Night, Neon

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Determined to tell her husband yes, she loved him, but no she could not remain with him. Her soul had been lacerated, lashed. For she’d fallen in love with …

  She shakes her head to clear it. Oh, where is she now.

  So much of her life has been lost to her. Each day, more falls away. Tattered and unraveling. Her heart is beating hard in this unfamiliar place that smells of paint, clay, turpentine, whiskey. Sweet-rancid rot.

  Vann sees. Vann understands. He has lost much, himself. The sag of his shoulders, the flaccid gut. Bloodshot eyes.

  Not quickly, but carefully, he approaches her. As one might approach a butterfly lighted upon a flower.

  “You seem upset, dear. Are you remembering something that makes you sad?”

  “N-No.”

  Feeling compelled to add, as Vann observes her, “Not really.”

  “Your college friend who is ill. You said.”

  “My friend—?” But has she told the stranger about Mia? In her awkward flirtation with the artist who calls himself Vnn, has she really been so crass as to exploit Mia’s illness? She doesn’t think so.

  Vann is determined to change the tone of their conversation. Telling her that the waterfront area is being developed. There will be a condominium complex on the river. Offices. A publication—Art in Detroit.

  “A very good time for investing. For investors.”

  To this L.K. has nothing to say. (Does he want her to invest money in Durant artists? In him?)

  “You might consider an article about the Durant. My friends and me. Take pictures—we’re photogenic.”

  If this is meant as a joke, it is a clumsy joke. Offensive to her.

  As if L.K. has nothing better to do, nothing of more significance in her life than to write about the local Detroit art scene. An older woman groupie attaching herself to avant-garde artistes.

  It is true, in her past life she might have written about the “resurgence” of Detroit. Might’ve called it the late, great American city Detroit.

  She’d done such work, freelance photojournalism. She’d known everyone, she’d driven everywhere and had rarely been afraid or in danger, and if so, only fleetingly.

  But now the local magazines that might have published such an article, part cultural criticism, part commercial promotion, have vanished. Shuttered years ago.

  She’d left her camera at the hotel. Probably she would not remove it from the tote bag. Where once the camera had been an extension of her soul, now it has become mere equipment, an impediment that feels heavy in her hands, pretentious. Vain.

  Still, the camera fixes her vision. Cuts her vision to size.

  A visual artist cannot fathom eternity/infinity. The viewfinder makes art possible.

  She comes to position herself before one of the kites hanging from the ceiling on a wire. Is this new? Is the artist working on it at the present time? Much of Vnn’s art looks unfinished, raw. Canvases with absences, blanks. That which is unspoken, undefined. The sort of art that L.K. has attempted is overfilled: she has felt that she must explain too much. Her art has been choked, airless.

  Nature abhors a vacuum. It takes a certain degree of audacity to leave much open, untouched.

  “Would you like another drink, dear?”—Vann is smiling, a genial host. L.K. notes that he has never uttered the name she’d provided him, as if sensing that it is not her true name.

  Without knowing it, L.K. has finished the single-malt whiskey in her glass. But—“No more, thank you!”

  Vann pours another inch or two of the amber liquid into her glass.

  It is maddening, the man pays so little heed to her wishes. All but winking at her, up close—You know, dear. And I know.

  Leading her now into the interior of his studio. Beyond the black-lacquered Japanese screens.

  Immediately the smells of clay, paint, turpentine are stronger. The odor of something sweetly rotten, rancid. Here, beyond the stately black screens, is far less order, coherence. Canvases lean against the wall, smudged watercolors. Sketches in pencil, charcoal pencil. The floor is frankly dirty. Wadded rags, tissues cast down. Behind the screens. The artist’s truest life.

  So this is where the artist works. That’s to say, where the soul of the artist lives.

  Some of this work is very good, L.K. thinks. She tries but cannot fasten upon Vnn’s influences. Lucien Freud? Francis Bacon? Goya? Somewhat crudely mixed with primitive art, Warhol parody. An air of vehemence, recklessness—Pollock. The larger canvases of sprawling, quasi-abstract naked bodies, collages, sculptures—intimidating in their size.

