Ava said. “He doesn’t want to do it,” Alex said.
Ava sank into a cushy love seat nearby that was covered in throw pillows. “I don’t either,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t know where I’m going. I have nothing to go back to.”
Alex sank beside her and said nothing.
“Alan is not going to give up, unless someone stops or derails him. That morning I socked you, I went to somebody about that. I just don’t know if it worked. I don’t think there’s any way I’ll ever know.”
“And you came back,” Alex said.
“Yes, I came back.”
For that moment, sinking into pillows, her head fell against his arm, almost as if she could sleep there.
“Maybe you have to keep moving,” he suggested.
She stared up at him. That strange burning in her chest was back. He was moving closer or he was moving away. A clock was ticking and she was thinking of Alan again. Alan on the rebound after her parting gift, the cellular in a train-seat trick. She smiled vaguely, thinking she had to tell Alex the story sometime. There were all kinds of stories she wanted to tell someone. Moving closer or moving away.
“Let’s try that number,” Alex said, pulling out his cell phone.
She gave him the number slowly so he could enter it right. Took a few tries before he pressed send. The phone got busy but there was no connection. He was trying it again when Mink came in.
“I mean, it’s an honor and all that,” Mink said, as if continuing something he had already started, “but blocks and cubes? I mean, did it have to be those fucking blocks and cubes? And I’m thinking I should talk to Monk, but he’s holed up and not picking up his phone, and besides, maybe it’s a bad idea to ask him. He might take it badly, you know, a big commission for me, and him, well, just the idea … that I’m doing better than him, you know. I mean, you already know that he’s the one with the ego.”
“Yeah,” Alex said.
“Who you calling? Monk?”
“Nah. This number.” Alex handed him the phone. “We can’t get it on my cell.”
“011? That’s an international call,” he said. “Cell phones are weird about that sometimes. Let’s use this one.”
There was a phone right by the computer. He hit the speaker button and a dial tone sounded. He punched in the long series of numbers and waited. A series of clicks. The ring was not at all like the American bell ringing sound. It was more like a long toot. “Toot.” And then someone picked it up.
“Service Point, Bahnhof Zoologischer Garten,” the woman’s voice said.
“That’s German,” Mink said.
“German?” Alex was wide-eyed. “That can’t be right.”
“Hello,” Ava said, stepping up to the phone. “Can you speak English? We are calling from America. United States. Hello?”
“Yes, please,” the woman said haltingly, as if rearranging her brain. “How can I help to you?”
“What is this number,” Ava asked, “this place you are?”
“This is train station Zoologischer Garten, Berlin,” she said.
“A train station?”
“Yes.”
“A train station in Berlin,” Alex said. “Why would it be—?”
“Thank you very much,” Ava said.
“Bitte schon,” the woman said.
Ava clicked off.
“That’s Berlin, Germany,” Mink said. “You know someone in Berlin?”
“Yes,” she answered. “I have to go over there.”
Mink looked at her again as if she were a small child. “Just like that?”
“Just like that. And right away,” she added, glancing at Alex, who seemed startled. His face was ashy, something confused in his eyes. He looked at Mink and shook his head.
“She has to go to Berlin,” he said.
Mink peered at both of them, one to the other. A vague smile played on his face.
“Are the police really after you?”
She hadn’t expected the question, coming cold and sharp like that. Mink nailed her with a penetrating look that he saved for emergencies.
“Yes,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “You give me a minute. I’ll be right back.”
He stepped out of the room, back down the corridor.
“Where the fuck is he going?” Ava asked, springing up from the desk.
“Take it easy. I told you you can trust him.”
“No you didn’t. How do I know he’s not calling the cops?”
Alex laughed. It was an actual laugh, something she had never heard before. He was laughing at her fear, her terror, her panic as she reached for her purse to feel the security of a gun nearby, ready to correct mistakes.
