Not having to be anywhere at any particular time, I savored the ride home, buzzing through the night from a vantage not much a part of my life—a yellow cab’s. Unlike the outbound journey earlier in the night, we took a looping route back. No sane person, in the era of Google, could believe the shortest drive between Fort Greene and my place beyond the Patterson Houses could bring one into Chelsea, but this is just what the driver attempted to convince me of, getting lost here and there, claiming that FDR and the whole east side of Manhattan was clogged when it was simply not possible at this hour. I didn’t care. His deception, the manner in which he was making me an instrument of his own financial designs, was just another part of my pleasure by this point. I surveyed my circumstance as if it were someone else’s, because, in a way, it was: Garrett’s cash would cover all of this. Given how much there was to observe, and even more to entertain, to anticipate, I liked being just where I was, taking the long way home. The longer the better.
I think what caught the attention of this opportunistic Balkan—wherever else they might take you, taxis and Ubers took you around the world right within the cars themselves, with every nation contributing its unwashed to their fleet of drivers—was the source of my sense of anticipation. He figured, correctly enough, that a man’s attention would simply have to be consumed in its entirety by the woman sitting beside me; there’d be no way to mind the driver as well. Certainly it would have seemed that way to him in the early stages of our trip. Just after Daphne and I dodged the rain and slid into his car, she poured a hand mirror, lipstick, eyeliner, foundation, and rouge into her lap from that deceptively capacious clutch. While the car’s creaky suspension had us rocking about, she proceeded with remarkable facility to do herself up again, instinctively altering the angle and placement of each stroke as we drove, anticipating bumps and turns as deftly as the bartender had foreseen trouble.
I asked her not to do this. There really was no point, we weren’t going out anywhere else. Yet my protest was somewhat undermined by the intensity with which I watched her primp and preen. She knew to disregard my words. I, like any man, was taken with the ritualized face-painting of womankind. Couldn’t I see that masks were her passion? By the way I was staring at her, she said, it seemed to be mine, too—other people’s masks, at least. From there, she expounded eloquently on the subject, even if she broke no ground. Actors are prone to giving this particular speech, about the truth in masks: namely, we cannot be seen properly until we don one or another of them, and without a frame for our face we are, all of us, amorphous, unformed, undercooked: in brief, sloppy. And she despised sloppiness—she avowed as much while looking sternly in my direction. She turned away from me then, swiping her cheeks with a delicate rouge that seemed to bond with her translucent skin.
Apparently she wasn’t merely an actor, but the thinking kind of actor, one who, even at this young age, had already weighed her craft carefully, was indeed, as she should be, still weighing it, sorting out her thoughts. Granted, she said, when she was onstage she might shift her appearance to emphasize one or another feature. And she’d looked decidedly different in the bar, with her stage makeup still on. Yet all of this was only a matter of emphasis, tilt, balance. There wasn’t a grain of outright fabrication to any of it. The face she was fixing now for me, though, had a special virtue, she said. It was a face without tilt, her natural or neutral face brought into focus, nothing more. No amount of dialectic was ever going to prove more convincing than what she’d just produced in front of my eyes: she’d transformed her face into something I could plainly see was exactly what she’d said it was, a face lacking deception or skew. The eyeliner and foundation and rouge, the light touches to her eyelashes, all communicated what lay beneath, which I was in the ideal position to verify, as she’d only just been free of makeup. Somehow her shaded, toned face was more lifelike than the untouched one, and anyone could have seen this for themselves.
Daphne turned to me and softly frowned. One might have thought she was acting the model in doing so, mimicking those glum runway looks. But I recalled her face from the bar, when no-one was looking her way and she’d been merely thinking and eating. She’d been offering then something like the same piercing glare. I realized now she’d probably been wearing this look since she was a little girl. It was a function of amber eyes, partly; it might have gotten her into a certain kind of trouble, or earned her a certain reputation before she knew it herself. So even now, as she stared into me, I thought I sensed a quiet, natural sweetness to her. If she were really trying to make an impression on me, she might have gone with a different expression, something coy or seductive, if that’s what this was about, as we headed to my place, ostensibly to examine more of my work. No, at this moment she was only making herself manifest.
Our driver kept mumbling excuses, excuses of scarcity and inefficiency, they seemed like particularly Balkan excuses, the kind that corresponded to breadlines running around the block. Once Daphne had put her makeup away, collecting it all from her lap and slipping it into her purse without ceremony, I realized how far west we’d drifted: the High Line was there just in front of us. So I brought us back on course, and rather quickly, curtly. As I stared the grubby driver down in the rearview mirror, conveying to him the finitude of my indulgences, this man, twice my size, a man who would have broken me in two for that look had I come across him on a lonely street—his poor sense of direction vanished. I instructed him to carry on up Ninth Avenue all the way through Hell’s Kitchen, then take a right on Fifty-Seventh, all the way back to Second. He seemed a little puzzled—it would have been faster to take Broadway north—which only confirmed for me that he knew exactly where we were. But I had my reasons for seeking out Second Avenue: to retrace the route I’d taken earlier, but in the opposite direction, so that I might witness the most storied homes of New York—nothing compared with Europe or Asia and their ancient traditions, but still—give way to indigence and abjection at the top of the park, beyond Ninety-Sixth.
