Everyone is Watching

by Megan Bradbury

  Painted head to toe in thick gold paint, Lisa lunges forward and back in the dark room, the beat of the music, tribal, bestial. There is only the body and the beat of the drum. This could be the beat of her heart. Electric, golden.

  Robert poses Lisa with a python, a tiger and a scorpion. The animals he chooses are always exotic creatures and never ones she wants to hold. Lisa dresses in a catsuit and high-heeled boots, and holds an epileptic tiger by a leash. The point of this is to show the many sides of Lisa Lyon. She thinks about the tiger having fits, the chemical imbalance in its brain. Her body will be beautifully preserved in art, hung in galleries, bought at great expense. The tiger fits and shudders.

  Lisa arrives for the launch of Lady, Lisa Lyon. The pictures and the books are on display. Lisa is wearing an elegant dress. Robert introduces her to influential people then leaves her so he can talk to other people. She sees the photographs. She cannot miss them. Journalists are asking her questions. She gives the usual answers: 5'3½, 105 lbs, May 13, 1953, French and Spanish, Best Deadlift: 225 lbs, Benchpress: 120 lbs, Squat: 265 lbs, Chest: 37", Waist: 22", Hips: 32". They ask about Robert. They ask about Patti.

  After Robert gets sick, there are many interviews. They want to know if Lisa has been tested. They want to know what she makes of Robert’s lifestyle. The steady stream of interviews and answering the same questions is an eternal performance. She wants to say – I’m in a book – it’s that simple – you take me out of life and put me in the pages of a book, but it’s him you want to know about. She shows them the book. She turns the pages for them. They ask if she’s been tested. They ask if she’d like to comment. But don’t you see what this means? They stare at her blankly. They write in their notebooks. They ask if she’s lost any weight. They ask if she still trains. They ask if she has ever taken steroids. They ask if she’s ever been tested – you slept with him, right? They ask if Robert has taken steroids. They want to know everything. She has nothing to say.

  After Robert dies, they stop asking questions.

  37

  The High Line is an elevated platform along which steam trains used to transport industrial goods up and down the west side of Manhattan. Edmund has read that before then a cowboy used to ride in front of the train to warn pedestrians of its approach. Edmund has known his fair share of cowboys along this railway line, beneath the elevated track, in the shadows, in the dark.

  Edmund walks along the High Line, tripping on the railway tracks that lie embedded in the path. The flowers in the flowerbeds are the same species as those that grew wild during the years the track stood abandoned between the 1980s and 2009. Crowds of people have come to see the High Line. They walk in packs, covering the walkway, stopping to touch and smell the flowers in the borders, removing shoes and walking on the grass, stopping to pose before the view of the Empire State Building, leaning against the rail with a hip dropped and a fixed smile, then exchanging with a friend, passing the camera over to allow the other person to pose, back and forth, different views, the same views. They stop in the middle of the path to take their photographs. They photograph Tenth Avenue below them, the bright cobbled streets of the Meatpacking District.

  There is a similar park in Paris. It runs along an elevated line. Edmund liked to walk there when it was raining. Edmund walked alone through the Promenade Plantée and he thought of the shadows beneath the western elevated track in New York. He thought about what he did in the past.

  In those days he dressed understated – jeans, T-shirt, sneakers never shoes. It was not the thing to look smart and polished. You had to look natural, available, desirable. He used to go out very late at night. He stood on the corner of Gansevoort and Washington Street, pausing on the cobblestones turned bright by the moon. The elevated track loomed behind him. He imagined the old market stalls beneath, the exchange of dollars for meat, remnants still visible, the reek of flesh, noise, cacophony, butchers’ stores now turned over to other uses. He followed a group of men through a doorway. He descended the steep flight of stairs. The booming bass of the club filled his body. He felt he was part of the mass. They were all in this together, he thought. He was standing in an expansive underground space. Everybody was dancing with him. There was music, laughter and conversation. He was very grateful for the noise. Time spilled over into the nextnextnext. He couldn’t separate the bodies from one another or from the beat until the music stopped and they all shuffled wearily to the door. This guy who had his hand on him stepped away and the club was quiet. The men filed slowly up the stairs. Light hit Edmund like the silence, the dawn having broken, market traders and retailers setting up for the day.

  A new outpost of the Whitney Museum of Art is being built beside the High Line. Edmund reads the sign – The Whitney is an idea, not a building.

  New apartment buildings stand along the park’s edge. As Edmund walks he looks into the empty rooms. He sees sleek grey furniture: a couch, a table, a solitary chair. The balconies are swept very clean. The view of the residents will be the long line of a railway, but instead of the rattle and boom of industrial shipments the residents will hear the chatter and laughter of tourists who walk up and down the path in the sun. They will see them sitting out on wooden deck chairs, on lunch breaks, on holiday, taking photographs.

  The Empire State Building stands to his right. He sees the Chelsea Piers to his left. Rainbow flags and advertisements for storage space are stuck onto the sides of the buildings. Ahead of him is a viewing platform where there are rows of benches and a glass wall through which he sees traffic flowing up Tenth Avenue. Here is the Meatpacking District, its industrial structures, the narrow cobbled streets he used to know. Children are pressing their hands against the glass of the viewing platform and looking down. Men, women and children are sitting at restaurant tables on the sidewalks, eating sandwiches.

