Authors: Roberta Latow
By nine o’clock that evening, Cheyney was sitting between a dazzling Zsa Zsa Gabor–type woman of indeterminate age and a Muncie, Indiana, bleached-blond homosexual hairdresser in a Park Avenue doctor’s waiting room, trying to figure out how she could have sunk to this humiliating experience.
There was a buzz and the inner office door clicked open. Najda nudged her and whispered, “Just go in and sit down, dawlink. Not to worry, we’ll wait here for you, dawlink.” Roland squeezed her arm.
The doctor was an immaculate, white-haired man in his late sixties. Handsome, well dressed, sitting in an expensively appointed office. He motioned her to be seated and then asked
several questions about her condition and the father of the child, whether he was a husband or a casual lover. No names, and he took no notes. And Cheyney felt confused and set on guard by his cold, matter-of-fact manner, and a mean glint in the steady gaze he fixed on her.
“Are these questions necessary?” Cheyney asked defensively.
“As necessary as your being here because you have been negligent and rather stupid. Now shall we get on with it?”
She felt her lower lip tremble and bit the inside of it not to burst into tears. She answered several more questions.
“Good,” he said, and rose from his desk and walked around it to Cheyney, “Now come with me.” He took her by the elbow and ushered her through a door, flicked on a light switch. They were in a white-tiled, antiseptic, gynecological examining room. In the center, under a large surgical light, a black, leather-covered operating table was supported on a metal frame dominated by large and small adjusting wheels. At one end of it, a pair of shining chrome contraptions raised two feet above the table, culminating in foot stirrups, were flung wide apart. Cabinets of chrome and glass, with shelf upon shelf of gleaming, bizarre-shaped surgical instruments, stood against its walls. A white-painted iron chair and a backless, black leather seat on wheels, a white enamel washbasin. The place terrified Cheyney.
The doctor walked her to the table and said, “There is nothing to be frightened about. I’m going to examine you, nothing more. Take off all your clothes and leave them on that chair.”
Cheyney found everything the doctor did frightening, seemingly calculated to humiliate her. There was no screen to undress behind. He sat in a chair opposite her. Was he actually watching her remove her clothes? When she asked for a robe, a smock, he answered, “No. Place your hands by your side and stand up straight.”
Never taking his eyes off hers, he stood up and removed his jacket, unbuttoned his tweed waistcoat and placed them both on the chair where he had been sitting. He had her nearly frozen with terror when he touched her breasts, pressed the flat of his hand just above her pubis, and said, “You’re a beauty, and sensuous, a good body in good health. Take a sheet from
that cabinet, open it, and cover the table with it.” She did as she was told, and, from the corner of her eye, watched him roll up his sleeves to wash his hands.
She didn’t cry when he lifted her up by the waist and sat her down on the table nor when he examined her breasts more sensually than professionally. Nor when he had her lie down flat and roughly pulled her down to the edge of the table by her naked hips. Nor when she asked him for a sheet to cover her nakedness and he refused, answering her by raising her legs and spreading them wide apart, adjusting her thighs on the curved braces and buckling them secure, placing her heels in the stirrups and prizing her legs even further apart. Not even over having to tolerate the discomfort, the humiliation of lying thus exposed and vulnerable under the glaring light. Only when he spread her vaginal lips, examined them with gloveless fingers, found her clitoris, did she cover her face with her arm and cry.
“You like your sex, my girl. You always will. Even if you have to pay the piper for it. That’s the way you’re made. Oversensitive genitalia used to masturbation. I could, even now, unhappy as you are, bring you on.”
He adeptly propelled himself on his mobile seat away from between her legs and said, “Hasn’t anyone told you that there are few things more fascinating for a man than a woman who enjoys her sexuality? Or, for that matter, anything more uplifting for a woman? For that you don’t have to cry. But you certainly should for being here. I give no lectures to women who come to me with your problem. I am only telling you what I tell the others. I will not help you again. Not to have taken precautions makes you criminally negligent.”
With that he rose from the seat and went to the washbasin. There he put on a white coat and washed his hands again. Cheyney heard the snap of the rubber gloves and sensed him sitting beside her again. “Take your arm away and look at me. Good. Now let’s make this easy for both of us. Relax. If you’re tense, it will be more difficult for you.” The thrust of rubber fingers deep inside her exploring, and then cold, cold steel. She despised the idea that he was looking right into the most secret, intimate place in her body.
