Sergei

There was a red sky last night but today was still a day to send any sailor hunting for his rosary beads—high winds that knocked over a metal wastebasket into the flurry of Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, bottles flying and shattering, a white pit bull with pale blue eyes narrowly escaping harm. The wind was not predicted, coming from nowhere as if ordered by a god to create fear and chaos as well as to disarrange people’s carefully pomaded hair styles.

I like the weather gods; my cynicism runs too deep to be touched by mere barometric pressure, no matter how fierce.

Marnie, the eldest of the three brothers who own the corner bodega, was ineffectually circling the store with a tarp as if trying to lasso it, the wind making the task impossible by billowing it out like a sail. We have a bona fide hurricane. Gloria. The sight of the clouds racing across the sky has inspired me to think that a metamorphosis is about to take place, like the yogic belief that if you stand upside down your life (or your luck) will be changed. Certainly, clouds racing at ninety miles an hour above the Projects must be an omen of some kind.

Marnie tried to wave me away as I approached the bodega.

“No muffin today. You should go home. We are going to close.”

In fact, the streets were strangely deserted, yet all around us an unfamiliar sound: people hammering boards across their windows.

But I had no intention of escaping.

I went inside and for once Marnie’s younger brothers did not giggle at me.

They find it funny that I am a painter. Once, while I was waiting for them to make a new pot of coffee, I scribbled their caricatures on a paper napkin. As a result, I became known as the neighborhood artiste (I am only a hack painter of Scandinavian extraction) and though it has distinguished me from their other patrons, it has brought no credit.

Sometimes one of the brothers comes out from behind the deli counter to chide me about drawing from nude models in my studio, which he erroneously assumes I do. Not that I have anything against the practice. A decade ago, I painted many varieties of naked people before I decided that my own internal interpretation of the human form was far more interesting than nature presenting itself in the low wattage of my studio. Rare anyway for me to be able to afford a beautiful model, male or female.

Today, after Marnie scolded me for not knowing to stay inside during a hurricane, he asked if I would help him affix a board to the outside of the window:

“We’re going to close. No one is out today except for you, Oskar—you are a crazy painter. Everyone is inside making safe.”

I helped him carry a board, which I realized was nothing more substantial than a plank of oak tag, and helped him hammer it to the window frame.

He seemed surprised at my strength.

“You work out, Oskar?”

“No, I’m just a painter.”

I gave him back the hammer.

Having a strong interior life, I have a horror of investing too deeply in routines. Most people wouldn’t guess how small a town Harlem really is, that, like anywhere in Nebraska or Iowa or Mississippi, you can become stupefied by the dull repetition of the people and places in your immediate environment.

I will exempt from this circle of misery a certain waiter. On my way back from the bodega, holding my billowing overcoat against my body, I passed by the Targo  Diner at 121st and Frederick Douglass Avenue. I couldn’t resist a quick scan through the window. And there he was, in a back booth with his head on the table—looking like it was the most natural thing in the world to sleep through a hurricane. There were no customers, yet they did not have a Closed sign on the door. I know his name is Sergei, but I resisted going in to greet him. It has been a month or so since I last saw him and suspect that the summer which I spent in his company has already evaporated in his memory or, worse, left behind an unpleasant half-life.

*  *  *

I began visiting the Targo in June soon after it opened, mercifully replacing a Bible shop (in my opinion, we already have too many of them in Harlem). From the beginning, I was aware of the exhausted-looking waiter who took my order. He is a noble figure, with black wavy hair, hollow cheeks, as if he suffers from TB, as well as a sunken chest. His thinness makes his beautiful face stand out from his body like a sunflower from its stem. He also possesses black, beseeching eyes, like a subject of El Greco’s.

Right from the beginning, he was always present in the restaurant, which is open all night, working from the morning shift, when I would pick up a cup of hot water and lemon, through the evening, when, on my midnight wanderings, I’d see him through the windows, waiting on an MD in green scrubs, or a pale insomniac, or a drunk trembling through the DTs. He was often perspiring, not just from the heat of the kitchen, as one would expect, but as if his body were responding to some internal furnace, his hair falling in loose wet waves against his temples.

