Queen Takes King

by Gigi Levangie Grazer

  Not that he’d been to any of those vacation spots for more than three, four days. Hadn’t he always left early? There’d been a business emergency. And another. And another.

  On the far wall was a large painting, a specter of something that once lived. The piece was one of his, set in a room rarely used. His focus narrowed.

  Well. For obvious reasons; it wasn’t very good.

  He lay back, fully clothed, his body spent.

  And fell asleep.

  There was the baby. But Chase was walking, which he’d never had a chance to in his short life. There he was, unsure of his baby steps but moving, moving forward and sideways at the same time. Jackson urging him on. Come to Daddy. But don’t fall. Don’t hurt yourself. Careful. ¡Cuídate!, he heard the Dominican nanny say. The baby’s arms outstretched, little sausage arms, like balloons with rubber bands at the elbow, at the wrist, around each tiny joint of each tiny finger, the baby reaching for him.

  Jackson woke up, his face slick. His cool sheet wet with nerves. He wiped his hand across his forehead. His sweat smelled like anxiety and alcohol. And Lara. His tongue felt like it was coated with fine sand. Where was he?

  He pushed himself up to a sitting position, pulled his legs over the side of the bed, and planted his feet. He felt grounded again. But for how long? What was coming?

  He turned on the lamp. He was still fully dressed. Were his shoes still on? Yes. Unbelievable.

  His painting, his past, looming over him, half lit.

  The baby. His baby boy. The boy who flew away before he ever took a step. Why this dream and why now? The last hours were finding their way back to his consciousness, clawing over the dark expanse of short-term memory. He could remember things from years ago so well, exact colors, measurements, sounds, pixelated, high-definition memories—but an hour ago, two hours—those were murky and torpid, like swimming underwater in a canal.

  He pictured Cynthia at the opposite end of the apartment, lying alone in their bed. The vision made him sad, imbued his guilt with shape, a physical presence—a cube lodged in his throat.

  Two hours earlier he’d lain in bed next to the girl who said yes but maybe no, and now he was thinking of the girl who said yes but maybe no all those years ago…

  The mid-eighties, Jacks remembered. When the East Village resembled postwar Berlin; he’d loved it.

  There was a gallery owner, dressed in the uniform of the trade: black boots, severely tailored sheath, dark tresses draped over the shoulders like a cape. Like all galleristas, she was nocturnal. They were like bats, hanging in artists’ caves, sniffing blood, life force, enticing these boys, these comers, a third of whom would be dead by the end of the decade. The galleristas were very thin, but not frail; they dined on espresso and smoke was oxygen to them, and they could supply you with heroin and were only too happy to suck your dick while you shot up, if that’s what would get you through your next painting, next showing, get them on the cover of Artforum, get you to hand over 80 percent of the sale price. They supplied you with anything you needed: rent money, drug money, diaper money, young pussy, young boys.

  Jacks wanted to please the vampire as much as he wanted his next breath. He was in his mid-twenties and feeling the weight of his age, already. He was like a model who was watching the new Cindys, the Christies, the Naomis take to the runway; one bold step and they took flight.

  There were rumblings. Names wiggled under doorways from rooms where people were too high to be coherent, yet these names formed clear and were suddenly everywhere. Jackson yearned to be one of them.

  There was something called Graffiti Art. An entire brick wall, a burned-out building. Jacks had stared in wonder, unnerved. He stared as though a beautiful woman had just walked up to him on the street, slapped him, and moved on. Slashes of black, of white, of red. Words and skulls. Demons and Angels. It was political exposé. It was art. It was not art at all.

  Jacks had been at this game for a few years; he’d been to art school. He was smart and had some talent and something to prove, but so did they all. So did they all.

  Cynthia was pregnant. He hadn’t yet proposed.

  Jacks’s first thought: get rid of it. There was too much pressure. He hadn’t sold anything. He couldn’t go back and he couldn’t move forward.

  Then he became determined. The baby would be a good omen. They would keep the baby, and his art would sell.

