by Paula Guran
Down here, that salty tang was stronger and a cool wind poured in off the water. The sea gleamed like the rippling hide of some living behemoth in the moonlight. The sand seemed to glow beneath their feet. Everything was precious, lovely in its impermanence, for what was not now imperiled? And an image came to Ben of the gray towers in the once-bustling city, of men and women in their millions but blackened effigies, shedding ashen debris in the unforgiving wind.
Yet it was nothing to brood upon, this slow doom that the earth or fate or the God Ben did not believe in had inflicted upon them. Not now anyway, not with another set of precipitous steps to ascend or another house of glass set back a hundred yards from the brink of cliff-side annihilation, great windows printing flickering panels of light upon the still-succulent grass, and pouring forth the dissonant, tremulous notes then in fashion. Inside, in the darkness, the intersecting beams of digital projectors cast violent images upon every available surface—upon walls and windows and the faces of the people who danced and drank there. “This is Bruno Vinnizi’s place—you know, the director,” Stan shouted over the music, passing Ben a drink, but he needn’t have said anything at all. The movies spoke for themselves, half a dozen stylized art-house sensations that Ben had seen in the last decade and a half.
Somehow, in the chaos, Ben lost Lois—he caught glimpses of her now and then through the crowd—and found himself talking drunkenly to Vinnizi himself. A blisteringly bloody gunfight unfolded across Vinnizi’s fashionably stubbled cheeks. “I have been making movies about ruin for years,” Vinnizi pronounced. “Even before there was a ruin, no?” and Ben saw how true it was. “So you are a poet,” Vinnizi said, and Ben answered something, he didn’t know what, and then, without transition, he found himself in the bathroom with Gabrielle Abbruzzese, the sonic sculptor, chewing jagged crystals of prime. After that the party took on a hectic, impressionistic quality. A kind of wild exhilaration seized him. He saw Lois across the room, sipping wine and talking to the front man of some slam band or other—Ben had seen him on television—and stumbled once again into Stan’s ursine embrace. “Having fun yet?” the big man yelled—and then, abruptly, Ben was squiring Cecy giggling across the dance floor.
Finally, exhausted, he reeled outside to piss. He unzipped, sighed, and let flow a long arc. A husky, female voice, deeply amused, said, “Something wrong with the bathrooms?”
Ben stepped back in dismay, tucking himself away.
A tall angular woman with razor-edged cheekbones and a cap of close-shorn blond hair stood in the shadows. She was smoking a joint. He could smell its faint sweetish scent. When she passed it to him he felt the effects of the prime recede a little.
“I know you,” he said.
“Do you?”
“You’re the artist—”
She took a hit off the joint. Exhaling, she said, “This place is lousy with artists.”
“No”—slurring his words—“the humiliation artist. Victoria—Victoria—”
In a stray reflection from the house, a car screeched across one of those exquisite cheekbones.
“Victoria Glass,” he announced, but she was already gone.
The party climaxed at dawn, when the rising sun revealed how closely ruin had encroached upon the house, and Vinnizi hurled himself over the cliff onto the rocks below.
It was accounted a triumph by all.
They slept late and joined Stan and MacKenzie on the verandah for drinks at eleven. Piano and saxophone burbled over the sound system. Stan paced, sucking down mimosas like water. MacKenzie reclined in an Adirondack chair, her long legs flung out before her. She sipped her drink, watching Cecy at some solitary game she’d improvised with a half-deflated soccer ball.
“Did you have a good time at the party?” Mackenzie asked.
“Of course they had a good time,” Stan said, clapping Ben on the shoulder, and Ben supposed he had, but the night itself came back to him only in flashes: blue smoke adrift in the intersecting beams of the projectors; the taste of prime sour on his tongue; the tall angular woman who’d caught him cock in hand outside the house. Her name came to him, he’d seen a piece on her in The New Yorker—Veronica Glass, the mutilation artist—and he felt mortified for reasons that he could only vaguely recall. All this and more: the headachy regret that comes after any bacchanal; the image of Vinnizi leaping off the cliff onto the jagged rocks below. No sight for a little girl, he thought, and he recalled swinging Cecy drunkenly across the dance floor.
