This is my neighborhood, my street, the house with the gateway is where I live. To remind himself of this was necessary, inasmuch as he’d substituted for a sense of reality a knowledge of time, and place. He glanced gratefully at sour-faced, faded ladies, at the pipe-puffing males squatting on the surrounding steps of brownstone stoops. Nine pale little girls shrieked round a corner flower cart begging daisies to pin in their hair, but the peddler said “Shoo!” and, fleeing like beads of a broken bracelet, they circled in the street, the wild ones leaping with laughter, and the shy ones, silent and isolated, lifting summer-wilted faces skyward: the rain, would it never come?
Vincent, who lived in a basement apartment, descended several steps and took out his keycase; then, pausing behind the hallway door, he looked back through a peephole in the paneling. The girl was waiting on the sidewalk above; she leaned against a brownstone banister, and her arms fell limp—and popcorn spilled snowlike round her feet. A grimy little boy crept slyly up to pick among it like a squirrel.
2
For Vincent it was a holiday. No one had come by the gallery all morning, which, considering the arctic weather, was not unusual. He sat at his desk devouring tangerines, and enjoying immensely a Thurber story in an old New Yorker. Laughing loudly, he did not hear the girl enter, see her cross the dark carpet, notice her at all, in fact, until the telephone rang. “Garland Gallery, hello.” She was odd, most certainly, that indecent haircut, those depthless eyes—“Oh, Paul. Comme ci, comme ça and you?”—and dressed like a freak: no coat, just a lumberjack’s shirt, navy-blue slacks and—was it a joke?—pink ankle socks, a pair of huaraches. “The ballet? Who’s dancing? Oh, her!” Under an arm she carried a flat parcel wrapped in sheets of funny-paper—“Look, Paul, what say I call back? There’s someone here …” and, anchoring the receiver, assuming a commercial smile, he stood up. “Yes?”
Her lips, crusty with chap, trembled with unrealized words as though she had possibly a defect of speech, and her eyes rolled in their sockets like loose marbles. It was the kind of disturbed shyness one associates with children. “I’ve a picture,” she said. “You buy pictures?”
At this, Vincent’s smile became fixed. “We exhibit.”
“I painted it myself,” she said, and her voice, hoarse and slurred, was Southern. “My picture—I painted it. A lady told me there were places around here that bought pictures.”
Vincent said, “Yes, of course, but the truth is”—and he made a helpless gesture—“the truth is I’ve no authority whatever. Mr. Garland—this is his gallery, you know—is out of town.” Standing there on the expanse of fine carpet, her body sagging sideways with the weight of her package, she looked like a sad rag doll. “Maybe,” he began, “maybe Henry Krueger up the street at Sixty-five …” but she was not listening.
“I did it myself,” she insisted softly. “Tuesdays and Thursdays were our painting days, and a whole year I worked. The others, they kept messing it up, and Mr. Destronelli …” Suddenly, as though aware of an indiscretion, she stopped and bit her lip. Her eyes narrowed. “He’s not a friend of yours?”
“Who?” said Vincent, confused.
“Mr. Destronelli.”
He shook his head, and wondered why it was that eccentricity always excited in him such curious admiration. It was the feeling he’d had as a child toward carnival freaks. And it was true that about those whom he’d loved there was always a little something wrong, broken. Strange, though, that this quality, having stimulated an attraction, should, in his case, regularly end it by destroying it. “Of course I haven’t any authority,” he repeated, sweeping tangerine hulls into a wastebasket, “but, if you like, I suppose I could look at your work.”
A pause; then, kneeling on the floor, she commenced stripping off the funny-paper wrapping. It originally had been, Vincent noticed, part of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. “From the South, aren’t you?” he said. She did not look up, but he saw her shoulders stiffen. “No,” she said. Smiling, he considered a moment, decided it would be tactless to challenge so transparent a lie. Or could she have misunderstood? And all at once he felt an intense longing to touch her head, finger the boyish hair. He shoved his hands in his pockets and glanced at the window. It was spangled with February frost, and some passer-by had scratched on the glass an obscenity. “There,” she said.
