The American Friend: September 2018

Bespoke Clown

“I’m friggin’ bored.” Jude Kowalski gazed skyward, puffing her doughy, pockmarked cheeks.

Tessa Scott frowned.

“Tessa? You mad at me?” Jude reached for her friend, who neatly avoided her touch. “I hate Hartford.” She picked distractedly at some fresh eruption on her face.

“Cut it out, man!” Tessa snapped, immediately regretting her sharp retort. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

Jude, rattled, folded her hands onto her lap. “S’okay.”

“What do you think?” Tessa shot back. “Hartford’s the last place on earth I want to be. I hate Connecticut.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Jude moaned. “You’re never bored. Why would—?”

Tessa shot back, “It’s not my friggin’ fault you’re bored!”

Stricken, Jude stared down at her mannish hands, willing them to reveal the reason for her friend’s pique.

Tessa shrugged off Jude’s dismay. Only slightly apologetic, she recalled their first adventure. “God, remember that friggin’ dog in New Britain? Oh man, you were freaked out!”

“Ma-a-an. He was friggin’ e-e-evil,” Jude drawled, relieved.

Short of carfare on a long holiday weekend in early October, the two high school seniors had made the nearly nine-mile trek on foot to an art museum in New Britain, the next town over from Hartford. At Tessa’s instigation, they’d plotted a route, packed a few peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and started out at dawn. Their only misstep brought them uncomfortably close to a nervy Alsatian pacing his domain, his matted coat oilier than the floor of the gas station, his bared teeth the color of old piano keys.

The museum turned out to be old-fashioned stucco that looked like somebody’s grandmother’s house. It housed a sizable collection of paintings by artists of the Hudson River School.

“You hated that stuff,” Jude laughed.

“That stuff” was nature portrayed as gaudy backdrops, what Tessa called calendar art. Her preference was for the modern, like Rothko’s dark abstractions that made her cry, or the art that pissed off her dad and made her laugh, like Andy Warhol’s Mona Lisa. She loved it all, every radical thumb that flicked at the nose of convention.

Tessa grinned. “It scored points with Miss Merz, am I right?” She mocked the art teacher’s prim New England lilt. “Albert Bierstadt was a painter of such grandeur. What divine brushstrokes….” Tessa twirled an imaginary brush in Jude’s face.

There was that irrepressible shriek, followed by the spluttered coughing sound Jude made when she laughed. Jude’s friendship laid bare such ferocious intensity that had Tessa not been so lonely it would have put her off. Instead, Tessa laughed along with her friend.

Again, Jude trailed her fingertips lightly across her face, exploring the scars.

“Don’t do that, okay? You’re bumming me out.”

“Sorry,” Jude mumbled.

Tessa searched for distraction among the unruly flame-colored daylilies fanning the porch stairs the girls sat squarely upon. It was still a novelty for Tessa—roomy old houses and the wicker furniture that creaked with exhaustion. A silent fusillade of wildflowers spilled across the worn selvage of the unkempt lawn.

Tessa lived with her father in a small, furnished apartment on Laurel Street, a few blocks from the high school where she’d spent her senior year.

On the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where she’d grown up, front porches and backyards were as scarce as swollen bank accounts. What prevailed in the 1950s were drab tenements, tough housing projects, Italian pizzerias, Jewish delicatessens, Ukrainian coffee shops, and bars. There was Tompkins Square Park—a place she’d avoided at the best of times—despoiled by the career homeless, as her dad called them, and paper-bag winos. He had equal disdain for the other bums, the artists and poets—the beatniks—who had put down roots and whom Tessa secretly admired. “Get a job,” he’d mutter or, “Get a haircut.” There had been talk about fixing up the park, but the neighborhood families were less bothered by its derelict band shell. They wanted something done about encroaching crime, rival teen gangs. They wanted to leave their airless apartments, return to park benches of a summer evening, and linger among desultory conversations with their fellow escapees. They wanted their park back.

