Paul Klee, Death and Fire
Jean first met Willard on the elevator on a rainy afternoon in March. They were alone on the elevator. He was tall, slender and bright-eyed. She was not good at estimating someone’s age, and It was especially hard for her to say how old he was. If there was anyone he reminded her of, it was the fictional Dorian Gray. He was wearing a neon yellow slicker on which droplets of water glistened like yellow diamonds. He had an iPhone in his hands. She recognized it by the Apple logo, the white apple with the bite taken out of it. Willard was using his thumbs with the incredible dexterity that everyone under thirty—Jean was forty-six—seemed to have mastered. For someone like Jean for whom the expression “all thumbs” was a synonym for digital clumsiness, the speed with which his texting thumbs could maneuver around a minuscule screen astonished her.
When Willard glanced at the peculiar look on Jean’s face, he immediately stopped texting. She could see he was embarrassed. He could probably indulge himself with his iPhone in a taxi or in first class on an airplane, but he apparently understood it might be impolite to do it on the elevator of a luxury Park Avenue apartment building in which the tenants were for the most part, contrary to the reputation New Yorkers had for being crass and unsociable, refined and polite.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized, blushing. He slipped the iPhone into the capacious pocket of his slicker.
“Oh, don’t be sorry,” she was quick to reassure him. “It’s perfectly all right. It’s just that I’m having trouble with my new iPhone,” she said, taking hers out of her pocketbook. “I envy your skill with yours. What model is it?”
“An iPhone 6,” he said. At that moment the elevator in its swift ascent had stopped at her floor.
“I get out here,” she said, somewhat flustered, still holding her iPhone as she stepped out of the elevator.
“Let me help you,” he said, following her off the elevator with the graceful, quick step of a ballet dancer. He was tall, as tall in fact as her husband, who at that moment was off somewhere in Africa hunting. She had forgotten which country.
“Would you like me to look at it?” he asked as the elevator door closed behind him with a swoosh sound that she couldn’t recall being fully conscious of before.
“You want to look at my iPhone?” she asked. He nodded and after a moment’s uncertainty on her part, she handed it to him.
“Your floor is different from ours,” he said, turning her iPhone over in his hand, examining it, front and back.
“The color scheme was my idea,” she told him, referring to the unusual color scheme and design on the walls. “I was inspired by Klee’s playfulness.”
“Of whose playfulness?” he asked.
“Paul Klee, the painter,” she said, and with her next breath asked, “Do you live on the top floor?”
“Uh-huh,” he said, turning on her iPhone. “This is one of the new ones,” he said. “I haven’t seen this model before.”
“I’ve been on the elevator more than once with a woman going up to your floor,” she explained. “She had blond hair. Like mine. But I’m not sure how old she was.”
“Uh-huh,” he said absently as his thumbs moved so fast on the screen of her phone that she felt she was watching an aboriginal trying to light a fire by rapidly rubbing sticks together.
“Was she a relative of yours?” she asked.
“The woman on the elevator,” he asked. No,” he said without taking his eyes or thumbs off her iPhone. She couldn’t believe he could carry on a conversation while the screen, in response to his thumbs, was kaleidoscopically flashing colors, as if the native had succeeded in starting a fire But then his thumbs began to move more slowly, as if he was closing in on the quarry, as a hunter might stealthily move toward a deer in a thicket. He appeared to be holding his breath as he proceeded.
“Ah,” he said as his thumbs stopped moving, suspended like the wings of a hawk alighting. “I think this is the problem.”
“What is? she asked.
“It’s complicated,” he replied.
"I’m sure it is,” she said, feeling somewhat patronized.
“There’s so much involved,” he said. She noticed beads of perspiration in the down on his upper lip.
“There!” he exclaimed. His search had apparently ended. He let out his breath as she had once seen a loin clothed Hawaiian diver do after surfacing with pearls in his mouth.
“You fixed it?” she asked.
“Uh-huh,” he replied. “You probably messed it up by futzing around with it.
“Futzing?” she asked. He didn’t explain futzing because his mind was already elsewhere.
“What is your name?” she asked as he handed her back the phone.
“‘Willard, ma’am. Willard Shaler.”
“My name is Jean. Jean Harlow.”
“Glad to meet you, ma’am.”
“Does my name mean anything to you?
“No, ma’am. Should it?”
“No, no,” she said. “There was an actress, but that was a long time ago. She was known as the Blond Bombshell.”
“Like Madonna?” he asked.
“Well, yes,” she said. “Sort of.” Jean’s father had been a big fan of Jean Harlow, who died in 1937 at the age of 26. Though they were both Harlows, they weren’t related. The actresses last name was Caprenter, but Jean’s rather shy, tightlipped father felt there had been some kind of bond between himself and the glamorous actress he, though had seen her only a few times in late night movies.
