Restoration (35 page)

He didn’t answer and Rhys said, “Mr. Lowenstein?”

“No,” he said. He started to stand again and Rhys held him under an arm. “I need a softer chair. Is there a softer chair?”

“We can go in my office,” Rhys said.

Together we helped him get there. “Jack? Bring that chair here for Mr. Lowenstein, please.” She nodded at a Mission chair with back and seat cushions upholstered in leather. I pulled it over and she and I lifted against his arms as he fell backward.

She leaned down and put her arms around him and whispered in his ear, asking again if he wanted something to drink.

“Have you nothing stronger than coffee and Coke?” Lowenstein said.

“We might have something.”

“Pour me a glass and I’ll tell you about Levette.”

Rhys seemed reluctant to leave him, even for that.

It was difficult to believe, he said, but in those days the French Quarter was still a neighborhood, a real one. One didn’t find all the nastiness on Bourbon Street, the strip clubs and transvestite bars, the T-shirt and sex shops with blow-up plastic genitalia in the windows. In those days the only place that sold whips was the hardware store, and they were used for spanking animals, not people. Oh, there were bars, and plenty of them. But one found none of the perversion and seediness, out-of-towners being sick in the gutters, many of them yelling, on any day of the week, and at any hour, for women on the balconies to show their breasts. The tourists, in other words, hadn’t ruined it yet.

On Saturdays ladies dressed when they came downtown and did their shopping on Canal Street. They came with their hair done or
else wearing little hats with flowers. This, he said, might border on cliché. Surely it was nothing Miss Goudeau and I hadn’t heard before, that the Quarter was once a real place, or that women actually went there wearing clothes, but he thought it worth repeating, if only to build a picture of a world entirely different from the one in which we now found ourselves. “It wasn’t all better in those days,” Lowenstein said. “God, no, it wasn’t. But I’ll get to that.”

He sipped from his glass of whiskey. His eyes were closed, I suspect as much to keep from having to look at Rhys and me as to see through his window on the past.

It was on a streetcar on Carondelet Street, he said, headed toward the Quarter on a Monday morning in August of the year that he saw him for the first time. The front of the car was crowded, but the rear, where the Negroes sat, still had seating available. Asmore was riding in front, in the middle of a crowd of passengers, busily filling in the page of a sketchbook open on his lap. Lowenstein stood in the aisle grasping a handhold overhead. Because he admired fine bones and great hair, and the general appearance of someone beautifully made, Lowenstein found that he could not keep his eyes off the young artist. Asmore’s long, slender fingers were making quick studies of unsuspecting fellow travelers, and drawing them in caricature. He was like that, always having to keep his hands busy. In fact, he smoked because he couldn’t stand to have his hands idle. It was not the nicotine he craved but rather intimacy with the cigarette itself.

“Did he chain-smoke?” Rhys asked.

“Did he chain-smoke?” Lowenstein opened his eyes. I, too, recognized the question as being odd, and hardly significant. “No,” he answered, seeing that she sincerely wanted to know. “I don’t think you could describe his smoking that way. We mostly rolled them back then. It took too much time for a busy young person to chain-smoke.”

“It’s just that I want to see him as best I can.”

“I understand,” he said.

The car stopped to load more passengers, almost all of them white, and Asmore, finding his range of motion restricted, and thus
being unable to continue sketching, stood up and casually walked to the rear of the car. Nobody said anything, but several passengers turned back and stared, including blacks scattered on the benches. Asmore sat next to a dark-skinned woman—a Negress, they would’ve called her—and began drawing again, not the least mindful of what he’d done. The only other white people Lowenstein had ever seen sitting among blacks on a streetcar were a bunch of drunks in devil costumes riding home after a Mardi Gras parade.

They got off at Canal Street and Lowenstein followed him into the French Quarter. As it happened, they were both bound for the Arts and Crafts Club Building. Asmore politely held the door open, seeing Lowenstein striding up behind him. “You rode with the Negroes,” Lowenstein told him.

