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  The Day the Bozarts Died

  A Novel

  Larry Duberstein

  New York

  I was the first to see the new girl arrive, partly because my studio has two big windows overlooking the parking lot and partly because I spend a fair bit of time looking out those windows. (Let’s face it, there are 17 waking hours in every day and no one fills them all constructively.) But her entrance did not strike me as The Turning Point or anything, just one of those lowercase turning points, as in yes, all right, here comes my next true love.

  As she charged up the fire escape with a sizable brown carton, parts of her (all excellent parts) were escaping from her abbreviated summer costume: honey-and-chestnut hair flowing under and through a Red Sox cap, lean and toasted arms protruding from a tee shirt I could not quite read, strong shapely legs protruding from cutoff jeans I could read in my sleep. A noticeable sort of girl.

  She barely broke stride before hauling up another box, this one big enough to hold a washing machine. Where were the troops, one had to wonder, for rare is the pretty girl who cannot marshal a boyfriend or two on moving day. No worries, though: I stood ready to befriend her.

  It is always good news to be surprised by beauty, but this young lady’s arrival would have been serious good news for everyone here at the Hotel Bozarts even if she had a face like Yasser Arafat. For the Bozarts as an institution, it registered immediately as a turning point, though I will have to backtrack briefly to tell you why.

  Start with the name itself. That we styled ourselves the Hotel Des Beaux-Arts was a joke, of course, and “Bozarts” is nothing more than the inevitable shorthand. Officially, we are the Blaisdell Street Artists Cooperative, the real estate manifestation of a charitarian impulse suffered by the Canterbury Institute of Technology in a bygone era. Basically, back in 1979, Tech agreed to take one of their outmoded lab buildings and rent it out to artists for short money. I don’t know how it worked out for them (whether they wake up every morning feeling virtuous as hell) but I know it worked for us. Over the decades, a ton of talent has found shelter here.

  The scene had been going slack, though, as the millennium wound down; the ancient covenant between art and science felt shaky. Artists were moving out, no one was replacing them, and no one knew why—unless Tech was getting into position to dump us. To take back the building for filthy commerce, or for the research they always hope will end in filthy commerce. Virtue, who really needs it?

  There have been people (girlfriends mainly, though not exclusively) who would have welcomed the Bozarts’ closing, or been glad of anything else that dynamited me off the sunny little rock I have been perched on here since year one, 1979. (Off that rock and, in the case of the girlfriends, into the chilly waters patrolled by themselves.) It is mentally unhealthy to be so long in one place, they have contended unanimously, not to say a place so cramped that they inevitably fall to calling it a “broom closet,” in honor of its prior use.

  “Do you want to for-God’s-sake die in there?” was what Big Al, my dad, always used to say. There have been such variants as this one—“I hope you die in there, Stanley”—from Francie Waters. Die, they mean to ask, without having first enjoyed a proper life composed of at least one wife, at least two children, some dogs, Ford Explorers, mortgage payments. Answer: yes, if die I must.

  “Diminishing” is a word I have heard a lot over the years, as though a person shrinks from spending time in modest accommodations. To me, the sunny rock seemed just fine and I felt undiminished, although there was this gathering storm: the herd had been thinned and we were waiting for the next hoof to drop. One more vacancy might mean extinction.

  Conversely, a new tenant with a fresh lease would give the rest of us a fresh lease as well—and here she was, like a sign from above. The new girl. So now as she ascended, for the third time, I stepped onto the landing to welcome her, and hold open the heavy door.

  “Why don’t we just wedge this for you,” I suggested, brandishing the very wedge.

  “Great,” she said, and spun past me clutching what looked like the tripod portion of an easel. I trailed her down the corridor to Monk Barrett’s old studio, liking the way her ponytail, a shade and a half lighter in color than the rest of her hair, was threaded through the baseball cap in back.

  “Stanley Noseworthy,” I said, to her profile.

