Authors: Roberta Latow
About once a month Dendre’s parents would arrive on a Sunday morning and Gideon would choose the exhibition he wanted to see in one of the museums. They would take the bus uptown, do the museum exhibition and then walk the streets of the Upper East Side, gazing into the closed art galleries. They would finally complete their day by eating huge sirloin steaks and baked potatoes dripping with butter in Joey George’s Chop House on Lexington Avenue. They repeatedly talked about going to a different restaurant but never did. Herschel, who always picked up the tab, was a creature of habit.
Gideon loved the days when his parents-in-law arrived for their Sunday visit. He was extremely fond of Herschel and Frieda who, having been charmed by him and his belief in himself and his work, now supported him in any way they could. They were certain that one day they would be seeing his work in a museum.
The very first thing that Herschel would do upon arriving at the studio on one of their Sunday outings was to ask, ‘You’ve been well, Dendre? You still happy with this genius you married?’ and make an attempt to punch Gideon teasingly on the chin. Gideon would always duck and the two men would hug each other in greeting.
‘Yes, Dad,’ she would answer, and go to him for a kiss and a hug.
Invariably the next thing Herschel would say was, ‘Gideon, let’s have a look,’ and he would show his father-in-law his latest work.
One evening after one of their Sunday outings, the fridge and larder stocked by his parents-in-law, Gideon lay in bed with Dendre and looked around his vast studio and the corner he had designated their living space. How piteously poor they were, yet Dendre had never complained. His parents-in-law had reconciled themselves to accept her life as she wished to live it with Gideon. How supportive they and his wife were of his keeping his freedom and concentrating on his work. Never a demand from Dendre. She always obeyed the ground rules he had laid down before they were married, gave him the firm foundation of love he had always hoped for and was grateful to have. He had it all and was the happiest of men. Taking stock of his life as it was now prompted Gideon to speak to Dendre about his delight in their marriage.
‘You do know, Dendre, that the reason this marriage is working so well is not only because we love each other but because we are so different and respect those differences. We dip our toes into each other’s lives and gain something special from the experience.’
‘You make it sound as if that’s the way you want it to be always?’
‘I do. And it will be,’ he replied.
Dendre felt the sting of fear. In the many hours when Gideon was not with her, in those endless days and nights when his work took over his life and she was forgotten, she thought of him constantly, convincing herself that he did love her as she wanted him to. Every hour of the day she yearned for him. He took command of her life and she blossomed. She fantasised that he loved her more than life itself. In time she grew to believe that that particular fantasy was reality and her passion for him became more intense. Fear of loss made her devious: she went to great lengths never to let him know how much more she wanted from him. She was stubborn and proud, she wanted it to come from him voluntarily. However, she would on occasion drop a word here or there that might lead him on to give more of himself to her.
In spite of her fear, she told him, ‘Sometimes I think you married me for my family, you love them so.’
‘I did, and I do,’ he told her.
Dendre extricated herself from his arms and sat bolt upright. He sat up too and turned on the dim light they liked to have sex by. He was clearly amused.
‘Do you love them more than me?’ she asked point-blank.
‘No, not more, as much as, but for different reasons,’ he told her.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said petulantly.
‘No, I don’t expect you do,’ he said, tenderness in his voice.
This was the first time in all the months they had lived together that Dendre sensed a closeness between them that had not been brought about by their erotic couplings.
‘Then tell me. I really need to know, Gideon.’
‘Well, let me see,’ he teased. Taking her in his arms and caressing her breasts, he continued, ‘I love you for you yourself, because you’re naive, good and kind, and extraordinarily sexy and good in bed. Because you’re bright and timid but always rise to the occasion. You understand me and my work, are very bourgeois and give me everything I want.
‘I love your family because they are good, kind, generous human beings, who recognise in me someone special who needs to be nourished with that Jewish love they are steeped in and I have been deprived of all my life. They, like you, are everything I am not nor do I wish to be.’
Gideon felt Dendre’s body grow tense. Still in his arms, he turned her round to face him. ‘Does that upset you?’ he asked, rather surprised that such honesty might upset her.