“Did I?” Asmore seemed either distracted or uninterested, Lowenstein couldn’t tell which. “Well, I should consider myself lucky to have survived in one piece.”

What an odd bird
, Lowenstein remembered thinking. Later someone told him who he was.

They were the same age, but they never had a class together. Asmore already had established himself as a star at the school, while Lowenstein was a pretender posing as a bohemian to avoid having to fulfill his parents’ expectations and enroll at Tulane. “I told my father I wanted my independence and my own place to live,” Lowenstein said. “I was stubborn and hardheaded even then. Against my mother’s wishes he let me have the cottage on Saint Philip. It was a dump, filled with antiques my mother no longer wanted. It had two bedrooms, and this pleased me because I saw an opportunity to make beer money. Without my parents ever knowing, I posted a note on a bulletin board at school advertising a room for rent. Levette was the only one who answered it.”

Asmore showed up with a cardboard suitcase containing toiletries and clothes, a large toolbox in which he stored painting supplies and an army-issue duffel bag stuffed with painted canvases. His disastrous show at the Arts and Crafts Club gallery was now a few months behind
him. A girl drove him over in an old Ford and stood around twirling her hair and trying to look mysterious. Her pose failed when she began to glare at Asmore with the kind of sexual hunger that Lowenstein heretofore had associated with men only. Soon another girl was knocking at the front door, this one an Uptown debutante whose social calendar was often reported in the papers. While the two girls argued in the kitchen, Asmore slipped outside and went for a bottle of whiskey. The girls were still arguing when he returned. Lowenstein recognized that life with his new housemate was going to be interesting.

“Besides his obvious good looks,” Rhys said, “why do you think women found him so attractive?”

“It wasn’t only women, dear girl.”

“Let me rephrase that, then. Besides how he looked, why did people find Asmore so attractive?”

“It’s a fair question, and one I’ve often wondered about myself, because if truth be told, Levette was a reluctant lover. I can tell you his reputation as a libertine is exaggerated and largely undeserved. He was many things—an alcoholic, for example; a terrible alcoholic—but he was not sexually promiscuous. Oh, he might’ve had dalliances with a few of them, but not nearly as many as the years have piled on him. He was more interested in making their picture than making love to them.”

“Yes,” Rhys said, “but what made him so desirable, Mr. Lowenstein? What made them
want
him?”

“Precisely what I just told you. His indifference, I do believe, combined with a shyness or humility that one finds attractive in a boy. There also was about his nature a wounded thing that every woman who met him presumed she could help him to heal. His drinking wasn’t attractive, no, but it did add to the impression that there was something deep and troubling at work beneath the surface. He had an air of being unknowable, and of having secrets. He was the sort of person people whispered about. And of course he was brilliant. Levette was truly brilliant. When I tell you there was no one like him I
mean he was not how other people are—other artists, I should say. Technically he was superior to the rest of the crowd. He could paint a complicated architectural view as easily as a human face, and he understood that women liked sitting for him. Rather than show them exactly as they were, he presented them as they secretly hoped to look. He appealed to their vanity. Women may deny this, or some may, but after a woman’s made love… well, these are the moments when she believes herself to be most beautiful and alive. Levette aimed to capture that. In most cases he succeeded.”

They lived together for two years, although Lowenstein left the art school after only a semester and began his studies in business at Tulane. Asmore, on the other hand, remained at the school as a part-time instructor of painting and took on various odd jobs in the Quarter. He waited tables and did carpentry and roofing work. For a while he contracted with a dealer named Harmanson, who had him decorate plates with New Orleans scenes for the tourist trade. All of Asmore’s plate paintings—and there were hundreds—were distinguished by their banality; he often painted two of them at a time, using both hands, a brush in each. Lowenstein once watched Asmore paint a view of the Brulatour Courtyard with his eyes closed, to prove a point. “Have you ever seen those plates?” Lowenstein asked.