I found it difficult to diverge from the pattern which was set between us; after a couple of weeks of going in two or three times a day, he barely acknowledged my acquaintance, although he finally admitted that he had memorized my order, which at lunchtime was sardines and mashed potatoes. I was not used to being ignored. In fact, my existence has taught me that it is impossible for me to be ignored. I could then only conclude that he disliked me.

This stalemate might have continued had I not come down with the flu, which is a peculiar occurrence in the summer but not peculiar in a constitution such as mine. Home alone with no food and lying in my miserable open-out convertible with my dirty sheets, in an apartment which traps the heat like a copper igloo, I called the coffee shop for a delivery. I wasn’t worried about going down the three flights to the street but didn’t think I could manage the stifling return trip.

About twenty minutes later there were a couple of muffled knocks and I struggled to the door.

Standing on the threshold with food box in hand and sweat running down his cheek was my El Greco, his black eyes fixed on me without even a flicker of recognition.

“Come in.” I shuffled back. “Please come in.”

He followed me and I felt a spasm of joy, recognizing that an inspiring object had entered the room.

“This might take a minute,” I said. I had forgotten to take my money out of its usual hiding place, inside a box of white surgical tape within the mirrored safe of the medicine cabinet.

He entered the studio and I saw him trying to figure out where to put the box of food.

“It’s ok—you can put it on the bed. The mice are nocturnal.”

Then a few seconds later he asked, “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“Not at all,” I said, coming back from the bathroom. In the hope of extending his visit, I lit a Pall Mall.

He seemed in no hurry to leave, despite my appearance with dollars in hand. In fact, he was absorbed in looking around my studio. I was working at the time on a series of “straight,” albeit magnified, representations of the human face, each canvas containing a feature, so that taken all together they formed a giant mural, like a cosmetics ad in Times Square.

“You get a lot of money for this?” he said, indicating the work with his cigarette.

“I should,” I said. “Or I guess I will. They’re not ready yet.”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“I don’t know. Something with the stroke or maybe the paint is too flat on the canvas. I’ll probably paint over them.”

“How could you do that?”

“You’d be surprised what you can do when you have no money for new canvases.”

He was taken by a spasm of coughing, right when I was attempting to place his mild accent, which appeared not only in the cadence of his words but as a kind of dark coloring to his speech.

I thought about going into the kitchen to get him water and remembered I had no glasses. (I drink directly from the tap—this is why I am incapable of properly utilizing an Alka Seltzer tablet.)

“Are you all right?”

“I am well.”

He regrouped quickly, as if he were used to these temporary lapses in the integrity of his being, and deeply inhaled his Lucky Strike. I decided that instead of TB, he probably had emphysema and he might be anywhere from thirty-five to forty-nine years old.

“You are talented.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” I sat down on the edge of the bed and, ever the generous host, started coughing myself.

“You have a cold.”

“The flu.”

“How do you know it’s flu?”He was talking to me but still looking at my walls.

“My legs hurt. I think I have a fever.” I hoped he would touch my head. “I have the chills.”

He reached his hand out then, I thought to touch my forehead but soon realized in the awkward silence that followed he wanted the bills I still held in my hand.

*  *  *

The next day, still bedridden, I called in my lunch order. I didn’t dare hope he would show up again, but it must have been another slow day, for there he was, cigarette already lit, at my door with my geriatric menu. He came in and deposited the box on the bed and looked around as if expecting to see something new.

“How long does it take you to do these?”

“Depends. Sometimes a day, sometimes a week or a month. Sometimes it’s never done, and you must terminate it.”

“You did this in a day?” He indicated a 36″ by 48″ pair of parched lips on the far wall.

“That? Half an hour. But that’s rare—I was working with a model who couldn’t keep his face still, so I had to work fast.”

He nodded his lovely head.

“You wouldn’t want to pose for me, would you? Not your body—just your face. I’d pay you.”

