White Tiger on Snow Mountain (19 page)

Sometimes you hit the target; sometimes you miss. So what? Reality is back again, a moment later, a day later, different body, different light. Another roll of the dice. Each moment leaves its mark, if you are looking, if you are present for it. (It takes a lifetime, it is so hard to do.) Until all our moments are gone.

That day, the naked woman I discovered in the next room—with her eyes shut, stretching like a big cat, breasts high on the rib cage, pussy wet in paint, or the one with eyes open, alert yet somehow more shy, glancing off the side of the canvas, pinkish-yellow thighs closer over her furred groin—was somehow more real, more present to me, than the hidden, clothed body of my wife, which I had not held in forever. Which was nevertheless right there, an inch from my fingertips, as we stood side by side, and yet already fading, becoming unreal, disappearing as I hurtled through time. (And now? Today? Has her body aged like mine? Have her beautiful breasts sagged? Are the veins too
risen to the surface of the skin, blue against the brown? Would we know each other again in darkness by touch? Could I paint her from memory, if only my hands knew how to paint?)

3

It was on the way home from the museum that the accident occurred. Still awkward, but quiet now, elated or stunned by what we’d seen, we stopped at a light. It turned green. I lifted my foot from the brake, rolling us forward, then pressed the accelerator as we eased into the intersection. Another driver ran the light and hit us, full speed from the left, striking the front of the car, fortunately, or I would have been wounded, at the very least. As it was, we spun around completely and ended up parked in the middle of the intersection, more or less where we’d begun. (God bless Volvo.) I was dazed, my mind still turning a moment behind my body and the car, but I was fine.

“Are you OK?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said, checking herself. “I’m fine.”

A white lady with short dark bangs appeared at my window. “I saw it all he hit you out of nowhere he ran the light,” she said. I looked where she pointed. A blue LTD was sitting a couple yards away at an angle from my crumpled front quarter panel. I saw a curly brown head regarding us in the rearview. Then the LTD puttered off, leaving a gray cloud of stink behind.

“Motherfucker. He’s leaving the scene of the crime.” Instinctively, I restarted my engine, lurching into gear, and incredibly my bent car came to life. We began in a creaky sort of way to pursue the blue LTD. (It was an old ’80s model. My grandfather had a red one.)

“What’s happening?” my wife asked, her mind clearing.

“He’s getting away,” I said. “Call the cops. Tell them we are in pursuit.”

The curly head glanced at me again in the rearview, a tan man with sunglasses. He sped up. So did I. He turned right at a stop sign without stopping, and I did too. My wife sat bolt upright, grabbing the dashboard, as if she were the time traveler.

“What are you doing? You’re chasing him?”

“You said you were OK, right?” I said.

“I am OK. You’re not. You lost your mind.”

On a long empty street that ran between parking lots, he hit the gas and shot forward. I stayed close behind.

“What if he has a gun?” she pointed out.

“Why would he? An armed red light runner? Anyway”—I gestured at his vehicle, reassuringly—“he can’t shoot at us if we’re behind him.”

Luckily it was a weekend afternoon and downtown was vacant. As we sped through empty, peaceful streets and wide-open intersections, pausing through lights and winding between corrugated warehouses, it seemed to me less like a death-defying, body-smashing, car-flipping movie chase, and more like a mild, cheaply made TV show, an episode of
The Rockford Files
. Still, the blood was pounding in my ears and in my hands as I gripped the wheel. My wife was on the phone with the cops.

“Give them the license plate number,” I shouted, trying to keep his plate in clear view as we bounced and twisted along. I could hear our tire scraping in the bent wheel well. A high-speed blowout would not be fun. “What do the cops say?”

“They say stop chasing him. He might have a gun.”

