Smoke City

by Keith Rosson

  Because you’ve started to believe what they say about you.

  The limo had a bar. The airport had a bar. The airplane had a bar. By the time they were in the air, he’d lost count of how many drinks he’d had.

  “Another rum and Coke, madam,” Vale said to the stewardess. He made a gun with his finger and shot her. She rolled her eyes, brought him another one.

  Twelve hours later he stepped through the terminal at Charles de Gaulle International, nearly blind with intoxication after drinking his way across an ocean. He wandered the airport, enjoying himself immensely, drunkenly pawing magazine racks and peering at his reflection in the windows of overpriced restaurants. Fixing his hair, smiling at people, ensconced in the sexy, ambient din of a language he couldn’t speak. He bought a corkscrew key chain in a gift shop that had the Eiffel Tower on it and after an hour or so returned to the concord he’d exited from, where he staggered into a man holding a placard bearing his name. Vale had stared at the man with his jaw hanging open as if he’d just materialized there.

  “Victory!” he crowed, slobbering. People passing by had stared, traded looks with each other. He threw a shoulder around the man with the placard like they’d caught shrapnel in Normandy together.

  The man’s name, he found out, was François. A representative of the museum, he said. He would be Vale’s guide and chauffeur throughout his stay in Paris. François was a short, blunt-featured man in an impeccable suit. He had an obvious toupee and nothing that came remotely near a sense of humor. None. A screaming void where François’s funny resided. He drove them through a series of rainswept, winding streets and dropped Vale off in front of his hotel.

  Vale spent most of the next day ordering from room service and nursing his hangover. He called Candice, told her he’d made it through fine. She was curt and Vale hung up on her, angry.

  That evening, François came to his door. Vale’s hangover was finally in remission; he had just started his second bottle of champagne. It was six o’clock.

  “Frankie!” he cried cheerfully. “Have a drink!”

  François’s nose curled and he said in his heavily accented English, “We go now, Michael, okay? We check that the art is good for the show tomorrow, okay?” They stepped out into a fog-heavy night and he felt impervious to death; transcendent. He was in Paris! His handler had a toupee and no joy in his life! Yes! Life was good. François cursed under his breath when Vale spent most of the ride leaning out the window and gleefully yelling lewd suggestions at Parisian pedestrians.

  The Museum d’Orsay was madness. A columned monstrosity, huge. It was a testament to his ignorance that he hadn’t heard of the place. He was frisked by slab-faced guards who noted his drunkenness and were clearly reluctant to let him in. François argued with them while Vale grinned at the exchange of spitfire French like it was a tennis match. They finally let him through, François leaving curses in their wake.

  The museum thrummed with activity, a hundred different artists and their handlers and assistants. Curators and staff. Reporters. A few collectors calling in favors, getting to see the show early. People barked into walkie-talkies or stood on stepladders, hanging eyelets and holding electronic levels against the walls as others below them barked orders.

  “If this was New York, the show would have been ready days ago,” Vale said. It wasn’t necessarily true, but the truth had never stopped him before. He waved at a group of bejowled men in ghutras, who frowned at him and walked on.

  François pursed his lips and said, “This is not New York, Michael, okay?”

  Everyone was trying to eye each other’s work, size it up. After traveling the length of the museum twice they still hadn’t located Vale’s paintings. Nobody knew where the museum director was, or the curator in charge of this wing. People with handheld recorders and notepads kept brightening with recognition and tugging at Vale’s sleeve as he passed, but François kept them at bay until he abruptly spun around in a circle, cursing. He put a hand gently against Vale’s chest.

  “You stay here, Michael.” He wagged his finger. “I will look for David. You stay, please, okay? Just stay to the ground.”

  “Who’s David?”

  “The—” François sputtered, seesawed his hand in a circle, impatient. “Museum man, you know.”

  “The head of the museum? To find my paintings?”

  “Oui.”

  “Got it, Frankie. No problem.” Vale’s buzz was wearing thin by then, but the hum and snap of the room held him aloft for the time being. He was still cruising.

