by SK Dyment
Vespa looks at Jackie darkly. “Did I remember to say the work is very passionate? I think I’ll go now,” she tells Jackie, and she leaves quickly, tossing the helmet with a clatter behind her at the door.
“Well … we won’t let that bother us,” Jackie tells the welding machine, and instead of pursuing Vespa, she removes slag with a light chipper hammer, then strikes the difficult arc again and nods into her helmet.
24.
AFTER PHONING FROM Toronto, Ben and Wanda are returning to New York. They are riding in on Ben’s rebuilt Triumph 750V Trident and they are having the time of their lives. In a apologetic attempt to win back Vespa, Jackie has traded the use of a rare Gilera Speciale Strada with a yuppy journalist for an exclusive interview with The Village Voice describing her amnesia incident and her correspondence with Olesya. It was a bribe and she accepted. She even allows herself to be photographed as the reformed ex-con.
Vespa is ecstatic and in love with her again while Jackie’s face is in The Village Voice as a previous felon for the sake of Olesya’s amnesic loop.
Feeling angry and wild-blooded, she binges on a weekend in an expensive hotel near Lake Placid. Wanda and Ben join them, and they watch the moon rise over artificial water while she holds Vespa’s hand on a midnight walk through a members-only golf course in her biker boots. Jackie has now outed herself as a struggling artist who is also a semi-notorious criminal. She has a strung-out, three-sheets-to-the-wind feeling that an FBI agent will make a sound-bite match of her interview style with the way she screamed in the gallery and robbed the bank. She kisses her lover, feeling unable to make a good judgement about anything emotional anymore that is not Vespa’s body. She fears that by caving in to the interview, she has just set herself up for a devastating replay of her previous time behind bars.
On the bike, Vespa is thrilled at the speeds Jackie achieves, fully confident in her mastery of the bike and her control and handling of a stranger’s machine. Jackie is shocked to realize that she pushes 160 klicks an hour almost the whole way, awed that her passenger is happy and calm.
When they picnic in the mountains, Wanda suggests Ben undress so that the women can sit clothed around the picnic basket like a sexist Manet. The two begin to discuss war and Degenerate art, and Ben mentions Paul Klee as an influential image-maker, complaining he was torn from the walls of Dresden and Düsseldorf by German censors for having a primitivist sensibility. Wanda becomes furious because Klee was quoted as saying that the feminine world was intellectual and emotional with no sense of humour. Ben remarks that Wanda’s inability to perceive satire makes Klee right.
Wanda cites Joan Miró’s Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird as a much more threatening form of Surrealism, and to prove it she throws one. The bird flies away; Ben does not laugh. Vespa and Jackie go for a walk.
“I know that you got this bike for me, for this trip, and I know that you have to give it back.”
“I might buy it,” says Jackie in a shoot-from-the-hip way, because she has no idea how else she would acheive her plan of chopping the beautiful Speciale Strada and hybridizing it with the power of Gilera track racers without telling the person who lent it to her what she has done. If she does, she will have to pull money out of various places she has stashed it over the years, and if she does it without telling them, it will have to be enough to mend the broken heart of the owner. If she does modify the borrowed bike as she feels compelled to do, and give in to her limited impulse control, it is going to be an extremely expensive social faux pas, made worse by her scary new, hot off the press, public persona of Jackie, the Reformed Crook.
“I want you to promise me that you have retired as a criminal,” says Vespa, kicking through leaves. “Ben had a brush with that through Rudy long ago, and a lot of people are going to be talking about you. I want you to promise me that you will not steal or rob things anymore. If you can promise this, I think I can save your reputation.”
“Okay, I promise,” says Jackie, lying. “But what about stealing something like a big, sweet plum sitting on the top of a fruit bowl when no one is around?”
“Jackie, if you promise me, I’ll do what I can to salvage your reputation as a serious artist, a person with a vision, a person people trust….”
