Night, Neon

by Joyce Carol Oates

  At first it seems that the Edelstein Gallery is darkened, but when she looks through the window, she sees that it is open after all. Indeed, a very thin young woman in stylish black is sitting at a desk speaking on a phone: an old-fashioned rotary phone. She glances up, sees Vann through the window, smiles (slyly?), and waves as Vann (and L.K., whom she ignores) pass by. This face is certainly not familiar to L.K., for the girl is very young, with Asian features and very black sleek hair to her waist.

  L.K. feels a stab of jealousy. The way the girl and Vann exchange greetings …

  An older man, physically unattractive, yet he exudes a sexual aura rising from his sense of himself, his masculinity. A woman of the identical age is disadvantaged.

  “We can visit the Edelstein later if you wish, dear. On our way out.”

  Dear. L.K. registers this, uneasy. But she doesn’t object.

  Telling him no. She does not care to visit the Edelstein Gallery.

  Artists’ studios are on higher floors, Vann says. Space is cheaper to rent there. Okay to take the freight elevator?

  The interior of the warehouse is much larger than L.K. would have expected, or recalls; the farther walls are lost in shadow.

  The freight elevator is not very clean. There is a smell here of dirt, grime. A badly soiled tarpaulin on the floor that looks, to the casual eye, as if it is covering something the size of a small child lying prone.

  In such close, confined quarters L.K. feels self-conscious with her newfound companion, who whistles thinly as if he too feels awkward.

  Above the elevator door there are four numerals—1, 2, 3, 4. Yet as the elevator ascends with creaks and clatters, none of the numerals light up.

  With forced ebullience Vann tells L.K. about the Durant—how being able to work here “saved his life” when he’d been a young artist in his twenties, with nowhere to go, a succession of poorly paying part-time jobs, including, for a while, a nightmare time in his life after he’d dropped out of Wayne State, working as an orderly at Detroit General Hospital.

  “The only good thing about the job,” Vann says, “is I learned to see how life becomes death—that quickly. No mystery to it, just a switch turned off.”

  But this isn’t true, L.K. thinks. Death does not come that quickly. And the shadow of death does not fade quickly—it does not fade at all.

  How slow the elevator is! She feels a frisson of panic that it will jolt to a stop suddenly; they will be stuck in it together, between floors.

  The man’s eyes drift to her. He sees that his words have upset her, perhaps. That was not his intention.

  Walking to the Durant, he’d brushed against L.K. several times, accidentally, or so it seemed. Here inside the elevator he stands stiffly apart from her, as she stands at a little distance from him. Her heart beats quickly with exhilaration. Is he afraid of her?

  He asks L.K. if she has a “family”—by which, she supposes, he is asking if she is married.

  “No.”

  So blunt an answer, she feels the need to amend: “Not now.”

  Then, trying to keep her voice from breaking, “Not for a while.”

  He waits for her to ask if he is married or has a family, but L.K. fails to ask. Quite deliberately she doesn’t ask, and why is that? (Does she not care? Or does she wish to give this man the impression that she doesn’t care?)

  And so Vann volunteers: he has lived with several women in the course of his life, and he has offspring scattered in the Midwest—“probably”—but he has not been married, and no child has ever looked at him and called him Daddy.

  L.K. laughs. But is this curious remark meant to be funny? Vann seems to be boasting of having children he doesn’t know, who have never known him.

  Should she say Too bad, you would have made a wonderful father.

  Probably, this is not true. Artists do not make wonderful fathers, to the degree that they are serious, driven artists.

  Presumably it’s time for L.K. to reveal to her companion that her husband, that’s to say her former husband, has departed from her life irrevocably. She cannot bring herself to say My husband has died, still less My husband is dead. Her lips turn numb at the prospect.

  She cannot bring herself to say, with a sob of fury—I am not a widow, don’t condescend to me. I am not defined by any man living or not-living.

  Her lips tremble. She is frightened of crying. How humiliating, the infantile face of one about to cry …

  Yet Vann persists: “Not for a while—does that mean that you aren’t in contact with him?”

  Yes. That is what that means.

  “And you have—don’t have—children?”