  He immediately walked the rooms again. A few reporters asked him questions. He tried his best.

  He nodded at Kenny Scharf and his bad haircut; Scharf had pieced together an installation using cartoon transparencies and television sets. It was crap, Vale knew, and he was sure Scharf would soon enough convince himself of the same about Vale’s paintings. There was a Basquiat triptych on loan from the museum’s permanent collection. Four of Judith Scott’s carapace-like weavings took up an entire wall of one room; they were braced by three of Jeffrey Koons’s meticulously painted wax casts of people in mundane repose.

  If Brophy’s little gestapo assistants had fucking lost a half dozen of his paintings in transit to Paris, heads would roll.

  He stood beneath one of Scott’s weavings and didn’t realize until he’d put his lighter back in his pocket that he’d lit a cigarette inside the museum. People turned, scowling.

  “Mister Vale? I’m sorry, but it is a no smoking building.”

  The woman held a clipboard in one hand and a clasp of keys in the other. Blonde, her hair cut jagged at the jawline. His age? Green-flecked eyes and the slightest overbite. She bowed slightly when he turned to face her.

  “Je suis désolé,” she said, nearly curtsying again, and waved a hand at the room. “The exhibition is an important event for the museum. The work is fragile.” She took the cigarette from his fingers and dropped it to the floor, which garnered a smattering of applause from those around them. A bridge sparked between them. He recognized it for what it was.

  “My name is Mike,” he said, and held out his hand. He sounded leering, buffoonish, in his own ears.

  She’d picked the crushed cigarette back up, awkwardly between her thumb and middle finger. She switched it to her other hand and shook. Her hand was tiny. “Oh, I know who you are. I have loved your paintings since I was in school, you know?” She laughed, and when she did showed one crooked tooth. She saw him looking and covered her mouth. He asked her what her name was.

  “Olivia,” she said.

  “Olivia.” Vale said. He gazed around the room, looked back at her. “Olivia, I’d like to have a drink with you.”

  “Yes,” she said immediately. “Me too.”

  They left. Olivia held his wrist as they wended through the museum and stepped through a door marked Privé that turned out to be a filing room with an even smaller door behind it. They ran through that as well, the cacophony dimming behind them, and they laughed and he wanted to kiss her then, but his blooming sobriety held him back—which was what he would only later understand to be, of course, his sense of loyalty. His propriety, sense of justice. Rightness. His love.

  He would only later understand—years later, long after he had split with Candice—that some part of him would always seek to sink lower, would only feel good when he tried to claw himself up from further and further depths. It was fucked.

  But for now, her car was in the back parking lot. A tiny thing, the bed he shared with Candice was larger. Olivia sped from the lot and they wheeled down rue Saint Dominique and rue de l’Université with the river threading like a slash of ink along beside them, and she talked about him, about how she loved his paintings, how he was a hero to her and her friends, his paintings spoke to her, the emblematic accuracy of them—such a thing to say, and Christ, with a French accent!—and his heart was lifted. His great and ceaseless vanity.

  They passed a shop that sold wine and Vale made her stop
. They ran in and he threw a handful of money at the proprietor and Olivia laughed and said, “No, no, it’s too much,” and took some of the money and handed it back to him. They stepped out with bottles pressed tight against them, as many as they could carry.

  Just within that minute or two in the wine shop, it had begun to rain again. He dropped a bottle on the ground and it broke with a sound like coughing and he cursed and laughed. He was suddenly sure that Candice was looking out the window thinking about him at that moment, he could imagine it: she would have a book open and slices of apple on a saucer, and when they got back to Olivia’s car he opened a bottle of wine in the passenger seat with his new corkscrew key chain. He did a bad job of it and savaged the cork until it crumbled in pieces into the bottle.

  He drank and the wine spilled down the sides of his face, darkening his collar. He was in a panic to finish the thing, to quell the image of Candice from his mind, to drink more.

