Allan Stein (3 page)

Regarding the weather of childhood, a harmless possum lived under the front porch of our fourth house—my favorite—which (belied by its trees, languor, and possum) was in a busy neighborhood near the city's downtown. It was our house for two years (ages ten to twelve), the house in which my mother and I were happiest. The trees, the languor, low-to-zero rent (the landlord died partway through our tenancy and no one noticed us for a year), plus my emergence into the age of reason and dinnertime conviviality, conspired to make of this place a brief heaven. The possum—I named him Larry—scratched at our door whenever it was going to rain. Louise called him our prognosticator. He wanted to come in, I think, because it got wet under the porch when it rained. We never let him (the only discord of these halcyon years) and I stopped arguing with Louise when she told me that possums love, more than anything, the spittle of sleep, and that Larry would find me at night and lick the saliva from my lips, from my tongue even, thrusting his ratty little mouth into mine, defenseless while I dreamt, to sip the sweet nectar of my boyhood mastications directly from its source, should we ever let him in the door. Later, when puberty began, this scenario became a fantasy of mine, the most horrible and forbidden of many imagined scenes and therefore (on a few intensely private occasions, of which I will spare you the details) the climactic one.

Why a fourth house? Why no father, siblings, or proper account of the scarring events of a troubled youth, etc., etc.? That is the part that bores me, all the psychiatrist's carefully hoarded trivia
of "damage," gathered in his great pockets like loose change, grimy coins that he can then count out against the final bill, the great tabulation of failed dreams and dysfunctions he must balance against the purchases of a childhood. I can only tell what I remember, and what
I
remember is growing up. My father was gone, along with three half-siblings he enjoyed with another woman, and my mother didn't like him and neither did I. His absence was as meaningful to me as the fact that I lacked an elephant. There are times when a boy could benefit from the company of an elephant, and it's too bad if he doesn't have one. However, I was so involved with what I did have, the missing parts of the "normal" went unnoticed, until everyone started asking me about them—which was early, age six or seven, when a virtual forest of adult faces began pestering me with questions about Dad, etc. Had the world turned its immensely caring eyes toward me and asked, sotto voce, "But, little boy, where is your elephant? " I would have burst into tears more sincere than any I have shed about my father. There is so much in this world that does not love a child it never seemed terribly important to single him out.

Herbert returned. He settled in, casting a disappointed glance at the empty scotch glass. "Where is that boy?" We surveyed the room brusquely, but Tristan was nowhere in sight. "So, what happened while I was gone?"

"Nothing, really. Tell me more about this Stein nephew."

♦2  
♦

A
llan Daniel Stein was born November 7, 1895, in San Francisco, the only child of Michael and sarah Stein. Mike, the older brother of Leo and Gerturude, sold a streetcar business in 1903 and moved with sarah and Allan to Paris. Gerturde and Leo had preceded them. Therese jelenko, Allan's teenage nanny and piano teacher, went with them:

"Among my parents' most intimate friends at the turn of the century were Michael and Sally Stein. I was a so-called child prodigy but hadn't a good piano. So it was arranged that I practiced on their Steinway every morning. Their little son, Allan, four or five years of age, began to study with me. And a celebrated musician of the time, Oscar Weil, heard him play and was so enthusiastic that he begged to give him harmony and theory lessons and congratulated his parents on choosing 'such a marvelous teacher,' etc. I didn't realize then what a compliment it was, but the Steins made up their minds that when they went to europe they couldn't dream of going without me. Of course I was then all of about fifteen years old, fifteen or sixteen.

"This was my first trip to Europe. Actually I never expected to be able to get to Europe, certainly not at that age, and there was great excitement. I left with Mike and Sally Stein and their little boy in December 1903, and arrived at Cherbourg and was met by
Mr. Stein's younger sister and brother, Leo and Gertrude Stein. No, Gertrude wasn't along; I'm mistaken there. It was just Leo. We actually arrived at Cherbourg about three o'clock in the morning, and I was thrilled and fascinated. I knew no French but was absolutely charmed. Leo took us to the old hotel; oh, dear, I've forgotten the name of it. The Hotel Fayot. It was the famous hotel in the Latin Quarter, facing the Luxembourg Gardens, where the Senators have their lunch; it was celebrated for its great restaurant. And that was an exciting night. I don't think anybody slept a wink.

"We finally found an apartment on the rue de Fleurus, 1 rue de Fleurus, which was the same street as Leo and Gertrude Stein, who lived at 27 rue de Fleurus. I remember ours was an apartment three flights up. There was no such thing as an elevator, and of course it had no bath. We had to go up the street to Gertrude's. They had a bath and were unique. I think in the whole street perhaps there was only one other bath. And the baths used to come around by cart. Pipes would be hoisted from the street into your apartment, the tin tub having been brought up ahead of time. And you 'bought' a bath, as it were. It was all very primitive and very exciting and very wonderful to me.