On any enervating summer afternoon, Tessa, her skin glazed with sweat, languished on a stoop in the projects, where she’d lived since birth. She watched through letterbox eyes as drugs were passed in narrow doorways on Avenue D. Older boys jimmied the hydrants, drawing sunburnt kids out of nowhere. They fanned out across the street, braving the icy cold torrent. A dare would prompt one of the braver among them to bodily redirect the deluge to an open basement window until the building super rained his fury upon them, scattering them like cockroaches at first light. Hartford had none of that. Tessa couldn’t get good pizza, not like in New York, a whole pie for under a buck. For beer, Connecticut had package stores. A hero back home was a grinder in Hartford.

The student population at Hartford Public High had taken her by surprise. Arriving on opening day, she was struck by the scramble of Negro teens discharged from a convoy of yellow school buses. Her old public high school in Manhattan had been fully integrated. Back home, some of the students at the High School of Art and Design—including her best friend, Hugh—had adopted Black as a self-descriptive term. Buses were for public transportation. Both the financially underendowed and the students who were better off coalesced from neighborhoods near and far for the purpose of generating some kind of art. Martin Luther King’s dream was not quite the reality on Forest Street in Hartford. Apart from Miss Merz’s class, which suffered from twentieth-century blindness, there was nothing close to that at Hartford Public High School: no painting, no photography class, no sculpture studio, no fashion or advertising design. Woodworking was a “boys only” class, relegating Tessa to home economics, a subject she found laughable.

All expectation of fitting in was abandoned early on. She’d been thrust into her senior year in a strange school. Her clothes were wrong. She spoke with a funny accent she refused to modulate. She unabashedly declared herself an artist. Friendly overtures to Negro girls in her homeroom were met with wary amusement. The madras-and-Weejuns crowd gave her wide berth. Asylum Hill seemed a perfect name for the neighborhood.

A big girl with a coarse complexion was seated next to her in art history class. The girl cackled with delight when a flippant comment escaped from Tessa, causing Miss Merz to pucker with irritation. “Jude, we’ll have none of that,” the teacher warned, not unkindly. Then, addressing the transplant, “You’ll find there is culture beyond New York City, Miss Scott.” Tessa’s face had burnt brighter than the Bierstadt sunset projected onto the pull-down screen at the blackboard. But the incident brought her the admiration of the few defectors from preppy she’d found there.

She’d left her old schoolmates and neighborhood pals back in New York. It was also where she had left her mother.

Tessa was an only child. Jude never asked, and Tessa never revealed her mother’s violent outbursts, rages that came from nothing ever being good enough. Her mother had a flirtatious side that bordered on hysteria. Tessa suspected she had been unfaithful. There were times when her mother fell into an almost sweet confusion, as if she didn’t know who or where she was exactly. The three of them were like strangers thrown together, and for a brief while they steadied their little boat until the tranquil sea turned savage again. Avoiding the flare-ups, Tessa sought refuge in her journal, her art, and the many galleries and museums in the city. Her father put in even longer hours at his antiques repair shop on First Avenue near the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge. Sometimes Tessa would walk the few blocks after school, spending the rest of the day into evening at her father’s side.

He sometimes talked about leaving New York. Tessa had assumed he’d meant the three of them. Finally, in 1963, there was a citywide newspaper strike that lasted one hundred days. After that, leaving was all he talked about. Tessa imagined it was the real reason he abandoned his idle business, taking a job with a decorator in West Hartford. He never talked about his wife. If Tessa asked about her mother, he’d reply, “You’re better off not knowing.”

All of that was behind her, allowing a dozy intermission on a muggy afternoon in June, the air so warm you could hear the trees drone. It was Tessa’s first summer away from New York. Liberty in a strange city stretched ahead for a few weeks longer, until the summer job started.

