Neon in Daylight

by Hermione Hoby

  “I expect his boyfriend stands it by listening to the sound of his sugar daddy’s pencil doodles going for half a million at Sotheby’s.”

  “Half a million?” she said. “Seriously?”

  “Or more, probably. Some idiot A-lister bought one three years ago and that was that.”

  There was a pause. Bill looked away and began jigging his left knee up and down. The sight of it felt like someone flicking the backs of her eyeballs. She blurted the question.

  “Who’s that woman?”

  “What woman?” he asked, vaguely.

  “The one in the backless dress you were talking to.” She couldn’t keep the acid out of her voice. “Cat ears.”

  “Oh, Saskia?” he said, as if she should already know that name, and he looked behind him in her direction. Kate didn’t say anything, didn’t follow his gaze, just watched the side of his face.

  “Saskia Poignard,” he said, still craning to find her in the crowd. “She runs a gallery.”

  “Oh.”

  He offered no more information. So she asked another question.

  “What’s it called?”

  He turned back to her and smiled at her in a way she disliked. He stroked her neck where his thumb lay.

  “Saskia Poignard Gallery,” he said.

  “Well,” she said. “That’s a good name for it.”

  He laughed. He was full of laughter tonight.

  “I’m going to pee,” she said, getting up in her bare feet. But he kept his arm heavy on her; she had to struggle free.

  “Don’t leave me!” he beseeched.

  When she came out of the bathroom, Clockwork Orange boy, the sulking boyfriend of the famous artist, was leaning on the door frame, texting while he waited. She couldn’t help seeing his screen, right beneath her nose: lol come see all the factory hasbeens casey reade crazy af

  He did not acknowledge her as she stood aside, just wheeled past her into the bathroom. She stood there, dumb, wondering if this was someone else’s dream she’d trespassed upon. A person had taken her place beside Bill on the sofa and she had no wish to go stand there in front of them, gormless. So she looked at the walls, as if perhaps she meant herself to be here, were just waiting for someone to come out of the bathroom. Every surface was covered. Torn pages of glossy seventies porn mags, bursting with big bushes and luxuriant handlebar mustaches; scrawled poetry; bejeweled cat skulls threaded together with string; curling movie posters; a ratty, fuchsia-

  pink boa, dandruffed with dust; a taxidermy hawk in a glass case, resting on real moss against an inexpertly painted sky.

  “You like all my fucked-up shit, child? All my lovely old crap?” Casey was beside her, boring holes with his eerie eyes.

  “You can have it, darling,” he said, reeling closer. “Take it all. Every bit. Might have to fight the others, but I’m done with it. It’s yours. You like this?”

  And he was pulling the horrible boa off its nail, looping it around her neck.

  “Take it, take it!”

  She stared at him, wordless, then the dust from the thing wafted up into her nostrils and she sneezed.

  “Achoo!” he yelped. Was he always this manic? “Ring a ring of roses! A pocketful of posies! Bless you, bless you! We all fall down!”

  She wiped her nose awkwardly and finally found some words.

  “Are you . . . moving away?”

  He smiled a slow smile and she felt the familiar panic of not understanding, not grasping other people’s secrets.

  “Catching on, child!” he cried, and he chinked her drink with his. “Cheers! Bottoms up! Auf Wiedersehen! Wish me a bon voyage.”

  “Bon voyage,” she repeated, stiffly, as if she were in French class, age twelve.

  And then Bill was there, topping up their glasses.

  “Our little secret, dear!” he said to Kate, tapping the side of his nose.

  “Are you behaving yourself, Casey?”

  “Never have, never will, Willie. Too late for that. Goodbye to all that.”

  “Something you should know, Kate,” Bill said, a gentle hand on Casey’s shoulder as he addressed her, “is that this gentleman is one of the last surviving Factory superstars.”

  “Superstar!” Casey snorted. And he did a stiff and unsteady twirl, glass in the air, champagne sloshing down his emaciated wrist. “Ha! Suuuuuuperstar. Look at me, don’t I look like a superstar? Last surviving! Last of the fucking Mohicans. Not that I ever had a Mohican, a Mohawk. All those vulgar punks with their Mohawks. I always preferred my locks au naturel, you know? Edie said I had the prettiest hair of any boy in New York City. Not anymore, of course.”

