Finally he got her to look at him, and they began their reunion on the tiny single bed that had once belonged to his aunt.
They took a walk. He should have known right away that something was wrong by the way she dealt with red lights.
She dealt with red lights by pretending they did not exist, and at the slightest opening wading into the avenue.
“Honey,” he said, pleading, “Baby. Please. The red light has nothing personally against you. It is not an insult. You have to respect it. We don’t have zebra crossings the way you do in London. The cars here don’t stop!”
“I‘ve been to New York” was her cool response.
His plan for their first full day together was not realized. It turned out she had friends in New York. They met one for lunch at a fashionable restaurant he had never been to before, though he’d heard of it. Then they met another at a gallery he had never been to, and together strolled to yet another gallery he had been to. She was obviously dear friends with the owner; it was obvious by the way he burst forth from that hidden back room, cordoned by a velvet rope, and gave her a hug.
Later that night she took him to a restaurant he had never been to but had read about in magazines and met more friends of hers. Their eyes were bright with excitement and a kind of amusement. He remembered how exciting it can be to see someone you know from home in some faraway place. It’s one of those irrational but powerful forces, like the excitement of hearing your favorite song, which you own, on the radio.
He introduced her to some of his friends with great pride, and kept casting her surreptitious glances, to see if she was appreciating them, as though they were artworks to be marveled at.
But now, through her eyes, his friends seemed more like boys than men. What was it about American men that made them so attached to that glorious moment when they first become grown-ups but don’t have to actually behave in a particularly grown-up fashion? There was something maddeningly blithe about them, immature, reluctant to take on responsibility.
“I want to take you to the Russian baths,” she said. “Have you been?”
AS WAS THE case with nearly every other establishment she had taken him to, he had not. And as was the case with nearly every other establishment she had taken him to, it was a strange fascinating place that he berated himself for not having known about.
The Russian baths consisted of a sauna, a steam room, a plunging pool of cold chlorinated water, and the main event, the bath itself—a large, furnace-heated room with concrete tiers on which people sat. He was familiar enough with the sauna and steam rooms of the various sports and health clubs; he hadn’t forgotten the Harmonie Club’s sauna with its well-fed, middle-aged patrons. But those places were meant to cosset, soothe, and keep life at bay. The Russian baths had a kind of raw brutality that seemed to say: “Bring it on, give me all you’ve got.”
Entering the Russian baths was like entering a dungeon full of writhing tortured bodies. The floor was made of rough stones. The heat slapped his face and singed his ears. The room was full of people wet with their own sweat. It was standing room only. Faucets spewed cold water into buckets, which people would hoist over their heads. Their flesh was lurid under the bare lightbulbs. Everywhere there was skin: black and brown and mocha and yellow and bright pink.
Men with opulent rolls of fat and hairy chests seemed to be trying to sweat out their age, as though the brutal heat would perform a kind of reduction, and they would emerge closer to their younger, more taut selves.
Men who had harder, younger bodies, like his own, seemed to be performing a kind of distillation, a purification in which all unnecessary fluids were purged to make their bodies more pure and potent.
The women’s shapes were varied too, but distinctions of pretty and ugly were obscured in the heat. Such hot bodies in such close proximity seemed, at first, disgusting, but it was comforting and exciting too, because everyone was glaringly human in his or her near nakedness. In a few moments all of Alex’s thoughts turned to issues of survival—how to survive the heat, how to survive his duties as a host, how to survive her.
Alex and Katrina took a seat on one of the benches. He told himself over and over: This is pleasurable, this is good, I like this.
Faucets poured cold water continually into white buckets, placed around the room, which filled to the brim and then overflowed until one of the heat-struck inhabitants hoisted one over his or her head. Each faucet poured at a different speed, with a different velocity. There was a kind of melody of pouring, of water flowing, that filled the room, punctuated by the frequent loud splashes of someone upending a bucket over themselves.
