Lion's Share

  The Lion’s Share

  A NOVEL BY ROCHELLE RATNER

  COFFEE HOUSE PRESS : : MINNEAPOLIS : : 1991

  Copyright © 1991 by Rochelle Ratner.

  Back cover photograph by Mellon.

  Cover illustration by Susan Nees.

  Author acknowledgements: This novel would not have been possible without the generosity of numerous friends who offered editorial advice and encouragement, and who freely shared their knowledge of the New York City art world and corporate support of the arts. In particular, I’d like to thank Elizabeth Cook, Maurice Kenny, Allan Kornblum, Elizabeth Marraffino, Susan Mernit, Paul Pines, Corinne Robins and Bernie Solomon.

  The publisher thanks the following organizations whose support helped make this book possible: Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation; The Bush Foundation; Dayton Hudson Foundation; Jerome Foundation; Minnesota State Arts Board; the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; and Northwest Area Foundation.

  Coffee House Press books are distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, 287 E. Sixth St., Suite 365, St. Paul, Minnesota 55101. Our books are available through all major library distributors and jobbers, and through most small press distributors, including Bookpeople, Bookslinger, Inland, Pacific Pipeline, and Small Press Distribution. For personal orders, catalogs, or other information, write to:

  COFFEE HOUSE PRESS

  27 North Fourth Street, Suite 400, Minneapolis, MN 55401

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Ratner, Rochelle.

  The lion’s share: a novel / by Rochelle Ratner.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-918273-87-0

  ISBN 978-0-991533-61-9 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3568.A76L5 1991

  813′.54—dc20

  91-24085

  CIP

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  MYRMAID PRESS, MISSION STATEMENT: Myrmaid Press is dedicated to keeping the work by and in the spirit of Rochelle Ratner in print and available online. In addition to her already published fiction, poetry, criticism, and non-fiction, there is an unpublished body of work that awaits careful reading. In our first offering, we bring four works that exist in hard copy with special thanks to Alan Kornblum and permission of Coffee House Press, publishers of Bobby’s Girl and The Lion’s Share. In addition, we are bringing out the never-before-published novel, Dear Diary, and her collection of short stories, New York Lonely. We hope-in addition to Rochelle’s extensive ouvre, to publish work by others that is similarly insightful, inventive, and humane. Enquiries may be addressed to paulpines@myrmaidpress.com

  http://myrmaidpress.com/

  CONTENTS

  Response to the Environment

  The Last Meeting

  The Nights Upstate Are Still Pretty Cold

  This Caring About Others

  Various Portraits of Women

  Self-Portraits

  The Comfort She’d Wanted

  Power and Light

  I Can’t Say I Wasn’t Concerned

  Mix Grenadine and Seltzer

  Not Your Decision Or Mine

  Free Speech

  Five Long Nights Alone

  Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing

  Vista

  for Ken

  CHAPTER ONE

  Response to the Environment

  TWO HEADS lay on the pillow, one of them a lion’s. The other head stirred. Was it a siren? Jana opened her eyes, jolted upright, stared around the unfamiliar space until it became familiar once again: bed, window, chair, table, phone. Phone, yes, it was the phone; she’d been working late last night and must have forgotten to turn the ring off.

  “Rise and shine,” declared Jana’s boss.

  Even with the sleep in her eyes, Jana could see her watch: the date read March 21; the hands pointed to nine-thirty. Natalie knew damn well she usually slept till at least ten. “I can’t find the floor plans for the Lincoln Center exhibit. They’re not in either of the folders with the others,” came the shrill voice through the phone.

  “What?” Jana shook her curly brown hair to get the knots out. On close inspection, you could find one or two strands of gray.

  “The Lincoln Center floor plans. I’ve looked all over the gallery. I can’t find them anywhere.”

  “I brought them home Thursday night. I left a note on your desk.”

  “Well, it must have gotten buried in the rest of the clutter. What did you take them home for?”