Willard was looking again at the walls and the playful design. “Does your place have walls like this?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “But it’s interesting.”
“Interesting?” he asked. But before she could answer the iPhone in her hand rang.
“Who can this be?” she wondered aloud. “Oh,” she said, looking at the number that was calling. “It’s my husband. Hello? Howard? Where are you? Yes, I lost track. So that’s where you are. You’re what? Going where? So you won’t be back next week. No, no. That’s all right. Where am I? I just got off the elevator at our place. No, I’m not alone. Who? A young man who lives above us. No, not that family. They moved out some time ago. This gentleman just fixed my iPhone. What? Oh, he’s technologically literate, I’m sure.”
When she hung up, she asked Willard, “Where were we?”
“We were talking about your place,” he said.
“Of course, Of course,” she said, as if she was resuming walking barefoot across a shallow stream, one stepping stone at a time. “Would you like to see it?”
“Sure,” he said.
She opened the door, which was a complicated process because her place had more alarms than a bank. Holding the door open for him, she smiled like the doorman downstairs. Willard hesitated. He seemed discombobulated by her deference. “Please come in,” she urged him.
When he entered, he stopped after taking a few steps. Looking around, he was awed. “I feel like I’m entering the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”
“You frequent the museum?” she asked.
“No, but my class went there on a field trip when I was in the sixth grade,” he explained.
“That must have been interesting,” she said.
“What’s that painting over there?” he asked, walking over to one of the many paintings on the walls. It was a painting of a naked woman.
“That’s the Blonde Bombshell herself, or that’s what I call her anyway.”
“You mean the actress you mentioned?”
“That’s right. Jean Harlow. Or at least that’s what my hunch is.”
“She looks kind of funny,” he observed.” He was staring at her vagina was like a black bush and her blazing long blonde hair looked like the trail of a comet.
“What style is it?” he asked.
"What style of painting?"
"Yes,"
“Expressionism,” she said, following behind him as he made his way among other paintings.
“What’s this one?” he asked, stopping in front of a painting of Adam and Eve. It looks different.”
“That’s a copy of a fresco, a wall painting by Masaccio. It’s called The Expulsion from Paradise.’Somebody had painted over the genitals, but when it was restored the fig leaves were removed.”
“it isn’t expressionism?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Masaccio was long before that. He was one of the first to use perspective. He died when he was twenty-six.” After a short pause, her curiosity got the better of her. “How old are you, Willard?”
“Me?” he said, nonplussed. “Take a guess.”
“I’m terrible guessing someone’s age.” she admitted.
“I’m eighteen.”
“Eighteen?” she repeated trying not to show how surprised she was. She was thirty-nine, but she told people she was twenty-eight so she didn’t have to people make cracks about Jack Benny, who was perenielly thirty-nine.
“Sweet eighteen,” he said. “But people tell me I could pass for twenty.”
"Oh?" she said, wondering if he was pulling her leg. “I’ll bet you could easily pass for twenty-one,” she added, just in case he was pulling her leg.
An awkward silence was broken when his iPhone rang. The iPhone 6 ring, called the Marimba, coming from the pocket of his slicker, sounded to her like the faint tintinnabulation of a grasshopper playing on a tiny xylophone.
“Excuse me,” he said taking the call. “Linda? Is that you? I’m so sorry. I lost track of the time. Where am I? I’ll explain later. I promise.” Then he hung up, the phrase revealing how idioms linger on long after the circumstances that had occasioned them had disappeared. In the old days one ended a call on a wall telephone by reaching up to place the ear piece back on the phone cradle. So one hung up on a cell phone by snapping it shut or pressing a button. Was the Linda on the phone the woman on the elevator? When Willard left, Jean still did not know what futz meant? Lighting a joint, she looked it up in her old Merriam-Webster, the binding of which was coming apart. Futzing was derived from the Yiddish phrase arumfartsn zikh, literally, “to fart around.”
With the Merriam-Webster still in her hands, in something of a daze, she went over and stood in front of “Blond Bombshell” for a minute. Then she sat down on one of the half dozen modern wooden Danish chairs in the Wishbone style that were scattered throughout the large room. Through the window she could see Manhattan stretching down below to the East River, and to the boroughs beyond.
“Farting around,” she said with a laugh. Then she became reflective. Was Willard really eighteen?Finally, she grew sad, thinking of Masaccio and Jean Harlow, both of whom had died young, at twenty-six, sparing them the disillusionment of growing older, unlike Paul Klee who lived to be sixty and died of a painful, wasting illness that was reflected in a late, smaller, expressionist painting called Death and Fire, a framed copy of which she hung up on the wall opposite the toilet.
