by Gary Indiana
In the gallery, two men in white overalls lug the pictures out of the office into the hangar-like white space. They hold them up here, move them there, Sarah stands in the center of the room directing traffic. Jacques, perched on the front desk near the door, untwists the wire ribbing around a champagne cork. Pop, fizz. I’d rather not get drunk this afternoon. Alcohol is softening my brain. What’s especially dangerous is Monday night, when Gregory calls up and talks about his cock; I know I’ve got to get my copy into the magazine computer before two the next afternoon, but what I want more than anything are several shots of vodka, one right after the other, and then the nights popped. Sometimes I can work myself into a rage and call him back, but the little prick always unplugs his phone before going to sleep. God forbid anybody should need him for anything.
Jacques has floppy brown hair and deep soulful brown eyes, big exaggerated features, big nose, he laughs easily like Sarah does. Hanging the paintings takes concentration, but after a while the serious way we’re shifting them around turns into a joke. It takes two hours to get them on the walls. The champagne’s long gone. Jacques says, Let’s get out of here and get a drink.
I suggest that we visit Gregory, who’s at work just around the corner. Sarah is eager to meet him. In my letters I’ve made a literary picture of him, with large areas left blank. “He’s not like the others,” I’ve assured her, since Sarah has met one or two of the others. There was, for example, a perfect imbecile who made paintings of natural disasters. I fell for the creep in a big way, just long enough to ruin a whole spring. But that was different. I want Sarah and Gregory to like each other. I think that Sarah, a great beauty and famous for it, too, will see him more clearly than I do. They are both cursed with beauty, and Sarah has managed to live a real life. Gregory’s stuck inside his face, he can’t get out of it.
We leave the gallery laughing. Isn’t it a relief that we’re all still alive? SoHo looks sleepy. The sun’s shining. The buildings absorb a hyperborean light that flattens against the street like a patina of dust, turning the black pavement blue. I decide I’m not going to die, the things I’m afraid of are not going to get me. I’m going to grow old with equanimity and physical grace.
The empty restaurant. They open at four, but nobody goes there before seven. Gregory’s standing with his back to the door, in the passage between the bar and the dining room where the industrial-looking espresso machine faces the toilets. He’s talking to Sammy, the new bar manager. They don’t react to our entrance. It’s as if they don’t hear us. I leave Sarah and Jacques at the bar and walk up behind him.
I say his name softly, still wrapped in the airy feeling that everything is going to work out fine.
A reaction. His strangest to date. The blood drains from my head. Someone has chopped an important section of the film. Gregory doesn’t turn around. His back goes up as if he’s been struck with a bat. Sammy spins around and walks out of the room as if on cue. And now Gregory turns, slowly, like a wax dummy on a carousel. I see the face twisted by an uncontrollable force, a paper face someone has crushed and smoothed out again, the eyes black and blazing.
I brought them to meet you, I whisper, waving towards Jacques and Sarah. I see he’s about to scream, he’s going to push me down the corridor and throw me through the front window. He marches past me, I see Sarah and Jacques freezing in bewilderment, their faces clouding up, Gregory starts shrinking as he gets close to them. The air turns silver and grainy and the walls of the room shine like sheets of mercury. I’m watching him evaporate. Looking down a long bleak funnel at a throbbing blotch of insanity. His body stiffens while he shrinks, he’s suddenly three feet high and completely emaciated. The floor stretches and sags, a ribbon of varnished pine chugging like a treadmill. He’s gotten away from me, and now he’s going to explode into a million pieces. I follow him, feeling like an oversized nurse in a mental hospital tagging behind a psychotic dwarf. When he reaches the bar he’s the size of a dashboard Jesus, his mouth erupts in a horrible grin, full of teeth that splay loose from his gums and shatter on the shiny floor, teeth the size of nail heads. Jacques attempts a smile. The figurine’s lips spread out across a tiny face in agonized congeniality, now it expands as it breathes, the limbs blow up enough to fill out the clothing, Gregory’s wrists reappear in their frayed white cuffs and his neck puffs out and fills his collar. He is almost himself by the time he speaks. Bits of him return in hazy leaps of some chemical reaction.
He catches my eye and smiles again. I smile back grimly. He drapes his face in a transparent, friendly look. This, he announces, is a bad moment. There is an elephantine silence in which I appreciate Gregory’s gift for understatement. I tell him we’ll leave. But he insists that we stay. He glides away into the restaurant’s hidden heart. Jacques smiles again, shrugging off the situation. Sarah says, Something’s wrong, we ought to leave. I tell them I’ve never seen him like this. Not like this. And I’m thinking that I’ve now seen him for the first time: almost mute with loathing and disgust. It’s far too late for this realization. I am part of this monster heart and soul.
He returns, magically composed, high-spirited, happy. He pours three goblets of Remy Martin. He asks Sarah about her show, her flight, her living arrangements. He listens raptly as Jacques talks about himself. Gregory tells a little of his work routine, smiles and sparkles like someone enduring the brief interrogation of a television camera. Now it’s his clothes talking. I imagine cracks and lesions appearing all over his skin, the roof of his skull popping open, snakes crawling out of his pockets. And finally this unendurable congeniality burns itself out as we leave, I picture a theatrical puff of smoke behind my back as we regain the sidewalk.
