by Jack Livings
You and my husband would get along just fine.
No philistine, he?
Oh no, he’s definitely a philistine. Just one with a chip on his shoulder.
She painted this last year, the man said. She asks me if I want it. I can’t decide—it’s that purple, you know. I didn’t understand it then, but it’s the purple that put me off. I bought another one instead.
You have that one locked up in a room with a chair?
I use it as a dartboard. I tape Bo’s photo to it and … It’s nothing compared to this one. He looked back at the painting. You probably think I only want it because I can’t have it. But this really is the superior painting. It might be the superior painting. And I’ve got four Rothkos.
Oh, be still my beating heart.
This one is better, is all I’m saying.
Hm, my mother said.
You don’t go in for rankings. I get it. I don’t agree with you, but I get it. You think you can’t rank art like you can’t rank your children, right? Something like that? Lies we tell ourselves. You can line them up one to ten, and you do. You’re just lying to yourself if you say you don’t.
Spoken like a man with too many Rothkos.
And too many kids. I’m not saying the Rothkos aren’t sublime, I’m just saying that I know which canvas goes with me when I wake up and smell smoke, and it ain’t one of the Rothkos.
Is this before or after you get your kids out?
Ah, they can take care of themselves. I don’t need them all, anyway.
That’s why you order in bulk.
They eat everything, you know? They eat everything in the cabinets and then they eat the cabinet doors, and then they start gnawing on the furniture.
I only have one.
Consider yourself blessed. You know, he said, you’re going to crack a tooth doing that.
Yeah, yeah, she said around an ice cube. You know what they say.
That it’s a sign of intelligence?
Right.
He looked back at the painting. I would never put good art out in the—what is this? The forum—
Foyer.
Yeah. I might be a philistine, but I’m not a philistine like this philistine, he said, jerking his thumb in the general direction of the party. Even worse, he’d never even know who she was if I hadn’t introduced them while we were over there.
There being Paris?
Paris. Paris. Yes. Bo never would have left the hotel. I had to drag him to the Louvre. Then I drag him to the Centre Pompidou. Then I drag him to her studio. It’s wall-to-wall canvases; they’re on the floor, they’re everywhere, and he’s whispering to me about how it’s all finger painting. We leave, and do you know what he says? Was that smell her or the dogs? Can you believe this guy? Next thing I know, this.
The man pointed at the canvas. Bastard was playing me, he said. He knew exactly who Mitchell was. He knew exactly what he was looking at. I love him to death but what a complete piece of shit he is.
I thought I detected the odor of sulfur, said a voice behind my mother.
Speak his name and he appears, yea verily, the man said.
Hello, Sarah, Bo said, hand on shoulder, kiss on cheek. I see you’ve met the esteemed Doctor Jonas Salk.
Yeah, said the man. He extended his hand to my mother. Neil. Neil Ford.
I had no idea you were out, Bo said. I’d heard syphilis was three months, but god bless you, looks like they cured you in two.
Entirely based on advances they made treating you, Neil said. Said they’d never seen anything like it. Pushed the absolute limits of scientific knowledge.
He hasn’t tried to rape you, has he? Bo said to my mother.
Only a little, she said.
Well, he was passed around like an old sock at Sing Sing, so it’s not entirely his fault.
How Christian of you to vouch for him, my mother said.
Sarah Saltwater, Bo said to Neil.
I know, he said, prompting my mother to raise an eyebrow. Hey, what? he said. I know good work.
I guess you do, she said.
All right, Ford, let her loose, Bo said. She’s got better places to be. I heard there’s a bris around the corner. And didn’t you see the sign outside? No boots and coats in here. Bad dog.
You’re crazy if you think I’m leaving my stuff out there, Neil said, pointing at the door.
Gentlemen, a pleasure, my mother said. And in a way, it had been. She headed off in the direction of the bedrooms. She was aware of their silence as she went, the fact that they were watching her, probably staring at her ass, and just before she turned into the hallway she casually flipped them off over her shoulder.
