The Cat's Pajamas Read online

  The great Montoya was staring at me from across a sea of summer fire.

  “Brilliant photos,” I whispered.

  Montoya read my lips and nodded with majesty, like a torero on a Seville afternoon.

  “Hold on!” I said, almost grasping something. “Those pictures. I’ve seen them somewhere else!”

  Carlos Jesus Montoya refixed his stare at the walls.

  “Come on,” hissed Sam and pulled me toward the door.

  “Wait!” I said. “Don’t break my chain of thought.”

  “Idiot,” Sam almost cried, “you’ll get yourself killed.”

  Montoya read his lips too and nodded the merest of nods.

  “Why would someone want to kill me?” I said.

  “You know too much!”

  “I know nothing!”

  “You do! Andale! Vamoose!”

  And we were out the door from hot burning summer to cold April, but were thrust aside by a cloud of weeping followed by the weepers, a dark mass of women shawled in black and shedding fountains.

  “No family weeps that hard,” said Sam. “Former lovers.”

  I listened.

  “Sure,” I said.

  More crying followed. More women, larger and plumper, followed by a solemn gent as courtly and quiet as guidon spears.

  “Family,” Sam said.

  “We’re not leaving so soon?”

  “There’s a crisis. I wanted you to see everything so you would take it in like a virgin observer, nonjudgmental, before you latched onto the reality.”

  “How much you charge for that bag of manure you just filled?”

  “No manure. Just artists’ blood, artists’ dreams, and critics’ judgments to be won and lost.”

  “Give me that bag. I’ll fill it for you.”

  “No. Step back in. Take one last look at genius slain and truth about to be corrupted.”

  “You only talk this way late Saturdays with your clothes on and the bottle empty.”

  “It’s not Saturday. Here’s my flask. Drink. One last swallow, one last stare.”

  I drank and stood in the door where the harvest weather breathed out smelling of hot candle wax.

  Far away calm Sebastian drifted on his white cloth boat. Far off some boy choirs chirped.

  ON THE FREEWAY, speeding, I guessed.

  “I know where we’re going!”

  “Shh,” said Sam.

  “To where Sebastian Rodriguez jumped.”

  “Fell!”

  “Fell to his death.”

  “Look sharp. We’re almost there.”

  “We are! Slow down. Ohmigod. There they are!”

  Sam slowed down.

  “Pull over,” I said. “God, I must be out of my mind. Look.”

  “I am!”

  On the freeway overpass bridge there indeed they were.

  “Sebastian’s paintings on the gallery walls!”

  “Those were photos. These are real.”

  And indeed they were, brighter, bigger, phenomenal, mind-blowing, cataclysmic.

  “Graffiti,” I said at last.

  “But what graffiti,” Sam said, gazing up as at a cathedral’s stained glass.

  “Why didn’t you show me these first?”

  “You did see them, but with peripheral vision at sixty miles per hour. Now you’ve got them twenty-twenty.”

  “But why now?”

  “I didn’t want the real to interfere with the crazy mystery. I wanted to give you answers so you could imagine all the lunatic questions.”

  “The photos in the gallery, the graffiti up there on the overhang. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

  “Half chicken, half egg. The priest Montoya sped under these miracles a month ago, did a shocked double take, and almost braked himself into a road wreck.”

  “He was the first art collector of Sebastian’s freeway annunciations and holy revelations?” I guessed.

  “Right on! Staring at these Latino-American beauties he spun and ran back for a camera. The resulting blowups were so mind blasting, so eye and soul riveting, Montoya conceived a super master plan. Since most people would snub any freeway graffiti art, why not nail Sebastian’s white-hot bouquets on the gallery walls to burn people’s eyes and inflame their purses? Then, when it was too late to renege, change their minds and ask for their money back, stage the big revelation: ‘If you think these gallery eye-winkers are God-given,’ Montoya cried, ‘fix your eyes on Freeway 101, overpass 89.’ So Montoya hung these windows on burning life as photos and prepared to spring the truth on the critics when they were all safely on board. The problem was—”

  “Sebastian fell on the freeway before the show could open?”