Bravely she told him, ‘You love us but you would not like to be us. That’s like giving a prize with the right hand and taking it away with the left.’
‘Dendre, it’s not in my nature to be like them. If you wanted a man like them then you picked the wrong one. We’re together because I am something else and we add to each other’s lives. I am the “significant other” in your life and it will always be that way.’
‘Why should it be?’ she pressed.
‘Because we were born to be different people. Our formative years were spent poles apart and will have influenced who and what we are. You will always be in the bosom of your family,
you are a replica of them, and I love you for it. I will always be the outsider, no matter how much fame and fortune and marital bliss I have. I have learned from childhood what it is to be an outsider and now I’ve grown into the role.’
‘I think that’s sad,’ she said.
‘Oh, my young, dear heart, you have a great deal of growing up to do and one day you’ll understand that it’s not sad to be different, an outsider, as long as you have faith in yourself and can walk that tight rope called life with chin up.
‘I have always known that I was capable of love and passion on a grand scale but you are the only woman of the many I have had to whom I was able to express it. You’re everything I have ever wanted: steeped in family love and loyalty, a woman willing to love me with unconditional surrender to my lust. One who is willing to share a life of poverty with me while I pursue my art, my dreams. You work for me, have become my provider, guard me from the outside world and any infringement that interferes with my work. I cherish you for that. I am constantly excited by you – your innocence. I adore opening up the world for you. You are a whore in bed which suits our sexual attraction to each other, or should I say needs? My constant seduction of you adds something thrilling to this game of love and marriage. Is the kind of love I have for you not enough?’
Gideon had once more seduced Dendre to him and she answered, ‘More than enough. I love my life with you, Gideon. I want no other.’
For the first six months of their marriage Dendre and Gideon saw few people but Gideon’s struggling painter friends and his wife’s family. Gideon and his friends would visit each other’s studios and look at each other’s work. The men would talk art and share a meal. The women on their arms were young and for the most part street-smart, knowledgeable and very beautiful. Dendre was never quite able to make friends with any of them; they seemed to her too frivolous, too trendy. She watched Gideon’s every move when there were other women around. He was the most attractive and vibrant man of their group and most women he met flirted with him.
Dendre learned to guard against their snatching her husband
away from her. She listened and learned about art and the art world. She never stepped forward to express an opinion but instead clung to Gideon and played the role of loving wife to the hilt. The result was that she was thought to be dull, a middle-class moralist, a nonentity who belonged in the kitchen and the background of Gideon’s life. The big question for the artists and their female companions was why he had married her.
They did not know that she did have opinions, and interesting ones, that she would discuss with Gideon. That he listened to her because she was clever and intelligent and mostly because she had the ability to be objective and honest. He was no fool, he could see in the eyes of his friends and most people they met that they simply could not understand his choice of wife. It was for that reason that when out in public he would be particularly affectionate to Dendre. It was also during that first year together that his work changed dramatically for the better. His friend, a dealer in Impressionist painting, Ben Borgnine, was certain this was the time for Gideon to show his work. He refused. Word went round the art world that the young painter Gideon Palenberg was something special. Dealers sent letters offering to look at his work. Dendre wrote polite replies which said in essence ‘thank you, but no thank you. Maybe at a later date’.
She had now finished with college and had a problem getting a well-paid job so out of necessity she went freelance and was bookkeeper for several small shops on the Lower East Side. Thankfully one was a kosher delicatessen with a generous proprietor, and she rarely left the shop empty-handed. She kept her night waitressing job and in her spare time posed for Gideon. Life was hard for Dendre who sometimes felt she was always going to be living on leftovers from other people’s lives.
There was a kind of hysteria in the art world at that time. The Abstract Expressionists were being challenged by Pop Artists. The dealers were searching for the next great art discovery. Letters from dealers and young museum directors trying to make a name for themselves arrived more frequently and still Gideon refused to show them his work.
Dendre, now eight months’ pregnant and obsessed with her love for him, never asked him to reconsider. Instinctively she knew that Gideon would show his work at the right time and that when he did he would be a huge success.
