Possibly I went on too long about their importance to me, about the breakthrough they represented. In my enthusiasm, I was long-winded and perilously close to pedantry. I knew she was ambivalent about being painted, and I guessed that in her mind, I was stealing her image.
She frowned when I told her that Max had said Leland would want to buy them. Her eyes filled with a cloudy, moody look I knew well.
“Are you going to sell them to him?” She seemed anxious.
“Of course not.” I thought this would please her, but it didn’t.
“But why not?”
“Frankly, I’d feel like a pimp.”
“You can’t own me, Nick. The only way you can have me is to not try.”
“I don’t want to own you, but I don’t want to be without you. At least I have paintings of you I can look at.”
“If you lose me, you’ll know that I loved you.”
I felt chilled. “I can’t lose you. Not now.” I reached across the table for her hand, and she stabbed her fork into it. I barely felt it. Drops of blood oozed up.
“Now you know what love is, don’t you, Nick?”
I turned to hide my eyes from her and stared out at the window at the skyline above the factory roofs. Taking a deep breath, I stood up to pinch out the candles on the table and the piano. When I’d finished snuffing them all, my fingers were hot enough to touch her.
She shook her hair out and brushed it, and we made love, biting and sucking and thrusting at each other. Afterwards, I was able to sleep awhile. It was near morning, a nacreous wet morning, when I felt her leave the bed. Confused and still half-dreaming, I sat up on the futon and watched her cross the loft and stand looking out thoughtfully, as I’d done after dinner. There was a silvery glow around her naked form. It was ghostly.
When she returned, she was in shadow. She stood over me and I put my arms around her narrow waist and my ear between her breasts to listen for her heart. When she spoke it was a whisper.
“I think you should sell those paintings to Leland.”
That was how she said goodbye.
16
SNUFFED
SO I CALLED Max and told him to make the deal. I felt dead inside; they didn’t matter any longer. They were painful reminders.
“What made you change your mind?”
“Rose convinced me. We’ve split up.”
“I see.” He waited, and I waited for him to say, “You mean she dumped you,” but he didn’t.
“No, Max, you don’t.” I hung up.
Rose started getting a lot of notice in New York. First a magazine columnist revealed her identity, then a slick magazine published a brief profile, and she was no longer an art world secret, she was a celebrity.
She wouldn’t see me or return my calls. I tried to get on with what passed for my career, but everything I did seemed irrelevant. I’d emptied myself into her, and now I was empty and depressed. I went over to Paris to prepare for a show, but when I got there I realized it was where she’d grown up. I kept looking for her around every corner, seeing earlier versions of her.
When I got back to New York there was an invitation in the mail. It was to the opening of a show called “Fantastic Fashions By Fetish Artists” at the temporary Museum of Current Art—curated, of course, by Gavin Kirk. Rose Selavy was listed as one of the celebrity models. Splash: jealousy filled my emptiness.
But I was in control when I stepped out of the taxi in front of the museum, dressed in a retro tux I’d bought in the ‘70s. All I needed was a top hat to make me look like a complete old fool.
She doesn’t want you, I said to myself, and howled inside.
But I was in control. I found myself a corner and lurked there like a crazy rejected suitor in a film by F. Dostoevsky, story by V. Van Gogh.
I saw Gavin meeting and greeting the rich and famous with his shrewd smoothness. It was a gathering of the tribes of art and fashion, and as glamorous as such parties get these days. The young people around me talked cyberculture and money; the older ones, theory and money. Rose’s name was mentioned often, followed by an incantation of her real identity and antecedents.
She was a celebrity, and more exposed than she’d ever been in my paintings. Everybody owned her now.
Max found me in the crowd. He held a drink in each hand.
“You’re going to need this tonight.” I tossed back the bourbon and thanked him. He handed me the other one, and I downed it.
“Now, why would that be?”
“Rose just arrived. She’s with Leland.”
I laughed bitterly, as if I’d expected it. He had my paintings of her, and now he had her. She had gone to the highest bidder. I’d played the red, and the black came up.
When the crowd headed into the small auditorium of the Museum, Max and I followed. The fashion show was a hit with the fashionably hip. They laughed and applauded as, one after the other, pretty kink models mocked art history. I watched Leland across the room and waited for Rose. There were gasps when she appeared, wearing a soft cap over a pageboy haircut, and a shirt with puffy shoulders. Above the waist she was portraying Marcel Duchamp as “Rose Selavy,” based on a 1921 photograph. Below the waist she wore a transparent skirt and high heels and panties where a red light flashed.
I suppose it was amusing to the onlookers, but it was shocking to me because she moved like she was in a trance, and the light around her body was gone. The red bulb flashing between her legs was an obscene joke not like her at all.
When she left the stage I looked around me at the faces of the supposedly perceptive. Couldn’t they see that she no longer glowed?
I saw Leland bearing down on me, his assistants hustling to keep up, and Gavin following them. Max grabbed my arm and pulled me away to the nearest exit. I was in control, I think.
“Nick, wait!” Leland was calling. I felt him breathing down my neck, then his fingers on the sleeve of my cheesy tuxedo. I stopped and turned to face him.
