The Exquisite

by Laird Hunt

  I don’t do this regularly, Henry, said Job, after I’d passed on a few choice articles to him one night.

  Me neither, I said.

  I got a guy, said Job, makes everything easy. But I only see him once in a while.

  I’ll let you handle it.

  Yeah, that’s right. I’ll handle it. And, Henry, they catch you and you start singing, you’re just some homeless guy with a dent in his head, correct?

  Mum’s the word, Job.

  That’s right.

  Except that, Job …

  Yeah, Henry?

  You didn’t really put that too nicely.

  You’re right, I’m sorry. I was trying to make a point and got carried away—like I say, I don’t do this very often, obviously I need to work on my technique.

  You do.

  I know.

  I’m not just some guy—I mean, no one is just some guy. I used to have a girlfriend, you know.

  I know. You told me.

  So I slipped a little, I said. So I got lost. We’ve all got a little maze upstairs. We all take a wrong turn sometimes and end up who knows where, shivering in the shrubbery.

  Now, there you lost me.

  Are you being funny?

  No.

  I’m paraphrasing. It’s from the book.

  What book?

  This book I’m reading. The Rings of Saturn. The one with the dragons. Whatever. What I’m thinking right now is that the dent in my head could be a lot bigger, correct? It could be an unplanned hole. A place to put a fist. A cup holder. An ashtray.

  Job let me go on a little bit longer then smiled, put a hand on my arm, gave it a hard squeeze, and told me to can it.

  I smiled back and canned it.

  I liked Job, very much actually. Not least because of his tendency, not always intentional, to slip into passable Edward G. Robinson imitations when we were discussing business. He also had an excellent low-grade sense of humor, especially about other patients, and was willing to listen to everything I had to say about the doctor, often offering me humorous advice along the lines of, you should just come out and ask her for a xerox of that ear. Probably, of course, this isn’t funny unless you have some morphine in you. Or maybe it is anyway, I don’t know.

  Sometimes, late at night, Job would sit by me as the evening meds nestled into the soft and secret areas of my brain and whisper strange little things or seem to whisper them as my eyes went shut. In this way, and in the ways I have just described, the early days and nights passed.

  SEVEN

  Mr. Kindt liked the museums. He liked the marble on the floor and the possibility of grand staircases and the displays so brightly and evenly spaced. He liked the statues with the arms snapped off and the small ivory carvings and the ancient bone-and-wood playing boards and the skeletons comparatively displayed. He liked the thick glass, with its “strange, dissipated reflections.” He liked the roped-off areas and the animals made of plastic and clay. He liked the displays with sounds and the possibility of narration. He had often wished, he said, he could play a substantive role in the creation of the text for these narratives and wondered how well his voice would be suited to high-quality recording. He liked the short explanatory notes by the exhibits, which he said were “like funereal inscriptions,” and he liked the proximity of dead languages, and the juxtapositions of artists and the guards and monitors and checkpoints. He liked the people moving slowly and silently, and the art holding its position, absolutely still.

  Look at that, he liked to say in the museums. He liked to say, ah, yes, this one, or, compare this one to that one, or, just, ah … He liked to bend, carefully, and to straighten, slowly, and to hold out his hand and to take it away. Mr. Kindt always wore his hat in the museums. For that matter, with rare exceptions, he always wore his hat in the house. It was a black felt hat with a large floppy brim. He liked that kind of hat. He liked, in fact, for me to wear a similar hat, a black job with a slightly smaller brim, which he handed me one day when I walked through the door.

  Uh? I said.

  Would you, Henry, my boy?

  It wasn’t so bad because Tulip also had a hat, floppy and black. Although it wasn’t quite as stylish as the aviator’s hat, the fringe of spun gold falling in sheets from the dark felt was, as Mr. Kindt put it one afternoon as we ate sliced hard sausage, pâté, and leftover meatloaf prior to going out, a truly noteworthy sight.

  So the three of us would sit there at the table or would stand there in the museum. With meat in our mouths. Chewing in the yellow light. Or not chewing, no meat, at the American Museum of Natural History, in front of the Animals of the Plains exhibit—a life-sized diorama with stuffed grazing animals and a stuffed carnivorous animal and a painted background behind glass. Tulip especially liked the next diorama over—the Displaced Animals in Urban Environments exhibit—which showed a flock of cherry-head conures perched in a tree next to a wooden balcony where some long-ago shellacked seed had been spread. Painted on the curved wall behind them was a broad-stroke rendition of San Francisco, with the bay off in the distance. A pair of the conures had been frozen in what was supposed to be midflight, but this potentially dynamic touch hadn’t been carried off as successfully as it could have been. A number of the birds that weren’t focused on the seed had their heads cocked to the left and were peering skyward, presumably, we decided, at the tiny painted hawk circling far overhead. After we’d stood there a minute, Tulip spotted a conure with a blue head nestled in a spray of bright orange trumpet flowers. The explanatory note, which Mr. Kindt conjectured had been assembled in haste, made no mention of this handsome aberration. It spoke only of the redheaded variety that was “already several generations into its stay in the wilds of San Francisco.” Apparently the “wilds” of New York were also home to an unnamed variety of nondomesticated parrot, although they had not been quite as successful as their cousins by the bay. Seeing an opportunity to draw Tulip out, I made some light remarks about birds, flapped my arms a few times to demonstrate what it was I thought was off about the conures that were supposed to be caught in flight, then asked her why she liked this display so much. Instead of answering me directly, she took Mr. Kindt’s arm, dabbed at her upper lip with the pointed end of her tongue, and said to both or neither of us that after the events downtown she had seen a very large parrot with a yellow head vanish into the haze over the water near Battery Park.