  L.K. is irritated, embarrassed. It is the mere question that unsettles her, that a stranger should feel he has the right to interrogate her so intimately.

  A flush rises to her face. No. None. And it is none of your business why.

  “I’m sorry if I—I’ve—overstepped …”

  The voice trails off. L.K. is furious at if.

  At last, in awkward silence, the elevator jolts to a stop. A clang, a clatter as Vann forcibly opens the door.

  L.K. laughs aloud, she is flooded with relief.

  Never again, that elevator. She will find a stairway when she leaves.

  They are on the top, fourth floor. Here remodeling has been crude. Dirt like grit beneath her feet.

  Vann leads her along a corridor past artists’ studios, some of them open to view—smells of clay, paint, turpentine are strong here. In one of the studios a radio is playing staccato rap music. On an easel, a half-completed abstract painting like a superannuated Jasper Johns.

  L.K. has been irritated with Vann, yet now she is thinking that she likes him. Or rather, she is attracted to him. Vnn.

  (The name is vaguely familiar, she has seen it somewhere recently—has she? On one of the hideous collages exhibited at the Chateau Renaissance?)

  It has been a long time since L.K. has felt anything approaching sexual attraction for any man. That the man seems to feel an attraction for her is the excitement.

  Vann is leading L.K. some distance, to a farther wing of the warehouse. Grit beneath her feet is more noticeable. Offhandedly telling her that you wouldn’t think junkies could find their way into the Durant, let alone to the fourth floor, but they do—“We’ve all been ripped off at least once.” Vann is both disgusted and rueful.

  Junkies. A startling word, in the mouth of someone like Vann.

  “… sometimes they break in downstairs, spend the night, that’s okay with most of us, but there’ve been fires started in the winter …”

  He has become a property owner, L.K. thinks. A bourgeois. Concerned for the safety of his art.

  Vann fuming about junkies endears him to L.K., oddly.

  She is thinking that if he touches her, she will not draw away. Perhaps she will touch him, fingers brushing against his wrist, his arm. Allowing the man to know how she feels about him.

  (But how does L.K. feel, exactly? Like a sleepwalker whose eyes are partly shut, uncertain where she is and where she is going.)

  If Vann kisses her, a mist will rise in her brain. That mist of passivity, oblivion. A promise of oblivion.

  She will respond to the man, blindly. She will kiss him in return. Instinct will take over, she will not be obliged to think.

  The fade-out of the movie screen. The curtain lowered.

  But life isn’t aesthetic, like art. She will have to see the man, close up. And he will see her, unblinking.

  Indeed L.K. feels a mild repugnance at the prospect of becoming physically—sexually—involved with this man. She has no wish to see him unclothed—naked. If they spend time together intimately, she will hear him coughing, clearing his throat. Breathing heavily. Grunting.

  Bathroom noises, a toilet flushing. She has lived alone for so long now, being in close quarters with another person, with a man, will be lacerating to her nerves.

  Vann has unlocked the padlock to the door of his studio.
As she steps inside, L.K. is surprised—more than surprised, astonished—at the dimensions of the space, its high ceiling, skylights, buffed plank floor, floor-to-ceiling windows emitting an eerie incandescent light. The room is part living quarters, part studio. Very impressive.

  L.K. feels a stab of chagrin, she’d underestimated the man. Not for the first time in her experience with strangers, she’d been condescending to him.

  Clearly Vnn is a successful artist. Or Vnn has money from a source other than art.

  Or, what is equally likely, the artist has very good taste and has made of a crude storage space something resembling a work of art in itself.

  “It’s—beautiful.”

  “Is it! I’m glad that you think so.”

  Vann’s face is flushed with pleasure. He’d wanted to impress her, she thinks. And so he has.

  The loft is a large open space with a fifteen-foot ceiling of metal girders. In the living area are a black leather sofa, several leather chairs, a low-slung table fashioned of a single piece of burnished redwood. There are lamps carved from wood, with translucent shades. Lights descend from the ceiling on narrow poles or rise from the floor. On the floor are scattered Moroccan carpets. In an interior alcove, what looks like a small kitchen. Behind black-lacquered Japanese screens is the artist’s work area.

