Authors: Hortense Calisher
“Are you the agent, then?”
“I—been handling for Ivan, up to now. He don’t have time for that.”
The shape of his face reminded her of a pony or a burro—its long, planed nose, large-fringed eye. Or perhaps it was the expression.
“Excuse me, miss—” He had been eyeing her too. “You’re not by any chance—from the Housing?”
“Housing? Me?”
“It’s just that you don’t look, you know. Like we talked.”
“I’m dressed up. You know how it is. For
landlords
.”
He laughed with her. “We got to watch it, you know—this izzen exactly a legal—”
“Oh, I know. We had a deal, over on Spring Street.”
“Oh, yeah—Spring.” He said it as if it were suburbia.
She described it.
“Sounds like the greatest.”
“Oh, it was, it was.”
He eyed her sideways. It was in the expression, half between animal yielding, animal mildness, as if suspicion were a harness placed on him. “You’ll excuse,” he said. “Excuse, but—so why move?”
She explained.
“Water, for chrissake. How do you like that! You can’t get around that; that’s for sure. Jesus Christ, water, thank God we got no trouble with that. Water everywhere, in the pipes, the view—” He swung an arm. “Everywhere!”
“Oh, it’s a wonderful place,” she said. “Wonderful. How’d you ever—?”
“Isn’t it! God, isn’t it.” A smile broke over his face. He touched her elbow. “You’ll excuse I had to ask why. You sure don’t
look
like you’re broke, but sometimes, know how it is, because this place it’s artists, we could get, you know—those floaters. Flop-artists. From one deal to the next, and no cash passes.” He paused and she nodded, thinking of the boy before them on Spring Street.
“Oh, we’re okay on that, we’re
rich
,” she said. “Oh, you know what I mean. We can take care of it.” She explained.
“I’m sure,” he said. “And you see, it’s only because Ivan has the whole weight of this joint on his shoulders.” He squared his own. “I don’t subscribe anyway, people like us in the arts, they don’t have to be responsible. Or to be physically dirty.” His sweater was clean, his hands and nails also, the whole of what she saw now to be a gentle, rather clerkly person on whom the sharp pants were a uniform, in the meantime wondering what he did, imagining the small, neat home, mother he might have got such maxims from. “You agree?” he said suddenly.
She nodded. “Like leotards,” she observed thoughtfully. “They always smell. In the crotch.”
“Right!” he said, immersed in his argument. Then he blushed. “Anyway, some people, one faction here, just because Ivan has what to eat—He’s a natural-born worker, that’s all, if a sculptor has to do tombstones—so he does! Didn’t he meet Kreisl, that’s the landlord, through the cemetery connection, and sell him the whole idea? Kreisl don’t take a hand, only to square the fire department and the garbage, the rest is up to Ivan. He don’t make it a paying proposition for Kreisl, then—” he drew a finger across his throat. “Right?”
“Right,” she said faintly.
“So—it’s like Ivan says—it can’t be helped. He’s on a very thin margin. A ve-ry thin margin. And just one sour apple could make the whole barrel—” he cocked his head, frowning, “not
sour
.”
“Rotten,” she said.
“Right!” he said gloomily. “And it can’t be helped, which one.” He clapped his hands, whistling under his breath. “Well! Down to business. You’ll excuse me for yacking. I got things on my mind.”
“I think it’s a miracle you’re not all filled up,” she said. “I usually never get to a place on time, not any place worthwhile. How many vacant ones do you have left?”
He took out a pencil. “Just one.”
“Oh!” she said. “Am I lucky.”
“Hey, you haven’t even seen it. Could be one of these ratholes. Maybe
it
don’t have water.” But he was grinning at her.
“You’re teasing. Because something told me. In the ad even. Even before I walked down this street.”
“I also,” he said, carefully grammatical with holiness.” I also. Whenever I walk down this street, something says it, it’s a dream but Maury, you’re walking. Even the first time inside, and believe me, Ivan and me worked like dogs, it wasn’t what it is today. God, could this be a high-class setup, I said to Ivan, he wasn’t only showing me the place, and meanwhile to myself, it’s gonna be a high-class setup, Maury, and it isn’t for you, you know his standards. I wasn’t only ushering, maybe once in a while an electrical job on the QT. And what does
he
do but offer me to work it out in rent!” He put a solemn hand on her shoulder. “What’s your name?”
“Liz. Liz Pagani.”
He repeated it. “Say, that’s nice. Make a good stage name,
Italiano, si?
—we’re Hungarians. Well, Liz, you’re right—it’s a doozy. And something tells me you’ll get it. Something tells me, you’ll be the one.”
She put her hand on his shoulder, like kids swearing an oath—he was such a one himself he made her feel about sixteen. “Okay then! What are we waiting for!”
