The Flamethrowers Part 9

Once, Giddle and I had followed her into a grocery store. She bought milk, white bread, a can of hominy, and two jars of mayonnaise. All white products. Giddle had leaned over as we waited behind her. "Oh my G.o.d. Guess what perfume she's wearing?" Giddle had whispered to me. It was White Shoulders.

"The show is going to be called s.p.a.ce," Ronnie said as he unlocked his studio to show us his new work. He'd photographed the black-and-white-speckled interior of his oven and then blown up the photographs and t.i.tled each "Milky Way (detail)." They really did look like photos of outer s.p.a.ce, but knowing they were his oven, the inky background and blurs of light made me think of Sylvia Plath more than of the universe. Sandro loved her poems, which was endearing to me because it was so girlish to love Sylvia Plath.

"What's this?"

Sandro was looking at a snapshot of a woman staring intently at the camera, young and blond, and clearly smitten with her picture taker.

"That's not part of my show."

"Just something for you to look at," Sandro said.

"Something for me to look at. Pretty in the face, as they say."

I turned away from the image. He would slip from this young girl's grasp, of course. The way he treated his lovers bothered me, though whether it was sympathy for the girls or a reminder that I had been one of the discarded, I couldn't say.

"I'm keeping her on layaway," Ronnie said, "a layaway plan. She's on reserve, held for me, and I pay in small increments. Actually, I'm supposed to see her tonight."

"You're not coming to dinner?" Sandro asked.

"I'm coming. I'll see her later."

"After dinner," Sandro said.

"Does it matter? I'll see her later. When I'm through with the other parts of my night."

He stood next to Sandro and gazed at the photo, angling his head to match Sandro's, as if Sandro's perspective might afford Ronnie some alternate or deepened view.

"I don't know," Ronnie said. "Could be actual love. I'm starting to think so. Because I'm using all the levers to suppress what puts me off about her."

Sandro laughed. "If it was love, Ronnie, you wouldn't be aware you were doing that," he said, and pulled me toward him.

"I'm always aware," Ronnie said. "That's why it never works out."

I tried not to look at the photo of the girl, who stared at us, meaning to stare at Ronnie, hoping for his pity. Sandro's warm hand was on my shoulder. How lucky I was, and yet I didn't want to see the young and hopeful face of the girl on layaway.

Ronnie and his women were a bit like Ronnie and his clothes. That was Sandro's theory. When Ronnie sold out his first show at Helen h.e.l.lenberger's gallery, Sandro figured Ronnie would quit his job at the Met. Sandro had quit long before. Of course he didn't need the tiny salary like Ronnie needed it. Sandro had stayed on as long as he had for Ronnie. To engage in a study together. Night guards figuring out the flows of art history and what they themselves were going to do. Ronnie kept his job and spent the money Helen gave him in large all-cash bursts. He hired a Checker cab on retainer. Paid up front for a year's worth of steak dinners at Rudy's. A year's worth of rent on his studio, because he said you never knew when you'd go from big-time a.s.shole to homeless. He went down to Ca.n.a.l Street in his private Checker cab and purchased a hundred pairs of shrink-to-fit Levi's 501s. Five hundred white T-shirts. Five hundred pairs of underwear and socks and said he was never doing laundry again.

When I had first heard the story, I saw Ronnie balling up his homemade Marsden Hartley T-shirt and lobbing it into the corner of my studio apartment on Mulberry. But I was grafted to Sandro now. We were a project, a becoming, a set of plans. He was invested in what I'd be. But that did not erase an attraction I'd had for Ronnie, on a long night when I never learned his name. I could see now what theater it was, the gesture of balling up the shirt like he would never retrieve it. But of course he had, and with such stealth that he'd sneaked out as I slept, without even saying good-bye.

It was a form of seriality, Sandro said, the clothes, and also the girls. Moving forward in a pattern of almost sameness. But it seemed to me more like a running away. Sandro himself owned precisely two pairs of jeans. Everything was scaled down to simplicity and order. One pair of work boots. One nice jacket. One set of materials (aluminum and Plexi). One girlfriend.

The next image Ronnie showed us was rephotographed from the cover of Time magazine, a woman sitting at her kitchen table, pulling down the waist of her stretch pants to expose her hip, revealing the outlines of a huge bruise, like a cloud was crossing the kitchen ceiling, darkening an area of her body in its shadow.

