HER FULL NAME WAS Rosalind — Rosalind Fleischmann Dreyfus — and she was the real thing, a Medici, an heiress, with a mane of frizzy red hair and the galloping lusts of a feudal baron. She had had forty-three years to learn that no one would ever love her for herself alone; most of the time she seemed like the perfect predator, all will and appetite and scarlet lipstick, but in unguarded moments her face could take on the desolate look of a woman in a Walker Evans photograph.
Things might have gone better for her if she had stuck to the company of the very rich, who would certainly have welcomed her despite her bad table manners and the dirty slip that always showed beneath her hem. She could have sailed the Aegean on their yachts, sat with them at the best tables in the best restaurants, her lips gleaming with animal fat, avidly crunching up bones with her sharp teeth. But her cravings were all for art, for the life of the spirit, which she somehow thought she could achieve by taking artists to bed. And then, of course, things always deteriorated fast. Between what she wanted, which was something like redemption, and what they wanted, which was much more basic than that, there could be no reconciliation.
It was on realizing this that, inevitably, she sought revenge. Her bloodlines on both sides were full of robber barons, men who had specialized in the destruction of their enemies, and this spirit still lived in her, though she lacked their ruthless self-control. She shrieked and howled, threw heavy objects from windows, slashed the canvases she had paid good money for. It was said that, like Ibsen’s heroine, she had once burned the only manuscript of an indigent writer’s novel, after finding him naked with another woman in the house she had lent him in the south of France.
In the last months before the war, she had raced around Paris buying up paintings cheap from their panic-stricken makers. La Vautoure, the artists called her — the vulture — as she bullied them into parting with their best canvases. But when she sailed for America on the S.S. France, she brought with her not only their paintings but some of them, too, the ones in most danger from the Nazis — three Communists and three Jews, several with wives and children — for whom she had miraculously, with the help of heavy bribes, obtained visas. Back in New York, she installed all thirteen of her new dependents in a townhouse near the East River that she had bought years before and never lived in because she disliked the staircase. She brought them oxtails and brown bread and oil crayons, hired a little man to tutor them in English, but like all the previous objects of her generosity, they showed no signs of gratitude. The crayons were the wrong brand, the light was hopeless to work in, she had never told them they would all be sharing a kitchen. Fights broke out among the women, who demanded that she referee. One of the Communists, when she tried to seduce him, locked himself in his upstairs bedroom, threatening to leave by the window.
A few months later, they dispersed, finding themselves hole-in-the-wall apartments of their own, borrowing shamelessly from her when the rent came due. She was left with her crates full of paintings. Then, with the war on in Europe and retreat to her villa in Nice impossible, she had her inspiration: to open a gallery in New York where she could show the refugees’ work. Soon they were all grumbling about her commission and the way her shows were hung. And when she announced that she was looking for American painters too, the downtown artists, though they all schemed to get her to their studios, sat around the bars mocking her pretensions to culture as well as her sexual habits. What they really minded was that she insisted on being seduced in their dingy walk-ups, rather than in her bedroom on Fifth Avenue; she believed, as they never could, in the purity of their squalor.
At last, having promised shows to far too many painters, she decided to extricate herself through a juried competition. It was there that Hugo Klesmer, the emigré painter she feared and honored most, had made a rare impassioned speech in praise of Clay’s work. At first she protested — she thought he must be joking — but soon she was parroting his remarks to everyone else: “the most original painting in the room,” “the first truly American art.”
Thus were Clay and Belle swept into Rosie Dreyfus’ orbit, or at least her outer circle, where they stood, incongruously, looking on. Belle, to whom Rosie had taken an instant dislike, was summoned to the gallery several times to help address invitations, and then shouted at for bad penmanship; once Rosie even demanded two cents for an envelope she claimed Belle had ruined. Clay, on the other hand, though he was edgy and silent around her, she treated with elaborate respect, calling him Mr. Madden in her tenderest, most girlish voice and apologizing fulsomely for every demand on his time. It was Belle who received the instructions about keeping him sober at Rosie’s parties — Rosie had a whole network of informers — just as it was Belle who was expected to deliver his paintings. And Rosie invited them only to her more respectable gatherings, attended by her Park Avenue friends. For some reason, they were kept away from the parties she was famous for, where jazz musicians and actresses and Italian countesses smoked hashish in the bathroom.
