The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  “To Stretch,” Ronnie said, holding up his slivovitz. “Poor guy is probably waiting for you now. He’ll wait for years. He’ll tell everyone, this girl came through town—”

  “All right, all right,” Sandro said.

  Ronnie smiled at him. “Jeal-ouseee, is there no cure,” he sang. “How exciting that Sandro and Stretch are going to have a log pull. A hay-bale-tossing contest. A proper duel.”

  “We’ve moved on from Stretch,” Sandro said.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that a guy living in a motel would make Sandro jealous. I was touched.

  Giddle hadn’t gone anywhere. Only to Coney Island. “But it felt far away,” she said. “The far-awayness tugs at you as you rumble out there on the F train. You finally reach Coney Island and think, I’ll never see home again. I went several days in a row. It was like taking tiny vacations to Europe.”

  “Place is a nightmare,” Ronnie said. “It’s nothing like Europe. It’s awful to go there even once.”

  “Once is good,” Sandro said. “Maybe once a year, even.”

  Sandro had taken me there in winter, just after we met. All the rides were chained down. Guard dogs barked at us, mean and lonely, behind fences. We’d walked out on the beach, which was covered with snow. The moon was out and full, and the waves pushed glowing white piles of snow up onto the shore. We’d gone to a Russian restaurant farther down Brighton Beach Avenue. The waiter set down a bottle of vodka frozen in a block of ice. Sandro ordered caviars and creamed salads and steaks like it was our wedding night. The restaurant was darkly lit, with a spinning mirrored ball and a tuxedoed Bulgarian entertainer playing a mellotron. There was a party of Russians on the dance floor. They gave off a feeling of hysterical doom as they danced, the men circling a woman in a short sweater dress who looked eight months pregnant. Later, they all returned to their table and took turns pouring vodka down one another’s throats. Sandro and I stumbled out late, our minds cold and hazed with winter vodka, snowflakes in our hair. Sandro said he loved me. The way he kissed the snow from my eyelashes, wrapped me in his warmth, I believed him.

  “It’s not a nightmare, Ronnie,” Giddle said. “The thing about Coney Island is you have to go with goals in mind. I wanted to win something. A hot-dog-eating contest. A big stuffed purple panda. Once I’d actually won it, I dragged it up and down the boardwalk until it was so dirty it looked like something I’d found in the Holland Tunnel. You have to ride the Skydiver and win a big ugly prize and live on Nathan’s hot dogs or you will never understand Coney Island.”

  “Well, I guess it’s my loss,” Ronnie said, but in a distracted way. I could tell he wished she’d shut up. Not that the details Ronnie shared were all that different. There was not enough separation between Giddle’s basic reality and Coney Island. That was the difference. She gave it a patina of irony, but Coney Island was probably the only Europe Giddle could afford, while Ronnie and Sandro did not have those limitations. Sandro because he was a Valera. Ronnie was self-invented, some kind of orphan, but he knew precisely how to make rich people feel at ease. Which was to say, he made them feel slightly insecure and self-doubting. As a result, they wanted something higher than Ronnie’s disdain, for which they were willing to pay a great deal to collect his artwork, and win his approval and even friendship, or what felt to them like friendship.

  “Saul,” Ronnie said, as Saul Oppler passed our booth. The great Saul Oppler. I’d never seen him in person. He was not the kind of artist you ran into at Rudy’s. You read about him in magazines, alongside photo-essays on the homes he kept in Nantucket and Greece and Ischia. He was huge and powerful-looking but very old, with strangely smooth, rubbery skin, a deep tan like you saw on people who wintered in Florida, and crisp, sherbet-colored clothing, also like you saw on people who lived in Florida.

  Ronnie stood and offered his hand to Saul, but Saul wouldn’t take it. He looked at Ronnie, his gaze bright and sharp and wounded. He was breathing in a labored way.

  “Stay away from me,” he said. He turned and moved toward the back of the room.

  “Ronnie,” Giddle said, “I thought you ate a chicken together. Patched things. He looks really pissed.”

  “Yeah, well, you know what, Giddle? I made that part up.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because people like a happy ending.”

  * * *

  We left Giddle at the bar and headed for Ronnie’s studio, where he wanted us to stop en route to dinner at Stanley and Gloria Kastle’s. Ronnie lived above a fortune cookie factory on Broome and Wooster. When we turned down his street, I spotted the White Lady up ahead. The White Lady was not always in white, only sometimes, and always at night. A white wig. White makeup. White cotton gloves. There were few lights on Broome, but she stood out.

