Since the disastrous party four days ago, Russell had been taking Desmond’s pending departure badly. It was all loutish, sybaritic Peter’s fault. The long-term couples in a circle of friends are like the big stores that hold down either end of a shopping mall. If one of them goes out of business, all the little folks in the middle start to panic that their world is falling apart; if Sears can’t stay in business, what chance does Pot Pourri Palace have of surviving? Peter might not have felt he owed it to Velan to stay faithful, but he should have considered his friends’ feelings. Russell had been cold and distant and had started spending long hours at the store while Desmond made desultory progress packing.
Boris wasn’t helping matters. This afternoon, another humid day, he was practicing especially thunderous pieces—Bartok, unless Desmond was mistaken—with a good deal less skill than usual, music that was perfect accompaniment to the ongoing battle of Tina and Gary on the floor above. This young couple had moved in two years ago. In private, most of their communication was shouted insults and accusations, but Desmond had never seen them on the street or in the hallway when they weren’t huddled together or holding hands, as if protecting each other from the hostile world. It was impossible to know which was the truth of their relationship, the private fighting or the public cleaving.
Desmond opened up a suitcase on the bed, put on a record (Pauline Anderton Goes to the Movies), and tried to drown out the sounds of Bartok and love, loathing, or whatever it was.
Desmond had always been wary of long-term relationships, perhaps wary of love itself. There was something about the enterprise of sealing yourself off in an isolation tank with another person that struck him as unwholesome. He didn’t understand how it could be healthy for two people to sleep in the same bed every night, eat the same food at the same table, visit the same friends, have the same conversations, and, for all he knew, think the same thoughts. Friends crowed about the beauty of intimacy and the liberating joy of opening yourself up to another person, but when you pressed them for details, it always boiled down to being able to express your anger without inhibition or being comfortable leaving the bathroom door open in front of your significant other. They claimed long-term relationships brought out their best, but that usually translated into being unapologetic about their worst.
Desmond’s own relationships had tended to be short-term tugging matches. If he met someone he was interested in, he worried they wouldn’t find him attractive or interesting enough. But if they reciprocated his enthusiasm, he felt the bar had been raised on his own net worth and was plagued by thoughts that he could have done better. It was like shopping in Morocco; once your offer was accepted, you felt you should have driven a harder bargain. The best way to avoid this cycle of disappointment was to flirt with friends and fuck with strangers and thus keep yourself suspended in a safe no-man’s-land somewhere between loneliness and suffocation. No soaring highs, but none of that get-me-out-of-here anxiety either. And after all, a comfortable emotional flatline was the Holy Grail half the population was seeking: How else do you explain the popularity of Prozac, hydroponic tomatoes, and Tom Hanks?
Then, six months after His Hard Road to Hell came out, he met Russell Abrams at a cocktail party, curled up in a chair in a quiet corner of the apartment, reading Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts, one of Lewis Westerly’s great rivals. He invited Russell to dinner and, in one way or another, they’d been together since. Desmond found Russell a curious and appealing blend of arrogant confidence—passed down directly from his confident father and arrogant mother—and severe, occasionally crippling self-doubt, the B-side of the same inheritance. He was teaching art to special needs children when they met, a disarmingly noble profession, even if it was one he’d chosen because he knew it would meet with disapproval from his mother. (“Any child who’s been properly toilet-trained,” Gloria had written in her infamous first book, Playing with Childhood, “will be bored senseless by mucking around with finger paints.”) Russell had the great virtue of wanting to take care of people and, at the same time, the unacknowledged but obvious need to be taken care of. Which made him, in Desmond’s eyes, both lovable and easy to manipulate.
