Do Nice Artistic Girls?

My friend Tom traveled down a curious detour of the normal instincts. He believed that the great boon of love -- the real thing: striving male and wagging, hallooing female -- was only possible with what he called a "nice artistic type." Tom himself was not an artist, of course, and not particular about which almondeyed, heavy-thighed, primordial beauty out of Henry Miller, Thomas Wolfe or Hunter College she would turn out to be. All he knew was that her breasts would be high and rosy, her ample belly starred with a biblical navel that winked only for him, and her heart surpassingly willing to help a shy lad find all the earthly delights. And that's all he knew.

It is obvious that Tom was a very sensitive, thoughtful, and troubled young man. His efforts to find this girl were not rewarded by immediate success; the soft evenings of fantasy are seldom in a hurry to fulfillment. "I like Ravel and Braque," he would say to some likely music and/or art student at a party, "and it's so noisy here. Would you care to have some coffee outside?"

"Why yes, I'd love it."

"I know a place -- let's go."

White-lipped and determined, old Tom avoided my eyes, found the girl's coat, patted his wallet reassuringly, and took her arm with the grimness of a crusader storming an infidel city. Since he was a clever and learned graduate student, twitching with excellent manners despite his stern passions, this first breach in the wall of sociability was always made with considerable skill. The girl was flattered. She was rendered curious. She didn't necessarily have her mind on the coffee at all. They put the party behind them.

Then, an hour or so later, they would very likely return, Tom ruffled and disconsolate, his glasses fogged, while the girl flashed across her pretty face that girlish signal of indignation and triumph. Why really, all she had wanted was to discuss Ravel and/or Braque! And a quiet cup of coffee with maybe a little cookie!

"Hi, Don," he would pitifully say to me.

"In too much of a hurry again?"

"Do you think that was it?"

"It's none of my business, pal. But they don't like to think you got only that one little thing on your mind."

And he shook his head because it's so hard for an honest young paranoid in a world of hypocrisy and pretense. Besides, it was a big little thing to him. The rest of the party passed with Tom's retreated gaze brooding abstractly on virtue and sin, the soul and the flesh, and whether a glass of wine would pick him up enough for a violent new try at climbing the great wall -- that Sharon, that Toni, that little Patrice with the ballet slippers over there.

Every clever young urban male carries the weight of obsessions and phobias, his psychic tics and his gaucheries of learning about the significant presence of others in the world. When gratification and the calming of age settle upon him, he turns these lonely troubled years to nostalgic memory. How ardent we were in our egotism! How bright and pathetic! Aware of my own several needs, I was perhaps more tolerant of Tom's use of me in 1946 than I would be today. With his graceful Park Avenue manners, his wealth and "family," the summer home and the winter apartment, together with his terrier-like worrying of intellect, he gave me something I needed. I was green out of the hills of Cleveland. We became "companions" in the original meaning of the word: we broke bread together almost every day. Pumpernickel, of course.

"What were you reading, Don?"

"Whitehead on science. Tawney on Protestantism. Al Capp on Sadie Hawkins Day."

"Did you notice how that Nancy Fredericks came to Logic and the Scientific Method with teethmarks on her collarbone?"

"Yes, but don't you think about it, Tom. She's going steady with a teaching fellow."

Our conversations began with philosophy and ended with love, began with literature and ended with love, or sometimes, for sweet variety, began with politics in order to end with love. Tom believed that, as a long-haired although crewcut poet, I was bred to an erotic ease and knowledge forbidden in his own childhood. While this seemed to me a considerable exaggeration, and I always denied it, my denials must have glittered with a brilliant and elegant lack of conviction. "I was no Casanova in high school," I insisted. "Sure, I had a few good long talks, but she usually rang the bell on me before we got to the end of the subject."

He never believed me; I did not want to believe myself; it was good to talk with Tom after one of my own hot and mussed contacts with a Barnard woodcut girl or the off-Broadway friend of a Juilliard friend.

"I had to turn my head when we passed a burlesque show," he said, sorrowing over his childhood.

"Terrible, awful, narrow-minded," I said, "I could bring Spicy Detective into the house. Listen, you could pick up some nice sadism that way."

"My parents made me leave the room when they talked about anything."

"Bourgeois," I said. "My parents didn't bother talking."

"I don't think it was any fun for Mother. I'm sure of it. My father stayed sober most of the day, but she couldn't stand his smell after dinner."

This one I had to think over. "Well," I admitted judiciously, "I'm not sure how much Mother enjoyed it, but ----"

"O I'm sure she must have, Don! Look at how free you are!" (Naturally I found Tom a magnificent judge of men.) "Modern poets don't separate the body and soul the way I do."

Convinced despite Eliot and Auden, despite so much wild play of metaand physics, I examined him for visible evidence of the Manichean division between dark and light on his graduate student's mug: fierce and ardent shaving, complete with little pink nicks; protuberant eyeballs that seemed, in certain lights, imperfectly oval; a lean, intellectual, Yankee head; Hamlet with hornrims, Ulysses packing his mama along with him, Ivan Karamazov with no brothers or Holy Russia to blame. Yes, perhaps he had difficulty tying the balloon of his soul to his body's little finger.

