“You?”
“Hahaha. We should just shut the place down. There’s better things I could be doing.”
“Like what. What do you have to do that’s better?”
Danny looked at her with his face a little slack, uncertain if she was making some kind of joke. “Chill out. Watch a movie, I guess.”
“I get so tired of doing the same dumb stuff.”
“Oh, well, we could do . . . something else . . . whatever you wanted . . .”
“No, I meant, in general. The stuff we all do.” It made her impatient that he was thinking she meant the two of them doing something together, like a date. She didn’t want to be confronted with somebody else’s hopeless, unhappy love. The one thing you’d expect she’d be sympathetic about, but instead it hugely pissed her off. “I mean, TV shows and magazines and people in stupid bands and . . . those guys.” Sophie made a shooing gesture in the direction of the gamers. She didn’t trust herself to start in on them. “All the small, selfish, trivial stuff, when we ought to be thinking about the real deal. Real life.”
“The meaning of life,” suggested Danny. As always, half a step behind in any conversation, and anxious to catch up.
“That’s not what I meant,” said Sophie, although it probably was; she just didn’t like the simpleminded way it sounded out loud. “More like, issues, problems—”
“You mean, like Jer’s always talking, his environmental deal.”
“It’s not like it’s just his planet. It’s not like everybody has to give him all this credit.” Sophie had to stop herself, she was being a total witch and Danny was looking at her like whoa, he might have to rethink this crush business, which was annoying on several levels. “Sorry. Heat makes me cranky.”
“How about I get you some more chai?”
Danny grabbed her mug and double-timed it over to the counter. Sophie figured this was less about doing her bidding, more that he didn’t want to stick around and see what she’d unload on him next.
So, scratch “dream girl” from her list of possible splendid destinies.
Instead of waiting for Danny to come back, Sophie followed him to the counter, paid for her drink, and went to examine the artwork on the back wall. This was the gallery space, so-called, although it had the dinky proportions of an afterthought. This batch of art was new, she hadn’t seen it before, and so it was easy to pretend rapt attention. Then, as she let her eyes take it in, she forgot to pretend.
There were half a dozen vivid, frameless oil paintings, small, about the dimensions of a phone book. Each of them was intricately painted with scenes of a recognizable but distorted world. There were skies of dark violet or greenish brass, buildings that seemed to have lost any sort of right angles, trees that were as uniform as factory cookies. In one painting a small,
fat-looking airplane climbed unsteadily toward a whirligig sun, like a bumblebee seeking a plastic flower. Anything mechanical or inanimate—cars, houses, roadways—had the soft contours of living creatures. And any natural element looked sharp-edged and unconvincing. There were no human figures in evidence.
Moving down the line of paintings gave her a sense of disorientation, almost of vertigo. Most of them had sparse, unhelpful titles—Landscape 1, or Untitled, Study, that sort of thing. But the last in the series was called How We Brought the Good News. Here a long road lay in flattened curves, like a dropped string. It cut through a countryside, if you could call it that, of odd, thickened orange grass, grass dredged in wet cement, perhaps, then sprayed with industrial paint.
By now Sophie was familiar with such reversals, could read the painting’s code, as it were. What was different about this one, in addition to its evocative (but still unhelpful) title, was the presence of what she at first took to be a small cemetery in the near corner. There was a delicate white fretwork fence and archway—metal? painted wood? It had an eroded quality, as if nibbled away by something caustic, or maybe it was ancient, abandoned. What Sophie had taken for mausoleums and fields dotted with gravestones might just as easily be elements of an amusement park or carnival. Instead of a monument, this might be a festive pavilion. These rows of crosses might be tracks for a roller coaster or a small-gauge railroad. It all depended on how you looked at it.
Sophie went to the counter and asked who the guy was, the guy who did the pictures? Rose and Danny said they didn’t know, they just went up the other day and neither of them had been here. Rose said, “I think there’s a name,” and fetched a card from within the cash register: Paintings by M. Najarijand.
