Chapter 11

 

                Art in Paterson was not always a contradiction in terms. Even though some people joked about Lou Costello and how he single-handedly built the boys clubs here, he and others from Vaudeville had flowed into Paterson when people ached for a taste of New York City's Broadway and Bowery, but didn't want to travel to Manhattan to get it. And when radio arrived, Paterson's jazz clubs grew side by side with Newark, sharing broadcasts that eventually went nationwide. Such institutions were the foundation of Paterson's only art.

                Maxwell had sensed this great tradition from his earliest visits here when he was still a very small boy, when the Broadway Bank was the Garden Theater, when parking lot on Main Street was the Majestic Theater, when the new office building near Spruce was the US Theater, and the now ruined edifice of the Fabian still displayed current first run movies instead of three b-movies for two bucks.

                Although the real death knoll for Paterson sounded with the 1913 labor strikes, Paterson thrived again through prohibition, and later the post World War Two boom. Even as late as 1955 when Maxwell's mother brought him here to shop, the magic and the mania remained as rich women from Wayne came here daily to shop, giving the streets an air of importance they would later lack. The theater institutions clung to their former glory, even if their marquees grew dusty and their doorways dirty. For Maxwell, each was a mysterious and wonderful place he routinely explored, sneaking here with quarters from his mother's purse when he turned eight to catch a few of the westerns these theaters then showed, or when the James Bond craze hit, he saw each dozens of time.

                Then, one by one, the theaters vanished, and the jazz clubs turned into go-go bars. Art for most Patersonians became the daily struggle to make the bus on time, or the train or the cab rid through the mugging-zone along West Broadway, into the foothills of Wayne. A few solitary artists remained like Don Meteor, who drew caricatures of town residents, or Billy Moore making music with a rusty saxophone, or Creeley raising plants, reading the stars, writing brief, mythological verses in his loft.

                These people saw the rise of Mayor Krammer, the first shocking sign of a national Republican resurgence as early as 1976. Krammer was to Paterson in the 1970s what Lindsay was to New York City in the 1960s, a well-meaning liberal Republican that had stumbled into office and now botched everything he touched. The national party needed Krammer to succeed in one of the great Eastern cities, so SETA money poured in, and Krammer, with his usual lack of ability, thought to return Paterson to its former glory, acting as a magnet for other industries. The council sought federal legislation that would declare the old mills as landmarks, and then began to advertise itself as the new center for the arts, drawing in poets and artists, creating festivals around the falls. And for a time, all this worked, go-go bars began to revert to jazz clubs, and galleries began to crop up in the section known as lower Market Street.

                Suzanne arrived in the midst of this, one of those Minnesotan broadfaced girls, still naive enough to believe any place beyond the frozen tundra of her father's farm was "the big city." She had come fresh from a small two year college out west designed to find her a husband, rather than a career. Maxwell had never gotten all the details of Suzanne rebirth straight. Apparently some untenured adjunct had come on board had seen real talent in her, and encouraged her to seek art as a way of life, a man full of his own deep dreams of art, who did not know that fine arts and literature in these Midwest farm colleges served only as frills to disguise the harsher realities of such institutions, like curtains hung on factory windows. Such courses as his were designed to break the monotony of the intensive social training for boys who would later become engineers and salesmen and girls who would become their wives. Indeed, such girls could not find successful husbands without going to college, and parents of such girls sacrificed greatly in order to send girls to these colleges with the aim of enhancing the family wealth, men like Suzanne's father who scraped at the frozen earth each spring, scrimping and saving for the tuition, to keep their precious daughters from marrying grubby men like themselves, mud-kissing men of the earth, who drove beat pickup trucks, got drunk in broken down bars, fucking those women they could find cheap enough, marrying those who refused the more convenient payment of cash. And these fathers, sweated out those years in order to keep their daughters from bar room rape or rape in the marriage bed, until they could find a wealthy enough prospect to make that rape profitable.

