Something of My Own

By Nick Zules

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 5, 2010
• ISBN: 9781456812126

Nick Zules

Nick Zules studied art history and philosophy at Columbia College and has spent his life investigating the relation between the two. Classes at the School of Visual Arts, where he studied oil painting, helped with the pragmatic approach, leading to exhibitions throughout New York, in Taos and Florida. Readings in history, sociology and a careful daily reading of the news helped develop his viewpoint. He’s combined his art efforts with writing and has managed to write over 50 short stories, a novella and is currently working on his second novel at his home on Long Island.

Book preview

1. Roger

I’ve just collected the paintings in my van from galleries on Long Island, the work I’ve done over the past year. They’re crap. And yet, I’ve sold these and others like them for twenty years, since I graduated art school. But lately, no chance; they’ve just gotten tired of me. This house you see behind me is mine too, a nice house with towering oaks, Japanese black pines and elms around it, a pond that reflects the stars in the evening. In September, like now, the moon rises in just the right place over the pond to give a second, shimmering light. My wife Eudora and I bought the house when prices were low, but low or not, there’s still a mortgage to pay, my son Kenny’s college tuition is a whopper, and everything keeps

going up.

I’ve been unhappy over the years painting the crap. I graduated at the head of the class from Pace University. My paintings exercised the imagination, had a unique sense of color and I drew, as they said about Picasso, like an angel. The life of an atelier beckoned, but I chose the suburban life, painted landscapes, misty landscapes, indefinite but tantalizing, making heady allusion to the great impressionists, particularly Pissaro. I did portraits like Van Gogh or refined ones like Sargent, indulged in postmodern, anything that sold. So here I am, twice defeated, thinking, wondering, planning, not simply to get back in the plus column, but how to recover my neglected dreams and fully understand their

meaning.

*

Henri Phillipe Bennet owed me seven thousand dollars for paintings of mine he had sold a year earlier. He ran the Paris West Gallery, near Port Jefferson on Long Island Sound and fifteen miles east of my home.

I pulled my van, loaded with paintings I tried to sell to other galleries on the Island, into the parking lot of the Paris West and parked next to Henri’s Citroen. The fenders had dents, the seat covers were worn through and it idled asthmatically. Why he kept it I could never figure. It cost him a fortune to keep intact and running over the years.

Pitch pines and short, wide-leafed grass surrounded the low-slung modern structure of the gallery. Away from the traffic, the air was bright and had the clean smell of the sea.

Through the gallery window I saw Henri lean on the front counter, a glass of wine at his elbow. He spoke to someone behind the counter, probably his latest version of gallery manager, always young, always beautiful, but one who knew little about art. The less the better, was the way he put it, as long as they can read and write. Better they know nothing about art than to pretend and speak insufferable absurdities.

In the past, I several times asked him, foxy me, But why so beautiful? He stroked his goatee and looked off beyond the blue waters of Long Island Sound.

In the gallery now, he greeted me in a hoarse voice and offered me a glass of Pommard. He had lost weight; his scrawny neck balanced a full head of gray hair. Dark circles under his eyes were the final tip-off something was up with his health.

It was indeed the gallery-manager behind the counter, the lovely Katherine.

We said our hello’s and I told him how tough things had been lately and how much I needed the money. He gave me the bad news.

My dear boy, I have only our past together to recommend me, but you must believe I barely have the money to get back to France, that is, should I live so long.

What’s the matter?

My other kidney, she goes, too.

I’m sorry. There obviously was no reason to insist or complain.

You understand me. I’m glad. Should money come my way before or after I reach Paris, I will immediately send it to you. But now the Pommard. He turned to an empty bottle. Katherine left to get another from his office and brought the scent of jasmine as she passed close by. She wore willow green shorts and a sparse white top. Her legs were fine and her breasts and back sculpted marble.

Henri was born of Parisian parents who were both agents for Dadaists and Surrealists in the nineteen twenties. As a young man he grew a goatee, tried to be a painter himself, failed, and opened a gallery in Monmarte selling the artwork of others. He made money and traveled. In the U.S. he fell in love with the solitude and hilly ridges of north-eastern Long Island. There he built his home, and built the Paris West on a stretch of white sand on the Sound nearby.

I tell you about him because he was a big influence on me, both negative and positive. I never met anyone who knew so much about art, could so keenly appraise its intrinsic value, and someone so down on my work.

But wait a minute, despite that fact, the first time I showed at his gallery and despondently collected my paintings, he asked me to leave a few, and when I asked him in surprise why, he said, because your fren’s here on Long Island know less about good art than you, my dear Roger, calling me Rogere.

I sold him many paintings in the years that followed and had a show periodically at the West, at which he called me Long Island’s greatest painter before clients, but privately never said a word of praise.

