by Colum McCann
I slapped him once across the face, surprised at how hard it stung my hand. I rose from the dock. The wooden boards creaked. The dock was old and useless, jutting out into the pond like a taunt. I walked over the hard mud, toward the cabin. Up on the porch, I pushed open the door, stood in the middle of the room. It smelled so musty inside. Like months of bad cooking.
This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.
We had been happy, Blaine and me, in the cabin over the past year. We had chased the drugs from our bodies. Rose each morning clear- headed.
Worked and painted. Carved out a life in the quiet. That was gone now. It was just an accident, I told myself. We had done the right thing. Sure, we’d left the scene, but maybe they would have searched us, discovered the coke, the weed, maybe they would have set Blaine up, or found out my family name, put it all over the newspapers.
I looked out the window. A thin stream of moonlight skidded on the water. The stars above were little pinpoints of light. The longer I looked the more they seemed like claw marks. Blaine was still on the dock, but stretched out lengthwise, almost a seal shape, cold and black, as if ready to slip away off the dock.
I made my way through the dark to the kerosene lamp. Matches on the table. I flicked the lamp alive. Turned the mirror around. I didn’t want to see my face. The cocaine was still pumping through me. I turned the lamp higher and felt its heat rise. A bead of sweat at my brow. I left the McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 122
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dress in a puddled heap, stepped to the bed. I fell against the soft mattress, lay facedown, naked, under the sheets.
I could still see her. Most of all it was the bottoms of her feet, I had no idea why, I could see them there, against the dark of the tarmac. What is it that had made them so very white? An old song came back to me, my late grandfather singing about feet of clay. I buried my face further in the pillow.
The latch on the door clicked. I lay still and trembling—it seemed possible to do both at once. Blaine’s footsteps sounded across the floor. His breathing was shallow. I could hear his shoes being tossed near the stove.
He turned the kerosene lamp down. The wick whispered. The edges of the world got a little darker. The flame trembled and righted itself.
—Lara, he said. Sweetie.
—What is it?
—Look, I didn’t mean to shout. Really.
He came to the bed and bent down over me. I could feel his breath against my neck. It felt cool, like the other side of a pillow. I’ve got something for us, he said. He pulled the sheet down to my thighs. I could feel the cocaine being sprinkled on my back. It was what we had done together years ago. I did not move. His chin in the hollow at my low back.
The bristle where he hadn’t shaved. His arm draped against my ribcage and his mouth at the center of my spine. I felt the run of his face down along the back of my body and the very touch of his lips, aloof and root-less. He sprinkled the powder again, a rough line that he licked with his tongue.
He was rampant now and had pulled the sheet fully off me. We hadn’t made love in a few days, not even in the Chelsea Hotel. He turned me over and told me not to sweat, that it would make the cocaine clump.
—Sorry, he said again, sprinkling the coke low on my stomach. I shouldn’t have shouted like that.
I pulled him down by the hair. Beyond his shoulder the faint knots in the ceiling wood looked like keyholes.
Blaine whispered in my ear: Sorry, sorry, sorry.
—
w e h ad or i g ina l l y made our money in New York City, Blaine and me.
In the late sixties he had directed four black- and- white art films. His most McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 123
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famous film, Antioch, was a portrait of an old building being demolished on the waterfront. Beautiful, patient shots of cranes and juggernauts and swinging headache balls caught on
sixteen-
millimeter. It anticipated
much of the art that came behind it—light filtering in through smashed warehouse walls, window frames lying over puddles, new architectural spaces created by fracture. The film was bought by a well- known collector. Afterward Blaine published an essay on the onanism of moviemak-ers: films, he said, created a form of life to which life had to aspire, a desire for themselves only. The essay itself finished in midsentence. It was published in an obscure art journal, but it did get him noticed in the circles where he wanted to be seen. He was a dynamo of ambition. Another film, Calypso, had Blaine eating breakfast on the roof of the Clock Tower Building as the clock behind him slowly ticked. On each of the clock hands he had pasted photographs of Vietnam, the second hand holding a burning monk going around and around the face.
