“What’s the matter with your face?” asked Lee as she settled herself in a chair opposite her brother’s desk. She’d spent the three-hour train ride from East Hampton refining a list of questions she had for him, but that wasn’t one of them.
Reflexively, Irving reached his hand up to the bandage under his left eye. “It’s nothing, just a shaving cut,” he told her. “Almost healed now.”
Lee looked at him skeptically. “Since when do you shave your cheekbone? And don’t tell me you ran into a door.” Still miffed that he hadn’t attended the funeral, and with another grievance simmering as well, she hadn’t embraced him when she entered the office.
Irving dissembled. “Really, it’s just a scratch. It’s kind of embarrassing—I’m not sure how I did it, maybe in my sleep. I’ve been restless lately, worried about you.”
His effort to divert her was successful, although she did make him promise to change the dressing when he got home. He waved off her concern and asked her what she needed from him right now. She decided to leave the loan request until after they had discussed some practical matters.
“The insurance. I want to be sure everything is fully covered. What happens if the studio goes up in flames? I’m afraid that fucking kerosene stove is going to blow up. I told Jackson not to put it in, but he insisted. He thought he was going to work out there in the winter, but he never did. He’d fire it up when it got chilly and I was sure he’d burn the place down.”
“You’re right to be concerned. As it stands now, the policy probably would not pay out the full market value if everything were destroyed. I’d say you have two options. Either get the stove taken out and keep the building locked, or move all the art into storage. That’s more expensive, but the premium will go down, so it may balance out.”
“Do I need to have everything appraised? It’s a few years since the policy was written, and the prices have risen quite a bit.”
“I strongly recommend it, Lee, especially if you leave the paintings in the studio. In any case, you need an inventory so we can update the coverage. There must be more work since we wrote the policy.” He flipped open a file on his desk. “It’s dated November 1, 1952, nearly four years ago.”
Lee shook her head. “Oh, Izzy, what can I tell you? There was hardly any more work after that. It broke my heart to see him so inactive. I don’t think there can be more than a dozen paintings that aren’t on the 1952 inventory. Most of what he did these past couple of years was reworking earlier things.”
“Well, that will have to be accounted for. The policy won’t pay out twice for the same canvas. Plus I’m sure some of the things on the old inventory have been sold, so they need to come off.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Fred Olsen bought Blue Poles—one of the biggest paintings Jackson ever did—for six thousand dollars. He was thrilled, especially when he deposited his four-thousand-dollar share in the bank—Janis takes a third. And Ben Heller is buying One, another big canvas, for eight thousand, though he hasn’t finished paying it off yet.”
“You have to check with Janis to find out what he has at the gallery or in storage. That won’t be covered by your policy.”
It was time for Lee to bring up the matter of her immediate financial needs. Better come right out with it, she decided. No point beating around the bush.
“Listen, Izzy, I need a favor. Like I said, Ben owes me money for the painting, but I don’t know when he’ll pay up, and I have bills to pay right now. I was shocked when I found out there’s only about $350 in the bank. I owe Alfonso for the funeral, the appraisal will cost something, and I’ll have other expenses while the estate is settled. I need a loan.”
“How much?”
“Five thousand should tide me over.”
Irving had been expecting something like this, though not quite such a large sum. He sat back in his chair and let the moments tick by as he figured out how much he could afford.
“I want to help you,” he told her, “but I can’t do that much all at once. I can let you have a thousand now, and more later if you need it. I’ll have to cash in some bonds. I’ll go to the bank tomorrow morning and have them transfer the funds to your account in East Hampton. You should have the thousand by Monday.”
Lee let out a sigh. She was disappointed not to get all she asked for, but she could hardly seem ungrateful. Even a thousand was a big help. Alfonso wouldn’t press her, and Gerry Weinstock’s attorney’s fee wasn’t due right away.
“Thank you, Izzy. I’ll pay you back, with interest. You know there’ll be plenty once I have clear title to Jackson’s work.”
“I only wish it could be more. Maybe after the first of the month I can do better. Let’s see how it goes.”
He changed the subject. “By the way, do you have someone looking after the place while you’re in town?”
“Yes, Cile and Sherry. I think you’ve met them; they live just up the road. They’re taking care of Gyp and Ahab, and I asked them to make sure everything is secure overnight. I’ll go back tomorrow. Gerry is coming out for the weekend, and I have to meet with him about the will.”
Irving approved. “Good. Gerry will know how to protect your assets.” He glanced at her overnight bag. “Now let’s get some dinner and I’ll take you back to my place.”
“Thanks all the same, but I can’t face the subway ride to Brooklyn. I made a reservation at the Earle for tonight. Let’s grab a cab downtown and we can eat there.”
Secretly glad that she had let him off the hook, he went around the desk and took her hand as she rose from the chair.
“This is such an ordeal. You must be all in. My poor little Lena,” he said, reverting to her birth name, which she had long ago renounced in favor of the more poetic Lenore.
