A Beautiful Crime

by Christopher Bollen

  Freddy too must have felt an immediate kinship. When the time came for Clay to move out of his rented room in Il Dormitorio, Freddy offered him a place to crash without ever presenting it as an act of charity. “Just drop your bags on my side, doll! Simple as daylight!” Clay understood, though, that Freddy was rescuing him. The other interns bunking at the palazzino watched in awe as Clay collected his belongings, crossed under the Blue Madonna, and carried them into the forbidden wing inhabited by the heir of the very old American family. The two stayed in Venice through December, celebrating New Year’s with Daniela, and in the first fog banks of January, they headed to the train station. “Don’t worry,” Freddy said. “We’ll come back.” He spun an imaginary set of keys on his finger. “We can always come back. We own the place.”

  “You mean, you own it.” Clay felt the need to make that heartbreaking distinction.

  Freddy clasped his arm and stared at him with his veiny gray eyes. “No,” he replied. “I mean the both of us.”

  They bought cheap train tickets to Paris, where they stayed gratis in a room at the Ritz permanently occupied by one of Freddy’s “oldest and dearest” friends. Clay was soon to learn that an astonishing number included itself among Freddy’s oldest-and-dearest, a global network of shady characters, and erstwhile artists, and drug addicts in decline, and gender-fluid freedom fighters who opened their spare bedrooms for him. At the Ritz, this oldest-and-dearest was of the warm and sketchy variety, an urn-shaped Frenchman named Antonin Marceau who told Clay flat-out that he was a key purveyor in the Parisian black market. “Just in case you need anything special,” Antonin offered with a flirtatious wink. “And I do mean anything. Documents? A new passport? I take any request as a personal challenge when it is made by a friend.” They were sitting around a gold-plated coffee table that held dishes of black caviar dolloped over baked potatoes. In the wake of Antonin’s disclosure, the two muscly Lebanese men perched on the opposite couch seemed less like mute party filler and more like bodyguards or rent-by-the-hour offerings. Eventually, the portly Frenchman went to make work calls in the adjoining bedroom. “Midnight,” Antonin explained cheerfully, “is when everyone wants something.”

  Freddy leaned over to whisper into Clay’s ear. “Antonin doesn’t own a cell phone or use email! But he can get semiautomatics delivered anywhere you want within five minutes! Isn’t he extraordinary?”

  “What do you need a semiautomatic for?”

  Freddy sighed in disappointment. “Clay, you’re missing the gift here. Tell me you aren’t so brainwashed to believe that all you’ll need in life can be found in a store.”

  From Paris, they went to Vienna and then on to Berlin, staying in the spare bedrooms of other oldest-and-dearests. Freddy was greeted as a beloved remnant of an otherwise extinct bohemian world; often their hosts would throw parties at which Freddy was paraded around like an old zoo tiger, a once ferocious animal that was now safe for kids to pet. Finally, Freddy grew tired of all the pawing and decided it was time to go home.

  Clay was scared to return to the city he’d fled after his mother died. He couldn’t imagine surrendering himself to that haunted Bronx apartment whose thin hallways were patrolled by his sullen father. He told Freddy he’d rather chain himself to a tree right there in the Tiergarten. “I understand,” Freddy said, and for the second time offered him asylum. Clay could stay with him in his Brooklyn brownstone for as long as he wanted, and in return he could help organize Freddy’s archive of art photographs. Bed-Stuy seemed a safe remove from the Bronx. Clay’s plan was to return without going home.

  “Are you sure I won’t be in the way?” he asked to be certain.

  “Don’t you see?” Freddy replied, dusting cigarette ash from the front of his shirt. His gray hair had grown long and girlish, and his head jerked around with the movements of a long-beaked bird. “In the way is where I want you.”

  The Victorian brownstone on Jefferson Avenue had been Freddy’s since the early 1990s, bought during one of the rare windfalls in his long and erratic art career. The exterior was best described as “the shade of twenty-eight Brooklyn winters,” although Clay began to think of it as “rotted snail.” Its interior made Il Dormitorio seem like a minimalist health spa. There weren’t hallways so much as trails. Blankets could hide either a throng of whiskey glasses that had gone unwashed since 2003 or the sleeping body of an elderly friend who’d stopped by for a visit and never managed to leave. Freddy had a habit of collecting things, and not just on nights when he couldn’t sleep and cruised online auction houses and eBay; a simple stroll to the corner for cigarettes could yield whatever random object he was able to drag onto the porch.

