Holfy

She can only be described through her city. Even more specifically: Gansevoort Street. Melville walked this street here in the far West Village in New York City. The author of Moby Dick found it hard to get work on a street named after his relatives. Holfy took on Gansevoort Street in the early sixties. Stonewall was years away from her, and I was not yet born.

She gets bored easily. In 1974 she started a restaurant with her then lover in the heart of Greenwich Village. The Black Man’s Table still does well almost a quarter of a century later in a city that devours restaurants before the paint has dried on their freshly finished fronts. But the restaurant bored her, she had a disagreement with her lover, and she left. Success in itself seems as uninteresting to her as the same meal two nights in a row. Then she got herself into photography in a city lit by photographers.

Holfy started buying her own train tickets from upstate New York to Manhattan as soon as she was old enough. At eighteen she flew to Denmark and took painting classes. She would become a painter. She sat on both sides of the canvas. Life opened. A year later, when she returned to New York, she and Robert rented a dump on Gansevoort Street in the guts of New York’s meat district. They knocked down the wall between them and the adjoining vacant apartment. When the landlord found out, there was nothing he could do because the lease stated Apartment, second floor. There was nothing describing another apartment on that floor in the plans. It was fun in those days to fool the landlord. Like his tenants, Charlie Gottleib was young and vigorous.

At night, on Little West Twelfth Street, a sliver of a block from her doorway, prostitutes prance on the cobblestone roads that have been battered by Mack trucks delivering skirts of beef to New York’s finest restaurants. In the filthy night, these prostitutes glisten, looking more outrageously beautiful than supermodels and with smoother legs. On a summer’s evening, even before darkness gives the hookers mystery, cars stalk the area. Syringes litter the streets on Sunday mornings. A prostitute is slumped in a doorway, his silver miniskirt gathered on his hips. The smell of urine teases the breeze that wafts in from the Hudson River. It is quiet.

During the week, Duffy Dumpster trucks collect the rubbish. Other trucking companies collect the inedible meat refuse after eleven at night. The meat is sprayed with green dye to discourage the homeless from eating it. Bins, as large as small apartments, crash to the ground throughout the night as they are emptied. No sooner has the rubbish been collected than the meat deliveries turn into the street. They park every which way, engines coughing. When the drivers are blocked they rest their elbows on their horns until someone moves. By five, the hour between night and morning, the workers arrive. They scream at each other in Aramaic and Spanish. Someone speaks English. Holfy sleeps with her windows open to the mouth of the street.

She has made her home here for over thirty years. During the summer she cycles to her appointments on her bokety bicycle, bouncing over the broken cobblestones and splashing through rivulets of blood that run out of the processing plants. If she’s out, the mailman drops off her photography packages at Florent’s restaurant next door. On the hottest days the stench seems visible and during snowy winter mornings the street is an abstract painting—Jackson Pollock playing with colours. I am entranced with it all but it wears off, although in the company of a woman like Holfy the excitement of living never fades.

Her studio is in this apartment. It is packed densely with contact sheets, negatives, photography books, film books, novels, poetry, jazz, classical, clothes, shoes, makeup, and light; the light she gained thirty years ago when she knocked down that wall. These days she feels guilty about the wall. Charlie never did well in the meat business. Soon, in his late sixties, he will break down and end up in an asylum. Photographs of old lovers are pasted on her walls. There are photographs of Robert in the last days of his illness. For her, it’s an expression of love, a visual depiction of how much he grew as he died. For me, it’s a macabre showing of decay, a photographic equivalent of Lucian Freud. His ghost lives here. Many of the photographs of naked men, their nudity compounded and not neutralised by their number. She photographs her friends for pleasure. She is in pursuit of an aspect of the personality they seldom display. She shoots quickly and seductively. She takes chances. She spends ages taping gels on her strobes and then doesn’t use them. She is restless when she works and yet somehow she captures most of her subjects in a state of tranquillity.

The first time I laid eyes on her she was shooting at the IBM kick-off. That was before I learned that I could be dishonest and live with fickleness. Fickle. That was the kind of word Holfy used. Fickle, and, credible. Credible was her most condescending term.

I was still staying with Gerry that first night I met her in the Puck Building. Gerry had been giving me the hint that I’d have to get my own place. IBM had won the Cunard account. Gerry had worked with Fintan, the guy who gave us both under-the-table work, and Fintan had worked with Cunard and got us an invite. She is crouching at my table taking photographs of the marketing director while he gives his lighthearted nautical speech. Gerry and I laugh, not at his speech but at his tic—constantly lifting his chin away from his collar as if the shirt is tweaking his neck. A finger taps my shoulder.

—That’s Mr. Welty?

