FICTION
Harold Brodkey
WHAT GOING OUT WITHOUT ORA IS LIKE:
JOHNNO: 1956
A noisy party. Ora has refused to come to it. Erratically
a changing group of men plays jazz in one corner of the large loft. A
saxophone and drums. A piano. The music was cacophonous with
the party noises; and it was discordant, partly, as experiment. That
music was the boneyard, the ragshop of some of the art of that
period.
Near the door, a larger than life-sized canvas with a blurred
portrait of Eisenhower in a toga on it smeared with brown paint that
had on it in one corner the letters S HIT. I saw the honesty of it.
There was a portrait of the painter's- Bruno Ultto's- psychoanalyst,
a woman: she stood naked by her desk looking lost. Her genitals
were carefully highlighted. A scribbled portion of the picture was
circled with red and in it was inscribed, among other things,
C U NTH 0 M E HOM EON THE RAG E.
Johnno was thirty-two, thirty-three. I was twenty-six.
Johnno talked for a moment to a woman painter about Matisse
and Picasso, whom he had characterized in a magazine piece that
had become fairly well known. He had distinguished them as the
idyllic and the enraged. "The topic of the century is rage," he said.
The woman thinks I'm uptown money. She wants me to buy a
picture: "I'm doing flowers-"
"Drenched
with time," Johnno said in a odd, sidelong, salesmanly
way.
She said to me in a tough, challenging way, "Hey, those stories
of yours make a lot of money."
"Naw. I'm starving."
She made a face.
Editor's Note: A different version of the first part of this excerpt from a novel in
progress by Harold Brodkey was published in the anniversary issue of
Partisan Re–
view,
October 1984.
