by
Jill Ciment
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Or maybe his analyst asked him about the other sources of his anxiety besides me. His wife, of course. And his other mistress, E.
I knew about E. He had promised me that he was going to break up with her soon, but it was complicated. She was married to a friend of his. The two couples dined regularly together. The affair had started seven years ago when E took private drawing lessons with him, though he assured me, she was not nearly as talented as I. I accepted his Gordian sex life as the birthright of the male artist.
But I was curious.
“Do you still have sex with your wife?”
“I have to, Jill, or she would be suspicious.”
“What about E?”
“I’ve only made love to her once since I started seeing you.”
“Isn’t she suspicious?”
E, by the way, never made it into the memoir.
bleh
rnold told me he wished he could be with me tonight. He was stuck at a party, hiding in the coatroom. The hosts of the party were old friends of his—fellow travelers from back in the Red Scare days. The husband now owned a fur shop in Beverly Hills; the wife was a big supporter of Israel. He didn’t mention if E and her husband were in attendance, or if his own wife, who must have been wondering where her husband had gone, was nearby.
He must have been wondering where my mother was. Phone cords in those days rarely reached past twelve feet.
I began to cry, but with restraint, so as not to alarm my mother, who was listening on the far side of the love beads. But a teenage girl who has been stood up on New Year’s Eve by her steady can rarely maintain restraint.
His response to my hysterical tears was to break up with me. For my sake. He didn’t want me to spend another New Year’s Eve crying.
I cried harder.
Between sobs, I put it to him this way: Why wouldn’t he just tell E and his wife that he had fallen in love with someone else? I did not say, with another woman. I did not yet think of myself as a woman.
I might not have thought of myself as the “other woman,” but I suspect that was a choice on my part. I wasn’t ready to give up the benefits of youth. I had only begun to appreciate the shifting power of a thirty-year age gap, how the king can abruptly become the queen’s pawn. I gave him two weeks to break up with his wife and E—or else. Then I hung up on him and repeated my ultimatum to my mother. She looked both stunned and terrified.
“Or else what?” my mother asked.
oh god
After I hung up, while I was still intoxicated from the accomplishment of having Arnold give up not one but two women for me, my mother swept aside the love beads.
“Is he getting a divorce?” she asked. “Is he going to marry you?”
I accused her of being pitifully conventional, but in truth, I had not thought further than having him all to myself. The state of wishing and wanting was the only state I knew.
I had already told them that I was seeing a married man thirty years my senior. To an addict, not one of the boys or girls approved. Despite the messes they had made of their own adolescence, they believed that I had made an even worse choice. The girls in particular found the idea of having an old man kiss them icky.
“You’re not creeped out when he touches you?”
“Does he get boners?”
“Are you ever worried he’s going to have a heart attack or a stroke or something when he’s balling you?”
I wasn’t, until she said that.
I didn’t yet know how to explain to the group that his age was my aphrodisiac, that I needed to be desired by someone older and important so that I could feel special. The fact that he was old enough to be my father was what elevated me above the line of wallflowers, girls who had to wait for boys their own age to ask them to dance.
lol
A friend of his, an art collector, offered a loan—to be paid back in artwork—but only on the condition that he get to meet the teenager who had broken up a marriage. Arnold didn’t say as much, but I sensed I was part of the transaction. The collector owned a steel plant, three homes, had grandchildren and a wife of forty years, and also a mistress not much older than me.
We met at the collector’s version of Ah Fong’s, a Japanese shabu-shabu restaurant with private rooms and servers who looked like geishas. He arrived with his mistress, who dressed her part—black dress, evening bag, heels, which she left by the shoji screen door. I wore bell-bottoms and gladiator sandals with tire-tread soles.
It was the first time I saw our age difference mirrored in another couple. The mistress had to help the collector sit on the tatami floor. When he took her hand, it looked like Father Time clasping onto a new branch. He was only five years older than Arnold.
“The oshibori goes in the basket,” the mistress said. “You weren’t supposed to wash your face with it, just your hands.” Her voice sounded kind, but her look said, You’re an amateur at this. My return look said, I’m not a gold digger like you because mine has no gold.
“I hear you’re applying to art school,” the collector said.
I told him that I had just been accepted by CalArts (Disney’s version of the Bauhaus) and now had to wait to hear if I got a scholarship.
The mistress smiled. The smile said, Mine is paying for the Japanese classes and an apartment.
lol
When the collector couldn’t eat another bite, she surprised me again. She lay back on the pillows and let him massage her feet. She did not close her eyes but watched me instead. I knew that if I stretched out, dropped my feet in Arnold’s lap, he would massage my feet, too. Two Father Times massaging four young feet in a geisha establishment. It was too depressing to contemplate. I let my feet fall painfully asleep rather than give her the satisfaction we were alike.
After the check was paid (by the collector), she easily slipped on her heels while I had difficulty buckling my numb feet into my gladiator sandals.
aaaahhh
He should have waited another semester before summoning her. He realized that only after she had quit her job as a salesgirl, packed her two suitcases’ worth of belongings, slammed the door on her ragpicker father, and moved across the country into his tiny studio apartment at the foot of the Hollywood Hills. The glamour of spotlights sweeping the night sky to announce movie premieres made her feel as if she had just fallen off a turnip truck.
She had never heard of television, and no matter how many times he explained its workings, she didn’t understand how a moving picture could be seen without a projector.
He began to make new friends and she just didn’t fit in. She was both too serious, and not serious enough. His crowd, mostly women and a few lucky fellows with 4Fs, grew up around the movie business. They spoke about the war in a way that upset her. Her war began with the Nazis rounding up the Jews. Their war had begun in Spain six years earlier, after Franco encouraged German war planes to incinerate the town of Guernica and the West did nothing to retaliate. They rallied enthusiastically in favor of a Soviet-American war effort.
He got a job at Warner Bros., as an assistant art director, drawing storyboards for a Tarzan movie, King of the Jungle (a bildungsroman, by the way). Hollywood went on strike a week later, October 5, 1945. The picket line was walked by movie stars and screenwriters and artists—not commercial admen who sucked on capitalism’s tit, but WPA muralists who painted sets by day and studied the Mexican muralists by night. He was invited to go landscape painting with them. He taught himself to paint by imitating their brushstrokes.
He left his wife with their one-year-old son (the daughter my age hadn’t been born) and traveled to Mexico to study at the source, with Rivera and Siqueiros.
He realized he would need more life drawing if he were to paint with any kind of acumen and abandon. He was twenty-eight already. By twenty-eight, Picasso had already finished his Rose and Blue Periods. Arnold had the same artistic aspirations that I would one day have, to get his own slide in an art history carousel, or his version of that ambition—the technology of the slide carousel had not yet been invented.
wow
He began what he believed were his most important paintings to date, the War Series, inspired by the photographs of the concentration camp survivors taken only minutes after they had been liberated. When he first showed his father the photographs in LIFE magazine just after the war, his father spent hours with a magnifying glass looking for his cousins among the living skeletons. Arnold painted eighteen canvases—Celebration of the Survivors, The Raped, The Phoenix Bird, Dance of the Survivors, The Survivors, The Death Cart, to name a few. He painted and drew with a superhuman intensity that artists feel only once or twice in a life, the galloping exhilaration when a story reveals itself faster than you can get it down.
The War Series was exhibited to some fanfare in the inaugural show of a gallery downtown. The press was excellent, a rave in the Los Angeles Times, but nothing sold. Who wants concentration camp survivors, even those dancing in celebration of their freedom, on their living room walls?