Jude’s life was just as it had always been. She was living in the house where she’d been born, still mired in submissiveness on a splintered porch. Her older brother, an abstract painter and radical by necessity, had left for Canada just before Tessa arrived, before the draft caught up with him. “An escape artist,” Tessa once joked, and then took care never to mention him or the Vietnam War again. Jude had a few friends before Tessa came along, but they fell back as Jude embraced Tessa. They could not compete with a girl from New York.

The houses on Jude’s street wore their benign neglect without rancor. Only its inhabitants differentiated Jude’s home from the neighbors’. Her family was white. The neighbors were black, apart from a few elderly Poles and Lithuanians who lived further from Farmington Avenue. The houses set back from the street shared a common fall from grace that demanded they respect each other’s privacy. They did not mix. There was no need.

A command, gruffly served in Polish, broke their reverie. “English, Mama,” Jude sighed. She took the straw hat leveraged above her from the thick, purposeful fingers of her mother. Mrs. Kowalski did not like Tessa, granting her only the thin evidence of a smile. It did not sit well that Tessa’s mother had stayed behind in New York. Jude’s Polish family was die-hard Catholic. “She’ll like you once she gets to know you,” Jude offered. When the girls bent over homework or hauled oversize sketchbooks to their laps, Jude’s mother appeared, wordlessly shoving her daughter’s bedroom door open. If Tessa stayed overnight, Mrs. Kowalski was sullenly even more uncommunicative in the morning. It was disconcerting. Mrs. Kowalski made Tessa uneasy, though Jude tried to reassure her. It was the language thing. Summer brought the girls out into the open, out of Jude’s airless bedroom under the eaves.

From the start, Jude followed Tessa’s lead, though her ardent nature was bothersome at times. They’d had other outings, closer to home. Many Saturday afternoons were passed in the cool marble interior of The Wadsworth Atheneum. It was graveyard quiet there. They wandered the empty galleries unnoticed, heads close, brooding over their reflections in a shallow pool under a statue of Venus in an open sunlit court. They huddled giggling in a dark corner, mimicking the marble statue of a couple of scowling women. “Let him perish!” they’d squeal, tearing up the staircase behind it.

“Caked-on blustery of dusty history.”

Jude often recited aloud fragments from the poems she wrote but never showed Tessa. She’d nod in earnest as Tessa excitedly described the meaning of a certain minimalist artist’s installation—the “approximate invisibility” of the piece—but Tessa failed at enlightening Jude as to the deeper meaning of Dan Flavin’s fluorescent tube. Compared to the museums in Manhattan—apart from contemporary bright spots—Tessa found the Wadsworth antiquated. She missed the welter of emotions that sprang up when she’d stumbled upon the ordered chaos of a Twombly at the Modern, both disturbed and aroused by a swan’s ecstasy.

They sketched outdoors in Elizabeth Park. Tessa showed Jude how to abstract the landscape around them. They had explored all three floors of Mark Twain’s pink-and-red Victorian Gothic mansion that rose above Farmington Avenue. Smaller, but no less interesting, was the cottage around the corner, which had once belonged to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Writers Tessa had devoured as a sophomore back home. “We’re reading it for English this year,” a senior classmate offered. “Uncle Tom’s Cabinet.” Hartford was a desert she’d not have to endure much longer.

Tessa stabbed a loose floorboard with her foot. Unthinking, she pouted. “What did you ever do without me?”

Jude, eager for validation, gushed, as if on cue, “M-m-m, my groovy friend.” She gauged Tessa’s irritated squint. “I meant groovy in a good way.” And then helplessly she blurted, “I mean, special. You’re my beautiful, special friend.”

Tessa rolled her eyes, mitigating discomfort. She took in Jude’s lank, waist-length hair, an ambivalent dishwater blonde cascade. Jude wore apology like a shroud: the thickset Polish physique, shoulders like sagging house beams, and a down-turned mouth that even laughter could not right. Tessa knew—because Jude had told her often enough—that she despaired of ever having the kind of attention Tessa got. Jude’s hooded reptilian stare, her complexion unfairly scarred by genetics were constant reminders.