  “Fell and endangered his reputation.”

  “I thought death improved an artist’s chances for celebrity.”

  “Some, yes, some, no. Sebastian’s was a special case. Complicated. When Sebastian fell—”

  “How come he fell?”

  “He was hanging upside down over the edge of the freeway overhang, painting, a pal holding his legs, when the pal sneezed, God yes, sneezed and let go.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Nobody wanted to tell his folks or anyone the truth. Christ! Upside down painting illegal graffiti and crashing down in traffic. It was listed as a bike accident, though no bike was found. They washed the guilty paint off his hands before the coroner came. Which left Montoya—”

  “With a gallery full of useless photo art.”

  “No! A gallery full of priceless relics from an artful dodger’s life, dead too soon but thank God the inspired photos stayed to be bid for in prices that skyrocketed! Cardinal Mahoney added his imprimatur, and they shot through the ceiling.”

  “So no one ever told where the original artwork could be found?”

  “No one ever will. The relatives warned their boy never to play on the freeway, and look what’s happened! They might have survived a living festival where Sebastian was celebrated for the gallery photo stuff but, my God, look, it’s overhang 89 on Freeway 101, but with him dead, it was too melancholy and too commercial. Then Montoya thought to light a thousand candles and create the Saint Sebastian church.”

  “How many people know this story?”

  “Montoya, the gallery owner, maybe one or two aunts or uncles. Now you and me. Nobody will let the cat out of the bag to cross the freeway. Mum’s the word. Reach over in the backseat. Feel around. What do you feel?”

  I reached back, blind-handed.

  “Feels like three buckets.”

  “What else?”

  I probed. “A big paintbrush!”

  “So?”

  “Three buckets of paint!”

  “Right!”

  “For what?”

  “To paint over Sebastian Rodriguez’s freeway masterpiece graffiti.”

  “Paint over all those priceless murals, why?”

  “If we leave them there, eventually someone will notice, compare them to the gallery photos, and the jig’s up!”

  “The world will discover he was only a freeway graffiti stuntman?”

  “Or the world will spy his genius and gawkers will cause collisions or block traffic. Either way it’s a no-go.”

  I stared up at the bright overhang.

  “And who’s gonna paint over the murals?”

  “Me!” Sam said.

  “How will you do it?”

  “You’ll hold me upside down, by my knees, while I whitewash. But blow your nose first. No sneezing.”

  “Siqueiros, nada, Orozco, no?”

  “You can say that again.”

  I said it three times. Quietly.

  THE HOUSE

  1947

  IT WAS AN INCREDIBLE, insane old house looking wildly out over the city with staring eyes. Birds had built nests in its high cupolas so that the place resembled nothing more than a thin, night-haunted old woman, hair untidily kept.

  They had walked up the long hill in the windy autumn ni
ght, Maggie and William, and now when she saw the house she set her Saks Fifth Avenue suitcase down and said, “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes.” He carried his battered old luggage buoyantly. “Isn’t it a bean? Look at her, isn’t she priceless!”

  “You paid two thousand dollars for that?” she cried.

  “Why, it cost thirty thousand dollars, fifty years ago,” he declared, proudly. “And it’s all ours. Boy!”

  She waited for her heart to beat again. She was sick. She looked at him and then at the house. “It—it looks a little like a Charles Addams house, doesn’t it? You know, the man who draws the vampire cartoons for The New Yorker?”

  But he was already up the walk. She came carefully after him up the moaning front steps. The house soared up, three mansarded, pillared, fluted, rococo flights of it, towers and peaks and bay windows pregnant with broken glass; a fine nicotine stain of years upon it. Inside there was a silence of moths and hung window shades and furniture draped like little white tombs.

