She lifted her head to look at me. “I gave you that,” she exclaimed. “Anything you wanted, any way, right?” She sniffled.
I ignored her and continued. “Then I met Rose, and I fell for her. I had to have her. But it wasn’t fair. It’s like I’m impotent when it comes to loving someone. Not physically, but I can’t get it up emotionally.”
“I don’t care, baby. You don’t have to love me. I can live without it—I always have.” She was sitting up now, rubbing her swollen eyes. I saw hope in them and tried to kill it.
“Jewel, I took advantage of you by trying to make you into Rose. Don’t you get it, you little slut? I wanted Rose, not you!”
“But it was me you were fucking! It was me!”
I shook my head, hoping that by my cruelty I could save her. I had to deny her even the certainty of sex.
“It was Rose. It was always Rose.”
“I’ll show you right now it’s me—I’ll show you, I will!”
She jumped up with youthful alacrity and pulled off her shirt. Her skirt followed. She snuggled up to me. Picked up my dead arm and placed it around her shoulders. She was cold, and her nipples were hard. Her skin was marble smooth. She shivered, digging into my rancid armpit. Then she took my hand and placed it on her breast. I felt nothing. I tried one more time to tell her. To warn her.
“What I learned from Rose is that I like the extremes of passion. I learned how to lose control from her. I found out I like to throw myself in the fire—”
“What fire?”
“Any fire I can find, Jewel. Can’t you see that I’m throwing myself away?”
I could not have said it any plainer, but she still didn’t understand.
“Nick, fuck me. I can’t keep up with you. But when you fuck me, I know you want me. When you fuck me real hard, I know you love me. When you touch me, it’s the best. I don’t want nobody else.”
I should have felt something. At least I should have had an erection, in honor of her girlish tribute. But I felt like a cold, indifferent old man.
She put her hand on mine and forced it to squeeze; but it was just cold marble my hand cupped, tipped with a rubber spike of longing. She palmed my crotch and found me limp. She pressed her mouth on mine and licked the inside of my lips, an oral caress that she knew I liked. Her tongue flickered against my torpid snake of a tongue. Her breath was young and sweet.
“There’s nothing, Jewel. I’m not capable. I can’t—”
She freed my cock and pumped it. She went down, and I thought I could feel her tears lubricating me in vain. When she stopped at last, I held her face in my hands and tried one last time: “I don’t love you, Jewel.”
She came up from my lap fighting, striking me anywhere she could, her breasts wobbling with her effort. Smack! Smack! I waited as she struck me, hoping to feel something. When I knew that I couldn’t, I grabbed her and pushed her down on the couch. I saw the stove light beckoning across the room. Somehow I got to it, and leaned heavily against its enamel bulk, as if it were my last best friend.
I turned on a burner, and held my hand palm down over the blue flame that knew me and loved me. The flesh cooked.
“Nick!” she cried.
“This is what I need, Jewel. Go away.”
37
SHOCK TREATMENT
DAYS PASSED, IT seemed, but maybe it was only hours before I heard a pounding on my door. When you don’t sleep, time is experienced as a curve coming back at you.
I dragged myself in the direction of those thunderous blows, knowing that Jewel wouldn’t be capable of making a noise like Fate itself come for me.
I fumbled with my left hand to open the door. The right hand hurt like hell. It was Manfred Damien. The muscular German stepped aside, and Midge pushed her way in.
“Why don’t you answer the goddamned phone? I’ve been worried about you.”
I held up my hand.
“Oh, Nicky. Look what you’ve done to yourself.”
I must have fainted. I remember dreaming that I was in a hospital getting my hand bandaged, then in a bathroom being washed by Midge and Lola, and that Manfred helped me to the toilet. Midge told me that I was out of my mind most of the three days I was in her bed.
One evening she perched on my sick bed and we talked.
“Howe do you feel?”
“Good as new, almost. Except for my hand.”
