by Rick Moody
Barbed wire, rusted by age and emissions of sulfurous compounds, separated her building from the known drug location. Coiled above the flush edges of the two buildings, bolted into cement. Remorseful visitations of conscience implicit in the difficulties of barbed wire. But these visitations of conscience didn’t last very long. Angel (real name Mike) seemed, of course, as if he was made to go over barbed wire, which was a generalization on M. J.’s part about things she didn’t understand, to which people who had a lot of stuff were given in the consideration of those who didn’t have as much. Nevertheless, Angel simply found a spot that was well traveled, and he pulled some heavy work gloves out of the pockets of his windbreaker, set them down, took off his windbreaker, tossed it like a proverbial cape so that it draped on the fence, gripped the fence in work gloves, vaulted over. Plucked the jacket from the barbs. Now the fence separated the two of them.
—I can’t go over that, M. J. said.
What about the party? What about the people gathered in the street outside? What about her career as a dancer? Did she want to marry? Did she mean to procreate? Had she been a good friend to her good friends? Had she attempted to remember the kindness of parents, for whom she was an only child? Had she taken in stray pets? Given to charity? Looked for the good in others?
—I’ll lift you over, Angel said.
—You weigh about ten pounds more than I do.
—No problem.
—You can’t.
He stood at the spot where he had climbed over himself. The barbs were speckled with gouts of blood. Maybe it was the light. Blood of the fiscally challenged, blood of laborers, blood of suffering addicts who flocked to the known drug location. While their wives or parents slept, when the attention was off, they came up Madison Street, incanting, skulking, sweaty, desperate, to 619 Madison. They banged upon the door. They didn’t own enough layers to put off the cold. It was no fashion statement. Angel reached out his arms. She didn’t have much faith. She climbed up on the ledge that separated the buildings, and with an expressive saltation, a frisson, she landed in his hands, arms around his neck; she could smell him now, and he smelled funky, like a human, and up close she could see the planes of his cheeks, hairless and boyish. It was true. He could lift her up. She was air, she had perfected the designs of the universal choreographer and made her body insubstantial like a bird’s, A bird is a messenger of death for people who have nofeeling. There ought to have been even more splashy lifts and embraces, but instead the sequence culminated predictably. That is, her black miniskirt became entangled upon barbs, and there was the shredding of fabric giving way, a sliver of her miniskirt, and her tights too, and then she felt the sting of it, the barb, and she thought about her immodesty, her exhibitionism, about tetanus. That skirt was expensive. He put her down, she touched herself on her thigh, with the shyness that had overwhelmed Anthony at the apperception of his sprained ankle, What was she doing here? She recognized, on her own roof, a dismal arrangement of browned spider plants and expired geraniums irresolutely tended here by the cat lady up on the third floor. M. J. was bleeding.
And he was all over her, suddenly. His brutish hands upon her caressing. There were endearments, You are the prettiest girl I ever seen. Never kissed any blond girl before, so pretty like you. His hands like sandpaper, like a hasp. The excesses of a Manhattan skyline, at this remove, like a Big Bang inconceivably past; a blanket had been thrown over something more perfect, of which the stars were an indication, perforations of night. What was the thing that endeared Gerry to her, back when he still endeared himself, and why were endearments of people she loved so inaccessible? Objects always stood in for what was missing, a certain slutty color of nail polish that he bought for her one Passover that she had never worn, but which she kept at hand. Objects were like orange traffic cones on the right shoulder of the highway of intimate relations. That’s why she was here on the roof, with a Hispanic boy in his late teens kissing her neck in a way that was sort of unpleasant now that she was thinking about it. It was hasty, not like the long, slow tentative daubs that Gerry favored.
—Hey she said. —Slow down, okay?
He was pushing down the strap of her silk blouse, trying to get at her breasts. Maybe it was romance, and maybe romance was exactly like the dance, maybe its gestures were that familiar, that immutable, even if everyone felt that they arrived at these gestures through their own impulsive ramble. Maybe the arabesques, the fouettes, the plies of dance could be superimposed on love; maybe these gestures of dancing were just love in a deconsecrated space. The way a certain brushing of lips against a cheek then led to a collision of pairs of lips, the way the lips then moved toward a nipple, it was as reliable as the movements of Ballets Russes. She tried to distract herself with terms of her childhood education, maître de ballet, port de bras. She tried to think of other possible interpretations for brutishness, until a terror started to swell in M. J. Powell. It started small, as discomfort, swelled into revulsion, and then assumed the actual size of terror, which is always one size larger than its container. Maybe terror is implicit in all anonymous sexual encounters. Maybe that’s what’s good about these encounters, maybe that’s what made degradation, when consensual, effective. But she felt nausea, a faintness. He turned her around a few times as if this were a child’s game. Which direction did she face? It was wet, on the roof; there were puddles from the last storm. There was the stench of wet towels.
