thanks for taking all this so... bravely.”
“Marsh, this is as good a time as any to tell you. And I meant to tell you, no sneaky stuff, understand. I met a guy during the war. Alfred...”
“What?”
“Don't be angry, I was all alone and worried and... well, there was Alfred. I still see him. He wants to marry me. He's a mechanic, got his own garage now in Jamaica. I would have told you sooner, but at first you were just back from overseas and I couldn't tell you, and then you seemed so... so... upset, I didn't want to do anything to... make you sick. Marsh, I know it was wrong to...”
“It wasn't wrong. What we were doing was the wrong thing—all this pretending. Marry this Alfred, Mary. Have a houseful of kids and be happy,” I said, getting up.
“Marsh, you really don't mind?”
“Everything's all right.” And that night I slept on the couch and pounded my ear like I was drugged, the best sleep I'd had in years.
Four months later Mary got her final decree and remarried. Alfred was a stocky, plodding-type, joker about thirty-five, and rather handsome, even with a bald dome.
At one of Sid's parties I'd met a Mexican girl, Ofelia, who had ideas about making marionettes and going on TV. She had a good singing voice, wasn't a bad actress. I was to make the marionettes. Ofelia was exciting in a sort of nervous way—I never knew what she'd do next. She had a furious temper and was always biting me. The second time I saw her we ended up between the sheets, and she was nervous there, too. She agreed to be the corespondent in our divorce, and we even thought it was rather clever to go to Mary Jane's wedding, where Ofelia was the center of attraction, by dint of passing out.
I gave up my real estate job and moved into a loft Ofelia had made over into an apartment, without much success. I spent all my time experimenting with marionettes, and couldn't make them. They either looked awful, were out of proportion, or didn't work. Ofelia and I began screaming at each other about money, borrowing from all our friends. Finally we were busted and we both got jobs in a factory, and Ofelia started seeing a psycho-analyst, who advised her to get the hell away from me.
I found a crummy room and was bored by factory work. I decided there wasn't any sense in letting the G.I. Bill go to waste, so I enrolled at N.Y.U. to get my degree. I managed to finish a year, but living on $75 a month was tough, and I always had the feeling college was unreal—a time killer. Somehow it was silly for a guy of twenty-eight to be acting like a school-boy. And what good would a B.A. do me?
I tried to change to art school, which made more sense, but they were filled up. So I stayed at school and thought about starting with clay again, but never got past the thinking stage. For one thing I couldn't spare the extra bucks. I tried not to hang around Sid's too much. Sometimes I saw Kimball, mainly when I wanted a decent meal. Kimball was okay, she'd even give me a ten spot when I looked too beat—without a pep talk.
During the following summer I decided to take a vacation from school, meaning no more subsistence money. I got Kimball to buy me a few shirts and took a job as a temporary salesman in one of the big department stores. The place was air-cooled, and not a bad way to spend the summer. I stole paints and brushes from the art counter and did some work.
Sid had bought this shack out at Sandyhook and when I went out there for a week-end, I fell in love with the place. It was a real artists' colony, even had a natural red-clay pit and the clay could be used, if you kept wetting it. There was a beach within walking distance, fine fishing and swimming, and at night a lot of characters anxious to drink and shoot the breeze.
That week-end made me snap out of my daze. I decided I was going to be a sculptor, no matter if I starved. I wasn't eating too regularly anyway. Sculpting was the one thing in life I wanted to do and I was going to give myself a crack at it, stop drifting around. Sid was leaving the place in September and when I asked if I could stay there, he said, “You're welcome to it, Marsh, only... be rough. No heat or hot water. I don't even know if they keep the electricity on in these shacks during the winter.”
“I'll manage. I figure I can live on a buck a day. I want to try it for six months. Save like crazy during the summer, maybe get a night job, too. Then I'll go back to school for a month, get that $75 check. If I can start out with about $250—I'll be in.”—
I got an evening job as a bus boy, which meant I didn't have to pay for my meals. The summer passed in a haze of work, sweating, penny-pinching, and little sleep. But I enjoyed it, I was happy, I was working towards something, had a goal, a purpose. During September I managed to hold on to my two jobs and enroll at college—cutting most of my classes, so that when I went out to Sandyhook the first week in October I had nearly $300.