A headless figure in a monklike robe reclined complacently on top a tacky vaudeville trunk; in one hand she held a fuming blue candle, in the other a miniature gold cage, and her severed head lay bleeding at her feet: it was the girl’s, this head, but here her hair was long, very long, and a snowball kitten with crystal spitfire eyes playfully pawed, as it would a spool of yarn, the sprawling ends. The wings of a hawk, headless, scarlet-breasted, copper-clawed, curtained the background like a nightfall sky. It was a crude painting, the hard pure colors molded with male brutality, and, while there was no technical merit evident, it had that power often seen in something deeply felt, though primitively conveyed. Vincent reacted as he did when occasionally a phrase of music surprised a note of inward recognition, or a cluster of words in a poem revealed to him a secret concerning himself: he felt a powerful chill of pleasure run down his spine. “Mr. Garland is in Florida,” he said cautiously, “but I think he should see it; you couldn’t leave it for, say, a week?”
“I had a ring and I sold it,” she said, and he had the feeling she was talking in a trance. “It was a nice ring, a wedding ring—not mine—with writing on it. I had an overcoat, too.” She twisted one of her shirt buttons, pulled till it popped off and rolled on the carpet like a pearl eye. “I don’t want much—fifty dollars; is that unfair?”
“Too much,” said Vincent, more curtly than he intended. Now he wanted her painting, not for the gallery, but for himself. There are certain works of art which excite more interest in their creators than in what they have created, usually because in this kind of work one is able to identify something which has until that instant seemed a private inexpressible perception, and you wonder: who is this that knows me, and how? “I’ll give thirty.”
For a moment she gaped at him stupidly, and then, sucking her breath, held out her hand, palm up. This directness, too innocent to be offensive, caught him off guard. Somewhat embarrassed, he said, “I’m most awfully afraid I’ll have to mail a check. Could you …?” The telephone interrupted, and, as he went to answer, she followed, her hand outstretched, a frantic look pinching her face. “Oh, Paul, may I call back? Oh, I see. Well, hold on a sec.” Cupping the mouthpiece against his shoulder, he pushed a pad and pencil across the desk. “Here, write your name and address.”
But she shook her head, the dazed, anxious expression deepening.
“Check,” said Vincent, “I have to mail a check. Please, your name and address.” He grinned encouragingly when at last she began to write.
“Sorry, Paul … Whose party? Why, the little bitch, she didn’t invite … Hey!” he called, for the girl was moving toward the door. “Please, hey!” Cold air chilled the gallery, and the door slammed with a glassy rattle. Hellohellohello. Vincent did not answer; he stood puzzling over the curious information she’d left printed on his pad: D.J.—Y.W.C.A. Hellohellohello.
It hung above his mantel, the painting, and on those nights when he could not sleep he would pour a glass of whiskey and talk to the headless hawk, tell it the stuff of his life: he was, he said, a poet who had never written poetry, a painter who had never painted, a lover who had never loved (absolutely)—someone, in short, without direction, and quite headless.
Oh, it wasn’t that he hadn’t tried—good beginnings, always, bad endings, always. Vincent, white, male, age thirty-six, college graduate: a man in the sea, fifty miles from shore; a victim, born to be murdered, either by himself or another; an actor unemployed. It was there, all of it, in the painting, everything disconnected and cockeyed, and who was she that she should know so much?
Inquiries, those he’d made had led nowhere; not another dealer knew of her, and to search for a D.J. living in, presumably, a Y.W.C.A. seemed absurd. Then, too, he’d quite expected she would reappear, but February passed, and March. One evening, crossing the square which fronts the Plaza, he had a queer thing happen. The archaic hansom drivers who line that location were lighting their carriage lamps, for it was dusk, and lamplight traced through moving leaves. A hansom pulled from the curb and rolled past in the twilight.
There was a single occupant, and this passenger, whose face he could not see, was a girl with chopped fawn-colored hair. So he settled on a bench, and whiled away time talking with a soldier, and a fairy colored boy who quoted poetry, and