In the corner two Russian men were beating a woman.
“She’s getting a platza,” said Katrina.
The woman’s skin was white. She was plump. Her bathing suit was a bright blue one-piece, and, with the casual ease of someone who knew what they were doing, she pulled it down for them, exposing her breasts. Her pale pink nipples bobbed into view for everyone to see.
Then she lay facedown on a wooden slat. A veteran, Alex thought. But then the men put their fingers under her bathing suit and pulled it farther down. Her ass popped out into the open, and he saw her twitch a little. Once it’s out in the open, an ass is just an ass, but the moment of transition between hidden and exposed is always fraught.
Alex remembered the first time he told Katrina that he loved her. Another fraught transition. The announcement caused him pain and grief. Why? It had felt like a surrender, a defeat. It had felt like an awful birth. He was sure she did not love him back, or did not love him enough, or did not have the resources to love him as much as he needed to be loved.
And did he love her? Or was he just talking himself into it? He wasn’t sure. At the moment he hated her. He had a primitive and brutal notion of how love worked. He associated love with pain; the pain of wanting. He had been loved abundantly but was somewhat apathetic in the face of it. He had a terrible addiction to love as a drop of water that falls into a parched mouth.
He cast a glance at Katrina. Her cheeks were flushed. She blew some hair from her face. Her elegant feet looked pretty against the crude concrete of the Russian bath’s floor. She wore a black bikini, wrapped her bottom in a towel, and averted her eyes from the other bodies packed into the sweltering room.
She had told him that her previous visit had been on the all-women day, and that she had stared with utter intoxicated inhibition at the other bodies. But now on co-ed night she was being demure. Her breasts, which normally had such a powerful effect on him, seemed diminished in the heat. It was impossible to have overt sexual feelings in this torture chamber. His penis was in a state of frantic self-protecting retraction. The top of his scalp was burning.
The burly Russian men were beating their subject with oak leaves, creating a sudsy froth on her skin. One man worked her upper body, the other her legs. They beat her and washed her and rinsed her with the buckets of ice water. Her pale skin became pink, then deep red. They turned her over and worked on her front. Bodies entered the room and left it. Alex poured buckets of cold water over his head. Katrina did too.
“It’s time to go out,” she said. “We’re getting too hot.”
He compliantly followed her out of the hot dungeon just as he had followed her into Dean & Deluca, where they shopped earlier that day, and into the gallery they had been to. Her assuredness threw him into a heightened uncertainty.
Sitting out by the cold pool, he watched fat men plunge into the water and scamper out, purged of something. It was the cooling section, where people regained their strength before the next episode of self-torture.
“You’ve got to get a platza,” she said.
“You think I should do that?” he said. “It’s a human car wash.” She smiled at this. He loved it when she smiled at things he said.
“I’ve always been obsessed by car washes,” she said. “Maybe that’s why I like the platza so much.”
Making her come and makin
g her laugh had become the two main objectives in his life since he met her. They were both difficult objectives.
“It’s the most wonderful thing,” she said. “You must have it.”
She stood up and walked over to one of the Russian men who had been administering the abuse, a muscular, bald, burly Russian man with a hairy back and a hairy chest but smooth shoulders. He had the vigorous athletic Russian-style body that suggested that his idea of a relaxing winter afternoon was to take a swim in a frozen river and then warm up with some vodka.
She spoke to the Russian, pointed back towards Alex. The Russian man looked at him and nodded.
It was arranged. They went into the scalding room. She took a seat on a bench. They laid him out facedown. The hot air was searing the backs of his legs. As an act of mercy, they threw a towel soaked in ice water over his head. The room went black and he was grateful. The first thing they did was yank down his bathing trunks. His ass was now exposed.
What was she trying to do to him?