The films were all the rage for a while. The phone rang incessantly. Parties were thrown. Art dealers tried to doorstep us. Vogue profiled him. Their photographer had him dress in nothing but a long strategic scarf. We lapped up the praise, but if you stand in the same river for too long, even the banks will trickle past you. He got a Guggenheim but after a while most of the money was going toward our habits. Coke, speed, Valium, black beauties, sensimilla, ’ludes, Tuinals, Benzedrine: whatever we could find.
Blaine and I spent whole weeks in the city hardly sleeping. We moved among the loud- mouthed sinners of the Village. Hardcore parties, where we walked through the pulsing music and lost each other for an hour, two hours, three hours, on end. It didn’t bother us when we found the other in someone else’s arms: we laughed and went on. Sex parties. Swap parties.
Speed parties. At Studio 54, we inhaled poppers and gorged on champagne. This is happiness, we screamed at each other across the floor.
A fashion designer made me a purple dress with yellow buttons made from amphetamines. Blaine bit the buttons off one by one as we danced.
The more stoned he got, the more open my dress fell.
We were coming in at exits and going out at entrances. Nighttime wasn’t just a dark thing anymore; it had actually acquired the light of morning—it seemed nothing to think of night as having a sunrise in it, or a noontime alarm. We used to drive all the way up to Park Avenue just to laugh at the bleary- eyed doormen. We caught early movies in the McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 124
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Times Square grind houses. Two- Trouser Sister. Panty Raid. Girls on Fire.
We greeted sunrises on the tar beaches of Manhattan’s rooftops. We picked our friends up from the psych ward at Bellevue and drove them straight to Trader Vic’s.
Everything was fabulous, even our breakdowns.
There had been a tic in my left eye. I tried to ignore it but it felt like one of Blaine’s clock hands, moving time around my face. I had been lovely once, Lara Liveman, midwestern girl, blond child of privilege, my father the owner of an automobile empire, my mother a Norwegian model. I am not afraid to say it—I’d had enough beauty to get taxi drivers fighting. But I could feel the late nights draining me. My teeth were turning a tinge darker from too much Benzedrine. My eyes were dull. Sometimes it seemed that they were even taking my hair color. An odd sensation, the life disappearing through the follicles, a sort of tingling.
Instead of working on my own art, I went to the hairdresser, twice, three times a week. Twenty- five dollars a time. I tipped her another fifteen and walked down the avenue, crying. I would get back to painting again. I was sure of it. All I needed was another day. Another hour.
The less work we did, the more valuable we thought we had become.
I had been working toward abstract urban landscapes. A few collectors had been hovering at the edges. I just needed to find the stamina to finish. But instead of my studio, I stepped from the sunlight in Union Square into the comfortable dark of Max’s. All the bouncers knew me.
A cocktail was placed on the table: a Manhattan first, washed down with a White Russian. I was airborne within minutes. I wandered around, chatted, flirted, laughed. Rock stars in the back room and artists in the front.
Men in the women’s bathroom. Women in the men’s, smoking, talking, kissing, fucking. Trays of hash brownies carried around. Men snorting lines of coke through the carcasses of pens. Time was in jeopardy when I was at Max’s. People wore their watches with the faces turned against their skin. By the time dinner rolled around it could have been the next day. Sometimes it was three days later when I finally got out. The light hit my eyes when I opened the door onto Park Avenue South and Seven-teenth Street. Occasionally Blaine was with me, more often he wasn’t, and there were times, quite honestly, I wasn’t sure.