                And after all that, a teacher with dreams of making artists sweeps into the class room, stealing all thoughts of marriage from these Midwest daughters' head. Even years later, when the promise of a new Greenwich Village swept Suzanne and hundreds of girls like her into Paterson, she could talk of little else, quoting that teacher as if each word mattered, bitterly castigating the college -- when under pressure from hundreds of angry fathers and even angrier male school mates who these girls avoided and thought of them as uncouth and greedy -- the college fired that untenured adjunct and replaced him with a cold-hearted academic who knew why the girls' fathers had sent them here and vowed to put them back into the career path fate intended them for them.

                Suzanne often recalled the slaughter as one by one those girls succumbed, some holding out longer than others, but eventually, bitterly and with no other choice, fell back into the dictates of the program, selecting husbands, or at least, boyfriends, from the shrinking pool of options.

                Only Suzanne continued on, resisting the new teacher, her father and the boys at school, refusing to let them eradicate the dream that one, now-unemployed teacher, had stirred in her.

                She actually graduated that college -- a feat most of her sister students could not brag of, since most quit once they had commitments or a positive pregnancy test, retreating into menial jobs like waitressing or secretarial or nursing, helping their future husbands through his undergraduate, then graduate, and even more advanced degrees in such practical careers as engineering. This commitment further relieved the father's of these daughters who could now cease paying their daughter's tuition, turning that money towards sending the next daughter towards college and some future husband. Suzanne's father, however, could not brag of some future happy event, ranting and raving over her selfishness, saying she was stealing the hopes of her two younger sisters, who might not be able to get in any college, and therefore find no wealthy husbands, because Suzanne insisted on being an artist.

                "An artist?" her father roared. "If you've got to take on this bra-burning man-hating women's-libber attitude, the least you could do is try for something that will feed your kids like being a doctor or an accountant. Or aren't you planning on having any kids either?"

                "No, Daddy, I'm not," she told him in the first of many defiant gestures, a clear declaration of war, not just between father and daughter, but between farm country and the city, between that whole dull-witted way of life and the self-improving way a real education promised for her. She told him again and again and again that she would not bring the same misery upon some poor child that she had had brought upon herself, just in the name of maintaining the blood line.

                At first, her father saw this as just a little wild blood mixed in with hers, from that distant cousin the family had ceased to mention that Thanksgiving or Christmas when he had performed that unmentionable thing, a slight taint in her that could be eradicated from her over time with a few good lectures and a determined effort on his part never to give into her whims. But as the battles over the dinner table continued, he came to realize she was her cousin in heart and soul, and it was the cousin’s blood that circulated through her veins, and the taint was an absolute discoloration that no lectures, warning, threats or rage could dispose of.

                He gave up the idea of salvation and began to slowly descend into hate, moodily silences interrupted by violent, unpredictable explosions. The money, which he initially agreed to give her to attend the next level of school for her "art" dried up. He told her to get a job and begin hearing her own keep -- he wasn't going to let no "artistic bum" live in his house for nothing. When she refused to work, he threw her out -- this last over the protests of her mother, brother, aunts and uncles, who saw something in Suzanne her father could not.

                "She rally has talent," said the mother of the cousin who's name was never mentioned, after the woman had gone to see one of Suzanne's performances. "If anyone can make it in ballet, our Suzanne can."

                "Oh, is that so?" Suzanne's father said. "Isn't that what you said about your own son before he went off the deep end?"

                Then, Suzanne's father and his sister ceased speaking also, though the aunt took Suzanne in for a while and tried to keep her from the harm her own son had met in the cold, cruel artistic world. More than once, this aunt told Suzanne to go east.

                "There's opportunity in New York," the woman said. "Ballet and poetry and music. That's where you need to be."

                But a waitress in Minnesota couldn't earn the kind of money needed for such a trip, even though Suzanne squirreled her cash away, often living without new clothing or more than one meal a day, sometimes even giving up on a ballet class or two -- just to keep the money mounting in that fund for her trip east.

                And she might have made it, too, if that cousin hadn't called her and invited her to come to Paterson.

                "Paterson? Where's Paterson?" she asked.

                "Not far from New York," he assured her. "And it's where things are happening. It's the new Greenwich Village."

