Authors: Roberta Latow
He raised his arm and waved it to encompass the room. “All this for
me
! Because you love
me
. I’m impressed at what you’ve accomplished. And so quickly. You’re in with a chance in big-league art in New York with a gallery like this. And all this because you love me. I did tell you that first night we met on the island, ‘Cheyney Fox, beautiful Cheyney Fox, I’m going to make love to you and change your life.’ Well, I certainly have.”
“All this because you love me.” Those words kept printing themselves on her mind, ringing in her ears. Oh, the complacency of the man! It robbed Cheyney of the joy she might have had in the limelight of Christopher’s admiration and respect. But worse, it frightened her.
She wanted to shout, It’s not true. I did it for
me
. For
me
, Christopher; not for you, did I change my life, did I open this gallery.
But how could she? His blatant egoism had planted seeds of doubt in her. His belief that she had changed her life for him stunned her. Could he be right? Was it possible that she had fallen under the Christopher Corbyn charm and, knowing his weakness for the rich and successful, had actually changed her life so as not to lose him? Was she less than in control of her emotions when they involved her lover? Cheyney was appalled at the very idea that she might not be on top of her relationship with Christopher, but might, instead, be under his spell.
Her eyes followed him for some time while he walked around the room looking at the paintings. Christopher Corbyn was not her artistic catalyst, just a man she was in love with. She felt relief, once she was certain of that. Cheyney went immediately to him, and, raising his arm, she draped it around her shoulders. She smiled at him, and said, “They say that Gertrude Stein’s last words before she kicked off to artists’ heaven were, ‘So what was the question?’ ” And she began to laugh.
B
eing on the threshold of the sixties intellectually didn’t mean a thing to Cheyney, any more than it did to millions of other people. Nobody then was announcing “the sixties.” For Cheyney those last weeks before the end of a dull decade were thrilling, bursting with vitality. Dramatic, unexpected things were happening, and none of them was the least bit familiar. Every day was like stepping off a cliff, with parachute. The free-fall was sensational, the chute ride like the romance in her life, a floating kind of ecstasy, the landings sometimes bumpy. It was near-impossible to plot one’s actions from day to day — or reactions for that matter — and nothing was coming out as Cheyney had planned.
She was living her life on several levels at once. Remarkably they amalgamated, and she made huge strides as a new dealer on the New York art scene, with her relationship with Christopher, and as an independent human being trying to make a success of her life. But it wasn’t easy. Escalators had not replaced stairways in her life. Nothing removed the twists and turns, the sheer upward slog of existence, that accompanied the dramatic intervals of free-fall.
Cheyney had no doubt that she was strong enough, determined enough to make a success of her endeavors. Not a matter of arrogance: she had no reason to think otherwise. And so she was able to take the downsides along with the upsides of her new life with equal aplomb.
Soon a pattern insinuated itself into their lives that Cheyney could not have envisaged. She withstood its pressures.
That Christopher and she loved each other was not in doubt. What she hadn’t bargained for was that they didn’t like each other very much. That she could never be enough for him to give up his Mayflower dowagers and his flirtations with anyone, man or woman, whom he could exploit for his golden vanities. Worse, he imagined she would not only accept that flaw in him but share his relish for such exploits.
Remarkably their love affair flourished, flaws and all, but only behind closed doors. It had not been a conscious decision by either of them to hide their love from public view. It just emerged that way from the pattern of their lives together. A further mystery to the romance was that each of them was an enormously positive influence on the other’s life. At the end of each day, in the privacy of their love, they had glorious sex. Cheyney looked forward to those nights together, clung to them. They nourished and sustained her.
This pattern of their life was just establishing itself by the night the gallery had its official opening. Her nerves had been fraying in spite of the fact that all was, at least for the night, under control. Even Christopher had been aware of the pressure she was under, and he had surprised her with his unqualified support. She looked ravishing and every inch the intelligent avant-garde art dealer in a Russian black flat karakul fur suit. Designed by Revillon in Paris especially for this occasion, its short black jacket with wide pointed lapels and a plunging neckline was worn over a skin-tight fitted skirt, a slit up the back, that accentuated Cheyney’s chic, sensuous look.
Hundreds of guests, waiters in white jackets and black tie proffering Kir Royal and Pernod, and pretty black girls in white dresses with frilly black silk organza aprons serving bite-size Chinese food: dim sum, egg roll, spareribs. That night in the excitement of the occasion Christopher had been for the most part working the crowd hard: flirting with the art critics and collectors, the dealers and the museum curators. He had played Don Juan to the dowagers and the millionaire closet-queens. He had given a wide berth to the unknown painters and made a beeline for the famous artists. He and his good looks, charming, courtly manners, had a way of seducing that was disruptive to his victims, putting them on edge. A dozen times she watched him take out his pocket diary. For business? Or just some
clandestine rendezvous? Other times she caught in the faces of one of his prey a bitchiness toward him, jealousy, anguish at his very presence.
