Assorted Prose (7 page)

I had been prepared by my Paris friends for the fact that Peintre’s living quarters were not commensurate with the elegance of his productions; but I had not been warned that the shack was mounted on ten-foot stilts. The only access to the hovel was by means of a movable ladder which, to judge from the sounds of altercation within, someone was reluctant to put down. At last, however, after I had nearly exhausted my battery in beeping the horn, a cheery red female face appeared at one of the windows, and a diaphanous old derelict clad in baggy blue coveralls, grumbling in a language I could not understand, lowered the rickety steps into place. This grim wraith was Alphonse Peintre.

I had an excellent opportunity to study his face when, as I carried my cameras up the ladder, a rung snapped and to preserve my balance I seized his Orientally long, silken beard. His face was eroded by wrinkles
as if by some never-ceasing geological process. His lips were thin and hard with peasant cunning. His ochre cheekbones suggested a possible Mongol strain in his blood. He wore a drab puce beanie on his abundant but unkempt locks, clotted with snaffles and burrs. But it was his eyes that held my attention. They were round with astonishment, their blue bleached as if by a sudden infusion of pain, and an indignant glint flashed deep in their lucid, oddly youthful depths.

His wife rushed forward to lift us both into the cottage. As I felt her broad crimson hands, roughened by homely labor, tighten around my abdomen, I realized who of the couple provided the physical strength. This faithful helpmate was
de la terre
. I perceived a paradox in so airy an art loyally sheltered by such powerful, earthy muscles. Mme. Peintre cradled her husband like a child and set him in the room’s one furnishing, a worm-riddled rocking chair. “You have brought us luck,” she confided to me. “You will pay for the chickens?”

It was a dispiriting room. A little wan light dribbled in across the thatched windowsills. Pots, peanut-butter jars, dried tubes, twisted coat hangers littered the floor. An icon hung cockeyed in one corner. The walls were entirely of canvas, punctured here and there where the good wife had snipped out pieces to sell to the American museums. Through these rents I saw a landscape from which all color had been drained by the vivid fancies of the artist’s remorseless imagination. Some sections of the shabby wall writhed with superimposed scribbles, like the magic caves near Lascaux.

The venerable eremite slowly allowed a few words to escape his canny reserve. Though he had been a contemporary of Balzac, his words were not those of a senile man. How remarkably old these visual sorcerers live to be! It must be the relaxed work hours. “Giotto … blotto,” he said, in response to a question of mine. “Michel Agnolo … a little dude.” He called him “Agnolo,” as you would a childhood friend. “Monet
 … nada
. Poor Cézanne … a grind. He seemed always to be preparing for an examination that was never scheduled. Art is not like that. Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn. Do not take down my words,” he protested with a sudden sly wave of his beautifully withered hand, encrusted with Byzantine rings, the ancient ascetic’s one luxury. “They are foolish. Art is foolish. Since Watteau,
nada
. And myself. I try. The moon is coming closer. I am not afraid. It is no bigger than a pie plate. Do you have enough?”

We ate peanut-butter sandwiches—a typical meal of this
pays de Caux
. Mme. Peintre, a girlish grace imprisoned in her heavy body, adroitly usurped the rocking chair and fell asleep. Peintre scowled and squatted on the floor and began to twist coat hangers into unique and exquisite shapes. Absentmindedly he spat on my tripod, near my shoes. I assured him it was an accident. In the mysterious way of genius, he seemed to have retreated into himself. My conversational gambits fell unanswered, as if into an inscrutable primeval pool. Regretfully, I took my leave; in going out the door, I forgot—so charming and intense was the atmosphere of this consecrated interior—about the ladder, and fell ten feet with all my equipment. Looking up from my position on the foul ground, I saw Peintre’s remarkable countenance framed in the crude portal, and was rewarded in a most unexpected way. The Olympian
hauteur
of his visage cracked, and the immortal smiled.

 
MR. EX-RESIDENT

(Assuming, Unlikely Though It Seems at First Blush, That Harry S. Truman, Author of “Mr. Citizen,” Also Wrote Adam’s Memoirs)

A
LARGE NUMBER
of people have expressed curiosity as to how Eve and I like residing out of Eden. The answer is very simple. We like it fine.

I began as a farm boy, so the thorns and thistles of the “outer world” are not news to me. We thoroughly enjoyed our years in Eden, but now that they are over we find many things to enjoy elsewhere. Pleasant as it was, Eden always had the disadvantage for me personally of being a little too lush and orderly. As the saying goes, I like some grit to my mash.

So many contradictory accounts of what happened have been published that I think the time has come to set the record straight. Now that my grandson Enoch has builded a city of the same name, I know there is a firm watertight place where the records can be kept. I think it is very important, whether or not it causes embarrassment in Heaven, for the First Man to set down in his own words his side of the story so that the generations succeeding him in this world can understand their present condition and why things are the way they are.

When the matter first came up of eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, I consulted with Eve and with the serpent and their consensus seemed to be that it could do no harm and might do a lot of good. It is easy to identify mistakes in hindsight, but at the time this was the best available information I could get, and it was my responsibility to act upon it. And I did.

