Spoonwood (14 page)

“But you need to,” she nods. “Thanks for doing the dishes and wiping down the counters.”

“My pleasure, the pleasure of faucet water. Everything in New York is a delight.” I pick up one of my spoons, return it to its modest carrier, and burst into nervous laughter. “I'm sorry, but I feel a little giddy, wondering why I'm enjoying this so much.”

“You're easy to please, it appears.”

“I've been in the woods a while.”

“That's a metaphor, right?”

“No,” I say.

I'm scanning the premises for something to play with when a buzzer sounds and this new person in our lives presses a button and speaks to the wall. The wall answers. I'm in baby awe. Even walls have language. Minutes later I hear a knock on the door. Bloom answers it and comes back with paper cartons.

“Chinese,” Bloom says. “They're just down the block. I order from them all the time.”

“That's what you were doing on the phone. You're very kind,” Dad says.

“Look, I also made a call to one of my father's clients. He does import-export, specializes in accessories for interiors. He's an old New Englander. He'll look at your spoons tomorrow at 10:15
AM.
” She gives Dad a card: “Brewster Wiley, Arts & Trifles for Good Living.”

“Thank you. I'll look him up first thing.”

“Better arrive early or on time. Brewster is a very scheduled human being.”

“I guess I'll have to start watching the clock,” Dad says, his voice falling. This is the beginning of a new way of thinking for Dad, the rules he made for himself at Forgot Farm slipping and sliding on the ice of Reality.

While Dad feeds me Chinese food, Bloom stands off with a drawing pad. Her face is very serious, very intense. She looks like a woman defusing a time bomb.

She draws Dad and me while Dad gives me a bath, and I splash around in her tub, quite a dreamy experience.

She draws me while I play on the floor with ashtrays.

Without saying anything she makes it clear she does not want any distractions while she draws, so she and Dad are quiet all during the time she works, and I'm quiet too. Except for occasional outbursts, I'm pretty civil for somebody not yet two years old.

Through the window I see the halo effect of lights flashing, vague shapes moving in the windows in the next building. Even in the dark Bloom is drawing pictures. I'm thinking about the refrigerator. When I was cleaning up I saw an open bottle of white wine. Old Crow pictures the bottle in my mind—green, label of a vineyard.

The spare room is full of junk, so for the night Bloom has made a bed of folded blankets for Birch on the studio floor. I'll
be sleeping on the couch. She covers Birch with a blanket, his head peeking out.

“Don't you ever sleep?” I say, sitting up on the couch.

“Of course. I'm a night person.” She puts the pad down, picks up one of the ashtrays Birch was playing with, and puts it on the coffee table. She remains on the floor, yoga style, and rolls a joint.

“I hope you don't mind.”

“Would it matter if I did?”

“No.”

She lights the noxious stick, draws the smoke into her lungs, offers it to me.

“No thanks,” I say. “I already reside in a mildly hallucinatory state. What are you going to do with the drawings?”

“Make paintings out of them, which I hope to sell for mucho dineries. My goal is to accumulate as much fame and wealth as possible.”

“I bet that's somebody in your family speaking.”

“No, it's me,” Bloom says. “I want money and I want notoriety.”

“I think everybody would be better off if we all made the minimum, lived minimum lives, and nobody was famous,” I say.

“You're like an old lefty, Latour.”

“I never thought about it in political terms. It's just the way I have to live.”

“But, Latour, you said ‘everybody,'” Bloom says. “You implied we all ought to live like you.”

“You're right. The absurdity of me,” I laugh.

After her marijuana interlude Bloom goes back to work drawing Birch as he drifts off, and I take a shower and return to the couch and lie down with my eyes closed, not exactly awake or asleep, alert enough to hear if Birch stirs, listening to the sound of charcoal on paper.

I'm thinking about my new name, Latour. The moment I'd spoken it aloud I knew it had been mine all along.

