“Charlotte! Oh, Charlotte,
there
you are—”
I looked up guiltily as my mother draped an arm across my shoulder. She was offhandedly elegant in black charmeuse, plastic champagne glass in one hand, cigarette in the other. “Lit, honey, will you be okay for a little while? Because there’s something your father and I have to do…”
It turned out that my parents had been corralled into going upstairs with a few others of the chosen, to watch Axel’s most recent opus. This was an underground film of a play inspired by Aubrey Beardsley’s
The Story of Venus and Tannhauser.
It had played briefly in a MacDougal Street storefront before being loudly condemned by Cardinal Spellman, among others, and finally closed by the New York City Department of Health.
And now, despite her laissez-faire attitude toward other aspects of my education, my mother had no intention of letting me see it.
“Sweetie, I know this is awful and you’re bored. We should have thought to ask Hillary to come with us. I don’t know why we never think of these things. I’m sorry—”
She sighed, smoothing back my hair, and smiled briskly as a producer we knew wandered past. “But we
do
have to see this, Axel thinks it could be a
real
movie and apparently there’s a part in it for your father though god only knows what
that
could be, I think the whole thing’s done in the nude. Here now, have some of the whitefish, we brought it so we know it’s safe, and maybe you can just curl up in a corner and read for an hour, all right, sweetie?”
She took my head in her hands and kissed me on the brow. “There! Bye now, darling—”
So I was left to wander the Nursery by myself. After a few minutes my unease dissipated. I just grew bored, and sat dispiritedly on a cinder block beneath a very large painting of a woman’s shoe. I’d been to enough grownup parties in Kamensic to know that adults behaved strangely on their own, but I was also young enough to have no real perspective on what I was seeing.
And what I was seeing appeared to be some grimy street scene, complete with bums and teenage runaways, that had been miraculously picked up and then plonked down some ten stories above the Bowery. Neighbors from Kamensic floated past, like well-dressed puppets moving across a dirty stage. For fifteen or twenty minutes a band played, deafeningly loud guitars and a cello held by a bearded man in a pink dress. Later I saw the bearded man fondling a woman while someone else filmed them. I sat on my cinder block, watching the door through which my parents had disappeared the way a cat will watch a mousehole. Around me, the crowd swelled until it seemed impossible that anyone could move. Then, abruptly, the place emptied. I was alone, and frightened. Had the other guests somehow been forced to leave? If so, were my parents being held hostage somewhere in this bizarre maze of rooms and bad behavior?
The thought terrified me. From somewhere far away I heard laughter, the shivering echo of breaking glass. With a cry I jumped up and headed for the door where I had last seen my mother.
It led into a narrow corridor: bare concrete floors, walls and ceiling painted black. There were other passages leading off this one, all crooked doorjambs and rotted sills, some of them strung with Christmas lights and one with barbed wire. I started down the first hall, almost immediately found myself entering a room where the floor was covered with writhing bodies. In one corner a thin young man in a black-and-white striped sailor shirt stood behind a Super 8 camera and trained a blinding spotlight on the proceedings. As I hesitated in the doorway he looked up at me.
“Hey,” he said, and frowned. “You’re early …”
I turned and fled.
Further down the passage there was more of the same: darkened rooms illuminated by 100-watt bulbs, handheld cameras grinding away as people danced or coupled or just sat vacant-eyed in the middle of rooms that were uniformly devoid of furniture. I had no idea where I was, and my anxiety was now full-blown panic.
Where were my parents?
My hands were sweaty; I had wiped them on my velvet dress so much it began to feel like damp suede. My short hair, neatly cut and combed for the holidays, was now stiff with dust, and stank of cigarettes and pot. Every room I passed seemed crammed with strangers. But except for a peremptory nod from one of the figures behind a camera, no one acknowledged me at all. I could feel the tears starting and I bit my lip, desperate not to cry, when in front of me the nightmarish corridor abruptly ended.
“Oh,
please,
” I muttered.
There was a door there, tall and painted with the same glossy black enamel as the rest of the Nursery. I stood a few inches away from it, held my breath, and listened: silence. Behind me slurred voices called out, names tossed from room to room—
“Bobbie? Has anyone seen Bobbie? Where’s Bobbie?”