  “She’s a beacon,” Ronnie said after we’d passed her.

  Once, Giddle and I had followed her into a grocery store. She bought milk, white bread, a can of hominy, and two jars of mayonnaise. All white products. Giddle had leaned over as we waited behind her. “Oh my God. Guess what perfume she’s wearing?” Giddle had whispered to me. It was White Shoulders.

  “The show is going to be called Space,” Ronnie said as he unlocked his studio to show us his new work. He’d photographed the black-and-white-speckled interior of his oven and then blown up the photographs and titled each “Milky Way (detail).” They really did look like photos of outer space, but knowing they were his oven, the inky background and blurs of light made me think of Sylvia Plath more than of the universe. Sandro loved her poems, which was endearing to me because it was so girlish to love Sylvia Plath.

  “What’s this?”

  Sandro was looking at a snapshot of a woman staring intently at the camera, young and blond, and clearly smitten with her picture taker.

  “That’s not part of my show.”

  “Just something for you to look at,” Sandro said.

  “Something for me to look at. Pretty in the face, as they say.”

  I turned away from the image. He would slip from this young girl’s grasp, of course. The way he treated his lovers bothered me, though whether it was sympathy for the girls or a reminder that I had been one of the discarded, I couldn’t say.

  “I’m keeping her on layaway,” Ronnie said, “a layaway plan. She’s on reserve, held for me, and I pay in small increments. Actually, I’m supposed to see her tonight.”

  “You’re not coming to dinner?” Sandro asked.

  “I’m coming. I’ll see her later.”

  “After dinner,” Sandro said.

  “Does it matter? I’ll see her later. When I’m through with the other parts of my night.”

  He stood next to Sandro and gazed at the photo, angling his head to match Sandro’s, as if Sandro’s perspective might afford Ronnie some alternate or deepened view.

  “I don’t know,” Ronnie said. “Could be actual love. I’m starting to think so. Because I’m using all the levers to suppress what puts me off about her.”

  Sandro laughed. “If it was love, Ronnie, you wouldn’t be aware you were doing that,” he said, and pulled me toward him.

  “I’m always aware,” Ronnie said. “That’s why it never works out.”

  I tried not to look at the photo of the girl, who stared at us, meaning to stare at Ronnie, hoping for his pity. Sandro’s warm hand was on my shoulder. How lucky I was, and yet I didn’t want to see the young and hopeful face of the girl on layaway.

  Ronnie and his women were a bit like Ronnie and his clothes. That was Sandro’s theory. When Ronnie sold out his first show at Helen Hellenberger’s gallery, Sandro figured Ronnie would quit his job at the Met. Sandro had quit long before. Of course he didn’t need the tiny salary like Ronnie needed it. Sandro had stayed on as long as he had for Ronnie. To engage in a study together. Night guards figuring out the flows of art history and what they themselves were going to do. Ronnie kept his job and spent the money Helen gave him in large all-cash bursts. He hired a Checker cab on re
tainer. Paid up front for a year’s worth of steak dinners at Rudy’s. A year’s worth of rent on his studio, because he said you never knew when you’d go from big-time asshole to homeless. He went down to Canal Street in his private Checker cab and purchased a hundred pairs of shrink-to-fit Levi’s 501s. Five hundred white T-shirts. Five hundred pairs of underwear and socks and said he was never doing laundry again.

  When I had first heard the story, I saw Ronnie balling up his homemade Marsden Hartley T-shirt and lobbing it into the corner of my studio apartment on Mulberry. But I was grafted to Sandro now. We were a project, a becoming, a set of plans. He was invested in what I’d be. But that did not erase an attraction I’d had for Ronnie, on a long night when I never learned his name. I could see now what theater it was, the gesture of balling up the shirt like he would never retrieve it. But of course he had, and with such stealth that he’d sneaked out as I slept, without even saying good-bye.

  It was a form of seriality, Sandro said, the clothes, and also the girls. Moving forward in a pattern of almost sameness. But it seemed to me more like a running away. Sandro himself owned precisely two pairs of jeans. Everything was scaled down to simplicity and order. One pair of work boots. One nice jacket. One set of materials (aluminum and Plexi). One girlfriend.

