by David Gordon
We finished our coffees. My friends had to go. They were busy. I was not. So I stayed, ordering a mint soda—they taste like toothpaste, but I love them—and wrestled with desire, toying with the single Gauloise I’d bummed from my friend: I hadn’t smoked in a year. That was when the older fellow appeared, or made himself known, I should say.
“Excuse me.” He spoke American English, with a profound New York accent. “Do you need a light?”
“Sure,” I answered. “Thanks.” Fate had decided. He leaned over and flicked a gold lighter. I breathed in deep. It tasted like car exhaust.
“Sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. That’s how it is over here. Your ear just zooms in on English.”
“Sure,” I repeated, not sure what he was getting at. I wanted to stub out the cigarette, my body had turned on them, like an old love grown toxic, but I felt awkward, so I held it in the air away from me, bent-elbowed, like an existentialist. “Have you been here long?”
“Two years,” he said, “but I can’t pick up the lingo. It’s fucking hard, French. But whatever. It sounds fucking beautiful. I just walk around and listen. But when I heard youse guys, I had to say hi. It’s my only chance to talk to somebody.”
It was indeed a pleasure to hear him speak. His accent was true old-school New York, as pure in its way as any Parisian’s precious French, and more rare. So when he asked, “Mind if I join yuh?” I said “Sure” and dropped my cigarette in the raked sand. He shut his sketch pad, scooted his metal tube chair around, and waved for the waiter.
“Cawfee.” The waiter nodded and asked if he wanted milk. “Nah,” he told me. “How do you say ‘espresso’?”
“Deux expressos, s’il vous-plaît,” I told the waiter, who nodded and was gone. He shrugged and lit a Marlboro. “I can’t get used to French cigarettes,” he said. “Like smoking dried dog shit. My name’s Eddie by the way.” He reached to shake, then realized his hands were filthy with charcoal and tried wiping them on a napkin. I noted his sapphire pinkie ring, his chunky gold bracelet, his fat, expensive watch. “Fuck it,” he concluded. “Whaddaya gunna do?”
The coffees came. He sipped his, sat back, breathed in smoke, and squinted his black eyes over the gamboling kids, the trees in spare rows, the flowers drenched in yellow and blue, the perfectly clouded sky. “Life,” he declared, “is fookin bootiful.” Then he shrugged: “But I godda tellya, kid. It can’t always be peaches and herbs. What? Whaddaya laughing at? Fine. Gahead. What do I care? Go fuck yerself. I enjoy life every day. Having a coffee, drawing, goofing on people. Painting in the morning. Walking to the park in the afternoon. Stopping at the bakery for one of those apple things. Fuck it. I didn’t come to Paris to be a miserable cocksucker.”
Since that seemed to be precisely why I did come to Paris, I couldn’t help but ask, “Why did you come? You said you paint? Are you an artist?”
“Nah,” he said. “Just an amateur.”
Two years prior, back in New Jersey, he’d actually been in art school, though not as an aspiring professional, rather as a dabbling auditor, living in a quiet suburban town that hosted a small liberal arts college. Before that, he’d never even finished high school. What was the point? But now he was retired, he had this nice house, free time, plenty of dough in the bank. So what the fuck, why not? He signed up for a class, Beginner’s Drawing. Then Painting I. He was the oldest student, by double at least. Triple maybe. And he was the worst. By like a hundred. A hundred what? Times, years, percents.
The thing of it was not just that he sucked, though. After all, you didn’t expect to hit a homer the first day of Little League or cook like one of these French guys as soon as you crack an egg. Even Picasso had to start somewhere, right? The thing of it was that he sucked and never got any better. He just kept on sucking, harder and harder.
And when he said “suck,” he meant serious ass. He tried to draw a woman and it looked like a house. He tried to draw a man and it looked like a really old house. He tried to draw a house and it looked like a fucked-up cow. As for painting, he just made a total mess. Everything ended up brown. He couldn’t even stay in the lines. His swing was so off that he accidently splattered other people’s canvases or dripped on the teacher’s shoes when he was trying to help Eddie follow the smooth curve of an apple with his wrist loose, feeling the ripeness of the fruit. The other students were confused or amused. The teacher was in despair. But Eddie didn’t give a fuck. He was happy. He loved to paint.
