The Day the Bozarts Died Read online

  My boss Smiley was a small acquisitive soul whose old man had bought up half a block in Sycamore Square back when it was so rundown no one shopped for anything but sex and drugs there. Now, predictably, it was a hot youth culture destination, with two more Starbucks bookending a run of restaurants, bars, and stylish dance clubs which had so urbanely renewed the sagging sad-assed neighborhood. Though he had trained as a slumlord, Smiley woke to find himself in possession of an upscale empire. Without selling a stick of furniture, he was pulling in $25,000 a month in rents.

  Still, he had grown up scavenging for bright coins and he would die that way. He paid his other employees less than the minimum wage, paltry as that was, simply because he could. Those employees were Passamaquoddy Indians, whose tribe up in northern Maine clearly owned no casino to buffet the economic winds. No one was sending these guys any credit card offers in the mail. Their shared apartment in East Boston, which I visited just once, was the bleakest housing imaginable—apart from my own, which they visited just once as well yet laughed about forever-after. A place that small and half of it taken up by a desk? This was a joke they never tired of.

  They had a fascinating game going with Smiley, who hated and cheated them, while they in turn naturally hated and cheated him, with all parties outwardly maintaining a constant stream of good-natured bonhomie. Each morning we would drive to the warehouse to load the day’s desks, dressers, armoires, nightstands, rugs—and each morning the guys would throw on one or two extra pieces they could fence for short money, beer money, at the back door of a bar in Eastie. They would get 20 bucks for a dresser worth $175.

  I was expected to go along with this. After all, I could not be on Smiley’s side, could I? It occurred to me that Smiley might have hired me to be the fox in the henhouse, as a deterrent, or informant, but you have to pay a proper fox a lot more than six bucks an hour. Besides, he didn’t want to know too much; didn’t want to catch them out and fire them, because then what? What he wanted was to despise, berate, and underpay them, then stroke them at day’s end with his change-of-pace jollity.

  It was a shitty dead-end job. (As I explained to Barney, I was only in it for the money.) The good news was that the whole nasty roundelay might be worth staging, possibly as a musical (my first), for there was something anomalously lyrical in the retro sets (the chaotic warehouse, cluttered storefront, wobbling truck, and godforsaken tavern) and in the sorry little comedy being played out.

  Two obstacles stood in the way of my promising new work, two more stones in my passway. I could neither sleep, nor sit. It starts with the fact that although I aged three calendar years over the course of those 1001 nights in Nina’s bed, my back had aged three decades. When I moved my tack into her barn I had never experienced a flicker of lumbar discomfort; when I moved out I had the spine of a pensioner—without, alas, his pension.

  Lying on my narrow cot by night, lugging furniture around by day, it got so bad I could not sit at my desk, much less think productively. My mornings came to resemble a geriatric modern dance, as I would unfurl myself to full height in slow motion, limb by limb. Putting on a shirt, I felt like the rubber man at the circus insinuating himself into a large jar. And when finally I achieved a more or less upright chimpanzee stance, off I would go to compound the crick by carting armoires up narrow twisting staircases.

  Please don’t misunderstand. This was the nickel bag of suffering, absolutely no big deal. I would never compare it to real suffering, to those poor fly-bedevilled souls with wasting AIDS in equatorial Africa, for instance. It was my deal, that’s all. My small portion. My back went south and as a result, increasingly, I could neither sit nor sleep.

  One year for Christmas, Nina gave me Arabel—or three visits to Arabel’s massage table. It was not that I needed anything of the sort. It was intended as pure indulgence, a nifty idea Nina came up with, and one I began to revisit as I writhed away the nights. Arabel had great hands, not in the way of shortstops or wide receivers; hers were knowing tireless loving hands. She played the skin like Ben Webster played the sax.

  It never felt like a business arrangement (certainly not in the sense where sex and health begin to blur at the front door) until one’s hour was over and Arabel “preferred” cash. Lots of cash. $75 the hour, $45 the half-hour, a true Hobson’s Choice. Which was the bargain?

  Answer, neither. (Nina had pre-paid; therein lay the bargain.) My current weekly haul of $108 was barely break-even, and worse if I indulged in an upscale muffin and coffee on my way to work. So I could only dream about Arabel—or I could have dreamt had I ever managed to become asleep.

