The Flamethrowers Part 19

"Still, she pays him and they do it on the session couch."

"Listen, Stanley, it is the least he could do for me after seventy years of Freud and his patriarchal bulls.h.i.t. You know what Freud wrote to his fiancee? Dear darling, while you were scouring the sink, I was solving the riddle of the structure of the brain. Dr. Butz can scour my sink."

"While the riddle-"

"It's your money I'm giving him."

"While the riddle of the brain goes unsolved," Stanley said to me as we walked into the gallery.

Sandro wanted me to come home. He said Talia was just a messed-up and confused girl. I didn't see what her state of mind, her confusion, had to do with anything. Sandro had let me know he was capable of harm, greatly capable of it.

What I'd done, helping Gianni-it was a secret that lived in me, one I didn't know quite what to do with. When I thought of Gianni, his brooding authority, the hurried departure, me driving what turned out to be his getaway car, I felt alone in a way that might be permanent. Secrets isolate a person. In that, I understood one thing about Gianni: the fog of his distance, the burden of secrets, the isolation.

Sandro had picked up the repaired Moto Valera, which had been shipped by the dealer in Reno to one in Manhattan. He relayed through Gloria that I could collect it if I wanted it. It was in the ground-floor hall of his building, the pink owner's t.i.tle folded and taped to the gas tank, the key in the ignition. When I went up to get my clothes, Sandro was at his big studio table, drawing. I went into our room, which had never felt in any way mine, and packed my clothes into my duffel bag, the same one I had brought here when I moved from Mulberry Street. I thought maybe Sandro would come in while I packed, try to apologize. He didn't. When I walked past, he looked up. I stopped. Neither of us said anything.

I went down, strapped the duffel to the rear rack of the bike, and rode it over to the Bowery, to the Kastles'. It was my first ride through the streets of New York City, but on a bike I already knew. I had to watch out for potholes, and cabs that came to sudden stops, but crossing Broadway, zooming up Spring Street, pa.s.sing trucks, hanging a left onto the Bowery, the broadness of the street, the tall buildings in the north distance, the sense of being in, but not of, the city, moving through it with real velocity, wind in my face, were magical. I was separate, gliding, untouchable. A group of winos in front of a Bowery hotel gave me the thumbs-up. At a stoplight, a man in the backseat of a cab, a cigarette hanging from his lips, rolled down his window and complimented the bike. He wasn't coming on to me. He was envious. He wanted what I had like a man might want something another man has.

There was a performance in riding the Moto Valera through the streets of New York that felt pure. It made the city a stage, my stage, while I was simply getting from one place to the next. Ronnie said that certain women were best viewed from the window of a speeding car, the exaggeration of their makeup and their tight clothes. But maybe women were meant to speed past, just a blur. Like China girls. Flash, and then gone. It was only a motorcycle but it felt like a mode of being.

A week after I took the Moto Valera, Sandro came to the Kastles'. His tactic was sternness. He said I needed to stop acting like a martyr. Gloria and Stanley moved in beside me, told Sandro to give me time. He looked at them, nodded in bitter a.s.sent. Yeah, okay. You're protecting her. I'm the guilty one. He nodded all the way to the freight elevator. Pushed the b.u.t.ton, waited for a moment, then took the stairs. It was the last time I'd seen him.

Inside Dogg's crowded opening, Gloria grabbed Helen h.e.l.lenberger by the arm and said she should come over to the loft and see my films. Helen was about to make an excuse. Her mouth opened. Gloria said, "Great. We will see you at our place, next week."

When you're young, being with someone else can almost seem like an event. It is an event when you're young. But it isn't enough. I was still young, and I wanted something else. I needed a new camera. The Bolex was smashed and I was alone and I wanted my life to happen.

As we moved toward the bar, Stanley said he was terribly thirsty, that he felt like something with rust stains on it.

"That's because you drank nearly a liter of vodka last night," Gloria said. "Your habits are going to be a slow killer of you, Stanley."

"I'm not in a hurry," Stanley said, and turned to watch a girl who pushed past us. She was wearing pants that had clear plastic stretched over her rear, a window for viewing her two b.u.t.t cheeks, which slid against each other as she walked.

The Kastles had always been engaged in a low-intensity war with each other, but seeing them day in, day out, was to witness the derangement in a new way. One morning Stanley had been drinking coffee when Gloria came into the kitchen area of their loft holding a page ripped from a magazine.

"Stanley," she said, "I want to show you something."

