“What are you guys doing?” I asked meaningfully.
I asked, knowing that with this substance, for some reason, the game would be forfeited. I would never get to fall in love. I would never learn to belong to the world. I might live for many years, of course, but it would be the end of me.
He narrowed red eyes, then examined his blue fingernails, flaking off some polish.
“Would you share?” I said.
He looked up, scanned my body as if he might want to have sex with me, even though I knew he didn’t.
“I think you’re lost, darling,” he said.
They all looked. Finally the man jerked his thumb at the door.
“Best way out is the way you came in,” he said.
* * *
—
Then I walked, coatless, down Bushwick Avenue. Tears. Streaks of mascara down my cheeks. Stopped at a bodega for a forty of Olde English, and the man who bagged my bottle actually asked if I was okay. “Chu okay, huhn-ney?” I passed packs of men in do-rags, slumped on bikes or assembled around the open doors of vans, Jay-Z and OutKast cranked up. None of them leered. They were afraid of me, in a way. “Oh, shit,” they murmured, and gave me room to pass.
I chugged the beer, threw the bottle down an empty street, cherished its smash on asphalt. Stopped at the deli next to my place, bought a big white Entenmann’s cake and another forty, and perched on my stoop.
At four in the morning, I somehow made it to Black Betty. Picked up a kid from Tijuana. He lived in a honeycomb of rooms, his bed separated from the next by a Bart Simpson beach towel hung from the ceiling. Prep-cook uniform, soiled, by the door.
“You’re all fucked up, little girl,” he said, watching me tangle my shirt around my neck. He pinched my nipple without real interest. When I offered to buy a condom at the bodega, he let me go alone. He knew I wouldn’t be back.
Woke up in my own bed, pillowcase wet with puke that smelled of malt liquor and coconut icing.
* * *
—
The B.Q.E. exit outside my building was the last before the bridge to Manhattan. All evening, I sat by my window. Dully, I watched pairs of cars pull onto the service road like mating dragonflies. Dealer in front, buyer in back.
* * *
—
That night, I went to the Laundromat and watched TV while my clothes sloshed in circles. On COPS, police chased a woman with a yellow mullet through construction, and she scrambled under a half-built house like a hunted dog. She started digging into red mud between pillars. The cameraman followed, the film jiggling, belt buckle scraping earth. When they caught up, her hands were bloodied, white shorts filthy.
“Are you on something, ma’am?” they drawled over and over.
I could have been an episode last night, I thought. Redhead in a bodega, eyeliner drawn down into Harlequin daggers, looking at white cake. Swaying, she picked it up, dropped it, frosting stuck to the cellophane window.
I’d always believed an innocent attitude made events innocent. I’d survived debaucheries, and afterward even felt that the girl in her white Sunday dress inside me had been renewed, forged in the fire one more time. I now doubted that mechanism. I now doubted myself. Innocence was finite and could not be regenerated. Like spinal fluid. I knew this because I had run out.
* * *
—
Taking reservations on the phone, I avoided Kelly’s gaze. Tapping the pen on the book, I cringed, wondering what he saw when he looked at me.
When I was little, I’d had so many ambitions. I saw them lined up like Barbies in boxes, accessories rubber-banded to their plastic wrists. Lee the fireman. Lee the trapeze artist. Lee the ballerina. When I really thought about it, though, I’d never planned on being anything, which is natural, I guess, for a child. I’d dreamed of being this or that, but never thought through to becoming anything. My first dream was to be a nurse, but that had to do with a hat no one wore anymore. And now my dream of being a painter was looking just as juvenile.
Kelly ate an apple, reading a newspaper, standing as he always did as if lunging into while pushing away from the bar. He grinned at me, and I smiled meekly at the apple.
Painting had been the only way to crystallize, distill, and change ordinary life. It had been alchemy. But at some point I’d lost the trick. I’d taken such bad care of myself that I was no longer talented. I had a feeling it was gone forever.