                "Greenwich Village?" she said, with all the appropriate awe that little girls felt for that mysterious place, having read every issue of the Village Voice for clues to what she might expect from that Avant Garde world once she was good enough to get there.

                "And better, because you'd be getting in on the ground floor, before the tourists ruin it. They have great plans, galleries and jazz clubs."

                "But what about school?" she asked, her voice still full of doubt.

                "There's a school here. In fact, there's two. You can finish your dance work at either one. Just get here now before word gets out. I remember what happened to San Francisco after the Summer of Love."

                Her leaving was the last straw on her father's back, the last break in the family ties. He had kept one small hope alive in his heart that she would come around to a proper way of thinking, and that died the moment she descended the front porch steps and walked away, a suitcase in either hand. He knew the poison that had infected her cousin had now taken hold in her, and when that poison spread to her younger sisters, too, he would blame Suzanne for setting the example.

                Suzanne traveled east by train, registering each stop as another gateway out of a Minnesotan hell, images of the farm nearly completely fading away by the time she reached Chicago. She had been to Minneapolis-St. Paul many times in her life, but it had never struck her as the Big City, not in the way Chicago did, or New York when the train finally deposited her in Penn Station. So when she rode that last train out of New York, via the PATH to Hoboken, and then NJ Transit to Paterson, she was racked with disappointment.

                Paterson?

                This wasn't even as large as Minneapolis or St. Paul. It was just another nowhere.

                Oh, it lacked the drudgery of the farmlands, and the tundra-like winters, but Paterson contained a misery of its own, a town nearly as flat as the plains, with roof top after roof top of decaying three storied buildings. Downtown was like a poorly designed shopping mall without air-condition or safety or a single store selling designer jeans.

                Paterson's tallest building was a 15-story bank that stuck out of the landscape like a large silver tooth, beautiful in its own way, but utterly inappropriate. She admired the red brick four story mills of the historic district when her cousin showed them to her, but many were little better than ruins, and those that had been reconstructed looked artificial, with polished wood doors and shinny brass knobs, more suited to a museum than every day life, a long dead past of a city which town hall sought to resurrect, pumping money into it the way a life guard might pump air into a drowning man's lungs -- but this man was four days drowned.

                "This is what you brought me all the way from Minnesota to see?" she asked bitterly of her cousin, a pleasantly plump little man with slicked down hair and a thin-annoying mustache that wiggled when he spoke.

                "Suzy-baby, you're looking at what it is right now," he said. "Look down the road a little. Wait till all of this catches hold. There's a bundle of cash to be made here for the man wise enough to know when to invest."

                "Invest? I want to find art, not invest."

                "They come hand in hand, Suzy," her cousin said. "And there's big bucks coming. You just wait and see. The Feds want to build here. And the state wants to rebuild the ramps from route 80. When all that happens, this town will bloom! Bloom! And with money flowers!"

                Her cousin had changed a lot since she had last seen him. His eyes glowed less over folk music and hippie claptrap than over capitalistic ventures. He had cut his hair, put on a suit, and looked more like the man Suzanne's father wanted her to marry. Where once he talk of poetry, he now bragged of assets.

                "SETA money is coming," he said with a hoarse whisper. "I got word from an insider in town hall, a friend who knows the mayor. "And as long as Krammer stays in office, we'll be flowing in loot. You might not see any skyscrapers now, but there will be. We're on the ground floor, baby, and moving up."

                So she stayed and waited and watched, taking ballet at the two local colleges, then later, in New York where teachers -- awed by her enthusiasm and obvious talent -- fawned over her, giving to her that little bit of extra they thought she needed to become a professional.

                Maxwell met Suzanne at one of Paterson's most historic homecomings, when poet Arthur Guttenberg returned to help celebrate the rebirth of art in Paterson.  Maxwell remembered her playful glance at him in the crowd, and then here almost child-like prance, her hair like a yellow flower stuck in the dark stream of people.

                "So what are you?" he had asked, after finally working his way through the elbows and bags of the crowd full of poets to take a seat beside her, all chatter around them concentrating on the arrival of Paterson's most famous poet, Arthur Guttenberg -- a man who most expected to help revitalize the Paterson art scene all by himself.