The men began to beat him. He gasped for breath in the dark wet airless space under the towel. Every now and then an incredibly strong hand reached down to the muscles of his neck and shoulders and administered a furious and utterly ungentle massage. His legs were burning. The heat was savage and homicidal, and they were beating him. He wanted to call out: Please stop! He wanted to flee. But he made himself go absolutely still. He deactivated the survival mechanism and hoped that he could thusly pass for a man who could take it (whatever “it” was). And then, through the clamor of voices, he heard her call out, in a faintly maternal tone that made the whole situation even worse: “It’s his first time!”
How utterly humiliating, as though he were some kind of sacrificial virgin. His ass was in the air being beaten with oak leaves, he was a passive, helpless creature, and his girlfriend and thirty panting strangers were observing the scene, and the worst of it was that he was supposed to rise from this, should he survive it, and pretend to his loved one that it was some wonderful reinvigorating experience.
Afterwards they walked up Tenth Street towards Second Avenue in silence.
“Wasn’t that wonderful?” she said. He did not reply. “Oh, come on,” she laughed. He walked on, somewhat stiffly, in silence. He was fuming. She had commandeered him in his own city. Nothing was happening the way he’d planned. But that wasn’t even true: the most important things, the sex, the intimacy, those were going well. But she refused to admit that there was a connection between the two of them in bed and the two of them in the world. Out in public she kept him at arm’s length, at best, or arranged to have his bare ass beaten in a sauna.
He cast a quick glance at her. She looked like what she was: a stylish mom.
They turned left on Second Avenue. It was a cool spring evening. They walked some more.
“Where are we going?” she said.
“It’s a surprise.”
He didn’t know where he was taking her. He just knew he was going to dictate the next move. All his previous thoughts about ways to make her happy no longer applied. He wanted revenge. They walked some more in silence. He turned right on Second Street, and they emerged onto the Bowery right next to CBGB. There was a crowd outside. They were young and most of them had Mohawks or bald heads, or some other in-your-face hairstyle. If her friends were mostly sleek, pleasant, prosperous professionals, then it was safe to say that among this crowd she had no friends. He didn’t either, but he felt he knew where he was. The hard-core scene had never made much sense to him even when he went to CBGB to see bands, even when his band had played at CBGB. This was a strange subculture from Queens. But he recognized the pent-up malevolence on their faces, the desire for release.
“This is a famous club,” he said. “I used to come here all the time. My band played here a few times.”
“I don’t want to go to a club,” she said. “Can’t we just go somewhere for dinner?”
“Just a peek. Come on.”
“I’m not in the mood for music,” she said.
“Oh, for God sakes, honey. Just trust me.”
She rolled her eyes. The place was dark, and the band seemed to have finished setting up. He pushed forward through the crowd until he was past the narrow space abutting the bar and in the open space near the front of the stage. The bassist had just lit a cigarette. He had a Mohawk. They stood together and for the first time he took in the faces around him. It was a smoldering moment.
“Are you ready motherfuckers!” screamed the singer at an excruciating volume. Alex saw Katrina flinch and put her hands to her ears. He felt a small spark of pity for her. A moment later, with the first crunching chords, the crowd would erupt in mayhem. It would be like being caught in a riot. She would hate him. He could already perceive, in the lines creasing her forehead, the beginnings of distress. But he didn’t care. He was at last showing her something of New York.
AT THE END of her visit she became ill, and he had to look after her, and take her to the doctor, from whose office she emerged with the news that she had strep throat. She had a prescription, which he got filled, and repeated to him the doctor’s one comment: “No oral sex.”
“You’re kidding,” he said, again and again, and no matter how many times she said she wasn’t kidding, he didn’t fully believe her. He had never heard of that stipulation being made to strep throat patients. But he was a good nurse to her. And when he made her chicken soup and fed it to her with a spoon in bed, and she said, “Can I have some of the chicken bits?” in a soft requesting voice, he nearly melted with affection. “Bits,” he thought, was the best word in the British language.