—and then suddenly music roared on.
Here…comes…the…Sun…King…
I reached for the metal doorknob.
“
Ouch—!”
It was burning hot. I snatched my hand back, very tentatively ran my palm along the door, worrying that there might be a fire on the other side. But the door itself was cool. I knocked, softly; heard nothing but a dull metal boom. I covered my hand with a protective fold of my dress, carefully turned the knob, and peered inside.
It was empty. I glanced back at the dark hallway, then stepped in, shutting the door behind me.
I was in a long, high-ceilinged room. Not much different than the corridor I’d just left, except that there were no doors save the one I’d entered by. On the floor flickered a votive candle stuck onto a small white saucer. Its flame looked disproportionately large; so did my shadow, rising and falling as I stepped toward the candle. I knelt in front of it to warm my hands, then looked around.
“It’s green,” I whispered. “A green room…”
And it was. Not the lurid, concrete-stairwell green you might have expected to find in that place, but a soft, ferny green, dappled where the candlelight struck it, and so welcome after the Nursery’s endless black that I almost laughed out loud. I stood, went to one of the walls and touched it, half-expecting to feel the moist warmth of foliage. But no, it was just paint, cool and slick beneath my fingertips. I crossed the room lengthwise, walking slowly and running my hand along the wall. The candle gave everything an odd velvety glow, and the way my shadow leaped beside me only added to the strangeness. I felt as though I were inside one of those fairy rings that grew behind our house in Kamensic, ferns reaching high enough to form a curved green roof above my head.
And there was a sound, too, so faint it was several minutes before I really became aware of it—a soft, steady
whoosh.
At first I thought someone had left a tap running in a neighboring bathroom. But when I reached the end of the room, the noise grew even louder, and I realized it was not water but the sound of wind in the leaves. Not a gentle rustling, but the restless, unrelenting toss of trees in the night.
I cocked my head, puzzled. There were no windows, no doors save the one I’d entered by; no skylight. And it was dead winter in lower Manhattan—there were no leaves, either. Yet the sound was so persistent, and so near, that I almost imagined I could feel a cool breath upon my neck.
It’s a movie,
I thought.
They’re just running a movie somewhere
…
I stood for a minute, listening, then turned. The votive candle had burned down to a nub. I was halfway across the room when I noticed something hanging on the far wall. Another painting, I thought, like that blandly weird canvas of a shoe. It was very big, so it was odd I hadn’t seen it when I came in, but unlike the other paintings I’d seen scattered around the Nursery, this one wasn’t immediately identifiable. It wasn’t a famous face, or a shoe, or a box of Cracker Jack. The edges were irregular and uneven, the colors dark swirls of brown and black and a deep, rusty red. I walked until I stood in front of it, and frowned.
It wasn’t a painting. Or rather, it wasn’t
just
a painting, but an immense slab of rock, perhaps ten feet high and twice as wide. It didn’t seem to be fixed to the wall so much as protruding through it. I could see no nails or wires, nothing on the floor that might support such an enormous weight. Its surface was smooth but uneven, with patterns in it like waves, and moist. I drew my hand carefully upward, the curved rock beneath my palm like something huge and alive, the flank of a sleek horse or bull. When I reached the middle of the stone I stopped.
There was something painted there, in colors so similar to the rock’s natural tones that I almost missed it. A figure as tall as I was, its body drawn out of proportion and its limbs all mismatched, and posed in grotesque angles. It stood upright, shoulders hunched and arms drawn up before it awkwardly. Dwarfishly foreshortened arms, painted in blurry dark lines to indicate fur. But the hands were human hands, and its legs, though furred, ended in human feet. One leg was oddly foreshortened—either badly drawn or meant to indicate that the creature had been injured.
The rest was merely monstrous. A striped, swayed back like a horse’s; long tail ending in a fox’s white point; a slender, curved shape hanging between its legs, that I knew must represent a penis. I grimaced and looked away, trying to find the creature’s face.
That was even worse. A face like a hideous mask, sitting square on its shoulders and staring straight out from the stone. The outline of the head was like that of a deer, and two asymmetrical antlers corkscrewed from its brow. Instead of a muzzle there was only a long black gash to indicate a nose or mouth, shading into lines sketched beneath to indicate a ruff.