"Meteorite," Ronnie said. "Only human ever to be hit by one."

The woman's expression was of calm, satisfied wonder. As if there were some secret logic to what had taken place, to her having been selected for this unusual fate. Time had posed the woman where the meteorite had hit her, seated at her kitchen table. Above her was a torn hole about the width of an oven rack, a shaft of sunlight boring straight through like an inward punch of G.o.d's hand.

Sandro said something about matter mattering. And Ronnie countered with a comment about single-story homes, the incident being really about that. And then they were talking about what it means to call a magazine Time. The latent heaviness there. Infinity parceled into the integers of humans, the integers of death. These random events, according to Ronnie, were the straw that stuffed the mattress of time. I tuned them out. I was thinking about the woman and how it had happened. It was morning, and her husband, maybe a contractor, a man in a hard hat and big, suede, mustard-colored work gloves, had gone. She was in her quilted robe, getting the kids ready for school, standing in the front doorway watching them mount the steps of the county school bus, waving as the bus pulls away trailing a plume of black diesel. Then relief. The hours are hers. For what? Smoking cigarettes at the kitchen table, perhaps with a neighbor who comes over to visit. Instead of making the beds, or doing a load of laundry, instead of marinating some kind of meat or at the very least brushing food crumbs and other debris from between couch cushions, she and the neighbor sit and drink coffee. Sometimes one tells a story, about what her husband said the night before, or didn't say, and the other listens. Sometimes they just sit. Sometimes one turns on a radio and they listen to music, or to the news, but they don't care about the actual news, just that the radio is issuing a steadyish sound whose particulars they do not have to follow to understand what the radio is actually telling them: life is being lived. No need to be a part of it as long as you know it's streaming. These are their days, the woman and her neighbor/confidante. The job of a housewife is a little vague and it's easy to just not cross anything off the long list of semi-urgent ch.o.r.es. The woman senses that time is more purely hers if she squanders it and keeps it empty, holds it, feels it pa.s.s by, and resists filling it with anything that might put some too-useful dent in its open, airy emptiness. Better to smoke in your robe, talk or not talk to the neighbor woman, turn on the television, which, with the sound muted, is like a tropical fish tank or lit hearth: a rectangle of moving color bringing life inside the house. And with life brought successfully in, she is free to sit and gaze at a ringing phone, remaining perfectly still. Free to nap on the couch, because doing nothing is tiring. At five, still somewhat exhausted, she puts onions in a hot pan, to fool her husband. "Smells good," he says, taking off his hard hat.

On one of these ordinary days she and the neighbor woman are at the breakfast table and blam! A heavy message arrives from above. Heavy and dense. It crashes through the ceiling and hits her thigh before clattering to the floor, a dimpled and puckered metal hulk.

"No," she says, when the neighbor woman goes to touch it. She has a feeling it might be hot. She knows somehow that it must be from s.p.a.ce. We better call and get somebody out here. Some kind of . . . meteorologist.

And what were the chances?

There were practically no chances. The chance was almost zero, and yet it happened. To her. The thing about news was that it never touched you. You could turn off the radio midurgent warning and know the escapee was not going to be in your bushes, not going to be peeping in on you in your shower. The news never reached anybody in a real way. The meteorite did, and a radio announcer never could have predicted it. All the world's uncanniness in that thing that came crashing in from deep, unknowable s.p.a.ce, and the proof that it left on her, a tremendous bruise (if only it had lasted!). The person to whom something so unlikely has happened is allowed to think it wasn't an accident, that a meteor fell through s.p.a.ce and into Earth's atmosphere and didn't stop falling until it had pa.s.sed through her ceiling and hit her and you can say accident, but she doesn't have to.

The neighbor returns the morning of the Time photo shoot, in full makeup, eager to talk to reporters.

"Sorry," the woman says, "but this is about me," and shuts the door on her friend.

II.

People were still milling with sweating gla.s.ses in their hands when we got to Stanley and Gloria Kastle's. Milling and speaking in soft voices over the melancholic and refined tones of Erik Satie's Gnossiennes, which were a soundtrack to the lives of the types of people who came to dinner at the Kastles'. If not the life they actually lived, the one they imagined for themselves and wanted to draw from for inspiration. Gloria, in a head wrap, her black handcuff eyegla.s.ses, and a caftan, came toward me with a hug. Many women were afraid of Gloria, as I had been, but I was becoming less afraid. I sensed she was coming to understand that I was part of Sandro's life and that there was no choice but to accept me.

