The Burnt Orange Heresy

"The controversial Galt essay was well timed. It rejuvenated interest in the old painter, and the 'bicephalous centaur-like creatures,' as described by Gait, made the new work resemble-or appear to resemble-Abstract Expressionism. Some wishful thinking was going on. Nineteen fifty-eight wasn't an exciting pictorial year. Except for a handful of New York painters, called the 'Sidney Janis Painters, after their dealer, the so-called New York School was undergoing a transitional phase. And Debierue was news, of course, because he'd received so little public notice in recent years."

Berenice dropped her chin. "Uh huh."

"One New York dealer cabled Debierue an offer of fifty thousand dollars for any one of the Chironesque paintings, sight unseen. Debierue acknowledged it by sending back a blank cablegram-with just his type signature. The dealer took advantage of the publicity by blowing up a copy of his offer and Debierue's reply and by placing the photo blowups in the window of his Fifty-seventh Street gallery. Other dealers, who aped and upped the original offer, didn't receive any replies.

"How I'll manage it, I don't know, Berenice. I know only that I'm determined to be the first critic to see Debierue's American paintings, and I've already decided to call it his 'American Period'!"

But I was talking to myself. Berenice, I noticed, with some irritation, had fallen asleep.

Despite her size, and she was a large woman, Berenice, curled and cramped up in sleep, looked vulnerable to the point of fragility. Her unreasonably long blond lashes swept round flushed cheeks, and her childish face, in repose and without makeup, took several years from her age. Her heavy breasts and big round ass, however, exposed now, as the short flimsy nightgown rode high above her hips, were incongruously mature in contrast with her innocent face and tangled Alice-in-Wonderland hair. As I examined her, with squinty-eyed, ambivalent interest, a delicate bubble of spit formed in the exact center of her bowed, slightly parted lips.

Oh, I had put Berenice to sleep all right, with my discursive discussion of Jacques Debierue. With an impatient, involuntary yawn of my own I wondered how much she had understood about Debierue before she had drifted off completely. She had been attentive, of course, as she always was when I talked to her, but she had never asked a serious question. Not that it made much difference. Berenice had a minimal interest in art-or in anything that bordered on abstract thought-and for some time I had suspected that the slight interest she was able to muster occasionally was largely feigned. An effort to please me.

Except for her adhesive interest in me as a person, or personality, and in matching sexual frequencies, I wondered if anything else had ever stimulated her intellectually. For a woman who had majored in English, and taught the subject (granted, she taught on a high school level), she was surprisingly low on insight into the nature of literature.

No one could accuse her of being well read, either. Her insights into literature when I had, on occasion, attempted to draw her out, were either sophomoric or parroted generalities remembered from her college English courses. She had an excellent memory for plot lines and the names of characters, but for little else.

She was probably a poor classroom teacher, I decided. She had such a lazy good-natured disposition she could not have been any great shakes as a disciplinarian. But she would have few disciplinary problems in a city like Duluth, where teen-agers were polite incipient Republicans. New York high school students would have had a gentle woman like Berenice in tears within minutes.

But how did I know?' I didn't. In a power situation, with children, she might inspire terror, fear, and trembling. She never talked about her work and, for all I knew, she might be an expert in grammar and a veritable hotshot in the classroom.

The persona of a woman in love is highly deceiving.

Did she feign sentimentality as well as other things?' She cried real tears one night when Timmy Fraser sang "My Funny Valentine" at the Red Pirate Lounge-stretching out the song in the mournful way that he does for fully ten minutes. Any woman who fails to recognize the inherent viciousness of Lorenz Hart's 1930s lyrics has a head filled with cornmeal stirabout instead of brains. She also mentioned once that she had cried for two days over Madame Bovary's suicide. Fair enough. Flaubert had earned those tears, but she had no insight into the style of the novel, nor did she analyze how Flaubert had maneuvered her emotionally into weeping over the death of that poor, sick woman.