Hoping to comfort her, he wrapped her in his arms, and she slumped against him. At five foot four, she came up to his shoulder, where she rested her head. She made no sound, but he could feel her sobbing silently. When she eased back and looked up at him, he saw the tears in her eyes—tears of sorrow, but also of anger and regret.
“If only you had gotten to her, Izzy! Why didn’t you get her out of there, away from him? That slut actually moved into my house. She was eating off my dishes, shitting in my toilet, sleeping in my bed—with my husband, for Christ’s sake! I told you to put a stop to it. Why didn’t you?”
Of course she was mad at him, who wouldn’t be? When she called him long-distance from Paris a week ago, he had promised to go to Springs and remove Ruth Kligman from the house.
“How do you know she’s there?” he had asked.
“I got a cable from May.”
Lee’s friendship with May Rosenberg went back a long way—back to the 1930s, when she was living with Igor. For a time they had shared an apartment with May and her husband Harold, a writer who had since become an influential art critic. It was partly because the Rosenbergs had a summer place in Springs that Lee and Jackson bought a house nearby, and they remained close in spite of Harold’s ambivalence about Jackson’s radical abstract paintings. A few years ago, in an infuriating article he had described them as “apocalyptic wallpaper,” a real slap in the face. Okay, he hadn’t actually named Jackson as the perpetrator, but everyone knew whom he had meant.
Lee had distanced herself from Harold after that, and openly mocked his criticism as hackwork, but she was still sympathetic to May, an aspiring writer who was as much in her husband’s shadow as Lee was. And like Jackson, Harold was unfaithful, so there was an additional common bond between the two beleaguered wives. It was no wonder, then, that May would alert Lee to the fact that her home had been turned into a love nest for Jackson’s infidelity.
The cablegram had been waiting for her when she returned to her Paris hotel after visiting friends in the South of France. When she read it—RUTH KLIGMAN LIVING WITH JACKSON STOP. SHE IS IN YOUR PLACE STOP—she had felt the blood rush to her head and her guts go into spasm. But it quickly occurred to her that, instead of acting as a well-meaning friend, May was taunting her, paying her back for the spiteful things she’d said about Harold. Then she was overwhelmed with bitterness. What could she possibly do about it from three thousand miles away?
It wasn’t long before her frustration turned to resolve. Even if she was powerless to intervene personally, she wasn’t without recourse. None of her friends could be trusted—she didn’t know which of them would take Jackson’s side and which would be loyal to her—but she could trust her brother.
She reserved a transatlantic call for two a.m. to his home number. It would be eight p.m. in Brooklyn. A bachelor, he could be found at home most evenings, buried in a book or listening to his large collection of jazz records.
Irving would do what she would have done if she’d been there. Evict the bitch.
But he hadn’t done it. Why not?
“I couldn’t just drop everything and rush out there,” he explained now. “I had to wait until the weekend, and I couldn’t get a car on Saturday. The rental agency didn’t have anything until Sunday, and by then it was too late. I was all ready to go on Sunday morning when I got the call from Alfonso about the accident.”
He gave her another hug. “How was I to know—no one could have known—that Jackson would choose last Saturday night to self-destruct? It could have happened any time, you must realize that.”
Lee was not mollified. “I’m sorry, Izzy, I can’t get over it just like that. What I realize is that Jackson is dead, and so is that other slut who was along for the ride.” She hadn’t picked up the Star that morning, so she didn’t know Metzger was already dead when they crashed. “Meanwhile slut number one is still alive. I hope every bone in her body is broken!”
Irving decided to change the subject again.
“It’s getting late. Let’s get you down to the Earle and checked in, then we can find a nice restaurant in the Village. Remember when we used to hang out with the bohemian crowd at Romany Marie’s on Eighth Street? I wonder if it’s still there.”
With working-class parents who had no interest in the arts, Irving had been the exception among the older Krasner children. As the family intellectual, he was a beacon to the renegade young Lena. He introduced her to philosophy, poetry, and jazz; encouraged her to be an artist; and took her to the Greenwich Village haunts that would become her inspiration, her refuge, and her spiritual home.
Chief among them was Romany Marie’s, where the intelligentsia had been drinking, arguing, plotting revolutions, and instigating love affairs since before the First World War. The owner, Marie Marchand, a genuine Romanian gypsy, lived up to her peripatetic heritage.
“She kept moving,” reminisced Lee. “Christopher Street, Minetta Street, Grove Street, Washington Place, West Fourth Street, West Eighth Street—she was literally all over the downtown map. Last I heard she was running the café in the Hotel Brevoort, just off Washington Square. That’s only a couple of blocks from the Earle. Let’s go find out if she’s still in business.”
Irving picked up her overnight bag before she had a chance to grab it.
“Let me get that,” he said. “It’s the least I can do.”