I painted in postmodern style for him most often since it brought the best prices. I had studied it in college and the gimmicks required came easily to me: paint a traditional scene and then mock it with added features that made it meaningless. The skunks in the immaculate parlor, Socrates looking at TV, brought sales and amused laughs. It was cynical and heartless but it sold.

After several years of success I told him I was sick of the repetitive, empty stuff I painted. I showed him a canvas I thought original, more me, painted in a primitive, wild style, full of violent colors and aggressive figures. He laughed, and then threw a fit.

You know not how to improve, my dear Rogere. If you did, even so it would not ‘elp us. You want to sell, no? You want to keep your pretty home in Eastbrook, yes? He scratched his goatee and with one eye closed, held the canvas away from him. Similar to Beckman, done when? 1928! He laughed. Original, eh? As pure art it is an improvement, a slight improvement, but by that slight improvement— he made an elaborate joke at which he laughed, but I again knew he meant—you have destroyed the integrity of the previous atrocities you so readily commit to canvas—and sell so easily!

He saw my chagrin. Bring it, dear friend, bring your supposed masterpiece to other galleries if you wish. It will not sell. You will work another fifty years to make this, he shook the canvas till I thought the stretcher-bar would break, into an appreciable art work to be proud of beyond money. As for me, I would never hang such a thing on my walls.

And so, for fifteen years we went on that way, him selling the everyday and putting down paintings my heart went into. Occasionally I’d complain the work I did made me feel disconnected from life. He’d hand me a check for the last canvas he sold and said, Voila, you are connected. I couldn’t hate the guy; he was my best gallery, but the devil that periodically visited my dreams wore not a black goatee but a gray one.

Henri spoke to me confidentially, the acrid smell of his breath confirming his illness, before Catherine returned with the wine. Rogere, there’s still a favor you can do for me. Apparently, my mildly foregoing the seven thousand was not favor enough.

I am not well now for a long time. You see the beautiful young woman, Catherine, in my care? I have not been able to make her happy lately.

Happy?

You should have seen the look on her face when she recognize you, with your fine masculine form, when you enter the lot.

She’s very beautiful.

Young and healthy, she responds to the demands of her body, he smiled, and looked at me over his horn-rimmed glasses, which apparently she feels you can fulfill. For emphasis, he smacked the palm of his hand with a small ruler that had the name of the gallery on it.

I hardly know her.

"Rogere, you always have a way of avoiding fundamentals. You don’t need to know her. He was truly upset. You’re a man, she’s a woman. A beautiful woman."

This in lieu of the seven thousand?

Och, Rogere, how vulgar of you.

I laughed. No, sorry, I have to think of Eudora, especially now. Things may get pretty tough for both of us.

He was flabbergasted. "Eudora? You wife? Quelle stupidite! You just don’t tell her."

Katherine returned with the wine. If what Henri said was true, she was a good actress. The smile on her lips as she served me betrayed no more than casual interest. Nah, Henri would merely have her working under orders, and I couldn’t stand that in any case.

I drank the wine and said goodbye to my friends.

I liked Henri, in spite of everything. He was crafty but had always been on the up-and-up with me on money matters, until lately, that is. Perhaps his being broke was just a line, but I didn’t think so. As I drove back to Eastbrook with a van-load of paintings and no money, I tried to formulate in my mind just how much good, or bad, he had actually done me over the years.

*

I looked out the kitchen window at Eudora’s garden as she prepared dinner; a breeze carried the scent of basil and rosemary. I arranged her flowers on the canvas in my mind into a placid suburban scene, plain flowers with exotic names, Gazania’s, Barberton Daisies, near the pond Lythrum and Verbena. Dismayed at the plainness of it, out of habit I placed a wolf with bared fangs just behind the shrubbery.

Eudora’s chop-chop-chop snapped me out of it. So the only thing he could offer you was a roll in bed with his secretary?

Gallery manager.

Oh, come on, you know why he keeps them around.

Kept. That’s why he needed my services.

Pity you couldn’t help out, she said.

Pity? Oh really. Pity I didn’t know how you felt about it. But my little joke fell flat when I saw the deep concern for our future on her face.

All these years, she said, and stood poised and reflective with the blade above a carrot, I know we did well with him, but there was always something in his attitude to you, to us, even in the best of times, that he did you a favor selling your work, that you were over-rated, a hack.

I was.

Roger—

Otherwise I wouldn’t have fallen by the wayside so completely.

"My God, the man really has done a job on you. You’ve had over forty shows. All the Long Island papers think you were great, that you are great. The New York Times said—"

"Tepid, my darling, tepid. I put together some bits and pieces from here and there and everywhere and the galleries went for it. But you are right about one thing. He’s always spoken to me from on high, kept me in my place . . ."

