The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  I recall my reaction to Westie’s studio, to the pickled eggs labeled Rat Poison and the molar umbrella and now that I’ve connected this work to the maker of that long-ago wax penguin lamp, I understand my response better. The things she makes have cloud logic, are recognizable but alien, parts swapped out; they resemble in their incongruity a memory that has been returned to you from a mind not your own.

  I reject what is happening; I reject the way Westie bores through the air between us, the way she projects her dominance through the space.

  “I have enough,” says Westie. “I don’t want this one on set. Put her on something else.”

  I require being escorted out, the AD’s hand on my shoulder. Of course it’s bullshit, he agrees. A stupid prank, a long time ago, but Westie is talent, and I am bottom-rung crew, and the AD’s sorry—he’s actually sorry—but I’m going to have to leave. There is a faint trace of “I told you so,” but also a kindness in his disappointment and I wonder, what if there are men like him all along the parallel tracks of my life, if I just keep missing them for some reason, just keep failing to catch onto whatever they are offering?

  I wasn’t completely lying to Mr. Boyfriend when I told him I was working as an EMT. I’d gone through the training, nine months of extra classes so I could sign onto CAVA, the volunteer ambulance that serves campus and Morningside Heights. Almost everyone else who did the training was Pre-Med, was thinking about getting into graduate school. I had begun to feel like something important was missing from me, that I did not quite react to things with my native intensity anymore. For example, I could sometimes forget for days that my grandmother had passed away. For an ambulance driver, however, being imperturbable was a virtue. And maybe, I thought, a few knife wounds would wake up in me whatever had gone dormant. But I never went on a single run. There turned out to be a drug test which I knew I wouldn’t pass. Still, along the way I did learn about the physiology of cloud, that clinically, cloud overdose is impossible because of how quickly the body metabolizes it.

  You sweat cloud out almost as fast as you take it in, cannot die of it no matter how much you eat. On the other hand, this doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences, outcomes from too much cloud over a life. You consume enough and things happen—the recognition troubles, the meaty deposits, the confusion and the sickness. You give away your mind that many times, you dismantle yourself on that many occasions, and eventually, you can no longer put yourself back together. They may not call it an overdose, but it amounts to the same thing.

  The second night of filming West 125, Paul comes home smelling of craft services, boursin sandwiches and donuts. “You still have that cloud?”

  There’s one spoon left from the Avenue D excursion. I’ve been doling them out to Paul since he’d given me the stash to hold on opening night, but this last one, I’ve unthinkingly secreted in one of my old hiding places, and Paul watches as I extract it from the back of a drawer.

  “Sorry,” I say. The hoarding is still instinctive with me, is the addict’s reflex which getting clean hasn’t left behind.

  Paul dangles the spoon from his lips. He’s always at his best, his kindest, just before the cloud hits. “You’re so stark, Mellie. You have the moral compass of a nine-year-old. You’ve got to shed that good person/bad person mindset. Out here in the oxygen, up here on the top of Manhattan, I forgive you. I forgive whatever is making you look at me that way.”

  Paul’s window fronts on the fire escape. He sits next to his ashtray, his burning cigarette perched on the edge for when the cloud vacates his mouth. Technically, the apartment is nonsmoking, but I don’t care, really. It’s Paul who seems hip to things like security deposits. It has surprised me about him, his areas of pickiness, his little specializations in the country of worry. For example, getting back security deposits, sneakers as cool or not cool, what the weather report predicts. I want this quality to translate into awareness of things like the bruise on my shoulder, things like whether anyone is lurking suspiciously on the street below, or where we are getting the money for our groceries. Paul watches the action on 109, the junkies, the shooting of junk, but he doesn’t see anything.

  “What did you even film today?” I ask.

  “There’s only one scene,” says Paul. “One long scene, broken into five shots.”

  “Well, what’s it about?”