When they arrived at her apartment, the night that Sophie warned Belle against her, the Europeans were clustered at the mantelpiece, with Klesmer, pale and severe, in their center. Meanwhile, the small contingent of downtown painters stayed near the bar, gulping down whiskey. Belle stuck by Clay’s side, both of them sipping seltzer out of crystal tumblers, until the Blodgetts, a couple they had met at another of Rosie’s parties, came over and greeted them. Mr. Blodgett, a lawyer, was large and pink-cheeked and jovial in an awkward kind of way; Mrs. Blodgett was fragile and sad and painted watercolors. She began telling Clay in her whispery voice about seeing the Marin show: “It made me want to run away to the seaside. Have you ever painted the ocean, Mr. Madden? Don’t you think everyone should?” He looked tense but manful, bending down awkwardly to hear her better.
“That was a damn fine show,” he said, and then fell silent. Belle started talking rapidly about the sea, quoting Conrad and Walt Whitman. She was becoming very adept with quotations. She also offered the information that Clay was a great admirer of Melville, since he’d neglected to mention that himself.
A jowly, leathery woman with bright red lipstick and a diamond pin came and greeted Mr. Blodgett, who agreed with her that the Reds seemed to be giving it to the Germans at Stalingrad. Rosie appeared, nestling against a blond boy with bad skin. “This is Anthony. He doesn’t hate me as much as the rest of you.”
There was a sudden blast of alto sax: somebody had turned the gramophone up. Abruptly, a few people sprang to life and started dancing. One young painter deserted the bar and started to jitterbug all by himself.
“Anthony’s going to help me in the gallery,” Rosie told them sweetly when the record ended. “But first we’re going to spend some time cataloguing my collection.”
“We’ve told our friend from Owens Merrill all about your paintings,” Mrs. Blodgett said. “He’s dying to see them.”
“Send him round,” Rosie said. “I love watching people fall in love with my paintings. Even Joyce admired them, although of course he can’t see too well. Only the Nazis refused to be converted. At first I thought it was my Jewish parents they minded, but no, it was my decadent paintings.”
“Interesting, isn’t it, how seriously the Germans take art these days.” It was a portly wall-eyed little man who had been standing nearby, the center of yet another group. “But of course what most people fail to understand is that Nazism is essentially an aesthetic phenomenon.”
“How brilliant,” Rosie said. “What do you mean, exactly?”
He strolled over, looking pleased. “It’s obvious once you think about it. Nazism is simply the Greek ideal filtered through the distorting lens of Nietzsche. The blond beast, beyond good and evil, all that relentless drive towards purity. I’m thinking of writing something on the subject.”
“That’s Alfred Lehrman,” the leathery woman said. “He’s a famous scholar, he’s just written a book about Courbet.” Mrs. Blodgett whispered to Clay, “Don’t men like that always make you feel so shy?”
Everyone was respectfully silent, until Hugo Klesmer detached himself from the group at the fireplace. “If you had seen the ruins of Rotterdam, my friend, I do not think you would talk about aesthetics in that way.”
“But that just bears out my thesis: Rotterdam is precisely what happens when one attempts to live by one’s aesthetic creed. The Nazis seem mad to us because they have put into practice a theory that others have only talked about.”
“That’s absolutely true,” Rosie said. “Professor Lehrman, you’re a genius. Anthony, get me another drink.”
Lehrman smiled graciously at Klesmer. “I’m not defending them, you know. It’s just that I find the phenomenon interesting. You don’t, I take it.”
“In a hundred years, it may be acceptable to call them interesting,” Klesmer said. “But not at this time, no.”
Lehrman shrugged, palms in the air. “If one has been trained not to take things personally, anything can be interesting. Particularly questions related to aesthetics.” Several people murmured approvingly.
“You think you’d be standing around in Germany right now talking about aesthetics?” It was Clay.
Lehrman stroked his chin, as charming as ever. “That hardly seems relevant. An observation can be true in any context.”