Votive candles flickered behind her, giving the loft the feel of a strange and magical chamber. On every surface were delicate little flowers-weeds, I saw upon closer inspection, clover and dandelions, with sprigs of ailanthus-in little transparent vases, which contrasted with the old, wide-plank floors, the high ceiling stripped to the framing. The loft had once belonged to the painter Mark Rothko, and knowing this gave it a despairing and enlightened aura. It was almost better than going to the Met and looking at the Rothkos. It was the afterimage of that: sad tones of the Gnossiennes, Gloria in a head wrap, looking feline and fierce, Stanley's mysterious martyrdom, for whom or what I never understood.

On long metal tables that Stanley had welded sat various collections of semi-industrial objects: early-twentieth-century lightbulbs, antique Bakelite telephones, an Olivetti typewriter given to Stanley by Sandro, who knew the family, and a cap-and-ball pistol, also a gift from Sandro, but as a kind of joke. It was a replica of an early-nineteenth-century Colt revolver that had been remade by the Valera Company for spaghetti Western productions. Stanley was terrified of it and had put it out, with its complicated boxes of ammunition and parts, hoping Sandro would take the cap-and-ball pistol home with him when we left tonight.

"This is Burdmoore Model," Gloria said, steering me toward a slump-shouldered man in a blazer that looked like he'd balled up and used as a pillow the night before. "You'll be seated together at dinner." An auburn beard tumbled down his chin like hillside erosion. He was short and pot-bellied but had a kind of blunt virility. He nodded at me with bright, sad eyes, tucking a lock of stringy red hair behind one ear.

"Modelle," he said. "The stress is on the second syllable."

But after meeting him that night I never heard anyone p.r.o.nounce it that way; they all said "Model." Gloria introduced me as "a motorcycle racer," which made me blush with embarra.s.sment, not only because I wasn't one but because I felt it made me seem young and unserious compared to the Satie and Rothko mood of the room.

"Well, all right," Burdmoore said, nodding. "That's cool."

He took a sip of wine and accidentally set his gla.s.s down too forcefully. Red flew upward and doused his hand and sleeve.

Ronnie came over to say h.e.l.lo to Burdmoore-they seemed to know each other-and I went to help Gloria. Despite her feminist claims and enlightened look, the caftan and the chunky African jewelry, I always sensed from Gloria that female guests were expected to help in the kitchen. But Gloria had ordered out, from one of the Indian restaurants on Sixth Street, so there wasn't much to do. As she and I moved chicken tandoori and various sauces and side dishes from white paper containers to ceramic serving bowls, she told me Burdmoore was a motherf.u.c.ker.

"He seems nice," I said.

"I mean the Motherf.u.c.kers," she said. "They were a political street gang. Late sixties. They went around pretending to a.s.sa.s.sinate people with toy guns. I think they 'killed' Didier de Louridier, who's coming tonight. That should be interesting. Eventually they put away the toy guns and stabbed a landlord. It was all so lurid and we wouldn't even know about it except the father, Jack Model, was a friend of Stanley's, a janitor who worked around the art department at Cooper Union when Stanley was teaching there. The two of them became close. Stanley hated academics and said Model was the only person he could relate to at Cooper, this blue-collar guy from Staten Island who lived on vodka and cigarettes. The darkest phase of Burdmoore's wasn't this 'Motherf.u.c.ker' business but when he gave up being an anarchist tough and started making papier-mache sculptures. Burdmoore got it in his head, in the wake of his landlord-stabbing phase, that art would put him in contact with some . . . thing, some kind of emanation. He had no permanent residence-he was on the lam, for all we knew. Stanley let him keep his art supplies and a bedroll here, gave him a small work s.p.a.ce, and we tried to suffer through the phase, this art-as-transcendence c.r.a.p. He'd work furiously on these ugly figurative constructions, and make us listen to his confused rants about the female body and Mother Earth. Shaping crude forms and talking about art moving up the thigh of Mother Earth. Art 'parting her l.a.b.i.a' and so forth. It was a real regression for someone whose father had pushed a mop, worked like an animal in hopes his son might get a high school degree, maybe join the police force. Instead, he was a dropout, and with such tacky ideas about art."