She was dressed and more composed. Or as composed as
she could possibly be under the circumstances. Looking across his Park Avenue desk at her, he summed up the visit, “It’s not going to be easy. You have left it dangerously late. But it will be all right, and so will you. Someone will call you.” He looked at his watch. “I doubt whether it will be tonight. Write your telephone number down here and see to it that you are available to take the call. You can go now.”
“I would li …” she started to ask as she passed the scrap of paper across the desk to him. He took it, interrupting her with, “No questions. I thought you understood that.” He stood up and ushered her to the waiting-room door.
The first thing Najda said as they walked out into the damp, bitter cold night air was: “He is a pig, darlink, but safe. Come, we go for a drink to cheer you up. You have cash in the house? It’s always cash. No: Oh: You must go to the bank in zee morning. Zat
cochon
iss one of zee best lovers in New York. Wheeman are maad for him. Two wheeman I know tried the suisside because he left them. Imagine, eh.”
Cheyney imagined only one thing, that she was going to be sick in the street, and a block later she was. It didn’t get better. In fact, it got worse and worse, like some terrible nightmare that was never ending. At six o’clock in the morning, the telephone woke her from a restless sleep. A strange voice, “I believe you are waiting for this call. Eight hundred dollars in cash. I will call back to tell you where and when. It will have to be short notice, so be ready. It’s best to stay close to the telephone for the next few days.” Then a click and nothing but a dial tone. It had been a man’s voice.
The second call came at eleven that evening. “The Dudley Court Hotel, room 1247, West Eighty-ninth Street, just off Central Park West. You must come alone, by taxi, and be dropped off a few doors from the hotel. Only enter the Dudley Court after the taxi has driven away. Don’t stop at the desk. Go right to the self-service elevator and up to the twelfth floor. Remember, these precautions are as important for you as for us. Wear something loose and no undergarments. And leave your house now.”
Giving herself into the hands of other people was not easy for Cheyney at the best of times. What she was going through as she did it now was almost unbearable for her. The Park
Avenue visit had been dreadful enough. But at least then she had the kindness of Roland and Najda to help her through her ordeal. To think of another uncaring stranger violating her body again was enough to convulse her. For a brief moment she considered the alternative, only to realize that it was no solution.
She dressed as she had been told. Then put on her mink-lined raincoat, a matching fedora with a leopard-skin band around the crown, and leather boots to protect her from the cold sleet that had been gusting over the city for the last few hours. It would be hell to get a taxi, she thought. So she planned to try to catch one at the Pierre, where she knew the doorman.
She hurried through the darkened, deserted streets, anxious to reach room 1247, to get the whole disturbing mess over with. She felt dirty and cheap. She fought against the wind and the sleet for no more than two blocks before the sleet turned to snow, great, luscious flakes that fell in abundance and dissolved on the wet pavement. A taxi set down a fare. She jumped into it before the driver had a chance to protest.
The cabbie looked at her and said, “You sure this trip is necessary, lady? Maybe you should stay in on a night like this.”
“Eighty-ninth Street just off Central Park West,” she answered and remembered the handsome stranger who had picked her up in the rain. Had that been only a couple of weeks ago? It seemed like years. And the warmth and love and protection she felt in his arms for a fleeting moment? All mere illusion now for Cheyney Fox.
Cheyney actually had to press herself against a building and bite into her gloved hand to suppress her impulse to scream. She had to take deep breaths to quell her anxiety, so overwhelmed was she by the sight of the seedy, residential Dudley Court Hotel. From its marquee of broken letters, its filthy windows, torn and sagging draperies, to its lobby of dim yellow light, shabby furniture, threadbare carpets, its pockmarked, stucco walls of slime-green, the place spelled “end of the line.” It was overheated and smelled of stale cabbage. The rattling metal elevator was scored with initials and a few choice graffiti — “Shirley sucks cunt” and “Irving takes it up the poop” — partially obliterated. Stench of cat piss. Cheyney
broke into a sweat that left her drenched and trembling. She escaped the elevator, walked the length of the deadly silent, dim corridor. She knocked on the door of room 1247.
