Piero abhorred men’s tendency to delight at another’s misfortune. Nevertheless, his discomfiture and frank dislike of the character of Silenus and his unseemly antics inevitably shaped the way he painted the sodden buffoon. The god’s flesh was now flaccid as a depleted wineskin; his features drooped to the extent they came near to dissolving. Silenus was sinking into a torpor so extreme he was nothing more than an overinflated fleshy sack.
As Piero pushed himself on to finish the work, he found his will failing. The scene had become despicable to him. He shrank from the task as if he feared the curse of drunkenness he’d depicted would contaminate him. That long-ago morning he’d woken with the sour stench of wine exuding from his every pore, there was a taste of Hell in his mouth. Was this why the satyrs who tried to pry Silenus to his feet looked so like devils, with their pointed ears and cruel lipless mouths?
Vespucci was not altogether pleased with this second spalliera, which he considered unfinished, and thus paid substantially less than the price originally agreed upon. Piero accepted this judgement in good grace and felt no need to explain his failure. The second half of the commission had brought him near an abyss he would prefer not to re-encounter. That morning after his self-indulgence, he had come very near self-murder. It was a cautionary lesson that he had wisely heeded since. There were people who should not drink wine at all because it was poisonous to both body and spirit. He had no doubt he was one of these.
And so he clung to his sobriety, with its assurance of clear vision: a clarity of eye and mind that must ultimately steer him through and out of despair. He had no doubt his neighbours regarded his rigid discipline of abstention as merely another of his eccentricities.
The foreign woman, whom he had not seen in the city for some time — now she, he thought, was one who might appreciate his stand and the great maxim: Cole perspicua. Study clarity. He hoped she was well and in no way prey to the various abuses inflicted on female servants of noble houses. He found he nurtured a deep care for her, as deep as that compassion she had so manifestly shown for the caged lions.
TWENTY
Laelaps
AGNES WOKE MID-MORNING, STILL IN her clothes from the day before. This time she also had neglected to take off her shoes. She groaned. Coming to consciousness was like struggling to emerge from the mouth of a shark. Her body was needling her, shark’s teeth in her temples, her belly, the backs of her knees. Sécheresse. She clutched at the elegant French word for a grain of comfort, a poeticizing of her hangover’s coarse physical symptoms: the parched throat, gluey eye and cracked lips, a brain in thundering revolt against the dehydration she has inflicted on its gasping cells.
Water will help. In the bathroom, she quickly drank two tumblers, while grabbing the edge of the vanity with one hand to counter the dizziness and stay erect. Her thirst was apparently unquenchable. She avoided the mirror lest what she see drive her back to bed.
After her shower and morning dose of Aspirin, she began the ritual of searching her purse and pockets for credit card receipts. These would reveal the names of the bars she had been at the night before, meagre gleanings from a recent past of which she had little recollection. She had stopped carrying much cash, other than for the taxi back to her hotel. She still wore the money belt she had bought for the trip to Arles, and many times over the course of an evening would check covertly that she still had the passport which was increasingly her sole link to who she was. New York had enabled her to succeed almost too well at becoming faceless. In the bars to which she gravitated — tiny, subfusc places she might consider intimate if she had a companion — no one approached her.
She was grateful to be left alone; to be, in some very needful sense, invisible. Since the incident at the Met, she had begun to dress more conservatively. A plain cerise top with an A-line jean skirt. A black sleeveless shift. She did want to disappear, much as something small and wet and wounded would crawl into a cave to save itself and be healed. Her prime medicament was whisky. It still struck her as miraculous: the swiftness with which the amber-coloured fluid lifted her so high she was made almost unbearably happy; her future was so dazzlingly bright with possibility and the promise of untold wonders, she had an urge to shade her eyes.
