“I knew nothing of what it must have felt like to Picasso, a fifty-five-year-old Spaniard, living in exile in Paris, to hear that in his home country, the city of Guernica had been destroyed as a bombing experiment. Picasso was, at that time, facing a deadline: he had agreed, that year of 1937, in March to create a work of art for the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exhibition. Two months went by. Then on April 26th, the Nazis bombed Guernica. Five days later Picasso began Guernica. His skilled heart was on fire. He painted fast and large. The painting was ready for the exhibition opening on July 12th. A masterwork in less than three months. I thought Picasso was French. Did it matter? The book learning came later. The painting, in person, destroyed me.” Vivienne shivered. She put his T-shirt on.
“I did not know that Picasso’s lover when he was painting Guernica was Dora Maar. I did not know there were women photographers. I had no role models, boo hoo, so what?” She sat between his legs.
“So in the same room on the third floor of MoMA was a series of photographs Dora Maar had taken of him painting Guernica. I did not know that Dora Maar was a celebrated photographer before she met Picasso. Why are women always so damn hung up on how Picasso did the ladies wrong? How come you hear nothing about how Dora Maar was legendary with a camera when she met Picasso? She was Henrietta Theodora Marković, born in Paris, raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I did not know that she spoke Spanish to him when they first met, which allured him. Dora Maar, well-known photographer in Paris, teaches painter Pablo Picasso how to use the photographic image in his work while she documents him painting the great Guernica, suggesting changes, being his visual editor. You know, none of that is secret information. I do not know why women like so much to moan and groan about how ill-treated the muse is – maybe the muse was the mentor – Dora Maar was. Maar mentored Picasso in the 1930s.
“The man on fire at the UN, New York in a blackout, seeing Guernica for the first time, Dora Maar. All of it within walking distance of each other. I was etched, I felt it physically, honey, my future was – SSSSSZZZZed – branded into me. Art was my corner, my safe place. The pictures were waiting. All I had to do was turn up. And always carry a camera.”
She turned around, faced Andy, took off the T-shirt and put her feet up on the headboard.
“You want a coda?” she asked. “So there is this beautiful woven tapestry based on Guernica. And that homage to Picasso’s painting has hung for many years at the United Nations. It has been part of the long-time decor there. So anyway, the Guernica tapestry is hanging at the UN as per usual, and it’s February of 2003, when George W. Bush is trying to lay down the sales pitch for going to war with Iraq, for the invasion. They’re going to make a speech at the UN about this; Colin Powell and John Negroponte are going to talk on TV. So guess what? The White House demands that the anti-war tapestry of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica be covered up with a white cloth before the cameras roll. Because God forbid someone watching them shill war should be distracted by seeing great art tell the story of a civilian bombing in the background behind them. ‘Oh, hey Joe, they’re talking about Baghdad, but isn’t that the Basque city of Guernica right behind them? Hmmm.’ And they did it, they got away with that, too. The UN – what else is new? – caves and covers up the Guernica tapestry so Bush can have a white sheet covering up history. A man burns himself alive to show his love for peace, another man covers up great art to sell war. You pick your choice.”
“I pick you,” Andy said.
“Sorry,” Vivienne said. “Love, I am taken.”
“I’m all right if you hurt me. I can do that,” he said. “Vivienne. Reconsider me.”
“Oh, baby,” she kissed his cheek. “It’s not like that.”
But there was something here, he listened to her. He paid attention, he allowed himself to be moved by what had moved her. She felt Andy inhaling her. Her husband, Johnny, was happy if she was in the environs, Johnny was happy if he could hear her footsteps in the house as he went about his business of writing, Johnny was content if he could miss her for dinner and leave her a love note. Johnny did not want to hear about the bad times or the sad times or the damage done. Not in detail. Johnny was family. Family wanted you back, safe, home. Family, in truth, did not want stories. Unconditional love was happy with you just being.