The parties rolled on like rain. Down in the Village, the door of our dealer, Billy Lee, was always open. He was a tall, thin, handsome man. He McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 125
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had a set of dice that we used for sex games. There was a joke around that people came and went in Billy’s place, but mostly they came. His apartment was littered with stolen prescription pads, each script in triplicate with an individual BNDD number. He had stolen them from doctors’ offices on the Upper East Side; he used to go along the ground- floor offices on Park and Madison, kick the air conditioners in, and then crawl through the open window. We knew a doctor on the Lower East Side who would write the prescriptions. Billy was popping twenty pills a day. He said sometimes his heart felt as if it wrapped itself around his tongue. He had a thing for the waitresses at Max’s. The only one who eluded him was a blonde named Debbie. Sometimes I substituted for whichever waitress didn’t make it. Billy recited passages from Finnegans Wake in my ear. The father of fornicationists. He had learned twenty pages by heart. It sounded like a sort of jazz. Later I could hear his voice ringing in my ear.
In Blaine’s and my apartment, there were a few citations for loud music, once an arrest for possession, but it was a police raid that finally stalled us. A crashing through the door. The cops swarming around the place. Get to your feet. One of them bashed my ankle with a nightstick. I was too scared to scream. It was no ordinary raid. Billy was lifted from our couch, kicked to the floor, strip- searched in front of us. He was taken away in cuffs, part of a Federal Bureau of Narcotics sting. We got away with a warning: they were watching us, they said.
Blaine and I crawled around the city looking for a bump. Nobody we knew was selling. Max’s was closed for the night. The tough- eyed queers on Little West Twelfth Street wouldn’t let us into their clubs. There was a haze over Manhattan. We bought a bag on Houston but it turned out to be baking soda. We still stuffed it up our noses in case there was a small remnant of coke. We walked to the Bowery among the plainsong drunks and got smashed against a grocery store grate and robbed at knifepoint by three Filipino kids in lettered jackets.
We ended up in the doorway of an East Side pharmacy. Look what we’ve done to ourselves, said Blaine. Blood all over his shirt front. I couldn’t stop my eye from pulsing. I lay there, the wet of the ground seeping into my bones. Not even enough desire to weep.
An early- morning greaseball threw a quarter at our feet. E pluribus unum.
It was one of those moments from which I knew there would be no McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 126
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return. There comes a point when, tired of losing, you decide to stop fail-ing yourself, or at least to try, or to send up the final flare, one last chance.
We sold the loft we owned in SoHo and bought the log cabin so far upstate that it would be a long walk back to Max’s ever again.
What Blaine had wanted was a year or two, maybe more, in the sticks.
No distraction. To return to the moment of radical innocence. To paint. To stretch canvas. To find the point of originality. It wasn’t a hippie idea. Both of us had always hated the hippies, their flowers, their poems, their one idea. We were the furthest thing from the hippies. We were the edge, the definers. We developed our idea to live in the twenties, a Scott and Zelda going clean. We kept our antique car, even got it refurbished, the seats re-upholstered, the dashboard buffed. I cut my hair flapper- style. We loaded up on provisions: eggs, flour, milk, sugar, salt, honey, oregano, chili, and racks of cured meat that we hung from a nail in the ceiling. We wiped away the cobwebs and filled the cupboards with rice, grain, jams, marshmal-lows—we believed we’d eventually be that clean. Blaine had decided it was time to go back to canvas, to paint in the style of Thomas Benton, or John Steuart Curry. He wanted that moment of purity, regionalism. He was sick of the colleagues he’d gone to Cornell with, the Smithsons and the Turleys and the Matta- Clarks. They had done as much as they possibly could, he said, there was no going further for them. Their spiral jetties and split houses and pilfered garbage cans were passé.
Me too—I’d decided that I wanted the pulse of the trees in my work, the journey of grass, some dirt. I thought I might be able to capture water in some new and startling way.
We had painted the new landscapes separately—the pond, the kingfisher, the silence, the moon perched on the saddle of the trees, the slashes of redwings among the leaves. We had kicked the drugs. We had made love. It all went so well, so very very well, until our trip back to Manhattan.
