DANDELIONS: City of Romance

I thought I was done with John Schatz, the disgraced decorator. Reba threw him out. But I was wrong. One day my cell rang with its familiar, irritating tune.

“Hello?”

“John Schatz.”

“How did you get my number?”

“Reba.”

When I was able to track her down I found myself in a ceramics studio on Third Street. Women glazed pots and nipped rose from plastic cups. A very lively crew. The girls were beautiful (what artist isn’t?) and laughing in their smocks. Intrigued, I half-forgot my mission. Reba has the power to do this, to confuse her adversaries, to convert them to bemused accomplices.

“Why did you give John Schatz my number?”

“I thought he interested you.”

“He does. But you told me to stay away.”

“I did?”

“You told me to avoid him. He never makes money.”

“I never make money either. And you’re friends with me.”

“You don’t ask me to sell a 1956 Mid-century Modern Italian sofa with brass feet.”

The next day I met John Shatz in a cavernous warehouse, located in a working class neighborhood called The Northeast. Or De Nordeast, as locals say. Schatz wore a square-crown trucker’s cap and Carhartt jacket. Very Proletarian. Except for gray hair he looked like a man in his thirties. He turned his ambitious eye on me. I realized his youthfulness was not a matter of luck or costume, but an exercise of will.

“Welcome!” he called. “To my very successful friend.”

“That’s debatable.” We wore masks. It’s hard to joke with masks.

Schatz inquired about Reba and a few other artists we both knew, or rather, he knew. I envied his profession. Furniture brought him in continual contact with creative people. “I understand,” he said. “You are in sales.”

“That’s not at all true.”

“But you write copy?”

“Only because the company can’t afford a copywriter.”

“Then you’re in sales.” He swung an arm toward the warehouse door. “I want you to see my baby.”

I helped him pull away the canvas. Underneath was a used sofa in the European-Moderne tradition, upholstered in purple and gold damask. It looked to be in good condition. What do I know?

“How would you like to make some money?” Schatz asked.

“I wouldn’t.”

He ignored this. “We have here a classic Georgetti Setee. All the catalogs list this piece at ten grand. Or more. I’ve got five thousand dollars into it. As my agent you get twenty percent of any profit.”

“I told you, I’m not a salesman.”

“You don’t have to be. It’s already sold.”

An hour later I drove through Maple Grove with a canvas-wrapped Italian sofa in the bed of my pickup. I followed my GPS. The houses were getting bigger, with colonnaded entries and outbuildings with pools visible beyond oak trees and maples, now leafless in December.

I struck the door with a heavy brass knocker. It was that kind of house. Catherine Baker opened the door. “Who are you?”

“John Schatz sent me.”

“Who?”

“John Schatz from…”

“I know who he is. Tell him to go to hell.” She began to close the door.

“I have your sofa,” I called, somewhat helplessly. I waved at my truck.

“My sofa?” she said, narrowing her eyes. She was a big girl in the old-fashioned sense. Big and busty, maybe forty. “Come in for a moment.”

Her blonde hair had been hastily combed, and stuck out in a halo, showing the dark interior. She brought two cups of coffee in teacups and we sat in her big living room. Furniture was heavy and artistically placed. A silver eagle on the fireplace mantle would weigh 50 pounds. The sleek Moderne sofa would not have fit anywhere.

Had there been some misunderstanding? I asked her. Because if so we should call and clear it up… She stopped me. “When did you see John last?”

“This morning. We loaded your sofa…”

“Who was he with?”

“He was alone. In his warehouse.”

“Alone? Was a woman there?”

“No.”

“In the office? A dark woman, about thirty, in high heels?”

“Nope.”

Catherine Baker poured more coffee. She had known John Schatz from the very beginning. He hired her, as a matter of fact, just out of her teens. It was a vision of decoration, the art of living he offered. There was nothing she wouldn’t have done for him. At one time. But he had a terrible problem with selfishness. And some other things.

He only hired women, for instance.

There was much she wasn’t telling me. “I don’t regret the years,” Catherine Baker said. “Any of them. It got me Baker and Fox.” I recognized the name. The big appliance dealers.

She took my cup.“It’s an old trick of his, sending a piece over. Tell him it doesn’t work anymore. Not with me.”

I called Schatz, furious.

“She’s not telling the truth,” he said. “Drop the thing off at Berringer’s. Right around the corner. I’ll mail you a check. And one more thing.”

“What’s that.”

“Thank you.”

Mary Berringer’s store was not right around the corner. Thirty miles later I found myself in the pleasant and leafy suburb of Apple Valley, although there were no leaves and the skies had darkened. Berringer’s sat next to Home Depot. And the doors were locked. Driving to the delivery doors, I rang the buzzer several times. No one answered.

Neither did John Schatz. I almost left the Georgetti on the curb. At 7pm I pulled into my garage. “What’s that in your truck,” my wife asked.

I told her.

“It looks like a dead body.”

Maybe next time.

Zita Lapinski had lived all over the world. Singapore, Australia. Amsterdam. Her hair was crow black and remained so. When she arrived in New York she married a much-older man named Walter Daily, a figure from the ‘Fifties with a pipe and gray suit. He built tractor trailers in Cleveland and made another fortune in energy stocks on Wall Street. With Zita one had the impression of length and the elegance that goes with it, long hands and nails, long neck, and a long, narrow, sexless body.

They met at an Andy Warhol opening. The tycoon was captivated by her international background and accent — what was it, Russian? He installed her as one would a painting in his Park Avenue penthouse. Zita Lapinski had come a long way from her semi-impoverished youth in Ames, Iowa.

After her husband’s death she lived with a poet in Little Italy. He was either unlucky or untalented, it was hard to tell. He drank innumerable bottles of wine and had terrible mornings. “You’ll feel better tomorrow, she would say. That was thirty years ago, the height of New York’s decadence.

“Have you met her?” John Schatz asked me.

I did not, and had no intention. “I’m bringing your sofa back. Don’t ask for anything again.”

“Stop and see her. It’s on the way.”

No chance.

“She’s waiting,” John Schatz said. “Just drop it off.”

“How about I drop it on your head?”

“There’s five hundred bucks in it for you.”

Five Hundred? Well… Zita’s place was on the way…

Two men in blue coveralls smoking plastic-tipped cigars unloaded the Georgetti from my truck. Zita Lapinski watched from her living room, where a huge window overlooked the parkway. She turned her black-lined, exotic eyes on me. As exotic as they get in Ames, Iowa.

“Tell me,” she said. “Did John have a woman with him?”

Oh boy.

I walked into the warehouse and slapped the check on his desk. Then stood back. I wanted to see the look on his face. It wasn’t what I expected.

Schatz held the check high and laughed. “I knew you could do it!”

“That check’s for five grand,” I said. “You didn’t make a dime.”

“For the Georgetti? I didn’t pay half that.”

“But you said…”

“I knew they’d whittle you to the bone. Luckily, there was plenty of fat.” He opened a drawer. “I owe you some money, my very capable friend.”

Minneapolis isn’t such a terrible place. Far from it. The neighborhoods are charming, with red brick apartments above pizza joints and flower stores. Brick cobblestones show where asphalt has worn away. Any neighborhood in Chicago or Lower Manhattan would fit right in. Only in winter does one think of Leningrad during the Siege.

Of course I didn’t take his money. I had no intention of driving furniture all over town for the rest of my life.

“If you ask me,” I told him. “Your clients were more interested in you than your sofa.”

John Schatz didn’t answer. He slipped his mask down and popped a stick of gum in his mouth. Smiling, he looked at something far away.