  The rough walls have been painted a muted oyster white, ideal for displaying art. Bright, primitively executed canvases and collages predominate. Vnn is a prolific artist, an industrious artist, one can see. The largest canvas measures approximately six feet in length, five feet in height, a vivid, shimmering wash of colors in the mode of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler. There are looming humanoid figures covered in white gauze, like bandages, in the mode of George Segal, with pinched, anguished faces and sightless glass eyes. More original are kites hanging from the ceiling, spiky in design, also very colorful, in the shapes of gigantic bumblebees, bats. The most clever is a five-foot butterfly that, as you approach, is seen to comprise hundreds of small butterflies. (Are these real butterflies? Captured, embalmed? L.K. notes that many are monarch butterflies, an endangered species.) “This is ingenious,” L.K. says of the giant butterfly, though she isn’t sure that she approves.

  “My dear, the butterflies are not ‘real.’ ”

  “I wasn’t sure …” L.K. is doubtful, disbelieving.

  “It would take me forever to capture so many butterflies,” Vann says, wincing and smiling, as a naughty boy might do. “I would have to anesthetize them one by one with chloroform. And I would have to be very careful to keep from tearing the wings.”

  L.K. sees that some of the delicate orange and black spotted wings are indeed torn. She imagines that she smells something sweetly chemical. (Ether? Chloroform?)

  L.K. has to concede, Vann’s loft/studio is very striking. Not what she’d expected. (But what had she expected? Something smaller, less ambitious? A pigsty? Mediocrity?) She had expected his work to be clichéd and ordinary, just another variant of Pop Art, but really it is far more subtle, and the paintings are intricately painted—brushstroke by brushstroke. She is not condescending to him now.

  Like all genuine artists, Vann has hidden his deepest nature beneath a personality worn like old clothes—indeed, like an artist’s work clothes. He is slovenly, but only in his being—not in his art.

  Indeed, L.K. is drawn to this mysterious person. Vnn.

  “Would you like a drink, dear?”

  “I don’t think so, thank you.”

  “Yes, a drink. To celebrate us.”

  Us. L.K. is touched by this, though uneasy. What does us mean?

  She thanks him and tells him she prefers sparkling water, club soda. If he has it, ice.

  “But don’t go to any trouble, Vann! Please.”

  “Call me Vanny.”

  Vanny. L.K. feels a sensation of sudden weakness in the region of her heart. The wild thought comes to her—He will be my lover. Vanny.

  While Vann whistles thinly in the kitchen area, pouring drinks, L.K. continues to look about the living area. The setting is a work of art in itself, objects on display. Art books, photography books, framed lithographs. (One of these is a Chagall lithograph, near identical to one owned by L.K. herself. Another is a Ben Shahn.) Pottery, weavings. An antique urn, badly cracked, very likely bought at auction at one of the great old Palmer Park mansions. Sculptures fashioned of burnt wood, painted cotton, and burlap, like oversized moths. Startling to think that out of his own work and the work of others that Vann has collected over time, the slovenly man has created such beauty.

  L.K. thinks, rebuked—Beauty can never be deduced by examining its creator.

  Could she live in such a loft? Or, could she live in close proximity to such a loft?

  Her smiling host brings her a glass half filled with amber liquid. What’s this?

  Single-malt whiskey.

  But no, she doesn’t want whiskey. Not at this time of day—afternoon …

  “Try it, dear. You’ll like it.”

  Laughing, she protests. “No. I can’t …”

  “I said, try it.”

  “If you have sparkling water, club soda …”

  “Sorry. I don’t.”

  “Wine …”

  “Try this.”

  Clinking his glass against her glass, which feels to L.K. unusually heavy.

  Oh, this is annoying! This is pushy, aggressive.

  Dislikes the man, this macho posturing.

  Out of politeness L.K. takes a small sip. Isn’t sure what single-malt whiskey is.

  The sudden heat of it! Amber liquid seizing her mouth, her throat, in a rush of sensation.

  “To us, dear. To meeting by chance on Belle Isle.”

  These words are ironic, are they? Or romantic?

