That night, in the 7B bar, Eli Hammond and I drank like we were vying for a trophy. While we did, he told me about witnessing the Meir Kahane murder, which had happened three months before. “Gunfire that close makes a big impression,” he said. How his ears rang from the volume of the blast, with the gunman so close, the guy ran right over the shattered plates of cake Eli had dropped, tracking blood and frosting as he fled. “I was so buzzed. I don’t think I slept for three days afterward.”
The next noon I found myself nude in bed, a pair of men’s underwear balled up by my foot, a faded and frayed pair of Fruit of the Looms. I felt a hammering across my forehead. He was gone. And the phone did not ring, and I did not have his number.
Remember that you could go hours and days wondering. The phone simply would not ring. The phone hung there in your dingy bedroom in your underfurnished apartment, utterly inert, a plastic wart on the wall, and it simply didn’t ring. Finally you had to stop waiting and emerge from your room and live your life.
Two weeks passed after that meeting in the bar at Seventh and B, and one day during my lunch break, feeling restless and lonely and hating Grady Advertising and Michael Hutcherson, I determined that I again needed to see the Jackson Pollocks on Fifty-Third Street. I liked to soak myself in the dribbled palette of fifties pinks and olives and blacks and silvers. I liked to muse on the cracks in the enamel he used, paints meant to be applied to cars and houses, and though his paintings were not so old, they were already splitting and flaking with time. There was one, called One, that had a Cadillac pink that truly slayed me. It still does.
Afterward I’d often go to the museum cafeteria, and sometimes I would sketch there, or read a book. This time, tables were mostly occupied, spring break, the town full of tourists. One free spot in the corner.
At the next table, a young man in a faded red T-shirt and jeans, golden skin revealed at their slashed knees. He wore a Walkman, they were relatively new, and it still seemed strange to see people sealed off in a private sound bubble, not sharing the aural world occupied by the rest of us. His eyes were closed. I sat in the chair opposite him and slid my sketchbook from my bag. The planes of his face, angular, the sideburns and the emphatic chin, the whiskey-sheen hair, in disarray, just brushing past his ears. The boy obviously did not own a comb. Of course I began to sketch him.
“I should have called,” he said. Suddenly his eyes were open. Evening blue. Reflections of the room’s pendant lights, like quavering stars.
I blushed and put down my pencil. “I’m sorry, I hope you don’t mind. I just . . .”
“Abby, right?”
“Right.”
“I wanted to call,” he said. “I had a girlfriend. Then. I don’t now.”
A half hour later we were in his bed and this time I remembered everything. I still do. I remember this though so much else is gone.
He lived in that tenement building on Avenue C, deliciously decrepit, shared with a few of his equally alluring friends. Sneakers and bootleg videos and ragged comic books lying open everywhere. I think we must have spent twenty-four hours that day, in his allotted chamber, just big enough to fit his bed, fucking to exhaustion, then recharging ourselves by listening to the music winding up the fire escape and swirling through the window, sinuous snakes of sound. We pounded our bare feet against the wall to the beat of the cumbia flickering up from below.
He’d dropped out of Columbia film school after losing his scholarship due to chronic class-skipping. (“It’s a long way uptown,” he sighed, a little ruefully.) His interest, after the Kahane assassination, was drifting toward photojournalism anyhow. And he had those cameras of his grandfather’s, the ones that had seen battle on the Eastern Front. So to afford film and rent, he took on more shifts pouring ice water and wine in the Marriott ballroom, black blazer with his engraved name badge. And every Monday and Tuesday he worked an overnight shift at the free newspaper, pasting up classifieds for massage parlors and pyramid schemes and miracle cures. And ducking into the darkroom to develop his film when no one else was around.
