The New York Stories of Elizbeth Hardwick (20 page)

“No,” Palmer lied. “Of course, I have gone once in a while to the movies at the museum, but I did this thing of Keaton from a childhood memory of him, my youthful admiration of his work.” Palmer disliked the way he said “youthful admiration of his work.” With a look of graceful irony, he added, “Or at least I
thought
that was the well from which I drew up the image.”

“People seem to be always fishing in the same well without noticing each other,” Frazier said.

Palmer laughed. In his own mind, he supplied the adjectives he supposed the Buster Keaton portrait brought to Frazier’s mind: fuzzy, sentimental, slick. Perhaps so, Palmer admitted — although there had been times in the past, and there would be times to come, when, gazing upon some work of his own imagination, he would say of it, “Warm, interesting, well painted, a true document.”

“Hard as it is, things are easier than they were when I was your age,” Palmer said.

“Depression and all that?” Frazier said tonelessly.

“Yes, that and more.”

“I suppose you really went in for rebellion in a big way.” Frazier had large, brown, unabashed eyes. He stood firmly on his two huge feet encased in shoes of rawhide calf. He was over six feet tall; his large hands and heavy wrists hung from the sleeves of his corduroy jacket. He lumbered about, bearlike and yet quick, full of energy. His soft, brown face had a look of melancholy, like the faces of Mediterranean men.

“Every generation can look back and see that there was a typical history, and we, in some respects, experienced ours,” Palmer said. “The thing that may surprise you is that
Alice
was a thorough-going radical. Women are much more intense about these things than men — if they go in for them at all, I mean.”

Frazier whistled, peering through the door at Alice’s trim little image — her pearl earrings, her black wool dress, her fair, round face, with its vigilant expression.

“What I was saying, or going to say,” Palmer went on, in some haste, “was that I went from the public schools of Virginia to Yale on a national scholarship, and from there to Paris on nothing much but nerve and cognac.”

“Good for you,” Frazier said. He dropped the contemplation of his host’s past and present as if they were ashes from a cigarette, and, going to the window, turned to look once more at his own painting. As he gazed on it, an expression of boyish tenderness and depth of feeling came over his heavy features. “I love Buck Sampson,” Frazier said. “Without him, I’d never have found myself as a painter. I was planning to go into the Foreign Service.”

Alice called out, “It’s not too early for cocktails, is it? I hope these young geniuses will forgive us if we display a middle-aged eagerness to begin the evening’s drinking.”

Loitering for a moment in the studio, Palmer acknowledged the true object of the meeting — the purchase of a picture — and tried courteously to withdraw. “I wish I could buy something from you,” he began, his smile pleading with the young man. “Of course, as an artist myself, I actually am the last man on earth to think of buying someone else’s work. I can’t possibly afford it. And you couldn’t possibly let the canvas go for the little I could manage to pay for it.”

Frazier did not respond in a comradely fashion. He began to press the matter, frowning, and in the spirit more of a man defending an assault upon his rights than of one hoping for a gratuity. “How much are you offering?” he asked, fixing his large brown eyes on Palmer.

Palmer hadn’t been “offering” anything. He had expected Frazier to move rapidly to another subject and, upon departing, to pick up his large canvas with a graceful and skillful gesture and take it off as if he had never brought it. It gave Palmer real distress to have to be rude about the painting — to seem to ignore the condition of a fellow-artist, to be cautious about money, and to pay no heed to his friend Buck Sampson. Still, he couldn’t take Alice’s money and buy this large, disorganized, floppy painting. They weren’t millionaires! They were, if anything, pretty strapped themselves at the moment. And if he made a sacrificial gesture, what would he achieve? Would he give hope and courage to a faltering soul? No — all Frazier wanted was the money; he was not in need of Palmer’s good opinion. It was absurd to think one could “encourage” a man of such majestic self-esteem.

“I can’t make an offer,” Palmer said, on a note of quiet resignation. “In a sense, a painting is worth, in money, everything — the whole world — and it is worth nothing.”

Frazier snapped back impatiently, “I’ll do you a favor and interrupt that lecture. It’s not fair to a man to let him go on like that!”