Jacques diplomatically observes that Gregory seems “anxious.” Sarah is less muddled. That look he gave you, she says. That was scary.
He later felt that he had to apologize: had to, according to some private system of accounting. His equilibrium had been pointlessly disrupted by the demon. He had revealed too much, for no reason. Perhaps no one has a personality when he’s alone, and some people cease to exist. Gregory had another person he became when he was out of sight, not necessarily one of the fictional selves who took credit for his dark moods, but someone else altogether. I was not supposed to encounter that person, and when I did the fragile cords of Gregory’s confidence ripped apart, the picture on the screen began an interminable vertical roll. In the course of a bitter argument he ended a string of accusations with the breathless announcement that I “wasn’t capable of love,” that I “didn’t know the meaning of the word. ” And in the next moment he retracted this with a high-pitched giggle, maniacally spluttering that he guessed he’d gone a little too far, that of course he didn’t mean what he was saying. It was as though he had been talking to himself, rehearsing things before a mirror, and then realized someone else happened to be in the room.
No one who answered the restaurant pay phone ever expressed complete certainty as to whether or not he was there. They covered the receiver and consulted other voices in the furry auditory background. He was often said to be running an errand, coming back later, to have already left for the night. In April, they started blatantly screening his calls, which told me when he didn’t want to talk to me. Since he often did come to the phone, I realized there were other people he didn’t want to hear from.
I told Bruno: His whole body just went rigid and when he turned around he looked like he was going to murder me. What goes on in that apartment when he’s got the phone unplugged? Nothing, Bruno said, yawning. He’s staring into space doing nothing. Or jerking off. One of the two.
There was a problem about going out together. Declining certain invitations he said, I want our relationship to be private. Declining others, he said I don’t want people to see us together and make all kinds of false assumptions. Declining still others, he said he couldn’t handle large groups of people.
We meet Libby and Jane in the cement stairwell of a SoHo building, at an afternoon o
pening. Uncharacteristically, Gregory has volunteered to go with me. Libby finds us on the stairs. She’s wearing a Barbara Kruger T-shirt that says, I CAN’T LOOK AT YOU AND BREATHE AT THE SAME TIME. Libby looks amused and depressed, or amused at her depression, or depressed by her amusement. Her hair is an ungovernable woolly cloud. I introduce Gregory. I pray that Libby won’t tell him she’s heard a lot about him. Gregory tells her he liked her book. She’s published several, so she asks which one. He tells her. Jane comes out into the stairwell, looking like a large, restless cat in a state of murderous boredom. Gregory is dazzled. He idolizes Jane. He wants his work to be just like hers.
Later, at midnight, Libby calls and says: My god, watch out. He’s beautiful. That face.
A half hour later Jane calls and says: So, he’s got a problem with his job? What’s the matter, GQ isn’t hiring?
Gregory brought me two of his pictures, mounted on wood. He laughed defensively, removing the bubble wrap. I don’t know what you’re going to think, he said. But I want you to tell me if you don’t think they’re any good. Or if they’re just all right. The one thing I don’t want to do is delude myself.
But Gregory, I said, while he hid the unwrapped pictures from sight, don’t make me the judge, because I can’t be, I mean, please, don’t ask me to tell you or explain why I like them if I like them, or appraise them. I’m not good at coming up with things verbally, just like that.
But your opinion is important to me, he said.
See, I don’t want my opinion to influence what you do. It’s too big a responsibility. You should do what you want. Follow your instincts.
What if my instincts are fucked up and adolescent?
So, I said, whose aren’t? You have to go with what you have, really.
A further display of reluctance. Finally he propped them side by side on the edge of the bookshelf above the desk. They were eight and one-half by twelve inch horizontals. One was a rich black and white, the other had a silvery bluish tint. The surfaces glistened like frosted glass.
In one picture a boy with a crewcut and severe, womanish features stood with his eyes looking down, in the extreme right foreground, while behind him a slightly blurry, squat figure in a vaguely military outfit glowered at him, pointing a square-format camera at his back. The mise-en-scene had an Alpine atmosphere, craggy peaks and snow. The other showed an interior, something like a boarding house room in a Weimar-period Fritz Lang movie. This time the right foreground was filled with the fuzzy, naked rear end of a young man, the frame cropping off his head and his legs below the knees. In the background, in sharp focus, a middle-aged man wearing a dark suit stood in the open doorway of the room, one hand clutching an indistinct figure drawing.
Gregory eyed me as I looked at them. They seemed so clearly to be icons of my worst fears about our relationship: that I was old and unattractive and dominant, exploiting a younger man’s confusion.
Tell me, he said.
Well, I said. What can I say.
You think they’re terrible.
No, not at all. They’re just . . . you know, depressing. I mean they are about you and me, aren’t they.
