by Paula Guran
They walked home at dawn.
Stan drifted ahead along the rocky white beach with Lois and Cecilia. Ben and MacKenzie fell back.
“Let’s swim,” she said.
“The water’s icy,” Ben said, but she slipped out of her clothes all the same. With a twinge in his breast, he watched the muscular flex of her ass as she ran into the water. She swam far out to the edge of ruin—he feared for her—before she flipped like a seal and returned. When she emerged from the foaming breakers, crystalline bubbles clung to her pubic hair. Her brown nipples were erect. She leaned into him.
“I’m so cold,” she said. She turned her face to his and they kissed for a long time. He broke away at last and they walked home along the beach. By the time they reached the house and MacKenzie had showered and Cecilia had been seen safely to bed, Stan had laid out lines of cocaine on the kitchen table. The drug blasted out the cobwebs in Ben’s brain. He felt a bright light pervade him, energy and clarity and a sense of absolute invulnerability. Somewhere in the conversation that followed, Stan proposed a change of partners.
“Yes, let’s,” Lois said, and that cool longing for MacKenzie possessed Ben. Then he thought of Veronica Glass, and he said, “I don’t think I can do that, Stan.” They went off to bed soon after. Lois had never seemed so desirable or his stamina so prolonged, and when he made love to her in their bright morning bedroom, he made love to her alone.
One by one, the Christmas lights along the coastline blinked out. The revelers dwindled, the parties became more intimate. Ben spoke with the poet, and they agreed that poetry was a dead art. Yet Ben was flattered when he learned that the younger man had read his work.
“You’re just being kind,” he said.
“No,” the poet—his name was Rosenthal—said, reeling off the titles of Ben’s three books. They had been published by university presses—small university presses, at that—but Rosenthal, who had been published by Little, Brown before Little, Brown decayed into rubble and his editor was ruined, quoted back a line or two of Ben’s. Ben forgave him the National Book Award and his perfect hair, as well. It was all ruined now anyway, meaningless. Maybe it always had been.
That’s what Rosenthal said anyway, and whether he meant it or not, it was true: as meaningless as Stan’s Oscars or the dead novelist’s Pulitzer or any other prize or accolade.
“And do you still write?”
“Every day,” Rosenthal said.
Ben thought of Veronica Glass’s dictum: art for art’s sake. He proposed the tautology, knowing as he did so that even she did not believe it—that her’s was the aesthetic of ruination and destruction and final things.
Rosenthal looked at him askance. “I write the truth as I see and understand it.”
“And will you continue to write?”
“To the very end,” Rosenthal said.
But the end was closer than he perhaps thought: the very next night, he and five others slipped into the black waves and under a full moon swam out to the ruin and ruin took them. As they pulled themselves onto the surface of the dead water, where the moldering fish had blackened into nothing, they became burned effigies of themselves, ashen. Over the next day or so the wind would disintegrate them too into nothing.
That was the night Ben saw Lois slip away into a spare bedroom with the front man of the slam band, and whether she did it for revenge or out of despair or for some reason beyond his knowing, he could not say—only that he too had had his infidelities, and his was not to judge.
“And what will you do now that she has betrayed you?” Veronica Glass said at his shoulder. “Are you ready?”
“She has not betrayed me,” he said. He said, “I am not ready, nor will I ever be.”
They leaned against the bar, sipping Scotch. She slipped him a handful of prime and they smoked a joint together, and the party degenerated into strobic flashes of wanton frenzy: he stumbled into an unlocked bathroom and saw MacKenzie going down on the architect who’d designed the Sony tower in Tokyo, long since ruined. He shot up with Stan in the kitchen. He found himself alone with Veronica on the verandah, looking out at the ruined ocean.
“Did you ever want a family?” he said.
She said, “Hostages to fortune,” and he tried to explain that Bacon had meant something entirely different than what she was trying to say.
