The Exquisite

by Laird Hunt

  Tulip. Sitting close and spinning. For a second she looked a little like a pale yellow pinwheel, like the retinal afterimage of a fizzing golden firework. Only she was wearing gray and had on one of those aviator’s hats, which completely covered her blond hair and set her eyes to sparking and crackling, so that what I should have been seeing in the money end of my similes was something opalescent, azure, electric blue.

  Tulip, I said. I was just talking to Job.

  The bartender? His name’s not Job, said Tulip.

  She was running her finger across the book I had tossed in the garbage can. It was sitting open on the table and there was a diagram of the interior of an arm. Vein system. Musculature. Old stuff. From back when surgery meant ugly things for everyone except the rats. Looking at it, I thought first of Manhattan and the deep hole that had been punched in it, then of this movie I’d seen in which a king had his arm operated on. He died. There was a long battle for succession. The country was laid to waste. Years passed. Hope began to glimmer in the east. The people prepared themselves. They set off on long marches and learned new songs. Then hope faded and the rats took over. I was guessing this book was about that old. It was written in Greek and Latin. Lots of significant-looking words. I tried to read one. No luck.

  So what’s his name? I said.

  Anthony.

  Good-looking guy.

  I put my finger on some delicately articulated vein system, ran it down a leg. There were shadows everywhere. It was like I was back at Mr. Kindt’s.

  He was home. I watched him leave, but he was home anyway, Tulip. He was sitting there, naked. He told me to take whatever I wanted.

  He’s a little strange that way.

  He was also hooked up to a heart monitor. He told me to steal something, then he invited me to dinner.

  I know.

  How?

  Because I was there.

  Where? In one of the big jars?

  She laughed.

  What’s going on, Tulip?

  Nothing, I told him about you and he wanted to meet you.

  Why?

  Because I told him he’d like you.

  You set me up.

  If you like.

  How do you know him?

  I just know him. A friend introduced me. She paused. She looked at, I think, something about her fingernails. Sometimes I do things for him, she said.

  Things? I said.

  She didn’t answer.

  I let it go.

  Who is he? I asked.

  An old guy, lonely, from upstate, but he’s been in the city for years. I don’t know. He’s eccentric, he does some business.

  I looked at Tulip. She was not smiling. I was drunk and didn’t feel well. The bar was full of smoke and colored light.

  I barely know you, Tulip, I said.

  That’s true, Henry.

  How did we meet?

  We met at a party.

  Was it a good party?

  We didn’t stay.

  We didn’t go home together either.

  No, we didn’t.

  What does he mean about fish?

  He likes fish. Don’t you like fish?

  I thought about fish. I thought about the book, with its rotten puddle smell and stained pages and cross sections and strange diagrams.

  Mr. Singh? I said.

  She nodded, stood up.

  I stood up. Or thought I did.

  Good-night, Henry, I’m leaving now, she said.

  FOUR

  For a time, during this pre–Mr. Kindt period, while I was still presentable, I made inquiries about work. Simple, legitimate jobs. Ones that would have required me to lift or sweep or distribute small multicolored flyers, that would have given me the opportunity, in exchange for miniature paychecks, to don brightly colored clothing and hand food across the counter, or wear a hairnet and wash dishes, or fold freshly laundered clothes, or run a steam press, or wear a billboard advertising Optaline eye salve, but each time I went out my frame of mind quickly soured and I didn’t have any luck.

