by Gary Indiana
It’s what I’m telling you, the woman said, Sylvia’s letting Annie lead her right by the nose. She thinks because Annie got that big settlement from Frank, all she needs is powerful attorney over your paycheck.
Using my kids, the man said, that’s what frosts my ass.
Can you hear that, Victor said.
This phone sounds funny, the woman said.
What Sylvia tends to forget, the man said, Annie’s case was open and shut, she had “before” and “after” pictures of her face.
Frank is prone to violence, the woman said, which for one thing, you’re not.
Try telling that to Sylvia, the man said, she makes a mountain out of a molehill.
Do you want to meet somewhere, I asked Victor.
Something’s funny with this phone, the woman said.
Well, said the man, it’s fucked.
Swat I told you, the woman said. Hank, I hate to say this straight out but Sylvia’s nothing but a little whore.
Yeah, the man said, but she’s the mother of my kids.
That’s the tragedy, the woman said. She was damned lucky, Hank, very damned lucky to land a man like you in the first place, and now she’s cutting up her nose to spite her face to destroy you.
So what if I come over, the man said.
I’ll come over, Victor said.
This phone’s wacky, the woman said.
An hour later Victor showed up, holding a quart of Ballantine ale in a soggy brown bag. A bad sign, I thought, once it starts with Victor, it never stops until we’re sloshed and maudlin. I’ll lay out all my insecurities and frustrations, and he’ll tell me stories about his hillbilly relatives, all those shitkickers in the Tri-State area, shitkickers and general practitioners and county pathologists and federal circuit judges married to his sisters and cousins. Or else, we’ll get on to Richard somehow, and Richard’s quirks, and how phony and superficial the world Richard moves in is, Victor will describe some recent uptown dinner he’s been dragged along to by Richard, and how he, Victor, repelled some errant snottery or inane comment from one of Richard’s dim-witted, filthy rich chums, stopping the person’s mouth dead in its tracks with a penetratingly candid observation, such is Victor’s conversational agenda. Or, he’ll explain in Gothic detail why he admires my integrity and my mind. Victor can be a regular little toady when he works himself up to it. And yet we do amuse each other, hardly ever does an evening spent with Victor seem humorless in retrospect, even when there are lugubrious patches of self-pitying exposition, on his part, or my part, the real problem with Victor, as far as I can tell, is that Victor’s never carved out a place for himself, never entered the fray, the city grows harder and harder to live in yet Victor maintains his low-level equilibrium, he’s never focused on anything, never said to himself, I want X, Y, or Z, I’ll do whatever I need to get them. Instead, Victor has been content knocking out custom furniture, sedating himself with manual labor, standing on the sidelines of my career and Richard’s career, Victor extracts his sense of himself from his intimacy with Richard or his friendship with me, he wins points in that bar he spends so much time in down the street, Richard and I experience all the real conflicts of life, and Victor gains simply from hanging around us.
Richard hasn’t slept with Victor in years, or rather, he’s slept with him but hasn’t made love with him, Victor’s become a sort of honorary consort to Richard, who has all kinds of desperate sick affairs with insane people while Victor lolls around, cleaning Richard’s loft, cooking Richard’s food, doing Richard’s chores, making the world safe for Richard, who says Victor’s hanging around drives him nuts, that it gives him a false sense of security, and Richard’s too lazy and too comfortable to do without it so the guilt he feels gives Victor a further wedge. Richard tells me: I love Victor, he’s one of the nicest people in the city, but the fact is, he’s too nice for his own good, I can’t shake him off because he’s like this overgrown puppy, and the sex part has been finished for years, Richard says. Frankly, he says, it wasn’t anything so wonderful to begin with, Victor has a sweet Italian face but his dick is tiny and he doesn’t know how to use it to excite anybody, that’s why he flips out over Orientals, they don’t expect anything gigantic in that department, Victor’s all cuddly and soft like a pussy, Richard reports, he’s so gentle you want to kick his ass. It’s strange, Victor works out every day, his body’s perfect, he’s built like a brick shithouse but in bed he’s a pussy.