“That was a very dumb thing to do.”
“I was making a point with Jewel.”
“Now you can’t paint.”
“I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.”
“Who are you kidding? Art’s your life. You always said that.”
“I can’t get over Rose—that’s all that matters, all that I think about. Why she went to Gavin and Leland.”
“You heard what Leland said. He had control of her family’s estate. She did what she had to do to try to save it.”
“Just like you did at the opening?” It was a cheap shot, but Midge didn’t flinch.
“Just like that. I got off easy. So I got my hands wet. So what? It’s happened before. My skin is not porous. And I am now a rich woman. That’s business.”
“But how could you just let them do that to you? How could you touch them? How could you let them use you like that?”
She smiled tightly, and blushed. “Why Nicky, I think you’re jealous. It’s been a long time. . . . Or is this the first time?”
She was right. I hadn’t cared what she did with Lola, or Manfred, or Boz, but she had no business masturbating my enemies in front of me. I could still see their triumphant smiles as they came.
“It felt like a betrayal,” I confessed.
“Be careful, Nick. You’re getting into dangerous territory. The next thing I know, you’ll be talking about evoL, and then where would we be? Making wedding plans?”
“You know I love you,” I replied, matching her sarcasm.
She shook her head sadly. “No you, don’t, Nick. But that’s okay—I’m a realist, just like Rose. Women are. We may prostitute ourselves if we have to, but we don’t lie to ourselves about it. At least I don’t. You don’t love me, but you need me—and that’s enough. You’re my best friend and we can go on together just like we have.”
“I don’t have anything to give you, Midge.”
“I like what you give me fine,” she joked. “I just don’t get enough of it.”
“You’ve got Manfred.”
She nodded. “And Lola. I’ve got my life under control. I’ve got sex, money, and a place in the art world.”
“It seems like you’re hornier than I’ve ever seen you.”
She laughed in acknowledgment. “I can’t get enough now, it’s true. My appetite is way out there. You know why? It’s what I realized when you met Rose. Manfred and Lola are young, and we are old vampires, sucking their youth.”
As if summoned by these words, Manfred entered the bedroom carrying a tray of hors d’oeuvres, three glasses and a bottle. He was wearing the silk pajamas I usually wore when I stayed over, and his muscles filled it out better than mine did. His spiky pink hair was growing in, and he had a fashionable two day’s growth of beard.
“I think you are better, Mr. Wilde,” he said to me, placing the tray on the bed table. Midge had made him her butler, I thought.
“Any man who wears my pajamas shouldn’t call me mister. We’re practically in-laws, the way you’ve been banging Midge.”
“It is my wish—no, my hope—that we can be friends. This is a delicate situation, is it not?” His accent had improved since we first met, but his diction was still a little shaky. He was trying—I gave him that, and eased up. He had more right than I had to be with Midge. He at least gave her his youth.
And his German prick, which Midge reached for boldly, surprising both of us. His embarrassment was obvious. It reflected mine.
“Midge, don’t go so far,” he chided her politely, but she had a devil in her. I knew her well enough to know she was trying
to tempt me out of my sick bed. She had always believed in shock therapy, and she was Nurse Midge after all, always in charge.
She pushed down his pajama bottoms and eyed his flaccid penis. She looked at me. She looked at him.
“Well, why not?” she said. “You’re both mine.”
She unbuttoned her blouse while holding my eyes with a hungry, seductive look that said I’ll do anything. She had taken charge, but she was letting me know she’d learned how to lose control.
“Midge, you’re so transparent,” I protested half-heartedly. But she only smiled, shrugged out of the blouse, and pulled her black brassiere up to show us her large breasts. She had goose bumps. Calmly, like a good hostess bringing strangers together, she poured the wine and handed us glasses of dark burgundy.