Daphne gestured vaguely at Carnegie Hall as we crossed town but said nothing. My eyes had grown bleary from drink and the simple fatigue of seeing, of drawing, of coping with the cast, especially the woman next to me. Yet I couldn’t help catching a glimpse of all the newly-built spires, all that reified foreign capital, in condominiums gone dark from disuse. There was hardly anyone about as we turned up Second. It was comfortably past midnight, and just as in movies, we hit green lights all the way, each one set just beneath the last from our point of view; but my fatigue, coupled with my tendency to see double at night in situations of high contrast, made these little circles of light run together into a column of green. And this column carried us quite a way unimpeded. Daphne wagered we’d glide all the way to Harlem like this. I took that bet, knowing that our crafty driver would dither, just to run up the fare. I won. He had a knack, I had to admit, for coaxing greens into red without its seeming intentional.
So what had I won? I wasn’t afraid to ask, although Daphne dismissed the question with a pat on my knee. The cosmetics she’d applied had altered her manner, calming her in the way my suit had calmed me this evening, even if, of course, she was still no more beautiful. I was falling for her flaws, the too-long jaw, the bony knees, the absent breasts. I felt like reaching for her tiny legs but didn’t.
From Ninetieth Street onward, we watched the world descend from the heights of elegance into something moribund and harsh, the obverse face of sublimity: Spanish Harlem. The numbers kept rising, One-hundred-twentieth, One-hundred-thirtieth, One-hundred-fortieth, and the people in the street fell ever lower in stature, along with everything else around them: the buildings, the foliage, even the air, which turned acrid by One-hundred-fiftieth as it scoured my face and flapped the Balkan’s cheap, shiny leather jacket about like plastic tarp in a hurricane. Still, a little while back, I’d been glad enough when the driver dropped the front windows; it had the happy consequence of mitigating his exuberant application of pine scent in the vehicle, which had made it smell as if we were traveling through some synthetic wood. I didn’t blame him for this, really. A masking agent, even a nauseous one, must have been nicer than the unpredictable bouquet a car traversing the five boroughs picked up as a matter of course.
I could have driven up and down that route all night with him, crossing worlds. But it wasn’t long before he was dropping me and Daphne off into the oxygen-starved air endemic to my block, air that smelled vaguely and permanently of motor oil, though there was no repair shop in the vicinity, only dying cars silently bleeding out over the streets. I was beginning to sober up, though, which meant I was tiring. Daphne too, had gone from a state of reverie around Carnegie Hall to something just shy of sleep by the time we pulled up alongside the curb. This woman, fully made up, as if she were just about to go out on the town—here she was, asleep, bleary, drooling. I paid the stubbled Balkan. I even tipped him heavily. He gave me a crooked grin full of small teeth, inadvisably bleached; they looked unhealthily white, as if they’d been eroded by chemical cleansing, shrunken to three-fourths scale. Maybe the tip would get him started on fixing that up. I wobbled Daphne up the inclined walkway leading to my door. It felt like fifty or sixty steps to me, as I struggled to keep her frail and limber person centered on the path. By the time we’d reached the threshold, she was mostly awake, reclaiming control of that exquisite mask she’d built in the car, which moments ago had seemed to have taken control of her.
“The artist’s home,” she said hoarsely as I, panting from the trip up the stairs, kicked the door open and guided her in. She’d not spoken for some time, which made her words sound especially stupid; and although she seemed to realize this at once, there was nothing to be done about it. We didn’t come back to them—words, that is—until I’d systematically turned on every lamp in the house. I’d gestured for her to sit on the sofa, comfortable mostly to one’s sense of sight, presiding in the living room beside my large kitchen—too large, really, given the slightness of my recent culinary exertions. But she refused to unlock her arm from mine. So we went around clumsily together, without pattern, switching on halogens, desk lamps, Japanese lanterns, simple hallway lights with twenty-year LEDs, nightstand lamps, and one or two naked bulbs on the ends of orange extension cords, hanging in my bedroom. There were more lights here than I’d ever bothered to think about, and in each case, as we approached the unlit lamp, the darker the immediate surrounds grew. On several of these sorties, because Daphne wouldn’t walk unassisted, one or the other of us ended up stepping onto artworks I’d left lying on the floor, the path being too narrow for us to take side-by-side. When we’d reach the epicenters of darkness and turn the switches, the many drawings we’d passed on the way there would appear all around us all at once. At these moments, she’d free herself from my grip. She could manage on her own, I realized. She just needed the right incentives. She’d then stoop down close to each piece, hovering just inches above. Her balance wasn’t bad for a drunk, but either she had odd thoughts about ideal viewing distances or she was so spent that only at point blank range could she appreciate what she was seeing.
