Oriole

In the summer of 1929 I was part of a crew hired to paint the Heritage Arms, a two-story apartment building with smooth gray walls perforated by sharply carved windows set high up from the street. The foreman called the building a seraglio; the other painters said it was rumored to be a nudist colony and that its private courtyard was a verdant oasis—or a mosquito-free rock garden; it depended on whose secondhand knowledge came my way as we set up our scaffolding outside.

New to Los Angeles—I had just moved there to attend a junior college opening that fall—I was supremely curious to catch a glimpse of the Heritage Arms’s residents. During the three weeks on the job, the largest expanse of bare skin I saw was the foreman’s backside as he leaned over a bucket of paint to tell me, once again, that I hadn’t stirred it enough. The rumors of the Heritage Arms were undone, joining other preconceptions that wilted once I was under the hot California sun: that the Pacific Ocean would be warm, that coconuts grew wild along the shore, or that the mountains were lush and green.

We moved on from that job to paint two other buildings that summer until, one Friday, the foreman handed me a slip of paper with some contact information. He said a woman from the Heritage Arms wanted to hire me. He’d taken down the message weeks ago but had kept it, as though knowing it would be more useful now, as he delivered his other message: he was letting me go.

I called the number on the note, but there was no answer, nor was I able to contact this Ms. Vollsteiner in person; she was never in. I wrote to her and asked what she needed done, and when I didn’t receive an answer, I thought no more of it, and squandered what I had made over the first month of summer on the glorious state of being unemployed and young. My roommates worked during the day, giving me the freedom of an apartment nearly to myself. I read magazines, went to the pictures, the beach, borrowed a roommate’s car and got my license and drove until the city ran out, though the roads never did. Just as I was down to my last few dollars, a letter arrived from Ms. Vollsteiner asking me to report at my earliest convenience. The note was written in dark emerald ink on personalized stationary, the ivory paper smudged red, as though with blood.

I arrived at the Heritage Arms late that same afternoon, dressed in my painter’s overalls. I used the courtesy phone in the empty lobby and squinted through a porthole window that gave a view of the inner courtyard. As I’d learned many weeks ago, the courtyard was neither a verdant paradise nor a desert but something more common for Los Angeles: Bermuda grass, palm and banana trees, a concrete fountain dead center with impatiens in perpetual bloom in its shade.

“Oh Ray,” a woman said, coming down a flight of stairs. She laughed as though we were old friends and I had committed a familiar gaff.

“Ms. Vollsteiner?”

I recognized her, just. She’d sat in the shade of the banana trees watching us paint. She was dressed then, as now, in a pale muumuu.

“I’m sorry we missed each other. I was in Laguna.” She drew close and scratched a nail across the dried puce paint on my overall’s bib while making a tusk-tusk sound. “Better let me do the painting,” she said, in an accent I hadn’t the worldliness to place. “March upstairs to number 5 and we’ll get straight to work.”

The apartment was airy and high-ceilinged, a few large canvases leaned against the walls, the wood floor ruined by a slaughterhouse of dried paint. I realized I was in an atelier, and that Ms. Vollsteiner—a short-haired, middle-aged woman who looked a bit like an older Janet Gaynor, with the same large eyes and faintly nocturnal air—was an artist.

There was a woman seated at a bench against the far wall, one foot lifted up to the worn edge of the bench as she fastened the buckle on her shoe. “Fresh blood,” the woman said, slapping her foot down against the floorboards.

“Never mind her,” Ms. Vollsteiner told me, and waited as the woman picked up a small suitcase and walked out of the apartment. Ms. Vollsteiner closed the door behind her.

I wouldn’t see the woman again until six or seven years later, when we were in the same aisle of a market and didn’t need to speak to communicate our experiences at the Heritage Arms—what we had done and seen there, what it had meant.

“Sketches, first,” said Ms. Vollsteiner, on that first day. “Quick ones, to make certain you’re suitable.” She clapped her hands.

When I shrugged, she revealed the equivalent of an unseen curtain and turned the rumors of the Heritage Arms into fact: she lifted up her muumuu and stood there in her altogether, paint speckled across her flat breasts, a mauve swash across the outside of one thigh. “Now, while there’s still the light,” she said and clapped her hands again.

“Ma’am?”

“Thirty dollars a week,” she said, turning from me to pluck a stiff apron from a hook on her artists’ easel. She placed it over her head and tied the apron strings in a quick knot that drooped down to her flat bare bottom. “Room and board included. Two-week minimum.” She picked up a stick of charcoal.

