[sic]: A Memoir (6 page)

But back to
Carmilla
, sitting at the glass bar at the restaurant in Chelsea, smiling her perfect smile and kissing me and handing me a martini that gleamed: then another, and then—quite predatorily, in a way; both overflowing with kindness and embedded in herself at the same time—grabbed my wrist with her lovely hand and gave me the first real kiss. Oh and speaking of bars and restaurants, any club or bar or restaurant owner will tell you that the two most important factors for success in their field in America are (1) music and (2) lighting. The music should not be subtle, but the lighting may be subtle, hidden, even, in a warm coven: perhaps a lightweight, easily installed, energy-efficient LED strip, recessed along the edge of the bar to produce elegantly dramatic effects. Take, for example, a person whose above-lit/below-lit quotient (
a
^lit
/b
_lit
) is just slightly, and to the untrained eye unnoticeably, “south” (i.e., low) of the apex
X
= 1 of the standard normal distribution curve—that is, just to the left of the tip of the top of the pear or the bump (
a
^lit
/b
_lit
<
X
). Place this person—who in the banal light of day is so normally, neutrally, unassumingly attractive—place him (or her) at the bar and what happens? Genes and environment will mix like memory and desire, slightly accentuating the inherent, latent below-lit factor that, when paired with the perfect musical accompaniment, should produce the desired effect for patron and proprietor alike: just a hint of darkened, enlarged eyes, the gentle emphasis of the cheekbones that cast shadows that trail upward. It’s a win-win.

And so what of the person for whom

a
^lit
/b
_lit
>
X

holds? The opposite case. This won’t be on the final, you don’t have to take it down, but if the bar owner is any good, then this person’s natural propensity to illumination from above will be gently, safely, environmentally nudged toward the center, just as the universe itself moves irresistibly toward equilibrium, forever creating an Apollo for the Dionysus already at the bar, sipping his drink; a McCartney for a Lennon, a Pound for an Eliot; a Figaro for the Don; an Eliot for a Pound; a Rolling Stones (who merely pretended to be fucked up) for a Beatles (who were more fucked up than the world will ever, ever know): the slightly below-lit slightly exalted, the slightly above-lit gently redeemed.

But I know what you’re wondering. What about
Carmilla
? How does someone not just slightly exalted, but for whom

a
^lit
/b
_lit

dangerously, in natural light, veers toward the zero limit, fit into this equation? Explosively?

I haven’t described her yet, but you’ve probably already guessed. What happens when you’re dealing with somebody of such striking physical beauty that even the most intemperate climes—the Siberian fluorescence of a subway on Wednesday morning, 3
a.m.
; the unforgiving Laplandic glare of a twenty-four-hour deli’s illuminated Marlboro panel—are rendered perfectly helpless, breathless, catalepsic? For in Gladwellian terms,
Carmilla
would be an “outlier”—just like Bill Gates, the four Beatles (including Ringo and excluding George Martin, who spent less time in Hamburg), and 3,879,000,000 Asians. How will the attributes of the specimen in question—the alabaster complexion; the gentle slope of the cheeks, impossible to not caress; the, frankly, nearly charnel gaze, blissfully and indisputably countered at the last possible moment by the cyclamen lips; the shock of the crop of the inkspill of her hair (I could have just said she was a model, but this is a little bit how my mind works when I’ve done a little cocaine)—how do these qualities reply to the reactive agents of that low-voltage LED strip tucked coyly behind the soda guns, beer mats, stirrers and swizzle sticks, not unlike a Cupidon hiding his eyes behind his wing? Seeing her perched upon the burnished designer barstool like a longtailed goldencheeked warbler on a wire, one can’t help but wonder: will that slight draft of the recessed, beauty-infusing light simply tip her over the edge? Will it push Beauty into its close cousin, the Monstrous? Will the felicity of her Nabokovian exquisiteness finally flinch once and forever, like Eurydice slipping away—despite the lyre, the frantic fretwork, and the song—past Rushdiestan, sliding irretrievably into Lower Pynchonia?

Oddly, no. For reasons still obscure to scientists, Carmilla’s status as a beacon was only heightened; she positively gleamed. Researchers can’t explain it yet, but they have observed that she’s endowed with the capacity to absorb virtually any source of light, partially digest it, and then (metaphorically, of course) regurgitate it, transformed, for the benefit of those mortals surrounding her who are, of course, unable to directly assimilate the light themselves. This is, after all, the ultimate expression of an exotic bird’s love: softened, liquefied, partially dissolved, the light emanates through her as if it had, in fact, originated somewhere deep within her very being—like Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of light, the embodiment of feminine beauty, and, when Rushdieless, the host of a reality show about food. This is one reason (three?) why when you’re with Carmilla in a restaurant, it’s not unusual for the waiters and kitchen staff and owners and clientele to form an informal circle around you and almost dance, almost like a Bollywood chorus actually dancing around Aishwarya Rai.

Carmilla and I kissed, and had a sip of our martinis, and then kissed, and then had a sip of our martinis, and kissed, and sipped our martinis. “So tell me what happened?” How low, her voice—never ceased to surprise me, a Lauren Bacall thing, Demi Moore doing—imagine!—Mamet instead of Ashton.

I told her how the six months of chemotherapy hadn’t worked, how it looked as if I were moving straight into a bone marrow transplant, salvage treatment.

“You’re worried about the pain.”

