by Carol Anshaw
“You don’t have to keep coming up here,” she said.
“I was in the neighborhood.”
“We don’t have any real connection. Not really.”
“I’m almost done stripping the dining room set. When I’m finished, I’m just going to oil it. No varnish.”
“I forgot to ask Mama for more paper.” This was for her book on what Jesus really meant to communicate to the world. Nick didn’t want to talk about this. She didn’t want to talk about the apartment he was fixing up for them. She wasn’t interested. That was okay. In here, he figured she could go ahead and be bored with him and his plans. When she got out—with luck, next year—she would have a clearer picture of her options. And by then he would have something solid to offer. What he was doing now was feathering the nest. The apartment was in a six-flat in Rogers Park; he got reduced rent for serving as the building handyman. He was buying up old furniture and refinishing it. He was trying to pull his lifestyle more in line with hers. He moderated his drug use. He wanted to keep his habits manageable, small quiet vices he would be able to shed when she got out.
“And Bic pens. They get stolen. They’re a big deal in here. Everybody has something they want to write down about why they don’t belong in here.” She took a closer look at him. “You should wear a hat in the sun. Your face is starting to look like a dried apple.”
“Thanks,” Nick said, and laughed. He took this criticism as a sign of affection. “I’ll get myself a flowered sun hat. That’ll go down real well with the guys on the job. I won’t take any shit about that.”
This pushed Olivia to a weak smile, and she reached across the table to pat his hand before getting up to leave. Her touch unfurled inside Nick’s head, and immediately seemed cause for a small celebration.
He waited in his car in the parking lot by the lake, eating Raisinets, tapping them out of the box one at a time. He clicked an Earth, Wind & Fire cassette into the tape deck. Most of the music he liked had happened during his adolescence. Great stuff and he was sticking with it.
He opened a folder of radio images someone sent Bernie from the dish at Arecibo. An event horizon, signaling a black hole beyond it. Nick and Bernie had been looking at this data for a while. He pulled an equation up in his head:
z(r)=sqrt(R3 / 2M) [sqrt(1 - (1 - (2Mr2 / R3)))] for r <= R
then,
z(r)=sqrt(R3 / 2M) [sqrt(1 - (1 - (2M / R)))] +
sqrt(8M (r - 2M)) - sqrt(8m (R - 2M)) for r >= R
He and Bernie collaborated even though Nick was no longer enrolled as a student. The whole school gestalt had gotten to be problematic. There was a casual quality to his attendance that burned the administration. In general, Nick was not terribly interested in showing up anywhere on a regular basis. He and the academic establishment differed on the importance of this.
The daytime population of the parking lot included apprentice drivers practicing three-point turns or parallel parking, or old men waxing their cars, but for the most part the lot at night was a bustling marketplace of sex and drugs. Every now and then some guy mistook the point of Nick’s presence and pulled up next to him and looked over with an insolent expression that Nick now understood was supposed to be provocative. At first, he tried to look uninterested, but sometimes this was only interpreted as coyness, so now he would say straight out, “Hey. I’m just here for drugs. You know.”
Specifically, he was here to meet up with one of two dealers. Angelo or Don. If one didn’t have something for him, the other would. They both offered a good line of product and always showed up; if you had the money, they had the drugs. In the world of addicts, who were pretty much totally unreliable, good dealers were almost parental figures. Pillars of the transient community that cruised this lot. They were reassuring to him; their presence implied a population still interested in the clarifying experience of drugs. Used to be everyone was into getting high, or could be persuaded. More and more, though, people seemed to have left partying behind for a creeping, phony “adult” culture that was all about jobs you had to wear suits to, and success. Whatever that was.
Waiting in the lot was part of the whole experience; it built a little tension around scoring. While he waited, he closed his eyes and lit up an equation behind his lids.
Mb=Co3 / 2(pi)GPo2
The sound of a large engine idling interrupted this thought. It was Don in his black Mercedes. Nick turned off the dome light in his car.
