Ruth Kligman & Willem de Kooning, 1959.
That night, they celebrated.
A corner table at Leone’s beside two stone lions, a wide view of the lavish room—the real New York. Women with diamonds at their throats and impossibly thin men in shiny black suits with silver wings over their ears. Billy Jean wore a dress she’d borrowed from Ruth, a little big in the bust, but attractively snug over the hips. Midnight blue velvet in the front, black lace at the back, black satin gloves. She and Ruthie had spent the afternoon at a beauty parlor—nails, sets, waves, the works.
Bill ordered wine for the table. He ordered their food, too, but Billy Jean didn’t mind—years of bland oatmeal for breakfast, a dry cheese sandwich for lunch, beef stew or pork and beans for dinner, she’d eat anything this place offered. He’d consulted the menu with the owner, Gene, who leaned over his shoulder, appreciating Bill’s every selection. Bill would have the calf’s sweet breads en casserole—two calf’s liver sautes with Canadian bacon for the girls. But Ruth overruled him—she would have the chicken cacciatore. And cantaloupe crescents for the table, she insisted.
“To Billy Jean and her new job!” said Ruth, and Bill said, “Hear, hear.”
After the meal the middle-aged couple at the next table came over. With apologies, the woman asked if Mr. De Kooning would draw her a picture of her cat, Ida.
“Sweet as apple cida!” said the husband with a red-cheeked chuckle.
The woman offered her handkerchief and the husband his fountain pen. Bill said he’d be happy to.
“No, he wouldn’t,” said Ruth.
“I beg your pardon,” said the woman.
“I said, he wouldn’t be happy to do it. In fact, it’s quite impossible.”
“Well, I—”
“It’s really no problem,” said Bill. He smiled at the couple, fountain pen poised at the ready.
“It really is a very big problem,” said Ruth.
“Shut up, you,” said the husband.
“Yeah, shut up,” said Bill.
“Are you going to pay Sid Janis his cut on that napkin?”
“For Christ’s sake, Ruth, it’s a cat on a hankie.” He’d started on the ears, two little triangles.
“I’ll tell Sid on you and he’ll whoop you good.”
“Yeah,” scoffed Bill.
“You little Dutch peckerwood, wood shoes—”
“Lady, you have a filthy mouth,” said the husband.
“Oh, get you back to Kansas City, you big fat hayseed.”
Billy Jean stood to excuse herself to the powder room, but Ruth said, “Sit the fuck down, Alma. You know these two twerps from back in Kansas?”
“A god-damned bottle and a half,” said Bill to the middle-westerners, jerking his thumb at Ruth. “One-whole-bottle, for Christ’s sake, and a half besides. Three-to-one it’s turned her nipples purple.”
“Yeah and I’ll have another half. But if you draw that fucking cat, I’ll tell Sid Janis on you.”
Bill flourished the fountain pen, one big swoop for the curlicue tail, a hump for the back. “Apologies,” he said as he signed his name and handed the handkerchief back. “I failed to draw Ida, sweet as apple cida. I’ve instead drawn a species known as ruthus ruthus. Black as her mammie’s asshole, round at the middle, a throbbing red cunt perpetually in heat.”
Ruth screamed, a sound like an alleycat, and swung the bottle of Riesling at Bill’s head, spraying the tablecloth with the dregs. Bill ducked and the bottle bounced off the stone lion—Billy Jean was amazed it didn’t shatter.
Bill stood to his feet and bowed theatrically. “And good night,” he said to the room.
Leone’s, West 48th & Broadway, 1959.
Latin Quarter, Times Square, 1959.
Billy Jean had assumed the evening was over, but they kept on going—from Leone’s to the Latin Quarter, a short cab ride down the street. Ruth even huddled against Bill, locking arms with him as they weaved down the sidewalk. They cooed and whispered, and it was all very strange.
Bill didn’t like the Latin Quarter. He told the door man, “three fat middle-westerners for the buffet special,” and hooted all through Betty Grable’s signature song. They were eventually asked to leave, by a lookalike Ernest Hemingway who doubled as a bouncer, but just retreated to a back corner beside the bar. Billy Jean had switched to beer, but Bill had started in on martinis and Ruth came back from the powder room red-eyed and clenching her teeth, furiously excited about something. Billy Jean offered to take a cab home—is that what you say? Take a cab home?—but Ruth had insisted that was a very bad idea and that Billy Jean wouldn’t want to miss such an evening.
The Latin Quarter’s floorshow featured the Six Flying De Pauls and a fleet of topless girls singing songs like Plastered in Paris and I Lost My Cherie in Paree. At midnight the whole room stood to their feet—those who could stand—and sang Auld Lang Syne arm-in-arm. Bill paid their bill with an American Express card. “It’s new!” cried Ruth. “It’s plastic!”
Metropole Cafe, 1959.
