The Flamethrowers: A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

  * * *

  We returned to the apartment. Gianni and Bene fought. I heard only her, just as when I had listened to them have sex, her voice behind a closed bedroom door, this time loud and upset, righteous.

  She came out, entered the kitchen, and ranted to the women gathered there, who were soldering radio parts. She called Gianni various names. The women all laughed.

  I stood outside the kitchen, awkward, his accomplice, perhaps the reason she was angry. Bene looked at me. Her face broke into a tight, unfriendly smile.

  “Go ahead. Just go with him,” she said. “Go on.”

  I’d spent a few innocent hours with Gianni, and she was shutting me out.

  Bene put her hand out, gesturing in the direction of the bedroom where Gianni was. “Go with him,” she said.

  The other women kept soldering. Not a single one looked up at me. I was being shunned because of Bene. Because of Gianni. Because of something that possibly had nothing to do with me.

  It seemed ridiculous, a joke, but it wasn’t a joke. They had turned against me in the few hours I was gone.

  Bewildered, I walked past the kitchen to the bedroom and opened the door.

  Gianni looked up at me.

  The rest of it I wish I could erase.

  16. HOOKERS AND CHILDREN

  John Dogg and Nadine were quite the couple now. John Dogg was showing with Helen Hellenberger. Helen was wild about him. All the important critics were at his debut opening at her gallery. There were slide projections of blank white light. And patterned light from shallow zinc rectangles of water he’d placed strategically on the floor. He’d aimed film lamps at the rectangular pools, which sent reflections up the gallery wall in veined and fractured shimmers.

  John Dogg wore a well-cut linen suit and laughed easily and occupied the role of feted artist with perfected naturalism, no sign of the pushy tactics I’d seen at the Kastles’. He moved through the room confident that he was universally adored, and it seemed that he was. I’d met him the previous September and now it was late April, almost May, and he had been reinvented. This happened in New York, and you could never point to the precise turn of events, the moment when the change in human currency took place, when it surged upward or plummeted. There was only the before and the after. In the after, no one was allowed to say, hey, remember when everyone rolled their eyes about John Dogg? Shunned him, thought he was an idiot? I understood all this now. Sandro disapproved of that kind of ambition, said there was no hurry, but it was a lie, a thing successful people said, having conveniently forgotten that they themselves had been in a rush.

  I watched as Didier de Louridier pumped John Dogg’s hand eagerly and congratulated him on the show.

  Nadine stood at John Dogg’s side. She, too, was transmitting and receiving on a new frequency. She was sleek and composed, all sheen and stillness. She wore a black, high-collared dress and stiletto heels of black patent leather. Her hair had been cut into one of those waferlike constructions you saw in fashion magazines, a wedge of it, hardened with aerosol lacquer, fanning over one eye. She gleamed like an obelisk, standing next to John Dogg as he shook hands with the people who surrounded them. The concentration of smooth, flattened energy in that wafer of hair, which shaded one eye like an upside-down poker hand. She was nothing like the woman I remembered, sunburned, drunk, crying, something starkly provisional about her enjoyments, Thurman’s goodwill, the sense that she would be on hard luck whenever he was bored with her, done escapading, and wanted to go back to Blossom.

  I was at the opening with Gloria and Stanley Kastle. Since my return, two weeks earlier, I had been staying with them, in the same spare room where Burdmoore Model had camped out in his fugitive days. I was their current adoptee, and my photographs from the salt flats, at Gloria’s insistence, went above the shelf where Burdmoore’s sculptures had been displayed. I showed Gloria my short films, which I associated with a naive era, before I’d met Sandro, tracking the row of limousines and drivers on Mulberry Street, a dark walk through neon-lit Chinatown, but Gloria liked them. I was a fresh cause for her and Stanley. They disapproved of how Sandro had treated me. But I understood that they would remain friends with Sandro permanently. I was temporary and Sandro was permanent. They claimed to be angry at him and said if he made an appearance here at John Dogg’s opening they would protect me, but there was no risk of running into Sandro. I still knew him, even after discovering that I didn’t quite know him. He would feel it was beneath him to come to the opening of John Dogg, so recently scorned and ignored.

