Banana Rose

  “This book is dedicated to the one I love,” he sang, and laughed.

  I smiled. “Do you know what dedicated is?”

  “Yeah, you’re dedicated to someone. My sister’s thirteen. She lost her last baby, so this time my mom is taking real good care of her. My mom’s dedicated to her. She makes her lie down a lot and not work, and my mom cooks for her.”

  “She’s thirteen and she’s having a baby?” I asked. Now I was off the subject.

  “Yeah, her boyfriend is seventeen. He leaves every morning to go home to his mama’s and work out. He’s got barbells over there.”

  “Does he work?” I asked.

  “No, he stays with my sister,” Maurice explained to me.

  “Does your mom work?” I was caught.

  “No, she’s taking care of my sister.”

  “Here, let’s start reading.” I pressed the book open to page one.

  “Why don’t you read it to me?” Maurice suggested.

  “I’ll tell you what—you read one paragraph, and I’ll read the next,” I said.

  “Let’s see how long this chapter is.” He counted four pages and shook his head. “I don’t know if we can finish it by the bell.”

  “Let’s try. At this rate we haven’t read one word.” I pointed to the book.

  “ ‘Joe was standing on the street when a boy went by on a motorcycle...’ ” Maurice read the first paragraph. He stumbled over two words. One was alley. I told him the word. I didn’t make him sound it out. I did not want to explain that all in alley didn’t sound like the word all. The other word was mechanic. When he finished the paragraph, he smiled and pushed the book toward me. “It’s your turn.”

  I read my paragraph slowly, giving Maurice a chance to rest after his turn. When I finished, I looked at him. He was staring out the window.

  He had a sweet round face. “What’s it like in those houses? And what’s those little houses?” he asked.

  “You mean the garages?” I asked.

  “Those are garages? For cars?” He digested the information.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “I always look out the window of the bus at the streets. There’s so much space here.”

  “You’ve never walked down those streets?” I asked him.

  “No, I only see them from the classroom and from the bus,” he said.

  “When it gets warm out, we’ll take a walk. Now let’s see if we can keep reading until the bell rings.”

  The bell rang. Maurice stood up. “I gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He waved as he walked out the door. We had only gotten through two paragraphs.

  After lunch I had a prep period and then one more class to teach. I looked at the school absentee list for the day. Only Randall wasn’t absent from seventh period, and if I knew Randall, by seventh period he would have skipped out. It began to snow again. I watched the flakes fall on the frozen rooftops. As I looked out the window, I wondered where Gauguin was eating lunch in downtown Minneapolis.

  I locked my classroom door and went down to the teachers’ lounge on the first floor. The lounge was painted a pale yellow, and the only daily newspaper was being read by the French teacher. I went over to the Coke machine and dropped a quarter and a dime in the coin slot. The PE teacher, the hall monitor, the math teacher, and the science teacher were all sitting around a small table in the corner playing poker. Smoke curled from two cigarettes in a red plastic ashtray at the gym teacher’s elbow. They were playing for money and she was winning. They didn’t worry that the principal might walk in.

  The principal was a man in his early sixties who in the cold weather went out to the local bar down the street every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for lunch. When it was warm, he sat in his car at noon and chugged down Johnnie Walker Red. If I met him in the hall, I could smell the liquor, even though his mouth was full of mints. He had been in the navy and would salute the teachers whenever he saw them.

  The teachers’ lounge was crowded and there was no place to sit. I left with my Coke in my hand and climbed the broad stairs to the third floor. Standing at the top of the stairwell, opposite the third-floor women’s bathroom, I wondered whether my classroom key would unlock the door. I tried it. Yes, it unlocked. I walked in. There were squares of unused toilet paper strewn on the floor. The window at the far end was opaque, but one pane was clear. Through it I could see the snow falling all over the empty trees and streets of Nordeast.

  I brushed ten dead flies off the windowsill that had been lying on their backs with their legs in the air, and in the small cleared space I leaned my head down on my arms and sighed. Where had life brought Nell Schwartz? No answer came to me, but in that hollow space I had an idea.