  “What everything’s about, Mellie. How small and petty we all are inside. How our lofty ambitions for ourselves and how the bullshit myths that we make evaporate when a tiny little treasure is offered to us. The elaborate narrative we make to justify our own basic selfishness, our animal minds. All the things that make more sense than ‘good’ or ‘bad.’”

  The spoon drops from his lips.

  —pop—

  I watch the depth and meaning drain from him; I watch the little sparks reignite within; I wait for the evidence that I am still in there somewhere.

  “I’m entirely out of socks,” he says. “Everything’s still downtown. I don’t want to go downtown.”

  The news from the East Village is terrific. Other publications have released reviews, and the owner of the St. Mark’s is considering moving the revamped production to the main stage. But still, they don’t call Paul.

  “Borrow mine,” I say, and pull laundry-gray tube socks onto the feet of my cloud-compliant boyfriend. “Come to bed.”

  The next day, the AD calls for Paul in the morning, and tells me I can come down to the set after they wrap for the day; there’s some location work that needs to be done. To kill time, I go to the library and look up Westie in Art Forum. The critics argue over her graduate thesis video, if it’s about lynching or vegetarianism or evil. In various interviews, she claims her next production will be an animated comedy about genocide, will be an exact replica of her last film, will document a lover’s breakdown in real time. “Actually, though,” Valerie is quoted as saying, “I abhor documentary. You know those films where everything was incredibly fucked up between the crew and the talent and everyone’s crying in their trailers every night and there’s a civil war thirty miles away, but it’s still a musical? That’s my kind of movie.”

  Valerie Weston—Westie—Video Artist—Filmmaker—Sculptor—Painter.

  See: —20 C women American artists–Realism, Anti-realism, surrealism

  b. 1965 Brookline Massachusetts. Daughter of Pierce Weston, Industrialist and Mamie Weston, 1981 Director of Membership Junior League Boston. Major Works:

  —Boy Girl Tree Meadow

  —Wax Zoology

  —Several Originals

  — (Found) Objects

  —The Dentist’s Apprentice

  I look up Mr. Boyfriend’s family name, the real estate holding company in New Jersey, and turn up the accidental, single-car crash that killed his parents on a sunny afternoon as well as a guy with his same last name in Philadelphia who testified at a trial, then ended up impaled on a bridge. There’s an image of some post-Communist factory exploding. Also, there is a photograph of pit bulls being seized from a breeder.

  I exit blinkingly into the afternoon. It’s still too early, too early to be expecting Paul. I think of his socks, consider washing the gray pair he’d left on my floor, but somehow it seems easier to take the train down to the theater. I’m skittish on the subway. Little scraps of movement keep attracting my eye, but when I turn, I find that corner of the car empty. It’s hot and I’m feeling disgusting.

  The girl at the box office, the one who’d taken all the free lattes, ignores me, or pretends to ignore me when I wave from the front door.

  “I’m here to pick up a bag?” I say, tapping on the glass in the doorway. The girl nods me to the empty upstairs. I see none of Paul’s things. The bed where he’d been sleeping appears to have been taken over by someone else. Eventually, Nadine appears, having returned from church. She startles to see me, showing something in her gaze which she masks with a smile.

  “He left his backpack here? Are you sure?”

&nb
sp; I shrug. “What he told me.”

  “Why didn’t he come down himself? Is it because he missed rehearsal yesterday?”

  I shrug. I find you get the most information when you act as if you already know, as if you don’t need to be told.

  “Or has someone told him? I knew Ned was going to tell him.”

  With Nadine’s help, I manage to find Paul’s frame pack, with the bullshit Maple Leaf patch he’s worn since the Gulf War.

  “Listen, you know and I know that Paul’s the best actor among them. It’s bull crap, the casting. But, also, honestly, it’s a theater company. There have to be consequences. If you go off message.”

  “Because of the review, still?” I ask.

  Nadine shrugs. “It probably seems petty to you from the outside. But it’s like showboating, like Paul isn’t always doing what’s best for the group. You know the concept of stealing the scene?”

  “I think,” I say.