“No, that’s what I mean exactly,” she told him, and then he was lying on his back in the grass with Cecy, pointing out the constellations that ruin had not yet devoured. A great wave of grief swept over him, grief for her and grief for all lost things, and as he watched Rosenthal and his companions swim out to meet their ruin, he grieved for them, as well.
Afterwards, Ben threw up on the beach. Someone lay a cool hand upon his neck. He looked up and it was MacKenzie. No, it was Veronica Glass. No, it was Lois. He scraped sand over his vomit, staggered into the icy waves, and fell to his knees, lifting cupped handfuls of water to rinse his mouth until it felt clean and salty. He did not remember coming home, but Lois was in bed beside him when awareness returned. He whispered her awake. They wandered out into the vast glassed-in rooms, in search of drinks and cigarettes.
Stan and MacKenzie still slept.
Ben mixed gimlets and they sat out in the Adirondack chairs, their eyes closed, nursing their hangovers. Their lives had by then become an endless round of revelry and recovery, midnight suicides and daylight drinks on the verandah, grilled steaks, liquor and iced beer in the long afternoons, sex, drugs. Cecilia joined them for a while and then wandered off to the other end of the verandah to play some game of her own invention. She had the virtues and the vices of the only child—she was both intensely independent, playing solo games of her own devising, and profoundly dependent. She had been too early inducted into the mysteries of adult life and she had not yet the emotional maturity to understand them. She was prone to tantrums, and for inexplicable reasons, Ben alone had the ability to soothe her.
But today she was calm.
Ben turned his face to the sunlight. He held a sip of gimlet in his mouth and wondered when he’d last been completely sober—or when Lois had last been sober, for that matter. She’d gradually slipped into the world he lived in on the road, whether out of despair or some other more complex reasons of her own, he did not know. And regardless of what he’d said to Veronica, he did feel in some degree betrayed. But his feelings were more complicated than that. He felt too a renewed sense of physical desire for her. If she did not possess the beauty of MacKenzie—or Veronica Glass’s aura of sexual intensity—she possessed the virtue of familiarity: he knew how to please her; she knew how to please him. Yes, and love, love most of all.
He reached out for her.
“Did you ever want children?” he asked.
She squeezed his hand. “It’s sweet of you to ask. I used to, but—”
“But I wasn’t the best candidate for fatherhood.”
“No, you weren’t. But you’re a good man, Ben. I always believed that. I knew it, but it’s a little late now, don’t you think?”
“Stan and I were talking about it, that day we walked inland.”
“And what did you see?”
“Ruin,” he said. “Ruin and devastation.”
“Yes. And any child we’d had, she would be ruined by now.” Lois looked the length of the verandah. Cecy pushed along a miniature truck. She sang softly to herself. “That sweet child will be ruined soon enough. And think of the things she has seen.”
“Sometimes—sometimes I think she’s more equipped to see them than we are. It’s part of her reality, that’s all. She barely knows the world before.”
“Do you think we’re the last ones, Ben?”
“Does it matter? Someone somewhere will be. It’s only a matter of time.”
“And nothing will survive.”
“Nothing.”
“No, I think I’m glad we’ve been childless. We are sufficient unto ourselves. We always have been.”
Ben he
aved himself to his feet, went to the bar, and made them fresh drinks.
He stood at the rail and lit a cigarette. He recalled MacKenzie running naked into the moon-washed water and felt once again a surge of desire. The flesh forever betrayed you. He felt headachy and regretful and even now he could recall the shape of her body in almost pornographic detail. Yes, and Lois, too, slipping into the empty bedroom with the tattooed front man of the slam band—Roadkill, that had been its name, and it too was ruined. And her hand upon his neck.
“Last night—”
“I’m sorry, Ben.”
“No. I wanted you to know that I’m not jealous. I want to be. I should be. But the rules seem to have changed somehow.”
He drew on the cigarette, sipped his drink.
“Yes, the rules have changed,” she said. “There’s a kind of terrible freedom to it, isn’t there?”
“Your hand upon my neck. It felt so cool.” He turned to look at her. “How did I make it home?”