 . . . called you the hack . . .

 . . . always the hack. Didn’t let me grow . . .

 . . . was afraid to let you grow . . .

I then put in words what had been on my mind since the sale of paintings had gone flat,  . . . and I think I can.

Can? What?

Grow. I can’t sell anymore doing what I do now. The gimmick’s over. In school we said everything’s been done already. Now everything’s been redone already. Over and over and over. I’ve got to change, right? Got to. There’s nothing to lose if I take some time off to think, try to find my own way, work hard over the next couple of years trying to find the painter I should have been. I know I can grow. I’ve thought it over a thousand times.

What in God’s name do you think you can grow into?

I’m not joking.

I’m not either. What do you think you can say that hasn’t been said by other artists?

That’s what I want to find out.

You don’t know?

"No one knows. No real artist knows. He just paints and one day, something comes out that he’s been looking for, that everybody’s been looking for. And he found it."

She spoke softly, now even more saddened. You’re starting a search and you don’t know where you’re going? What to look for? Roger, you’re over forty years old. I’m almost there myself. And you say there’s nothing to lose? What about us? What about Kenny? He’s just started college. What you’re looking for may take years. And look, the economy’s gone to hell.

Things always turn around; we’ve always made it through tough times, haven’t we? I have a job lined up already, and even without it we have money for another six months. Meanwhile, I’ll see my old man—

Your old man? Oh, no. How . . . how can you think of going to your old man?

We owe too much on our credit cards to go to a bank for a loan. I don’t want any gifts from him, just a small loan.

My father had three sons. The other two labored under him at his insurance business and were rewarded with upscale lives, one in Westchester and the other in a townhouse near my father’s on East 53rd Street in the city. They, the three of them, had no comprehension of art, which worked in my favor, since they considered me a true artiste, a whacko who sacrificed all for art, but still deserved some respect. They were not aware of the compromises I had made. When I had some success, my brothers looked at me with envy. I had eluded without too much pain one of the worst traps in life, to work for one’s father. But for some reason, Dad took it as a personal affront I disdained the gold, gold to him the measure of all things. Little did he know I sought it in another way, in a means closer to my heart, perhaps, but as clear a sell-out as any.

He did his best to lure me with a startling salary offer that would have me earn in a month what it took a year spreading paint, with a fabulous life insurance policy that promised early retirement. His cigar dropped from his mouth to the carpeted floor of his office when I turned both down. My brothers understood. Dad thought I was nuts. He wondered how a son of his could have gone so wrong, been so stupid, so violated common sense and the American way. Over the years I had many shows. He came to only two, when my mother was alive and made him. He sulked about at both, drank a gallon of wine and wolfed down a trayfull of canapés. He might have been at a horse show; he hardly looked at my paintings. The brothers were firmly discouraged from visiting galleries where I showed in the city, but when they had a client to see nearby, they sometimes did. At their weddings, my father presented each with an El Dorado. He sent a bottle of Johnny Walker (Red not Black) to Eudora and me at our ceremony in the Little Church Around the Corner. It was spite, pure and simple. When we were together, which was seldom, I felt him examine me for signs that I might succumb to the difficulties of the artist’s life. Now that I might, it would be interesting to see how he’d react.

Listen, Eudora, sweets, I said, and ran my hand nervously over my thinning hair, though I managed to speak in a charming, placating voice, we want to hold onto the house, right? Dad’s been indifferent, but who knows, he might want to help.

Help? You are desperate. You know he’s going to make you crawl, and then he’ll insist you join the business. Eudora went to the fridge. She turned, sore as hell, and bam went the chicken on the counter-top. Isn’t there another way? Her hand went into the chicken with running water to clean it out. Is this, this finding yourself that important?

How can you ask me that? It’s everything to me. I’ve got a job doing restorations lined up. Evenings I’ll work on my painting. I’ll—

Restorations? With your knowledge and contacts? Why? Maybe just a slight change in approach would mean a lot. Look at Jess Whittaker—

Oh, God, I said, and hung my head. Jess, my room-mate from Pace days, had a magical way of dressing up a canvas that gave it appeal, that made it look special at first and made you want to buy it. Jess is a black artist with a brilliant color sense, but that’s about it. After a while you got to recognize the same old Jess, those flashy, contrasty color schemes, the same labored exaggeration in the drawing. You know what Henri said about Jess?

Henri again. I’m telling you, the man’s poisoned your mind. She nervously wiped her hands on her apron, embroidered by Eu herself with beige and mauve chrysanthemums. Don’t tell me. Merde. Right? He called it merde.

I had to smile at that one. Right.

"Right. Merde. Crap. But Roger, it sells!"

Eudora, I said, and faced the lovely wide-apart eyes and open