  “Well, so, it’s not just an outcome of being better than the other players. It’s like, a stylistic choice. A choice to act in a way that commands attention. When you notice the acting, then it takes you out of the play.”

  “So—” I’m trying to put all the pieces together.

  “So, that’s why he is going to be cut from the mainstage production. It’s still not official, but we all know. It was only ever an experiment anyway, Paul in the lead, but Davos could have kept him as a villager. That’s the part I disagree with.”

  My initial response is an ugly delight. It’s disloyal, I know. But it feels like a victory, like I’ve won him from them, somehow. I say some girl-to-girl thing to Nadine. Like, you really deserve better than these guys, or another empty exit line. I want to be alone on the subway, rocking back and forth. New York, I say, it’s out of my control. Things are starting to spin and I don’t know why or where they’re going or what to do about it. Keep me awake, New York. I don’t want to miss it.

  I haven’t eaten all day. My lips are puckered with dehydration, but I don’t feel hungry. I ride the subway in a daze of starvation and paranoia. I get to my stop, but I have that recognition problem where I don’t know where I am and then I have to walk back from 125th. Some of the crew is outside the studio smoking, but no one makes eye contact as I pass, so I can’t gauge how much my shakiness is visible on the outside. In my apartment, sorting through Paul’s clothes, the delusion develops. They don’t seem like his things. They seem like things from some other Paul, someone I’ve never known. I want cloud, but Paul’s eaten the last spoon and I can’t remember how you get it, how I get it. I know I’m waiting for a phone call, for a page from the AD saying I can come back, but it’s past whatever hour I was supposed to hear and now time is putty, stretching to infinite thinness, articulating into strands. Darkness begins to fall, and it’s one long scene.

  I jump when the phone rings.

  “Amelia.” It is not Paul, not the AD calling to say I can come. It’s my mother’s psychic goon. “I’m concerned you may have misunderstood. This reading is going to be free of charge. I personally am getting nothing out of it, do you hear me? This is something your sister asked of me before she left, and I am doing it out of my continued regard. Even and despite, with no benefit to me. Your danger is elevated. There is a very dear person to you who may be at great risk.”

  “Sister?” I say.

  “Are you still eating the unusual foods? Have you recently changed your diet or are you about to? This is very important,” she says.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Who told you to call me?”

  And then, it is like something has been swapped in for something else. I hear a PA system announcing departures in the background, and it’s as if she’s calling from Nancy, like Zarah has been switched with Nancy.

  “Your sister is coming for you. She sees the danger, and she’s coming to get you.”

  I hang up. It is time. I push aside the cloud hunger, the crawling sensation of being followed, and start walking toward the studio on West 125th.

  Fifteen

  New York

  1993

  In Manhattan’s protracted evening, the substitution art of Westie’s 125th Street studio is somewhat less unbalancing than when it had been full daylight. Something has shifted in the arrangement of the objects; objects have been placed between other objects, so that the viewer can follow a sort of logic. Pickled eggs and bird’s nest, for example, knucklebone dice and tooth umbrella. On this visit, I can be pretty confident the molars are actual molars, enamel and calcium, rather than some wax facsimile. I can see a few fillings and the dark discoloration of old cavities.

  It is not fully dark because it is never fully dark in Manhattan. The light pollution, street lamp and passing car and all-night deli, invades an interior in even the deepest night. After sundown, city dwellers enter a kind of non-time or extended twilight which perhaps explains why the bars stay open until four and why a daytime party feels so transgressive. Westie’s art works in Manhattan, the shelving dissolving in the perpetual magic hour of the city. I hear rather than see someone entering the studio behind me.

  “She collected those, you know,” says the voice in the muted light. It’s my AD. “Fucked up, right? She posted ads at like shelters and places poor people would take their kids, social service agencies, certain neighborhood parks and select schools. This is in Boston, not New York—back where she’s from. And it’s more sick because she is actually rich, was born to money. Has never worked at anything but making this stuff. So, anyway, in the ads, she’s like, let me be your tooth fairy. Basically, it’s offensive.”