  A six-foot tree of birds—bird skeletons. Tiny eye sockets, empty.

  “Tree of Life—it isn’t complete.” Vann frowns at his creation, as if seeing it through another’s eyes.

  The tree is, or was once, a “real” tree, a young birch. The birds?

  L.K. shudders, contemplating the perfect little bird skeletons that by their size appear to have been sparrows, songbirds.

  Seeing her reaction, Vann says again, “It isn’t complete. All my work back here is ‘in progress.’ ”

  He is standing close beside her. His voice in her ear, intimate and mesmerizing.

  Then she discovers, at the rear of the studio, a supply of mannequins. Some are leaning against a wall as if weary, some lie in a heap on the floor as if discarded. Several are hanging from hooks, pulleys—an unnerving sight.

  Vann doesn’t want his visitor to wander back here, it seems.

  “Maybe you’ve seen enough, dear. We can return to …”

  Even as she is appalled by what she sees, L.K. feels drawn to see more.

  “ … these are works in progress. I’ve set aside for the time being …”

  L.K. comes closer. She notes that the mannequins are all female. They have no genitalia of course, but they do have small, conical, perfect breasts, slender waists and hips. Their faces are smooth, seamless. Some are wearing glamorous wigs, others are bald. They are all “white”—“Caucasian”—a pale, pasty hue. Several have been despoiled: their skulls cracked open and sponges placed inside to suggest the human brain; through eye sockets, plastic flowers emerge. Through nostrils, mouths. Tentacles.

  One of the mannequins sports a bleeding-red wound between her legs, framed by “pubic” hair.

  L.K. is shivering. Of course it is a mistake to be here in this stranger’s territory. She has known this since the freight elevator.

  Hurry! Now.

  Yet she asks coolly, like a true art professional, “What do these—sculptures—sell for?”

  “These ‘sculptures’ are not finished.”

  “But if finished—”

  “Prices vary. Wildly.”

  “This one, for instance. If you were to price it.” A mannequin on a hook, one of those with a sponge for a brain. Between its legs a mock-bleeding wound. Both the “pubic” hair and the hair on the mannequin’s head resembles L.K.’s own hair, though it is—of course—synthetic and not human hair.

  Vann states a price. L.K. recoils in surprise.

  “D’you really get such prices? For things like this?”

  “Depends.”

  Things is deliberate. Vann must hear the contempt in her voice.

  L.K. cannot look away from other works in progress, stuck back here in the shadows.

  Canvases smeared with paint and adorned with “human” artifacts—finger- and toenails, earlobes, hair. Much hair.

  Hair of all hues, textures. Wavy hair, glossy hair, frizzy hair, straight hair. Ashy blond, dirty blond, chestnut, mahogany, russet-red, dark hair threaded with silver.

  Shelves of wigs. L.K. assumes these are wigs and not human hair in swaths.

  (But how pungent these smell! A sort of arrested rot, treated with a chemical solution.)

  “I’d told you, dear. All this is work in progress. Not for viewing.”

  “Yes. I can see that.”

  Vann lifts one of the wigs from the counter. Playfully, perhaps just slightly meanly, he
suggests that L.K. try it on.

  “Thanks, no.”

  “But it will suit you. Try.”

  Vann hands the wig to L.K., who takes it from him hesitantly. It’s a thick black wig, somewhat matted, lusterless. Its smell is pungent—indefinable. L.K. has no intention of fitting it on her head, but she examines it closely and sees, or thinks she sees, blood-stippled roots of hairs—actual hairs.

  She drops the wig, appalled. She is trembling badly.

  Vann laughs and picks the wig up from the floor.

  “It smells. It’s awful. Please—put it away.”

  In what appears to be a refrigerated display case L.K. sees bruised and battered heads, sallow-skinned faces. Heavy-lidded, bruised eyes. Matted hair.

  There is a sickish, rank smell. A window has been opened partway to air out the loft.

  Along a wall, a white porcelain freezer humming just perceptibly with electricity. L.K. thinks—He keeps his captives there. His “art.”