He looked at her fearfully. She held the page in front of him. It was a glossy pictorial of three men and a woman. The men stood over the woman, erect c.o.c.ks wagged in her face, s.e.m.e.n jetting across the image, thick pearls of it on the woman's open lips.

"Should I get my hair cut like this woman?" Gloria asked. "Do you think that style would work for me? Is it becoming?"

Stanley closed his eyes. He shut them tight and shook his head.

"Are you saying no, Stanley, or are you refusing my question?"

When she realized he wasn't going to respond, she left the room. Stanley turned to me.

"A little boy and girl, brother and sister, are looking out the window of a train as it rolls to the platform," Stanley said. "The girl sees a sign on a station door and says, 'Look, we're arriving at Gentlemen.' 'You dummy,' the boy says. 'Can't you see we're at Ladies?' You see," Stanley said. "The boy will wander around Ladies, and the girl will venture into Gentlemen. It's the same place. But they will never realize it."

While we were in Italy, Gloria had been given a residency at the Kitchen on Wooster Street. She did a one-day performance called Alone. Gloria stood in a small booth with a curtained, pelvis-level opening. A sign invited people to Place Hand in Window. In the window, behind the curtain, was Gloria's naked pelvis.

Stanley had been too prudish to touch his own wife's genitals, as Ronnie announced to me. While Ronnie himself had apparently not just put his hand in the window, but kept it there awhile. "I did my volunteer work for the year," Ronnie said. "I always maintained I wouldn't turn down public service." He put his hand in the window, and barely realizing what he was doing, lost in an interior reverie about the construction "to finger," and how interesting it was that it was gendered, and not reversible, that to finger a man was to pin something on him, a crime, and to finger a woman was to bring her off, and that he was just moving his finger in a kind of unconscious way, back and forth, back and forth, and thinking about those two completely different meanings-not obverses, but maybe not completely unrelated, to finger a man, to pin a crime, to finger a woman . . . suddenly he feels this shudder from Gloria. Oh my G.o.d, he thinks, she just had an o.r.g.a.s.m! And if that wasn't bad enough, she cheated her own formal precept by peeking to see whose hand it was. As he turned to go he heard this m.u.f.fled voice from behind the curtain whispering his name. He told the story as if Gloria was somehow presumptuous or overreaching, when he'd put his hand in her v.a.g.i.n.a. But that was of course the joke, the outrageous pretense of innocence. Of pa.s.sivity.

"I should get one of those T-shirts that says o.r.g.a.s.m DONOR," he said.

Afterward, Gloria followed him around for a week like a puppy dog. He finally had to tell her she was about twenty years older than his type. "I thought you don't have a type," Gloria had said. "You always make a point of that, of not having any type. You don't have one, and I'm not even that."

Gloria told me about her residency at the Kitchen, and about Alone, but not what happened with Ronnie.

"It was about the fourth wall," she said. "It was also about making an a.s.sertion. There. Factual. In a sense male. If someone chose to break the fourth wall and place his hand in the box? They brought to the piece any component of s.e.x. They brought it. I offered an object in a box, coldly. If someone placed a hand in the box, it was that person insisting on sensuality, on touching. Not me."

But then she broke down sobbing, and when she had regained enough composure to speak she told Stanley, with me as witness, that she believed she might be in love with Ronnie, and that the terms of her performance of Alone had not included that possibility, and perhaps she was losing her mind. She sobbed and sobbed, her body convulsing into the arm of the couch.

The three of us sat, Gloria crying, and then Stanley sighed, cleared his throat, and spoke.

"Dear Gloria," he said, as if he were writing her a letter, "remember how we used to joke about the concept of love? The phrase 'to be in love'? I would say to you, Darling, I believe I may be in love with the woman who announces the time of day over the telephone. Her voice is so calm, and even, and feminine but not artificially sweet, just measured. And she is always available, always there when I call. I can get a drink of water in the middle of the night, while you're sound asleep, furtively dial MEridian 7-1212, and she'll say to me, 'At the tone, eastern standard time will be 2:53 a.m. exactly.' I could call her whenever I wanted. She was totally available to me, and yet an enchanting mystery, one not to be solved. I could never make anything advance further. And remember that while I held this fascination for the Time Lady, you one day fell head over heels for the man who answered the suicide hotline? Remember, Gloria? You said to me, 'Stanley, he listens to me. He listens.' And I said, 'Gloria, that is his job.' And when you were better, when the temptation to hurt yourself had pa.s.sed out of your mind completely, you forgot all about him. Remember? You didn't even want to call the man you'd once been in love with, because you no longer were in that frame of mind. Call a suicide hotline? I'm Gloria Kastle, G.o.dd.a.m.n it-I don't call hotlines. Hotlines call me."