The evening was made for Cheyney by the loyal support of her friends in the New York art world. Betty Parsons had been there, that grand lady of the arts, loved by every artist lucky enough to cross her path or to have her as a dealer. She had been putting to use a discerning eye. Acton Pace, supportive as always, and Mervyn Jules and Walter Kamus, Tomayo turned up, Milton Avery and his wife, the two Soyers, Moses and Raphael, separately, Saul Steinberg, Chaim Gross. They were viewing and talking art and giving her the backup she needed by their very presence. There were others like Richard Lindner, Adolph Gottlieb, Alexander Liberman, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, who had arrived with Betty Parsons. Their words of encouragement saw Cheyney through the evening. It had been the artists who had taken the edge of anxiety off her evening. The people who were fearful for her, because they knew how tough it was to make it in the New York art world. They had wished her well and had given her support with invitations to their studios. Friendship asked no more.
The curators of several museums, critics, and Sebastian had turned up. Some with smiles, others with raised eyebrows, and a “We’ll wait and see what she can do” attitude toward her. She was not unhappy about that. None of the really big collectors showed up. A disappointment to her only because their mere appearance at the opening would have sent a buzz through the crowd. Good for press reviews, a boost to business. A number of small ones did, and, by the time the last supper guest had left, seven red stickers were glowing in the lower right-hand corners of seven picture frames. Seven sold the first night was no disgrace. Cheyney had been launched.
In bed, while lying in each other’s arms they talked for hours about the evening, its success and the artists who had turned up to fete her. Christopher had clearly been impressed. The excitement he had felt at being steeped in the New York art world, with her at the center, if only for a few hours, left him glowing. The competition he was faced with that evening served to spur on his own work. In the dawn hours he confessed he was less than satisfied to
show what he had brought for his own exhibition.
“My exhibition is scheduled for fifteen weeks from now,” he had said. “I’ll paint a new show for it. Find a studio to borrow as soon as I return. You were so right, something new is happening in art now. By God, I’m going to part of it.”
“Return?” Cheyney felt as if she had been hit with a wooden bat. Where was he going? Why? When? All she had been able to think while she had tried to get her breath back was, It’s not possible. I’ve misheard him. I’ve left it too late to tell him if he’s going away. He is part of this, he has to know about the baby. The guilt, the sadness of destroying a life we created; I need him to help me get through this. She felt queasy when he took her in his arms and, bringing her to her knees, slipped her silver silk nightgown up over her hips and breasts, over her head, and abandoned it to the room. He placed her on her back and slid very carefully on top of her, saying, “In honor of this dazzling evening and our life in the art world.”
He teased, he taunted the outer lips of her clitoris and her vagina with adept fingers and used the tip of his now large and hard penis to caress the opening with delicate seductive strokes. He created his own special sexual dance, penetrating no deeper than the rim of her cunt. In and out, in and out, only enough each time to open her wider, make her ready and yearning, desperate even, to receive the full thrust of his masterly cock. To have it buried deep inside her, to feel that exquisite movement of the grand fuck, it was that bliss she craved. And now he was penetrating much deeper, and withdrawing, with an exquisite leisure that tortured. She could feel every nuance of his penetration, accentuated a hundredfold by the moistness of her orgasms. It was time, deeper, deeper, until he filled her full of himself, and then …
Their intercourse was sublime. Their orgasms, like sexual tidal waves, swept away any doubts that anything but love governed what they had together.
How could she tell him in the midst of their passionate lovemaking? Afterward, before either had fully recovered from their exertion, he had announced he was leaving to visit his uncle in San Francisco that afternoon. Back in three weeks.
“Can you put it off for a week?”
“Why should I?”
“Bad timing, I’m afraid. I have a problem that could complicate our lives if I don’t do something about it in the next few days.”
His silence was like a reprimand in the dark, worse than a slap in the face. It said bleakly, You’re alone. It brought tears to her eyes.