Three weeks after we met, I quit my job. And so, when he wasn’t working, we were together, at his apartment or mine, where we had more privacy, since my roommate Gregory was rarely around. I would sit in Eli’s lap on the wobbly old bench on the balcony. We smoked his cigarettes and flicked the butts into the rain-filled ash bucket. Recounting for each other essential episodes in our personal histories, laughing about the stupid things we’d done, as if the stupidity of youth was already behind us, which of course it was not, our hands exploring each other under our clothes, the warm realms of air and skin, the dense insistence of his cock, proclaiming itself. We often invited it out into the night air, it was dark enough there, high up above the little gardens that filled the block’s core, and it felt secluded, even if perhaps it wasn’t. His was the most beautiful I’d ever seen or will see, the strangeness of that, still, that a cock could be beautiful. It was. We’d fuck against the railing or on the damp crumbling cement, not particularly comfortable but we were well beyond caring about that. It seemed significant, what we were doing. So important that we wanted any bird or cloud or star passing over this canyon to witness it, two humans pursuing pleasure, maybe even—as we might have felt it—transcendence, defying every mundane thing in this world up to and including mortality.
This is the memory that unfolded in my mind as I sat in that very same bar twenty-two years later. The place still beer-stinking, still tattered, a baseball game still slowly and silently unspooling on the TV hung in the gloom. Waiting to meet the detective.
My home life had buckled under a hail of flame and ash. I wanted to seek refuge in a dark place. And maybe also defy mortality. I’m at that age now, after all. I knew it was a terrible and foolish impulse, to reach out to him.
He had texted back: You know that place at 7th and B? We could meet there, maybe?
Yes. Yes, of course I knew the place.
Everyone does.
THE LITTLE BABY ALBUMS I’d so diligently filled out had been transformed into stiff sheaves, more like wood than paper, by the time the flames passed through and the hoses had drenched the rooms and the flood had dried.
“The house is sixty-eight percent inhabitable,” the deputy fire marshal had told us, the day after. The four of us stood with him in the small front yard, bleary-eyed from a sleepless night at a Times Square tourist hotel. Neighborhood kids horsed around on the sidewalk behind us, gleeful at this unusual excitement on the block. The fire marshal, a square-shaped man, smoothed his luxuriant mustache as he surveyed the scene. “You could live in there, but you better hope it won’t rain.” He gestured toward the sky with a jerk of his head. “And it’s kinda looking like rain.”
How could we make such a decision, where we would live, whether we sleep in the rain? Dennis and I couldn’t even locate our own house, we were so dumbfounded still—coming from the hotel via subway, we actually wandered too far down the block, missing number 312 completely, and it was Pete who said, “Where the hell are you going?” The black gaping monster mouth across the second-floor facade, bits of charred wood and plaster dribbling out of it like crumbs of its last meal. The shriveled leaves hanging in a black fringe on the Rose of Sharon bush that had been on the verge, just yesterday, of bursting into purple blossom. As we gazed at the mess, Dennis just kept saying “I don’t fucking believe it,” and I really couldn’t say anything at all. My voice box seemed to be one more thing left twisted by the blaze.
The boys were the ones who first started picking through the rubble. They found the baby books. Also the black bird painting, water-damaged, gradations of darkness muddled into a mess. Ruined, really, though Dennis insisted that he would take it directly to the best restorer in the city. His Circles in Repose sculpture suffered just a few scorch marks, which he claimed added gravitas and might be just the thing that would finally vault the piece to greatness. “I’m going to show it to the Vienna curators,” he said to me. “Straight out
of the smoking ruins.”
“You think?”
“Turn disasters into happy accidents,” he said. “It’s the only way.”
I stared at him. I wanted and needed his comfort and solidity. But in my pocket I still had the key marked with the M. I hadn’t yet said a word about it.
The fire marshal found the staircase structurally sound. The master bedroom had been mostly spared, though water damage happened there too, of course, as the great hoses rained down. The boys’ rooms were a blackened zone, with the gaping front wall. In Ben’s closet, I salvaged a tiny pair of yellow rain boots.
Meanwhile, Dennis and the marshal yanked open the heat-warped basement door, descended to check on the boiler and water systems. They came up smudged and coughing, Dennis carrying something under his arm. A brown rectangle. He sank to the floor, kneeling with his head hung over the wrapped painting. “It was the water heater,” said the fire marshal. “A blast of steam and flame down through the pipes, just blasted everything within range.” He clapped his hands on his pants.