“I’m in no hurry,” he said. “Just Ivan. Okay, give me that dope again, will you?” He noted it all down on a pad, David’s employer, Mrs. Jacobson, where they were living. “Now wait here. Don’t make a move. Just wait right here.” He made for the street door.
“Maury, wait.”
“I’ll take you up there in a minute. We just making coffee. But first I got to—”
“Just tell me one thing.” She had to have some tidbit for expectancy to brood on. “Is it a big one?”
“Fifty by a hundred,” he said, with pride. “The girl upstairs, Sonsie, she had twins they just put up a partition. Okay hon, I’ll be right back.”
He was gone quite a while, maybe to get the morning’s rolls somewhere; she knew the routine. She stood very still, imagination brooding on one leg. David, off hunting locales with Barney, had no part in it. Inside, the building had a romantic darkness that smelled of good wood and stone, filled with overtones of what she had hunted for and now recognized, as if a voice had just echoed itself. “Beyond. We have come to it. Ond.” Above stairs, a whole context waited for her, people she would get to know, have coffee with. Except for Sonsie, the one leaving. Other people’s
partitions
—she thought irritatedly; we shall probably have to remove it. Or—she could decamp, right now while he was gone, as she had sometimes done when left by a super in a place that was impossible—leaving behind her, she was quite sure, little surprise. People were so casual about these things, when where you lived, how, could change your whole life, the friends you met and loved, could mean almost everything. A lozenge of sunlight barred the door through which Maury had gone. She could step over it, annihilating at once a whole world she would never know. No one was keeping her here but herself, she thought proudly. But she would try to save in memory, to laugh over someday with one of the yet unknowns, this moment that still swung in the balance.
He was back, without rolls. “You don’t mind, Ivan, he wants to see you.” He led her into the street, around the side that she had not yet seen, where a line of ordinary windows was curtained in the harsh machine lace seen sometimes in the tenements near her mother’s, sold by Yorkville drapery stores that still catered to the old, middle-European worker-taste, ugly but assertively clean. After there, a great, blind window went up for two stories.
“Old piano factory,” said Maury. “Ivan made over the office his apartment, for the studio the delivery end. He saw the possibilities at a glance.”
The door to the living quarters was opened to them by a heavy young woman with the veal-colored skin of some Germanic blondes. Though Maury said nervously, “Helga, Mrs. Kostec, the young lady,” she let them pass without a nod, down a long hall, past as many newly partitioned box-rooms as could be crowded into a space originally several fine ones, but even hurriedly passing, one could see that no starkly spatial drama was here intended, but its opposite. In the last one, a three-piece suite in eggplant mohair lay like boulders grouped around the television, on the wall above them a flight of wooden bluebirds. Only the kitchen was ample enough for all the happy leatherette and chrome needed to hold its special tide of gimcrackery. Its owner spent time in Woolworth’s, with a sharp eye out for the inorganic and the double-functional—plastic whizamoroos which held clothespins, gingham dolls that were potholders, donkeys with china cactus in the saddle, plus a few showpieces of that streaked opaline or soapstone heavy in which “Under-a-dollar” hunted the art form.
Liz had seen such rooms before, but never among “artists,” and never in lofts. Turning, she saw the woman looking at her with stolid satisfaction; this was what she scrubbed and bought for; her life was an open book. Short-necked, small-eyed, she looked indeed like the ruffled lady-porker in an old German morality tale, from Mrs. Jacobson’s own childhood, that Liz had always hated having read to her. She was “the pig who was neat.” Yet, behind the door at the kitchen’s end, there came a steady sound Liz thought she knew—the knock of a mallet being used. Maury opened the door.
The high room, tawnied with dirt as the walls were, was impressive. Cables and winches hung from the ceiling, recalling what a large-scale craft had once been practiced here, one so lucidly near the good and ultimate—after all, pianos. Against that classic dirt, the tombstones which lined the floor in businesslike rows of dull granite, smartly polished moss-green or ham-colored marble, were ranged as they would be in any monument works on the outskirts of Queens, and it was like outdoors here, in this stone-harbored cold. Back of some unfamiliar machinery, several busts lay unpedestaled, one a copy of the Houdon Washington, and in a corner, a seven-foot saint in the style of Mestrovic bent ram-curls over smoothly flowing clasped hands. The man who regarded her, in his glove a power tool with a dangling cord, was covered with dust, from khaki cap and jacket to trousers stuffed in the tops of shoes—higher than the soft desert boots of the art students—ending in steel safety tips such as workmen wore. Even his beard, no silky, random bush of devotion but thick and squatly trimmed, was dusty and looked wool-warm. Despite this, it gave his face no majesty; she liked the man coolly staring at her no better than his Mestrovic. Nevertheless, if Maury introduced her as a sculptor, she would die of embarrassment. No one she knew worked directly in stone.