Lois must have been thinking the same thing. “Do you really want Cecy to see things like that?” she asked MacKenzie, and Ben could sense her struggling to reserve judgment, or anyway the appearance of judgment.
MacKenzie waved a languid hand.
“What does it matter anymore?” Stan said, and Ben thought of Abby, built like a fireplug, with none of MacKenzie’s lissome beauty. Abby wouldn’t have approved, but then she wouldn’t have approved of MacKenzie either, even if the other woman hadn’t stolen away her husband on the set of a failed summer blockbuster where her blank mien actually played to her advantage. Skill was a handicap in such a role; MacKenzie’d been little more than eye-candy on the arm of the star, an aging action hero long since ruined himself.
A wind off the ocean lifted Ben’s hair. He leaned over to peer through the telescope mounted on the railing. Near at hand, white-capped breakers rolled toward shore. Farther out—he adjusted the focus—the waves gave way to the cracked, black mirror of dead water. Moldering fish turned their ashen bellies to the sky.
“How long, you think?” he asked Stan.
“Not long now.”
“It doesn’t matter. No child should have to see a man throw himself over a cliff,” Lois said.
“She’s not your child,” MacKenzie responded drily, and Ben straightened up in time to see Lois shoot him a look of disgust—with MacKenzie and with Stan for marrying her, and with Ben most of all, for standing beside the groom and collaborating in the disposal of Abby like a used tissue, and this after more than twenty years of marriage.
But what was he to do? He and Stan had been friends since their freshman year at Columbia, when they’d been thrown together by the vagaries of admissions counselors on the basis of a vapid form with questions like: “Do you sleep late or get up early?” He slept late and so did Stan. And they’d had the same taste for girls (as many as possible, as often as possible, and no need to be choosy) and for drugs (ditto). It had been a match made in heaven. Sometimes Ben wondered why Lois had ever been attracted to him in the first place. He supposed she’d wanted to save him. The same was probably true of Abby and Stan. But old habits die hard and in his peripatetic days, reading indifferent poems to indifferent audiences, Ben had fallen into his former ways: banging nubile English majors and chewing prime. At home one man, on the road another: Jekyll and Hyde. Last night Hyde had been in the ascension. And why not? Nero fiddled as Rome burned, but what else could he do, break out impotent buckets against the conflagration?
All this in the space of an instant.
“Here,” he said to Lois, “why don’t you have a look?”
“I’ve seen all I want to see,” she said, but she strode over and gazed through the telescope all the same. She’d thickened in middle age, and Ben found himself studying MacKenzie, suddenly envious of Stan, who’d had the courage to throw it all aside. A sudden hunger for MacKenzie’s raw sexuality—she seemed to glow with lascivious potential—possessed him. What had Stan said, when he’d called to tell Ben that he and Abby were done? “She’s a fucking tiger in the sack, Ben.”
Stan shoved another drink into his hand—they’d moved to chilled vodka, it seemed—and Ben felt his headache retreat before the onslaught of the alcohol.
MacKenzie lit a cigarette. He could smell its acrid bite.
“Mom!”
“It’s not like I’m going to die of lung cancer, sweetie,” MacKenzie called, and Ben thought, no, none of us is going to die of lung cancer.
“You
mind if I have one of those?” he said.
MacKenzie held the pack silently over her shoulder. Ben shook one out and struck it alight, inhaled deeply. Smoke drifted in twin blue streams through his nostrils. He’d smoked in college, but Lois had convinced him to give it up; it had become another vice of the road, indulged in frenetic after-reading parties. Playing the role of the dissolute poet, he used to think. That’s what they wanted to see. Yet he wondered who he really was—if the persona hadn’t become the person or if the persona hadn’t been the person all along.
Lois looked up from the telescope. “It’s terrifying,” she said.
Stan shrugged. “It just is, that’s all.”
“It’s terrifying all the same.”
She set her unfinished mimosa on the railing. “I’m going in to make a sandwich. Anyone else want one?”