“No problem with salvage. Together let’s go to every salvage place in New York State. We can trade buy an old pickup and go from here to Ohio looking for interesting pieces of bent, distorted, and hopeless warped-out-of-shape steel.”
“And aluminum, you have such a sensitive touch with this medium. I can’t wait until Ben sees your work on the glider cat.”
“Yes, I’m good with it. I could weld a house of beer cans, a canoe out of flashing.”
“You drive like my mother used to drive. Very, very fast. When I am with you, I feel like I am rocking in a cradle.”
They reach the end of their path and the trail winds off in two directions at once. Vespa looks up at Jackie, her eyes flooded with love.
“Let’s turn back, back to the primitivist degenerates.”
“Good memory,” says Vespa. “I was just going to call them the babes in the woods.”
Instead, she takes Vespa in her arms and kisses her, the old trees whispering above them. “I love you,” says Jackie.
“I love you more,” says Vespa. “I wish you could see how bound to you I am. It’s hopeless for anyone else to attempt their charms on me. If you hurt me, I will pull away, but I think it’s too late for you to lose me.”
Jackie brushes the hair from Vespa’s eyes. “I will always love you as you are right now,” says Jackie. “Such soft shadows under the trees, you, so beautiful, so desired by others, choosing me.”
Vespa smiles. Her eyes admire Jackie’s squared jaw, the frightened, tough, unquenchable spirit in her eyes.
They make love, and later, they ride back into New York in a mood of fulfilment and tranquillity, the engines humming beneath them as Vespa and Jackie swap spots. Jackie begins to ruminate on her desire not to lose her life, and something stirring in her about her own mortality makes her think perhaps she isn’t the morally corrupt person she used to believe she was.
Vespa continues to push the Gilera Speciale Strada up to 180 klicks, passing and then waiting for her brother and Wanda, who snail along at 125 klicks for most of the journey. The gun up to 150 klicks for a straightaway chase with Vespa as the countryside opens out around them and the wind presses against their faces until they are forced to grin.
They are both ticketed as they enter the suburban areas that surround the city.
“Jupiter and Saturn did play,” Jackie tells the police officer, but since she is only a passenger, he dismisses her explanation. They stop and inquire as to whether or not the restaurant has noodles and cheese, and Jackie is tempted to playfully impersonate Olesya’s voice and order a wheat germ smoothie. She realizes this is something she must never do.
25.
A MAGAZINE HAS TAKEN photos of Jackie’s Didactic Aluminum Cat, presenting it as work she has done for the Condo Owner’s Association of West 108th Street, and Vespa has made the photographer focus on the fine weld work and elaborate interpretation that Jackie has made from Vespa’s sketches. The magazine profiles not only Jackie, but a collection of Vespa’s other metal work, even publishing a few photos of the stone sculptural works she won custody of after she sued Skip Donkely.
The photos she had shot were all she had left of her stone sculpture, and she had sold the sculptures at the time for the price of a hydro bill. Donkely’s name is not used to promote Vespa, and Vespa is not particularly used to promote Jackie.
It isn’t everything, but it is a start.
Hang-Gliding Cat is sold to a gliding club, on the agreement that it may be used as a mascot for the Condo Owner’s Association, who receive a small gratuity every time someone pays to try the glider and it is seen as a cat ethereally falling through the sk
ies above the club. It soon becomes locally famous, and Alaska acquires a collection of article clippings with photos of the flying machine that she sends to Olesya.
Olesya has been determined to have had a nervous breakdown, after her amnesia argument was rejected by the court. Her lawyer has quit the case after declaring her specialty was real-estate disputes rather than criminal law. Olesya’s mental health is being reassessed in an infirmary, which Olesya declares is a Soviet psychoprison.
Her most memorable statement is that if any of the doctors around her were put on Haloperidol for a week they would be twitching, drooling, convulsing, and they would be unable to rest or to sleep.