"The Michael Steins moved to the rue Madame, I think it was 58 rue Madame, and part of my duties as an assistant in the household was to take the little boy to school. I'm going back a couple of years. I'm going back a couple of years. He went to a private school a few blocks away. And each morning I would meet Degas, the painter, who lived a block away, and each morning he'd ask how my little boy was. Well, I was only ten years older than Allan, but just the same I never corrected him. I was very proud of him, this very handsome young boy. Degas was an interesting figure and must have been at the height of his painting career then. I was just
stupid enough to be really only interested in music. Well, it's hard to follow in detail. There's so much detail."

T
he last days of March, all crazy with cold weather, swooped and shifted around me like the torn, blown pages of an old book. My forced holiday had brought new pleasures, but it had also robbed me of any enduring structure. I woke most mornings to nothing. For six years there had been some necessity to getting up. The stack of marked exams, toast in a paper napkin, plus my leather satchel stuffed with books and what-have-you (torn from their nooks as I rushed to the door), and my head full of plans and anticipation for the children and the day, I had to catch one of those monstrous buses that filled our streets by seven just to make it to school before the concierge, with his paw full of keys, locked the great iron door shut for the morning. Those were sweet, rapid mornings, full of flight and arrival. They loomed behind me like the shimmering, silvery peaks that frame our city's portrait, east and west: a magical, distant place—entirely unreachable. Now I was idle. I saw Dogan when he could arrange it. We had sex in the laundry room of his apartment building a few times. Twice we saw movies. I barely noticed the films, pinioned as I was to the minutest changes in his posture. I could never phone him. Lurking near the soccer field was out of the question, so I saw him less and less. The weather was terrible for a few weeks, and I stayed home and read. Herbert kept me supplied with books. It was an awful time, more destabilizing than I had then realized, and Herbert was my only reliable anchor.

On the last Friday of that disappointing March, Herbert called from work to invite me for dinner at the Hotel Grand. He'd made some great discovery about the Steins and wanted to share it over a meal with me and our friend Henry Richard. Henry always stayed
at the Grand (a squat brick and glass monstrosity that rose from the edge of our "historic district" like a staging area for some kind of theme-park ride). Henry was in town just now, buying art.

Herbert, who really is extremely good at what he does, had discovered three "missing" drawings by Picasso—studies, he believed, for the 1906 painting called
Boy Leading a Horse
. (An utterly enchanting boy, standing nude beside a horse, which he seems to command without reins; the earth is tawny and burnished like the boy, while the sky is a festering storm of silver and gray, like the horse.) Herbert believed this boy might be Allan Stein. He'd uncovered a bill of lading sent by Allan to Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore in 1951, listing a portrait Picasso had painted of Allan, age eleven, during the same months that he painted
Boy Leading a Horse
—included with it were "three preliminary drawings." The portrait arrived in America, but the drawings did not. Herbert thought these drawings might have been for
Boy Leading a Horse
. If Allan had posed one afternoon, during his sittings at Picasso's studio, standing nude in the posture of the boy, he might, in some small way,
be
the
Boy Leading a Horse.
Finding the drawings could provide the link.

"Obviously nothing can be proven per se." Herbert rambled on as we sat waiting for Henry at the Grand. "Given Picasso's use of—well, virtually anything he could get his hands on to make his paintings, no one could prove Allan was the model in any conventional sense. But it's just so tantalizing to think of finding 'the boy,' I mean, a real boy stuck somewhere in that painting. It's a monumental piece." Herbert showed me a once-tipped-in color plate he'd cut from a book at the museum. The painting was very erotic. The contours of the boy's belly and chest were supple and inviting. "Any evidence linking it to Allan Stein would be, you know, more than delightful. No one ever mentions him in this regard." Henry arrived now, but that didn't keep Herbert from going on. "Everyone's so ga-ga about Cezanne's
Bathers
, Greek kouroi, or this weird grown-
up Parisian delinquent who I'm sure was
very
important and blah-blah-blah, but why never a real boy?" I smiled hello to Henry, who looked very smart in his linen jacket. "Why wouldn't Picasso look at an actual boy? "

Henry Richard, first name English last name French (Herbert simply called him "the Day-Glo king" [Henry made a fortune with a 1961 patent on psychedelic poster paints {the patent was his even if the idea wasn't—his brilliant, druggy college roommate stumbled across it fooling around in chem lab, Henry saw the $$$ and offered the friend pot (to his credit a lot of pot) for the rights—and he licensed it out to manufacturers} without ever owning or running anything more than a postage meter at home] though Herbert only ever said this to me, not Henry), had spent the day with Herbert buying art. He liked to be called "Hank."

Hank bought art with Herbert's advice, while also buying Herbert's advice with art. The payoff for these friendly consultations was paintings, given to Herbert by the artists he pitched to the Day-Glo king (at that time building a fantastically high-profile collection)—a little thank-you for making their rent and maybe their careers. It all gets very complicated when Herbert later curates shows featuring these same artists, borrowing from the collections of the dozen industrialists he has advised in the past and writing lavish essays that create great reputations and markets for everyone involved: the artists, the collectors who own them, and not coincidentally Herbert, who just happens to have pieces by every last one of them, tossed his way free like a bone to a good dog who, in the last reel, turns out to have been the star of the movie all along.

