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By Root 2727 0

few days later, I went to Clinton Street to settle up with Jimmy Washington, our former superintendent. I climbed the heavy stone steps one last time. I knew I was never coming back to Brooklyn. I stood outside his door for a moment getting ready to knock. I could hear “Devil in a Blue Dress” playing and Jimmy Washington talking to his lady. He opened the door slowly and was surprised to see me. He had packed up Robert’s things but it was obvious that he had taken a liking to most of mine. I had to laugh coming into his front room. My blue poker chips in their open inlay box, clipper ship with handmade sails, and garishly appointed plaster Infanta were carefully arranged on his mantel. My Mexican shawl was draped over the big wood desk chair I had laboriously sanded and painted over with white enamel. I called it my Jackson Pollock chair for it resembled a lawn chair I had seen in a photograph of the Pollock-Krasner farm in the Springs.

“I was keeping it all safe for you,” he said a bit sheepishly. “I couldn’t be sure you were coming back.” I just smiled. He fired up some coffee and we struck a bargain. I owed him three months’ rent: one hundred and eighty dollars. He could keep the sixty-dollar deposit and my stuff and we’d call it square. He had packed the books and records. I noticed Nashville Skyline on the top of the record pile. Robert had given it to me before I went to Paris and I had played “Lay Lady Lay” over and over. I gathered up my notebooks and found among them the copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel that Robert bought me when we first met. I felt a fleeting pang in my heart for I knew that innocent phase of our life had passed. I slipped an envelope with the black-and-white shots of Woman I that I had taken at the Modern into my pocket but left behind my failed attempts at painting her portrait, rolls of canvas splashed in umber, pinks, and green, souvenirs of a gone ambition. I was too curious about the future to look back.

As I was leaving, I noticed one of my drawings hanging on the wall. If Bard didn’t get it, at least Jimmy Washington did. I said goodbye to my stuff. It suited him and Brooklyn better. There’s always new stuff, that’s for sure.

Although I was grateful for the job, I returned reluctantly to Scribner’s. Being on my own in Paris had given me a taste of mobility and I had a difficult time readjusting. My friend Janet had moved to San Francisco, so I had lost my poet confidante.

Things eventually picked up when I made a new friend named Ann Powell. She had long brown hair, sad brown eyes, and a melancholy smile. Annie, as I called her, was also a poet, but with an American angle. She adored Frank O’Hara and gangster movies, and she would drag me to Brooklyn to see films with Paul Muni and John Garfield. We wrote daring B movie scripts and I’d play all the parts to amuse her on our lunch hour. Our spare time was consumed with scouring junk stores for just the right black turtleneck, the perfect white kid gloves.

Annie had gone to convent school in Brooklyn but loved Mayakovsky and George Raft. I was happy to have someone to talk to about poetry and crime as well as argue the merits of Robert Bresson versus Paul Schrader.

I cleared about seventy dollars a week at Scribner’s. After rent, the rest of the money went for food. I had to supplement our income, and looked into other ways to make a living besides punching a clock. I scoured secondhand stores for books to sell. I had a good eye, scouting rare children’s books and signed first editions for a few dollars and reselling them for much more. The turnover on a pristine copy of Love and Mr. Lewisham inscribed by H. G. Wells covered rent and subway fares for a week.

On one of my expeditions I found Robert a slightly used copy of Andy Warhol’s Index Book. He liked it but it also agitated him as he was designing a notebook with foldouts and pop-ups as well. The Index Book had photographs by Billy Name, who took the classic shots of the Warhol Factory. It included a pop-up castle, a red accordion that squeaked, a pop-up biplane, and a hairy-torsoed