From the Latin Quarter they went back the other direction to the Metropole for “some Dixieland,” because Bill insisted it was his turn to choose. Billy Jean switched to ginger ales at the Metropole, though their barmaid—who was topless with little glittery circles glued to her nipples—had rolled her eyes. Bill’s eyelids looked like sagging, worn-out window shades, a character in a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Ruth’s lipstick was smeared and her mascara was clumped in the corners of her eyes but she kept insisting she was having a marvelous time. They looked like two people who had walked through a wall. Billy Jean again offered to take herself home, but Ruth just said, “Don’t be a baby, Jilly Bean.”
At two in the morning they wandered around the corner to the Shelton Towers Hotel and stumbled into Basin Street East in such a state that Bill had to hold onto Ruth’s shoulder, as though he were a blind man. The music was pleasant, soft and smooth, a mellow cap to the evening. A suntanned man sitting at the bar sent Billy Jean a bright red drink. A tall fellow in a pale yellow suit asked her to dance and kissed her on the ear and offered her to go back to his flat.
It was after four when they took a cab back to Bill’s studio. Ruth’s eyes were bugged open though she seemed otherwise to be asleep. Bill chattered ceaselessly with the cab driver, a Scotsman, about golf. He sat on the edge of the back seat, between Ruth and Billy Jean, and kept scooting forward to make a point, or demonstrate a backswing.
Bill and Ruth stumbled at the curb and fell in unison onto the sidewalk in front of Bill’s building. Billy Jean tried to help them up, but they both just crawled to the building on their hands and knees, laughing all the way, and pulled themselves to their feet by the door-handle.
“He’s a fucking drunk,” slurred Ruth.
“Why don’t you go into the grave with your Jackson Pollock,” spat Bill.
Ruth threw her head back to laugh, seemed to injure herself, sucked her teeth and said, “I had two months with Jackson Pollock and my Dutch Crutch is jealous.”
In the elevator they began to scream at one another, screaming such incoherencies—incoherent for all but the vilest expletives—that it turned, about the third floor, to hair-pulling and face-slapping. Ruth smacked Bill across the face with her handbag and Bill drew back and let fly a wild punch. Billy Jean screamed and shrunk into the corner. Bill missed Ruth’s face, where he was clearly aiming, but hit her so hard in the chest that she collapsed to the floor of the elevator wheezing for breath.
“That’s what you get,” he panted.
Billy Jean sank into a crouch and wept in the corner.
When the elevator arrived at the top floor, Bill said, “Phooey to it all,” and stomped off somewhere. Ruth fumbled and lit herself a cigaret before struggling to her feet. When she noticed Billy Jean didn’t follow her out, noticed for the first time she was crying, she said, “Oh, kid.”
“I’m sorry,” said Billy Jean. “I really did have a wonderful night.”
“Oh, kid. Oh, kid.” Ruth helped her off the elevator and shushed and soothed and petted the curl in Billy Jean’s hairdo with her cigaret hand.
“I wished for you to be so happy,” cried Billy Jean.
“I am, kid. I am!” said Ruth. “Look here, look.” She shook Billy Jean by the shoulder. “Look here, kid, I want to show you something.”
Billy Jean dabbed at her eyes and met Ruth’s. They were wild, misshapen goat’s eyes, ringed in deep black circles.
“I want to show you,” she whispered, and the eyes went to opposite corners like her whole head was filled with booze, the eyes just bobbing around in it.
Ruth placed a finger over her lips. She staggered unsteadily back beside the elevator, to what looked like a maintenance closet. “He doesn’t have the key,” she muttered. “Only I have the key, he can’t be bothered with such things.”
She opened the door and pulled a chain, lighting up a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The room was about eight feet by ten, stacked with wood crates and paint buckets, crammed with broken frames and disused canvases.
“Come on, come on,” whispered Ruth, stepping gingerly past the clutter, cigaret held aloft. “Look here.”
Set low in the corner was a plywood door the size of a small cabinet, sort of a makeshift safe with a small brass padlock, like for a jewelry box. Ruth produced a key and opened the little door with a squeak. She pulled out a parcel wrapped in brown paper, an oblong shape about a foot by three. She set it on the floor and futzed with the paper with her cigaret hand, said “Fuck’s sake,” as her nails scratched ineffectively, jabbed the cigaret between her teeth and scratched some more.
“What is it?” asked Billy Jean.
“Insurance, Alma dear. Man insurance.” She stuck her tongue in the corner of her mouth and grunted grotesquely at her work. The cigaret fell out just as she got one corner peeled back. She licked her lips and sighed.
A brilliant confusion of whites and blacks and oranges and golds. Like an angry, exploded sunset.
“What’s it called?”
“Alma, this is called Number 25, 1950.”
MONDAY, 20 APRIL 1959. NEW YORK CITY.