No, he was no different from me.

• • •

Inevitably we discovered Sylvia. She was no longer a student; she twisted silver and copper into Indian, African, Mexican, and other dream-symbol shapes for a jewelry shop on Eighth Street. They were signed and sold under the name of the man who rented the store, but Sylvia earned enough to outfit herself in sandals with every variety of strap the esthetic girl could want, a fine assortment of ribbons for her ponytail, and a cash balance for buying the Blake, Unamuno and Soviet folk songs by the Piatnitzki chorus which were still de rigueur in the Village of that faraway epoch.

"Caution, patience," I counseled Tom from the heights of my insight. "Take her to the Stanley maybe, tell her about your thesis, show her you really care."

"And I do!" he said. And he did.

My own concern with how he made out was deepened by a warm sense of benevolence and self-sacrifice. She had the look of tallness in her chin-lifted, prideful way of moving; she wore a strong, straight, sensual nose with genuine nostrils; her cheeks were healthy with sport on the Village greens (Washington Square, Sheridan Square, and with a variety of squares); her body was sleek, firm, and sure of itself. I had seen her first, but his need was greater than mine. One day she wore a black turtleneck sweater -- earlier, by an oversight, she had somehow neglected this facet of her character -- and on that day I decided that, no, my need was greater than his.

But by that time it was too late. Tom and Sylvia were careening down the trail of courtship, almost out of my sight by now. "Have a good time last night, Tom?" I asked him.

"I got to get me some sleep."

"Which means," I commented with surly and jealous sarcasm, "that you don't want to talk to me now."

"Not now. Later maybe. I'm tired."

"Nice going."

But then, by the thin look of pain which flapped across his face, narrowed by scruple and doubt, frayed by the spirit and the mind, devoured, I knew that this proud Sylvia was no more easy for Tom than he would be easy for a girl. "Man, oh man," he said, "talk talk talk. She never stops."

I shook my head sympathetically. It was the occupational disease of those with little occupation. "She probably admires your mind," I noted sympathetically. "You know how it is. Those people she meets in the art jewelry racket never went past their B.A., if that far. Try keeping quiet, why don't you?"

"I do," he complained, "you already told me about that technique. But then she asks me some question and I get started. Last night it was Plotinus. Not my fault, Don! She asked me, and pretty soon it was too late. I was tracing Neo-Platonism (continued on page 44)Artistic Girls(continued from page 28) from the beginning down to me, and then it was just too damn late."

"And the wrong kind of mood."

As he suspected, I could no longer help him. When it came to women in general, I was perfectly content to set myself up as an authority; but it would be hybris, that wild pride which brought the Greek, heroes to their doom, to pretend to understand a specific, sweet and salty, high-breasted and warm-breathing Sylvia. A deep medieval philosopher, Maimonides, gave this advice to the young man tormented by desire: "Drag it into the House of Study." Tom, poor fellow, was now on his own, dragging it out of the house of Sylvia after many futile hours of travail.

"Do you think she wants to get married?" I asked him.

He looked at me as if I had gone mad. "Sylvia? A true artist? With her career before her?" And then he sank desolately into my single overstuffed chair. "God," he said, "I think maybe you're right."

My onlie begetter of clarity in logic had become confused. "You need a rest, man," I told him. "Here, have a vitamin pill -- my mother sent them to me."

"Thanks, why are they so brown?"

"Fell behind the radiator last September, I thought it was from the mice and I set a trap, but then I started to smell the niacin and ascorbic acid when the heat came on. Maybe that's all you need -- vitamins."

He gazed upon me with sublime pity for my vanished character. His mournful stare, those eyes bulging imperfectly and blue, meant several things: You used to be a true friend, you used to sympathize, now you're just making fun. "All right, I'll show you," he said. "I'll show everybody."

"Better just show Sylvia," I advised him, "and you won't need to worry about the rest."

Sylvia was no dope. To this day I am not certain of what she thought she wanted from him, but it may merely have been that she was born in Yonkers at age zero and had decided to spend her declining years after age 23 in Scarsdale. On the way, every dog which barked and every boy who howled could provide assurance that her charm, her Sylvia's charm, was a unique blessing of Sylvia's alone -- somehow independent of arch of foot and curve of throat, smudge of eyes, gloss of hair, and long clever line of nostrils. "And yet art thou still but Faustus!" -- and yet was Sylvia still but a girl.

"I like you very much," Tom said.

"Very much," she repeated. "Hmmm. Just because I know how to solder silver earrings together? It's a trick, that's all."

"You have beautiful eyes. So deep, so ----"

"Because that photographer on Grove Street wanted to take my picture for the Maybelline people? I suppose he tells every girl the same story."

"You are really very talented. Your work has genuine distinction -- authority -- you know, that vital difference centering in the original, imaginative personality -- yes, creative. Why don't you pay attention?"