“Stan and I practically carried you.”
“And the stairs?”
“The stairs, my love, were an absolute bitch.”
He laughed humorlessly.
“I remember opening a bathroom door to see MacKenzie—”
“You needn’t bother. Last night became something of an orgy, I’m afraid.”
“New rules,” he said.
“Or perhaps no rules at all.”
No rules at all. And what did that mean but ruin?
He thought of Rosenthal, writing every day, imposing a discipline of his own upon the world until even that collapsed into despair. Was not his own resistance of MacKenzie—or of Veronica Glass—a kind of discipline, a kind of personal rule, newly instituted. Maybe that was all you had in the end: the autonomy of the individual will.
“No,” he said, “I have my rules still. Maybe for the first time I have them.”
He ground out his cigarette in MacKenzie’s ashtray.
“Is that why you wouldn’t trade spouses with Stan the other night?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t thought it through. It just seemed wrong, that’s all.”
“Surely you want MacKenzie. I saw you kissing her.”
He laughed. “I’ve wanted MacKenzie since the day I met her.”
“Then why not take the opportunity? I wouldn’t have minded.”
“Maybe that’s it. You wouldn’t have minded. There was a time you would have.”
She stood and came to him and cupped his face in both hands. She gazed into his eyes, and for the first time in years, he noticed how deeply green hers were, and kind.
“What a sweet man you’ve become, Ben Devine.”
“I only love you,” he said.
“And I you,” she said. She said, “I’m sorry about last night. I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what?” Stan said, pushing his way out onto the verandah. MacKenzie followed.
“What a capacity for drink you had, you old fool,” Lois said with a sparkling laugh.
Stan dropped into a chair with a thud. He groaned and pressed a beer to his forehead. “Bullshit,” he said. “You’ve known that as long as you’ve known me.” He shot them a glance and shook his head. “Lovebirds, you.”
“Lovebirds are entirely monogamous,” MacKenzie said from the bar.
“Then you are no lovebird.”
“Nor you, my dear.”
“Nor any of us,” said Lois, “except for Ben, monogamous in ruin.”
“What’s wrong with you, Ben?” Stan said.
Ben said, “I’ve always been monogamous in my heart.”
“Your heart’s not where it matters,” Stan said.
“It’s the only place that matters,” Lois said. They were silent after that. Wind came in off the water. The last gulls screamed, and the red sun dropped behind the roofline of the great house. “Come play with me, Mommy,” Cecy called from the grass. MacKenzie went down. They played a complex game involving the shrunken soccer ball. Ben could never decipher the rules, if there were any, but their laughter lifted into the air like birdsong, and that was enough. Waves washed the rocky shore; the sound of them was music. Stan broke out a joint and the three of them shared it as the summer day drew toward dusk. The air tasted more sweet then, and the beauty of all things grew sharper and more clear in its transience.
“So what shall we do tonight?” MacKenzie said when she joined them.
“Tonight Veronica Glass is our hostess,” Stan said.
Carpe diem, thought Ben. He wondered what beautiful and grotesque death Veronica Glass had concocted for herself, and he took Lois’s hand and held it tight. There was so little time left to seize.
As they climbed to Veronica Glass’s cliff-side home that evening, they could hear the steady thump of music. The great windows pulsed with light and shadow. Wheeling scalpels of purple and red carved the dark. Reluctantly, Ben followed the others inside. He blundered through the crowd in revulsion, trying not to see the white pedestals with their grisly human freight. But he could not avoid them: colored lasers slashed the dance floor, and each bloodless piece had been illuminated by a blaze of clear light that exposed every detail in stunning clarity—every white knob of bone and gristle, every tendon, every severed artery, root-like and blue. The supplicating hand might have been begging him for mercy, the amputated head might have been his own.