  “Tell Kate about Andy.”

  “Andy? Andy who? Oh, we don’t want to talk about that old cunt,” he said. “Dead ’n’ gone. He was so pissed, you know, that he didn’t die from being shot, from being murdered, you know? Gallbladder! How galling! The ignominy of that, you know? But it’s all ignominious in the end, isn’t it? Unless you decide it’s not going to be. Take matters into your own hands!”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Casey?” Bill said amiably.

  A seven-foot goddess glided past them, crowned in a headdress of plastic leaves.

  “Oh, did you meet Dendra?” Casey said. “You should meet Dendra. Dendra is a dendrophile. Meaning she is a lover of trees, the trees’ lover. She fucks trees! What have you come as, dear?”

  “Why, sweetheart, nothing but myself, always.”

  Dendra extended a hand to Kate. “And you? What do you come as?”

  Much later, Kate thought that what she could have said was a bloody mess, and, what with her conspicuous British accent, people might have deemed it rather amusing, if not exactly witty. But as this seven-foot human with green and black-swept eyes gazed down at her, Kate couldn’t think of anything. Dendra cocked a penciled eyebrow: Does the creature not speak? And then, eyeing Kate’s butch haircut, she gave it a meaningful stroke, smiled, leaned forward, and in a stage whisper said: “Oh, you’ll figure it out, darling, no need to decide now. Enjoy it all, I say.”

  Bill, laughing too loud, pulled Kate into him, and Dendra drifted on, taking Casey with her.

  “I need a cigarette,” Kate managed.

  “And I need the bathroom,” he said. “Meet you over there.”

  The fire escape was packed with drag queens—Cleopatras and Hindu goddesses, Boudicca, Brunhilde, Joan of Arc—and Kate wanted to take their picture but felt too foolish to raise her phone to them. She smoked awkwardly on the edge, wrought iron beneath her bare feet, smiling at them, thanking them when they shifted to make space for her. Across the street, at the pizza joint, a lone man in a Yankees cap was hunched in the window, stark in antiseptic fluorescent light, his gaze heavy on the street in front of him as he pushed a slice into his face. Kate watched him while the conversation beside her gusted in and out.

  “So I said, well at least I can die knowing I’m in the Getty!”

  “Oh, honey,” said another one, luxurious with condescension. “The picture Mapplethorpe took of you is in the Getty.”

  Bill arrived at her side and pointed to the pizza place. “Let’s get a slice.”

  She made no mention of her shoes; to get to them would mean fighting back through the bodies, undertaking the ungainly business of burrowing beneath people’s knees and ankles at the sofa. She’d get them later.

  As she followed him barefoot down the stairs, the stairs whose this way to the disco was visible only in ascent, she regarded the back of his shirt, taut across his shoulder blades. Of course, it hadn’t occurred to them to fake-bloody their backs. Offering up red-splashed fronts to the world, thinking that’s enough.

  In the interior of the pizza place they sat side by side against the wall. She chewed and looked toward the window, to where the disconsolate customer had sat face to face
with his reflection. She wondered, as she ate, if she looked just as bleak as he had.

  30

  Inez opened the cab door, leaving her companion to pay. She looked up at the drag queens on the fire escape as Dylan came and stood beside her on the street, hands in his pockets.

  “Shit,” he said mildly, appreciatively, at the sight. Then, with another thought: “Hey, you know Don Riley?”

  “Huh?”

  “He’s this big Abstract Expressionist guy. He’s my friend Caleb’s boyfriend.”

  “Are you gay?” she said.

  He didn’t seem to mind the question, didn’t find it funny either, just shook his head. “No, I’m just friends with a lot of twinks. I go to Parsons.”

  She stared.

  “Art school.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  He inclined his head toward the door: “Come on.”

