by Keith Rosson
“It’s an honor to meet you,” Vale managed, his voice sounded high and feminine to his own ears.
Basquiat nodded, looking somewhere around Vale’s chest. The other man put his hand on Basquiat’s arm. “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s go, man.”
Vale was eighteen years old. He’d been so dumb. “Your paintings,” he said, “are . . . brilliant. Regal. Ferocious and . . . studious at the same time. You know? They’re incredible.” Yammering.
Basquiat nodded and put his hands in his pockets and with a kind of steadied, indefatigable sadness pulled his fists out and held them in front of Vale. Vale held his hands out palm up and Basquiat dropped into the nest of his hands crumpled receipts, a book of rolling papers, a cassette tape, a gold money clip with a sheaf of hundreds showing.
“Goddamnit, Jean. Don’t do that. Don’t give him that,” the other man said.
“They’ll take every ounce, man,” Basquiat said. It was nearly a whisper. “They’ll take everything in there. Edwin owes me money.” He was missing a tooth, Vale saw.
Basquiat abruptly turned then and the man with him said softly to Vale, “Sorry, man,” and scooped the items from his hands.
He watched as the man led Basquiat to a blue sedan parked down the street.
“Where’re we going?” Basquiat called querulously, his voice high and plaintive. He sounded like a young boy, a child.
The man opened the passenger door for him. “We’re going to Larry’s.”
“Larry’s? I don’t want to go to Larry’s.”
“We’re going to Larry’s, Jean,” the man said, and helped him inside. Less than a year later, Basquiat would be dead and Vale himself would be on his own howling trajectory to stardom. He watched the car pull into traffic and felt a clear arrow of sorrow for the man take flight, his diminishment. Vale vowed then, a vow cast out with the great impetuousness and surety of youth: Never me. No fucking way.
He stepped then into the open door of the gallery, buoyed and emboldened. Sunlight fell in pale squares on the cement floor. The place was made up of two gigantic rooms braced by track lighting and moveable paneling; a random doorway here and there. He called out a hello and a moment later heard the clack of heels on the floor.
She stepped from the other room wearing a brisk charcoal suit and a cap of dark red hair that curled at her temples. High cheekbones, green eyes bright as stones. Vale found himself almost unable to speak for the second time in as many minutes.
Finally he managed, “Uh, is Mr. Tanazzi here?” His voice cracked on the last word.
She took one look at him and the boards in his hands and rolled her eyes. When she did that, he realized she was probably only a few years older than him. It was 1987: the shoulders of her suit were padded like a linebacker’s; she wobbled on her heels and seemed dedicated to moving as little as possible. He felt like they were both children playing dress-up.
“You’re a painter, right?” she said drily.
“Right.”
She sighed. “Do you have slides?”
“Slides? No. I have these drawings.” He held them out to her.
The way she looked at him—was it curiosity? Condescension? Christ, pity? “I’m just the assistant,” she murmured, but she took the boards and slowly shuffled through them. She went through them again. A moment later she raised her face to his and he knew—without doubt—that his trajectory and talent was assured. At least with her, this girl.
Mark his arriving: September of 1987, the day he met Candice Hessler in Los Angeles.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” he said.
She looked back down at the boards. “When did you do these?”
“Last night,” Vale said. “This morning.” He decided to risk it. “I slept on the loading dock back there.”
She lifted her eyes again, stared at him. “You did these today.”
“And last night.”
“You people.” She smiled grimly and shook her head. “I hate painters, do you know that?”
Candice, he would find out, was twenty-two, in her last year at UCLA, trudging through an art history degree, a minor in English. There was no sense of collision or collusion, no sense of predestination between them. He had no idea. He had come all this way to instigate his own destiny. She was alluring, but at first, honestly, she was simply a doorway. That was all. And truth be told, the pantsuit had been an unlovely thing.
“Mr. Tanazzi will probably be in about an hour from now. I can show him these then.” She shuffled through the boards once more and then handed them back. “I hardly ever say this, but you should wait for him to show up. Those are really good. Do you want some coffee?”