“Mink would never call cops,” Alex said, still laughing. “He’s got twelve skunk plants up on the roof in the little greenhouse. You should relax.”
“I can’t relax.” She was pacing. “I have to get to Berlin and I probably don’t have enough money for a ticket. That bastard put a slash on my account. The ATM I tried to use this morning confiscated my debit card! … What’s so fucking funny?”
“I’ll lend you some money, calm down.”
“No, I won’t calm down.”
“You should. Everything happens for a reason.”
“Oh yeah? Is that your attitude, Mr. Blackout?”
Alex nodded slowly. His silence created an empty space, left her desperate for words, a fight, something. There was nothing. He was just looking at her, and she was looking at him, when Mink returned. He was holding a dingy plastic bag and an envelope.
“I was thinking,” he said. “We can’t just let her walk out of here, Alex. With that blond hair on her, she’ll get spotted in a minute. Cops notice stuff like blond women walking down a South Bronx street.”
“Especially white blond women,” Alex added.
“So, check these out. I picked them up in Europe. I met this girl in Amsterdam named Sasha. She used to change her hair color about three times a week. Keeps people guessing, she would say. She told me to use the stuff for painting, and I did—The Sasha Series. I guess you could call it my experimental stage.”
He uncapped one of the cans, shook it a little, and sprayed into his palm. A blob of black foam.
“Black mousse,” she said, grabbing a can from the bag.
“Yeah, it’s hair color. I must have ten cans of this stuff. You foam it up, then splugga into your hair.”
Mink laughed again.
“Twenty minutes later, no blond. Just like that. All those nosy cops searching elsewhere.”
Ava looked from Alex to Mink and back again. Her eyes brimmed hopeful. Some weird thought about not being blond. Some weird thought about losing her identity, if Ava Reynolds was supposed to be blond—some deep philosophical issue about what makes a person.
Mink must have read her thoughts. “It comes off eventually.”
“Okay,” she said. “Thank you.” She rushed up to Mink and hugged him, planted a kiss on his cheek like a grateful little girl. Alex too. Got a long hug, though she lingered a bit more, pressed closer. His arms went around her waist and they were now face to face.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
“You won’t go out the bathroom window?”
“No.”
“No cheap tricks, no lies, no stories?”
“No way,” she said.
Were they going to kiss? Mink thought so, and when she scooted down the corridor with her cans of paint, he was staring awful wary at Alex, who looked like he had been kissed. He leaned against the desk and took out his tobacco.
“What are you getting yourself into?” Mink said. “Are you sure about this?”
“Yeah, she has to go to Berlin. The least I can do is drive her there.”
Mink squinted. “Hello. Car?” He made motions, like he was behind the wheel. “Plane?” He shot a hand upwards like a 747. “You’re taking her? See, I figure
d that. You don’t know what this woman is carrying with her, Alex! You’re not drunk now, you’re in total command of your senses, right? What do you really know about her, that you should take so many chances?”
Alex thought a moment, holding his clump of tobacco. “But it’s always like that. I’m only taking her to the airport.”
“I knew that. That’s why she should at least not be a blonde. I don’t want you catching whatever she’s going to get. Though seeing you now, I figure you’ve already caught it.”
“Yeah, well. Are you going to show me what you painted?”
Mink’s face tilted like he’d heard a musical note. “I’ll show you both,” he said.
In a letter to a fellow poet, Anne Sexton wrote about how she had been having blackouts. In Dr. Kenneth Rangle’s book, Blackouts: The Memory of not Being There, he cited twenty-nine case histories of people clinically treated for blackouts. People who lost whole chunks of life like loose change falling down a subway grating. People who learned to switch situations, react, make it up as they went along. It was a dance, an acting job. It was like modeling. To make it up as they went along from one slide to the next.