She’s pointing her middle finger at the podium. I smile a yes at her. She finishes her roll, replaces it, writes something on the spent roll, and slips it into a fannypack. I watch her working for the rest of the evening. She has a precise economy of movement as she works the hall. I think about talking to her and then dismiss her—as one does with these idiosyncratic New York types. But I remembered that middle finger pointing.

Months later I am at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis benefit on Christopher Street. I forget now what I was doing there. Something altruistic. I was with William Davies. We had painted Bill’s gallery, and Bill was after Gerry. There she was photographing again. No sleek black suit this time. An official Keith Haring T-shirt with green shorts. She is laughing a lot. She seems to know a lot of the people she is photographing. She touches them gently on the arm, pushing them into poses. Someone hands her a glass of wine which she takes and then leaves on the sidewalk. Bill and I are sitting on an overturned barrel at the end of Christopher. The cops are relaxing; laughing at a drunken Judy Garland look-alike whimper that he isn’t in Kansas any more. Bill is watching me watch her.

—You like her?

—Who?

—Holmfridur. The photographer.

—You know her?

—Sure. The one and only Holmfridur Olafsdottir.

—Holmwho?

—Holmfridur Olafsdottir. Imagine crunching your teeth. She’s a fag hag.

She has her hair in a ponytail.

Holmfridur, he says again, smiling. He wants me to appear a little stupid, never missing the edge knowledge gives. He gets up with his half-eaten chicken drumstick and goes over to her. She responds much more warmly than he expects. Not the usual strained friendliness that trails Bill’s sick life.

—I’m Holfy, she says, giving me the gift of her hand. Long fingers. She speaks as if she has marbles in her mouth. She doesn’t remember me.

—We met—talked—at the IBM thing a few months back. At the Puck?

—Right. I remember.

She doesn’t.

—You asked me the name of some guy.

Her face darkens. She remembers.

—You’re the fuckhead who lost me the account?

—I beg your pardon?

—You said Welty was the M.D. and he wasn’t.

—I was just joking. I thought you knew I didn’t know any of those gobshites.

—Expensive joke.

She walks off.

—O, dear, you do have a way with women.

—Want to do it Bill?

He looks at me quickly to see if I mean it. He’s imagining pushing me down on my stomach but already I am walking after her.

—I love this garlic chicken, she says to some wrinkled queen, stripping a morsel from the bone and popping it in her mouth.

—I’ll pay.

She looks around at me.

—I’ll pay for whatever I cost you.

—Fifty thousand.

I pale and the queen laughs.

—It was five thousand, and future business.

—I’ll pay the five. I can’t get the business back.

—You’ll pay the five?

Earnest nod.

—Okay. Send the check here.

I take the card and walk down Christopher Street. I walk across to Washington Square, whistling. Then I think of the money. Lot of money for a phone number. That was the beginning of life with her.

I’m as sick of Gerry as he is of me. His girlfriend is some Jew with the classic honker who makes furniture out of sheet metal. He’s either too dumb or too indifferent to be bothered by her fake orgasms but it’s getting to me. I’ve put the word out to everyone I meet that I need something. The response is always the same. Everyone is always looking for a place. Every day there is always someone shouting in the window of the gallery wanting to know if it is being renovated into an apartment.

I start to pick up books again but it seems meaningless. Cynical voices. People who have nothing to say, saying their nothing with glossy panache. I begin to walk the streets a lot. In the evening I turn on the radio. The same voices discussing the same problems. I feel cold and put on my old jacket. Rummage for a cigarette. The letter that arrived yesterday that I was afraid to open. I had written in weakness and asked her to reconsider, to say yes. I find it in the inside pocket and open it. I feel shame rise as I read it. She is right.

What you say you want. What you need. I need to explore myself. I can’t believe you’re coming out with that shit. Are you looking for my blessing? Why don’t you just say it? You want to fuck around. You don’t have the balls to say it. You want to go and search for the balls you don’t have. You know who you should fuck? Yourself. And you know nothing of my passions. You are an assumption with a steady voice. You have become plausible. You sound like Brefini. He talks nonstop about how wonderful Una is and he wouldn’t change a nappy if shit was coming out her shoes. Shit smells so men like him—and you—take notice.

I am solid. Dependable. This is what you prefer to think. You pour stoicism into me. One thing I do know about us is that I got to know you well and you got to know me not at all. I am a mystery to myself—how can you claim to know me? This is not aphoristic babble—the kind you excel in uncurling at dinner parties. This is the truth. As for your honesty? Fuck your honesty. I wanted commitment.

You started listening less. Surely one needs to listen more as the mystery of two lives deepens. It’s harder to see what is already there. I can remember the month you stopped trying: the weary and contented roll away from me and the snoring. You can only be yourself through your work, you say. Such indulgent twaddle. I was always with you. Never for a moment did my mind stray from you—from us. What do words say, you ask. What do words say. Words are no proof. Actions are proof, you say. So you went into management for us? So you wore those suits for me? So you ate in the Orchid Szechwan every second day for me? So you went to New York for me. Proof is what I do not need, thank you. Proof is an ending. I was looking—I am looking—for a continuum.

