Helpful.
Ida Shultz studied the drawings. She looked like Gertrude Stein, or how Rosie imagined Gertrude Stein. Cubist, dressed in brown.
“Zay are good,” Ida growled in her smoker’s voice, her heavy European accent. Rosie had heard she’d survived the Holocaust. “Togezzer, a strange und powerful ani-mation.”
Rosie did not smile, though she was happy; she kept her expression serious. Ida had agreed to meet with her in the city, having given all her students her number in case they needed her advice over the summer.
“You are accessing zee interior.” Ida was regarding her with the dark, unblinking eyes of a curious bird. “Vat are zay?”
“Gloves,” Rosie said.
Ida smiled, because that much was obvious. “Vat I feel ven I see zis work, it iz not casual. It iz not a bagatelle.”
If there was anyone to tell, it must be Ida. Her corporeal solidity suggested unlimited absorbency; Rosie’s secret would enter into the brown pleats of her smock, Ida would keep it safe.
“The Giggle Man,” Rosie mumbled and the mere sound of his name summoned him and he opened the door and pulled on his white gloves.
“Zee gig—?” Ida leaned forward. “Forgiff me, I haf terrible hearing.”
She had gone willingly up the stairs, along the hall, she hadn’t run away, she hadn’t screamed or cried, she had sat on the bed.
Ida was looking at the drawings again. “Drrread. Zat is vat I feel. Vill you tell me zee story?”
“There’s no story,” Rosie said.
“Just gloffs?”
“Just gloves.”
Ida shifted on her chair, making it creak. She shrugged and made a “Hmmmph.” She was drinking black coffee with four spoons of sugar. They were in a dingy coffee shop on Varick, just around the corner from Ida’s studio. The studio was really where Rosie had hoped to meet, but the coffee shop was its own reward. Men slopped in smelling of blood from their meatpacking jobs. Ida smelled of paint and turpentine. The coffee shop smelled of coffee and onions. It was fantastic. What if you could draw a smell? Rosie wondered. She knew she was destined to live here one day, to become a regular in this very spot. “Hey Joe, Hi Mack.” Just like Ida. “How’s it goin’, Ida?” She painted their lives in the warehouses, vast, dripping canvases, the ribs and backs and skulls of butchered animals.
Sliding the sketches back into Rosie’s portfolio, Ida ordered the bill, refusing Rosie’s offer of payment — the grubby dollar bills she’d fossicked from Bennett’s laundry — and then folded her huge hands. They were slabs of flesh. Suddenly, the left sleeve of her shirt inched up and Rosie glimpsed a set of tattooed numbers on her wrist. Ida Shultz quickly pulled her sleeve down. There was a moment of church-like silence when Rosie could hear the sounds of the kitchen, clacking plates and voices. Then Ida said: “Rozee, zese are personal. Zis is vere you must start und leaf quickly. How can you transform zis — zis fear, zis mal-ignunce — into art? Rozee, art is not about vat you feel but vat you share. Wizzout connection to a greater experi-unce, art iz pusillanimous. It’s a diarree for leetle girls.” She patted Rosie’s hand. “I look forward very much to vorking wiz you in zee autumn, yes, yes.”
Back at the boathouse, Rosie had to look up the word pusillanimous. Cowardly.
They were walking up the garden to the main house. Hobie and Mitzi were back from their trip to Lake Como (not Comma, as she’d thought, a huge blue lake appealingly shaped like a comma), they were having drinks and at last Rosie would meet them. The house was alight in the evening, the doors open so the sound of laughter and conversation fluttered merrily upon the air. The gardens around them exploded with fat peonies and roses, the tidy beds were dense with frothy flowers, daringly color coordinated, and winnowy plants Rosie thought might be foxgloves. Wisteria draped itself along the veranda — not patio — and drooped over the arbor. So much effort had been put into the garden to make it appear casually robust.
“How did they make their money?” Rosie wanted to know.
“Make it? Oh, no, no, no. Nothing so gauche. Money is inherited, carefully channeled through the DNA, like a sixth finger. Though, it’s true, Mitzi owns half of Phoenix. She bought land when she first went to rehab in the ’70s and now it’s worth a fortune.”
Even though the house had been in her view every day for the past month, Rosie hadn’t seen it up close. It had seemed unreal, a movie set looming at the top of the garden, four stories up and at least 1,000 feet wide, layered out and up. As they closed in, she noticed the fine brickwork and the meticulously painted shutters. Nothing was cracked or peeling or chipped. She thought of Gran’s moldy house. The mold still clung to her, the rust, the rot, the damp.
“Do I look OK?”
“You’re lovely.”
But the right espadrille was still too small and the heat made her hair frizzy. Her Perry Ellis dress bunched under the armpits.
“Then what do they do then?”
“Do?” Bennett laughed his secret-joke laugh, only he knew where he’d put the whoopee cushion. “They dabble. They travel to their properties. They lunch, they dine. The Algonquin. The New York Yacht Club. They sit on boards. They found foundations, they are on the committees of charities. They have other people take care of their money — bankers, accountants. They have other people cook their food, buy their art, and eventually, wipe their assholes. The very wealthy are, essentially, decorative.” He seemed pleased with this assessment, for he chuckled lightly and then squeezed her hand, giving her confidence. “They may dress well and have nice hair, but they are dull and they are cheap and some are even stupid. Don’t be intimidated, my girl.”
A dozen guests mingled on the veranda, sparkling and murmuring. Rosie could see they were perfectly coiffed.
Bennett steered her up the steps, leaned in, “Just remember, polo never refers to water.”
“Hello!!” A male voice came through the crowd. Rosie looked to see a trim, silver-haired man in his mid-fifties, hailing them. He had a glass in one hand.
“He’s wearing a scarf,” Rosie whispered.
“That is a cravat,” Bennett corrected.
Hobie shook Bennett’s hand, eye-to-eye, bass-toned greetings mumbled, then he took her hand and when she made an odd bobbing curtsey, he smiled as if he knew exactly how foolish she felt and forgave her. He looped his arm through hers. “Come, Rosie, and let me get you a drink.”
He led her inside, where everything was beautiful, exquisite, there was even a bar with a barman in a white tuxedo and maids in black uniforms with silver trays serving drinks. Rosie took the glass of champagne as Hobie and Bennett drifted away from her, talking about boats and racing, the time Bennett crewed with the America’s Cup, and Rosie recalled that boats meant yachts, though you never used the word yacht, but ketch or boat or skiff or yawl, just as polo was for ponies, and the ponies decamped to Boca in the winter. Rosie kept moving with her glass of champagne, slipping like a silvery, silent eel between conversations so that no one noticed her.
In New York, she had often wondered what the apartments along Fifth Avenue and Central Park West looked like inside, and if Bennett’s family lived in one with their Picasso above the dining table. Because he had not, of course, stayed with her in the dorm at Parsons. He had moved, even then, mysteriously beyond her purview, in an adult world she had not yet entered. Sometimes, she felt that Bennett was in an elaborate play, there was the stage, and there was off-stage, but she didn’t know which one she inhabited.