Yet Ben felt something else as well, an almost sexual arousal that he could neither deny nor sate. He stumbled into the kitchen with Stan, where they snorted lines of coke and heroin that had been laid out on the counter-top. He poured himself a slug of eighteen-year-old Macallan and drank it off like water; he smoked a flash-laced joint with a short, heavy-set woman he had not seen before, a memory sculptor whose work had gone for millions before ruin took it all. Back in the enormous glassed-in atrium, he looked for Lois—for Stan or MacKenzie or even Cecy—but they’d all disappeared into the mob. He opened a door in search of the toilet, to find himself in a dim bedroom. Two couples—no three—writhed inside, on the bed, on the floor, against the wall. Someone—was it Stan?—held out an inviting hand. Ben reeled away instead, stumbled blindly through the orgiastic throng, and slammed outside.
He staggered down to the yard and stood cliff side, looking at the ocean.
Veronica Glass said, “It’s quite the party, isn’t it?”
“It’s that all right. What madness have you prepared for tonight?”
“You started this, Ben,” she said. “We chanced to meet on Vinnizi’s lawn, nothing more. You’re the one who wanted to talk about my work. You’re the one who showed up uninvited at my door.”
The wheeling lasers painted her face in shifting arcs of green and red. They illuminated the sheer material of her dress, exposing the shadows of her hips and breasts. Against his will, he found himself aroused all over again, by her or by her work, he could not say for sure. Probably both, and as if to deny this truth about himself—and what else was art to do if it didn’t strip away our masks and expose us raw and naked to the world?—as if to deny this truth, he took a step toward her.
“It’s anatomy, nothing more,” he said. “It’s cruelty.”
“The world is a cruel place,” she said. “Perhaps you’ve noticed.”
An image of the sectioned arm possessed him, its imploring hand lifted in adjuration like Vinnizi’s hand. An image of the flayed leg, the head on its pedestal, its mouth sewn shut against a scream. An image, most of all, of the ruined and dying world.
His hand lashed out against his will. The blow rocked her. She wiped blood from her lip and held it up for him to see. “You prove my thesis,” she said. And turning, “You could have had me, Ben. You saw the truth and you could have possessed it. It was within your grasp. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. Isn’t that what you believe? Let me show you the beauty that lies at the heart of ugliness. Let me show you the heart of ruin. Let me show you truth.”
She didn’t wait to see if he would follow. But
he did, helpless not to. Up the stairs. Across the verandah. Into the great glassed-in room. She touched a switch. The music died. The lasers ceased to sculpt the dark. The lights came up.
“It’s time,” she announced to the silent crowd.
She led them murmuring through a cleverly disguised door, and down a broad stairway. A cold amphitheater lay at the bottom. Enormous flat-panel screens had been mounted overhead, at an angle facing the audience. On the floor below them, gently sloping toward a central drain, Veronica had readied the tools of her trade: an X-shaped surgical table, upholstered in black; bone saws and scalpels and anatomical needles for pinning back flesh; rolls of clear silicon.
Even as Veronica began to speak, Ben knew with a sick certainty what she planned to do. “The body is my canvas,” she said, “the scalpel my brush.” Her audience mesmerized looked on. “I sculpt the living human flesh in ways that unveil to the unseeing eye both our fragility and our strength, our capacity for love and our capacity for cruelty. As ruin closes in upon us, let my art unfold on the canvas of your flesh: the glorious art of death—prolonged, painful, beautiful to behold.”
She paused.
“I have a friend”—and here she fixed Ben, in the third row from the bottom, with her gaze—“I have a friend who equates beauty with truth, who believes that art serves something other than its own ends. I did not always countenance this, but my friend convinced me otherwise. For there is beauty in pain and in our capacity, our courage, to bear it. There is beauty in death, and in that beauty lies a truth, as well—the truth of the ruin that every day engulfs us, that has awaited us from the moment we came screaming from the womb, when we were hurled into a world indifferent to our suffering. In these, the last days of Cerulean Cliffs, we have seen our little assays in the art of death. I propose that you transcend these small attempts. We are all artists here. I challenge you to pass from this world as you have lived in it, to make your death itself your final masterpiece.”