After four or five shots, her mind readily overthrew logic and trumped death. Spelled into being by the magical fumes of the whisky, Campbell and Zebra were resurrected intact and glowing with health. She sat in her crepuscular bar nook, always with her back to the wall, sketching their lovely faces just as they came to her mind’s eye, quick and so radiant with conviction, the eyes she darkened with her pencil tip had the look of live embers.
When there was the least indication she was beginning to see double or her fingers trembled even slightly as she moved the pencil, she settled her bill and called a cab. She wanted no repetition of the degrading incident at the Met. She was proud of the fact she had her drinking under control. She would never again appear inebriated in public. When she entered the hotel lobby after her evenings out, she monitored her every move scrupulously. The line she walked across the marble floor to the bank of elevators was die-straight. Not even a policeman would have found fault with her performance.
In her room, she extracted the current bottle of Single Malt from the wardrobe. Her habitually careless decanting of the whisky had left a little pool on the cupboard floor, and this spillage had attracted a stream of ants from deep within the crevices of the building. To the tiny scurrying black bodies in the wardrobe Agnes was mostly oblivious, just as she was oblivious to the breast-high smear of green relish on her T-shirt from the vegetarian burger she had ordered at the last bar. She knew it was important that she eat. Apart from dry toast in the morning, she was managing about one meal a day. Her clothes were beginning to look rather loose on her frame. This fact, too, barely registered.
When she went on Saturday to settle her bill for the week, the receptionist in the immaculate navy jacket informed her that the room would no longer be available after Sunday. He had the air of a judge pronouncing sentence. She smarted under the supercilious chill of his gaze.
“Why?” She heard her own voice with dismay, a child’s cry, petulant with an undercurrent of alarm.
He explained very slowly, as if she were indeed a child, that they had a convention coming in, which had booked multiple rooms months ago. As he spoke, he drew heavy score marks on a hotel notepad, then crossed them diagonally, just as heavily. The female receptionist — the hotel seems always to have a man and women in tandem behind the desk — meanwhile directed a tight-lipped smile at Agnes.
“But surely there is another room somewhere in the hotel?”
“I’m sorry, miss. We’re absolutely booked up. But there are plenty of other hotels in New York.” She could not tell if he intended this remark to be snide. Only when she was back in her room did it occur to her that neither of them had apologized or offered to make enquiries with another establishment. She assumed this perfunctory treatment was the norm for callous New York. She was soon to be disabused of this idea by the chambermaid, Ines, whose insistent knocking and shrill cry of “housekeeping” had often roused her from a late-morning stupor. Agnes’s dishevelled and confused state on these occasions had propelled them into a kind of makeshift intimacy. “Bad head this morning, miss? Sit down. Sit down. I will get done fast.” For these small courtesies, Agnes was immensely grateful.
On the Monday she was due to check out she stuffed her clothes into her suitcase with a careless haste, having overslept. Ines appeared earlier than usual, closed the door quietly behind her and surveyed Agnes’s chaotic packing with obvious distress.
“Oh, miss. I came to say sorry. Sorry I had to tell them about the ants.”
“What?” Was this a joke at her expense? Her stomach slid sideways. Her palms started sweating.
“The ants in the cupboard where you hide your bottle, miss. If I don’t tell them, I lose my job. Not just the ants, Miss.” Here Ines briefly touched Agnes’s hand. “
They don’t like the heavy drinking in the room. For a man, not so bad. But women drunks, they don’t like to see that. Bad for business. Other guests complain.” She put on a mock grimace and pinched her nose.
Agnes rocked on her feet. What? She stared at Ines in defiance.
“I am not a drunk,” Agnes declared, even as her stomach slithered and the inside of her head clanged in a clamorous self-rebuke. “I am not a drunk,” she repeated. This time she stamped her foot. How hollow her protest sounded. Worse, she perceived a heavy pity in the chambermaid’s eyes which simultaneously enraged her and made her want to curl up on the bed and sob.
“Take care, miss.”
Agnes glared at Ines. She had intended to leave fifty dollars in the tip envelope for housekeeping. Instead, she inserted a miserly twenty.