So many land mines in this new territory called adulthood. Talent has a window. Freedom sometimes becomes a trap. We may die before we finish our dreams. Actually, that we die is a pretty big surprise by itself. We can’t spend innocence without accounting. Relationships are contracts. We partner not just for love but because we become too weak to make it alone.
* * *
—
My junior year in boarding school I made the first big mistake of my life. Her name was Lucy.
She was a townie, but not an ordinary one. Her father, a film producer, rarely visited their Massachusetts home, let her live there with his ex-girlfriends or his assistants or no one. She drove a black BMW. Her skin was so bad it sometimes bled. Her body was stocky, white as potato flesh. Everyone hated her. So I became her best friend.
She introduced me to the particular liberty sometimes found in motel rooms. Despite dirty bedspreads and smoky curtains, a room could still offer anonymity. A tabula rasa for the poetry of amphetamines or grain alcohol. I liked not coming face to face with a childhood toy while tripping. I liked a place where nothing could remind me of myself if I made sure to avoid the mirror. And my phantoms to this day are probably curled up in those motor lodges, smoking, watching game shows, and coming down or coming to.
One night, we wanted coke, but the regular guy wasn’t responding. So we went to meet a man and his wife who were eating burgers at Friendly’s. In the car on the way back to the motel, she told me they didn’t have what we’d wanted, but she’d gotten something else.
Sitting cross-legged on a mauve bedspread in room 201, we smoked crack off a Dr Pepper can. I succumbed immediately to a chemical hurricane. When I came back, she was on round two. I didn’t want any more, but she urged me to try again. After that, I couldn’t take it. All I wanted was to watch television, but she turned out the lights, told me to be quiet. I sat in the dark, listened as she sucked the soda can and fell back, moaning.
She didn’t want to have fun. She did it all to mark herself, like carving a bedpost with sexual touchdowns. I preferred fun, but I also understood her motives. When I was a kid, I had shaved one forearm in the bath. At school the next day, the hairless skin filled me with dread. But it was exhilarating, too, that in what seemed an accidental world, I had forced change. When Lucy and I finished a Rumplemintz bottle, Led Zeppelin on the alarm clock radio, Bible as a coaster, we were queens of disaster.
I’d cut Lucy loose by senior year, convinced she was dark and I was light. I sneered at her walking through snow in wet black Converse high-tops with a new nose ring and a freshman. Started a rumor that she was a lesbian. Even claimed I’d seen her cut a cat open in the garage of an abandoned house, sacrificing its blood for Satan. I did all this to make a distinction that didn’t exist.
* * *
—
Got up in the middle of the night, manic, dead set. I’d had a vision. Pulled out a box of oil sticks and a pad from under the bed. The names on the giant crayons thrilled me as much as they first had in high school: alizarin crimson, burnt sienna, raw umber. They formed the periodic table of my ideas. I rushed an underpainting using my fingertips. The oil was slick, grimy, and I loved it. From tenth grade on, I’d been loyal to oils: they were the only medium in which I could create light.
Sitting at the kitchen table in boxers and a wife-beater, I tried to re-create that lantern at Camilla’s loft, its luminous blue, those glowing orange flowers. I saw it hanging in a void. Swinging in blackness. I worked.
Within an hour, I came to my senses, stared at the page. I was waking from a good d
ream, forced to realize it had only been a dream. It was paper and paint. I felt elated that I’d failed, that I’d been right in fearing that I would fail, and defeated, and foolish.
Sat there for a while, absorbed the strange euphoria and disappointment like a snake moving a rat through its body. At the sink, I eventually lit the corner of the paper with a Bic. Only way to make that lantern burn.
* * *
—
After dinner a few nights later, I peeked into Yves’s study. He was drinking Perrier and smoking, brown cigarettes crumpled into ashtray. Phone pressed to chin by shoulder, hands typing on laptop.
I tossed salts into the tub, feeling shitty and sorry for myself. I sat on the edge and gazed at tile until it was obscured by steam. Took off clothes, left them in a pile. Gasped when I stepped in, then lounged, skin red below water and pale above.
I heard the thud, but it was the subsequent groan that made me sit up, wild-eyed.
