"A Couple of Painters," a story by Robert Wexelblatt

 

            In the 1960s many institutions, like many people, greened up and reinvented themselves.  One of the former was the School of Visual Studies on West 27th Street in Manhattan.  What had long been a trade school for illustrators burgeoned into a nursery for aspiring painters and sculptors, experimenters and the conventional, bohemian and staid, classicists and romantics.  The students were as diverse as the city they all confidently believed was the center of the art world.  Paris was passé; Berlin and Vienna were washed up.  New York may have seethed with crime and wandering mental patients but also with ambition and energy.  It was on West 27th Street that Judah Ausmacher and Julie Kwiecisty, both starting their second decade on the planet, met.  He was a Jew from the Bronx; she was a daughter of Polish immigrants settled in Wisconsin.  Judah was enthusiastic about politics, economics, the Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, and left-wing everything.  Julie was a lover of nature, favored Albinoni and Vivaldi, worshiped Bach, and was among that tiny group of people who read poetry without writing any.  Judah was extroverted, fiercely anti-war, a challenger of authority and his peers.  Julie was introverted, engrossed in her work, self-contained and unusually quiet in the swirling, noisy stew of the School of Visual Studies.  However, both wore the uniform of ripped jeans, t-shirts, and leather jackets.  Neither enjoyed an easy relationship with their parents who, though loving, indulgent, and resigned, did not regard the making of art as a sensible career choice.

            What first attracted Judah to Julie was her seriousness.  She was talented, imposing, guarded.  Judah imagined her ringed by ground-to-air missiles.  She inspired respect, even deference.  The male teaching staff behaved flirtingly, often condescendingly, to the other young women, addressing them by their first names.  But Judah noted that they always addressed Julie by her surname even though they found it hard to pronounce.

            He couldn’t help staring at her, trying to stand close to her.  She was a magnet; he was an iron filing.  Dogging her wasn’t even something he did consciously.  Beyond a perfunctory good morning or good night, he never spoke to her.  To his surprise, one day when he was working next to her his knees went weak.  Pheromones, he mused, and shrugged the episode off.

            Julie’s hair was long and dark, brown almost to black, and, when she loosed her ponytail, it fell almost to her waist.  Judah liked that.  There was also something about her profile, the curves from nose to mouth to chin.  It reminded Judah of something, but he couldn’t place it until he remembered a matchbook that had been given to him as a joke by a high school friend.  It was an ad for a correspondence art school with a sketch of a girl in profile—“DRAW ME.” 

            Whenever he got up his nerve to say good morning or good afternoon, Julie was polite but seemed indifferent to him.  Judah wondered if she even noticed the way he noticed her.  This all changed at the Christmas party after classes ended.

            Julie watched him chatting with two classmates, waited for him to disengage, then marched up to him and sternly commanded Judah to follow her. 

            They went down a corridor and into an empty studio. 

            She turned abruptly and crossed her arms.  “Why are you always following me around?”

            Not knowing what else to do, Judah kissed her, and Julie didn’t resist.            

            During the long vacation, Judah spent a tense week at home, mostly with his brother Reuben even before their parents flew to Florida.  He thought about Julie nearly non-stop then leapt at the chance to take off with some friends for a demonstration in Philadelphia followed by a road trip to see Pennsylvania Dutch country.  Julie spent the whole of the holiday in Eau Claire with her parents and eleven-year-old sister sketching leafless trees, reading The Bell Jar, and being laconic.  Both missed their cramped downtown apartments, the studio classes, even their roommates.  It was as if they had been shunted from a future just starting back into the past.  They missed each other, but in different ways. Julie wondered if what had happened at the party was consequential, why she had permitted herself to be kissed like that, why she had unclenched the fist of her reserve, her exclusive concentration on work, why she wanted to be kissed again.  She thought over what she knew of Judah and how she felt about him.  It might have been a relief to talk about him to somebody, but certainly not her parents or her eleven-year-old sister.  As for Judah, he relived the scene in the empty studio dozens of times.  Sometimes, he wondered if it really happened at all, if he had dreamed it.  At other times, especially at night, he felt perplexed, though more about Julie than himself.  She had not resisted that unpremeditated, impulsive kiss, but did she accept it, think it meant something, that he had drunk too much beer, that he did such things all the time.  Strangest of all was the shock that he hadn’t known his own heart until he acted.  The feeling must have been there, dammed up, or he wouldn’t be feeling so absurdly thrilled.  He’d thought he thought Julie merely interesting, different.  He wasn’t aware of how his fixation must have struck her until she challenged him with all his staring and sidling up.  He recalled that moment when his knees nearly gave out.  Despite the long hours with them in the car, he didn’t mention Julie to his friends.

