Songs of the Spanish Renaissance

10.  Songs of the Spanish Renaissance 

            “Art critics, be damned.”

            “He’s so creative, it blows my mind.”  

            “He’s got to be one of the most talented painters in America.”

            “Everyone at the MFA thinks Charlie’s a genius.” 

             “Did you say one of the board members is here?” 

            “Someone said a big New York agent was coming.” 

            “Wait, those old cats, in the alpaca coats?” 

              Throughout the studio everyone is praising Charles Trent.  Lean and bearded, Charlie sits confidently, tilting back on an old wooden swivel chair, his cowboy booted-feet resting on the exposed brick fireplace that he’s built in his colossal mansard studio above the Bavarian Hofbrau.  Charlie is living the life he had dreamed.  He is the guy that all the women at the Boston Museum art school are turned on to and men envy.

            The room is filled of art students, models, painters, their wives, mistresses and boyfriends.  The old, dark beams of the wooden mid-Victorian roof rise twenty feet above the paint-splattered floor.  Plastic sheets cover work tables where the paints and solvents, brushes, and rags sit waiting to be used in the morning.  But tonight is party time.  Soft Spanish guitar music insinuates itself discreetly into the animated conversations.

            Charlie paints immense, electrifying, abstract expressionist canvases.  Even those who despise this trend in art have to admit his work is arresting.  Dominating the assembly is a massive easel supporting Charlie’s current work.  A spotlight clipped to a beam shines light onto the painting like a blessing from heaven, creating a clearing before the canvas, which measures at least twenty feet wide and twelve feet high.  The painting’s vibrant energy pulls the viewer in, as into the pulsing infinity of outer space.  One cannot describe but only feel its dynamic, almost musical effect. 

            Everyone wants to be at a rare party at Charlie’s.  The studio is a crush of velvet and denim, black-lace and white muslin, Indian prints and leather, long hair and beards, bare arms gesturing.  A long, pale leg escapes from the slit side of a black silk skirt.  Everyone is dressed to seduce.

            A squat, dark green bottle of cheap ruby port, Charlie’s preferred drink stands beside a jug of Gallo Mountain Red on a wooden door laid across two sawhorses.  Close to Charlie’s boot tips, a pork loin turns on a spit in the fireplace, brown and crackling, adding its thick fragrance to the aromas of turpentine, linseed oil, and Gauloises in the crowded, candlelit room.  Charlie gazes amused through his port into the fire, slowly turning the goblet, observing the shifting color.

            Mammoth round loaves of Russian black rye bread sit next to a long brick of processed Swiss cheese.  A vintage bone-handled hunting knife invites everyone to cut a slice.  A massive wooden bowl of spaghetti with red sauce and a matching bowl of endive salad flank a gallon jug of mountain red wine.  Everything is in a topple, like an intricate Meléndez still life.  Irish crystal tumblers, cups missing handles, Venetian glass goblets, chipped salvaged saucers and bowls are scattered among piles of mismatched plates and donated bottles of Richardson’s Wild Irish Rose and Thunderbird, wino wines, the perennial favorites.  The leftovers will be passed out to the guys that shelter in the doorway to this dilapidated building, further enhancing Charlie’s image in the neighborhood.  

            Charlie lives like a king, or at least a baron, of a small country.  He’d moved into the top floor of this monstrous decaying relic of the gilded age after he’d departed the warehouse on the waterfront.  Olive-green velvet bedding waits in the sleeping loft, tucked up close to the timbered roof, a mossy nest he built over the bathroom.  Years before, a fire had destroyed a lot of the old building, so there is always a lingering, dangerous, smoky scent.

            The elderly widowed mother of the two Greek brothers who own the Hofbrau insists on living in the building where she and her husband founded their fortunes and the neighborhood she’d become used to.  She is superstitious about a move.  The brothers, now wealthy themselves, live with their families in a suburb with good schools, but the old lady is stubborn and refuses to join them.  With her black shawl tight around her shoulders, tan cotton stockings, heavy shopping bags, a scarf tied beneath her chin, she can be seen every afternoon in the shabby restaurant downstairs, checking the glasses, counting forks, lining up chairs, making herself useful.  Unable to care for her properly the brothers need someone young and strong to be at hand.  They have given Charlie the virtual freedom of this semi-derelict building in exchange for his remarkably charming ways and his help.