Just being was not enough for Vivienne Pink. The secret, unhidden to her, but hidden to Johnny, her husband, was that she wanted to tell the stories behind the pictures she took. This Andy was her brief companion in solace. Never underestimate the power you have, as a man, if you listen with sincerity to a woman. A woman can tell, and the power is intensely sexual. To be understood, to be heard is the greatest aphrodisiac on this wretched Earth.
Vivienne was in the thrilling vortex that this was not right, this thing, this boy, this man, these feelings. It was not right to remember how it felt to be listened to, and then loved right after. You walk anywhere for this. You walk through the new trails. You bivouac strangely, then in the midnight hour, you leave that safe dark, and you move along where no one has gone, you head up the slope, if only, once more, to see the feeling world. Andy was up out of the bed, putting the T-shirt and his jeans on again. “You want to go get coffee?” he said.
“Are you nuts? Go. You have to go. I’m working.” She did not know why she said this. It was not what she felt. It was what she said at other times when things got too heated with subjects. “This can no way happen.”
“I’ve got news for you,” Andy said, all cheery, back on the bed, cross-legged. “It’s already happened. Enjoy yourself.”
“I have to go to Death Valley.”
“Come to Life Valley with me.” Not a bit of it made sense. He was leaving for Iraq, a different death valley. She was married.
“Kiss me,” she said.
“I’m going to think about you every day,” he said. “Will you write me every night? I might be able to phone you sometimes, if I can.”
She panicked to hear him talk as if there was anything between them. This sudden deep connection made her need to get him away from her. She did not want him to go. And so, he had to go. She had to betray the moment. “You cannot phone me. I will not write you. What happened here was business, work, a mission. I’ll pay you money if you want me to. Okay?”
Andy – how could she ever forget it? – did not move to leave. He, instead, unbuttoned his jeans, his back to her, his face at the big glass window. His jeans pooled on the floor. A small pistol fell out of a pocket. You could not carry a camera on the casino floor, but you could carry a firearm. “What is that?” Vivienne said, shooting a pic of the pistol resting on the jeans. Andy walked over to the bedside table. He put the pistol beside the hotel phone. He stood at the edge of the bed.
“The plan, like I said about my buddy Sean, was Seany takes that smashed up yellow Commander to the shop. He gets back to Fort Bliss. Okay. He leaves me a voicemail: ‘Andy, they say I’m in Texas. It’s a damn trick. It’s not Texas. I don’t know how, but it’s fucking Afghanistan. They kept me up for three weeks, now they’re fucking with my mind. The whole thing is bogus, it’s a damn trick, I love you, man.’ He goes in the shower and hangs himself.”
“When was this?” Vivienne asked, reaching for his hand.
“What day is it today?” He got back on the bed.
“Day? Wednesday, maybe Wednesday. I think the 25th was yesterday.”
“Yeah, yesterday. Christmas Day. Just like James Brown. Comes the day of reckoning. No way I’m going to let Sean have a pauper’s funeral.”
Andy’s eyes were right in front of her but they were occluded again with the micro-blackouts blowing in.
“And you want to know what the best part was? Sean slept with Caroline,” he said, bringing Vivienne into his arms, as if to console her with his own loss. She angled her flesh against his.
“Your Sean? Who hung himself?”
“Yeah – my fucking Sean. Only my Sean was her Sean it turns out. Right behind my back, righ
t in front of my face.”
Everything had been betrayed. Everything, everyone. Every baby atom inhaled the air of betrayal. This was the century of betrayal. “Did you tell her you knew?”
“No way. She acted like it was peachy-dory. Her and me – Caroline and Andy – was a lie the day she died. She died thinking I was her fool. You know what?”
“Tell me.” Vivienne moved closer to him.
“I was her fool. But him – Sean? My best buddy. We went through missions, then he fucks me.”
“Is that why he hanged himself?” she asked. Andy looked at her as if she were an alien.
“Hanged himself – over that? Come on, I thought you were a sharp cookie.” He ran a finger down her neck.
“I’m not seeing it.”