            The kiss was a revelation to them both, yet doubtful.  There were no phone calls, no exchange of letters.  Everything felt suspended, as if they were stuck for a couple of weeks in the castle of Sleeping Beauty.  They anticipated the coming semester, their last, with both excitement and dread, neither sure whether to seek out or avoid each other.  Would Julie look away with embarrassment and pretend there had been no kiss?  Would Judah?  Might they both?

            As it turned out, they ran into each other on the stairway between the second and third floors.  Julie, going up, froze on the landing.  Judah, headed down, nearly stumbled then joined her. They scrutinized each other like a pair of border guards checking identities.  A few people went up and down before they were alone.  Judah was the first to open his arms.

              They ate together, strolled through Central Park hand in hand, took walks by the Hudson, visited the Met, MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and went on painting, always side by side.  After graduation, with small loans from their parents, they leased a walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen and studio space in SoHo.  His father found Judah a summer job in the financial district, which he called “the Capitalist Hive.”  Julie waited tables.  They got by.

            The walk-up was small, usually too hot or too cold. The exiguous studio was poorly lit.  Nevertheless, they were delighted, working together, and sleeping together.  Julie was even persuaded to come along on occasional nights out with Judah’s political pals.  She drew the line at other artists.  She objected to their vanity, self-promotion, competitiveness, apodeictic declarations, and also because most reeked of marijuana.  These outings were usually in dive bars where Judah drank beer and expostulated while Julie did neither.  She read Yeats, Dickinson, Plath, and Sexton.  He read Jerry Rubin, Malcom X, Michael Harrington, and Herbert Marcuse.  They were sufficient unto themselves, but when money got tight Judah made lunch runs to the capitalist hive for Katz’s Deli, and Julie waited tables at the Minetta Tavern three nights a week.

            One Sunday in Washington Square, a stray marmalade cat rubbed hopefully against Julie’s leg, purring.  They couldn’t decide if they adopted the cat or vice versa.

            Back home, Julie stroked the animal and said decisively, “We’ll name him Kahlo.”

            “But he’s a tom,” Judah pointed out with an indulgent smile.

            “I know, but Kahlo’s much better than Diego.  It’s more feline.”

            They worked hard and happily, producing a great deal, narrowing their subjects, refining and gaining confidence in their styles.  Half their money went for rent, a third on canvases, brushes, and paint.  Julie painted flowers, plants, and started to work on the series she called “imaginary gardens.”  She explained the name to Judah by reading him Marianne Moore’s famous poem, the one about poetry.

...nor till the autocrats among us can be
   “literalists of
    the imagination”—above
    insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have
   it.

            “Moore was born in Missouri but spent most of her life here, in Greenwich Village and then Brooklyn.”

            They had different masters.  Julie’s were Leyster, Wyntges, Ruysch, van Oosterwijk, seventeenth-century Dutch women, but she revered Georgia O’Keefe.  Judah’s models were men, especially the angry early 20th-century Germans, Beckmann, Dix, and Grosz.  His hero was William Gropper.

            Life settled into routines.  Julie became a vegetarian, and Judah tried too, but found he needed some sort of meat at least twice a week.  He ate fresh fish on Fridays, because it was on sale.  Kahlo loved the leftovers.  They adopted the custom of reading supine at midnight before sex and sleep.  Both had what they called bedbooks as in “Don’t let the bedbooks bite.”  Julie read new poetry by Rich, Ginsberg, and Di Prima; Judah favored Baldwin, Illich, and Zinn.  They splurged on a subscription to ARTnews. 

