MILT MIGHT OR might not have been an artist in terms The New York Times could understand, but the sales to the Herrick connections were having their effect. His pictures hung among Mondrians and Rine-harts, Alberses and Klees, in the houses of people who bought serious art and where other buyers of these rarefied objects saw them and where, it was seen, the Pughs looked at home with the Mondrians, Alberses, Rineharts, and Klees. They fit right in—though Milt much preferred them in the museum of his house, emerging spacelessly from black walls. But he could not demand that his customers paint their houses black and hang nothing but Pughs.
It was no surprise that a show emerged out of this, a one-man Fifty-seventh Street gallery show. It was the kind of thing that just “happened”—people talked at a party, and the artist’s name was heard at another party; then people wondered why they didn’t know about this much-talked-about artist and why they hadn’t heard of him before; and this was connected to a sense of uneasiness about whether they were, at that moment, part of the in crowd or had been deluded all along about being part of it; and then the artist was no longer an obscurity but rather a mystery, which they believed it in their power to solve. They could be among the discoverers. They could be one of the people who knew him first, who bought a Pugh way back when, when no one had heard of him. Except them and their friends, people who bought art.
Milt was introduced to a famous gallery owner. It was at a party. She was a woman who’d had a little money and lots of luck, and who, in exchange for the money and renown her artists brought her, was generous to them, and so her fame grew as artists flocked to her. She leveled on Milt’s saleable looks her assessing gaze. That distinguished white mane, she thought, that height, that skinniness like Giacometti without being so tubercular-looking or unhealthily intense.
Her assessment rapidly kindled to warmth. In its glow, her artists tended to forget business was involved at all; so grate-ful, they would forgive anything: they were collecting tens of thousands: what did they care that it was only fifty percent of what their creations brought?
Milton, introduced to the gracious, polished lady with the short, expensive haircut, was not so self-destructive as to remind her that for years he had sent her his dearly purchased, unre-turned slides, or that he had been introduced to her before by an art-school classmate of his who had done well but not quite well enough. He bowed slightly—maybe the bow was a little sarcastic, just a little, but who was to say?—and said he was so pleased to meet the legendary——-. He behaved like gentle-folk. Because in a way he was. And he was pleased to meet her. Again. Though it could truthfully be said that it was the first time she met him
It would be a small show, just the back room. The gallery was really booked for the next two years; she was shoehorning him in. Because she was so excited about his work. His work was so exciting. It was hard-edgy without that tapey, machined look; it had a little op without, thank God, being op, which had become passé almost as quickly as it was snapped up to copy for dress fabrics: Pughs were oppy without being, so to speak, go-go-esque. They were minimalist, maybe even color-fieldy (despite the tiny size—had he done any larger work?) without being, she didn’t like to use that word, but, barren. There was something reas-suringly old in feeling about them, as if she had discovered an unknown early modernist, and yet it was so—modern. Making no gesture toward gesture, it yet had the feel of hands’ having touched it. Devoid of imagery, with only incidental, accidental signs of brushwork, it was yet unmistakably human. It felt believed in. It was solid.
Most of all, she could sell it.
Though the show was months off, it was in many ways as if it had already happened. People somehow knew. Milt got calls from people he hadn’t heard from in years. “It’s Lou Jacoby,” Maude would say, handing Milt the receiver of the clunky black telephone with an ironic look; “It’s Jake Rosenfeld”; “It’s Anton Slack”; “It’s Harry Sigmeister.” And they congratulated him. They’d always already heard, and they congratulated him. It had been believed that some of these old classmates and col-leagues had become successful enough to feel uncomfortable with those who weren’t. It had been received truth in the Pugh household that they were afraid you would ask for a handout or had become too grand for people in tract houses without New York galleries.
Maude, in the last years before this crowd had dropped away, observed her parents with it and had seen, over tinkling cocktails, her mother’s awe, which translated into an awkward, giggly eagerness to attack. How could they remain friends with someone whose wife asked, “So how’d you end up with Ken-nedy?” (a grand gallery), her shoulders stiff as a cat’s with a dog in sight. Despite Milt’s assured equanimity, Nina’s defensive responses had made friendship impossible.
