Playdate

was at her place, seated on her floor, helping Angie paint her studio high-gloss white. I warned her: White never lasts. We had praised Alberta, eighty-five, for her good looks, and she’d told us, “Ain’t nothing I ever done. It’s just: Black don’t crack.”

“White sure do,” Angie replied. “Look at Hartley already.”

The studio flooring had been barn-red; it kept souring and skewing her new blue work, and, no, she had not asked her landlord’s permission. He would say forget it. Ang had been refilling her Zippo with fluid and now she squirted a little flaa of that across the red floor, to see what paint did. Then she brushed white over that; it made a moment’s pink. Working, we chatted, catching up. We’d not seen each other in six hours.

“Wait one,” she frowned at something I said, suddenly pointing her brush my way. “Hartley, I think my ears must fail me. Because, please repeat that. Let me get this straight. It’s during the taxi strike and you share a cab with the assistant director of Marlborough Gallery, right? And you never one time mention me or my work? You’re always telling me that you respect what I am doing for easel painting generally. Daily, I hear this. I talk you up everywhere. Any idea how many copies of that fucking dog magazine I bought and mailed? But here you finally get a ride from Fourteenth to Fifty-seventh with him, held captive, a silver-tray opportunity—and it’s like I’m on the cattle car headed for Auschwitz and you’ve conveniently forgot my name …”

“Angie, it would have been forcing things. The man was a stranger, and straight to boot. We never even talked painting. It never came up.”

“Well, bring it up. Here I am, slaving away and instead of friends I get narc-collaborators, I’m hidden here in this attic, slaving away, and they’re off riding in stretch limos with the friggin’ SS and …”

“Angie, darling? Captain Tom to Earth toward Angelina. Would you consider giving up all this recent Holocaust imagery? You’re catching Manhattan’s toxic shock. Your Mom’s people were snake-handling Baptists from a county whose only beauty spot is probably a ditch. Your Dad’s Episcopalian and you’re from Savannah and were about one inch from having been a debutante, as you never tire of telling us, your ranking friends in the Gestapo, sweetie. You’re growing solemn. Beware. Under the misapplied rouge, your face is turning the color of concrete. You’re forgetting how to mess around, Goofy. You’ve stopped really playing in your work. Honey? it’s mattering too much to you. And that makes it count less for the rest of us. Ansel is right, your best is the stuff you do with your left hand. Your accidents are better than most of what we manage with tongues pressed between our new big teeth. Remember what got you started at your grammar school? The prizewinning Fish and Birds of Georgia mural, remember? Play’s still the thing.”