I stepped out, threw on silk robe, ran into hall trying to belt it. Yves had made it to the office threshold. He sat on the floor like a boy playing with toys, but his shoulders slumped and his eyes saw nothing. I took his face in my hands.
“Yves!” I shouted. I shook his face.
I punched his shoulder, and he flinched in slow motion but his face didn’t change. “Come on,” I said, even louder.
Then I called 911. “He’s dead.”
“Feel his wrist. Pick up his wrist.”
I held his wrist, but he didn’t lift his eyes.
“Oh my God he’s so dead!” I cried.
“Do you feel a pulse?” she asked severely.
“Don’t yell at me!” I answered.
“Lee,” Yves said thickly.
“He said my name!” I told the woman.
“Yves, Yves,” I said, kissing him. “You said my name.”
He was standing before the EMT guys arrived. He was collected enough to send me away when they buzzed. His primary emotion seemed to be shame. As the group conversed in gentle and formal voices, I looked into the bathroom mirror. My heart had become silent. The robe, blue with flamingos on it, was soaked to the skin like a tattoo. I realized I’d been waiting for this, not willing it, not dreading it. An autonomous part of me had been collecting premonitions and clues.
“Is there someone here?” I heard a man say. “Someone who can come with us?”
“No,” Yves said gruffly. “No, I’m alone now.”
* * *
—
His window looked at the East River, spires and smokestacks seamed with beige light to the sky. Headlights and taillights on the bridges. I sat, McDonald’s bag on the floor, and watched him breathe. Picked cheeseburger-bun crumbs from my fur lapel and ate them.
Since I first saw him collapsed in his office, I’d gone through about eighteen moods. I’d forgotten that just one moment, one phone call, can catapult you into a new dimension. In a cab to the hospital, I’d relived a jagged anger at the threat of losing someone. Pissed and defensive as if someone were fucking with me on purpose. When the doctor turned me out of the room for a spell, I’d walked outside for an hour, hating everyone. This rage turned into self-pity, a gross and milky film of depression. I’d stood on a corner, let the DON’T WALK turn to WALK then to DON’T WALK then to WALK, unable to cross the street. Then I’d had that stage-set feeling. (When my mother died, I realized she had to be somewhere else. I’d never thought of this world as a place, because it was the only place. If she was elsewhere, though, this was somewhere. That had suddenly made the universe look like a rickety theater.) But coming back and seeing him awake, if unsettled, had ignited a strange calm. I was giddy, even. The world had conspired to make us both vulnerable at the same time. We matched, for once.
Burped quietly, took off stilettos, and lay on the bed with my coat over me, spooning him.
He was gaunt, eye sockets lilac and deepened. Coming off him was a pungent sweat. His spirit was wet, like a newborn. I rubbed my uncovered feet together, thinking the red polish could use a touch-up.
“Did you see a white light?” I whispered.
“What?” he said roughly.
“Did they try to make you stay?”
“Oh, Christ, Lee. You watch too many movies.”
* * *
—
Even though I had the night off, Yves sent me home. But my heart wouldn’t leave him. So I sat at my kitchen table with the pad. Oil pastels, their tips flat and grainy, labels tattered, arrayed in front of me. I twisted off the beer cap, tossed it across the room into the sink. Lit a smoke and leaned back.
When I’d said good-bye, Yves had nodded weakly, his yellow-white hair wild as Mozart’s. It was hard to keep a straight face. He reminded me of a beautiful woman who’d had a nervous breakdown.
A vision from childhood came to me. At a beach club, I’d faced off with a swan that was twice my height, hissing, opening his white wings yellowed with pollution. Adults circled us, calling me away, but I’d been paralyzed by fear and awe and absurdity. The bird was frightening because he was threatened, and threatening because he was frightened. But what I couldn’t get over was that he had legs. Swans were always gliding over the water; my young mind had believed their undersides were smooth hulls of white feathers.