  Overhead the skylight is scummy, opaque. L.K. is feeling weak and uncertain. Vann leads her out of the workroom into the living quarters of the loft. L.K. stumbles and sits heavily in one of the leather chairs. She reaches into the canvas bag for her cell phone and sees that it has gone dark, it has lost its power.

  It is formaldehyde she smells. She is certain.

  6.

  “You don’t recognize me, do you, dear?”

  Words you don’t want to hear in a private and sequestered place on the fourth floor of a near-deserted building.

  Faltering, she says no. She doesn’t think so …

  “Try. Maybe you will remember, dear.”

  Dear, reiterated. She wonders if dear is meant to be consoling or ironic.

  Staring at him searchingly. The genial creased face, as big and round as a sunflower? The murky-brown bloodshot eyes?

  Of course, this is a person of color. In ancestry, if not in the (obvious) hue of his skin.

  He removes the Tigers cap. Graying-dark hair, oily. Receding from a blunt forehead. You can see—(L.K. can see)—that this hair had once been thick, wavy.

  “Vanny was what people called me. Including you, dear.”

  “Vanny …”

  Does the name sound familiar? L.K. remembers a man—a young man—named Vanbrugh … Is this Vanbrugh?

  “And you, you were—Lavinia.” In a flat, jeering voice he has named her, exactly.

  L.K. is stunned by his hostility. Realizing too that she has had too much of the powerful drink, a mistake.

  “Lavinia Kohl. Yes?”

  How diminishing it seems. To be found out, named.

  “Y-Yes … How do you know me?”

  “How I know you? Of course I know you. All these years, I have known you—hated you.”

  “Hated me? Why?”

  “You left me for dead. You assumed that I was dead.”

  “What? N-No … That isn’t possible.”

  “You came to my studio, on the first floor then. You saw me collapsed on the floor, you ran away.”

  Vaguely L.K. recalls: the young artist with a studio on the first floor of the Durant. Her lover, briefly. One of her lovers. It had not been that important—had it? No one would remember such a fleeting relationship.

  But this man—this middle-aged, heavyset man who calls himself Vnn—is not that individual, certainly.

  “You arrived, Lavinia Kohl, you let yourself into the studio, you saw me collapsed on the floor. You panicked and left and never called for help. You left me for dead, and in fact I did die.”

  Seeing the bewilderment in L.K.’s face, Vann laughs.

  “But then I was revived. Because someone else interceded and called an ambulance.”

  Vann has come to sit beside L.K. Closer. She has not the strength to pull away,

  “My heart had stopped and was shocked into beating again. No thanks to you.”

  L.K. looks at Vann pleadingly. Her nostrils pinch at his sharp, accusatory smell. What is he saying?

  “You didn’t want to be involved. You were married—you were thinking of your marriage. Your safe, ‘white’ life. You saw that I’d collapsed, you had no idea if I was going to die within minutes, you simply fled and told no one. I suppose you thought that I would never know, since I was unconscious, and if I revived—I wouldn’t know what you had done. But I knew. I was told. By another artist on the floor, who’d discovered me. She’d seen you running out—she’d seen your face, she said. How frightened you were. How guilty.”

  It is a bad dream, this memory. Though perhaps not a memory, but only a bad dream.

  “I thought I would never forgive you, Lavinia. But today, seeing you, recognizing you—seeing how you too have changed—I do.”

  “You—forgive me?”

  “In Esdra’s place. In the magnanimity of Esdra’s soul.”

  “But—Esdra? I thought your name is …”

  “Esdra was my friend. My brother. I am acting in his place.”

  “But nothing like this ever happened. I—I never left anyone to die—I did not. You must be confusing me with …”

  “Another Lavinia? I don’t think so.”

  Vann laughs expansively, drinking whiskey.

  On shaky legs L.K. tries to stand. “I want to leave now—Vann. I am leaving …” Her voice is plaintive, pleading. The whiskey has made her very weak.

  “Leaving for—where? You couldn’t possibly go alone—in this neighborhood. And how’d you get back to your hotel? It’s miles away. You can’t walk. There are no taxis here.”