Gloria had a way of insisting that I track her comments, agree with them, as she spoke. I nodded in a.s.sent as she went on about how bad art could not save itself and could not be saved, as she spooned sauces, all of them the same ocher-orange color, into bowls. Helen h.e.l.lenberger, just arriving, peeked her head into the kitchen and blew an air kiss to Gloria. Helen looked around the kitchen, pa.s.sing over me as if I were Gloria's a.s.sistant, hired to help out for the night, and then left the room, to chat with the men.

As Gloria went on about Burdmoore and bad art, I nodded and privately hoped I was on the side of good art. I was not making papier-mache, obviously. Or declarations about parting l.a.b.i.a. And I was safe in another essential way: I had not put myself out there yet. I could delay it until I knew for certain that what I was doing was good. Until I knew I was doing the right thing. The next thing would be this Valera project. It was half art and half life, and from there, I felt, something would emerge.

Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste. She said the Motherf.u.c.kers' actions were interesting, in the context of the dreadful hippies of that era. The Motherf.u.c.kers were about anger and drugs and s.e.x, and what a relief that was, Gloria said, compared to the love-everyone tyranny of the hippies.

As we all took our places at the table, Sandro came over to kiss me, say hi, because he was at the other end, next to Didier de Louridier, victim of the Motherf.u.c.kers. I didn't mind being seated so far from him, although sometimes Sandro would speak later to whomever I'd been next to. "So-and-so said you were very quiet." As if I had some duty-to Sandro-that required me to be more a.s.sertive, to entertain his friends. So-and-so talked nonstop, I'd say, and he'd laugh. They all talked nonstop. That is, if you didn't intervene. They were accustomed to being interrupted. Whoever was hungriest to speak, spoke. I wasn't hungry in that same way. I was hungry to listen. Sandro said I was his little green-eyed cat at these parties. A cat studying mice, he said, and I said it was more like a cat among dogs, half-terrified. "You shouldn't be," he said. "You always have something interesting to say, but you withhold it. The only one besides me who knows you," he said, "is Ronnie." Which sent a curious wave through me. I wanted to believe it was true that Ronnie knew me.

We were at a ma.s.sive, outdoor-use picnic table with ancient-looking messages knifed into its top. "Kilroy was here" and "eat me" and "f.u.c.k" and "f.u.k." Its gouged surface was lacquered over in glossy black. The Kastles had purchased it from P.S. 130 in Chinatown, which, Gloria announced somewhat triumphantly, was selling everything but the smoke alarms to keep from closing down.

Burdmoore turned to me. "That's who you're here with?" He gestured in Sandro's direction.

I said yes.

"What are you, eighteen years old?"

"No," I said, laughing. "Twenty-three."

He was looking at Sandro and about to say something more when Gloria started in about the purchase of the table, how they'd found someone to strip it and lacquer it, and how it had to be lifted up the elevator shaft, end-on, with ropes and pulleys. Burdmoore concentrated on the chicken tandoori, the problem of its sauce in his beard.

"Enough about the f.u.c.king table," Stanley said.

He and Gloria squared off in lowered voices. As they argued, Gloria got up and went to a sideboard and I had the terrible thought that she was going to pick up Sandro's cap-and-ball pistol and point it at Stanley. But she retrieved a tea towel and a bowl of water and set these in front of Burdmoore so he could clean his beard.

Sandro raised his gla.s.s and said he wanted to make a toast. He gazed warmly at me across the table, his smile punctuated by dimples, and I thought perhaps he was going to toast me, my ride across the salt flats.

"To Helen," he said, "and to the future, our future. Let's hope it's a long one."

As I drank to Helen, I understood that her elegant Greek air, like Gloria's stern air, was not an attack on me. The important thing was to be patient. To not make enemies. I would even try to befriend Helen, I thought.