Next morning, when Birch and I depart, Bloom is asleep. I climb the ladder to her bed and leave a note on the phone pad.
In a few hours this tough-minded and driven young artist has dented if not demolished the belief system I built on Forgot Farm. My hostility toward people seems to have lifted, if temporarily. The idea of “no unnecessary conversation” seems silly. What do I feel for her? Lilith used to tease me that I only had one erogenous zone. But what I feel for Bloom is not directly wired to my genitals. It's as if she's throwing off rays that touch every part of my body. The feeling, I am sure, is tied to my experience nursing Birch and making spoons, the touch of wood.

Like everything else in New York, Arts and Trifles for Good Living is farther away than I've anticipated, east from The Hot and among jazz clubs, cafes, and art galleries. The storefront is plain, with shiny black vertical lines in the brick. I lose confidence and pace back and forth in front of the store. If I didn't owe Bloom for going through the trouble of making an appointment for me, I'd probably leave. Eventually, though, the inertia of my pacing pushes me toward the door.

Inside, I know in an instant that my gut feeling was wrong. Everything here speaks of the “Q” word—from quality candle holders to quality book ends, from quality brass door knockers to quality framed marquetry landscapes from Russia.

We meet with Brewster Wiley in his office, which is simple and spare. He sits behind an antique wood desk with inlaid side panels in an abstract design of wood “made from all fifty states,” he says. On the wall, in a gilded frame, is a dollar bill and a caption, “What It's All About.”

I sit in a leather easy chair, Birch on my lap. Unlike myself Birch has an instinct for the importance of decorum in crucial situations, so he does not squirm or make funny faces or noises. After a lengthy chit-chat Brewster spends the longest time inspecting my spoons laid out on his desk, and it is impossible to tell from his scholarly demeanor what he is thinking.

As I will learn later, Brewster Wiley is seventy years old, fit, alert—rueful, like Howard in that way, but without the sarcasm. He manages to dress conservatively but still distinguishes himself with expensive gray business suits and black cashmere turtleneck sweaters. In 1959 it was said that he was a dead ringer for
the actor Craig Stevens. Today his various toupees are all based on the Peter Gunn haircut. He'll claim never to have touched alcohol, mind-altering drugs, or tobacco. He eats only lean cuts of meat and then only two days a week. He has never used vulgar language, nor is he known to raise his voice in anger. With men he is courteous, with women courtly. His amusements include a partiality to Western movies, which he watches on his Betamax VCR, and a collection of antique cars, which he keeps upstate in a garage. He attends Trinity Church every Sunday, because he likes walking down Broadway to Wall Street. He has never married, and he is often seen in the company of younger men.

Brewster is an upcountry New Englander by birth, but he considers himself a New Yorker. Indeed, his New England accent has almost disappeared. He says “woid” instead of “wuhd.” He will tell me that even as a boy he collected objects that interested him. In adult life he'd discovered that a man can combine his passion with his livelihood. After a series of failed businesses he'd found a secret to success. “I buy and sell items I fall in love with,” he will say. “My tragedy is that I'm doomed to part with the things I love.”

On this first day we meet, he puts my spoon down, faces me, and says, “Can you make Welsh love spoons, with ball and chain and link carving, Celtic designs?”

“That's stuff's gimmicky, it's for show, or some tradition I don't belong to,” I say, unable to conceal my contempt and envy. “It requires power tools, and the wood is usually bass wood. My spoons are made of good hardwood, and they're for use.”

“They're pleasing, I'll say that, and well made, but they lack something, a consumer hook—like if they were from Africa, or the Andes.”

“They're documented. I bet nobody else has that,” I say.

“Documented, demented—what are you talking about?” Brewster says, putting on the New York accent, perhaps because he knows it will intimidate me.

I reach into my backpack and remove a manila folder. I fish around until I find a couple sheets of paper. I pick up a spoon.

“This tells the story of this particular spoon,” I say.

“The handwriting is sensational, I'll say that,” Wiley says. “It's almost like calligraphy. But combining writing with crafts, I don't know. It'll confuse people.”