In the end, it probably wasn’t productive or even possible to deconstruct attraction. One night, six months after they’d met, Desmond came out of a movie in the East Village and saw Russell walking along the street halfway up the block ahead of him. It was a warm, cloudy night and Russell was dressed in a white shirt and dark pants. From a distance, he looked short, young, and perhaps a little lost. Drifting, to use Sybil’s word. Desmond was about to rush up to him, but instead decided to follow him, hoping to discover something about him he hadn’t known before, a secret vice, perhaps, something he could use as a bargaining chip in the future—assuming they had a future together. Russell went into a greengrocer and bought flowers, paid for a magazine at a newsstand, stopped to talk briefly with a large middle-aged woman in an orange dress, picked up two coffee mugs and a small stack of books from a jittery sidewalk vendor. After twenty minutes of shadowing him, Desmond began to lose his sense of purpose. He turned and walked to the nearest subway. As he was standing on the hot platform, battered by the sound of a train approaching from the wrong direction, he realized he had discovered a secret vice; but it wasn’t Russell’s, it was his own. He’d been stalking someone for twenty minutes, stepping into doorways to avoid being seen. That had to mean something.
The next night, Russell showed up at Desmond’s apartment carrying a vase filled with the flowers he’d bought at the grocer, and the mugs and books he’d bought from the street vendor. Later, as they lay in bed, Russell suggested he move into Desmond’s apartment. “Oh, come on,” he teased when Desmond hesitated. “You know you want me to.” And lying in the dark with Russell’s head against his chest, thinking about his behavior twenty-four hours earlier, he had to admit it was true, even if he wasn’t sure why.
Pauline Anderton was singing the theme from Goldfinger. The whole album was more or less a disaster, an ill-conceived concept from the start. Anderton obviously had no feeling for the songs and took the movie motif as license to ham it up in a way that was frequently embarrassing. “His heart is cold,” she sang in a nasal whine—a failed attempt at imitating Shirley Bassey—and then dug herself in deeper by forcing out an “evil” laugh. There were so many questions he wished he could ask Anderton. The main one, in relation to this album, was: “What the hell did you think you were doing?” He turned off the record player.
The bedroom he and Russell shared was too small for the king-sized bed Russell had insisted upon, and as he went from closet to suitcase, Desmond had to squeeze between the footboard and the bureau. Why were beds getting so big these days? Everyone he knew had enormous beds—no matter how small their apartment—with mattresses thicker than their walls. Everyone had such immense box springs under their mattresses and such deep sheepskin cushions on top of them, they practically ended up sleeping pressed against their ceiling. Everyone was saving to expand their bathrooms, install Jacuzzis, buy bath towels the size of blankets. Everyone wanted urinals, bidets, heat lamps over their sinks, and bathroom scales that carried on conversations. And then there were the cathedral-sized kitchens, even though no one cooked. It was all so primordial, in a sordid, indulgent way, this attempt to reconnect with the basic needs of the body through home improvement. The economic prosperity of the past decade had led to Welfare cuts and bigger bathtubs. It said something about the cultural moment, but he was too exhausted to articulate it clearly. He ought to write an op ed piece about it: The Flush Years.
But perhaps it wasn’t the politics of the bed that bothered Desmond as much as it was the way it represented Russell’s tendency to fill up space in the apartment. Like everything else in their relationship, Desmond had at first welcomed it. He’d never trusted his own taste in furniture and had equipped the apartment with functional chairs and tables and bookshelves. Russell brought color to the place and a cluttered style t
hat made it look as if it had been decorated by some whacked-out grandmother addicted equally to overstuffed comfort, modernism, and irony. The Heywood Wakefield desk with a primitive, hand-embroidered portrait of Ike and Mamie hanging above it. The heads from three French dressmaker’s dolls lined up on top of a glass-fronted bookcase.
Desmond had loved all of it, so much so that it wasn’t until too late that he noticed almost everything he’d bought over the half dozen years he’d lived in the apartment alone had been moved into storage or exiled to the back of a closet door. It wasn’t a stretch, not a great leap of faith, to recognize that his own thoughts and perceptions, his own solo identity, had probably been put on mothballs as well, and in a similarly insidious manner. His only real hope of finishing the Pauline Anderton book was to get away from it all, the books and the pottery, dolls’ heads and doilies.
He closed up the suitcase and slid it under the bed with the other boxes and cases he’d already packed, not entirely sure if the undershirts and socks he’d packed had been his or Russell’s.
3.