The common table conversation had lulled and people were breaking off into smaller groups. Burdmoore and I glanced at each other awkwardly. Each time I thought we'd speak, he smiled in a stunned or stoned way, nodded enthusiastically, and said nothing. I heard Ronnie tell someone that if you weren't sure where the camera was focused in an image you were looking at, as a general rule you could a.s.sume it was the crotch. A man named John Dogg was talking to Helen about his art, too excited to tone down his sales pitch. Only a certain kind of pushiness works in the art world. Not the straight-ahead, pile-driving kind, which was the method John Dogg was using.

"Malevich made the white paintings," he said in a loud voice. "And then we had Robert Ryman. Ryman making them, too, more academic and provisional than Malevich, the religion subtracted from the facture. Little test canvases of white, like bandages over nothing. White on white. Now what I do is I make white films. Just light. Pure light, and what's fascinating is-"

He didn't seem to notice that Helen's face had gone blank, as if she'd been summoned elsewhere but had left an impa.s.sive mask behind, for his self-promotion to bounce off. John Dogg pressed on, hoping to recapture her attention. It wasn't going to work. But I admired how convinced he was that his work was good, good enough to show to her, and he simply needed to get it seen. As if that were the main stumbling block, and not the problem of making art, the problem of believing in it.

"They made the white paintings. I make the white films. I've been rather protective of the conditions of display but I'm coming around to the idea of making my work more accessible. In fact, I'm open to showing them to you. I'm enormously busy but I could make time. I could bring the reels by the gallery. No projector? Well, I could bring a projector. Oh, I see. Or perhaps to your residence, then. I'm not opposed to the idea of making a visit to your home. Why don't we say tomorrow?"

"I used to paint," Stanley said to no one in particular. "I had to give it up. I lost contact with the paintings."

"Although it's true that there is a powerful enough idea behind the works," John Dogg said, looking for a signal in Helen's blank face, "that you could just get the idea, and not necessarily see them. The main thing to understand is that I deal in light. I mean I deal with light. It's a way of portraying light-light that is a lit picture of some other, original light. Like happiness is both an experience and an afterimage of something else. An original happiness-"

"I tried to keep it going," Stanley said. "Some relation to painting, to the hand, by drawing. I tried to draw pictures and could only draw b.o.o.bs. I used up all my good drawing paper and a full box of Lumigraphs and every day it was the same thing. b.o.o.bs. Just b.o.o.bs."

Didier was talking to Sandro. As he spoke, he ate and smoked simultaneously, puffing on his cigarette and then transferring it from his hand to his lips as he b.u.t.tered his bread, a blue box of Gauloises next to him, ashes fluttering and mixing with his rice and curry and meat.

"It's best you gave it up," Gloria said to Stanley.

"But sometimes I want to cry."

"My films are not about bringing people together," John Dogg told Helen. "They're about dividing people into for and against."

I turned to Burdmoore. I said Gloria had mentioned he'd been involved in a movement that sounded interesting.

He looked at Gloria and said it might be something Gloria snickered about but it was real. He had been a Motherf.u.c.ker. Lowercase, too, he said, according to his ex-wife.

I tried to rea.s.sure him that Gloria had not said anything insulting, but he waved my words away, as if to say don't bother, no hard feelings.

"We took over the Lower East Side," he said. "Place is dead now. If you could only have known it then. But you're too young."

"The Lower East Side is full of people," I said. "There's all kinds of stuff going on there."

He smiled at me like I was endearingly naive.

"I'm talking," he said, "about insurrection. There isn't s.h.i.t going on in that regard. It was armed struggle, and the cops"-he said "cops" with a tough, flattened New York accent, as if he were beheading the word with the chop of his voice-"had come in with tanks, and dirtier methods, informants, heroin."

"No kidding?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said, and some people even suspected that narcs had deliberately introduced s.e.xually transmitted diseases. "Every one of us had the clap. It gave us a bad rep. Although we wanted a bad rep."

They fought the cops, he said. Drove out the dealers. Fed the people of their neighborhood. And lived a life that felt free, "given the police state we live in," he said in his flat accent, which was growing on me. He seemed so much tougher, more streetwise, than the usual dinner company at the Kastles'.

"In a way it's worth explaining this," he said. "I mean to anyone who wasn't there for it. Did she tell you we loaded our guns under the soda counter at Gem Spa?" He nodded his chin at Gloria. "We carried these black flags. We had switchblades and guns hidden here and there. No shoulder holsters-that was a kind of unwritten rule. Shoulder holster not cool. No hip holsters, either. It's way too NRA fanatic, that style. We all had the same kind of hand-cobbled Peruvian cowboy boots. There was a guy who sold them for cheap on Saint Mark's, and you put the gun in the shaft of your boot. f.u.c.king beautiful boots. I wish I had a pair now."

