Regiment of Women (11 page)

“Hyperaesthesia is a symptom of your sickness,” Dr. Prine had told him.

“But it hurts!”

“You only
think
it hurts,” the good doctor would say.

“But if I think it does, what's the difference?”

“Georgie, Georgie…” Then she would proceed to hurt him.

Cornell had lost his virginity at eighteen. In his last year of secondary school he had majored in art appreciation. His term paper in the senior year dealt with the meaning of that enigmatic simper on the face of Leonarda's Mono Liso. “Leonarda was a Lesbian,” wisecracked Jimmie Wilhelm, a smart-alecky classmate. “That made Mono laugh.” But Cornell had been very solemn about it, humorless adolescent that he then was. He remembered writing: “Leonarda was undoubtedly madly in love with Signor Liso, but he was promised to another. Mono, however, was touched by the devotion of the great painter, and his smile is one that endeavors to apply the unctuousness of pity.” The teacher struck out the misused word and red-penciled “unction” in the margin. She gave him a B-plus for the paper, the highest grade he had ever gained.

For a while thereafter Cornell had worn his hair in the style of Mono Liso's and daydreamed of breaking the heart of some great painter. With this vague project in mind, he had on graduation listed himself with the Employment Facility as seeking “work in art on the administrative side,” and as luck would have it, a midtown gallery needed a boy to do clerical work. Cornell applied and was hired. At the end of the first week, he repelled an attempt at rape by the gallery owner, a husky, hairy Greek-American named Basilica Dondis, who had made a fortune in shipping and retired from commerce at fifty to indulge her love of beauty by a tax-deductible means.

She fired Cornell forthwith. Weeping, he adjusted his dress and left the gallery, running, literally and figuratively, into the outstretched arms of Pauline Witkovsky, arriving to hang her current show of epic battle scenes. Witkovsky was at this point in her career toeing the threshold of fame—this was to be the show, indeed, that established hers as one of the essential names on any roster of contemporary pictorial greatness.

To naive Cornell, however, product of an art-appreciation course that had only just reached Thomasina Gainsborough by the end of term, Witkovsky looked a pudgy nonentity in turtle-neck and paint-stained jeans.

“Hey, wait a minoot,” she said, thrusting him back for inspection. “You look like a nice piece of cooze. How'd you like to be fucked by a famous artist?”

Cornell made himself rigid. “I'll scream if you don't let me go!”

“Bullshit,” she said, breathing garlic at him. “Half my show is sold out before the opening.”

He went limp. “You're not Pauline Witkovsky?”

She released him. “Just got the word,” she said.
“Time's
review will be a rave.”

Cornell gasped in admiration, hand going to his hair, which he knew must be disheveled from Basilica Dondis' pawing.

“I'm Georgie Cornell,” he said. “I consider it a privilege to meet you, Miss Witkovsky.”

Witkovsky goosed him. “You call me, kid, when you get hard up. I like your obsequious style. I'm in the book. If I ain't too busy, you come to my studio and I'll throw a fuck at you.” She swaggered into the gallery.

Cornell had no success in finding another job in art. Perhaps Dondis had blacklisted him with the other galleries, or perhaps there were merely no openings. Those to which he applied were already staffed with one or more youths of his age but of another order of sophistication, as he could see by their languid bodies and charred eyes. He also went around to the newly organized Municipal Museum, to form which the old Metropolitan, Modern, Guggenheim, Whitney, Frick and eleven other degenerating institutions had been combined, the fat trimmed from the assembled collections (the forgeries discarded, the second-rate daubs, as determined by the new school of multum-in-parvo criticism, destroyed; the stolen works returned to their rightful owners or the heirs thereof), and the remaining twenty-five pictures and six sculptures displayed in the new facility, those tunnels of the old Columba Circle subway station which had not fallen in during the general collapse circa A.
D
. 2050.

The guard collected the ten-dollar entrance fee and laughed in Cornell's face when asked directions to the personnel office.

“We only hire three people, and the waiting list is two years old.”

Cornell turned to leave, and the guard said: “Don't you want to see the stuff? We don't make refunds.”