  Balloons overhead. A pack of bodies. The bed crammed with so many people—an optic confusion of limbs. A small dog, dressed in a tuxedo and a tiny top hat, trotted across them, its eager progress stopped when someone plucked it into the air and kissed it, lips meeting its pink lapping tongue. The dog, legs dangling, looked, Inez thought, acutely embarrassed. She was glad she was not a dog.

  Dylan was being greeted by a boy dressed as a droog from A Clockwork Orange, and as they began talking to each other she could tell she was going to be ignored from this point on, that there was no place for a girl in their interaction—that at best he wanted her to hang around and wait to be fucked later on. They seemed to expect her to stand here quietly, laughing at the right moments, these boys, as they one-upped each other with bitchy judgments about people she did not know, correcting each other loudly, dropping pronouncements. She weaved away from them, to a sofa, plucking a can from a bucket of ice, shouldering through bodies, shoving past a seven-foot person in a headdress of leaves who snapped, “Manners, madam!”

  Inez claimed the sofa, a bubble of space. She sat on her haunches, knees up, as she wondered whose party this was. It was hard to tell. It could have been the giantess’s, in the headdress of leaves. Could be the droog’s, maybe? Everyone here seemed to exude ownership, ego, too-much-ness. She didn’t think she’d ever been at a party where’d she’d known no one.

  The can of beer in her hand was sweating its chill all over her palm. She leaned forward to park it on the floor, to half tuck it beneath the sofa, so that for a moment her head was bowed. Her eyes went straight to a bolt of silver spiked heel. A shoe, lying on its side, as if drunk and asleep under the sofa where it thought no one would find it. On its toe, a bright red spot, like blood.

  31

  Casey grabbed Bill by the shoulders.

  “Willie,” he hissed. “I thought you’d run off.”

  “Wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye,” Bill said. His sick old friend actually gasped at these words, a ragged intake of breath.

  “Now listen! Billy. Billy-boy not a boy anymore. Not a man yet either, are you? Willie, I’m telling you this now and you’d better heed it. Shut up and listen,” he said, blinking, spitting slightly, fingers tightening on Bill’s shoulders. “You’re lazy, Willie. Indolent! You always have been. Me, too, but I didn’t care and never wanted more. Fucked-up fags like me don’t care. But you care, that’s your problem. You’re a lazy fuck and you know it, and now you’re all balding and old you think you can’t change and you’ve given up entirely. Haven’t you? Haven’t you?”

  There was a terrifying force in Casey’s grip, but Bill willed himself not to protest. His hands stayed at his sides.

  “Give me a break, Casey,” he said softly. “Just relax for a moment. Enjoy your party.”

  “You’ve had a break! You got a break! And you’ve been on a break for twenty-five fucking years! Break time’s over, Billy the Kid! You hear me? Try working before you die. Try making an effort! Try trying!”

  Casey was very breathless now, shaking, worse than ever, and finally the pincers loosened, slipped away, and he was spent. Bill looked at him, at the blue of his eyes, and thought the word petrified, as in ossified. And then Casey blinked rapidly, grabbed Bill’s hand, kissed it wet-lipped, violent and tender, and left.

  

  Kate had returned to the fire escape. Once again, she had that unwelcome sense of invisibility. Inside the apartment the air would be fractious, staticky: even thicker human weather than before. But out here, looking up, the sky was navy and cloudless, and she opened her mouth to it a little. As if that might make her cleaner; alcohol had made her sluggish and spoiled, a lumpen thing, heavy in her bare feet. Where was Bill? With the gallery woman, probably. He’d disappeared, and actively searching for him seemed like an indignity.

  Now a creeping awareness of being stared at—it seemed to happen more and more—made her turn around. For a second she thought it was someone who looked just like Inez. That was the surprise Kate felt at first, the surprise of resemblance more than recognition, the general shock of beauty. Inez was holding the shoe, its spike of a heel pointed at her, and looked crazed, furious. As Kate watched Inez open her mouth to say something the crowd shifted and she was obscured, swallowed up.

  Heads away, Kate could make out Bill, just a cut of him in profile. How long had Inez been here? Had she seen him? Had he seen her? God, the two of them, in the same hellishly hot and overstuffed space.