I did wonder at the portrait Daphne was forming of me, or indeed, the mask she was forming for me to wear for her benefit, at least when she was around. Maybe that’s why I’d agreed to bring her here, to accelerate this process. Theater folk, even when their performances were purely personal, enjoyed and insisted on casting characters around them wherever they went, much more deliberately than did the rest of us. So here, in my apartment, was her chance, and she was leaping at it: the only thing I could tell from regarding her as she knelt or stood on her toes beside each of the pieces, depending on their location, was that she was working quickly and with terrible joy. She lived for this, as I knew she would. I’d met plenty of people like this in college, mostly performance and dance students who worked with their bodies, not pigment or language. I liked the idea that Daphne would probably spend a lot of time coming up short; she’d have to recast this character, this mask of mine she was making, many times, as and when she realized she’d erred, suturing the wrong things together or mislaying the foundation. But that would be later on. Tonight, as we passed through the various clusters of drawings scattered around each of the lamps we lit, I felt it was her grip on me that was tightening. And when finally we came to those bare bulbs in my room, and we took in the ink-wash landscapes lying on my bedsheets—sketches of the fetid park outside—the two of us each gazed at these pictures, self-segregated by searing streaks of undiluted gouache, with the same degree of distance. That’s how much ground she’d managed to cover, coming toward me, and equally how far away I was from much of my own work. What it meant was that this time, when I looked upon her, there was no delay, as there’d been at the bar: her eyes were already waiting for me.
She kissed me roughly in the morning with that wide mouth of hers. She fell on top of me when she did, and I felt her nipples press into me through the sheet between us. That much I could remember through the hangover—the slight unkindness and unpleasantness of it. Perhaps the hour made her crabby: it was barely past dawn. Something about needing to be home before her father woke. The last picture I had of her in my mind, she was standing in my bedroom doorway, her makeup slightly smeared, which lent her an uncanny blurriness. She gave me a smile. She hadn’t meant to be unkind, I gathered. It’s just the way she’d felt then.
I tried to go back to sleep once she’d left, but I couldn’t. Consequences loomed, and, although I didn’t think them over explicitly, they weren’t going to let me rest. After a forty-minute battle, I surrendered to wakefulness of a kind and brought last night’s sketchbook into bed with me. It’s what had started everything between the two of us, right? Hadn’t she softened once she’d paged through it? Wanted to go home with me to see more? Or did the change in her stem instead from her trip to the bathroom in the bar, when she’d sent me off with her cigarettes and done who knows what besides wash her face?
By the light still gathering outside my window, I went through the drawings myself. The pictures were a mess, probably the price of the double-blind setup. Still, for what they were, entirely experimental, entirely unfinished, they were far from barren. Daphne had behaved as if she’d understood this, but how could that be? Only another draftsman could see what was sensitive, telling, even expert in these night-visions of mine. Which meant that either Daphne had been insincere, or she had a deeper grasp of the medium than I knew.
Within the swirl of lines from my ultrafine rollerball, her movements and poses had a plasticity I’d not managed to give to anyone else. Her lithe and lengthy body—she was as tall as I was, possibly a half-inch taller, if that wasn’t just her springy hair—seemed to impress itself more strongly on the sense of sight than all those slightly more rounded and stocky sorts. It had been too dark in the theater to fully make out any of the actors, but even by gross measures Daphne had managed to intrigue and defy: the slump in the shoulders, the kink in the neck, the rise in the thighs. There are those who are photogenic, and others, like her, who were graphogenic, naturally suited not for the simulated eye of the lens but for the biological organ and the hand with which it has co-evolved.
Coupled to the gravitational pull her person exerted in ink, there was an inscrutability of spirit, I thought, as I looked back and forth through this little book of scratchings. You felt the pull easily without quite understanding what it meant; and you continually doubted that you saw what you thought you did in her, as these were sorts of things you wouldn’t begin to think you saw in others. You could draw a hundred pictures of her—doubtless I did in the end—and still there’d be something left to work upon, some as-yet-unarticulated matter. So many of the people I committed to paper were wasted away by my pen, used up. Four or five drawings later, there was nothing left of them. That’s how it had been with handsome Elias. It made good sense that all you could find at the close of The Vegetable Gender were the disassembled pieces of the bassoon: the musician had already disintegrated, and I would hardly have been able to draw him again had he reappeared on stage. I’d consumed him by that point with my various sketches, like a photographer stealing Native souls with his camera firing away. But Daphne, I knew now, couldn’t be voided like this. I had the proof in my hands, and it filled me with lusty, whole-souled hopes.