On moving day, Russell slept uncharacteristically late, and in order to make it to the store on time, he had to dash around the apartment pulling on his clothes and swiping at his hair as he brushed his teeth. He gave Desmond a distracted, passionless kiss as he hurried out the door. “Have a good trip,” he called out as he ran down the hall to the elevator.
Desmond packed the car in the stifling midday humidity, bid farewell to the apartment, and got onto the West Side Highway. He made it only to 96th Street before hesitantly pulling off the road and driving back into the city. Desmond had been counting on Russell to initiate a big, sloppy goodbye, preferably with tears and a hint of anger and a fast hot fuck to finish it off properly. Instead, there had been all that emotionless rushing around. It wouldn’t do to leave town like this. Among other things, it was unfair to Russell, who would regret having been brusque the minute he walked into the apartment that night and realized that Desmond wouldn’t be living there for another four months.
He drove across the city in the dense haze of sick air, through the forest of Central Park where all the trees and the parched lawns seemed to be crying out for rain and a little privacy. They were predicting an active hurricane season this year, and after a summer of heat waves and drought and subtropical nights, Desmond was ready for it. Turn on the faucet, he thought. Drown me.
On Second Avenue, he slipped in a tape he’d made of some of Pauline Anderton’s better-known recordings, and within seconds the car was filled with the overpowering sound of her amazing and awful voice singing “Cry Me a River.” This was the first song on Pauline Anderton’s first album, one of two recordings in her career to make the charts, and supposedly the song she’d been singing when Walter Winchell wandered into a dreary cocktail lounge—the Brown Room—on the outskirts of Tallahassee, Florida, and discovered her.
At a stoplight in Midtown, a passenger in a taxi glared at Desmond and rolled up her window. Desmond smiled at her and lowered the volume. Listening to the tape and lane-hopping through the heavy traffic, Desmond felt a surge of enthusiasm for the project, something he hadn’t felt in months. Perhaps it was a good thing he’d stalled as long as he had; by the time the book came out, Bette Midler would be exactly the right age to play Anderton in the middle years of her career.
He drove across Houston and wove through a maze of narrow, shadowy streets, finally turning onto Ludlow. Less than two blocks from Russell’s store, he found something that would easily pass for a parking space and backed into it.
This ribald corner of the Lower East Side was changing so rapidly, stores and coffeehouses seemed to come and go within days. In June, Russell’s store had been flanked by a gallery and a pet shop that had been converted into a café—cages and aquariums still in place. Both had disappeared. Russell and Melanie had signed their lease when rents were still affordable. Desmond never would have guessed that theirs would become one of the most stable businesses on the block.
The store was called Morning in America and the theme was furniture, clothing, and memorabilia from the 1980s. When Russell had announced his plans to go in on the venture with his friend Melanie, Desmond had listened politely. Nineteen eighties style clothing and furniture? He had no idea there was such a thing. As far as Desmond was concerned, the entire decade had been a disaster socially and politically and a personal waste of time. Celebrating it in any form, even acknowledging that it had given birth to a coherent aesthetic, struck him as counterintuitive and politically regressive. Russell’s friend Melanie, a randy, gorgeous dyke from the Midwest, had inherited a basementful of Reagan memorabilia from the right-wing Christian father who’d tossed her out of the house at age seventeen. Russell had been trying to get out of teaching for several years and Melanie loved the idea of using her father’s carefully hoarded junk to support herself in a life that would have made her old man shudder.
Four months after they opened, New York magazine had run a snide item about the shop and it was launched as a destination for out-of-town shoppers and jaded New Yorkers who thought they’d seen everything. A few 1980s icons occasionally stopped in to sign pictures and have their photos taken, Ron Reagan Jr., Shelley Long, and Bernhard Goetz among them.
