The Flamethrowers Part 20

"No," Nadine said in a dispa.s.sionate tone, almost like a corpse, no expression on her face. I sensed that she had been coached by John Dogg to remain aloof or to pretend to. She held herself perfectly still. By revealing any animation to her face or body she would spoil the effect of the hair and the dress and the patent leather heels, which shone on the roof's gravel like wet ink. Watching her hold tight to sudden elegance, hold it like it was a religion that could save her, I understood that Nadine had told the truth and Giddle had lied. Giddle had never been a prost.i.tute. I didn't know where she went in the velvet jumper she kept in her work locker, but it wasn't to a midtown hotel.

While Thurman Johnson and an unidentified Ronnie had gone out to buy scotch that night at the Chelsea Hotel, Nadine had told me about the first time she turned a trick. It was with a very old man. He wanted a b.l.o.w. .j.o.b. "Five dollars a minute, I told him. I knew he had a lot of fives in his wallet." This was an important part of the deal, she had explained. You made an educated guess of roughly how much money they had on them, and how much more they might be able to acquire if they ran out of what was in their wallet. You priced accordingly, tried to divide time into segments that corresponded with a complete emptying of their wallet. "You have to think in totalities, as my ex-husband used to put it. The larger view. So I said five a minute, figuring he had about a hundred dollars. The first minute goes by. I take his little pud out of my mouth and he says, Oh please, oh please. 'Five more dollars,' I say. I made about eighty bucks. My mouth was numb. It's actually not so simple when they stay soft. It's like slurping on the corner of a plastic bag that has a little bit of air in. He never came. It was just minutes and fives. Another thing I have done to make money is cry. Some men will do anything to get you to stop crying. They don't like to see women cry, nuh-uh. Nice guys will do whatever they can to get you to stop. The problem is most guys aren't nice."

Giddle's lie didn't matter. Giddle lied about everything. I didn't even know if her name was Giddle. Her lie was not a claim to a life like Nadine had lived. It was something else, whatever Giddle naively imagined to be the glamour of the call girl, the secret power, a cliche, champagne and silk teddies. The way Giddle said "businessmen," daubing cuc.u.mber oil on her neck. The way she said "midtown," and flipped her hair out so it lay evenly and full like she was Rita Hayworth. It was play-acting. It wasn't that different from my childhood fantasy of the Mustang Ranch as an actual ranch, grand and Western-fancy, and not various ugly trailers. It was like saying "timepiece" when you meant watch; there was no such thing. Only minutes and fives.

"This one's called Bud's Doughnuts," Dogg said into the microphone. "Our Second Avenue home away from home." It sounded like surf rock. A psychedelic projection behind them. Hookers and Children were like a slightly ironic prom act.

"I know Bud," Ronnie said to someone. "It's a real dude. I know him from high school. We both moved to Manhattan and he opened Bud's Doughnuts on Second Avenue. His brother Tom opened a car wash."

"Tom's Car Wash, out on Myrtle Avenue?"

"No, man, that's not the same one."

There was a guy on the roof with a Polaroid camera, getting girls to show him their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. When he approached Nadine, she gave him a terror-stricken look and shook her head. She was again with Helen h.e.l.lenberger, who politely said, "No thank you."

Burdmoore had talked about the lost children. The times to come. The times that had been to come but that had not come.

There was the matter of who was awake and who was asleep. The question of it. The ambiguity inherent in this way of dividing people one to the next, awake or dreaming. We were their nightmare. If one group was dreaming the other, there couldn't be certainty as to which group was which.

After Burdmoore and Fah-Q had withdrawn themselves from battle, retreated to the mountains of northern Mexico, Fah-Q had a vision, Burdmoore had told us that night at Gloria and Stanley's. After the vision came to him, Fah-Q broke from their grim, secret encampment and traveled all the way back to New York City. He needed to speak with Allen Ginsberg. Fah-Q was certain that Ginsberg had an important message for them, Burdmoore had recounted to us. A message about their clandestinity, about the revolution. "So what was it?" Didier had asked, a lightness in his voice, the joke being that whatever the message was, perhaps it might still be of use. Fah-Q found Ginsberg, Burdmoore told us, and indeed, Ginsberg had a message for the Motherf.u.c.kers. The message was that they should all quit smoking. They should give up cigarettes. Didier, seated across from Burdmoore at the Kastles' dinner table, had narrowed his eyes and sucked wetly on his Gauloise and nodded, understanding that Allen Ginsberg was truly the idiot Burdmoore had claimed he was.

