Part 3 (1/2)

It hadn't occurred to me that Lisa had been murdered. I a.s.sumed she'd been impatient to meet her future and had just fled into it and never bothered to let anyone know where she was and what she was doing. The representative who paid me could not track her down. He called to ask if I knew anything and I'd said no.

”I miss Los Angeles,” Nadine said. ”Don't you?”

”I was only there the one night,” I said. ”In the City of Industry, which isn't really Los Angeles, and so-”

”The way the palm trees shake around,” she went on, ”and it sounds like rain but everything is sun reflecting on metal. I once went to a house in the Hollywood Hills that was a gla.s.s dome on a pole, its elevator shaft. Belonged to a pervert bachelor and he had peepholes everywhere. He was watching me in the toilet. Same guy drugged me without asking first. Angel dust. I was on roller skates, which presented a whole extra challenge.”

Thurman was laughing. I understood she was his airy nonsense-maker, a bubble machine, and occasionally he would be in the mood for that.

”How the h.e.l.l did you manage, drugged, on skates?” he asked her.

”Like I said, there was an elevator. Anyhow, there's some use in being doped against your will. Before it happened I didn't have my natural defenses. Some people don't get the whole boundaries thing until they've had their mind raped by another person. It helped me to establish some kind of minimum standard.”

She turned to me. ”Did you see Klute?”

”Yes,” I said, ”I did, I-”

”I liked it,” she said. ”He didn't.” She gestured at Thurman. She wasn't curious what I thought of Klute. But that very film had been on my mind, this portrait of a woman who is alone and isolated in the dense and crowded city. In my empty apartment I'd been thinking of the scenes where her phone rings. She answers and no one is there.

Perhaps because I was so isolated, as darkness fell outside that Fourteenth Street bar, and more drinks were ordered, and a sense of possession over time faded away, a sense of the evening as mine loosened, one in which I would eat my habitual pizza slice and lie down alone, I began to cling in some subtle way to these people, Nadine and Thurman, even as they were drunk and bizarre and didn't listen to a word I said.

I heard the sound of a motorcycle pulling up on the sidewalk in front of the bar.

A man walked in wearing jeans tucked into engineer's boots and a faded T-s.h.i.+rt that said MARSDEN HARTLEY on it. He was good-looking and I guessed he knew it, this friend of Thurman and Nadine's whose name I did not catch. He walked in knowing he was beautiful, with his hard gaze and slightly feminine mouth, and I was struck. He had the Marsden Hartley T-s.h.i.+rt and I loved Marsden Hartley. He rode a motorcycle. These commonalities felt like a miracle to me. I realized when he sat down that he had made his T-s.h.i.+rt logo with a pen. It was not silk-screened. He'd simply written MARSDEN HARTLEY. He could've written anything and that was what he wrote.

Compared to Thurman and Nadine it was like reason had stepped through the door. He didn't speak in rambling non sequiturs or take pictures of the ceiling. Thurman started acting a bit more normally himself, and he and this friend of his had a coherent exchange about cla.s.sical music, Thurman demonstrating a pa.s.sage of Bach by running his hands over the bar as though it were a piano, his fingers sounding pretend notes with a delicate care and exact.i.tude that the rest of him seemed to lack. There were several rounds of drinks. Their friend asked if I was an art student. ”Let me guess,” he said. ”Either Cooper or SVA. Except if you were at Cooper your enlightened good sense would keep you away from dirty old men like Thurman Johnson.”

I said I'd just moved to New York.

”You had a college sweetheart who is joining the military. He was also in fine arts. He'll use his training to paint portraits of army colonels. You'll write letters back and forth until you fall in love with someone else, which is what you moved here to do.”

These people seemed to want to have already located the general idea of the stranger in their company, and to feel they were good guessers. It was somehow preferable to actually trying to get to know me.

”I didn't move here to fall in love.”

But as I said it, I felt he'd set a trap of some kind. Because I didn't move here not to fall in love. The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it's worthy of respect. It's not admirable to want love, it just is.