“Our commanding officer left us with no water, no supplies, shit for vests – a fly could get in that fake foam they call bulletproof. I could look at you and be inside that vest. I don’t want to talk about it. Sean saw it before any of us. Those blowhards up on high? They were granting us the divine privilege of carrying out how they did not know a rat’s fuck about what they were doing in Iraq. I volunteered to go over there and fight for Dick Cheney’s right to be an ignoramus. When did he ever lay his body on the line? When did he ever band with a group of fighting men? He’s got his pedal to the metal. Yeah, Dickie DUI. Driving Under the Influence of Shit for Brains.”
They lay back on the bed together, sitting up against the mounds of pillows. Andy lit two smokes, gave one to Vivienne.
“I got a good telephoto shot of Dick Cheney one time when I was working in El Salvador,” Vivienne said. “Cheney comes down to San Salvador, hangs out with the head of the Salvadoran death squad, Roberto D’Aubuisson. So, they’re having a club sandwich in the coffee shop of the Camino Real hotel. I’m a couple of tables away. That was back in the days when Cheney dressed like the guy who the guy from the used car lot hires to torch the joint: too bright blue shirt, cheap striped tie, light blue sports jacket with the back drooping. He had brown hair then. That was the day the death squad had a contract to kill a bearded US AID worker in the hotel coffee shop. But they came in and executed a bearded Jesuit priest by mistake. I call my pic of Cheney and D’Aubuisson He may be Murder Incompetent, but he’s our Murder Incompetent.”
Andy let Cheney dissolve back into the fog of patriotic lies, and said, “I don’t know why my Sean killed himself, at Bliss. Baby, I am feeling kind of abandoned.” Andy’s eyes went across the latitude line to another desert. “Your buddies over there aren’t the war, in a way. It’s a place out of time it’s so real. You’re in the minor chords all the time. I was with Sean in a promise. I’m going to get back home, if I ever get back home, and at least my Sean will know, like you said, my soundtrack. How can the music hang itself? I loved that man. He was better than a brother. I get over there tomorrow, Sean will be gone for good.”
Andy threw his lit smoke on the floor. He grabbed her into his body, wrapping her in his arms. He stroked her head. “I could love you. That would be okay.”
“Okay’s not an option now,” she said. There was no ma’am anymore. He was abandoning the protocols so he could be at his ease with her. Listening was a form of healing. It might be a form of honour, too. Vivienne had seen how war counterintuitively brought out the compassionate side of men. It had to. If you are counting on your brother warrior to save you, to have your back, then it was a form of love you each had to have, for each other’s flesh. The love warriors have for each other is outside of gender or sex; it is eternal love, love for which we have no word. Love in the action towards your closest co-operant saviour. She could feel the wound Andy had, that his saviour-buddy Sean had gone and said the whole enterprise was bogus. And now Andy’s Sean was gone.
Andy stroked Vivienne’s neck scar. “Let me nurse you,” he said. He was wounded, and he kept comforting her. He pecked her the way a bird that has known damage pecks a new damaged arrival. He put his ear to her heart. “Let me take care of you.”
“I am not someone anybody takes care of,” she said. It was a statement of fact. It had the Baby Pink decree in it. Andy kept his head at her heart.
“Let your feathers down.” He was stroking her face. “Here, we’ll ease you down, down, fold into me, no more nightmare feathers.” He set her into weeping. He folded her in. “Hush now, hush down, the battle will never be won. No one wins. Down, down, ease your wings down.”
From her thighs came a weeping up through her pussy, and her ribs hurt, constricted. “I love you, regardless,” was Johnny’s love for her. But regardless made a kingdom of stories jammed up behind her rib cage. Andy made her feel like a bird on a curb, with so many high low songs yet to sing.
“Little one, ease those wings, sleep now. Hush. Girl, lay low, lay low, come to earth, be low in the pillows, hush. Don’t go yet, don’t make me leave, let me put you down to sleep. Hush your eyes, little one, little dove girl. Would you just give me one more kiss I can stow securely until I see you again?” And she was asleep in his arms, and he fell asleep.