None of these things have happened to her—she is not even on drugs—and Wanda is furious. She tells Olesya to read about the use of neuroleptic drugs experienced by protesters and dissenters of the Soviet system who were submitted to this abuse. She sends Olesya collections of Natalya Gorbanevskaya’s writings, a poet who was imprisoned after protesting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and one of hundreds diagnosed with a psychiatric condition when they were only challenging the State.
“Be careful,” says Ben, his voice echoing in the workshop. “I’ve made a bath for the aluminum. I want to braze these pieces together once they are perfectly clean.”
Ben and Jackie are working together on a new glider: A folding Squirrel that can carry over four hundred pounds and snaps together like a kit for kids.
“Isolation, that’s not good,” says Jackie, who has been reading everything Wanda dug up on the topic of totalitarian abuse. Ben nods his head.
“Being out of control of your body is equally frightening, I think,” he tells her.
“How do you know?” Jackie asks. “You have never been incarcerated! You have no idea what it is like not to have any control over how people are going to behave towards you. Believe me, in prison, you have to figure out the whole thing by yourself, understand someone else’s idea of punishment and reform, and all out of sight of everyone. If they kick you, if they hurt you, if you hurt yourself, it is out of the view of the bourgeoisie. There is an eye on you all the time, but it is a punitive eye, and an eye that judges the concealment of your spirit as a sign that you are rehabilitating.”
“Are you saying people are born with destinies, or are you saying people are born free and then they fuck-up?”
“I would never say that we are born fated. I think that is a philosophical concept that serves the State. And I don’t want to get into one of your theological dialogues, or your uncle’s ‘existence of God’ arguments that rattle around in your head. I am how I am, and yes, I fucked-up, but unless you are very wealthy and well-connected, the time in a prison is generally considered a descent into Hades, not a rehabilitation. It’s a retaliation for the abuse other people in society have heaped on the warders. And to those who appeal for help, many people will say, ‘Well, it’s not supposed to be the Hilton, you know. It’s meant to deter.’ As if society is not creative enough to come up with productive ways to deal with people who break laws, besides trying to break them in spirit.”
Ben gingerly sets down the piece of metal he is rinsing before applying a weld. “Trapped inside my body all that time, I made connections to freely associated ideas, incarnated my own primitive images, and touched the places where the spirits within our mind ignite life. Because I had nothing much else to do, lying there presumed vegetative, I travelled around in my unconscious and, over time, I got to know it like a taxi driver knows a town! When I began to speak again, you were in my garage, doing a check on my brake mechanism like a real pro. But I really resented you when you looked at my spasms and they made you discuss me like a damaged machine. In front of my face. I wanted to throw you all out on your asses, to tell you the truth.”
“I saw that, Ben, and I feel ashamed. I was uncomfortable because of your physical condition. I’m sorry,” Jackie says.
“You were horrified! My convulsive movements made you feel like I was not ‘all there’ as people like to phrase it. That’s a scary feeling of not being in control.”
“Maybe because some of them you now admit were hostile and aimed at me. Maybe you picked that up. But I also saw grace in you. I actually wondered why society so often takes real battles, like yours, if you’ll forgive me, like mine, and hides them behind walls. I wasn’t in the best condition myself at that time if you recall. But I didn’t call you a broken machine!”
Ben laughs, shakes his head, and picks out a brazing rod for the aluminum.
“I didn’t know you would recover like that. It was different than anything I had seen before.”
Ben takes his aluminum, and dips it in a pickle liquor bath, then rinses it, and repeats until the surface is perfectly clean. Like Jackie, he is methodical about good work.
“Where art seeks form, it finds the human spirit,” says Jackie.
“Who’s that a quote of?”
“Me.” She starts up her grinder so that conversation is impossible.
Both Ben and Jackie have spent whole days working together in near silence. Neither one will tell the other that they have been tormented by images of their work partner’s suffering each night as they sleep.
Jackie lets the grinder moan down to a stop and consults the blueprints she and Ben have drawn together. Next to them lies a newspaper with Olesya quoted in the middle section. She is drifting out of interest to the public.
