This is an experiment. Old-timey newspapers used to serialize fiction and it was enormously popular with readers. I remember an account of American readers waiting on the docks at New York for English ships to arrive with the London newspaper carrying the latest installment of Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop. "Does Nell still live?" they asked the sailors. So we'll give it a try in this new-timey kind of newspaper . This is a spooky sort of story in novella form, divided into six segments, to be serialized on Wednesdays. Any writers out there want to be part of the series? Submit to news@dadeplanet.com.
“Monsters: The Portraits of Joan Grey.”
It wasn’t a real headline, just a few words of boldface in a newspaper that Dr. Cotton, in town for a medical conference, was flipping through as he drank his coffee on a hotel terrace. The doctor didn’t go in much for the arts; it was only the juxtaposition of the word “monsters” with the name “Joan” that caught his eye. He had once known a Joan who painted monsters.
A single paragraph announced, without a photograph and without visible enthusiasm, the opening on Friday of a showing of Joan Grey’s oil paintings at a gallery Dr. Cotton had never heard of with an address he doubted he could find. Anyway, it couldn’t be the Joan he’d said a bitter goodbye to in 1968, and it couldn’t be the same Greys, either.
He put the newspaper down and stared out across the sidewalk. But he wasn’t seeing what was in front of him, to wit, a small park in New York 2006; he was seeing a bigger park in a smaller city, nearly forty years in the past.
***
It was September of 1967 and the weather was perfect, still warm but with just a nip of autumn in the air so it wasn’t too hot. Hot enough that people selling lemonade and beer were making a killing, but not so hot that Joan Lorenzo and Matt Cotton behind the table were suffering. Matt had rigged up a tarp against the sun, and Joan had plenty of Cokes in her ice chest.
Ice chests then were heavy metal affairs, and Cokes were still in bottles.
It was an outdoor festival, with guitars playing folk music somewhere and the smell of marijuana mingling with the smell of roses. Joan was selling, or trying to, her paintings. Monday through Friday, nine to five, Joan worked for an advertising agency and drew charcoal grills and kitchen ranges, but the rest of the time she was an oil painter. She was half Mexican by birth and her paintings were big loud Mayan, or something, monsters, with a lot of yellows and reds and deep blues.
Matt didn’t much like the paintings but he did like Joan. She was his neighbor on the third floor of the cheap apartment building, just across the street from the park, where he was living while he finished his residency in the emergency room at St. Mary’s. Matt was now Dr. Cotton, but this was so new he didn’t think of himself that way. He was still just Matt.
In the emergency room, Matt had to make vital decisions all the time. People’s lives depended on him. He was up for it. He was smart and skilled and his reactions were quick.
But he was in his twenties and off duty he still worried about what his parents would approve or disapprove of. His folks were prominent Congregationalists, had been for generations, and as long as he could remember they had always been disapproving of something.
Now, Joan, say, if he’d brought her home for Thanksgiving, which really wasn’t in the cards anyway, they would definitely have disapproved of. Look at the way she was dressed. A tiny denim miniskirt, sandals on her itty-bitty brown feet, and a rose silk blouse with the conspicuous absence of anything underneath. Matt could see her little nipples pressing against the fabric. He disapproved, himself.
Every time he looked.
Joan was tiny and beautiful, with thick black hair down her back and liquid gray eyes that talked to you without words. She was 24 and had a serene fairy-princess face with glowing light olive skin and a sweet smiling mouth that begged to be kissed.
Matt, of course, had never kissed her, he knew she’d hate it. You didn’t get into medical school, much less out of it, by being stupid.
On the other hand, he kept putting up tarps for her and taking out her garbage and taking in her groceries. Once he changed a flat on her terrible old Ford and she gave him a hug. He had to content himself with things like that but it drove him a little crazy.
This was, after all, the 1960s. There was something called the Sexual Revolution going on. People were Doing It all the time, inside marriage, outside marriage, twice on Sunday.
Matt was not.
Neither was Joan, apparently. She seemed to take the Sexual Revolution with a grain of salt. The term “love-in” made her face screw up and she said, “That is so, like, gross.”
“So you don’t believe in free love?” said Matt.
“No,” said Joan. “True love, maybe.”
Then that day in September Joan met Haakon and everything changed.
Matt saw a big, fair-haired guy going along jingling his keys in his pocket, not at all interested in the festival, like he was headed for work or something though it was a Saturday. Then he saw one of Joan’s paintings – it was an orange and green monstrosity that looked to Matt like a tyrannosaurus rex on drugs – and he stopped as if transfixed.
