The Exquisite

by Laird Hunt

  You looked good in that robe, I said.

  She smiled or smirked—it was too dark to tell which—but didn’t say anything.

  I thought I’d better try something else.

  So you’re involved too, I said.

  She shook her head. Not really. Cornelius just asked me to help out tonight.

  Did he ask you in French?

  No. I don’t parlez franais. Do you?

  No. I know a few words. I used to date someone who was fluent. Did he pay you?

  She shook her head—it was a favor. That’s why you’re buying. Go buy more.

  I went over to the bar and bought us another round.

  It seems like a pretty questionable gimmick, I said when I got back to the table. I mean, do they have people who actually want to pay to have that done to them?

  Tulip shrugged. It’s the times, she said. It’s in the air. Gloom and doom. New York–style. Aris says it falls under the rubric of the danse macabre.

  That’s French.

  So is the Statue of Liberty, honey. Not to mention Dior and cognac. Would you like to hear some Latin?

  Are you serious?

  Spiritus meus attenuabitur, dies mei breviabuntur.

  What the fuck does that mean?

  “My spirit is corrupt, my breath grows extinct.” It’s from the Bible. I saw it in one of Aris’s books. Ask him to show it to you. It’s mostly a picture book. Full of skeletons and people doing the danse macabre. Mostly the skeletons are doing the dancing. “Ring around the Rosie” is more or less what we’re talking about.

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!” A danse macabre for kids growing up in plague times.

  I heard that wasn’t true. That it didn’t have anything to do with the plague.

  Whatever. It’s true enough. Can you think of anything?

  Dead man’s float, I said, remembering once bobbing facedown in the water at the Hamilton Fish Park pool long enough for the lifeguard to jump in.

  Or just playing dead. It’s all the same thing. The closer you think you are to death, even if you haven’t thought about it, the more you …

  Danse? I said.

  Yeah. And anyway, people pay to have all kinds of bizarre and/or anodyne shit done to them.

  Like what?

  Like hair implants, collagen injections, liposuction, skin lightening, complexion alteration, extreme makeovers, safaris, Rolfing.

  Do you think the knockout …?

  The what?

  Never mind. It’s stupid. Any idea why Mr. Kindt wants me involved?

  Who knows, you never know with Aris. Maybe Cornelius told him he needed a new guy. I understand that pretty boy from last night isn’t going to work out.

  You mean Anthony?

  Is that what you call him?

  Pretty boy? I said.

  The knockout? she said.

  Tulip did the smile/smirk thing again. I sagged a little into my chair.

  Don’t worry, Henry, you’re pretty too, she said.

  Yeah? I said, the way I quietly say it when someone has just told me something I’d like to hear again. I leaned back, then forward, then cleared my throat.

  But she just shook her head and told me about the blade, that it was a kind of scalpel, once owned by a famous Dutch embalmer, that Mr. Kindt owned the embalmer’s entire set of tools.

  It’s an impressive little collection, she said. You should ask Aris to show it to you when you look at the danse macabre book.

  Do you think he brought it down with him from Cooperstown?

  Maybe, she said. But I was under the impression that he was pretty broke when he hit town. I’m guessing he got it, like most of his stuff, when things started picking up.

  Do you really think I’m pretty? I said.

  I do, she said.

  With that she got up and walked out the door.

  I stayed another hour, playing the murder scene over, again and again, comparing it with the mess from the night before. I thought about how I had taken Tulip down not so much onto as into the plush carpet—hard but not too hard—how I had put my forearm against her throat and pulled her forehead back, how she had gasped and grinned madly and looked into my eyes, then passed out. How the knockout and contortionists had emerged for a moment, taken in the scene, then withdrawn.

  I’m pretty, I thought. I ended this little colloquy with myself by letting my head fall to my chest, my shoulders droop, and my mouth sag open.

  Danse macabre, New York–style, I said.