The pictures that came to her were fast speed. She saw it two ways: she, cringing, bullets, spatter. Like water splashing, hot grease. The other way was harder to make out through all the harsh lighting, those tilted camera effects and zooms. She would not fill in those blanks. Anne was there to fill spaces with words and pictures of her own. She might give you a handful of links. She would not, piece by piece, reassemble the chain. Dr. Kenneth Rangle pointed out that blackouts are sometimes self-inflicted. Created barriers, firewalls, a pop-up blocker.
She would have blacked it out if she could. Anne was her blackout. There were no blank spaces she did not fill. There was a semblance of circus music. Marilyn Monroe in fishnets atop an elephant. Seals clapping. Marlene Dietrich, the master of ceremonies. A pair of aerosol cans. She read instructions in English in Dutch in German in Spanish. What was it Alex said about the god of disguises?
This Mink. A real guardian all right. Could take over any chapter in any book, all lines were his. He was storm, he was calm. His hands never stopped moving.
She stared into the mirror at that blond face, she immersed in dark, in hot flaming water that dizzied her head, and barely twenty minutes later, no blond. Still curly, still those large eyes, now in a darker frame. She stared and stared.
When she came out, they stared and stared.
“Wow,” Alex said.
“You don’t like it?”
Immediately after she felt so stupid to have said it, so stupid to have let such a thing slip, and now she stood looking at him, hopeless.
Alex stepped closer, to touch. “It’s pretty,” he said.
“It’s a different girl,” Mink added. “Bella, bella.”
Her eyes had not left Alex’s. “But you can still look at me?”
“Yes,” he said. “I can still look at you.”
“Now there’s something I want you to look at,” Mink said. “But first, here.” He handed her the envelope he had brought out before. As she opened it, he passed her a sheet of paper. “Can you sign this?”
She glanced at it, glanced back. “What is it?”
“It’s a release form saying it’s okay I painted you. That goes together with the envelope.”
Ava opened it. Inside was cash, and a receipt.
“Three thousand dollars? What did I do for this?”
Mink smiled. “Let me show you.”
The studio was separated from the living room by a glass block wall made sturdier by bookcases. It shared the skylight and was raised in the center like a stage. Here were those big picture windows, from floor to ceiling. To see the street through them was to float above it. Canvases were stacked against the wall. A fish tank of colored rocks. Tin cans in rows, bristling with brushes brushes brushes.
The chairs, small end tables, stools, all looked like props. He shoved them offstage. Full center was the big picture. A smaller one on a second easel stood right off the stage, a little below, just crowned by light. It was a bare skeleton yet, with dabs and shadings of gray.
The painting of the blonde on the island looked done. He said it wasn’t. He was still working on the right color, the final touches that he couldn’t define yet. Alex was speechless when he saw it. Ava came close, almost to touch but not quite touch.
“That’s me,” she said.
“Could be,” Mink said.
“It’s not blocks and cubes,” Alex said.
“She’s got an armband.” Ava sounded like she was in a trance. “It looks like a—”
“Yeah, this poor girl’s got a past. A bad one. Maybe she ran away this time. Maybe she escaped.”
“Maybe she came back,” Alex said.
“It took me all this time to get here. Now I have these Romero brothers asking me to do blocks and cubes. Right when I’ve broken with them.”
“Maybe you should do it one more time,” Ava said. “A grand kiss-off. The way to send it away with a big bang. While this one,” she smiled, looking like the hostess in a gallery, “you can show your agent.”
“I like this girl,” Mink said. “She’s going far with a brain like that.”
Alex stared at the painting with glassy eyes. “All the way to Berlin.”
Ava moved to the big table and signed the release form.
“It’s beautiful, Mink.” She hugged him. “Thank you for everything.”
“Sure,” Mink replied. A hesitation hit everyone. “Will you be making a move?”
“Yeah,” Alex said, looking at Ava.
“You coming back?”
The question caught Alex off guard. He stared at Ava. Her dark hair shaped her face in a new way, it was almost like meeting a different girl. There were still those large green eyes though, already too familiar to belong to anyone else, blond or brunette.