            Rational people would never live in this place.  It is a rat-infested firetrap.  The brothers are aware of the building’s condition.  It may be a white elephant, but they still have a gold mine in the tourist trap on the ground floor.  Accordingly, Charlie pays almost no rent, just a pittance to cover the gas and electric, but he checks on Mama every morning to make sure her heart hasn’t given out over night.  Women all love Charlie, even ancient Greeks.  

            Was it an ancient Greek sage who proposed that everything changes to its absolute opposite, that the wise man seeks the middle way in order not to fall so far?  Charlie is clearly not a sage of the middle way.  “No guts, no glory” is more his style.  Better a short life as a lion than a long one as a chicken.  

            Wiry, dark and bearded, Allen Schwartz is a very tight friend.  He lives in a studio just a few doors down Columbus Avenue with his gorgeous wife Greta.  She is a descendant of the founding patriot, Thomas Paine.  Her magnificent face is framed with shining chestnut hair.  Her privileged patrician grace, impeccable manners and worship of art (matched with a complete lack of artistic talent) have accorded Allen the kind of respect he might not have achieved without her.  Her conversational skills were honed at the exclusive Winsor School, in the Fenway.  In her family, skillful banter is served with a silver spoon at every mealtime from birth.  Allen and Greta have each gone their way mingling in the crowd.  Greta does not perhaps realize what an asset she is.  As a senior at the Museum School, Allen is already flying high.  A paragraph on his work has already appeared in Art in America!  The party is actually in his honor, to celebrate the toast of Newbury Street.

            I have never liked him or his work.

            Priscilla, Charlie’s new—well, kind of new— girlfriend asks me in a chirpy voice if I’d like a cup of Thunderbird.  It is obvious that Priscilla issues from an old, advantaged North Shore family.  She has never seen Charlie and me together in any more than a purely social setting.  She always seems unaware of the sparks of energy that still ignite between us, always talking down to me, the lowly artist’s model, when addressing me at all.  Priscilla is a student at the Museum School, too, although her work is unremarkable.  Her family can easily afford the tuition, which they pay every year without complaint.  She knows Charlie will become one of the great stars of the art world.  He has all the right ingredients, including her and her family.  

            Charlie has suffered a recent heartbreak, or as much of a heartbreak as he is capable of feeling.  His latest flame, Lulie, a beautiful dancer, collapsed into insanity after her abortion.  He is over it now, he says.  He is, he admits, a narcissist.  He doesn’t need drama from a girlfriend, never mind a kid.  Lulie was fragile, icy, nearly transparent, but erotic.  She was a Finnish beauty, immune, he thought, to common emotional flare-ups, cool, he thought—until she burst into flames.  

            Priscilla willingly took him back, even though he’d dumped her roughly for the Finn.  If he is the king, Priscilla is the queen, and like a good queen, affects a deliberate blindness to his dalliances.  It is the price of her station in the Museum School, an office she guards fiercely.  She knows everyone wants to make it with Charlie, and Charlie is generously willing to make everyone happy.  

            By the fireplace, Charlie is positioned to observe everything that is going on.  An elaborately gilt-framed, door-sized mirror leans against the wall, reflecting two unidentified older men, jaded cognoscenti, dressed in dark alpaca overcoats.  They are almost invisible in the far background.  Also reflected, bright and warm, is Arthur, another old friend of Charlie’s, who is glazing the pork, now finished roasting, with orange marmalade and French’s mustard.  There is something in the framed mirror that reminds one of intimate court life as portrayed enigmatically in Las Meninas.  One asks, who is the observer?  Charlie, the two mysterious men, or you? 