  Spring had arrived and it was a mild, windless night, the pear trees on West Broadway covered with white flossy blossoms as I had parked the bike and waited for the Kastles outside the gallery.

  “She’s sleeping with her analyst,” Stanley said to me as they approached.

  “The couch is there for a reason,” Gloria replied. “You are flat, horizontal, frontal. They are vertical. The session can either be inert or it can be activated, in which case, Dr. Butz is active.”

  “She pays him,” Stanley said, “a hundred bucks.”

  “I pay a negotiated fee of eighty-five, Stanley.”

  “Still, she pays him and they do it on the session couch.”

  “Listen, Stanley, it is the least he could do for me after seventy years of Freud and his patriarchal bullshit. You know what Freud wrote to his fiancée? Dear darling, while you were scouring the sink, I was solving the riddle of the structure of the brain. Dr. Butz can scour my sink.”

  “While the riddle—”

  “It’s your money I’m giving him.”

  “While the riddle of the brain goes unsolved,” Stanley said to me as we walked into the gallery.

  * * *

  Sandro wanted me to come home. He said Talia was just a messed-up and confused girl. I didn’t see what her state of mind, her confusion, had to do with anything. Sandro had let me know he was capable of harm, greatly capable of it.

  What I’d done, helping Gianni—it was a secret that lived in me, one I didn’t know quite what to do with. When I thought of Gianni, his brooding authority, the hurried departure, me driving what turned out to be his getaway car, I felt alone in a way that might be permanent. Secrets isolate a person. In that, I understood one thing about Gianni: the fog of his distance, the burden of secrets, the isolation.

  Sandro had picked up the repaired Moto Valera, which had been shipped by the dealer in Reno to one in Manhattan. He relayed through Gloria that I could collect it if I wanted it. It was in the ground-floor hall of his building, the pink owner’s title folded and taped to the gas tank, the key in the ignition. When I went up to get my clothes, Sandro was at his big studio table, drawing. I went into our room, which had never felt in any way mine, and packed my clothes into my duffel bag, the same one I had brought here when I moved from Mulberry Street. I thought maybe Sandro would come in while I packed, try to apologize. He didn’t. When I walked past, he looked up. I stopped. Neither of us said anything.

  I went down, strapped the duffel to the rear rack of the bike, and rode it over to the Bowery, to the Kastles’. It was my first ride through the streets of New York City, but on a bike I already knew. I had to watch out for potholes, and cabs that came to sudden stops, but crossing Broadway, zooming up Spring Street, passing trucks, hanging a left onto the Bowery, the broadness of the street, the tall buildings in the north distance, the sense of being in, but not of, the city, moving through it with real velocity, wind in my face, were magical. I was separate, gliding, untouchable. A group of winos in front of a Bowery hotel gave me the thumbs-up. At a stoplight, a man in the backseat of a cab, a cigarette hanging from his lips, rolled down his window and complimented the bike. He wasn’t coming on to me. He was envious. He wanted what I had like a man might want something another man has.

  There was a performance in riding the Moto Valera through the streets of New York that felt pure. It made the city a stage, my stage, while I was simply getting from one place to the next
. Ronnie said that certain women were best viewed from the window of a speeding car, the exaggeration of their makeup and their tight clothes. But maybe women were meant to speed past, just a blur. Like China girls. Flash, and then gone. It was only a motorcycle but it felt like a mode of being.

  A week after I took the Moto Valera, Sandro came to the Kastles’. His tactic was sternness. He said I needed to stop acting like a martyr. Gloria and Stanley moved in beside me, told Sandro to give me time. He looked at them, nodded in bitter assent. Yeah, okay. You’re protecting her. I’m the guilty one. He nodded all the way to the freight elevator. Pushed the button, waited for a moment, then took the stairs. It was the last time I’d seen him.

  Inside Dogg’s crowded opening, Gloria grabbed Helen Hellenberger by the arm and said she should come over to the loft and see my films. Helen was about to make an excuse. Her mouth opened. Gloria said, “Great. We will see you at our place, next week.”