In particular he loved painting Doreen. She was his muse, like. A performance art major minoring in philosophy, she worked as a nude model to make extra money and also, one sensed, because she just liked getting naked in front of people. In fact, he suspected that her performance art consisted mainly of nude posing as well, plus talking or playing a CD of some weird music. In class, however, she simply held whatever position the teacher, a homo but a great drawer, put her in, then pulled on a kimono to smoke and send text messages during breaks.
Doreen was his type: big boobs with a narrow waist and thin arms, high hips, round ass, narrow ankles, pretty feet. The kind where her breasts (naturals, he specified) stuck out like a balcony over her rib cage. Long black hair she tied up but that hung halfway down her back when she let it. Pale skin, blue eyes, pink nipples. Kind of a weird nose that was tricky to draw. Shaved her puss, which he was not a fan of, he was old-school ’70s and liked hair on his pie, but that’s what they were all into these days, and anyway it was good for the sake of art. You could really see what was going on there. Not that it mattered, the way Eddie painted it. His painting of her lying back with spread thighs looked like a house, a little fairy house with a narrow pink door, nestled between two bony white mountains.
Eddie liked painting Doreen so much, he even paid her to model for him privately. There was nothing shady about it. He was too old for her and this wasn’t a strip club and anyway she only liked girls and had a girlfriend. She made all this quite clear when he broached the subject after class one day while she was smoking in her kimono. He understood completely, he just needed more time to finish the oil portrait he was doing of her—head and supine torso this time, another pink-doored house with blue windows above two pink-tipped snow-white hills and hair like black chimney smoke streaming into a canvas sky. He offered her double what the school paid and she said yes.
It was nice. He turned the living/dining room into a studio, since he ate in the kitchen anyhow and hung out and watched TV in the family room. He’d paint her, or when she wasn’t there he’d paint Felix, his cat, and when Felix wasn’t available he’d paint flowers he bought from the deli or a still life of apples or just the tree outside his window. He’d play music while he worked, classic rock or regular classical, or Ella and Frank, or else he let Doreen put on some of that hippity-hop indie pop or whatever they listened to now. He’d cook sausage and peppers or lasagna. And they’d talk. She’d talk mostly, he had to concentrate, painting is fucking hard, and anyway he preferred to listen to her, stretched out there naked, petting Felix or eating his still life apples and talking about herself, maybe with the gas fire on to keep her and Felix warm while the cold rain tore leaves from the tree outside. He didn’t step out of line. He didn’t lay a finger on her. Did he want to? Sure. But it wasn’t the main thing. He was older, mellower, he guessed. Once in a while he’d drive over to the massage place and let one of those Romanian girls take care of him, but even then he took it easy. Bad heart. Really the thing was just to be there, painting and hanging out with someone young and alive and beautiful. Was he in love with her? Maybe a little, but so what? Fuck it.
Of course, he understood perfectly well that she didn’t love him back, and only came around for the money. He knew it was just a hustle when she gave him a whole song and dance about tuition or rent. He knew the money went to the junkie girlfriend, some tall harsh blond Viking-looking chick with dope fiend written all over her. He knew the deal. He wasn’t a chump. Or, OK, he was. But he knew it. He j
ust didn’t care. He’d rather be a happy chump. Isn’t that what love is, after all? What else do you call a grown man writing poems and trying to dance like a fruit, or a dignified old gent on his knees playing dolls with his granddaughter, or a woman carrying a dog in a designer bag even though the fucking mutt has four good legs, except someone who has found a good reason to act like a fool? Everyone is a chump, sooner or later.
So when she didn’t show one day, he didn’t think too much of it. His expectations were low. He just painted Felix, who also got bored with posing and wandered off, tail in the air. Girls and cats are like that. But when she didn’t come to class, and then didn’t answer his calls, he got concerned. Then a few nights later, she showed up at the door.
