Mile High (33 page)

It was a bleak, dirty day. The tarnished winter city lay stiffly outside the windows of the classroom. Mr. Seligson kept his back to the wall on which had been tacked the work of Van Gogh, a sure anaphrodisiac. Directly over Mr. Seligson's shoulder Vincent's mean little red-stubbed face glared at her. “Ah, Mayra,” Mr. Seligson said, as though she had surprised him in a reverie on art. “Good afternoon. Come in. I have the application papers all prepared. Would you like to see them?”

“Where are they?”

“Right here on my desk.”

“Oh. Yes. Then I would like to see them.” But she didn't move forward. She remained in her
querencia
, shuffling her feet, and Mr. Seligson sidled across her terrain as cautiously as though he were concealing a hole in the seat of his trousers. He moved to her left, while she sidled just as carefully, moving to her right, always facing him, and keeping her arms as stiff as horns so that she could hold him off if he should lunge. They made it to the desk at approximately the same time. “Here they are,” the art teacher said hoarsely. He reached out to lift the form, but his hands were trembling, so he withdrew slightly and nodded at the desk top instead. Mayra watched him peripherally. Curiosity gripped her and she leaned over the desk to read the forms and as she did she felt Mr. Seligson enclose her, pretending to lean over the desk to look with her in case the Board of Education should bust into the room, but his offside hand cupped her breast and she could feel the bulge of his trousers at her buttock. She stepped backward, felt her high heel touch his instep, then she shifted her weight to bear down fully. He stifled an outcry. She apologized, and as he fell back, picked up the application form and moved out of reach to stand in front of the window.

Mr. Seligson fell into an approximation of Cheyne-Stokes breathing. His eyes jerked wildly, toward then away from each other in a deeply disturbed labyrinth. Each cycle became more intense and was followed by what seemed to Mayra to be total cessation for fifteen or twenty seconds until the rales would begin again, and through the labored gasping he tried to speak to maintain the illusion of normal composure. “As—you—can see—my dear. All—is—in—order. All. Complete. I shall pop it in—it shall be popped—into the mailbox—this—very—afternoon.” He groped to his right to find the chair, then sank into it slowly. Mayra said, “I'll mail it, Mr. Seligson.” She jammed it into her purse. “I just can't thank you enough.” She crossed the room, walking backward, and opened the door to the corridor behind her. He waved at her weakly as a captain from his bridge might salute the last departing lifeboat. The door closed. He put his arms across the desk and rested his head on them silently.

Mama read the application very carefully, then she had Mayra make a copy of it. She studied Mr. Seligson's signature and said that the open loops and high letters indicated a very artistic nature. They went out together that evening and mailed the letter at the post office slot, not just in a mailbox. Eight days later, on a Friday afternoon, Mr. Seligson invited Mayra to tea at his apartment on the following day. She asked if it was to show her his paintings. He said he had many of his paintings there and she was welcome to see them but that there had been some developments about Shannon-Phillips and they needed to have a long talk. She said she thought she'd better bring her mother if it was about Shannon-Phillips. “You are not to bring your mother,” Mr. Seligson said primly, “and that is final.”

Mama said there was nothing to do but to follow through. They could do nothing on a Friday afternoon, tomorrow would be Saturday, Shannon-Phillips would be closed, so they couldn't find out whether she was accepted or not—so she'd have to take her chances. If Seligson actually was legit, okay. If not, the first time he tried to put his hand down her dress or up her dress she was to kick him in the ankle if they were standing up or drive her elbow into his stomach if they were sitting down. Then while he recovered she was to run all over the apartment, leaving her fingerprints on every surface she could think of, all the unlikely places—such as the ceiling of the refrigerator—and remember where she left them.