  She craned to look for her, failed to find her, and began fighting her way back inside.

  It wasn’t Inez she saw now, but Casey, careful and clumsy, as he climbed slowly onto the coffee table in the center of the crowd. This made sense to Kate: he was finding an island, a pocket of space. No one seemed to notice him, no one helped him up, as though he, too, had slipped out of the situation, had crossed its borders to join her in the observing and mostly unobserved world.

  She watched him, breathless, trembling, standing now, raising himself up, frail, and then he slid something metallic from his pocket. It was a tiny silver pistol—a toy, she assumed—and he lifted it in the air.

  In this moment he seemed to feel her looking, because now he was catching her gaze and smiling, giving the pistol a faint sway. She smiled back in a kind of stupor. Still no one else seemed to be looking at him. She glanced around for Bill, or Inez, or any other person who might see what she was seeing, but then the shot came, and with it an eruption of plaster over one corner of the crowd. A quick, chilly spray of fear went through her lungs, then faded.

  A collective shriek, spilled drinks, stumbles, an embarrassment at the sudden hush. Now audible, the voice of David Bowie telling people they could be heroes. Laptop speakers had stood no chance against the crowd noise.

  “Someone turn that off!” Casey snapped, pointing the tiny pistol at the sound, and someone did. Quiet thickened. Kate could hear the soughing of the balloons, their extraterrestrial whispers, animated by a gentle rush of fresh night air through the windows.

  “Friends!” Casey said. All eyes were on him. “Foes! Frenemies! Oh, forgive me if I spooked your dear hearts! But how else to get your attention?”

  Kate craved Bill, or, rather, the idea of him grabbing her hand again until it hurt. She wanted to feel her own fingers crushing against one another, to be reminded of the solidity of her own bones.

  “Hello, everybody,” Casey said. He seemed to have become smaller on the glass table, forlorn, marooned there. His body drooped. It was as if this were a punishment from a parent, rather than a performance of his own making.

  “Get down!” someone heckled without conviction. “Someone get him down and get that off him.”

  But there was just weak laughter at this. This seemed to be the sort of thing Casey did, Kate thought. Waving guns around to get attention. You didn’t stop him.

  “I want to thank you all very, very sincerely, for coming to my birthday party. And I want everyone to take a balloon when they go. Do
you hear? Everyone must take a balloon. And then you can let it go, watch it float off, or you can take it home and watch it shrivel ’n’ wilt. Float or shrivel! Your choice, dear friends! I suggest float!”

  He wiped the dewdrop from his nose with a trembling hand.

  “I am honored to spend this night with you all.”

  Someone said, half-heartedly, amiably, “Get on with it!”

  “Oh, I will!” he said. “Yes, yes. I will get on with it! Thank you, that’s just the thing.”

  And then, with exaggerated ceremony, he bowed: north, east, south, west. There was a shallow noise of humor, of curious confusion. Drawing himself up a touch taller, he screwed shut his eyes and said, “Thank you all for coming tonight.”

  He paused, as if to say something more, but then faltered and instead put the tip of the silver pistol to his chest. The gesture had the modest delicacy of a person pointing to himself to ask, “Who, me?” Kate saw the gun, heard the second shot, saw the blood explode huge on white, but as he fell, as those frail knees buckled and his arms went slack and his body became a bundle of falling bones, her thought was Someone catch him before he hurts himself. It took a moment for the sound to become understood, the crowd screaming in horror. They knew this sound from TV news but now it surrounded them, as if it had come for them, seeking vengeance for them never having believed in it. Kate, too, had disregarded death, the real eruption of it in life.

  She tried not to lose her balance in the crush of bodies, noted that her heart was beating briskly but beneath this she was fine. People said this happened in crises, this lucidity, this confidence.

  Ginger Rogers was clutching Fred Astaire to her chest. He’d lost his hat and was barking, over and over, while his owner screamed in blasts.

  And then Inez was in front of her, face to face, a shoe in each hand. The whites of her eyes were blazing.