—Not here, please, come on.
His manual circulations upon her became more urgent. Here, on her exposed shoulder, he romanced a certain mole. Her nipple, at the summit of a faintest incline, was now exposed to the air. His hips were fast against hers.
—I want to show you our place. I want to show you our gallery, she said, reaching for a sequence of words that might put a stop to it. He showed no indication of understanding the we implicit in our, that locution with which couples reinforced their reign over single persons.
—Stop, she said.
She pushed against him. He resisted. She pushed harder. He pushed back. She pulled away. He held on. She pushed again. He pulled away, holding on. He pushed back. She fell away. He held on. She pushed. He resisted. He pushed. She covered herself. She pulled away. She changed directions. He held on. She pushed against him. He resisted. She pushed. He resisted. She pushed, he resisted. And suddenly, disgustedly, he put a shoulder against her, the whole of his upper body, and she was free, and her liberty was foul. She bolted for the door at the far end of the roof. But before she could get there, there was a commotion behind her. A neglected attic closet of memory opened, forth came the image of a blanket, left from a picnic up in the north during a summer visit to the Green Mountains, a blanket, at dusk, aired on a laundry line, at night, disturbed by heavy wind. She was out with a friend, and behind them they saw it, the blanket, and its animus was expressed by the gust, a malevolent spirit that sent them, as girls, howling into the pantry, inconsolable. It was behind her, this very entity, tackling her now, and she was on her back. How horrible the words in the moment that they appeared in her mind, You are on your back, while another part of her noticed the masonry on the edge of the building. It needed attention. And there were car horns, in the distance; her hand dipped in the meniscus of a puddle; her own hyperventilations, sixteenth notes, remarkably constant. This was simply an arrangement of bodies she had once experienced, during an audition, nothing more, and just when her sorrow was beginning to accompany her terror, just when she was beginning to wonder what threat would be used to ensure silence, he whispered, Iain’t gonna hurt you, and she found, instead, that he was rolling over her, hefting her up, she went over onto her right side, and then onto him, and she was on top, and the first thing she did was slap him hard across the face, You already hurt me, you fuck, she said, and he did nothing, didn’t smile, didn’t speak, and then he took her hands, coinciding, she noticed, with an infrastructure of spotlights scintillating in the heavens on the Manhattan side of town, near the Maxwell Hou
se factory, where there had formerly been a robust, good-to-the-last-drop fog, all days, all times; he took her hands; he fitted them around his own throat, tightened his grip on her hands on his throat; there was no swiveling of hips, there was no grinding at her, there was no recognition, no sexual anything; only hands on her hands, and the tightening at his throat. She struggled to pull away, What are you doing? He struggled to keep her hands around himself, and his breathing became labored, if only she could see better in the dim light of the roof, she was murdering him, he was slipping away, and yet he was tightening the grip, Let me go, she angled her legs off of him, began to pull away again, Are you out of your mind? Looking up at her, plaintive. Suffocation of the earth, putrefaction of the land, foulness of marshes, reeds and egrets and muskrats and snappers all replaced by the even fouler rattus norvegicus to make this town of Hoboken, so cars could be stolen, substandard buildings constructed, bribes paid, drunks displaced, so bond traders could purchase their condominiums. Then she was off, heading for the door, racing for the door, expecting him to finish her off in the stairwell, to impale her through the heart on the diamond stylus of his stolen turntable, to fire the exploding bullet of his class war into the base of her skull. But when she tried to ascertain his whereabouts, he was gone, except for his voice, It’s your town now, calling after her, Your town now.