All day yesterday, when he pounded the streets trying to sell his spoons as Frederick Elman, Dad was nervous, hesitant, resentful of every cross look. Now as Latour he is calm, relaxed, confident. I, too, remain calm. I can read Dad's mood by the beats of his heart, the smell of his sweat, the assurance of his hands on me.

“Read it—it'll change your mind,” Dad says.

Wiley looks the spoon over, puts it down, and reads Dad's document, first to himself, then hissing a few words, and finally out loud. Little streaks of white foam form on the corners of his mouth.

By the time Brewster Wiley finishes, his New Yorker accent has dissolved and he is speaking in the Vermont voice of his childhood. He hands the paper back to Dad.

“You have documentation for all the spoons in that bag?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That's book length. You must spend as much time writing about these spoons as making them.” Wiley is amused.

“Almost.”

“I think you must be a little or a lot crazy.”

“A lot,” Dad says.

I glower at Mister Wiley, not out of anger, just practicing my raptor stare.

“Can't you get day care for the kid?” Wiley says.

“I am the day care.”

“You can work with him tagging along?”

“Look at him, look at me, look at my spoons.”

“Well, all right,” says Brewster Wiley. “You have a company name?”

“No, and I don't want one.”

“What about signing your spoons? Don't you want credit for your work?”

“No, just cash.”

“How much?”

“Just enough. I believe in just enough. It's my philosophy.”

Brewster Wiley gives Dad a little smile and a nod. Even I can tell they're in business.

Brewster opens a wall safe, takes out money, gives it to Dad. Dad will come to New York periodically to drop off spoons and collect money—just enough.

12

BLOOM

D
ad's ready to head out for the wide open spaces of the West, but he owes Bloom a debt for referring him to Arts and Trifles. He agrees to model for Bloom for a week.

Besides posing for Bloom whenever she needs him, Dad does all the dishes and keeps the place picked up. Not because Bloom asks him too, but because he likes things orderly and neat. Dad cleans out Bloom's spare room and we move in. The previous occupant (Bloom refers to him as The Ex) was a sculptor, and he left behind some of his creations, metal things that resemble car wrecks. The room includes a single bed for dad and an ancient, smelly (from mildew) settee, which is my bed.

I often stand on the settee, hold onto the window sill, and look out at New York. Across the street higher up than us is a balcony with plants in pots and a woman with dark, flowing hair who leans over the railing and gazes outward as if she is thinking of taking flight. I can relate. Below her two stories are a couple of unwashed smoky windows where the blurred shapes of people come and go carrying stacks of something or other. At street level, concertina barbed wire tops a fence surrounding a small parking lot. On the street in front of a meat-packing building
boy/girls stand on the running boards of trucks and talk to the windows, or so it appears to me. Sometimes a truck door opens and the boy/girl goes in. I'm not interested in any of these matters. I am studying three-point perspective. From here, way up high and looking almost straight down, people have odd shapes, and I am trying to determine why and what it all means.

Bloom watches Dad and me closely. When she sees us in a position she likes she'll holler “Hold it right there!” We freeze. She touches Dad, touches me, gently adjusting our poses to suit her eye. Then she takes Polaroid pictures of us. We wait in freeze-frame while the pictures develop. She watches the Polaroid take shape, her eyes intent and hungry. (That's what I'll remember most about Bloom, those hungry eyes.) Usually, she grabs the picture before it's fully developed and chucks it in the wastebasket. Then she fiddles around with our bodies some more. I like the touch of a woman, satisfying in a different way from Dad's touch. When she finally finds a picture she likes she exhales audibly and says something like, “This is it—beautiful!” She files the picture in a box.

I am acquiring a new understanding of the world and my place in it. Instead of me watching other creatures—bugs, birds, and beasts—another creature is watching me. I have that understanding to this day. You pose for other people, and they process pictures of you in their minds, which they use to judge you, reward you, or dispense with you. You, Mother—do you watch me with doe-deer eyes? I hope so.

