She didn’t play the game the rest of us did, where we expressed destitution one moment and bragged about some pipe dream opportunity someone in their thirties promised us that always fell through the next. Instead, Tamara was focused, dancing in a professional company, and always worrying about the potential of suffering some injury, googling phantom pains she felt in the fascias of her feet or in the tendons of her knees. She drank teas that looked like she’d just scooped up the forest floor and used our blender for herbal poultices that gave off a warm, sweet odour when she heated them against whatever part of her body was feeling precarious that week.
—
The night I put the painting outside was so hot—we were in the midst of an unbearable heat wave that threatened to knock out the city’s power, and I hadn’t been able to sleep at all. I tried all kinds of New Jersey childhood tricks, like putting my pajamas and pillowcases in the freezer. Tamara understood my situation—because she once had the windowless room—and left the small door that connected our rooms ajar and placed her plastic fan in it with the hope that whatever hot air was coming in from her window might make it to my room. It was kind but didn’t work.
I tried sleeping in the living room, but Dev had a boyfriend with whom she had effortful-sounding sex, and (from the hum I heard coming from her bedroom but that she denied) an air conditioner, so they could fuck all night long, which made staying on the couch just impossible. I tried to catch her on the air conditioner multiple times, because that meant she should carry more of the electric bill, but I was certain that her boyfriend took the air conditioner in and out of the window frame and hid it in her closet—yes, her bedroom had one of the only closets in that apartment.
Tracy had moved me into the apartment in the fall, when the cool air prompted us to drink dark beer and attempt to make a heating pad sexy. And between these activities, she taught me how to look at Dev’s painting.
“Okay, go up close,” Tracy said.
I stood in front of the couch, above which the painting hung, my shins hitting the edge of the cushions.
“No, closer,” she urged.
I was a new roommate and this wasn’t my couch, but because she told me to, I slipped off my shoes and stood on one of the cushions. The painting was a grey-and-yellow checkered pattern with lines that weren’t exactly straight. I stared at the squares. Some of the lines waved out slightly, giving me a headache. I looked at Tracy for guidance. Her lip piercing had recently healed, and she compulsively spun the hoop with her tongue, as she had seen every pierced-lip person do before her.
“Now stand back here,” she directed.
There was the ghostly form of a man in a suit from the waist up. He looked like a sadly drawn news anchor—the curve of his elbow, the funny oval of his head. I stepped back into Tracy’s arms and leaned my face against hers as we stared at the lumpy man in the painting. She rubbed her piercing against the edge of my ear, and I let out a little grunt—felt the heat of her body against my back.
“I know,” she said, and kissed my cheek. “It’s just so stunning. I knew you would see it. Mega just didn’t get it. She thought she was so above everyone.”
Mega loomed over our relationship. Mega, who was in her thirties, and a fashion photographer, and not as femme. Tracy was fresh off the breakup when we got together, so in the beginning, all I heard about was the drama, which continued because it took a while for Mega to move out. I was so used to hearing about it that I didn’t consider what it meant that I was still hearing about it.
“I mean, what kind of person tells an artist to ‘hang that fucking piece of shit in your room,’ and then within days makes a pass at Tamara, who, I mean, told me and all, and I can’t blame her because Mega is so manipulative. I should know. If it weren’t for Dev being so hurt by the whole situation, I would probably still be with that snob and missing out on you.”
“Well, I love it,” I lied, because I was hungry for any opportunity to be a better, more appropriate, girlfriend for Tracy.
Dev walked through the door as we stared at the painting. She had the kind of long commercial hair that she would flip over her shoulder at specific moments, and this was one of them. She smiled and said, “Tracy, I swear, you are, like, my biggest fan.”
“Not for long. Soon I’ll have competition from Steph here.” Tracy held me forward like she was presenting me, and like a puppet, I smiled at Dev.
“You know, you might be right about that having-competition thing.” Dev closed the door and came over to us, like she had to whisper some precious secret that would make the rest of New York jealous.