                "What do you mean?" she asked.

                "I mean everybody here is something, poet, writer, actor, musician, which one are you?"

                Her green eyes sparkled deviously. "Do I need to be any of them at all?" she asked.

                "No," Maxwell admitted. "But one thing I've noticed about our little scene, very few come here who aren't artists of some sort."

                "Is that bad?"

                "It is if anyone expects this thing to go anywhere. It's fine and good to have all this talent in one place, but not if we're just talking to ourselves."

                "Us? You mean you're something, too?"

                Maxwell blushed, shifting uneasily as he shifted uneasily in his chair, glancing around at the crowded room, at the girders above and the wooden floors, marking a distinct change from the disaster of the formerly ruined locomotive factory. He loved the place, but believed it would draw very little attention as a museum. The past here had little relevance to the masses of people who now populated Paterson.

                "Yes," he finally admitted in a low voice. "I am something. At least for now."

                Suzanne frowned. "For now?"

                "I'm on my way to Nashville," he said.

                Something soured in Suzanne's eyes. "Don't tell me you're a country and western singer," she said.

                "What's wrong with that?"

                She glanced away this time.

                "My father loved country music," she said.

                "And you don't?"

                "I hate it."

                "Why?"

                "Because all it talks about is heartache."

                "That's not true."

                "It's true about every country song I've ever heard."

                "You never heard mine."

                Suzanne looked up.

                "I supposed that means I'll have to come up to your place to hear it?" she asked.

                "We could go to a park."

                "You're serious, aren't you?"

                "Of course."

                "All right, I'll listen to your music. Only not today. Today I've come to hear poetry."

                "You mean Guttenberg?"

                "Who else?" Suzanne asked. "Isn't he the main attraction?"

                "I suppose he is," Maxwell said and glanced at the faces of the crowd again, expectant faces waiting to meet the man who'd known Jack Kerouac, and the other people of the Beat Generation, the man who bridged that time with this time and this Paterson with the greater Paterson of the past, the man who had come to give his blessing over what organizers of the Great Falls Festival promised to be the renaissance of art here.

                "Don't tell me you don't like poetry?" Suzanne asked, seeming to read his thoughts from his expression.

                "I love poetry," Maxwell said. "But Guttenberg doesn't write poetry. He rants and raves, he curses up and down, and some fool pays him for it while others applaud, and every wannabe poet in Paterson imitates his style, hoping someone will pay them, too."

                Suzanne stared.

                "You do have strong opinions," she said. "What do other people think of them?"

                "You mean these people?"

                "Yes."

                "They think I'm a heretic, and tell me I should go form my own group if I don't like theirs."

                "Have you expressed these opinions of yours to Mr. Guttenberg?"

                Maxwell laughed so loud some of the other people paused in their gossip to look up, and when they saw who it was that had violated their sacred ceremonies, they grew annoyed.

                "Oh, I told him all right," Maxwell said.

                "What did he say?"

                "He asked me to have sex with him."

                "What?"

                "Guttenberg's a homosexual," Maxwell said. "I thought everybody knew that. Didn't you?"

                "Well, I..." Suzanne started, then stopped, her face growing very red. "I suppose I knew. But is he always so forward?"

                "Why don't you stick around after the reading and find out for yourself."

                "What happens after the reading?"

                "We all go to a bar and get drunk."

                "Really?"

                "There's a jazz club around the corner, and from what I gather it's Guttenberg's birthday. All the poets got together and prepared something special."

                "Won't it be private?"

                "Nothing Guttenberg does is private."

                So Maxwell suffered through the endless hours of Guttenberg and his imitators, through pages and pages and pages of verse that was not verse, each poet reading his or her best work to impress the guest, only slightly embarrassed when he sat back in the back of the room holding a private but loud litany of laughter, howls and back slapping with old friends from the neighborhood, paying so little attention to what was going on that he was surprised when the event ended.

                All rose in a collective clatter and chatter and made for the door at once, following behind the still laughing man like bubbles behind a leaking boat, crowding the double doors, fighting each other to be close to the man they adored. Maxwell held Suzanne back until the worse of it passed, then took her arm and leisurely strolled out into the dark parking lot and up the dark street, following the chorus of the poet's laughing as it bounded from the face of the dying city.