Gregory put on his shocked, outraged look, like a Kabuki mask.
That’s not the idea at all, he insisted, indignantly. Don’t you realize, he went on, pointing at the pictures, switching to a tone of maniacal reasonableness, Don’t you understand, if I make a picture like this, who it is I identify with? Isn’t it obvious?
He meant the older, unattractive figures, but I didn’t see where that was obvious at all. And then, looking at the bluish one with the mountain background, I noticed the strong resemblance between the youth in the picture and Pugg.
Gregory sighed. I feel, he said, like I’m about sixty years old.
Lucky for you, I laughed, secretly infuriated by the thought that Gregory was in love with Pugg, you’re only twenty-seven.
Gregory’s voice tightened. The last thing I expected when I came over here, he said, was ridicule. He spat the word out with ugly finality.
I touched his shoulder. He twitched my hand away. I could see him racing for the basement door of his dark mind. If he numbs out on me, I thought, this time I will actually slap him around.
Gregory, I said, don’t, please? For once will you just stay right here on the set instead of running away? I was making a joke, Gregory. A harmless little joke. I wasn’t ridiculing you, I’m not trying to destroy you, you take everything too seriously, you let everything disturb you, when I say something light and silly you get offended and act like I’ve committed a capital crime, and then you disappear for days and days and I flip out wondering if you’re still alive, and end up thinking it’s better if you really have committed suicide because if you haven’t I should hate you.
He looked at the floor and pouted.
Look, I said, very gently. If we can only be miserable together I’d rather see you happy with someone else. If you want to be with Pugg then go be with him.
I instantly wondered if it were true, that I’d rather see him happy, or if this was an unfortunate rhetorical flourish. Now what, I thought, if he suddenly says he’s seeing someone else.
Pugg doesn’t want me, he whispered.
He had sat down in the metal semi-reclining chair one of my decor-minded friends had outlived. It consumed an unreasonable amount of space in the study, which was already jammed with wall-high bookshelves, the desk, a plain wooden bench piled with back issues of The New York Review of Books, and the wheeled office chair. The tiny figure of Gregory—slunk in inexplicable anger, smoldering in that ridiculous chair, on an afternoon when sunlight blazed through the apartment and a pleasant, fitful breeze kept dislodging all the papers on the desk—looked so incongruous and idiotic that I feigned a coughing spell to avoid laughing. And then I burst out laughing anyway. Gregory’s head came up and his face shifted from tragedy to bewilderment. I could see he thought I’d finally snapped and gone loony. His interest in the situation revived.
It’s a mistake, someone said, to swim in the ocean if you happen to be menstruating. Too true, too true.
When a whole day and night went by without calamity or fugue, I heard myself thinking: It’s at this moment in a novel that the protagonist is brained by an unknown assailant, found dead in the trunk of a stolen car, or learns of his fatal illness from the family doctor. And of course it was the irregular, blissful evening when we left each other’s nerves intact that raised, in its immediate wake, the most noisome fears, the specter of random violence and accidental death. We functioned so habitually on pain and anxiety that their occasional absence automatically foretokened doom, the intrusion of the world’s casually distributed misery into our privately cultivated torture garden.
I wanted the line free, in case he called. When people kept me on the phone, I knew he was trying to reach me from the corner, to ask me to dinner, a movie, to hear some live music somewhere: Let’s breathe for a change, he would say, enough of this claustrophobia. It never happened like that, never once. Even if we went somewhere we dragged along a ten-ton weight of exiguous distress. Nothing was ever right, not entirely, and even if it was, you felt it could go wildly wrong in a split second, for no apparent reason.
Two hundred people swarmed through Cyril’s townhouse for Sarah’s pre-opening party. Doris had fulfilled the questionable inspiration of having two openings, on consecutive evenings: the first for “VIPs, ” the second for “the art world. ” The people who turned up at Cyril’s after the VIP opening were not, on the whole, art people. There were fashion people. There were jewelry people. There were, mixed in, entertainment people.
There were tall, equine women in Halstons and Chanels and Lagerfelds who used expressions like shockhorror and mega-brill. There were marketing people from Laura Ashley and ad people from Vogue who assured one another that they wouldn’t be trapped into using the C-word, or the M-word, or the E-word. They were perfectly nice, mediocre, irrelevant people for whom Doris had passed over the
entire art community. Sarah held court in a third-floor bedroom, where breezy international types repaired to adjust their mirror images and toot a few lines.
Victor had accompanied me, since Gregory had refused to. Victor’s discomfort was more or less total. Worse, he’d dressed horribly, in what looked like the Sunday clothes of a trucker. Jeans and a sweatshirt would have been fine, but Victor had struck a fashion note of proletarian obtusity as if intending his clothes to convey his loathing of luxury and graciousness. Yet his natural sweetness defeated him. He assumed the job of fetching drinks for people, up and down the narrow staircase, and otherwise stood around with the chandelier glazing his eyeglasses, smiling miserably at the glamor hounds who circulated through the house.