Dez shook the rain from his hat and folded the collar of his raincoat down. He had to elbow in sideways, the San Remo was so crowded. In the left-hand corner booth, curving around from the front window along dark paneled walls marred with chalk graffiti—Howzit Gozit Was Here!—Harry Dial waved him over.
Harry was an old timer, a drummer and a bandleader of the generation preceding Bus Bassey’s, the early bands who played a thing called jass and which Bus’s generation turned into radio swing. Harry had seen the end coming and invested his money, buying up cheap land out in Suffolk County, selling it back to the State of New York for the construction of the Long Island Expressway. He did it all through a shell company with a white man fronting so nobody could cheat him out of it. Now, he wore a gold ring on his pinky and an ostrich feather in his two-hundred-dollar hat, which was hung from a peg above the booth. No one knew where Harry lived now—he wouldn’t say, though Bus swore he’d seen him get out of a cab in Central Park West—but he still palled around with the same crowd, drank the same beer, sat in the same booth at the San Remo he’d occupied since ‘25.
Dez hung his Stetson Continental on the peg next to Harry’s, tossed his raincoat over the back of the seat and slid in.
“Dez, you remember the kid Paulie,” shouted Harry. The kid opposite was tall and goofy with a scrawny beard and thin moustache that didn’t quite connect to each other. He was a banjo player from somewhere, Dez seemed to remember. The Village was full of them, goofy kids from Indiana and Tennessee and New Hampshire—the hometown-best at the autoharp or the harpsichord or the Chordomonica, come to the big city on a 20-day contract with C. B. S. Stinking up the studio rooms with reefer and farmboy armpit stink, followed around by a secretary with a can of Lysol. Dez mimed a hello across the table and Paulie smiled and waved back. The waiter came around with a tray of Schaefer longnecks. Harry elbowed Dez and shook a thumb at Paulie. “I told him now that Castro’s in town he’s gonna have to shave that thing.” Paulie snickered and smiled sheepishly. The butt end of a marijuana cigaret smoldered in the ashtray.
Dez wiped the raindrops from his glasses with his necktie—the only necktie in the place—and surveyed the room. There were berets and ballcaps and plenty of bushy hairdos with no hats at all, women in lithe black turtleneck sweaters and men’s corduroy trousers, fellows in corduroy suits and denim jackets. The place smelled like spilled coffee and wet leather. There was an enormous silver espresso machine on the bar, smudged with handprints, skinny arms and steam spouts, the biggest thing in the room. It looked like something out of Forbidden Planet, and in fact Dez could just make out Leslie Nielsen in a booth in the far corner, cheersing Camparis with Colleen Dewhurst and Eli Wallach—there were usually a couple of Hollywood tourists these days, juicing their curriculum vitae with something uncommercial in some stifling off-Broadway box.
Appearing suddenly out of the crush of bodies, Bus Bassey slid into the booth next to Paulie and Fernie Legros slid in next to Dez. Fernie wore a blue velvet sportcoat over a cream-colored shirt buttoned at the collar. He smelled of Aqua Velva. Bus leaned across the table and shouted, “Was just talking to Peewee Steed.”
“Dig,” said Harry.
“Tough times,” said Bus. Bus was in his powder-blue cardigan and a soft chamois shirt with no tie. He smiled at Dez and saluted, two fingers touching a wildgrown drainpipe eyebrow.
“Peewee used to play with the big bands,” explained Harry. “Now he’s a one-hander, the Broadway day rehearsal scene. Rolls dice with the other hand, in the alleys out back.”
“Whatcha drinking?” Paulie asked Bus, the kid’s accent pure Massachusetts Sticks.
“Desmond’s laying out Dewar’s,” said Bus, and nodded back over his shoulder. Dez saw Paul Desmond, a skinny square bent like a dollar sign, surrounded by youths in motorcycle jackets. With a penknife Desmond was chopping at a line of cocaine. He snorted it off the little sill that ran along the paneled wall below graffiti that said Tall boys call Mamie to-nite! GR 2-2277. Desmond smiled big, white powder smudging the lenses of his glasses. GRamercy two, twenty-two seventy-seven. “GR A-BASS,” said Dez and snickered to himself.
“Desmond and Brubeck,” Harry was saying, “gonna get paid by Columbia. Gonna spend it all on booger sugar.”
Paulie snickered and nibbled at the tiny butt end of his joint, rolling around his big hick-kid fingers.
The waiter returned with another round of Schaefers. Dez dropped a dollar bill on the tray. “My round.”
“This kid’s high as 125th street britches,” said Bus, thumbing at Paulie.
“That’s why he’s so quiet,” said Harry.
“Quieter than a John Cage number.”
Dez said to Fernie, “Ran into Monsieur De Hory at the Ukrainian diner.”
“He’s going by Raynal these days,” smiled Fernie. “Tax purposes.”