  Barney solved the sleep deprivation piece for me. Not that he gave me any massages. Barney knows sleep, it’s his other area of expertise, besides torts. He used to sleep through classes in college and then crush me in the exams. He could sleep anywhere, anytime, and if they gave a genius grant in sleeping Barney would ride the first wave in. So when he advised me to try The Sleep Store (“Where a good night’s sleep begins with the right mattress” and where happily they do not prefer or even accept cash) I was loathe to argue. Not in my state. Even when greeted with the news I would need a fucking appointment to shop there, I did not say “Get over yourself, Sleep Specialist” and slam down the receiver. No sir, I made an appointment. I even kept it.

  They assigned to me Gloria, those canny marketeers. I am not so sure Barth, the male Sleep Specialist with more gel than hair on his head, would have sold me a bed that day. Whereas Gloria took me in hand, showed me her wares (never better than when demonstrating, in her short black skirt, the legs-raised pillow-between-the-knees fetal posture most conducive to lumbar happiness) and worked with me toward my ideal sleep number, before selling me a rig that cost what Big Al’s speedboat cost him in 1982.

  Instrumental to the sale, of course, foremost among inducements, was Gloria’s eagerness to initiate my last active credit card. Thus when she inquired about delivery, I was equally unfazed by the $50 surcharge. No problemo, just put it on the card, along with any other happy surcharges.

  “You don’t by any chance deliver personally,” I probed, and here a grinning Gloria displayed the bright bulbous engagement ring I am fairly certain she was not wearing as we busied ourselves with buying and selling.

  Oh well, it was the bed I needed, and I can only hope Barney is not as right about everything else as he was about those jokers at The Sleep Store. The new bed, which they barely squeezed into my studio, gave me back sleep, which over time gave me back my back, which in turn made sitting and thinking possible. My fresh assault on the Broadway stage was finally underway.

  I came to Barney’s house for dinner feeling better about life than I had in months and feeling confident Chloe would not accuse me, as she sometimes did, of being “a passive participant in your own damned life.” After all, I was a man who had gone out and got a job and a bed. Besides, if she was in full Nuke Stanley mode, she would have packed us off to The Red Stripe, instead of cooking up a nice fish stew.

  Still, I could not say she was warm. The hug was brisk, the kiss sailed wide right. With Chloe, you measure affection by quarter-inch increments between her lips and your cheek.

  “I had lunch with Nina, so I should probably recuse myself,” she said, though we were contesting no points of law at the time. Judges recuse themselves, I did not reply.

  “How is Neen?” I did reply, taking care to invest my voice with the appropriate balance of breeziness and concern. I was concerned for Nina, genuinely, it’s just that at the moment I was managing Chloe, and trying to steer our evening clear of the reef.

  “She’s good,” was all I got from Chloe, who stayed in the kitchen while Barn and I soaked up a cold one in the living room.

  Barney had come equipped with another new theory to explain me to me, a pastime of his since we were freshmen in college. “I know your problem, Stanley,” he said. “No, listen, this is new. Your problem is that you choose the wrong women.”

  “Nina? Francie? Da
wn? You are saying—?”

  “Nothing. I am saying nothing about any of them. This is about you, stupid. You want to be this marginal, fringes-of-society semi-dropout dude, but then you keep chasing after uppercrust Seven Sisters stock. You like them to be combed and groomed and educated, sweet and normal. So there is a built-in endgame each time, because they are normal.”

  “And I am not?”

  Bless his soul, Barney just could not give up on me completely, could never entirely curtail his efforts to repair me. I love him for this and I love him in spite of it. I am aware that people (his own wife, for starters) are always asking why Barney keeps befriending that asshole Noseworthy? When will he ever learn? But this side of the Ten Commandments there is no absolute right and wrong, there are only differences between people and cultures. Someone could as easily say why does Noseworthy like that uptight lawyer dude so much. The other side of the same coin, no?

  “Didn’t anyone ever tell you about opposites attracting?” I said, with me-and-Barn in mind as much as me-and-Neen. “Maybe that’s why I am drawn to them, and why they are drawn to me. Why it does work, not why it doesn’t.”

