Why I Won't Be Going To Lunch Anymore. Douglas Atwill
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with simple landscapes of local nature, thematic work, and Indian related canvases.”
“Ouch. Are we really that provincial?”
Avoiding an answer, Charles pulled away from me and my opprobrium, and by evening’s end he was the owner of Brownell’s “Gilded Square No. 9”. After the purchasing paperwork, he insisted that we go talk to her, that I introduce them. When the circle around her dissipated for a moment, we closed in for a talk.
I made the introduction. “Julia, this is Charles McKenna.”
“Oh, they told me you just bought Number Nine. The best of the lot, I think.”
Charles beamed with satisfaction. “I think you’re wonderful. Such intriguing work. So joyous and exuberant.”
“You have a good eye, Charlie,” she said.
“The use of gold was a clever idea.”
“I loved doing them, finding ever cheaper paints. The best were the golden poster paints from Woolworth’s. They have chunks of unmixed glitter and they drip with lovely, riverine abandon. These paintings will become nightmares for art restorers.” She laughed.
At least she admitted they were archivally poor. What would happen to that masking tape and poster paint in a few years? Peeling up and falling off in expensive drawing rooms the nation over.
“Are you ever in New York?” asked Charles.
“Next month, Charlie.”
“Call me, I’ll take you to lunch.” He gave her a card.
She smiled, saying neither yes nor no. We pressed through the crowd to the cool street outside.
Charles went back to New York that Sunday, and he asked me to take delivery of the painting at the end of the exhibit. Since he was between apartments in the city, I offered to warehouse it for him until his new place was ready. The men from the gallery helped me in with the large panel. Charles had suggested that I hang it on the wall of my entry hall, but I liked the entry exactly for its emptiness. I relented, however, because there was nowhere else for it and I asked the gallery men to hang it where he indicated.
It immediately commanded attention in my hallway, catching the morning rays of the sun and projecting an Egyptianlike radiance in my small adobe. In the cooler hours of the early evening, portions of it contracted, emitting twanging and plucking sounds like a primitive ceremonial instrument. My exquisite Mexican Colonial pine table in the hallway seemed to hiss in disapproval when I walked between it and the new Brownell.
My three cats, a testy old female and two younger more active males, inspected it in turn, standing up on the wall to smell the bottom. When I discovered a piece of the painting on the floor, I accused them of pulling it off. My disapproval was faint-hearted as I was secretly pleased they shared my dislike.
When other pieces fell off on their own, I had to apologize to the cats for my suspicions. Small sections continued to cascade down onto the floor from time to time and I regularly glued them back on, sometimes hunting without success for their original sites.
The work on Charles’s apartment spread from weeks into months, but he called regularly to update me on its progress. He always asked if I now liked the Brownell better, feeling uneasy with it in the hands of an infidel. I assured him I was a trustworthy bailee, but one with strongly differing views from which nothing would dissuade me.
Charles created an amiable new setting for the Brownell panel. He bought an ormolu French writing table and lines of Mycenaean gold cups to echo its glitter; one wall of his sitting room was papered in Indian tea papers with pressed-in strips of real gold leaf. It would be a parlor of complete aureate beauty, he said.
“So how is my painting? Are you loving it yet?” he asked on the phone.
“Not yet, its charms continue to elude.”
“Soon, maybe.”
“Maybe. But you should know that the cats seem to have accepted it, as they don’t try to pee on it anymore.”
“Well, there you are, then. Just a matter of time and you won’t want to defile it either.”
“And it has stopped making that notice-me, notice-me twanging sound when I have parties.” I had a hard time explaining that quality when it did sing its scratchy song in the cooler temperatures of the early evening, startling my more highly wired dinner guests.
“So it’s beginning to love your house. Poor thing, soon to be moved again. By the way, I found a New York gallery for her work. They want to give her a show next year.”
“You’ve seen her then.”
“Yes, we had lunch a few weeks ago. She told me that the Santa Fe exhibit had been purchased almost entirely by out-of-towners.”
Finally one day the movers were there to claim the Brownell and ship it off to New York City. I had to admit the wall all but hummed a song of emptiness in the first few days after its departure. I hung one of my larger garden paintings with bright colors in that location but it curiously did not take command like the Brownell did. It annoyed me that the absence of her painting was stronger than the presence of mine.
I tried other paintings and objects there but nothing really felt right. Is that all that Art is about? The perpetual ownership of a hanging space? Even now, years later, when I pass down the hallway, I feel that particular spot has been deeded for time immemorial to the gilded square.
The Deathbed of Cecily Brompton
One day in the summer of her ninety-first year, Cecily Brompton, after a lifetime of good health, avoiding minor colds, broken bones or major illness of any sort, took to her bed at the unaccustomed hour of nine in the morning, feeling very unwell. Her bedroom, a small cell with an iron-frame single bed, adjoined the Santa Fe studio where the work on her newest painting was not going well.
The household staff did not notice her departure from the studio, as they provided her complete privacy during the morning hours, her best hours for painting. She had trained the staff to make no noise or disturbance during these important early hours. At noon, the cook, Isabel Rodriguez, was instructed to check quietly into the studio. If work was going well there, she adjusted the serving of the midday meal accordingly.
The entire staff was aware of the necessity for seamless quiet in the home studio of the most important woman artist of the western world, as the art magazines had it. Brompton herself rankled at the adjectives “woman” and “western,” preferring to think of herself as the most distinguished painter alive, not merely an American female version of greatness. After all, Picasso, Matisse and O’Keeffe were all dead. Since her paintings sold for vast sums soon after they were delivered to her New York gallery, who could question her self-assigned spot at the top of the list? Collectors on both sides of the Atlantic lined up to purchase a prized new Brompton, an icon for success on sitting room walls the world over.
The four people who comprised the Brompton household, the cook, maid, driver and gardener were justly proud of their employer and furthered the cause of art and fame like a trusted palace guard. Isabel Rodriguez was the liaison between Brompton and the rest, nurturing the pride of servitude and quelling any disturbances. Few people got past this phalanx without permission to interrupt Brompton’s work.
The staff had learned to assess the situation without words; they sensed the direction work in the studio was taking and awaited Brompton’s re-emergence from her workplace at whatever hour she chose. So that was how the staff missed the start of Brompton’s malaise and her odd retreat to her mid-morning sickbed.
For two hours she slept fitfully, dreaming of brightly costumed dancers emerging from and retreating into a roiling wall of mist. She had this dream several times before and now, waking around eleven in the morning, made a painter’s practiced effort to remember the bold black and white patterns of the dancer’s costumes and small details of the dances. The sketchbook on the bedside table was full of quick renderings