  “Ali?” I say to the shape moving through the gloom of the darkened studio.

  He comes into the light, smiling. “You can never remember my name. And I’m beginning to think you will never go to coffee with me.”

  “You said you wanted me for set work?”

  “Yeah, but they’re still shooting up there. We’re not going to get to it today. Anyway, it’s stupid. She wants us to do this stop-motion thing with the cubbies: film, empty certain ones, film again, until the whole configuration is different. She’s drawn this map, but no one can follow it.”

  At this point in my life, I have not yet seen Boy Girl Meadow Tree, the student film which had so won over Ansel and Albert, but I’ve heard about it, and the idea for the shelving sequence is similar in a way, a very slow transformation from routine to atrocity. Valerie Weston’s genius, her special quality, came from her absolute willingness, her enthusiasm for doing the things that appalled other people. At a certain point in our lives, this will make us well suited for one another, but the person I am about to become will not begin for a few more minutes. For the moment, I’m still capable of qualms, of being shocked or repulsed.

  Valerie Weston is watching this Mellie, even now. I hear her, behind me, in the studio’s murk. I turn, expecting one of the brothers, expecting Paul, but I’m wrong. It’s her, her own white, privately educated teeth a disembodied smile in the dimness.

  She’s laughing at me. “You thought you’d dodged me, huh? Well, you’re here. Come on up. You’re supposed to have a good eye. We could use another opinion.”

  Light isn’t perpetual up here. On the roof, there are twenty minutes left before darkness, even accounting for the ambient light of window squares and Kansas Fried Chicken and the McDonald’s at the corner. Albert is in cut-off shorts and a white men’s t-shirt. Ansel is chewing out the script supervisor who fans herself with the continuity photos. The AD extracts them from her hands and shows them to me. A breeze has picked up. Even though it’s been a hot day, here in the air, after dark, my skin cools. I don’t pick out Paul right away and then I locate him.

  He is seated, wrapped in a green cotton blanket, and sipping a coffee. We wave, far away from each other. I think: he looks spaced out. Not high, not like he’s on cloud, but like he did that night I collected him from the St. Mark’s Theater.

  “Everyone nice and rested?” Westie asks. She has the
kind of voice which always carries, which others listen to. “Everyone ready to roll?”

  I glance over the rooftop, the water tanks and the thinning of buildings toward the Hudson, the density to the north and east, the purple clouds against the indigo horizon. I take in the chicken coop three roofs over, the tile details on the building that fronts LaSalle. This isn’t a set, precisely, but Valerie has purposefully done violence to the sense of the normal world. The objects hanging from the clotheslines are not clothing, for example, but loose pieces of yarn roughly strung together. For another example, there are train tracks running along the asphalt roof tile, a berth that appears to have come from a vintage sleeping car. Still: the familiar world seeps in. New York is vast and doesn’t want to be squeezed into a costume to suit one woman’s whims. A horn, for example, honks its irritation at the intersection with Broadway. The moon, its benign presence rising over the scene, inserts time into the piece, suggests an ending and relief. “Get rid of it,” I say.

  I can tell Ansel and Albert think I’m a nut, but Valerie Weston consults with the AD and looks through the DP’s lens. She makes minor adjustments, calls the properties master, and in a few minutes, someone shifts the yarn clothesline and the moon disappears.

  Westie peers through the lens again, nods to herself, and then favors me with a look. “That’s it,” she says. There is much in this phrase, acknowledgement, recognition of mutual skills. When later, in Los Angeles, she hunts me down to work for her and I in turn introduce her to my employer Lew Cohen, it will be because of the moon and not what is about to happen with Paul.

  “OK,” I agree.

  “Places, everyone,” calls the AD. Ansel and Albert fall silent.

  Paul stands. He’s dressed in boxers and a t-shirt. Another man, the main actor, takes a place on the lower bunk of the berth. He is wearing a bandana, smoking a cigarette. He is not tall. One of the PAs places a backpack on a pale chalk X very near the actor.