She knows Joan Baez, Bo said.
No shit, Neil said.
She’s older than she looks.
Baez?
Sarah.
Okay, Neil said.
Husband’s a complete fucking weirdo. I can’t figure it out. We had them out to the house over the weekend and among other things he obliterates a tray of my grandfather’s crystal tumblers, wandering around in the middle of the night, wakes up the whole house.
I heard he’s a drunk.
Drinker, not a drunk. Said he was looking for a pencil because he didn’t want to disturb anyone with his typewriter. He makes me nervous. Just a weird weekend. Sarah was trying to talk Jane into buying one of her paintings.
Did she go for it? Neil said.
Nah. Don’t mix business and friendship.
Rookie mistake. She’s a good painter, Neil said. I might know someone who’s in the market.
Don’t do it, Bo said. She’s not like that.
I’m not doing anything. I’m not going to buy it. When I say I know someone I mean I know someone.
Client? Bo said.
Yeah, Neil said.
You like the painting? Bo said, nodding at the wall.
What painting? Where?
I put it up. Just. For. You, Bo said, tagging him on the nose with his index finger.
Fascist bastard.
Bo waggled his fingers in double Vs. I’ve got some stuff in the study. Want a puff?
Markets went into the shitter, Neil said. Explain to me what four feet of snow has to do with the Dow.
It’ll be back tomorrow. Let’s go get obliterated. You poor dear. The things you must have done to survive at Rikers.
I’m still full from all the dick I ate, Neil said, patting his belly. He unlaced his boots and pitched them underneath a Louis XV table atop which was a display of Bo and Jane’s wedding photos.
Neil stuck out his elbow and the two men walked back into the party arm in arm.
* * *
A study in orange and brown, the room where I was lying facedown on the chenille bedspread. The TV was on. My mother sat down next to me and watched. A young Hari Krishna walked beside his father, a nattily dressed man in a raincoat carrying a pile of books on the new religion his son had adopted. Conciliatory tones from a piano, wide-angle, the pair receding into the distance. Fade to black. A still of Lou Grant as the theme saxed over the credits.
Don’t talk to the TV, Mommy, I said into the bed.
I wasn’t talking to the TV, she said.
Don’t turn it off, I said.
I think I should take you downstairs, she said.
Can I stay?
In here? With the statue? She nodded at the Maasai herder and poked his beaded loincloth.
Please? I said. They have cable.
How’s your head? Does it hurt? Headache?
No, I believe it’s quite fine, I said. I was the age at which children weave adult constructions into their speech, something overheard, something from TV, and I was also old enough to know that my mother found it endearing, and that it could thus be used to my advantage.
You’ll stay in here, then, madam? No wandering? my mother said.
I’ll stay here, I said without undue solemnity, without any affect at all. She knew I’d comply. She often said to other adults that s
he admired my forthrightness, that I never resorted to baby talk or whining to get what I wanted. She said I was a straight shooter. I doubt she cared whether or not I had merely figured out how to play the game to my best advantage. What was important to her was that I was no baby.
Okay, my mother said. You’ll be watching the news, I presume?
Nooo, I said.
She flipped around until she found The Odd Couple. The picture was crisp and clean.
Good? she said.
Good, I said.
You want to get under the covers?
I’m okay, I said, propped up on my elbows, already lost in the show. My mother hugged me, then looked at herself in the mirror on the back of the door. With a pinkie nail she scooped the lipstick at the corners of her mouth, floated her hair, tugged at the black turtleneck, adjusted the gold pendant against her breastbone.
You sure? she said.
What? I muttered.
You sure you don’t want me to take you home?
No, Mommy. Close the door. It’s noisy.
Please?
Please.