  Olivia lived in a tiny flat at the top of a brownstone. There was a winding staircase with a flimsy, ornate railing. At her door a black cat entwined itself around her legs and she gently pushed it away with her foot. She opened the door and they stepped inside and she turned suddenly shy again, setting the bottles on the counter in her cramped kitchen and smoothing her skirt. He felt like an animal loosed in there, something too big for the room, churlish and awkward. This American beast with his wine bottle and his false bravado and his bullshit. He drank from the bottle again and looked at her and she blushed. She took a bottle opener from a drawer and a glass and said, “I guess you don’t need one of these.”

  “I do not,” he agreed. She turned her back to him and poured a glass and he felt it all on the verge of dissipating.

  He stepped through the kitchen into the small living room. A bookshelf full of monographs and art history texts on one wall, a CD player and mismatched wingback chairs. Traffic down at street level, a little white dog tied up outside of a café, barking at people that passed. It was still early. There was a coffee table covered in medieval maps and glossed in Lucite. He walked over to it.

  On the maps, the unknown edges of the world were populated by blue, unfathomable beasts with scales and many heads. It hurt his heart a little to see: it was something a girl in college would make. He almost left then. Above the love seat was a reproduction of Pollock’s Number 7, 1951, the right half of it always seeming to him like a face in profile, a playful caricature.

  He stood there in her small apartment, saw through the doorway the dried herbs hanging above the kitchen sink. The photos of strangers on the refrigerator, Olivia in front of a tree, silly and cross-eyed with her arm slung around the neck of another girl, the sun flung on her like paint. Only a teenager in that one.

  She stepped into the living room, her eyes fixed at a point beyond his seeing. Determined. He finished his bottle of wine and dropped it where it rang hollowly against the floor. She cringed: the neighbors. He put her at twenty-one, twenty-two. Olivia raised her glass to her mouth and then held it in front of her birdlike chest and he wrapped his hands in her hair and kissed her first.

  Afterward, after they were done, Olivia pulled a comforter from the love seat and lay wrapped in his arms on the floor while the cat continued to ingratiate itself against their legs. His heart clanged in his chest with a fear that would eventually char its way down into a fine silt of shame. A silt that he would eventually inure himself to, that he would over the years grow, if not comfortable, at least familiar with. He would do this again and again.

  He cradled another bottle of wine to his chest, like an infant, waiting for his heart to slow.

  “I have to get back to the hotel,” he said. “I have to call my guard dog. François.”

  “Oh,” she said, raising her head so he could pull his arm free. “I can drive you,” she offered, her voice bright with hurt, and he could see that he had of course failed her too.

  “No,” he said. “That’s okay, thanks.”

  And then the graceless act of the drunken adulterer clumsily pulling his pants on. Maybe nine o’clock at night. Olivia lay on the floor, her blonde hair fanned out on a pillow, one hand pinning the comforter to her chest as he staggered about the room for his clothes. She stared at the ceiling.

  He stood at her doorway—a shithead enough to take another bottle of wine with him—and said, “It was nice meeting you, Olivia. I had a nice time.”

  A tight smile flitted across her face, her eyes hard as stones.

  “You’re beautiful,” he managed.

  She laughed and pressed both of her hands against the floor, pinning the blanket down at her sides. “Poltron,” she said, and flitted her hand at him as if her were an insect. His fear clanged like a stone against the ladder of his ribs.

  “Maybe I’ll see you at the show tomorrow,” he ventured, and cried out as his empty wine bottle struck him above the eye.

  Fifteen minutes later, his own wine bottle emptied and abandoned on a bench, he managed to hail a cab. The driver slowed and peered at him through the rain-beaded window. He was a hawk-nosed man who began to accelerate until Vale slapped the window and held a wad of francs against the glass. Toy money, colorful and brash. The driver slowed and unlocked the door.

  “Où? Where to, my friend?” His reluctance was obvious. Vale pressed his hand to his eye, trying to stem the blood.

  Vale got in, the wine roaring inside him. He knew little besides that in failing Candice, he had failed any vestige of probity or morality within himself. He also understood that grievous errors required great proclamations. And that he had drunk three bottles of wine in two hours.