Once I knew you; at your beginning; learning you like a petal learning sunshine. My hand on the smooth trembling of your desire. Such tenderness in the intensity of your restraint. You waited for me then. Love was in the containment of your release. Your fingers held the moment of my pleasure. You opened me to the pleasure of myself: my ankle surprised by the kisses of your lips. Finding excitement on the tips of my fingers. Afterwards, your flaccidness resting against me like a tongue. Your hand bringing me to climax. How that hand made me come. An hour later I could feel my uterus tightening and loosening.

You didn’t leave me in January. You left me a long time ago. Long before New York. You abandoned me when our minds conceived each other as a single entity. Abandoned: cruel, forlorn word. The tears won’t stop. I can’t believe I’m this weak. I never liked the way you whispered obscenities in my ear during lovemaking. I should have told you that long ago. I kept too much to myself. Mea culpa. Mea culpa no more. I’m telling people why you deserted. Is deserted too strong? Pick a word. I do think it would be inappropriate for me to be the bearer of your morality. We don’t want to shroud our lives in lies. Do we?

The darling wife, Ursula.

Remember. Every time you piss. Every time you put it in someone. Take a look at it and remember your wife.

We are in the downtown Guggenheim to see some modern art. She is educating me although she would deny such a grand claim. We are in front of an Agnes Martin, a blank canvas. The museum is empty save for us and the attendant. Holfy is talking about the artist’s life. I try to hide boredom, irritation at this pretentious canvas. I say nothing because my comments seem so ordinary, so commonplace they embarrass me. There is too much of my father in me to be taken in by this kind of art. How many bags of potatoes would that buy, he’d say. Holfy is talking about the artist’s spirituality. Her depth and commitment to statement. As I stare at the canvas, thin grey lines emerge. There is a grid system as clear as a map of Manhattan itself. Lines that are painted with the fine wet hair of a brush, the artist’s hand working up and down, across the large canvas. Hundreds of lines and each of them perfect—or almost perfect. The edge of the brush occasionally shows itself beyond the line it has formed. I begin to see the mind of Agnes Martin, the heft of years she spent in the desert.

Although this is art stripped of ego, it dawns on me I can see more artistic passion in this painting than anything else I have gawked at. The reclusiveness—what I considered eccentricity—is an armour worn to enable her to peel her skin away. Suddenly Rodin is as vulgar as Dali. The opinion shocks me. It makes me uncertain of all my opinions. As I stare the grid seems to fade, so too the cream texture: I am staring into myself. Art, Pound says, is fundamental accuracy of statement. Truth was found with passion and commitment. The blood runs through my veins and the hair breathes on my skin. She says religion plays no part in her life. I look at Holfy, taking in what she is saying as if she is an apparition. It is as if her voice has been in my head and her presence—my own presence—startles me.

We scour New York together: the Met, the Guggenheim, the Frick, the Morgan. We are in the downtown Guggenheim again, looking at the Agnes Martin paintings. They still make no real sense to me—the blankness. A depth and commitment to statement. She spent years in the desert.

—She’s full of herself. All ego.

Holfy looks at me and nods, not agreeing with me. Pride stops me from admitting I’m seeing it, seeing what she sees. All else is nonsense and a chap trick. Truth had to be found with passion and commitment. This was what one did. What was true to the spirit.

—She’s all ego and she doesn’t believe in religion and she was years in the desert.

—Christ. It’s worse than school with you.

She looks offended.

—I’ve been listening to you. I just don’t see it. Let’s go to Fanelli’s.

We eat and talk about photographs. She talks about Fanelli’s. She talks about her next project—photographing boxers. The food is good and she cheers up.

—Photography and boxing are immediate acts. With photography it depends on the way the camera is used. Photography can have an attitude that painting never can. Paint insulates the viewer.

I am tired listening to her. She’s going on about Beaton and his snapshots—as she calls them.

—He’s morally dishonest. He says he’s getting behind glamour. Sure he is.

I am doubting her ethos. I think of her waiting for that moment when one’s guard is down and she clicks and captures an ugly corner of the soul. Where is honesty? I have no idea what honesty or truth is. And I see I don’t know Holfy any more than I know why Agnes Martin trailed lines across canvas. Holfy lives in the grove of uncertainty. That is her fascination.

Photography and boxing: two of her passions, two violent acts. Sixty-five percent of New Yorkers, if asked, would refuse to have their photograph taken, I read somewhere. We go back to Beaton and agree we dislike the photographs for the same reason. He insisted he didn’t take fashion shots. His work was beyond fashion. It was art. Morally dishonest shit. The same is true of Inge Morah. She, apparently, searched for the intelligence in her subjects as if this somehow portrayed a profound understanding of humanity. Knickers.