  “Rose,” she said, to the floor. No eye contact, no surname, though I caught a winning hint of hoarseness, a burr, in her voice. The tripod and the bulky cartons sat on the carpet while she fished for her key. I had a key to Monk’s door (unlike Monk, who locked it only by accident, therefore locking out no one except himself) and stood ready to save the day, if necessary. If not, well then, I had a key to her door.

  Monk had moved out incompletely, to say the least, neglecting to take along the tables and chairs, the big flat folders with sketches spilling out of them, the dozens of cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew (Monk led the league in consumption of Dinty Moore, even in those latter years when you were more or less prospecting for the beef), the sprawling piles of junk mail, plus those vestiges of real mail sometimes known as “bills.” Monk never believed in paying these, explaining he was far too strapped to take on “unnecessary expenses.”

  Although I hadn’t gone in there since April, when I last scored a can of Dinty Moore for my lunch, I expected it would still look as though a pack of wild dogs had been penned up inside. True, you were required to leave the room “broom clean,” truer still that Monk Barrett never perused such literature, nor learned the art of brooming. Now as Rose opened the door, it was clear that Joe the Janitor had tackled the job at night. The place was freshly-painted, sun-shocked, and way-better-than-broom-clean. 20,000 gallons of ambient sunshine, and not a mote of dust visible to the naked eye.

  These studios are big and, totally empty like this, they seem immense. With the high windows, high white walls, and 600 square feet of pale gray floor, this one looked like a museum gallery whose curators were about to install the reassembled skeleton of a mastodon, and construct a mezzanine on all four sides for viewing it..

  Meanwhile, Rose had bolted away, already launched on her next round trip. Either she was running late for the dentist or she was not what my mom would call sociable. I was just furniture; you step around it and keep going.

  “Why don’t I give you a hand with this stuff,” I said, when she reappeared with an armload of cardboard tubes. “I’ve got some time to kill.”

  “Thanks, I’m good.”

  “Honestly. I could use the exercise.”

  “Me too,” she said, and though this time there was the tracery of a deflective smile, it began to seem there was a burr to her personality, not just her voice.

  Still, one must be cool. Dismissed, one must go, and I was going when I heard the clatter. The bottom of a carton had given way and a dozen large art books lay splayed on the macadam. Rose was still muttering her Oh shits when I attempted to re-enlist, or re-attempted to enlist, only to be re-rejected: “Please. I’d really rather deal with it myself.”

  Clearly. Back in the broom closet, I noted that my entire ever-the-gentleman act had burned less than 15 minutes. Impressive. I mean, a woman could deflect every overture from a cup of coffee right on up to holy fucking matrimony and still kill a lousy half-hour, no? What are you working on, how was your weekend in Vermont, seen any good constellations lately? This was extreme.

  But it could not be personal, since she didn’t
know me from Adam. I could only conclude (as I monitored her progress, lap after lap) that here was a young lady proud or shy, private, and perhaps a bit humorless. She might provide a nice challenge.

  This perfectly reasonable formulation satisfied me strolling home, where Nina, my then current true love, was retailed an amusing account of our eccentric new tenant, a painter every bit as disagreeable as a city tow-truck driver on trash day.

  “A tenant is a tenant is a tenant,” said Nina, who knew our plight. I did not add the obvious, that a Rose is also a rose.…

  Maybe it was personal, though, because the very next morning I would behold this selfsame withdrawn soul hanging with Clapper at his studio door. They were loud and they were jolly, they were downright chummy, without the slightest sign the girl might be reserved or reclusive. Her merriment rang down the corridor like church bells rampant, her laughter spilled freely into every crevice of the Clapper’s laugh track.

  He insisted on that. Lacking a teleprompter, he was not above coming at his audience directly if you lagged at the punch line: “That was a joke, old man. Joke?” (Daring you to sear him with the truth, to cauterize his ego: “Understood, Clapper, but it wasn’t funny. Not funny?”) So far as this honey-haired painter was concerned, every plummy phrase, every pregnant pause was worth a hearty chuckle.