  “That underground arcade has so many tunnels and blind corners. I wanted to walk through on my own, without a dozen special-event coordinators leading me. I had to meet friends for brunch at The Ginger Man Saturday, so I was in the area. And I was right: we’ve been including at least thirty feet that are worthless for an exhibit, unless we’re expecting an audience of ostriches and giraffes.”

  “Good thing you discovered it before we started mapping the installation. I’m sorry if I woke you. I panicked when I couldn’t find the plans.”

  “When was the last time we lost anything?”

  “There’s always a first time.” Natalie had been executive director of The Paperworks Space for eight years now. “You’ve no idea the kinds of problems I’ve had to deal with.”

  “So you’ve told me. Well, let me finish waking up.” Jana hung up, crawled back under the flannel sheet, and hugged her lion to her. Leroy had been a birthday gift from Marilyn, her closest friend, three years ago last December when she’d turned thirty-one. Two months before that, they’d driven down to a Southern Graphics Association meeting in Virginia. Along the way they passed endless billboards advertising Jungle Wilderness, showing a boy proudly hugging a lion. Jana had fallen into her high-pitched little-girl voice, whining about wanting a lion to cuddle. It was only half in jest.

  The conference had progressed exactly as expected. By the second day the “happily married” Marilyn was spending most of her free time with some guy she’d met. Virtuous Jana, on the other hand, attended strictly to business and wouldn’t let herself be bothered with flirting. Not that the guys didn’t try. There was one who helped her unlock her door the day it jammed, then stood there blocking her entrance, making small talk. There was the jerk from Atlanta who took her hand as he was showing her his prints; Jana quickly said she had a meeting in five minutes and ran off.

  She didn’t need men; there were plenty of other things to busy herself with. The first day she was on a panel discussing fundraising for the visual arts. The third day she gave a talk on curating shows in nonprofit spaces. There were continual lunch and dinner meetings with people on the association’s board of directors. She made arrangements to look at the work of what seemed like a hundred different artists (five of whom they eventually showed), while running from meetings to cocktail parties and back again. But then, late at night, the queen-sized bed with its stark white sheets changed daily had accentuated her aloneness.

  Sometimes those conferences reminded her of small towns, everyone knowing everyone, spending more time gossiping than working. She was at her worst in such situations. Even now, she sometimes imagined people could tell that she, a 34-year-old professional in the swinging art world, was still a virgin. It wasn’t due to some hideous deformity. She might not be a beauty queen, but with her petite frame and naturally curly, shoulder-length brown hair, her appearance was moderately attractive. If that final moment never arrived in her occasional brief relationships with men, it was because she’d decided long ago that she didn’t want it to. “Virginity—it isn’t a disease,” she said aloud, defensively.

  She hugged Leroy closer to her, turned to face the wall. She had to keep reminding herself that she was a New Yorker: even virgins were lost in the crowd in a city this large. Anonymi
ty was precisely what she’d been searching for when she’d moved to the city fifteen years ago. Neighbors smiled in the hall but never knocked on the door to sell Girl Scout cookies, they never asked in passing if she was “still painting.”

  Yes, she told herself again, she was a New Yorker, an artist. She rolled over, opened her eyes and, presto, everything within her field of vision offered confirmation: an easel and an old wooden drafting table (tilted at an angle that would be too sharp for anyone taller than five feet) stood back to back by the far window; beside them was the white plastic cart that held her paints (and had paint smudged on every conceivable surface, including the woman’s head she’d painted on one corner years ago); the sheet of glass she used as a palette was laid on the counter, with racks of paintings beneath that; the floor space was easy to clear for larger works, the paint-stained linoleum covered uneven floorboards.