His icy eyes sparkled with triumphant malice. His voice was loudly contemptuous, so that others stopped to listen.
“You’re the greatest, Nick, I just wanted to tell you that. I’m grateful for your friendship and your talent—and for introducing me to Rose.”
“You think everything is for sale, don’t you, Lee?”
“I think I’ve proven that, Nick. Or would you like another demonstration? Would you like to see her wear a lampshade on her head?”
“Why?” It was a cry from the heart.
He leaned in close to me and whispered, “Because I’m a collector. Because I can.”
I punched him in the ear and he went down.
17
“WHERE’S ROSE?”
I WOKE UP in St. Vincent’s Hospital with a concussion. After I hit Leland, his personal assistant Jason had stomped me. I also had a sprained left wrist, a broken rib, an injured spleen, and multiple contusions. Everything was blurry. The television opposite my bed played a constant test pattern that resembled a Pollock painting. I appreciated his work for the first time.
Max came into focus. He was sighing loudly as he did his own inspection of my injuries. I was doped up, so our conversation skirted the borders of reality. During one period of clarity I heard him say, “You made the front sections of the News and the Voice.”
“It’s about time they proclaimed my genius.”
“Oh, they’re rave reviews, all right. Maybe Madison Square Garden will offer you a retrospective.”
“Where’s Rose?”
He shook his head and looked at my Pollock. “Forget her.”
“Where’s Rose?”
I saw her in my nightmares, and then one night late she was standing next to my bed. She was without light, and her hand when it touched me was cold.
“What did he do to you?” I asked.
Her eyes expressed confusion, fear, and regret.
“You don’t understand, Nick.”
“Please tell me.”
“It wasn’t hi
m.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was me. It was always me.”
“I love you, Rose. Kiss me.” But she was inside my nightmare, and not in the room at all.
I was in an immense cemetery crowded with row upon row of tall headstones. I was walking quickly over the graves toward a column of smoke. Each of the stones displayed a reproduction of a famous painting; a museum exhibition for a necropolis. When I arrived at the source of the smoke, I saw that it was coming from a grave. On the stone was my secret portrait of Rose.
I screamed and fell full length upon the grave, digging into the fresh mound with my bare hands. The soil was hot, and the smoke was acrid, but my hands were made of asbestos. I dug frenziedly down to a fiery coffin and wrenched it open. Rose lay there in a bed of coals, but her flesh was untouched—and then when I began to make love to her, she disintegrated in cold ashes.
Max brought the news that Rose had died in a conflagration in her loft. They thought the fire had been caused by a candle falling on the straw matting that covered her floor. I stared at him, seeing her burning in my nightmare.
Rose!
18
APB
ALL POINTS BULLETIN:
Last seen running down
The lost highway together—
Knees pumping,
Eyes wide in red faces
Bursting with complicity!
Burn, blares the music in their heads,
Burn!
ALL POINTS BULLETIN:
Last seen running
One step ahead
Of the lightning’s
Silent yellow slash
Across the face of night!
ALL POINTS BULLETIN:
Last seen running down
The lost highway together—
Like torches in the driving rain!
PART TWO
BOUND ON A WHEEL OF FIRE
19
NURSE MIDGE TAKES CHARGE
THE FLAMES OF hell were hot, searing my heart, liver, and guts with a hissing sound, licking at my fingers and eyebrows. If I screamed, Nurse Midge did not complain. I know I babbled.
She peeled me out of the bed every morning, fed and bathed me, and wiped my chin before heading out to the art market hustle. I vegetated in her living room all day, staring at landscapes of places I’ve never been to. I healed rapidly, but I was burnt black inside. There seemed to be nothing to say, so I said nothing.
Midge didn’t mind at first. She talked to me in an endless monologue, the way a ventriloquist might talk to his dummy offstage. Was this marriage?
“It’s love you’re suffering from, Nicky, I see it now. It’s worse than lust, isn’t it? Love. . . . remember when we called it evoL, to distinguish it from our long, intimate friendship?”
I registered the bitterness in her tone, but I didn’t look away from a view of Yosemite I was studying, in which a deer was climbing to the top of a mountain. I couldn’t face her wet owl eyes.
“Poor Nicky,” she continued. “Love has turned out to be just exactly what we knew it was—hell. I think I understand. I mean, in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, I admit to loving you, but it’s mostly pain that I feel as a result.”
She was sniffling. I don’t know how I would have answered her if I could have forced my mouth open, but the deer was getting to the top, and I didn’t want to lose sight of it.
I knew that if I looked away from the landscape, I wouldn’t see Midge, but Rose: Rose at my opening, like a candle in the darkness of the crowd; Rose entering Leland’s dining room naked, Rose on her knees in the rain, Rose playing the piano our last night together, Rose in the portraits I’d painted of her. Rose’s cunt.
In an attempt to amuse me, Midge talked about her young Germans. Beautiful Manfred, for example, was in crisis, wondering if he wasn’t gay. This was a blow to Midge’s ego, because she thought she’d been able to bring out the stud in him. She talked to keep herself company, but one day I’d heard enough and blurted between clenched teeth, “Oh, shut up, Midge, for God’s sake,” and we both knew I was better.