Desmond walked into the artificial chill of the cavernous store and took off his sunglasses. Russell and Melanie were carrying a nondescript, vaguely industrial dining table to the back. Whenever he stopped in, the two of them were moving furniture from one end of the store to the other, trying to make the store seem less cluttered if they were overstocked or more cluttered if they were low on inventory. Presentation is everything, Russell had explained to Desmond, a statement Desmond wouldn’t argue with, since the goods themselves were clearly nothing: nondescript, mass-produced furniture, nondescript cotton clothes Russell had labeled “early’80s Gap,” Brooks Brothers suits representing the financial boom portion of the decade, lots of Tom Clancy novels. The store’s big sellers were the Reagan memorabilia they had tucked into every corner—magazine covers, plates, framed photos of Ron and Nancy, political pins, even little diorama-type shrines—and assorted clutter relating to a variety of the decade’s top television shows. Desmond was convinced that with the way things were going, American history courses would be using TV Guide as primary source material within a decade. Sooner or later, all cultural references seemed to circle back to Cheers or Dallas. Increasingly, students referred to television shows as the decisive factors in their spiritual and psychological development. They came to the store in droves buying up lunch boxes and dish sets and toys that reminded them of their very recent childhoods.
Russell and Melanie were about the same height and had similarly slight bodies. They were often mistaken for brother and sister, although at the moment, turning the table on end and maneuvering it into a sliver of empty space against a back wall, they looked more like husband and wife preparing their house for a natural disaster. They set down the table and Russell disappeared. Melanie—black work boots swimming around her skinny legs—clomped up to the front of the store, grabbed Desmond’s hand, and shook it with the robust enthusiasm of a politician. “Big day, huh?” She pulled up a metal folding chair, motioned toward it, and held it for Desmond until he was seated. “Russell’s all worked up about it, although suffering in silence.” She shook her head with concern for her friend, lit up a cigarette, and plopped down on a sofa with her big feet up on a coffee table. Melanie had the gestures and vocal inflections of a three-hundred-pound truck driver, a bizarre juxtaposition to her wiry body. “It’s going to be a rough few months.”
“Just remember,” Desmond said, “it is only a few months. Very few in the scheme of things.” He shifted uncomfortably in the chair. “What’s Russell up to now?”
“Just checking a couple of boxes in the basement. We’re planning to open a ‘90s room down there, for all the shit we can’t figure out what to do with up here. He’ll be up in a minute.” She tipped her pretty,
angular face to the ceiling and blew out a lungful of smoke. “It’s nice to talk to you, one on one. I hate when everything is about couples and you can’t even talk to a person but you have to talk to some goddamned couple. Sometimes you look at this couple and you don’t see two people sitting there, you see one behemoth with two mouths.”
“Right.” He hated to agree with Melanie, whose theories usually seemed crackpot, but sometimes he just had to.
“So, tell me about this school you’re teaching at. What’s it called?”
Desmond liked Melanie and had been infected with a smaller dose of Russell’s desire to watch over her and take care of her. She claimed to be “well into” her thirties, but Desmond would have bet good money that she was no more than twenty-eight. Despite a disfiguring bleached crew cut and a recently acquired fondness for tattoos, she could look, in unguarded moments, like an abandoned child. She always wore white sleeveless T-shirts to display the bands of colorful design inked into her scrawny upper arms. She insisted upon pulling out chairs for Desmond, holding doors open for him, and hailing cabs, all of which he would have found unbearably emasculating if she hadn’t been so blatantly vulnerable. Desmond started to tell her what he knew about Deerforth College, but after two sentences, she pulled a business card out of her shirt pocket and began to study it intently. Desmond let his words trail off.
“A friend of yours?” he asked, nodding toward the card.
“Not exactly. Maybe. I hope so. Let’s just say gorgeous, whatever she is.”
Melanie had the single most calamitous love life Desmond had ever heard of. She was always falling in love with lanky, glamorous women, the more audaciously blond, wealthy, and unavailable, the better. Most were Upper East Side types who popped into the store while slumming their way through the East Village with a friend. To prove her love and chivalry, Melanie showered these chilly goddesses with phone calls, flowers, and absurdly expensive gifts. Few, if any, of these entanglements blossomed into sexual relationships—a returned phone call was a major triumph—but that didn’t seem to make them less powerful for Melanie. Eventually, they all ended with Melanie harassing her love objects and then retreating into a depression when she received threatening letters from lawyers. Legions of muscular plumbers and electricians who worked in the neighborhood pursued her, just dying, apparently, to show her what she was missing.
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