“Sure,” Stan said.
And Ben, “Why not?”
She didn’t bother asking MacKenzie, who, by the look of her, hadn’t had a sandwich—or maybe any food—in years, if ever. The door clapped shut behind her.
Ben ground out his cigarette in MacKenzie’s ashtray. “I’ve always wondered,” he said. “What’s your real name?
Stan laughed without humor and downed his drink.
“MacKenzie,” MacKenzie said.
“No. I mean the name you were born with. I thought you’d adopted MacKenzie as a stage name. You know, like Bono, or Madonna.”
“My name is MacKenzie,” she said without looking at him.
Stan laughed again.
“Her name is Melissa Baranski,” he said.
“My name is MacKenzie,” her voice flat, without emotion.
Wishing he’d never asked, Ben descended to the lawn. “Throw me the ball,” he called to Cecy, and for a while they played together by some rules Ben could never quite decipher. “Stand here,” Cecy would say, or “Throw me the ball,” and between sips from his drink, he would stand there or toss her the ball.
“I win,” she announced suddenly.
“Sure, you win,” he said, ruffling her hair.
They climbed the steps to the verandah together. By then Lois had returned with a tray of sandwiches for everyone.
Later, he and Lois made love in their suite. Before he came, Ben closed his eyes. A blur of faces passed through his mind: the features of an especially memorable undergraduate, and then MacKenzie’s affectless face, and the woman on the lawn last of all, Veronica Glass, the mutilation artist, kneeling before him to take him into her mouth. He felt something break and release inside him. He cried out and drew Lois to him, whispering “I love you, I love you,” uncertain whom he was speaking to, or why, and afterward, as she pillowed her head on his shoulder, that headachy sense of regret once again swept through him.
Later, they walked by the sea, waves foaming far down the beach. At high tide, the water would hurl its force against the stony cliff itself, undercutting it in a million timeless surges. It leaned over them like doom, unveiling the faint blue tinge that gave the colony its name.
He took Lois’s hand and drew her into an embrace. “It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” he said, as if by the force of language itself he could redeem the fallen world. But Ben had long since lost his faith in poetry. Words were but paltry things, frail hedges against the night. Ruin would consume them.
And it was to ruin that they came at last. They stopped at its edge, a ragged frontier where the beach turned as black and barren as burned-over soil, baked into a thousand jagged cracks, and the surf grew still, swallowed up by the same ashen surface. Digging their toes in the sand, they stood in the shadow of Bruno Vinnizi’s ruined beach stair and gazed out across the devastation. Vinnizi’s shattered corpse lay among the rocks, arms outflung, one charred hand lifted in mute supplication to the sky. As they stood there, the wind picked up and his outstretched fingers crumbled into dust and blew away, and the sea, where it still washed the shore, retreated down the naked shingles of the world.
As ruin spread, Cerulean Cliffs retreated. On the second night, Ben stood on the verandah and counted lights like a strand of Christmas bulbs strung along the coastline; in the days that followed they began to wink out. One afternoon, he and Stan hiked inland to the edge of the destruction: half a mile down the gravel driveway, and two more miles after that, along the narrow two-lane state road until it intersected with the expressway. In the distance, a soaring overpass had given way, its support pylons jutting from the earth like broken teeth. The pavement Ben and Lois had driven in upon was cracked and heaved, as if it had endured the ice of a thousand years. Businesses that had been thriving mere days ago had decayed into rubble. The arms of corroding gas pumps snaked across blistered asphalt. The roof of the Bar-B-Cue Diner had buckled, and the shards of its plate glass windows threw back their sooty reflections.
“Abby and I celebrated our fourteenth anniversary there,” Stan said.
“We used to go there every time we came down,” Ben said. “Best barbecue I ever had.”
“It was shitty barbeque, and you know it. The company made it great.”
Laughing, Stan unclipped a flask of bourbon from his belt. He took a long pull and handed it to Ben. The liquor suffused Ben with warmth, and he recalled his first liquor drunk—he’d been with a girl, he couldn’t remember her name, only that she’d held his head as he puked into the toilet at some high school revel. After that, he’d vowed never to drink whiskey again. You had to learn to love your vices.