If Vale was gifted a legacy, it rested wire-thin on so many things. Most of them reliant on Candice and how she had looked through his early Bristol board drawings and opened the door for him. She had made it so easy for him. How his life would’ve been different if she’d turned him away.
He would think many times in the years that followed: Candice, goddamn, I owed you for every good thing, didn’t I?
And to what did he owe the bad? His own limitations? The drinking? But that was the thing about drinking, about how far he’d fallen: Drinking, even then, constantly diminished and renewed Vale’s world. Daily. It was a constant do-over. Tomorrow’s road would simultaneously be paved in soul-death and possibility. Alcohol’s greatest gift and simultaneous curse, then as now: there would always be another chance to get it right. Tomorrow was a new day to atone for grievances and walk straight in the world. Tomorrow was the day he would manage the grace to go about drinking less and moving more throughout the world. Tomorrow he would banish heartache and open his arms.
And so on and so forth.
But tonight?
Tonight he was in the Tip-Top Lounge in Roseburg, Oregon, waiting for his van to get fixed.
Thinking about Candice.
The bartender poured him another whiskey, generous. “Anything else?”
Tomorrow I’ll do better, he thought, and shook his head.
When he’d gotten back from Paris, Candice had wanted to pick him up from the airport but he’d begged off and said he’d meet her at home. He’d taken a taxi, angry at the way guilt slung itself into his bones, made him hunch over with its weight, its obviousness. And then he was angry for being angry. And on and on.
She knew, of course, the moment he walked into the kitchen and set his bag down.
Not the specifics, clearly, but the depth of it. The scope. That look of clarity on her face. She was holding a blue mug of tea and she told him later that if he’d taken a step toward her, just one, that she would have thrown it at him. And that might have been enough, might have made it a little easier to forgive him. But he didn’t do anything. He just stood there.
Candice looked from his face to his bag and back to his face. He couldn’t meet her eyes and kept looking to the stove where the teakettle sat clicking above the coils. She had a clip in her hair and was barefoot and the recognition of his betrayal became clear on her own face, like a wound trying to close. The light threw strands of copper in her hair and she would never be more beautiful or more lost to him. Candice scratched one foot with the other and sucked her teeth and turned to the sink.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She turned her back to him. She turned the faucet on and rinsed out her cup, set it gently in the sink. She said, “Your shit’s already packed. Go somewhere else for a while.”
“Candice.”
She lifted her head, held up one hand. “I’m serious, Mike. Go. Drink up. Fuck some starlets. Go live the dream.”
“Candy.”
“Get. The fuck. Out.”
“Candy, please.” He went to her and put a hand on her shoulder and she flung her arm loose like some thing grown blood-maddened just by his nearness. She wouldn’t turn to him. Her shoulders hitched up and down as she wept silently. He stood there a moment longer and then took his bag and stepp
ed back through their doorway and down the stairs.
And that had pretty much been that. The doorway that lead to his many transgressions. If he thought of Olivia at all afterward—and he rarely had—she was a figure outlined behind a screen. Her color dimmed. The first in a series. Just some blonde French girl. It got easier, the falsehoods.
He thought of Candice often. All the time. They divorced a year after Paris. She had actually been willing to walk through it at first. Counseling was brought up, but Vale had refused. He worked in absolutes. Broken or fixed. No in-between. Why bother? He moved out. Some kind of dam inside him had broken.
His guilt and drunkenness and shame were all at odds with each other; and also that ceaseless ugly urge for gluttony. And he found there was no shortage of interested women.
The year after Paris was the last year he would paint anything of any strength. Anything that was worth a shit. Candice moved back to LA after the divorce. She wanted nothing from him financially, only his agreement that he would sign the divorce papers without fanfare, which he did.
