In the Night Café by Joyce Johnson Page B

relatives.
    According to Leon, it was only in America that an artist could live the way he did. You couldn’t do it in Paris, where things were much closer to the bone. The stingy French never threw out anything. “You could starve in Paris,” he said indignantly. “America’s the greatest place for The Artist.” “The Artist,” he kept saying, as if he were an expert conducting objective research on the subject.
    Leon was an ex-marine. The scar on his head was a war wound. Tom had met him at the Art Students League when they were both young guys on the GI Bill. For eight months they’d shared a horrible room with a hot plate in a boardinghouse full of drunks and Jehovah’s Witnesses in Brooklyn. In Reginald Marsh’s class, they did hundreds of sketches of Serena the model, an elderly Follies girl. Once they even got Marsh to have a beer with them. Tom had been drawing all his life, every time his fingers found a pencil, but he’d only started painting after the war. Even so, he was already thinking big, thinking about Mexico, talking about doing murals like Rivera. Leon wanted to paint apples like Cézanne. On the dresser in their room he kept A&P bags filled with apples that turned rotten before he could render them and attracted mice.
    Leon went on to abstract expressionism years before Tom, but never got anywhere with it. Now he was working with chicken wire. So far he alone was on to it. It made a grid, but it was an expressionist grid, and it was also a very cheap material. He had a couple of enormous rolls of it in his studio. He was taking all his old canvases that hadn’t sold and painting them over with deck paint—battleship gray. Pieces of grid were going on top of that. And just lately—one day when his sleeve had caught in the wire—he’d had the inspiration to use rag, bits of rag caught like his sleeve, and maybe thread or even yarn.
    He led me around the studio, turning on lights so I could look at all his new work on the walls. I saw a lot of gray paint and chicken wire. It all sort of hung there mute, not even ugly in a way that might shock someone into staring. “This is just a pre- view,” he said. “The rags go on next week. You see how they’ll work, don’t you, what they’ll do to the space.” I said, Yes, I thought I saw.
    Leon turned off the lights and scrutinized me. “Hey, you should talk more. How’ll I get to know your thoughts? So what do you think?”
    I said, “Leon, they depressed me.”
    â€œExactly!” he cried excitedly. “Of course they did!”
    And they had, they’d brought me down, invaded my happiness, reminded me how easily people’s lives got wasted. Even when I was young I knew that life could be destroyed by art, though it was worth it, of course.
    â€œWhen the new wave comes,” Leon said, “I’m gonna be up there on the crest.”
    Tom looked up from the corner of the studio where he was stuffing things into his suitcase. “Fuck the new wave! Throw the art magazines in the garbage!”
    â€œNow Tom,” Leon said patiently, “you don’t understand the situation. You haven’t been here.”
    â€œRight, I’ve just been painting fifteen years. Out in the sticks. Don’t forget that!”
    â€œAbstract expressionism is through, finito .You could be Michelangelo and you couldn’t get a gallery.”
    â€œI paint what I paint. I’m not going to be one of the fish lying on the beach, panting through my gills for the collectors.”
    â€œThis is a good man, but an impossible man,” Leon said to me.
    â€œVan Gogh was impossible! Pollock was impossible!” Tom yelled.
    â€œThe handwriting is on the walls of the museums, man!” Leon shouted back at him in exasperation. It was the title of an article by a new upstart critic that had made all the abstract expressionists furious.