Maude did not like to think that these people now regarded Milt as restored to them, free of Nina’s jealousy. Maude would have to prefer the explanation her absent mother would offer. “They only like him because he’s riding high,” she’d snort.
“Jake! How goes it?” Milton picked up where they’d left off, as if they’d never been out of touch. “It’s marvelous,” he’d gasp to Maude afterward. “You never really lose the connection!” And he’d look happy. Until he looked sad.
They didn’t seem to have any more money than before. That was mysterious.
Other old colleagues had also disappeared, but these into abjectness, into an angry obscurity that was as comfortable as a smelly old favorite blanket. One day in November, Milton asked Maude to come with him to visit one of these, who had also renewed contact, Saul Partridge. Saul had a friend who had died, leaving him to deal with his large body of work. “I thought maybe, with you so big these days, one of your fancy connections could help out,” Saul reiterated when father and daughter had arrived at his walk-up in Little Italy.
Maude could hardly believe a person could address another with such direct yet seemingly undetected, and certainly unac-knowledged, hostility. But it was also oddly familiar to her, and her father took no offense.
“Whatever I can do.” Milt spread his hands, palms out.
The apartment was on a narrow street built for carriages and never widened, across which squat tenements netted with fire escapes eyed each other and where, on lines across airshafts, archaic laundry flapped. Heavy women, purple under the eyes, sat on garbage cans in front, looking censoriously at the length of Maude’s legs exposed between boot top and skirt hem, clamorous in yellow tights. But they nodded gravely in response to Milt’s not at all sarcastic bow. He sighed as he and Maude started up the stairs and said the ladies reminded him of the old neighborhood, stories of which had always been like legends of Greek gods and heroes for Maude and Seth, the ur time before they were born.
The building’s hallways were sour and dark, the black-and-cream ceramic tile in mosaic patterns browned and missing sections, which had been filled in with inappropriate greens. It took a very long time for Saul to answer their knock—the doorbell was rendered static by layers of shiny brown paint—but he finally opened the door. Maude thought of a dog’s mouth opening, releasing bad breath.
The apartment was three tiny rooms all in a hodgepodge, as if one squareish room had been divided unequally into a rectangle and two tiny squares, but most remarkable was what was in them. Racks to hold paintings had been built into the kitchen, wedged between the bathtub and a chugging yellowed refrigerator, up which a brown stain crept from the chipped linoleum floor, its own color lost beneath ageless films of dirt. But the racks, from which stiff tufts of dust and grease grew, had long since overflowed, and the kitchen cabinets were equally crowded with fungoid wooden stretchers, the wood darkened and brittle-looking, frayed canvas edges furred with dust, poking the flimsy metal doors permanently open and askew.
There was not a bare surface anywhere, or a clean one. The kitchen was the biggest room but no longer had a place to sit, so they sat in the living room, which had the artist’s pathetic bed in it because the bedroom, which had the two windows not on the airshaft, was the studio. Adding to the sensation of crowding were the paintings on every inch of brownish, peeling wall, not just the Kandinsky-like garish swirls of this artist but the many gifts of pals and lovers collected over the decades. A charcoal nude showed a long-departed wife, its outlines just a little too thick, too insistent, for art.
Saul offered them coffee, which Maude refused, and which he made with instant plus hot water from the faucet. “This freeze-drying, this is wonderful technology, no?” Saul had been a teacher at the art school Milt went to, one of many short-term jobs. He insisted Maude have something and thumped a glass of orange juice before her. She got as far as finding a place on the rim without lipmarks, but when she brought it close a reek of something foul overwhelmed the orange scent, and she set it down.
“Whatsa matter, you don’t like o.j.?”
“No, no, it’s fine. I’m just not thirsty.”
“How about milk? I’ve got Carnation’s right here, for the coffee. It’s sweet, mm—try it.”
“No, really—”
“A girl like you, such a skinnymarink! You gotta get some flesh.” He pinched her cheek and turned to Milt. “A beauty. A little beauty. Well, no wonder.” He sighed deeply. “It’s all luck. Everything in life, it’s just luck.”
