drapes over wide plate glass windows that could not be opened. The east wall, abutting the bedroom, was almost 25 feet long and nine feet high.
This expanse, painted a flat white, Daniel Blank had decorated with mirrors. He had allowed a space four feet from the floor to accommodate a couch, chairs, end tables, lamps, a bookcase, a wheeled cart of hi-fi equipment. But above that four-foot level, the wall was covered with mirrors.
Not one mirror or fitted tiles of mirrors, but more than fifty individual mirrors adorned that wall; tiny mirrors and large mirrors, flat and beveled, true and exaggerative, round and square, oval and rectangular. The wall quivered with silver reflections.
Each mirror was framed and hung separately: frames of wood and metal, painted and bare, plain and ornate, modern and rococo, carved wood and bland plastic. Some were fogged antiques; one was a 3X4-inch sheet of polished metal: the mirror issued to Marines in World War II.
The mirrors were not arranged in a planned pattern on this nervous wall; they had been hung as they were purchased. But somehow, haphazardly, as the wall filled, frames and reflections had grown an asymmetrical composition. His city was there, sprung and lurching.
Padding back to the bedroom, naked, scented, oiled, Daniel Blank looked to his mirrored wall. He was chopped and fragmented. As he moved, his image jumped, glass to glass. A nose there. Ear. Knee. Chest. Navel. Foot. Elbow. All leaped, were held, disappeared to be born again in something new.
He stopped, fascinated. But even motionless he was minced and snapped, all of him divided by silvered glass that tilted this way and that. He felt himself and saw twenty hands moving, a hundred fingers probing: wonder and delight.
He went into the bedroom, adjusted the air-conditioner thermostat, slid into bed. He fell asleep seeing in the dim glow of the nightlight those myriad eyes reflecting him in framed detail. Waist in steel. Shoulder in carved oak. Neck in plastic. Knee in copper. Penis in worm-eaten walnut.
Art.
3
She had been one of the first women in Manhattan to leave off her brassiere. He had been one of the first men in Manhattan to use a necktie as a belt. She had been one of the first to adopt a workman’s lunch pail as a purse. He had been one of the first to wear loafers without socks. The first! A zeal for the new bedeviled them, drove them.
No notice of Florence and Samuel Morton was made in the long, detailed separation agreement signed by the Blanks. Gilda took the Buick sedan, the Waterford crystal, the Picasso print. Daniel took the apartment lease, 100 shares of U.S. Steel, and the Waring blender. No one mentioned the Mortons. It was tacitly assumed they were Daniel’s “best friends,” and he was to have them. So he did.
They contradicted the folk saying, “Opposites attract.” Husband and wife, they were obverse and reverse of the same coin. Where did Samuel leave off and Florence begin? No one could determine. They were a bifocal image. No. They were a double image, both in focus simultaneously.
Physically they were so alike that strangers took them for brother and sister. Short, bony-thin, with helmets of black, oily hair, both had ferrety features, the quick, sharp movements of creatures assailed.
He, married, had been a converter of synthetic textiles. She, married, had been a fabric designer. They met on a picket line protesting a performance of “The Merchant of Venice,” and discovered they had the same psychoanalyst. A year later they were divorced, married to each other, and had agreed to have no children because of the population explosion. Both gladly, cheerfully, joyfully, submitted to operations.
Their marriage was two magnets clicking together. They had identical loves, fears, hopes, prejudices, ambitions, tastes, moods, dislikes, despairs. They were one person multiplied by two. They slept together in a king-sized bed, entwined.
They changed their life styles as often as their underwear. They were ahead of everyone. Before it was fashionable, they bought pop art, op-art, and then switched back to realism sooner than art critics. They went through marijuana, amphetamines, barbiturates, speed, and a single, shaking trial of heroin, before returning to dry vermouth on the rocks. They were first to try new restaurants, first to wear Mickey Mouse watches, first to discover new tenors, first to see new movies, plays, ballets, first to wear their sunglasses pushed atop their heads. They explored all New York and spread the word: “This incredible little restaurant in Chinatown…The best belly-dancer on the West Side…That crazy junk shop on Canal Street…”
Born Jews, they found their way to Catholicism via Uni-tarianism, Methodism, and Episcopalianism (with a brief dabble in Marxism). After converting and confessing once, they found this groovy Evangelical church in Harlem where everyone clapped hands and shouted. Nothing lasted. Everything started. They plunged into Yoga, Zen, and Hare Krishna. They turned to astrology, took high colonics, and had a whiskered guru to dinner.
They threw themselves in the anti-Vietnam War movement and went to Washington to carry placards, parade and shout slogans. Once Sam was hit on the head by a construction worker. Once Flo was spat upon by a Wall Street executive. Then they spent three weeks in a New Hampshire commune where 21 people slept in one room.
“They did nothing but verbalize!” said Sam.
“No depth, no significance!” said Flo.
“A bad scene!” they said together.
What drove them, what sparked their search for “relevance,” their hunger to “communicate,” to have a “meaningful dialogue,” to find the “cosmic flash,” to uncover “universal contact,” to, in fact, refashion the universe, was guilt.
Their great talent, the gift they denied because it was so vulgar, was simply this: both had a marvelous ability to make money. The psychedelic designs of Florence sold like, mad. Samuel was one of the first men on Seventh Avenue to foresee the potential of the “youth market.” They started their own factory. Money poured in.
Both, now in their middle 30’s, had been the first with the new. They leeched onto the social chaos of the 1960’s: the hippies, flower children, the crazy demand for denim jeans and fringed leather jackets and pioneer skirts and necklaces for men and Indian beads and granny glasses and all the other paraphernalia of the young, taken up so soon by their elders.
The Mortons profited mightily from their perspicacity, but it seemed to them a cheesy kind of talent. Without acknowledging it both knew they were growing wealthy from what had begun as a sincere and touching crusade. Hence their frantic rushing about from picket line to demonstration, from parade to confrontation. They wanted to pay their dues.
In further expiation, they sold the factory (at an enormous profit) and opened a boutique on Madison Avenue, an investment they were happily convinced would be a disaster. It was called “Erotica,” based on a unique concept for a store. The idea had come to them while attending religious services of a small Scandinavian sect in Brooklyn which worshipped Thor.
“I’m bored with idleness,” he murmured.
“So am I,” she murmured.
“A store?” he suggested. “Just to keep busy.”
“A shop?” she suggested. “A fun thing.”
“A boutique,” he said.
“Elegant and expensive,” she said. “We’ll lose a mint.”
“Something different,” he mused. “Not hotpants and paper dresses, miniskirts and skinny sweaters, army jackets and newsboy caps. Something really
“Love?” she mused.
“Oh yes,” he nodded. “That’s it.”
Their boutique, Erotica, sold only items related, however distantly, to love and sex. It sold satin sheets in 14 colors (including black), and a “buttock pillow” advertised merely “for added comfort and convenience.” It carried Valentines and books of love poetry; perfumes and incense; phonograph records that established a mood; scented
