It’s One Thing to Be Poor. It’s Another to Be Poor in : The Red Room

SOMETIMES, WHEN I AM sitting in my ugly old chair of no particular color, I am overwhelmed by the beauty of this room. The Red Room. It is not a perfect room. If it were, I could not love it as I do. The walls have been darkened by cigarette smoke and candle soot, the ceiling is cracked and peeling from the leak that appears whenever it rains. It has been 18 years since we painted this room red. Time has taken its toll, some might say, but I think time has given it the charm of a decaying palazzo in Venice. The Red Room. I could not live without a room that was painted red.

Years ago, I read that a red room, that is, a room with painted red walls, would drive a person mad. I wonder. Have we gone mad living in the Red Room, Paul and I? Perhaps we have, yet I’m not really certain--there is no way to judge one’s own madness. The only thing I am certain of is that we have become very poor. It seems odd to be poor and live in a red room. Yet, I thank God for this one blessing. It is one thing to be poor; it is quite another to be poor in a red room.

This is a room that love has changed as we have changed. Once it was filled with elegant things, handsome sofas and pretty French chairs, but those things are long gone, sold though newspaper ads, or sold on the street below in one of our many yard sales. Now there are tired old lounge chairs, old wooden packing crates from a long-ago traveling photographic exhibition, paintings in gilt frames. Renoir’s plump, pink naked lady dries her hair, after her bath, and looks down upon the green malachite table. Everywhere, leaning against the walls, on top of the crates, there are large color photographs, some framed, some not, and here and there on top of the narrow glass table are photomontages, my last works, once published, now not so new anymore, growing old and forgotten like me.

Things come and go. Last year, John gave us an old chemistry bottle from the 1930s, a clear glass ball with a long, straight neck. I filled it to the brim with water, which turned it into a huge, magic magnifying glass. I set it on a glass pedestal and placed it on the glass table and filled it full of pale, pink lilies from our garden. A fortuneteller’s crystal ball with pale, pink lilies set against the red walls--a still life to be photographed. But my camera was sold a year ago, or was it two? And the still life is long gone, the glass ball sold to some stranger. Yet the image remains in my mind. I see it now, pink and red, a fortuneteller’s glass ball. The mind is like a camera, but there is no camera like the mind.

At Thanksgiving, I imagined that we would have our usual modest meal of oatmeal and toast in the Red Room. Neither of us is a very good cook, and food is something of a luxury--and besides, the oven has not worked properly in ages. But when we went to the supermarket, Paul discovered a glass case with amber heat lamps that was filled with hot, plump, juicy chickens. It was just too much for him and we decided, on the spot, to splurge on a somewhat scaled-down, but no less festive, dinner. We bought one hot, golden brown chicken, the least expensive one we could find, and one big pumpkin pie, which we ate with relish late that afternoon in the Red Room.

It’s late at night now, and it’s cold. Paul has gone to bed and I’m sitting here in one of the old lounge chairs, watching James Ivory’s “Maurice” on television. It starts in England in the early 1900s, and I notice right off that in one early scene there is a red room--in the professor’s apartment at Cambridge. It’s as beautiful as our Red Room, but then all red rooms are beautiful.

It’s cold in here, but I’m warm and cozy. My feet are propped up on the folding footstool, my legs are covered with a warm plaid lap robe, and I’m bundled up in a polo shirt, a sweat shirt and a light zippered jacket, topped off with a wool sweater with deer-horn buttons that Jeanie made for me. Jeanie must think I’m a giant, this sweater is so huge. It’s even big on Paul, who’s 6 feet tall, but I love it; it’s cozy and warm, and it’s wrapping me up like a big fur coat.

At moments like this, this room always seems to overwhelm me, it’s so beautiful. Next to me is the green malachite table, and a candle is burning in a silver holder, reflecting its light in a large silver dish, an antique from Edinburgh. There’s a polished brass kettle, made in Occupied West Germany, and a pile of 18th-Century books with leather bindings, printed in London in 1762. These are Mama’s things. She loved antiques and curiosities and rescued them whenever she came across them. She gave them to me, most of them. Some I stole from our house when she died and I lost my inheritance.

