Authors: Lucy Ellmann
“Look at this one!” she fumed.
“
‘Stitched with love’! Quilts are stitched with
loathing
. That’s what’s good about ’em!”
“You’re sticking with your ‘rags and rage’ theory, huh?” I just couldn’t see the rebelliousness of bedspreads. Nor could I be convinced that they were significant works of art. After (reluctantly) studying an ornate quilted tableau of historic events, I said to Mimi, “It’s not Leonardo though, is it?”
“Yes it is!” she replied.
“It’s not Van Go—”
“Yes it is.”
And, standing before a red-and-black Amish number, “It ain’t Rothko.”
Mimi had had about enough of this. “Look at that Crazy Quilt,” she said, drawing me over to a jazzy-looking blast of color. “
That’s
abstract, that’s modern. . .” I did like “Crazy Quilts” a bit better than the rest of these bedspreads. They were like Cubist collages, and at least tried to break up the monotony of all that obsessive repetition. But chintzy or minimalist, innovative or traditional, revolutionary or docile, slavish or self-indulgent, quilts
all
seemed a little crazy to me. Why waste so much time sewing cloth together, for chrissake? Stitch, stitch, stitch! It’s got to be a major cause of arthritis. I wasn’t too happy about the thought of all those Bellevue cases either, armed with needles, every loop a noose in their minds for some worthless jilter, some Casanova, cad, scoundrel, some nebbish, some nudnik, some no-goodnik who done ’em wrong. All this taut, fraught cloth—no wonder we have castration complexes!
“What
is
it with women and cloth?” I murmured. “Do they have to pull the threads so
tight
?”
“Thrift,” answered Mimi. “Women are always broke.”
“That doesn’t explain the pillow fights.”
I was deep in unhappy contemplation of an ancient quilt dominated by a goofy central rose design made up of at least one million zillion petals—sheesh!—when I heard a commotion going on in some dark corner of the room.
“Step back from the quilt, ma’am,” said the same guard who’d shown us out of the Rag Rug Room. I went over and there was Mimi standing
behind
the museum rope, clinging onto a truly beautiful quilt. Her aunt’s, I assumed. The design was abstract and geometrical, with a pattern of thin diamonds of intense color, set against a black background (not wholly unlike the colors of Epicure cans!).
The Firefly Quilt
Circa
1960
The Bronx
The brighter diamond shapes seemed to twinkle on and off like fireflies. But that didn’t excuse Mimi’s attempt to tear it off the wall! The quilt wouldn’t budge, but Mimi fell awkwardly over the rope—and into my arms.
“Thanks!” she said, looking up at me, her face glistening madly. Still, there was something luscious about her in that pose.
We were now escorted down into the bowels of the museum, in order to be reprimanded. As we waited for the elevator, Mimi whispered, “I need you to do something for me.”
“Huh?! What now?” I asked, a little ungraciously.
“Just act like you’re my lawyer.”
“Like I’m. . .
what?! I’m a
doctor
, Mimi, not a lawyer. Doctors are better than lawyers. Lawyers take your money and don’t even give you an ointment.”
“You won’t have to say much,” she coaxed. “Don’t forget you owe me. Madison Avenue, Christmas Eve. . . ”
“What, were you busy or something? Did I hold you up? I already said thank you!”
“Think of it as your first lesson in public speaking.”
“Public
sneaking
, you mean.”
After a few walkie-talkie confabs, the guard delivered us into the care of a long-legged arts-and-crafts PhD student, who led us disdainfully through corridors stacked full of folksy clutter: piles of old newspapers, scary bassinets, bashed enamelware, rusty pots and pans. . . probably a few crapholes of the famous too.
“Whewee!” I said under my breath. “Time for a garage sale.”
“Focus!” ordered Mimi.
“
You
focus!”
