OF COURSE, DARIUS had also gotten an invitation to the Vail vernissage. He didn’t go. It wasn’t about avoiding the good friend. The show was too important to him. He wanted to be alone with his master. Vail was someone in whose home he’d spent his whole life. Every time he entered or left it, he’d passed Vail’s suicide spot and tried to figure out how it was done. He didn’t want to suffer through a simpering evening of Ça j’adore and voici les recoins de l’imaginaire étrangement évertés.
In momentous solitude, he pushed at the gallery’s glass door. The glassy reflected sky warped, but the door was locked. Darius frowned. He watched the swatch of sky wobble and still, blue enough to merit a sob of gratitude in other circumstances. Beyond the azure, a streaky shadow gestured at him. The door made a flatulent buzzing and Darius pushed it open. Cassie’s gallerist friend wasn’t there, only a well-dressed peon and an intense hush. The main room was filled with large, late Sam Francis paintings in screaming California colors. Darius thought he had the wrong gallery for a second. “Colleen Velle?” he asked the peon and was waved toward three smaller rooms.
Everything was there. A smile feathered his lips. He began with one of the six extant versions of The Battle of Desires and Bitternesses. This wasn’t the one that had been meant for him. But it, too, was dusty and woebegone, especially in contrast to the gallery’s spic-and-span whiteness. Blobs of glue showed. Corners of the cut-out magazine eyes along the pavilion interiors were unstuck and curling. The very shoddiness somehow added a tragic, human element that a critic had once insisted was missing from Vail’s fantasies. One after another, the assemblages seemed to fit back into him like old pieces of himself, both necessary and useless.
He felt disappointment, too. Even before he’d finished looking, he sensed a purpose that had been driving him for a long time was now extinct. “Where do I go from here?” was the gist of it. Darius paused in the center of the third and largest room. He turned around. This room was full of drawings. A hygrograph sat on a white shelf. The pen had ceased recording on a roll of graph paper, its scratchy purple line about half complete. The cylinder had paused, or else the instrument was only there for show. The silence here was even deeper than it had been in the front room. Darius examined the hygrograph as if it were an unknown Vail work before glancing around him at the drawings again.
Over the years, Darius had become a bit of an expert on Vail. He knew the catalogue. He’d read all the books and articles. He looked down at the glossy page he’d taken from the peon’s desk on his way in. Turning to the English side of it, he read that the drawings were from the “collection of a gentleman.” There was no more information on them. If they were for sale, the prices weren’t listed.
His slight confusion, the affront to his expertise, was the smallest part of the strange mental state Darius found himself in. As far as he knew, no Vail drawings existed. He frowned extravagantly. He thought the drawings were Vail-like at least. Several of them included small, skewed sketches of other works by Vail. Here was the early Madonna with Prell bottles and Mardi Gras beads which Darius had just looked at in the other room. Which he remembered from the basement in New Jersey. Here was a sketch of The Battle of Desires and Bitternesses from overhead. But recognizing bits and pieces didn’t make Darius believe any of the drawings were authentic. He was positive they weren’t.
He didn’t know what to call his state of mind. Not déjà vu. He had no memory of the drawings. None at all. At the same time, he thought he’d seen them before. What’s more—though memory still wasn’t involved—he could pick out with some confidence—here, here, here, here, here—a typical spastic line in pencil, tiaras with clumsy lozenge-shaped jewels and circular pearls, several awkward princesses in hoop skirts, their hair worn in a sixties flip—things had been his own particular artistic specialty as a child. Darius himself had defaced or collaborated on these drawings. They must have come from the New Jersey house.
Disoriented, his body didn’t seem to know what emotion it was going for. Doubting everything for a moment, his where-do-I-go-from-here hollowness returned along with anxiety that this whole journey to Paris was an oxbow in his life, an empty gesture, and that the true, unbearable pull on his life was coming from elsewhere. No, he was right. A workman must have taken them. Or Oliver. Stan? Not the housekeeper. Not Sohaila obviously. He remembered nothing.
Darius asked Rolf to come with him on a return visit to the show. Rolf was delighted to spend the day with his American friend. And when they got to the gallery, he was content to be watched closely as he examined the works on view. He smiled at Darius frequently, meaningfully, but said nothing about Vail or the work until he’d looked at everything. He sighed. “I’m asking myself, Is it a young taste? Some are still marvelous—the Madonna. But I’m a tiny bit let down. All of them together, they’re somehow less than I’d hoped.”
“What about the drawings?”
“Yes. I’ve never seen those. They’re strange. Almost like Basquiat. You know how he always has those men wearing crowns. And they’re sort of childish and disordered like him. But not as convincing.”