  One day, my mind already as sour as an old so-called SweetTart, I saw Carine as I was coming out of a hole-in-the-wall Indian deli on Roman Street with a day-old onion cake in my hand. I had meant to inquire about the position advertised in the window. Instead I had handed over fifty cents, scowled a little, and accepted the oily cake. Carine was wearing a handsome vintage gray suit and walking with her arm around a young man dressed in fashionably rumpled beige linen pants and a bright green Cockfighter T-shirt. I bit into the awful cake, chewed once or twice, then let it fall out of my mouth. Carine did not see me and I did not call out to her. She and her young man looked nifty together. I went back into the deli, asked about the job, and was immediately told I was “unsuited for the obligations.” Chewing hard on the insides of my cheeks, I asked for my money back for the cake, scooped five gleaming dimes off the counter, then walked over to a lonely patch of wall on Eldridge Street, leaned back, shoved my hands into my pockets, saw a flickering procession of Carines in the handsome gray suit that I had helped her pick out the previous Christmas, and, with the taste of old onion and even older oil in my mouth, pretended, badly I imagine, that the substantial facial moisture that was threatening to bust loose was just something caught in my eye.

  I beat someone during this period. Someone standing next to a deep fryer with grease flecks on his cheeks, who told me I smelled like I was dead and that I should get out and that I should not waste his time asking for work. He had a good life and he had worked hard for it and he had a feeling that hard and work were not words in my vocabulary. He spit in the sink after he said this.

  I asked him if what he was saying, as someone else had recently said, was that I was “unsuited for the obligations.” That I wasn’t, in essence, up to the shit job he was offering for shit pay in his shit place.

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he repeated the thing about how awful I smelled.

  You smell, baby, I said to him as I walked away, as he sat slumped against the refrigerator with his hands, palms up, at his sides.

  I realize that divulging this kind of information about myself, whether or not it is true—some people I have told about it have looked at me and laughed, i.e., there may be some blur involved—does not help my position, but I can live with that. I have already, after all, been found guilty and sent here, and it is not my intention in chronicling the eventually unfortunate circumstances of my friendship with dear dead Mr. Kindt to sway public opinion. I was broke, and beat the shit out of someone, some jerk in the kitchen of an eating establishment, or I probably did, then laid low for a while. That’s a fact.

  By laying low I mean I got sort of swallowed up by certain parts of New York, not to mention certain events, and for quite some time wasn’t presentable at all. The days and nights that compose this period seem now to have been poured into a bucket and tossed into the East River, so that every time I go looking for them it seems as if I am slipping out to sea. I know that at one point, when the gaping hole—in what I heard someone standing outside St. Mark’s Church call “the arm of the city”—was still horrifyingly fresh, and the air was still stinging everyone’s eyes, and you saw people going around like death’s heads with their goggles and respirators on, I slept under some scaffolding on Great Jones Street in company with several others and that these several others didn’t want me there. I also know that for a while I walked around with one eye swollen shut, because I can remember seeing my reflection in a mirror as I passed the shining windows of a Duane Reade. I can also remember, not very long after this, walking down my old street, late at night, looking up at my old apartment, where I could see a light and a little corner of the ceiling, and being overwhelmed by the feeling that I had slipped back into my old life, that Carine, with her gray suit and salade niçoise and soft lap, was upstairs with the cats. The feeling was so strong, or I wasn’t, that I walked over to the door, reached into my pocket, felt for my keys, and was surprised not to find them. It
seems to me it was at this juncture, as I reached with great certainty for something that wasn’t there, that I felt the ground going out from under me and became convinced that I was looking for myself in my own pocket and that—this realization increased the size of the wave of disorientation that had swept over me—it was me, not my keys, that had been gone for weeks.

  There were other moments—sitting in Battery Park eating the remains of a shrink-wrapped giant cookie, great clouds of smoke wafting out over the harbor, the Statue of Liberty gray instead of green and somehow, at least the way I remember it, lacking a face; or lying on a bench near the Cloisters, the unseasonably hot sun smashing me into a stupor, a man very nearly as unpresentable as I was walking over and pinching my arm.

  He had a plan, he said, a wonderful plan that lacked only a partner. If I was interested in being that partner he would let me in on it. I told him I was interested. He said that before he could let me in on the plan he had to test me. I asked him what the test was. He said I had to find someone who looked like me and pinch him on the arm. I then had to tell him I had a plan and ask him if he would like to be my partner and, if he agreed, test him in the same way.