More silence, more darkness, until he snapped on the table light close to where they lay. Meticulously he arranged the disheveled bed, then sat up against the pillows. He did nothing about his own nakedness but attended to hers. He gathered a diaphanous lavender silk shawl embroidered with cream-colored silk flowers from the floor and draped it around her shoulders. He took time to arrange the fine silk fringe over her breasts so that their round voluptuousness was not obscured. He strewed the long threads decoratively around the sensuous nipples that gave him such endless pleasure. Otherwise she remained naked down to her toes. With mock painterly solemnity he made of her a Goya, and called her “my own naked Maja, my Duchess of Alba” in a husky whisper. He tenderly touched the flat of her stomach, caressed the triangle of curly black hair, and then the roundness of her thigh. He stroked himself erect, and, sidling tight up against her side, spoke.
“Then it’s a good thing I’m leaving tomorrow. It will give you time to heal yourself and be well by the time I return. You do understand that I can’t help you in this? You know I can’t cope with one more complication in my life. Especially now, with a whole new show to paint. I must erase anything else from my mind: a divorce still not finalized, Kostas on a fallow period in his work, the money needed for repairs on my houses, even you and your problem. Tell me you understand.”
“I understand,” she answered in a hollow voice. And the worst thing about it was that she did. That she expected no more than she got from Christopher That she accepted her pregnancy as her responsibility, hers alone. Just as he expected her to. She knew she was wrong. That he was so insensitive to
their
problem was painful to her.
“I will call you from the coast.” His magnanimous gesture.
Where was her pride? she wondered, when he touched her lips with his in a passionless kiss. Then, seconds later, he slipped between her legs and fucked her with a kind of desperation.
He demanded she reciprocate with orgasms so copious and passionate as to send her into a frenzy of lust. And she did. Only then was he able to express his real feelings, able to say, “I love you, Cheyney, against everything I believe in and want, I have fallen in love with you because there is no measure in your love for me.” There had been tears on his cheeks when he had made his confession of love for her. She saw that it was true. It showed in his eyes. But there was, too, something else she recognized, a rage within his love for her, rage held in check, for her having made him fall in love.
Cheyney pulled her hands from her face and wiped the tears from her eyes. She was sobbing with self-pity. She looked at her watch, yet again, and imagined the wheels of the plane lifting off the runway at Idlewild airport, the plane ascending dramatically into the air. And was relieved to think he was gone and out of her life for the next three weeks so that she could confront her immediate, appalling problem: the abortion. Her mind was so fragmented she had no idea what to do first, or indeed what to do about it at all. What if his plane had not taken off? She distracted herself with that, until she worked herself up into such a state that she had to call the airport to make sure. Once that was confirmed, there was little choice but to get on with it. But how?
This was 1959, New York. To get a legal abortion you quitted the country for Mexico, Europe — or was it Puerto Rico? She wasn’t even sure about that. Anyway, she was tied to the gallery. How could she leave it now, just as it had opened itself to the world and called for her nurturing presence. To go abroad would be impossible. She needed to have the operation done on a Saturday evening, to recuperate over Sunday, and be able to be on her feet and in the gallery again on the Monday morning. It was only just becoming a reality, the trouble she was in, the difficulties she was going to have to go through even to find someone to do it. And the doing of it.
Cheyney didn’t have the sort of friends who knew about illegal matters, especially ones that involved life-and-death issues. Secrecy soon became all-important as she realized she was about to become a criminal. Who could she turn to? The doctors she knew were out, their practices would be in jeopardy,
even if they only recommended to her where to go. Aiding and abetting. Her friend, Lala? Impossible. She gossiped too much. Her other friends? They would be shocked and embarrassed for her and she didn’t want that. Her family? Unthinkable. That left only Dora. She called her housekeeper into her office.
Dora’s reaction, “It sure is hell bein’ a woman. Shit, girl, you is in trouble, an I can’t help yah. I could find you somebody, but it ain’t the kind a job you want done. A cheapo job is what you’ll get up my end of town. And them Harlem abortionists ain’t reknown for their ability, nor the places for cleanliness. You gotta find a good one, Miss Cheyney, an get the job done right. You’re a young woman, one day might want babies, not hysterectomies.”
Cheyney felt a chill rack her body. She had hardly thought of the actual physical side of what had to be done, the danger involved. “I don’t know anyone else to ask.”
“That’s simple. Your hairdresser. Those fairies know everything. All them rich ladies confidin’ their indiscretion on ’em. Your guy Roland, he’s the one to ask.”
Cheyney called Roland at once. And indeed Roland came through for her. Roland and another client of his, a glamorous Hungarian woman-about-town. By seven that evening, Roland was sitting in the upper gallery on the Georgian sofa, sipping a martini while dialing his Hungarian client’s telephone number. Now Cheyney wanted it done immediately if it were possible, not to lose a day, for fear that the more she heard and the more she thought about her condition, the less she would want to do it at all.