Darius was about to tell Rolf about recognizing his own work. He knew it would sound deranged, and he wasn’t sure he could convince Rolf that something was odd about the drawings. That Darius really had been involved. That they’d come from his basement. But the argument felt like too much trouble or too intimate a truth was involved. Anyway, he had no plans to expose the drawings, if they even needed to be exposed. Why would he? Instead, he retold Rolf about the bed and the basement and growing up with the afterimage of a suicide-by-hanging in his front hall. They strolled east along the quays, then up toward the Bastille along the wall of the great Caserne. Rolf said, for his part, he remembered nothing of Afghanistan but that his father had always talked about the fields of mustard. And hippies. And he said he wanted to go back to visit the Buddhas of Bamiyan.
Darius saw the Vail show once more before it ended. That evening he ate alone. Around one a.m., he found himself stir-crazy and unable to sleep in his room at the Moderne. So he went to Le Trap to stare at California porn videos looping on a monitor over the bar. Immobile, staring, he got drunk so slowly he didn’t notice.
Le Trap was a backroom bar on rue Jacob. Almost a sex club initially, the place had become a relic with the advent of AIDS. For now it endured, though it would close within the year. This being Paris, the possibility of actual death may have amped up the intense and decadent erotic electricity of the place. Apologizing for his French, Darius chatted with several people. A bear in a harness was unexpectedly genteel. A handsome blond had a Marquis de Something about him. His pallid skin resembled wax run under a broiler briefly. The resulting slippage didn’t look like age so much as melt. He was older but not old. He pinched Darius’s nipple very hard, eliciting shocked laughter, which was somehow also cozy. Darius thought he asked the bear, Can you believe this guy? Maybe he shot him an appalled side-eye instead of using words. Anyway, the bear looked unhappy for him and wore a censorious expression. Darius frowned back aggressively, and patted the blond sadist on his back as if to say, Don’t worry about him, you’re OK in my book.
By three or four, when he set off for the Moderne, his brain wasn’t functioning in the usual way. The drunkenness had gone underground in him. He felt almost sober, but in a very muddy way. He thought it might just be some momentous gassy belch building inside him. At first his thoughts wouldn’t stop. He couldn’t put a brake to his mind’s harassing riot of imagery, the sort that can give anybody an intimation of insanity. For one thing, he wasn’t sure whether he’d left Le Trap with the marquis or not. He’d intended to or wanted to or imagined doing so. But once he was on the street, the presence walking next to him didn’t have the solidity of a person. He didn’t think they were talking. His busy thoughts started going dark then restarting at full speed, which made it seem he was repeatedly waking up a little farther along on his walk. That was confusing. He was too nervous to turn to glance at his invisible companion. The Marquis’s footsteps might have been his own, echoing on the stony, deserted streets.
In his room, he undressed and staggered. More moments pattered out of existence like the centimes that sprayed from his pockets when he dug out his keys and wallet. “Ding, ding, ding,” he spoke for them, because they landed on carpet and hadn’t made a peep. “Whoa, big guy!” He felt over-full as if he’d been eating foam. He found himself masturbating on the bed. He heard a voice repeating something, but that didn’t make him stop in shame or cover up. His hearing was peculiar. That he could be unconscious, sexual, and sick simultaneously—triple-bodied like Geryon—fascinated him. His mind churned on. He rolled over on the bed as if pretending to be a couple. Almost without him noticing, sperm from one of his bodies arced out, the usual youthful explosion onto the chocolate curtains. The most comical of body fluids, it made great white clown tears. A glyphic thought, sadness, came to Darius as he stared at the tears. He mouthed, “I’m so aggrieved you’re here.”
The intermittent darknesses went on and on. Spent penis in his fist, he felt the last oozing of semen separate like salad dressing, the watery part trickling off his abdomen. Then darkness. He was unable to move. The marquis in his black T-shirt detached himself from the curtain. He was standing over Darius.
This had to be a waking REM state, Darius figured. He couldn’t raise his arm or open his fist to take the Oscar statuette that the famous actress and Jayawarman VII were trying to hand him. It’s heavy! Whoa, really incredibly heavy! REM state, maybe, but Darius also felt a sort of unconsciousness paradoxically keeping him from sleep. Perhaps he got his fingers to twitch like a half-crushed ant. He probably had a fever. He went dark again.
With the worst headache of his life, Darius awoke to an interior debate. He held himself impossibly still in the bed. The stillness was so perfect his body couldn’t sense anything for certain. Feelings of illness or pain might be imaginary. He avoided deep breaths. But his heart raced. His thoughts toggled from one position to the other. No one had been with him in his room last night. Yes, the marquis really had been here and had—sort of—raped him. He remembered nothing. But then he argued to himself that he hadn’t remembered the Vail drawings, and he certainly hadn’t been drugged during his childhood. Eventually, when he allowed himself the first slight motion, sensations throughout his body forced him to abandon the innocent alternative. He was bitterly angry, overwhelmed by screaming anger as he pried himself from the bed and staggered to the commode to piss in clench-jawed silence. All grim resignation. He drank from the faucet until he regurgitated water and bile. He swore. After the toilet, the bidet, then the shower.