  She pressed Leroy’s plush body tight against her. It was disconcerting to realize she was the same person who, five or six years ago, had lain under these same sheets, in this same bed. The same person who had desperately needed to be painting every waking moment, as if it were the only way to justify her existence. She’d accomplished much in the past few years—a front-page review in the art section of the L.A. Times, singled out by one New York critic two years ago as the best artist in a show at Nancy Hoffman’s gallery …

  And here she was on the verge of significant recognition as a curator. Associated Power and Light (or APL, pronounced Apple) pioneered in sponsoring art events throughout the city. They’d already provided backing for three shows at The Paperworks Space. But those shows were sidewalk art exhibits compared to the prospect of an exhibition in six public spaces, curated by The Paperworks Space, subsidized by APL: Artistic Response to the Environment. Given all the ecology issues getting attention these days, the concept seemed inspired. And the sites were all high-traffic areas: the underground arcade at Lincoln Center, the Central Park boat house, the Staten Island ferry terminal, the Mid-Manhattan Library, the second-floor lobby at the World Trade Center, and the concourse at the Herald Center. To top it off, the budget included a forty-page catalog with eight pages of four-color-process reproductions, to be distributed free at selected locations.

  Jana’s mind was racing. No use going back to sleep now. She got up, put on her jeans and a flannel shirt, pulled her hair back and secured it with a rubber band, straightened the sheets. She picked the other animals off the floor and threw them on the bed any which way, yanked the Indian cotton bedspread off the window, and grabbed a cup of room-temperature coffee which had been sitting in the pot since yesterday. She turned on the radio and settled down to work on the painting which had kept her up till 3:00 AM. Mulberry Street, she called it: a buxom woman in a sleeveless house dress, graying hair uncombed, was leaning out a window, yelling to her children playing on the street. The children were little more than flat gray shadows, but in one corner of the painting lay a darker black form—the body of a twenty-four-year-old woman, raped and killed while walking home from work less than a year ago. The contrast between the violence of today and her memory of the city’s innocence in 1969 disconcerted Jana, who usually avoided overt political statements.

  This work speaks for more than the city, she reminded herself. Especially on a morning such as this, when she’d been harshly awakened by Nat’s super-sweet voice, the painting seemed a memorial to her own earlier innocence. Her first apartment here had been on the corner of Mulberry and Grand streets, a four-room railroad flat she’d gotten for $150 a month. Jana recalled lugging canvases up the five flight walk-up, convinced that it was a temporary inconvenience—within two years she’d be making enough money off her art to hire an assistant to stretch canvases for her. Those were also the days when she assumed losing one’s virginity was a magical rite that would take care of itself as soon as she was away from her parents’ critical eyes. Talk about innocence …

  The radio was blasting a commercial for Ronald Reagan—Morning in America! Snorting in disgust, Jana snapped the thing off. Deciding the painting before her was too drab, she mixed blue paint for the flowers in the woman’s dress and emerged with an ungodly color. Her head was too foggy to concentrate. “Maybe it’s wrong to pay too much attention to the past,” she admonished herself.

  But focusing on the present is even worse, she thought, glancing at her latest self-portrait propped against the far wall. While she had no intentions of becoming a modern-day Rembrandt, she was aware that she had to get closer to herself in order to sharpen her depiction of others. For the past three months she had, as an exercise, painted one self-portrait a week.

  Did all short people really have no neck? No, of course she had a neck. She might be just under five feet tall, but she had a delicate bone structure, so the rest of her body was, as Marilyn would describe it, “cut to size.” She didn’t have that misshapen appearance she’d noticed in other short people. In this side view of her head and shoulders, she’d purposely depicted herself with her head down; on a painting two weeks ago, she’d let the neck show, and her mole turned into a dark blotch that jumped out at the viewer. I can never seem to get my hair color right, either, Jana realized. It might be a dull, indistinct brown, but the center of the curls always caught the light.