When she's ready to start a study, Bloom re-poses us in the studio against white, ghostly sheets, placing us in the correct position using the Polaroid as a guide. She lights up her obnoxious and smelly marijuana and draws with charcoal on paper. The drawings will serve as templates for the paintings. During the drawing stage she smokes marijuana, because “it frees my hand.” She says she never smokes her nasty weed when she paints, because it messes up her ability to judge colors. When Bloom is working, her disposition changes from easygoing and wise-cracking to sullen and silent. She draws all night and sleeps all day. Since Dad and I are on-call models, it doesn't take long before we're on the same schedule as she is.

.   .   .

It's early morning, after Bloom and Birch have finally gone to bed. I'm still awake, in an odd state of mind. I'm happy with my work, with its potential for the future; I'm happy it's making me some money. Well, not really. I don't want to make money with my spoons; I merely have to. I want to give them away. Money taints them, taints my efforts, taints everything. I'm happy to be here in New York with Bloom and Birch. Well, not really. I really want to be back at Forgot Farm. I miss the woods, the pond, certain trees, certain smells, certain feelings when one lives in self-imposed privation. I'm dependent for survival on a greedy old businessman and a sexy but obsessed painter. Even so, I'm happy. Well, not really. I'm thinking of that old Peggy Lee song: “Is that all there is?”

“Look in the backpack,” says Old Crow.

“What do you mean?” I don't know what he's talking about.

“You know exactly what I mean.”

It's not until I actually unzip a compartment in the pack and find the vodka bottle that I remember putting it in there. Without any thought or hesitation, I twist off the cap and take a deep swallow. Another. I stand there waiting for the feeling. For about a minute, everything is quiet, everything is perfect. I bring the bottle to the sink and dump the remainder of the contents. I listen for Old Crow's lament, but all is silence in my mind.

I'm as ambulatory as a Thanksgiving Day turkey running from a hatchet, but I have no more chance to find freedom than that gobbler. I want to be outside testing my theory of perspective: that people routinely change in size and angularity, which is why self-knowledge is so hard to come by. I want to hunt for raptor nests, find myself a raptor mother to train me to stalk pigeons and eat them. Climb the barbed wire fence into the car lot and steal a shiny one. Follow a road to the nth. Ride the meat trucks to where the meat comes from. Wear the dresses of the boy/girls I see daily outside The Hot. I'm afraid, Mother.

Tension builds up in all of us. Dad promised Bloom a week of our time, but two weeks have gone by. One night Bloom breaks
down from overwork and frustration, and Dad hugs her. Dad closes his eyes, and Bloom closes her fists until gradually they open and she completes her part of the hug. I do not—repeat—do not like to see them all wrapped up like that, and I cry hard to break them apart.

Dad isn't getting enough sleep. He's up at all hours sitting for Bloom or cleaning the studio or making spoons from New York wood, of which there is plenty in Central Park, about a hundred different species of trees. Dad can't sleep in daylight. He grabs naps during the twilight hours of dawn and dusk. Bloom might be up all night but during the day she sleeps like the dead; I, too, sleep like the dead. On occasion Bloom and I meet in our sleep in a church. In my dream I hide in the pews, because Bloom is trying to kill me, which is quite a trick since I am already in the land of the dead. She fools me by posing as a statue. I suck on her toes, and she snatches me up and envelops me in a crushing hug. Bloom and I share the same dreams, because she tells her dreams to Dad and he tells them to me, and they are the same as mine, Mother.

Dad has been trying to wean me since we arrived in New York, but he doesn't try very hard. He depends on me as much as I depend on him. Nursing is our magical time.

One week goes by, another, another; an hour or so after a session, when Dad goes to bed, I lie in my settee thinking. The air is pure and fragrant, and we are alone with flowers. Is this my dream? Dad's? Or maybe—and now I think I'm getting closer to the truth—it's your dream that you put in our heads. I get confused sometimes.

I wonder about that fragrance, and wondering lets me experience fragrance in my own hair (it's coming in sandy-colored, like yours). Flowers? But the fragrance changes. I smell the thick aroma of burnt marijuana and sweat, Bloom's all-night, art-work sweat. I open my eyes a slit. Bloom has come into the room, and she is standing in front of Dad's bed.

“Is he asleep?” Bloom whispers.

