Under The Table

a short story

Morgan glances at the paint-splattered grandfather clock standing forlornly in the corner, just to the left of his latest incomplete painting. Noon. The old clock keeps proper time but makes no sound, the gong long silenced. Morgan has made two moves on his painting since dawn: a little Grass Green smear in the upper right-hand corner, and a timid Aquamarine line—horizontal—across the center. The canvas is four-feet high and six-feet wide, his favorite size. He’s made eight moves total in three days. Two greens, five blues, one silver. To a literalist, his painting resembles a gigantic face drawn by a hesitant child.

“Two more hours until she might be here,” he murmurs, hating himself for doubting her. She hasn’t missed a Tuesday in twenty-three years. Not when she’s in town. Still, it seems inevitable to Morgan that she will eventually stop coming. She was an hour late two weeks ago, a half-hour late last Tuesday. She used to stay until dark. And long ago she never left. But nowadays she has dinner dates, cocktail parties, speaking engagements.

She’s leaving for Florence in a month. A wealthy collector is lending her his villa for the winter. She will have servants and a driver. Her studio in the villa is vast, the light ethereal. French doors open onto a pine forest. A trail traverses vineyards to a waterfall. She’s shown Morgan pictures, big glossy color photographs sent by her patron.

Can he go another two hours without a drink? He loves being sober when she arrives. He feels oddly proud to know he can still choose his delight in being with her over the transient relief of alcohol. Nowadays he gulps gin in the middle of the night to staunch the throbbing in his temples. When gin fails to quell the beast, he takes three tiny turquoise pills, though his doctor told him never to take more than one every four hours. But one pill does nothing at all, not when the leopard sinks her fangs into his skull.

Celia doesn’t like the smell of alcohol on Morgan’s breath. She says the sour odor reminds her of her father who beat her when she was a child. Sometimes her father used a belt, sometimes a cane. As he beat her, he would accuse her of sexual misconduct, though she was a very little girl and had no idea what he was talking about. Her parents divorced when Celia was seven. She moved with her mother from New Jersey to California and never saw her father again. He died on her eighteenth birthday.

There is a chance Celia will want to make love with Morgan. When they first became lovers, they made love whenever Morgan desired her, which was constantly. He would send her away so he could get some work done. “Don’t you dare come back until five o’clock,” he would say, his heart bursting with joy. “I’ve got so much to do.” She would leave and he would pour his longing for her onto his canvases. He covered his clock with his coat to keep from constantly checking the time. Unquestionably his greatest acclaim resulted from those paintings he made in the first year of his love affair with Celia.

Morgan searches in the usual places for marijuana, knowing the search to be futile. He hasn’t left a joint unfinished in a decade. So he descends the metal stairs to the studio of Pedro Lopez, a rising star of the Captured Graffiti movement, the intoxicating exhaust of freshly brewed espresso reaching Morgan’s nostrils before he’s halfway to Pedro’s door, the aroma causing him to growl in despair, for Pedro’s coffee is verboten to Morgan, even a few sips of the potent brew makes his heart go terribly wonky.

Mariachi Rap blasts from Pedro’s gargantuan speakers, the brief silences between the crushing beats punctuated by the hissing of poisonous paint escaping from pressurized cans. Morgan pounds on the big aluminum door, and it slides open revealing Naomi Rosenburg, Pedro’s buxom girlfriend in a frayed yellow bathrobe. Naomi smiles avidly at Morgan and gives him a ferocious hug and a sloppy kiss, her breath rich with the very substance Morgan hopes to secure from them.

“Dias,” shouts Pedro, waving to Morgan from the other end of the vast room. Pedro—a dark, muscular man with long black hair—stands naked in front seven enormous contiguous canvases. Pedro holds his spray cans like six-shooters. “Have some coffee, hombre. Lethal.” Pedro giggles and resumes outlining with blue mist the enormous eye of a ferocious hound.

“He’s in a zone,” says Naomi, pouring dense black coffee into a white mug. “You take cream?”

“What?” says Morgan, shouting over the music.

“Cream!”

“No! Can I buy a joint off you guys?”

Home again, Morgan ignites the spliff Naomi so deftly rolled, and recalls the night Celia first brought out her marijuana.

“I don’t drink,” she murmured shyly, “but I like to get high, and this is how I do it.”

They shared her joint and made love, marvelous love. And for years thereafter, or so it seems to Morgan now, they did little else but smoke pot, make love, order pizza, and make art.

“Who needed booze?” says Morgan, emboldened by his memories to make another move on the canvas, this one a big swooping magenta semi-circle.

He met Celia when he was forty-one, she twenty. She came to his studio with Margaret Lacy, the sculptor, Morgan’s friend and tormentor and never quite lover. “Here’s Celia,” said Margaret, in her disarmingly direct way. “Show her how to paint. She’s a dunce with clay, but she understands light. Her sketches are remarkable.”

Morgan refused. Margaret stormed out. Celia stayed. She stood in front of Morgan’s just completed Fore Paw Seven: Foot Covers Ear and practically put her nose in the paint. Then she got back as far as she could and burst out laughing.

“You get it?” he asked, amazed.