“Yeah, he’s coming back, he’s only driving me to the airport,” she said.
The door buzzer sounded.
Ava looked at Alex. She slipped a hand into her purse.
Mink checked the video screen. “It’s Monk,” he said, buzzing him in. They could hear him clomping up the stairs fast. The walk to the door was a little awkward. Alex seemed to have withdrawn and become his old, wordless self, grimace grinning like a Steve McQueen still.
Ava kept her hand in her purse as they waited for Monk, reminding Alex that she wasn’t quick to trust. “But she trusts me.” He spoke the words under his breath as if the charm they carried mystified him.
“If there’s anything about that boy,” Mink said as he opened the door and caught it on a stopper, “it’s his timing. He never misses anything and he usually comes in at exactly the right moment.”
Monk looked thin in that worn PJ Harvey T-shirt, arms boyish bony. His eyes were fevered and luminous, glazed, yet with an intensity that seemed manic. Mink flicked a switch and turned on the light outside on the landing. Ava immediately saw that the universe of blocks and cubes on the door was only a fragment of the universe that Mink had painted on the surrounding walls and even part of the ceiling.
“Thanks for calling. I’m glad I caught you before you took off,” Monk said.
“Me too,” Alex said back, the two of them clasping hands.
“Ava, this is my good friend Monk.”
Monk kissed her hand. “Enchanté.” There was an energy to him that radiated kinetic, stubble-faced and no cap on this time to crush down that bush of curlies.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said.
“Some of what you’ve heard could be true,” Monk replied, pulling a book out of his backpack. “Alex told me you two were leaving and I busted my nut trying to think of what to give you, you know, to take with you, and of course I thought book. My book and Mink’s pictures—”
“A copy of Shadowtown,” Mink said. “I could’ve given her that!”
“It’s mutually autographed,”
Monk said, showing the page where they both signed a long, long time ago. “It’s got him, it’s got me, a quick way for you to take both of us along.”
He shoved the book into Alex’s hands.
“But then I thought, man, that’s so stupid. You guys on the run and everything and I’m giving you some dumb book to carry around. Not what you really need, so I kept beating my brain. I knew there was something I had of yours …”
“Of mine?” Alex asked.
“That’s right.” Monk fished around in the backpack. “You remember that time we went to Spain with Mink?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“You crashed at my house for three days after we came back, remember? You left this. I’ve meant to give it to you for a while now, just kept forgetting.”
He handed Alex his passport.
“You might need it, you know. ID and stuff. Cops always ask for shit like that.”
There was a weird silence. Ava and Alex glanced at each other.
“No, no, not that you’ll be running into any cops …”
“We have to get out of here,” Alex said.
“Yeah, we have to go,” Ava agreed.
“Sure, sure, here, take this.” Monk passed Alex the backpack.
Alex shoved the book in there, along with the passport. “Thanks for that.” He looked at Ava, then Monk. “I’ll see you later.”
Alex gave Monk a hug. It was a tight, quick back-slapper. Ava hugged Mink and Alex smiled sheepishly at him.
As Ava and Alex started to descend the steel steps, Monk touched her arm, making her turn. “I just wanted to thank you,” he said.
“Thank me?”
Ava saw the strangest look in his eyes. It was reverent, grateful, compassionate. It was the look of a satiated house guest.
“Thank me for what?”
“For a hundred and forty pages,” he said.
The words made her laugh, the same way a little boy saying “eleven-teen” or “eleventy-seven” would, some nonsense line when she expected grandiloquence. It was a relief to laugh, and Monk laughed too.
Outside, the late afternoon felt slow, the sun blinding. They moved quickly so as not to be seen coming out of Mink’s. Alex pulled Ava along by the hand, toward Fox Street. They saw Mink and Monk standing in the big windows, but they could not wave.
South by South Bronx Page 23