He took a long pull on his cigarette and looked away. “What do you want with my face?”

“You have a nice face. Very sculptural.”

“Then why you don’t sculpt it?”

“I am not a sculptor. I can offer you a little money.”

He waved this away. “Money doesn’t mean anything to me. Everything I owe. And I have no place to go to spend it.”

“Gambling debts?”

“Immigration.” He didn’t elaborate. His accent was unplaceable, neither Greek nor Spanish. Albanian, perhaps. “I live in the restaurant.”

“You live there?”

“I sleep in the booths. Anyway, we have customers most of the time. I only need a few hours sleep. I sleep when the winos come in. I don’t sleep much.”

I was sitting on the edge of the bed. I wanted him to sit next to me, but he was standing in what seemed to be his natural posture, a sort of hollowed slouch, shoulders hunched, belly inverted, like a question mark.

“I could immortalize you.”

“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t want to be stiff, like I’m dead.”

“You can smoke.”

He considered this. “I’ll do it for a carton of cigarettes.”

I reached out my hand. “It’s a deal, then. I’m Oskarsson, by the way.”

He shook my hand. His was strong and broad. “Sergei.”

If his English had been better, I might have explained that I wasn’t making a hierarchical judgment by giving only my last name while he supplied his first. The truth is, I have come to regard my name, my only name, as my first name. It has a whole other meaning when applied to my father or, God forbid, my mother.

We agreed on a carton of Lucky Strikes for ten consecutive lunch hours. That meant I couldn’t afford cigarettes of my own for several weeks. I would subsist on sample cigarettes the tobacco companies give out during rush hour on upper Broadway.

*  *  *

When I was over my flu, having made a miraculous three-day recovery, I invited Sergei back to my studio and started in, first with heavy charcoal sketches on vellum and then on a real canvas, the “forehead” which had hung over my door for a year having been happily sacrificed to the cause.

He smoked continuously and barely looked at me, sitting on a low fold-up chair I’d found discarded outside a grade school. We were often interrupted by his coughing spasms, which ended with a whooping sound that ricocheted off my walls. Still, I knew I was getting enough, though enough of what I couldn’t say. I wanted to capture some part of him, for I believe that you can possess a person by putting his image on canvas.

*  *  *

Of course, I also wanted him. Something in his sunken chest and hollow cheek masked what appeared to be great strength. He barely met my eyes, and this gave me the full freedom to explore his face, neck, collarbone …

I began to regret that I had only asked to paint his face.

Sometimes our sessions would extend beyond the hour and I would have a cigarette with him, balancing myself diagonally from him on the couch arm, feeling closer to him when I wasn’t painting and feeling possessive of the long curly black hair on the backs of his hands and arms. His hands were like a road map, the thick veins raised in high relief on their reddened backs.

“You are fortunate you can do this,” he said. And I was aware how remote our existences were from each other. “Most people struggle. They cannot think like this, what things look like. They must scrub, wash up, I don’t know, cook, run the threshing. In my country most people work with their hands. They are farmers, and everything is from the land, you know?”

“I work with my hands.”

He looked at my pale hands and a sudden crooked smile broke across his face, though he put his head down first.

“It is a different thing.” He looked up and pointed to his head. “Comes from up here, no?”

“Not always. Sometimes there is nothing up here and then I just follow my eyes.”

But I couldn’t look at him for long when I wasn’t painting him. I was afraid it was obvious that I was devouring him.

On the fifth day he asked to see what I’d done. I’d made such quick progress with the picture I was hesitant to display it. Sometimes in the early draft of a painting you will have something that appears complete, but it is very important that you undo this, create chaos on canvas, rearrange the forms if you ever hope to come up with something of greater depth and truth.

I moved away from the easel. He looked at it briefly, the grays and pale browns of his complexion, the layered purple lines drifting in and out of his contours and his eyes, staring out into space under the protective web of his eyebrows, and then went back to his chair. His reaction intrigued me. He also seemed to understand that I was far from finished. When the ten days passed, neither of us mentioned the fact.