Get under the covers if you get cold. She glanced at the TV, the granular perfection of the images, as if the station were right next door. How many more representational permutations would they have to go through before the images became so clear they lost all recognizable form? Would there someday be an abstract channel, formless swaths of pulsing color, sounds from an auto repair shop piped in? Someday we’ll get over our childish insistence on mimesis but we’ll never get over the advertisements for disposable razors and luggage and cars with insides like Marie Antoinette’s boudoir. We’ll move forward to something better, won’t we? We’ll move forward and we’ll be in exactly the same place. That’s progress, isn’t it, a walk around the block? Progress isn’t anything but a retrospective device, anyway, a name on the wax and wane, representational overtaking abstract, abstract overtaking representational, the rules thrown out the window and the old molds broken so we can bake up something brand-new that in the end tastes suspiciously like a childhood memory. You’ll crack a tooth, Sarah. Don’t think you know how other people think. Back straight, eyes up.
The party ricocheted through the foyer, a hollow, Victrola wash, and she felt that she was acting in a TV drama, her flats clapping against the marble, as though she alone knew the true nature of existence, the depths of everyone else’s ludicrous vanity and endless pursuit of distraction. The foyer was filling with people, yet she stopped in front of the Mitchell and backed away from it, nearly to the door, so that the paint no longer moved like electrons but formed larger, sweeping planes of color. She hated the word beautiful and she hated the limitations of her intelligence, which always tried to turn everything into words that she could convey to students or to Erwin, when what was on the wall was indescribable. To reduce it to a linguistic description was to destroy it. Wasn’t that the hallmark of good work, anyway? A thing that could be only itself, a thing that defied adaptation or explanation?
What is it about us, she wondered, that compels us to speak the most on subjects about which we know the least? Is it because language is how we exercise our misunderstanding? Once we understand something, we don’t talk about it anymore—we set it in action. Even Jefferson, declaring those truths he claimed to be self-evident, was speaking to a point of personal contention, giving voice to an argument within himself, an argument with his god. All men created equal? Surely not in the tobacco fields. Surely not at Monticello.
Someone had taken off Iggy Pop and put on the White Album, “Dear Prudence” droning along peacefully while my mother alternated between meditation on the painting and arguing with the rowdy, disagreeable visitor parked at the kitchen table in her mind. Shouldn’t she be able to look at a painting without ruining it? What the hell kind of painter was she, who couldn’t simply experience a work of art? Too many years of practice. Her muscles had warped and knotted to perform the specific task of disassembly and now there was no other way to see. There was no other way to paint, either, and that was why Mitchell, and not Saltwater, was hanging on the wall, no matter what Jane said about not mixing money and friendship. The Mitchell was better.
6.
The more weed he smoked, the more people Bo called. By the time I’d fallen asleep, the party had become a sweeping, pulsing organism that had oozed into every room of the penthouse, consuming whatever lay in its path, vacuuming up all the drugs, all the food, all the liquor, the people. And as it grew, the party moved backward in time, as my mother had known it would, the guests collectively regressing to the age of their greatest beauty, the pinnacle of their intellectual and sexual potency. Corners and quiet rooms were colonized so that flirtations could flourish. Faces appeared in the doorway of the bedroom where I was watching TV and moved on.
Bo believed that there came a time for every party at which its alleged purpose fell away like a trapdoor to reveal its actual purpose, which was to facilitate sex. Whether you just wanted someone to tell you you’re pretty, or whether you wanted to fuck the living daylights out of someone half your age against the sink in the laundry room, a party’s soul was made of those who stuck around for the pheromones. Sometimes everyone left when the trapdoor fell open. Sometimes everyone dove right in.
This one was a diver, Bo could feel it. These people were in for the long haul. This party had motivation. In the blizzard, it had a reason to exist. The thick haze of infinite possibility had formed. These people imagined they were partying their way through the fall of civilization, like Brits groping each other in an alley as the air raid sirens screamed, possessed of the reckless courage that was born of hopeless terror. In the absence of bombs, a blizzard was a good enough excuse. And that’s all you needed, an excuse.