Gloria sniffled, blotted her tear-streaked cheeks with a throw pillow from the couch, and smiled weakly.

"Do you realize how many Larrys are at Dogg's opening?" Ronnie said, coming toward me in a shirt that said MARRIED BUT LOOKING.

"Larry Zox, Larry Poons, Larry Bell, Larry Clark, Larry Rivers, and Larry Fink. And they're all talking to one another! This is some kind of historic moment. Reminds me of a story Saul Oppler once told me. He was sitting with Saul Ba.s.s and Peter Saul on a rock in Central Park, and they look down from this rock, and below they see Saul Bellow with Saul Steinberg, together, buying hot dogs from a Sabrett cart."

Nadine and John Dogg posed for someone's camera. Nadine turned her head just slightly to one side. The light from the flash lapped at her hair and polished complexion, the black, shiny cloth of her dress. She did not blink. I told Ronnie I almost didn't recognize her. I did recognize her, though. There was no question. I meant to say she seemed changed, altered.

"She looks like a model advertising an expensive timepiece," Ronnie said. "Funny how they try to make it into a separate category. Not 'watch' but 'timepiece.' "

Nadine was close to us now. Ronnie said h.e.l.lo to her.

She said h.e.l.lo to him and then to me, separately, but as if she'd never met me. I didn't press the matter. We watched her walk away.

"Are you still friends with that photographer?" I was breaking the long silence about that night. What the h.e.l.l, I thought. She's here, and Ronnie's here, and Sandro, Sandro is not here.

"Yeah. Thurman's wife died recently. People say the stupidest things about his work now. Thurman took a lot of pictures of the sky, and now Didier and his ilk claim that this is a kind of mourning. A great sadness, Thurman unable to face the horizontal world, the low material world, because he's pining for his wife and thinking only of death and the heavens. This is a man who slept with everyone but his wife. Took pictures of the sky because he was too drunk to get up. Puked in a church donations box in Louisiana-I was with him. He had a bad hangover and had gone in to photograph something, I don't remember what. He said it was the only time he'd been in a church since he was a child. But now he's gazing at the heavens, in tribute to Blossom. People and their need to interpret."

He waved away the subject of Thurman. The subject of that night.

"Hey, listen. I don't know what you were doing over there in Italy besides having melodramas with Sandro. But the place must suit you or something. You look good."

"Thanks," I said, fairly sure I looked no different. I was in cutoffs and knee-high socks, the men's kind with blue and red stripes around the ribbing at the top. Those socks weren't allowed when I was with Sandro. "Come on, seriously," he'd say. "You'll make me look like your father, like I'm taking you to your basketball game."

I had on a leather jacket; maybe that was the difference Ronnie noticed. And I had the bike, outside, unseen, but it had become a kind of mental armor.

"Yeah, you look like you've grown up a little." He was looking at me from various angles. "See, now you're doing that whole smiling-woman thing. That's good."

I'd had a fantasy, back at Sandro's mother's villa, of saying something to Ronnie, letting him know he was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d for giving Talia my hat. But now I couldn't bring myself to do it. Talia wasn't here. She didn't matter. I would make her matter by bringing her up.

Even while he seemed not to focus on me, I felt Ronnie's attention at John Dogg's opening. Even as he spoke to others, performed his Ronnie shtick, I suspected he was secretly performing it for me. Things were shifting. I was no longer his best friend's lover, but a girl he'd once slept with.

Ronnie told John Dogg's parents his name was Sergio Valente. To the girl with the see-through pants, he introduced himself as Albert Speer.

"I hearda you," she said, unimpressed.

Being Albert Speer got Ronnie started on the notion of the uncommon criminal, and then he turned to me and cued himself. What made a criminal common or uncommon? The girl with the see-through pants took the opportunity to wander off. She moved through the room, trapped inside her exhibitionism, unable to pretend she was just another girl at the opening, to get beyond the awkwardness of her nudity.

Ronnie seemed not to notice her exposed b.u.t.t, even as he stared at it and at her.

"I'm collecting mug shots," he said to me as his eyes tracked her across the room.

"Did I tell you that? I go down to police records on Centre Street. I'm looking for convicted criminals with my name."