  When you’re young, being with someone else can almost seem like an event. It is an event when you’re young. But it isn’t enough. I was still young, and I wanted something else. I needed a new camera. The Bolex was smashed and I was alone and I wanted my life to happen.

  As we moved toward the bar, Stanley said he was terribly thirsty, that he felt like something with rust stains on it.

  “That’s because you drank nearly a liter of vodka last night,” Gloria said. “Your habits are going to be a slow killer of you, Stanley.”

  “I’m not in a hurry,” Stanley said, and turned to watch a girl who pushed past us. She was wearing pants that had clear plastic stretched over her rear, a window for viewing her two butt cheeks, which slid against each other as she walked.

  The Kastles had always been engaged in a low-intensity war with each other, but seeing them day in, day out, was to witness the derangement in a new way. One morning Stanley had been drinking coffee when Gloria came into the kitchen area of their loft holding a page ripped from a magazine.

  “Stanley,” she said, “I want to show you something.”

  He looked at her fearfully. She held the page in front of him. It was a glossy pictorial of three men and a woman. The men stood over the woman, erect cocks wagged in her face, semen jetting across the image, thick pearls of it on the woman’s open lips.

  “Should I get my hair cut like this woman?” Gloria asked. “Do you think that style would work for me? Is it becoming?”

  Stanley closed his eyes. He shut them tight and shook his head.

  “Are you saying no, Stanley, or are you refusing my question?”

  When she realized he wasn’t going to respond, she left the room. Stanley turned to me.

  “A little boy and girl, brother and sister, are looking out the window of a train as it rolls to the platform,” Stanley said. “The girl sees a sign on a station door and says, ‘Look, we’re arriving at Gentlemen.’ ‘You dummy,’ the boy says. ‘Can’t you see we’re at Ladies?’ You see,” Stanley said. “The boy will wander around Ladies, and the girl will venture into Gentlemen. It’s the same place. But they will never realize it.”

  While we were in Italy, Gloria had been given a residency at the Kitchen on Wooster Street. She did a one-day performance called Alone. Gloria stood in a small booth with a curtained, pelvis-level opening. A sign invited people to Place Hand in Window. In the window, behind the curtain, was Gloria’s naked pelvis.

  Stanley had been too prudish to touch his own wife’s genitals, as Ronnie announced to me. While Ronnie himself had apparently not just put his hand in the window, but kept it there awhile. “I did my volunteer work for the year,” Ronnie said. “I always maintained I wouldn’t turn down public service.” He put his hand in the window, and barely realizing what he was doing, lost in an interior reverie about the construction “to finger,” and how interesting it was that it was gendered, and not reversible, that to finger a man was to pin something on him, a crime, and to finger a woman was to bring her off, and that he was just moving his finger in a kind of unconscious way, back and forth, back and forth, and thinking about those two completely different meanings—not obverses, but maybe not completely unrelated, to finger a man, to pin a crime, to finger a woman . . . suddenly he feels this shudder from Gloria. Oh my God, he thinks, she just had an orgasm! And if that wasn’t bad enough, she cheated her own formal precept by peeking to see whose hand it was. As he turned to go he heard this muffled voice from behind the curtain whispering his name. He told the story as if Gloria was somehow presumptuous or overreaching, when he’d put his hand in her vagina. But that was of course the joke, the outrageous pretense of innocence. Of passivity.

  “I should get one of those T-shirts that says ORGASM DONOR,” he said.

  Afterward, Gloria followed him around for a week like a puppy dog. He finally had to tell her she was about twenty years older than his type. “I thought you don’t have a type,” Gloria had said. “You always make a point of that, of not having any type. You don’t have one, and I’m not even that.”

  Gloria told me about her residency at the Kitchen, and about Alone, but not what happened with Ronnie.

  “It was about the fourth wall,” she said. “It was also about making an assertion. There. Factual. In a sense male. If someone chose to break the fourth wall and place his hand in the box? They brought to the piece any component of sex. They brought it. I offered an object in a box, coldly. If someone placed a hand in the box, it was that person insisting on sensuality, on touching. Not me.”

