“Food, you understand,” Rif would say, watching me eat, “is really nothing but the mood and the place you are eating at. This same dish could poison a millionaire … and if you were in love you would think this dish vulgar. But the time and place are just right for it. You are not thinking of going to your banker or to bed.”
“I don't get it,” I said.
“You will someday.” I did twenty years later…
After we would eat we would feel better and Rifkinoff would paint a flower canvas … there were two hundred of them unsold in the studio … the landlord said they made very fine roofs for his rabbit huts. Rif, as everyone called him, said he didn't mind. He would lean back in his chair and chew a fistful of goujon and say: “Think of the turmoil and shouting that will come to Paris when in fifty years the collectors come tearing down M. Hilaire de Salignac's (our landlord, a poor but proud member of an old southern family—southern France, of course) rabbit huts to recover priceless paintings by Ignacy Dyonizy Rifkinoff! It is to laugh. Can I borrow your white shirt? I am playing contract bridge this afternoon with Miss Moffet.”
“Of course, Rif.”
Miss Moffet owned several oil wells in Kansas, but lived in Paris because, she said, it smelled better. “And besides, could I get L'Humanité fresh every day in Kansas?”
Rif and I always said no … not that it mattered, as she couldn't read French anyway. She liked to wrap gifts in French newspapers and send them back to Kansas, to show the folks back home she was dipping into culture. Rif and I loved Miss Moffet, and when we were very hungry we used to flip coins to see who would go to her and ask her if she wanted to buy a flower painting. (Somewhere in Kansas today is the greatest collection of Rifkinoffs in the world. The rabbit huts were burned down during the war, and Rif died in the battle of Warsaw.)
So Rif would go off to play contract bridge with people at the Ritz, and I would go to O'Rahilly's, a vast studio behind a church, where half a hundred art students worked from the nude (and slightly soiled) flesh of a beautiful model, under the eagle eye of old O'Rahilly's. He was a bitter old man with a polished head and a dark burning wit and a sad set of eyebrows. He had once been a great painter, in his youth, and had beaten Monet and Renoir at art shows, and had been spoken of as the greatest painter of light since Turner … only he had given it up to go to Ireland, and help in the Trouble. He had spent fifty years there—and when Ireland was a Free State he hated it and its narrow ways. His life was wasted, he used to say. He came back to Paris and started a studio and took in only those students he wanted with him. He spent his week ends getting drunk with James Joyce and reciting poems by Yeats until the brandy gave out. He no longer painted as his fingers were badly twisted, but he would rub a big thumb on a wet canvas and make something almost worth while out of a bad sketch.
He would come up behind me and stick his damned thumb into my canvas and snarl: “What is this, a buttock or two loaves of bread? Can't you see the shoulder go back … not the forehead, and who ever called a wedge like that a nose? Why don't you steal dogs for a living?”
“I don't like dogs.”
“Well, that's something in your favor. Where is Rifkinoff?”
“His aunt died.”
“She died two weeks ago … and before Christmas, and after the last frost.”
“He comes from a large family, sir.”
“It's the same aunt. He's most likely playing bridge on her coffin.”
“I don't know,” I said.
“He's at Miss Moffet's,” said the old man, and he allowed himself his daily joke, “Well, only the brave chemin de fer.”
“Yes, sir,” I said and I carefully redrew the buttocks his thumb had outlined on my canvas …
I mustn't give the impression that we went hungry very often in Paris … that only happens in books. We made a great deal of money doing drawings for magazines and Rif was a very fine bridge player. If he had not been honest he might have made a career for himself as a card player, but he didn't. He could have been a very great lawyer too but he couldn't stand the dishonesty that was a lawyer's stock in trade. We did dream of inventing a roulette system or a new school of art, or of winning a sweepstake, so we could hire a boat and tour the Greek islands, and eat new kinds of foods, and talk to new kinds of girls, and drink wine from bottles that hadn't been refilled by waiters.
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