“All the paintings,” said Dennis miserably, “except this one, it wasn’t with the others.” A torn paper corner, exposing brilliant green, glistening, tissue in a wound.
All the paintings. The boys continued to sort through the wreckage. I wandered back upstairs, to the blackened hole. I sat on the floor, staring through the hole at the clouds. Then I noticed a charred paper half under the bed, with fat lettering: OUR TIME IS NOW. And an unfamiliar Brooklyn address, and a date and time. Under it, handwriting, Pete’s loopy scrawl. It read: “We will not only fight, but come out better for having struggled with and for one another. Perhaps we will not only make a life from within the ruins, but create a new world.”
THE RUINS. The words swivel through my mind every waking moment, even as I am back at work, sitting at my desk, trying to focus. The smoking ruins. A week later, they still haven’t made any determination about how and where the conflagration began.
Maybe I’d lit the spark, somehow, that afternoon. Mariah’s gas burner. Dennis’s lunch with the ordained powers. Was she on the board of Viennarte, had I read that somewhere?
Much of the afternoon was not recoverable in my mind.
Driving Dennis home from his lunch meeting, my legs hot on the vinyl seat, speechless with fury in our broken-down Isuzu, weak air-conditioning, and my husband in a daze, still half-blinded by the spotlight cast upon him.
Me, standing under a cool shower, trying to get the car sweat off me.
Some pointless argument between the boys, which ended in Pete shoving Benjamin into the banister upstairs.
And Gianna talking about candles.
And Pete and Dimitri Petimezas and the boys’ wet clothes and the chlorine smell.
And the truck driver flattened on Flatbush Avenue.
And the text I sent that said meet me.
And the blue flower of flame.
And the ginger chews.
And the red spiral.
My head throbbing, something trying to escape, some bulging thought too big for my skull.
A, finding scraps of burned foil and smoky glass in a shoebox under a bed on Avenue C.
A, falling with her arms wrapped around the boy, falling into a void where memory ceased.
A, a shadow against shadows, seen through a bedroom window that no longer exists.
A, flicking out of sight down the block, a flash of red, a bird vanishing into forest.
And, just before that, opening a fortune cookie at Szechuan Palace. Empty, without fortune.
That means you can write your own, said Benjamin.
Or you’re going to die tomorrow, said Pete.
Looking into his eyes, so like mine, like hers, sitting in that dingy familiar clattering eatery with the half-consumed platter of kung pao chicken spread before us.
Now what kind of thing is that to say, scolded Dennis. I will give Mom my fortune. He handed me the slip of paper.
A GREAT CHANGE IS COMING YOUR WAY.
FOR MY RENDEZVOUS WITH THE DETECTIVE, I sat on the very same stool at the bar at Seventh and B, just on the cusp of the curve, that I had chosen the night I first met Eli Hammond. Don’t ask me why. A group of suit-and-tie boys clustered at the other end of the bar, erupting in howls of laughter every now and then. A few women, moms on a night out perhaps, drank martinis across the bartender’s pit. Everyone looked clean, pressed. Yes, the place was still crusty and gloomy, but the ragged patrons of former days had been somehow spirited away, and so the bar’s crust and gloom had the faux quality of a historical re-creation.
When he arrived, he leaned over to brush a kiss on my cheek, discreet, in this public place, but unmistakably imbued with heat. He too looked clean and pressed. He sat beside me, his eyes on mine. Mirrors in a dark room. Shining but revealing little. Three weeks had passed since I’d suggested we meet, but then that was the day of the fire. And then everything after. It had begun to seem like a bad idea again. But here we were. Was the old stool wobbling under me? I certainly felt woozy.
We both ordered beers, nothing too strong, I think we both understood it was best to keep our wits about us. I told him a few things about the conflagration, about living in the hotel, about the burned baby books.
“And my friend Pete, how is he faring through all of this? Steering clear of trouble, I hope?”
I smiled and nodded. “Just, you know, busy with school.” I gulped down the remainder of my beer.