“Really nice night,” Don said once he had pulled next to Nick and rolled down his window. He was looking up at the sky where a full moon hung low and fat. But he wasn’t talking about the clear sky or the mild fall temperatures. “I’ve got some excellent morphine drops,” he said, clicking a small, brown bottle against the window opening. “Undiluted. Straight from hospice.”
The price tag on these was too steep, though, so Nick just picked up a dozen Percodan.
“Hey. You can probably help me with this. My living room is the coldest room in my house. There’s an old fireplace, but I’ve never tried it.” Dealers always liked to talk to you as though you were a real person, or as though they were. Little conversations like this lubricated a transaction.
Nick told him, “Get someone over. Make sure the flue is working. Get it cleaned, get the chimney lined. You can build a fire in it then. Nice and cozy.” He had told Don that he worked in construction, which was true on the mornings he could get it together to show up at this or that job. Telling people you are an astronomer, he found, was not usually a conversation starter. Or, worse, it started a conversation with the other person telling you his sign.
As he pulled onto the Drive, Nick popped three percs to get the party rolling, then headed over to Alice’s. Something was wrong with her toilet; it ran on unless you did some complicated jiggling with the handle. He had promised to take care of this a week ago then lost track of time. He had a wrench and a new ball stopper on the passenger seat next to him. He took pride in Alice’s loft; he’d done a lot of work on it, helped turn it from a gray space with a strong bleachy odor into an apartment she could live in.
According to her lease, Alice was only supposed to use the loft as a place to paint, but she lived there too, sort of openly on the sly. She had made a kitchen in one corner with counters that were planks across sawhorses, a two-burner hot plate, a giant sixties refrigerator in harvest gold—an artifact from an earlier American epoch. Nick rigged up a metal stall shower off the pipes on the big wash sink. Next to this there was a toilet—the one now running on—that he enclosed with drywall.
By the time he parked down the block from her, the pills were pushing through his blood, spreading their grace, casting a tint over Alice’s neighborhood that was not a color so much as a mood. Even with the dog-boarding kennel and the dry cleaning plant, the atmosphere was definitely homey. He opened the plastic bag and took one more pill—a shooter to put him in a visitation groove.
“Boocs,” Alice greeted him, opening the door. The nickname was ironic. All three siblings were named after operatic characters. Horace, their father, was a huge buff. Naming his kids was a little opportunity to show off his erudition. Alice was really Lucia. Nick was Nabucco. Only Carmen had hung with the deal.
Alice was surprised to see him, he could tell. People, he noticed, seemed less and less into the idea of dropping by. Now you were supposed to call first. The dropping-by era was, apparently, over.
“Are you high?” she asked him once he was inside. The question caught him off guard and in pondering it, he forgot what it was.
“High?” she tried again, pointing upward as a visual aid.
“Oh. No. No way.” He didn’t want to disappoint. She was so earnest. He adored Alice. At this exact moment, he was overwhelmed by how much he loved his sister. A lot of people loved her, many at first sight. They wanted to be her friend, or lover. They wanted to hire her or get her on their team. This was all due to something she put out, into the atmosphere around her. She was not beautiful in any conventional
sense. The elements of her face were too severe, her eyes brown edging toward black, the whole effect weaving between mysterious and tragic. Something about this blend made people want it, want her. She had been hit on by gay guys, also by women in straight bars.
Right now she just continued to stare the truth out of him.
“Well, maybe a little,” he admitted. “Just a little feel-good thing. A top-off. Today was visiting day.”
“Oh,” Alice said. “Right.”
“You know, Olivia is really a very fascinating person.” He pulled out his wallet, but Alice stopped him with a hand pressed on his arm. “I’ve seen the picture. Listen, we have to be quiet. Is toilet repair quiet? The thing is Maude’s asleep already. She has to be downtown at five a.m. tomorrow so they can get her into makeup and out on the Michigan Avenue Bridge in some evening gown before the morning rush hour.”
