by SK Dyment
She has been trying to tell him in quick emails, but there is no way to fill him in on the events that are affecting their future if he is not there. Her Manhattan, set in a slopped pool of bourbon, begins to slide away from her at her desk. With the grace of the dancer she will someday be, she catches it, wondering why gravity is such a problem in her home.
Camelia finds a letter the next morning by her email remote requesting a meeting with her in New York. It’s from “a woman who was once a female friend of Rudy.” She assumes it to be Natalia, forgiving her for her drunken behaviour by pretending that Camelia is not yet in New York but only just arrived.
She writes back playfully announcing that she is now in New York and invites the “female friend” to meet her in the cocktail lounge of the hotel where she is now staying.
A few hours later, after a two-hour shower alternating between hot and cold taps, Camelia is made-up, dressed attractively, hesitating over lipstick, and eating Tylenols like they are jelly beans.
She paces the restaurant waiting for the arrival of Natalia. She has just taken a seat and ordered a tea when a noisy motorcycle parks outside. A piratey-looking woman strides in and calls her name.
Camelia is glad she subdued the lipstick and feebly raises her teacup in a salute. Wanda walks to her table, sits down with an envelope in a hand that to Camelia’s bugged-out eyes does not seem real. But then, nothing about this woman seems real. “I have to be fast,” says Wanda. “I wouldn’t give the valet my keys.”
“I know how that can be,” says Camelia. “I don’t even remember how I got back here last night.”
“Silence!” says Wanda.
“Are you with Natalia?” asks Camelia, not one to be daunted by a gruff manner and a scuffed jacket.
“Is she a West 108th Street tenant?”
“That’s where she lives, but I was hoping…”
“Yes, Natalia is one of us.”
“Uh-huh,” says Camelia, thinking “one of us” is a euphemism for queer. Then, because no one else is saying anything, she adds, “I was hoping as much. I was thinking I may be one of those as well.”
“All we want to know now is where to contact Rudy.”
“Why?”
“Because he is not doing his job, and because our lawyers want to speak to him at once.”
The valet is tapping on the window.
“This is a legal matter now?” Camelia asks.
“You don’t have to be involved in any of this. It’s Rudy’s problem. We are all past the point of no return on this one, and he can’t hide forever. Look what’s happening to us all.”
“I am entering quite a big decision in my life around this area. But certainly, I know when my feelings have been stirred.” She glances shyly at the saucer. When she looks up, Wanda’s hand is outstretched, palm up, open. Feeling lonely, Camelia takes it.
“Rudy, where is he?” Wanda persists.
Camelia scribbles an email address and some coordinates on a napkin. She is hung over. She notices the napkin is made of linen. She passes it to Wanda, who releases her hand.
“Thank you,” says Wanda, and she smiles. Camelia realizes that the gentle hand that embraced hers was made of rubber rather than skin. Outside, Wanda mounts the chrome-polished bike, winks at the valet, pulls into traffic, and is gone.
Camelia goes back up to her room to have a nap and pack her things. She leaves a note on Natalia’s machine, telling her she had a very nice time, but she is not yet sure if she is “one of them,” and that Natalia’s friends are certainly rougher trade than she thought they would be.
The next morning, Natalia rises and reads Rudy’s quotation once again. She thinks to herself he is being influenced in the wrong direction by these great poets, because he knows so little about what is going on and is not with her in the big city. Natalia writes, “Awareness bias in Taos,” mistakenly encrypts it, fires it off, and goes to her balcony to meditate in her garden of small rocks. Some of them have slipped from the edge. Entertaining Camelia has been a long, tuckering ordeal.
In his treetop perch, where he has only just started considering reuniting with Natalia in a low-profile way and adapting himself slowly, through therapy, back into society, Rudy receives an anagram that reads: “Beware Assassination.”
28.
