Harmony In Flesh and Black Read Free Page A

to visit my studio? What may I call you, sir?” He opened a closed door off the sitting room, revealing a brief and surprising expanse of white clarity. Fred shook his head.
    â€œI’ll wait,” Fred said.
    Smykal closed himself into his studio.
    You don’t need to wrap a painting to carry it, but Smykal wouldn’t understand that. Half the people who own them don’t know about paintings. They have them, but it’s like a gorilla trying to take care of a baby bird. Let the man wrap his painting if he wanted. If the person’s leaning in your direction anyway, don’t push.
    Fred sat in an armchair of abused velour. He listened to Smykal grunting and wrapping in the next room. He’d be later getting to Molly’s, that was all.
    On the gray wall opposite Fred’s chair, over a bookcase crammed with magazines and bottles, was a horizontal stain of absence on faded wallpaper that, between the gynecological displays, was dotted with crimson roses anyone’s granny would enjoy. The disembodied crotches looked wise and solemn, omniscient, indifferent, like visitors from outer space. The velour on his armchair began crawling.
    If that stain was the size of what Clay had bought, the canvas Smykal was wrapping was roughly two by three feet. Fred saw a handy toolbox in red plastic on the floor under the vacancy, and picture hooks lying ready, and several of Smykal’s framed prints waiting to take advantage of the opening.
    â€œI trust I made the right decision,” Smykal called from the studio. “We artists are not suited to the marketplace. I could undoubtedly have sold it for much more if I had held out. I am an innocent. We artists are. God must care for us.”
    Fred stared at his knees. They were nicer than anything else here: hard knobs in brown twill.
    Smykal stuck his head out of the studio, his mouth, between the hair, making words and pursing between them for emphasis. “Arthurian’s interest in fine art could be so easily extended to the film.”
    Smykal said “the film” the same way some people say “the dance.”
    Fred stood up, looking at his Timex.
    The package, when Smykal brought it out of the uneasy starkness of the back room, was, as Fred had guessed, about two by three feet, bulky at the edges on account of a paste frame that Fred could feel crumbling behind the newspaper. It was bound like a mummy in string and tape. Fred took hold as soon as he could because Smykal was having trouble with it, sliding it along the floor and making tracks in the greasy dust of a rug whose generic color Fred classified as Barbizon, or Blakelock.
    Smykal wagged the stump of his cigar. “Mr. Arthurian must call me. I found him an interesting person. So cultured. But a man of the world. He was taken with my work. We are soul mates. I felt him responding.”
    He leered. The cigar had gone out between his lips. Anything would. “Perhaps you yourself, even,” he suggested. “You won’t believe how easy and releasing it is. I am arranged for total privacy.…”
    â€œFor God’s sake, give it up,” Fred said. “Arthurian knows how to reach you if he wants to make prints from your hired vaginas.”
    Smykal gulped and blushed, spluttered, looked from side to side, said, “For goodness’ sake, we don’t think of it like that…,” and saw it was no use, Fred was moving. Smykal waved forlornly. “Farewell, then, little one,” he said. Fred gave a start. Then he understood that Smykal was talking to the package, the painting, telling it good-bye.
    As Smykal opened the door to the landing, he looked as if he might try to snatch the package back. “Why should we even think of money? God must take care of us,” he said. “Like the birds of the field, or the lilies of, the lilies of—” He hesitated.
    Fred said, “I’m off.”
    He reached the sidewalk and breathed