The following day, God came to me and asked, “Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?”

I thought this was a curious question, since if He were omniscient as
supposed He must have already known that I certainly had. But I have never had any trouble keeping the reins on my temper. With the utmost patience and courtesy I explained the situation.

When I was done, He simply told me, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” I felt lucky at that, since what He said to Eve and the serpent was far worse.

We wasted no time getting out, once the circumstances had become definite. I expected no fanfare, so it was one of the deeply moving experiences of my life to see all the cherubim waving goodbye with their flaming swords. I had not in any way asked them to do this. It was a truly spontaneous demonstration.

Two things need to be cleared up, for the reason that there has been a lot of improper and inaccurate speculation written concerning them.

The first is this. At no time, then or since, have Eve and I exchanged recriminations. She was produced from my rib and I have never for a moment wanted my rib back. In my opinion, she did a wonderful job raising Cain and Abel in an environment that was necessarily unsettled and far from ideal. If the boys did not turn out exactly the way we had hoped, this is no excuse for the disproportionate publicity that has surrounded their quarrel. It is of course a tribute to the office of First Man that everything that happens within his family circle attracts widespread comment.

Secondly, a lot of well-meaning—I will give them the benefit of the doubt—souls have expected us to resent how the serpent has insinuated himself into the good graces of subsequent administrations and is in fact enjoying a good deal of present prosperity. This shows they have no knowledge of the nature of the cosmos. It is the essence of the system that the serpent, having served his term with us, should seek “greener pastures.” While I cannot feel that his advice was always in the best interests of my family, he was by his own lights successful and must be admired for it. History has been created by just this type of personality.

I have been called, among many other things, an optimist.

I do not think of myself as a optimist or a pessimist but as a normal human individual blessed with 100% excellent physical health since the day of my creation. At the time, a certain number of angels whom I do not wish to name doubted my ability to serve as First Man. I showed them that they were wrong. It is my sincere belief that any healthy man, placed in that position, could have done the job.

Though there is a lot wrong with the state of the world as we know it, I think entirely too much is made of the Fall. Eden just could not have accommodated all the men and women who now enjoy the blessings, qualified though they are in some instances, of earthly life. I lived in Eden many years and I flatter myself that I know more about its dimensions than most of the theological journals I make it my habit to read. These are written by good men, but their morbid preoccupation with Original Sin rubs me the wrong way, though I don’t mind in the least whatever they say about me. I have no regrets. And I recommend that you have none either.

March 1956

O
N THE AFTERNOON
of the first day of spring, when the gutters were still heaped high with Monday’s snow but the sky itself was swept clean, we put on our galoshes and walked up the sunny side of Fifth Avenue to Central Park. There we saw:

Great black rocks emerging from the melting drifts, their craggy skins glistening like the backs of resurrected brontosaurs.

A pigeon on the half-frozen pond strutting to the edge of the ice and looking a duck in the face.

A policeman getting his shoe wet testing the ice.

Three elderly relatives trying to coax a little boy to accompany his father on a sled ride down a short but steep slope. After much balking, the boy did, and, sure enough, the sled tipped over and the father got his collar full of snow. Everybody laughed except the boy, who sniffled.

Four boys in black leather jackets throwing snowballs at each other. (The snow was ideally soggy, and packed hard with one squeeze.)

Seven men without hats.

Twelve snowmen, none of them intact.

Two men listening to the radio in a car parked outside the Zoo; Mel Allen was broadcasting the Yanks–Cardinals game from St. Petersburg.

A tahr (
Hemitragus jemlaicus
) pleasantly squinting in the sunlight.

An aoudad absently pawing the mud and chewing.

A yak with its back turned.

Empty cages labelled “Coati,” “Orang-outang,” “Ocelot.”

A father saying to his little boy, who was annoyed almost to tears by
the inactivity of the seals, “Father [Father Seal, we assumed] is very tired; he worked hard all day.”

Most of the cafeteria’s out-of-doors tables occupied.

A pretty girl in black pants falling on them at the Wollman Memorial Rink.

“
BILL
&
DORIS
” carved on a tree. “
REX
&
RITA
” written in the snow.

Two old men playing, and six supervising, a checkers game.

The Michael Friedsam Foundation Merry-Go-Round, nearly empty of children but overflowing with calliope music.

A man on a bench near the carrousel reading, through sunglasses, a book on economics.

Crews of shinglers repairing the roof of the Tavern-on-the-Green.

A woman dropping a camera she was trying to load, the film unrolling in the slush and exposing itself.

A little colored boy in aviator goggles rubbing his ears and saying, “He really hurt me.” “No, he didn’t,” his nursemaid told him.

The green head of Giuseppe Mazzini staring across the white softball field, unblinking, though the sun was in its eyes.

Water murmuring down walks and rocks and steps. A grown man trying to block one rivulet with snow.

Things like brown sticks nosing through a plot of cleared soil.

A tire track in a piece of mud far removed from where any automobiles could be.