“That’s a big help,” said Sophie crossly. It was too much like a trick or joke, intended to make you feel stupid because you couldn’t figure it out. “Who is he, some friend of Pete’s?” Pete owned the coffee shop and liked to refer to himself as a supporter of the arts community.
“I guess,” said Rose. “I don’t know where he finds these people. Do they all hang out at some artists’ club, with secret handshakes? You like these? I think they’re kind of depressing.”
“I don’t know if I’d say like. They’re different.” Sophie hadn’t yet arrived at words that might say exactly what about the paintings had set off such a commotion in her. She only felt that the world she inhabited had turned out wrong, flawed in unexpected ways, and the paintings knew it too. Now she said, “Hey,” in another tone, conspiratorial, urgent.
Rose moved a little ways down the bar, away from Danny. “What?”
“He’s such a jerk.”
“Well, duh.” Sophie’s mother, who had never met Jer, had the same opinion of him as Rose, who had met him, and furthermore was in possession of all Sophie’s worst stories. “He’s such a poop-head.”
“Like we say in Michigan, he’s so full of shit, his eyes are brown.”
“Like we say in Baltimore, told you so.” One reason they were friends had to do with them both arriving in New York at about the same time, from similarly benighted places. “What’d he do now?”
Sophie launched into her catalogue of grievances. He had done this and failed to do that. Had flaunted his insensitivity, indifference, even contempt. Nothing that she said was untrue, strictly speaking; facts were not in dispute, only motives and intent. Yet hearing herself berate him, and with Rose there, loyally chiming in at the chorus, she began to feel false, even unfair, and abruptly stopped talking.
“Well that sucks,” said Rose, after a moment. “Look, you feel like getting away, come stay at my place for a few days. We can do our hair the same color. Red or black, you pick.”
“Thanks,” Sophie said. “I might take you up on it.” Or she might not. Now that she had the opportunity to follow through on her complaints, leave Jer on his own to miss her, worry about her (or not miss her, not worry—asshole) she hesitated. “How about I check in with you later? I’m going to go get some hummus or something.” She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and although it would have been more satisfactory to languish lonely and neglected and unfed, she was starving. Besides, she bet that Jer wasn’t skipping any meals. “I’ll leave my bag here, okay?”
Outside in the wretched heat again. Somewhere beyond the swollen cityscape the sun must have been setting. Shadows were toppling sideways. People hurried home from work or out to important places. The usual yellow contagion of taxis thickened the streets, but tonight at least Sophie had no wish to do them harm.
Because after all, if you got rid of the taxis, what would all the men from Ghana and Senegal and Russia and Turkey and even worse places do, and indeed, what would happen to the families of those men, both here and abroad, without those little pieces of money passed from hand to hand, transformed into wired bank orders, into drachma, euros, rupees, pesos, and then into bread, bacon, shoes, roofing material, feed for chickens, milk for children, an entire economy fueled by traffic jams and bad driving. It depressed her to think how complicated it might be to unravel what seemed like obvious wrongs. Even dynamiting a dam to let the salmon run free probably had unexpected consequences,
would drown or parch some other unsuspecting creature.
Having worked herself into an entirely black mood, Sophie arrived at the little sandwich shop and, instead of ordering the virtuous hummus and pita, got a hot dog with everything and fries. After all, she was an American. No point in pretending she was anything better than she really was.
As she stood at one corner of the ledge set aside for customer enjoyment, extracting her food from its paper wrappings, Sophie sensed the hair on her back of her neck prickling. It had nothing to do with chewing and swallowing; there would be later physiological alerts involving the food. Rather, she was looking straight at another of the unmistakable oil paintings, hanging just above the hatch for the cashier.