Trundling her wheeled suitcase behind her through the lobby, she strove to undo a percolating rage at the management. How the spurned infant in her would love to make a scene and berate the smug desk attendants loudly. But she had made her vow about unseemly public displays and so wisely kept moving. What she needed was a place with far fewer strictures; somewhere anti-establishment and free-thinking. The Chelsea Hotel struck her as a perfect solution. Didn’t it welcome junkies and hard-drinking rock stars of both sexes? Didn’t it in fact celebrate excess?
She found a quiet coffee bar and settled into a back corner with a double espresso which her stomach soon told her was the wrong choice. She switched to a pot of peppermint tea, Granny’s traditional cure-all for anxiety, nausea and cramps. With the help of her smart phone, she discovered that the Chelsea Hotel no longer existed as such. Like so many “heritage places” of character, it was being transformed into luxury apartments. How sad, she thought. But in a city this huge, there must be hotels similar to what the Chelsea once was, the kind of place her parents would shun.
She found a cash point and withdrew two hundred dollars. After several frustrating attempts, she succeeded in hailing a cab. The driver was obese, his bulk exceeding the confines of his seat. When he turned to ask her where she was going, three horizontal rolls of flesh on the back of his neck contracted wormlike. His bald head was covered with purplish spider veins. These things, combined with the cab’s reek of pine-scented deodorizer, made her feel queasy and dangerously vulnerable.
“Can you take me to a cheap hotel . . . I mean, low-budget? Something like the Chelsea Hotel maybe.”
He grunted. She was perplexed as to what this noise signified. The cab took off and her mood lightened briefly as the rush of air through the open window touched her face. He drove for what seemed a long time but when she checked her watch, she saw that she had been in the cab only fifteen minutes. As so often with her hangovers, time elongated. The entire journey became a protracted agony as she struggled against a rising nausea and anxiety as to where he was taking her.
At last he stopped in front of a decaying brownstone. A stuttering pink neon sign in the ground-floor window told her this was the A-1 Guesthouse. She had not expected anything quite so unprepossessing. Without doubt it was an establishment her parents would spurn. There was a mound of fresh dog dirt on the sidewalk in front of the hotel’s pocked stone steps. The orange paint on the door had been deeply scored — perhaps by a knife, or a large dog’s claws.
“This is it?” she asked.
“You wanted cheap, right?” His tone was truculent. She did not have the stamina to argue. Besides, she very much needed to lie down. Surely for one night it would do?
“Ninety dollars.”
“What?” She assumed he meant the price of the rooms. He could not possibly mean his fare.
“You owe me ninety dollars.”
She started to tell him this was outrageous; then desisted. She was just too weak and was feeling increasingly unwell. He pocketed the hundred dollars she handed him without acknowledgement. She sat pointedly waiting for him to retrieve her suitcase from the trunk.
“My suitcase,” she prompted.
He sighed. His sodden shirt stuck to the plastic of his seat as he levered himself out of the cab. He deposited her case on the sidewalk beside the dog dirt. Was this deliberate? As he sped away, she tried, Pinto-like, to imagine his life, the sweltering confinement in his unhealthy body and the fume-filled car, hour after tedious hour. Weren’t his irascibility and the demand for one hundred dollars understandable?
She averted her eyes from a planter of long-expired geraniums filled to the brim with cigarette butts and pushed open the door, half-hoping there would be no room available. The hallway was long, narrow and dimly lit. There was a faint odour of sewage. What was she doing in this awful place? Why did she ever come to this huge, heartless city? Nothing was working out as she had intended. She had to pull herself together, decide about Bremrose. Should she go back in September? Could she bear it?