Some women bloom in pregnancy. Dendre did not. Her skin appeared sallow, her hair lost its lustre, her lips became puffy. But that did not matter to Gideon. He adored her even more during her pregnancy, had sex with her at every chance he could. She was heavy with child and carrying all in the front. Except for that her figure remained much the same. They had little time for anything but working and making love. These were the happiest days of Dendre’s life.
Gideon was painting feverishly; he thrived on work and making love to Dendre. Their sex life was more adventurous. None of Gideon’s erotic demands shocked or disturbed her. On the contrary, she was becoming obsessive about sex with Gideon and thought about it all the time. She was primed, ready and waiting, anywhere, anytime. She was enslaved by her lust and thought about sex and Gideon constantly. And that was just how he wanted her.
One night he woke Dendre and insisted she go with him to the centre of the studio where he had placed a chair. He invited her to sit down. He wanted her to be the first to see the exhibition he had been putting together for three years.
After she had taken her seat he told her, ‘I’m ready to show. Tomorrow I will go uptown and invite three dealers to view this work, but I already know the one I want. Now feast your eyes.’
The studio was dimly lit except for spotlights shining against the empty white walls where on the floor leaning against them were his canvasses, facing the wall. Two large easels had been placed dramatically at angles from his exhibiting wall. Dendre sat in the chair wrapped in a woollen blanket, her heart racing. She could hardly think of the paintings, as anxious as she was
to see them, because she realised that her life with Gideon, once the baby was born and he had his show, would change radically. She needed no further proof than to look at her husband. He had already set himself free from what had been. He was eager for tomorrow and all the days after that would take him where he wanted to go. She buried her anxiety at having to leave behind the simple and secluded life they had shared so happily.
Before he turned the first canvas round for viewing, Gideon went to Dendre and dropped to his knees in front of her. He opened the blanket she was huddled under and caressed the roundness of her swollen belly. He raised her nightdress and laid his head on her stomach, then kissed it and licked her flesh. He covered her again and wrapped her in the blanket once more. She was reassured by this gesture of love. They were both aware that this was the most intimate moment of their lives, nothing else would ever come close to it.
‘I could never have done this without you, Dendre,’ he told her.
Her heart swelled with love and pride because she knew that to be true. She would have liked him to kiss her on the lips and to tell her that he would love her always as he loved her now. But he didn’t. Instead he rose from his knees and told her as he walked away from her, ‘And so it begins.’
And so it did. The dealers came and they went and there were offers for a one-man show. Gideon, Dendre at his side, listened to the offers and played one dealer off against another. Then a New York museum offered to take three paintings for their ‘New Painters’ exhibition. A Californian dealer flew into New York to see Gideon and offered to buy outright five of the canvasses. Gideon turned him down. He leaned heavily on Dendre’s opinion on every little thing. Finally, after several weeks, Gideon got everything he wanted: a daughter whom they named Amber, the only dealer he really wanted to represent him – Haver Savage, a one-man show in New York of his oil paintings simultaneous with a one-man show of his water-colours and drawings in London.
Haver Savage was an important figure in the art world. Museums, critics, dealers and collectors listened to Haver. He managed only a few artists, the best Abstract Expressionists, and
dealt in Picasso, Miro and Soutine. To have Haver for a dealer meant assured success.
A tall, needle-slender man, frighteningly urbane and handsome with the bluest eyes Dendre had ever seen, there was about him an air of sensual decadence that was fiercely attractive. He had wealth and power and knew how to use both. He was arrogant with a reputation for wasting no time on insignificant people.
The first occasion Dendre met him was when he arrived at the studio to view Gideon’s paintings. He greeted her politely but spoke to Gideon quite differently. Dendre, standing next to her husband, sensed the empathy between the two men.
She kept wishing she had worn her best dress, had made up her face. This was the sort of man for whom those things mattered. Amber, lying in a padded Moses basket, was fast asleep in the corner they called home. Dendre prayed she wouldn’t wake up and start crying. Domesticity would be viewed as a distraction by a man like Haver Savage, possibly enough to ruin this visit and Gideon’s chances.
