‘Jewish penicillin?’ I asked. ‘Chicken soup,’ I got told.”
The brothers beamed. Max and Morris Abrams, Master Electricians, came over as a pair of vaudeville comics who took turns at playing the straight man in their act. Burlesque rejects, borscht-belt comedians, working their way through the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, their dream to play the Concorde Hotel. Cheyney gave in because she knew they never would. She allowed them to take over.
The upper hall was stacked with paintings. The trio walked through it to the first-floor room overlooking the garden. Max found two rheostats on the wall and turned them to maximum power. The spot and flood lights played dramatically on the stark white walls. The room was architectural perfection. A double cube, with all the impact of that classical proportion: cold, empty, and vast. The thick, sunflower-yellow carpet was like the masterly stroke of an artist’s brush.
Cheyney was impressed. Against all advice, she had insisted it would work, and it did. She had taken a quantum leap in choosing that color. But then, that was Cheyney: always aiming outward in time and space. In fact, Cheyney acted always from instinct and near-certainty. She was a young woman who did not lightly take a chance.
The room was an artistic powerhouse even without its paintings.
It was supercharged with an ethereal energy that pricked the senses, and the memory.
Hans Hofmann, his house, his paintings, Provincetown, Massachusetts, several years before. Trashy, ramshackle Provincetown. A seaside village, quasi town, of gray, two-story, fishing-shack-like houses teetering over the water, with only slivers of space between them, along the crescent-shaped bay-side of its long, narrow one-way main street, and its weatherworn wooden houses stretching back into the narrow lanes of the town. Only Provincetown, of all of the artists’ summer colonies, had that cheap, honky-tonk, seaside atmosphere, that total absence of chic. That was its charm: trash on the outside, the promise of greatness behind a few firmly closed doors.
From the moment she stepped into the small wooden house, she had the feeling she had stepped into one of his paintings. It had been white — crisp white walls everywhere — nearly bare of furniture, with pure and rich slashes of bright color strategically placed: a painted chair vibrating with one color while standing on bare boards painted of another. It had made the heart sing. A door, open — and where you could see through from one room to another, the space and everything within was used as a canvas. One painting, one chair, the sun streaming like a corn-yellow beam through the window.
Cheyney had felt instantly enriched, refreshed, and joyful. An atmosphere, undefined, but magical — enfolded. She had dissolved into it, yet felt rooted to where she had stood listening to Hans Hofmann. He had been in a short-sleeved, open-necked shirt, of slate-gray cotton, worn over baggy, puddy-colored, wrinkled slacks, bare feet showing through the leather crisscrosses of his sandals. With his large, round face, and a receding hairline fringed with thick white hair, Hofmann had looked like a wise, indulgent granddaddy cum philosophy teacher lecturing art to the younger men in the room: the painters Rothko, Motherwell, the critic Greenberg, and Hofmann’s dealer, Sam Kootz.
The open discussion that had reverberated between them had astounded Cheyney. She drank in their enthusiasm, their passion and belief in abstract expressionist painting. Here was an art that was as cerebral as it was visual as it was expressive. Provocative by its insistence on forcing, pushing, always pushing,
the viewer to use his brain as well as his eyes and his heart and his soul. An art that triggered its viewer to experience his own abstract expressions buried deep within. This was no-easy-on-the-eyes folksy Norman Rockwell art. This was postwar American modern art taking wing.
Cheyney had been taken to the Hofmann house by her host, Acton Pace, another abstract expressionist painter, a onetime lover, kindred spirit, and close friend. Acton saw more in Cheyney than just an intelligent, sensuously beautiful young woman passionately interested in art, who ran a fascinating gallery in the provinces. She combined in her personality both sexy lady and art dealer. The mix appealed to the artistic mind. Not only his. It gave her entry into houses and studios like Hofmann’s, and a stable of interesting lovers to choose from. But it also left Cheyney Fox with a confused picture of herself. She never knew quite how seriously she was being taken as non-woman, art dealer, gallery owner. In the fifties to be a non-woman woman in the business world was a prerequisite for success.
Cheyney gave a sigh, less of anguish than of relief that she had done it, destroyed one life designed to make anyone but herself happy, in order to build another. She was here where she wanted to be. And, if it was scary — and it was, this beginning again — that was just because she had been for too long too weak to break out and fight for what she wanted.
“So long, see you tomorrow.” Max broke into her admiring contemplation.
“Yeah, see ya,” added Morris. “And don’t forget the hot bath and the schnapps.”
“We’ll lock the door behind us,” said Max, as the pair walked away from her.
“And turn off the light,” added Morris.
They were halfway down the stairs when Cheyney rushed across the upper gallery to call down to Max and Morris, “Thanks again, for everything. See you tomorrow,” and flash them a smile.