I had met Zoë at a low-budget ashram years ago in upstate New York, where we both utterly failed at approaching nirvana but became the best of decadent Western friends. In fact, she was also with me when I met Primo at the Cobalt Colt. Zoë, the sexual beacon, was sending out all her usual amorous signals: the low-cut blouse, the push-up bra, desperately heaving breasts to contrast with the subtle, tasteful mascara. It drew Primo like the fly he was. From the pretentious way he cupped his cigarette to his ambivalent expression, I detested him on sight. He moseyed up to her with a drink and some flushable cliché like, “Haven’t we met in another life?”
Zoë’s mantrapping strategy was to take a guy home and sleep with him until he was so utterly exhausted he couldn’t leave. But somehow they always did. My role in her mating process was to be the straight man to her signature quips and comic barbs. But with Primo, even Zoë reacted indifferently.
I suggested that we leave the place, hoping to shake the creepo. Not getting the hint, Primo asked if he could tag along. Zoë, always starved for male attention, replied, “I suppose.”
In the course of that first evening, as we passed through the gauntlet of coffee shops, clubs, and after-hours bars, something strange happened. His tired delivery, his burned-out one-liners, his twisted face, all turned from plain ugly to a surreal, seen-it-all, done-it-all charming. By the end of the evening, I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He made failure wonderfully stylish and reelectrified the tired, dumb, and predictable: he was the dismissed Beatle, the glue-trapped Ratpacker, the laid-off Warhol Factory worker. This man couldn’t make shit stink, or a fly fly. He couldn’t hold a tune, or walk a straight line. Yet despite it all, there was a distinct success to his failure.
Zoë’s snappy remarks, like well-chewed pieces of Juicy Fruit, started losing their humorous flavor, while retaining their jaw-weary insults.
When she demanded, “Have you done anything at all with your life?” it signaled that she had lost all interest in him.
“Zoë.” I gave her the look, which she picked up on immediately. It was the “if you’re done, it’s my turn” face. She restrained her confusion, yawned, and said she was tired and had to run. I wished her good night, and had him by default.
After a couple more drinks, we walked, talked, and soon, against my better judgment, kissed. Oddly, on that night alone, he was a great kisser. I truly had no plans to sleep with him, but as I had just gotten dumped by Greg, I enjoyed tormenting him.
Very quickly, I had him wiggling lustfully on my hook. What can I say? He was always there, and though he didn’t sparkle, he mastered the fine art of not offending.
After work, but before meeting Zoë at the Cobalt Colt, I stopped at home to find that the dog had defecated in the boudoir. I screamed at Numb. It looked at me shamefully, then I realized that I was actually the monster. The poor thing needed to be taken out. I should have dropped it off at the pound that morning. I cleaned up its protest dump, put a leash on the canine, and walked it around the block. It kept stopping, sniffing, and haphazardly urinating—just a squirt—on a million different artifacts of the street—lampposts, meters, the tree. Finally, it stared up at me soulfully as it dispelled a monstrous pile.
As I dashed away to meet Zoë, some civic-minded dude yelled at me to scoop up the poop.
“It’s not my dog,” I said sincerely.
“You’re holding the fucking leash,” he screamed back.
I grabbed a discarded Pennysaver and shoveled the load into the corner garbage can. How did Primo do this? I never saw him scoop up his own shit, let alone anything else’s. In fifteen minutes I was showered, re-dressed, and pushing open the door to the Cobalt Colt.
“What the hell happened?” Zoë asked as soon as she spotted me. It took me a moment to realize she was talking about Primo.
“I came home, and he was dead in front of the TV.” I saved myself the embarrassment of explaining that I made his corpse dinner and got mad when he didn’t eat it. I told her that I had called his mother that morning.
“How’d she take it?” She stirred her mochachino.
“Remarkably well,” I replied, and suddenly wondered if June wasn’t the beneficiary of a mega life insurance policy.
“I hope you don’t mind if I ask you a question?” Some hairy Italian leprechaun had just imposed himself on our giant world.
“We’re in the middle of—”
“Go ahead, dear,” Zoë interrupted me. Her smile was pouty, her standards dwindling.
I watched her are-you-Mr. Right? face float to the surface like an ice cube in a punch glass. For several minutes, while this obvious gentile bantered incoherent imbecilic nonsense that in his world passed for wit, I watched as she blossomed under his attention.
“My boyfriend just died!” I finally blurted when I had reached critical mass.