Inside was a sour-faced woman with a pocked face, but a soothing voice. Cheyney was ushered through the dingy sitting room to a windowless kitchenette, glaringly bright with chipped, blood-red enamel paint, under a tube of fluorescent light. A small table of white Formica covered with a transparent sheet of plastic, up against one wall. “The money please. It’s payable in advance.” Cheyney took the blank envelope from her handbag and handed it to the woman. She looked in the envelope but didn’t count it, saying, “You can take off your hat, but nothing else, not even your boots.” And hiking Cheyney’s clothes up around her waist, she helped her onto the table.
“I’m so hot and so frightened,” confessed Cheyney, wiping the beads of perspiration from her face. The woman opened Cheyney’s coat for her and said, with a degree of sympathy, “I know. But it can’t be helped. We must be able to leave here as soon as you are able to walk. Rest assured, you are in good hands. I’m a trained operating-theater nurse. The doctor knows his job. You will be fine in a few days, with not even an internal scar to remind you of tonight.”
“No? But the humiliation, the degradation, and, I expect, the pain to come, the guilt, oh yeah, the guilt — what about all that? I don’t expect I’ll ever lose those scars,” Cheyney heard herself saying. She felt angry at how much worse the law made what was already going to be a desperate experience.
“Tell that to your congressman,” said the doctor, a young, presentable man. She sought compassion in his face. He placed a soothing hand on her forehead and took her pulse.
N
othing would ever be the same for Cheyney after the night she had the abortion. In the misery of that evening, any illusions she might have had about her own superiority were shed forever. Her own sense of vulnerability magnified, she realized that everyone, no matter who they were, or how protected they might think they were, was only a hair’s breadth from despair.
Najda had been right. Unpalatable as it had been, Cheyney had had the safest illegal medical care that was available to her. After a few uncomfortable days, life was “business as usual.” By day that is. But by night, after the gallery had closed, and when she was alone, that was a different matter.
Cheyney was haunted. She kept reliving fragments of that night. The needle pricking her skin and sinking into a vein. Sensations of being half-clothed, half-naked, boiling hot above her waist, icy cold below. Counting back, 100, 99, 98. A searing pain. But her worst hauntings were the isolation and the aura of lovelessness, her own, and that of others around her.
Visions of herself struggling on wobbly legs, in a not wholly conscious state, to get out of the filth and ugliness of that hotel without being caught. Feeling weak and faint while clinging to a lamppost for support, on a near-deserted Central Park West in the middle of the night, heavy showers of wet snow driven in gusts and swirls all around her. It all lingered in the recesses of her mind. The massive seepage of her self-esteem, as if from an open wound, during her seemingly endless, crosstown
taxi journey to the gallery, was the most dangerous of the losses she sustained that night. But the brand that burned the deepest into her flesh was her isolation, a bitter pill for someone like Cheyney, who had her entire life believed herself loved. She cried and her body healed itself, and she recovered and got on with her life. But now she didn’t expect too much from it.
“Cheyney, how are you?”
“Fine, Christopher.”
“Really fine?”
“Yes, really fine,” Cheyney answered with as much gaiety as she could muster.
“I miss you. It’s only been a week, and all I want is to be there with you, if you know what I mean?”
“Yes, I think I know.”
“Only think!”
“I know, Christopher, I know. In bed, inside me, making passionate love to me.” His response a nervous, boyish laugh. Hers icy silence.
“It will be all right for us when I come home, won’t it? You’ll be all well?” He lowered his voice to nearly a whisper and added, “I wish I could take you right now. Make you the happiest of women. I want to give you all the fucking you can take and more. More even than that. When can we be together in that way?”
“Not for a few weeks.”
“But you do want it, as much as I do, to be together in that way?” He pleaded.
“Yes,” she whispered huskily into the telephone receiver, and despised her weakness.
Cheyney could feel sexual stirrings. Desire for Christopher. She began to relax. She had been so worried that not Christopher, nor any other man, would be able to excite sexual passion in her again. Most especially Christopher, because of his response to her predicament.
It wasn’t just his words that were seducing her. She was able to conjure a vision of his lips, his handsomeness. She could feel again the allure of his charm. She wanted him, as he wanted her; but more, she needed him to want her, to restore some of her lost self-esteem. She needed his desire for her to confirm
she was not the lowly half female she felt herself to be at this traumatic time.
“Then I’ll be home two weeks from today.”
Najda, a perfect stranger, became a friend. That was something Cheyney had to get used to. Instant, fair-weather friends. New Yorkers, strangers seeking out strangers for instant companionship. Every day you were meeting your best friend. The common link, the climb. Up that success ladder or die. And dead in New York while still breathing is the same as being ten feet under, marble slab and all.