The front door of the Mad Son Electric Gallery swung back almost exactly on time, seven P.M., that evening in October, for its opening gala, and the guests outside, who numbered exactly seven, were unaware that anything much in the way of a delay had taken place. M. J. Powell, temporarily sobbing hostess, could hear, on the other side of the door, Gideon Katz, the boyfriend of Lori Fine, her dancer friend from NYU; Gideon was a mathematician, extremely talkative, and his specialty was knots, and Gerry Abram-owitz loved him, loved everything about him and his knots, how beautiful they could be in the telling, no symbolism to them at all, just knots with numbers describing them, An invariant, you know, that’s any number you can assign to a knot which doesn’t change if you twist the knot or pull on it, like if you wrap a piece of rope around a banister and don’t tie it and just pull on one end, it comes off the banister, well except that they’re not knotted around anything. They just are. So that example doesn’t count. On the other hand, if you havetwo ends in front of you, you cross one over the other, one way would be the positive way and you can assign a number of one to that, the right strand going over the left, a positive crossing, see, and the other way would be negative. So any kind of knot has an algebraic length, get it? The minimum is if you pull on it to get rid of the loops, and so forth. Had to be Gerry that Gideon was talking to. Who else could it be? Who else would tolerate a disquisition on knots? No knotted knot has a crossing number less than three, see, but, unfortunately, its also true that there’s knots that have the same invariant but aren’t the same knot, so it gets complicated. Maybe Gerry had lost his key too. He had left his key in the library up at Columbia, the library for Asian languages, where they had once gone together to kiss, because he liked it so well, its dim, neglected stacks. Books and kissing were related somehow. When she appeared in the threshold of the doorway, to the seven excited guests here for the opening gala, she could see that Gerry was not among them. What a disappointment. And she was a complicated figure to the assembled, too, and instead of attending to them immediately, she watched as, going up the block in the distance, a shade, carrying some bulky object, hastened off. If you have a loop with two crossings in it, then you can pull it and flip it and twist it with just an unknotted loop.
—Are you okay? Lori said. M. J. saw herself as she must have appeared, torn skirt and stockings, face wet, hair matted, an open gash on her thigh.
—A long story, she said. —Come on in.
Here was the part that Gerry would have loved, because it was the part he designed himself. He often made sketches of things, on scrap paper, not terribly adept sketches, but sketches anyhow. One day she’d found the plans for the gallery, scribbled in this style, on the coffee table. Just sitting there. For her. Then she began the job of realizing this interior for the Mad Son Electric Gallery, according to his vision; no whitewash since Tom Sawyer’s was applied with such method. They had taken the whole of the weekend, and while they were laboring, they were laboring together. It involved putting the old sofa, with the stuffing unstuffing, out onto the street, where it disappeared at once. Other furnishings, such as they had, were hidden under white sheets, so that the effect, in toto, was of perfect eggshell, a blank slate, incomplete potential, like in the great galleries. All these years later, fifteen years later, she remembered the sad parts of the story, but the good parts too, as one thinks of youth after it is gone, a laugh, a goof, a riot, made some bad decisions, made some worse decisions, made awful decisions, smoked a Quaalude, slept with a boy on antipsychotic medication, wrecked a car, watched thirteen dawns in thirteen towns, loved people otherwise spoken for, wrote a life story, threw it out, spent recklessly, gave a dog to the ASPCA because it barked, quit speaking to a guy and his friends, gave up dancing, above all, gave up dancing. Tried out for Arnie Zane and Bill T. Jones, stayed up nights, didn’t get the job, and then the knee problems, and then social work school, after which she got married to somebody, some other guy. Oh, it wasn’t worth going into. What was attractive became repulsive, this particular habit, this particular inhibition in the beloved, you were married and your heart was in the freezer in the basement. But all that weekend they painted the interior of the gallery, she and Gerry, that was a good weekend. The disappointments from later on never interfered with the memory of washing paintbrushes and rollers with Gerry, holding his hands under the faucet. His hands: long and narrow, fingernails incredibly short, the hair on his hands strawberry blond. All this, his hands under the faucets, the big soft part at the base of his thumb. If she had these hands, fifteen years later, in her own hands, if she had back her youth, she knew she would prize these things in a way she hadn’t then.
The exhibition? The opening?
It took a few moments to sink in. They were huddled in the doorway, in the glare of interior light, her guests. Two or three of them squeezed into the doorway, like Keystone Kops hastening into a comic interior. The paint job was semigloss. The bright illumination of track lighting and the spots that Gerry had erected around the ducts on the ceiling ricocheted from these blank walls. Across the space, into corners, back into the space, the glare of it. Blank walls. Exactly blank. Completely blank. Blank without interruption. As the first two guests lurched into the space, more were just behind, crowding behind them. It wasn’t like every corner had been swept clean. M. J. could see that colony of dust bunnies, making its way, as always, from the heating register under the bay window into the center of the floor. But it was the walls that arrested everyone. Whiteness of the white walls, absolute blankness of the display, absolute poverty of ideas contained in it, M. J. could feel it even where she stood, the moment where each of the guests tried to evaluate whether or not they should consider themselves suckered by the gallery interior. By the implicit privation of the space. There was no exhibition. Or, at least: no art. The art at the Mad Son Electric Gallery was the gallery, was the fact of its presentation, was its concept, was its appearance, was its history, was its ambition. There was a discouraging silence, while each of them made his or her way past each of the dividers that separated the exhibition space, looking, making sure there wasn’t some tiny, postage-stamp-sized statement somewhere that might account for what they were not seeing.