The Weeping Trees was published soon after, and received decent reviews and low sales. Six months after the move to LA, she was broke and out of desperation wrote a mystery novel about a newly divorced female private investigator. She signed a three-book deal—her first advance was sizeable—and hung up on him when he, drunk and repentant, would call her at night.
He coasted on sales and reputation for a few years more, painting less and less, painting muddied shit. No draftsmanship to them. No vigor. No ache to them. Started painting blackout drunk. Then not painting at all. Reviews went from mixed to bad in short order. He started getting turned down for shows. Collectors started paying less, then just wanted the early work.
Brophy hired assistants for him, supposedly there to help do the shitwork, stretching canvasses, prep-painting the bigger works. Even Vale could read between the lines: they were guard dogs. Babysitters and bottle-stoppers.
He found himself looking for her in restaurant windows and taxicabs, in the strut and arch of a woman walking down the street ahead of him. He was living in his studio at that point, relying on his dwindling savings and the generosity of women young enough to still be starstruck by his name.
He was thirty-three years old when Brophy had a case of bourbon delivered and then came to the studio uninvited with a gram of cocaine and a sophomore from Pratt named Mindy who paid her tuition by stripping. It was like a bad joke.
Vale and Mindy did lines until it felt like someone had pressed shaved ice into his sinuses and he could feel his heartbeat in his teeth. That was when Brophy pulled out the contract and started talking. One million dollars for the early paintings. One lump sum. Get your head on straight, Mike. Get back to work. It seemed like an answer of some kind. He signed it and Brophy cut a check and the earbud assistants came by the next day and took everything from the early days. Everything, except the one painting. Afterward, there was hardly anything left. A few shitty leaning canvasses, muddy and dark.
He spent entire days in blackouts. He came to once in the back of a detox van, held down by a rubber-gloved cop as he howled obscenities into the air. Blood everywhere. He’d shit himself. It scared him straight for a little bit. But then he lost the studio and got an apartment out on 128th and Stark, way the hell out there in the dead zone, and every time he even saw a paintbrush he got scared.
Only alcohol seemed to thaw him. Only the Moment. Then came the time he’d gone berserk on the gallery windows down in the Pearl, with rage unfurling in him like someone snapping a sheet off a laundry line.
How long, a wise man once asked, does it take to drink up a million dollars?
The answer: Years. It takes fucking years.
They were able to reconnect, years after the divorce. There was a gentleness there that seemed to surprise them both; Candice had already married Richard by then, which allowed her a certain distance. It was due in no small part to that, to her grace. When he spoke to her, Vale was not surprised; able to find parts of himself that he thought had long since atrophied or been scorched away. Decades later, he pined for her like a schoolboy but knew everything had been ruined.
And now here he was. Long since bankrupt, his last card played. Sitting in the Tip-Top Lounge with a broken down van and a one-eyed hitchhiker. A dead ex-wife, the only woman he’d ever loved. Again, it was like a joke. His entire life. As if aliens had written the lyrics to a country and western song.
He ordered another shot and lifted it toward the hanging lights, and it went down burning and glorious, like drinking jet fuel is glorious.
He watched the bartender pour him another. Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow he would shake hands with Richard on their emerald lawn. He would grieve Candice honorably.
But tonight?
Tonight the liver gets an acid bath, my dear.
“One more,” Vale said.
“You’re the boss,” the bartender said, grinning and shaking his head. Vale’s shoebox sat on the stool next to him. He and the bartender were the only living things in the room, though dozens of animal heads studded the walls. Deer, elk, big cats; everything blued by the television and the lottery machines. Vale eyed a moose mounted on a plank of glossy wood, its eyes a deep and fathomless black. Grim.
“My uncle hit a cougar once,” Vale said. “With his truck. It was an accident. He had a buddy who was a taxidermist, so he had the thing mounted. Made the thing look so fierce in death, you know? Jaws open like this, all ready to pounce. But really he’d just run over the fucking thing.”
The bartender nodded. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder toward something that looked a little like a fox. “I shot that one,” he said. It was a tiny and sad-looking little thing, whorls of dirty red fur. Each ear was as big as its skull.