  I lifted my head up, smiled, and walked back to the bathroom door to check that it was locked. I returned to the windowsill and brushed off the rest of the flies. Pulling down my tights and panties under my skirt, I bopped up on the windowsill and raised my hand in salute: “To Banana Rose.” And then I masturbated, my eyes closed, my head leaned back against the cold windowpane.

  As I was about to climax, I heard a plow in the street pushing aside the thick snow. Back in the bathroom, the dead flies joined me in my ecstasy and hovered for a moment above the floor tiles before they dropped dead again to the ground.

  Gauguin and I cooked dinner together that night. He complained about how he wasn’t playing much music and hated going to work each day. I knew he was jealous of my upcoming art show. When I first told him about it two months ago, he had acted excited, but I could tell from his eyes that he felt panicked—I was getting ahead of him, and in his hometown.

  He should talk about hating work, I thought to myself and didn’t say anything. In the building where he worked, I knew he often saw Sherry, the woman he had dated before I moved to Minneapolis, but I never questioned him about it. I suspected he still wanted her.

  “So what happened today?” I asked as we sat down opposite each other.

  “Nothing much. What about you?” Gauguin asked, his head bent over the steaming brown rice on his plate.

  “Well, I think the gym teacher is having an affair with the hall monitor,” I said conspiratorially.

  “Yeah?” Gauguin held his fork in his hand, his elbow on the table.

  “Yeah. The school brings the monitor in with the bused kids. He has nothing to do all day but yell at the kids who don’t have passes. I saw them touching each other by the pool.”

  “Did any kids see it?” Gauguin asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Are they married?” he asked.

  “No, both are single.”

  “So what’s the big deal?” Gauguin served himself some more salad.

  “Gauguin, it’s public school. The kids go wild over anything like that. You should have seen when I said, ‘Armand, if you’re late for class one more time, I’m going to kiss you when you come through the door.’ It took me five minutes to quiet the class down from making kissing sounds.”

  “That’s what you do all day?” Gauguin asked. I ignored his condescending tone.

  “Ye ah, and Armand said, ‘What will your husband say? Does he kiss girls too?’”

  “ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Everyone at his job stays in their seats.’ ” I looked sideways at Gauguin as I tilted the water glass toward my face.

  “I’m gonna go and practice.” He finished eating quickly and got up from the table.

  “Gauguin,” I called after him. “Do you still love me?”

  He stopped at the kitchen door. “Sure I do, Nell. I’m just unhappy. I’m not any closer to making music than I was in Taos.” He turned and went into the back room. I cleared the dinner dishes, washed them, and left them to dry in the rack.

  38

  “NELL, DO YOU want this one here?” Gauguin held up a blue abstract.

  I removed a nail from my mouth. “Yeah, a little lower.”

  “And this one here?” He reached for a painting of a red truck.

  ??
?Uhh, okay.” I stood back. “Yeah, I like it.” Gauguin was being really helpful. It made me happy. Maybe the jealousy had gone.

  “Oh, and I got you something. They’re behind the counter,” he called over his shoulder as he hammered.

  I went to look. “Oh, Gauguin!” There were eight purple irises with one red rose in a green vase. I carried them over to where we were hanging and thanked him.

  We were almost finished. Three of Gauguin’s musician friends walked in carrying their instrument cases. “Where should we set up?”

  “Over there,” Gauguin said, and left to work with them.

  I hung the last painting, another abstract of deep blue, purple, and a hard pink all swirling with a red star in the middle. The upper third of the paper was almost all left white.

  I stood back. I was pleased. Six of the sixteen pear corner paintings were up and two paintings I’d done at the old lady’s in Boulder. There were five postcard paintings, including one to Henri Matisse of a pink lawn chair, one I’d done from memory of my father sleeping in his big chair after coming home late from work, and one of the Mississippi with the Minneapolis skyline in the background. I even included the first real painting I ever did, the one after I’d walked out on Indian land and met that cottonwood.