  Clay should have realized Freddy van der Haar’s dire financial straits the moment he entered the brownstone after their subway ride from the airport. None of the light switches worked. But like everyone else, Clay had fallen victim to the power of the van der Haar last name. Fancy white people who owned property in multiple cities couldn’t possibly be destitute. Freddy was too proud to admit the truth, so instead, he lit candles and set them in baroque candelabras and in the spouts of empty soda cans. “It’s more fun like this, anyway,” Freddy concluded. And it was.

  Clay knew he should be looking for a real job in the city, just as he knew he should call his father to tell him he was back. But the slogging, workaday world of New York didn’t exist inside Freddy’s brownstone. Clay felt that he had been admitted into a secret universe where the air crackled with art and wit and the clocks were always wrong and maybe it was still 1979 or 1983 or any time before the city streets resembled an oligarch’s real-estate portfolio. If Clay decided to leave, he wasn’t sure he’d ever find his way back, and he loved Freddy’s universe too much to take that risk. It floored him that this grouchy, eccentric, mostly sofa-bound man, so acid-hearted around strangers, a glass shard in human form as soon as he stepped foot out of the house, treated him with such uncomplicated affection. Freddy had taken Clay in, and he kept letting him in, further and deeper into the back rooms of his life: “I want to show you the necklace of shells my first boyfriend made for me. It was an ice age ago, back in 1972, when he worked as a painter’s assistant. He died later, of course, in the Great Plague, jumping off a fire escape before the disease got him. Go on, slip it over your head.” It was Freddy’s stories that enthralled Clay to the point of devotion; they were dispatches from a feral, war-torn city that seemed to share little ground with the one of his birth. Clay was determined to soak up the education Freddy offered while he could: a queer education—not just gay, but strange. Thus, as the months wore on, he and Freddy practiced their Italian; they killed cockroaches while making pasta dinners and reading aloud on the lives of Renaissance painters; they watched old movies; they cracked each other up. It was the closest Clay had felt to a family since his mother died. He told himself that in six months he’d find a real job. In six months, he’d call his father.

  Meanwhile, Freddy really needed him. On Jefferson Avenue, Clay could flex his muscles as the responsible resident, the one who did make regular contact with Con Edison to keep the power on, who abracadabraed the blankets off mystery junk piles and secretly returned the broken birdcages and Hula-Hoops to their neighbor’s trash. Clay dove headfirst into the job of organizing Freddy’s photography archive, which was no small task. Freddy had captured tens of thousands of black-and-white portraits of himself and his friends over the decades—there was Freddy at age twenty as a pretty, long-haired twink in the middle of a Manhattan street wearing a halter top and jean shorts, eyebrows plucked, smoking a cigarette, camel-thin legs crossed coquettishly. Freddy had taken to the camera the way his friends took to drugs, compulsively, romantically, following a night’s adventure through the early, beautiful highs and deep into the late, grievous lows of dawn. But his work wasn’t all misbehavior and collateral damage; amid the stacks of photographs, like flowers pressed in a book, were softer, sweeter moments of love and companionship that nearly brought Clay to te
ars. He would often carry these photos over to Freddy and ask, so urgently it surprised him, as if he were asking for directions, Who were these men? How did they live? How did they get so free?

  Over the years, Freddy’s gallerist Gitsy Veros had milked most of the salable value from the shriveled teats of the photo archive. To be fair, Freddy had needed the money—he was always in “desperate danger, doll, for a tiny bit of cash.” As a result, there were too many van der Haars clogging the art market for the archive to provide much of a nest egg. Even still, Gitsy and Freddy’s other “back in the day” friends treated Clay like a last-minute party crasher who was trying to squeeze any last dollars out of their ailing friend. On their visits to the house, they stared Clay down with silent fury. They winced in displeasure when he and Freddy finished each other’s sentences: “Doll, could you go get—” “the magnifying glass” “from the—” “sugar bowl in the kitchen” “so I can show Gitsy—” “the holes in the Persian rug” “in case she knows—” “what moth larvae look like.” Freddy and Clay had crawled inside the madhouse of each other’s head, and Gitsy, in particular, took it as a violation. (Gitsy would later say to Clay, “You didn’t know the real Freddy. You only knew the sick Freddy, which hardly counts.”) “Ignore her,” Freddy said between drags on his menthol cigarette. “I’m sorry she’s such a beast. I’ll talk to her.” Clay suspected that Freddy never did. No doubt he savored the idea of two people he cared about fighting over him.