So he went on in, the guard, having bolted the door, following him with her shotgun. When she was satisfied that he was neither thief nor vandal, she took the weapon from his back and used it as a pointer.

“Nobody but nobody understood paint like old Carmen,” she said, pressing the twin muzzles against a canvas labeled, with ball pen on a three-by-five index card Scotch-taped to the cracked wall, “Philippa IV—Carmen Velasquez.”

“Fabulous,” said Cornell. “Too bad it's damaged.” There was a rent in the mouth of the depicted face.

“Whatchuh gonna do?” asked the guard. “Hooligans get in somehow, no matter how close you watch. They punched a hole there and put a cigar in it.” She shook her capped head. “Young girls with too much time on their hands, poolroom toughs, car-strippers. Hold up candy stores, mug old people, rip paintings. Oughta put 'em in the army. It straightened
me
out years ago, I'll tell you that.”

At the end of one corridor that was blocked by debris, Cornell suddenly felt the guard's hand on his buttock. They were alone in the museum. He had to use all his diplomacy, make a date for after closing time, indeed, to get out intact. There seemed to be a surfeit of dirty old women in the art world.

Not that Pauline Witkovsky was clean, mind you, but at least she was under thirty-five. He boldly decided to call her, found the number in the book, but chickened out several times in the phone booth, losing a series of zinc dollars in one of those installations that, like the museum, gave no refunds. Finally, with his last coin, he took the plunge.

Witkovsky answered on the first ring.

“Fuck you,” she said. “Whoever you are.”

He gave his name.

“Have I fucked you?” Witkovsky asked.

Cornell explained how and where they had met.

“Listen kid,” Witkovsky said in her raspy voice, “I wouldn't remember you if I
had
fucked you. So you better get your ass over here.”

… Cornell's reminiscence, in the darkness of the cell, was disturbed by an odd event. He heard Harry get up and walk across to his cot; he felt him look down, heard him say softly: “Georgie?”

Undoubtedly he wanted to apologize for his earlier performance, but now Cornell saw nothing to be gained from quick forgiveness. Let him wait a little—a spiteful decision, maybe, but Harry must understand that moodiness was no excuse for bad manners. Cornell remained silent in voice, but breathed audibly, regularly, as if in slumber.

Harry did not ask again. After a long moment his slippers were heard gliding away. He was next at the cell door, scratching thereupon. The bolts were soon thrown; the hinges faintly squealed; light entered and was corrupted by Harry's exiting shadow; the door clunked shut.

Harry had left the cell.

This event was so extraordinary that Cornell was immediately discouraged from making any effort at all to explain it. He was stunned in the present, and escaped to the past…. The phone book listed Witkovsky's address as Chase Manhattan Plaza, a long walk from the fleabag men's residence where Cornell was then living, at 70th and Fifth.

Harry had left the cell? That made no sense. Cornell called his name, rose, and felt the other bunk. It had been no illusion. The man was gone. He groped around in the dark, found a pail, and peed in it. Too late he remembered that he had forgotten to ascertain whether it was the slop bucket or the one with the drinking water. In the grip of that horror he was of course desperately thirsty. He crawled about the concrete floor on his knees. No, there was the other bucket, the dipper handle protruding. He gulped some metallic-tasting liquid, which in the chill of the cell was yet tepid. The combination made his teeth chatter.

He returned to bed and cocooned himself in the blanket. He hated suspense. In detective novels he turned to the last chapter just after reading the first. He also disliked analysis, and was embarrassed by anything that could not be translated into instant emotion.

—Chase Manhattan Plaza had turned out to be a huge rubbish heap among the ruins of several buildings that had once been made chiefly of glass, judging from the greenish chunks in the rubble and the gritty powder underfoot. His pumps were covered with it. Witkovsky must have given this address in jest. There was no possible place here for a studio. Nevertheless, Cornell had tramped about, virtually ruining his last pair of shoes and snagging his stockings on the rusty edge of a fallen girder.

At last he reached a concrete parapet, giving onto some sort of dry well which the rubble had filled to within ten feet of the brim. He flapped his hankie to clear the dust from a fanny-spaced portion of the parapet and sat down. Scarcely had this happened when he heard, from behind him, a vile obscenity, though rather cutely pronounced. He turned and saw Witkovsky at the top of a ladder rising from the filled well.