  It wasn’t officially an opening—after all, it was a funky student café—but I didn’t care. I rearranged the flowers in their vase.

  Lunch customers began to trickle in around eleven in the morning. Well, this is the beginning, I thought to myself, and took a deep breath. A young girl with stir fry and rice and a wedge of thick chocolate cake carried her tray to a table. Her friend followed. I stared at them. Look, I said under my breath, look at my paintings! They didn’t look up. Two young boys with their mother pointed to my painting of a truck, but I couldn’t hear what they said.

  I guess I should just be glad people are around, I thought. It was a bitter cold Saturday. When I drove over that morning, it’d been zero degrees and had begun to snow. Each time someone opened the front door, a terrifying gust of wind flew in and made everyone shiver. I’d made a few friends since I’d been in the Twin Cities, but I didn’t know if any of them would come in this weather.

  Just as Gauguin and his group began a Duke Ellington song, Marian and Matthew entered and went over to my work.

  I watched them from across the room. Marian stood in front of one of the pear paintings and pointed. Matthew nodded. I’d begun painting them because I wanted to feel grounded where I lived. Painting something made me intimate with it. At first, Minneapolis had felt alien: square lawns, square blocks, square corners, no modulated adobe. But then the squares had become an object for my painting and I grew to like them. I became friends with all the corners in our apartment.

  And the pears? I reached for a glass of water. The café said I could have anything I wanted to drink free, but I was nervous and wanted only water. The pears? Once Gauguin and I made love, and it had felt like two pears touching each other. It was a long time ago, but when I began my first corner painting, the flesh of that fruit rose inside me.

  Maybe it was a dumb idea, I thought, maybe everyone will hate my work. I bit the side of my fingernail and spat it out. I suddenly wanted everyone to go home. I wanted my paintings back. I didn’t want anyone to look at them. Matthew stepped up close to one of my abstracts. I had framed that one, and he was breathing on the glass. Nell, let go, I whispered to myself.

  Marian and Matthew drifted over to the food counter. I just sat on top of a table, as if it were my dog house, and guarded my bones across the room.

  A few more people stopped, trays in hand, to look at my work. I heard one older woman say to her husband, “Those are unusual. I kind of like them.”

  Gauguin came over to me at 2:00 when his friends left. He seemed happy to be alone with me. “Nell, be patient. It will be up for a month. People didn’t all think they had to come today.”

  “Do you think they’ll like them? Are they too expensive?” I asked.

  “Art isn’t people’s first purchase. Groceries are more like it. That’s why your father makes a good living and Van Gogh starved.” Gauguin put his arm around me.

  Just then Alice walked in. She came directly over to us. “My, it’s cold out there.” She pulled off her gloves. “So where are they?”

  I pointed across the room and walked over with her. Gauguin went to get us tea. “My, that’s a truck. And aren’t those pears? Under a toilet seat.”

  I nodded.

  “I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to make anything out in them. You know how modern art is. Rip always wanted me to go with him to art museums, but I never wanted to.” She stepped to the next picture. “Nell, those pears are hanging from the ceiling! And those—they’re in the cupboard! The cupboard in your kitchen.” She turned to me. “You paint such ordinary things.”

  I was enjoying myself thoroughly. Gauguin came over with some spearmint tea and poppyseed cake. “Alice, this restaurant is where I proposed to Nell,” Gauguin said.

  Alice didn’t answer. She was engaged in a painting. “Nell, this one I like best of all.” She turned to me. “I don’t know what it is, but it makes me feel something.”

  Both Gauguin and I looked over at the wall. It was one of the three abstracts in the show. “I don’t know what it is either,” I said. “I had a dream I couldn’t remember, and as soon as I woke up, I went right over to the easel and began to paint.”

  Alice nodded.

  I continued. “I painted three in a row. That’s the second one.”

  “Tea is getting cold,” Gauguin chimed in. We went over to the table. “Alice, you should have come earlier. I was playing music with old Doug Rolletter.”

