"Yes, but not working at it."
"Listen, my girlfriend's cooking dinner at my place. Why not join us?"
Wingate demurred politely. Brett insisted.
Five minutes later they left for Country Club Manor.
***
Barbara Zaleski had a key to Brett's apartment and was there when they arrived, already busy in the kitchen. An aroma of roasting lamb was drifting out.
"Hey, scullion!" Brett called from the hallway. "Come, meet a guest."
"If it's another woman," Barbara's voice sailed back, "you can cook your own dinner. Oh, it isn't. Hi!"
She appeared with a tiny apron over the smart, knit suit she had arrived in, having come directly from the OJL agency's Detroit office. The suit, Brett thought appreciatively, did justice to Barbara's figure; he sensed Leonard Wingate observing the same thing. As usual, Barbara had dark glasses pushed up into her thick, chestnut-brown hair, which she had undoubtedly forgotten. Brett reached out, removed the glasses and kissed her lightly.
He introduced them, informing Wingate, "This is my mistress."
"He'd like me to be," Barbara said, "but I'm not. Telling people I am is his way of getting even."
As Brett had expected, Barbara and Leonard Wingate achieved a rapport quickly. While they talked, Brett opened a bottle of Dom Perignon which the three of them shared. Occasionally Barbara excused herself to check on progress in the kitchen.
During one of her absences, Wingate looked around the spacious apartment living room. "Pretty nice pad."
"Thanks." When Brett leased the apartment a year and a half ago he had been his own interior decorator, and the furnishings reflected his personal taste for modern design and flamboyant coloring. Bright yellows, mauves, vermilions, cobalt greens predominated, yet were used imaginatively, so that they merged as an attractive whole. Lighting complemented the colors, highlighting some areas, diminishing others. The effect was to create - ingeniously - a series of moods within a single room.
At one end of the living room was an open door to another room.
Wingate asked, "Do you do much of your work here?"
"Some." Brett nodded toward the open door. "There's my Thinkolarium. For when I need to get creative and be uninterrupted away from that wired-for-sound Taj Mahal we work in." He motioned vaguely in the direction of the company's Design-Styling Center.
"He does other things there, too," Barbara said. She had returned as Brett spoke. "Come in, Leonard. I'll show you."
Wingate followed her, Brett trailing.
The other room, while colorful and pleasant also, was equipped as a studio, with the paraphernalia of an artist-designer. A pile of tissue flimsies on the floor beside a drafting table showed where Brett had raced through a series of sketches, tearing off each flimsy, using a new one from the pad beneath as the design took shape. The last sketch in the series - a rear fender style - was pinned to a cork board.
Wingate pointed to it. "Will that one be for real?"
Brett shook his head. "You play with ideas, get them out of your system, like belching. Sometimes, that way, you get a notion which will lead to something permanent in the end. This isn't one." He pulled the flimsy down and crumpled it. "If you took all the sketches which precede any new car, you could fill Cobo Hall with paper."
Barbara switched on a light. It was in a corner of the room where an easel stood, covered by a cloth. She removed the cloth carefully.
"And then there's this," Barbara said. "This isn't for discarding."
Beneath the cloth was a painting in oils, almost - but not quite - finished.
"Don't count on it," Brett said. He added, "Barbara's very loyal. At times it warps her judgment."
The tall, gray-haired Negro shook his head. "Not this time, it hasn't."
He studied the painting with admiration.
It was of a collection of automotive discards, heaped together. Brett had assembled the materials for his model - laid out on a board ahead of the easel, and lighted by a spotlight - from an auto wrecker's junk pile. There were several burned-brown spark plugs, a broken camshaft, a discarded oil can, the entrails of a carburetor, a battered headlight, a moldy twelve-volt battery, a window handle, a section of radiator, a broken wrench, some assorted rusty nuts and washers. A steering wheel, its horn ring missing, hung lopsidedly above.
No collection could have been more ordinary, less likely to inspire great art. Yet, remarkably, Brett had made the junk assortment come alive, had conveyed to his canvas both rugged beauty and a mood of sadness and nostalgia. These were broken relics, the painting seemed to say: burned-out, unwanted, all usefulness departed; nothing was ahead save total disintegration. Yet once, however briefly, they had had a life, had functioned, representing dreams, ambitions, achievements of mankind. One knew that all other achievements - past, present, future, no matter how acclaimed - were doomed to end similarly, would write their epilogues in garbage dumps. Yet was not the dream, the brief achievement - of itself - enough?