  “I—I could call …”

  “No cell phone service here even if your phone wasn’t dead.”

  L.K. has not the strength to scream. If she ran to a window—the loft is on the fourth floor, she could not jump out. If she stood at the window and screamed and flailed her arms, Vann would easily overcome her within seconds.

  “You can’t leap from a window, it’s four floors to the ground.”

  L.K. is dazed. Alarmed. (Drunk? Her senses are muddled.) Trying to recall the old Durant: the old, first-floor studios. A young man, a boy really: Esdra. Had that been his name? She’d known several artists. Possibly, one had been Vanbrugh. They’d vied for her favor, had they? Competed for her attention? Though possibly, she hadn’t wished to think at the time, they’d laughed at her among themselves as they laughed at other privileged white women.

  “Stay a while, dear. You’re in no condition to venture out of here. Let Vnn take care of you.”

  Naïvely she wants to think—He has forgiven me. He will protect me.

  Vann circles his stubby fingers around L.K.’s wrist. His fingers are strong. The nails are ridged with paint, dirt.

  L.K. shudders. She would move away, but Vann holds her fast, and she knows that any struggle on her part will be met with force.

  “Dear Lavinia, why did you come here? You’ve made a long journey just to come here.”

  L.K. doesn’t protest. For this is true, she sees in retrospect. Her journey began years ago.

  “Of your own volition, dear. No one forced you. You’ve come back here with me.”

  He will protect her, she thinks. He has said he has forgiven her, he will have mercy on her.

  Slipping his arm around her shoulders. His heavy arm, L.K.’s slender shoulders. If she can make herself small enough, L.K. thinks.

  She is exhausted. Can’t keep her eyelids open. What has he given her to drink! She will be one of thousands of butterflies, preserved in formaldehyde! Her ashy-blond hair, like metallic filaments, will be preserved for all to admire.

  Together, she and her male companion will drift off to sleep. Whiskey has warmed them. Her hand clutches his. If she tried, she could not hope to close her fingers around his wrist.

  The happiest she has been in her posthumous life.

  7.

  But no: there is no sleep.

  Happiness, but happiness is fleeting.

  No sleep beyond a few fluttering seconds, and when she wakes sudden
ly, her eyes fly open to see that Vnn has left her to bring some of his art supplies to the sofa.

  Over his (unshaven) jaws the artist has affixed a half mask of white gauze, of the sort worn by medical workers at risk from contagion.

  On his big-knuckled hands he has managed to force surgical gloves.

  Out of a cloudy, quart-size commercial bottle he has poured a virulent-smelling transparent liquid onto a wadded white cloth of the size of a face towel. Frowning as the liquid soaks into the cloth.

  Oh, what is it? Ether?

  Chloroform.

  The whiskey has made her sleepy. The smell of chloroform—harsh, heavy—makes her sleepier still.

  Wanting to protest—But I am innocent! Have mercy.

  Yet—what is most mysterious—L.K. does not really seem so frightened of what is about to happen to her. For perhaps it has already happened and she is only remembering.

  Carefully the man in the white mask is speaking to her. Patiently.

  His animosity toward her, that has so wounded her, seems to be past.

  “Remove your ivory bracelets, dear. And the necklace.”

  Fumbling to obey him. Her face flushes with chagrin. She would protest—But I did not buy this ivory jewelry new! It is all secondhand.

  Vnn takes the beautiful bracelets and necklace from her and sets them carefully aside. He has only to glance at her watch, and L.K. slips it off her wrist.

  “Very good, dear! Now take this cloth. You will press it against your mouth and nose and hold it there for as long as you can. It may help to shut your eyes. Breathe deeply.”

  Handing her the wetted cloth, which she takes from him hesitantly.

  What has he instructed? Press the cloth against her—mouth, nose?

  “You are one of the rare subjects allowed to control her own fate. That is, you will be allowed to ‘put yourself to sleep.’ It is painless.”

  Vnn speaks tenderly to her. Despite his disheveled appearance and the winking gold stud in his earlobe, he is a gentleman and will not hurt her.