More and more people crowded onto the roof as Hookers and Children finished their set. All the other roofs around SoHo were dark, occupied by squat water towers, rickety and hand-hammered s.p.a.cecraft set down for the night, dormant and crouching on spindly legs over dark, flat expanses. This roof was noise and movement and shifting silhouettes. Empty plastic cups sent over the edge. The hopeful, gaspy pumping of an empty keg. Ronnie telling someone a story about a j.a.panese stripper named Shomi.

The air was cool and breezy now. I checked again on the bike as a gust loosed pear blossoms from the trees, invisible hands stripping branches of their little white petals, scattering them on the sidewalk.

"The thing about songwriting," John Dogg was saying to someone, "is that you can address things obliquely, but no matter. You can't get away from the content that is the essence of the form. All songs are about unrequited love."

"Except 'Green Onions,' " Ronnie said. "Which isn't about love at all."

It must have been Tim Fontaine, and not Ronnie, who'd had to live with that song in his head. Tim had spent a decade in prison. Got out, violated his parole, and was now back inside, as far as I knew. It was Tim's experience in prison that Ronnie had spoken of. Tim, who was doing Ronnie's time. Why couldn't Ronnie just say so? Why did he have to present these elaborate stories, and some of it was true and some wasn't and you were never going to know which was which. Either he'd worked in factories, or on boats, or both, or neither, and whatever he had or had not done, there were a lot of stories. Sandro had always protected Ronnie's evasions. "You don't know," he'd tell people. But Sandro didn't know, either.

"I'm talking about songs with lyrics," Dogg said. "Not instrumentals. 'Green Onions' is an instrumental."

" 'Take This Job and Shove It,' " Ronnie said. "Tell me that's about unrequited love."

"Oh, but it is. It is," Dogg said. "It is. Take this job and shove it, I ain't working here no more," he sang. "He's quitting because his woman left him. And she was the only reason he withstood the lousy treatment in the first place. He's done being abused by the factory foreman now that his heart is broken."

John Dogg was not a complete idiot. He had merely seemed like one. It was wanting something a great deal that made people embarra.s.sing-which was why I'd hidden my wants around Sandro and his friends, and Giddle, too, pretended I didn't want an art career when I did. Pretended I wasn't jealous of Gloria, of Helen h.e.l.lenberger, of Talia, when I was.

I wove through the crowd, heading for the fire stairs. Giddle was flirting with John Chamberlain, who made precarious sculptures of crushed-up car parts. She was drunk and kept asking him if he had a driver's license. That was a particular mood of Giddle's, heckling as flirtation. When that didn't work, she said she knew his secret, his dirty secret.

"What is it?" he said, suddenly interested, looking her up and down in stark a.s.sessment.

"You used to be a shampoo girl," she said.

He laughed, grinning at her broadly. "So come on back to my place and I'll shampoo you."

I pa.s.sed Ronnie. He was talking to a girl I didn't know. "Have you had any contact recently with people from other planets?" he asked her. His voice got louder as I pa.s.sed. He turned in my direction.

The stairs were behind the water tower, where the drinks table was. Nadine was there alone. She poured wine into a keg cup all the way to the top. It was dark and she didn't see me. I watched as she drank the entire thing in one quick and continuous series of gulps, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, looked around nervously like a hungry animal eating some other animal's food, and refilled the cup.

Don't you remember me, Nadine?

Don't you?

But why would she. She was on her way down, or up, or down, and not looking for friends. She wasn't shopping for experience. She was trying to survive. I was the one shopping for experience. I who remembered her and everything she had said to me, and that was enough. It was enough that I remembered her.

The bike would not start. I couldn't get it to turn over. I pushed it off the centerstand and figured I would try to b.u.mp start it, coast and get some speed and hopefully it would catch. It had been fouling spark plugs. Maybe that was it.

"Engine trouble?"

I realized, hearing his voice, that I had hoped Ronnie would follow me out. He bent down. "Could be this."

One spark plug lead was dangling. A simple thing that anyone could see. He plugged it back into the cylinder head.

"Thanks, Ronnie."

"Well, maybe you could give me a ride. I mean, if you can start it."

"I can start it."