HE WOKE UP, lit a cigarette and stood pulling the curtains closed. Vivienne, still in half-sleep, reached for her camera on the side table, ready to be aimed. Her conflict art was anticipation. She pushed the pistol into the frame, and snapped a quiet pic of Andy, the pic she had been waiting for: Andy cupping his hands around the smoke, the match illuminating his face as if it were the age of Rembrandt and this was a candle casting gold on his skin, a moment caught, a nonchalant last night in town shot, an offhand look of a man fully and entirely aware he was being photographed. A man with the skill set children have, but do not know it, to play unselfconsciously and allow themselves to be photographed, not aping for the lens, accepting it as part of the life.
The man in the photograph on the way to or from undress, at dusk, in contemplation with a cigarette in a room with a side table, a phone, a gun. This was the shot Vivienne had hoped for, even though she planned one of his back. Those ones were good, even excellent, but this photograph she shot while half-asleep was the one, because it had in it the intentionality of the photographer to capture her subject who was being damn intentional in his lighting that smoke and holding that light. It was the detour you adopted as your intention.
“I need to take a shower,” Vivienne said.
That was it?
“I could write you,” he said.
“Thanks for the photographs.” She went into the bathroom, closed the door, got in the shower and wasted water all over her face.
When Vivienne came out of the steam, she heard the door to the room close. Sitting up against a pillow on the bed was the white T-shirt.
8
OVER THE RAINBOW
THEY SAY THAT the infant in his first transitions sees his arms and his legs as lies, in that unformed early perception of himself. He does not understand self, he sees only the glimpsed sections of his being as unconnected strange falsehoods. A man torn apart by a woman can feel just like an infant without speech: dematerialized arms, legs, eyes floating in woozy unfocused space. Only the infant doesn’t know how crazy it is. The infant is in a Paul Klee painting he’s making with pretty little feces. The man is a man saying, “I am in a Paul Klee painting, and I don’t know how to get out.”
Behold the arrival of the jugglers. They were juggling Andy’s body parts. He tapped a plastic bucket sitting on top of a woman’s head. “Ma’am, do I have skin? I think I might be burlap.”
She took the long straw out of her mouth with which she was sipping a two-foot tall drink. “He’s super-cute, don’t you think, Artie?” Talking to the magenta-coloured drink, which had a corsage on its rim.
The truths were all in play. Where was the centre? His brain, concussed in an Iraqi explosion, red-shifted and blue-shifted astronomical rays. Andy walked up the sloping hill beside Lago di Como, a ten-acre lake, where the water had been taught to dance to music. At the top of the hill he came to the ochre facade of the Bellagio. Inside, a canopy
of glass flowers hung suspended from the ceiling, the artist Dale Chihuly’s masterwork Fiori Di Como, two thousand pieces of undulating glass blooms in deep blues, verdant greens, scarlet and brilliant sun yellows. Where were the bivouacs if there was no centre? The world was a mysterious affront. He went up the few wide stairs to Petrossian Bar tucked in the lobby with little balustrade railings to look out on the passing parade. His armpits were soaking wet. He ordered a Knockando and knocked it back. An old cat was at the piano, pushing the ivories and ebonies with ease through “Over the Rainbow.”
Andy looked at his own long fingers around the copper-coloured liquid. He opened and closed a fist three times. He sat back in the cozy chair, listening. Those happy little bluebirds flew like unmanned drones over the rainbow, making direct hits on the hearts of men. Andy called for more single malt Knockando. He hugged himself tight around the ribs, looking behind him. He got up and walked the periphery of the Petrossian outlook, holding the balustrade railing. He eyeballed the inside bar. He came back to his table. He moved the three other chairs closer to his chair. He sat down, hands open on the table. He looked behind him again.
He was disturbed earth, as disturbed as any blown-up roadside shoulder. But he had organized his disturbances so they did not have to disturb him much. Things were set before she came along, and like intimate psychoanalysis the photographic process of being a subject had moved things around inside him, a feral thing war counted on, but he knew that one, and he did not know this one.
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