Wherever There Is Light (16 page)

“I'll take you to the train.”

“You get some rest. I can take a bus.”

Kendall kissed him, and Julian tried to go back to sleep, but his mind was racing and he got up and dialed Siano Abruzzi. The two of them had some details to iron out.

T
hat Saturday, as a church bell rang in the golden air, Kendall's luck didn't improve, and by noon she was walking by tour buses of suburbanites who roamed the Village as if they were on safari, hoping to spot wild bohemians in their natural habitat.

At the Caffe Reggio, where the waiters couldn't have cared less about your race, Kendall drank a cappuccino. An older couple was at the next table. The man, in a butter-yellow suit without a shirt, had long white hair and the white chin whiskers of a billy goat; the woman, with a fuzzy cap of gray hair sprinkled with reddish brown and the face of a wise and mischievous angel, was draped in an olive poncho made from a blanket. Neither of them spoke, but they didn't seem unhappy—more like sculpture designed to provide the out-of-towners, chatting over coffee and pastry, with a glimpse of bohemia.

Kendall didn't spot the tether until the man stood to pay the bill. He was holding one end of a fat-looped chain; the other end was clipped to a bracelet on the woman's right wrist; and she shuffled behind him, chanting, “Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush . . .”

Horrified and fascinated, Kendall dropped a dollar on the table, took the Leica from her satchel, and followed them up MacDougal Street, listening to the droning nursery rhyme and the jingle-jangle of the chain hitting the sidewalk. As the man reached Washington Square, he turned, saying, “Come along, Christina,” and by the time she caught up with him, Kendall had clicked a fast five pictures of their backs as they disappeared into the crowd around the fountain.

On Monday, as Kendall rode the train into Manhattan to begin her painting from life class, she wished she'd been able to photograph the couple's faces and wondered if she'd see them again. All she had to do was wait the eighteen minutes it took her to walk from Penn Station to the Art Students League, because in a studio on the fourth floor, the man in his linen suit was poised beside an easel, staring at the dozen or so students on the folding chairs, and Christina, in her poncho, was sitting cross-legged on the floor, the chain running from one of her ankles to one of his.

Kendall was ecstatic. The man was Dodd Brigham—
the
reason she'd enrolled at the League. She hadn't recognized him in Caffe Reggio because in the photographs she'd seen of him, he was young, with a crew cut and clean-shaven.

“I cannot teach you to paint,” he said. “I can help you learn to see. Like the cubists, futurists, and surrealists, you may be tempted to twist form like a cruller or merge the realistic and fantastic to arrive at the essence of truth . . . I say there is paradox aplenty around you, and if you can render a paradox truthfully, then you will be an artist. So before you play with form, open your eyes. Wide. Consider my wife, Christina.”

The chain rattled when Christina stood and removed her poncho. A few students reacted with awkward laughter. Christina was naked, and she rotated in a full circle.

Kendall was astounded that she hadn't seen it immediately. Christina had to be in her midfifties. Her forehead, cheeks, and neck were lined, and her pubic patch was white. Yet her skin was taut, unmarred by sags or stretch marks, and she had the sleek curves, pert breasts, and beautifully shaped legs of a college girl. It was as though her face and hair had aged while her body had been exempted from the wages of time.

“A paradox, isn't it?” Brigham asked. “Its cause? A hiccup of nature? Exercise? Prayer? Who cares? Your task is to see it, then paint it.”

That evening, after Kendall told Julian about her experience in class, he said, “Let me get this straight. His wife's body looked younger than her face, and that's a paradox?”

“Over thirty years younger.”

“Nothing strange about them being chained to each other.”

“To me it was, but he didn't mention it.”

“And you paid for this?”

Kendall performed her shoulder trick, hunching and unhunching them, a gesture that appeared to express resignation but, Julian knew, was designed to dismiss his criticism. “Do you mind if I set up my easel and paint in the spare bedroom?”

“No problem. We could stop at a hardware store and get a chain.”

Kendall laughed, reluctantly, it seemed to Julian, as if she really didn't think it was funny.

A
fter four days, the painting was done. On the top half of the canvas was a young Negro woman in a lavender swimsuit standing in the sea, her eyes on the dawn coming over the horizon. Below her was a snowy sidewalk at dusk and a man in a fedora and overcoat walking with his head lowered. Julian could see the left side of his face. The man was white.

“It's great,” Julian said, not feeling as chipper as he sounded, because the painting made him nervous. “Don't I know those people?”

“They're not us. They're a paradox. They're together and they're in different places.”

“Where are they together?”

“Uh, in the painting?”

Intending to reassure her, Julian said, “Now I get it,” though the symbolism hadn't been apparent to him.

“Knew you would,” but Julian heard the doubt in her voice.

Perhaps it was painting again, but when Kendall went into New York on Monday, she was optimistic about her future. Not even the terse letter her mother had mailed to Julian's, demanding to know when she was going to move, or her discovery that the basement apartment next door to the Cherry Lane Theatre was no longer for rent could dampen her spirits. At the corner of Commerce Street and Bedford, Kendall bent to retie her Keds and noticed a man in a blue work shirt and dungarees watching her through a courtyard gate. When she stood up, she saw that it was Dodd Brigham. He called out to her, “You are in my class, are you not?”