Hiwatt had finally pulled himself together and showed up with the Guerrero Gold, and every time Bo looked up, more people were streaming through the doors—strangers, people in jester hats and bonnets and propeller beanies. He’d made a pass by the bars and both were stocked to hold out for about another hour or two before he’d have to make a run to the basement for reinforcements. For now, his mission was to get the goddamn Beatles off the air before everyone under the age of thirty packed up and left. He do-si-doed, left hand lady, right hand rounded his way through the crowd, and was halfway across the expanse when he saw the Iranians talking to Daisy Walker.
She had them pinned down twenty feet from the bar. The heaving crowd left no chance of retreat. Daisy was the wife of a partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, a pearl-handled penknife whose Charlestonian lilt dropped just enough shadow over her incursions to make her a decent spy. Associates at Sullivan called her Death by a Thousand Cuts. At the moment she was trying to charm the Iranians, no doubt excavating tunnels beneath whatever fortification they might have erected in the name of privacy, and Bo only knew that he needed to get to them and derail the inquisition before Daisy breached their walls. He’d seen them first. They belonged to him. What were they doing here? Had Jane invited them or had they washed in under the door with the rest of the backed-up sewage?
Daisy would have said, And now how do you know the Vornados? in that little-girl voice, and Shahin, cross-eyed goon that he was, would have said, Ah, we are in business together! and that would be that. Daisy would hightail it home and tell the old sturgeon that Bo was in cahoots with some Iranians and he’d get on the phone to Paris, and Paris would pass it along to the Texans who’d been camped out on the Shah’s doorstep since all the trouble started, and they’d do a big fat belly flop on his plan to tap the vein when everything fell apart in Tehran.
Iranians had been bugging out all year. The Upper East Side had turned into little Elahieh. Entire buildings full of them, and they all burned hundreds to light their fireplaces. Looking around, somehow half of them were in his living room. Did they charter a fucking bus? Jesus, had he invited them? He couldn’t even remember.
Get ahold of yourself. Go smoke another spliff and sort this out logically. So Iran
is here. They’re not stupid. Maybe they’re not stupid. How stupid are they? Not the sharpest tool in the shed, not Shahin. He would ruin the whole deal. Nelofar might keep him in check, though, sweet Jesus, please keep his tongue wrapped around your pinkie, you beautiful bitch.
Bo landed all teeth and eyeballs, two hands for Daisy Walker, a kiss, hands to shoulders for Nelofar, she went to school in England, lips to right cheek, lips to left cheek, dear god the woman smells like honey and she’s barely even here, she’s like water under my hands how do they do that, and her hair like water sweet mother of Christ what does she do with herself when Shahin’s out with his girls at 54? How does a wiry little prick like that get away with it? Money. Money uncurdles the milk. A strong handshake for the little shifty-eyed shit, a pat on the shoulder, you little Persian pissant.
Shahin pulled him into an embrace and Bo felt the disagreeable scrape of a stubbly cheek against his. Get her away from us, Shahin whispered in Bo’s ear as he thumped him on the back.
This good man, Shahin said to Daisy, has been an absolute prince, guiding us around the city, and he asks for nothing—nothing—in return. A gentleman in the finest sense of the word.
Well, don’t I know it, Daisy said. Such a dear.
Bo dipped his head and smiled at Daisy. He saw that lipstick had bled into the creased flesh around her lips, absolutely repulsive, yet his eyes locked on her mouth as she raised her wineglass for another dose, and he watched the waddles beneath her chin undulate as she worked the liquid down her esophagus, and the powder in drifts on her cheek. Repulsive. A horror.
First he took us to the Statue of Liberty, then the Empire State Building. Oddly enough, as many times as we’ve been to New York, we’d never had occasion to visit either one, Shahin said.
Well, that just makes you a true New Yorker, doesn’t it? I lived here fifteen years before I ever set foot on Liberty Island, Daisy said. And do you know, I wept when I did. That’s the truth. I wept.
It’s quite moving, Nelofar said.
Yes, a complete tour, Shahin said. Bo left no stone unturned.
We’d been discussing the situation, Daisy said.