  Their friendship was never sexual. There wasn’t even the usual one-sided pining of an old man for twentysomething flesh. Freddy wasn’t always the easiest man to read. He could speak for days in quotations. He pulled quotes from everywhere, from Psalms to the QVC shopping network, from Edith Wharton to Barbara Stanwyck to Edith Piaf. Most of his references were plundered from old movie dialogue, always the cranky heroine or the spurned villain. It was an art form, a conversation collage, but Freddy could also go off script and speak with frankness. When Clay suggested he try online dating, Freddy rolled his eyes and said he’d given up the possibility of love and sex decades ago. He couldn’t tap that tired vein anymore. “Sex was all I could think about when I was your age, like the loudest roar in my ears. Now I can’t even remember what it sounded like.” Many gay men in the city had found themselves highly desired late in life, more active in their seventies than they’d been in their youth. But Freddy had let that part of him go.

  Clay presumed it was due to all the lovers who had died on him. If your heart broke nonstop for twenty years, maybe it finally shut off for good. Freddy often talked about French Paul or Canadian Eric or Trenton Mike, his great loves, all dead by thirty, first-wave casualties to a plague the size of an ocean. Clay had seen these boys in Freddy’s photographs, living their last years as if they were their first, oblivious to their fast-approaching deaths. Try as he might, Clay couldn’t imagine living through a cataclysm like that. Freddy had survived, but he had not been spared.

  When Clay went out at night, he was careful not to mention his hope of finding a boy to go home with. But Freddy, dressed in his terry-cloth robe, could deduce his intentions simply by the round of pushups he did before he got dressed or the gel sparkling in his hair. “You’re going out on the make tonight, aren’t you?”

  “I’m just meeting some friends,” Clay replied as he threaded his belt through the loops. He knew it was ridiculous to feel guilty about leaving Freddy alone for the night, but he did.

  “I wonder who the lucky fella will be,” Freddy intoned. “You’ll have your pick at the dance.” He twirled the sash of his robe. “Now, don’t wait for the perfect dream man, just grab a decent one. You know you can bring him back here if you’d like. I won’t mind!”

  “Yeah,” Clay answered coolly, avoiding Freddy’s eyes. “I know I can.”

  But Clay knew he couldn’t. An intruder might have broken the spell between them. Freddy had ruled out sex, but he still had a weakness for beauty, and Clay didn’t want to dangle a cute guy in front of him like a bauble that he wasn’t allowed to keep. There was also a second, more selfish motive at play. Clay had grown possessive of his roommate. He couldn’t risk bringing a new young man into the brownstone for fear he might discover Freddy’s magic and try to claim him. It wasn’t just neighborhoods that were gentrified; people with personalities the size of a borough could be co-opted too.

  On those nights out, Clay took the subway almost as far as it ran. On the subway map, Lower Manhattan appeared as a massive octopus head, a bundle of nerves and glands, and its tentacles stretched out in every direction. Clay sometimes had to go all the way into the octopus head to follow a tentacle tip out as far as the airport. Climbing aboveground, Clay quickly dove underneath it again, into basement clubs where music and lights and friends spun around in the soupy, subterranean dark. He took his shirt off and danced for hours under metal pipes that heated strangers’ apartments and flushed away their waste. And sometimes he would go home with strangers, black boys or Asian boys or white boys or some combination thereof, to their crowded, boxy apartments in Brooklyn or Queens. He would feel young and happy there, sleeping in snatches beside these smooth bodies whose first names he didn’t quite catch. In these foreign beds, his sanity would briefly return and he’d decide that it was time to live full time in the New York of the present. He needed a real job. He needed to face his father, who thought he was still in Italy working at a museum. He needed a boyfriend, someone his own age and steady, rather than this occasional, semi-anonymous catch-and-release. Clay would slip out before the stranger awoke and take the train back to Bed-Stuy, often sharing a subway car with zombied morning rush-hour commuters. He’d shut the door of the brownstone, clean up a night’s worth of crushed Newport Lights packets, and breathe a sigh of relief. The real world would always be there. He wasn’t ready to pin his life to it yet.

