by Jeet Thayil
“Goody, the phone, dear god!” he shouted, and just then the ringing stopped and she heard him say in a lower, much lower register, “Yes?”
It was probably Amrik hoping to talk him into agreeing to a show in India, something that would make them real money for a change. She put the pen down and touched her shoes, black pumps with a medium heel. She slid a finger into the right one: it was too tight. She needed new shoes and winter boots and a digital camera. Really, she needed more money. For a man who had earned a fair amount of cash in his life, New lived from hand to mouth. There was never enough money to not think about money.
Again on the phone New said, “Yes?”
She would have to move out of the Union Square apartment and into Chaos Central because the upkeep on the two places was too much. Rent, power, maintenance, not to mention his insurance premiums. She had no health insurance because she was self-employed. She had no steady income and was therefore not eligible. Was this the life artistic? If so she’d be better off working in a bank or a nail salon. There was no point telling New she needed to make her own money and work on her own show. He would tell her not to mess with a good thing and to think of their arrangement as an apprenticeship or master class.
“Yes,” said Newton for the third and final time.
Later, after they’d been to the gallery where Goody hung the new pictures it had taken her all of ten minutes to choose; after she’d made sure the gallery assistant – whose name was Clare, who had stayed late and was not happy about it – was using latex gloves so she wouldn’t nick the polished steel of the frames; after late supper at a newly trendy Francophile bistro in Chelsea where Goody had ordered onion soup, oysters on the half shell and wine, and New a croque madame that he barely touched, but drank a pot of black coffee all by himself; after they’d taken a cab home, though Goody had mooted the idea that it was a lovely evening, cold and full of stars, and it would be nice to walk a little, and they’d stepped out of the restaurant to the sudden sound of air brakes from a bus on the corner and New had cried out, shielding his face with his hands, and that was the end of the walk; after they’d got home and Goody had had a shower and wrapped herself in a bathrobe and gone to her desk where she’d angled a magnifying glass over the face of the rope-bound sari-clad figure lying prone on a sidewalk, her own face; after she closed her eyes and imagined a woman she’d known at Goldsmiths’, a maddening gender-conflicted English chick named Megan – these were the women Goody fantasised about, while her nesting fantasies were always with men – whom Goody saw in parts or a single part thereof, in the men’s Y-fronts she favoured, Megan, a music major and femme dyke; after Goody imagined pulling the briefs aside at the crotch, not taking them off because she wanted the act to be uncomfortable and intense, she settled back in the chair and used both hands and didn’t care if Newton saw.
Pulling the curtains for the night she remembered that she had first come to the apartment at the same time of year with the same wintry view from the window. Though the scene had not been so blank. Blankness was a thing come new into the world.
She had left the bright winter sun of Delhi for the frigid wastes of Manhattan. Her first sight of the city had been late at night through the window of an airport taxi. Much of it seemed as poor and shabby as a city in India. The cab driver played soft music on a tape deck, choosing from a box of cassettes on the passenger seat. The music was full of bounce and yearning and the driver sang softly along, the word ‘safiatou’ – or was it ‘safi a tout’? – repeated in alternating tones of demand and release.
When they got to the apartment New had opened the door with a key he wore around his neck. He made a little speech. They would sleep together and work separately. He would teach her how to put together a show, how to use the press to advantage, how to frame a picture, and so on. Meanwhile, she was free to do as she wished. Her private life was her own business.
He said, “You are too young to be faithful. I’m too old to be monotonous, I mean monogamous.”
She had not even put her bags down and he was talking about monogamy or its opposite. For a moment she considered finding a cab, the airport, a ticket home, but his voice pulled her back. He said he was addicted to solitude. He craved it and repudiated it in equal measure. He had grown up with a mad mother and it had marked him. He had started to think about death in his teens and now in advanced middle age or early old age he thought about it in a different way, like a daydream or a treat for the future, and he thought about it more and more as the years went by. Why was he telling her this? Not because he wanted her sympathy or because he was prone to making dramatic statements, which of course he was. He was telling her because she had a right to know that he’d been asking himself the important questions. What makes life worth living? What do you do when the best is behind you and whatever comes next will be a disappointment?