With me, too, Victor assumes a subservient role, somewhere between a friend and a valet. He opens the ale, pours it, carts the glasses into the living room, plants himself down on the floor and looks at me with puppyish expectation. It’s my job to decide what to talk about, he’s not exactly brimming over with news, and so, naturally, I tell him I’m rattled by my new job, it’s eating up all my productive time, the hours leading up to my deadline are hours of pathological anxiety for me, I sometimes think I’m having a heart attack, but of course it’s also bringing in money, right now I need money, I suppose I will always need money, and once you have money, it’s impossible going back to having no money, here I’ve been scraping by for seven years, begging and scratching for chump change over the phone, whoring out on little acting jobs, little rewrite jobs for little independent films, selling the occasional slender essay to ill-paying magazines, whining to rich friends about the unfairness of it all, especially to M., who gets a commission whenever someone flushes a toilet in North America, and now, at least, I’m getting a regular check, I can fix this flat up, go to the dentist, start really living, but then, now that all my time won’t be consumed by begging and borrowing, I’ll discover that writing for the paper chews up every second, making it impossible to finish my book.
Oh, Victor says heartily, once you get this apartment under control, you’ll find yourself using your time more productively. The clutter of all these unshelved books and papers everywhere distracts your mind. You really only need a few shelves, and a file cabinet, fix this leaking plaster, paint the floors, in fact, he says, what you need are tables, and a proper bed, get your life up off the floor, you’ll be amazed how it changes your entire attitude.
I nod stupidly as Victor gurgles on about beds and tables and shelves and file cabinets, we both know perfectly well I’m not going to do anything. Richard often says: Have you noticed that Victor’s paranoid about smelling bad? It’s true. Victor thinks he smells. Sweats from labor and then smells, or sometimes for no special reason Victor says: Jesus, I really smell today. I’ve never noticed any odor coming from Victor, but for a while now Victor has been advertising the idea that he gives off a miserable smell. I wonder why he goes on about it.
Richard has no body odor, no body insecurities either. Richard dances his nuts off whenever he goes out, Richard’s all body, it probably works his nerves that Victor’s so stiff, so uncomfortable with himself. And Victor wears these ugly square glasses that ruin his face, thick frames that make his jaw seem more square than it is, though they do hide the softness of his blue eyes, which are so soft and watery they retreat into his skull when he takes his glasses off. When he takes his glasses off, Victor looks like a weepy little boy who’s just wet his pants. Victor has a black belt in karate. I don’t know what he gets out of it, developing this complicated skill he can’t use, when he never develops any that he could use.
I read Victor my recent notes for Burma. Except for the early pages that flowed so lyrically, all I have are notes. I am never entirely sure if I am actually writing a book because of the huge spaces of time that have interrupted my progress. The narrator travels to Rome or Venice, probably Venice so that something important could occur on the Rialto Bridge, just as the morning bells toll and echo across the canals, though maybe that’s too stagey, and from there, he catches the slow night train to Ancona, meeting in the pitch-dark compartment a coffee-skinned boy named Antonio who wears a red beret, who takes him into the WC, where they clumsily have sex as the train lurches back and forth. In Ancona, the frie
nds who had been living near some caves on the Adriatic have vanished, he’s stranded suddenly with $40. He hangs around the public square, loitering under the spiky palm trees, waits for someone to pick him up. No one does. He wonders if he’s beyond the age when other men will protect him. In Rome, his bank wires New York, it takes ten days to answer, when the wire comes the account’s empty, the friend he thought he could trust to deposit checks hasn’t done it, he now ends up sleeping in the Termini, guarding his pockets, woken every few hours by the carabinieri’s nightstick, placing collect calls during the day from the phone center under the station. He has enough lira to shower at the station every day, checks and unchecks his luggage as he needs clothes, washes his feet in all the fountains. At a big fountain near the station a Brazilian guy invites him up to an expensive hotel suite, treats him to an all-afternoon fuckorama that leaves his ass bleeding, then shows him a green chamois sack full of square-cut emeralds. You’ll never have things like this, the Brazilian tells him. You’re a loser, a wimp. Good for fucking and that’s all.