This painting seemed to break the pattern of the others by featuring an actual blue sky, but as Sophie craned to stare up at it, she became aware that the blue represented water, the viewer looked into water as if into an aquarium. Or the ocean, a section of ocean without a floor. Indeterminate shapes, white and ribbony, like elongated jellyfish, or perhaps giant squid, descended from the upper left-hand corner. Or no, they were smaller than she’d first perceived, because here was a collection of incongruous items to give everything scale: an empty picture frame, a single glove, what looked like the coils of old-fashioned bedsprings, glass bottles, lightbulbs, flowerpots. Debris from a shipwreck? Remnants of a flood? What she had taken to be tentacled sea creatures now appeared to be fragments of paper, newspaper, perhaps, with bits of smudged words on them. It was hard to make out with the picture so far overhead.
She was in the way of other customers placing their orders. “Excuse me,” she kept saying, sidestepping, jostling. Once there was a lull in the traffic, she approached the window again. “Hi, could I ask you about your painting?”
He didn’t know what she meant at first. He was a foreigner, like almost everyone in New York—which made for its own kind of puzzle—and he was too used to hearing “Coke,” or “ketchup,” words like that, too attuned to the cash register to fathom anything else. A slight, olive-skinned man, like so many others. Sophie had always assumed the proprietors were Lebanese, something about the pitas, but now as she searched his tired, tired face, she thought he might have come from anywhere in the world, and that she herself was perfectly ignorant.
He stood on a chair to lift the painting from its hook. It was obscured with a sheen of cooking grease and another layer of adhered grit. Sophie dabbed at it with a paper napkin and was relieved when the colors brightened. It seemed clear from the composition that you were meant to read the painting like a book, top to bottom, left to right. So that you began with the paper fragments and ended with the floating trash heap. The words on the newspaper scraps were just as jumbled as the objects. “Fantastic opportunity help expensive,” she read. “Total convenience amazing sleep.”
“Where did you get this?” she asked the proprietor. “You know him? The painter?”
The man spoke in his own language to someone behind the counter. “Friend of,” he said to Sophie. “Trading for food.”
“Do you know where he is now? Where I can find him?”
Another conversation. In Urdu? Farsi? The man went back to the kitchen and returned a moment later with a receipt torn from a pad. Sophie read the penciled address, West Twenty-sixth, somewhere in Chelsea, she calculated. “Is this, like, a studio? Is there a telephone?”
But there were new customers lining up and the man was done with her.
Jer still hadn’t called. What was he doing right now? Hanging out with his friends in the band, probably, making their angry music. Or maybe just sulking around on someone’s couch, waiting until later to go home so he wouldn’t look overeager to see her. Of course, she was doing the same thing. But he was the man, after all, and men were supposed to try harder, want you more. It had been another disappointment to realize this was not necessarily so.
In fact she was pretty sure that if she went home, acted as if nothing was wrong, nothing had happened, Jer would go along with it in silent relief. He would be his same old noncommittal self. They would paper over the quarrel, go back to the way they were before, or maybe a little worse. But she wasn’t ready to do that yet, out of either pride or spite, or a sense that the day—now the night—had not yet given full service. She didn’t want to quit on it yet. To do so would make her feel dull, quiescent, unexceptional. She didn’t want or expect to be a saint—the idea was so purely Mom. And yet she had her secret hopes, something along the lines of being the star of a great TV show, only real.
She calculated bus routes, boarded an evil-smelling local, and set off. In the latest edition of her trashy fantasy life, M. Najarijand saw her gazing attractively through his studio windows and invited her inside. “The moment I saw you, I knew I had to paint you.”
By now it was dark and the city was a scaffolding of lights, near, far, or at middle distance. If Sophie closed her eyes to a slit and looked through her eyelashes, she saw streaks and smears of light, almost beautiful, in a disordered way. And her fellow passengers, crowding in on her, holding their faces aloof even as their bodies collided—if you could step back from them, take the long view, see them as a design or pattern, if you could rearrange their murmurs and squawks into an accidental symphony . . . Sophie shook her head to clear it. “Woolgathering,” her mother used to call it. “Sophie’s woolgathering again.”
