Picturing Will (9 page)

At a wedding she photographed recently, some relative of the groom had said to her, “Love is like a feather in the breeze.” People often said startling things at weddings, so perhaps it was just the dreamy—no, deranged—look on the woman’s face that had made Jody force a smile. As the old lady walked away from her, Jody had thought several things in quick succession: Love, that exhilarating and exhausting state, is whatever anybody says it is, so stop the poetry and end the song; love is, indeed, like a feather; love is nothing like a feather; the word “breeze” might have been indicative of the lady’s attitude, because a feather in the wind would be another matter entirely.

Jody put her key into the lock and opened the door. A flight of steep black-painted steps rose into Mel’s apartment. Except for two rooms in the front, under the steep pitch of the roof, the area was open space, with an off-center stairwell surrounded by a high railing. It was like being in a treehouse; tall windows at the back overlooked the tops of ailanthus trees growing below. In the kitchen there was a skylight through which wisteria had pushed its way. When it rained, the top of the stove would be moist, and occasionally tiny flowers would be scattered over the stovetop. When Mel turned on the stove he ignored them, but she always brushed them away, as if they were alive. She sat for a minute, a little out of breath, on the sofa that curved around the room. No sofa in New York rose higher than midback.

Mel had left a note for her on one of the sofa cushions. Apparently Duncan had called to say that his former roommate, who lived on Christopher Street, had just gotten very bad news from a blood test. What was she supposed to do? Call some man she’d never met? She pushed the note aside and wandered away. Tucked in the bathroom mirror was a picture of Will, straddling Mel’s neck, proud of his new red sneakers and looking as secure, perched there, as the driver of an armored car. Recently, Mel had instigated the silliness of nicknames. Some days Will wanted to be Ace, some Butch. She thought that on the day the picture had been taken he was Ace. Ace in need of a haircut. Ace, who swung as hard as he could and still didn’t raise a bruise on Mel’s bicep. (“Of course you can’t hit me in the stomach,” Mel had said to him. “You’d hurt me.”) She looked at the lipstick on the saucer on top of the toilet tank. Mel would like it—he liked any profession of affection, however corny—if she scrawled
I LOVE YOU
on the bathroom mirror. The lipstick had cost ten dollars. Ten dollars for lipstick! She took off the cap and put lipstick on her lips but didn’t write on the mirror. She filled a glass with water and rose on tiptoes to water the spider plant. Putting the glass back in the holder, she remembered one of Mel’s peculiarities: wiping the glass, after use, with his bath towel. How could men be so neat about some things and so haphazard about others?

She tried to remember the name of the man she would meet that night. Could it really be Haveabud? His first name was probably Steve or Ed. No, there were no more Steves or Eds in New York. They were now Steven or Edward, whether they were gay or straight. If they had money, they didn’t have a nickname. Everybody was into high seriousness, so that now even dogs were named Humphrey and Raphael.

When Angela buzzed and Jody let her in, she was dressed in stone-washed jeans, probably about a size three, and an enormous sweatshirt with a green-faced, red-lipped Oriental on it and raised red letters spelling
SUMO
. Her hair was yellow—not any shade of blond but yellow, Crayola-crayon yellow. Pink ballet slippers. No socks. On her wrist a coiled bracelet that ended in the triangular head of a spitting snake. An earcuff and a diamond stud in one ear, a replica of the Empire State Building dangling from the other.

“I’ve left my old man, but it’s a good thing. I just don’t want him
inquired
about ever again. But wait, you weren’t here when he came to help out last time, were you? Tell Mel that it’s over, and to
please
not ask how he is, because that’s as boring as somebody calling you to tell you how their day went. The thing I’m handing you now”—Jody had stopped on the second-floor landing as Angela rushed up the stairs two at a time, heading for the top—“is a date-and-prune tart. The prunes cut the sweetness of the dates, but don’t tell anybody about the prunes because they won’t eat it. They think prunes are those things they bring you in wet bowls in Miami Beach, and prunes actually don’t cause you as much trouble as corn, but try telling that to anybody. So. I’m double-parked, and if you can help me carry stuff upstairs I can leave the car at the curb. It’s salmon mousse for the main course. And I
love
that lipstick. That’s going to look fantastic by candlelight.” Angela smiled a beatific smile. The waves that surrounded her face looked more like a corona than overdyed yellow hair. “Room temperature,” Angela said, handing the platter to Jody. She put her hand over her heart. “As if we know no seasons in New York. As if each moment is purely invented.”