“You know, baby, there are all kinds of indirect ways of getting things done, but the kind way is the best way. You remember Miss Pupchen, the little blonde chick on Forty-eighth between Fifth and Madison? Well, this very, very,
very
rich john stashed her there. We won't talk about him. I mean if we can work it out that way we won't even talk about him. He had a lock on her with a chauffeur who was really like a stoolie and a bodyguard—she couldn't do nothing. And a Chinee secretary who could watch her in the places where the chauffeur couldn't go. The john dropped by whenever he felt like. All crazy hours or maybe not at all for like two weeks. Miss Pupchen was flipping her wig, except it was good money and lots of good sharp clothes, but she had this thing about herself that she was oversexed and she needed more than anybody else, but she couldn't even score the chauffeur or the secretary because those two was being paid to cancel each other out. Like they didn't even talk to each other. I was referee. The john knew me from when I was with Miss Baby, way back. I remember I had no connection at the moment and I was doing laundry at Four seventy-one Park and this very smooth, skinny guy came around and he offers me solid money to be maid for Miss Pupchen. She was no hustler, you understand. She just always had a rich john keeping her, so there was no tips in it for me, and besides being the maid and all like that my job is to keep an eye on the chauffeur and the Chinee chick and to call a certain number if either one of them chopped at Miss Pupchen.

“Well, it's a living. And that Miss Pupchen was a little doll. She used to cry so hard. She says she's so oversexed that it hurts her when she don't get it and that I have to help her get a little relief for which she is willing to pay well. I see what she's after, and it makes me sad to say it but I tell her I only know how to pitch righty but thanks anyway, and why don't we just play gin to get her mind off it? Well, we played gin. I'd win a couple hundred, then she'd win a couple hundred—mostly we broke even. But she keeps talking about her troubles, and I tell her it would be nice if she was to call up her mama and just breeze. Just talk. Because, I mean, I know that's a good thing for anybody. So she did. She says why didn't she think of that? We were on East Forty-eighth in New York and her mother lived in Vienna, Austria, that's in Europe, and Miss Pupchen kept an open line going right around the clock. And Miss Pupchen had her mother hire the neighborhood drunk or somebody like that, because it was all in German, and that man sat there Sats, Suns and Hols to call the mother to the phone, and she kept that open call going for five and a half months. She'd come bare-ass out of her shower in her itty-bitty mules with the big pom-poms and she'd pass the phone laying there and yell ‘Loodvig!' into it and he'd answer. If it wasn't late at night there the mother would get on and they'd breeze about the weather or whatever, and the idea that she was oversexed went right out of her head because she was not only always talking to her mother but she figured she was getting even with this rich john.

Well, we waited. Five weeks went by and the phone bill had to be sent to The Man. Nothing. Nobody says anything. We waited four months, but nothing. Finally, one night when the john is laying on top of her she starts to yell at him right in the middle of it. She tells him he's a big chump and how she's been taking him for his roll with the telephone and how she kept that open line going all those weeks, and you know what he said?”

“What'd he say?”

“He said he was proud of her that she thought that much of her mother and that it was one of the nicest things he ever heard. I mean, that's what he said.”

“What'd she do?”

“She had a nervous breakdown right after that. I don't suppose she sent her mama even a post card ever again. And that's the whole point, baby. Hustling johns is a loser's racket. You can't win in it. But what I mean is, it was a
nice
way to handle her differences with that john, and you got to figure out the same approach with this horny art teacher.”

Mr. Seligson's apartment was on Washington Heights between Broadway and Audubon Avenue. He was so nervous waiting for her all day that he couldn't stay in the apartment and went to a Jack Holt double feature in a revival house, and what with the pressures on him he broke out in pimples all over the backs of his hands, so he bought a pair of white cotton gloves to give the rash a chance to go away by five o'clock. He wished he had gone to a Turkish bath instead of the movie. He worried about making love to Mayra with gloves on. It could give her a fixation and he'd be responsible. And worse, he ought to be thinking about what he'd be missing with gloves on. Never had there been such skin. His legs turned to water when he thought about it.

Mayra was precisely on time. He led her to a chair, then went to the kitchen for the tea and the cookies that he had bought in the Hungarian bakery where they also sold bean soup to take out. Mayra started talking the moment she arrived. She kept talking when he left the room, she merely spoke more loudly. “Surely Giorgione represents the finest High Renaissance painting of the Venetian school, don't you think, Mr. Seligson? He outgrew Bellini, no matter what anybody says about the ‘Virgin of Castelfranco,' and no one could spiritualize a landscape the way Giorgione could do it.”

