Enter Without Desire

days, Marsh?”

     “I'm a sculptor. I make statues and heads and things.”

     “Don't say.” My old man fingered the five 20-dollar bills again, said, “You must make out good at it.”

     “Not yet.”

     “Man make himself a living at fooling with clay?”

     “Very few do. I can't.”

     “Then why you doing it?” the old man asked.

     “I don't know. Guess because I like it.”

     “Hmmm! Son, son, don't you know life ain't doing what you like?”

     “No, pop. Elma and me, we try to do as much as we can of what we like to do. That's called happiness.”

     The old man shook his head and pocketed the cash. “Marsh, that's just talk unless you got money—and you seem to have money.”

     The art colony came back to Sandyhook and there was the usual heavy talk, the heavy drinking, and all of it gay and—interesting. And we had that and in addition the wonder of raising a baby. My statue of Elma... RELAXED... had won several honorable mentions, and the new one, which I called... HUNGER... was so fragile I had to make it in sections, and it gave me a hard time before it was finally cast. It caused some talk, especially when one jerky critic decided it was obscene and an insult to “motherhood,” when my agent displayed it in his gallery.

     Don't get me wrong—I wasn't the boy wonder of the art circle, no one was shouting my name up and down 57th Street, but I was becoming known. My name would be mentioned as “promising” or as one of the “younger” artists in some of those dull Sunday bread-and-butter articles the critics wrote. But I could see I was a tiny bit important and enjoyed the feeling—from the way Sid and the others talked to me, asked my opinions. Wasn't anything they said, but the way they said it that made me feel good.

     Elma and I were completely in love and Joan was a healthy bawling baby. We decided she would be given ballet training as soon as she was old enough—not that we especially wanted her to be a dancer, but dancing gives people such wonderful bodies. Elma wanted to start having another baby—mine—but I felt it would be best if we waited a year or so.

     Elma was full of little surprises: she could swim like a fish—seemed to love the sea. When I asked her where she learned to swim so well, she gave me a corny, seductive look with her almond eyes, said, “You know the gag... I was a call girl in Venice! Father taught me to swim soon as I could stand.”

     She and Joan practically lived on the beach, Joan even crawling around in the water. They were both tanned a deep nut brown and I loved to watch Elma take off her bathing suit, the creamy white of her breasts and hips in happy contrast to the brown of her body. I decided to do a terra-cotta figure of her in the nude... the UNDRESSED BATHER... made several water-color sketches, finally decided to do her from the waist up and accentuate the whiteness of her bosom by making the nipples a deep red.

     My agent was excited about it and I even crushed bricks to mix with the clay, for heating... but somehow I was too busy bathing and going to parties to work. I had the sketches down, would work on the clay during the winter.

     Elma was quite popular with the summer crowd. They were happy she was part Lapp—having never seen a Laplander—and they trooped into our house to hear her old records, get into hot, wordy arguments over King Oliver and Bix and Bunny Berrigan, the atomic bomb, and anything else that came to mind. We hired a part-time nurse to look after Joan, purchased a second-hand boat with a new outboard, some ridiculous yacht caps, and did a lot of fishing.

     We were really eating high up on the hog.

     Elma and I had our little spats, too. She felt we should live abroad while we had the money, while I wanted to play it safe—make our cash last as long as possible. Elma said, “You yourself told your father happiness is doing what you like to do. Way things are, all this war talk, let's enjoy ourselves. Joan has her own money. If after a year or two we end up starving artists, hell with it, I'll go back to punishing a typewriter.”

     She gave up the idea of Europe, after reading all the travel ads, when I pointed out she would have passport trouble, due to her non-citizenship. We compromised on seeing California and maybe Mexico during the winter. With everything, we were living cheaply, spending money only for food and rent.

     Sid, and some toy manufacturer who was interested in art, were working on the idea of plastic reproductions. They worked hard but ran into several snags. They made some transparent heads, but the transparency robbed all realness, and when we experimented with colors—a foggy gray, white, blue, the figures somehow reminded us of piggy banks. But we all had hopes of it making our fortune, some day.

     All in all I was never so happy in my life—till one Sunday early in August. One of the painters always made a point of inviting Negroes down. Knowing I was from Kentucky, he seemed to get a bang out of introducing them to me.