The truth was that I'd loved Chris Kelly, who'd gone to the South of France to find Nina Simone, only to be shot at with a gun she'd lifted from the pocket of her robe. We were in an Italian film cla.s.s together. He looked at Monica Vitti like he wanted to eat her, and I looked at her like I wanted to be her. I started cutting and arranging my hair like hers, a tousled mess with a few loose bangs, and I even found a green wool coat like she clutched to her chin in Red Desert, but Chris Kelly did not seem to notice. He was graduated and gone by my second semester at UNR and mostly an impression by this point, a lingering image of a tall guy who wore black turtlenecks, a cowlick over one eye, a person who had risked himself for art, had been shot in the arm and then moved to New York City.

A few days earlier, I'd finally tried the number I had for him, from a pay phone on Mulberry Street. I'd gone downstairs, pa.s.sing the teenage girls styling each other's hair in the hallway, trying not to breathe because the Chinese family one floor below me slaughtered chickens in their apartment and the smell of warm blood filled the hallway. I'd dialed the number from the phone booth, nervous but happy. Someone was yelling, ”Babbo, throw down the key!” It was the morning of the Fourth of July and kids were lighting smoke bombs, sulfurous coils of red and green, the colors dense and bright like concentrated dye blooming through water. I was wearing Chinese shoes I'd bought for two dollars on Ca.n.a.l Street. The buckles had immediately fallen off, and the straps were now attached with safety pins. Sweaty feet in cheap cotton shoes, black like Chris Kelly's clothes. It was sweltering hot, children cutting into the powerful spray from an uncapped fire hydrant. As the phone began to ring, I watched an enormous flying c.o.c.kroach land on the sidewalk. A woman came after it and crushed it under the bottom of her slipper.

The phone was ringing. Now there was a huge mangled stain on the sidewalk, with still-moving parts, long, wispy antennae swiping around for signs of its own life. A second ring of the telephone. Mythical Chris Kelly. Third ring. I was rehearsing what I would say. An explosion echoed from down the block. An M-80 in a garbage can. The key sailed from a window, inside a tube sock, and landed near the garbage piling up because of the strike.

A voice came through the phone: ”I'm sorry. The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”

It was true: I didn't move here not to fall in love. That night, I watched from my roof as the neighborhood blew itself to smithereens, scattering bits of red paper everywhere, the humid air tinged with magnesium. It seemed a miracle that nothing caught fire that wasn't meant to. Men and boys overturned crates of explosives of various sorts in the middle of Mulberry Street. They hid behind a metal dumpster as one lit a cigarette, gave it a short puffing inhale, and then tossed it onto the pile, which began to send showers and sprays and flashes in all directions. A show for the residents of Little Italy, who watched from high above. No one went down to the street, only the stewards of this event. My neighbors and I lined our rooftop, black tar gummy from the day's heat. Pink and red fireworks burst upward, exploded overhead and then fell and melted into the dark, and how could it be that the telephone number for the only person I knew in New York City did not work?

I had asked Giddle if she knew an artist by that name and she'd said, ”I think so. Chris. Yeah.”

We were on Lafayette, outside the Trust E Coffee Shop.

”I can't believe it,” I said excitedly. ”Where is he? Do you know what he's up to?”

She tugged the foil ap.r.o.n from a new pack of North Pole cigarettes and tossed it on the sidewalk. I watched it skitter.

”I don't know,” she said. ”He's around. He's on the scene.”

The wind blew the discarded foil sideways.

”What scene?” I asked, and then Giddle became cryptic, like, if you don't already know, I can't spell it out. That was when I first sensed, but then almost as quickly suppressed, something about Giddle, which was that there might be reason to doubt everything she said.

I told this friend of Nadine and Thurman's that I was from Nevada and he started calling me Reno. It was a nice word, he said, like the name of a Roman G.o.d or G.o.ddess. Juno. Or Nero. Reno. I told him it was on the neon archway into town, four big red letters, R-E-N-O. I made a film about it, I said. I set up a tripod and filmed cars as they came to a stop at the traffic light under the archway.

”Spiritual America,” he said. ”That's Thurman's thing, too. Diner coffee. Unflushed toilets. Salesmen. Shopping carts. He's about to become famous. He's having a show at the Museum of Modern Art.”

Thurman was not listening to us. He was nibbling on Nadine's ear.