  There was such little money that Clay started to impose austerity measures, like cutting Freddy’s hair himself in the kitchen and canceling the cable service. They already bundled themselves in coats and blankets at all hours to keep the thermostat as low as possible. Freddy cried elder abuse at his new haircuts and the television blackout, but even Clay knew these cost-cutting strategies were tantamount to cleaning up an avalanche with a snow shovel. Nevertheless, twice a year, they squeezed enough pennies to buy the cheapest economy tickets to Venice, and Clay and Freddy would race around their favorite city with their hearts hammering and their arms interlocked. Sometimes Freddy would make him study an altar painting for nearly an hour. Even as a onetime museum guard, Clay had never actually witnessed a person brought to tears by a work of art. But Freddy’s shoulders would quake and his eyes leak at the normal Renaissance sight of a Virgin Mary swaddling her newborn ball of light. “Sometimes I’m scared that I’m saying goodbye to them,” Freddy confessed, “that I’ll never see them again, that this is the last time.” Clay squeezed his hand. “We’ll be back. We own the place.”

  The end began as a shortness of breath. Back in New York, Freddy panted when he climbed three flights of stairs and a dry, high-pitched wheeze rattled in his chest like an alarm clock ringing under a blanket. “Are you okay?” Clay asked. Freddy waved him off. “Don’t worry about me. I’m indestructible. I’m part cockroach.” Eventually the wheezing grew constant. “I can’t catch my breath,” Freddy complained before grabbing the cigarette tucked behind his ear. “You’ve got to stop smoking,” Clay shouted. “I’m buying you the patch!” “We can’t afford it!” Freddy bit back, deploying the excuse of tight ends whenever it was convenient. Wheezing led to fainting in the tub. Fainting in the tub led to bloated ankles and vomiting one morning in the kitchen sink.

  One doctor led to two, to five, to ten. The news was bad and getting worse by the hour. Freddy was x-rayed, mined for blood and urine, and forced to stand naked on an old-fashioned counterweight scale. Clay was with Freddy for each test and exam, during which the patient remained uncharacteristically quiet. It was almost possible, as he stood
naked in the mint-green hospital room, to see his heart jittering in his thin chest. Freddy was afraid.

  Clay broke into tears in the taxi on the way back to Jefferson Avenue. He knew what to expect from hospitals and treatments and tall tales from doctors on beating the odds. “Stop it!” Freddy barked. “I’m going to be fine. If you’re going to cry, you have to move out.” He rolled down the window and let the dirty Manhattan wind rinse his face. “Anyway, I can’t die right now. I’ve got too much to live for.”

  “Really?” Clay asked in disbelief, wiping his eyes. “Like what?”

  Freddy laughed. “Well, like you haven’t finished archiving my work yet.”

  Clay knew that all of the photographs had been promised to Gitsy. In truth, he and Freddy had never spoken about the preservation of his archive beyond compiling it into a semi-coherent order. Did its survival matter to Freddy? Did he secretly hope it might secure him a spot in eternity? Clay stared out the window as the taxi lumbered over the Brooklyn Bridge. It occurred to him what a horrible weight it must be to have once been important. What a noxious task to worry over your legacy as your body crumbles like a leaf.

  He turned to Freddy. The shadows of the suspension bridge were slicing the daylight all around them. “Do you mean you want to leave something of value behind?”

  The question had come out crudely, but Freddy didn’t flinch. His fingers, though, rooted around on the back seat until they found Clay’s hand. He said quietly, “I am leaving something of value behind.” They didn’t speak for the rest of the ride home.

  Freddy was convinced he was going to be fine. And to show just how fine he was, he spent the next month smoking and drinking more than usual, putting his lungs and liver to the test. These indulgences were minor in their destruction compared to the internal killers. An Axis of Evil was preying on Freddy’s organs and had been for some time. The hepatitis had ransacked his liver and was running sorties on his kidneys. Cancer was squatting in the shells of his lungs and threatened to move into his bones. The HIV was the indolent superpower leader. It sat back and laughed as it strategically weakened Freddy’s immune system while its rogue-state cronies did the real fighting.