A PLAN WAS made for him to spend two months of the summer with her. He made some inquiries about possible contacts at the BBC, Channel 4, and ITV, and though he couldn’t imagine ever working again for a television station, it at least gave him a sense of momentum. Meanwhile, New York had again become a place of fun and possibility. For a while, after he had been fired, every don’t-walk signal flashed “You Lose.” Now it was almost as if he were visiting his hometown, and he made the rounds of lunches and dinners and drinks like someone with just a little time to do lots of things before he was swept off to other adventures. The principle she had explained to him on their first meeting—people will always like you better if you are just about to leave—now applied to his own hometown.
HE RENTED A car and drove down to visit Aunti B in her nursing home in Pennsylvania. He went every three or four months. They were ghoulish events. He would come into her room and find her in her easy chair, unmoving, unblinking, staring with a horrible kind of absence at the ceiling. Her ankles were swollen, her body gaunt.
“Hi, Aunti B!” he would call out. “I’m here!” It would take a long time for her to focus on him, whole fat ticking seconds of awfulness as her eyes rested uncomprehendingly on his face.
“Look! I brought shrimp!” This was his rallying cry. He held the Zabar’s bag aloft. Cooked shrimp with cocktail sauce was her favorite.
At first, she would laugh when she recognized him. The expression of existential horror in which her face had frozen would melt and there would be that same look of incredulity with which she used to regard him when he visited her apartment. And then the laughter. And then the laughter would devolve into tears. Terrible wrenching tears.
“You don’t know what they do to me here!” she would scream.
With each visit the Alzheimer’s progressed, reducing the metropolis of her personality to rubble, and then dust. Eventually his aunt’s speech, always peppered with German, became all German, and then, as far as he could tell, she simply stopped making sense in any language. Every visit began with a long bout of crying at the sight of him.
But there were also moments of happiness on these visits. The nurse would bring dinner, and Aunti B would throw it into the room. This amused her. Once, instead of trying to stop her, he took to throwing food as well, which she enjoyed immensely. For a finale, he smashed a wedge of lemon meringue
pie in his own face. This brought down the house.
There was a stereo in her room, and a photograph of Karl as a baby hung on the wall. He was a cute baby but a little distorted. She had ripped the photo to shreds shortly after she moved in, when she still was a little bit herself. The nurses pieced it back together and hung it higher. Alex marveled at her anger. From where did it come? Why Karl?
Karl had left a CD of the Beatles for her. Alex ended every visit with a sing-along to “Yellow Submarine.” He jumped around the room clapping and singing while she clapped and waved her arms like a conductor. At the chorus she sang: “La la la la lala lala lala…”
It had been nearly a year since she said anything coherent to him in English. Now whole visits went by with her eyes vacant, her body wasted to almost nothing. He had taken to touching her a lot. Language had lost all meaning. He drove down for the sole purpose of putting his hand on her cheek.
On this last visit he was greeted by an unusually vigorous cry. He leaned over the big easy chair she was slouched in and kept his hand pressed against her cheek while she wept and sputtered hostile sounds. He murmured nice consoling words which he was quite sure meant nothing to her, and thought about going to London.
His habit during these initial cries was to go into a sort of numb state and wait it out. Now he half watched her tears evolve into laughter. Then she put her hand on his and said, in an accent that for a horrifying second captured some essence of her personality that he had thought was forever lost, “I love you.”
JUST BEFORE ALEX left for the summer he raced into Nuts and Dry Fruits, a tiny store across the street from him on Amsterdam Avenue. Every afternoon it was overrun with children just let out from the Joan of Arc Middle School up the block, but for the rest of the day it was mostly empty, a tiny cramped space filled with every imaginable kind of candy, glass jars of nuts and dried fruit, and two old men—one bald and one who wore an outrageously bad toupee, both in yellow smocks—who bumped into one another with the absentmindedness of people who have spent years in each other’s close proximity and hardly notice each other anymore.
The Sleep-Over Artist Page 22