by Richard Vine
“How sweet. Why would you do that?”
“Because you take good care of me now, and no one else does.”
“How can you say that? Lots of people take care of you. Especially your mother.”
“Sometimes. But I take care of her, too.”
“How so?”
“In a special daughter way. You don’t get to know.”
“Not ever?”
“Only when we get married.”
I had a long drink of wine and tried to laugh Melissa’s fantasy away.
“Don’t kid yourself, Missy,” I said. “Once you’re grown up, you won’t even remember my name.”
“Won’t I?”
“Guaranteed. The first love is never the last. You’ll understand that someday.”
“Do you understand it?”
“No, not really.”
It was too much. I began to look desperately, vainly for a waiter.
“Why are you being so difficult?” Melissa asked.
“Look, you’re a wonderful girl, Missy, but I can’t be a boyfriend for you.”
“Why not?”
“I’m too ancient.”
“You are not. You’re too scared, that’s all.”
“It’s more or less the same thing.”
She pondered for a moment, her right index finger working the edge of the table. “Why do you always talk to me about being old?”
“Because anything else would be a lie.”
“You don’t seem old to me. You seem my age.”
“It’s a trick I learned once.”
“I like it. It’s magic.”
“With you, yes. Not with everyone.”
“See how good I am for you?”
46
Word about the next Virgin Sacrifice taping came directly from Paul, when we ran into each other at Bob Flanagan’s birthday performance at the New Museum.
For several weeks the California artist, who suffered from cystic fibrosis, had been ensconced in a hospital bed in the main gallery. Covers drawn to his chest, he greeted visitors and chatted quietly until the time came to stand up and strip himself naked. Every few hours, completely exposed, he would wrap a rope around his ankles and be winched upside down toward the ceiling. There he hung with arms outstretched in an inverted crucifix position meant to incarnate his art and help clear his lungs of accumulated mucus. But for tonight’s landmark occasion—he had attained the odds-defying age of 42—Flanagan promised something unprecedented.
A large crowd was on hand, milling about among the displays that accompanied the artist’s live-in project. Near the front was an installation duplicating the look of a pediatrician’s waiting room: low tables and chairs, children’s magazines and books, a few toys, a low wall of building blocks. Only on second look did one notice that the toy box was salted with rough-sex implements and the blocks were arranged to obsessively repeat the letters “S” and “M.” Nearby was a black stool crowned with a tapering butt plug. A long text, Flanagan’s memoir and credo, filled one wall, culminating in a catchphrase that, reiterated, encircled the entire exhibition space: “Fight sickness with sickness.”
In the rear gallery stood a scaffold holding half a dozen video monitors suspended in the form of a cross. One showed Bob’s head, others his hands, his feet, and his crotch. The last featured scenes of self-mortification—his penis being bound tightly with black leather thongs, his foreskin probed with needles, a nail driven through his scrotum and into a board. To one side of the scaffold lay an open, flower-bedecked casket with a video clip of the artist’s living face displayed on a monitor propped against a white satin pillow.
Bob himself, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans with a slim oxygen tank strapped to his hip, circulated among the guests. Joking and gesticulating, he breathed with the aid of a clear plastic tube taped just under his nose. He was an excellent host, doing his best to make everyone feel comfortable and entertained.
Behind him, moving when he moved, was Paul Morse. The familiar shoulder-held camera covered the younger man’s pretty face as he shadowed Flanagan. The event was being recorded, in a glare of artificial light, for PM Videos.
Once the crowd had filled the room, Bob disappeared behind a curtain. Soon a huge cake in the shape of male genitalia was wheeled out by assistants. Pieces were cut and distributed along with plastic glasses of wine. Finally, Bob reappeared—lying nude on a bed of nails atop a hospital gurney. The overhead track lights revealed a small bead of perspiration on his upper lip, his only sign of discomfort. After a few minutes, he sat up and spoke into a handheld mike, thanking us all for making this birthday such a memorable treat.
An artist I knew vaguely—one of the youth set, with shaved head and Dr. Martens boots—caught my eye and edged closer. He seemed to be screwing up his courage to speak to me, and I hoped it wouldn’t be a come-see-my-work pitch.
“How have you been, sir?” the young man asked.
“Fine. Just back from the Hamptons. It was all very chic. Guests arriving by helicopter on the front lawn—that sort of thing.”
I enjoyed the little white lie. Bohemian types always assume that SoHo dealers lead gilded lives, and the illusion is good for my brand.
“So,” he said wearily, “are you going anywhere interesting after the show?”
“No,” I replied. “I’m tired of interesting places, aren’t you?”
“Oh, for sure.” His eyes brightened. “Dull stuff is actually much more refined. Like, you know, this new French theorist says that blandness is the essence of Chinese culture.”
“Does he?” I finished my wine. “I wonder if he’s ever had a meal in Sichuan. Or a girlfriend in Shanghai.”
Just then Paul—heaven sent at that moment—eased between us, moving in for a final shot over my shoulder.
“Perfect,” he said as he switched off the camera and lights. “I never get tired of watching Bob.”