“Look at me,” she had said. “I’m next. Are you disappointed?”
She could hear him now moving something in the bedroom and her spirits sank. If he was moving stuff around it meant he was going to be up all night. Which meant he would be wired and unpredictable in the morning.
He stood by the closet in the guest bedroom. On the floor were two open suitcases. In one he’d dumped a pair of shoes and a pile of black T-shirts and one of the ancient Olivettis he liked to use. The other suitcase was empty but for a carton of Pall Malls.
“New? It’s late, what are you doing?”
He turned, his eyes demonic or haunted or on the verge of panic.
“I’m packing, Goody, packing if it’s okay with you. I’m not leaving things for the last minute, if you see what I mean. I am planning ahead.”
“Planning what?”
“I told you, my retrospective and party, the last and final blowout. In India.”
“The India trip isn’t for a few years.”
For a minute it was as if he had not heard her. Then he shook his head. He said, “Next year is a month away.”
She led him by the hand into the bedroom. The night had turned cold and outside she heard the high whine of the wind.
2.
The subway car rocked its way due north and the lights failed for four or three seconds. Fear was never far when you were trapped in a moving cylinder deep in the innards of a city under attack. In a subway tunnel you were unseen under the weight of the earth, immured, losing all sense of definition. You were no different from worm, clod, or bony root. A tunnel approximates the experience of burial.
The complexion of the car had changed as the train creaked past midtown and coloured faces gave way to pale, but the expressions were the same. The same look of grievance, of having been wronged, the same averting of the eyes from the dark-skinned man with the parcel wrapped in foreign-language newspaper.
At Fifty-Ninth and Lexington he came out of the subway and continued north. Old snow had frozen hard to the gutters. The air was crisp and he could smell some kind of rot or fermentation. A sanitation truck moved on the street, a single word spray-painted in red on the front bumper. REVENGE. Of the driver all he could see was a reflective orange vest and visored sunglasses. The truck sparked a memory of a front-page item by his friend and colleague Shyam Pereira, a story about sanitation workers who had chased a young Sikh man on the morning of September Eleven as the towers came down. There had been a picture of the truck the men drove. He was certain it was the same one. How many city sanitation vehicles would be emblazoned with such a slogan? Dismas walked a block and stopped when he saw the steam from a hot-dog vendor’s cart. He asked for a dog with everything.
“Dirty water dog with onion, sauerkraut and mustard?” said the vendor, who was Hispanic.
Dismas told him no, hold the mustard, and waited while the man made his dog. He paid and took a bite as he walked up the block. He ate some more but something in the meat or the onions tasted off and he put the rest of it into a bin. At the end of the block a man was pushing a cart and Dismas ran to catch up with him. He asked
for bottled water. The man said he sold honey-roasted nuts not water.
“Honey-roasted nuts, okay. What do you have to drink?” said Dismas.
The man gave him a Pepsi. He drank most of it standing on the sidewalk with his parcel between his knees. The parcel’s Hindi newspaper wrapping had come undone in layers and you could see the frames on the paintings inside. He was tucking the shreds of newspaper into place when a woman in a short fur coat swerved around him. Her yellow T-shirt said I HATE NEW YORK and her hair had a green sheen that was the exact colour of something. What? She glanced at the paintings and smiled. There was something about her that was familiar or familial and he would know what it was in a minute, except the wondrous stranger was going, going, gone, disappearing out of his life for ever. Her hair was disappearing too, hair the exact shade of coolant. And then he noticed the vengeful sanitation truck idling nearby. It had matched his progress up the block. Was he being followed? It was not too far-fetched an idea. The driver was white and Dismas was not and there lay the basis of their antagonism. It was December of the year 2001, three months after September Eleven and a bad time to be ‘South Asian’ in New York City. Better black, better yellow, better blue than brown. To the sanitation man the street was divided between his people and other (lesser, hued) people. Dismas understood the man’s narrow rural white point of view, he really did. He too wanted a world cleansed of the foreign and peopled only by Dismas, the comely coolant-haired New York-hater, and a wide flotilla of retail technicians. But there was no time to pursue this line of thought. Wednesday was the day the paper went to press and he had an interview to turn in to his slave-driving editor.