“I’m not looking for a pla—”

“I won’t pay more.”

“Pay?”

She turned to me, cocked her head and dropped the charcoal. “No, I think we’ll go straight to the oils. I have a good feeling.” She rummaged through a welter of clothing and props in the corner of the room and plucked out a few items. She walked over to me and shoved a trilby and a pair of boots into my arms. “Something for your head and feet, in case you become cold. Coffee?”

I declined the coffee, and I was also uncomfortable with the idea of undressing in front of a stranger. But thirty dollars a week to be an artist’s model was a small fortune, and I couldn’t help but feel a creeping pride that I had been noticed, chosen, asked for. “About the room and board…”

“Next door. Number six. Vacant at the moment. You can stay until the committee decides on a new renter.”

I rubbed my neck.

“Too warm? We can do this in the courtyard. You’ll need to assist me to carry the easel. It’s a bit spindly on the left side and tends to—”

“No, no,” I said. “This here’s fine.”

The boots were roomy, and cold at first. I undressed and held the hat before me, to be certain I was and wasn’t on the up-and-up.

“Ray,” she said and laughed.

I placed the hat on my head, but it fit poorly and I flicked it to the bench. I felt more exposed in the boots than out of them, and I soon stood in my bare feet. All the while I told myself: thirty a week, thirty a week, thirty a week.

Without a break, even for water, I stood naked for hours and watched the last of the day’s light creep across the wall, inch by inch. Though I was meant to stare into the distance, I looked askance at Ms. Vollsteiner as she worked. She took only the briefest stabbing glances at me from behind her large canvas. She talked incessantly while she worked, except for occasional grunts she made at the direction a certain brush stroke had brought her, or perhaps as a comment on my anatomy. Then she would fall silent for a quarter hour or more.

I learned that Ms. Vollsteiner was seventeenth in line to some disgraced European royal house. She emigrated to America in her twenties, living first in Buenos Aires (too hot) and Chicago (too cold) before settling down in California where she’d been married to an art collector until he passed away nearly ten years ago. She had a daughter, but they never spoke. Her own work paid the bills, she said, but she occasionally sold one of the lesser pieces from her late-husband’s collection to finance her excursions. I didn’t know if she was famous or well-known, but I knew she wasn’t an amateur; anyone with her work ethic could only be a professional. If I said I needed a short break she said she could continue for hours. If I said I was hungry she said I should eat a larger breakfast. I never saw her consume anything other than a pale cake containing dried fruit which she had me fetch from a bakery several blocks away on my second day, and each day thereafter.

Posing, I often found myself missing the physicality of the painting job I’d had earlier that summer—and the regular hours that had come with it. Here at the Heritage Arms, Ms. Vollsteiner would come knocking at my door on a whim: if the moonlight fell in a manner she liked, if the Santa Anas were gusting in a way that might tussle my hair, if a power outage forced her to burn candles, their light requiring my presence—even though she could have lit candles any old night. (She said it was the honesty of the lambent light, amid a power outage, that was so precious.) She especially liked to wake me before dawn in order to paint in what she called the “Divine Light.”

Despite all the attention—eight canvases over three weeks—I felt dispensable. The figures in the paintings bore little resemblance to me; perhaps the body a bit, in a callous sort of way. I never saw myself in the faces—and often there were no faces, only blossoms or goat’s heads, or strange geometries. If it was my subconscious she was painting, she saw more in me than I saw in myself.

We fell into routine: Ms. Vollsteiner told me what to do, and I did it. She even prescribed my midday break: I had to lie on the courtyard lawn, in the sun, rotating every five minutes, as though on a rotisserie, for my coloring and for the “sun vitamin.” Lying on a towel, I would watch male orioles hovering amid the wind-thrashed fronds of the banana trees, and follow their flight as they cautiously sipped from the fountain before darting off like a smear of yellow paint. I caught glimpses of the other tenants, too, on my breaks and in the evenings. They were mostly older, unclothed, reading the paper or going or coming from the laundry room or hanging up their sheets and towels to dry on the lines that ran parallel to the dormant horseshoe pit. Ms. Vollsteiner said the other tenants were minor celebrities: theatre directors, costume designers (ironically), poets, the occasional retired mid-level banker. There were a few get-togethers while I stayed there, where most everyone wore nothing at all except the occasional piece of jewelry, and where the conversations, full of quips and ripostes, were far too erudite for me to dare open my mouth.