FOOT-LONG GUS and Swan have been in email contact with Wanda, and they are coming to see New York. They are bringing a baby. It is Swan’s. It is the five-month-old infant of their friend Celeste, born during a past-life regression session with the famed Dr. Tetons Popair. The men are enjoying carrying the little Arnica Montana everywhere they go. They are looking greatly forward to seeing SoHo, Little Italy, Bowery, the small theatres of the Lower East Side, the large theatres of Manhattan, The West Village, The East Village, The Gay Village, the Greenwich Village, the Flatiron building, The Chelsea Hotel, The Manhattan Bridge Arch, The Chrysler Building, The American Museum of Natural History, The Empire State Building, The Hamilton Fish Park, and all the islands and ferries that are available. They have obviously never been to New York before. Wanda tells them that it may be difficult for them to stay at Olesya’s, but that there are many hotels in the area, since the baby is too young for a youth hostel and they are too old. The three visitors arrive on a Wednesday, and book into the Carlton Arms hotel on E 25th Street, with a four-poster bed and a room that is decorated with a fresco of two women making love. It is not what they wanted, but it is queer and the only vacancy they can find. The halls have also been decorated by local muralists, and the stairwell is painted to look like a sky, with floating hats and chairs decorating the blue.
They proceed on Thursday morning to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Edgar Degas and his paintings of girls engaged in ballet studies bewitch little Arnica and send her into fits of squeals. Gus believes in having a disciplined orientation from an early age, while Swan is of the mind that if Arnica is excited by the images, she has a right to express her reactions, even if they are louder and in a sharper octave than the hushed sounds around her. Swan takes her into the men’s room and changes her wet pants so that his childrearing principles will not be shot down by his oblivious boyfriend.
Gus is gazing at Woman with a Parrot by Gustave Courbet, which Cézanne had a photo of in his wallet, and is wondering why it had pissed off Émile Zola. He moves on to Les Demoiselles de village, which Courbet divided into sky and hill. Within the composition are three well-dressed women; one holds a parasol, and one looks on as the third talks and extends her hand to a girl with bare feet who appears to be a fishing rod. She has a large hat pushed away onto her back. He is charmed, and when Swan comes back, he only assumes he has been busy looking at something else. As far as Gus knows, Arnica is dry throughout the visit.
As far as Gus is concerned, Arnica sucks joyfully on soy milk in a bottle, and later an entire infant formula refill, not noticing that Swan dashes her off for three diaper changes in less than an hour.
A tactile infant, Arnica causes Swan to be spoken to twice by security people when he allows her to reach out and touch a seventeenth-century painting of a Madonna with Child. He is spoken to again in another room for letting her touch an eighteenth-century painting of a Madonna with Child, when he was, in fact, simply leaning forward to inspect. He begins to panic, afraid that they will be thrown out before they even enter the nineteenth century, and realizes Gus is a hundred years behind him, looking at a seventeenth-century French sculpture of Leda and the Swan.
In the subway, Arnica is extremely quiet and at ease with the crowd. Later, they find a man’s wallet in her carrier. They argue over whether they should give it to a police officer or drop it in the mail to the last listed address. They decide to put it in a bubble-wrapped envelope. Swan uses a tissue to pick the wallet up and his shirt sleeve to purchase the stamps for fear of leaving fingerprints, as the wallet is so far only covered with baby fingerprints and t
hose of the previous owner.
Because she is drooling anyway, Swan uses the baby as a handy source of saliva for wetting the stamps, while Gus pens in the address of the police station nearest to the subway stop where they found it.
All this takes the better part of an hour, and the two men are tired when they at last visit the area of town near where their friends are staying. They stop for a drink at a bar with a beautiful umbrella-filled terrace out front, and then stop to look at shoes. The shoe salesperson is extremely pleased to have a baby in the store and begins to play with her. Gus brings her out of the baby carrier and lets the shoe salesperson hold her.
“I am going to have a child,” he tells the couple, and then rests his hand on Gus’s tattooed arm. “When Wanda returns, she will marry me,” he adds, and puts a package of shoelaces in the baby’s fingers.