The friend said, ”He's a great artist.”

”And what are you?” I asked.

”I turn the hands on the big clock in the lobby of the Time-Life Building. Twice a year it has to be reset, to daylight savings and then back to standard time. They call me. It's a very specialized job. If you push too hard, you can bend the hands of the clock.”

There were tacit rules with these people, and all the people like them I later met: You weren't supposed to ask basic questions. ”What do you do?” ”Where are you from?” ”What kind of art do you make?” Because I understood he was an artist, but you weren't allowed to ask that. Not even ”What is your name?” You pretended you knew, or didn't need to know. Asking an obvious question, even if there were no obvious answer, was a way of indicating to them that they should jettison you as soon as they could.

”I was in Nevada once,” he said. ”To see something a guy I knew made, the Spiral Jetty. The artist, Smithson, had just died. He was a friend, or something like one. Actually, he was an a.s.shole. A sci-fi turkey, but brilliant-”

I said excitedly that I'd been there, too, that I had read his obituary, I knew who he was, but he didn't seem to think it was a remarkable coincidence.

”He had a hilarious riff about the 'real authentic West,' pretending he's Billy Al Bengston, you know, gearhead who makes paintings, and he'd say, 'You New York artists need to stop thinking and feel. You're always trying to make concepts, systems. It's bulls.h.i.+t. I was out there chrome-plating my motorcycle and you're, like, in skysc.r.a.pers, reading books.' Smithson was a genius. There are two great artists of my generation,” he said. ”Smithson is one and my friend Sammy is the other.”

”What does he make?”

”Nothing. He makes nothing. He's living outside this year. He doesn't enter any structures. Right now he's camped in a park in Little Italy. He had been out in the Bronx sleeping on a construction scaffold and they were shooting at him.”

There was another man, besides Henri-Jean with his pole, who was often in my little park at Mulberry and Spring. He slept there sometimes and I figured he was homeless but he didn't quite look it, this young Asian man with shoulder-length hair. There was something too careful and precise about him. I asked if his friend Sammy was Asian and he nodded and said Taiwanese, and I told him I thought I'd seen his friend. He said Sammy had come to New York as a stowaway on a merchant vessel, and that whenever this came up people a.s.sumed it was an art project, a performance he had done, and Sammy would have to explain the obvious, that he did it like millions of others, to come to New York. To be an American. And people would laugh as if there were a deep irony under the words.

”We have a bond, Sammy and I,” the friend said. ”In having spent a lot of time on boats. In having been delivered from that into a realm where everyone thinks we're kidding. But it's the other way around. Life is kidding us.”

I pictured a sh.o.r.e at night. Dark water like the edge of a curtain. A nighttime sea where he and his friend Sammy had both spent time.

At some point Thurman and Nadine decided we were going to another bar. ”You're coming?” I asked the friend. I sensed his hesitation before he nodded sure. Under it, Why not? There's nothing better to do. He left his motorcycle in front of the bar because it turned out Thurman had a car. Not just a car but a car and driver-a mid-1950s black and brushed-metal Cadillac Eldorado with a chauffeur who looked about fourteen years old, in a formal driver's jacket that was several sizes too large, and white gloves, also too large. I thought of the drivers on Mulberry. I said it was like Little Italy on a Sunday but no one heard me or they didn't care.

We piled into the car with drinks in our hands. Nadine had picked hers up and carried it toward the bar's exit, and following behind, I thought, Yes, of course. This is how it's done. Thurman paid our tab, and I was with them, in a Cadillac Eldorado, heavy rocks gla.s.ses in our hands, damp c.o.c.ktail napkins underneath, the ice in our gla.s.ses ta-tinking as the car turned slow corners, honking so people would get out of our way, because we were important in that car, me on their handsome friend's lap, our drinks going ta-tink, ta-tink.

”This is my favorite,” the friend said, pulling a leather datebook from a pocket in the door. ”It actually comes with the car: the 1957 Brougham's own datebook. And this,” he said, pulling out a perfume bottle from a little cubby in the armrest. ”The Lanvin cologne atomizer with Arpege perfume. You could order this stuff at the GM dealers.h.i.+p when these models were new. Thurman, what else is this thing loaded with?”