“Oh, jeez, hey hon, I’m sorry,” the Italian said. It was the only thing he said that made any sense.
“Do they know what he died of?” Zoë asked, still wearing her sensitive enchantress mask for the benefit of the stranger who listened on.
“Not yet. The medical examiner is going to call when he finds out.”
“Hey, can I get your number?” the small stallion neighed at her. As soon as she gave him the seven-digit combination to her telephonic safe, he took off like a burglar in the night. Even if she didn’t know it, I knew she would never hear from him again. Too many guys nowadays were phone number conquistadors, too cool to go any further.
“What’s your problem?” She pounced on me.
“He wasn’t even Jewish,” I pointed out.
“Don’t you ever tell me what kind of man—”
“You distinctly said you were only looking for a Jewish husband,” I shot back, adding, “In case you don’t remember, my boyfriend just died. I’m entitled to some sympathy.”
“Primo Schultz was the biggest piece of crap loser that this bogus city ever squeezed out!” she screamed.
“Excuse me, did I hear you mention Primo Schultz?” interrupted some coiffed, early-middle-aged pseudo socialite sitting at an adjacent table.
“Yeah,” I replied, glad to have an opportunity to disconnect Zoë.
“God, I haven’t seen him in ages. How is the swine?” she asked with a wide-open expression. She was sharply suited and professionally poised. Zoë looked at me, amused to see how I was going to tell her.
“He’s not well,” I began, feeling slightly jealous. “May I ask who you are?”
“He was my boyfriend nearly twenty years ago,” she replied matter-of-factly.
“Twenty years!” Zoë kerplunked. We both looked at each other agape.
“You went to junior high school with him out in Brooklyn?” I assumed aloud.
“No, no,” she corrected. “We both lived right here. Between First and Second Avenues, near the Ninth Precinct.”
“You lived there together?” Zoë asked, pulling her seat nearer to the lady.
“Sure,” she replied, “We went to Cooper Union.”
“You’re kidding.” I had no idea that Primo had any kind of formal education.
“Well, he dropped out after his first year.” Sounded like him.
“Wait a second,” Zoë interrupted. “Primo was only thirty-five. He couldn’t have been in Cooper Union in the late seventies.” I had thought he was thirty-two.
“Thirty-five!” the Agnes B. deportee remarked. “He can’t be a day younger than forty-two.”
Looking at her watch, she stood up, dropped a five-dollar bill on the table, and was about to give salutations when I asked, “Where are you going?”
“Work. Give Primo my best.”
“Primo’s—” Zoë looked at me.
“Here.” She pulled a business card from a small vest pocket that seemed to be customized for them. “Tell him I forgive him enough so that if he wants to give me a call, I might be able to help him out a bit.”
“What do you do?” I asked, inspecting her card as she opened the front door of the bistro. She didn’t respond. The gilded Romanesque lettering answered for her: “Barbarosian Gallery—Helga Elfman, Assistant Director.”
“You should tell her,” Zoë said as the art peddler stepped off the curb to hail a cab. I jumped up, leaving my coat and purse on the table, and dashed out the door. By the time I was outside, Elfman was already climbing into a taxi.
“Wait a second!” I grabbed the door before she could slam it behind her.
“What is it?” she asked, obviously thinking about her upcoming appointment.
“I … I …” The Middle Eastern cabdriver craned his thick ox neck to see me.
“Primo … he’s …” Someone started honking. I jumped into the cab, slamming the door behind me.
“Five-twenty-five Madison Avenue,” she told the driver, and then looked at me almost nervously, as though I might be a danger. As the cab zoomed west on Houston and the annoying recording by some older, out-of-work, barely known actor warned us to buckle up, I explained, “Primo died last night.”
She gasped and placed an open hand over her mouth in horror. Tears came to her eyes. She took out a Kleenex, dabbed around her nose, and finally, ceasing to sniffle, took out her compact. At a stoplight, she refixed her makeup. I wondered where she got her eyebrow pencil, yet propriety forbade asking.
“This is sad in so many ways,” she stammered, “it’s almost impossible to count.”
But I was dying to hear that count. I wanted to feel for Primo too, but hadn’t, didn’t, and couldn’t. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel bad for him, I just didn’t feel that his death was tragic.
Snapping her compact shut, she looked out toward the south side of Houston and said, “These streets here, I can’t tell you how many times Primo and I walked them, back when you could get a loft for four hundred a month and you could still count the number of East Village galleries on your right hand.”
