Professor Diamond, coming up behind me on the sidewalk, doesn’t cross the street this time, no doubt recalling the previous incident with shame, her humiliating defeat the last time she came up behind me. With her footsteps just a few yards away, I hold resolutely to the center of the sidewalk, knowing she will have to step onto the grass to get by me. The footsteps quicken—she is accelerating her pace in order to blaze past me. And now she is passing, her sleeve swishes millimeters from mine. I turn and look. She is staring straight ahead, her aquiline profile inches from my face. I smell the perfume, see the throbbing of the pulse in her neck, and now she is in front of me, in her black half-heel shoes, stepping smartly.
As I watch her walk away the word “hussy” comes to mind. I feel a peculiar satisfaction, as if I have found the right word at last.
Of course this is a game I am playing. A childish, stupid game.
I manage to get the new suit on, a dark-gray suit with vest. She has bought me new underwear as well. She holds the mirror for me to see. She is not happy with the way the pants bag at the seat. I tell her that doesn’t matter, since I will be lying down. “Hush,” she says. She folds a handkerchief and fits it in the breast pocket.
The taxi driver is a tall smiling African who helps me get in and out. Moll wears a blue loose-fitting dress and high heels. Her ankles and feet are so swollen she has had to manhandle them into the shoes. “You look like Cinderella’s sister,” I say. I sit across from her in the restaurant in my new suit. She asks me what I want to eat, and when the waiter comes she orders for us both. At the end of the meal he brings her the check. She has taken me in charge, I find myself thinking.
She has draped a scarf over the shade of the standing lamp next to her chair, to protect me from the glare. The light shining through the scarf casts shadows of flowers on the walls and paintings. I close my eyes. I hear her turning the pages. I fall asleep, and wake and she is there, and I go to sleep again. It must be left over from childhood, this feeling of peace that comes over me, falling asleep while someone is reading in the room. I wake up again when she clicks the lamp off. I listen to her climb the creaking stairs to her room. Alone in the semidarkness, I watch the leaf shadows moving faintly on the bedcovers.
On the refrigerator this morning, under the magnet that held the picture of Diamond, which I have thrown away: the secret of happiness is not to grieve for the past or worry about the future, not to mull over yesterday or fret about tomorrow, not to anticipate troubles, but to live the present moment wisely and sincerely.
Buddha was a dog, I tell her.
Meininger’s huge paintings piled up. They leaned four and five deep against the walls of his studio and in the hall. Only toward the end of his stay did he manage to sell anything. Toward the end he sold three or four pieces for a pittance.
The belief, which everyone accepted, which was taken to be evident on the face of it, held that Peter Meininger was a genius. His paintings did not make him a genius, he was a genius before he ever picked up a brush. It was because everyone already thought he was a genius that they took his paintings as evidently works of genius. His uncanny ability to sense the newest thing made him look to most people like a genius.
He was capable of becoming a great art failure, I thought at the time. With the critical dismissal and general ridicule of his nudes, he was on his way to becoming an obscure great artist reject. In spite of the personal animosities between us I thought of him as a spiritual art pal, as one of the club. I paid for the paints and canvas. I was eager to do that. They were huge canvases, he never touched a brush to anything that was less than gigantic, he painted in the most expensive manner possible. Apart from a few odd jobs, he depended on my money, and I fell over myself to help him. For three years I supported him in the most public way imaginable. It was the least I could do, I thought, as a friend of the artist and as a collector. I thought he was a great artist, that we were artists together. I see now that he was a great sponge artist.
He had been living in my house for more than a year, when one day he stopped me in the hall. I was returning from somewhere and was taking off my jacket when the door to the studio slid open. He has been waiting behind the door for my return, I remember thinking. He stepped into the hall and gravely announced that he wanted my opinion on something. I remember being struck by the formal, almost pompous way in which he said this. We sat in two straight-back chairs. A huge canvas was propped against the wall in front of us. It was not what I expected. Meininger was a representational painter: despite distortions, one could always make out a figure, a design of some sort, a plan, but here there was nothing. We sat side by side and looked at the painting. He sat leaning forward, elbows crooked, hands on his knees, as if about to spring to his feet, as if about to leap toward the painting in order to add some decisive touch. I searched in vain for a motif, an organizing principle: I saw an impasto quilt of ragged reds and browns, a hodgepodge of splotches. “What do you think?” he asked. I pretended to study the painting. It looked unfinished. Perhaps that’s deliberate, I thought. I didn’t want to say anything that would suggest it was not finished, if that was deliberate. I was aware that he was looking at my face, at my eyes, he was leaning forward in order to follow the movement of my eyes. I could not find my way around in the painting, it was an impenetrable thicket of color. I felt lost, and I panicked. Meininger stood up. He said, “You don’t know how to look at a painting, do you?” His tone was matter-of-fact and dismissive. That is all he said, and he turned his back on me. With his back to me he resumed work on the canvas: I had been dismissed and could now leave. At that moment, walking out of the studio, shutting the door softly behind me, I felt the first stirrings of hatred for Meininger.