At the end of the block he consulted a Post-it he had stuck in his back pocket. The directions he’d copied were meticulous, which subway, where to exit and to cross, the turns, the street number – all of it unnecessary as it turned out. The Fifth Avenue building was prime Manhattan property and impossible to miss. Park-facing and rent-controlled, the redbrick was so red it might have been fired only minutes earlier. Against the westside façade was old signage – HARRY’S DEPT. STORE, FOR THE GREATEST VALUE – faded but visible. The building had four floors and no elevator. Wrought iron scrollwork and small recesses set off the redbrick. The bay windows curved and projected just so. The steep mansard roof had ornate touches on the, what were they called, the dormers? The wood-panelled entrance door was a proper step or two above the sidewalk. Three floors of limestone façade and the top floor some kind of light-coloured brick. A florist and newspaper kiosk on the far corner and from the park the sound of birds.
He stood across the street and looked at the building’s pre-war stolidity and modest height, so modest nobody would crash a plane into it. Then he saw the Revenge idling on the corner and the insane sanitation driver. It was hard to believe but he was being followed by a garbage truck! Of the many ways to die, the thousands of available permutations, he could think of nothing more shameful than to be run over by garbage.
With an eye on the truck Dismas hurried across the street and into the building. He was not too agitated to notice the exceedingly red Moroccan walls and yellow Siena marble floors. The doorman took him up two floors to a door with no nameplate. A hunched man in a loose pink T-shirt and overcoat opened, a younger thinner version of the face in the photographs. The man’s glasses were smudged and he needed a haircut and he had that look, fame turned against itself, a famous philosopher gone intentionally to seed, or a late night television host put out to pasture, trying on his fuck-you beard and yearning for action. More to the point he had no idea who Dismas was or why he had come.
“I called yesterday,” he said, holding up the paintings. “Dismas Bambai?”
Some weeks earlier on the wall of a Chelsea gallery he’d seen a black and white flier in the style of a vintage news photo. It announced the showing of new work by Newton Francis Xavier. A blurb from Art News said, “These portraits announce the return of the mercurial talent whose pitiless evocations of sex and god remind us of what we’ve been missing in the modern art scene. His first show in eleven years is nothing less than a cause for celebration – and cerebration.” To his editor, Mrs Merchant, he had pitched a story idea. He would interview the artist for a one-pager around the show, with reference to the controversy following his statements about September Eleven. On the Internet he found a Hotmail address for Xavier and wrote an email citing his admiration. He mentioned that he’d bought two Xavier oils in Bombay in 1990 from a dealer who had subsequently been accused of selling fakes. Dismas had brought the pictures with him when he moved to New York. He hoped to meet Xavier and authenticate them. There was no reply. Then the editor approved the interview idea and Dismas looked up the phone book and found, to his surprise, that Xavier was listed. He waited a day before he called. The number rang and rang and then the connection was cut and when he called back the line was busy. That evening he tried again. The British voice that answered was rusty and full of weird pauses.
“Yes?” said the voice, doddering or distracted, in any case distrustful.
Dismas introduced himself and mentioned the email he had sent.
“Yes?” the voice said again.
Dismas repeated the contents of the email in case Xavier had forgotten. Could they meet the following day?
“Yes,” the voice had said for the third time, sounding merely aggrieved.
Now the owner of the voice, who was not doddering by any means, led the way through riverine interiors to an oddly shaped central room. There was only one chair and Xavier took it. Work he seemed to have lost interest in was stacked against the bed’s headboard. Paint spatters decorated the hardwood floor and the ceiling. An antique Olivetti sat on a bare mattress that was used as a surface for newspapers and loose typescript and books of all kinds. There were no pillows or sheets. Where did he sleep? Facing the park was a rolltop desk, the only uncluttered surface in the room.