She said she’d come to say good-bye, but he knew it was to hit him up for more money. She said she was taking time off from school because of family stuff, but when he saw her girlfriend waiting in the car, engine running, smoking like a furnace and checking the rearview every ten seconds, he knew it was trouble, drugs most likely. So he gave her a good-luck gift of a hundred bucks traveling money and told her to keep in touch. Then he said good-bye. Sad, sure. But what are you going to do? He figured that was that and let it go. He made some dinner for Felix and himself and worked on his last unfinished portrait of her and then he went to bed.
She was back around five in the morning, with her finger on the buzzer, jolting him out of bed. She was distraught, tear-streaked already, and as soon as he opened the door she started again. He sat her on the couch and asked what the fuck had happened—a car crash, a fight? Her lip was cut and swollen, bruises on her arms, and he figured the junkie girlfriend had been smacking her around again.
Did she hit you, that bitch? She shook her head. No. It wasn’t Judith. She’s in trouble. My God. She got hysterical again, hyperventilating and hiccupping, so that he thought he might have to slap her himself. Instead he hugged her, like he would a little kid, while she drooled and snotted all over his robe, but it got slightly awkward because she wasn’t a kid, she was a fully grown woman, and he could feel her heavy boobs against him and had to be careful when he patted her back not to go too low and touch her ass. Finally she seemed to taper off and he got her some water and Kleenex. She blew her complex nose with a wet honk.
So tell me now, calmly. What happened? Did Judith get busted? That’s probably for the best in the long run. They’ll detox her, maybe send her to rehab. She shook her head vehemently, and for a second he was afraid the waterworks would start up again but she just blew another lusty blast into a tissue and told him, No, Eddie. That isn’t it. It’s worse. They took her. Like for ransom. That’s why I need your help.
What? Who? What the fuck are you talking about? Finally she calmed down enough to explain. The girlfriend, Judith, had been trying to deal a little bit, coke mostly and some dope, nickel-and-dime stuff, and in classic junkie fuckup style had ended up partying it all away and now didn’t have the money to make restitution. What a surprise. That’s why they had decided to split, like Bonnie and Clyde. But of course, the supplier had seen that coming. He’d grabbed them, roughed them up, and was holding Judith while Doreen raised the cash. That was why she’d come to him. For a loan. Five grand.
Loans, however, get repaid. Giving money to Doreen was like flushing it down a toilet. Still when she started blubbering again, he caved. But he insisted on bringing the money along himself. He was a sucker, OK, guilty as charged, but not the kind of sucker who trusts a junkie with money or a girl in love with making rational choices, which is pretty much like a junkie anyway, just strung out on hormones and shit. So he told her he’d get the cash as soon as the bank opened in the morning and they’d drive over together, and she had no choice so she agreed.
He got her settled in the guest room he’d never used, with fresh towels and a new toothbrush. Then he went back into his room and lay down, but he couldn’t sleep. He kept turning the whole thing over in his head. Then just before dawn, there was a soft scratching at his door. He thought it was the cat. The door swung back, slowly. Eddie? It was her, in the T-shirt he’d lent her to sleep in. Are you awake? she whispered. Yeah, he said, what is it, can’t you sleep? She slipped into the blue morning light that swelled from behind the shade and dripped across the window ledge, brushing her dimly. He could barely make her form out in the gloom, his eyes straining for a pale smudge, a curve. She materialized only faintly, then flickered out, like a ghost that had failed to appear. She said, I just thought. I don’t know. I feel like I owe you so much. I mean. If you want to. She took off the shirt.
He had seen her naked body many times before of course. This was different. Then he’d pored over every inch. Now he couldn’t even see her, but he could touch her if he chose. She was right there. He imagined painting her like this. He’d do her in faded pinks and grays with the door frame white and the dark behind it white and deeper gray. He’d been taught that the goal was to paint just what you saw, not what you imagined you were seeing, but that would mean not painting her at all and instead portraying the air around her, the empty space between their bodies, between her skin and his eyes. But of course it wasn’t really empty. It was full of molecules and shit. Of darkness, breath, wind and heat, the scent of her body, of the cat, and of his old man’s body too, no doubt. Making all that appear out of nothing. Loading all that onto a brush. That was the trick.
That’s OK, he said. Don’t worry about it. It’s late. Go back to sleep, he told her, like an idiot, and she picked up the T-shirt and went.