                At the doors of the club, the crowd reassembled, its bulk pressing to squeeze through the narrow opening, the most important dignitaries of the local poetry scene first, with their noses elevated and their gazes glazed, and their self-righteousness unmarred by the bad jazz music dribbling out from inside. No one had thought to hire a competent band. No one on the local scene knew the difference, except for Maxwell, and he cringed as he entered, aware of the wrong notes and the sour approach the four piece band used in the name of jazz.

                Guttenberg noticed, too, sitting himself at the table of honor with an expression of deep annoyance.

                "How long is this going to take?" his gaze seemed to ask as it moved from fact to face until it stopped on Maxwell. Then, he grabbed one of his stammering fans and pointed across the room, asking just who Maxwell was.

                The fan -- a local poet who'd made her reputation as the state's most important Italian-American poet -- glanced up, squinted, and then grew angry, shaking her head vigorous as if to say Maxwell was no one of importance at all. Yet at Guttenberg's insistence, this fan got up and cross the room to where Maxwell and Suzane stood.

                "Mr. Guttenberg would like to talk to you," the middle-aged woman said coldly, unable to take on the English accent most of the local poets used.

                "So?" Maxwell asked.

                The woman -- whose name was Sophie -- grew agitated.

                "Don't start with your nonsense," the woman hissed, abandoning all attempts at civility. "It's the man's birthday and he's important, and he wants to see you. God knows why. I won't have you offending him the way you usually offend everybody else."

                "I offend people?"

                "Constantly."

                "How?"

                "Stop with the inquisition!" the woman moaned. "Are you coming over or not?"

                Maxwell glanced at Suzanne, her green eyes greeted with that star-struck look that annoyed him, begging him not to miss the opportunity.

                "All right," Maxwell said with a sigh. Lead on, Virgil."

                Sophie glanced sharply at him, trying to figure out if this was an insult or not, finally deciding he was just being snide again. She led him through the crowd to where Guttenberg had settled int his role, admirers of all shapes, sizes and colors fumbling prepared speeches or bringing him unasked for drinks, placing the glasses on the table before him like religious offerings. He took these, swallowed each and issued a few words of thanks and encouragement to those who gave them, then turned to the next, forgetting immediately the person who he'd just spoken to. Then, Sophie arrived with an offering of a different kind in tow.

                "I brought them, Mr. Guttenberg," she said in a humbled tone

                "So I see," Guttenberg said, sitting back with his large hands folded across his equally large belly, his gaze studying Maxwell's face, dismissing Sophie with a flick of his fingers.

                Sophie glared at Maxwell, then at Suzanne, backing away slowly, reluctantly surrendering Guttenberg to them. When she was gone, Guttenberg motioned for Maxwell and Suzanne to sit. They complied, sitting across the large table from him, as admirers continued to come and go, and the space between them continued to fill with glasses, some now half full rather than empty.

                "Where do I know you from?" Guttenberg asked Maxwell

                "Here," Maxwell said. "You came here to read a few years ago.

                "Ah," Guttenberg said with a relieved sigh. "And you were one of the young poets who wanted to learn at my side?"

                "No, I'm one of the poets who told you you were full of shit."

                Suzanne gasped. Guttenberg blinked.

                "What?" the huge poet said, his voice without its previous pretentiousness.

                "I also earned your ill favor by refusing to become one of the young boys who went back to your motel room with you," Maxwell said. "That's what you probably had in mind for me this time, too, and I still refuse."

                Guttenberg's bloated face reddened.

                "Nobody talks to me like that!" he bellowed, shoving his seat back as he rose, while waving frantically for Sophie.

                Sophie rushed over, her own jowls quivering. She had witnessed the change from across the room. She already knew Maxwell had said something stupid.

                "What is it, Mr. Guttenberg? What has this troublemaker done now?"

                "He's insulted me," Guttenberg said. "And if he's an example of the kind of poets you're breeding here in Paterson, I might as well leave."