  And for the serioso moments, a respectful hush. For there would come in course such gems as the Clapper Doctrine, the Clapper Mission Statement, and the always edifying tale of an NEA grant he turned down on principle when they failed to also grace his then girlfriend Sofia Cellini. Every bullshit salvo elicited a response unmistakably admiring, possibly adoring. Had I heard adoration? I could not be certain I had not.

  Meaning of this? That I had lost it and Clapper hadn’t seemed awfully far-fetched. More likely, what we had here was the latest Clapper protégé, a student or former student of his from Cheltenham College, where his tome Sculpture as Scripture ($50 U.S., $75 Canadian) was the assigned reading. In other words, the fix was in.

  Let me interject that “Arnie Cloud” (the name on Clapper’s door, on his book, and on his pieces in parks and museums) was born Arnold Clapperberg and so was in this one small way something of a fraud. Did I, Stanley Noseworthy (and there is a name well worth the changing) take the low road to Worthy like my uncles in Freetown? I did not. Clapper did and his nickname is just a small reminder of this considered career move, for those who would render him a shade less holy.

  Sadly, there is nothing fraudulent about the dude’s work. It is the genuine article. In his studio that day were half a dozen of his lifesized pieces, including Clapper’s mom nursing a cup of tea, Joe the Janitor leaning on his broom, and the two George Bushes arm-wrestling, their faces wrenched and straining, their thin inarticulate lips and close-set unseeing eyes perfectly rendered. The stuff is somehow whimsical and powerful at the same time, and it truly kicks ass.

  Bottom line? Any time Clapper lured a girl into the sculpture grove, he flat out had her. Maybe in an atrium or a rotunda somewhere, these things were statues, but in that studio, where the process oozed from the very walls, they were invariably experienced as a trumpet blast from the God of Art, a celestial endorsement of the great “Arnie Cloud.” And my next true love was in there. I heard the murmur of their conversation, smelled the fresh pot of coffee they had brewing, and faced the unforeseen possibility that I had lost the first round.

  In truth, I had taken not one but two tough punches the day before. Mere hours after Rose rebuffed me (and after regaling Nina with a pleasingly distorted version of that event) I was sitting with my pal Barney at The Red Stripe when three 30-something ladies ventured past our booth. Schoolteachers night out, Barney whispered a bit unkindly, adding that they looked like the husband-hunting trio in How To Marry A Millionaire—redhead, blonde, and brunette.

  They looked pretty good to me and on instinct alone I gave them The Look, only to see it glance off their shoulders. The redhead even reached back absently and hung her coat on my head, more or less. I was invisible to her too. “Losing your touch?” said Barn, with an evil grin, just to certify the hit.

  How could this be? Clapper was six years older than I. That’s the best thing about him: he will always be six years older and four inches shorter, not to mention balder, grayer, and almost pudgy these days in his purported marital bliss. How could he still have it? How so easily maneuver the new girl into the stately grove of bronze and plaster?

  But he had, and the door was already closed. Clapper never, ever, closed that door except when he was “entertaining.” Music might crash and blare, bare-assed models might parade boldly, and all manner of crap spill into the hallway (along with the entourage) as Clapper lay about him with his screeching drills and diamond saws and the legendary homemade compressor-driven hacking chisel. This was Arnie’s World, on display. The door closed only for sin.

  I needed to get in there right away, to ward off the irreversible Dracula moment. Just go. But first: Stan checking his face in the mirror.…

  I always check now, ever since the night my dear teen queen niece Maisie made her telling remark at the Casa Parentini, or “home” as it once was known to myself and my sister Lisa, who is also Maisie’s mom. Our parents were only in their 60’s, but to Maisie they were these ancient lovable grandparental relics. However fit and vigorous they really were (and often as not Big Al was up on a ladder repairing some damn thing), to Maisie they were two people who could never make it through dinner without having some sort of food stick to their faces. The chin or cheek, most frequently, yet also areas as remote as the forehead, as unlikely as the ear. Maisie was not a bit mean, merely observant and curious when she said it:

  “Can’t old people feel their faces?”