They were as unalike as Lucille Ball and her television sidekick, Ethel. Tessa knew they made an odd couple in the school hallways—she with her trim, athletic build, unconventional dress, and a disposition that drew guys to her like rats to cheese. Tessa’s female classmates regarded her with suspicion, taking in her blonde ponytail, a barefaced, flawless complexion, and a laugh that struck like lightning.

Tessa wanted to scream, “Don’t blame me if I’m pretty. I hate it, hate all the friggin’ attention. I hate every friggin’ minute of it. Guys don’t take me seriously. No one takes me seriously.”

Instead, she softened her rebuttal. “You were born here at least. You weren’t dragged kicking and screaming.” She snatched the straw hat from Jude’s head, spinning it with her index finger. “You’re really talented, you know, Jude. You get to be treated like an artist. Everyone drools over your work. Miss Merz thinks you’re a genius already.”

Jude shrieked, lunging for her hat. They wrestled like boys, rolling into the wicker chairs, shoving them aside in their tussle. Jude straddled Tessa, thrusting her meaty hands against Tessa’s thin shoulders.

“Get off!” Tessa shouted, grimacing. Red-faced, she rose sharply, clapping her hands to her thighs. She tugged at her denim cutoffs. “Right. I have an idea.”

“What?” Jude asked.

Tessa grinned. “Trust me. It’s outta sight.”

They were the first ones through the entrance to the Wadsworth Museum the following morning.

“Shush,” Tessa whispered. She pushed Jude from the smaller gallery where the new acquisitions were displayed.

Jude, surprised by Tessa’s urgency, yelped, “For Pete’s sake, don’t have a cow.”

“Cool it.” Tessa urged under her breath.

“You’re cr-a-a-zy,” Jude snorted. She drew a lank of hair into her fist. She scowled at the ends for a moment before tossing it behind her. “What’s this all about?”

Tessa coughed. “Let’s go outside.”

Jude allowed herself to be hurried past the tapestries and through the Great Hall.

At some distance from the museum entrance on Main Street, Tessa breathlessly repeated her idea. “This will blow your mind,” she said. They would create a painting, frame it, and hang it in the museum.

“We’re artists, right? Ready for anything? Ready to be a little daring?” Tessa urged.

Jude nodded soberly, still unconvinced. “But we could get in trouble, big trouble. What about the guards? You gonna hammer a nail—?”

That was going too far, Tessa had to admit, banging holes in museum walls. But she was running out of options. Downtown had taken only a few weeks of exploration before she’d covered all the historical sights. The hoopla surrounding a newly completed glass building they called “The Boat” seemed overblown considering where she’d come from. She’d be working downtown soon enough, filing medical records for an insurance company. Constitution Plaza had a desolate, crypt-like feel away from Main Street’s older department stores. She’d sauntered around the East Side neighborhood of her school back home in Manhattan and encountered the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Suzy Parker in Bloomingdale’s. She’d cut class sometimes to wander alone in Greenwich Village and check out the troubadours in Washington Square Park. Downtown Hartford got pretty old, pretty quick.

They planned their moves carefully. They made many return trips noting the uninterested museum guards’ whereabouts. Because it was summer, a heavy overcoat would only draw attention, so they had to devise a way to sneak in a watercolor portrait of a clown, loosely painted on a thick sheet of Arches that they had gingerly removed from a 9 x 12 block.

Jude balked at making it into an abstract. “I’m painting it, let me do it.”

Tessa saw the bigger picture, leaving it to Jude. Tessa signed it Maurice Rageau. They framed it with the simplest frame they could find at the art supply store, attaching picture wire to the back. It looked professional enough. It fitted nicely under an old paint smock Jude would wear buttoned to the neck. They practiced roping Jude’s waist with a perfect knot that would loosen with a flick of the wrist. They purchased gummed hangers, testing them to hold the modest weight of the picture.