Thinking about it later, I realized this this was the first step in Meininger’s process of annihilation, his methodical crushing operation, which I would finish up by becoming completely insane.
In the meanwhile, my frank and open admiration of Meininger became a disguise for my repressed loathing of Meininger.
There are moments when death seems to pull back, losing its imminence, becoming just another unpleasant thing I will have to deal with someday. But probably not today, I think, probably not tomorrow, and so forth.
We sit across from each other at supper, talking quietly. The weather is warm, the kitchen door open. I imagine people in the adjacent yards hearing the clink of cutlery, the murmur of voices. I imagine the sounds calling up in their minds images of quiet domestic happiness.
I handed her over to Meininger. I saw he wanted her and I pushed her onto him. It was only later, when I finally got a psychological distance on Meininger, that it became clear to me that I had been acting under his influence all along. He wanted her and he cleverly used his influence to get me to push her onto him.
It was not something he consciously set out to do, he was not the calculating type, he never thought, I am going to manipulate my friend into handing over his wife. It all happened quite naturally. The handing over, the voluntary ceding of my wife to him, seemed at the time, in the context of the household at the time, the usual thing to do, as banal as the most ordinary commercial exchange. It was a completely normal consequence of the power of Meininger, a natural effect of the Meininger magnetism, of the Meininger system.
The system was like a web, with Meininger crouching at its center.
Moll is not well. I sat with her on the porch glider while Janine ran the vacuum. I actively forced her to go to Meininger, I can see that now.
In the end I came up with the money that allowed him to start again in California, to go there and move into a first-class studio, step into the middle of Los Angeles art life as an up-and-coming German artist, though he had scarcely sold anything. Meininger, the completely successful minor art waste producer, had always intended to become a serious painter again, I still believe. He was just going to set himself up, financially speaking, and then he would go back to painting seriously in complete freedom, he must ha
ve thought. But that was impossible. In the end he must have seen how impossible it was.
I was always insane, but for most of my life I thought I was normal. I believed that any objective test would show how depressingly normal I was. I wanted to be interestingly crazy. I wanted to be interestingly and romantically crazy, while in fact I was tediously crazy without even knowing it. Meininger, who appeared totally mad, who became practically famous as an artistic lunatic, was secretly a one hundred percent sane art-business schemer and calculator.
I thought he would disappear in California, but he did the opposite of disappearing. With the astonishing commercial success of his family portraits he came to a fork in his life path. This was his second life crisis. He had abandoned his wife and children in Munich to come be a failure in America, and now in California, with his family portraits, he realized he could either fail as an artist or succeed as a businessman. With the unexpected success of those shocking portraits he became a world-class art entrepreneur. He turned himself into an art-genius impersonator. Aspects of his character, unpleasant personality traits that he had kept secret from us or that we had dismissed as minor flaws, now became art-marketable assets, flaws and assets put on display in the calculated viciousness of his public rants and spectacular feats of self-promotion. The confident and blatant advertising of himself became his life function, and that very fact became a selling point for artworks that with the aid of a production crew he was turning out on an industrial scale. He didn’t first become a shameless self-promoter in California, but he was now that for everyone to see. And the more he celebrated his own crassness the more he was sought after by a class of people for whom the shameless display of wealth is a way of life.
It was completely predictable that Meininger’s portraits of wealthy Californians of the most boorish type, in the midst of their outlandish vegetation and with a background of palm trees and ocean, especially the portraits of their families, would make him an art celebrity. An art celebrity who would be invited everywhere as a pseudo bohemian party trophy. Posed with the family was always some piece of Southern California lifestyle equipment (automobile, golf clubs, jewelry, furniture, villa), often in the center of the painting and meticulously rendered: this became a Meininger signature. They thought these portraits, for which they paid small fortunes, showed the brilliance and comfort of their lives when in fact they were a merciless denunciation of those lives. They didn’t see this because he kept to himself, kept who he was hidden from them, behind his affectations, the white linen suits, the omnipresent dark glasses, the crazy stunts. He pandered to them, but I, who knew Meininger better than anyone else, saw it right away, saw the absolute contempt. The minute I laid eyes on the portraits I saw they were practically homicidal.
Meininger threw away his genius in exactly the same way that I threw away my small fortune.
He went to California and left me the Nude in Deck Chair, and of course all the other paintings. For the past twenty-five years I have lived with a houseful of paintings I was tricked into buying. He left the painting here in order to drive me crazy, so that every day I could stand by the Nivenson mantel and look up at Moll in the deck chair and ruminate about it endlessly, daring me to throw it out, knowing I would not throw it out, that I would sit here in this room and chew on it.
With his spectacular, shocking end, Meininger surpassed me even in the art of failing. It was a woman I scarcely know, a person from one of his other circles, who told me the circumstances of his death. Talking to people afterward I surprised and shocked everyone, including myself, by referring to his death as an attention-grabbing stunt. It was, I told them, Meininger’s last art trick.