  Cynthia hadn’t come to a decision yet. She was, after all, a ballerina, ethereal, as though she should be flying around their loft, flitting over the paint cans, canvases, torn white sheets, stacks of toe shoes ragged with wear.

  A ballerina couldn’t have a baby.

  Jacks had completed a new series. He’d pushed himself, taken risks. For the baby. What was the thing no one else was doing? Rockwell twisted. Americana—and what was America? Baseball. He’d begged a few of the Great Ones to sit for him. The young, handsome Dominican. The retired, surly black hero. The manager, his feuding owner. He felt the series was good, good and different. But the talent of the other artists attacked him at night, in the dark, when Cynthia was sleeping next to him. He would wake up feeling dead from a hundred gorgeous cuts, each from a different hand.

  In his head, he screamed at the competition when he saw the flashes of their brilliance. Why this color here? Why this subject matter? Broken dishes. Warhol revisited. Elementary figures. Child’s play. Words on canvas. Revolutionary! Stagnant! Sometimes, he screamed because he didn’t understand, and in his heart he felt he never would.

  “You’re brilliant,” the gallery owner told him, stationed on her knees, looking up at him. Her eyes were dark behind her black-rimmed glasses. He could see the faint gray stripe down the middle of the part of her dark, glossy hair. Skunk, came the unbidden thought.

  He hoped to God he could finish. What would she do if she had to suck him off much longer? He wished he were gay, like her other charges, her favorites. He doubted that they would have to endure this humiliation. A grown woman wearing the colors of her profession, black and more black, on her knees, her one hand manically teasing his balls, her violent red mouth full of him. He heard her choking noises and this gave him satisfaction. Let her choke on it.

  And then, comforting epiphany: he was doing this for Cynthia, he thought. For the baby, the baby he was sure would be a boy. He was doing this for his family’s future. He had nothing else but this showing. Nothing else but these paintings. The gallerista wanted to celebrate her “discovery,” though there’d already been an article in the Times, mentioning his art and his bohemian lifestyle, the way he’d “turned his back” on the family fortune, on his father. The anxiety of his life in black and white; he didn’t want to be the trust fund baby who becomes a dilettante artist. He wanted only to be an artist.

  He needed to sell something. There was no money. They were living on a ballerina’s salary. Enough for food and his canvases. He’d have to find work soon, but he was trained to do nothing.

  He came.

  “Lick my pussy,” the gallery owner said, her voice hoarse with desire, but also something else, something more intoxicating: power. She slipped off her fishnet stockings and wiped the sides of her mouth, tattered red with her signature lipstick. He would forever try to forbid Cynthia to wear red lipstick, unable to give a reason that made any sense.

  He hiked up his pants and knelt before her, as if he were praying.

  Jackson was so nervous before his art opening, he threw up over and over until he and the porcelain ring were old friends. Cynthia held his hair back from his face. She was succumbing to morning sickness. Soon they were taking turns—you go first, no please, you—until they were vomiting and laughing at the same time.

  “We’re going to be late,” Cynthia said.

  “You go,” he said, “I’ll stay here.”

  She talked him off the floor of the bathroom and into clean clothes; she pushed her fingers through his hair. She was a vision. And so wan, she looked like something he could dip
his finger into. The pregnancy was making her more beautiful.

  The thought brought on a flash of anger.

  They walked to the opening; it was three blocks away. The cold pushed them closer together.

  The street was lit up from the gallery; noise made the light more intense. Chatter and bass. Jacks could feel the circus. “No journalists,” he’d warned the gallery owner. “Let’s slide into town, under cover of night. I only need to sell a few.”

  A few will tide me over. A few will save me, he thought. Us.

  Suddenly, he dropped to his knee. Cynthia started to pull him up. “What’s wrong? Are you still sick?” she asked.

  “Marry me.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Marry me.” He pulled on her. “Please marry me.”

  Even as he said it, even as he was begging her to marry him, he felt it was the last thing he should do. Somewhere inside he knew he would drag her down with him.

  “You don’t have to,” she said.

  “I won’t go in there unless you say yes,” he told her.

  Cynthia’s hand brushed his face; he kissed her cold fingers. She looked straight into his eyes, and it seemed like hours before she said yes.

