Gone

by Martin Roper

  —I’ll go.

  —You’re not a sulker, are you?

  —The worst. Hold grudges too. Forever.

  I take the subway out of illogical spite. A black man, dressed like a dishevelled magician, does tricks with doves. The birds flutter up and down the train carriage. As the train grinds to a halt at Forty-second he whistles and the birds fly back to him and into their black box. I got off at Ninety-sixth to catch the local. Workmen are painting the station poles. The heat is stifling.

  We don’t see each other for a week. I break and call. She talks about New York and art and photography and her dead husband and her mother screaming at her father on long-distance phone calls. I can’t imagine Holfy as a seven-year-old. I can’t imagine her as a person other than the woman she is in front of me, the woman I have already created in my mind. I am terrified of her and know I will betray Ursula again and I haven’t even touched Holfy. I haven’t left Ursula. There would be no feeling of betrayal if I had really left her.

  * * *

  She is going to Pennsylvania to visit friends—partly because she can’t bear the silence since Kahlo died. I offer to take care of Botero while she is away but she is taking the dog too.

  —He doesn’t miss Kahlo at all, treacherous bastard. If you want to be useful you could water the plants and collect the mail?

  She spends hours packing and I sense, in her careful movements, she is already with them. I hate these people who make her whistle happily. I want to crawl inside her life. I want to possess her. To know her more fully than she knows herself; to watch her dress in the morning. She takes an age to face the day and I want to see her create herself. I want to watch her buying her hats; watch her ask a shop assistant for this scent and that one; her ease at not feeling the need to make a purchase.

  She takes me around the apartment and explains how much each plant needs. As she talks my life comes into focus. I remember when, as children, my cousin Brian and I were pillow fighting. I was getting the upper hand and in a fit of rage Brian threw down his lumpy pillow and leaped on me, screaming. He was stockier and stronger. I remember my eyes closing in pain as he clenched his fleshy fingers about my throat, his thumbs pressing on the Adam’s apple. I knew Brian would strangle me he was so angry. It was my first realiszation that my life could end and in one heave I tossed him over my head and his foot crashed through the bedroom window. I stood rubbing my neck, triumphant and terrified and relieved; such is my relief listening to Holfy. She is explaining about the outdoor plants. I see the years ahead with Ursula; can see what would happen with our lives; can see all the fights over her wanting to have a child, or worse the silence over it, and I don’t want to be responsible for any of it. I love her and can’t live with such suffocating compromises. Holfy is still talking—something about Bela Bartok and flowers—and she catches sight of my mind drifting. I apologise. The fullness of life floods into me. How can I tell this woman, who hardly knows me, whom I hardly know, that I am planning to spend the rest of my life with her. She makes up the futon in the corner of the apartment that overlooks Gansevoort Street. You can sleep in my bed if you find it too noisy, she says. I shake my head that it will be fine right here.

  Her phone rings constantly while she is away. She has told me not to answer it. Waking up feels like a sudden transportation into a deserted movie set. Each morning the meat trucks wake me before five. I stare out the window watching the men unload the meat. Then I go and shower.

  I go through her books, one by one, fanning the pages, dust taking flight. I wipe down the bookcases and reshelve them, wondering which ones belong to her and which ones belonged—still belong—to Robert. His handwriting in the margins of many of them, little ticks by passages that pleased him. I look for naïveté in his comments, an emptiness in his intellect; find none. We have similar taste and it makes me dislike the ghost of his presence even more.

  She has no vacuum cleaner. I find a broom and sweep out the apartment. I try to clean the windows with Windowlene but the grime is too thick. I wash them inside and out with hot soapy water, make tea while they are drying, polish the windows with the radio on the station she listens to, voices that become the voice of New York, more New York than the streets themselves.

  The second night I lie in her bed, smell her off the sheets, imagine her sleeping in it with Robert, the conversations they had, the lovemaking. I pick up the book by her nightstand. Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann. I open it on the bookmarked page: I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself. Alexis de Tocqueville. I read the chapter headings. What mind writes such a book? What mind reads it? Would Robert and Holfy have debated over it? I don’t understand why I am so happy here.