Joan and Matt exchanged a look as they watched the big guy studying the painting, then Joan gave him a grin and left her seat to go to her fan. Matt watched the stranger looking down from the huge, ugly painting to the small, lovely artist, and he knew he was witnessing the phenomenon called love at first sight.
That was the first time that Matt had the funny feeling that he was to retain for the rest of his history with Joan – that he was an audience, part and yet not part of the drama unfolding before him. It was all right there in front of him, yet he could no more affect its outcome than if it had been happening on a movie screen.
If it had really been a film, you would know right away that the big blond guy was going to be the hero and get the girl. He was the type, not exactly movie-star handsome but taller than everybody else and when he spoke he had an English accent. As he loomed over Joan he seemed to get larger and more masculine while Joan got tinier and girlier, her cheeks a delicate pink and her eyes saying more than her lips.
After a while the hero came over to the table and bought the painting. Never taking his eyes off Joan, who was wrapping the canvas for him in brown paper, he somehow managed to write a check which he gave to Matt, who took it feeling vaguely like a waiter. Then he stood there still looking at Joan, so Matt thought he might as well look at the check.
The check identified him as Haakon Grey, with an address on the north side of town. Matt thought it was an unusual name. When he looked up, the big man, Haakon he supposed, had finally torn his eyes from Joan and was considering Matt. Matt raised his eyebrows inquiringly.
“You the bloke, then?” said the stranger.
“No,” said Matt, who had never heard the word used that way before but instantly knew what was meant. Later he wondered if it would have changed anything if he’d said yes, he was the bloke. Or if he really had been the bloke.
Probably not. Matt doubted whether they would have let anything as insignificant as a preexisting bloke get in their way.
Matt had to get out of their way, in fact, the next Friday night. He was coming home from a grisly shift in the emergency room and had to flatten himself against a door on the second story landing to avoid being trampled by the lovers on their way to the third floor.
Joan was a small woman and Haakon was a big man, and he was carrying her up the stairs with her flippy little red skirt falling away over his arm to reveal black panties. It would have been embarrassing but neither of them noticed him at all. Their mouths were melded together and Matt could tell she was sucking his tongue.
Matt had been living next door for a year and had taken out countless bags of garbage, draped tarps, even once caught a mouse, and he had never gotten past the one hug. Big Guy after a week was getting his tongue sucked and, to judge from the noises emitting from Joan’s apartment shortly thereafter, other appendages as well – in fact, Matt surmised, he was reaping the full benefits of this Sexual Revolution Matt had been hearing so much about.
Joan came over to Matt’s place shortly after that to get him to open a jar of pickles. Matt did it, grimacing. “For this I did coursework in surgery?”
“Send me a bill,” said Joan. She ate a pickle out of the jar, hooked another and put it in Matt’s mouth. It was hot and garlicky, just the kind of thing Joan would like. “I don’t guess you got much sleep Friday night,” she said.
He managed to swallow his mouthful. “I don’t guess you did either.”
“And I guess you think I’m a slut like my mama.” Joan’s stories about her Mexican mother were so full of feeling and drama he was pretty sure they were wildly misremembered. Mama had died early and Joan had grown up in a foster home in New Mexico under the auspices of a repressed Catholic lady, Miss Pratt, whom she hated very much.
“No,” said Matt. “I just surmised you’d found true love.”
Joan nodded solemnly, then proceeded to recount to him the marvels of Haakon.
Haakon was accomplished! Educated! He had a mysterious and exciting past! Just after World War II, he had been a beautiful child found wandering around with his twin amid the wreckage of Europe by an eccentric Englishwoman. She’d given him the Scandinavian name because he was so tall and blond and blue-eyed in a part of the world where people were short and dark. She’d spared no expense educating him and he spoke five or six languages, but he’d chosen to be American because he, and the eccentric Englishwoman, considered the USA to be the best country ever thought of.
“That’s what Mama thought too,” said Joan. “Only Miss Pratt got her deported and she died trying to get back. Well, I’m an American citizen and so is Haakon, so it’s a bond between us.”
This made no sense. Matt’s people had been Americans practically since the Mayflower but that didn’t cut any ice with Joan.
Matt was smart enough to realize that nothing he did was going to cut any ice with Joan now, and either wise enough to accept it or too tired from his grueling shifts at the hospital to fight it. He kept opening the pickle jars and taking out the garbage, and he was eventually rewarded by an introduction to the great man himself.
