Free After Dachau by Daniel Quinn

all over and locked up there in the past.”
    “Different how?”
    “We didn’t see it this clearly at the time, but the whole thing was all about these ten or twelve guys. They were the Club—I mean literally they called it the Club—and they had the
word
, y’see, and nobody else.” She paused, chuckling at the memory of it. “There was Pollock and Bob Motherwell and Willem DeKooning and Mark Rothko, guys like that. You had to be one of those guys to belong to the Club, and of course you had to swear off figurative painting forever. You could have the word and swear off figurative painting, but if you didn’t belong to the Club, then you were just derivative, a copycat.”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “What I mean is, you could paint just like the guys in theClub, but if you weren’t actually
in
the Club—for example, if you were a woman—then it didn’t count. You were just derivative.”
    “I’m afraid I still don’t get it.”
    She took a minute to think how to get past my thickheadedness. “Look, the guys in the Club could all paint like each other, and that was okay. It was more than okay. To belong to the Club, you
had
to paint like the guys in the Club. But if a woman painted like them, she wasn’t invited to join the Club, because she was just playing ‘monkey see, monkey do.’ ”
    “Why is that, Mallory?”
    “Because only
men
know how to paint, Jason. Don’t you know that, for God’s sake?”
    It was clear enough she was being sarcastic, but just at that moment I couldn’t think of an exception to her rule. She waited half a minute, then went on.
    “I don’t suppose you ever heard of Lee Krasner.”
    I admitted I didn’t.
    “I met her just a few months after I arrived in New York. I guess she was about fifteen years older than me. Anyway, she’d just spent three years studying with Hans Hofmann, one of the charter members of the Club. She told me he once stood in front of one of her paintings for ten minutes, staring at it and shaking his head. Finally she said, ‘Why, what’s wrong?’ and he said, ‘There’s nothing wrong. This is so good I could almost believe it was painted by a man.’ He honestly thought he was paying her a terrific compliment, as if he expected her to say, ‘Why, I’m sure it’s
very
chivalrous of you to say that, Mr. Hofmann!’ ”
    I had the feeling I was treading deep water here. Finally Iasked when she’d started painting herself.
    “Oh shit,” she said, taking another swig of bourbon. “It was all true of me—all ‘monkey see, monkey do.’ I was no painter. These guys had all
studied
, you know—the Art Students League, the American Artists’ School, the National Academy of Design, places like that. These were professionals. I was just a fucking ‘primitive.’ I didn’t know anything, but I watched and I learned the moves.” With her head tilted to one side, she peered at me and said, “You know?”
    “No,” I confessed, “I don’t know.”
    “This is all absolute horseshit,” she said, gaily waving the bottle at the collection of paintings around us. “Trust me, it is,” she added, as if anticipating some dissent from me.
    “Then why did you paint it?”
    “I was lonesome,” she said simply.
    I spent some time looking at it in the growing twilight. By some unknown magic, it was beginning to make a sort of sense to me. “You really think it’s horseshit?”
    She shrugged. “It has its moments, but they’re scattered around too much to be of any use. That’s what Abstract Expressionism was all about. Getting all those moments together and hitting you right in the middle of the forehead with them all at once. Some of those paintings had moments that’d knock you fucking down.”
    As I watched, astonished, tears filled her eyes, spilled over, and coursed down her cheeks, carving white valleys in the dust. Unlike any woman I’ve ever known, she didn’t seem the least self-conscious or apologetic about it. She just