  When she returns she asks me if the noise disturbed me and I say yes and tell her she should move immediately. I like the meat district. I grew up with screaming, she says. She smiles at the tidiness of the place, asks if I am trying to ingratiate myself. Yes, I say. Her directness is contagious. We agree on six hundred dollars a month, to be reviewed each month by both parties. Window cleaning welcome. Book tidying not.

  She drives a blue Saab, and this evening we are driving uptown to visit Barbara’s bar which is not doing so well. This is the evening I realise we have been avoiding the obvious. I have known her a year, been living here six months. We have never touched except to jab each other playfully. She is asking me about the painting job at Bradley’s. Janis Joplin is singing on the car radio. The bar is almost empty when we arrive. Holfy refuses the free drinks. Barbara smiles at me, and her smile is that of a professional politician, a smile that seems to say she knows something about me, something I’m not even aware of myself. In that moment, it strikes me how it looks as if we are a couple.

  That night, I go to her bed. She smiles at me and shakes her head. Slink back, she says. I ignore her finger pointing me back to my corner. She sits up and glares at me and I retreat. I sleep on my stomach, on the pain of hard desire.

  * * *

  Holfy’s roof is full of large potted flowers, their clay containers cracked and crumbling, life held together with wire and hope. She spends hours here, watering the plants, pruning them, having dinner. Breakfast on a weekend morning on this roof is heaven. She has a coq for cleanly lifting the head off a boiled egg. She has an egg spoon with a serrated edge, perfect for scraping the last morsel out of the thin base of the egg. She has spoons with deeper serrated edges for eating grapefruit. She has glasses that could never be filled with anything but orange juice. Small oval plates to accompany the boiled eggs. Napkins that cover the lap like small, heavy tablecloths.

  The roof leaks badly that first summer and Gottleib blames Holfy and the weight of her plants. He threatens to remove everything. We rescue what we can before the roof is refelted. When the work is done she moves her plants back out, despite the warnings of the man who reputedly owns half of the meat district. The next day, when she comes home from work and climbs over the bed to the window she is confronted with a wrought-iron gate the size of a wardrobe, bolted onto the outside wall. Her first reaction is to fight but I suggest another approach. We can call the fire department. The window is the only escape from the building other than the door. But she can’t wait. She asks me to climb up on the roof and remove the gate. I climb up and fidget with the bolts. There are twelve. Some of the nuts are too tight, I lie. The pointing on the bricks looks fragile as if the mortar is crumbling like everything else on the street. I want to wait for the fire department. She asks me to try harder. I start to sing: tryyyy … tryyy … try just a little bit harder so I can lovelovelove … I kneel down, and tar, still wet in the summer heat, oozes from underneath the felt and sticks to my trousers.

  —I don’t care how long it’s gonna take … Let’s wait, please.

  She nods. Moments later she is beside me on the roof and with one enraged yank she rips the cage off the wall. Fuck him, she pants, wiping her hands on her hips. The twelve bolts lie on the roof lik
e spent cartridges.

  That evening we drive across the village to Barbara’s house for dinner. Holfy has a way of pouring wine that enhances its enjoyment before it touches the lips. The glass should always be half full. A full glass of wine is aesthetically vulgar to the eye. I study her hands. They are brown with the fading summer. She is wearing the lapis ring that she and Robert bought years ago in Italy. Although her fingernails are bitten they do not have a pained look about them. Hers are delicate hands. Femininity and femaleness meet in these hands. Beauty is stored here.

  As time wears on I begin to question everything, including Holfy. Ah, when the pupil turns the gaze on the teacher. I am painting apartments and working in a catering firm. At night, if I’m free, I assist Holfy at the weddings she is covering. We are both at home at the same time, and it makes it hard to breathe. I suggest making a room in the apartment, a space in a corner that would have room enough for a small desk. But Holfy refuses to build walls. She wants twelve hundred square feet of light. It would ruin the light and nothing mattered more to her in the apartment than light.