“Cheers, boys.” She winked and took a big sip. Her composure contrasted with mine and Manfred’s discomfort at the awkwardness of this forced intimacy. Neither of us could take our eyes off her. The room was suddenly electric with the sex that we knew was about to happen. It was if shades had been pulled, and red lamps lighted. I could smell the familiar aroma of Midge’s excitement, a heavy perfume in the closed bedroom.
She had the total attention of the two men closest to her. She was a star, and she was willing to go wherever we wanted to—or where she could lead us.
She reached between the German hunk’s legs and hefted his heavy testicles in one hand, while using the nails on her other hand to wake up his sleeping flesh. He looked down at her and then at me sheepishly, as if his mother was playing with him in front of his father. Shame and excitement made him as pink as his punk hair.
They had a routine, I saw, just as we had when I took her from behind. He began to massage her breasts—she had trained him well—squeezing and pulling at them and smacking them together, standing in a crouch as she licked him hard. He was no bigger than me, but a little fatter, making her cheeks puff out as she sucked.
Having been sucked by Midge since art school, I could identify every sensation he was feeling, so there was a doubleness I was experiencing which excited me. In a sense she was sucking both of us, the old man and the young one.
My left hand grasped my penis and shook it awake, without my volition. Voyeurism is the essence of art, and seeing Midge giving head to Manfred—drinking at the fountain of youth, so to speak—had a primitive arousing effect on me. I growled, and jumped out of bed to join them. Midge shucked out of her skirt and we arranged ourselves on the bed so I could push into her wet vagina while Manfred spilled himself down her throat.
PART FOUR
INFERNO
38
DEPTH CHARGES
IF AN ARTIST works hard throughout his career, with any luck he will use himself up, like a tube of toothpaste, and at the end he will be empty. I sat in the junkyard of my studio staring at the portrait of Jewel as Rose, and realized there was nothing left in me. I had emptied myself.
This was my best work, an inexplicable gift of capricious gods, and of the women who had inspired it: all of them. Believe me, it was fucking beautiful.
But it was like the Medusa. Don’t look at it for long.
It sat on my easel surrounded by candles, gleaming and complete with truth and regret, and I couldn’t stand looking at it and couldn’t stop. I was about to put it away and then consider jumping out the window when the phone rang. It was Max, and he was in the neighborhood. Could he come up right away? His tone was urgent, so I said sure. Nothing was urgent to me any longer.
I covered the painting and tried to rouse myself from my torpor. When Max knocked I hadn’t decided whether to show it to him or not.
“What the fuck are you doing to yourself?” the good doctor exclaimed when he saw my singed painting hand. “Are you crazy, pulling this Van Gogh shit?”
Did he foresee the end of profits in my “pornography?” Was he concerned about his investment in me? No, I thought not. Despite his early reservations, he was enjoying fighting the censors, and the controversy was good for business. He was my friend. He’d stuck by me. So I held out my hand for him to examine.
I let him unwrap the bandage and peer at it with a professional eye. “Well, it’s bad, but it’s not that bad. But you can’t work for a while. Am I right?”
“It’s over, Max. I’m finished.”
“You’ve been working hard and playing crazy. You’ll snap out of it. Painting is your life.”
He was nervous, but I didn’t pick up on it, I was so full of myself. “That was before I met Rose. Do you know I’ve only been getting a couple hours of sleep a night for the past year?”
“No. You haven’t exactly been forthcoming, Nick. But I’ll say this: you know I was skeptical at first. Despite what you might think, I’m pretty boxed in when it comes to sex. You wouldn’t be wrong to call me narrow. And I guess I was jealous of you getting laid by a twenty-four-year-old. But—”
Max was more confessional than I’d ever heard him. I tried to focus on what he was saying. “But what?”
“What you’ve been doing—it’s your best work. And I hate to say that—for your sake.”
He was unburdening himself. I had to go along with it.
“All right, Max. Why? Why do you hate to say it?”