I'd given rides back in Reno, when I'd had the other, older Moto Valera. A lot of pa.s.sengers didn't understand that you leaned with and not against the driver. That you put your hands on her waist, never on her shoulders. But Ronnie had ridden plenty. He owned that Harley when I met him, and he knew how to be a pa.s.senger, to lean with me when I cornered. He held me snugly, his arms tight around my waist, his chest pressed to my back. I couldn't tell if this was deliberate or not. Scott and Andy had told me that boys became connoisseurs of breast size, shape, feel, having girls pressed against their backs as they cornered and braked. Andy said if you weren't sure, you stopped short, so that your pa.s.senger mashed into you, which gave you a good idea of what was underneath her sweater.

I drove Ronnie to his place on Broome Street. "You can come up," he said, hopping off. His tone wasn't exactly enthusiastic. It was as he said, you can if you want to.

It had been two full years since the night I'd spent with him, a night that had opened out, self-expanding, into a world of infatuation and innuendo and games, and finally, the two of us in my old apartment on Mulberry Street, innuendo had turned to a.s.sertion. We had lain down. Faced each other and let our lips touch, and I had felt like we were two shirtless kids, sibling and casual, done with our paper routes and relaxing on the gra.s.s. Later, our bodies entwined, we weren't casual, or like siblings. I had been sure it meant something. Even if he had shown no vulnerability, nothing even close to it. I had mistaken physical pa.s.sion for pa.s.sion.

Ronnie's loft had the same high ceilings and industrial grime as Sandro's, but it was more cluttered. The cakey smell from the fortune cookie factory on the ground floor filled the room, a rising sweetness in the middle of the night. The floor Ronnie occupied had been an Asian import foods warehouse before Ronnie took it over, and he had kept a lot of what had been left behind. Huge barrels that said MSG on them, where he stored the clothes he bought and wore and then threw away instead of laundering. Against one wall were crates of canned lychee packed in heavy syrup, whose labels he said he found beautiful, and meant to do something with at some point. There was a 1954 calendar on the wall, an Asian woman whose prettiness was meant to promote some product, her face faded to grayish-green, smiling under all that lapsed time.

I opened Ronnie's refrigerator. He had gold boxes of Kodak film and three cans of Schlitz. We each opened a can and joked about how no one had food in the refrigerator. I would have thought married people like Stanley and Gloria might have food in their refrigerator, but no. Film canisters, margarine, and Kraft Fluff. Generic brands had just begun appearing on the grocery store shelves. What would they call Fluff? Ronnie wondered. Schlitz could be "Beer," and Fritos "Corn Chips." But Fluff was its name and what it was. "Whipped Marshmallow Puree?" I said. Maybe, he replied, but it lost the effect of simplicity. It sounded like an industrial product.

He was telling me about the state the loft was in when he signed his lease. "These guys did not believe in banks." He bent down and opened a door hidden in the wall. "A safe is an adjective as a noun. Probably a very old concept."

He could have been talking to anyone. Where I had felt his attentions at the opening, now I felt the old distracted and performing Ronnie.

"What do you keep in there?"

"Secrets," he said, shutting it. "And deeds. This guy whose boat I worked on as a kid gave me some land and money. I never claimed any of it. I keep the deeds in this safe."

"Why didn't you claim it?"

"It's a long story."

"Like all your stories."

"This is the longest. But listen, I think I need to hit the hay."

I said I should go anyhow, it was late. But I hesitated, hoping for some way to make it through the distance, to reach him.

"The guy in Rikers with your name," I said. "It's about Tim, isn't it."

I detected a faint crease of irritation in his face.

"That's right. It's about Tim," he said. "Guy I shared a childhood with."

"Why can't you just say, 'I feel bad about my brother'?"

"I feel bad about my brother," Ronnie repeated in a robotic tone. "I feel bad about my brother."

I stayed quiet.

"You think you're the first person to think of that? That I feel bad about my brother? Let me introduce you to a concept. Two concepts, actually. Important tools for surviving the human condition. One is called irony. Say it with me. Eye-ron-eee. Now, the next is harder to p.r.o.nounce, but let's try. Diss-sim-you-lay-shon. Giving the false appearance that you are not some thing. Like a hustler pretends that he is not a skilled player of pool. One may, in a quite different circ.u.mstance, give the false appearance that he does not suffer from guilt about his own brother's incarceration, but instead, simulates an interest in the incarceration of not his kin but phantom subjects with which he has only one tenuous but coherent link: a name."

He lay down on the couch.