The semester began at the junior college, but I deferred my start as Ms. Vollsteiner kept me on for a further series of studies. She’d agreed to thirty-two dollars a week. I couldn’t have friends over, naturally, so I spent most of what little free time I had reading from Ms. Vollsteiner’s library. The pulpy novels I could just manage with my high school German, the French and Spanish ones not at all. We worked Mondays through Saturdays, but Sundays I had to myself, and I would read and doze in the shade of the garden while lying on a towel, with only the harshest bleats from car horns making it over the building’s walls from the city beyond. I constructed a fantasy that I was someplace exotic, like Morocco, and that some other resident would see me and fall for me, and I would show her the many canvases and sketches Ms. Vollsteiner had done and slip her one as a gift, and from there things would progress. When she and I left the Heritage Arms together, a bazaar would greet us, the sun African and exotic. But there was no one at the Heritage Arms even close to my age, and if they looked at me, it was only with a quick smile that was more dismissive than kind.

On a few occasions, Ms. Vollsteiner had friends from the building over for what she called her “rejuvenations.” She would send me out for art supplies, or to the market or a bookstore, telling me not to return for a few hours. I forgot my wallet once and came back to find Ms. Vollsteiner in my apartment, fully dressed in an elaborate wedding gown, gamboling (or was it fighting?—my glimpse was brief) with two other residents: a woman dressed in a business suit, and a man half-fit into a severe black dress, wobbling in boots as he shook a tambourine. They were all chanting in unison. It was perverse and unintelligible and after I went out, I almost didn’t return, except that the city beyond had seemed to lose its magic in comparison. It was staid and unlovely, and stank.

In October, as the country pitched and wobbled and people lost fortunes I hadn’t known existed, Ms. Vollsteiner departed the Heritage Arms for an extended trip to Mexico. Apartment #5, where I’d been living, was rented out. Uninvited and once again unemployed, I left the Heritage Arms and slept on a couch at the apartment where I’d previously stayed; my room had been long-since rented out to another student. The couch was awful and I napped in the other students’ beds when they were in class studying to be engineers and accountants, teachers and public servants. The odor of their aftershaves and tonics was like the lubricants of industry. I could barely stand it.

After a few days, the awfulness of having stood stock-still for hours at a time as an artist model began to be forgotten, and I thought only about how I had been painted day after day, and had glimpsed a simple, artistic life filled with three-pots-of-coffee sessions and “Sun Vitamins” and childish play in an enclave my roommates couldn’t even conceive of. After that, I grew a little bitter. The Heritage Arms wasn’t my world; Ms. Vollsteiner had only wanted my structure and skeleton to borrow for a while. No one had flirted with me or cared to beguile me, despite my hope, and I wasn’t perverted until after I had left the Heritage Arms and was on the outside, and could think of nothing else but where I’d been.

I did some life modeling work at the junior college, but it wasn’t the same. I joined the army instead. When I came out again, the state of the world was no better. A parking lot took up the block where the Heritage Arms had once stood, $25/MONTH the sign said. The lot was sparsely used, the painted lines as yellow as the orioles had been. The residents of the Heritage Arms had dispersed, disappeared; it was as though they’d never been. They were dream-like imaginings from those pre-Hays Code days, when naturism seemed a taste of the coming, enlightened future.

Which takes me to the day I ran into the woman who’d been buckling her shoe when I’d first entered Ms. Vollsteiner’s atelier. I was in a market, holding a few sad tomatoes and an uncut loaf. She, wearing a cloche hat, was pulling a box of Shredded Wheat from a shelf. She was shorter than I remembered, the hair below her hat now streaked with a bit of gray. I could swear she was wearing the same shoes, though. She recognized me as well, and we nodded. We stood in line, one behind the other. She was waiting for me outside when I exited, and I walked with her a few blocks to her apartment, neither of us saying anything.

We didn’t talk about Ms. Vollsteiner and the Heritage Arms until after, sharing a cigarette between us in the woman’s too-small bed, both of us sweaty and spent and strangely ambivalent about each other, despite what we’d done. We wondered if Ms. Vollsteiner was famous and what had happened to her. Where were her paintings or her late husband’s art collection? But neither of us had answers. The woman lit another cigarette and we shared this one, too, and after that we had another go at it, but found that we disliked each other after, though what we disliked more was the prospect of climbing from the bed and putting on our clothes and our hats and our shoes, and attending, once more, to the unmet demands of the day.