  Your plan is to make people who are already dizzy even dizzier, I said.

  It’s not really my plan, he said.

  All of this would no doubt have continued had I not, one night after I had swiped a bottle from a sleeping colleague and drunk half of it over a couple of Halcion, wandered out in front of a Gentle Fragrance Florists truck. This truck, even though it did little more than clip me, proved to be my ticket out. An ambulance arrived and strong arms put me on a stretcher and bore me away. I could see nothing out the ambulance windows—the world had been reduced to that bouncing over-lit interior and four small panes of dark glass. A man with a bored look on his face presided over my passage. I spoke at some length, but he either chose to ignore me or did not hear me or both.

  In the hospital, I was bathed and fed and my dizziness receded. The food was served on flimsy pastel-colored trays and was pretty bland, but it was real and certainly more palatable than anything I had ingested in some time. In the hospital, I began to steal and to sell what I stole. In the hospital, I lay on a firm mattress and things happened.

  FIVE

  It was a little hard to figure out, once I became a regular at Mr. Kindt’s, why Tulip was spending so much time with him. I mean for starters consider the physical discrepancy: Tulip young, tall, beautiful, with a penchant for tank tops and tight jeans and with long, fresh muscles that seemed to be living their own bright life beneath her simple clothes and the exposed expanses of her skin; old Mr. Kindt was beautiful too, but in the way that exotic mushrooms or worn-out manatees or bacteria formations are beautiful: a focus on certain aspects and angles is required. Of course, given some baseline commonalities and even, at times, without them, New Yorkers have a surprisingly high tolerance for dissimilarity, and I have no doubt that were I to rip the front off any of the buildings in, say, Stuyvesant Town, I would uncover a jaw-dropping proliferation of physical mismatches. So it wasn’t so much that that confused me. It was something else, something about the way they were and weren’t together, the way Tulip seemed practically to live there but also not to be there at all, the way Mr. Kindt would stare fixedly at her while seeming simultaneously oblivious to her presence, the way a troubling cocktail of ambivalence and affection seemed to sit at the heart of their interactions. Tulip was almost completely silent on the nature of and motivation for her relationship with our mutual friend. For his part, if asked about Tulip, and even if not asked, Mr. Kindt would offer up bon mots along the lines of: she takes care of me, the darling, or, I would be lost without her, the dear. The second one I wasn’t so sure about, and the first one, despite my imaginings—which had started almost the moment she had told me she did “things” for Mr. Kindt—I quickly decided just wasn’t true. Though she was awfully nice to have breathing in your direction as she sat cross-legged and barefoot in one of Mr. Kindt’s overstuffed couches or armchairs, Tulip didn’t particularly take care of anyone. Just about all she did for Mr. Kindt—at least that I was aware of—was hang around and help out with ambience and, occasionally, down in the little parlor on Orchard where she did some freelance work, give Mr. Kindt a tattoo. He had several, as I was to learn. They were rather intriguing. And certainly fit his general mysteries-and-perishable-properties-of-the-flesh aesthetic. I eventually got one too.

  He had tiny blue eyes. He had a small head and a neck that looked like there was something wrong with it. Thick through the midsection, solid or had been, with stubby, hairless legs. So it was the eyes mostly, and it was his hands.

  I soak them, he explained. You might consider it.

  This was soon after I arrived, that second night. Tulip was there. Mr. Kindt was fully clothed. The heart monitor was sitting in a tangle of wires on a small table in the corner.

  Look, he said, and, by way of demonstration, dropped his hands into a silver bowl with some kind of poorly mixed substance in it.

  One hour a day, he said. Minimum. That allows the substance to seep in.

  What is the substance?

  Never mind, it’s extraordinarily beneficial. Tulip, take the bowl away, please, he said.