                "LEAVE?" Sophie wailed, her high pitched voice carrying through the club so that even the jazz musician stopped. "But we've arranged this party for you."

                "Maybe you should have told him that," Guttenberg said. "Have someone find my driver. I'm going home."

                "But..." Sophie pleaded, making a helpless gesture with her hands.

                "And I won't be back," Guttenberg added. "A lot of other places would appreciate a poet of my talents, even if Paterson doesn't."

                Then with one more glare at Maxwell, the great man paraded out, Sophie and others begging at his heals for him to stay, or at least, come away with them to some more private feast to which the likes of Maxwell would not be invited.

                "That was cruel," Suzanne told Maxwell when the entourage had moved out of the room, and the jazz band now played for a mostly empty room.

                "It was cruel to let him go on for a long as he did," Maxwell said. "Letting him build up these people's egos and his own. They all think they can make their poetry pay off the way he did."

                "Why shouldn't they think that?"

                "Because it isn't true," Maxwell said. "He's a fluke. His poetry isn't really poetry at all, but a kind of jazz that for one instant in time was popular with the masses. He's been riding that wave for forty years, but few other people can, and he knows it. No one makes money off art except a few very lucky people, all the others find their dreams crushed when they try."

                "You sound like a disillusioned poet."

                "No, just a practical one. I write poetry, but I don't brag about it. I write songs because I think someone might buy them. My poetry will never make me money, but my music might. Even then, it'll take me years of practice and perfecting, and one hell of a lot of luck."

                "So you're just like them," she said with a laugh.

                "No, I'm not. They let charlatans steal their dreams."

                "But you sit here in this town, thinking you will get what you want."

                "That's partly true. But there's some other ingredient that makes for greatness."

                "Which is?"

                Maxwell shrugged. "I don't know. I've read about writers and others, and in every case, some event happens to them, some person or disaster spices up their lives and their work, and sends them on their way."

                Suzanne stared, clearly unconvinced.

                "Look," Maxwell said. "Why don't you come back to my place?"

                "What for?"

                "What do you think?"

                She looked at Maxwell for a moment, then towards the door through which the others had gone.

                "I think I'll go find out what happened to the others," she said, and rushed out of the club, leaving Maxwell to the jazz band and the nearly empty club.

                He saw her a few times after that, her blonde hair bobbing up and down at on-going literary events, laughing hard with the in crowd. She seemed to barely notice him, though when she could not avoid his stare, her green eyes seemed to cloud over, and her mouth pucker with distaste, imitating all those other Paterson art devotees like Sophie.

                Maxwell wanted to talk to her, and then asked her to dance during one of the local folk festivals. She squirmed and grimaced and told him to go away.

                "Why?" he asked. "What is your problem, anyway? Are you still offended by what I said about Guttenberg?"

                "No, it's not that," she said. "It's the others. They say you ruined the Great Falls Festival by scaring him off."

                "I didn't ruin anything," Maxwell said. "They got their funding cut and they're blaming it on me."

                "I don't understand."

                "Most of the poets here have been getting money through SETA. Ronald Reagan cut them off and now they're pissed. But instead of blaming themselves because they're addicted to grants and federal money, they blame me. They can't live with the fact that Paterson's great art revival is falling in around their ears."

                Suzanne nodded her head slowly as if the things Maxwell said made sense. "I've heard talk that some want to go off to San Francisco," she said. "Some place where the scene is still alive."

                "They won't find what they want in San Francisco or Cincinnati or even New York City," Maxwell said. "It's not a place that makes art, it's talent."

                "Oh you!" Suzanne said and marched away.

                Months later, he saw her again at an impromptu poetic affair, something thrown together in a desperate attempt to revive waning interest in the Paterson art scene. The ranks of writers, poets and artists had thinned -- down from hundreds to loyal dozens, many of whom Maxwell knew were making plans of their own for trips out.

                Suzanne had lost her indignant air, though not the 1950s Greenwich Village black beret or her long-legged tights. Her blond hair and green eyes drew Maxwell's continued admiration, only this time, she did not glare at him, in fact, she moved towards him, apparently relieved to find his familiar face in the crowd.

                "I thought you were going to Nashville?" she said.