“An assistant from that gallery I was telling you about loved my interview with that female orgasm person in Nervous Breakdown and they want me to report on an upcoming show and they said they’d put me in touch with the Voice. We’re going out for drinks tonight and I suggested they come by the apartment first so I could show them some of my paintings and they are totally in. Can you imagine? If I just got a gallery?”
“Oh, Dev, it’s totally going to happen for you. I can feel it,” Tracy said.
Dev was always on the verge of some significant breakthrough. I looked between Dev and the painting and dug my nails into my hand, not to keep myself from saying anything but to be sure that this was all really happening. When Dev went into her room, I closed my eyes and prayed silently: Please, please, please, don’t let that work out.
Drinks got cancelled, but I was only partially relieved, because I knew, at some point, my prayer would not be answered.
—
On August 14, I was enjoying an unusually quiet afternoon at home. It was my day off and Dev had gone to East Hampton for a long weekend with her boyfriend—one of his friends had gotten a gig house-sitting for Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson and had invited them up to party. I rested on the living room floor, feeling sticky and uncomfortable but better than I did in the furnace of my room. I had my shirt off—Tracy had stayed over the previous night, but our bodies had gotten so hot from wanting each other as much as we did. She went home to Jersey for the day—her parents promised to give her some money for an air conditioner for her bedroom. That morning, we had spoken of it like a great dream.
“I’ll buy a cheap one so we can use the rest of the money to take a cab home from Target,” she said.
“We’ll leave it on all the time,” I said, “with the door closed so we can walk into the room and feel relief.”
“I’m going to stand in front of it and suck on a Popsicle while you go down on me.”
Alone, shirtless, I was contemplating this last scenario when the lock tumbled. It was only one p.m. and Tamara wasn’t due back until at least seven. I gasped obnoxiously, which startled her and elicited a similar sound. I moved to put on my shirt, but she just waved a sweating bottle of vodka at me. In her other hand was a small container of orange juice. She limped into the apartment and slammed the door with her foot.
“What happened?” I asked.
Her left foot was bare except for an ACE bandage and she walked carefully on the toes of that foot, letting out little grunts whenever her weight shifted off of it.
“Wanna get drunk with me?” she called from the kitchen.
“I do,” I said, with such conviction that I blushed.
She came back with two coffee mugs and a package of frozen peas, which she wrapped around her ankle. Once she was settled, she pressed her face into her hands, let out one sob, then stilled.
“It happened,” she said, and moved her foot with the frozen peas forward. The swollen skin was hot, and her ankle was still swelling.
“I twisted it. I knew it was going to be this ankle, too. They told me this was my weak one, and I thought I was doing everything I could, but it was such a simple move. I landed and my foot went one way and my ankle went another way.”
“What does this mean?” I asked. The intensity of her grief was contagious and I gave myself over to it.
“My director told me to ice my ankle, a
nd then he gave me this bottle of vodka and told me to drink it. In a few days I might put a hot compress on it, and we’ll see. But in the long run, I know this means I’ll become a physical therapist or masseuse who used to dance. And if I’m lucky, fucking Dev will be an editor and solicit a review of a dance concert from me for the Times, and then she’ll reject it.”
“What a bitch,” I said.
Neither of us had actually spoken ill of Dev before. I stiff-ened, and the heat covered us. Tamara snorted and filled our mugs with vodka.
“A total fucking bitch,” she said.
I splashed orange juice into our mugs, and we swirled it with our fingers and chugged it down because this was like no vodka I had ever tasted. This was how vodka was supposed to taste, kind of smooth and like it was made with vanilla.
“This is a successful New Yorker’s vodka,” I said.
“It’s because my career is over. He would have given me something in a plastic bottle if everything was going to be fine.”