It so happened that Iran got into the World Cup that year. In exile, Reza Pahlavi published some palaver about the team’s achievement in the International Herald Tribune. Darius showed the vacuous article to Rolf and said, more in sorrow than in anger, “They’re not really a good family, you know. The Pahlavis. Arrivistes.” He shrugged. He couldn’t have been more transparent.
Darius noticed he’d begun to sound a touch bitchy or bitter sometimes. This darker shading of his manners didn’t seem to have anything to do with his most recent aristocratic encounter with the marquis. Indeed Darius refused to search for interior transformation, or for possible deep feelings in himself at all.
With a repressed smile, Rolf indulged what he took to be Darius’s New World snobbery about the Pahlavis. He concluded that Darius somehow felt his adoption made him inadequate. As a matter of irony, it now came out that Rolf was, properly speaking, the Graf von Hartzfeldt-Trachtenberg. (And that wasn’t even the good side of the family.) His mother’s Swabian ancestors had been Crusaders. Rolf’s real name wasn’t Rolf. It was Rudolfus. He kept all of this secret as part of his arduous effort to become orange.
Darius couldn’t conceive of hating being a count, or a marquis for that matter. But he pretended to act embarrassed by his enthusiasm for aristocracy. Rolf cast him a jaded look and explained how obsequious grade school teachers had tried to drill into him the importance of his heritage. They chalked his full name and title across the blackboard for the whole class to read. His younger brother, in contrast, had terrorized fellow eight-year-olds with regal threats of torture or decapitation. “Rolf, honestly, that’s probably healthier,” Darius told him. “I bet I would have done the same.”
Darius had been able to truss up the memory of rape in his mind. This wasn’t entirely unlike extinguishing consciousness of Alan Wilkinson’s rejection in New York. Of course, he was terrified for his health at first, until a blood test came out negative for HIV. And he supposed he was feeling the inevitable self-dislike. But the testing, the hatred, guilt and vengeful fantasies all transpired in perfect darkness, quarantined from the tick-tock of the world and, nearly, from personal awareness. But he no longer spent the occasional evening prowling the bowels of the mall at Les Halles for Arab hustlers as he’d done at first. He put an end to that life. He even indulged in a kind of Magdalene sobriety.
With rigor, he embraced fond daytime life with Rolf. Between them, a freshet of bright talk about art and politics burbled continually. Rolf took the liberal side. Darius liked the brutal, libertarian slant. As fascism was politics aestheticized, his libertarianism was politics made psychological. He wasn’t thinking about the social contract. Or people’s lives. Or other people.
Darius and Rolf’s slashing critiques of art aligned much better. They started to see each other almost every day. The days themselves got longer. Sex, eventually, was pastel for Darius. More intense for Rolf, perhaps.
Rolf had finished his studies at the Beaux Arts. While Darius was content to drift, his friend made elaborate plans and junked them time and again. He wanted to leave Paris. He wanted to move to New York. With his thoughtless, tender availability, Darius was holding him back. Rolf’s roommates, Roger-Pôl and Moktar, on the other hand, were goading him to leave if only to escape the drama of their tedious, ever-thwarted love affair. Moktar was straight. Roger-Pôl was a chivalrous fantasist.
An ocean apart from Sohaila and Stan and Oliver, Darius wasn’t so far from them at all. He tolerated Sohaila’s embarrassing construction that he was “trying to find himself.” Real orphan though he was, the great cord of his life ran straight back, taut as ever, to Oliver and to Oliver’s pot of gold and to the Qajar daydream, never sufficiently put to bed.
During his years in Paris, Darius tried the Cedar Street place by phone and by letter several times. He talked to his mother weekly. Sohaila began to doubt Oliver’s fortune, a relief for her. “He never sees bankers. He has no office. You know what he’s like. It doesn’t seem plausible.” But slowly, money started becoming a problem for her. The sums involved were large—insurance, taxes on the house, so it was hard to see trouble coming. The absurd warren of savings and checking accounts and money market funds in which she kept the money Oliver had settled on her was as difficult to navigate as ever, but happy discoveries were becoming rare. Unlike Sohaila, Stan didn’t want to give up on the pursuit. His investigator claimed he’d unearthed filings on Mather Capital. So the firm at least existed.
Stan found work as a nurse/phlebotomist at a clinic for the blind. During one three-way call on Sohaila’s birthday, he dominated the conversation. He’d discovered the key to the American work ethic, he said. “I think no other eastern European will understand this. It’s sinister really. It’s all about schizophrenia. You must act cheerful and humble, but you must also foster ruthlessness in your heart. Europeans naïvely think Americans really are naïve, but they’re not. Nor are they exactly deceivers. What they are is deliberately insane.”