Gideon was the first to get the drift. By exercising the powers vested in him as a doctor of philosophy in mathematics, he found that the piece of art that most fascinated him was the table on which the case of wine sat, still in its box. A pair of sawhorses with a door across the top of them, a sheet thrown over the whole thing, bottled wine on top. Meaning is usage, after all. Right? An interpretation of a gallery, not a gallery itself. You rope it off, but the ropes themselves ar
e the artwork. Something like that. I can get behind it. Let’s drink. A good preliminary theory, anyway, unless it was the people contained in the gallery who were the show, a bunch of youngsters from the Mile Square City of Hoboken, NJ, who had come through intersecting routes, to be here, at this moment of disappointment. M. J. stood at the mirror by the front door, attempted to fix her makeup. There was Gideon and Lori, and the three locals —musicians, one of whom had once played bass for Yo La Tengo. There was her cousin Nicky Jarrett, who never said boo, his girlfriend of the week, called Annabelle. They all made themselves comfortable. The ancient crushed grape flowed from a decanter. Gideon acted as steward for the event, carrying the first and second and third bottles around, pouring out their contents, mopping up the overturned glasses.
Later, with the sprawl of them sitting on the floor laughing, drinking out of plastic cups, she roamed out onto the step. There were two strays now. One of them was Gerry.
two
Late in every possible way. Late to engagements major and minor; late when it was crucial to be on time; late when it made no difference; late when lateness was clearly his fault; late when he was at the mercy of others; late in the mornings (for having slept late); late in the evenings (for having stayed up late); late to the birth of his godchildren; late to the World Series game, that October classic; late to movies, notwithstanding trailers; late to plays; late to job interviews; late to the doctor and dentist; late to dates and romantic escapades; late when remorseful about lateness; late when careless; late when happy, late when sad or impervious to feelings, increasingly late, and it had always been that way. He was always leaving someone, arms folded, irate, in a lobby or on a street corner. He’d even been late to his accident, that frivolity of kids in their twenties. He’d waited until later, a decade later, after giving up on New Jersey, before finding himself on a stretch of interstate between Brattleboro and Northampton, on a rainy autumn afternoon, at dusk. Red been drinking sure. His was a flying car. He swerved onto the shoulder, gravel percussive in his treads, and then the car lifted off, and there was a blissful moment of flight, too brief. The front tires struck earth and his car began to negotiate the fields of New England, rolling lengthways, like a steed getting friendly with the mud, three or four of these gymnastic tumbles. Inside, alone, upside-down, right way around, a game. It didn’t leave him time to think of his death, although death was a possibility. How were the cars behind him accounting for this sequence, in which a rental car plunged off the road into a meadow? What did they think as this rental car rapidly approached a majestic American linden over near some cows; wasn’t it clear that he would frontally strike the American linden, now, scattering the cows, and what did those cars back on the interstate think. There was nothing to do but strike the tree. His aloneness was poignant to him later: if none of the cars on the interstate skidded onto the shoulder, to offer help, well, there would be no one to acknowledge his last end; there was barely time for conjecture as the car was telescoped by the tree, and his arm, his left arm, the arm with which he wrote diary entries and scribbled doodles that a quack therapist had once called evidence of a fine, questing mind, his left arm was pinioned by the engine when the engine came up into the front seat of the rental car, pinioned between steering wheel and engine, when the air bag failed to inflate. He fractured his arm so multiply that even a half-dozen invasions by eager surgeons couldn’t alleviate his suffering. We can give you ninety percent movement, definitely. He had fifty percent movement. And there were pieces of aeronautically perfected metal in there now. He had an elbow made of plastics, a titanium humerus, bone grafts in the radius and the ulna, and pain all day. Pain in the morning, pain in the evening, pain when he slept. He hadn’t known anything about pain until a state policeman with an infernal apparatus pulled him from the wreckage. The arm hung from him sideways as if it were the right arm and he had wrongly assembled himself with right attached to left side. Pain commenced. Medication commenced (Percocet, Percodan, Dilaudid). Now there were two things that were chronic in his life, namely lateness and pain.