“He told me he was in a band, and I remember him telling me he painted, but—”
“Oh, please! He couldn’t play that awful guitar to save his life, but he was a gifted painter.” The cab turned up Lafayette and proceeded up Park Avenue. “When the big art boom hit in the early eighties, it seemed to happen all around him. Everyone he knew—some of whom I believed copied his style—was having their works snatched up, but he couldn’t get a single deal. It was uncanny. He was friends with Basquiat and hung out with Warhol until he couldn’t bear them any longer. Amazing in this business how a person will be friends with you, will lend you money, let you stay at their place, even sleep with their girlfriend, they’ll give you everything but help in selling your work.” At Twenty-fifth the cabbie turned onto Madison.
“Where are his paintings now?” I wondered aloud.
“I don’t know—he had this series of paintings that were superb. I know that he destroyed a lot of his old stuff. By the beginning of the nineties they must have reminded him of his failure.”
Does good art become bad at the end of each decade? I wondered. “You couldn’t help him?”
“Well, I loved him so much,” she admitted. “And what does he do? What does the slime do? He dumps me on New Year’s Eve 1980 for a sixteen-year-old.”
She didn’t need to say anything more than that. Getting dumped on New Year’s Eve sounded awful. Soon the cab came to a halt. Helga Elfman tossed a ten-dollar bill onto the wornthrough vinyl of the front seat and slid out the back.
As the cold wind snapped around the southeast corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue, I immediately awoke to the fact that I was without a coat or purse. Zoë was probably still sitting at the table with my things.
Helga took long strides. I trailed behind as if she was Mother Goose. Turning to me as an afterthought, she said, “Maybe you really should notify that Asian jailbait he dumped me for.”
“Who is that?”
“That crazy Sue Wott. The Cambodian trollop.”
If I had loved Primo enough would he have dumped me?
“I guess I’ll let sleeping infidels lie.”
“Well, they were married.”
“Married?” The word ricocheted and reverberated. “Where is she now?”
“Call the Film Archives. They’ve showed those boring short films that she did.”
“Do you really think I should tell her?”
“Sure, she should feel crappy along with everyone else,” Helga replied.
She opened a large glass door and vanished, leaving me shivering and alone on the dark Midtown sidewalk. Trembling and penniless, looking inside, I saw her standing at the elevator bank, facing away from me. I heard the bing sound. She had stepped into an elevator. I whipped opened the door and hopped in just as the doors were sliding shut.
“Unless you’re about to tell me that yet another ex-boyfriend from years gone by is dead, our business is done,” she said at close quarters.
“Actually, I was wondering if you could lend me ten bucks to get back downtown.”
“If I learned anything from Primo, it was never to lend anyone anything” she replied. Pulling a ten from her purse, she handed it to me and said, “Call it payment for information.”
“Thank you,” I replied. We rode the elevator up to her floor together, and before the door opened, she asked, “How do I look?”
I studied her face. In it I could see deals and dollars swirling about. “Great.”
“Let me know if there’s a funeral or something.”
I promised I would, and the door slid shut. It was goosepimply cold out as I slid my arms into my shirt. I looked like a fat amputee as I grabbed a cab on Fifty-ninth. Back in the Cobalt Colt, it was as if I had never left. Zoë was sitting with a bald guy in his forties, smiling meaningfully. He looked like a detainee at a dental convention. I waited as she pamphleteered out her phone number. Afterward, he rose and left, probably to return to his wife and kids in Long Beach. Even on a bad day she could do better.
We paid the check and tried to agree about a restaurant. She wanted to try a new Chinese restaurant, Shun Tung’s, on Fourth Street. I craved Middle Eastern on St. Mark’s. We compromised in the center of Asia—going to Milara, an Indian restaurant on Sixth Street. Rice, unidentifiable meat that looked like chunks of clay swimming in a gummy brown sauce, a large bowl of cabbage tossed from the Cuisinart to the microwave, various cold sauces, a nonpunitive check, and an evening of strange-smelling burps. During the meal, I told her that I had learned that Primo was married.
“You’re kidding?” she said.
“Some Cambodian girl.”
Perhaps to pay final respects to the location of Primo’s departure from this earth, Zoë walked me to my apartment. As we climbed up the stairs to my door, something was whining and scratching behind it.
“You don’t want a dog, do you?” I asked.
“I’m allergic,” she replied quickly, but I knew that she had never even owned a pet.
“How do you know unless you make the mistake of adopting one?”