  But then she broke down sobbing, and when she had regained enough composure to speak she told Stanley, with me as witness, that she believed she might be in love with Ronnie, and that the terms of her performance of Alone had not included that possibility, and perhaps she was losing her mind. She sobbed and sobbed, her body convulsing into the arm of the couch.

  The three of us sat, Gloria crying, and then Stanley sighed, cleared his throat, and spoke.

  “Dear Gloria,” he said, as if he were writing her a letter, “remember how we used to joke about the concept of love? The phrase ‘to be in love’? I would say to you, Darling, I believe I may be in love with the woman who announces the time of day over the telephone. Her voice is so calm, and even, and feminine but not artificially sweet, just measured. And she is always available, always there when I call. I can get a drink of water in the middle of the night, while you’re sound asleep, furtively dial MEridian 7-1212, and she’ll say to me, ‘At the tone, eastern standard time will be 2:53 a.m. exactly.’ I could call her whenever I wanted. She was totally available to me, and yet an enchanting mystery, one not to be solved. I could never make anything advance further. And remember that while I held this fascination for the Time Lady, you one day fell head over heels for the man who answered the suicide hotline? Remember, Gloria? You said to me, ‘Stanley, he listens to me. He listens.’ And I said, ‘Gloria, that is his job.’ And when you were better, when the temptation to hurt yourself had passed out of your mind completely, you forgot all about him. Remember? You didn’t even want to call the man you’d once been in love with, because you no longer were in that frame of mind. Call a suicide hotline? I’m Gloria Kastle, goddamn it—I don’t call hotlines. Hotlines call me.”

  Gloria sniffled, blotted her tear-streaked cheeks with a throw pillow from the couch, and smiled weakly.

  * * *

  “Do you realize how many Larrys are at Dogg’s opening?” Ronnie said, coming toward me in a shirt that said MARRIED BUT LOOKING.

  “Larry Zox, Larry Poons, Larry Bell, Larry Clark, Larry Rivers, and Larry Fink. And they’re all talking to one another! This is some kind of historic moment. Reminds me of a story Saul Oppler once told me. He was sitting with Saul Bass and Peter Saul on a rock in Central Park, and they look down from this rock, and below they see Saul Bellow with Saul Steinberg, together, buying hot dogs from a Sabrett cart.”

  Nadine and John Dogg posed for someone’s camera. Nadine turned her head just slightly to one side. The light from the fl
ash lapped at her hair and polished complexion, the black, shiny cloth of her dress. She did not blink. I told Ronnie I almost didn’t recognize her. I did recognize her, though. There was no question. I meant to say she seemed changed, altered.

  “She looks like a model advertising an expensive timepiece,” Ronnie said. “Funny how they try to make it into a separate category. Not ‘watch’ but ‘timepiece.’ ”

  Nadine was close to us now. Ronnie said hello to her.

  She said hello to him and then to me, separately, but as if she’d never met me. I didn’t press the matter. We watched her walk away.

  “Are you still friends with that photographer?” I was breaking the long silence about that night. What the hell, I thought. She’s here, and Ronnie’s here, and Sandro, Sandro is not here.

  “Yeah. Thurman’s wife died recently. People say the stupidest things about his work now. Thurman took a lot of pictures of the sky, and now Didier and his ilk claim that this is a kind of mourning. A great sadness, Thurman unable to face the horizontal world, the low material world, because he’s pining for his wife and thinking only of death and the heavens. This is a man who slept with everyone but his wife. Took pictures of the sky because he was too drunk to get up. Puked in a church donations box in Louisiana—I was with him. He had a bad hangover and had gone in to photograph something, I don’t remember what. He said it was the only time he’d been in a church since he was a child. But now he’s gazing at the heavens, in tribute to Blossom. People and their need to interpret.”

  He waved away the subject of Thurman. The subject of that night.

  “Hey, listen. I don’t know what you were doing over there in Italy besides having melodramas with Sandro. But the place must suit you or something. You look good.”