“Yes, sir,” she answered, and introduced herself.

Opening the gate, he let her into the courtyard and said to his wife, “Christina, my student Kendall Wakefield is here.”

Christina was seated on a redwood settee in a black velvet smoking jacket and squinting against the sun. Again, Kendall was amazed by the contrast between the age lines creasing her face and the youthfulness of her legs. Like her husband, Christina was barefoot, but both had a metal cuff on their right ankles and were connected by the chain.

When Kendall said hello, Christina chanted, “Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.”

“My wife's displeased with one of my paintings. Why don't you give them a look?”

Six paintings, magnificent additions to his series
The Rooftops of New York
, were on a bench and tilted back against a wall of a townhouse. Brigham's technique was borrowed from the Ashcan School, but the critics referred to him as a “psycho-realist,” for his sole focus was the stormy internal weather of women, and though Kendall believed that her race had made her life more difficult than her sex ever did, two of the paintings disturbed her.

The first was of a rooftop wedding on an overcast afternoon, the groom slipping the ring on his bride's finger as the minister and guests watched. The only person not paying attention was the bride. Her left hand was extended to receive the ring, but her right hand was pressed against the pregnancy swelling her gown, and with eyes as desolate as the clouds, she gazed out at the surrounding rooftops, where women were hanging laundry on the lines.

The second was the painting that Kendall guessed Christina had objected to. On a twilit roof, Brigham, in a tuxedo, sat at a cocktail table. Across from him the chair was empty, and on the table was a candelabra and two flutes of champagne. Behind Brigham, a violinist in top hat and tails played. Cupping a hand to his mouth, Brigham called through the shadows to a woman. She was naked and, with her cropped hair, resembled Christina. Yet only her back was visible, because she had jumped from the ledge and was suspended in midair, the lights of the city glittering on her pale skin.

“They're extraordinary,” Kendall said.

Brigham was perched on a stool, so shameless in his admiration of Kendall's chest that she thought it was a miracle his eyeballs didn't shoot out of his head. Just then, Christina yanked on the chain, the links rattling, and Brigham flew off the stool, exclaiming, “Good grief!” Kendall managed not to laugh. Brigham said to her, “Excuse our contretemps,” and once on his feet, asked Christina, “What would you like, my dear?”

“Jack Sprat could eat no fat, his wife could eat no lean.”

“Yes, the pharmacy. The key, please.”

She gave a key to Brigham, who unlocked the cuff from his ankle, put the key on the arm of the settee, and stepped into a pair of moccasins. Brigham was gone before Kendall could conjure up an excuse to leave. Wary, she looked at Christina, who erupted in laughter. Kendall had expected a mad cackling, but her laugh was warm and whimsical, like a smile set to music.

“Take a load off,” Christina said. “What brings you to the Village?”

“Trying to rent an apartment.”

“That must be a hoot and a holler. Negroes used to live in Little Africa, over on Minetta Lane and Minetta Street, before the Italians chased them uptown.”

Kendall knew it was rude to stare, but she couldn't stop staring at the chain, which was coiled on the grass. Christina said, removing the cuff from her ankle, “I'm sorry if the chain upset you.”

“It made me think of my grandfather.”

Christina flung the cuff onto the grass. “He was a slave?”

“He was. And his mother was sold to another plantation when he was a child.”

“I told Brig it was in bad taste, but the chain's his trite notion of a metaphor for the bondage of longtime love.”

“Is that how it feels? Like being in chains?”

“More or less. You feel imprisoned and safe, and after a while, you can't tell the difference. Do you have someone?”

“We're sort of starting out.”

“The chains take time. I've been with Brig since high school. My father was the headmaster of Tabor Academy. That's eighty miles from Boston. He'd been roommates with Brig's father at Harvard. Brig's from Chicago, but he came east for Harvard and spent Thanksgiving with us. I showed Brig the town, and he showed me my clitoris.”

Kendall blurted out, “You got the better end of that deal.”

Christina laughed, and Kendall suddenly felt a rush of affection for her. “Brig and I ran off the night of my graduation. We didn't get married till years later. In the garden at Saint Luke's. It was an interesting wedding. Vincent Millay wrote a poem for us.”

“You're kidding? I've heard her read her poetry on the radio. She's a friend of yours?” Kendall was excited, feeling as if she were inching closer to the carnival she'd come to find.

“Vincent lived next door, and if I didn't clock her at my wedding, she'd have diddled Brig in the rectory. My parents said I loused up the ceremony with the fight and because the guests threw marijuana seeds at us instead of rice. You ever smoke Mary Jane?”

“It's illegal, isn't it?”

“Not if you buy it from a doctor or druggist who pays the federal tax on it. Brig's getting some now. I'll give you a couple of samples and you can smoke them with your someone. And don't fret. You won't end up reciting nursery rhymes. That's a game I play with Brig. He has to figure out what I mean. How's your painting going?”

“I just finished one. I don't know if it's any good.”

“No artist knows. Brig has to ask me. He hates that.”

Kendall wished that Julian could critique her paintings, a wish that made her feel selfish and unappreciative. He'd been so kind to her, and art was her choice, not his. Still . . .