The final touch was the label. Tessa typed it on an old Remington in Jude’s father’s office, in the pharmacy he managed at the top of the hill where Farmington Avenue veered off Asylum. Jude’s father was always pleased to see Tessa. Whenever they stopped in they were treated to hamburgers at the lunch counter, scarfing them down with cherry cokes. He enjoyed their giggling presence and did not interfere as Tessa pecked out the words: The Clown, by Maurice Rageau.

On a quiet weekday, under a dull sky, they set out for the museum. For a brief moment they stood before the turreted stone castle, reconsidering. Jude’s heartbeat caused her to stammer.

“We, we, shoulda done a dress rehearsal.” She gripped the bulk she was carrying, feeling for the knot atop her stomach.

Tessa breathed in deeply, steadying their resolve. “If you snooze you lose, Jude. We can do this.”

Moments later they flew from the galleries, heading straight for the main entrance. They slowed past the lone guard who had not seen them arrive. He nodded to the familiar sight of a couple of teenage girls.

Afterward, they tore across Bushnell Park, charged with adrenaline. The sight of the palatial sprawl of the Capitol building stopped them. They were joyous, sweating profusely. Relief came in a swell of laughter.

“We did it! We friggin’ did it!” they chorused.

Breathlessly, Jude ripped off the ridiculous smock, throwing it to the ground. They punched the air with a fresh round of laughter. Collapsing onto the grass, they gripped their stomachs.

“Outta sight,” Tessa wheezed. “Now, aren’t you glad we did it? For real, man.”

Jude turned on her side and gazed at her friend. “I am,” she said giddily, “I’m glad you’re my special friend. Love you,” she whispered, “for real.”

“Love ya, too,” Tessa laughed.

Jude stretched her arm, a languid motion that landed her fingers above Tessa’s face. “I mean, I love you,” she breathed as she trailed her fingers across Tessa’s cheek.

They walked home without speaking. Jude left her at Laurel Street. Tessa shouted after her, “Later!” Jude raised her arm in a half-hearted wave, and without turning, continued along Farmington Avenue.

A week later Tessa was flipping through her assigned carousel. She pulled cards on file with names and numbers of those listed as deceased. It was deadly boring, but she’d make a little money for her return to Manhattan in September. Everything was going as planned. She’d work in an art gallery on Madison Avenue that sold posters. She would be little more than a glorified stock girl, but she would attend evening classes at the Art Students League. She and a former school classmate in Manhattan planned to move into a basement apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. She’d be seeing her old friend Hugh soon enough.

When her father asked, Tessa told him that Jude was getting ready to move to San Francisco, where she would take classes at the Art Institute.

“We’re both busy, you know. But we speak on the phone,” she said.

Jude’s father had told him another story.

Tessa’s dad had stopped at the lunch counter at the pharmacy for a coffee. “What happened with you two?” he asked Tessa. “Mr. Kowalski said you don’t come around anymore. He said Jude is brokenhearted, like you guys had a falling-out or something?”

Tessa felt ashamed and angry at the same time. “She’s busy,” she said. “We both are.”

In the days after their escapade, Tessa had planned to call Jude but one thing or another got in the way. Then she started her summer job. She never told anyone about the museum caper. Once or twice she thought about walking over there on her lunch hour to see if the painting was still hanging. She never did. Not because she thought she might run into Jude. Because she was busy.

In the week before Tessa was leaving, a letter came for her from Jude. Her father asked about it. Was Jude already in San Francisco? Yes, Tessa said. But that was untrue. The letter contained a poem Jude had written. It was typed, Tessa could tell, on the old typewriter at the pharmacy. Tessa’s hands shook as she read it in the privacy of her bedroom. It was a bold poem. Tessa was surprised at how good it was, but it struck her like a knife, tearing at her insides. “Some clowns are worth tears,” it said. “You get what you ask for.” The letter was signed, “Love, Jude.” Tessa crumpled the paper tightly, unable to tear it up.

Tessa thought about packing. She would get what she asked for. She wouldn’t have to think twice. She would be all right. Freewheelin’ soon, like the song said.