“Chief of detectives announced his retirement today.” He swigged his beer. “Major reshuffling ahead.”
“You’re going for the job, I hope.”
He shrugged. “I need to break a big case. Your pal, Pizziali, he’s up against me.”
“That guy?” I laughed. “I wouldn’t think he’d be much competition.”
“He’s not, but he is. He’s a determined little fucker, and he is hot on this antifa so-called brigade, wants to tag it up as domestic terror.” He shook his head at me. “I think it’s garbage, Abby, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Stupid kids’ stuff, really.”
We fell into a long silence.
“So . . . how are your girls?” I asked.
“Nina is obsessed with the Titanic. It’s a bit morbid, she’s encyclopedic on who died, ages, and nationalities. Marlie, she’s still into princesses, so, you know, everything is pink and sparkly in her world.”
He didn’t mind talking about his kids, but clearly, he didn’t want to be talking about his kids.
I didn’t want to talk about my kids either. Or my house. Or my troubles.
I wanted to be like her again.
I reached under the shadow of the bar and took his hand. Looked again into his eyes. “I wonder what we should do,” I said.
“What feels good to you?” he said, voice low.
Around the blurry edges of my vision, the other people in the bar had evaporated, the bar had unfolded to emptiness, we were alone, a pair of voyagers.
“You do,” I said. The aliveness was extreme. Like living every day of my life all at once. Bone, skin, veins vibrating with it.
“I’d like to just stay right here, in this moment, in this place,” I said.
“Then that’s how it will be,” he said. “Always.”
He lifted my hand and kissed it. Then he pulled his phone from his pocket. “Should I find us a hotel nearby? Or we could cab it to the Marriott.”
ABBY, JUNE 11, 2015
Mariah’s show at MoMA, almost at the end of its run. As I walked to find lunch, threading through sun-dazed throngs along Fifth Avenue, I realized I wanted to go. I wanted to see her work hanging there in the spacious hush. I stepped into the museum, its air-conditioning and quiet enveloping me, sudden as a plunge into a perfectly cool pool.
When I saw her work, I tasted salt. Tears. Three rooms hung with large paintings, optimistic, powerful, defiant, shouting a dare to the universe. I dare you to ignore me, they said. It is impossible. I cried because I l
oved them so. They made me want to dare. I was so grateful for them. And for her, truly. She was a master, and we had been young together, and I admired her so. And, apparently, she had fucked my husband.
The complex snarl of emotions overtook me. Quite blindly, I drifted from these galleries, rode the escalators down, and then I found myself on the floor of the Pollocks. I turned from the corridor into the room of One, the large mural-sized work, as big as the side of a tractor trailer, athrob with splattered energy.
Like something out of quantum physics, matter birthing.
Standing in front of the painting, too close: a young woman in a pale denim jacket.
Studying it, her whole body yearning toward it, her face inches away.
Really, too close. I glance around. Where are the guards? None in sight.
I take a step or two closer. But then I freeze.
She reaches her hand toward the painting.
No motion sensors? Were there motion sensors, back then?
Holding my breath. I watch as she traces a crack with her fingers.
And then a small flake flutters to the floor.
She has defaced the Pollock.
She bends to pick it up.
She turns to leave, staring at the chip of paint in her hand. As she comes near, I can see it’s about the size and color of an eyelid.
I block her as she’s hurrying from the room.
Did you actually do that, I say. I am enraged. She is a defacer. Destroyer.
She registers shock as she recognizes me. She presses her hand to her side. That chip of paint, hidden in her fist.
It’s a little good-luck charm, she says, trying to maneuver past me.
I grab her arm.
You are so lucky, I say. So very lucky. He dies. You don’t.
Look, she says. I know you want to help me. I don’t want to hurt you. It’s just. Her eyes go wide and dark. I’m not you. You are just a person looking at art on the wall. I will be on the wall.
I release her. Absorbing the blow. And then she’s gone, of course. The painting is still there. As ever, pulsating, vibrating, hurling itself through time.
You Again Page 12