Palmer nodded pleasantly. “I guess you’re right. What I meant was that I can’t buy anything. I doubt that I have more than, say, two hundred and fifty dollars in the bank.”

Frazier pounced. “I was expecting five hundred. You might even say I’ve already spent your five hundred dollars. We got a little manic when Buck’s letter came, and, of course, it was a few days before we could get together with you. Between then and now, there has been a sort of easing of the purse strings. A general relaxation of prudence has taken place.” Frazier chuckled comfortably.

Palmer did not know what to do except to summon a tolerant smile. “I’m ready for a martini,” he said. “How about you?”

“Any old time,” Frazier said jauntily.

They went into the living room, where their wives were waiting. It was a long room, with windows on Park Avenue and also on the side street. “I think continually of those who are truly rich,” Frazier said, bowing gaily to Mrs. Palmer. “Isn’t that a sort of 1930s quip?”

“God, it is, rather!” Alice agreed, deciding upon good humor and urbanity as the way to handle this large, menacing young man and his pretty young wife, upon whom some of his air of accusation and indifference had worn off.

The Palmers’ living room was grandly, starkly modern, the result of much careful consideration and a good deal of money. There was always something askew in the Palmers’ way of living; they were tormented by their own perfectionism — a condition difficult for them to satisfy, because they were not rich. Yet achieve perfection they did, at least in some ways, and with the achievement they felt obliged to make explanations and excuses, as if they would have preferred simplicity and disorder had not some impish force dragged them into elegance, into bourgeois correctness, into up-to-date chic. They had a Mercedes, which one would have thought they had been compelled to own for reasons of charity, because they said they had met their sweet little blue Mercedes under such curious and touching conditions of devaluation that she could not be denied. Sometimes the Palmers were mildly denounced by other artists as “middle-class,” but more often they were enjoyed for their love of pleasure and their sociability. Their explanations eased the poor and critical among their friends; their comfort reassured the conventional.

Alice Palmer was prudent and watchful, yes, but she believed passionately in art — or, rather, in artists. Her first husband had been working on a novel at the time of his death. He had been writing his novel at night, with Alice’s intense approval and involvement, while working with great success during the day at the manufacture of plastics. When he died, Alice had taken her plastics money and had looked for a full-time artist. She had found Palmer. Not only was he an artist but he was handsome, charming, and gay, and she fell deeply in love. She would gladly have lived anywhere — in an old boathouse or a barn or an attic — but it was typical of the way things happened to the Palmers that her sister-in-law should have been moving out of her large and, everything considered, “reasonable” apartment on Park Avenue. The Palmers, hardly thinking, had moved in. It took an awful chunk out of their income, but then the war and rent control came, and there they were.

Now that she was married to a living artist, Alice felt it a matter of principle to buy furniture, dishes — as much as possible, everything — from living designers. She had white walls, bits of modern Spanish rug, furniture by Knoll, draperies of heavy, creamy Belgian linen, pedestal tables by Saarinen. But in this carefully chosen setting Johnson Palmer’s paintings hung forlornly, wistfully shivering in the pure, cold light. His paintings derived from the more pleasing and popular examples of modern art. They showed their derivation in an agreeable manner, as if it were a coat of arms on a teapot. His coast of Brittany, his Chagall chicken (which he called
Virginia Farm
) were executed with commendable talent, but were swept over, as by a coating of lacquer, by a final diffidence.

On a level with the Palmers’ apartment was the living room of an apartment on the side street. The lights there went on suddenly, revealing a plush setting of red velvet sofas, a wall covering of dull, golden-hued fabric, a handsome chest with brass knobs, and an American-primitive portrait of an old lady greatly resembling George Washington about the jaw. “I suppose your neighbors are families renowned for deeds and accumulations,” Frazier said in a mock-heroic tone, after swallowing his cocktail in two gulps.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Alice said gaily, meeting the challenge. “That place belongs to a pansy from Akron, Ohio.”

“Well, somebody’s got to uphold tradition and a sense of the past,” Frazier said.