In New York in 1959, the magic ingredient was not brains, although brains helped. Not talent — the city was drowning in its pool of talented people. Money? Power? Both necessary, but still useless without pumping out that old magic. The success twins, energy and stamina. By God, you needed that cocktail to make it in New York City! There were no second chances, just the main chance and keep going.
Three weeks after the gallery opened, Cheyney had met a cross section of all types of climbers: social, political, career, and a whole bunch of culture climbers. Eight million people scampering on those rungs. The operative word is always up. You simply have got to be going
up
so they can go with you. There is nothing miserly about New Yorkers, or most Americans for that matter — when it comes to success. They can be the most generous people on earth, they want everybody to make it. Hit the top, grab the brass ring, win the jackpot, be rich and famous. But … You have to prove you
are
before they put their money where their mouth has been.
And that was where Cheyney’s real trouble was. These sharp, sophisticated city folk in the art world were not putting their money on the line. Not buying art from her or anyone else that had not been tried and tested for being
in, the smart eye
, and declared Go, Go, Go, by the art pundits:
Art News
magazine,
Vogue, The New York Times
, and the Museum of Modern Art. And they were holding back, just like everyone else, because American art couldn’t make up its mind where to go in the approaching decade. The brand-new sixties.
Three weeks was all it took for Cheyney to understand that she was in deep trouble. She wasn’t going to make it in New York City.
She didn’t have what it takes. She had the energy, the stamina. It was just luck that was missing. Time was not on her side. Cheyney could hardly close her doors after three weeks and save herself. She had commitments. She must soldier on, try to weather the art storm, but for that, she needed enough capital to sustain the gallery for a minimum of two years. She was through before she had even begun.
The financial side of the gallery had never been her strong point. She didn’t understand it, was not even interested in it, so long as the books balanced and it was legal. Did that make her a bad businesswoman?
For months she had been happy to let Tony Caletti handle that side of things. Then there had been a contretemps with him over the five thousand dollars in checks she had issued to Sebastian and her consultation with the new accounting firm. That made her suspicious and watchful of Tony as never before. A second clash with him occurred several days after the Sebastian incident.
“Cheyney, what’s this check stub made out to cash for eight hundred dollars?”
“Personal.”
“You wrote a personal check out of the gallery account.”
“Only because you transferred all my personal funds
into
the gallery account, and, by the way, without my authority.”
“I thought we agreed,
I
write the checks around here. It’s me who handles the money, not you. You want money, okay, you ask me for it. Your job is to play the art game. I play the money game.”
He seemed cool and calm. But there had been fury in his face, his voice. He had continued, “Now what was it for? Unless you have already spent it, I want it handed over at once.”
“Tony what I do with
my
money is my business. ‘Personal’ is quite enough for bookkeeping purposes. Why the fuss every time I write a check? And why have you left me with barely a cent for my own personal use? I’m not at all happy with your manipulation of my money.”
He had not missed the tone in her voice, the lightly veiled warning that she could fire him and would if she had to. If she could have read his mind, she would have been even more
worried.
So that’s how it is. Well, it’s already too late for warnings. But too soon to let you know about it
. He did a rapid back pedal. He placed a conciliatory hand on her shoulder, and said, soothingly, “Because there is no need for you to bother yourself with financial matters. You’ve got too much else to do. All I want is to move money around in the way that is most beneficial to your business interests. And I can’t do that if you go writing out checks without consulting me. I thought I made it clear to you. I thought you understood we were forming three companies out of your personal holdings for that purpose.”
“I asked why then, Tony. And I didn’t understand the answer. But you convinced me in time I would be grateful for the benefits. Well, I’m not. Not yet, anyway.”
“You will. Trust me. It’s early days yet. But please leave that end of your affairs to me. If you have to write a check, just talk to me. Try to remember the Cheyney Fox Gallery, Cheyney Fox Industrial Design, Inc., the Cheyney Fox Fine Arts Trading Company, are no longer just your one-man band to play with. Now, don’t worry yourself about it. Just leave everything to me, or I might have to slap your little hand.”