            One afternoon, looking at the canvases leaning against the studio’s four walls—two walls for his, two for hers—Julie said, “It’s time.”

            Judah put down his brush and finished her sentence. “Time to get serious.”

            She nodded.

            The rejections from agents and galleries varied only in their rapidity and degree of politeness.  What compliments they received were immediately and firmly qualified.  Her portraits of vegetation were charming but out of style. His paintings were powerful but unsalable.  It was discouraging.

            “Well, at least we’re getting rejected together,” Judah reflected with a grim grin.  “I mean, what if you became a celebrity and I stayed a nonentity?”

            “Not a bad couplet,” said Julie, then bravely quoted Hopkins from memory.

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more.

            “I get it,” said Judah. “ But my head hurts; the wall we’re hitting it against doesn’t.  So, yeah.  Okay.  We don’t throw in the towel.  But what do we do?”

            “What the poet did,” Julie replied and quoted another line from Hopkins.

Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

            “Sure, Julie.  But, putting it mildly, supply’s wildly outstripping demand.  So, what do we actually do? ”

            Julie shrugged.  “Pingere et orare.  Paint and pray.”

            Their single semi-success was not a success.  Julie persuaded her bosses to hang two of her smaller still-lifes in the restaurant, petunias and peonies, pansies and periwinkles.  She fancied the alliteration.  Nobody asked about them, and she couldn’t bring herself to point them out to her customers.  They soon lost touch with their classmates.  Neither Julie nor Judah was a networker.  They were hardly on the ragged fringes of the culture, even the counter one.  During an evening at a bar with live music and a raucous crowd, Judah shouted into Julie’s ear, “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll.  It’s just an adolescent version of wine, women, and song, isn’t it?”  They’d left early with their ears ringing. 

            Julie was a feminist and Judah a radical but only as sympathetic spectators.  They were not joiners.  So, they pressed on together, Judah delivering pastrami, Julie serving chocolate mousse.  They ate lots of rice and beans but were always painting, penurious but productive.

            One spring morning in 1973, Julie went to the library to try to borrow Berryman’s Dream Songs and Lorde’s New York Head Shop and Museum.  While she was there, she decided to look through copies of ARTnews published before their subscription started.  In the January 1971 issue she found the article by Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”  It might have been written for her.  Nochlin revealed how many works by women had been attributed to men.  Sofonisba Anguissola’s work was so good that it was ascribed to Titian and Leonardo.  Even better, the essay focused on Julie’s favorite period, the Dutch Golden Age, including proof that many of Frans Hals’ pictures were the work of Judith Leyster.  Julie was excited.  Nochlin’s article gave her an extraordinary idea.  On the walk home, she nearly dismissed it as silly, but it was electrifying, and she couldn’t let it go.

            1973 was the year of Roe v. Wade, the year Billy Jean King beat Bobby Riggs, of bra-burning, consciousness-raising, the bugout from Vietnam and the end of the draft; it was the year when Title Nine began to be implemented, OPEC embargoed oil, inflation set in, and Watergate erupted from a scandal to a constitutional crisis.  1973 was likewise the year the Tremiti Gallery opened on Fulton Street in Brooklyn.  The business was co-owned by Victoria Turner and Carlo Berti.  Turner was a British heiress and collector, a class-rebel who preferred New York’s messiness to London’s decorum.  Berti was an Italian scholar who became, for a time, an art dealer in London.  It was there that the two became friends, decided to move to the States and open a gallery.  They were keen to show new work, promote new artists, and make their mark.  Turner staked the money and Berti named the gallery. Tremiti is the archipelago to which Mussolini banished homosexuals whose removal from society the Fascists declared necessary “to protect Italian virility.”  Carlo Berti was gay.  Victoria Turner was divorced.  