  38

  The reporter rushes into his editor’s office.

  Get up to the Bronx and take a look around, the editor says. They’re knocking down the last tenement any day now but some old guy’s refusing to get out.

  The reporter climbs the stairs to the fifth floor. He is watchful of the spaces where the wood has rotted. The man is waiting for him at the top of the stairs. The man recognizes the extent of the climb with a nod. The reporter follows him into the apartment. He tests the floorboards with his foot as he goes. He steps over the objects on the floor – radiator, bathtub, oil drum. He scrapes his ankle against something sharp and curses.

  How long do you plan on living here? the reporter asks.

  The walls are black with dirt.

  Look. Nothing sticks any more, the man says.

  The man lifts up a piece of sodden wallpaper hanging from the wall.

  In the room there is a mattress and a heap of dirty clothes. A gas burner and lamp are positioned on a broken chair.

  The man sits down on the bed. The reporter knows this man can’t win. This fight was over before it began. This man cannot beat Robert Moses. He cannot beat that formidable man.

  The reporter goes into the bathroom and closes the door. He runs water into the basin. He splashes water onto his face and turns off the faucet. He dries his face with the sleeve of his coat and holds his sleeve to his nose to breathe in the cologne. He looks at himself in the mirror. It isn’t his own face he sees reflected back. It is another man’s face he sees in the wall. Another man is standing in the neighbouring apartment, looking at him through a hole in the wall where the mirror should be. This man does not flinch. This man does not shout. This man does not even seem to notice. This man stares at the reporter as if it is his own face he sees reflected back. The man smooths back his hair, looks left, looks right.

  CENTRAL PARK, 1956

  The engineers in Central Park decide that they must go for lunch. In their hurry to get out of the sun, they leave behind the plans for the new parking lot. A young mother who has been playing with her son in the adjacent playground collects up the billowing sheets of paper. The plans show the
outline of a marked perimeter extending from the existing parking lot into the park, encircling the nearby trees, the flower borders, the shrubs.

  When the woman gets home she calls her friend.

  They’re destroying the park! she cries.

  I’ll be right over!

  This isn’t just any neighbourhood; this is the Upper West Side.

  Within half an hour the troops are rallied. Residents have made banners and boards displaying their hatred for Parks Commissioner Robert Moses.

  Reporters follow like dogs behind. They interview the kids.

  One father says, Our children might as well be playing in the street if this goes through.

  Parents tell their children to make a racket. Look what they’re doing to your park! The children are excited and some are screaming, crying because they don’t like the drama. This means the papers get their shots.

  When the press interview Robert Moses he says, I don’t want to give the impression of being impatient but I don’t have the time to argue about taking down a tree for a parking space.

  Engineers are ordered to return to the park to cordon off the tree and cut it down. The protestors, holding hands, encircle the tree and they don’t let go. The workmen are laughing because they’re getting paid regardless and, anyways, they’ll just come back tonight when the women are all tucked up in bed, which is what they do.

  At the break of dawn, the children are dragged from their beds. Hey kid, don’t you have some kind of war-playing kit, a uniform and a hand grenade? Great! Put it on! Get wailing! We’re all in this together!

  The children are dragged along the street, dragged out of sleep and out of dreaming. They arrive just in time to see the show. The men are hacking away at the tree.

  A young boy watches. He trembles with excitement as the tree falls.

  39

  The reporter is waiting on the central lawn beside a high-rise block. There is a chill in the air, an early fall. He buttons his coat and looks out at the road.

  A car pulls up. A city official gets out.

  He walks towards the reporter and nods a greeting. They walk together across the lawn.

  As you can see, the official says, we’ve gone a long way to ensure an attractive environment. The previous accommodation had no gardens. Residents used to have to walk fourteen blocks to get to the closest green space. Now it’s right on their doorstep.

  The grass is growing. Thick, waxy grass. Hard. A small area in the corner of the plot has been cordoned off and positioned. There is playground equipment, a slide, swings, but not many.

  How many children will that serve? the reporter asks.

  The numbers haven’t been finalized yet. As I was saying, these people had no parks at all before.

  The official points out the service exits and fire-escape provisions. The doorframes are freshly painted and the paths have been laid. Sturdy shrubs have been planted in the borders. Border railings have been secured.

  And so the residents who are waiting to be relocated here, where are they living now? asks the reporter.

  Temporary accommodation.

  Which is where, exactly?

  40

  They are passing through farmland, past small homesteads, through cornfields. Walt sees the people who must have helped to build the railway living close to the line. Chimneys expel smoke. Washing lines nod in the breeze. Children are playing in the earth. Walt sees horses tied to posts. There is no station platform for these people. Workers rarely benefit from their own labour.

  He takes Leaves of Grass from his trunk. He examines the cover and the spine. He begins to read ‘Song of Myself’ as Bucke has requested. It is a fine work and he likes to read it.

  Bucke feels pinned to the wall. The woodland through which they are passing is dark. No light penetrates. Out the other side. Green fields. Farmland. Shacks. All goes unnoticed when Walt is reading.