How many could there be? I asked.

"A few," he said. Actually, only one so far. But three if you included the Ron Fontana and the Robert Fontaine that Ronnie himself did include. They were doing important work, especially the one with his actual name. The heavy lifting, Ronnie said, the dirty work.

I thought of Ronnie's brother Tim, the single time I'd met him. Too muscular to be trusted. His clothes too new and too boxy, the clothing of a prisoner just freed. He was talking about a partner, the plans they had. He could have meant a partner on a construction job, but "partner" could mean partner in crime, cell mate, or all three: a guy you met in jail and then doubled up with for construction jobs and burglaries.

"I'm starting to believe this guy up at Rikers is doing his time, pacing his cell, for both of us," Ronnie said. "Doing our time."

He's talking about his brother, I thought.

Giddle showed up. She and Burdmoore were no longer together. He was too sincere, she said. It had started to drive her nuts. He always wanted to get to the bottom of things. Get to the heart of things. "This supposed heart," Giddle said. The way he talked, a.s.suming it existed, zapped whatever feelings she'd had for him. "This whole 'let's take off the masks and hold each other' thing," Giddle said. "No thanks. I'm just pa.s.sing through. I said, 'If you want to pa.s.s through from some other direction and meet and have a good time, fine, but there is no heart and no fundamental thingie.' He put too much pressure. I started making things up," she said, "to satisfy him. Like I'd tell him I was s.e.xually abused by my brother and that was why I had low self-esteem, which was what led me to cheat on him with Henri-Jean."

"The guy who carries the pole?"

"Yeah," she said. "And the thing is, I don't even have a brother and suddenly Burdmoore wants me to start hypnotherapy with this friend of his, a woman who counsels incest survivors. I'm just trying to entertain myself. Keep it light. Have a good time. By which I mean make stuff up and watch how he reacts. He didn't know how to play the game. And then the thing with the pants, oh G.o.d."

Giddle had brought a pair of white pants into Rudy's and pinned them up on the wall with an announcement that anyone who fit into them could sleep with her. It turned out the white pants were too small for most of the guys at Rudy's. The artist John Chamberlain got them up to his knees. Henri-Jean managed to get them on but could not zip them. Didier was next to try them when Burdmoore showed up. Burdmoore s.n.a.t.c.hed the pants out of Didier's hands. He held them upside down, gripped each pant leg firmly, and ripped the pants by the crotch seam, tore them clean in half.

"If you could have seen his face," Giddle said. "The guy has a serious anger problem." She left with Henri-Jean, who shrugged as they pa.s.sed Burdmoore. A mime's shrug. Life is sweet, I'm a helpless neuter. Whimsy is the answer to tears. I'm going to f.u.c.k your girlfriend here shortly. Shrug.

"Did he use it on you?" Ronnie asked.

"What?"

"That big pole he carries."

"Ha-ha. He didn't need to, Ronnie."

John Dogg led Nadine past us, holding her hand like she was his little girl. She looked down shyly as he spoke to someone about borrowed light. They seemed like one happiness, a partnership. She'd been reinvented in the glow of his sudden success. And her rehabilitation made her into useful and effective arm candy for him. Just as you weren't supposed to point out that John Dogg had recently been considered a clamoring outsider, one was not meant to approach this gleaming version of Nadine and ask if she remembered p.i.s.sing in a bathtub, or letting Thurman Johnson rub the barrel of his starter pistol between her legs. It was more unseemly of me to think of these things than it was unseemly for her to have done them.

She and John Dogg had made it into the castle just before the gates shut. And the point was not how they got in, or that they almost didn't, or to wonder if they deserved to be there. It was, here they are. Welcome. The point was that they were in. They were in.

"I bet you wore a long coat tonight, and took it off when you got here. Is that right?" It was Gloria, accosting the woman with the b.u.t.t window.

The woman looked quickly at Gloria and then turned away, but before she did, I saw the distress in her face.

"I just wanted to know," Gloria said to me because I happened to be pa.s.sing by, as if she would have spoken to anyone pa.s.sing by and barely registered who that person was, "how committed she is. I wanted a sense of her commitment.

"When the revolution comes it won't make any difference," Gloria said. "They'll have a special guillotine for girls like that. With an even rustier blade for the artists who ogle her. These people here don't matter. It's MTA workers who need to see her rosy b.u.t.t cheeks. But no, she wears a trench coat on the subway and reserves her hot little a.s.s for us people who have already seen any number of hot little a.s.ses. Barbara Hodes was making see-through dresses in 1971. Eric Emerson wore chaps and a jockstrap upstairs at Max's, and Cherry Vanilla only goes topless. It is so done. Done done done."