  The next image Ronnie showed us was rephotographed from the cover of Time magazine, a woman sitting at her kitchen table, pulling down the waist of her stretch pants to expose her hip, revealing the outlines of a huge bruise, like a cloud was crossing the kitchen ceiling, darkening an area of her body in its shadow.

  “Meteorite,” Ronnie said. “Only human ever to be hit by one.”

  The woman’s expression was of calm, satisfied wonder. As if there were some secret logic to what had taken place, to her having been selected for this unusual fate. Time had posed the woman where the meteorite had hit her, seated at her kitchen table. Above her was a torn hole about the width of an oven rack, a shaft of sunlight boring straight through like an inward punch of God’s hand.

  Sandro said something about matter mattering. And Ronnie countered with a comment about single-story homes, the incident being really about that. And then they were talking about what it means to call a magazine Time. The latent heaviness there. Infinity parceled into the integers of humans, the integers of death. These random events, according to Ronnie, were the straw that stuffed the mattress of time. I tuned them out. I was thinking about the woman and how it had happened. It was morning, and her husband, maybe a contractor, a man in a hard hat and big, suede, mustard-colored work gloves, had gone. She was in her quilted robe, getting the kids ready for school, standing in the front doorway watching them mount the steps of the county school bus, waving as the bus pulls away trailing a plume of black diesel. Then relief. The hours are hers. For what? Smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table, perhaps with a neighbor who comes over to visit. Instead of making the beds, or doing a load of laundry, instead of marinating some kind of meat or at the very least brushing food crumbs and other debris from between couch cushions, she and the neighbor sit and drink coffee. Sometimes one tells a story, about what her husband said the night before, or didn’t say, and the other listens. Sometimes they just sit. Sometimes one turns on a radio and they listen to music, or to the news, but they don’t care about the actual news, just that the radio is issuing a steadyish sound whose particulars they do not have to follow to understand what the radio is actually telling them: life is being lived. No need to be a part of it as long as you know it’s streaming. These are their days, the woman and her neighbor/confidante. The job of a housewife is a little vague and it’s easy to just not cross anything off the long list of semi-urgent chores. The woman senses that time is more purely hers if she squanders it and keeps it empty, holds it, feels it pass by, and resists filling it with anything that might put some too-useful dent in its open, airy emptiness. Better to smoke in your robe, talk or not talk to the neighbor woman, turn on the television, which, with the sound muted, is like a tropical fish tank or lit hearth: a rectangle of moving color bringing life inside the house. And with life brought successfully in, she is free to sit and gaze at a ringing phone, remaining perfectly still. Free to nap on the couch, because doing nothing is tiring. At five, still somewhat exhausted, she puts onions in a hot pan, to fool her husband. “Smells good,” he says, taking off his hard hat.

  On one of these ordinary days she and the neighbor woman are at the breakfast table and blam! A heavy message arrives from above. Heavy and dense. It crashes through the ceiling and hits her thigh before clattering to the floor, a dimpled and puckered metal hulk.

  “No,” she says, when the neighbor woman goes to touch it. She has a feeling it might be hot. She knows somehow that it must be from space. We better call and get somebody out here. Some kind of . . . meteorologist.

  And what were the chances?

  There were practically no chances. The chance was almost zero, and yet it happened. To her. The thing about news was that it never touched you. You could turn off the radio mid–urgent warning and know the escapee was not going to be in your bushes, not going to be peeping in on you in your shower. The news never reached anybody in a real way. The meteorite did, and a radio announcer never could have predicted it. All the world’s uncanniness in that thing that came crashing in from deep, unknowable space, and the proof that it left on her, a tremendous bruise (if only it had lasted!). The person to whom something so unlikely has happened is allowed to think it wasn’t an accident, that a meteor fell through space and into Earth’s atmosphere and didn’t stop falling until it had passed through her ceiling and hit her and you can say accident, but she doesn’t have to.

  The neighbor returns the morning of the Time photo shoot, in full makeup, eager to talk to reporters.

  “Sorry,” the woman says, “but this is about me,” and shuts the door on her friend.

  II.

  People were still milling with sweating glasses in their hands when we got to Stanley and Gloria Kastle’s. Milling and speaking in soft voices over the melancholic and refined tones of Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes, which were a soundtrack to the lives of the types of people who came to dinner at the Kastles’. If not the life they actually lived, the one they imagined for themselves and wanted to draw from for inspiration. Gloria, in a head wrap, her black handcuff eyeglasses, and a caftan, came toward me with a hug. Many women were afraid of Gloria, as I had been, but I was becoming less afraid. I sensed she was coming to understand that I was part of Sandro’s life and that there was no choice but to accept me.

