William Wharton - Scumbler

He smiles, I smile back. He says when a man has lived with a woman for fifty years he can’t live without one. He’s telling me?

Men are only parking spaces for women to fill. A man without a woman is a house without windows. God, I hate to think what I’d do if Kate died. It’d sure take most of the fun out of life; not all, but a big part of my reasons for living.

TO SEE IN SOMEONE ELSE’S EYES

THE CENTER OF YOUR OWN AND FEEL

LIFTED, SHUTTERING FROM THE GROUND

The wild part is this woman friend is forty years younger than Sasha. He’s proud as a rooster. His kids are going crazy, afraid he’ll give her his money. His woman friend is an Arab widow; he keeps her in an apartment near the mattress shop; he’s thinking of moving in with her.

Sasha laughs; says he’s had everything else in life, so what if he has shit for kids.

No sense me explaining the regression to the mean, so I don’t; too complicated; nobody wants to admit it anyway.

I tell him he should have more kids with the new woman, Middle Eastern peace right here in Paris, handmade. To hell with the old kids; make new ones; maybe they’ll be more real, like him. He gives me a punch on the arm, a hard punch. You know, that’s about the closest men come to showing love for each other, giving and taking punches. That’s weird.

I LIE HERE WEEPING IN MY WIRE

SPIDER’S LAIR; DRY MOTES FLOAT

FREELY IN INSECTLESS AIR.

I ask Sasha if I can paint him. Sasha handles it in stride; wants to know how long it’ll take. I knock this painting out in an hour and a half; get a good one. I do it size 20F, about eighteen inches by two feet. I do head, shoulders, full face; great head, pig eyes, putty nose. When I’m finished, I try giving it to him.

‘What for?’

‘Give it to your kids, make them suffer!’

Also I want to pay him back for his story, his life.

Sasha punches me again, tough, thick, ham hands. He hangs his painting on the wall between some brass springs, tells me to follow him.

He waddles along ahead of me and we go farther back up the alley. There’s a three-story wooden building there. It leans out in every direction, has a tar-paper roof. It’s half full of old furniture, mostly waterfall design, nineteen-twenties stuff. Everything’s dirty as hell, inch-thick dust, caked and oily. Sasha says I can have any furniture I want; all this taken in on trade years ago.

I’m excited by the building; ask if he’ll rent it to me. Sasha laughs. I tell him I’ll turn it into a studio, have naked women in to pose. Sasha laughs louder, says wind blows through, cats crap all over, holler and fuck at night; rats eat cats’ kittens, pigeons fly in through the roof. I tell him I’ll feed the pigeons, train my rats to fight his cats.

FLOATING, FALLING: NOTHING UP

PEERING BLINDLY THROUGH SNOW.

MY IGNORANCE, SKETCHING ARROGANCE.

THE FINAL SCOPE OF INNOCENCE.

We make a deal right there; no papers. I pay six hundred francs every three months; that’s about forty bucks a month. I promise I’ll paint a portrait of his wife from a tiny photo. It’s the only picture he has of her, one of those five-and-dime automat photos.

A FACE AS STILL LIFE

BUT STILL LIFE LEFT.

I get in there and clean things up. This is grim corruption. I haul most of the furniture up into the attic; chop the worst, stack it up for firewood.

First I put in big beams so the whole place won’t fall down on me with a strong wind; then I cut a hole through the roof to let in light. I put plastic panels in this hole and line underneath with thin-roll plastic for insulation. I cover all the walls and ceiling with Styrofoam panels and paint the floors white.

Sasha lets me tie in to his electric line; I’ll pay a set amount every month. Then I buy two potbelly stoves at the flea market, put in long pipes to radiate the heat. I haul back down some of the furniture and spread it around. The place is light, great, looks like something between a cheap whorehouse and a surgical theater.

ANOTHER NEST, NOT MY BEST

YET MEETS THE FINAL TEST.

The first thing I do there is paint the portrait of Sasha’s wife. I let myself drift, float into it, hardly looking at the photo. I’m painting her as Sasha described her to me, the way he felt about her, her soul.

A FACE I DON’T KNOW, A MIND ECHOING ME.

I’M INFUSED WITH ANOTHER. MOTHER, SISTER, BROTHER.

I do this in an afternoon. Sasha says the painting looks more like his wife than the photo. He cries.

I’m a bit psychic; it’s a nick of woman in me, I think. I might be part male witch. I’ve met two true witches in my life so far: exciting women.

A WOMAN LIVES INSIDE ME, CONTENT

TO PULL THE REINS OF MY CLUMSY CART.

Next, I rent out the ground floor to a sculptor. He’s a rich young French aristocrat, pays me six hundred francs per month, cash. Everything cash. French officials are very uptight about people like me.

I keep the middle floor for myself. The stairs come straight up from the door, so I wall off my stairs and put in another door for the sculptor.

To bring water in, I run a line from the street spigot across the alley – strictly illegal. I bootleg this in at night using a plastic hose going under the cobblestones.

I’m out there in the dark, working with a flashlight, digging up cobblestones, when the concierge catches me. I tell her I’m looking for some money I lost. She stares but isn’t willing to call me an outright liar. The French are nice that way.

I bring water into the downstairs and up to the first-floor studio, but can’t rig a drain system for the very top floor.

This third floor isn’t much; the ceiling’s low and it’s dark. I figure I’ll use it for storage. To get up there, you need to go through my studio, up a ladder and through a trapdoor.

A TRAP NEST, SPIDER NEST, PULL IT IN BEHIND YOU, HIDE AND ABIDE.

Just shows how you never know. Three months later, I have a Dutch woman in for some modeling. She has a nice body and is only charging me ten francs an hour. Great, beautiful, solid, rounded tits meant for having kids sucking on them, one kid on each tit. It gets me all hot and bothered for nothing just looking at her. I’d give anything to have big working tits like that; feel like the fountain of life. I’d rent myself out as a wet nurse and learn to eat grass – regular green grass, that is.

She starts telling how she doesn’t have a place to live; hints about staying in the studio, doing free modeling – that kind of business. To turn her off, I tell her I’ll rent the upstairs room for two hundred fifty francs a month.

She’s one of these new, rugged, live-on-a-sewer-cover kind of wonderful women; takes me right up, moves in, money on the barrel two months in advance.

I squirm three days hoarding enough nerve to tell Kate, my wife, about it. Kate is not enthusiastic; knows how vulnerable I am. We have a good working relationship, Kate and I, based on respect for the way each of us is. Still, despite all, sometimes it gets hard. No two people so close could be so different. I wouldn’t have it any other way myself, but easy it ain’t sometimes.

This Traude turns out to be a neat, clean hamster of a woman; no trouble at all. I don’t know she’s there most of the time.

She gets herself a Primus stove, cooks her meals; invites me for lunch once in a while – very domestic. She usually stays in bed mornings on cold days till I get the fires going. Some heat must move up to her place, but she comes down and dresses next to the glowing stove; has a nice, round, almost heavy body, wide hips, beautiful glutes. I get some fine drawings; good deal all around. But I’m not showing these drawings to Kate; no sense pushing the edges. I’ve fooled myself into thinking that sometimes honesty can be a cruel hypocrisy.