“Brutalized Matisse,” she said, arching an eyebrow. “Feathers in the mouth. And you definitely don’t do pretty.”

“Okay,” he said, blushing from head to toe. “Tuesdays. You can come from noon to three. Whatever happens happens. I may paint, I may drink. I may paint and drink. I may not be here at all.”

So once-upon-a-time she had been his student. She brought her sketchpad and rendered him while he worked or didn’t work. She grew from a tall young girl with short brown hair into a ravishing woman with hair tumbling to her waist. Each week, he would look at her sketches—ever more fluid and succinct—and urge her to make them huge on a canvas with colors.

She resisted his suggestions until her twenty-fifth birthday. He remembers the day vividly. December thirteenth. Clear and cold. They’d just come home from birthday blintzes at Mama’s Royal Cafe. They were wired on coffee, giddy about their upcoming show at the Jaffe Gallery, her big-time debut, the gossip venomous—another sexy bitch sleeping her way to an opening.

For her birthday gift that year, Morgan wrapped an enormous blue ribbon around a five-foot by seven-foot canvas and affixed a note that said, “To my beloved Celia, my best friend of all.”

She wept when she read his note. He tried to comfort her, but she shook him off, grabbed a plug of charcoal, and sketched him larger than life onto her birthday canvas. He backed away, unsure what to do. She continued to sketch him until the charcoal was gone, then she boldly raided his colors, working with such fury he couldn’t bear to be in the same room with her. He ran down to the corner bar and drank until dark. Upon his return he found her painting complete, the title scrawled on the floor in red. My Master. And the rest, as they say, is art history.

Now Morgan lives for Tuesdays, and not for the sex, but because he loves Celia. The promise of sex is tantalizing, but problematic, too. He is not always capable these days of performing to either of their satisfactions. And though he knows the waning of his sexual powers is related to his drinking and lack of exercise and his gaining forty pounds since his sixtieth birthday, he feels powerless to reverse his decline.

Why she still wants to occasionally sleep with a fat old has-been is an ongoing mystery to Morgan. He understands she feels indebted to him for his early support of her, but she’s a living legend now, while he is remembered solely because of his connection to her. The four-page catalogue of his last show at Steinberg’s, a dismal flop with no sales, referred to him as “the mentor of Celia Leigh.” That was nine years ago. Why, he wonders, does she remain so fiercely loyal to him when no one else has?

Just two month ago in a big splashy piece about Celia in Art In America, she insisted they include her praise for Morgan. “We all have yet to catch up to Alexander Morgan,” she is quoted in the article. “Fads will come and go, but his art will live for millennia.”

When she was twenty-eight, she had her first one-person show at The Whitney. At the opening, Morgan watched her from afar, feeling old and abandoned. She beckoned to him from the tumult, but he couldn’t bring himself to join her.

The pundits outdid themselves proclaiming Celia the new Empress of Big Oil Paintings. Overnight she became everybody’s darling. The Feminists claimed her for her content. The Realists crowed about her technical virtuosity. The Abstract Expressionists bowed to her fearless fluidity. The Colorists rejoiced in her dazzling hues. And the Neo-Impressionists extolled her love of the blur. But she insisted then, as she still insists today, “Anyone interested in my art must look to Alexander Morgan to understand where I’m coming from.”

“I hate my work,” he says, snuffing out what little remains of the joint. “I hate my life, except for Tuesdays. I’ve never known, not for one minute, what to do next. Yet she goes on telling people I’m the fount.”

It was shortly after her first show at the Museum of Modern Art that Celia began leaving checks for him in pale blue envelopes propped against the mirror in his bathroom. He finds them after she’s gone. For a time, he kept the envelopes in a shoebox under his bed. He intended to buy her a diamond bracelet. But then his paintings stopped selling. His rent came due. He spent the money and became dependent on her.

Now each of her paintings sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars and the blue envelopes contain checks for large sums. He spends what he needs for rent and food and drink, and keeps the rest in a savings account. “For when I’m too old to work,” he tells himself. “Or if I fall ill.”

He looks at the clock. Nearly two. He glances at his canvas and likes what he sees, which makes him want to destroy it. “Babies are cute and cute is phony,” he sneers, opening a jar of shit brown paint.

But for the first time in ten years—since Celia moved into her own studio—something stops him from obliterating his creation, and he decides to take a long look at what he has done. This is not easy for him. His fingers itch to open the jar, to grab the dark mud and bury the loveliness. He places his armless chair fifteen feet from the canvas, sits down, and forces himself to face his painting. He gazes at each of the movements of color, gazing longest at his last move—the swooping purple circ. He stares at that comet of feeling for what seems like hours and days and months and years, yet when he hears Celia’s key in the lock, the grandfather clock shows little time has passed.

She stands behind him and rests her hands on his shoulders. “Now what?” she whispers. “What comes next?”

“You do something,” he says, his heart pounding.

She walks to his table of paints, snatches up a tube of Quinachradone Mulberry, moves without hesitation to his canvas and spells in gossamer letters all around the heart of his painting

Together Again

(This story originally appeared in The Anderson Valley Advertiser in September of 2009)