Just beyond, the TV is set in the center of the white breakfront. It’s 8 feet tall, with folding panel doors that usually are closed but are now flung open, fully 8 feet across, exposing the shelves and the insides of the doors. As I look at it from my cozy perch, it is a splendor to my eyes. Paul has lined the inside of the doors and shelves from top to bottom with hundreds of Christmas cards from years past. These are not Christmas cards anymore; they are a hundred dazzling little Russian icons. It is an explosion of eccentric Russian taste. It’s wild and wonderful, and when seen from across the malachite table, as I see it now, it is a wonder to behold.

To my right and behind me is the glass table, a late ‘60s design. Chrome legs and a narrow band, topped with thick glass. So simple it’s almost invisible, a wisp of air, reflecting the changing colors of “Maurice” on the flat surfaces of its slender legs. Hanging on the wall behind, and on the table top, are large photomontages, flickering faces made of hundreds of hand-cut pieces of photographic prints. I made these in a great burst of creative energy. Some were published, others were exhibited. One day when our situation improves, I’ll continue this work. But this will have to wait; we do not have the money to spend on artistic expressions.

The table holds a pile of books and a beautiful little portrait of Mama, taken in the last days of the ‘20s or the very first days of the ‘30s. She is wearing a dress of silk crepe de Chine, and pulled up around her face is a thick red-fox fur. She is so young and beautiful, so elegant and sophisticated.

Here and there, about the room, are the ugly old lounge chairs. They’re floppy old hound dogs; they are bums in ragged clothing. When our French chairs were sold, I missed them terribly. I loved those pretty French ladies, and that’s what they were, Parisian beauties with rouged lips and spiked heels. But I don’t miss them anymore. Now I am much more comfortable with bums in rags than with fancy French ladies. These lovable bums are at home, here in the Red Room.

It’s been raining for a week now, and the little drip on the ceiling of the Red Room is busy adding more patina. Tonight, with the rain coming down and the little drip dripping, we splurged on a bit of heat and dined in the Red Room on the meal a poor artist living in Paris in 1924 would eat. It’s become a tradition with us. John sends us this artists’ meal in a basket every year. He sends it to us because we are artists, and we understand, as only artists can. In 1924, John was a dapper young man living in Paris. One cold, rainy night on his way home from some cafe, he found three beautiful young girls shivering in a doorway, soaked to the skin. He took them home to his tiny garret under the eaves, where they removed their wet clothes and hung them by the fireplace to dry. There, in the flickering light of the fire, John and the naked young Parisian beauties dined on French bread, Italian salami, cheese and wine. They babbled in French and giggled and laughed until they all fell asleep on the floor in front of the warm fire. John does not join us when we eat our artists’ meal; he is 90 now, and blind. Yet, every year he sends us a basket with French bread, Italian salami, cheese and wine. Tonight, at home in his chair by the window, John dreams of Paris, 1924.

The Renoir has got to go. I just put an ad in the paper to try to sell it. “Renoir, After the Bath, 37x47 inches, a fine copy in oils, with ornate gilt frame. Reasonable.”

Everything in the Red Room seems to have a story, and the Renoir is no exception. Thirty years ago, when Paul and I were young, we met a very old lady. She was a French teacher who had lived in Paris at the turn of the century and had been a friend of Pierre Auguste Renoir. I could hardly believe it--Mary a friend of Renoir. She had been reduced to tragic circumstances and lived in a bleak and barren little apartment with only a few possessions: a hard chair, a tiny table that she used as a desk, a little blackboard with her name painted across the top--MADAME MARY--and a simple cot to sleep on.

There amid her pitiful belongings--bits of yellowed lace, tarnished silver spoons engraved with her initial--was a beautiful old book, “The Works of Renoir,” which had been given to Mary by Jean Renoir, the artist’s son, and signed to her with a personal message in French. She loaned me the book, her most valued treasure, and from it I made the copy of “After the Bath” in oils on a large piece of cardboard. It leaned against the refrigerator in our first apartment. And it has always hung in the Red Room.

We are down to our last $7, and so far, there have been no calls for the Renoir. Our situation could not be more bleak. Yet, for reasons I can’t explain, I feel wonderful, even optimistic.

There are two new arrivals in the Red Room. Paul found two upholstered office chairs near the trash cans. He took them apart, cleaned them and put them back together today. They are in pretty good condition and should sell at our next yard sale. Paul has become an expert at finding things in the trash cans--even interesting things, like a solid-brass piano lamp. It needed a bit of repair and a good polishing, but Paul has enormous patience, and he soon made it as good as new. He found most of the clothes that I have on, including the shoes on my feet, in the trash cans.