“You’re a Jew, aren’t you? Your people are disappearing every day. You think they’d care about your fine distinctions?”
Rosie gave Belle a furious look, as though this must be her fault. Lehrman threw up his hands. “My dear sir, I can hardly presume to speak for any group of people. One’s thoughts still belong to oneself, even in wartime.”
A doggy-looking woman with a bowl haircut who had come up behind Lehrman took his arm protectively. “Why aren’t you in the army,” she asked Clay, “if you feel like that?”
He took a step towards her. “Because they wouldn’t take me.”
“Why not? You look healthy enough to me.”
“That’s none of your business,” Belle snapped.
“Oh God,” — it was Rosie — “this is ridiculous,” and then to Clay, “I think you owe the professor an apology.”
“No, no, that won’t be necessary,” Lehrman said. “It was only a misunderstanding. A quibble over art.”
He had turned away when Clay yelled at his back, “You prick. You wouldn’t know art if it weighed four hundred pounds and sat on your face.”
For some reason Belle thought of Sophie. Everyone edged away, moving as one body, until she and Clay were marooned together in the center of the room.
And then Klesmer appeared. “How do you do?” he said briskly. Clay remained mute. “I have hoped to make your acquaintance since I saw your work.” Klesmer clucked his tongue. “I cannot do all the talking. Somebody must help me. You, then,” he said to Belle. She gaped at him. “We will discuss the charms of New York.”
“You’re being sarcastic, right? You don’t really think it has any charms.”
“Not at all. I think it an ideal city, except for the trees. And the museums are too crowded. If I were in charge, I would impose a large entrance fee to discourage people.”
“But that’s so undemocratic.”
“Precisely.” He beamed at her.
Now Clay was looking longingly at the door; Klesmer made a face. “You are tormenting yourself needlessly, I promise you,” he said, as a dance tune came out of the gramophone. “Artists have said worse things.”
“He’s right,” Belle said. “I don’t care. Let’s dance.” But Clay ignored her.
“Perhaps the young lady will dance with me,” Klesmer said. “And you go talk to Stefan Probst. He also admires your work. Remind him that he mustn’t leave without taking his umbrella.”
She could not conceive of his dancing, except in some stately eighteenth-century way, a minuet maybe; she could imagine him marching, or clicking his heels at attention, but never, ever doing the jitterbug. But that was what he proceeded to do, flinging her outward and snapping her back, his torso erect, his bony face as severe as ever, his feet, in their narrow black shoes, kicking rhythmically. When she stumbled against him, dizzy from being whirled around, she could feel the brittle bones in his chest.
Then the record ended, and he wiped his brow with a spotted handkerchief he took from his breast pocket. “When I was in Paris and would listen to such music, I used to imagine that all Americans were afficionados of le jazz. It was one of my greatest shocks on coming to this country, to find that so many had no knowledge of it.” He replaced the handkerchief as boogie-woogie poured from the gramophone again. “Shall we try once more?”
So they did, and this time she found her rhythm; she shimmied and dipped, the mass to his line, the horizontal to his vertical; her shoulders, her arms, her pelvis were suddenly independent of her feet, could take off in whole different directions. It seemed with every passage as though she might not come back to him in time, but miraculously she always did; they were a symmetry, or more than that, a conspiracy, in league against the others, who looked on disapprovingly while they danced themselves out of reach, playing off the music, moving against it, ahead of it, until they had found their freedom.
Then he bowed to her gravely, as though they’d been dancing a minuet after all, and they started all over again.
Thirty years later, when Klesmer was long dead, she went to the opening of his retrospective at MOMA — one of the very rare occasions, by then, when she entered a museum in a spirit of homage — to be greeted by the sight of a red, medieval-style banner with a quotation from him: “All painting is about rhythm.” For a minute, as she stood there in her heavy silk suit, with heavy Mexican silver around her neck, lightness descended; even her joints felt weightless, as if some other, more ethereal body were inhabiting her own. And she thought how strange it was that Klesmer, severe and ascetic Klesmer, with his thinning hair and concave chest, had managed what no one else in the world ever had; he had shown her what it felt like to be beautiful.