"Why were you called Motherf.u.c.kers?"

"Because we hated women," he said. "You think I'm joking. Women had no place in the movement unless they wanted to cook us a meal or clean the floor or strip down. There are people who've tried to renovate our ideas, claim we weren't chauvinists. Don't believe it. We had some heavy s.h.i.t to work out. But we were idealists, too. We saw a future of people singing and dancing, making love and masturbating in the streets. No shame. Nothing to hide. Everyone sleeping in one big bed, men, women, daughters, dogs."

"Who wants to do that?" Sandro said later that night when I told him that the detail of men masturbating had seemed particularly sad. But he said he respected Burdmoore. That the Motherf.u.c.kers were something formidable. He told me the first time he met Burdmoore, he didn't know anything about that history. He remembered the janitor Stanley would go on alcoholic binges with, a tough old guy from Staten Island whose eccentric redheaded son was an equally unlikely pet project for Stanley to have chosen, a dropout freeloader. Burdmoore had answered the Kastles' door in his socks, wearing the kind of cheap team jacket you send away for after purchasing so many cartons of cigarettes. Sandro said the Kastles let Burdmoore drink their good whiskey and run roughshod over the loft. But that he brought some kind of life into their house and the Kastles would probably have killed each other without the distraction of a fugitive from the law.

A wave of laughter overtook the table. Ronnie was recounting the episode of his trip to Port Arthur. Stanley said Ronnie had killed Saul Oppler's rabbits unjustly but that the rooster, it sounded like it had wanted to die, and so Ronnie hadn't done all bad.

"The most you can hope for," Stanley said, "is that someone will have the guts and know-how to kill you with a two-by-four."

"What kind of know-how do you need for that?" Didier asked.

Which made Stanley laugh. He was laughing so hard he had to wipe tears from his eyes, and suddenly he was really crying, his head in his hands, the table quiet, Stanley's body shaking as he sobbed.

"Come on, Stanley," Gloria said. "You devalue the tear when you do this. You really do."

She looked around the table, perhaps seeking consolation. See the maudlin bulls.h.i.t I have to put up with? Then again, she might have been saying, You better not think this is funny. This was the way with them. It was all very grave and dramatic, and you didn't know if it was a joke or if it was real. Sandro said their gloom was almost mathematical, an endgame that Stanley had created. All Stanley had to do, at this point, to keep his art career going, was order neon tubes in various colors from a manufacturer, and his a.s.sistants arranged the tubes according to an algorithm he'd invented long ago, as if to subtract himself from the production of his own art. He was rich and well respected but he had forced his own obsolescence. The art made itself. Sandro said that Stanley's work had outmoded him the way the postindustrial age was now robbing the worker of his place and that this truth made the art more powerful.

The Kastles had spent the summer in East Hampton, although apparently Stanley never stepped foot on the beach. He slept all day and spent his nights drinking and making monologues on a reel-to-reel tape recorder.

Ronnie asked if he could hear a bit of one of Stanley's recorded reels. We ate silently, listening to Stanley's voice.

"Without clothing nudity loses context," it declared as the tape wound forward, one large wheel tracking the other.