  I am uneasy working illegally in New York. We should marry, she says, simply to deal with the problem. I am tempted but in my gut know that it is not the answer. It will only compound the problems. I am drowning, drowning in my infatuation with her, frightened of how well we click, and beginning to see how lost and rudderless I am, how much I miss the tedious familiarity of Ursula.

  * * *

  —Darling?

  Holfy is looking at me over her spectacle rims. She looks her age tonight. She smiles and it is a smile filled with such affection that I feel sad. I want to tell her I love her but know, even as the words form, that saying them is a selfish act: a pathetic need to reassure myself. She puts her book down and holds her arms out. I stare across at the Judd’s Gym sign flashing in the night.

  —I’m farting tonight. Just to let you know the vastness of your love must breathe in the foulest odour.

  I laugh and pick up her book. Holfy is reading Rousseau. Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

  * * *

  —After Cooper Union. Never put a line on paper unless you mean it, he said. I froze. I never put a line on paper. So I went to ICP instead. Full of Europeans. Photography is light, the guy there said. I’m from Iceland—there’s nothing he could teach me about light. As soon as I held a camera I knew. This was it. I felt the relationship. The rest was struggling with being artistic. I knew it was nothing to do with art. It was attitude. And Stillness. Light. I didn’t need to be told it was light, light was obvious. If you need to be told that it is already too late. But I was shy then. I said nothing. I made a mistake. For ten, fifteen years, I made a mistake. I hid behind the camera. Dead years. I won all the competitions in the those dead years. An explosion of hate—which was good to release but I didn’t channel it. I directed it at the viewer. I thought I was honest. So did all those judges. Olafsdottir is unflinchingly honest. We were all wrong. I should have been making it the essence of the photograph. Essence. Oops—essence. Time to stop talking.

  —An explosion of hate?

  —For my dear parents. Who else can we hate with such devotion?

  The fragile and ancient hurt that seeps out of adults when they speak of wronged childhoods.

  * * *

  —I was raised by my mother after they divorced. My father got my brothers. My mother and I went to New York. She wasn’t going to stay in Iceland, and Hungary was out of the question—even if she liked her in-laws. She sold the Icelandic International Travel Agency and we left. I was happy. That smelly room had been responsible for the first time my mother hit me—I asked her why we put International in front of everything. It’s like living in a desert with a bodyguard, I said. Holfy lashes a hand through the air.

  —She hit me a lot after that.

  —And your father?

  —My father. My father is my father. What else to say? I got to admire him a lot—when I had to live alone with my mother. When we all lived together I thought all the arguments were his fault. I thought the divorce was our fault, my brothers and I. Then I thought it was my fault. Years later, I looked at my mother and saw, as they say in America, she was the key player. My therapist—imagine a little village girl from Iceland having a therapist—asked me what is the one thing that sticks with me about my mother. Are you listening. The therapist said yes, and I said no, that was what I remember. Are you listening. I did nothing but listen to my mother.

  Her husband.

  —Robert was with Lavansky. The aeronautics Lavansky—not the painter. That’s what brought us together. Painting. He called me his chiaroscurist. I thought he was ribbing me when he said he tested helicopters. You mean whether they crash or not? I asked him and he nodded. Do they? I asked. Sometimes, he said. And he was so genuinely nonchalant that I fell for him there and then. Holfy’s face takes on a softness. She loves his memory too much for me ever to grow fond of him. I pour her some fresh coffee, go into the kitchen to wash the dishes. She continues talking through my drying.

  —He crashed five times, you know that? Five times and never a scratch.

  —What about the sixth?

  It’s out before I can help myself.

  —You’re a cruel, blue-eyed angel.

  —Sorry.

  —He was coming home. Midweek. He had been up at Lavansky’s. He was a real man. She blows me a kiss, takes off the purple chinese jacket. Underneath, a pale pink man’s shirt. She waves her hands in front of her reddened face.