“Evening pants,” Maude said from the bed at the far end of the loft, around the corner so she was only a ghostly voice. The voice sounded wide-awake, though. “Who can sleep at eight-thirty at night?” she said as she came out in a T-shirt and men’s striped pajama bottoms.
“Toddlers,” Alice said as Maude pulled her into a headlock. She was way taller than Alice, so it was an easy move. “Toddlers are definitely asleep by now. Don’t bother calling any of them.”
Maude was great looking, but also a pain in the ass. She had disappeared after the accident, and now she was back again. Sort of. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be a dyke. In Nick’s opinion, Alice was too vulnerable to her. But just now, as he looked at them standing there so perfectly together, he got a whole other view. He could see how Alice, with Maude’s arm draped over her shoulder, was taken care of. He saw now the way the two of them occupied a space that extended into the future. The image filled him with hope. The wide, flat plane of hope it lifted you onto—this was what he loved best about Percodan.
“I’m starving,” Maude said.
“We could order some gyros from the Greek place,” Alice said.
“Oh honey,” Maude said. “You know my stupid job, my stupid life. We could order a grape, maybe.”
Alice turned to Nick. “Are you hungry?”
He shook his head. He was trying to follow what they were saying, but the words kept clicking right and left, like a Ping-Pong ball being volleyed across the table. Clickety-clack. Clackety-click.
“I hate when he shows up like this,” he heard Maude saying, but from a great distance, like an animated character on a cartoon show being played on a TV in another room. When he was straight, she scared him with her arrogance, that and her low opinion of him. She hated him for bringing Olivia to the wedding, for taking some stupefying amount of drugs with her, then letting her drive. He could tell she had also written him off as a loser. She thought he was blowing off a big career on account of the drugs.
He couldn’t explain to her, to anyone, the whirl astronomy sets up inside a person’s head, the vertigo that comes with trying to understand what’s going on way out there. He might be the first person to understand a significant piece of missing information. People didn’t see that pursuing information on this scale can be agitating. He needed something to help him chill out. Drugs were just extremely helpful. Also manual labor, which let him back off from the abstract into the concrete, finite, orderly nature of carpentry and plumbing. Tools and measures. Something, in the end, he could put his hand on.
“I can’t let him back out on the street to drive around like a bumper car,” Alice was telling Maude when he tuned back in. Then Alice guided him to the sofa. “Good thing you brought that wrench, Mr. Handy. You’re going to be doing a lot of work tonight.”
He saw the sofa coming into view. Lying down was so right. You couldn’t argue with lying down. A perfectly simple equation appeared before him, linking black holes to dark energy. It shimmered for just a second, then dissolved.
small breeze
A few thousand kisses, maybe a hundred fights into their relationship, Maude leaned over the back of the sofa to kiss Alice, who was in the throes of a bad summer cold.
“I don’t think you have a fever,” she said. “Just take some Contac and you’ll be fine.
“Stay and play doctor with me,” Alice said.
“Can’t. I’ve got a shoot at ten.” But even as she said this, Maude was getting undressed, letting Alice pull her on top of her. “Okay. You win. Give me your cold. Come on. Really try.”
This moment, taken out of context, would be misleading, making it appear their relationship had moved along to some further place where Alice could feel secure. What Alice wanted was for Maude to love her and they could go on from there to wherever people go when they have paved the road they’ll be traveling together. That was not happening. They were still in the place where Maude was deciding which fork in the road to take. Maybe further back than that even. Maybe they were still waiting for the asphalt truck.
The problem was not between Alice and Maude. Their time together, their conversations, their shared jokes, the sex, even though they were three years in, was all still dense with color, everything so amazingly vibrant. The problem lay in the connection between Maude and her mother, Marie, who had by now figured out what was going on between Maude and Alice, and was lobbying her daughter to move back into her own apartment. She referred to Alice’s loft as an occasion of sin. Alice was resigned to this move. What worried her more was that Maude had taken on some of her mother’s crazy queer hating herself. She saw her attraction to Alice as something inside her, but not exactly who she was. Alice feared Maude saw it as something she should be able to kill.