  “And maybe you are not so opposite as you like to think. Maybe you are a Seven Sisters’ brother in sheep’s clothing. It’s not as if you didn’t go to a very good college yourself.”

  “You’re just saying that because you went there too.”

  Barney is terrific, he’s in my corner, so sometimes I let him go on. But sheep’s clothing? What’s that about? And these Seven Sisters? I have no idea who that would be. Guessing Radcliffe/Barnard type of deal? Well I could name him some very close friends who went to the 27th sister, or to art school, or no school at all except the school of hard knocks. Could not matter less to me.

  Anyway, he wasn’t really saying I should find a woman as useless as I am, he was saying I blew it with Nina and better fix it quick. Behind his thinking lay the erroneous assumption that if Nina chose to fix it (if she called to absolve me, recall me from Triple-A to the bigs) I would be right back over there on Euclid Street in a flash, cheerfully processing my laundry in her ex-husband’s parents’ ex-basement.

  I would not argue that I was “happier” in my present state (even with my Glorious new sleep situation) but I will say I was committed to it. Ever since that first critical morning, when I elected not to bring the conciliatory flowers (and certainly since that edifying visit from the FedEx Man), I had been rehearsing the arguments against such a hasty surrender. “Never shall I say that marriage brings more joy than pain,” Euripedes wrote, and who am I to doubt a dramatist whose work has endured for 2500 years?

  Even conceding that Barney and Chloe have proven marriage possible, it is undeniably a long shot. Far more prevalent than joy are such chronic pains as predictability, infidelity, boredom, and betrayal—none of them the sort of outcome to be envied. Yet are they not inevitable any time we dare exceed the 60-month limit that even banks define as the outer boundary of sensible long-term investment? Euripides may not have called it “relationship fatigue,” but he knew all about it.

  “Dinner,” Chloe came to say, with a sweet worldweariness she does extremely well. I have always loved Chloe’s face, with the doleful Modigliani triangulation, the straight hair slice-parted down the middle to present the merry slanting eyes. She is so lovely I can almost enjoy being berated by her; her words ricochet around the room, missing me, while her face remains a pure visual treat. It’s sort of like watching Jennifer Connelly in a really bad movie.

  “Why don’t you boys go ahead and start without me,” she was saying. “The salad needs a few finishing touches.”

  Some salad it must have been, too, to take up half an hour in just the final stages. I had begun to suspect I was wrong, that possibly Chloe was in full Nuke Stanley mode and had elected to poison the fish instead of the conversation. For sure I was wrong about Barney, who knew for a fact that my next true love (whether from the Seven Fucking Sisters or from the gutter) would not be my former true love Nina. It seems he had withheld one small tidbit of information.

  “Nina’s getting married,” said Chloe, supplying the tidbit for dessert. “I thought you might like to know.”

  “You don’t say. Married as in married?”

  “She’s marrying Philip. So it’s not as if they don’t know each other.”

  I had come with a small plan in mind. Confess to mistreating Nina (and missing her) in hopes that Chloe might be moved to broker a deal. Now I had no plan; nowhere to stand. She had pushed me into the river and left me to tread water.

  “And love each other too, I’m sure,” I said, not altogether sportingly.

  Chloe knew as well as I did that Nina had broken up with Phil in college precisely because she did not love him. Or so she had testified, though it was also her testimony that she did not “really love” Bob and she did marry him.

  “Also? They are expecting a baby.”

  “A baby.”

  “Yes, Stanley, a baby. Isn’t that great?”

  I said that it was, then changed the subject as quickly as I could. A sip of coffee, a mouthful of flan, and a question for Chloe about her son Alex. Which never fails. Even at her most hostile, Chloe can never resist going on (and on) about a boy Barney (who loves him every bit as much) refers to as The Beloved, so nutsy is his mom about him.

  I was still treading water, barely staying afloat. She wouldn’t name the baby Tess, would she? (Or Cecil: that was her boy’s name.) She wouldn’t sell the ex-husband’s parents’ ex-house and buy Phil an old house with fucked-up plumbing, would she? Could Nina truly unlove me so abruptly and thoroughly?