            The Tremiti opened on a Saturday with a variety of works by young New York artists, plus a few older ones with local reputations.  Julie and Judah visited it the following Wednesday morning.  As they expected, the place was not busy.  They were greeted by a fastidiously dressed Carlo.  They explained who they were and showed him a dozen Polaroids of their work.  He appeared surprised, looked at them quizzically, but was interested.  He asked them to return on Friday with some of their work.  “My partner will be here then.  I want you to meet her.  It will be symmetrical,” he added in his Milanese accent with an amused smile.  “Boy girl, boy girl—like at a dinner party, sì?”

            When Julie had returned to the apartment from the library on that spring morning she brought two books and one wild notion.  When she told him what she had dreamed up and why, Judah was taken aback.  He gave her an argument, their first.  He said her idea was absurd and would be a fraud.

            “A fraud?  I’d call it an experiment.  The work is no fraud.  It’s all genuine, all ours.”

            “But it’s a deception.”

            “So was calling Judith Leyster’s work Frans Hals’.  And that went on for centuries.”

            Judah shook his head.  “Not the same.  I’m sure Leyster didn’t do it—or Hals.  I mean, this just doesn’t seem like something you’d do.  Do I know you?”

            Julie didn’t give in.  “Look, if anything comes of it—and it probably won’t—then we can let people know.  It’d make a good story.”

            “A good career move?”

            “I don’t know about that.  Maybe.  It’ll be fun and, anyway, what have we got to lose?”

            Over dinner Thursday night, they decided they would have to take a cab to the gallery.  As they drove over the bridge, Judah felt increasingly anxious.  His conscience wouldn’t shut down.  He looked up at the great arches.  Julie had once read him a poem about the bridge.  He tried to recall it and couldn’t.  He asked Julie.  “Hart Crane.  It starts with a seagull at dawn.”  She pointed toward the harbor and its hovering gulls.  “Like them.”  Julie was apprehensive too but not about what Judah called a deceit.  She feared that it wouldn’t work.  She worried that, even if Berti and his partner went for the pictures, having them hung in a new gallery on the wrong side of the East River wouldn’t be any different from their hanging in a trendy restaurant on the right one.

            They rolled up a dozen canvases each but wanted to bring two large pictures on stretchers.   They wouldn’t fit into the cab’s trunk, so they leaned them between the back of the front seat, steadying them with their shins and knees.  Judah’s big picture was a strike scene, lots of workers with red, purple, and blue faces; Julie’s was one of her imaginary gardens, a canvas with enough height for cedars, date palms, and blue spruces, for hibiscus and oleander.  She’d fantasized about success, imagined striking a blow for feminism, receiving a congratulatory letter from Linda Nochlin who would then profile her in The New Yorker.  She did not share her pipedreams with Judah.  There was no need to prompt his teasing when she laughed at them herself.

            Diane Turner was a head taller and ten years older than her partner and as smartly dressed.  She greeted Julie and Judah with formal courtesy and began chatting at once.  She had a contralto voice and a posh accent, the kind that can intimidate English farmers and educated Americans.  The woman had presence; she exuded authority.  She began chattering away at once, dropping big names of men like Lucien Freud and David Hockney, but also Bridget Riley and poor Pauline Boty.  To hear her tell it, she had shared cocktails and gossip with them all.  Her rambling was a suspense-raising prelude to her examination of their work, which she did slowly, carefully, and silently while Carlo, Julie, and Judah nervously looked on.
            At length, she delivered her verdict.  “Carlo said I’d be amazed and he was quite right.”  From what she said next it was clear that she approved of the paintings but was more impressed by who painted them.

            “Extraordinary.  Really astounding.  Judah, your work is charming and so delicate.  Those gentians, for instance.  And so imaginative too.  That sort of jungly one with the plane trees and the orange cat hiding in under the forsythia?  Brilliant.  The sensibility’s so Dutch, so—and I mean this as a compliment—so feminine.  You saw it too, didn’t you, Carlo?  And Julie, your work packs a tremendous wallop.  One is reminded of the Fauves, still more of the Expressionists.  Your colors are almost—well, I was about to say brutal, but violent is better.  So aggressive and so very masculine.  You’re quite the couple.”  She turned to her grinning, deferential partner.  “Carlo, we must do a show.  This work has to be seen.”