“This won’t really change anything,” Maude said, now deeply late for the shoot, rushing back into her clothes and clattering handfuls of tape cassettes into a duffel. “I’ll call to see how you are tonight. And I’ll see you this weekend.”
Alone, Alice sat at the kitchen table while her coffee went cold, then finally went into the studio and sanded a gessoed canvas to begin a fresh portrait of Casey Redman. This would be the fifth. The early ones came to Alice set in places of Casey’s childhood—inside a snow fort in a field by the toboggan hill, on a raft in what was clearly Sullivan Lake. Like that. As these were also places familiar to Alice from her time at the co-op, she was remembering as much as imagining. But the next one—Casey awkwardly slow-dancing with a boy at a party—came to Alice already articulated, though she had no familiarity with the specific setting, what seemed to be a paneled family room. In this new painting—which she already saw complete although she had yet to touch brush to canvas—Casey is about fourteen, as she would have been if she were still living. She still has white-blond hair although Alice realized that, had the girl lived, it might well have darkened by now. In this picture, she is leaning inside a shadow, against a pole, which supports the high, blue-white light pouring across the edge of a football field.
Alice was beginning to see the terms of these paintings. She would wait for them to arrive and then paint them, like clicking a shutter, making snapshots out of oil and canvas. This was the central point of her art now, to record the girl’s unlived life. Also, these would be her best paintings. She knew this already. She could see a whole world of paintings ahead of her that she wanted to make, and she would make them, but none would be as good as the Casey Redman paintings. She wasn’t sure if this was a gift, or a sentence.
Around noon, she looked out the window next to her easel. Across the street, there was a vestigial patch of the neighborhood as it used to be—a short row with a wholesale butcher, a fishmonger, a greengrocer. On the sidewalk directly below Alice’s windows, there was a cart that sold sno-cones with breathtakingly lurid syrups. Chartreuse and ultraviolet and blood orange. The scents, which in a weird way matched the colors, drifted sweetly up through the gray, slightly industrial air.
She broke for lunch at the taqueria downstairs. Coming back in, she could feel Maude’s absence as a small breeze whipping through the place. She sat down by
the phone, but didn’t know who to call. None of her friends wanted to hear about Maude anymore—her comings and goings, her waffling about her sexuality. They had said what they could say, put an arm around Alice’s shoulders, bought her a drink, took a few weepy calls graciously, and now they were done. Alice was on her own with this now. Then she thought, Jean. Jean might have a few drops of sympathy left in her. Alice biked up Halsted to her studio. Jean was at a soundboard pushing small levers up and down. She had headphones on and didn’t see Alice until she looked up.
“What’re you working on?” Alice said.
“Oh. Finishing up the Sylvie album.”
A year ago, Jean’s uncle dropped dead at a Cubs game, cheering then dead. Suddenly she was in possession of a small windfall. She moved back to the city, bought herself some state-of-the-art recording equipment and a real studio—a two-story brick building on Halsted with a storefront at street level, an apartment above. Free of financial constraints, she was now able to make a significant contribution to music preservation. She had already signed a few neglected artists she considered truly important, even though almost no one knew their work. She intended to change that.
One was Sylvie Artaud, an elderly chanteuse réaliste Jean discovered in a tourist trap in Montmartre, playing piano, backed by a Mr. Drum, singing “C’est si bon” and “Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo” for Americans killing time waiting for showtime at the Moulin Rouge.
“I think Sylvie’s problem—in terms of commercial success—is that she’s too good at what she does. Her songs, you know, about the crippled streetwalker. Or that one about the woman whose lover is killed as he’s bringing her flowers and doesn’t see the falling safe from behind his bouquet. Who could bear to listen to that? I think her records are bought by the same handful of fans. Women with a few divorces behind them. Older gay guys. People who live in some far reach of romantic nihilism. For them, Sylvie’s songs are kind of a liturgy. Which is great. All that intense devotion. Still, I’d like to see her reach a wider audience.”