a novel in progress
I LEFT her asleep, her long fiery hair spread out in a swirl on her pillow. I awoke around seven, according to my wrist-watch on the little shelf beside her head with our two empty champagne glasses, a Dom Perignon bottle, and the two empties of Perrier and grape juice we had mixed and drank while watching ‘Action Of The Tiger’ with Van Johnson, then a late night music video programme with our favorites like ‘You Are’ by Lionel Richie, and ‘Save A Prayer’ by Duran Duran. At the same time, I had been telling her those three stories about my obsession with cinema in my tropical childhood hometown. Now, even under the mauve silk sheet, the deep curves of her figure were enticing, I thought, while sliding over her waist and carefully descending her loft bed’s steep wooden ladder to the bedroom’s warm carpet.

I had to get back to my studio, about four blocks away in a diagonal across Dundas, Queen, Richmond and Adelaide Streets.

My ex was expected to arrive there with our six-year-old daughter at about 8.30 am.

I never asked what it was she had to do that early, but it probably wasn’t work because today was Saturday….in any case I cherished whatever time I got with Maria, our little girl.

I was thinking all this while pulling on my cream jeans and the vermillion checkered flannel shirt with stud buttons Annabella, asleep in the loft bed above, loved to hear snap open.

I was thinking how grateful I was for the chance to tell those stories, and for the light carefree feeling she produced in me, and the voluptuous way she looked from behind and the sounds she made, not to mention the freckled smooth insides of her thighs and the way her tongue seemed to inflate between her lips and her eyelids became like fluffy rising pastry as she sailed away on waves of orgasm.

Zelda, my ex, who had auburn hair and tanned golden like a California surfer girl, was extremely sensuous, kind and generous, but showed little interest in my tropical childhood.

I was thinking this as I wrapped one of Annabella’s long maroon cotton Oriental scarves twice around my neck and put my dark green beret – straight, never slanted- on my uncombed husky hair before her mirror.

I pulled on thick dirty white cotton socks, put on my grey leather cavalier boots with jingling gold ankle buckles, then the wrinkled green Varig trench coat bought at ‘Flying Down To Rio’, a second hand clothing store.

I grabbed my soft brown leather tote bag, routinely checked to see if my notebook, pen, plastic page with slides of my recent paintings, and a precious small hardcover edition of Malraux’s ‘Museum Without Walls’ was inside, then stealthily shut her bedroom door behind me , entered a short balconied hallway and as silently as possible went down the stairs to the front door lobby.

One of us would call first. There was still a fog. The last of winter’s chilly air had collided with the warm incoming air of spring, but the trees were already budding into bright green foliage beside the street and in backyards.

I suppose why I especially liked how the skyscrapers looked half erased in the descending fog was due to the visible quotation I carried in my mind’s eye of all those Film Noirs I had seen in my tropical hometown.

Now the reality felt like a pleasure doubled. As I walked I pulled out a pair of small navy blue mitts from my coat pocket and stretched my fingers to their limit, raised my broad Varig’s collar around my neck and had a flashback of Dana Andrews in that night scene in ‘Laura’ walking alone on the wet sidewalk over to Laura’s apartment, an unlit cigarette at the side of his taciturn mouth.

But I rarely smoked, I figured I needed my breath for stamina in bed. I left Pasquale’s barber shop behind at a corner, my leisurely pace metered by the hollow sound of my boot-heels on the wet pave.

At the next corner I crossed over to the huge Henry Moore bronze sculpture, its design like the cavity of a missing joint-bone made a perfect summer seat while you waited on a street car.

On my right, the Museum Of Fine Arts stretched to the next corner. I thought of the fluffy poached eggs on toast with jam, hot coffee in one of those heavy broad-rimmed ware cups with a green line below its rim I would order at an old diner straight out of one of those 1940’s Edward Hopper oil paintings.

I had become sort of a regular at one a few corners away from my studio, where on a stool beside truck drivers in their denims and wind-breakers, a bunch of keys jingling at their waist, or street cleaners in their yellow canvas jump-suits, the inevitable question: “Artist, right?” or “How’s the writing coming along?”, would eventually come from one of them, as if they knew my paintings or the obscure essays on painting and film I had published in underground periodicals.

I would nod affirmatively, because it was all the same to me, knowing that to them my presence this early in the morning at a diner meant that what we had in common was camaraderie based on poverty and work.

But it wasn’t always like that. The back door of the sumptuous Museum Of Fine Arts inner restaurant and its parking lot with containers filled with bulging garbage bags brought back that year, a few years ago, when I had opened the same back door, ran out into the freezing wintry air, and heaved the restaurant’s garbage bags into the same containers.

My marriage to Zelda had been on the rocks and I had caught a flight to a Latin American capital and did well exhibiting there. We had spoken on the phone, and she had threatened to post me divorce papers.

Our daughter was about three years old already. I flew back, and now separated, stayed with a photographer in his downtown studio-apartment.
I found a job as a busboy at a trendy uptown Restaurant/Club loved by flashy black pimps who laughed behind my back after I wiped their tables and took away their dirty dishes.

Their horny white hookers took sympathy on me, said they liked the way I stayed cool under pressure, asked what cologne I was wearing, and left big t
ips. Things weren’t going too bad until one evening I coincidentally arrived at work at the same time as a young Italian man, and we walked up the stairs side by side dressed equally dapper.

After I had changed into my busboy’s white shirt and black bowtie, the Maitre ‘d asked me to follow him into an office. It turned out the young man was the restaurant owner.