  The next day, there were headlines in a newspaper that his father’s friend published. Jacks didn’t read the article; he didn’t need to. He knew what they’d said.

  Not one painting sold. Not one.

  The millionaire’s son couldn’t buy talent.

  Jacks knew it wasn’t true. He knew he had talent, but he also knew it didn’t matter. Truth is not a solid, he thought. Truth is as malleable as clay. The lesson would stick with him, and serve him.

  Two weeks later, Cynthia started bleeding. Her insurance premium had run out. There was no money for the doctor.

  Jacks went to his father.

  “I knew you’d be back,” his father said. He didn’t even bother looking up from his soup.

  “If there were any other way—”

  “You’re in good company, Jackson,” his father said, drowning him out. “Hitler was a failed artist, too.”

  Jacks didn’t know it then, but he would never lift a paintbrush again.

  The painting hanging before him reached out over the decades and the victories and the disappointments. The sorrowful, rheumy eyes, the tilted Yankees cap, the flaccid flesh of the old base runner. Who would want this hanging in their dining room? What had he been thinking? And the lines—oh, they were technically sound—deliberate and anxious, but the lack of sensuality hurt him. He’d never let go. The rule was: know technique cold, then let go.

  First, Jacks thought, first his dream died, then his baby, then came the long, drawn-out death of his marriage. Oh, he and Cynthia had lived together as man and wife long after Chase was gone, but it had been over. He thought back to his first affair, the comely secretary. Such a cliché. Three months after the funeral. Lush body and wanting to please, and, oh, she had dark, hungry eyes—and he felt terrible, terrible—but the terribleness died down with each affair, until the girls became just another petty obligation—brush your teeth, run three miles on the treadmill, fuck that girl you met in the elevator.

  Suddenly Jacks felt famished. What was the quickest route to the kitchen from the guest bedroom? Jacks tried to picture the blueprint of the triplex, flipped it around in his mind.

  He’d have to bear left.

  AFTER winding turns and dead ends and irritating discoveries of powder rooms and maids’ rooms and side closets he didn’t know existed, Jacks was finally facing the blank inside of the industrial-size refrigerator. The room was quiet as a stone, except for a symphony of beeps. The machines were awake, but hidden. He could hear them, muffled robots mocking him.

  There were no leftovers, of course. No eating in the house? No leftovers. However, there was bread. And butter. Perhaps, God willing, he could find the toaster.

  He opened a cabinet. The coffeemaker was on, dripping, beeping. What was it doing on at this hour?

  Jacks suddenly sensed that he was not alone. He turned and saw Cynthia the Ninja watching him.

  Neither spoke as they continued to be serenaded by electronic katydids.

  “Are you hungry?” Cynthia finally asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “What happened to room service at the Plaza?” she asked.

  First strike. “Can we keep this civil?” Jacks asked.

  “Absolutely,” said Cynthia, “if you move out by morning, I’ll even pack for you.”

  “So much for civil,” Jacks said. “You’re the one who should be moving out. I own 740. The family owns 740.”

  “And you’re welcome to own it for as long as I live,” Cynthia said. “And I prefer to live here. And my lawyers prefer that I live here. And so does the state of New York.”

  Poker face, Cynthia thought, steady…

  “I don’t want to get ugly right now,” Jacks said plaintively, “I just want toast.”

  Jacks turned and opened another cabinet. No toaster.

  Cynthia opened a cabinet. There was the toaster. She put two slices of bread in, pressed the lever down.

  “Thanks,” Jacks said, “I never could have found it.”

  Cynthia nodded. It had taken her twenty minutes to find the toaster a couple of sleepless nights ago. Now the thing was locked in her memory.

  “So,” he said, “what were you looking for?”

  “A cigarette.”

  “You’re smoking again,” Jacks said.

  Something flickered in Cynthia’s eyes—Shame? Epiphany? Disgust?

  Disgust.

  “I never stopped,” she said. She opened a drawer, grabbed a pack of Gitanes, and left.