But it's new to her, I should have said but didn't. She's on her timeline, Gloria, not yours or anyone else's.

After the opening there was a party on the roof of a building around the corner from the gallery, and John Dogg's band played. That was what he'd wanted, a performance of his own band. It was a way to get a gig, using his newfound popularity in the art world to shoehorn in his music project behind him. Once you wedge the door open, push as much of yourself through as possible. They were called Hookers and Children. Ba.s.s, drums, saxophone, and John Dogg playing guitar and singing. They wore suits, and the drummer had a silver-sparkle drum kit like an entertainer from the mezzanine of a midtown hotel. They covered a Donovan song, "Young Girl Blues." Dogg wasn't bad. In fact, he was good. He sang like he really meant it, wavering his voice just like Donovan.

It's Sat.u.r.day night. It feels like a Sunday in some ways If you had any sense, you'd maybe go away for a few days The tender but slightly paternalistic love of whoever was addressing the young girl.

Stanley and Gloria had gone home. I stayed. Partly because Ronnie stayed. But I didn't hover around him. We were two coordinates on that crowded roof. I was aware of him and I felt his awareness of me even as he mingled with others. It was a clear night, three stars glinting through a suspension of smog and city glow. I recognized a lot of the people on the roof, but because I'd been away, I felt I was watching them from some remove and didn't have to engage, didn't have to say h.e.l.lo the way you needed to when you had seen everyone the week before, that h.e.l.lo of having mutually decided you would permanently remain mere acquaintances. I stood back, hands in the pockets of my leather jacket, leaning against the railing. I felt like a balloon, like I could just float off the rooftop. I weighted myself with beer from the keg. Watched Giddle dance with Henri-Jean. Leaned over the railing periodically to be sure the Moto Valera was still there.

I didn't want to think about Sandro. I didn't want to think about Gianni.

"The three pa.s.sions," Stanley had said to me that morning, "are love, hate, and ignorance. Ignorance is the strongest."

I had a hard time getting Bene's face out of my thoughts, her barely concealed smugness, as if to say, he's all yours.

I had not wondered, why is she pa.s.sing him over? Why is she letting him go so easily? I had not wondered.

Bene had put her hand out, steering me toward the room where Gianni was. To the right of her, the other women soldering, hoping to repair a transmitter the carabinieri had smashed. When I pa.s.sed them, Lidia and the others had not looked up from what they were doing and I understood that I had been shut out. I had not done anything wrong, but that was it. Bene had shut me out. What other choice did I have? I had no money. No friends. Gianni had brought me there, and it was to him I turned.

He and I, listening to Bene's steps on the landing as she departed.

Gianni's face, unreadable. His distance, which I had interpreted as chivalry, a form of respect. When in fact it was just what it seemed: distance.

"I need to take a trip," he'd said. "I want you to come. We'll go together. You want to see the Alps?"

His question confirmed or explained or simply filled the s.p.a.ce of tension I'd felt all along with Gianni, from the first moments at the villa.

He took out a cigarette and lit it, in no hurry for my answer. Probably in no hurry because he knew, somehow, that my answer would be yes.

It was a North Pole, the same brand of cigarettes that Giddle smoked. It struck me as funny that Gianni smoked Giddle's brand, but there was no witness who would understand why this was funny. Giddle and Gianni, from opposite sides of the globe featured on the cigarette packet.

I had no other world to turn to now but this one, the roof, Dogg's band, Giddle's antics.

Hookers and Children filled the night. There was a lot to say on these two subjects.

They were playing their own stuff now. Dogg's earnest voice, but with more dissonance in the chords.

Henri-Jean wrapped himself tightly against Giddle and they swayed from side to side. Their dancing seemed especially obscene for the fact that he was out of character. He wasn't supposed to grind against women. He was supposed to be this lone figure in the cityscape, jester and outcast with his idiosyncratic burden, the pole over his shoulder. But in fact he was a man, bending his knees to lower his pelvis to the level of Giddle's a.s.s.

Nadine was talking to Helen. Smiling in a remote manner that was probably nervousness but would be read by Helen as reserved, attractively reserved. Helen said Nadine looked familiar and asked if she, too, had by chance gone to Dalton.