“I don't know. I'd better check,” Dad says.

“He'll be all right.”

“No, I have to see.” Dad comes over to my settee. My eyes are closed but I see him. He touches my cheek. His hand is warm.

“He's okay,” Dad says.

“You check on him often?” she says, her voice still low.

“Yah.”

“What are you looking for?” she asks.

“I just want to know he's alive.”

“You're with him too much. It's not healthy.”

“That's probably true.”

I open my eyes. Dad is in his jockies. Bloom is fully dressed. He takes her hand, and they go into the studio. I slither down from the settee onto the floor and very quietly crawl through the half-open door and hide in the shadows. Way back when I was a newborn, I learned from Spontaneous Combustion how to watch unobserved.

Dad and Bloom stand by the window and kiss. My first thought is to scream out my anguish at this sight, but something about the embrace is different from the hugs I'd seen earlier. Through Dad, I experience the touch of Bloom's lips, sweet and good. Stop right there, I want to say. Let's just preserve this in memory before it's stained by anything else that might go on between the two of us. No, it's three of us, or even four of us? I tell you this tale, Mother, as if three persons were involved, Dad and Bloom in an embrace and me watching and listening, but at the time it seems as if the three of us are all part of this gathering action, and now that I'm sending you thoughts it seems as if you were there, too.

“I like it by the window; I can see you better,” Dad says, his voice soft and teasing in a way it never is with me.

“I like it by the window so others can see us,” Bloom says.

“Our contribution to the city,” he says.

“Yes, New York is a great big mirror,” she says. “That's how I want to think of it.”

They keep pawing at each other. It's annoying and unnecessary. I want to break them up, or do I want to jump in the middle and join? Join what? I have no answers.

“What are you, Latour? You're not gay, but you're not like any man I know. At one end of the scale you're almost ridiculously
masculine. At the other end”—she touches his chest—“you're like a woman. What are you, Latour?”

“I guess I'm some kind of hybrid.”

“Hybrid painter, hybrid models—hybrid love,” she says in a whisper, followed by kissing.

Bloom lays out a canvas on the floor. She squeezes tubes of paint on the canvas. She tosses her clothes away and lies down on the canvas. Dad kneels beside her and fondles her, and then she fondles him and then they sort of fall over each other and roll around on the canvas, spreading the colors. Because of the dark it is hard to tell what they are doing. They writhe like snakes in a stone wall. I hear rustling sounds of their bodies on the canvas. I hear vowel sounds I never heard before. I don't understand those sounds, but they excite me. I picture the raptors of New York soaring through the night, enjoying experiences unknowable by lowly persons such as myself.

And suddenly whatever happened is over. Bloom laughs. “We better get cleaned up. This stuff is definitely not healthy for skin.”

“I'll give you a turpentine rubdown,” Dad says.

“Latour?”

“Yah.”

“You know what this means, don't you?”

“I do. You don't need models anymore.”

“I plan to start painting right away, and I need privacy when I paint.”

“Birch and I will be gone in the morning.”

I manage to sneak back to our room just before Bloom snaps on the light.

Six months later Birch and I return to New York with a load of spoons for Brewster Wiley. I visit The Hot looking for Bloom, not sure what I am going to say to her, and am startled to discover that the building is being pulled down. I check a phone book—no Rachel Bloom. An old feeling of unreality hovers over me. It's as if she were never there, as if our odd lovemaking never
happened. Brewster tells me that Bloom has decided to travel the world in search of subject matter for her art.

Brewster demands more spoons. He wants me to keep in touch via telephone and written communication; he wants “production”; he wants me to sign papers. I refuse on all counts. I'll take cash only, and he's not to know my whereabouts. I will never own a telephone. I will never purchase a post office box; I will never have an address. If the IRS or Persephone Salmon or anybody else wants me, let them find me on forgot land. Let the world swirl around me. I'm not part of it, nor do I wish to be. I enjoy being a fugitive. I tell Brewster how greedy he is, and he tells me how stubborn I am. Both charges are true. Our frailties are our bond.