  Still, most importantly: he had committed adultery. Something needed to be done. Atonement.

  “Tattoo parlor,” he burbled.

  “You’re bleeding, my friend.”

  “A definitive statement is needed,” Vale said, slapping the back of the driver’s seat. “Tattoo motherfucking parlor, please.”

  “Where is your hotel?”

  “Tattoo parlor, goddamnit.”

  “Of course, the drunk American is in my cab,” the driver said, sighing and edging his way into traffic. He bit a thumbnail and spit the clipping out. “The drunk, bleeding American. A tattoo is exactly what you need.”

  Vale handed him the wad of money and the driver shook his head. He took the roll from Vale, thumbed half of it out bill by bill. He paused, took one more bill and handed the rest back.

  Vale leaned his head against the seat. Touched his eye. The blood on his fingers was black and then bloomed into color when they passed beneath a streetlight.

  The driver muttered to himself and pulled a U-turn. Car horns sang out, headlights ran across the interior of the cab. He tossed a newspaper over his shoulder onto the backseat.

  “I don’t need to read the paper right now,” Vale said.

  The driver shook his head, readjusted his cap. “Sit on it. I don’t want you bleeding on my seat.”

  • • •

  It was in a basement somewhere. A tiny, brick room with a drain set in the checkered floor. The walls were painted red and covered in tiny, framed illustrations. The room caged in drawings of pirates, broken hearts impaled by swords, screaming panthers, blue-eyed women with roses in their hair. The tattooist wore a leather vest over skinny arms and a vast gut. A torpedo-breasted demon glowered over his bellybutton. He sighed when he saw Vale stumble in with the driver.

  The two of them laughed and talked in French while Vale swayed in front of the art. Finally the driver left, jovially clapping Vale on the back as he walked out. “You are a fucking idiot, my friend. You’re on your own.”

  “I know it,” Vale said.

  The tattooist didn’t understand what he wanted. His English was worse than the driver’s. “The word of candy?” he kept asking. He lit a cigarette and scratched his armpit with his thumb. “Why the word like that, my friend?”

  “No,” Mike slurred, “my wife. My wife’s name. Here.” He took a piece of paper a
nd a blue pencil from the man’s table of supplies.

  “Ah, okay,” the man said. He thought for a moment. “But they do not match, okay? No . . . no balancing.”

  The man waggled his fingers in front of Mike’s face as if he were showing off rings. “You see? C-A-N-D on this hand. I-C-E on this hand. Does not match, my friend. No balance.”

  “Fuck it,” Mike said. “Put an exclamation point at the end.”

  The tattooist’s eyebrows rose.

  Vale drew it on the scrap paper:

  C-A-N-D on his right hand.

  I-C-E-! on the left.

  The man laughed. “You are an idiot.” He grinned and clapped Vale on the shoulder.

  It was a brotherly gesture, friendly, and it made remorse rise like bile in his throat. He remembered the feel of Olivia’s ass in his hands, the knobs of her spine like topography. And then came the images of Candice: walking around their room in only her socks as she talked on the telephone. How she always held a book by its top half. That dimple of a scar on her ribs from some forgotten childhood wound. Her back to him as she’d washed dishes the day before, as if already aware of his transgressions.

  “Let’s go,” Vale said. “Let’s get this done.”

  • • •

  François was furious with him—“We nearly called the police,” he hissed—and then seemed strangely satisfied when he saw Vale’s bandaged hands and cut eyebrow. A man who could do such things within the space of a few hours, François seemed to think, was clearly one who could not be reasoned with. After that, François mostly left him alone.

  His paintings had been located. Two collectors bought them all for roughly a quarter of a million dollars. Vale stayed sober throughout the opening the next night, shaking hands and posing for photographs. His shame was like a bed of coals; it banked and glowed on its own whim, its own current. He didn’t see Olivia anywhere and wondered if she’d gotten in trouble for leaving the museum the day before.

  The day after the opening, François met him in the lobby of his hotel and put him in a cab without another word spoken between them. In the airport bathroom, the letters on his fingers were a fine and depthless black.