  Again she felt everything sink within her. When you have lived in a big clean house on a big secluded street all of your life, with servants invisibly keeping the order, with a phone wherever you put out your hand, with a bathtub big as a swimming pool, and your only exercise is the energy it takes to lift an immensely heavy dry martini, then what is one to think when confronted by a rusty mountain, a haunted catacomb, a thing of gray work and utter chaos? Oh God, she thought, if Americans’ lives come to this, fewer houses, incredible prices. Why did people marry at all?

  It was hard to keep her face together, to make it look right, because William was shouting up and down stairs, walking swiftly, tall, through the rooms, proud as if he’d built it himself.

  “I am Hamlet’s father’s ghost,” said William, coming down the dim stairs.

  “—father’s ghost,” said an echo from up the stairwell, at the top of the house.

  William smiled and pointed up. “Hear that? That’s the Listener at the top of the house. Old friend of mine. He hears everything you say. I was saying to him only yesterday, I love Maggie!”

  “I love Maggie,” said the Listener at the top of the house.

  “A man of taste, that Listener,” said Bill. He came and held Maggie’s shoulders. “Isn’t this house swell?”

  “It’s big, I’ll give you that. And it’s dirty, I’ll give you that. And it most certainly is old.”

  She watched his face watching hers. And by the slow change of his face she knew that her own face wasn’t doing a very good job of loving the vast place. She had ripped her nylon stockings on a nail, coming in the door. There was dirt on the expensive tweed skirt she had brought from ’Frisco already, and—

  He took his hands from her shoulders. He looked at her mouth. “You don’t much care for it, do you?”

  “Oh, it’s not that—”

  “Maybe we should have bought that trailer.”

  “Oh, no, don’t be silly. It’s just I have to get used to this. Who’d want to live in a bread box trailer? There’s more room here.”

  “Or maybe waited another year to get married, with more money.”

  “Perhaps we won’t have to stay here long, anyway,” she said, trying to be gay. But it was the wrong thing to say. He didn’t want to go, ever. This was a place he loved and wanted to fix over. There was a permanence in the way he looked at it.

  “Up here is the bedroom.” At the top of the first landing, where a feeble bulb burned, he opened a door. There was a room with a four-poster bed in it. He had scrubbed and swept the room himself and fixed the bed as a surprise for her. There were bright pictures on the wall and new fresh yellow-print wallpaper.

  “It’s nice,” she said, still forcing it.

  He did not look at her as he said, tonelessly, “I’m glad you like it.”

  THE NEXT MORNING he was all through the house, up and down the stairs, whistling and singing, full of breakfast vigor and ideas. She heard him ripping down the old shades, sweeping the hall, breaking the old glass shards from a broken kitchen window. She lay in bed. The warm yellow sun streamed in the south window and touched her idle hand on the coverlet. She lay, not wanting to move, incredulous at the sound of her resilient husband ricocheting from room to room with the momentum of his inspiration. Resilient was the word. You hurt or disappointed him one day, and the next day it was forgotten. He bounced back. That was more than she could say for herself. He was like a string of firecrackers set off to explode all through the echoing house.

  She slid from the bed. Let’s try and make it better, she thought. Let’s keep the face right. She looked in the mirror. Is there any way, she wondered, to paint a smile on?

  He handed her a dust mop and a kiss after the instantaneous burnt breakfast.

  “Onward, upward, excelsior!” he cried. “Do you realize that man’s preoccupation is not with love or sex or getting on or keeping up with the Joneses? It is not for fame or fortune! No, man’s longest battle, mistress, is with the element of dust. It comes in every joint and elbow of the house! Why, if we sat down and rocked in our rocking chairs for a year we’d be buried in dust, the cities would be lost, the gardens would be deserts, the living rooms dustbins! Christ, I wish we could pick the whole house up and shake it out!”

  They worked.

  But she tired. First it was her back and then it was, “My head aches.” He brought her aspirin. And then it was sheer exhaustion from the many many rooms. She had lost count of the rooms. And the particles of dust in the rooms? God, it ran into the billions! She went sneezing and running her small nose into a hankie, confused and bitter-red, all through the house.