  She did not say it to them, mind you. She did grasp the delicacy there. One never referenced the subject of age at Casa Parentini. One was given to understand that Big Al could not handle it. She said it to me off-stage, sotto voce, and it quickly became a treatable chronic joke between the two of us.

  “Onion fragment on the tip of your nose,” I would alert her, and the sweet beet-red child would speed to the bathroom, clawing at her nose.

  “Crouton stuck in your little beard thingama,” she would sally back, girded for battle upon her return. And perhaps I would run my fingers casually through my beard thingama so as to certify it crouton-free. We are all suggestible and the truth (here too a reason for checking the mirror en route to Arnie’s World) is that no one seems able to “feel their faces.” Small particles of food can appear at any time. Age may indeed exacerbate the problem, but cheese pizza with several toppings? A cake with its many facets: frosting, filling, and crumbs? Stuff does turn up.

  Stan, passing muster. Ready for pushback. In his own Red Sox cap now (we would be teammates, Rose and I), he descends the fire escape, hustles the length of the alley to the front door, and begins his approach to … Arnie’s World.

  But wait, what was the pretext? In my haste I had neglected to invent a fucking pretext. Stan, hesitating … and then eureka: Rose herself could serve as pretext, and aptly enough, since she was the entire text as well. In our most recent conversation about the vacancies (Was Tech really looking for tenants? Would they even accept one?) Clapper and I had riffed on hiring an actor to pose as a “mixed media specialist” desperate for studio space and prepared to sign a lease on the spot. We would dispatch the actor to the Hargrove & Drew offices where he would offer to pay triple the asking price.

  Now here was an actual flesh-and-blood non-Actor’s Guild artist whom I had encountered and Clapper had not—or so I would pretend to be the case. An excellent pretext: Stan reporting in on an exciting development.…

  I knocked and listened for the soft clop of shoes. Until you heard shoes on the linoleum, you could never be sure with Clapper and his crowd. They were not above a little dejeuner sur l’herbe action in there, with the deshabille and more, apples and wine, the whole mid-19th century Barbizon School
schtick. Prior to his happynormal marriage, Clapper had sold it to wave after wave of them.

  “Stanley, I presume.” (Clapper, reciting his line.)

  “Herr Clapperberg, I come bearing good news.” (Me, reciting mine.)

  Then, since I could not pretend to miss her, posted at his right shoulder, I had to append: “But it would appear you already know the news I have come to report. Hello again, Miss—?”

  “Gately.”

  Rose Gately, then. And Rose Gately could not know she was already a major character in my life, that she had dominated my thoughts for the past 20 hours. But then why not? “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?”

  “Stan Noseworthy.”

  “Yes,” she said, still the minimalist where I was concerned. Nor were they standing aside to welcome me in; they stood shoulder to shoulder, like offensive linemen, to keep me out. No mention of coffee.

  “What you don’t know, Rose,” I plugged on ahead, “is that the studio you rented has been empty for years. And the landlord hasn’t—”

  “But I do know.”

  “I told Rosie the whole story,” said Clapper. “In fact, she’s here because of me.”

  “Oh?” I said. (Rosie? I thought.)

  “I did a little recruiting.”

  “Hey, and now the future is looking rosy.”

  “That’s good, Stanley.” Then turning to Rose: “Stanley is our wordsmith. He makes that sort of joke—fairly well, I might add.”

  “Coffee smells fresh,” I said.

  “Yes and it’s getting cold. So, if you’ll excuse us?”

  Door swinging shut over crocodile smiles. As though (Stan musing, as he trundles away, abruptly banished from the forest of Fontainebleau) they were enjoying a private joke at my expense. In the light of her earlier improbable laughter, I could almost believe Clapper had hired the girl on his own, to fill the new tenant role in our neverending game of playing with one another’s minds. For “Rosie” was not merely non-responsive, she was in her demure way hostile. A little vicious.