———

After the party that night, Mel listened to the message tape. Duncan was flying to New York in the morning. Jody shrugged. “Why does Duncan think I’m going to get involved in the problems of a man I’ve never met?” she said to Mel. Then they fell into bed and drunkenly made love.

In his dream Mel sank to the bottom of the ocean in a submarine. At first it was one of those submarines the tourists get into to see the coral reef and the fish swimming around, but a few seconds into the dream everything changed, and suddenly there was a commanding officer who was quite annoyed with him for thinking of the submarine’s downward path as “sinking.” “We are
descending!”
the man shrieked shrilly at Mel, who suddenly had to endure the stares of the other Navy men. One woman from the first part of the dream was still there: a tourist in a pink pants suit, taking a picture of a flat yellow-and-blue fish that floated by. Then there was the carnage: the deer on the road, again; the Halloween revelers squatting and standing in the glow of the headlights. The bright eye of the deer. A body too large to have been supported by such delicate legs.

He kicked his feet backwards, out of the covers.

In the next part of Mel’s dream the small dog who lived downstairs was sniffing the corpse in the road.

Mel opened his lips, exhaling to blow the scene away, but the deer stayed still. The October cold made him shiver. His lips closed.

The small dog sniffed and sniffed, and then it became apparent that there was a second dog, identical with the first, and that they were not partygoers on Halloween night but damned souls in Hell.

He had some consciousness of his mouth. Was he drooling on the pillow? But then there was confusion: It was the dog who was drooling—the dog in the dream—and that dog was Cerberus, who was guarding the gates to Hell.

The small dog had an owner, but Mel could not imagine who among the costumed partygoers that could be. It was not Richard Nixon, because Richard Nixon’s dog was named Checkers. It must be Will’s dog, then. He and Will must have persuaded Jody to get a dog.

Mel turned onto his side.

Just before the dream ended, dogs were floating past the window of the submarine. In the little corner of his mind that fought to become conscious, Mel knew that if there were a cartoon caption—if Gary Larson were in charge—everything that was dreadful could be amusing. But the unconscious mind won out, so he knew that if he laughed it could be a death sentence: It would attract the rabid dog, and once bitten—once his leg had sprung a leak—it would be impossible for the submarine to rise again. Even the woman in the pants suit was alarmed. She had been photographing fish, and then drowned dogs began to drift by. Then Will was in the dream, looking at him as if he had known all along how grotesque this would become.

Mel drew his feet inside the covers and moved his knees up, toward his chest. His eyes darted left and right, behind closed eyelids. Like little fish, Jody thought. She was propped up on one elbow, looking at Mel. The aspirin she had taken was slowly dulling the thud in her head that was the result of too many drinks too late at night. Now Mel’s REMs had subsided, though she still looked sleepily at him in the gradually brightening bedroom. A line from “The Waste Land” came to her:
Those are pearls that were his eyes
. She had read Keats and Auden to Will, but did not think “The Waste Land” would hold his attention, even though a few of the lines had end rhyme. What was the line before that line? The world could indeed be a perilous place, she thought as she was falling asleep, if you could not remember those things that came first. She remembered that someone had drowned but not the line itself.

EIGHT

L
ord Haveabud raised his glass—topheavy, so that it was easier to curve his fingers under the bowl and forget about the stem—and swooshed the blue margarita through the air like a courtesan about to make an elaborate curtsy. The toast was all eye contact and no words. The deal had been decided on (though Jody, who kept forgetting his last name, didn’t know it was a deal), the deed as good as done (though Haveabud wanted to see the entire shoot, not just the enlargements Mel had shown him at Palio), and now all that remained was for Haveabud to buy a tie—lately, he didn’t like what Alexander Julian was up to—to wear to the opening. Photographic galleries, like Witkin, were showing paintings, so why shouldn’t he show photographs? Haveabud believed that new ties brought him luck. Also, whenever he flew, he carried with him in some pocket a small geode he had bought in a previous life, when he and his second wife visited a gift shop near the Grand Canyon. Being an agnostic, he recited silently to himself, in times of stress, a litany of introductory adverbs, in alphabetical order: after, again, also, as, before, besides … He fancied himself something of a character, wearing a Swatch instead of a Rolex, but spending more on Missoni socks than most people spent on an entire outfit. Haveabud bought his ties well in advance of openings and put them, still in their boxes, in his filing cabinet under the artists’ names.