Beyond the smeared window was sunlight filtered by the chemical residue that drifted across the city at all times. The window was conceptual, a window in name only, sealed shut with adhesive sealant or some kind of industrial grade resin. It shed no light and allowed no air and had not been opened in a decade or more. The objects on the sill – a silver horse with one hoof in the air, red clay replicas of funerary urns, a voluptuous Venus figurine with its extremities painted wine red, a pair of dice, Ken and Barbie dolls tied up and suspended from the window latch – and the dust around the objects suggested years of untouched repose. Sketched in crayon on the window’s bottom panes were twin towers, in the foreground the peaked roof of a church, a rough cross floated above.
Xavier said, “I hate being interviewed but you brought paintings all the way from India and I suppose I feel obliged. Let’s establish the house rules. No questions about whether or not I’m married and how many children. No questions about alcohol, do I write with pen or computer, first thing in the morning or at the stroke of midnight. No questions about the difference or similarity between poetry and painting. No comments, positive or negative, about my work. No suggestions for future work. No comments at all regarding the future. Otherwise you’re free to ask anything you want.”
Dismas didn’t know if it was meant to be funny.
To the left of the window was a picture partially hidden by a hanging drape, heavy oils squeezed straight from the tube, a woman in a burkha smoking an opium pipe, her round face lit by lamplight. When he leaned in for a closer look he saw that the pipe was a penis and the penis was attached to the woman, who was smoking herself, her eyes looking directly at the viewer, Chinese eyes, wet and opaque, as if she had died and the information had not yet reached her brain.
“Who is she?” said Dismas.
“She’s nobody, or no body, a Bombay ghost.”
Then he muttered something about genital amputation and the ghost penis, or he might have said guest pianist. The plummy British monotone was difficult to follow.
An ancient to-do list taped to the
window obscured Dismas’s view of the street and the possible presence of a sanitation truck.
Xavier gestured at the crayon sketch on the glass, “Based on an old photo taken from Union Square.”
“One minute,” said Dismas, taking out a pocket tape recorder. “Do you mind?”
He switched on the recorder and took a seat on the bed.
*
In his celebrated chapter-long second account of the meeting, Dismas wrote that the interview began with the appearance of the tape recorder. Xavier’s voice and posture were transformed. His mumble disappeared. Now he was engaged.
“The photo was taken from the Union Square town house in which the photographer rented modest rooms. He was a recent immigrant, the kind of European whose use of the word ‘exile’ was never self-conscious, unlike Asiatic immigrants who cannot say it without an inward smirk or shudder. Our Czech was gloomy, as people from those parts often are. His taste in music tended toward the melancholic and melodramatic, gypsy violins, crashing pianos, the operatic expression of grief or jealousy. He did not learn to speak English until he was in his mid-thirties and settled in New York, around the time he found an old Rolleiflex in a pawnshop. Because he came to the language late he used it in ways that struck native speakers as unusual. For instance, he favoured unexpected combinations of words that produced rather odd results. He would say, the hair of my dog is biting me today and I am opting to stay bitten. Or, tonight I am numberlessly sad. Look, Mr X, before you stands a man downcast beyond measure. Whatever his linguistic peculiarities his work habits were singular and remarkable. You see, he took pictures of the towers at different stages of construction from the window of his apartment and from the roof of his building. The pictures were all framed the same way, that is, twin towers in the middle distance and a structure of some sort in the foreground. They spanned many years. As the towers grew taller the Czech’s photographs grew dimmer. If you look at the pictures chronologically there is a consecutive darkening as in Rothko. In the final images you can just make out the shape of the towers glowering under layers of cloud. In the last image, by luck, he found a sliver of light and a bird in full flight up where the structures disappear into mist. What kind of bird? What was it looking for among the buildings of lower Manhattan? Had it been blown off course or was it a city bird experimenting with the thermals created by high towers? These were questions the Czech photographer asked himself to no avail. For if he had been able to answer the question about the bird’s true purpose and destination perhaps he would have chosen a different course in his own life. As you have no doubt apprehended, soon after the towers were completed he killed himself for no apparent reason, or none that could be discerned since he left no note. All this is exceedingly clear to someone who looks carefully at a photograph. I am wondering if you are able to do that?”