                "I am."

                "When?"

                "When I'm ready."

                "But how long will that be?" she asked.

                He learned later of her own growing panic, each of Paterson's fires making it look as if her own dreams might vanish in their flames. Even the last of the main stream businesses had begun to falter and fail, or betrayed Paterson by moving to the malls -- thereby sucking the last drops of financial blood from the city. And even now, she looked so desperate he wanted to comfort her, her eyes showing the regret she felt for leaving her father's farm, where her doom did not depend upon declining federal dollars, and where she did not have to live with the pretense of art.

                After knocking around with these people, Suzanne had apparently finally come to the same conclusion that Maxwell had held all along, predicting the death of the city and its art. After a decade battling the malls in Wayne, Paterson could not handle sucker punch Ronald Reagan issued. But Paterson itself had changed, and if a new Gutternberg or Williams were to rise from its streets today, someone would mug him, steal his money, burn his poetry and laugh over the foolishness of anyone stupid enough to think this place worth writing about.

                "I'm still polishing my craft," Maxwell told her. "I'll know when I'm ready."

                "Are you seeing anybody?"

                The question came out of nowhere, and Maxwell let out one long breath, her green eyes revealing a look he hadn't expected, as she slowly licked her thin lips. She looked hungry.

                "What do you mean?" he asked, suddenly and acutely aware of how close she stood to him, and how sweet she smelled, and how pointed her small breasts seemed, poking at her white blouse.

                "What do you think I mean?" she asked, her sharp fingernail touching his chests and slowly lowering, coming to a stop at his belt. "You didn't answer my question. Are you seeing anybody? Romantically."

                "Well, no," he stuttered. "I guess I'm not."

                "Would you like to see me?"

                The surge of desire overwhelmed him, sending his thoughts crashing against each other so that he could not say anything at all. See her? He had wanted as much since the first day he'd met her, and had dreamed since of singing songs and writing poetry to her -- all those silly things he'd seen people do in movies, and hated them for. Yet during that same time, he believed she would never fall for him.

                "Well?" she asked.

                He whispered: "Yes."

                She grinned, and took his arm. "Then maybe we should go to your place and listen to your music, eh?"

                ***********

                "Why me?" he asked later.

                She stirred beside him in the bed, green eyes growing slightly wider.

                "What do you mean?"

                "You came here even though you didn't want to. Are you sure I'm the right person?"

                Suzanne sighed, and stared up at the arched ceiling and the shadows created by the sun through the skylight. "What's a right person?" she asked.

                "The person you ought to be with."

                She laughed. "Then that depends upon who you talk to, doesn't it? If you ask my father, he would give you a different right person than I would."

                "But I'm asking you."

                "I don't think so," she said with a sigh. "But the right person isn't going to get me where I want."

                Maxwell rose slightly in the bed. "Which means?"

                "Which means I'm not the pretty little innocent girl you first met," Suzanne said, glancing side ways at him, looking up at him through her batting eye lashes in what would become her classic pose, and a pose Maxwell would cringe over for years. "Do you disapprove?"

                "I'm not sure," Maxwell said. "I've always believed you can only depend upon yourself."

                This time Suzanne's laugh was harsh.

                "No wonder you're still here," she said. "Don't you know you can't get anywhere without knowing someone important?"

                "That all depends upon where you want to go," Maxwell said.

                "I want to go to the top," Suzanne said, a sudden look of intensity in her eyes. "I want to stand up there and look down and laugh at all the people who said I couldn't make it."

                "People who look down often fall down," Maxwell said.

                "People who don't look down, don't know where they are who why it's important to be there."

                Maxwell's lips grew tight, giving his face a look of serious concern.

                "Then it makes me wonder why you would associate yourself with me," he said softly. "By your standards, I'm one of those nobody people you wouldn't want to know."

                Suzanne shook her head.

                "No, you're different from the way you seem. You knew all those people around the falls were phony. You even told Guttenberg off. I was very angry with you at the time. But now I think you're the only one who knew what he was about."

                "But am I worth knowing?"

                "I think your music is."

                Maxwell laughed, shaking the small bed in which the two of them had managed to fit.