The bus made its pokey way up Tenth Avenue. Every so often it seemed to lose energy and stopped to lean against a curb. At Twenty-sixth, Sophie got off and walked two quick blocks, squinting energetically at the addresses. Without the sun, the heat crept up stealthily from below, from the still-baking sidewalk. It was a district of anonymous, blocky buildings, warehouses, maybe, or small offices. None of it looked very artistlike, but she had to remind herself that this was an artist who traded paintings for food, and not very distinguished food at that.
The address was another nondescript building with a loading dock and double glass doors. She tried the doors and found them unlocked. Inside, her feet tapped and echoed on the spooky tile floor.
A skinny young security guard poked his head out of the door marked Manager, eyed her, decided she was harmless. “Sup,” he said, by way of inquiry.
“Oh, hi, I’m looking for . . . this artist guy . . .” It was beginning to feel like an entirely foolish errand.
“We got lots of artists. Artists R Us.” He was a Puerto Rican kid with a narrow, fake-looking moustache. “Friend of yours?”
“Sort of,” she said, unwilling to tell him much.
“Hey, I’m an artist. I draw real good. Horses. Race cars. Skulls. My cousin does tattoos, I drew this one skull and he put it on this dude’s right arm. Full color.”
When Sophie failed to be impressed by this, he turned businesslike. “Who you want to see? Almost everyone gone home already.”
“Najarijand,” pronounced Sophie, reading it carefully from the printed card.
“Oh yeah, they always here.” (They?) “Go on up, I call and say you’re coming. Fif’ floor, last one on the right. Watch your step on the elevator.”
It was a creepy elevator, a cage with an open wire grating on top, so that the passenger had an unreassuring view of the cables as they unspooled and grabbed. It ascended, shrieking, and ground to a halt at the fifth floor. She stepped into a bare, wide corridor, rather dusty, lined with solid doors. Most of them were unlabeled, although every so often one announced itself as “East-West Novelties” or “Back Seat Productions.” A porn film studio? Those odd little businesses that advertised in the back of cheap magazines? Lifelike Glamour Wigs. Miracle Wart Cure. Send check or money order to PO Box Whatever, New York, New York.
At the last door on the right, which had nothing written on it, Sophie hesitated, listened, and knocked. The door was opened right away by an Indian lady, gray hair pulled back in a braid. “Ah, here is our little visitor.”
“Hi, I’m sorry to bother you, I’m looking for . . .”
&
nbsp; The lady shooed her inside. She was short and plump and except for her sari and the red dot on her forehead, she might have been Sophie’s Italian grandmother. “Avyark, here is company,” she called.
On the other side of a folding screen, a gray cricket of a man sat on a low couch, reading a newspaper. “A girl,” he said, peering over his spectacles. “Where did you get her from?”
“Don’t mind him, sweetie. He is always being clever. He is a very educated man. Sit, I will get you an iced drink.”
“I’m sorry,” Sophie said again. “I think I have the wrong address.” There was a little kitchen in the space beyond the couch, a table, lamp, piles of books, and a zebra-patterned rug on the floor. But no sight or smell of painting. “I was looking for a painter.”
“Inside or outside of house?” the little man said, and this time Sophie could tell he was being funny.
“Oh be quiet, Avyark, you will scare her away. Sweetie, what is your name? So-fee. So pretty. Here, sit. Mango tea and ginger cookies.”
Sophie sat and drank some of the tea, mostly so she wouldn’t have to speak again just yet. The lady said, “My husband knows very well you mean painting-painting. Always comedy. Are you married yet, So-fee? Good. You must be very, very particular.”
“Let her drink, Padmi. Always such a noise.”
“Always never listening.”
“What would Manoj think, that you misbehave so in front of his friend? I am afraid the young lady will be forming a bad impression.”
“Manoj will have told her all about your foolishness.”
“Your lack of sensible talk.”
“Your very bad humor.”
“Excuse me,” said Sophie. “I don’t know anyone named Manoj.”
This caused enough consternation to silence them for a moment. “Ahh,” Avyark hummed, sucking his teeth. “Ahh, ah.”
“I saw the paintings at the Java Station. I work there.” She was anxious to explain herself, anchor the conversation. “Are they yours?” She looked from one to the other.
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