  In his notebook is a list of all the things people have said about Walt: it is an honour, pleasure and privilege to know him; we are filled with love, anxiety, awe; he is a rogue, a beast and a scoundrel, incomparable, inconceivable, insurmountable.

  And a description from a veteran, who, when Bucke asked what he remembered of the war, said this:

  They wanted to take my leg on account of the infection. But I didn’t want it to be taken. I was mad. The fear was worse than the pain. I didn’t know what to do. I explained myself to a nurse. I told him I wanted to keep my leg. I pleaded with him to do something, but he didn’t need to be persuaded. He went directly to the doctor and demanded they leave my leg alone. They did. I recovered. I owe this man my life. He helped me to recover. He fed me. He supported my head when I needed to drink. He sat so close to me on the bed that I could feel the warmth of his body through the blanket. He had such kind eyes. I have never seen such a face before. I remember him perfectly. I still dream about him.

  Was the man’s name Walt Whitman? Bucke asked.

  The soldier’s face lit up like the dawn.

  Will you be happy to get to New York? Walt says.

  Bucke cannot answer. He looks out the window at the passing land. The sky has grown dark.

  The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

  (1986)

  NAN GOLDIN

  Nan Goldin turns off all the lights, downs her drink and looks beyond her audience at the air vent on the back wall of the bar. She imagines her narration coming directly out from the photographs she is displaying on the screen, shooting out over these people’s heads, through the vent and onto the streets of New York. Nan begins and ends in this room in the Bowery, but after tonight traces of her will be found all over the city. The audience will look at their hands and see traces of Nan’s blood. They will look in the mirror and see in their faces traces of Nan’s love, or they will see the colour blue, which is the colour of the bathroom in which she took the photograph of herself reflected in a mirror, where the sun caught her face, or they will see the rooftops of Manhattan and the man, so arrogant, the one who battered her, sitting against the wall on the roof with the whole of New York City behind him, sitting there with his shoe untied, completely in command of his own face and her attitude, Nan’s bruised face, now an object of art.

  These photographs are just a hint of how beautiful everything is.

  If the man who battered her dreamt at all, it was a dog dream, with fleas and hunger and a picture-perfect link between what he had done and the pictures she took of her face the next day, of the thing she saw there in her face when she looked in the mirror and held up the camera, when she could barely see because the bruise on her face was as inflamed as a badly pummelled peach.

  The photographs she displays on the screen are not moments from her past, they are moments extracted from it. The images begin and end within the frame of the shot, and the world is contained there.

  She dedicates the sequence to her sister, who showed great courage one day in lying down on the commuter tracks in Washington DC and waiting for the train.

  The last image flickers on the screen and she turns off the projector. The audience applauds and she walks offstage. She gets a drink at the bar like an ordinary person. She remains in the same place, as a seed does, burrowed down, showing excellent potential, buried in a basement bar in New York City. Her camera is stored safely behind the bar with a virgin roll of film.

  Her art is related to the death of her sister but Nan refuses to let this become the focus. She thinks of the batterer’s face and wonders whether showing a photograph of him isn’t just the same fucking thing as showing a picture of a train.

  The ability to love is a rare gift. Nan shows it through the photographs she takes, but the photographs also show how she possesses people.

  After her sister’s death, Nan had an affair with an older man and learnt what it meant to be truly sexual. This man took advantage of her body and of her grief, and she wanted him to. She wanted to be whole by connecting with another. She wanted to live every moment to its fullest in ca
se it was her last. She wanted her sister to see that what had happened didn’t matter. All the while she thought of her sister. It was like she was giving life to her by fucking him. She transformed this man into her father then she transformed herself into her sister, and the train and the tunnel and this nation’s capital all formed a link, and she was the apex of that link, the connecting part, the coupling, the coupler between the engine and the carriages behind. She lingered there in the arms of a stranger. She felt young and alive. She felt unconscious like her sister. She felt limbless.

  She photographed every part of her body. She recorded every part of her life in vivid colour. She wanted to be that woman in the photograph. She wanted suddenness. She wanted to see the detail. She wanted to blow her own mind with the detail. She wanted the blood to be a deep red, like a certain shade of lipstick, like the colour of her bloodshot eye after she was battered. She wanted someone to find beauty in that comparison.

  Nothing is real.

  What is real to Nan is this hot basement bar, the buzz of the projector, the cold vodka in her hand, the fixation of her stare on the bar, the solidity of the cigarette in her hand, the silence of the audience behind her, a sign that they have moved on to some other art.

  41

  Robert Mapplethorpe is walking through the streets of Manhattan in 1986. He is walking to meet a friend for dinner. He is too busy to sleep. Although he needs sleep, there is no time to sleep. He will probably have sex with the friend he is meeting. Robert will take his picture first. He will suggest he take his picture and they will both know what that means.

  At the restaurant, Robert is shown to his seat. He is an hour late, as this guy was expecting. It is all right. He has the time to wait for Robert Mapplethorpe.

  Look, I can take your picture sometime, sure, just make an appointment with my secretary, Robert laughs.