     Actually, since I was raised in a mill town and the mill only hired whites, I never saw a Negro when I was a kid. I suppose I grew up with some sort of prejudice instilled in me, but I lost that with my drawl while scuffling for a living in New York. Outside of admiring the works of Barthe, a Negro sculptor, I didn't especially like or dislike Negroes.... I never thought of people as a race, but merely as persons.

     This week-end the painter had a West Indian down, a middle-aged dark-brown man named Sandler, whose heavy body was still fairly muscular, and a face with an interesting high forehead and sharp cheek-bones. Sandler was some sort of union leader on the water front, and in his lousy, patronizing manner, the painter insisted I take Sandler fishing in my boat. Being from the islands, Sandler was nuts about fishing.

     I wanted to study his face, and as I was going out anyway, I was glad to have company. He had an odd, sloppy English accent, and was fond of talking. As we fished, not getting much outside of some small porgies and one weakfish, he kept telling me about his work as an organizer of the rank and file along the water front.

     He talked a lot; about the corruption on the docks, the stealing and dope racket, the gangster control. “And the stoolies,” he said. “We had this white joker started to hang around our group, and the sonofabitch turned out to be a dick, like I suspected.”

     “From one of these un- American committees?” I asked, because I had to say something. I relit my pipe and watched the muscles of his big face as he talked. I had his head firmly in mind, but didn't want to look like an “artist” and start sketching as we were bouncing around on the waves.

     Sandler laughed. He didn't have white teeth or a flashing smile, merely bad teeth. “That's what we thought. Like to give us a fit. But turned out he was just a private dick hunting for a punk. Seems there was a hold-up and a killing in New Jersey and... I don't know what made them think a longshoreman did it, but this guy was just nosing around. So we...”

     I didn't move. I bit through the stem of my pipe and my guts began turning over and I thought I was going to puke.

     For a while I didn't say a word, let him talk on. But when we ran into a school of king fish and Sandler started remembering the fishing he did in Trinidad as a kid, I said, “This fellow hunting for a murderer—what did you say his name was?”

     “You mean the guy who was killed? Some clown who ran a jewelry shop over in Newark.”

     “I mean the dick?”

     “Used a phony name with us, of course, but when we got suspicious of him, he was ducking too many real jobs, we did a little snooping on our own. Name is Harry Logan. Why do you ask?”

     “No special reason,” I said, hoping my voice wasn't shaking. “Don't have much to read out here in the winter, so we read every line in the papers, including all the murders. Remember that case.”

     Sandler reeled in a two-pound king, said, “All you see is crime headlines. I say only way to cure crime is to cure the society that makes it necessary to rob to eat or...”

     I waited till he was done making his speech, asked, “And that dick, he was a real cop or a private snooper?”

     “Private dick. We got the whole story out of him. Some woman in Newark had hired him, given him a few bucks and offered a reward. He told us everything—to get off the stoolie hook. That's the trouble, always suspect hard working people, especially black people, although it turned out he was looking for a white man. But of course they never investigate the gangsters who run the docks and...”

     I had a nibble but didn't even bother hitting the line. So Mama Morse had to put a dick on my trail! Things were going too well for me, something had to spoil it. Nothing was over, forgotten, that bastard, Mac, was still harassing me—us, even from the grave.

     A sudden cramp nearly doubled me up. I started to sweat and Sandler asked what was wrong and I told him, “Nature is calling. Get your line in for a moment.”

     Peeling off my trunks, I jumped over and holding on to the anchor rope, I relieved myself, which isn't as easy as it sounds.

     The water brought me back to my senses. Climbing back into the boat, I put my trunks on and started to make a lot of chatter—getting Sandler to talk about the islands, fishing, anything... And all the time I was frightened stiff at how close I'd come to giving myself away. We hadn't talked about Mac's death in Sandyhook, of course, but the postman knew Elma's “maiden” name was Morse, and all Sandler had to do was hear that, or notice my sudden nervousness, tie it up with my sudden interest in the dick and... it wouldn't take much to add that up.

     After awhile we cleaned our fish and, like all newcomers, Sandler was amazed at how close the gulls came around us—fighting over the fish heads and insides. Cleaning fish is an aid to thinking, just as I find sweeping or mopping a floor helps me