            Arthur is one of Charlie’s genius friends.  While still an undergraduate at MIT, he invented part of Telstar.  He is free to play in his life, experiment with anything that interests him—like magazines.  He wondered why there were none for sailboats; yachts, yes, but not small sailing boats.  So he founded one.  Arthur is more than a friend.  In a sense, he and Charlie are related by marriage.  Both of them married and divorced Hilda.

            Hilda is legendary in Boston.  She is a Velazquez Venus, a phenomenon with an ideal figure, exquisite skin, and deep red hair that falls past her knees but which she keeps tightly braided.  She pins the braid, coiled like a well-fed serpent, at the nape of her supple neck.  When she runs her hand down the braid and begins tenderly to loosen waves of flaming hair, it is challenging for a lover to remain still.  But Hilda will not be rushed.  She remains absorbed with her hair, sometimes raising her eyes.  When liberated, it expands with a shake into a great russet cloud.  She permits it to be brushed, smoothed, by her anointed lover.  Yes, her seduction is rare and frightening.  Once her hair is released, her passion knows no limits. 

            Charlie violated Hilda’s code when he told me about his seduction.  He confessed to his inordinate hair fetish, quipping, “It must be some primate grooming instinct.”  This admission was occasioned by my cutting my own hair very short.  Charlie used to like to run his fingers through the cropped silk.  “It seems it Is so honest, simple,” he said.  “It reminds me of Saint Joan’s valiant purity.” 

            Hilda is not at the party.  She is never present at parties—except as stories.  She is seldom seen; indeed, some even question her existence.  Buy many tell intricate tales about her.  Her colorful pranks are mythical.  Hilda is very possessive of her husbands.  She demands full devotion.  She always mates with very creative and prolific men. Charlie was her first.  She married him when they were both only twenty-one, defying her strictly observant father.  After she left, he sat shiva, mourned, prayed, burned candles, and released.  She was reborn.  She and Charlie lived a fairytale vie de Bohème on the wharves.  Hilda wrote but allowed no reading.  He painted and invited friends in often to view his work.  

            One night, Charlie came back late to his studio after drawing class.  He had spent some extra time with his instructor.  Charlie’s studio was in a huge brick and concrete warehouse far down a dark cobbled street.  He had installed a wood stove, a hanging bed, and a makeshift kitchen.  Even before opening the heavy metal door, Charlie could taste turpentine and linseed in the damp air.  Penetrating light fell from the enormous florescent bar, like lavender tinged poison, as the fog surged in from the wharf.  The light fell on a startling apparition, Hilda standing nude, hair unleashed, holding a knife, tears of anger staining her moon-pearl face.  

            “You idiot!” she screamed.  “You don’t understand that real geniuses don’t hold onto their work thinking they are God’s gift.  You pompous ass.  You hold onto this shit like you’ll never do better!  Well, you won’t if you cling to this rot.  It will kill you!”  

All of his work lay thrown about, slashed, cast against the walls like rubbish and doused in turpentine.  He did not hesitate to file for an annulment.  

            Arthur was next.  Arthur thought it was the other women that drove Hilda to destroy his best friend’s work.  He believed that his loyalty would let Hilda feel safe and loved.  Also, he thought, because he was at least nominally Jewish, marrying him might make a bridge to her family.  Her father was unforgiving, however.  Once she violated the law, she was dead to him forever.  And Hilda’s destructive mania proved to be a repeating pattern.  All of Arthur’s papers, the work of his postgraduate years at MIT, even the Telstar notes, perished in the wood stove in their Vermont cottage.  He was forced to start over.

            I think Hilda is blocked in her own creativity, although I have only heard the men’s side.  I’ll neither defend nor indict her, but my own thought is she has read too much Ibsen.  Hilda Gabler?  

            Beth and Elliot climb those twisted stairs to Charlie’s loft.  Beth is very drawn to Charlie; his sexy reputation intrigues her.  She is my best friend and knows that I am done with him.  Now there is only Priscilla, the horse-faced blond, the inbred infanta, to get around.  