“Glad he’s doing better.”
“He is.”
“A sweet old guy.”
“The sweetest,” said Bus.
Fernie leaned in, “We’re digging up gold potatoes in Florida, Dez—the comte and me. Could use someone with your experience, you just say the word.”
“Dig the suntan,” said Bus.
“I’ve got no eye for it,” said Dez. “I’d only be in your way.”
Fernie said, “The method is brilliant, Dez. There is a warehouse out on Staten Island, another in Chinatown, one on the way down in Baltimore. Each has got a whole catalog of frames and canvases and paper and everything—period specific. Paints and dyes made as they would have been in the 16th century. Processes for staining, burnishing metals, aging woods, every little thing. It is all worked through a blind medium, untraceable. I tell you, you cannot see the difference. But you’ll forget I told you this.”
Dez said, “Forgotten.”
The juke was playing Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm, some of the kids were dancing by the bar, girls with boys, boys with boys. Dez spotted Dore Ashton, in a peasant blouse and linen skirt with pockets, leaning on the bar chatting with a colored girl. Dore’s hair was dark and short, trimmed to show a long porcelain neck she always seemed to be caressing with her hand. Behind her, Grace Hartigan, in a kid mohair sweater and dungarees, was waving at the bartender.
“Hairy underarms,” said Fernie, following Dez’s gaze.
“Who, Grace?” asked Bus.
Fernie shrugged. “All the female painters.”
“How in the fuck would you know?” asked Harry, and laughed silently, only evident because his big shoulders heaved up and down.
“Believe me, before they understand my unique persuasions, plenty have doffed their smocks and shown me their wares.”
Bus craned his neck. “He’s kidding us.”
Dez offered Filter Kings and Bus lit them. “Gros visages de lune and hairy underarms,” said Fernie.
Paulie laughed into his cocked elbow. “Not Dore though,” he said, and though it was only three words he barely got it out.
“How come,” said Bus.
Fernie shrugged again. “She is not really a painter, she is a critic. But she is like them. Une touche bohème.”
Paul Desmond leaned his elbow on the corner of the boothback. His eyes were wide, the lenses of his glasses still faintly dusted white. “The most attractive thing about her is the Times byline,” he said.
“He’s kidding us,” said Bus.
“They would never let her in their club without them,” said Fernie, making his point in the air with his cigaret.
“You knuckleheads,” said Harry.
“Plenty of gorgeous painters about the Village these days—Mercedes Matter, our Miss Hartigan.”
“Adele Morales,” offered Desmond.
“Don’t the fellas you’re laying pipe with have hairy armpits, Fernie?” said Harry.
“Union boys,” someone said, and someone laughed.
“That’s skilled labor for you.”
Fernie clucked his tongue. “Not all of them,” he said, dripping a Dean Martin baritone. Paulie snickered himself out of the booth and stumbled up to the bar.
“Kid’s all right,” said Dez. “I like him.”
Paul Clayton, 1959.
“He’s working on a Pete Seeger thing,” said Harry. “You know, my banjo’s in the baño and all that. New songs that sound old. He’ll be alright, all right, if he can stay off the dope and the he-she hookers.” Harry sucked on his cigar. “We was on a tour, during the war. One night after a show up in Harlem, Harry Altman asked us up to Buffalo to play a new place he was opening, the Victory Room. A fruit club, but back then they’d let the colored bands play the fruit clubs. The usual floor shows, a novelty dancer named Leon la Verdi and a six-girl chorus. Only the girls was boys. Leon comes out in the encore in the same outfit as the chorus girls. I tell you, them armpits was smooth. Not a follicle.”
The jukebox swapped records, Domenico Modugno’s Volare. The room swelled and everyone sang the opening lines together, bouncing along to the rhythm of Italian syllables.
Dez squeezed out of the booth and made his way across the room. At the bar he reached out his hand over the head of a short girl in a pleated skirt doing hip-dips with her beatnik boyfriend. Dore Ashton smiled, took Dez’s hand, and let him spin her in close.
“It’s Keener, right?” she smiled.
“Uh-huh.”
They danced for a while together, Dez’s Filter King clenched in the corner of his mouth, Dore’s head resting on his shoulder. She laughed and he made faces, she tossed her head back and sang along with the record.
“For a square,” said Harry, “Dez sure does make it look easy.”
“She don’t know it, but she’s in there with the champ,” said Bus.
Harry said, “That boy’s got a deep, unbridled kindness in him that only comes out when he’s very drunk.”
“Makes you wonder what good he might’ve done,” said Bus.
“You mean the plane crash?” said Fernie.
Harry sighed. “He means Toffee.”
Dez dipped Dore so low she ran parallel to the ground, swung her back up giggling, and kicked his bad leg out so high he had to limp back to the bar, both of them laughing the whole time.