He tells the Brazilian he’s a lousy fuck, that his dick tastes like goat cheese. Later the same night, they meet up again, in the cruising park near the hotel, he gives the Brazilian another long BJ and this time lifts the guy’s wallet from his pants, which are bunched around his ankles. The guy comes, with histrionic groaning and panting, then as he’s pulling up his pants the narrator runs from the park, runs past the Termini into a part of Rome he doesn’t know where lots of mammoth ruins are brooding in the moonlight, runs till his lungs ache, wonders how a vast city can be so still and quiet and full of eternity at night, the eternity of sex and blood and death, and finally he sleeps under a bush near the Teatro Marcello. Under a carpet of stars. The next day he buys a ticket for Munich with the Brazilian’s dough.
It all really happened, I tell Victor, but it’s becoming fictitious as I write it down, I don’t believe in it anymore.
These things that happen between people who don’t know each other and never see each other again might as well be fantasies. The big problem, I say, is getting him from one place to another, so far this book is stalled, stalled in South Hampton that summer with Rita when it all began, my adult life, five or six or seven years ago when my adventures started. We’ve gone for more drinks, the bar on Avenue A features dark mirrors set in smoked wood and tables full of magenta-haired teenagers in spray-painted black leather jackets. Some of these kids have soft, kind faces. Others are puffy with a strange fascistic rage. Behind the bar, a chubby youth with a dozen studs in one ear, a wrinkly shaved head, and oddly endearing bad teeth—at least one flaw that isn’t self-inflicted. The kids and the bar are among the things that have taken over the neighborhood. Hardly the worst things.
Maybe the story is too complicated, Victor suggests. That train stuff, this travel from country to country. Then you have to paint in this vast panorama full of precise details. Why not make everything happen in your apartment?
Who would want to read what happens in my apartment, Victor, virtually nothing, not that anything has to happen in a book, but you’d think I could put all my adventures to use, a lot of people never even have any adventures, whereas I’ve had many, many adventures, just think. If they die on the vine I’m going to feel like a terrible . . . vagrant.
Victor asks about Gregory. This unleashes a Niagara of complaint, to my own astonishment. I realize I’ve been storing up anger like a dry cell battery. Gregory’s invariable lateness, our canceled dates, the casual contempt that flashes through his behavior like the metallic threads in that vest he’s always wearing. Gregory adores himself with such incredible ardor, and yet he hates himself too, and so hates anyone who adores him as much as he does. I’ve acted like a masochist before, I tell Victor, but no one’s ever quite picked up the ball the way Gregory has. Victor has heard this catechism of lamentation before, he doesn’t even need to say: You see the pattern here. Two days on, three days off, one day on, four days off. The guy’s a fucking flake. It’s because he smokes so much grass, I suggest, defensively. And he used to shoot heroin, Victor reminds me, right? Yeah, but he doesn’t do it now, I protest. This I’m sure of.
In the street, I suddenly feel that Gregory is much better than I’ve painted him, I rue having poisoned Victor against him before they’ve even met. At first I would only tell my friends that Gregory made me happy, but now he scrambles my feelings every other day and I don’t know what to think, really. Since my friends don’t know him, the only picture they have is the one I give them, and I’m continually retouching it according to how he treats me. I’m sure I’m getting tiresome. I burst into tears in front of my building, blubber and drool against Victor’s shirt while he whispers that I deserve better than that little crud, that he can’t stand seeing me so upset. As Victor says this I get the creepy feeling that Gregory has somehow overheard every word of this conversation. In fact, I never say anything about Gregory without imagining he’s inside my head, listening to everything. On some deep-down level where I can’t conceal anything he knows me, knows when I panic about this thing between us, knows when I’m hating him, he even knows when I’ve forgotten to think about him. And of course the prudent thing, the grown-up thing, is never to discuss the intricacies of a love affair with anybody. But what lover, abandoned time after time without warning or explanation, can sustain himself on prudence?