“Tell them to cut him off before he gets on the freeway,” I
suggested. “Give them our location.” I went faster, leaning into the race. We squealed around a corner and came to a major thoroughfare. Traffic rushed by in both directions, and a line of cars waited at the light. He hit his brakes, screeching to a halt, and I slammed mine, almost banging into him this time. We lurched forward and bounced to a stop. I chanted his plate number under my breath, trying to memorize it. Then his door opened. He stepped out, hands extended, not so much in surrender as a kind of hey-you-got-me shrug. He was a thin older man in a polo shirt and cheap slacks. He smiled and waved, kind of shyly. I started to open my door—“No, no, please don’t,” my wife begged—but as soon as I put a foot on the ground he hopped back into his car and fled, cutting off the other mergers on the right and drawing a chorus of honks. I stayed put. (We had his plates and make. The cops did indeed find him, but it didn’t do much good. He was driving without insurance, on a license already suspended for drunk driving.) Sitting there, at rest, my heart pounding like a fist inside me, adrenaline leaking through my stomach and rage running in my veins, I felt victorious and alive. I turned and grinned at my wife. She was trembling and her face was crossed with tears, and I could see in her eyes that at that moment I was no one she knew. We had no further dates.

4

“Wow, that was close . . .”

I was back. J and I stood on the corner of 116th and Broadway, staring at the two crimped cars before us. We realized we
were holding hands and let go. The two drivers got out, uninjured, and chatted calmly. Traffic adjusted and began to flow. Time resumed, closing back up like the skin of a river closing around a drowned rock. We realized we were late for our hermeneutics seminar and quickly crossed the street. By the time class ended, two hours later, it was dark out, and this entire incident was forgotten.

J now lives in Brooklyn somewhere. I never see her, but from what I hear she’s doing very well. My ex-wife lives in LA in our old house and, as far as I know, drives the Volvo (the insurance paid out since we were found 100 percent not at fault), with her new husband beside her, or maybe now she prefers him to drive. She is also doing fine. In the years since, I have had a number of adventures and relationships and jobs that have taken me to Paris and Taiwan and the Lower East Side, but I have somehow ended up alone at last and living back uptown, just a few blocks from where that accident took place, when J and I were walking. I pass that corner all the time, but even standing in that exact spot, waiting for a red light to turn, now transports me nowhere but across the street. That autumn day has vanished, joining the spring day in Los Angeles, out there in the past, that afterlife of lost space and time, which I cannot touch or even completely believe in any longer. Everything seems equally far away. Leigh Bowery is dead. Lucian Freud is recently dead, though I still go to see his work every chance I get and hope there will be another retrospective soon. I am reminded of something he said in an interview long ago: “I visit museums as I visit the doctor, for help, and with some urgency.”

White Tiger on Snow Mountain

Last fall I became impotent. Well, not literally. For one thing I wasn’t having sex with anyone and so couldn’t verify any specific incidents of impotence. But I began to suspect that if I did, I would. More precisely, I became afflicted with the fear of impending impotence. I developed various alarming symptoms, including numbness and tingling in my fingertips (though this may have been caused by texting outside in the cold), insomnia, the slackening of my normally oppressive sex drive, and a general feeling of unsettled weirdness below (and often above) the waist. It was a vague malaise, an attitude problem, really, as if my own body were shrugging me off and refusing to participate further in the ridiculous antics of my personal life: Call it impudence.

I had recently ended a relationship with a girl who managed to combine a fascinating and compelling kinkiness with a sluggish libido. At least it was new: She wanted to be tied up, spanked, and talked dirty to. She liked to perform stripteases. She loved to watch me masturbate and, believing it good for her skin, even offered her dainty face up to receive my offering, which she then spread over her pores and let dry like a flaky
beauty mask. Nevertheless, she had almost no interest in actual intercourse, and insisted that it was unbearably painful for her, despite assurances from several doctors (and one dedicated amateur) that she was, at least anatomically, normal.

She was forthright if nothing else, and told me after our first kiss that “basically” no one had ever given her an orgasm, including herself. But the problem intrigued me, from the scientific point of view, and besides she was extra cute, so I volunteered to mentor her. At first, it was thrilling if exhausting: a tremendous amount of naughty talk and sexual busywork, of role play and foreplay, all building up to what was often, for both of us, rather an anticlimax. If for a while it seemed like my coaching was bringing her around, in the end the influence worked the other way. My own libido began to falter. I started losing interest halfway through the routine and even found myself reconsidering whether orgasms—my own included—were actually worth all the effort. Defeated, I flopped beside her on the bed.