As they turned and started back, he snorted, thinking of Cecy and her soccer ball and her mysterious games upon the grass.
“What?” Stan said.
“Cecilia.”
“She’s a good kid.”
“The best,” Ben said, taking another swig of whiskey. He handed the flask back to Stan. They passed it back and forth as they walked. The blasted land fell behind them. The day brightened. The sky arced over them, fathomless and blue. Ben took out a cigarette and lit it and blew a stream of smoke into the clear air.
“You ever wish you’d had children?” he asked.
“I have Cecilia.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I had a career.”
“What about Abby?”
“What about her?” Stan said.
“Did she want children?”
Stan was silent for a time.
“Ah, it was my fault,” he said at last.
“What?”
“You know. The whole goddamn mess.” He took a slug of whiskey. “We had a miscarriage once. I never told you. After that—” He shrugged. “She never forgave me you know.”
“For a miscarriage? Stan, she couldn’t have blamed you—”
“Not that. Cecilia, I mean. She could forgive the infidelity. God knows she had in the past. She never forgave me Cecilia.” He looked up. “She always thought that was driving the whole thing: MacKenzie had the child she could never have.”
“And was it?”
“No.” Stan laughed. “It was lust, that’s all. Simple lust.” He shook his head in dismal self-regard. “I envy you, you know. Holding things together the way you have.”
They turned into the driveway. Ben kicked a stone. A wind came down to comb the weeds. Somewhere in the trees a bird burst into song. The faint sound of the ocean came to him. Envy was a blade that cut two ways.
“What about you?” Stan said.
“What about me?”
“Kids?”
Ben finished his cigarette.
“It never crossed my mind,” he lied. “I wish it had.”
They’d reached the house by then. Ben went to his suite and lay down to sleep off the whiskey before the party. When he woke, the sun was red in his window, and Lois was reading in the chair by the side of the bed. They walked out onto the balcony and gazed at the ocean. The dead water had crept closer. He’d lost track of time. It all blurred together, the liquor and the prime and the multi-hued tabs of ecstasy spilled helter-skelter across the butche
r block of a financier who’d filled her house with priceless paintings. Her taste had run toward the baroque—Bosch, Goya—and over the course of the party she’d slashed them to ribbons one by one. At dawn she’d walked out onto the lawn, doused herself with gasoline, and set herself on fire.
“Did you know Abby had a miscarriage?” Ben asked.
“Of course, I did,” Lois said, and they stood there in silence until the first faint stars broke out in the dark void where ruin had not yet eaten up the sky.
The parties were Ben’s solace and his consolation: the photographer whose prints adorned the walls of her house, the painter whose canvases did not, the novelist who’d won a Pulitzer. Ben had met her once before, a lean scarecrow of a woman with a thatch of pink hair and a heart-shaped pinkie ring on her left hand: a brief introduction by a friend of a friend at a Book Expo party. “What are you working on?” he’d asked as she paused. “I subscribe to the tea-kettle theory of art,” she’d responded. “Open the valve and the energy escapes.”
Ben had nodded, taking a long drink of his gin and tonic. He leaned against the wall, trying to pretend he wasn’t alone. He’d come for the free drinks—he always did—but he knew that nothing was ever free; you paid the price in the coin of humiliation. And that reminded him of his fleeting encounter with Veronica Glass, the “humiliation artist,” as he’d called her. He’d seen her flitting through the crowds occasionally, tall and gamine with her cap of blond hair, but mostly she lingered in corners. If it bothered her to be alone, Ben could not discern it. She observed everything with an air of bemused fascination, the expression of an anthropologist faced with a curious custom she had not seen before.
Once or twice, they’d even talked briefly.
“Hello, again,” he’d said, as he squeezed past her in the scrum around the bar, and briefly he felt her taut body glide against his sagging middle aged one.
Another time, she appeared ghostlike at his side, and handed him a joint. “I’ve had my eye on you,” she said.
“You have?” he said.