“I heard you’re supposed to be an artist?” he said, and pushed a blank sheet and pencil forward, adding : “Draw me a Hippopotamus.”
I told him I didn’t do any of that kid stuff. He looked at me for a few seconds then waved me out. At the end of my shift that night, dog tired, the Maitre ‘d gave me an envelope with my pay and told me not to come back.

The restaurant/café business was a cherished employer of artists on the rise. Free food and drinks came with the job, lessening a budding artist’s expenses. The photographer and I knew that, and were always on the look out for such jobs.

One day he found one advertised for a waiter and busboy at the Museum Of Fine Arts. We applied immediately and got the jobs, he as a waiter and I as a busboy. Our manageresses were two suave experienced high class playgirls from France and Ireland.

While the photographer, a naïve skirt chaser of all colours and shapes, quickly grew tired of his job and walked off, I kept on; I had to, I had a small child to help support and a studio to find. I worked from ten to three each day, except weekends, and sometimes for gala openings for famous artists’ solo exhibitions.

Each day I walked into work down the halls of the Gallery’s inner court, and grew to like a large Sam Francis ‘Untitled’ canvas of 1959 more than any other work displayed.

I took my breakfast in the kitchen when I arrived: thick clam chowder soup, warm ground prawns marinated in garlic, olives, and onions in spicy tomato sauce on dark rye, then foamy Capuccino, the daily menu’s entre prepared by a jovial raunchy Chinese chef from Hong Kong who had already passed through the kitchens of some of the finest restaurants in Singapore, Milan, Paris, Monte Carlo, and New York , and liked artists.

In a few months I became the head busboy due to sheer tactical style. The restaurant opened for the 11.30 lunch hour and the busboy’s job is to lay the tables correctly, (a job involving infallible memory), constantly supply the waiters’ stations with cutlery, the barman with wine, liqueur, and cocktail glasses, and continually take away the used dishes.

In the morning, before clientele arrived –gallery members, art dealers, critics, successful artists, business people, politicians, civil servants , rich patrons – after I supervised the work of the two junior busboys, I vanished to the kitchen and idled while snacking and gaffing with the chef as he worked.
When the roar of the packed restaurant could be heard from the kitchen and the first guests started to get up, I appeared on the floor.

This became an anticipated moment because a huge line-up waited impatiently in the hallway until their tables were cleared, cleaned, and laid once more.

I devised a system of simultaneous co-ordination: as the busboys walked away after clearing and cleaning the mess, I arrived with handfuls of cutlery and plates which rolled from my fingers in perfect order, each item finding their correct position the first time, just as the French or Irish Maitre ‘d arrived with her guests laying down their menus on their plates, as I walked away to another table.

This went on for a hectic half hour at least, until the next round of well-heeled customers received their tables. In each lull I had, the tall Taiwanese playboy bartender, who became a fan of mine, would whisper me over to his station where he gave me miss-ordered (sometimes done purposely by him) cocktails, wine, or liqueur, which I stooped down out of sight and consumed, then continued working, clearing the waiters’ oval trays stacked with fifty pounds of soup plates, escargot dishes, Perrier and wine bottles, cutlery, wine, champagne, and cocktail glasses.

One waiter’s station stood near a heavy busy door on silent swift hinges only waiters used as they left the kitchen with steaming dishes balancing up their arms .

I deliberately used that door as a short cut to the kitchen, a full tray held high on the palm of my right hand as waiters rushed out unexpectedly, pushing the door into my face while I danced back and went by them in a split second without dropping anything before the swift door could swing back and knock me and everything to the floor.

Often as I slipped through I heard the entire restaurant gasp behind my back. In about five minutes I would return quietly to the floor with my hands in my pockets, high as a kite on a medley of drinks like the grinning bartender, as though nothing unusual had happened.

The result was a bulging envelope of fat tips every afternoon, which I lived on, banking my entire salary. The downside was the hernia I began to develop on my left side from opening that heavy door with my left hand everyday.

I resigned after a year or so, immediately took the operation my doctor ordered, and remembered two pretty Jamaican nurses fondling my testicles and giggling before I passed out under anesthetic on the operation table.

My recuperation was painful, and from a room I temporarily rented upon my release, I hobbled slowly over each day to the carrot juice and apple cider health shop owned by red-haired Annabella, whom I got to know , and had just left asleep in her loft bed in the early misty morning.

Now on the stairway of my studio I awaited the arrival of Zelda, realizing there had been something about our future pulling our present apart.
I suppose we had realized this and knew we had limited time to gorge ourselves on each-other. So we did. We had never valued conventions over human experience.

She arrived hurriedly, delivered Maria in a disoriented manner, then rushed back to her car and sped off. Maria must have been fed quickly, because she brought up some of her cereal on the stairway.

I lifted her down the hall to my quiet spacious studio, gave her some Perrier, put her in my hammock and began to swing her a bit until she had cheered up and started to run around, opening my art books and ga
zing at paintings, tiptoeing up to the window to stare at the colorful huge poster of a half naked girl on a sunny beach.

I took her to a nearby park and sat on a bench, watching her play at a fountain, giggling at the water she sprayed in her face. I bought her a box of caramel Cracker-Jacks and a chocolate popsicle at a nearby corner shop, then hoisted her unto my shoulders, and as we walked back to my studio she said: “Daddy, can I always come to visit you where ever you are?”, and I said: ‘Sure, always Maria, anytime”.