Sometimes Jon lives in this apartment by himself; sometimes another person will be there, sometimes two, camping out on the floor in sleeping bags. These are other painters, on the lam from irate landlords or between odd jobs. When I ring the downstairs doorbell I never know who will open the door or what will be going on: the morning remains of an all-night party, a multiple argument, someone tossing their cookies in the toilet. “Tossing their cookies” is what Jon calls it. He thinks it’s funny. Different women pass me on the stairs, going up or down; or they are found hovering around the far end of the white room, where there’s an improvised kitchen consisting of a hot plate and an electric kettle. It’s never clear who these women are paired with; occasionally they are other art students, dropping in to talk. They don’t talk much to one another though. They talk to the men, or are silent. Jon’s pictures hang in the white room or are stacked against the walls. They change almost weekly: Jon is productive. He paints very swiftly, in violent eye-burning acrylics, reds and pinks and purples, in frenzied loops and swirls. I feel I should admire these paintings, because I’m incapable of painting that way myself, and I do admire them, in monosyllables. But secretly I don’t like them very much: I’ve seen things like this beside the highway, when something’s been run over.
However, the pictures are not supposed to be pictures of anything you would recognize. They are a moment of process, trapped on the canvas. They are pure painting.
Jon is big on purity, but only in art: it doesn’t apply to his housekeeping, which is an exuberant protest against all mothers and especially his own. He washes the dishes, when he washes them, in the bathtub, where scraps of crust and kernels of canned corn are to be seen caught in the drain. His living room floor is like a beach after the weekend. His bedsheets are a moment of process in themselves, but a moment that has gone on for some time. I prefer the top of his sleeping bag, which is less septic. The bathroom is like the bathrooms of service stations, on out-of-the-way roads, up north: a brown ring around the toilet bowl, which is likely to contain floating cigarette butts, handprints on the towels, if any, nondescript pieces of paper here and there on the floor.
At the moment I make no moves toward cleanliness. To do so would be to overstep the bounds, and to display a bourgeois lack of cool. “What are you, my mom?” I’ve heard him say, to one of the hovering women who was making feeble attempts to corral some of the moldier clutter. I don’t want to be his mom, but rather a fellow conspirator.
Making love with Jon is not the leisurely, agonizing trance it is with Josef, but rambunctious, like puppies in mud. It’s dirty, as in street fighting, as in jokes. Afterward we lie on top of his sleeping bag, eating potato chips out of the bag and giggling about nothing. Jon doesn’t think women are helpless flowers, or shapes to be arranged and contemplated, as Josef does. He thinks they are smart or stupid. These are his categories. “Listen, pal,” he says to me. “You’ve got more brains than most.” This pleases me, but also dismisses me. I can take care of myself.
Josef begins asking me where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing. I am casual and sly. I hold Jon against him like an ace: if he can be duplicitous, then so can I. But he does not talk about Susie any more. The last time I saw her was in late August, before I left the Swiss Chalet. She came in and had dinner by herself, a half chicken and some Burgundy Cherry ice cream. She’d been neglecting her hair, which was darker and straighter; her body had grown stubby, her face round. She ate in a mechanical way, as if eating was a chore, but she finished everything. It could be that she was eating for consolation, because of Josef: whatever else might happen, he would never marry her, and she must have known that. I assumed she was there to talk to me about him and I evaded her, brushing her away with a neutral smile. Her table wasn’t one of mine.
But before she left she walked right up to me. “Have you seen Josef?” she asked. Her voice was plaintive, which annoyed me.
I lied, not well. “Josef?” I said, flushing. “No. Why would I?”
“I just thought you might know where he is,” she said. She wasn’t reproachful, but hopeless. She walked out, slumping like a middle-aged woman. With such an ass end, I thought, no wonder Josef’s keeping away. He didn’t like scrawny women but there was a limit in the other direction too. Susie was letting herself go.
Now, however, she calls me. It’s late afternoon and I’m studying in the cellar when my mother summons me to the phone.
Susie’s voice on the line is a soft, desperate wail. “Elaine,” she says. “Please come over.”
“What’s the matter?” I say.
“I can’t tell you. Just come over.”
Sleeping pills, I think. That would be her style. And why me, why hasn’t she phoned Josef? I feel like slapping her.