No, I said. I’m worried about mortality: the chance of death, something unforgettably described by a woman with whom I was once in love as, simply, “the worst thing in the world”: the real chance of death, not only from the transplant itself, because there was, too, the very real possibility that my disease was in fact a resistant case that would prove unresponsive even to said treatment.

“You’re worried about death?” Carmilla asked me, her voice suddenly as if in the darkness, in her bedroom, as if we’d somehow just for a second flash forwarded three hours.

Yes, I said.

“Why?”

Because, I said, I don’t want to die.

“Why not?” She frowned and with her face formed a question mark: the stroke a raised eyebrow, the dot a shrimp dumpling popped in her scarlet mouth.

•

HER APARTMENT, NEXT
door, was beautiful: hardwood floors as far as the contact lens–less eye could see, and that was my view, having removed my contacts, nearsighted, staring at her breasts, which seemed afar. What are perfect breasts? (These.) Times change, as Cole Porter and Eliot and the Byrds and those guys who wrote the Bible knew so well. And then there are the champagne glasses modeled, supposedly, to Marie Antoinette’s chest: a headless chest at the Place de la Concorde: glasses from which we’d been drinking good champagne. And then the perfect curves of her sterling silver art deco ashtray (New York is, after all, the essential art deco town). And this gorgeous exotic thing, variegated now in the safe shade of her sylvan habitat, this austere, infinitely beautiful, infinitely suffering thing stretched out upon me, the tendons of her hamstrings taut: she caught me staring at her perfect breasts, and—

But “perfect,” after all, if I’m to use the word, must meet some strict criteria, even universal criteria, in spite of the unceasing capriciousness of Time: there is surely some ancient correspondence to a divine proportion between the slope, say, of the distribution curve and the diamondsharp tip of the top of the pear.

And so she caught me, glancing at her breasts—the plaster cast of her breasts mounted on the wall like the trophy of a hunter, or the marble fragment of a torso sculpted somewhere thousands of miles away and thousands of years ago, once whole, once standing in shade or in sunlight, casting a shadow. And of course she didn’t mind that I was gazing at her breasts, how could she have minded, that’s the whole reason she’d had them cast and mounted in the first place, when they told her the double mastectomy was her sole option for survival. And that after—what? Here her story mingles in my mind with so many other similar testimonials, a tumor discovered somewhere, chemo, success, briefly, then disappointment, the discovery of another somewhere else after a few months, then more chemo and now surgery: then another few months of reprieve, maybe, before recurrence, this time fought with localized radiation, which might make one’s skin fall off, as it did mine. The loss of hair: one’s long used to that by now, but for her it carried specific implications (there’s only room on this planet for one bald model at a time, she’d laugh). But then again for everyone it carries implications entirely specific. And yet these narratives differ in detail, but the general thrust is the same. The radiation might work for a while before a spot is discovered on a scan. More chemo then, but a different protocol. This new protocol might not work at all, and the spot turns aggressive. More surgery, then, and full-body radiation. Here the phrase “six months” might be uttered for the first time and not heard and uttered again. More chemo then, but yet another protocol. These stories, legion. This protocol, on the other hand, might seem to be working, until another “six months” is pronounced—and meanwhile you might be looking down from the window of your apartment, watching civilization wander about. And then another six months, although this time the phrase doesn’t sound like it’s in quotes. And maybe now, like in the tale of the martyrdom of Saint Agatha of Sicily (Carmilla considered herself half Sicilian in spite of the fact that she was merely [and merrily] a Jewish girl who had merely been married to a Sicilian), one had one’s perfect breasts sliced off, but not before one had them cast in plaster, to hang on a wall. So Carmilla wasn’t irritated by my admiration. On the contrary, she was flattered. In this way, her breasts still belonged to her. In this way, she was giving them, with so much else, to me. Although my hands had a problem: where should they go? The hollows of her chest. Her dear chest, and my dear hands, meeting there. And I would never tell her this, but I felt as if my hands were gripping the eyestones of a skull. And meanwhile.

But that was why she had her clitoris pierced: such a simple thing, to refocus one’s erogenous zones.

And then, at some point, which would be impossible to determine on the curve of a parabola, or on a map, we were, for the moment, finished: both satiated and done. Satiated, both; and done, done with the adolescent anxiety before death—she, seemingly, forever; me temporarily, vicariously, through her.

And she was finished with treatment—she’d refused that well before this point. After the loss of her breasts, enough was enough. People in white jackets had been removing parts of her body for years. And at a certain tipping point she simply said no. She’d just had a scan that clearly showed recurrence.

You’re refusing treatment? I yelled. Cleaning up. She was putting on some music.

“I know I can do it alone. It’s just the mind. More treatment will kill me. I’m treating myself: good food, sex, vodka and cigarettes. And like I was saying before—who cares? If I go this second I’ll be fine. What’s the big deal about death?”

Francesco Guarino,
Sant’Agata si copre la ferita
, c. 1637.

It’s what we’d been talking about before. I’d been worried about death at the restaurant, leaving the restaurant, her hand grabbing mine, entering her apartment. Now I was again.

I don’t want to die, I said.

“Why not?”

I want to write a book, maybe. Maybe make a movie or two. Projects. I have this idea for a movie where—

“Projects!” she screamed. She raced back to the bed, bare feet slapping against the hardwood floor, and tackled me, laughing. “Oh, sweetheart—projects. It’s the moment. There are no projects. There used to be. Something switches off, at some point. Maybe part of your humanity? I can still fall in love, but if it ends—I literally couldn’t give a fuck. It’s not that I’m incapable of love. I’m capable. But—something throws us off, as survivors.”