Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [30]
When she finished I asked her, What do you feel you’ve done? How is this painting necessary to you? But she just laughed. You’ll never be a man, she said, until you can live without explanations. Death is the only explanation. To be explained, to be understood, is like dying. But it’s such a solitary feeling, I said, never to be understood. I think I’d rather be half-understood, or misunderstood, than not to be understood at all.
Sheri’s expression at that moment reminded me of Bill de Kooning’s answer when he was asked, What does abstract art mean to you? He said, Frankly, I don’t understand the question, and then he started to describe a man he had known twenty-four years ago in Hoboken, a German who had always been hungry in Europe:
In Hoboken, this man found a place where you could buy all kinds of stale bread very cheaply—French bread, Italian bread, German bread, Dutch bread, American bread, and Russian black bread. He bought big bags of it and let it get even harder and then he crumbled it and spread it on the floor in his flat and walked on it as though it were a soft carpet.
De Kooning said he’d lost sight of him but then found out many years later from someone who’d run into the man that he had become some kind of Jugend Bund leader and took boys and girls to Bear Mountain on Sundays. He had become a Communist too. I could never figure him out, de Kooning concluded, but now when I think of him, all I can remember is that he had a very abstract look on his face.
It was time to go. I felt myself getting sentimental, snuggling in the apartment, remembering only the good parts. I decided to take the painting. I would take it whether I liked it or not, whether it could be explained or not. I would hang it over my bed, which was much too wide.
I was finding it difficult to settle down on Prince Street. When I was looking forward to it, I thought of my apartment as filled with promise, sunny with promise, a box that I would open to find gifts, to unpack my life. But now that I had it, the apartment seemed to be simply a place to wait. I sat in it, or lay in it, and waited. I didn’t even know what I was waiting for. What I needed, of course, was something to do. Going to the New School at night wasn’t enough. Sheri had been a full-time job, but now I was unemployed.
I would have liked to invite someone to my apartment, just for an hour or so, to drink a beer or a cup of coffee. A visitor would have helped me to break in the place, but there was no one I could ask. I didn’t know any girls beside Sheri, or at least not well enough to invite them to my apartment. Going to a man’s apartment was a serious thing in those days. And it didn’t seem natural to ask a male friend—men met in bars.
Before long, though, I did have a visitor. One night there was a knock at the door. It was early and I was listening to jazz on the radio, trying to decide what to do with the evening. I had not yet succeeded in spending a single night at home.
I got up to answer the door. I thought it might be Sheri; she might have found out where I lived. I didn’t have a phone yet and she might have decided to come over to see me. After all, she had gone to Brooklyn.
But it was a man at the door, a stranger. He was holding something in his hand, showing me something, and I took him for a building inspector or a meter reader. It was my first apartment and I didn’t know what to expect. Then I saw that it was a shield he was holding. He was a policeman. I have a complaint against you, he said, after I had identified myself. You’ll have to come down to the station.