Nightwork

I found myself on a narrow busy street, the via de Babuino, where there were several art galleries. Faithful to Fabian, I peered in through the windows. In one of the windows there was a large oil of a deserted street in a small town in

America, the familiar drugstore, barbershop, fake Colonial bank, a clapboard newspaper office, all in what looked like the last faded night of a cold evening in the middle of flat prairie country. It was painted realistically, but realism heightened by an obsessed attention to every smallest detail, which gave the impression of a distorted, fanatical vision of the country, loving and furious at the same time. The name of the painter who was having the one-man show in the gallery was not an American one - or perhaps half an American one, Angelo Quinn. Out of curiosity I went into the gallery. Aside from the man who ran the place, a wispy, gray-haired sexagenarian in a high collar, and a youngish, sloppily dressed man in need of a shave who sat in a comer reading an art magazine, I was the only one in the shop.

All the paintings were of small towns or dilapidated old sections of cities, with here and there a weather-worn farmhouse set on a bleak, windy hill, or a rusted line of railroad tracks, with frozen puddles reflecting a dark sky, the tracks looking as though they were going nowhere and as if the last train had passed that way a century before.

There were no little red stamps on the frames to indicate that any of the paintings had been sold. The owner of the gallery did not follow me around or offer to talk to me, but merely gave me a sad little dental-plate smile when he caught my eye. The young man with the art magazine never looked up.

I left the gallery saddened, but somehow also uplifted. I wasn't certain enough about my taste to be able to pronounce whether or not the paintings were good or bad, but they had spoken to me directly, had reminded me, elusively but surely, of something I didn't want to forget about my native country.

I walked slowly through the bustling streets, puzzling over the experience. It was very much like what I had felt about books at the age of thirty, when I had begun to read seriously, (he sense that something enormous and enigmatic was being tantalizingly revealed to me. I remembered what Fabian had said the morning we had visited the Maeght Museum in St-Paul-de-Vence - that after I had looked enough I would pass a certain threshold of emotion. I resolved to come back again the next day.

Near my hotel, by accident, I noticed that I was passing the shop that Fabian had told me was the place I should get my suits made. I went in and spent an interesting hour looking at materials and talking to the head tailor, who spoke a kind of English. I ordered five suits. I would dazzle Fabian when I saw him next.

The next day I got a directory of the art galleries in Rome that were having exhibitions that week and I visited all of them before going back to Quinn's show. I wanted to see how the other contemporary works of art on view in the city affected me. They affected me not at all. Realistic, surrealist, abstract, my eye remained unmoved. Then I went back to the gallery on the via del Babuino and slowly drifted from painting to painting, studying each one carefully and critically, to make sure that what I had felt the afternoon before had not been the result of its having been my first day in Rome, following a good lunch with plenty of wine and the pleasure of conversation with a knowing young American after a week of silence.

The effect on me was, if anything, greater than it had been the day before. The gallery owner and the young man with the art magazine were again the only ones in the shop, looking as though they had not moved in the last twenty-four hours. If they recognized me, they gave no sign that they did so. If I can afford to buy suits, I decided suddenly, I can afford to buy a painting. I had never bought even as much as a print before and was unsure about how one went about it. Fabian had haggled with the dealer in Zurich, but I knew I wasn't up to that.

"Excuse me,' I said to the wispy old gallery owner, who smiled automatically at me, 'I'm interested in the painting in the window. And maybe this one, too.' I was standing in front of the oil of the disused railroad tracks. 'Could you give me some idea of how much they might be?'

'Five hundred thousand lire,' the old man said promptly. His voice was strong and steady.

'Five hundred thousand . . . Uh . . .' It sounded monumental. I still suffered from fits of apprehension when dealing with the Italian decimal system. 'How much is that in dollars?' Tourist, tourist, I thought bitterly as I asked the question.

'About eight hundred dollars.' He shrugged despondently. "With the ridiculous rate of exchange, less.'

I was paying two hundred and fifty dollars for each of the five suits. They would never give me as much pleasure as either of the paintings. 'Will you take a check on a Swiss bank?'