I spent over seventy bucks for a small oil heater, a hot plate, lead pipes for armatures—to support the figures I'd make, wire, cutters, proportional calipers, and other tools, along with a book on anatomy and a plaster female figure for study.
October was a mild month and I dug up pails of clay and went to work. I was pushing myself, trying to knock out a major work in my first attempt... with the result I developed a very trite idea. I tried doing a small tableau to be called,
October was a good month. I caught up on all the sleep I'd missed during the summer by not getting up till noon. I'd work all afternoon—long as the light held—then go down to the beach for surf casting. Evenings I'd listen to the radio, read, or drop in on the Alvins.
Tony and Alice Alvins were local people who had been influenced by the summer invasion of artists. Tony started doing some bad water-color abstractions, while Alice turned writer and, after doing a trashy novel, she threw it away and started a long book about the Long Island Indians— which was rather good, in spots. They had a comfortable all-year-round house and Tony worked at the Grumman Aircraft factory and made a good salary.
I guess they were glad to have me around: Sandyhook is pretty isolated and lonely in the winter. I'd drop in and bull with them about art, Paris, the Village, and the world in general. Tony had been a combat man, had a Purple Heart, and we often talked about the European towns we'd both been in.
It got so I'd barge in without ringing their bell, get a beer out of the icebox, thumb through their newspapers and magazines, even read Alice's novel over her shoulder as she typed. I'd bring them fish, and sometimes a bottle of rye.
There's such a thing as being too intimate and two petty things came up that ruined our friendship—for me, at least. One day when I was in their house and Alice was out shopping and Tony at work, I was searching through his desk for a pipe cleaner, when I came upon a Luger in one of the drawers. I admired the deadly beauty of the gun, left it where I'd found it. Later, when I casually mentioned it to Tony, he got angry, snapped, “Thought I had that hidden away. Don't see why you had to snoop around and...”
“Sorry. I wasn't snooping,” I said, stiffly. “Well, I don't like people to know about me having a gun.”
“I certainly won't go around blabbing about it I know it's against the law and...”
“I have a permit,” Tony said. “It's... the gun brings back a lot of unpleasant memories. I took it off a dead Nazi—guy I killed. The point is I might have captured the guy alive, but it was in my first combat and I was trigger-souvenir-happy... Well, forget it. Gun means things to me other people can't understand and... Just forget it.”
“Sure, I never saw it,” I said, still angry.
Several weeks later we were sitting around the table after I had helped them put away a duck supper and Alice was talking about the summer colony—some of the people had sent her cards from Mexico. She said, “They have money to travel, but out here they're nothing but spongers. They'll eat you out of house and home and never even think about reciprocating.”
I'm sure she didn't mean that as a dig at me, but it made me uncomfortable, as though I'd outlasted my welcome. From then on I only saw them once or twice a week, instead of every day, never stayed for supper or took a drink. Tony and Alice didn't seem to notice the difference, so maybe it was a hint.
My troubles started in November when Nature lowered the boom on me. It got so cold the water pipes busted and it cost me twenty bucks to have them fixed, and after that I had to keep the water running all the time and the noise drove me crazy. I'd spent far too much money—I had less than a hundred dollars left—so I began cutting down on everything, eating lots of starches and fish. I found a kerosene lamp in one of the empty cottages and used that to save electricity. My radio broke and I didn't bother to fix it. As it grew colder I became a hermit. I'd get up in the morning, force myself to leave the warm blankets. Not wanting to buy oil, I'd made a stove out of some tin cans and I'd run around the beach to find driftwood, and any frozen fish, then dash back to my shack and start the wood fire going.
I'd stuff the door and windows with paper to keep the cold out, and by early afternoon the place would be comfortably warm and I'd start working. By six it would begin to grow dark and I'd knock off. But I stayed in the shack, for to open the door would let out all my precious heat. I'd eat fish and a can of beans, then huddle around the kerosene lamp and read anything I could find—usually this old World Almanac, then climb into my bed, the stuffy air giving me a headache.
Actually I was bored stiff with myself. I knew my “masterpiece” was junk, but I wanted to finish it. The only thing that gave me any confidence