  I repeated this the next day when I went over to Mr. Kindt’s. He did his own version, one that involved shutting his eyes, sucking in his cheeks, and leaning back into his chair. Then he told me that he too liked to play dead, and that once he had had to play dead to stay alive when a business affair he had been involved with had gone “terribly wrong.”

  It was so strange, he said, to have a pulse when those around me did not, to have hands and feet and toes I could still wiggle when those around me did not, to be able, after those long minutes, to rise and leave when those around me could not.

  I had more or less not stopped playing dead while he spoke. When he had finished, I opened my eyes and looked at him. He was sitting up straight with his arms folded over his chest, looking at me.

  The episode I just described did not happen, he said. But I have often imagined such a scenario and it is true that I like to play dead.

  And you’ve been murdered before.

  He smiled. He suggested we play dead a little longer. While I was still lying there with my eyes shut he put a cracker in my hand and asked if I would like a cup of hot tea.

  EIGHTEEN

  One gray morning, Job walked into my room and said, get rid of it.

  I nodded, and Job walked out.

  An hour or so later, after I had taken the little case of vials and the white robe with its badge to the incinerator chute—burning my hand on the chute’s handle in the process—he came back.

  He said, we’ve got difficulties—they called the cops after that last one.

  Yeah? I said.

  So we stop. Call a temporary halt until things quiet down. It should be O.K., all good, you know, but keep cool. They talk to you, you don’t know anything, right?

  I remember, I said.

  Job went away. I never saw him again. The next day I heard from a new nurse that he had gotten himself picked up walking out of his apartment door with a suitcase and a fat wallet, had made some commentary, and had gotten smacked a couple of times, before being encouraged to kiss the pavement while he was cuffed.

  I was sure I was next. In fact, I could practically hear them coming down the hall, a whole lot of them, probably more than was necessary. Since they were about to arrive at any second, I tried to get myself in the right frame of mind to be hauled off, imagining how I would act (tough, impervious) and what I would say (nothing) and what kind of look (devil-may-care, baby) I would give Dr. Tulp, standing in the door of the hospital as they shoved me into the car, and to Mr. Kindt, standing beside her (noble, resigned), and what I would do to Job (unmentionable) when I saw him, if I saw him.

  For a couple of days (they didn’t come), I ran through a lot of permutations of this basic scenario, permutations that got pretty strange when I’d get my meds. I won’t get into all of them, because that would just be too boring, but, as an example, in one I hugged Mr. Kindt, who had very awful, very fishy breath, then kicked Dr. Tulp’s shin as the police were dragging me away.

  Mr. Kindt, you’re my friend, Dr. Tulp, I hate you, I called as they stuffed me into the waiting patrol car.

  It would probably be only fair to note, as a kind of corrective to the above-expressed sentiment, that most of the permutations in fact only involved Dr. Tulp. I mean there were no police and there was no Mr. Kindt and no hospital in them, and believe me, I wasn’t kicking shins. I was both elegant and gallant as I escorted Dr. Tulp to various local purveyors of handsome vintage apparel so t
hat she could appropriately outfit herself for her upcoming green card proceedings and subsequent celebratory gatherings with her colleagues in the medical profession. At said gatherings, I would stand beside her in appropriate apparel of my own, holding a handsomely housed Cape Cod or Campari and soda, whose rich colors would add that subtle touch of depth to the convivial atmosphere. Occasionally, Dr. Tulp would flick her hand out and stab me with her pen, or lean close and sink her teeth into the soft flesh of my neck, but no one would take any notice and the smiles and soft chatter would go on and on. It is true that both Job and Mr. Kindt occasionally trespassed into these scenarios, but they invariably appeared in a service capacity, moving in and out of the crowd with trays of drinks and small, mysterious edibles encased in puffed pastry.

