Girl in the Moonlight by Charles Dubow

Author:Charles Dubow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

16

CESCA MARRIED GAVIN, AS I WAS AFRAID SHE WOULD. IN the end, I wasn’t invited to the wedding. I wrote to her often. Long, passionate, youthful letters. Occasionally she wrote me back a short note. Once I got a postcard from Spain with a photograph of the sea on the other side. It began Dear Tricky Wylie . . . But eventually we lost touch.

I cherished her memory. I dated other women, but none of them touched me the way she had. I was just going through the motions. Fumbling in the dark, the creak of bedsprings, bad breath in the morning, forced gaiety to pretend that what I really wanted was for her to be gone. Cesca was the apogee. No one else came close.

After college I returned to New York, rented a small apartment downtown near Wall Street, where the streets in those days were empty of life at night, and tried to paint. I took classes several days a week at the Art Students League. My father gave me a year to succeed. After that, who knew? He mentioned law school, but I never gave him any reason to think I would really do that. To his credit, he was surprisingly supportive of my wanting to paint. He seemed proud of my talent, one he lacked. I think that, not unlike Izzy Baum, he would have been pleased to be the father of a famous painter. He even steered a few of his friends and colleagues to me, and they obliged him by paying me to paint portraits of them, or their wives or children. Once even a favorite Pekingese dog.

At the same time, he constantly reminded me of how difficult a painter’s life would be. “There’s no money in it,” he would say over dinner. “How do you ever plan to support a family?” I had no proper response and always assumed there would be money from somewhere, whether I earned it myself or was given it. He had been raised without such assumptions, earning every penny. He warned me about the dangers of being a rich man’s son. That was why he wouldn’t give me more money. He pointed to Roger as an example of early privilege having ruined his life. I had no answer to that.

I worked as a bartender and a copy editor. I lived as cheaply as possible, eating primarily pasta and canned soup. I completed a cycle called “The Life of the Poet.” It was a series of ambitious canvases depicting different aspects of a poet’s life. The poet with his family. The poet at work. The poet in love. There were eight in all. Aurelio formed my mental image of the poet—tall, gaunt, handsome, slightly tortured, wholly dedicated to his art. The paintings were large. I labored over them with everything I had. I made slides and showed them to several galleries. The only one that evinced any interest was run by an old queen, who took me for dinner

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