Central Park
Fifth Avenue was throbbing like an artery in cardio-vascular crisis at his back. Frank lit a Lucky and inhaled the smoke with the cool September air, pumped fresh from the 843 acres of Central Park. It was nine in the evening and he needed to be alone and dark and very, very quiet. New York had made him comfortably wealthy, but the Vogue reception had demanded a level of indulgence to the vacuous lives of his patrons that had been more than he could stomach.
He thought about Charles Ives, who had composed a sound picture of this spot more than sixty years earlier and smiled as he remembered that the composer had likewise lived a double life: to his neighbours he had been a successful insurance agent, whilst privately creating some of the most revolutionary music of the period. Frank’s hidden life, or lives were far more radical. It was acceptable to devise perfumes, frequent artists’ lofts and jazz cellars; even indulge in narcotics and have a discrete relationship with a celebrated male artist. Many of the elderly socialites at the Vogue reception made a point of surrounding themselves with homosexual creatives, to use the jargon. They would not be able to comprehend the scope of Frank’s involvements, the brilliance of his real work, the scale of his vengeance and the profundity of his present emptiness. He ground the cigarette into the gravel of the path and set out into the black horizon of grassland.
Once in the void he let the pulse of Ives’ music still the frantic pace of his thoughts. The drunken teenagers, the nervy dealers and their desperate clients barely troubled his perception of a black base of earth tinted green and its indigo equivalent above. He stopped by a bench which offered a point of rest between the competing and massive presences of earth and sky. He lit another Lucky and as he let the smoke go murmured a few notes from Ives.
“He married a girl called Harmony: Harmony Twitchell actually.”
His isolation violated, Frank looked in vain for the source of the comment. A man in his early thirties was standing among a cluster of trees growing alongside the bench. Two things irritated him: that he had failed to notice the other man and that whoever it was imagined he did not know the name of Ives’ wife. He was, however, fascinated by the instant recognition of the composer from a few muted notes.
“You must be a musician?”
The man stepped forward. Frank registered glasses and conventional straw-coloured hair. “It’s a hobby. I’m a painter; trying to be a painter. I’ve met you before.”
“You have?”
“Yes, at Jack’s studio. A couple of times actually. You probably didn’t notice me.” Frank was privately astonished: he hadn’t noticed this man before, he had really taken his eye off the ball, because this meeting could not be coincidental: something important was happening, and he didn’t know where it was coming from or going to.
“Sorry, I couldn’t recognise you in the dark: of course I remember you, but I have to confess that I’ve forgotten your name...”
“Spong, Bennett Spong. I’m from Connecticut. Danbury; the same place as Ives. When I was a kid I’d listen to ‘Central Park In The Dark’ and imagine all this.” He stood before Frank and searched his jacket pockets for something which he failed to find. “Well; I didn’t listen directly. I read the score: it was better than listening on those terrible 78 phonograms. Abstract music.” He rummaged in his trouser pockets and found his cigarettes. “Silent but full of sound.”
“Light?” Frank sparked and illuminated Spong’s youthful grin. He sucked the flame into his Chesterfield.
“You’re in the groove, Jackson! That’s why I’m a painter. Sound field and colour field.” Spong chuckled and coughed out nicotine but Frank was freezing inside. He remembered the first time he had met Jack, at a New Yorker interview session. That phrase, stolen from a musical comedy film had been a special code between Jack and his then lover. He had never understood why Jack, so warm and so cool had suddenly cut him off after more than a year of an intense relationship that had been everything his senses, ravaged by Europe, had desired. Now he knew everything.
“You seem... perturbed,” said Spong, suddenly noticing Frank’s introversion. He glanced into the surrounding night and nodded towards an inky clump of trees. He drew on his cigarette and illuminated for a second lips that contrived the innocence of youth. “I could take your mind off it.”
Frank let the words hang long enough for the aspiring painter to feel uncomfortable, he coughed. “I mean I thought...”
“Then I would be really screwing myself,” whispered Frank.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Another time, but soon,” said Frank, appearing to shake off his cares. “We’ll get together soon, I promise.” He slapped Spong on the back and turned back to face the city. It was time to move on.