  A few days went by like this, or maybe it was more than a few. In addition to the mental space taken up by my dismal flights of fancy, the subject of lost cats came into my mind and lodged there, unpleasantly, as did that of lost love. Thinking of this latter, I took to positioning myself on a bench by the ward’s main entrance in the hope that some remnant thereof would find its way through those tall metal doors. If Aunt Lulu—whom I had lost or let go or let sink forward toward her bowl of soup—had found me, I reasoned, why couldn’t Carine, whom I had lost in a different way but just as definitively? Dr. Tulp got concerned after I began to talk a lot about saliva in one of our sessions and upped my meds. I smacked the new nurse, an outrageously comely individual wearing a silver charm necklace with little devils on it, because the way she lifted her arm reminded me of Aunt Lulu, and passed a night in restraining straps with a slab of cold lead on my chest. Then I heard they weren’t going after anyone except Job, who was wanted for a couple of other, more complicated things.

  This news calmed me down to some extent, but I did spend time obsessing over what Job’s other operations might have been. He’d talked one night about what had sounded at the time like a condominium deal in Florida, so I imagined him taking big, illicit bites of mob-related bogus property deals and eventually bilking the wrong guy. Because another time he had mentioned a predilection for indulging in a certain variety of late-night extracurricular activity and had remarked on its probable profitability, I pictured him running a ring of prostitutes, one catering exclusively to lower-middle-class East Village shop owners, maybe hiring someone to slip flyers under security grates at night. Job, as I imagined it, would sit at the center of this handsomely functioning mechanism with a green visor and violet glasses placing phone calls, delivering comportment lectures, and tallying receipts. When this line of thought began to lose its freshness, I decided that I needed to start getting some exercise and began jumping up and down and pumping my fists and doing other calisthenics in front of my mesh-covered window.

  The new nurse came in then went out.

  That is not acceptable behavior in a public facility, Henry, Dr. Tulp said.

  But is it productive? I said.

  It is neither productive nor acceptable, Henry. That bed you were jumping up and down on like it was your own personal property is the property of this facility and is not to be damaged. And jumping up and down without any clothes on anywhere in this facility besides your bathroom is out-of-bounds, period.

  Well, fuck you.

  That’s not very productive either, Henry.

  No, I don’t suppose it fucking is, I said.

  Dr. Tulp put one of her long, thin fingers on the intercom button and asked an attendant to come in. Two of them answered her call. They were small but persuasive.

  That’s when I started talking about Aunt Lulu.

  I talked and related and described, and after a while Dr. Tulp told the attendants it was all right for them to step back.

  Ah, Aunt Lulu, I said. Aunt Lulu in her dirty housedress. Aunt Lulu with the protruding veins in her calves. Aunt Lulu and her cats before school. Big fat fucking huge and mean-as-hell Aunt Lulu.

  Tell me about this meanness.

  She used to kill her cats. After she had had them for a while, she would coax them into a double-ply plastic bag and seal it.

  That is mean. But do you think it was inappropriate?

  I thought so. I found some of them one day when I was building a fort at the back of the yard. My friend and I actually played with them for a while. The bags. We used them to build a dike.

  And your father?

  Long gone.

  You used to own cats, didn’t you?

  I shook my head.

  Good, Henry, she said. That’s some progress, we’ve made some progress now.

  I’m lying, I said.

  What are you lying about, Henry?

  About the fort. About Aunt Lulu. About everything.

  Dr. Tulp’s long, thin finger flicked out, and the attendants came back in when I got out of my seat and started to shout.

  Mr. Kindt helped me get out of this sorry rut. One day he came into my room, tapped me on the shoulder, and took me for a little walk around the ward. When I got back I felt different, better. Actually, better is overstating it. Especially given the way things evolved. Maybe what I should give Mr. Kindt credit for is helping me get out of one rut and into another, and everyone knows that change, in the grand scheme of things, is rarely good.

  Anyway, it was quiet time, when the doctors are off in their offices and the nurses and attendants sit quietly behind counters and the patients are in their beds, maybe thumbing through magazines or books or watching television or staring out the window, maybe mired in nightmares, awake or asleep.