"My brother got out of prison a month ago," he said, looking up at the ceiling. "He was keeping his appointments with his PO. He was trying to get into the welder's union. I loaned him a thousand bucks to buy a Trans Am. I said, 'Why do you need such a stupid car?' And he does this, Come on, Ronnie, come on, big bro, I've been in the joint ten years. What broad is gonna be interested in an ex-con? I need the car to put me back in play. I need it to keep me good. I won't be just some a.s.shole looking to screw up his program and get back inside. Who could argue with that? I gave him the money for the car. He totaled it on the New Jersey Turnpike. Chest right through the steering column. He crashed the stupid car I bought him and died. So I feel especially bad about my brother. But that is my business. And I'll mention him or I won't as I choose."

He stared at the ceiling.

"Ronnie, I'm sorry."

When he finally spoke, his voice was gentler. "I used to tease Sandro about you," he said. "Sandro playing coach. Or dad. You just seemed too young. And you were. But honestly, I don't even know if you'd be different older. I like you. But there's something you never seem to get."

And that's why I can't love you.

Ronnie didn't say that. And yet all the way back to the Kastles', and lying in the dark loft, the sound of someone kicking a metal garbage can down the Bowery, I felt the sting of that phantom phrase.

I was the girl on layaway. And it wasn't Ronnie who'd put me on layaway. It was something I had done to myself.

The news. .h.i.t about Roberto Valera the next week. I didn't see it in the newspaper. Helen mentioned it when she came over, on Gloria's insistence, to see my films. I'd borrowed a projector from Marvin and Eric. In the way Marvin had gravely made me memorize the proper procedure for loading my reel, I understood that he and Eric were invested in me. They liked my films and were saving "damaged" but in fact perfectly good roles of Kodachrome for me to take home. I had just loaded the first film, Waiting, I had called it, the footage of the patient Mob chauffeurs on Mulberry, when Helen asked if we had heard what happened to Sandro's brother.

"He was kidnapped!" she said.

My film flickered on the screen that Gloria had put up for me, a white bedsheet. The first driver. Sweat rolling down his face.

From my terrified position I was able to see that to Helen it wasn't a big deal.

"Kidnapped," she said, "and Sandro has been in my office talking to people in Italy nonstop. No one can get through to the gallery now, never mind that it's costing me a fortune."

Helen watched the films and said they had something. "Maybe for a group show I'm thinking of," she said, "for next summer."

I nodded but it went in one ear and out the other. All I could think of was Roberto.

I went to the international newsstand on Astor Place and bought all the Italian newspapers they had. It was not major news, not on the front page. Deep in the business section of La Repubblica, one incident of many. Roberto Valera, taken on May 1 from his countryside home above Bellagio. Armed combatants had entered in the early-morning hours and then driven him to an unknown location. There was a photograph of Roberto holding up the previous day's newspaper, May 2, proof he was alive, that he existed inside time. He gazed at the camera, looking like the Roberto I knew. Irritated, a man whose patience was being tested.

A call had been made to the police in Rome, the article reported, the caller declaring the kidnapping the work of the Red Brigades, not by accident on International Workers' Day. It had been confirmed that the anonymous call had been placed from inside Rome's Termini train station, from a pay phone right next to the police kiosk. A comical, taunting gesture. The playfulness of it reminded me of Durutti and the others in the Movement. But Durutti wasn't kidnapping anyone. The people on the Volsci carried guns, but as defense, they said, against Fascists, who also carried guns. They shared an att.i.tude about life, a lightness. They weren't clandestines. Only Gianni was possibly that. Gianni, who had been watching Roberto. That was why he had been there, at the villa. To form an impression of schedules and habits.

The anonymous caller from the pay phone near the police kiosk said Roberto Valera was an enemy from the enemy cla.s.s. He was being detained by the people's army. Held in a people's prison, at a secret location. He would be tried by a people's court. If he was found guilty, the punishment would be severe.

There were other kidnappings and attacks that had also occurred on May 1, according to La Repubblica. A SIT-Siemens manager was shot forty times in the legs outside his home in Milan. I remembered what Roberto had said about the kneecappings, that it was a b.u.mpkin method borrowed from the Mafia, who would do it to cattle to destroy a farmer's herd. Roberto had shaken his head at the savage stupidity of borrowing a technique meant for cows. Another manager, from Fiat, had been kidnapped that same morning, with a three-billion-lire ransom.