—
a blue daw n stretched in the room. Blaine lay like a stranded thing, all the way across the bed. Impossible to wake. Grinding his teeth in his sleep. A thinness to him, his cheekbones too pronounced, but he was not unhandsome: there were times he still reminded me of a polo player.
I left him in bed and went out onto the porch. It was just before sun-McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 127
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rise and already the heat had burned the night rain off the grass. A light wind riffled across the surface of the lake. I could hear the faintest sounds of traffic from the highway a few miles away, a low gurgle.
A single jet stream cut across the sky, like a line of disappearing coke.
My head was pounding, my throat dry. It took a moment to realize that the previous two days had actually occurred: our trip to Manhattan, the humiliation at Max’s, the car crash, a night of sex. What had been a quiet life had gotten its noise again.
I looked over at the hut where Blaine had hidden the Pontiac. We had forgotten the paintings. Left them out in the rain. We hadn’t even covered them in plastic. They sat, ruined, leaning against the side of the hut, by some old wagon wheels. I bent down and flicked through. A whole year’s work. The water and paint had bled down into the grass. The frames would soon warp. Fabulous irony. All the wasted work. The cutting of canvas. The pulling of hair from brushes. The months and months spent painting.
You clip a van, you watch your life fade away.
I let Blaine be, didn’t tell him, spent the whole day avoiding him. I walked in the woods, around the lake, out onto the dirt roads. Gather all around the things that you love, I thought, and prepare to lose them. I sat, pulling the roots of vines off trees: it felt like the only valuable thing I could do. That night I went to bed while Blaine stared out over the water, licking the very last of the coke from the inside of the plastic baggie.
The following morning, with the paintings still out by the garage, I walked toward town. At a certain stage every single thing can be a sign.
Halfway down the road a group of starlings flew up from a pile of dis-carded car batteries.
—
t h e t roph y diner was at the end of Main Street, in the shadow of the bell- tower church. A row of pickup trucks stood outside with empty gun racks in their windows. A few station wagons were parked on the church grounds. Weeds had cracked through the pavement at the door. The bell clanged. The locals on the swivel seats turned to check me out. M
ore of them than usual. Baseball caps and cigarettes. They turned quickly away again, huddled and chatting. It didn’t bother me. They never had much time for me anyway.
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I smiled across at the waitress but she didn’t gesture back. I took one of the red booths under a painting of ducks in flight. Some sugar packets, straws, and napkins were scattered on the table. I wiped the formica top clean, made a structure out of toothpicks.
The men along the stools were loud and charged up but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. There was a momentary panic that they somehow knew of the accident, but it seemed beyond the bounds of logic.
Calm down. Sit. Eat breakfast. Watch the world slide by.
The waitress finally came and slid the menu across the table, placed a coffee in front of me without even asking. She usually wore her weari-ness like an autograph, but there was something jumped- up about her as she hurried back to the counter and settled in once more among the men.
There were small drip marks on the white coffee mug where it hadn’t been washed properly. I scrubbed it with a paper napkin. On the floor beneath me there was a newspaper, folded over and egg- stained. The New York Times. I hadn’t read a paper in almost a year. In the cabin we had a radio with a crank arm that we had to wind up if we wanted to listen to the outside world. I kicked the paper under the far side of the booth. The prospect of news was nothing in the face of the accident and the paintings we had lost as a result. A full year’s work gone. I wondered what might happen when Blaine found out. I could see him rising from bed, tousled, shirtless, scratching himself, the male crotch adjust, walking outside and looking over at the hut, shaking himself awake, running through the long grass, which would rebound behind him.
He didn’t have much of a temper—one of the things I still loved about him—but I could foresee the cabin strewn with bits and pieces of the smashed frames.
You want to arrest the clocks, stop everything for half a second, give yourself a chance to do it over again, rewind the life, uncrash the car, run it backward, have her lift miraculously back into the windshield, unshatter the glass, go about your day untouched, some old, lost sweet- tasting time.