He had succeeded as a minor artist. His art career was at its peak, with worldwide recognition, when he died. In the art world his death was viewed as a tragic loss. It was an inexplicable tragedy. The thoughtless reflex explanation one heard everywhere at the time was that he had succumbed to the pressures of fame. The fact that he would shoot himself in the kitchen of his own luxurious house, with dozens of close friends, his customers and patrons, partying on the other side of the door, was an offensive and completely shocking display of Meininger’s absolute contempt for them all.
John Berryman was a great artist who produced great art. Peter Meininger was a great artist who produced minor art. Enid Diamond is a minor artist, though it is possible she doesn’t know that, who produces minor art. Harold Nivenson was also a minor artist, but he was a lost minor artist who was never able to accept his place in the scheme of things.
Her legs and ankles are hideously swollen. Even talking makes her breathless. Janine makes supper. Alfie sits in the rocker and jiggles.
The suicide of Emily Dickinson. The suicide of Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde was present. I was a child when Dwight Eisenhower committed suicide, with his wife Susan. Hemingway held her dog while Gertrude Stein committed suicide.
What difference could it possibly make?
The Meininger period did not end with his departure. It became the impossible Meininger period. Those who remained thought of themselves as Meininger’s old entourage, his art pals and his art nudes, but they were actually an unruly mob of losers and failures at everything. We struggled to continue after he left. The art-movement atmosphere deteriorated into aimless hanging out. Without him we didn’t know what to do with ourselves or each other. It gradually dawned upon me that these were not interesting people. They were thoroughly boring people who had been made interesting by Meininger.
Even basic sanitation became a problem. Filth piled up in an atmosphere of drug- and alcohol-induced indifference. At times, rather than wash the hundreds of dishes caked with molding food that were scattered not just in the kitchen but all over the house and yard, people went out and bought paper plates. They filled garbage bags that no one could remember to put out on pick-up days, stacking them on the screen porch where raccoons broke in and tore them open.
The house became notorious as a completely unruly place. It became a house of scandal. I would wake to shouts and see blue lights racing across the ceiling. I spent a lot of money on whole teams of lawyers to prevent it being shut down completely, as an ill-governed and disorderly house, under a statute governing public nuisances. People were becoming sick, they were becoming physically diseased. The atmosphere, not just the actual air but also the entire mental-health climate, had become mephitic, I thought.
When Meininger left I went downhill. I did this even though I was recovering, even while I was recovering, while I was gradually undoing the tremendous damage he had done. It was debilitating and painful, the surgical removal of the artificially implanted persona I had taken on in the course of his period, and therefore it looked as if I was going downhill.
People commented on my outfits. They made remarks suggesting I was letting myself go. In fact I was getting rid of the Meininger style, which for a time required an anti-Meininger style, as a form of therapy. In place of the broad-brimmed hat, for example, I wore a ragged watch cap that I pulled down over my ears. I chose ill-fitting discount-store suits even when I could still afford something better. It was psychologically necessary to turn my back on the Meininger dandyism at the same time as I was turning my back on his painting.
With Meininger gone I didn’t know what to do with myself. I finally locked up the house and went away, traveling first to Mexico, then to Egypt and Europe. I threw away the last of my small fortune on pointless tourism, until I was completely worn out, crisscrossing the whole of Europe, driven from city to city by my hatred of Meininger. In every city I went to I visited museums. I did nothing but visit museums and sit in my hotel. I lived on bread. By the time I reached Istanbul I was completely insane. I had thrown away the little that remained of my fortune and had no idea who I was or what I should do with myself.
She didn’t come down yesterday. All day today I have expected her to come down, hearing her footsteps and thinking she is coming down, but she is only crossing the hall to the bathro
om.
The smell of incense drifting down.
She has not turned on the television.
Three nights without a light in Diamond’s house. She is on vacation, I suppose. She has gone on a trip somewhere, perhaps even a sabbatical. She might have been gone for days already before I noticed. Now I check every night.
In the end I came back. Because the house was here. I came back and found it practically in ruins. The roof leaked and water had caused plaster to fall from the ceilings upstairs. Squatters had moved in, scrawling on the walls and turning the house into a garbage dump. I cleaned and repaired it myself and brought the paintings back from storage and hung them again, thinking I would recapture something of the old life, though of course it was too late for that.
The neighborhood had already begun to change. The social standing of my house also changed. It metamorphosed from a center of neighborhood art activity into a place of resistance. It went, metaphorically speaking, in a span of just a few years, from a hub to a dugout. In reaction, in a reflexive bit of reactive behavior, the sort of behavior I have exhibited throughout my life, where I have always been a plaything of circumstance, I myself changed. From a man in the thick of it I metamorphosed into a marginal character.
I became boring. The few people I was still seeing showed by their expressions and by their avoidance behaviors that I had become a thoroughly tedious person, one who was also doggedly persistent and therefore completely annoying. As a thoroughly annoying marginal person I was now forced by them, by that, into what was practically a clinical depression.
That was when Roy came and pulled me out of it.
I went from a socially excluded, potentially suicidal person to a marginal character with a dog.