Suddenly, with the intense lamps extinguished, everything seemed less important. Paul spoke to me quietly, under the general murmur of resumed chatter.
“We’re taping a new Sacrifice in a few days. Are you game?”
“Sure, as long as Sammy makes it worth my while.”
“He will. Is Melissa ready? Does she trust you?”
“Better than that. She’s sweet on me.”
“Righteous, man.” Paul said it firmly, though he looked a bit hurt. “And her mother?”
“Not a clue.”
“They can be real hellcats, you know. Some moms.”
“Angela is busy playing Florence Nightingale to her ex-husband, who’s marooned in Sloan-Kettering.”
“That should keep her distracted.” Paul told me to expect a small group at the Crosby Street building. “What are you going to tell Missy?”
“That we’re off to a fun dance party with Uncle Paul and his friends.”
“Good, I like the way it sets her up.”
“I thought you might.”
47
Once I agreed to go to the taping session, everything else started to feel slightly irrelevant, a waste of my time. Certainly Angela’s opening proved—to put it kindly—an underwhelming affair. Yet her failure enabled me to put the next part of my plan into motion.
Even though Michael Loomis Fine Arts was not large, too much space separated the few unimportant visitors, most of them Angela’s personal friends. Each looked as lonely as her isolated sculptural figures, and only a little less contorted. No drinks were served. For once, information would be my only intoxicant until the afterparty.
“What should I say to Angela?” I asked Laura, who was sleek and deadly looking that evening in a new Gemma Kahng skirt.
“Tell her the show will be well received critically.”
“She knows what that means.”
“Then make up a smooth story about how recognition builds over time, how Michael will sell things out of the back room for months to come.”
“I’m supposed to be her friend.”
<
br /> “So be one.” She scowled at my plodding reaction. “Why tell nice people the truth, Jack? Isn’t there enough grief in the world already?”
I looked around the room. “I half expect to see Phil here,” I said, feeling foolish. I was still a long way from accepting my friend’s bleak condition, even though I’d seen some of the devastation for myself. Laura gave me a reality check, reminding me that our former client never left the hospital anymore, could not care for his own daily needs or engage in more than the simplest verbal exchange.
“It’s too strange,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“How they work the same way basically—sex, age, disease.” Laura fingered her glass. “Beyond a certain point, your body just does what it’s going to do.”
I still couldn’t quite grasp it. Philip had been fully cogent at the time I lost Nathalie. Yet the breakdown that began only two and a half years ago with negligibly small slips—writing “soon see you” at the end of his e-mails instead of “see you soon”—worsened at a vicious rate, until now it had ravaged him totally, leaving the former magnate only nominally human. In the past few months, with increasing rapidity, memory loss had invaded his brain like an alien cell-killing substance, spreading wildly until his troubled, once-agile mind was obliterated. His thinking had suddenly passed over into a simpler, more blissful dimension, like Dante stepping through the wall of flame to embrace his lost Beatrice.
No one could say exactly when the last trace of guilt left Philip, when the final synapse gave way—the one that formerly connected the image of a dead woman, his wife, with the emotional oddity we call remorse. At last, irreversibly, he had entered into a pathological beatitude. Philip was far past crime and punishment now, beyond good and evil.
I could have used a little of his oblivion that evening, as the scene grew even more painfully subdued at the loft gathering after Angela’s show.
She had invited a bevy of old acquaintances, mostly third-rate artists, and a few junior-level museum people. Two catering tables were overloaded with wineglasses, liquor bottles, smoked salmon, and cheese—enough for a crowd twice the size. The few attendees passed each other at awkward distances, like mutually distrustful scavengers at an accident scene. Only when the drinks took effect did the conversations start to rise in frequency and tone.
I poured myself a vodka tonic and went to see how Angela was doing.
Pretty rotten, it turned out. She was standing alone in the kitchen, scooping unneeded ice cubes into a silver bucket. “This isn’t working,” she said.
“What isn’t?”
“This bloody party, the show, my so-called career.”
“Give Michael a chance. You’ve been away for a while.”
“Too long, I know.” She stared down at the mound of ice. “There are times when I just hate art,” she said.
“You don’t mean that, Angela. It’s about all we have—the likes of us.”
“That’s the worst of it. My work was supposed to make life just dandy again after Philip left. Well, it didn’t. And now what? I can’t pray like your friend Hogan, and all I have to show for my efforts are those damned fiberglass witches.”
“That’s quite a lot, actually.”
Angela shook her head. “A dozen wretched, oversized dolls—do you know what they tell me, Jack?”
“No.”
“Art is no match for flesh and blood. Only love is love; only Philip is Philip.”
Suddenly, I wanted to touch her, to put my good arm around her waist as we stood by the softly humming refrigerator. But I didn’t dare.
“He wasn’t exactly sweet to you after he took up with Mandy,” I reminded her. “And he’s not exactly Philip now.”
“No, he wasn’t sweet. Not at the end.”
“Was he ever?”
“Wonderfully, in the first years. I can’t begin to tell you. But he’s a man like any other. He threw away the best thing he had. Sometimes I think that’s how we all keep ourselves going.”