Mimi Frazier, sitting in a low chair of red wool, was wearing a full black skirt, a black Italian sweater, a copper necklace, copper loops through her pierced ears, and T-strap Capezios. Her hair was shaped in a wind-blown, tousled style, and through it ran bleached streaks. This tousled, indifferently executed artifice hugged a small head of perfect shape, which sat upon a long, young swan’s neck. Mimi chain-smoked, she bit her nails, the gap of an extracted molar appeared when she smiled, and yet she was from certain angles lovely to look at. Her thinness, the sharp, pure line of her chin, her careless glance, her restless, careless shrug — to these one turned back, impressed.

“Are you really the great new younger generation?” Alice said to Frazier, with just a shade too much briskness.

“Yes, I am the younger generation,” Frazier admitted, after a pause for reflection.

“Well! It’s nice to know what you are — to have it decided,” Alice said.

“No, I’m serious,” Frazier insisted.

Mimi accepted a second martini from Palmer. Opposite her chair, one of Palmer’s canvases was hanging. The subject of the painting was a young girl, perhaps fourteen years old, with a long, melancholy, dreaming face, a thick body full of strength, and a brooding, puzzling mystery about her. “That’s sort of good,” Mimi said to Palmer. “It looks something like Balthus.”

Palmer was hurt. He did not like to have his painting compared to that of another man, but more — or at least just as much — he was hurt that Mimi had not, if she chose to speak to him at all, wished to make him happy. Women liked Palmer. He was a little spoiled in that respect. It hurt him when a woman failed to make a special effort, to show some special need to please him. He was one of those attractive, talented men of rather sordid, depressing background who have risen above it as effortlessly as the proverbial flower growing in the dump heap. He had a good bit of talent for a number of things. One could easily imagine him as an actor, as a newspaperman; he might have been in law or medicine; and, of course, he had shown early in his youth a greater than usual gift for drawing.

He had been born in Charlottesville, Virginia, of a feckless family noted for their good looks, their good marks in school, and their inclination — which seemed to come upon them as a part of the very life process — to do nothing with themselves, to collapse into smiling, good-looking indolence during high-school years. Palmer’s father — lean, ironical, handsome — had worked on the grounds at Monticello. As Johnson Palmer grew older, this became embarrassing to him. His shuffling, discontented father, by his presence at Monticello, seemed to enter history like the Prince of Wales’s barber. He was never the chief gardener;
politics
, the father would explain, with a shrug, his clear blue eyes twinkling.

All this had been long ago. Johnson Palmer’s early life seemed to him truly another life, complete in itself, improbable, not a preparation for the life he later came to have. Sometimes his sister, Dottie, appeared in New York on behalf of the Charlottesville dress shop she worked for. She did not come often, for which Johnson was grateful. She had the Palmer family trait of somehow stopping before the top of the hill; she was therefore only brought along by the head buyer upon infrequent occasions. And there she would be, still pretty, in debt up to her neck, carrying snapshots of children of extreme good looks and striking shallowness of expression.

Mimi seemed to sense that Palmer felt wounded by her remark. She chewed a nail and looked slowly, appraisingly at him, and then said, “I didn’t mean this painting wasn’t your own when I mentioned Balthus. You know what I mean. You know how you see something and think of something else — sort of association, and all that.”

Palmer felt redeemed. He thought Mimi was charming. He knew exactly how she must live — litter and mess, cots with Mexican rugs for blankets. Yes, he thought, he knew it all — the only salad bowl, the wine bottles with branches of something stuck in them, the fruit crates for bookcases, the baby being washed in the dishpan and bedded down in the buggy and pushed to exhibitions. A wave of sympathy swept over him. “It isn’t an easy life being a painter,” he said.

Mimi grunted. “Rembrandt loves it,” she said, nodding in the direction of her husband. “He turns ’em out like crazy.”

“Never blot a line,” Frazier said fuzzily, having had several more martinis.

Palmer kept his attention fixed upon Mimi. It still seemed to him surprising that this young couple — poor, bound to the city — should have given birth to offspring. In recent years, he and Alice no longer said they hadn’t wanted children. If the matter came up, they said they hadn’t
had
any children. They did not stress deprivation, nor did they clearly deny it. Certainly they had not wanted children; Alice had been thirty-five when they married, and Palmer thirty-four. She had her legacy from her dead husband; they were dedicated to art and fun, to their trips to Europe and their nice apartment.