  Perhaps the most beautiful of the exhibits in the museum was the Hall of Planet Earth. Here there were sulfur chimneys from the floor of the ocean and zircon crystals from near the beginning of time. Mr. Kindt stopped and stood for a long while in front of the display on tectonic displacement and even longer in front of the garnets set in black granite pulled out of the heart of the Adirondacks, a range he was fond of because of its many streams and lakes. An illuminated globe on the ceiling demonstrated the effects of drastic climate change, and Mr. Kindt sat so long on the circular recessed benches under it, watching the clouds vanish and the continents go brown and the oceans evaporate and the reverse of this process, that Tulip and I fell asleep. I woke, I thought, to Mr. Kindt whispering in my ear: it was like that, it will be like that; and to Tulip, her eyes glinting in the reflected light of the barren continents, looking at me.

  Or we would go to the movies. Mr. Kindt liked the old films. The black-and-white ones with all their “precise inaccuracies,” with all their instances of exaggeration for the purposes of evoking artifice and, for the same reason, settings that were not quite right.

  It is the almost-world I have so often dreamed of, Mr. Kindt said one afternoon as the credits rolled on a film in which a man and a woman had walked for fictional hours through a fabric jungle. The world that all these so-called realist films we have today have banished from the screen. Imagine, my dears, if we could forever slip, or, more important, feel ourselves slipping, like the floodlit ghosts of those old actors and actresses, from one happily constructed world to another, rather than, as we flesh-based units are obli
ged, from inexplicable light to inexplicable gloom.

  Sometimes, if the theater was crowded, we would take our hats off and fan ourselves with them. We would sit there, the three of us, or the two of us if Tulip hadn’t come, and the mouths on the walls of light would move and the sound would come out of the walls and our hats would move back and forth in front of us like instances of pure darkness that looked lost in the brightness that lit our faces in sporadic bursts.

  Mr. Kindt liked to sit in the front row. He liked, in looking up at the screen, he said, to have to arch his neck, and he liked for his neck, as a reminder, he said, to have to hurt.

  Reminder of what? I asked.

  Of my namesake, he said.

  Your namesake? I said.

  But he didn’t answer.

  Sometimes, as we watched, I would let my hand move behind Mr. Kindt’s pale white neck and I would allow my fingers to exert a certain amount of pressure that Mr. Kindt, his desire to have his neck hurt notwithstanding, loved.

  It was this deep enjoyment of orchestrated experiences in which pain and pleasure lay tightly coiled that had prompted Mr. Kindt, I presumed, to take out a membership at the Eleventh Street Russian baths, a venerable mobster-frequented establishment where what I took to be blast furnaces filled with boiling, beet-red lumps of flesh coexisted with sinister massage cabinets and a deep icy pool. Because of a recent change in management policy, a coeducational sweat-extruding experience was available most days, meaning both Tulip and I could accompany Mr. Kindt and partake with him of his biweekly round of steams and saunas and lashings with oak leaves. It was Mr. Kindt’s rule, one that Tulip and I were both happy to comply with, that if we went with him we did all of it. So it was that, to my surprising delight, I had a huge guy sit on my back, soap me up, whack me with oak branches, and time and again pour near-frozen water on me. Also, of course, I got to witness Tulip, who was built even more extraordinarily than I have helped you to imagine, in a wickedly petite gold-and-green bikini, receiving the same. It was also pleasurable, though differently, less dramatically, to watch Mr. Kindt—in part for the blissful smile that would spread over his mottled features as he was being smushed and swatted, in part for the gleam, through the dim, burning air, of his little blue eyes. So it was, anyway, that after changing into bathing suits, over which, at the start of each session, we draped a sort of house-issue smock, we went down into the steamy gloom of the baths and moved together from one area to the next, a progression that always ended with a collective shriek in the pool of ice water and a race, well, a race between me and Tulip, back upstairs.

  Sometimes we went out to eat. When Mr. Kindt wasn’t at home he liked variety in his dinners, which meant we split time between North African, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. Mr. Kindt’s preferred Indian establishment was a little spot on the corner of First and Sixth. The tiny dining room was festooned to the point of feeling overrun with garlands of flashing red lights that were reflected, in ever-receding depths, by panels of glossy plastic and hand-cut disks of wrinkled foil. Mr. Kindt, who was well liked by the staff for his generous tips, loved the minuscule tables and the jostling of the waiters and the 3-D wallpaper and the accelerant effect all this had on the complex combinations of tastes and smells. “Cardamom diffused throughout a blend of lamb and cream and good Bengal curry is magnificent, but cardamom diffused throughout a blend of lamb and cream and good Bengal curry under blinking Christmas lights is sublime” being the sort of remark he was apt to offer us or the waiter or even fellow diners.