  “Smoking’s bad for you,” Jacks said as he watched her leave. From behind, Cynthia looked about sixteen. He wondered how old she would be before her ass dropped. Then he reminded himself that they were getting divorced and he hated her.

  “Have another one!” he called out.

  The toaster beeped.

  17

  MIDDLE GAME: WEEK ONE

  LATE TUESDAY night: Cynthia and Jacks run into each other again in the kitchen. They exchange words. Jacks flips her off; Cynthia throws a cigarette pack at his back. They retreat to their wings.

  Wednesday Morning: After calling her lawyer, Ricardo, Cynthia has a locksmith change the locks to the master suite.

  Wednesday Afternoon: After calling his lawyer, Penn, Jacks changes the lock on the guest wing door.

  Thursday Morning: Cynthia leaves a typewritten note for Jacks: Ten Rules for Houseguests. Number One Rule? Stay out of host’s way.

  Thursday Evening: Cynthia finds a small, wrapped gift at her bedside. She opens it. Inside the lovely package is a lovely vibrator. Cynthia throws it at the wall and screams.

  Friday Morning: Cynthia hands Gordo a prescription for Viagra in Jacks’s name. Jacks tries to bribe Esme to leave Cynthia and work for him.

  Friday Night: Jacks blasts The Ultimate Barry Manilow in the guest wing, puts it on endless repeat, locks the door, and leaves for the night.

  Saturday Night: Cynthia retaliates with REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity album. She spends a very comfortable night at the Carlyle.

  18

  MIDDLE GAME: WEEK TWO

  MONDAY MORNING: Cynthia buys a Yorkshire terrier. Jacks is allergic to dogs and dog shit (which he promptly steps in).

  Tuesday: Cynthia can’t find her dog. Anywhere.

  Wednesday Morning: Harry innocently thanks Cynthia for the dog. His wife loves it.

  Wednesday Afternoon: Cynthia buys another dog. A Chihuahua.

  Thursday: Jacks tries to get a restraining order against the dog. Cynthia tries to get a restraining order in the name of her dog against Jacks.

  Friday Evening: Jacks hosts a cigar party with his Gargoyle pals. Cynthia calls the fire department.

  Saturday Evening: Penn and Ricardo meet at their monthly book club and shake their heads.

  PART TWO


  TWO WEEKS LATER

  19

  THE PAWN IS ROOKED

  ADRIAN HAD returned to bartending at the St. Regis and he was happy about it, so kindly fuck off.

  “Nothing wrong with being a bartender. It’s honest work,” he’d said to Miss Tracy Bing.

  Off-Off-Off-Broadway. A mile and a half and light years from the Great White Way to the cramped cobblestone street where the non-Equity theater sat next to the Venus Flytrap sex shop. Theaters were closing down. It was getting harder to find a venue, a sponsor, an option that will end your days of “What can I get f’you?”

  Adrian thought he’d hit the fucking Lotto.

  Adrian had been working on this play since he was sixteen. There was an English teacher, a grad student. Mr. C, they called him. Adrian couldn’t remember his full name, a fucking shame, because he planned to thank Mr. C when he climbed up onstage to receive his first Tony.

  Adrian remembered the day Mr. C entered the classroom. Classroom? More like a cage. Adrian and, like, thirty gang members, a low-level stew of Latin Kings, Bloods.

  Adrian and his parents lived in a neighborhood that never knew “nice.” They could have run out long ago, like everyone else, but his father refused. His dad, a mailman, wore steel-toed boots and carried mace to ward off drug dealers’ slavering pit bulls. Dad would crawl home and put on a jazz album, not just Miles Davis or Chet Baker or the Bird, but the guy who played backup bass on an album produced in a tiny studio in Le Havre.

  Dad was caught in some sort of time warp where the feeling was mellow, the sounds cool, the music a uniting force.

  You been outside lately? Adrian would wonder.

  Mr. C tried to teach the kids about metaphors: crack is a snake; the needle is Mommy’s boyfriend; your eight-year-old self, a baby crawling through a minefield; melody is a pillow; rap an AK-47.

  Adrian approached his teacher after class. “Jersey City is a giant mouth, with sharp teeth. A shark of a city…”