She wore an unspeakable coverall, splashed with paint, torn out at the elbows, unbuttoned at the fly.

“Shithead! You're trespassing.” Her face was smudged with filth. She could have been a member of the company of derelicts who had harassed Cornell on the route down when he had strayed into the Skid Row of midtown Park Avenue and been cursed, kicked, and spat upon for his error.

“Miss Witkovsky, I met you outside the Dondis Gallery….” He went through it again.

Witkovsky's indignation became sullenness.

“I don't sell pictures behind my dealer's back,” she said. “I never allow the public into my studio. I have contempt for people who think me a genius, and I ignore everyone else.”

She went down the ladder. Cornell looked over the parapet and saw what he had not seen on the earlier cursory glance: that the mound of rubble sloped away on one side and that the walls of the well were glass, or apparently once had been such, with some panes remaining and others replaced with plywood sheets. He watched Witkovsky slide one of the latter aside and admit herself to whatever subterranean space lay beyond.

Now, in those days, Cornell still possessed some spirit. Furthermore, he was desperate. He had been terribly lucky to find the job at Dondis' so soon, and terribly stupid to give it up so irresponsibly; he understood that now. At this point he would have surrendered his virginity to anybody who would have taken it.

He thought otherwise a quarter-hour later, after he had shamelessly gone down the ladder and into Witkovsky's studio, explained his plight to the eccentric artist, been thrown onto a foam-rubber mattress and brutally penetrated with a massive dildo.

Once she had had him, however, Witkovsky showed her gentler side, for behind that hard shell she was not the world's worst gal.

“Artists have to be tough,” she told him, “to survive in a commercial culture. And if the Philistines ain't bad enough, your so-called admirers will eat you up to feed their own squalid little egos.” She put some Vaseline on his bruised parts and then dusted the area with Mexican Heat Powder. She patted his right ham. “Don't take it so hard, kid. You would have lost it sooner or later anyway, and at least I'm a celebrity. A pimp might of grabbed you and sold you to a series of slobbering old women, pocketed most of your earnings, and kicked your ass out when you lost your looks.”

She helped him to his feet and pushed him towards a door. “Go in the toilet now and fix your face.”

He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror and murmured: “So that's making love.” The tears had made his eyeliner run down in two black lines. What a boy must do to survive!

When he came out, Witkovsky asked: “Want a bite? I forget about eating when I work.”

Her kitchen had been improvised at one end of the large but low-ceilinged and dark room. At the other end a big canvas was spread upon the concete floor, with tubes of paint and brushes scattered nearby, the area illuminated by floodlights on tripods.

While she went to a little half-refrigerator and took out packages of frozen provender, Cornell looked at the work in progress on the floor. It seemed to him a magnificent beginning, already populated with a host of brawny women assaulting male nudes against a backdrop of classical architecture, columns, arches, and the like. On the horizon, not yet reached by pigment, were charcoal outlines of hills: seven, by his count. He tried to remember from his art-appreciation courses the principles by which one judged a picture. Color. Yes, the flesh tones, always very important, glowed. Perspective. This seemed very accurate, from the prominent figures in the foreground to the much smaller hills in the distance. Moral significance….

He called: “Miss Witkovsky, I'm admiring your new painting. Am I right in thinking it concerns ancient Rome?”

Witkovsky shouted back: “You can call me Pauline, for Mary's sake!” She slammed a pot down on a two-burner electric hotplate. “Shit, food bores me. I wish you could live on pills.” She tore open a frozen-food container and dumped the solid rectangle of its contents into the pot.

Cornell went back to the kitchen area.

“Here,” said he, “let me.” He reached for the spoon she held.

“You?” asked Pauline. “With that face and body, you're also a cook?”

“My minor was home-ec,” said Cornell. He looked into the battered vessel and saw a glutinous-looking mess of melting succotash.

Pauline cocked her head and smiled at him with her yellowed teeth. “Hmm.” She patted his rump. “I could use somebody like you around here.” She patted him again. “How's the old heinie now?”