“Ivan, this is Liz.” Maury pushed her a little ahead of him.
She smiled a weak hello. The man, Ivan, appraised her slowly from head to foot, until she could almost see herself in his calculation—hairdresser’s bob, good coat and shoes, sweater and graduation pearls, in her ears the only sign that she might be not quite of these—Mr. Pagani’s astute gift, dangling it was true, but gold. His eyes reminded her—of whose? Then it came to her—of the lady-porker’s, his wife’s. He nodded once, twice, not imperceptibly, over her head, at Maury. Then, without a word, he turned to his work. He had seen her possibilities—at a glance.
Maury was silent until they were again inside the other part of the building. “See, didn’t I tell you? You want the place, you’re the one.” His puckering smile was jaunty, but his cheekbones had gone pink. “Come on up now, I’ll show you.”
She cast a look over her shoulder. “Not exactly wordy, is he.”
“One must respect he’s such a hard worker.” It was said staunchly—a maxim that increased his own credit.
“They don’t seem much like artists to me. Not the ones I know.” As yet, she really knew none except the teachers at the League and her own crowd of would-bes. Yet that they existed—and according to the strict category of her own maxims—she never doubted. Somewhere they brooded, orbed above the bourgeois on some high Olympus toward which she must push her own orb. They were not the pigs who were neat.
“Now, don’t you go sounding like the rest, like Sonsie.”
“I hope the rest are more friendly.” Following him up the dark spiral, she paused on the first rung, feeling for a side rail. There was none.
“Oh they are. To me and Footie, they been wonderful.” He peered down to where she clung, stock still, just above the first spiral. “’Smatter, you dizzy?”
“Is this the only staircase? Isn’t it against the build—I mean, isn’t it dangerous?”
“What was Spring Street like, hah, Rockefeller Center? Here, do like me, follow the ropes. You’ll catch onto it.”
She groped blindly after him. The ropes, lost in the black, hung apparently from the polestar, but they held. Spirals above her, he waited until she climbed to his perch. Once they left the stairs, the landing was broad enough for one door—only one loft then, to a floor. He knocked. Footsteps came, but the door did not open.
“You dressed yet?” he said. “The girl is here who called.” The door opened a crack. He leaned down—the person behind it must be small. “Okay, okay, give me Sonsie’s key, hmm. On a string by the towel. And put coffee, hmm.” They waited until the key was handed him. “Put coffee, Fyush,” he said softly to the crack. The door closed. He turned, gaily swinging the key in a pinwheel. “Sonsie’s the same as ours. We all got
substantially
the same layout here. Course they got
regular
dough, they done everything.” He led her up another flight. “She took off with the kids, upstate to her sister’s. She and Joe split up for a while.”
“Oh, too bad,” she said, without sorrow. Enter the Paganis, smiling. Such is life.
“Oh he’ll go after her, sooner later. He’s one of these moody Irish.” They stopped in front of a tangerine-painted door. It was lighter here. “Well, whaddya know!” he said. A large movie-theater poster was tacked on the door half sideways, as if flung there in haste. “Joe draws them, for a good living too, but he ain’t proud of it, like her. Sonsie gets mad, she does this. Once she dressed the kids up in them.” Inserting the key, he spelled out the glaring legend under the blown-up hero. “‘Flaming waterfront tale, watch the Man from Nowhere!’ Hah, that girl!”
He opened the door, smiling with a proprietary air, then he disappeared from her consciousness. The loft was huge, huge and light—none in her crowd had any better, or as good. She even recognized it—one black wall, one white, one orange and one umber—the floating paper lamps, the drama of an emptiness freed from all but the prophylactic color—the orthodox void in which a soul, or perhaps two, might hang. The “Italian” café chairs were permissible, if one went in for chairs. Their owners might have been one of the crowd. It was a shame, of course, that what they had not done, their children had—a washer marring the somber umber, beautiful color they must have mixed themselves, a stroller and playpen stuck anywhere, a general fuzz-and-welter of the flannelly, plasticky world babies brought with them, the cute things one had to buy for them—melting this pure, stark order down to the coy. When her own time came—there was no excuse for allowing the candid shape of one’s life to be so smeared. She walked the length of the place, tested the nursery partition with a knuckle, and passed on. Already she saw flaws in the way these people had managed the total space, and was annoyed at their possessions for still being in it, occupying what she yearned to be alone with, and already felt to be hers. On the far wall, bookshelves framed the window that took up almost all of it. A three-foot high, ebony reproduction of an African fertility goddess stood on one of them, the blind ellipse of her face pointed at a pile of Little Golden Books, her belly prolapsing toward the room. In the window, a central blue pulsed and changed like a flaw that would not be downed—the river. “Oh!” She stood there for quite a time.