“Fuck it. I’m exhausted.” I felt like I had carpal tunnel syndrome.

“Well, it’s soft now,” she said, poking my deflating hard-on like an undercooked sausage she was sending back to the kitchen.

“It’s depressed.”

“Never mind,” she said, hopping to her feet. “I’ll put on my cheerleader outfit.”

I was trapped in a pornographic nightmare: I could talk about my cock with her, wave it at her with impunity, threaten her with it, even slap her in the face with it, but I couldn’t put it inside her without her cringing and urging me to get it over with while she lay rigid as a corpse. I even found myself reminiscing
about the latter nights of my marriage, those doldrums before the final storm when, still more fed up with life than with each other, my wife and I would just roll into position on our sides and take care of the sex chore that way, with the Food Network whispering seductively in the background, or else we’d multitask with morning sex in the shower before work: Sex as soporific or stress reducer. Sex as cleanser and detox. Sex not as a drug—dangerous, glamorous, addictive—but as medicine, to be administered in sensible doses.

Finally, even those dubious pleasures I was sort of enjoying with my oddball girlfriend came to a shuddering halt one night when, just as I was about to spank her, she burst into tears. I panicked, as I always do when women cry.

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” I hadn’t laid a finger on her, yet.

“I don’t want to play any games,” she gasped. “I just want to be you and me.”

I grinned and kissed her. “That’s fine, sweetheart. That’s the best.” We went to bed, and it really was the best, but only for a night. It turned out that being you and me didn’t work at all. There was no you and me. So we broke up, out of exhaustion really, but instead of being driven by horniness back out into the cold world, I found myself retreating, reclusing, recoiling at last, even from my own touch.

The solution, I decided, was to quit smoking. I’d read, somewhere on the Internet, that impotence could be brought on by smoking. I smoked! I’d been trying to quit unsuccessfully for the last fifteen years but was so hopelessly addicted that once, after a week of Nicorette, a shrink actually advised me to smoke
again: He was afraid that my outrages and crying jags, my bank line tantrums and post office panic attacks, were building up to a real breakdown, perhaps even an arrest. So I went back to my trusty Camels, comforted by the knowledge that they had been medically prescribed. But now the same obsessive, compulsive mind that used to make me climb into dumpsters at 3 a.m. to retrieve the pack of cigarettes I’d ceremoniously thrown away at noon flipped on me and, in a stunning reversal, my own neuroses came to my assistance: I became convinced that I could actually feel the cigarettes killing me, one by one. I could sense my nerves dying, my capillaries withering as I inhaled, and began constantly testing the numbness in my fingers by snapping them as I walked around town. Any second, I expected my penis to shrivel away like a dead vine and blow off down the street. Finally, in a fit of hypochondria, late on a cold November night, I spit my last butt into the street.

I should have been grateful to be impotent, really. I should have welcomed it as a saving grace. My relationship history, long and arduous, comprising brief episodes of ecstatic agony relieved by epic stretches of dull despair, had often driven me to “pray” (in the atheistic, communistic, profane sense of the word) for relief from that most intolerable of all itches, the one you can’t scratch yourself. I had been married and divorced, both against my will. I’d been moved in and out of various shared dwellings. I’d been hopelessly in love with tragic, troubling beauties ever since Cindy Blumberg stabbed me with a pencil in kindergarten. And never once, in all that time, had I made a sane or rational decision. Always I had thrown myself in harm’s way, obeying the loon call of love. And each time, when I found myself
shattered still further, into still tinier bits, I had thought, If only desire would leave me, if only that hunger would cease and desist, I could find some peace. Now, at last, the prayer had been answered: I walked the streets, and though my eyes still reflexively tracked this smooth curve or that flash of shining hair, there was, in the heart, in the groin, no real response. I chatted politely with waitresses and shopgirls, but nothing in me grasped for anything in them. I’d lost that desperation, that howling in the soul, that made the dog in me chase the scent of a passing cat. Woman delighted not me. No, nor men neither. Nor porn. I was, I realized, completely without desire. There was no one I loved or hated, needed or missed. I was free. I immediately rushed to the doctor.