She yawned. She was hungry, she was sleepy, she was Sylvia. She wanted a bite to pick her up. And out he trotted by her side in order to have just a little sandwich, plus a glass of something and a belting by the three-hour floorshow at Cafe Society Downtown that somehow needed to go with it.

Sylvia led Tom a merry chase through the suburbs of coyness and the subdivisions of teasery; she said yes, she said no, she said maybe; she insisted on an evening in a crowd just when private success seemed in sight. She maneuvered him into discussing Wilhelm Reich in a drugstore booth when he had his mind set on a large noisy party to start things off. But somehow, unlike the other girls, she was never deeply insulted by his obdurate, deprived insistence. "That's absolutely all you want from me," she pouted.

"Not all," he said glumly, precisely. "But all I can think of now."

And her peal of denying laughter rang out. And somehow her go-away-closer-game -- "Step right up and starve near me!"-- never destroyed the greedy will to do battle of this sensitive young swain. They had a dark secret between them: they really liked each other. If Tom had known what tenderness is, he would have felt it for this clanking girl with her slave bracelets, her flaring nostrils, and her gaudily made-up eyes. Sylvia enjoyed talking with the skinny, intense scholar with his undying affection -- somehow she knew how to keep it undying, at least temporarily. She even began an educational project on his pale, wizened, concentrated, turnipshaped soul. She conducted him toward laughter, frostily at first, with the merest green shoots of hee and haw, finally employing part of his chest and the upper regions of his belly. He noted in his journal an improved peristalsis. At the same time, Tom succeeded in making Sylvia realize that the universe of Culture extends past the tiny rectangle bounded by Jean Cocteau movies, bop, African masks, and whupped copper.

"Surrealism is dead," he argued, "Free verse doesn't mean a thing, Sylvia. How can you have an art which isn't based on the tradition?"

"Take off your shoes when you talk," she ordered him. "How can you explain things to me under all that leather?"

They were getting what they were needing without knowing that this too was what they wanted.

In order to survive his combat with a most wily adversary, Tom had to learn to adopt her tactics. As it became more of a play, a joyous combat, he began to come closer to winning the game. Perhaps Sylvia, a healthy young creature, did not mind his winning, so long as he could not predict her, classify her, understand her. She fought amiably and like a tigress for her girlish quiddity: Who is Sylvia? What is she?

One afternoon Tom asked me to go to a record shop with him. We had been seeing less of each other lately -- my attempt to Indian give Sylvia had altered our friendship -- and so I was pleased to attempt a return toward our old ease with each other. Later, as we discussed the music, I realized that he was not indulging his own taste at all. He turned out to be weighting down his record changer with a work of highly derivative composition -- Tom's First Symphony in Erotic Minor, made up of a snippet of Berlioz, a patch of Wagner, and then Ravel's Bolero all the way to the bitter end. He had worked out a theory about blood pressure and how nobody could resist it.

Having put this concoction on the machine, he planned to charge up his coffee table with wine, oysters, cigarettes, and tamales, and then to settle down with Sylvia in a determined effort to avoid talking about Lessing's Laocoön. Apart from suggesting the interpolation of a Schubert song to lighten their digestion between oysters and tamales, I offered no judgments.

"What do you think, Don?"

"Me? I'm going to read the Laocoön."

"Am I a fiend?"

"Not if you lend me the Everyman edition. Save me going to the library, Tom."

The desperate and fatal encounter was for that evening. It was Washington's Birthday. Tom promised to telephone me the next day.

I went to my room to study, not expecting his call, which came, however, in the middle of the night. "Listen, Don," -- Tom's voice hoarse and bewildered.

"Well, how was it?"

"..."

I waited a moment. Curious I was but also irritably sleepy. "Tom, you drag me from bed, Ok, but now why don't you say something?"

"I thought Sylvia was coming out of the shower."

"Congratulations!" I shouted into the telephone. "That's great!"

"Thanks."

"What's the matter? You sound all (concluded on page 67)Artistic Girls(continued from page 44) upset, man."

He was. The dark mystery of female humanity remained unilluminated by Tom's triumphant battle. Talking to him, I could imagine his pale, baffled face, confessing all to me while he watched the bathroom door, under which wisps of steam curled and rose. "Don, I've got to tell someone, I've got to ask you." he said. "Please, I just can't understand. I don't get it, Don. She ate a whole box of Ritz crackers afterwards!"

I tried to assure him that, as long as she took them out of the box first, the act was not strikingly abnormal. But the damage was done. By this event, unanticipated in his strict Yankee imagination, the mystery of Sylvia had increased and multiplied and become a burden far beyond what a man like Tom could carry alone. He needed her help.

When she emerged from the shower, lovely in towels, damp, pink, healthy, and greedy for the last crumbs of cracker in the box, Tom asked her to marry him. She said yes, but the first thing was to go out for some chow. He now pursues his scholarship on the eternally artistic nature of Woman in Scarsdale, where, I presume, he and Sylvia keep a well-stocked kitchen.