  “You’d better sit down,” he said.

  “No, I’m all right,” she said.

  “You’d better go rest.” He wasn’t smiling.

  “I’ll be fine. It’s not lunchtime yet.”

  That was the trouble. The first morning, and herself tired already. And she felt a rush of guilty color to her cheeks. Because it was a strange tiredness made of unnecessary strains and superfluous actions and tensions. You can only deceive yourself so far, no further. She was tired, yes, but not of the work, only of this place. Not twenty hours new in it, and already tired of it, sick of it. And he saw her sickness. One small part of her face showed it. Which part she could not tell. It was like a puncture in a tube, you couldn’t tell where the puncture was until you submerged the tube and then bubbles rose in the water. She didn’t want him to know her sickness. But every time she thought of her friends coming to see her and what they would say to one another at their private teas: “Whatever happened to Maggie Clinton?” “Oh, didn’t you hear? She married that writer fellow and they live on Bunker Hill. On Bunker Hill, can you imagine? In an old haunted house or some such!” “We must go up some time.” “Oh, yes, it’s priceless. The thing is toppling over, simply toppling. Poor Mag!”

  “You used to be able to play I-don’t-know-how-many tennis sets every morning and afternoon, with a round of golf thrown in,” he said.

  “I’ll be all right,” she said, knowing nothing else to say.

  They were on the landing. The morning sun fell through the tinted rim glasses of the high window. There were little pink glasses and blue glasses and red and yellow and purple and orange glasses. The many colors glowed on her arms and on the banister.

  He had been staring for some moments at the little colored windowpanes. Now he looked at her. “Pardon the melodramatics,” he said. “But I learned something when I was a kid, pretty young. My grandmother had a hall and at the top of the stairs was a window with little colored glass in it, just like this. I used to go up and look through the colored panes, and—” He tossed down the dust rag. “It’s no use. You wouldn’t understand.” He walked down the stairs away from her.

  She stood looking after him. She looked at the colored panes. What had he been trying to say, some ridiculous, obvious thing he had decided finally not to say? She moved to the window.

  Through the pink pa
ne the world was roseate below, and warm. The neighborhood, poised like a squalorous avalanche on the brink of a cliff, took on tones of the rose and a sunset.

  She looked through a yellow pane. And the world was the sun, all bright and luminous and fresh.

  She looked through a purple glass. The world was covered with cloud, the world was infected and sick, and people moving in that world were leprous, lost, and abandoned. The houses were black and monstrous. Everything seemed bruised.

  She returned to the yellow pane. The sun was back. The smallest dog looked clever and bright. The dirtiest child looked washed. The rusty houses were seemingly painted afresh.

  She looked down the stairs at where William was dialing the phone, quietly, no expression on his face. And then she looked at the colored panes again and knew what he meant. You had a choice of panes to look through. The dark one or the light one.

  She felt quite lost. She felt it was too late. Even when it isn’t too late, sometimes you feel it is. To say something, to speak a word. One word. But she wasn’t ready. The whole idea was too new to her. She couldn’t speak now and fully mean it. It would have to seep into her. She could feel the first faint excitement, but then smothered with fear and hatred of herself. And then quick little thrusts of hate at the house and William, because they had made her hate herself. But finally it resolved into simple irritation, and only at her own blindness.

  William was phoning below. His voice came up the bright stairwell. He was calling the real estate agent.

  “Mr. Woolf? About that house you sold me last week. Look, do you think I could sell it? With maybe a little profit?”

  There was a silence. She heard her heart beating swiftly.

  William lay the phone down. He did not look up at her.

  “He can sell it,” William said. “For a little profit.”

  “For a little profit,” said the Listener at the top of the house.

  THEY WERE HAVING A SILENT LUNCHEON when somebody banged on the front door. William, with a silence unusual to him, went to answer.

  “The darn doorbell doesn’t work!” cried a woman’s voice in the hall.

  “Bess!” cried William.

  “Bill, you old son of a—hey, this is a swell place!”