            Beth escaped from her wealthy fifth-generation Philadelphia Jewish-American family before she was eighteen, married Elliot, and was a mother at nineteen.  Although married, Beth and Elliot are by mutual agreement free to play the field.  Elliot says that since Beth was so young when they married it isn’t fair to keep her all to himself.  Besides, he has his own arrangements.  Elliot’s appointments are long standing, and he is not prepared to forego his Wednesdays with Ellen.  

            Beth slips off the heavy mink coat her mother insisted she take.  If she had to go live in Boston, at least she wouldn’t freeze.  The deep red silk garment now uncovered flows like tinted air over her body, clinging and rippling.  It is no secret that she does not wear underwear.  Beneath that single garment begging to be removed awaits a nude maja. Her brown curls are bound with a silver ribbon in the manner of a Greek goddess.  Her playful eyes invite and dare any man to tangle with her.

            Outside the cone cast by the single spotlight, the room is as dark as an El Greco, little pools of candlelight from flickering flames illuminating the hazy atmosphere.  Aromas of spice and wine drift in sweet wafts as Beth floats past old friends and lovers.  She joins Charlie, Arthur, and me by the fireplace, holding a chipped Minton cup of mountain red.

            Beth wears a pair of marvelous sandals made by our friend Bort, copied from a statue of Aphrodite.  Bort specializes in reviving classical styles.  Fine lambskin is twisted and knotted—never sewn—braided and split.  The leather flows on the body, like water.  It is gilded and then held in gathering pools by silver rings.  Leather bands and laces cover Beth’s maja-pink toes and legs up to her smooth rose-golden knees.  

            She balances on the rough stone hearth, beside the fire, close to Charlie’s boots.  Smoothly, she crosses her legs as the red silk parts, showing the elaborate sandals.  She is risking everything in this latest attempt to tempt.  Her cupid-bow lips unadorned, wine-stained and inviting, part to sip the red wine.  Charlie tips his chair forward, lowering his feet carefully past her, and stands up holding out the goblet of port in Beth’s direction.  She blushes, eager to make arrangements for later.  Elliot could pick up their daughter Liza, from the sitter.  She knows the power of her body, barely concealed by the translucent ruby silk.  Charlie’s irresistibly powerful hand pushes his nearly black hair back.  His white teeth sparkle treacherously through his dark beard.  

            “Beth you are truly beautiful,” he declaims and drains his glass.  “If you were a painting, you would surely be kept in a private room, in a locked cabinet opened only by a king after dinner.  I would carry you up there and fuck your brains out tonight, because that’s what you need—were I not resolutely opposed to having another Jewess as a mistress.”  He sets the goblet on the stone and turns.

            Beth goes pale.  She erupts from her stone seat, throws her mountain red in his face, and runs through the gasping crowd out to the stairwell, minus her fur.  Elliot retrieves the coat from the pile and rushes after her.

            Suddenly all is hushed, talk and laughter cease, swallowed into the great Goyaesque void.  Everyone can now hear the stereo playing Songs of the Spanish Renaissance, the solitary, clear soprano of Joan Sutherland begging for love and pity in the trembling air.

            Charlie, silhouetted against the flames shooting up in the hearth behind him, faces the awkwardly silent party.  Red wine stains his white shirt.  He removes his gold-rimmed glasses, wipes them with a white handkerchief, and replaces them, carefully adjusting the wire temples.  

            “Now you know,” he proclaims as he begins climbing to the loft.  Half-way up the ladder, someone calls out, offering a straw of redemption.

            “Charlie, all your friends are Jewish!  Bernie, Arthur, Benji, Allen—” 

            Charlie pauses.  “Jews, yes—Jews—but never another Jewess.” 

            All eyes are riveted on the gifted artist, the man whose fame would enhance the status of everyone in the room when his career bursts onto the world stage.  They would say, “I remember him from the Boston Museum School.  We were friends.” 

            No one notices the two enigmatic strangers in alpaca overcoats hurrying out and down the shadowy stairs, rolling up and taking with them what might have been a red carpet to a bright destiny.