A rope-thin old man emerged from a doorway at the end of the corridor. As he came nearer, she could see his grubby string vest, and the bluish exposed flesh which sagged in little runnels, despite his skeletal aspect. He began to cough, so harshly his entire body shuddered, and he did not cover his mouth. Automatically, she put her hand over her face. Was she exposing herself to tuberculosis by being in this dreadful place? Did the taxi driver bring her here out of deliberate malice? But surely that was a foolish, paranoid thought? It was hard to think clearly when she felt so unwell.
“Are you looking for a room?” It was a woman’s voice. Although nasal, it had none of the cab driver’s abrasiveness. She turned to her left and saw a face framed by a wicket cut in the wall. How could she have failed to notice this aperture, with its rudimentary counter and push-bell?
The woman’s hair was the colour of dull brass, densely teased into a rounded pyramid. This rather astonished look was intensified by the severe arcs of her pencilled eyebrows. Her foundation had an orange cast under the flickering ceiling light, and the makeup had already developed tiny fissures, like the craquelure of an old oil painting.
“Do you have a room with a private bathroom?” Then she added rapidly: “This isn’t just a hotel for men, is it?” Before she could stop herself, she gestured toward the door behind which the man in the undershirt was performing his cacaphonous ablutions, gargling and coughing by turns.
The woman laughed. “We welcome all genders here, miss, including the in-betweens. I can give you a room with its own toilet and shower. Our policy is that you pay for a minimum of two nights in advance.”
Studying the tacked-up laminated card with the various room rates, Agnes quickly calculated that three nights here would cost less than one in her previous hotel. She paid with her credit card and received the toothed metal key to room 11.
“Up the stairs and on your left,” the woman told her. “Is this your first time in New York, honey?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll be safe here. Just make sure you keep your door locked and your eyes on your purse.”
Agnes absorbed the perils implicit in this warning as the norm in any big city. She was surprised how pleased she was that the woman called her “honey.” Was she that desperate for crumbs of kindness?
She bumped her suitcase up the tight staircase, grateful to meet no men, either young or elderly, coming down. Number 11 smelled of stale cigarettes and was a quarter of the size of the room in Manhattan. Its dominant feature was the double bed with a tangerine chenille spread that had several noticeable bald spots amongst its tufted pile. She wondered if these were the result of erosion, from the weight of all the bodies lying down and rising over the years. Or had various successive guests plucked out the little tufts, either intentionally or in fits of abstracted despair?
She parked her suitcase against the wall and put the key on the dresser with its haphazard lattice of overlapping water stains. It was only when she had her head on the pillow that she recalled the desk clerk’s warning about locking the door. There was a sliding bolt lock, as well as a chain and both of these she dutifully fastened. She even drew ba
ck the calico curtains on the window and was reassured to see its inset vertical iron bars. Glancing into the cupboard-sized bathroom, she noted that the small window set near the ceiling was similarly fortified.
She congratulated herself on her move. She was probably safer here than in the bourgeois hotel in Manhattan. Besides, this place had far more character and the woman called her honey. She hugged the word to herself, and pictured Nanny’s blanket of hand-knitted squares.
When she woke, it was with a start. Where was she? It took her a moment to recall the morning’s gruelling cab drive and her arrival at this less than salubrious guesthouse. She was surprised to find that she had slept nearly six hours and that it was now early evening. As she swung her legs over the edge of the bed, she went suddenly light-headed. Her hands were trembling. She felt the closeness of the room pressing, like a hot and thirsting mouth, at her temples and wrists. She needed fresh air. She needed to eat.
She washed her face and tidied herself as best she could in the sepulchral light of the bathroom. The mirror over the sink was small and so high set she had to stand on tiptoe in order to see her whole face. She looked sallow and unwell. Food would help.
At the desk she was pleased to see the same woman with whom she’d spoken in the morning. The reception staff at the other hotel was always changing.
“I know this will sound strange,” Agnes began, “but I don’t know what part of New York this is.”
The woman looked at her and blinked. “You’re in the Bronx, honey. This is South Bronx.”
Hunting Piero Page 27