I covered Tamara’s mouth with my hand, felt the ridge of her teeth meet my skin. “This will heal. We will do whatever it takes to make sure that ankle heals,” I said, and though she didn’t immediately move her mouth away from my hand, she gave me that look she’d given me before—You really don’t understand anything.
I refilled our drinks. The vodka warmed me up going down, but I felt myself forgetting the heat.
—
We hit our high, halfway through the bottle, when we stormed into Dev’s room, took the air conditioner out of her closet, and jammed it into the window in the living room. We couldn’t figure out how to get the window to seal around it, but it didn’t matter. We knelt in front of the cold air like it was time for Communion, our tongues extended. At one point, I even started to shiver and crawled away towards our bottle.
The air conditioner made loud chugging sounds, and the power light blinked off and then on again and, finally, in a great scream, off. So did the electricity on the rest of the block. The people of Bedford Ave. shouted, “Hey!” as their air conditioners and TVs silenced. We waited a few moments for the rush of electricity to surge back into our appliances, but there was nothing. Some people were gathering outside, kids running into the street like it was a holiday. Normally, I would have run outside to be part of the commotion, but we were both too disoriented by the headiness of afternoon drunkenness.
We brought the bottle close and leaned against a wall. I talked to Tracy on the phone and worked hard not to sound drunk. NJ Transit trains weren’t running back into the city because of the blackout, so she was stuck with her parents. I could tell she was disappointed, and I did my best to comfort her, but I couldn’t stop watching Tamara as she created a dance, her beautifully potent leg lifting into the air.
The party outside grew with intensity, a sense of reckless freedom taking hold as the sun began to set and the city, which barely acknowledged the night, descended into an electric darkness. We lit a candle, which caught Dev’s painting in a beam of buttery light. The figure was even more apparent, even more grotesque.
“God, I fucking hate that painting!” Tamara shouted. Everyone in the street was shouting now, so it felt good and safe to raise our voices, too.
“This painting,” I said. “This painting.”
“Say it,” Tamara said. “Let it out.”
“It fucking sucks. It’s the worst fucking painting I’ve ever seen.”
“It makes me fall over,” Tamara said. “Sometimes I think of it when I’m dancing and it makes me fall over.”
“I was putting mustard on my hot dog the other day,” I said, “and I was looking at the colour and the fucking painting came into my mind’s eye and I almost threw up. I carried the hot dog for a block and then left it on the ledge of a staircase.”
“If you had eaten that hot dog, it would have been like eating the fucking painting.”
I sloshed more vodka at Tamara’s mug, but some of it missed, landing on the floor and on her leg.
“This painting is a power totem of white mediocrity. Mega said that to Dev one night and I think about it all of the time. This painting. This painting. Ruining our lives,” she said.
“I thought she said that Dev should hang it in her fucking room?”
“She also said that. We said a lot about it. And that’s where some of its wicked power was, too. Once we started talking about it, we couldn’t stop, and then—we just couldn’t stop. This painting ruins lives, and Tracy just believes in Dev so much.”
“Why doesn’t Tracy hang it in her apartment?”
“Mega said that, too. You better watch out. This painting will damn us.”
The candle flame trembled and the man in the painting seemed to sway from side to side. Where was he going? I had the urge to lie down, but I knew that once I did, I’d be done for. I made my way up to my feet and took a precarious step forward, felt the top of my body lunge. I took another step.
Here is where my memory becomes faulty. We were both topless. I remember Tamara’s face. She was spinning around the room. The painting was in my hands.
“I can dance again,” she sang. “You’ve lifted the curse. I can dance again.” Her puffy ankle at work, the thumps from her landings shaking the walls.
I remember my vision trembling and then steadying, trembling and then steadying. I was outside. There was a drum circle on the rooftop next door and another on the street, and they were in counter rhythms, working alongside each other, an offbeat away from merging, but it was coming, as the hands worked skin after skin. The group on the roof gave a hoot when they saw me, and I raised my arms over my head.