"And yet to give the body partial context . . . a belt around the waist of a naked woman, a bow tie on a naked man . . . you see what I mean. Accessories take away nudity's dignity. Cheapen it. I know a man, a husband, whose wife enjoyed Playgirl calendars. Each year she bought one and tacked it up in her area of the loft that she and the man shared. Each month offered a different theme. A doctor, nude, with stethoscope and lab coat. A logger in Red Wing boots and a hard hat, an enormous dingaling hanging down between his thighs. The wife was always careful to turn the calendar to the new month, as if the previous one had not been enough of an imposition on this poor husband she lived with, who suffered enough as it was, from unknown causes. One day the husband decided he'd reached his limit. He took the calendar down and removed all the genitals with scissors. He put the calendar back up on the wall, careful to return the page to the proper month, the model's genitals, previously outsized and healthy, now a jagged absence, a peek of wall from underneath, as if the nude model himself had forgotten to include his own d.i.c.k and b.a.l.l.s, or had lost them someplace, or had them taken from him in some unwholesome arrangement where he'd bet them or traded them away, and had to suffer the consequences, posing without a crotch area. The wife said nothing about it and yet in the way she proceeded, as if nothing were amiss, the husband knew he had deprived her. This made him happy for a while. But it wasn't enough, this husband discovered. Calendars were only a touchstone for the endless fantasies that were doubtless running through his wife's mind and he could not get in there with scissors to remove them and so he cut the cord on his wife's personal ma.s.sager-that was what she called it, but we can say vibrator. Vibrator. But I've digressed from the original subject of partial nudity, which is what I aim to discuss. I'm not the first to point out its tasteless nature. Diderot said something about the consequences of putting stockings on the Venus de Milo. Which brings me to another, related matter, her limblessness, so obviously part of the allure. It would be unthinkable kitsch to fit the Venus de Milo with arms. Her missing limbs are a positive attribute, not an absence. Really quite strange, as a concept. I once knew a man who played a hanky-panky with his wife that involved pretending she was an amputee. She would strap her lower leg up behind her thigh, with his a.s.sistance, and go around in a knee-length skirt and crutches, hopping on the one serviceable leg, and people a.s.sumed she had lost the other one in a terrible accident, or an illness of some kind. The two of them would have these 'erotic weekends' in towns where no one knew them. They would pick a place on the map and arrive in their respective play-act roles, a stoic amputee crutching her way into a motel office with the help of her doting caretaker. They would check into their room and then go to a restaurant, where they received looks of shy condolence from the hostess and waiters and the other clientele. They would order as if they were on some kind of significant date, an anniversary, say, in these hickville special-occasion establishments where the waiter comes to the table with a pepper grinder that's five feet tall. You know what I mean. Heavy and oversized furniture, ugly American Colonial lighting, either too bright or too dark, places where the wine is some kind of grapy burgundy served in a carafe by small-town goobers trained by the management to congratulate you on your order. Excellent choice, sir. As they ate their chops and drank their burgundy and took in the shabby ambience, the husband covertly fondled his wife's stump under the table, her not-real stump, her play stump. The two or even three carafes of burgundy staining in, blurring inhibitions, they would return to the motel. The man, drunk now, and good and ready to get into the real business, would remain ever patient and solicitous with his handicapped wife, help her to the room, carry her over the threshold like a child bride being airlifted into a territory of freshness and antic.i.p.ation, the lightness of his wife's body in the man's arms somehow exactly the weight of her light compliance. He would set her softly on the bed. Proceed to undress her slowly, with meaningful pauses and great care. Eye contact, deep and even breathing. Extra attention to her knee stump, the surface of it, rounded but with shallow areas, like a very smooth rock, the knee. And then touching the cold bed below the knee, the emptiness of it. A complicated thrill, which I myself can only imagine. 'Not for the layperson' was what this man said of their game, an advanced level of fantasy and humping. The idea of her missing leg was a shared s.p.a.ce between them; it was practically a religion and they didn't want to give it up. At the end of these dirty little weekends, when for the return home she released her hidden leg, unstrapped it so that her 'stump' was yet again just a normal healthy knee, the sight of it there in front of her was beyond painful for both of them. The real leg contradicted everything. It ground the memories of their romantic jaunts to nothing. The wife, her two healthy legs stretched out, would sob inconsolably all the way home. This distressed her husband, as you can imagine. And he had his own interest in hoping to find a solution to their problem. So they began to inquire. They saw various doctors at various clinics. n.o.body was interested in helping them. One or two medical professionals even threatened to call the police, suggesting that the man could be arrested. Which is another topic for another discourse. But briefly, why is the common good dependent upon preventing these two semi-free individuals from removing something that belongs to them, and that they both agree must be disposed of? What interest do we have in her leg that she herself does not have? Because I must confess I am among those who would want it to stay attached to the rest of her, even as this seems an abuse of governance, and an imposition on the victimless s.e.xual satisfaction of two people, as I said, semi-free. Last time I talked to this man, we have lost touch, the reason for which you'll learn in a moment, anyhow the last time I heard from him he and his wife had finally found some kind of doctor down in the Yucatan who was willing to perform the operation, and apparently there was a community there for rehabilitation and general lifestyle support. They were planning to relocate. The man wrote to me and said, 'Our dream will soon be coming true.' And here I arrive at my point. The point is that everyone has a different dream. The point is that it is a grave mistake to a.s.sume your dream is in any way shared, that it's a common dream. Not only is it not shared, not common, there is no reason to a.s.sume that other people don't find you and your dream utterly revolting."