In the morning, Doreen was too upset to eat breakfast, but he fed the cat, had his usual oatmeal and fruit, and then they drove to his storage off Route 4. What is this, she asked him as he parked beside the orange warehouse, you said we were going to the bank? This is my bank, he told her, wait here, and found the small space he rented, like a walk-in closet, with cartons of old papers and knickknacks filling the shelves on one side and a workbench on the other. He lifted a small locker onto the bench and brushed away the dust before opening the padlock. Inside were bundles of cash, various documents. He peeled off the five grand, then locked everything back up. All set, he said, climbing back into the car. She was smoking furiously and biting her nails at the same time. He lowered the windows and patted her knee. Don’t worry, he said.
The dealer’s place was a few towns away, in a working-class neighborhood that had slowly decompressed into ghetto while the surrounding suburbs bloated into affluence. This was where the maids and gardeners of the wealthy lived, where their kids went to buy their drugs. It had been a decade or more since he’d even taken this exit or passed through these streets, Pine, Ash, Maple, and barely a green leaf in sight. He had to let Doreen direct him. It all looked the same to Eddie. The house itself was nondescript—weathered siding, dying yard—but the tightly sealed blank windows and the high-end cars in the drive were tip-offs, a sleek Lexus and a fat Denali, both with shining rims. Eddie gave Doreen’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze before he pressed the buzzer, which didn’t work. So he knocked.
A classic dirtbag opened the door, long greasy hair, vaginal whiskers around cracked wet lips, crazy eyes, tattoos up his arms like the funny papers, wifebeater and baggy jeans. Doreen said, Hi, Dirk, this is Eddie. We brought the money, let us in. And Dirk scowled but stepped aside, ostentatiously stroking the butt of the .45 automatic he had stuck down his pants. Eddie kept his hands loose in plain sight. A guido with stiff hair and tan muscles in a pink polo shirt and expensive jeans, and another dirtbag, covered in ink and piercings like a sideshow freak, were hanging out on the crappy modular couch inside. There was a coffee table heaped with bottles, ashtrays, pizza cartons. A big-screen TV ran ads on the wall. Doreen made the introductions. Eddie, this is Richie and Renard. Renard the freak nodded amiably—Sup?—but the guido leapt to his feet. What the fuck? Who’s this? I said come alone. Obviously tweaked and waving a Glock. Doreen trembled and moaned. No, Richie, don’t. Eddie stepped in front of her, hands out, palms up.
Hey, hey, take it easy. For Christ’s sake put the gun down.
Who the fuck are you? Richie asked, still menacing but a little less sure, gun hand drooping.
Eddie said, I’m the only person she knows with five grand.
Richie considered this, then tucked the gun in the back of his jeans and quickly checked his hair in the mirror across the room. OK. Whatever. Just hand over the cash.
It’s in the car, Eddie told him. I want to see the girl first. Go get her, we all walk out, put them in the car and get the dough. Then we drive away. Nice and simple.
What the fuck are you trying to pull? Richie’s back was up again. The dirtbags stirred and growled.
Hey, Eddie said. For all I know Doreen was setting me up. This chick is always hitting me up for money. Doreen scowled, fear shifting to annoyance. Hey, that’s not fair, she said, though her hands remained in the air, as if she’d forgotten them there. Look, Eddie went on. You can see I’m not packing. He turned around, like he was modeling his button-up shirt and slacks. You got three armed guys. I got bupkis. What am I gonna do? Pull a Starsky and Hutch?
Who? Richie looked confused now.
It’s a movie, Doreen explained. Starsky and Hutch.
Then who’s Bupkis? Dirk asked suspiciously.
OK, OK, whatever, Richie said. Retard, go get the bitch. Dirk, keep an eye on them. Renard rose slowly, with the unsteady bearing of someone who’s been on the couch a long time. Dirk massaged his gun handle. Richie, pleased now that he’d reassumed command, found a box of Marlboros on the table and lit up. Can I get one of those? Eddie asked him. Sure, he said, why not? I’ll toss it in no charge. Everyone laughed and the tension eased. Doreen took one too. Dirk fished a Newport from his shirt pocket. They all smoked.
