Ed Lacy - Enter Without Desire

Drake was impressed, said, “See what I can do for you, Jameson.”

I cinched the deal by giving him a pen-and-ink drawing of himself. A week later I was sent out of Dix on a one-man shipping list, stationed at Lexington Avenue and 46th Street. I was part of a special-service outfit that made posters. We had a chicken officer who must have got a rake-off from the shoe polish companies. We had to march along crowded Lexington Avenue, trying to look like soldiers, and all the people staring at us as though we were. I felt more of a fraud than in Dix. It was very frustrating.

Also, I was seeing Mary Jane every night and I wanted to get away from her. Poor Mary was at least working in a defense plant in New Jersey and I didn't want to be a tin soldier. I casually mentioned to the first looey who was our CO. that I didn't think the war effort was really dependent upon whether we shined our damn shoes or not. Two days later I was back in Dix and out the same night on a troop train heading for Fort Benning, Georgia.

Infantry basic wasn't as rugged as football training and it felt fine to get into shape again. But one morning when they had us hitting the dirt—running and throwing ourselves on the ground—breaking the fall by digging the butt end of our rifles into the hard earth—I took a heavy fall and had a headache that scared hell out of me.

On sick call I told the doc about having had a concussion and they took X-rays and stuff. To my surprise I was soon on my way to an artillery outfit in Kansas where I worked at painting camouflage. It was interesting work and I learned a lot about blending colors. Most of the fellows were artists and I became pals with Sid Spears, who'd been studying sculpture when he got his greetings.

Sid was a tall, thin fellow with a sensitive Jewish face, but he'd been a college boxer and for some unknown reason his skinny frame packed a hell of a wallop. The two of us became a jerky goon squad; we made a good combination—Sid so thin and me so short. We'd get a little liquored up in some dive, start talking a lot of high sounding “art” talk—which was bait for characters who thought wearing a uniform made them rugged, entitled them to make snide cracks about us being “ball-bearing Wacs, charging over the top with fixed paint-brushes.”

It was stupid fun, Sid flooring guys with one punch and me tackling them if he didn't floor them, or throwing them against the walls.

Sid and I came to New York together on leave and had a good time at his place. I wasn't going to see my wife, but I felt like a bastard and finally spent my last two days with her.

After nearly two years in Kansas we were all shipped to Camp Patrick Henry in Newport News, Virginia, I called Mary J. and she bawled over the phone and then I was jammed on a Victory ship for a slow and pleasant crossing of the Atlantic, spent some weeks hangings around Oran in North Africa, sketching the Arabs and the ruined tanks. Then Sid and I and four other fellows were flown to London, and after D-Day, we followed the real soldiers into Paris, lived at a small hotel on Place Clichy, worked eight hours a day drawing maps, making scale topographic models of future battlegrounds.

Of course Paris was terrific and Sid had been there in 1935 and seemed to know a lot of people on the so-called Left Bank. He introduced me to a huge old man with a flowing white beard named Bonard. Bonard liked nothing better than to tell us about the old days of the Left Bank and the Montmartre—as he smoked our cigarettes and took our rations home. He was a sculptor and “home” was a large, dirty old barn on the outskirts of Paris which was also his studio. He had a few heads and small figures around, and I don't think he'd touched any clay in years, but I began fooling around with clay and right away I knew I'd found my medium—this was what I wanted to do. Sculpting was far more satisfactory, more creative than working with paints and brushes. When you made a statue of a woman, by God, there it was—nothing on flat canvas, but something you could touch and handle and feel proud of, as though you had almost created life.

I spent the war in Paris, working on maps during the day, visiting the famous old cafes at night with Bonard, as he talked about Saint-Gaudens, Rodin, Malvina Hoffman, Epstein, about Stein and Hemingway. I heard about the successes, the suicides, and the love affairs of the “old days.” I knew most of the time Bonard was merely repeating gossip, and I didn't believe him when he said he'd been a personal buddy of Gauguin, had in fact urged him to go to the South Seas. Bonard was a grand old liar but he did give me valuable lessons in the human anatomy, and when I slipped him a few cartons of cigarettes, he came up with some plaster and I began making casts of my fingers, my hand, my fist. The first time I tried it, I didn't know plaster grows hot as it hardens, and I screamed like a madman that I was losing my hand as Bonard roared with laughter. Under his instruction I even tried a few heads and one figure, was pleased when he said I had talent. Whenever I could get a jeep, the two of us would drive around examining the various statues with which Paris is studded, Bonard pointing out the good and bad techniques. I became very fond of the old man.

Mary wrote me faithful, insipid letters, sent me packages of stale cookies every week. I sent her perfume, sent Kimball a bottle, and one to my mother—all purchased with packs of cigarettes.

In a sense, Paris was a school for me, with Bonard my teacher. And I studied hard—read everything I could about Rodin, buying pictures of his works, going over them with Bonard.

I imagine Bonard was more amused by Sid and myself than really interested in our work. He could drink two or three quarts of wine at a bull session, and he had a secret supply of wine which he flatly refused to share with us.