*  *  *

“I grew up with the movies,” he mentioned on a particularly hot, overcast day, when the view through my sooty windows revealed only gloom and the only illusion of circulating air was supplied by my small rotating fan.

“That’s what America is to us there. My family lived in the farm, but we didn’t have much, so my brothers and I stole apples from the neighbor and when she saw us, she throw stones.” He stopped, taking himself out of the pose to flick his cigarette into the ashtray on the bed. “She was a good shot. My brother almost lost his eye. But we would always go back because we wanted apples. Sometimes we go and work on the planting on somebody else’s farm and we would have some change so we could go to the movies and there you can stay all day. I don’t like movies here. You cannot sit through to the next one. They clean up and you are made to go.” He took a fresh cigarette out of his breast pocket and lit it. “Otherwise, I would sleep there, more comfortable than the restaurant. They turn off the air conditioning at night and it is bad during the summer. The kitchen—very hot.”

“Why do you have no home, Sergei?”

But he didn’t answer, and his face seemed to close off for several seconds.

He didn’t comment when I put the first canvas aside and started on the second one, destroying a very effective five-foot eye which had hung over my bed. There was no point in painting parts of the face when I had a whole unit in front of me and similarly, I grew impatient with only drawing Sergei’s face, cutting off mind from heart. After a few days at the new canvas, I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“Sergei,” I said, rather loudly, “could you perhaps remove your shirt?”

He said nothing, but, holding his cigarette between his lips, wordlessly removed the sweat-soaked white shirt he wore every day and let it fall to the floor.

I had my paintbrush in a tight grip to prevent it from noticeably shaking.

His chest was so inverted it looked like it had been hit by a basketball. But his stomach was minutely and intricately muscled and his shoulders and back, though bony and hunched, were not spindly. In fact, he had powerful biceps and on his right one, a greenish tattoo of a coiling snake.

“I was in the merchant marine,” he said, and shrugged. “A long time ago. One day we got drunk and stopped in a tattoo parlor in Bangkok. I picked the snake; it was the only thing he could do.”

“What does it mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? How about the snake in the Garden of Eden? Surely you heard of that, Sergei?” My adrenal glands were sending me into a cold sweat.

“Yes, but it is not that snake.”

I tugged the window up the few extra inches it would allow and pulled some dirty air into my lungs.

“Let’s get back to work,” I said, while trying to keep my voice at a normal octave but feeling the snake coiling around my heart muscles.

I didn’t try to guess his sexuality. That is, I couldn’t conceive of myself being lucky enough that he might not be straight. He seemed to have the neutrality of sick people and pet dogs.

By the time I was on my third canvas and detailing his chest and neck, the sheer frustration of not possessing him, at least on canvas, as a whole self, wore away at me and I became resentful.

One day in mid-July, I could take it no longer. I had a figure which was hopelessly provocative. He had no clear sexuality but a kind of noble gravity, which seemed intrinsic to his character and which to me suggested the kind of distinctive energy which could make for one of those dark inner-cities of sex, where you could lose your identity in the unfamiliar and perhaps arise with a new self.

I put my brush aside.

“This is useless,” I said. “I’m repeating myself.”

For all the frustration I’ve had in life and lived with, for all the times I’ve looked longingly into the eyes and at the bodies of people I knew I could never have, I cannot take that same degree of frustration as a painter. I sat on my stool in front of the easel and put my head in my hands.

I heard a movement across the room and soon he was there behind me, looking at the canvas.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I can’t do this anymore.”

He continued to stare and blow smoke. Then he moved away. I looked up to see him putting his shirt back on.

I am a practiced loser. I know how to lose people. I would just have to let him go, change coffee shops. Try the one on Claremont with a plastic cactus in the window.

“I get like this sometimes. I’m sorry, Sergei. Please come back tomorrow.”

After he had gone, I went to the canvas and covered the image in black paint. Then I went for a walk.