Condescending jerk, she thought, unreconciled by his arm around her as he rushed her from her office. She found him repellent. At best, she had no time for this short, sloppily dressed, pudgy man. Everything about Tony Caletti was just a little bit seedy. A single glance declared him penny-pinching, mean of spirit. But then, she hadn’t hired him to be chic.
He had been, for twenty years, the head bookkeeper with a firm Cheyney occasionally designed for. When he had approached her for extra part-time work, he seemed perfect to take over the areas of her business she was least competent in. She had known him casually for five years before she hired him. Now, two years later, she knew no more about the man than she had then. Married with two children and living in New Jersey, he had dandruff and sometimes halitosis. But they hadn’t affected his performance.
Right now Cheyney wanted just to pull away, wipe his very touch from her. But good sense had prevailed. Intuition signaled red. From then on she was cautious.
Cheyney kept her unease to herself. Although alert to his
continuing change of attitude toward her and her various business interests — aggressive, seeking even greater control of her affairs than he already had — she was cunning enough to hide her growing doubts about his work and his manic need to control her business affairs.
Too much was already going against her for her to admit that Tony was mishandling the gallery’s affairs as well. She had to believe all was in order until she had proof that it was not. So she watched, she listened, and discreetly queried checks and documents put before her to sign. A hazy image was slowly developing into a black-and-white picture she did not want to focus on. Her only consolation was that Tony Caletti was not robbing her. Not yet.
She bided her time as she gathered information from him on her business affairs. Tony Caletti was another Sebastian: men who were supposed to take some of an already heavy work load off her, but who had proved to be just deadweight. The gods had something special up their immortal sleeves for Cheyney Fox and her gallery. Cheyney felt as if she were living with death every day. The death of her baby, the end of her great romantic interlude, the demise of her gallery. How could she go on?
She kept her emotional traumas secret, relegating them to her subconscious. Her silence served her well, it honed her personality, giving it a new texture, a richness of spirit that intrigued Christopher and the passing parade of instant friends. It enhanced her with a more powerful presence, a new maturity, of which she was scarcely aware. She was too busy hiding the bruises of her rapidly changing life, coping with the world without rose-tinted glasses, making her hectic run for survival in the art world.
For months, they came and they went and came back into her gallery, that cross-section of American humanity that fed on art, the excitement of creation, the passionate interpretations of life and time. Cheyney, too, was nourished by being a part of it.
Every day there were opening exhibitions at other galleries to attend. New York, the richest art market in the world, had something for everyone. In the month Cheyney exhibited the work of “Five New Contemporary Painters,” she saw the
sculptures of de Rivera, the Delecorte Gallery’s Egyptian art and artifacts. The Downtown Gallery was showing Shahn serigraphs, Duveen had Titians, Andre Emmerich had Pre-Columbian. Albers was a dazzling exhibition at Sidney Janis’s Gallery, Tomayos at two galleries but only Knoedler’s had the oils, Kootz showed David Hare, Dubuffet, Rivers, Hardigan, O’Hara, at their galleries. Betty Parsons was showing Ossario, Graham Sutherland, Picasso, Kollwitz, all eye-opening exhibitions. The Pissarros for sale dazzled Cheyney. The Marin watercolors calmed her heart while remaining a lesson in how the quiet beauty of watercolor can excite the mind and imagination. Museum-like Wildenstein’s was selling Cézannes.
Of the two hundred-odd galleries that Cheyney knew well, seventy-six of them, located above Fifty-seventh Street on the upper East side alone, were exhibiting American Contemporary Art. Men and women like Jim Dine, Sam Francis, Franz Kline, Harry Gottlieb, Georgia O’Keeffe, Philip Guston, Clyfford Still, Morris Louis, Mark Toby, Agnes Martin, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Jackson Pollock, Larry Poons, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella — some of the giants and some of what the dealers were banking on as incipient giants to carry them through the sixties.
Every dealer like Cheyney was looking, searching out any young artist who might make it, who might boost their galleries with a new art image, one that could take off as
the
new movement. And, except for those who handled exclusively the well-established master painters and sculptors, they were all worried, jumpy about the future. Rosenquist, Dine, Oldenburg, Chryssa were giving hints of what was to come. Teasing hints, no more.
The Cheyney Fox Gallery produced some good exhibitions, and every day Cheyney sought out her own new giant, and the more she saw, the more desperate she was to find the artist whose work could pack the punch to challenge the Abstract Expressionists, those still untoppled moguls of American contemporary art.