  Chloe brush-hugged me once more when I left. Didn’t even fake the kiss. Barney walked me out to the curb. “Think about what I said,” he urged.

  “I always do.”

  “To sharpen your arguments against. Really, Stan, I don’t know what you are looking for, but I doubt it will be a better deal than the one you just blew.”

  “That makes two of us, Barn.”

  “So?”

  “So I guess I don’t want a deal. It’s not that I can’t compromise, or be content with half a loaf sometimes. I am not a moron. But I guess I would rather have nothing and be me than have a cushy little life and be … I don’t know, you. No offense.”

  “None taken. And that’s good to hear, because at the rate you are going, bud, nothing is exactly what you will have. No offense.”

  “None taken. And thanks for dinner, Barn. It was really nice seeing you guys.”

  * * *

  “The Day The Bozarts Died,” by Lucy Young, reprinted from The Baskin Reader:

  Cloud’s tale is reluctantly told. “I hate to make a colleague look bad,” he says. “But if you want to know the worst about men? Meet Stanley Noseworthy.”

  For a number of years Cloud had organized a monthly life drawing studio at Blaisdell Street. Thus he was able to provide affordable models for the Beaux-Artists (and for his more promising students at Cheltenham College), extra income for the models, and opportunity for Monk Barrett, “who could never afford a model but drew them better than anyone.” Barrett did pay his portion in sketches, motion and gesture. Each session, Cloud chose one to keep and so did the session model.

  Everyone’s preferred subject was a daycare teacher named Edie Vickers. Cloud, with his anecdotal statuary, rarely employed figure models; when he did, the model was always Vickers. (See his Darwin & Eve at Cheltenham College, for an example.) “Edie was already sculptural,” he explains. “There was something monumental in her bone structure and muscle definition. An absolute knockout but, as someone more clever than I phrased it, she put the male in ‘female’.”

  It is with Edie Vickers that Cloud’s “story about Stanley” begins. Or with her ritual of arrival on hot summer nights. Having bicycled five miles, and then carried her bike upstairs, she would undress in the corridor.

  “Why not? She was hot and about to be naked anyway. So she would show up
looking like an alien bike messenger and about two minutes—and five garments—later, she’d be this gorgeous blonde casually hanging her laundry on the bicycle.”

  Witnessing Vickers’ inadvertent striptease one night by chance, Stanley Noseworthy borrowed a stick of charcoal and signed up on the spot for life drawing. “But of course Stanley couldn’t draw a lick,” says Cloud. “To him this was nothing but a peepshow. He sat there just drinking her in, for two hours. Honestly, it reminded me of my cat staring up at the fish tank.”

  Noseworthy does not exactly deny the inference. One of his disarming traits is an inability to be shamed by sexual attraction, which he points out is universal and healthy, or by the charge of voyeurism, which he labels observation. “It’s true,” he says, “that I had not done a lot with the plastic arts since elementary school, but one look at that girl transformed me. I had to draw her.”

  According to Celia Firestone, certain conventions attach to working with live models. There is a boundary separating artist and subject, “sort of like the ‘invisible shield’ in those old toothpaste ads.” Thus a model might wander lightly robed through the maze of easels, curious to see the work she inspired, and still this distance would be religiously maintained. Noseworthy did not maintain it.

  He never missed a Vickers’ sitting, never failed to request her phone number, offer to walk her home, buy her a drink—“all of that, and non-stop. It was beyond just hitting on the woman, it was pretty much harassment.”

  Vickers always declined politely. She never showed anger, or impatience; never discouraged the inappropriate advances, for (according to Firestone) her lesbianism was of a stripe that allowed for some enjoyment of a man’s disappointment. “Edie would smile at him like the absolute good angel of Hollywood, the fantasy girl who surely will say yes the next time you ask—because she wanted him to keep asking. She really played the devil’s hornpipe for that silly man.”

  The increasingly skewed occasions became an embarrassment for Cloud. He tried turning to other models, but Noseworthy persisted in enrolling. He called in male models, but few artists preferred drawing the male figure. In the end, he gave up. More engaged than ever by his own major pieces and by his teaching duties at the college, he was almost relieved to put an end to the popular tradition.