Until one day coming out of the Bowladrome on lower Broadway in New York, Joe in his coveralls and boots, shaking out his limbs for the walk to his boarding room, when he came upon a man and a woman.
The man spoke first. “Hey,” he said. “I know you.”
Joe tilted his head.
“We’ve met before.”
The man was all forehead, with black curly hair around the edges. He held his head as though he wished you to admire the magnificence and plenitude of his forehead. His chin was tucked into his muffler, he had a beard and mustache that likewise suggested that his face was beneath notice, his bespectacled eyes were weak, his nose (he unfurled a handkerchief and blew it) faulty, but his forehead! It gleamed beneath the streetlight; his wife bent away from its dazzle. She wore a brown cloth coat fixed with a pewter pin shaped like a lobster. (She was the important one, though Joe didn’t know that yet.) It was entirely possible, thought Joe, that he’d met the man in a bathhouse but they had not paid attention to each other’s face, and that the moment the man remembered in the presence of his wife he would shriek and scuttle away.
“I’m pretty sure not,” said Joe.
“Yes!” said the man. “At the Jackdaws.”
“Oh,” said Joe, relieved. “No, that wasn’t me.”
“It was,” said the man. “No, I’m sure of it. The Jackdaws,” he said. “Thanksgivingtime, or thereabouts. You were sitting on Abigail’s lap.”
“I don’t know Abigail.”
“Very likely!” the man said. “Not a requirement, for entrance to her lap. Constance, tell him: we’ve met.”
The woman was very small, with a round face and round red glasses. She seemed to be wearing a round sailor’s hat. “Leave him alone, Manny.”
“I will not! Not only,” said Manny, appraising his wife, “will I not leave him alone, I will very threateningly take him to dinner, and I will pay the bill, and we will discuss the Jackdaws, and we will introduce him to Arthur, and we will crack open our fortune cookies and follow the directions therein. What do you think of that.”
“Well!” said the woman. “Can’t argue. You like Chinese food?” she said to Joe.
“I guess I might,” said Joe, though he was thirty-nine years old and had never tasted it.
They went to Chen Wei’s on Thirteenth. Arthur turned out to be their favorite waiter, a Chinese-looking man in his seventies who wore a red bow tie and spoke English with a disorienting County Cork accent very much like Joe’s aunt Rose. Joe couldn’t figure out why they wanted to introduce him, though they shook hands. Arthur was so old that every time he showed up with a plate Joe half stood to help him with it. This incensed Arthur. “Lookit,” he said to Joe, “lookit,” but he was so mad he couldn’t finish the thought. To make peace, Manny made them both sit down and went to the kitchen to get the plates himself.
“Oddest thing,” said Manny. “Chinese makes my forehead sweat. You don’t believe me, I can tell. He doesn’t believe me, Arthur. Feel my forehead!”
Arthur said, “The man does not want to feel your terrible forehead.”
“Sure he does.”
“He does not,” said Arthur. “No man alive wants such a t’ing.”
“Listen,” said the woman to Joe. “What do you do?”
“Manage a bowling alley.”
“Really?” she said. She sounded genuinely touched. Her voice was buttery and odd. He found he trusted her. Now Manny was trying to convince Arthur to touch his forehead. “I’m wondering if I could paint you. Mostly I don’t paint people. I paint shipyards. Or train yards. But—no, please, I’d love to paint you.”
“Well,” said Joe, “I don’t have too much time—”
“I’ll pay you, of course,” she said.
A month later he was sitting naked on a stool in New York City, surrounded by strangers and entirely relaxed. Men and women: they drew him with bits of charcoal. There were twenty-five faces in the room and thirteen of them were Joe Wear’s.
It was as though he had to be turned into a stage prop before he could turn back into a human being. What had he been? He wasn’t sure. Not human the way the rest of the world had been, because being human meant getting along with other human beings, same as being a fox meant running with foxes. Who thought of him in the world, when he was not in front of them? Not a single person. Though it had been a case of mistaken identity, Manny and Constance had seen him that night. Three months in New York City and he’d concluded that he was as invisible there as he’d been in Massachusetts, and then somebody had said, I know you. Constance particularly. Of course she painted him naked, that didn’t surprise him—what surprised him was that he felt not a single scrap of modesty. He didn’t care. To be looked at was no threat.
Soon enough Joe was posing for artists everywhere in the city, in studios and classes. They liked him for his angularity, the honest muscles of his trade, his ability to hold the most punishing poses for ages, even if it might put him into bed spasming the next day. Then Constance introduced him to yoga. Like laundry for muscles: it was as though he had himself steam cleaned and steam pressed and folded perfectly back into his body’s compartments. He still ached, limped, stiffened up, spasmed, but it allowed him to model day after day.
It was an age of murals: Joe Wear appeared as sailors and Gods, as Columbus arriving in America, as John Smith, as Powhatan greeting him. He had never known what it was like to be beloved. He took advantage of it. An authentic tough among all the artists: he actually knew how to fix things. The artists splinted and patched but no repair they made ever lasted.
At one show, at the Louska Gallery, you could see a two-foot-high plaster maquette of Joe Wear looking at a pink and green watercolor of Joe Wear who was turning his head in the direction of a disembodied leg of Joe Wear, knee like a boulder, foot kicking aside a flying ladder. Joe Wear, the real one, bone and muscle, came to the opening in his coveralls. (The artists loved his coveralls. They asked where he got them but he wouldn’t say. “I came by ’em honest,” he’d say, and they knew it, it’s why, in their dungarees and fishing sweaters and leather sandals, they loved him.) Like Cracker Graham he’d figured out that a casual roll of his cuffs, ankle and wrist, gave him a louche, alluring look. Then he realized short-sleeved coveralls were even more effective. The opening was in March. Another man would have shivered in the thin coveralls and canvas tennis shoes, but Joe Wear loved the cold, the way it made lesser mortals say, “You must be freezing! How do you stand it?” He felt the cold and shook it off, in order to be admired.
When Ethan Olcoff showed up at the Louska Gallery, he was wearing shorts and sandals, a long-sleeved striped sailor’s shirt tucked into a belt. He had dark curls and blue eyes and a long nose that sliced at Joe Wear’s heart. Constance whispered in his ear, “His father invented the shopping cart. You’d think he could afford socks. Well,” she said, pulling back to regard Joe, “I suppose you’ll keep each other warm.”