Matt met them on the sidewalk as they were coming out, not going in, so that they were sated for the moment from a noisy session in Joan’s bed that had driven Matt outdoors into the rain. The walls were thin.
“We met before,” Matt reminded Haakon as they shook hands. “At the arts festival.” They were all wearing raincoats. Joan’s was cherry red – Day Glo, they were calling these bright colors, Matt believed – and Haakon’s was some sort of gray and looked like it had cost as much as Matt’s car. Matt’s was yellow and his mother had bought it for him.
“Of course. I thought you were the competition.” Haakon laughed easily. He had a firm, dry grip, an engaging smile, and good English manners that would have made anyone like him but Matt didn’t somehow. Maybe it was because of the easy laugh. What was so damn funny?
Plus it didn’t seem fair about the English accent. With the advent of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones an English accent opened girls’ legs like an electric eye on a grocery store door.
Haakon didn’t sound anything like the Beatles, though. His voice was cultured and educated, like the Queen’s, only deeper. He stood, his arm draped casually yet possessively around Joan’s shoulders, and asked Matt about his medical studies, told him he was himself a construction engineer, got rid of him politely. “Well, I’m pleased to meet you properly at last,” he said. “Joan thinks you hung the moon. We must all go for a drink one day, or perhaps a meal.” And he bustled Joan into his waiting car, a Saab, in which they sped away to a drink, or perhaps a meal.
Matt went up the stairs, thinking: He smells like money. Not just the imported car but the public-school accent and the careless way he wore his raincoat. He remembered Joan’s story about the eccentric Englishwoman adopting the mysterious orphans in war-torn Europe. He supposed any Englishwoman roaming around Europe just after the war would have to be eccentric, perhaps in fact crazy, but anyway rich.
The year moved on swiftly, accelerating mysteriously the way it does after October. Thanksgiving came and Matt regretted not being able to spend it with his folks. The emergency room was particularly busy during the holidays.
The year before, Joan and Matt had had Thanksgiving dinner together, cooking a turkey together badly and enjoyably with the help of a cookbook. Joan’s guardian in New Mexico was long since dead and anyway Joan hadn’t liked her. Matt often suspected Joan of exaggerating her biography for drama but one thing that seemed unassailable was that she was alone in the world.
This year, though, she had Haakon, and he was taking her to the coast for the four-day weekend. “What about his adopted mother?” asked Matt. “Do eccentric Englishwomen not eat turkey?”
“Her name is Theodora,” said Joan. “And apparently she spends the cold months traveling in warm places. Haakon never says so but I gather she’s got a pile of dough. She’s in Egypt now, and Haakon’s twin is with her.”
Matt nodded. Egypt. Of course. But he carefully kept the skepticism from his face, because of a certain subtle tone in Joan’s voice.
Christmas, Matt did manage to get home for a few days. It was at first comforting and eventually annoying to have his mother fuss over him. She asked him if he was Seeing Anyone, and he had to admit he wasn’t. She asked him if he was going to church, and he said he almost always worked Sundays. So she arranged for him to meet a Nice Girl, at church.
Somewhere in there, Matt realized he didn’t care much for Nice Girls anymore, and that he found church irritating. Luckily the visit was too short to reveal these changes to his parents, and Matt returned to the emergency room with a kind of relief.
Joan, meanwhile, had been whisked off by Haakon to a ski resort in Vermont. Matt gathered he had a “pile of dough,” too. Joan had tried to learn to ski but had been out of her element, and anyway, she said, Haakon was more interested in indoor sports.
The tone in Joan’s voice was unmistakable this time. After she told Matt about her trip, she sat for a minute looking restless. “You know what I want, Matt?” she said. “I want about forty kids. At Christmas I want this huge table, with candles and everything imaginable to eat on it, and enough people to eat it all and then ask what’s for dessert.”
She added, not quite bitterly, “For Christmas, apparently, Theodora and the twin went to San Juan.”
Matt nodded. San Juan. Of course.
But after the holidays, things settled down. Matt worked at the hospital. Joan worked at the ad agency. In between, she and Haakon spent the winter keeping each other warm and everybody else awake.
One Saturday in late March, when spring was finally triumphing over winter, the weather was delicious and Matt for once wasn’t at the hospital, Joan collected him and dragged him off for a picnic to the big park so conveniently located just across the street.
“What’s the occasion?” said Matt.
To be continued next week....
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