“I’m putting it outside!” I shouted at them. “This painting ruins lives.” I swayed, felt the painting lift from my hands. “I’m putting it outside.”
—
Tamara woke me and I felt that it was impossible that this, the waking up, was happening. I rolled over, the couch groaned, and my neck seemed to respond, too.
“It’s almost noon,” she said. “There’s a strange man sleeping in your bed, the power is still off, and my ankle is worse.”
She showed me her ankle, which I will not explain because no part of the human body should look like that. She gave me a shirt and I felt chivalrous as I put it on. I went about my duties with a swollen tongue. I asked the man, who turned out to be our neighbour, and quite friendly, to leave. I wiped up the spilled juice and vodka in the living room, which now felt more capable and lighter, the painting’s blank space on the wall like a missing tooth.
Outside, I found there were more people in the street than usual. The painting was propped up against a tree and seemed to be doing no energetic damage there, though maybe it was feeding the commotion around it. The deli on the corner, not wanting their food to spoil, was giving away breakfast sandwiches for a dollar. I got two and a bottle of warm orange juice. There was no ice, but a woman gave me a tube of Icy Hot for Tamara and a bottle of Advil for both of us.
“Tell her to elevate it,” the cook said, as he flipped ten eggs in rapid succession. “Drinking might help, too.”
—
When I came home, Tamara greeted me like a husband, with a kiss on the cheek. This was the last time in my life that I would ever acquire a best friend with such swift intensity. She extended her hand and I pulled off my sweaty shirt and she hung it on the key rack. We ate our sandwiches topless on the fire escape. We didn’t talk about the painting. We used the last of her computer’s battery power to watch a movie, snuggled in bed. This is what it would be like to have one roommate that I liked, I thought, as she lightly tickled my arm. My hand rested on the thigh of her propped-up leg. The battery was about to die and I was slipping towards sleep.
Then there was a bang, a great hum, and the lights came on. My phone, where it was plugged into the wall, buzzed with Tracy’s name, and a kind of roar came from the kitchen and the living room. We stepped out of Tamara’s room like the first people, or the last people. The refrigerator
was back on and, we discovered in the living room, so was Dev’s air conditioner, rattling, cockeyed. Cheers rang out from outside, and there was so much noise that we pulled away from each other. We felt our half-nakedness, the strangeness of our intimacy, the absence of the painting. We put the air conditioner back in Dev’s room. I grabbed my shirt off the hook, started to go outside.
“Wait,” Tamara said, and suddenly her touch felt different, and my breasts felt different. My phone kept ringing, and I let it.
“Leave it outside, just for tonight,” she said. “I’m not ready.”
—
Tamara met me after my shift at the market—we knew that our time together was limited. We walked so closely that our forearms met and separated in predictable beats. We needed to bring the painting inside, no matter what state it was in. Dev was asked to cover the aftermath of the blackout for a blog and called Tamara to let her know she would be home sometime that afternoon. Our plan was to confront her about the rent and tell her that we wanted to move the painting to her office area in the living room, or give it to Tracy. If she didn’t agree, then Tamara and I would move out, get a two-bedroom in South Slope, or maybe Gowanus. Red Hook was very cheap, and inconvenience then still kept parts of the borough affordable. I pictured us holding hands as we rode bikes over cobblestoned streets.
Just before we reached our building, I grabbed Tamara’s hand and pulled her to me. Our bodies rested lightly against each other, except for our faces. In this moment, the city no cooler after the blackout, our lips teased close and pulled away, teased close and pulled away.
The painting kept our lips from touching.
As I gained the courage and moved in with certainty, I heard Tracy’s voice. She was holding the painting over her head and she was shaking and I had caused it. I wasn’t the first, but I had caused this trembling that would come for her in the wake of each subsequent relationship’s end. She fell for someone like this again, and would keep falling, and I would keep hurting someone like this, again and again. And though this time it was the painting’s fault, it wouldn’t be forever.
We Had No Rules Page 9