  —Hot flushes. That stage of life. He was coming in through the Queens tunnel. I never understood that. He always came in on 1. Always. And down the Hudson Parkway. He liked to get a look at the Palisades. He used to say Imagine what it was like when they first came in and saw the Palisades. New York must have been something else then. He liked the snatches he could glimpse of the Empire. He and it were born the same year. It’s why he liked my place so much—he’d stand at the window and say Our precious inch of Empire. He never ceased to be enchanted with New York. A car broke down in the tunnel in front of him. And then, in the other lane, going in the opposite direction, the same thing happened in almost the exact same spot. One in each lane at the same time. They had to reverse in trucks at either end. Traffic backed up in both lanes. When they towed out the car in front of Robert, he didn’t move. He was dead. He had had a heart attack. She laughs at the absurdity.

  —A man who risks his life in the sky and dies underground. You have to have a sense of humour, yes?

  I stare out the window at the mauve inch of the Empire State. Precious inch. The city seems full of love. The time I went to the top with Ursula when we visited New York. She sneaked up behind me as I leaned against the rail and slipped her arms through mine and brushed her fingers over my chest. Such bliss it was; the view of Manhattan and her. Hot dogs and sticking stamps on postcards and running my hand over his arms. The silence at the top; no horns, no sirens, no whoosh of hot subway train, no screaming miseries; nothing but breeze and dampness of clouds. I was still translating dollars and punts in my head, a tourist. Such a long time ago it seems. My eye catches sight of an ant traipsing up the windowpane; it pauses on the Empire’s tip, peaking over the Village, over all of us. His minuscule legs leading him nowhere. He crawls with vital importance to the top of the glass; reaches the edge; stops; hurries with magnificent urgency to the bottom. He marches up again, and halfway, turns and scurries daintily to the left. Three is such randomness in his movements and he makes decisions with such haste that it’s impossible to imagine there is a rationale behind his decision to turn left and not right. And yet there must be. I consider crushing him with the back of my thumbnail to end his frustration but stop myself: God must watch the world with the same indifference. Ursula. Longing for her overcomes me. The scent of her skin; seeing her laughing in the bed as we read those dreadful review books together.

  * * *

  I wash and dry the last glass. Holfy is
sitting with her coffee, scraping at the wax that had spilled from the candleholders onto the wooden table. I sit down again and look at her. We look fixedly at each other for a long time. Then I stand up, the chair screeching on the tiled floor. I stoop and kiss her. She stands and kisses me back. Her mouth tastes wonderful. Even barefoot she is taller than I am. I pull away from her. I pick up the Eliot poems I’ve been reading and go into the darkroom. She potters around for a while, talks on the telephone.

  * * *

  —What you doing?

  —Reading. Bed.

  She frowns and shakes her head.

  —Ms. Olafsdottir. I didn’t want to presume.

  —Excellent pronunciation. Can you fuck too?

  She nods her head for me to follow her.

  * * *

  She hands me a towel and tells me to shower. She tells me to hurry. A large curling turd floats in the toilet. Her own sweet smile. When I come out she tells me I am not supposed to get dressed again. Undress, she says. She sits by the fireplace and watches me. She tells me to lie down and to touch myself. I lick my finger and caress the tip of my nose. She tells me I must be serious. She takes straps from her travel case and ties my wrists to the bedposts. I am nervous, excited, fight a smile. She kisses my lips, my chest, my cock. She kisses my toes. She ties my ankles to the bedposts.

  —Where did you get the ropes?

  —My yoga ropes.

  —Yoga ropes.

  —Stop talking.

  She unbuttons her shirt and looks at me looking at her purple bra. She grins and looks down at herself, grabs her own breasts. Then she pulls on a pair of yellow leather gloves. She lifts her skirt to her hips and gets on top of me. My stomach tenses under her wetness. She slaps me gently. I start to laugh unable to take it seriously. She shakes her head in warning. She holds my cock with her gloved hand, finds her opening, and encloses me. He rises up and down, slaps me hard. My face burns through my smile.

  —Tell me when to stop.

  She slaps me harder.