Her ears pricked up and she stopped thinking about herself and how she appeared to Haver when she heard him say to her husband, ‘We’ve missed you and your black coat with the velvet collar doing the gallery openings and art world parties, trying to make connections with the right collectors and dealers. I did wonder what had happened to you.’
The manner in which he said those things upset Dendre. She wanted to say, ‘You make my husband sound like a hustler,’ but kept silent and wondered instead why Gideon had never mentioned that part of his life. What more had he kept from her beside his troubled relationship with his Aunt Martha?
‘Now you know, Haver. I married Dendre and have become the father of a beautiful baby girl called Amber. I’ve also had a breakthrough in my work and now I’m ready to show.’
The canvasses were all turned to the wall and two boys whom Gideon had picked up in the street and trained how to present his work for these exhibitions were standing by. He offered Haver the same chair set in the same place in the studio that Dendre and the other two dealers had occupied when they had had their own private views.
Haver sat down and told him, ‘Before I see one painting I have
to warn you that there is a less than one per cent chance I will take you on. I am only interested in new people if they excite my interest and I am so passionate about their work it would be impossible for me to let them go. I’ve taken on no one new for eight years now.’
‘I don’t have a problem with that, Haver. I want you for my dealer because you are so choosy when it comes to art and the art world.’
‘Well then, let’s see what you’ve got.’
Gideon turned on the spotlights and instructed the boys to begin. He had paced the showing of each canvas at four minutes apart. They were placed first on the easel and from there hung on the wall. Haver remained silent with not a change of expression throughout the display. His passive attitude unnerved Dendre. If he was an example of the art world, she knew she was in trouble.
Several times he did break his silence but only to ask, ‘And when was that painted, Gideon?’
When all the paintings had been seen the boys rolled out a table stacked high with water-colours, pencil sketches and ink drawings which they held up for Haver to view. Finally it was over. The boys left the table and let themselves out of the studio
The first thing Haver did was to walk to Dendre, raise her hand and kiss it. Then he told her, ‘Mrs Palenberg, you are not a wife, you are something more than that – Gideon’s muse. My compliments.’
Gideon placed his arm around Dendre. ‘That, coming from Haver, is praise indeed. His way of saying he’s impressed. The question is, how much?’
‘Enough to talk further with you about working together, and to ask you to put a reserve on five of the portraits I would like to buy outright. Enough to suggest you do not show these works to anyone else if you want us to do business together. What you have painted … well, Gideon, let’s just say to have done what you have done in just a few years is a triumph.’
The two men threw their arms around each other and Haver said, ‘This is a big night in the art world, only they don’t know it yet.’
Both men laughed and walked together through the exhibition,
talking about the paintings. It seemed to Dendre that the studio was suddenly charged with sizzling excitement, passion, what once were dreams bubbling into reality. Her head was spinning. All they had worked for, dreamed of, the hardships Gideon had suffered for his art – that book was closed. The two men were lost in the grip of dazzling creativity and were only wrenched back after more than two hours when Amber began to cry.
Dendre snapped out of her daze when she heard Gideon say, ‘Come meet my daughter, Haver, she’s lovely.’
After saying all the right things about Amber, Haver suggested, ‘This night is cause for celebration. Come and dine with me. I’m having people in and it should be amusing but for the moment we’ll say nothing about your work and my interest in representing you.’
‘I understand. Anything you say, Haver. And we would love to come. If we can’t find a sitter, it will have to be baby and all,’ warned Gideon.
That evening in Haver’s town house on 65th Street Dendre saw the other side of the art world: beautiful, chic, intelligent women, with wealth beyond her imagining. Handsome and interesting men. Two famous artists whose smallest works sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars; their large commissions sold for millions. These were people who lived in houses with masterpieces hanging on the walls; who sat on eighteenth-century English, French or American furniture. At Haver’s that evening they drank vintage champagne and ate fresh
fois gras
, caviar, stuffed pigeon breasts. Dendre was out of her depth; she worried about which fork to use, her hair, chapped hands, broken fingernails, Amber – who had been relegated to one of the five guest bedrooms, and most of all Gideon.