  Trying to forget the face, she let her eyes move down the canvas. The upper half of her arms looked not only heavy, but flat, wide, more like her mother’s than her own. On some supposed portrayals of herself, she’d ended up cluttering those arms with the liver spots she recalled on her mother’s arms, a throwback to the time her mother had scarlet fever. On other portraits, she depicted huge sores from her own infected mosquito bites. Maybe it needs these awful blue flowers, Jana laughed, glancing back at Mulberry Street. No, she might not have perfect taste, but her clothes weren’t that bad. Besides, those flowers were large, and the picture would appear top-heavy if she didn’t show the whole upper half of her body.

  All her self-portraits either stopped above the chest or began below it. Her frustrations concerning her breasts dated back to fifth grade, when she still wore an undershirt while the girls who’d grown breasts were being teased mercilessly by all the boys in the neighborhood, so she’d never gotten used to the idea of wearing this C cup. She refused to wear scarves or jewelry for similar reasons—they called attention to the top half of the body. “You just don’t want to see yourself as interesting,” Natalie said when Jana talked about these portraits. Maybe she was right. Even when painting someone she thought of as odd-looking, the finished work ended up gripping the viewer more than these self-portraits.

  Telling herself she didn’t have time to get caught up in self-analysis today, Jana grabbed the rolled-up Lincoln Center plans from her drafting table and laid them on the floor, put a stuffed animal on either end to keep them from rolling up again, and brooded. Were there any other hidden areas she’d overlooked? She knelt, examining that one narrow area, running charcoal over it to deepen the shading. What if APL insists they use every inch of available space? She’ll argue that if they have to use that giraffe corner, at least put a painting there, something more colorful than the drawings selected for other places. Since it will be too late to find anything suitable from other artists, she’ll have no choice but to hang Mulberry Street.

  She picked up a sheet of plexiglass and quickly painted a thick black checkerboard pattern across it, then propped it in front of the painting to see the shading’s effect—appalling. The figure appeared to be behind bars, trapped in the subway at Lincoln Center, not leaning out a tenement window. No matter where her paintngs were hung, the light seemed wrong.

  Jana gave up, washed off the plexiglass, took a shower. She stuffed herself into gray slacks—a little too tight in the waist, but they were 100% wool and looked respectable. Then the black Danskin with the crew neck—out of fashion, she knew, but turtlenecks made her too hot. She put on the black satin jacket with the wine embroidery … no, too dressy. The black and green Chi
nese jacket? The sleeves were a little frayed. She settled on the gray tapestry jacket with the black fringe down the front, a dim reminder of how wrong that painting had looked. I look almost like the shadow of that murdered woman, Jana thought. I might not be able to paint self-portraits, but do I have to become my own haunting figures?

  It was nearly twelve already. For someone who insisted she didn’t give much thought to her appearance, she’d certainly wasted enough time dressing. She grabbed the floor plans, raced down the stairs, entered the subway just as a train was pulling in, and got to the gallery at five past one.

  At five minutes past two, Jana Replansky and Natalie Connors were seated at the large oak conference table, making small talk with Frank Markowitz and his assistant, Marsha Tapscott. Ed Gabrielli, community coordinator in Associated Power and Light’s Public Affairs division, stepped into the room.

  “Sorry I’m late; I had some letters I wanted to look over and get out in this afternoon’s mail,” he explained, sliding into the nearest thickly cushioned chair. Promptness wasn’t the only difference between Ed and his boss, Jana noted. Frank had a perfectly puffed handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket, its blue silk matching the jacket’s lining perfectly. Ed had a pack of cigarettes casually jutting from that same pocket. Frank wore perfectly polished shoes; Ed wore Rockport Dressports—that’s why his footsteps were so noticeably muffled by the room’s charcoal carpet.

  “Last week Ed audited a play we’re sponsoring—he got to the theater in time for the final act,” Frank said with an ironic smile. Ed winced at Frank’s pathetic attempt at corporate humor, but he didn’t sulk about it—he recognized the quip as Frank’s device for getting the meeting under way. Papers were shuffled, chairs were pulled under the table. Jana clutched the floor plans, then glanced at Natalie, both wondering what surprises might await them, despite their thorough preparation for this meeting.