            Julie, the tension loosening from her back and shoulders, smiled and said, “Thank you.”  Judah, speechless and stunned, blushed.

            The show first received a notice in the Brooklyn Daily Bulletin, one of the local papers trying to fill the vacuum left by the demise of the venerable Brooklyn Eagle, once edited by Walt Whitman.  The notice featured the new gallery, not the paintings.  But then a second local, the Brooklyn Times, gave the show a write-up that devoted a few more lines to the paintings and the painters than the gallery.  Then the story, to the joy of Diane and Carlo, was picked up by the Sunday Times.  The article featured photos of the gallery owners, the painters, and one picture by each.  After that, the show at the Tremiti sold out, except for that big picture of the strikers. 

            “Not quite the thing for living rooms or corporate sale d'attesa,” Carlo observed to Julie with wry sympathy.

            Two Manhattan galleries that a few months earlier had declined even to look at their slides asked to take three pictures from each.  Agents who had turned up their noses now offered their representation.  This was heady business, but what thrilled Julie and Judah most was finding an article about the Tremiti show in ARTnews.

            Judah wanted to go public immediately, but Julie insisted they put it off.  “Too soon,” she said.

            The work started selling regularly and for higher prices each time.  They weren’t stars, but now they did have money, a lot of it by their standards, enough to relocate.  Inspired by Pollack and Krasner, they bought a rundown farmhouse on Long Island and fixed it up.  The old barn would be their studio, and, after they put in half a dozen tall windows, they loved the space even more than the old house.  While they worked, Kahlo curled up on the old red settee they bought at a local antique store. They cultivated a garden, planted green beans, tomatoes and lots of flowers. They acquired a dozen cookbooks and experimented in the kitchen.  In the evenings they ate, read, and listened to albums of music by Bach, Albinoni, the Stones, the Who.  They bought lots of albums, also a used Chevrolet Impala.  Contentment suggests a degree of resignation.  Julie and Judah were content but not because they were settling.  They were happier than they ever expected to be. They liked getting up and being themselves all day.  Still, Judah remained uneasy and hesitated every time he put his initials on a painting.

            On a May night in 1975, after a celebratory dinner at Le Grenouille with Diane and Carlo, Julie and Judah were driving home when an intoxicated nineteen-year-old in his parents’ Mercedes took a wrong turn, going the wrong way up an exit ramp from the Long Island Expressway and proceeded to drive east in the west-bound lane.  It was later estimated that when he crashed head-on into the Impala he was going at least eighty.  No one survived.

            That summer Reuben Ausmacher was just a year out of law school.  With directions from his father and permission from the Kwiecistys, he took on the business of executor for both his brother and Julie.  He arranged a good home for Kahlo, dealt with the couple’s agent, their paintings, several galleries, real estate agents, the Surrogate’s Court, the press, as well as the anguish of the Kwiecistys’ and his own parents’ grief. 

            When they purchased the farmhouse, Julie and Judah were advised to make wills by the lawyer they hired to facilitate the transaction.  He insisted over their objections that they should make provision not only for what would happen if one of them died but also if they both should.  Julie left all she had to Judah and Judah did the same.  But, if the worst should happen, Julie’s estate would go to her parents and sister, Judah’s to his parents and Reuben.

            Prior to the farmhouse going on the market in July, Reuben found an old wine crate in the cellar.  It contained their diplomas, birth and marriage certificates, two photo albums, and some letters.  There were not many letters, as they were seldom apart.  Among them was one from Julie to Judah written during one of her visits to Wisconsin.  In it were these sentences: “Finally finished the little Japanese garden with the real toad and the bust of Leyster.  Don’t forget to sign it when I get back.  How’s that Weather Underground picture coming along?” 

            It didn’t take Reuben much time to figure out the significance of the letter.  After all, he knew his brother’s work and his politics.  It took him only a little more to decide not to tell anybody about it.