  Vann is regarding her with a smile. Is it a fond smile, a bemused smile, a smile of appropriation, a smile of sexual yearning? Desire? Aggression? Threat?

  He is no threat to her, she is sure. He means no harm to her, surely quite the opposite. Now that they are out of the clanging freight elevator.

  But did they meet by chance? L.K. isn’t sure that she believes in chance.

  What appears to be chance is just obscurity, perhaps. You don’t know the connections between things, as a fly blundering into a spider’s web has no idea what he is blundering into.

  To the fly, chance. To the spider, destiny.

  Vann drinks. L.K. takes another, tentative drink. She has not had anything so strong to drink in years and feels a sensation of sheer elation, recklessness. Why not?

  Her dear friend in the hospice is dying. She has been terrified of seeing her friend die before her eyes. As she’d been terrified of seeing her husband, her husband’s body, after his death, when he had needed her and she had abandoned him out of cowardice.

  Vann is telling her about the history of the Durant. The “mecca” for outsider art for decades.

  (How old is Vann? How long a career has Vnn had? The man looks to be in his mid- or late fifties at least. She may be a decade older.)

  The closer L.K. examines her genial host, the more it seems to her that the man isn’t “white”—not altogether. Could he be (part) Hispanic? Middle Eastern? (There is a large Lebanese-Catholic population in Detroit.) More likely part African American, with murky brown eyes. That broad, flattened nose, sensuous sharp-chiseled lips …

  She has been staring at those lips. Thinking—If he kisses me, I will … She has no idea what she will do. Her limbs feel weak in anticipation.

  L.K. has had lovers of ethnicities other than her own. She has been color-blind all her life.

  Trying now to remember her lover. The emotional young painter who’d later killed himself, possibly by accident, with a heroin overdose.

  Almost, she can remember him. Was his name Lester? Esdra. His olive-pale face. Thick dark hair. Serious, somber manner. The hesitancy of his touch.

  She had not heard of Esdra’s death until months after. Somehow that had m
ade the death seem less urgent, less real.

  She’d wept, her heart had been rent. But then she’d dried her eyes and hurried out to her car … For always in that phase of her life people had awaited her.

  Hears herself ask if Detroit is still a center for drugs.

  An annoying question, L.K. knows. When Vann has been regarding her with soft, solicitous eyes.

  “Depends on which drug. No more than anywhere in the Midwest.”

  She doubts that that can be true. In its boom years Detroit was besieged by drugs: crack cocaine, a killer. And now, from what she has heard and read, methamphetamine, manufactured illicitly in the devastated inner city, indeed in old buildings like those surrounding the Durant, is the leading killer.

  “Why do people insist upon poisoning themselves? I’ve always wondered.”

  “I don’t.” Vann snorts, laughs. He is the experienced one, knowing all the answers. “I don’t wonder at all.”

  “Yes, but why?”—L.K. persists.

  “When you’re high, you don’t want—anything. And when you’re not high, you’re waiting for the high, which is what you want—not anything else.”

  L.K. feels rebuffed by these words.

  Words of wisdom, she supposes.

  But yes. It is the great weakness of her life. Wanting.

  A moment’s stiffness between them: the woman and the man.

  From a window L.K. can see the Detroit River, not so scintillate from this distance, lead gray. Belle Isle is obscured by buildings. Lake Saint Clair is invisible. But she can see something of the skyline of Windsor, Ontario.

  Living in Detroit, she’d fantasized a parallel life in Canada. In the city so much smaller than Detroit she would live a smaller, more virtuous and saner life, a life of anonymity. A husband, a child or two. A life lacking in invention and novelty and for that reason a life of immense satisfaction.

  Once, with Esdra, in his rattletrap pickup truck that had aroused suspicions at the border crossing, she’d driven into Canada, not to the small city of Windsor but to Point Pelee, a vast national park south and east of the city, bordering Lake Erie. Esdra had wanted to take photographs of migrating birds, but his heavy Nike camera had malfunctioned. (L.K.’s camera had functioned well enough.) She recalls crossing the windswept Ambassador Bridge, returning late to Detroit. Storm clouds overhead, flashes of lightning.