Hank snagged the waiter, and we ordered more drinks. Herbert handed me a photograph of the Steins, winter 1905. It was enchanting. The family is standing in the courtyard of 27 rue de Fleurus. Allan is ten, the only child in a group of six. The adults
form a dark wall and Allan stands in front of them, chest high to Gertrude, dressed in a white sailor shirt and knickers; he is wielding a stick. His eyes are dark flowers, barely opened. Gertrude has her hands on his shoulders, like the claws of a bird, though it's unclear if she means to protect or devour him. The Steins' faces are hard and flat, like the cut ends of tree stumps; they're all staring in different directions. Only Allan and Gertrude regard us directly, and this fact enchanted me—the directness of the boy's regard. Hank took the photocopied bill of lading from Herbert.

"Mmm, I see it right there. 'Three preliminary drawings.'" A good empiricist, Hank.

"I think Allan never sent them," Herbert went on. "He was never very good with details in the first place, plus being sick and all. The drawings probably stayed in Paris and ended up in the hands of his family when he died." The Grand management had scattered white narcissus willy-nilly throughout the dining room, so the air was pungent and cloying. Herbert performed a miracle with the encyclopedic wine list (thirty pages, possibly copied direct from the distributor's warehouse inventory), finding an Oregon pinot to complement the ubiquitous floral perfume. This acrobatic wine also had the virtue of going well with the lamb we ordered. We dined in a sea of odors: garlic, sage, rosemary, more garlic, someone else's cheese cut by my knife (an earlier dinner), lingering cleanser used to scrub grit from the tiles, plus the overpowering blooms.

"Do you know them?"

"Allan's family? I certainly know
of
them —"

I interrupted. "That's a very nice tie, Hank, very fine." Hank's tie interlocked salmon with clams in a kind-of Escheresque puzzle, a regional knickknack, I supposed, that he probably only wore on his trips north. It looked like a local bouillabaisse.

"Thanks very much." He tipped his fork to me, chewing. Herbert grimaced and poked at the pink lamb on his plate.

"It's a Jeffries," Herbert put in. "We bought it right off the artist's rack at his studio this morning. Hank is very lucky to have gotten the last one."

"Mmm, I thought it looked like a Jeffries," I improvised.

"Jeffries didn't make it, he simply owned it. Don't you read anything I clip for you? He's selling a bunch of his old clothes, you know, with all the grime left in, signing them and selling them. Each one is dated so you can tell when he owned it, kind of a record of his own evolving bad taste." Herbert cackled at this joke and then blushed when neither of us joined him. "This one's from very early, before he had any kind of name, you see, so it's especially sought after. Apparently it's got blood and cum stains, Jeffries says so, anyway."

Hank's tie, with its generous swirl of fish and bivalves, slipped neatly into a collar that was immaculate. Despite the pleasure of good company, the tasty lamb, the odors, the talk (a pungent, literate conversation)—all the epicurean delights, that is to say, of good company in a well-serviced cosmopolitan setting—I couldn't keep my mind from swimming into that beguiling collar, with its perfect single crease, which Hank kept lightly touching. The dry circumspection of this knife's-edge crease, tie snug as if folded within a thin and expert crepe, transported me to the moment of its creation— the firm hand of the laundress pressing her flat, hot iron to the cloth, the burst of steam, twined cotton fibers minutely loosened (breathing like Turks in a cave of heated rocks), then turned and pushed flat against the board into their traditional, more orderly arrangement. Handed to shirtless master in a flash, touching the fold (simple curtsy, a dry dollar pressed into her palm), the crease became a warm tunnel of delight for Hank's finger, which he slipped along the inner edge while flipping the collar up for the tie. And there was more in that fold, that neck-long fold of cotton—in the poorly lit, poorly designed, poor great dining room of the Grand—with its doing and
undoing. My attentions slipped back and forth along the collar, following Hank's absent caress, his paired fingers mimicking the skis that rushed out from beneath me down the steep snowy ridge of Hurricane Hill, high above "our meadow," where my mother and I watched the trails of jets tracing their course across the bright ice-blue sky to Tokyo, LA, Bogota, Miami, Corsica for goodness' sake, because there is so much in this world to see (she said, laughing and pushing off to race me down the hill), so much; and with the guile-lessness of a twelve-year-old I felt the great wobbling globe spin forward beneath us toward a future of fantastic communications and swift, glamorous transport across promising skies. It disturbs me to realize this is not an interruption; this blossoming, this rupture, is what is permanent, and the hollow wooden box of conversation, our simple evening meal at the Grand, the way Herbert glances at me when he drinks his wine, the timely, clever remark, are the disturbances, interruptions that distract us from the more permanent ether in which our lives swim. Herbert, who never knew my mother, tells me this is crazy. But how could anyone call such transports insanity when they dwell in something as plain and sober as the crease of a well-starched collar? Hank's fold, at dinner, was a portal into life's pleasing enormity.