He hesitated, shooting me nervous glances. I guessed that he was afraid to tell me something—he’d come with an agenda. He usually did. But that was all right. Now, after hearing his admission that he really liked the new work, I couldn’t resist the impulse to show him my portrait of Rose.
He had something he had to get off his chest. He grabbed the lapels of his blazer and twisted them.
“Despite what I’ve said, now you’re a marked man. You’ve got a reputation as a”— he hesitated. “A dirty old man. A sex fiend.”
“Max, I don’t give a shit. You’re getting a lot of heat, aren’t you?”
He nodded, about to burst, judging from his color.
“Nick, before you got into this dirty stuff, you had a chance. You could have been big—and respectable.”
I laughed at my dear Max, no longer so hip in my eyes.
“You mean, I might have been invited to paint the governor’s portrait? Max, I hope you never thought I was that boring in my ambitions.”
“Not that. Just that you could have had some respect—and sales. You’re a true artist. But people don’t understand. . . . ”
I wanted to assuage his fears for me. “Let me show you something, Max.”
He followed me to my improvised exhibition space for the portrait of Jewel as Rose. I pointed to it, my hand on his shoulder.
“This is worth everything, Max. Everything I’ve gone through.”
I pulled off its cover and waited for his response. I don’t know what I expected. He knew my work best, besides Midge. I watched him turn redder, saw his eyes bulge. Was that smoke coming out of his ears?
“Who is that woman?”
“It’s Rose, Max. Can’t you see that?”
“That’s not Rose. That’s Lee Abbott’s new sex toy! No wonder he’s so pissed off at you.”
I didn’t get it. Then I thought I did. Jewel had gone to Leland after I’d told her to go. Well, why not? She was a whore, wasn’t she?
But I didn’t say that. It was obvious there was more.
“What happened?”
“The police came and took away your work. It’s now in some city warehouse somewhere. The Buildings Department padlocked the gallery.”
“No. I don’t believe it. The Buildings Department? Huh?”
“They can always find a violation. We have to go to court in two days to answer charges. It’s a mess, Nick. I’m sorry.”
I was stunned, of course, but depth charges were going off deep inside. I regretted not jumping out the window before he showed up with his news.
“But you’ve been holding them off. You said you had lawyers. . . . ”
“Leland Abbott is a real estate developer, Nick. A biggie. You know that. He has a lot
of clout in this administration.”
“But why? Jewel went to him. He has her. What more does he want?”
“I called, and asked him that. Or rather I talked to his assistant, who said he’d get back to me. He did: Leland has nothing to say to us. So I called Gavin, and asked him.”
“And?”
“He said it was about Rose, and that you know why.”
39
THE DEAD STAY YOUNG
HE SNUFFED THE candles and put his portrait of Jewel as Rose in the same closet where he’d put the first. He put on his leather jacket, and stuffed his sockful of Sacajawea dollars in a pocket. Then he turned out the lights, and locked the door on his life as a painter. His hand hurt, but he ignored it.
He was in a hurry. He loped along broad and windy Houston Street like a wolf, sucking in the night air through his open mouth, grinning in anticipation of blood-letting. His fangs seemed to hiss as he ran.
He raced across busy night streets dodging honking cars, indifferent, like a god, to death. Now he submitted to violence, as he had to sex. Now he exulted in the anger that drove him. Revenge at last on the envious ones—the collectors, critics, gallery owners, trendsetters and trend spotters, even fellow artists—justifiable mayhem!
One man, in the capital of Western Art, had the power to either buy, or steal, his paintings! And this cut-rate Medici was well-guarded by his dour doormen. No getting to him.
But his henchman Gavin Kirk was always available at the temporary Museum of Recent Art. The sharp-faced young blonde greeted him with a smile that said “Go away.” It was closing time again, but this time he didn’t feel like lurking. He wanted immediate access to his prey.
“Yes? We are closing in ten minutes.”
“Just tell Gavin that Nick is here.” He tried to keep his voice down, but he could see by her eyes that he had failed.
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