                "But you said you didn't like country music."

                "What you do isn't country music," Suzanne said. "At least, not the kind my father used to listen to. You don't have the godawful twang."

                "I'm not a singer from the west or south, why should I have a twang?"

                "Because most of them do," Suzanne said. "And you're better than they are, too. I don't know how to put my finger on it, but you touch me in a special way, as if you're inside me, reading what I'm thinking and feeling. That kind of music will go very far someday."

                "And you're banking on me making it?"

                Suzanne snuggled closer to him. "You know I am."

                For two years, she and Maxwell played, he moving out of his room with Creeley, and she out of her dorm at the college. Neither felt able to lie the way many others did in order to qualify for artist housing at the Mills, so they found a small apartment on Oak Street, near where Paterson General Hospital used to be, and played the roles of husband and wife, played because both knew it wouldn't last any better than the unraveling Paterson art scene.

                Suzanne already ached for the big city again, to test her meddle against the real pros in the real art scene. She wanted Maxwell to come with her. He refused.

                "But why?" she asked. "What's holding you to this dumpy little town? You can write your poetry and music as easily there as you can here."

                "New York is the wrong direction for me," Maxwell said. "And far too expensive. I'm saving my money for Nashville. I don't need to be swallowed up in that pit."

                "So you'll rot here, waiting for some big break that will never come?"

                "I'm waiting until I've saved enough to go south, then I will."

                "And leave me?"

                "You can come with me."

                "Oh sure, I can see me, a ballet dancer, being a real big hit in the Grande Ole Opera."

                "I'm not going to Nashville tomorrow," Maxwell said. "Why can't we just stay where we are as we are until the time comes?"

                "Because I can't keep commuting between here and New York and I can't stand the irritating looks I get from people when I tell them I live in Paterson. New York is where everything is happening. And I either go there or dry up."

                "I guess you'll have to go then," Maxwell said.

                "And you'll stay here, like this, alone?"

                "I can always move back with Creeley"

                Suzanne sighed, and nodded, and two days later, she was gone. Maxwell moved back to Creeley's loft, unable and unwilling to maintain the Oak Street apartment without Suzanne. He missed her dreadfully, and pined after her for months, thinking about their walks and talks as if she was dead -- and their old life, an unrecoverable memory. At first, she wrote, letting him know of her progress in the Big City. After all her time wasted in Paterson, Suzanne finally believed herself on the right road at last, the road that led her to the right people and therefore success.

                Not long after the letters stopped, the rumors started, twisted and cruel tales Maxwell had heard about other artists who dared to flee the Paterson art scene, those left behind, full of jealousy hatred that emerged in cheap talk. But some of this talk was aimed particularly at Maxwell, designed to hurt him even more deeply than her departure had, many of the remaining artist still blaming him for ruining the scene.

                Other stories, however, gave Maxwell hope. A troop had apparently recognized her talent and taken her on as a regular, not in a starring role, of course, but one foot on the right rung to the right ladder, which meant all she now had to do was climb. When the bad news finally came, no rumor brought it. Instead, Maxwell discovered word about Suzanne in a small article in the Arts & Leasure section of the times.

 

Tragedy strikes an up and coming dancer

 

                A promising young dancer's career was struck down this week when a freak fall from a stage resulted in multiple break in two of her legs and ankles. The accident occurred during rehearsals for one of the most celebrated new programs on the dance scene, and will delay its opening for two weeks while management finds a replacement for Suzanne .....

 

                After this, the rumor mill went crazy. The dogs of the Paterson Art scene mad with blood lust, tearing at every bit of vulnerable flesh. They weren't satisfied with her ruin as a dancer, they needed her demise as a person as well, repeating and expanding upon the tales of her decline. Some said she married a mobster who beat her. Others said she turned to 42nd street peep shows, doing a kind of dance that didn't require perfect bones, just a perfect body. One rumor even said she'd sent out invitations to all her artists friends for them to come see her. Maxwell never saw one of these, but he did later get word from a reliable source that Suzanne had spent time in an upstate sanitarium where she dried out from alcohol and drugs.

 

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