Any minute now I was going to start laughing. To steady myself, I told myself this was my big 007 moment. The glamorous PhD student’s
froideur
somehow seemed to demand James Bond suavity in return. But first Mimi and I had to sit in what looked like a couple of old baskets, in a dingy waiting area outside the Director’s office, where one plucky little plant was perversely striving to survive. I was beginning to think it might be a
faux
plant made by nineteenth-century craftsmen in Arkansas, as light relief in between wrestling those hopeless basket chairs into being—when we were ushered in to see the Director. I was all ready for Donald Pleasence, complete with the white cat clawing its way up his lapel (you can tell Donald doesn’t like that cat—his suit’s been ruined by it). But I was wrong again:
another
gender switch! The Director was a woman. Is everybody a woman these days? They sure get around.
This one, I immediately detected, was a Manhattan art-world person in the Gertrude tradition. In fact I might even have met her at one of Gertrude’s Dohnányi parties. The woman had never whittled anything in her life and clearly had no time for us because
we’d
never whittled anything either. After a few unpleasant pleasantries, Leggy whispered something in her ear—but before the Director started interrogating us, Mimi took charge.
“We’ve come for the Firefly Quilt,” she announced to my surprise.
“Yes, I see,” the Director replied. “Would you prefer a slide of it, or do you need a digital reproduction?” She really was not on the ball.
“Reproduction?!” Mimi turned red with fury. I thought I’d better intervene.
“Excuse me,” I said.
“And you are. . . ?”
“Hanafan. Harrison Hanafan. Ms. Fortune’s attorney.” The Director seemed to soften, either awed by my shaky Bond act, or by the idea of lawyers. “We would like to discuss your recent acquisition of the Firefly Quilt,” I continued.
“I believe we acquired the Firefly only about a week ago,” she proudly began. “It’s a fine example of quilt-making of the period, with finer materials than is customary. It shows an astonishing awareness of quilting traditions, Amish and Ohio influences in particular—”
“Madam,” I broke in. “We are not concerned right now with the item’s place in history. We have a more urgent purpose: to restore it to its rightful owner. The article in question was never knowingly sold by my client, to whom it belonged. It is stolen property. Did you establish the quilt’s provenance before you bought it, may I ask?”
Flustered, the Director replied, “Well. . . the man said his aunt made it! Quilt provenances are notoriously difficult to. . . I think he said her name was Sophia—”
“It’s Phoebe, and she was
my
aunt,” Mimi broke in. “Not
his
!”
“I can assure you,” said the Director to me, as if she only wanted to deal directly with Bond, “we bought the quilt from the bona fide owner. I have the paperwork here. . . somewhere. . . ” She now glanced anxiously at Leggy, and began to shift piles of papers around on a desk that was beyond folksy: it was chaos! Leggy raised a leggy eyebrow and went over to assist her, but you could tell they were never going to come up with any document relating to the quilt; not fast anyway.
I barged in. “What you’ve got there, madam, is a hot quilt.”
The Director and Leggy looked at each other, then stepped outside the room to confer. This was a moment of great danger for us—because of the temptation to
guffaw
. Mimi and I studiously avoided eye contact. The two women came back, with an offer.
“We have decided that in fairness, subject of course to official clearance. . . we should consider selling you the quilt,” said the Director stiffly, fearful of admitting (to a lawyer) any failure in the museum’s procedures. “We will only require you to meet the price the museum paid for it.” Success!
“How much?” asked Mimi, suspiciously.
“Twenty-five,” answered Leggy.
“Twenty-five dollars?! Trust John to sell it for—”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” Leggy corrected, the eyebrow rising ominously again before she and the Director shared a classic Laurel and Hardy nod of mutual approbation.
Next thing I knew, we were in the museum shop, where a reddened Mimi bought ten bucks’ worth of postcards, her mouth a tiny dot of fury. To cool us both down, I took her to MoMA to see Matisse: to MoMA with MiMI! She studied one of his odalisques for some time before saying, “Was that Sherlock Holmes you were trying for in there?”
“Sherlock Holmes!? I’m wounded. That, Mimi, was my best James Bond impression! I thought I’d never get a chance to use it.”
