The Burnt Orange Heresy

I parked in the street, put the canvas top up on the Chevy-a seven-year-old convertible-and started across the flagged patio to the stuccoed outside staircase. Halfway up the stairs I could hear the phone ringing in my apartment on the second floor. I stopped and waited while it rang three more times. Berenice would be incapable of letting a phone ring four times without answering it, and I knew that she was gone. Before I got the door unlocked the ringing stopped.

Berenice was gone and 'the apartment was clean. It wasn't spotless, of course, but she had made a noble effort to put things in order. The dishes had been washed and put away and the linoleum floor had been mopped in a halfassed way.

There was a sealed envelope, with "James" scribbled on the outside, propped against my typewriter on the card table by the window.

If she didn't want me to follow her, why tell me where she was going?'

There were three crumpled pieces of paper in the wastebasket. Rough drafts for the final note. I considered reading them, but changed my mind. I would let the final version stand. I crumpled the note and the envelope and added them to the wastebasket.

I felt a profound sense of loss, together with an unreasonable surge of anger. I could still smell Berenice in the apartment, and knew that her feminine compound of musk, sweat, perfume, pungent powder, lavender soap, bacon breath, Nose-cote, padded sachet coat hangers, vinegar, and everything else nice about her would linger on in the apartment forever. I felt sorry for myself and sorry for Berenice and, at the same time, a kind of bubbling elation that I was rid of her, even though I knew that I was going to miss her like crazy during the next few terrible weeks.

There was plenty of time before the preview at Gloria's Gallery. I removed my sport shirt, kicked off my loafers, and sat at the card table, which served as my desk, to go over my Miami notes. My three days in Dade County hadn't been wasted.

I had stayed with Larry Levine, in Coconut Grove. Larry was a printmaker I had known in New York, and his wife Paula was a superb cook. I would reimburse Larry with a brief comment about his new animal prints in my Notes columm.

I had enough notes for a 2,500-word article on a "Southern Gothic" environmental exhibit I had attended in North Miami, and an item on Harry Truman's glasses was a good lead-off piece for my back-of-the-book columm. Larry had steered me to the latter.

A mechanic in South Miami, a Truman lover, had written to Lincoln Borglum, who had finished the monumental heads on Mount Rushmore after his father's death, and had asked the sculptor when he was going to add Harry Truman's head to the others. Lincoln Borgium, who apparently had a better sense of humor than his late father, Gutzon, claimed, in a facetious reply, that he was unable to do so because it was too difficult to duplicate Harry Truman's glasses. The mechanic, a man named Jack Wade, took Borgium at his word, and made the glasses himself.

They were enormous spectacles, more than twenty-five feet across, steel frames covered with thickly enameled ormolu. The lenses were fashioned from twindex windows, the kind with a vacuum to separate the two panes of glass.

"The vacuum inside will help keep the lenses from fogging up on cold days," Wade explained.

I had taken three black-and-white Polaroid snapshots of Wade and the glasses, and one of the photos was sharp enough to illustrate the item in my column. The spectacles were a superior job of craftsmanship, and I had suggested to Mr. Wade that he might sell them to an optician for advertising purposes. The suggestion made him angry.

"No, by God," he said adamantly. "These glasses were made for Mr. Truman, when his bust is finished on Mount Rushmore!"

The phone rang.

"Where have you been?" Gloria's voice asked shrilly. "I've been calling you all afternoon. Berenice said you left and that you might never come back."

"When did you talk to Berenice?"

"This morning, about ten thirty."

This news hit me hard. If I had returned in twenty-four hours, in forty-eight, or sixty-I'd still have Berenice. My timing had been perfect, but a pang was there.

"I've been in Miami, working. But Berenice has left and won't be back."

"Lovers' quarrel?' Tell Gloria all about it."

"I don't want to talk about it, Gloria."

She laughed. "You're coming to the preview?"

"I told you I would. What's so important about secondhand Haitian art that you've had to call me all day?"

"Westcott's a good painter, James, he really is, you know. A first-rate draughtsman."

"Sure."

"You sound funny. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine. And I'll be there."

"That's what I wanted to talk to you about. Joseph Cassidy will be there, and he's coming because he wants to meet you. He told me so. You know who Mr. Cassidy is, don't you?"

"Doesn't everybody?"