  We walked for a time in a silence broken only by Mr. Kindt’s breathing and the soft thud of our feet. When we did fall into conversation, it was only so he could tell me about a book he had once owned and read obsessively. This fascinating work contained a list of books, artworks, and objects that in a better world would have been written, painted, crafted, or found but in this poor world of ours probably hadn’t been. He had loved this list so much that he had memorized many of the descriptions, which included A Sub Marine Herbal, describing the several vegetables found on the rocks, hills, valleys, and meadows at the bottom of the sea; A Tragedy of Thyestes, and another of Medea, writ by Diogenes the Cy-nick; The Prophecy of the Cathay Quail, being the veritable and exquisite chronic of that epic questor whose exemplary fate it was never to be less than twain, by Anonymous, with engravings by Winfried Georg; A Snow Piece, of Land and Trees covered with snow and ice, and mountains of ice floating in the sea, with bears, seals, foxes, and variety of rare fowls upon them; and An Etiudros Alberti or Stone that is apt to be always moist: useful unto drie tempers, and to be held in the hand in Fevers instead of Crystal, Eggs, Limmons, Cucumbers. He gave the titles and descriptions in a kind of dreamy half-whispered cadence, which helped them to lodge more firmly in my own head, and I suspect that if he hadn’t eventually pressed my arm, raised his voice, and switched the subject, being with him would have done me some good beyond getting me out of my rut.

  As it was though, he said, well, Henry, you are quite low, quite low indeed it seems.

  I looked at him and nodded.

  It is the blue devil of melancholy, he said.

  Must be, I said.

  It is a vanquisher of kings, a destroyer of great minds, a ruiner of artists, so what can such as we hope for?

  Very little, I said.

  That’s right. He squeezed my arm and laughed.

  I asked him what he thought was funny.

  We are, he said. Walking round and round a hospital ward in these awful robes.

  I looked at his robe. It was covered in strange splotches and was wet in places. I tried to look at mine.

  There’s a documentary on tonight, he said.

  On what?

  North American fur traders. On the system’s ever-shifting economic model, the breakthrough that was made possible when the mechanism of wampum was understood, on the types of traps they used, on the extraordinary amount of pain experienced by the beavers, gnawing away at thei
r bloodied feet and hands.

  Hands? I said.

  I speak figuratively.

  Have you already seen it?

  Twice before.

  Sounds depressing.

  One blue devil for another.

  I suppose.

  We had entered a long, cold stretch of empty hallway, the locked doors giving onto storerooms, spare showers with handicap bars, and visitor toilets. There was a distant rattling sound somewhere in the walls and, occasionally, what sounded like a distant scream. Otherwise it was silent. Mr. Kindt paused here.

  We continue, he said.

  What? I said.

  Just like before, except that now you get your tips directly from me.

  I looked at him.

  He smiled.

  What do you mean now I get my tips directly from you? Where did they come from before?

  Certainly not from Job.

  Mr. Kindt smiled. It was a hard smile, hard and cold like a thin piece of frozen fruit pie. Looking at it I shivered involuntarily and thought of its owner crying about herring and standing in the shower talking about screaming. I thought about his obsession with seventeenth-century Dutch exploits, including his own, which were the product, he said, of that “vortex of Dutch-made misery whose razor edges extended to the far corners of the world,” and I thought of his giggle and how he would go outside in freezing weather in his robe. I looked at his hard, cold smile and thought of these things and of other things and I shook my head and started to walk away.

  Where are you going, Henry?

  I’m sorry but you’re—I mean this literally but in the best possible sense—crazy, Mr. Kindt. Which is fine in general, especially here, but not for business.

  We’re both literally crazy, Henry.

  I’m not, I said over my shoulder. I got hit by a truck—I’m just traumatized. I have some dreams. Some communication issues. Pretty soon I’m getting out of here.

  Hit by a truck, Henry?

  Yes. A flower truck. It was my fault.

  It was your fault, he said. It certainly was. But that was quite some time ago. It’s true that you went to the hospital, a hospital for the injuries you describe, but that’s not why you’re here now. Oh, my, heavens no—that’s most certainly not why.