Leonard Wingate had remained, unmoving, before the canvas. He said slowly,
"I know a little about art. You're good. You could be great."
"That's what I tell him." After a moment, Barbara replaced the cloth on the easel and turned out the light. They went back into the living room.
"What Barbara means," Brett said, pouring more Dom Perignon, "is that I've sold my soul for a mess of pottage." He glanced around the apartment. "Or maybe a pot of messuage."
"Brett might have managed to do designing and fine art," Barbara told Wingate, "if he hadn't been so damned successful at designing. Now, all he has time to do where painting's concerned is to dabble occasionally.
With his talent, it's a tragedy."
Brett grinned. "Barbara has never seen the high beam - that designing a car is every bit as creative as painting. Or that cars are my thing," He remembered what he had told the two students only a few weeks ago: You breathe, eat, sleep cars . . . wake up in the night, it's cars you think about . . . like a religion. Well, he still felt that way himself, didn't he? Maybe not with the same intensity as when he first came to Detroit.
But did anyone really keep that up? There were days when he looked at others working with him, wondering. Also, if he were honest, there were other reasons why cars should stay his 'thing'. Like what you could do with fifty thousand dollars a year, to say nothing of the fact that he was only twenty-six and much bigger loot would come in a few years more. He asked Barbara lightly, "Would you still breeze in to cook dinner if I lived in a garret and smelled of turpentine?"
She looked at him directly. "You know I would."
While they talked of other things, Brett decided: He would finish the canvas, which he hadn't touched in weeks. The reason he had stayed away from it was simple. Once he started painting, it absorbed him totally and there was just so much total absorption which any life could stand.
Over dinner, which tasted as good as it had smelled, Brett steered the conversation to what Leonard Wingate had told him in the bar downtown.
Barbara, after hearing of the cheating and victimization of hard core workers, was shocked and even angrier than Brett.
She asked the question which Brett DeLosanto hadn't. "What color are they - the instructor and the secretary who took the checks?"
Wingate raised his eyebrows. "Does it make a difference?"
"Listen," Brett said. "You know damn well it does."
Wingate answered tersely, "They're white. What else?"
"They could have been black." It was Barbara, thoughtfully.
"Yes, but the odds are against it." Wingate hesitated. "Look, I'm a guest here . . ."
Brett waved a hand. "Forget it!"
There was a silence between them, then the gray-haired Negro said, "I like to make certain things clear, even among friends. So don't let this uniform fool you: the Oxford suit, a college diploma, the job I have. Oh, sure, I'm the real front office nigger, the one they point to when they say: You see, a black man can go high. Well, it's true for me, because I was one of the few with a daddy who could pay for a real education, which is the only way a black man climbs. So I've climbed, and maybe I'll make it to the top and be a company director yet. I'm still young enough, and I'll admit I'd like it; so would the company. I know one thing. If there's a choice between me and a white man, and providing I can cut the mustard, I'll get the job. That's the way the dice are rolling, baby; they're weighted my way because the p.r. department and some others would just love to shout: Look at us! We've got a board room black!"
Leonard Wingate sipped his coffee, which Barbara had served.
"Well, as I said, don't let the facade fool you. I'm still a member of my race." Abruptly he put the cup down. Across the dining table his eyes glared at Brett and Barbara. "When something happens like it did today, I don't just get angry. I burn and loathe and hate - everything that's white."
The glare faded. Wingate raised his coffee cup again, though his hand was shaking.
After a moment he said, "James Baldwin wrote this: "Negroes in this country are treated as none of you would dream of treating a dog or a cat." And it's true - in Detroit, just as other places. And for all that's happened in the past few years, nothing's really changed in most white people's attitudes, below the surface. Even the little that's being done to ease white consciences - like hard core hiring, which that white pair tried to screw, and did - is only surface scratching. Schools, housing, medicine, hospitals, are so bad here it's unbelievable - unless you're black; then you believe it because you know, the hard way. But one day, if the auto industry intends to survive in this town - because the auto industry is Detroit - it will have to come to grips with improving the black life of the community, because no one else is going to do it, or has the resources or the brains to." He added, "Just the same, I don't believe they will."