Free Artist's Proof by Gordon Cotler

head—Madeleine’s custodian in the Bemelmans classic I must have read to my children a hundred times. Miss Clavell, who woke in the middle of the night and said, “Something is not right.”
    Something was not right here, and I didn’t know what it was. It couldn’t be much, and if I took the time to try to figure it out I wasn’t going to get any work done. And I had acres to fill on Large.
    I climbed the scaffold and wet my roller.

S IX
    E VEN UNDER FAVORABLE conditions the trip to the city on the Long Island Expressway sometimes made me feel like a medieval knight on a quest. There would be the dragon of the overturned trailer truck, the black knight in the careening Porsche, the malevolent road gangs with their ever-narrowing construction lanes, and at the end of the journey the dreaded city that held the fair princess. Well, not quite. The city held Lonnie Morgenstern.
    I hadn’t seen Lonnie in months, and I filled the endless drive by reviewing, as I did every second or third trip to Soho, our troubled history. An exercise in masochism.
    When Leona Morgenstern and I met in 1977 I had been going to the Art Students League for years. On my first evening in a life drawing class that semester I spotted her opposite me through the model’s arched leg, intent on her work. Her eyes, Jewish and blue, were set in an oval face of flawless alabaster ringed with unruly dark curls. My heart—there is no better word for it—sang.
    After class a few students gathered on the ASL’s shallow front steps facing the trundling buses on West Fifty-seventh Street and talked art. Art theory talk was the kind of gasbagging that set my teeth on edge, but I wanted to get to know this beauty, so I hung around the periphery of the group, contributing just enough platitudes so that I didn’t seem a mere voyeur. On the third such evening I was able to position myself next to her on the second step.
    We made small talk. She had a voice somewhere between sultry and smoky. But liquid. Not so liquid as to pour too easily; slightly viscous. She was taking just the one class, she told me, but as soon as she had some savings she’d be adding another, under a well-known painter whose work she admired. Luckily, so did I.
    Her name was Leona, but she had been called Lonnie since she was six months old. I figured her for twenty; I was twenty-one. She worked for a department store chain as a buyer-trainee in sleepwear, but she didn’t think of herself as on a career track; all she was looking for right now was to earn enough money to further her ambition to paint seriously. The alabaster face turned full on me, like a newly risen moon. And what was my day job?
    â€œI’m a cop.”
    She laughed. “No, seriously.”
    â€œSeriously. I’m a New York City police officer.”
    She stared. “Sid Shale…” She was tasting the name.
    â€œYes, I’m Jewish. It was Shalkowitz. My father shortened it to speed passengers’ complaints against him with the Hack Bureau, but then there never were any. And yes, there are lots of Jewish cops. But not nearly as many as Irish or Italian cops. Too many Jews get suckered into physics and microbiology.”
    â€œStill…,” she said doubtfully.
    â€œThink of the Tel Aviv police force. A hundred percent Jewish.”
    â€œThe firemen too, I suppose,” she said earnestly. At barely twenty she had not yet fashioned her razorlike sense of humor. There was something endearing in her helping me make my points.
    It took another six weeks to persuade her to go out for a cup of coffee after class. She was heavily booked. She had boyfriends by the job lot, and a waiting list. Doctors, lawyers, microbiologists. Nobody, so far as I could tell, on the civil service rolls. What finally got my toe in the door was my drawings. She locked on, and she said the right things—almost the same things I would have said about them.