Arnica, who slips her pinky into the ring hanging from the shoe salesperson’s nose, pulls down with all the strength of her new-found muscular abilities. The salesperson screams, and Gus disentangles them. “I think you would be a wonderful father,” says Gus, and he lets the shoe salesperson jiggle the baby in his arms. “Wanda who?”
Swan seizes the moment to duck out the door and inspect the small street-level gallery that neighbours the World of Shoes. There seems to be no one in the gallery when he enters, only a wall painted a ragged pale lake blue, with a new peephole drilled in the centre. He looks for art on the walls, and then notices a number of photos of what seem to be a naked young woman posing next to stone carvings of herself. She poses in the same position as the sculptures but curves her body in a sensuous way around them. She barely looks sixteen, but there is something provocative about her face. The signatures under the photo collection say Skip Donkely, but Swan realizes with a gasp that the model is Vespa, or a very young look-alike, and surely underage. A man in a blue sweater emerges from behind the wall and greets Swan, rubbing his hands together and smiling.
“How much are these?”
“Those are not for sale,” says the man, “but if you want something of this sort…..”
“Do you have others with girls so young in them?” says Swan in a state of dismay.
“That depends on how much you are willing to pay,” the man answers.
Swan feels the breath retreat from his throat. “You have other snapshots of underage girls?”
“I can possibly come by some for you,” says the man, “and depending on your special area of interest, they are not all inexpensive.”
“I am interested in this girl here,” says Swan. “She looks so very much like a friend of mine, very much like her, a friend I met here.”
“You are not from here?”
“Not really,” says Swan.
“One is either born here or from some other place. No one is ‘not really.’”
“I come from up North..”
“A Canadian?” says the man. There is a choked menace to his voice that Swan does not understand.
“I suppose so,” says Swan. “I’m from the territory that straddles northern Ontario and the north of Québec, so I am First Nations, as well as what we call Québecois, which is derivative of…”
“A Canadian! Grave robber! What a monstrosity! The way they sell off their own Indigenous people! They wanted me to sell those bad things in here! I wouldn’t do it! I told them no, no, no!”
“Look, I just told you I identify as Indigenous … I think you are a bit confused.”
Swan takes another look at the naked image of the girl that so resembles Vespa. He commits the signature to memory. “I wouldn’t walk back into your shop if it was raining rocks,” Swan tells him and turns on his heel.
The gallery owner returns to his chair behind the faux-finished wall. “Dammit,” he mumbles to himself. “Lost another sale.”
When Swan re-enters the World of Shoes, Gus has taken Arnica back into his arms and is telling the young man that he must be mistaken. “Please, the woman you are describing sounds like a very good friend of mine, one who would never engage in such adolescent-type antics! You have met my friend and you are fantasizing.”
“You will see, when her belly swells out. Wanda is pregnant with my shoebox baby child.…”
“A look-alike!” says Gus, and he storms out of the store.
“It’s about Vespa?” Swan asks in the street. Arnica Montana begins to cry. Gus has put the snuggly on wrong. He hands her to Swan, who finds that she is wet.
“No, not Vespa, Wanda. I have never been so insulted in my life.”
“Are you certain?” says Swan. “Are you sure an insult to someone else is more serious than one to yourself? Where do you find all the extra indignation?”
The two men cross the street and return to the bar, ordering a plate of curried rice while Swan changes Arnica and composes himself in the mirror. There is no time to wonder who he is, why he is Swan. Gus has been insulted. Gus and his world of untouchable European art. He does not know what Gus is going to say when he comes back out with the baby girl. She is laughing again and reaches out to pull the waitress by the hair.
“I must be suffering from some sort of an infatuation with Wanda. I defended her honour in a rage. Did you see it, Swan? That young man said he had had sex with her. And I was ready to fight him like a cock. I must be infatuated with her. I feel like I am,” Gus tells him, adding, “because of how we met. And you know what I think about women.”