There were so many surprises for her that evening. They began the moment they were ushered into the house. The look on Haver’s face when he greeted them suggested to Dendre that she did not look the part Haver would have liked her to play. She knew she looked too downmarket for her surroundings, too dull, and especially so walking into the drawing room flanked by Gideon’s good looks and sensual charisma, and the urbane Haver. She wanted to die. Her confidence in herself plummeted.
Several people approached Gideon at once; the men shook
hands, the women kissed him seductively on the lips. He seemed to rise to the occasion and Dendre knew she must somehow do the same. She was fidgeting and Gideon squeezed her hand and whispered as he kissed her on the cheek, ‘Mustn’t fidget, dear heart. You are better than all of them rolled into one. Play the art game, it’s great fun.’
They had barely entered the room when that happened and she was surprised when Haver took her away. He marched her from the drawing room into his library. She stumbled and he caught her. She apologised, saying, ‘Sorry, I couldn’t take my eyes off the Soutine and wasn’t looking where I was going. Are you going to represent Gideon, Mr Savage?’
Haver sat on the end of a huge, beautiful and impressive Louis XIV Boule desk. He reached for a cigarette and offered one to Dendre.
‘I don’t smoke, we can’t afford to,’ she told him rather petulantly.
Haver took his time lighting his cigarette, then told her, ‘Well, that rather depends on terms. And on you.’
‘Me!’ she exclaimed.
‘Yes, you. I want to be frank with you, Dendre. If Gideon and I do come to terms, I will not stand for any interference from you. It will have to be a one to one business relationship between Gideon and me. Now don’t take this the wrong way. I will welcome you always as Gideon’s wife, his muse, the woman behind the man, the model of his “Woman In Love” series, and respect you as such. I will be there to help you in that role in any way I can.
‘But I have come across too many artists’ wives who, when their husbands make it big, get greedy. They think they know better than his dealer how their husband should be handled. They see the prices their husbands’ work commands, that art is first and foremost in his life and comes before wife and family. The dealer meanwhile is making huge profits, which I might tell you I hope to do representing Gideon, and so they undermine their husband’s confidence in his business associate. Under the guise of protecting their husband’s interests they go on the attack.
‘Suddenly they want to step into the forefront of their husband’s life and take over the running of his career. They want to come out of the shadows to present themselves as being more clever, more
shrewd than the dealer who has spent years manipulating the art market to make certain their husbands are firmly entrenched in it. They see only how they have suffered neglect for art’s sake. It is never enough for them to be wealthy beyond anything they have ever dreamed of, famous in the art world for being the wife of a genius. What they want to do, what they think is their right, is to run their husband’s life, control his work, and turn themselves into art stars in their own right. I think that most succinctly states why we are having this talk and why whether I take Gideon on has everything to do with you.’
Dendre was astounded at the picture of the painter’s wife he had drawn for her. Would she turn into one of those women Haver had described? It was too much even to contemplate. She collapsed into a chair, tears brimming in her eyes. She was out of her depth in this world of Haver Savage’s, filled with successful, erudite men and stylish women, steeped in art and culture. She watched him rise from the desk and walk over to a drinks tray where he poured her a brandy. Walking back to the leather sofa where she was sitting, he handed it to her. She drank it down in one swallow and then coughed and spluttered.
In those few moments when she was trying to compose herself, Dendre made a firm decision: she wanted no part of the art world other than as Gideon’s wife, the mainstay of his home and family, and most important of all his lover and muse. She vowed to herself that that was how it began and that was how it would end. That decision gave her a new kind of strength and power. It gave Dendre the courage to take on Haver.
‘You have been candid with me, now I’ll be candid with you. You have my word I will never interfere between my husband and any dealer he chooses to represent him. I have no interest in controlling his work nor do I want any power in the art world. As he himself has pointed out, I am Brooklyn born and bred. I like who I am and so does Gideon. That’s why he loves me and married me. He is my life, his happiness is mine. Art is his world but it will only be a small part of mine – Gideon is far more important. Make no mistake, if fame and fortune do come our way he and I will reap the rewards but we will always remember to keep them in proportion to our life together.’