“We should get her a proper lawyer,” says Jackie.
“Why?”
“Ever been struck on the head and ended up rigged and framed for something you don’t even remember doing wrong?”
“I guess a bike accident is like that. I’ve never been to jail,” Ben says.
“Bullshit,” says Jackie.
“Never. Rudy and I must have stolen a dozen cars at least and parked them in unexpected places. We never sold them. Never bragged. Never caught. But there was more. Rudy used to safe-crack, break locks and find his way in. Never made a mess. Never got caught. Always acquired the most interesting things.”
“Isn’t Rudy Vespa’s old flame? The one who is up with B.F. Turner’s Conglomerate? The sellout Rudy?”
“Same. But he’s left behind some very interesting scraps, which is pretty sloppy, and not like him at all. I don’t think he thought I was going to pull through my coma with my wits. Either that or he thought I would never challenge him. I am.”
“What do you have?”
“Some papers I safe-cracked from his deceased father’s safe in the basement of his old family place. Went in and had a tea with his mom.”
They look together at the envelope Wanda had earlier hidden down her pants.
“So, Rudy has never been caught?” Jackie asks.
“Over a hundred break and enters, over thirty grand theft autos. And something to do with the benign presence of the new man his mother married after he lost his father.”
“Who was that?”
“The man who killed his father. Big-time criminal. Police fink. Protected. Same man his father set out to kill. Night of deceit that took a twist. Mama never had a clue.”
“Was Wanda interested in this stuff?”
Ben cautiously pours a collection of receipts, frayed-looking, and time-stained papers and notes across the table.
“Nah, she was hoping it would be money.”
“What is it?” Jackie turns away, displays disinterest, the opposite of what she is feeling.
“Mementos. Even if he didn’t leave with the money, he always left with something of value to the place he broke into. Receipts, chequebooks, must have bugged the life outta them. The only thing I wanted in this package was the photo of my ’65 CZ, unmangled.” He shows Jackie the photo, evidence of Rudy’s affection.
Jackie smiles. “Were they mementos or a collection of blackmail devices? Bombs waiting to go off?”
&nb
sp; “All of it, certainly. All of it he could have blackmailed the owners with. You can see he stole fudged books and good books because the real accountancy was always in the safe. But as far as I can tell, I don’t think he ever blackmailed anyone. Of course, they are now something that Rudy could be blackmailed with himself.”
Jackie turns to the pile on the table, examining the scraps Ben has poured across Olesya’s spread in the newspaper.
“Yeah, fudged versions of the books and the real accounts, dated the same days: 1997, 1999, 1991, 1995, all paper-clipped together. Any auditor got their hands on this, he could have put the whole operation out of business, and there are dozens. And other kinds of insider files and records of company tactics, secrets and tricks of the trade, and notes on the competing companies, some of which were stolen by transferring secretaries and paying people off.”
“Dirty business school from the ground up.”
“I don’t know if it was over his head or what, but he certainly was primed when he walked into Turner’s office. Vespa always said Rudy was bad to the bone, but he couldn’t have been that bad if he never capitalized on this.”
“Probably afraid.”
“I guess…..” While Jackie looks on, Ben scoops the material back into the envelope and puts it into the bottom of a tools drawer, shrugging in a way that means he does not want to discuss his relationship with the owner of its contents. He sweeps the newspaper clean again.
“What do you think Olesya meant by ‘psychoprison’? You think she’s alright in there?”
“Ask Alaska. She sees her often enough. It’s not as bad as she describes. She’s not drugged, but I’m sure she’s not all right. The last time I got out of the can, I was so surprised at how isolated people are on the outside because I had been so lonely inside the walls. And I really started to think about it. I mean, we need our communities or we’re nothing. Not cliques, not destructive little cults, but the unity of contact and dialogue with many ideas, many people. We may have our own power of one, but a person can become divided on the inside, and even once they are free, divided they will fall.”
