AT MILO’S BAR, ON Lafayette Street, the subject is not the art world for a change but women. Two of the artists’ girlfriends have been clamoring for babies; one of them, staring forty in the face, has moved out, taking her pots and pans with her, to look for a man who wants a family. The other is still hopeful that she can prevail; all week she has been arguing and pleading and acting sweetly reasonable, and then waking him up in floods of tears.
“You think you’ve finally met one who really means it, she’s so independent she won’t even make you a fucking cup of coffee the first night you stay over, and you think, fine, great, at least this one won’t be after me about babies. But in the end it always comes back to that.”
“When did you figure that out? Tonight?”
“Thirty-seven; that’s when it starts creeping up on them.”
“It’s hard on her, I know that. Her sister just had a kid, her girlfriends all have kids. But why didn’t she tell me five years ago that was what she wanted?”
“They can’t help it, they’ve got ten thousand years of instinct programmed into their psyches. The propagation of the species. Feather the nest, find someone to dig the worms.”
“Fuck the worms. I don’t want to be told I’ve ruined someone’s life. I’d never say that to anyone. I can ruin my own goddamn life, I don’t need any help.”
“They don’t know what they want any more. They’re all mixed up from this feminism shit.”
“They never knew what they wanted. Even Freud said that.”
“He couldn’t figure it out either.”
“So what are you going to do? Become a fag?”
“I’m considering it.”
But what they vent to each other is always the anger; the other part, the sadness, they can only confess to women — it’s what they need them for, more almost than sex. The artist whose girlfriend has moved out had his own fantasies of fatherhood; there were days when he caught himself staring at babies in the subway, the same as she did, imagining himself in a house like the one he grew up in, back in Michigan, with his children running up and down the stairs.
“What the fuck is this precious freedom of yours except the freedom to be miserable?” his girlfriend said to him as she crammed her sweaters into the matching luggage her mother had sent her for Christmas. “Do you really think you’d feel any worse if we had a kid?”
“I just can’t do it,” he said. “I can’t change my life like that, I’m too old. If I did it I’d want to do it right, protect and provide and the whole bit. I wouldn’t want my kids growing up in this slum.” Really he was scared that his sense of defeat was permanent, that he could not dredge up, ever again, enough faith or hope or love of life or whatever it took to do this thing. The bartender, who used to paint himself, twenty years ago, and now has two kids out in Queens, gives him a free drink.
Meanwhile, Paul Doherty, who has sometimes vaguely imagined that if his art career took off he might have a few kids himself and teach them all to paint, is making reckless splashes on a canvas he fully intends to destroy the next day. It’s not really his painting, but a pure act of homage, or of celebration; for the same reason, he is drinking as he works, neat Scotch, though he is also listening to the Niebelungenlied, which has nothing to do with Clay Madden.
Three hours ago he got a breathless phone call from Lizzie.
“You’ll never guess where I’ll be living this summer.”
“In London,” he said, remembering her professor.
“No. I’m going to be at Belle Prokoff’s house.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There was an ad posted at the Student Employment Office, she wanted a kind of companion for the summer, so I phoned her. And she remembered me! I’m starting on June 1st … isn’t that wonderful?”
“Hang on a minute. Is it wonderful? She’s supposed to be a real ball-breaker.”
“I thought you’d be excited. Don’t you even want to meet her?”
“Sure I do. But I can’t see why you’d want to spend your summer looking after an old woman.”
“Because I loved her, that’s why. When I phoned her she said, ‘Of course I remember you. You’ll do fine.’ I loved the way she said ‘Of course’ like that, in this very sharp voice. She’s got no patience, that’s what’s wonderful about her.”
“Just what everyone wants in an employer. What happens if she gets really ill? Do you start carrying bedpans?”
“Don’t be silly. She’s got arthritis, that’s all.”
“How do you know? Have you seen the doctor’s report? Anyway, it’s not the greatest thing to have on your c.v.: Nurse-companion to art widow. What about your professor?”
“I just realized I’ve never liked Carlyle, I don’t even like Mrs. Carlyle. And I don’t want to spend my whole summer in a library. I’ve been in a library all winter.”
“That’s not why you’re doing it,” he said, and then stopped.
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Never mind.” He’d been going to say, “You’re doing it because of me,” but decided against it. It seemed risky, incriminating somehow, to say it out loud; it would make him responsible. The truth was, he wanted her to do it: he wanted to drive her and her belongings out there, on the perfect pretext that she could not carry everything on the train; he wanted to meet the widow himself. Most of all, he wanted to go into the studio and stand where Madden had done those paintings. But first he had to make some honorable effort to dissuade her.
“Just think it over, okay? Think about being stuck in the house with her for twenty-four hours a day. And then we can talk about it later.”
Now he turns the music up louder. Bellowing along in his nonexistent German, he dumps some more whiskey into his glass and steps back. The painting is shit, just like the pseudo-Maddens his students turn out in droves. “Fuck it,” he says, and turns off the music on his way to the phone.
“Okay. I’ve been thinking about this job of yours, and you’re right. It’s wonderful. You’re wonderful. Why don’t you come over here right now so I can ravish you?”
“Have you been drinking?”
“I’m not pissed, if that’s what you mean. I’ve been painting, a godawful painting, and the fumes have probably got to me. It’s dangerous stuff, paint, it can kill you. All that lead.”
“You always say that … you know I can’t take the subway out there at this hour.”
“Shit. No, you can’t. Take a cab. I’ll pay for it.”
“Why don’t you come here?” It is a minor bone of contention between them that he will never spend the night at her place, with her roommates eyeing him accusingly when he arrives and running in and out of the bathroom in the morning. It makes him feel like a dirty old man, he has explained all that, but it hurts her feelings nonetheless.
“You come here instead. Go on, get a cab.”
In the end she agrees, as he knew she would. He washes out his glass, he puts the Scotch away and goes to check on his sheets, to see if they are reasonably clean; in his makeshift kitchen, he washes the paint off his hands and brushes his teeth, and then, as an afterthought, his hair, the same dirty-blond color as hers. He even tends to his beard, dragging a comb through its frizzy snarls.
She has never tried to get anything from him, never blamed him, nagged him, kept a balance sheet of who did what, and now she is making him a love offering, however she denies it. He knows from experience what happens when a woman sacrifices herself for him; it always ends in disaster, but right now he wants to make her some offering in return. And so he decides to draw her; in bed that night, after they’ve made love, he will get out his battered sketchbook and his charcoals and draw her naked, in all her ripply-haired, oval-faced, pre-Raphaelite splendor, and give it to her.
It’s been years since he’s drawn anyone, except in the classroom to demonstrate a point to his students. In the late twentieth century, rendering the body seems as relevant as painting a cottage with a thatched roof. But sometimes he thinks of it with a kind of a guilty longing, as if it were a sensual pleasure forbidden him by the vows of abstraction. Now it seems like the perfect gesture, as foolishly romantic as picking her flowers in a meadow, though she will not understand that.
She will look at it and say, as women always did, “I look so fat,” or “Is my nose really that wide?” “Are my breasts really that funny shape?” She will be hurt that he did not make her as beautiful as she wants to be. But some day when the children she’s left him to have are squabbling and shrieking, when there are frown lines in her forehead and her respectable husband has taken to flirting with younger women at dinner parties, she will take out the drawing and remember making love in his dirty loft. Then maybe she’ll forgive him for whatever hurt he’s going to inflict on her before they’re done. She will see the way he drew her breasts, and her lips, and the light fuzz of hair between her legs, and know that he would have kept her if he could.