Now I saw a diptych. The first painting: a plane of sand, the swan, the white child, the sun-bleached cabanas in the background. The second: a bed, a white-haired man, his pale face. Both pictures would be like fields of snow. The only colors would be vanilla, ivory, ocher, periwinkle.
Nowadays, when images conspired in my head, they exploded, like stars, and turned to dust. The event was always over before the painting began. But the power of this fusion lasted as I sketched. I worked for a couple hours, but was afraid to press my luck, and stopped. It felt like a fluke. I couldn’t move to canvas.
* * *
—
Standing on Houston’s meridian near Sixth, I noticed a tree’s red berries, elongated like pearl drops, wet with sunshine. Saw pumpkins in shop windows. In Minetta Park, a lone azalea blossom stood up in the copper-leafed bush. A calm dragged behind me like a wake.
He’d had an EKG, and they booked him for an overnight at the Mayo Clinic in December. But basically they couldn’t say for sure if it had been nothing at all, or a minor stroke, or something more serious. Now he opened his door to me in a black V-neck sweater, hair wet and combed, face icy and vigorous again. I flushed with pleasure at seeing him look strong. Holding my hand, he sauntered through the living room. He looked me in the eye, said conspiratorially: “Hope you’re hungry.”
A table was set in the middle of the room. A low and fat white bouquet of lilies, gardenias, camellias, orchids, roses. Plates were arranged with death-row decadence. Kumamoto oysters with mignonette sauce, the vinegar crammed with minced shallots. Oily caviar piled in a glass dish, on crushed ice in a silver bowl. Warmed blini with crème fraîche. Dom, with its bat-wing label, tilted in the bucket.
“I’m sure as hell hungry now, daddy.”
Greasy-haired Jean-Marc, a Raoul’s busboy, stood with a serving napkin over one arm. He sneered, he couldn’t help it, the chocolate fleck of a mole stretching on his upper lip.
My heart was slow, open, as if sexually languid. I remembered how it felt to sit with Yves in the beginning, not wanting to be anywhere else. While Jean-Marc refilled my champagne, I asked if the doctor had prescribed anything. Yves accused me of wanting his pills.
“You don’t need to be suspicious all the time,” I said. “Maybe I just want to look after you a little bit.”
“No, no,” he said. “Not necessary.”
“But it would be fun to play nurse.”
He looked at me with intensity. “I take care of you, Lee.”
“You do,” I agreed uncertainly.
“I’d like to take better care of you.”
“Yves, what’s wrong?”
I thought he was angry by the way he wiped his mouth with the napkin. I tho
ught he’d dropped something under the table when he started to go down on one knee.
In a Dior box lined with mink, the unusual ring was four-petal sapphire flowers embedded in a tall band of tiny diamonds.
“I want you to have everything. You can move in here, or we can get a new place. You can work with a designer, build out a loft from scratch. The way you live, child. It’s beneath you.”
I laughed because it was all I could do. “What do you mean?”
He made a face, as if this was a delicate topic. Then he shrugged. “You live next to a highway. You wear secondhand clothes, some dead person’s things.”
“It’s called vintage.”
“In any case, you know what I’m talking about.”
I swallowed a glass of champagne, poured a new one. It was strange to be looking down at him. It was strange, in fact, to be alive.
“Maybe,” I said, burping through my nose.
“What’s that, love?”
“Maybe is my answer tonight.”
After he stood, he tried to give me the ring to keep while I decided, but I vehemently pushed it away.
“Do not trust me with that, baby,” I said. “If I’m not wearing it, I’ll lose it.”
He grinned wolfishly, tucked a napkin into his collar as Jean-Marc served scarlet lobsters. I watched him eat, almost unable to eat myself, shocked and overjoyed and tripping. The blue and white gems smoldered in the box. Every clump of pollen on the lily, every gradation of orange on the lobster was acutely meaningful. The room was saturated with meaning. I’d always known Yves wanted me, the way he wanted any luxury. I never believed one day he might need me.
“Take your time, Lee. I’ll give you however much time you need.”
My eyes teared. “Thank you.”
He glanced up, smiled again, cracked a claw.
* * *
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