Before sitting, Maude had spread her coat on the bed, over the brown blanket. As the men talked—argued, as if contradiction and one-upmanship were an expression of affection—she took in her surroundings in more detail. The blanket wasn’t brown. Or at least it had once been blue. When she took her coat as they at last were to make their way to the dead man’s apartment, she saw that it would have to go to the cleaners, just from lying on the bed. She hoped Saul would not once again notice the undrunk orange juice, separating into liquid and solids, and wished she were capable of noticing less.
The dead man, Immerman, was a few blocks away, where Little Italy gave way to Chinatown and the lower east side, where the streets were soft with wadded garbage underfoot and no one sat on cans guarding them. Terrifying men looked at the outsiders with calculating, predatory keenness and whistled through their teeth at Maude’s legs and whipping hair. She kept her eyes down.
Immerman’s place was worse than Saul’s. As he went through the heaps of crumbling, dusty junk, Saul came upon a little volume, its cloth cover cracking, that turned out to be a book of poems he’d written. “Oh, yes, I write poetry too,” he said as if everyone surely knew this, and began declaiming from memory, stumbled, and stopped to turn pages forward and backward to find the line and speak it correctly. Saul held the wafer of dusty poems toward Maude. “Take it. I have enough copies, God knows. Here. It should go to someone new and young.” Maude reluctantly accepted the volume.
“Here, here, look at this one,” he said, not taking it back but turning pages, knowing from upside-down the spot he was looking for. Maude felt that she herself could be devoured by this hunger to have her see, to hear, to understand, and above all to receive this unappeasable egotism of art, grown monstrous from starvation.
Immerman’s work was as depressing as his former surroundings. It was meant to be depressing, or at least the subjects were inarguably sad—dead children, mourners at coffins, a grieving mother, or, in a mode that declared the artist’s virtuous condem-nation of lynching, a man hanging from a tree, with red paint at his crotch and another grieving woman. (The title, written in harsh brushstrokes on the back, was “Golgotha.”) Compared to the aesthetic in which, at school at least, T.S. Eliot was a god, Nausée was required reading, and the first movie shown in Bay Farm’s film series was Last Year at Marienbad, these paintings were wriggling with irrepressible, unfashionable life. Sorrow suggested a livelier connection to the world than did existential despair and the elegantly presented assurance of the pointlessness of it all. Like the popularly grim works, however, these claimed seriousness by tackling death.
But there was something about the way it was shown that was too lively, that said “Look at me” and said it with the same neediness as Saul’s declamations, inducing the same cringing. The children, the mourners, the mother, the widow—even though they had nominally different features, all had the same face, and somehow it was Immerman’s face: Immerman’s inner face, the face he was dying for the world to see. To mourn for him. As if, by depicting sorrow, he enacted sympathetic magic that would make the viewer feel how noble he was, how tragic his deeper understanding, and make them beat their own breasts for having misunderstood him.
But apparently he himself didn’t know that inner face, because what the faces shared above all was generality. They were the generic face of sorrow, not Immerman’s, not anyone’s. He probably thought this made them universal, but it didn’t. They did point at him, but they didn’t express the tragic. What they showed was the artist’s weltschmerz. Self-pity, actually. And that was what he had to give the world; pity was what the world had withheld from him, long before he recognized it as his donnée.
Even the artist’s bewilderment that others could work in this mode, on these themes, and be blessed for it, but that he was left out, was visible in the paintings’ imitative and calculated grays and reds. His desire for success might have been their real subject.
“Forget it, Saul. You can’t do anything here.”
“This one—it just needs a little cleaning. A little patching.” The cheap or badly mixed paints were deteriorating, and the pictures had been treated by the artist with such inconsideration that canvases had been pierced by other pictures jammed in next to and on top of them.
“Saul. Saul. Forget it.”
“But—” If Immerman could be legitimized, then Saul too could look forward to redemption.
“I’m telling you, there isn’t anyone to buy these paintings.”
Saul’s fingers covered his mouth. “Maybe I’ll make some donations. The Modern. The Whitney.”
“Sure, Saul. Sure. You do that.”