Three in the morning. An iodine breeze scuds off the river, the streetlamp rakes flecks of mica in the sidewalk. The middle-aged homeboys who usually occupy all the stoops on the block have crawled back into their flats like tuckered-out cockroaches. A skinny, fiftyish leather lady marches past with the Times under his studded sleeve and his Afghan on a rhinestone leash. I remember that I’ve invited Gregory for dinner on Friday, that I need Victor’s help to clean the apartment. Now, after bad-mouthing Gregory all night, I can’t very well ask. So I make up something. I just remembered, Victor, I’ve got these important people coming Friday, I hate to ask you, but it’s business, and I’m busy all day tomorrow, I won’t have a minute between now and then to clean. Please, as a friend.
What people? Victor wants to know.
Oh, publishers. A couple.
You didn’t mention this.
Well, I didn’t want to say anything until I got a firm deal, in case everything falls through. Anyway, you see why it’s important for me even just psychologically to have a clean house when they come over.
Sure, he says, no problem. Shit, he says, it’s about time something comes through for you.
Thanks, Victor, I tell him, I think so, too.
7
A memorable lie, as it turns out. On Friday Victor arrives two hours late, adding to the senseless panic I feel when I wake up: Gregory’s coming here, at last. If he sees what a slob I am he’ll have all the more reason to despise me, we’ve got to get everything spotless, and how is that even possible, there’s no place to hide all these years’ worth of idiotic accumulation, all these books, newspapers, it’s my mother’s fault, she’s never thrown anything out, at home there are thousands of shoe boxes full of receipts and notebooks and family snapshots, I’m just like her, with Gregory I’m actually turning into her, why has it always been so strange between me and my mother when I’m exactly like her, and Gregory, Gregory’s a bit like my father, clever with his hands, anyway, this is the trouble with getting involved with people, they don’t know what they’re supposed to be with each other so they turn into their parents. Dear Christ, this place is filthy. It’s a wonder I’m not insane. Victor can somehow manage all this brutal organizing, what stops me, exactly? I’m afraid of this piled-up crap everywhere. It’s my life, it’s stronger than me.
I don’t mind watching Victor clear everything out of here. It’s less of a decision if he does it. I’ve lived here too long. You can’t have your own life in New York except if you’re rich. For years and years I’ve been going through this door, down and up these stairs, in the door again, the mailbox has brought me
millions of pieces of waste paper, most of them still lying around in disturbing clumps, stuffed into shoe boxes, Victor sweeps through the apartment swabbing down surfaces while I yearn for a garbage dumpster big enough to swallow the entire past. Books, books everywhere. I suppose this is my life, my books. Virginia Woolf and Leopardi and Henry James and Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann and Heinrich Mann, Chekhov Turgenev Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë and George Eliot, Defoe and Fielding and Swift and Pope, Byron Shelley Keats, Hazlitt, Herzen, most of all Nietzsche, Sartre, Darwin, Lévi-Strauss Plato Plutarch Pliny the Elder Pliny the Younger, Seneca’s Letters, Olga Freidenberg’s letters to Pasternak, Brecht, Euripides, Don Quixote (both versions), Dante, Ford Madox Ford, Swift, Kleist, Kafka, the Fugger Newsletters; these are the memories I’ve ended up keeping, Herodotus, no snapshots, Emerson, no souvenirs, History and Class Consciousness, some day I’ll regret not holding on to other things, mementos, when my parents die, though of course now there’s every chance I’ll die before they do, how strange that must be, thousands of children dying before their parents do. Libby says she wishes she had tape-recorded her father’s voice, because now she finds herself forgetting what he sounded like. Next time I go home I should tape them talking, though they never do say anything worth remembering, never open up, I’ve never had the faintest clue what either of my parents really thinks about anything, I don’t even know if they’re happy or miserable or bitter or resigned. Nothing worked out as they wished, not with me, anyway. They did get all the money they wanted, nothing outrageous, enough to live the same as everyone else, of course they slaved for it their whole lives and chopped off their childhood dreams and wishes, and now they do nothing, if I had to say what they enjoy in life I would have to say television, television and shopping.