“Is that a baby?” Vale couldn’t imagine shooting such a thing—a bullet would disintegrate it. “Is that a little baby fox?” He could feel the booze starting to warm him, sand off the angles of things.
“It’s a kit fox,” the bartender said. “They’re actually endangered as hell, turns out. All I knew was it was getting in the old lady’s tomatoes.” He laughed.
“Did the rest of it disappear? When you shot it? I bet it just about evaporated.”
“Oh yeah, pert near,” the bartender said, happily enough. “Pretty much all that was left was the head, you know? Speaking of which, the hell happened to your head, bud?”
Vale leaned forward, angry at the bartender, angry at the offhanded ease with which he discussed shooting the little fox. Sick with the world. “I gave the Tasmanian Devil a blowjob,” he sneered, holding his shot in front of his mouth. “I really slobbed his knob, man. Things got out of hand.”
The bartender frowned and opened his mouth to say something—their friendship was clearly in danger—when from the restaurant came a chorus of bellows and one high-pitched scream, sounding for a moment like some truly awful a cappella group.
Vale staggered off his stool and into the restaurant. He saw a pair of men circling each other around a table in the middle of the room. Marvin stood at the front door, his hands on his hips. The waitress wrung her hands while the old men at the counter gazed from their stools, interested enough. The man holding the bat—a pot-bellied kid in a goofy shirt and a pair of jeans that looked like they’d been spray-painted on—pivoted to the right. The other kid, gaunt and sore-pocked, juked left.
“Goddamnit, Casper,” the waitress said, “I am for real calling the police this time.”
“Call whoever you want, Janelle,” the kid with baseball bat snarled, feinting to the left again, not breaking eye contact with the other guy. “Me and Dunk need to get something straight between us.” This prompted one of the men at the counter to bug out his eyes and hold his hand out in front of his pants, followed by a lot of laughter and knee-slapping.
“Oh, it’ll be real hilarious when I bust all y’all’s asses,” Casper called out.
“Hell, son,” one of the men
said. “Looks like you couldn’t bust your own ass with that thing.”
With that, Casper took a half-hearted swing at Dunk over the table top. Dunk backpedaled and then toppled when he hooked a boot around a chair leg. The waitress screamed.
Casper scrambled around the table and raised the bat.
17
From the journals of Marvin Deitz:
Joan of Arc’s execution took place on the morning of May 31st, 1431. She was, most historians agree, probably nineteen years old. She had been sold by the Duke of Burgundy and judged guilty by a room full of terrified theologians for, long story short, dressing as a man.
As English mercenaries watched over her day and night, leering and suggestive and brazen in their threats of assaulting and raping her during her imprisonment, she dressed as a man to dispel their advances. And was thusly judged a witch for it. She was brilliant and frequently acidic during Cauchon’s interrogations, and always adamant in her faithfulness, even as he tried incessantly to verbally trip her up. I think Cauchon was afraid of her.
Joan of Arc, judged guilty of heresy and witchcraft. For dressing as a man to fend off advances from captors who should never have served as her guards in the first place. Had it been a proper trial she would have been placed in an ecclesiastical prison, had nuns as her guards. But not with Cauchon and the English involved, no way. There was a lot at stake here.
The execution took place at the Vieux-Marché in Rouen, not far at all from the marketplace where I had chased the tails of my father’s coat those many years ago. So much of my life took place within the walls of that city, and so little of it worth anything.
The fug of horse shit and rotten vegetables still hung in the air amid the same clamor of voices. The air that particular morning was heavy with the stink of thousands of unwashed bodies, all of us packed together, vying for space.
Lines of English men-at-arms leered at the crowd, occasionally calling them names and brandishing swords if they got too close. Thousands of people. I heard a soldier tell Cauchon, who was gathered beyond the pyre with a clutch of his assessors, to hasten it up, lest his men grow impatient and do the deed themselves.