“Why not just move on yourself, then? You certainly don’t lack for options.”
Her head shifted minutely, slowly, from side to side. “After Philip left, I tried to cut him out of my soul like a cancer. Later I realized the cells had metastasized.”
“Are you really that far gone, Angela?”
“All the way. What I felt for him—what I feel—is not a thing I can control.”
“I just hate to see you go through this misery for a second time,” I said.
She looked straight ahead, past me, past everything. “It’s hell to live without hope, Jack.”
“I know.”
Angela’s voice dropped to a whisper. “I wouldn’t wish that on Philip. So don’t wish it on me.”
“All right, whatever you say.”
Her eyes returned, powerfully. “I want the right, real thing, that’s all. Nothing less. I’m tired of everything else, and I’m too damaged to fight anymore—damaged nearly to death.”
“You deserve whatever you want.”
“I’m no fool, Jack. I know that someday—not so very long from now—this ridiculous pain, these crazed thoughts and feelings, will slowly end. I’ll be myself again, calm and reasonable and rather dull. But in the meantime, I have to think them and feel them. There’s no shortcut, no exemption for being smart.”
“No, I don’t suppose.” I finished my drink, placing the glass on the countertop. “At least you have Melissa.”
“Yes, I have my daughter.” Angela seemed to find herself again. “We have each other. The two of us, no matter what.”
Angela picked up the ice bucket and forced her thin lips into a party smile.
“Missy’s been looking for you, by the way,” she said. “She’s in back by the stereo, waiting with something quite important to ask you.”
“That’s funny. She never likes my answers very much.”
At the rear of the loft, I found Melissa cross-legged on the floor, flipping through her mother’s old albums.
“What are these things?” she asked. “Like clay tablets or something?”
“Nothing you recognize?”
“It’s all super-ancient.”
“Angela said that you wanted to see me.”
“I was waiting for you.”
“Waiting for what?”
“Just good practice. For our future.”
“Oh, right. I forgot.”
“Did you think about me at all today?”
“Every moment.”
“No, you didn’t. Phony talker. Pretender.”
“Am I?”
“Fake, fake, full of cake.”
“It’d be better for us both if I were.” I sat on the edge of an ottoman near her. “Actually, I was thinking today about an adventure we could go on together. A secret party. Would you like that?”
“Can I wear my birthday present dress?”
“No, they want to see you in your school uniform.”
“They who?”
“Paul and his friends. They want you to dance.”
“You told them? It was just for you that day.”
“I know. But if you make Paul like it too, maybe we can find out who hurt Aunt Mandy. Then your dad won’t be in trouble anymore.”
“And the police will stop bugging Mom with so many questions?”
“That’s right.”
“Why doesn’t Paul just help us, without any dancing?”
“He’s a little bit selfish.”
“I know.”
“Was he ever selfish with you?”
“In a way. He told me about that other kind of kissing. The one men really, really like.”
“He just talked or he showed you?”
“We looked at pictures on the Internet. I thought they were pretty rank.”
“Paul makes video shows like that. That’s why he wants you to dance for his friends. I want to bust them, so the cops can get them to tell us what really happened to Mandy.”
; “Will Paul go to jail?”
“He might. If we learn enough.”
She seemed to contemplate the prospect at length while a Roy Orbison song played.
“How do you know his friends will even like me?” she asked.
“They’re men. They won’t be able to help it.”
48
I was glad to get home that night, away from the gallery opening, away from the lingering party chatter that I could still hear below me—down in Angela’s loft—where Melissa, too, was shut away in her room for the night. I stretched out, but sleep eluded me. This was the same bed, I thought, where I had made love to Nathalie countless mad times, and where I used to lie awake after she was gone, wishing I could make my body shut down, my heart stop its beating. I wanted to die there, quickly, with no pain or fuss. Unfortunately, you can’t erase yourself from the world without violence. Even the strongest human will is not enough to paralyze your lungs, to reduce your vital processes to zero. You can fight sickness with sickness but not life with life. No, it takes a stronger poison than that.
A joke came into my head in the dark. What if Hogan’s God Almighty had gone slightly nuts like Angela’s ex? It was a funny thought. The result might be the world as we know it. I don’t care what Hogan says, there’s a flaw in the universe, and its name is death. How’s that for profundity—or was it blasphemy? Great, I said to myself, now I’m doing theology on sleep meds and vodka. No wonder that Jehovah, like Hogan, comes into my mind at the oddest times. Often they arrive together.
Nathalie once had everything but innocence, I thought, and now I had everything but faith. Hogan says I lack the daring. You have to be willing to fight—and maybe die—for an innocence that you’ve already lost and no longer believe in. He calls it thinking like a soldier—a Christian soldier no less. According to him, it’s the very absurdity of faith, its evasion of logic and evidence, that makes it the only sane response to an irrational world. Or was it the other way around? Anyway Christ, to Hogan, is like a criminal whose dossier can never be closed. God is a crime against reason—the only one he condones. His theory makes no sense, but I understand it completely. Sometimes I think about Missy that way.