After a pause, Stanley's recorded voice began to sing to us from the machine: Oh, dreams coming true in Quin-ta-na Roo Where we will cut off what's making you blue.

We'll take it away, and you will feel whole.

Oh, dreams coming true in Quin-ta-na Roo.

Stanley got up and fast-forwarded the reel. His voice became a high-pitched ribbon until he lifted his finger and it quavered back down to the speed of regular talking.

"The great thing is, it's a buyer's market right now," his voice said from the machine. "Then again, if you want to sell, it's a great time to do so, because it's a seller's market right now, too.

"Home. We say 'home,' not 'house.' You never hear a good agent say 'house.' A house is where people have died on the mattresses. Where pipes freeze and burst. Where termites fall from the sink spigot. Where somebody starts a flu fire by burning a telephone book in the furnace. Where banks repossess. Where mental illness takes hold. A home is something else. Do not underestimate the power in the word home. Say it. 'Home.' It's like the difference between 'rebel' and 'thug.' A rebel is a gleaming individual in tight Levi's, a sneering and pretty face. The kind Sal Mineo wet-dreams. A thug is hairy and dark, an object that would sink to the bottom when dropped in a lake. A home is maintained. Cared for. Loved. The word home is savory like gravy, and like gravy, kept warm. A good realtor says 'home.' Never 'house.' Always 'cellar' and never 'bas.e.m.e.nt.' Bas.e.m.e.nts are where cats c.r.a.p on old Santa costumes. Where men drink themselves to death. Where children learn firsthand about s.e.xual molestation. But cellar. A cellar is where you keep root vegetables and wine. Cellar means a proximity to the earth that's not about blackness and rot but the four ritual seasons. We say 'autumn,' not 'fall.' We say 'The leaves in this area are simply magnificent in autumn.' We say 'simply magnificent,' and by the way, 'lawn,' not 'yard.' It's 'underarm' to 'armpit.' Would you say 'armpit' to a potential buyer? Say 'yard' and your buyer pictures rusted push mowers, plantar warts. Someone shearing off his thumb and a couple of fingers with a table saw. A tool shed where water-damaged p.o.r.nography and used motor oil funneled into fabric softener bottles cohabitate with hints of trauma that are as thick and dark as the oil. I'm not talking about Playboy or Oui. Harder stuff. Amateur. Pictorials featuring married people with their flab and bruises and smallpox vaccines, doing things to each other in rec rooms and sheds like the one housing these selfsame magazines. Middle-aged couples who get trashed on tequila and doc.u.ment with a supply of flash cubes. You have to be careful about words. You're thinking about your commission, your hands are starting to shake at the idea of the money, and meanwhile your client hears 'yard' and sees himself nudging icky amateur p.o.r.no with his foot, potato bugs scattering from their damp hideout underneath. Again, it's 'lawn.' 'Lawn' means crew-cut gra.s.s. It means censorship, nice and wholesome. It means America. And you know what I mean by America, and by the way, 'cul-de-sac.' Not 'dead end.' If I have to explain that, you'll never pa.s.s the exam to get your license. We say 'dinner.' Never 'supper.' 'Dinner' is the middle cla.s.s, semi-religious . . . Christian . . . Christianesque. 'Dinner' is a touch-tone doorbell with a little orange light glowing from within the rectangular b.u.t.ton. The bell is there for expected guests. People carrying warm dishes covered with gingham checked cloth-the cloth, needless to say, has been laundered with stain remover. The type of people with stained old dishrags are not going to press this doorbell. No one with a beard. No one with a grievance. Only people who share the values of the hosts. 'Thank you for having us to dinner in your lovely home.' Say 'dinner.' Say 'home.' Say 'lawn.' Don't be afraid. Like prayer, through repet.i.tion and habit, these words will begin to-"

Stanley shut off the reel-to-reel machine.