  Votive candles flickered behind her, giving the loft the feel of a strange and magical chamber. On every surface were delicate little flowers—weeds, I saw upon closer inspection, clover and dandelions, with sprigs of ailanthus—in little transparent vases, which contrasted with the old, wide-plank floors, the high ceiling stripped to the framing. The loft had once belonged to the painter Mark Rothko, and knowing this gave it a despairing and enlightened aura. It was almost better than going to the Met and looking at the Rothkos. It was the afterimage of that: sad tones of the Gnossiennes, Gloria in a head wrap, looking feline and fierce, Stanley’s mysterious martyrdom, for whom or what I never understood.

  On long metal tables that Stanley had welded sat various collections of semi-industrial objects: early-twentieth-century lightbulbs, antique Bakelite telephones, an Olivetti typewriter given to Stanley by Sandro, who knew the family, and a cap-and-ball pistol, also a gift from Sandro, but as a kind of joke. It was a replica of an early-nineteenth-century Colt revolver that had been remade by the Valera Company for spaghetti Western productions. Stanley was terrified of it and had put it out, with its complicated boxes of ammunition and parts, hoping Sandro would take the cap-and-ball pistol home with him when we left tonight.

  “This is Burdmoore Model,” Gloria said, steering me toward a slump-shouldered man in a blazer that looked like he’d balled up and used as a pillow the night before. “You’ll be seated together at d
inner.” An auburn beard tumbled down his chin like hillside erosion. He was short and pot-bellied but had a kind of blunt virility. He nodded at me with bright, sad eyes, tucking a lock of stringy red hair behind one ear.

  “Modelle,” he said. “The stress is on the second syllable.”

  But after meeting him that night I never heard anyone pronounce it that way; they all said “Model.” Gloria introduced me as “a motorcycle racer,” which made me blush with embarrassment, not only because I wasn’t one but because I felt it made me seem young and unserious compared to the Satie and Rothko mood of the room.

  “Well, all right,” Burdmoore said, nodding. “That’s cool.”

  He took a sip of wine and accidentally set his glass down too forcefully. Red flew upward and doused his hand and sleeve.

  Ronnie came over to say hello to Burdmoore—they seemed to know each other—and I went to help Gloria. Despite her feminist claims and enlightened look, the caftan and the chunky African jewelry, I always sensed from Gloria that female guests were expected to help in the kitchen. But Gloria had ordered out, from one of the Indian restaurants on Sixth Street, so there wasn’t much to do. As she and I moved chicken tandoori and various sauces and side dishes from white paper containers to ceramic serving bowls, she told me Burdmoore was a motherfucker.

  “He seems nice,” I said.

  “I mean the Motherfuckers,” she said. “They were a political street gang. Late sixties. They went around pretending to assassinate people with toy guns. I think they ‘killed’ Didier de Louridier, who’s coming tonight. That should be interesting. Eventually they put away the toy guns and stabbed a landlord. It was all so lurid and we wouldn’t even know about it except the father, Jack Model, was a friend of Stanley’s, a janitor who worked around the art department at Cooper Union when Stanley was teaching there. The two of them became close. Stanley hated academics and said Model was the only person he could relate to at Cooper, this blue-collar guy from Staten Island who lived on vodka and cigarettes. The darkest phase of Burdmoore’s wasn’t this ‘Motherfucker’ business but when he gave up being an anarchist tough and started making papier-mâché sculptures. Burdmoore got it in his head, in the wake of his landlord-stabbing phase, that art would put him in contact with some . . . thing, some kind of emanation. He had no permanent residence—he was on the lam, for all we knew. Stanley let him keep his art supplies and a bedroll here, gave him a small work space, and we tried to suffer through the phase, this art-as-transcendence crap. He’d work furiously on these ugly figurative constructions, and make us listen to his confused rants about the female body and Mother Earth. Shaping crude forms and talking about art moving up the thigh of Mother Earth. Art ‘parting her labia’ and so forth. It was a real regression for someone whose father had pushed a mop, worked like an animal in hopes his son might get a high school degree, maybe join the police force. Instead, he was a dropout, and with such tacky ideas about art.”