Casamorte was alive though, and real I suppose, certainly more genuine an artist than I was at the time. Oh, I loved the role of being an artist, I played the role a bit more amateurishly perhaps than Casamorte, but I played it nonetheless. I would sit on subway trains or buses, incessantly sketching, not because I really itched to draw — or perhaps I did, who the hell knows anymore? — but only because I wanted everyone sitting opposite me to see that I was an artist, to understand that I was an extremely talented and serious person who was sketching, sketching, sketching all the time, oh boy, was I serious! Sometimes I would walk into a luncheonette still wearing my paint-smeared workshirt, knowing that everyone at the counter would turn and stare at me and think again Oh lookie, there's an artist, especially if Ebie was with me in her dirty green smock, her cheek smeared with pigment, she was a good painter but a sloppy one. Or I would sometimes stop dead in the middle of the sidewalk, and raise both hands in front of my face, palms flat, thumbs touching, to form a fleshy picture frame around a tree or a bench or a building in the distance, once again courting appreciation from the people in the street, the onlookers, the outsiders, those poor, untalented, uncreative souls. I think I knew even then I would never become a painter. I have since seen music students practicing scales on subway trains, their fingers running over imaginary keyboards in their laps; I have watched architectural students describe with soaring hands the engineering feat of the Guggenheim; I have overheard playwrights discussing the interminable and incomplete second acts of their works in progress; and I have learned without question that those who play the part never live it. I was only playing at being an artist. I knew it, and Ebie knew it, but neither of us ever mentioned it.
And yet there were times when, visual evidence to the contrary, talented people surrounding me day and night, doing work I could see, work I could compare against my own, there were nonetheless times when I felt I really had it in me. Laboring late into the night in Ebie's apartment (stay, she would constantly plead, must you go?), I would feel a solitary isolation (never truly solitary because I knew she was there across the room) a total absorption with the drawing pad before me, the charcoal or pencil moving in my hand as though directed by someone, something, other than myself, the line clean and sure and unfaltering. That was real. That, at least, was real. That, and Ebie.
Ebie was everything; everything paled beside her.
I can recall the first time we saw El Greco's Cardinal at the Metropolitan, standing before the painting — silken scarlet robes stiffly parted over intricately detailed lace, beringed left hand tensely gripping the arm of the chair, eyes covertly regarding something beyond the frame — my own eyes were on Ebie alone, watching her reaction, thrilling to her response. She caught her breath in wonder, a radiant awestruck look crossed her face, and I watched her in soaring delight; El Greco, for all his magnificance, could have been for me that day a Greenwich Village hack exhibiting seascapes on a Sixth Avenue sidewalk.
I loved her so much.
So very much.
There were daffodils blooming in the courtyard of the church on the day we were married. A stone baptismal font, fallen into neglectful disrepair, stood lopsidedly in one corner of the garden against a stone wall covered with English ivy. Beyond the wall and behind it, the city's buildings rose against an April sky stretched in taut blue brilliance. We stopped in the garden after the ceremony. The wedding party was on the sidewalk in front of the church, the photographer wondering how he had managed to lose us in the blizzard of tossed confetti and rice, the rented limousines at the curb, relatives and friends shaking hands in greeting, exclaiming no doubt on the beauty of the bride and the nervousness of the groom, anxious to get on with the reception, all waiting for the newly married Mr. and Mrs. James Driscoll to join them. But we had seen the garden earlier, separately, and now we were drawn to it together, neither of us uttering a word, as we ran down the church steps through the flying rice and paper, Ebie's hand in mine, and then raced along the stone wall to the low iron entrance gate. The gate was painted green, chipped in spots to reveal the rusting iron beneath. I opened it, it squeaked into the silence. We went into the small cloistered garden, treading softly over the slate walk to where the daffodils ringed the fallen stone font.
The ceremony had already taken place, but it was there in the garden we were really wed.
With her hand in mine and her eyes wet, Ebie looked up at me and said, "Forever."
And I whispered "Forever" to her.
Louis Brackman lived in a garden apartment in Queens, a complex of six buildings set around a grassy court in which there were concrete benches and a lily pond. In the summertime, the benches were invariably occupied by young housewives taking a late afternoon breather before the dinner hour, which was just when Sidney arrived each time. In the winter, as now, the benches were empty, the lily pond was a dark amoeba reflecting the starless sky above. It was six o'clock. The lights in the buildings surrounding the court were aglow and cooking smells wafted on the evening air. Sidney quickened his step and moved along the shoveled concrete walk to his father's ground-floor apartment. Through the kitchen window, he could see Louis wrapping something at the table, why did he always wrap the stuff, Sidney wondered. Why not simply say "Here, Sidney, here's some worthless crap for you" instead of going through this idiotic ritual each time? Sidney sighed and rang the bell.
His father did not ask who it was because he knew this was Thursday, and he knew that Sidney arrived every Thursday at close to six o'clock. Sidney did not expect him to call out, nor did he expect anything less than a five-minute wait on the doorstep since that was usually how long it took his father to get from the kitchen to the front hallway, give or take a few thousand years. He did not ring the bell again, nor did he exhibit any signs of impatience. He leaned against the brick wall' of the building instead and looked up at the sky, wishing there were stars, and smelling rain in the air, and beneath that the aroma of borscht, his father was cooking borscht again. When Louis finally opened the door, the two men embraced silently, and then walked slowly into the kitchen, where Sidney would spend most of the visit. Sidney supported his father as they walked, one arm around the old man's waist, deploring his smell and the smell of the beets boiling in the kitchen, permeating the entire apartment until Sidney thought he would suffocate.