“You're absolutely right,” he yelled from the kitchen. He took down the English cookbook to check that he was making the tea the right way. He could hardly concentrate on the printing the way she was demanding his attention.

“And as for those rebellious Pre-Raphaelites,” she yelled as though being drawn into his English polarization, “it seems quite clear now, doesn't it, that they simply were not the rejected outcasts they pretended to be. When have painters ever been such darlings of the speculators? I mean, aside from right now, can you think of a more marketable period for art, plain supermarket art?”

“No. No, I can't,” he shouted back at her. He peeked under his white glove while he waited for the tea to finish steeping. The hands had definitely improved! It was going to be all right! He stripped the gloves off. He wished he had the talcum powder in the kitchen. No matter. He'd use flour.

“And let's face it,” Mayra was bellowing. “The Louvre has its drawbacks. It's dark whenever the sun isn't shining, and their own painter, David, recorded his scorn in 1795 when he said the gallery produces false illumination almost always unfavorable to the paintings.” Mr. Seligson rushed in with the tray of tea and cups and cookies. He lowered the tray to the table in front of the sofa where Mayra was not sitting but where she was supposed to be sitting, where she was when he left the room. “I won this samovar with Green Stamps,” he said.

“It's beautiful.”

He filled her cup, then his. He put hers on the table in front of the sofa, his beside it. He sat down and motioned to her to come over, saying, “I have some rather good news for you, Mayra dear. Please. Sit down.” He motioned again.

“I'm fine. This is a wonderful chair.” She darted across the space and got the cup. She returned to the chair, gripping the cup with both hands. She was wearing an old black dress of her mother's and no lipstick. It had been her idea, but Mama had said she didn't understand—nothing could make her look less than sensational. “Are those some of your paintings, Mr. Seligson?” she asked.

“Call me Casey.” He had always liked the name. His name was Mort, but he had always liked Casey. He had never before suggested that anyone call him that, but he had never before been about to take himself a gorgeous Negro mistress either. Age sixteen, maybe seventeen, tops.

“Casey?”

He knew he would have to wait until “after” before she'd call him Casey. “It looks very much as though I have been able to get you that scholarship at Shannon-Phillips.”

Mayra clasped her hands under her chin, her face as expressionless as a face can become.

“I sent along a portfolio of your work, of course,” he continued, “but I very much suspect that it was my endorsement and my twenty-three-hundred-word analysis of your work that clinched everything.”

“I am grateful,” Mayra said. “I am very grateful.”

His eyes suddenly filled with tears. “It was a privilege. An honor. I lay myself down as a bridge over which you may carry your talent into the world.” He slid to the end of the couch, directly beside her. “You must go forward into a greater appreciation of the gifts God has seen fit to accord you.” He slid his left hand swiftly along the channel made by her tightly closed legs and moved straight toward the treasure. Her torso leaned forward as though to receive the hand, but the movement was to free her right hand, which slammed like a steel building-wrecker's ball into the side of his jaw. She sprang to her feet and ran to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator door and impressed her finger and palm prints upon its enameled ceiling.

She fingered all the eggs in the egg compartment. She fingerprinted the bottom of a roasting pan she found in the oven, the steam pipe and the side of the stove. She returned to the living room and sat down in a straight-backed chair, her purse and her white gloves neatly in her lap, her feet together.

“That did it, Mayra. Just forget it. Forget the scholarship. Forget even passing your art course—and see what that does to your graduation.”

She listened politely. The side of his face was red. He did not open his eyes as he spoke to her. “Monday morning I go to Shannon-Phillips and tell them with regret that you have been caught stealing art supplies from my class and that severe doubts have been cast upon your morals because you were seen having sexual relations with three men in Van Cortlandt Park. You'll be sorry for the rest of your life that you turned down my friendship.”