  “Oh, that’s nice, dear. Your friend from high school?” She turned to me. “Nell, it feels like a mystery. What was the dream about? I love mysteries. I’ve read all the Agatha Christie books.”

  “I don’t know.” I shook my head. Then a smile broke over my face. “I know. I’ll call it Foreshadowing.”

  “Of what?” Gauguin asked, and there was a tinge of impatience in his voice.

  “Of things to come!” Alice offered.

  Just then Rip walked in with a striking blond woman on his arm. She was almost as tall as he was.

  Alice grabbed her coat. “Gauguin, dear, Nell, I have to go,” she mumbled, and bolted for the door. I don’t think Rip even saw her, he was so engrossed in the woman at his side.

  They rambled over. “Hey, here’s the artist. Where’s your beret and smock?”

  I smiled weakly. Boy, was he corny.

  “Oh, this is Saundra, not Sandra but Saundra.” He almost whistled her name. “This is Nell, the artist, my daughter-in-law. You already know my son.”

  “Oh, yes,” Saundra said. “We went out for lunch with—what was her name?”

  I stiffened and turned to Gauguin.

  “Sherry,” Gauguin said quietly.

  “Well, where are they?” Rip managed to take his hands off Saundra and clap them together.

  “Over there.” I pointed. Sherry? All four went out to lunch?

  “Nell, let’s go over with them.” Gauguin took my arm. “It was nothing, Nell,” he whispered in my ear.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said. I felt sick.

  I didn’t hear a word Rip said. I just nodded and agreed, and finally he and Saundra left. It was late afternoon and they were going to a cocktail party.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Gauguin. “I’m exhausted.”

  Gauguin gathered up the nails and hammer. I put my arms around the vase of irises and we carried them out to the car. It was still snowing. The white streets and drifts made the single rose even redder.

  The car was cold. Our breath fogged in front of our faces. Luckily, we only had a few blocks to drive home.

  “Well, that was great.” Gauguin started up the engine.

  I nodded, looking straight ahead.

  “Nell, what are you thinking?” Gauguin asked as the
car warmed up.

  “How I can paint live roses in winter,” I said, still not looking at him.

  “And underneath that? What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “Sherry.”

  “Oh, come on, Nell. You’re still friends with Neon.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t go out to lunch with him.” I turned to face him.

  “Yeah, but you’d like to,” Gauguin retorted.

  “I feel trapped. This is all your world.”

  “Yeah, and you have an art show in my world, and I go to work for my father.” He steered the car out of the parking lot.

  “Let’s drop it,” I said. “I’m tired.”

  Three days later, Marian phoned. “Nell, there’s a review of your show in the student newspaper.”

  “What?” I said.

  “The Minnesota Daily. It comes out at the U every day. Someone saw your show and wrote about it. Here, you want me to read it?” she asked.

  “Yes, please.” I sat down on a kitchen chair.

  Nell Schwartz, who recently moved here from New Mexico, paints so you laugh. This artist has a sense of humor: Pears all over the house, a Pillsbury sign over the Mississippi, a pink lawn chair for Matisse. These are her urbane paintings, but when she’s serious she goes back to where she came from. Three abstracts of blues, purples, and pinks recall the source of the New Mexico landscape and hold the haunted quality of beauty that permeates the land there.

  Schwartz is traveling in two directions: one of wit, the other of nameless beauty. This reviewer puts his bets on the second. There’s already enough lighthearted work around here. Show ends the end of February.

  “Wow!” I said. “Wow. Would you mind reading it again?” I paused. “Never mind. I’ll run out and get a copy—five copies. Where do I pick it up?” I was thinking in my head: one for Anna, one for Blue, my parents—who else?

  That night, I showed it to Gauguin. I had decided to drop the whole thing about Sherry. I wanted to believe him, and besides I was too happy about my art show.

  “Congratulations,” he said, and hugged me. He seemed to be honestly making an effort.

  While I was in his arms, I thought: New Mexico. I have to visit there and paint.