Then we did crack up.
We went back to her place in Grove Street afterwards, to her cramped kitchen with its view of a brick wall opposite. Mimi fixed us huge Scotch and sodas and we sat at her bashed-up kitchen table, talking shyly about things. I think profiteroles came up, and their (debatable) relation to vol-au-vents. After a while she said she had to go have a shower, and left me sitting there all alone, making whirly patterns on the table with my wet glass. When I got tired of that, I wandered around the apartment, a funky little place with an unexpected sunken living room that must have seemed the hottest thing in about 1964. The bedroom was surprisingly spacious. It seemed dark and calm in there. Hours passed, or so it felt. “Mimi?” I called out, but she couldn’t hear me over the sound of running water. I went back to the kitchen and poured myself another whiskey and wandered with it into the bathroom.
There was Mimi, in a towel, reaching up for something, one breast exposed. She looked just like Delacroix’s Liberty leading the people! A brave, sturdy dame with freedom on the brain—bayonet rifle in one hand (or, in Mimi’s case, a damp towel), French flag in the other (comb), a load of dead supporters or enemies at her heels (pile of discarded clothing), and one big foot peeking out like the Statue of Liberty’s (minus the questionable sandal). If I didn’t shave, I could have been the Abe Lincoln lookalike, standing protectively by with a gun my own (glass of whiskey). There was none of the fragility of Gertrude about this gal. Nor were those the delicate flower-sewing hands of Puccini’s Mimì. This Mimi was no vulnerable waif or stray, no flower-girl. In fact, she wasn’t my type.
It was really that
bathroom
of hers I first fell in love with! The one thing my apartment lacked, a great old-fashioned New York bathroom with white hexagonal floor tiles, squared black towel rails, black-and-white tiling around the walls, a white china toilet-paper recess, and that great wide square sink with its mammoth X-shaped faucets. Mimi had it all!
She’d now gone into the bedroom, and I thought I heard her say, “Why don’t you kiss me?” This request seemed highly unlikely, so I went back into the kitchen, but there were too many circles in there. A few fireflies too. So I went to join Mimi instead, walked right up to her in her towel in her dark bedroom and her miasma of mayhem, and suddenly thought, I must kiss this woman before one of us
dies
.
Our four lips met, like the four corners of the earth, the four elements, a foregone conclusion. I didn’t see stars but there were skyscrapers and my mother’s raspberry jam and bulldozers and dachshunds. Some Matisse odalisques too, and cops, news flashes of politicians and flood victims, a quilt or two, Schubert, a Grecian pillar. . . and Gertrude. Yes, some lingering guilt toward Gertrude tried to throw me—misplaced, an error, a reflex, a shield against the unknown, the last refuge of the unadventurous. I pushed it aside. I think I saw tall pines waving against an evening sky, baskets, some chair I used to own: I ricocheted off all these obstacles in search of Mimi. Her towel slipped down, which distracted me, and I suddenly wondered if I might have jumped the gun, forced myself on her, offended in some way. Maybe she hadn’t suggested kissing at all, only said something like, “Where’s the Kleenex?”
She smiled though, that smile that always got me, and all my hesitancy dissolved: I wanted to kiss her whole being, every kooky thing she’d ever done, every thought in her crazy head. I had to be near that womanly softness of her, to hell with the exact qualities of her body that I was overtrained in noticing. Jumping hurdles of my own prejudices—too tall, too big, too old, too bold?—I kissed her hot temple, her hot temper, her neck, her hair, her warmth, her alienness. I wanted to know her everything. I ran my thumb down her unfamiliar belly until she moaned.
A kiss is a big step, an opening, an honesty, a transgression. There’s something
equal
about it, this mutual penetration, a relaxation (if only temporary) of self-love. Forget dualism—in the midst of a kiss you’re neither male nor female, yin nor yang. You’re not yoursel
f
! I only paused to ask, “You don’t embroider, do you?” before Ant and Bee painted the tire the color called RED, and we went to bed.