Swan hands the infant to the waitress. “Do you mean you are in love with her?”
“I didn’t say that. Did I say that? I am not in love with her. Like a painting, like a portrait, an infatuation, there is something, there is something I need to discover.”
He takes Swan’s hand before he can pull it away. “I am not in love with her. I am not interested in sleeping with her. I want to be with you for the rest of my life. I will never tire of desiring you.”
“Even if I am a Canadian? Even if I am an American? Even if I refuse to be either one? Even if I have to walk through life with three feet?” asks Swan.
“Pardon me?” says Gus. He smiles for a moment, then takes the baby back from the waitress, who returns with two bowls of ice cream.
“Of course, Swan, I will always love you. But I am extremely distracted by a boyhood memory. It was my first real job. I rescued a girl with one hopelessly frozen hand, lying like marble in the snow. It must have been that museum. It’s made me mad. They have a hundred statues of naked men and women with their noses chipped off their faces next to dinner plates with aroused men chasing each other around and around and around. Who am I in love with? Who was Leda in love with? A swan. You know I believe that we are destined, a closed logic system, and it makes you angry. But I am in love with you. Look how strong this girl is growing.”
“Even if I have to think with three heads? You are so stupid. Leda was in love with a bird. What kind of a culture creates a story that would eroticize this? It’s vulgarization of a beautiful myth, and you stared at that sculpture for half an hour.”
“In a few years, she will walk into that shoe store and demand shoes for foot-long feet.”
“Do you think she’s going to be a ten?” asked Swan.
“An eleven, a thirteen … the largest size for women.”
“Those are men’s sizes, Gus. You are all mixed up.”
“I am mixed-up,” Gus admits.
“I am mixed-blood,” says Swan, “but don’t bother asking how my day went. And I am a man, and I am not Leda’s bird, and I am not your bird. I am a man of First Nations heritage, here in a maze of birds and imagery, and I intend to survive these insults and thrive in it.”
“Don’t you see,” says Gus, “I defended her because I believe I knew her as a child. This missing hand. It must be her. But I, I am Leda.”
“That’s why you stared at that thing for an hour. In love with a Swan.�
�
“Yes, if you are not in love with Celeste.… I am in love with you.”
“Touching. I courted a few ladies, and many men, before I realized I myself was fond of you, as preoccupied and bad as you may be.”
The baby cries. Swan takes her in his arms. “She’s yay long, and yay tall, and all happiness and sunshine and dry pants and never mind Gus. He’s silly, so fait la bête, and ignore his obsession with Wanda. Arnica will walk in bare feet like the girl in Les Demoiselles de village.”
“Yes, darling, there is a child in a painting by a man named Gustave Courbet. I want her to be that free and happy.”
“I wish the same thing,” says Swan. There is a silence while he thinks.
“I just saw something I didn’t like at all. More crass than the shoe salesperson. Photos of Vespa, I believe, posing with sculptures. As a mixed-medium. She has size seven feet, is about sixteen years old, and naked as the day she was born. On the wall across the street.”
“You admire her.”
“I am disturbed by this idea of her being exploited. And I want to talk to her very much.”
A smile warms Gus’s face. “Oh look, sweetheart. Nudle s houbami.”
29.
ALASKA IS FURIOUS that such a large donation of money has been offered anonymously to spring Olesya out on bail. Olesya is free. It is more than enough, and once Olesya is spoken to during a rare, in fact, her only visit by Jackie, she decides it is tactically important to co-operate with the order that she stay away from the gallery next to World of Shoes and to report to a bail officer twice a week so that she is not able to leave the city.
The owner of the Gilera has located a new motorcycle of the same vintage model and in the same lousy condition in Belgium, and it has been purchased with Vespa’s credit card. It cost over four thousand British pounds, and Vespa is wondering who deposited all of the money in her account. She looks at Jackie in an accusatory way, as if depositing money in someone’s bank account behind their back is some sort of crime.