A new stage of recuperation began. Nurse Midge’s occupational therapy consisted of shameless attempts to seduce me. She ran around the apartment in her underwear. she rubbed her breasts against me, she talked dirty. “Nick, I need it. I’m really, really horny. Just stick it in me.” But as she found out when she took matters in her own hands and unzipped me, I was numb below the waist. I was impotent.
After that she decided I should do something creative. I should take up my sketch pad and draw my way out of hell. She tried posing for me—that marble rump of hers—but when I didn’t respond to that, she said, “I guess you’re really addicted to young bodies now.” I guess she figured I was like a vampire.
I was watching television when she brought Lola home. (Or, I should say here, it was more like “he” was watching television. “He” was the victim of his own passions, not me.)
Five minutes after saying hello to Lola, it was obvious to him that Nurse Midge had decided that extreme measures were necessary.
Lola was a moon-faced brunette with an overbite, which gave her the pouty look of a twenty-something who had not yet been given her due. She seemed to have a black cloud hovering over her head. She was an art student, Midge explained with a wink, with aspirations to a successful career in performance art.
It was late, and Lola was a little drunk. He suspected Midge had picked her up at some party, and given her a story about posing for the celebrity painter Nicholas Wilde. She was shameless.
“She’s not in the first blush of youth, Nick, but look at that tight little body,” Midge whispered to him. Lola was on the other side of the room, looking into the liquor cabinet.
Midge fixed her a drink, and helped her undress. It was a kind of woozily abbreviated striptease, which revealed, as Midge said, a tight little body. He was struck by how white Lola looked, standing naked in the middle of Midge’s comfortably tasteful living room. The whiteness of her full figure was shocking in the shadowy, familiar room. She chattered nervously with Midge, who brought her to sit on the chair opposite the couch where he sat. Midge turned the light up and stood behind Lola’s chair, smiling maliciously at him: Here’s your fix, how do you like her?
It dawned on him that Lola was a stripper. Midge had gone out and hired a stripper—who probably turned tricks on the side—to stimulate him. He was touched, but nothing stirred between his legs.
He talked to her a little, asking about her life. She was well primed, and spoke freely. She said she was from Oregon, where she’d been going to school for environmental science. She left after a year, when she found it too depressing to continue.
“I was learning about all the bad things that are being done to us through our food and water and even the air we breathe. So I decided I wanted to come to New York and be an artist.”
He shivered with pity for her. I watched his reaction with surprise, and was even more surprised when he picked up his drawing pad and began to sketch her as she talked and sipped her drink.
Somehow the activity of listening to her drunken stream of consciousness while drawing her body excited him. Not sexually, but emotionally. I felt something like excitement rising inside him and Midge noticed it on his face. She misinterpreted it as erotic feeling and began kneading Lola’s large breasts, plucking the stripper’s nipples.
“Hey, honey. I didn’t know you were part of it, too. Oh god, I love it when a woman plays with my boobies. . . .”
Midge lifted Lola’s right thigh and then her left, draping her legs over the chair arms and exposing her hairless slit. Then she pulled up her dress and knelt between Lola’s legs, showing him her behind. The two women put on a show for him that would have aroused most dead men, but his mind had taken another turn.
I remembered my portrait of Rose. I saw it superimposed over Midge and Lola’s lovemaking. I threw pencil and sketchbook aside and stood up, looking down at them, not k
nowing what to say.
They both looked at me expectantly, as if I was about to unzip and join them. I leaned down and kissed Midge’s wet mouth and told her I was going.
“Nicky, no—wait. Let us both give you head. I promise it’ll be good.”
But he was headed to the door.
20
OPENING THE TOMB
WHEN I THREW open the door to my studio, it was like stepping into an airless tomb. It smelled musty, as if the canvases stacked against the walls were rotting. It was past midnight when I flipped the lights on, and I half-expected a black cloud of bats to swirl up.
I had one reason for being there. I went straight up to the storage closet, where, at her insistence, I’d hidden Rose’s portrait. I hesitated just for a moment, wondering if I could bear to look at her likeness. The portrait was my best work; I’d brought her to life in it. I pulled the blanket off with trembling hands.
He screamed. I heard him. The portrait had been destroyed, slashed and burned. What remained was frightening in its negative, glowering power. He tossed it aside.
I felt a loss that was more overwhelming than her death, because it was more final. This was the death of the connection between us—the magic charge of art we’d created together.
I threw myself on the stained couch where we’d made love, and wept, calling out her name.
She was truly gone. He could not accept this. It would have been too much. I couldn’t see him suffer so much, so I told him: only Rose would have destroyed her portrait. It was what she did, at the end.
Rose was alive!
21
PRIVATE EYE
THE SHARP-FACED blonde at the admissions desk of the Museum of Recent Art was obviously new to Manhattan. She looked fresh out of Bennington, but more attractive than most of the type. She was clean and coiffed, deep-bosomed and starry-eyed. She didn’t recognize me from the disastrous opening, perhaps because I wasn’t formally attired.
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