But most dreadful of all were the creature’s eyes. Huge, round, staring eyes, the irises daubed dead-white, the pupils black pinpricks: two blank orbs unsoftened by lashes or lids or anything that might have lent them the faintest breath of humanity. They could have been a serpent’s eyes, or an owl’s; they could have been the glaring sockets of a skull. I started to shake, and stumbled backward for the door.
That was when I saw her.
“Hi,” she said. Her voice was low and breathy, as though she were talking to herself. But her eyes—wide and staring as those of the creature in the painting, but etched with green like leaves on dark water—her eyes were fixed on me.
“You know, I was going to tell you something,” she went on, absently scratching her head. “But I forgot, and then you were, you know—” She made a flurrying gesture. “—
gone.
And then I got worried…”
She was at the far end of the room, leaning against the wall. Not anywhere near the door—but then how else could she have gotten in? There was no other entrance, and I was certain I would have heard her, or seen the door open. The sound of the wind in the leaves rose and died away as I looked around in a panic. The girl continued to stare at me. After a moment she slid down to the floor, her patchwork bag beside her.
“Hey…” She beckoned me. “Come here—”
I hesitated. Then I went. After all, I was only twelve; she was older, but not old enough to seem dangerous. As I crossed the room I felt the gaze of that dreadful figure in the stone follow me. But I refused to look back, squeezing my eyes shut and taking tiny careful steps until I reached the other side. I opened my eyes then. The girl smiled up at me, and my terror faded. It was like one of my own friends smiling at me, welcoming and without guile, and somehow complicitous.
“I know who you are,” she said. She scooched over, patting the floor as though she were plumping a sofa cushion. I settled beside her, trying to arrange my velvet dress so it wouldn’t get dirty, and still being careful not to let my gaze fall on the rock painting opposite.
“Pretty,” she said, stroking my dress. Once more she gave me that ravishing smile. “You’re the godchild. Charlotte. Right?”
I shrugged and said, “Yes.”
She looked pleased, and started playing with the hem of her dress. There were runs in it, spots where the metallic blue fabric was so frayed you could see right through.
“You know how I know that?” Her lips were dry and cracked. She licked them, over and over and over, until a seam of blood appeared. “Because I am, too. Did you know that?”
“No,” I said shyly.
She nodded. “So we’re sort of related. Right? So that’s why I wanted to talk to you. Because of what happens to us. Just so you’ll know.”
She leaned toward me, and once again I caught that rank chemical smell. “No one understands about Axel. People think they do, they see the movies and read all that stuff but no one really
knows.
Except me.”
She took my hand and opened it, traced the lines on my palm the way my friend Ali did when we were playing fortune-teller. The girl glanced up, her gaze flicking from me to the far wall. Despite myself I looked, too; then quickly lowered my eyes.
She pointed at the rock painting and said, “You see that.” It was not a question. “Hardly anybody does. Do you know what it is?”
“No,” I whispered.
“A self portrait.” When I looked at her doubtfully she shook her head. “Not
mine.
His.”
This reassured me somewhat. Plus, I felt flattered by her attention, the fact that she was talking to me as though I were one of her friends and not a little girl. I thought of the strange artwork some of my parents’ friends collected, and the ugly paintings I had seen elsewhere in the Nursery, and ventured another glance at the rock painting. “Really?”
“Sure.” She lowered her voice. “You should see some of the other stuff. I mean, I probably shouldn’t talk about it ’cause you’re so young—but, well, some of it is
very
sexy. Definitely X-rated.”
She giggled. “That’s one of the amazing things about Axel. All this stuff, you know? It’s all sort of hidden in plain sight. Like the movies, and the paintings, and the books and things he collects—everyone thinks it’s just, like,
junk
—but really it’s all for a reason. He’s been very careful about what he brings into this place, and his other houses…
“Like, at Swarthmore I read this book about witchcraft, and I mean, his stuff is
in
there. I mean the things he owns, the manuscripts and that collection of—well, some of those sexy things—it’s all
real.
And you know what else, Charlotte?”