It was ninety degrees outside, offering no relief but adhering my mood to me like a prickly rash. Harlem in summer was not soulless but unendurable all the same. Sweat was beading up on the face of the painted Indian in front of the tobacco store on Broadway and 120th. The passersby looked like they were half a glass of water away from collapse.

*  *  *

Sergei appeared the next day and, without being asked, stripped completely. I busied my mind, giving silent manic thanks to the gods. I was so happy he was back that I feared showing it, though I could feel the blush that was traveling across my cheeks and neck. I started a new painting, employing white flat paint on top of the dried black, while he smoked, indifferent to his own nudity.

He’d left his socks on, which lent a beefy smell to the room, and continued to smoke, staring out the window, past the detergent box crowding the narrow bathroom sill of the apartment across the courtyard, so far away from where he sat that it seemed to matter little whether the body he left behind was clothed or not.

“Are you comfortable, Sergei?”

He shrugged. I wondered if the idea of comfort had any relevance for him.

The more I painted, the more I became aware of his vulnerability and the more agitated I was that I couldn’t touch him. Did he want me to touch him? The hour passed and then another and still he continued to smoke. My lunch box sat on the couch, the food untouched. I had forgotten to put out the ashtray, and he was dipping his cigarette in the box, which gave me a clear idea how he esteemed the food. Finally, at the end of three hours and a particularly long coughing spasm, he stood up and came around to my canvas.

His form stood out, in white enamel and black background, hanging arms muscled but empty, a massive limp sex cradled by his wrinkled scrotum. The eyes glance away. He has offered himself humbly and his flesh is pumiced, with hundreds of dots sprawling through his interior like a flattening plane of locusts descending on the Midwest.

He stared at the painting, possibly forgetting he was still naked, and I shivered with the realization I’d presented him with pain.

“I won’t sell this. I’ll give it to you when it’s done.”

“I think it’s done now,” he said.

I stood next to him, yet it seemed like blasphemy to touch him. He turned and reached for his clothes.

“Sergei—Do you like it?” I came behind him, holding his shirt open for him.

He shrugged his shoulders and reached his arms into his shirt sleeves without looking at me. “It is not for me to like or not to like.”

“I’ll give it to you.”

I would have sold anything then, my sight, my soul, to be able to cross the space between us. I wanted to touch him, hold him in my arms and feel the craggy edge of his bones against my chest. But something in his manner, holding the cigarette between his lips, and buttoning his shirt from the bottom up, perhaps as he was trained as a boy, kept me back.

“I have no place to put it,” he said, with a charming smile, zipping up his trousers, fastening his belt (the last time I would see him do these things), and left, closing the door gently behind him.

*  *  *

I told myself that something could still happen between us. I’d go the coffee shop during his overnight shifts and we would become friends, this whole incident forgotten, and one day, in the middle of a chummy conversation, he would come back up to the studio and I would take him to bed.

But it took just a couple of visits to the coffee shop for me to see that there had developed between us an unbridgeable distance: I was the one who saw him and had presented him with what I’d seen.

And he didn’t want to be reminded.

In August I sold the painting to a collector of Mexican art I met at a local bar. He gave me $550 for it, and I painted over the other sketches, which were only half-realized. I stopped going to the coffee shop because I couldn’t bear the unfamiliar face he turned to me, the face of a stranger who was back among his own, as if we had never known each other. But I have never stopped searching for his figure in the window.

I hope that someday he finds a home.

*  *  *

The hurricane, which consisted of a few hours of pounding rain, is less fierce and I would not have given up seeing the racing clouds spreading out across the sky in a thousand broken pieces. When you see such a thing you realize you’re just a mere actor in this game of trying to capture beauty. You can create your own excitement, perhaps, but you can never come close to touching anything which has already been destroyed.

PIA QUINTANO

Pia Quintano is a New York City–based writer/painter. She received a MacDowell Colony residency in fiction and her stories have appeared in Lunch Ticket, Tulsa Review, Atlas and Alice, Sonora Review, and Hoxie Gorge Review, among other publications. Her story “Sergei” is a chapter from her recently completed novel entitled Notes on a Matricide.