“Waste of time, waste of wine. You Americans and your hard liquor—always in a hurry. Wine is a slow sensation, a long delight. Hard liquor, that's for idiots who receive no sensation unless hit over the head. Like I see your soldiers running after the girls on the Pigalle... push, push, and it's over.”

“We're a very sexy bunch,” Sid said, kidding him. Both Sid and myself were so damn scared of getting a dose we left the street-walkers alone.

“Americans understand sex the way you understand wine. You get no satisfaction. In the old days a man went with a woman, even an ugly man and a dumpy woman, and they enjoyed each other. But today the movies have ruined young people. In France too, but especially in America, where the movies are more a part of life.”

“What's movies got to do with it?” I asked.

Bonard fixed his watery eyes on me. “You go with a woman but are you thinking of her? Bah! Her arms are around you and her eyes are closed, but she is seeing Clark Gable, Boyer. And in your mind you are with a Jean Harlow, Mary Pickford, Rita Hayworth or...”

“I don't know about Mary Pickford,” Sid said, winking at me.

“I saw you wink!” Bonard roared. “A wink—shallow as your work, you have not the heart or understanding for art! For you art is like a woman. You Americans, always chasing, hoping in the next woman to find the full enjoyment you do not have with this one—and only because you are thinking of the next, instead of the woman you have.”

“That's too complicated for me,” Sid said. “Bet you were hell with the gals in your day.”

Bonard kissed his fingertips. “Ah, my youth, when there was true love! The dancing of Avril and La Goule in the Moulin Rouge, the singing of pale Yvette Guilbert. Or sitting at the Chat Noir, with Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec... the lucky ones, the sons of the rich.”

“Stop it, old man,” Sid said. “That was about 1880, make you at least eighty now.”

“You dare call me the liar?” Bonard screamed, clutching his wine bottle, but looking around for something to throw.

It was a wonderful way of sitting out the war, working hard during the day and believing the maps, your work, was important... spending all my spare time with Bonard. For a time Sid was cool to me. I think he was jealous of Bonard's interest in my work. Sid had reached his art level long ago, a mediocre level, and while he was still the better sculptor, I was progressing and he was standing still. He started hanging out with the other GI's, which was okay with me, since I had Bonard all to myself. One evening the old man asked, “When will you have a free week-end?”

“Get a three-day pass most any time, I think.”

“Good. It is time you work from a model.”

“You mean a live model?”

Bonard groaned, pulled his beard, said in French I had the sense of a mule's rear, then added in English, “The purpose of a model is to get the breath of life into your work. For a death mask we need the lifeless, for now you need the living—a nude woman.” The old man puffed on a cigarette, waited for me to say something.

I didn't know what to say. Finally I said, “Okay.”

Bonard banged his big hands together. “The croak of the idiot... okay, okay, okay! Mon Dieu, you show no interest. I, an old man, am wasting precious time with you!”

“Sure I'm excited. How do we get a model?”

“I will bring the model, a great-grandchild of mine, Yvonne. Her face leaves much to be desired, but the lines of youth are in her body. Three days of intense work in my studio. Of course, it will not be cheap.”

“How much?”

“One carton of cigarettes for her mother. At least two cartons for Yvonne—she needs clothes. As for myself, I only ask two cartons—and some cans of rations, so we may eat as we work.”

Bonard had been smoking (and selling) my butts for months. I shook my head, said, “Take me a month to save that many. Can't we do it for less?”

“Yvonne has never posed before, it will take much pleading for her mother to trust the child in my care. Your friend Sidney, it would do him no harm to stir his lazy soul, strain his small talent—join us for a week-end of work.”

I told Sid about it that night, and at first he wasn't interested. But after a lot of sales talk on my part, he agreed. We went through our outfit borrowing cigarettes, telling everybody we had a terrific “shack job” coming up, mortgaging our PX rations for the next two months.

We arrived at Bonard's barn on a Thursday night with the butts, cans of C rations and boxes of K rations, candy bars, a couple bottles of coke, plus a bottle whose label claimed it was cognac.

Bonard soon had a hot meal going and, as usual, his bottle of wine. Yvonne was disappointing: a sullen, horse-faced thin kid about IS years old, she was dressed in her worn best, ate greedily, and never spoke.

After supper, she immediately went to sleep in a room at one end of the barn as Bonard showed us our straw beds, set up the work tables, helped us make two small wire armatures. He had managed to get fifteen pounds of raw clay, which was wrapped in a dirty, wet cloth.

The old man was in one of his talkative moods. For the tenth time he told us about his true love—a laundress who'd been the best can-can dancer in the Montmartre. He went into modest details about his ability in bed, the firm body of the laundress... while Sid and I numbed ourselves with cognac, which tasted like a poor-grade shellac. When Sid began to yawn, Bonard shouted, “Sleep, idiot, it is a waste of air to talk to this generation! Sleep may give cleverness to your fingers tomorrow—surely nothing else will!”

Sid stood up, a little angry. “Time magnifies everything, even your sex life. Bet you couldn't even pay your way into that laundress' bed.”