Why Roberto would be tried and the other ransomed I didn't know. When I looked at his image in the newspaper, the impatient gaze, holding the newspaper up, a wave of nausea pa.s.sed through me. Not sympathy, just nausea. It was possible he might die.

I thought of Gianni telling the carabinieri I was married to a Valera, his employer, and that he was taking me shopping.

I thought of that long and bewildering day, waiting for Gianni on the other side of the Alps. How cold it was as the light drained away, and Gianni did not appear, and I could not seem to answer my own question of how long it was a person was meant to wait.

The day after I learned Roberto had been kidnapped, Burdmoore Model came to visit. The Kastles were out. I invited him in. "Oh, uh, okay," he said, slightly unsure of why he should stay since Stanley and Gloria were not home. He asked about Sandro. I said we were no longer together. There was an uncomfortable silence. I said his brother had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades. Did he know? Had he heard about it? I imagined in him some silent sympathy for my involvement with Gianni. I wanted his sympathy.

"They are trying him," I said.

Burdmoore nodded. "This brother of Sandro's, he runs the company? What business are they in again?"

I said, "Rubber, mostly. And motorcycles."

"I'd imagine he'll be guilty," Burdmoore said.

"And then what?"

"After the death sentence?" He scratched his chin, thinking.

"Like in Brecht's Der Jasager," he said. "After a fate has been decided, it's customary to ask the victim, the sacrifice, if he agrees to his fate. But it's also customary for the victim to say yes. So maybe he'll be given that option. I mean the mandatory option of accepting his fate. Then again, maybe they'll just let him go. One thing I'll say about these kinds of militants, which I do understand, from my own history. These are people who consider the means they use to be the same, morally, as those of their enemy. In other words, no less justified. One's own means are always justified. To them, the capitalist, like in this case your boyfriend's brother-"

"Ex-boyfriend."

"Either way, the capitalist isn't a marionette serving some other, larger system of evil. He is power himself. Evil itself. And they've nabbed him."

I went back to check La Repubblica on the newsstand at Astor Place a few times and didn't find anything. I realized that if I wanted to follow that kind of news, I had to read Il Sole 24 Ore, the financial and business paper Gianni was always holding in front of his face. I went to the library on Forty-Second Street after work and read it on those wooden dowels in the periodicals room, rustling pages as old men smelling of liquor slept in club chairs, a woman shuffled around trying to look purposeful, but the wrong kind of purpose for a library. She circled the room, moving with that particular way that homeless women had of seeming like little girls, taking steps with their toes turned slightly inward, chewing on a frayed sleeve, little girls shuffling down the hall to their parents' bedroom in the middle of the night. I read through Il Sole 24 Ore. After three days of no news except that the Fiat manager had been released after his family produced the ransom, Roberto appeared again in the paper. There had been a statement by the Red Brigades that he could forestall his trial, and the possibility of a guilty sentence, if the government was willing to trade him for eight militants currently imprisoned. Roberto had written a statement encouraging this. Insisting on it. It was, he said, the only way to save his life.

"He's not himself," an article headline in Il Sole 24 Ore announced the next day. The quote was from his own mother. Signora Valera said her son deplored any negotiations with terrorists and never, never ever, would have advocated such a thing. "He's not himself." The photo of him holding the newspaper the day after his capture appeared next to the article.

Not himself. It seemed a kind of death sentence. If Roberto was killed, it wasn't the old Roberto. It was some other, who was now begging for negotiations that he hadn't approved of until it was his own life in question. There was silence the next day, and then an article on the question of where he was. The police in Rome had apparently hired a psychic who held a seance that the investigating team attended. The planchette had produced only the word Cinzano. A dead end. On the seventh day of Roberto's capture, the chief constable in Rome stated that priority should be given to investigating the organized wing of the autonomist youths in Rome's San Lorenzo, from which he believed the Red Brigades found support and cover.

I told myself that the question of Roberto's life had nothing to do with me.

I had been back in New York a month. I was not in contact with Gianni. Not in contact with Sandro, had not seen him since the week after my return, when he walked out of the Kastles' loft nodding angrily.

My guilt concerning the question of Roberto's life was a fantasy, I told myself. It was not reality.

If Gianni was involved in Roberto's kidnapping, that was not related to anything that was related to me. If Gianni had said the family would pay, that was something Gianni had said. I was just a girl who went to a factory to meet her boyfriend and met him by accident with another woman.

If Gianni was keeping tabs, well, that was Gianni. And if the family paid in some form, that could be Gianni. It certainly was not me.