We once lived a happy life--a glamorous life, I suppose. We were well known, even famous artist-photographers. We were never rich but we were comfortable. We lived the ideal life--the life of artists, enormously interesting and bohemian. We could not have asked for more, and we lived in the Red Room.

Then our troubles began, so slowly at first that I was hardly aware. Work just slowly petered out. We began a new series of photographs, which we sent off to Life magazine. They loved them, they said, but didn’t publish them. Then we designed a collection of decorative boxes. We showed them to manufacturers, who said they were terrific but too complex for their American workers to make; they could only be made in Korea. We designed a collection of coffee mugs for an importer, to be made in Korea. But they were too expensive-looking, he said, to be sold at Pic ‘n’ Save. We were never paid. In the end, we needed Valium.

Valium, our friend and enemy. We had been taking Valium for years. Valium, the wonder pill. It had always helped iron out life’s little tensions. It contributed to our happy bohemian life style. We were users, but not abusers. We were civilized people. We handled it well. We were users but never more than one pill a day, and not even that at times. We were small users, but we were consistent users. And now, suddenly we had a money problem, and we were out of Valium. Valium had gone from $5 a bottle to $28, and a visit to the doctor to get a refill had gone from $10 to $100. Now we really needed the Valium, but it had become a question of food or drugs, and we needed both. So we decided to stop taking it.

The first day without Valium was a cinch. The third day was no problem; we were quite proud of ourselves and wondered about the withdrawal symptoms that people talked about. We felt great. One week later, we were devastated. We were climbing the Red Room walls.

Every day seemed to present new horrors. One day, my left arm would be numb and useless. The next day, it would be my right arm, then my left leg and my right leg. My hearing became strange, my eyesight would blur and double, my knees would suddenly give out, and I would almost fall down; my speech was impaired. I felt crazy. Paul was feeling the same way, and we knew that these were the dreaded withdrawal symptoms, which we hoped would soon withdraw from our lives.

After a month or two, Paul seemed to be getting better, but not me. I seemed to be getting worse and had developed a constant pain in my chest. I was sure that I had heart trouble. Finally, with Paul’s encouragement and no money, I went to see a doctor. He checked me over, ran tests and told me my heart was fine--that the pains were only Valium withdrawal symptoms. Then he gave me a prescription for Xanax. The pain went away but I was hooked on the new drug just like that.

I learned about a tiny drugstore where the door was always kept locked. There were no lights, and it was dirty and dusty. The shelves were almost bare. There were no employees other than the druggist, and he was a very strange fellow. He would put my pills in any old used manufacturer’s bottle that happened to be lying around, then hand it to me and say, “You’ve got to stop taking these; you’ll get hooked on them.” He was right, of course. I took them for seven months.

Then one day I ran out of Xanax, but I just couldn’t go back to the drugstore. I put it off for a day, then a week. Then a month passed, a year, two years. Last October, I began to feel like I had awakened from a long sleep. And now we buy food and not drugs.

When our world began to collapse, we told no one, not even our closest friends. We stopped seeing people, and they drifted from our lives. They must have wondered about us. We had become increasingly shabby-looking, our cars disappeared, and then our furniture. We started having yard sales, food became a luxury, and any kind of medical attention was out of the question. If an aspirin or soaking our feet in hot water didn’t cure it, we were doomed.

I felt embarrassed, as though I had done something terribly wrong.

I missed the days when the famous came to the Red Room to be photographed, on business or to visit. Sir Cecil Beaton, the photographer, spilled his tea on the Red Room carpet after we had photographed Mae West for Vogue. Fashion designer Rudi Gernreich had sat under the Renoir. Bridget Fonda’s first grown-up, movie-star photographs had been taken there.

Tonight we ate a pumpkin bread that Paul brought home from his sister’s. And at last we took down the Russian icon Christmas cards. It was a shock to my soul; I wanted to leave them up forever. They were not Christmas cards to me; they were dazzling Russian icons.

The Red Room has changed again; yet as always, it remains the same. And I’m still sitting in the Red Room, in the ugly old lounge chair of no particular color, thinking.