When he first came to New York he had been married to his high school sweetheart and had worked as a clerk in a store specializing in art books. He became so trusted that he was left behind in the store to take inventory and to create his impressive displays after the others had left. When he was done, he threw two switches to activate the alarm, then got out the front door and locked it, all within fifteen seconds. Those few seconds were never a problem until he started drinking champagne after hours. The champagne came to him as gifts from women—daytime browsers who were searching for more than oversized books on Monet’s water lilies. It was classier to meet someone in a store such as the one Haveabud worked in than to go to a high-class bar. And if the women didn’t meet anyone else, or if they just took a fancy to the earnest young man with a body he imagined to be better than it was (now he worked out four days a week, swam on Thursdays, and jogged on weekend evenings around the reservoir in Central Park), they were likely to ask him over for a drink after work—the husbands were always away on business—or to try to please him with enough gifts of bubbly so that he’d ask them out for a drink. Much to Haveabud’s surprise, you could often have a beautiful woman lusting after you just because you had special-ordered a book on Christ’s sexuality or a biography of Courbet. In fact, Courbet was Haveabud’s favorite painter, but he would not reveal this to anyone. He had his secrets: his geode, his visions of Courbet’s landscapes, his package of French ticklers in the file under
S
. He might never have been in the position he was in today if he hadn’t been fired from the bookstore. In the good old days, he and a few of the other employees (now they hired clerks who looked like people in a Grant Wood painting. Where did they find them?) had opened bottles of champagne and played baseball in the buff on the second floor of the store, using the handle from the toilet plunger to bat rolled-up wads of duplicate inventory slips. This had never been discovered, but a jealous husband had had a tête-à-tête with the owner, and Haveabud was fired. “You don’t want to hear whether I deny having an affair with her?” he had asked the owner. “No,” the owner said. “I knew that anybody as knowledgeable and personable as you was too good to be true.”

There had been months of anguish after he was fired, but finally he had gotten a part-time job proofreading, and the excellent job he did with one manuscript resulted in an admiring call from an editor at the publishing house who, when she heard Haveabud’s plight, called a friend who owed her a favor, and zip, Haveabud began working part-time in a gallery on then-still-unfashionable West Broadway. The rest was history. History was personified in the form of Luther, a.k.a. Jake Markson from Brooklyn, an overweight overachiever from the Queens College art program whose talent Haveabud knew he could market. He put Luther on a protein diet and called twice a day to make sure he was drinking the daily gallon of Poland Spring. By the time showtime rolled around Jake Markson didn’t exist anymore and Luther, twenty pounds lighter, pores cleansed at Dr. Mario Badescu’s for extra radiance, stood in the gallery in his jeans and white shirt—a shirt that had cost Haveabud two hundred dollars—to start a new tremor in the downtown art scene. Around him were hung photorealistic paintings of enlarged cash-register receipts, including the smudged thumbprint of the clerk who ripped one out of the register, or the spot where it had been slightly torn, the numbers in black ink or purple, some so pale they could hardly be read. The Tx./Tl. show was the rage of the moment, pronounced upon even by Andy Warhol, who said, “Money is very important, but usually artists don’t keep good receipts.” After the opening the two-hundred-dollar shirt was handed from Luther to Haveabud the way a bullfighter folds his cape and gives it to a worthy lady. Haveabud’s cut of the sold-out show was fifty percent, and he and Luther did a pas de deux to Dean Witter Reynolds to find out about shelters. As anyone might imagine, fame went to Luther’s head. In trendy restaurants he offered to autograph the bill for the dinner he and his hangers-on had eaten, in lieu of payment. Though many places would not go for this, Luther found that star-crazed waitresses themselves would often foot the bill for the dinner in exchange for a fuck. One of those waitresses nabbed him, of course: a nobody from Lyme, Connecticut, who had come to New York to study acting—a young woman who dyed a green streak in her hair long before it was fashionable and went by the name Thalo. She became Luther’s Yoko, and eventually he was lured from Haveabud into instant obscurity, after doing a recording with Thalo that consisted of the sound of whips cracking, punctuating a two-way whispered argument, as a boys’ choir soared to high soprano in the background. The bitch got pregnant instantly and had twins. When she and Luther divorced, Luther attempted to work his way back into Haveabud’s affections, and when he could not—Haveabud believing that those who turned their back on people who had helped them did not deserve a second chance—ended up working in his brother’s restaurant, though later Haveabud heard that he had gone to Paris, to the Left Bank, where he made take-out
ceviche
that was praised in
Le Figaro
and French
Vogue. Quel dommage
, Haveabud said, with malice instead of sincerity.