“I’ve seen plates from that period decorated with city scenes,” Rhys said, “but never one that I can say looked like his work or came with his signature.”

“Oh, he never would’ve signed one of those dreadful things, and he intentionally painted them all to look like something the worst street artist might’ve done. I’m a little uncomfortable bringing up the subject of the plates, because his legacy is secure and I don’t want to detract from it. He never advertised the fact that he was painting plates. Outside of Mr. Harmanson, I was probably the only person who knew it. Levette was paid ten cents for each plate, if I recall correctly. You could always tell when his funds were depleted because he would say, ‘Well, Low…’—he called me Low—‘well, Low,’ he’d say,
‘my plates await.’” Lowenstein laughed. “
‘My
plates await,’ as if he cared about them.”

One night in his room Lowenstein was awakened to the sound of a woman’s laughter. It wasn’t the first time, but he checked his wrist-watch and saw that it was 4:00 A.
M
., late even for Asmore. Lowenstein covered himself with a robe and walked into the living room. There was no one. He looked around and saw empty wine bottles standing on the floor, a saucer serving as an ashtray covered with butts, pillows arranged in a stack at one end of the sofa only. The doors leading to the courtyard were open, and when he walked outside he saw Asmore sitting on a bench with a young woman. Moonlight sent their shadows in sprawling puddles on the flagstones. A wind rustled the leaves of the banana trees and blew the girl’s hair in her face, and when she raised a hand and pulled the hair back Lowenstein saw that the girl was a light-skinned Negro. Levette and the girl rose to their feet, and Levette, who was so drunk he had a hard time standing, introduced her as “Jacqueline, not Jackie, LeBeau.”

Had he grown up in any southern city but New Orleans, Lowenstein might’ve been shocked to find his housemate involved with a black woman. When Lowenstein was a teenager his uncle Teddy, a bachelor with a wily, concupiscent nature, had often regaled him with stories about the Quadroon Balls of old at which moneyed white men, most of them French Creoles with wives and children at home, had courted beautiful women of color to keep as paramours. Perhaps Asmore was pursuing such an arrangement. “But, no, this didn’t add up,” Lowenstein said. “Levette wasn’t married and he barely had enough money to keep himself, let alone a woman.”

They carried on their love affair largely in the confines of the cottage, venturing out in public together after hours when there were few people to observe them. They went for walks along the river or borrowed Lowenstein’s car and took drives in the country. When Asmore painted plein-air in the old district, Jacqueline occasionally accompanied him, but she made certain to keep a distance, slipping in doorways or blending in crowds. None of Levette’s contemporaries knew
about the relationship, although he seemed less reticent to talk about Jacqueline with his teachers at the school, primarily Alberta Kinsey and Paul Ninas. “Like them, I thought it was an infatuation that would end after a few weeks,” Lowenstein said. “But it didn’t end. Levette continued to pursue Jacqueline for no reason but the obvious one. He was in love with her.”

From his bedroom Lowenstein could hear the sounds of their lovemaking. One night he listened as Jacqueline pleaded with Asmore to stop drinking. “I heard her say, ‘Please, Levette, you are my heart,’ over and over. She was weeping, and to hear her that way almost made me weep myself. It probably sounds maudlin now, but she was begging him not to kill himself.”

Other times, better times, Lowenstein endured their giggles as they played like clumsy puppies on the living room floor. When Asmore got the WPA commission to paint the post office mural, the couple took over the kitchen and Jacqueline prepared a huge dinner in celebration. They had porterhouse steaks, Lowenstein recalled. “It was a happy day. We played jazz on the phonograph and took turns dancing across the floor, the three of us did. When Jacqueline left off to tend to her cooking, Levette and I came together and danced as well. We were both three sheets to the wind and there was no suggestion of intimacy. He and I had roughhoused before, as young men do, but this night was the only time I ever actually held him in my arms. I remember how strong and powerful he felt. His body might’ve been cut from rock.”