  It’s true that Tulip did sometimes take Mr. Kindt’s bowls away. It occurred to me after I saw her do this for the first time that regardless of whether or not I was witnessing one of the “things” she said she did, I was seeing something worth paying attention to. Believe me, it was far from unpleasing to watch—both as it was occurring and afterward—tall, lovely Tulip uncurl herself, come slowly forward, then walk across the room carrying a silver bowl.

  He was a weirdo, basically. He was short and fat and was in the habit of wearing out everyone around him with his talk. He had been a quiver maker or something back in the old country and had had his tough times. A transformation of sorts had allowed him to break with his countrymen and, though it had not been easy, come to the United States. He had landed, still very young, in Cooperstown, upstate, where he had made certain acquaintances, who had helped him to acquire the stake that would transform his fortunes. This, he told me, had involved swimming the considerable length of Cooperstown’s Lake Otsego on a bet.

  Just like a fish, he said. An aquatic creature. In the Netherlands, my boy, I could swim all day and, when the weather was fine, all night. The gentlemen who told me I couldn’t do it were afterward obliged to pull significant sums from both their literal and figurative wallets, prompting one of them to cry. They did not, of course, appreciate it when I handed them my handkerchief. It was really most remarkable.

  Basically, he had done well and then better and had come to New York. Here, through hard work, luck, and a certain measure of ruthlessness, he had been able to acquire “many objects, many pretty things.” One of his favorites, which I had a hard time understanding, was a hand-painted ceramic male duck, the green of whose feathers, he assured me, was most convincing. Another favorite, which hung on the wall in the kitchen beside the stove, was a framed daguerreotype of a young nun. The nun was in full nun regalia and was smiling. There was a kind of smudge over her right shoulder, like a messy thumbprint, which had been ascribed certain supernatural qualities of the prophetic variety. The smudge had apparently manifested itself during the developing process. No one had thought anything about it until on the very day the daguerreotype was brought home the young nun had been struck fatally on the right shoulder by a loose ceiling beam. Mr. Kindt told me he had a very handsome certificate somewhere, itself a clever counterfeit, that testified both to the veracity of the story and the authenticity of the daguerreotype. What pleased him most about his nun, he told me, was not the supposed mystical aspect of the image, but rather the early documentary evidence it provided of humankind’s ongoing efforts to harness modern technology to aid and abet the most ancient variety of fraud.

  Unchecked, he said, our belief systems eventually overrun everything, blot out
the world, at the very least rewrite the map. That these belief systems are most often built on the model of the Indian mound—layer after layer of oyster shells, animal bones, and miscellaneous bric-a-brac: everything plus dirt—which grew, more or less blindly, ever upward and outward, until the people standing on it were either swallowed up or rolled off, seems only to underscore their authority in the minds of the initiated. History, it has been said, Mr. Kindt noted, is but the analysis of the impact of our systems, all of which glow with varying brightness for a time then grow dim.

  Mr. Kindt liked to talk about history in this way and more than once offered different models for understanding it. One of my favorites was that history was simply love and destruction intermingled, their twin strands reaching far into the past, where a man or a woman, long since forgotten, inferred only through faint echo, stood grieving over one who had been lost.

  Often when we were together we would munch on something. That first evening we munched on crackers and some kind of cold fish paste.

  It’s good, isn’t it? he said.

  Hmmm, I said.

  There is a fine salt-to-oil ratio, is there not?

  I thought about it. I didn’t answer.

  It is an acquired taste. You will acquire it.

  I said I hoped so.

  I am strange but you will get used to me, you know.

  I looked at him.

  Yes, you will get used to me.

  I think, I said, I’m already starting to get used to you.

  That’s wonderful, my boy. But don’t get used to me too quickly, otherwise you will get bored. So often, you see, they get bored.

  They? I said.

  A figure of speech, he said. He scooped a little paste out of the jar, daubed it onto a cracker, and handed it to me. My finger, in taking it, touched one of his. It seemed much softer than a finger should have been. When I had shoved his shoulder the previous night it had felt frail but normal. The substance, I thought. I shivered a little. His mouth made itself into a smile.