  Mind your fucking business, the larger and more aggressively postured of a pair of young men sitting at a table near us said one evening after Mr. Kindt had directed a like observation in their direction.

  Pardon me, gentlemen, but you are my business, Mr. Kindt said.

  Both young men slowly turned their heads toward Mr. Kindt.

  Then both young men flinched.

  Oh …, the smaller of the two said.

  Not to worry, Mr. Kindt said. The two of you will leave now and when you leave I will put money on your table to pay for your abrogated dinner. How was your abrogated dinner? I hope that you had time to enjoy one or two bites before you addressed yourselves so unpleasantly, so gratuitously, to me.

  We should have known better, the larger one said.

  Yes, you should have known better, so good-night, boys. Good-night, boys, and don’t fucking come back, Mr. Kindt said.

  When the two of them had left, Mr. Kindt reached over and put some money on their table. He also took a piece of their untouched chicken tikka and put it on Tulip’s plate.

  Everywhere we went, Mr. Kindt paid. He always had a tremendous amount of cash with him and he was not averse to slipping a couple of twenties into my pocket at the end of an evening before I went home. After a while, I asked Tulip about this, and if she thought Mr. Kindt was expecting a little something in return.

  He’s just generous, she said.

  Right, I said.

  She smiled.

  Why don’t you ask him what he wants? I don’t know.

  I did. It was evening, and he had just been showing me something about the lights in Tompkins Square Park from his window, how “lovely and scattered” they were, especially through the black netting, like some kind of “sparkling sea creature,” or maybe, I said to myself, not really getting what he was trying to show me, like a sparkling sea creature that has been blown to bits. We were still standing there, gazing, when I said, Mr. Kindt, is there anything you would like me to do for you?

  He looked up at me.

  How do you mean, Henry?

  I mean you’ve been very generous.

  Have you been enjoying yourself?

  Sure. Yes—absolutely.

  Well then that’s perfect.

  So there’s nothing I can do for you?

  You can get Tulip off my bed and tell her it’s time to eat.

  I looked at Mr. Kindt.

  I meant I could help you, if you needed it, with your business engagements, or with, you know, anything you want.

  Mr. Kindt took my arm. He held it for a moment in one of his cold little hands then let go and gave it a few pats.

  Don’t worry about my business affairs, they are quite well looked after, such as they are at this late stage in my career, my boy, he said. As far as anything else goes, I am an old man and like to talk and I do not like to talk alone. Tulip has been a wonderful companion to me, but it occurred to both of us that another friend might be even more wonderful, and now we are fortunate to have you. It is certainly true that, on occasion, friends do things for each other, but for now I’m not sure what it is exactly besides rousing that lovely wisp of a Tulip you can do.

  I looked at him.

  He looked at me.

  All right, sure, I said.

  EIGHT

  The early, the innocent, the unambiguous days and nights in the hospital gave way to an indeterminate period during which I thought I had received my discharge orders and returned to the world of cars and bricks and clogged gutters—where things went well then badly then worse—but then I was back or had never left, I had never left, there I was, and in the deep and dark hours of the night I woke from the dream of wind and voices and met an old man.

  May I call you Henry? he said.

  Yes, of course, I said.

  My name is Aris Kindt.

  I saw you today when they were looking at your throat are you sick they tell me I’m not well but I’m better what’s wrong with you? I said.

  I know, he said.

  What do you mean, you know?

  His upper lip curled a little. He shrugged.

  Well, Mr. Kindt, may I call you Mr. Kindt, then you also know that I’m a thief—that I’m thieving in this establishment, that I’m making a fucking killing. And speaking of fucking, I wouldn’t mind, that is, with my doctor, she’s a peach, a pale yellow one with funny ears, do you know her?

  My throat is fine, he said. It’s much better. Thank
you for asking.

  Your throat?

  His lip curled again.

  Dr. Tulp, I said. Best thing about this place, very bright, an incandescent bulb, a light-emitting diode. She’s getting a green card. She likes me a lot, takes my case very seriously. I’m in her office all the time. My humble room here is her second home. Peaches. I grew up on Long Island. Well, Staten Island too. That’s my story. My father was in construction. Do you know Job? We’re in business. We’re practically fucking partners.

  Shhh, he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. That’s the morphine talking. It often talks much louder than is necessary about things not everybody need hear. I haven’t even properly introduced myself yet—we can allow a greater measure of detail into our discussions after I have done so. Does that sound like a good idea?

  It does, I said.

  I went quiet. I closed my eyes. When I woke again he was gone.

  He reappeared the next night and sat very still for a long time. We stared at each other and then he went away. He came back minutes or hours later with a large red balloon and asked me if I wanted a bite.