*   *   *

Holfy rings and tells me her cat is not eating. When I come over the cat is asleep, its purr deep as a drunken snore. We take the subway to the clinic on the East Side. The veterinarian holds Kahlo loosely in her coal-black hands and looks her over.

—She’s not too good, is she?

—I know that—that’s why I’m here.

The veterinarian looks over the rim of her spectacles and takes Holfy in:

—Uh-huh. We can take tests. But she’s very sick. You can get some food down her with a syringe but—

—But what?

—She’s very sick. She’s suffering.

—She’s told you that? My cat told you she’s suffering?

The veterinarian purses her lips, looks at me, straightens her spectacles and looks back to Holfy.

—That’s my opinion.

We leave her in for overnight tests.

Holfy phones the clinic the next day. Kahlo has cancer of the throat. We take the subway over again with Kahlo’s carrier box.

The same veterinarian sees us, her pink surgical gown splattered with dried blood:

—What do you want to do?

Holfy waves it all away from herself and walks out.

I wait while the cat gets the injection. She goes slack, her tongue peeping out her mouth playfully.

We take shelter from the rainstorm in the Bloomingdale’s foyer. Cars and cabs scream at one another in the traffic jam. We step in from the street noise, dripping and steaming with rain. We dry ourselves as best we can.

—Who put her down?

—The nigger.

—Jesus. Don’t say that word.

—The nice vet with the hip orange spectacles wearing the pink gown. Sorry about the N word. Doing what you do, pushing it.

—And you were there?

—Sure was.

She looks at the empty cat carrier in my hand and smiles painfully. When she recovers herself we set off through the labyrinth of perfumes and clothes. She stops an assistant and asks him about the density of a certain fabric. When she looks doubtful, he raises himself fully erect and mentions its durability. They discuss resistance and fall and contour, defining themselves through the way cloth is cut. Holfy presses a jacket against me and tells me to try it on. The assistant crosses some ill-defined social precipice and looks at me with tragic encouragement. He snaps the jacket in the air and holds it open:

—Adolfo Dominguez.

—Pleased to meet you.

He knows the jacket looks silly on me.

—Hey it’s nice.

—It certainly is. It balances discipline with vitality. It gives him a rather potent air. I’m on the verge of telling them both to go and shite but I think of Kahlo’s body soft with death. I slip the jacket on. It has a price tag of $1,125. I feel like a tramp. My trousers are creased and my shoes need a polish. The store is too hot. Holfy tilts her head and tells me to pirouette.

—It does make a statement, says the assistant, picking at his moustache. With his crisp black suit and neat bow tie he looks like he could be on his way to a wedding if he took the measuring tape off from around his neck. Christmas carols dream of a white Christmas on the in-store music and make me dizzy.

—No, says Holfy finally as if disappointed in some failure of the Bloomingdale’s jacket. The assistant leans on his aesthetic temperament, holds the ends of his measuring tape like extravagant lapels and sighs approval at her. Taking the jacket off I see the label is Dominguez and blush.

—I do need lingerie.

—One floor up, he says without blinking.

Holfy looks at me.

—Want to look around here awhile? We can meet up later.

We agree on the diner and she wipes the last streaks of tears from her face. All the stores are too expensive. But I do buy her something. I get her a soft puppet. It’s a sheep, Lambchops. I open it and slip my hand inside it and go in search of her.

She is immersed in conversation with the store assistant, a tall elegant woman. They both throw back their heads in laughter. She buys a two-piece. On the way out, she stops and peruses some silver lingerie.

—Open the cat cage.

She drops several sets into the carrier.

—You’re stealing?

—Be a detective when you grow up. Stolen lingerie turns me on.

—It’s tagged.

She pulls me close with that waggling middle finger and whispers:

—Follow me.

We go through the Lexington Avenue exit and the alarm goes off. Holfy is already halfway down the subway steps.

—Let us go, you and I, and drink some cappuccino.

We face each other in the full subway, the cat carrier jammed between us.

—Will you eat with me tonight? I don’t want to be in the apartment without her. Gerry is sick of you anyway.

Stuffed into the swaying subway with the smell of rain off our clothes, I see her as she must have been as a child sitting on the stairs.

—I’d be very happy to eat with you tonight. Let’s get some food.

—There’s stuff in the fridge.

—But it’s not from Zabar’s, is it?

—No. It is not from Zabar’s.

—Well, let’s do it then. We’ll get a cab over.

—A cab—you in a cab?

—I get cabs. Sometimes.

The express rattles through station after station, each one a blur of tiles and people. Our eyes avoid each other all the way downtown. From there we get the taxi over to the store and then over to the meat district.

*   *   *

I am here in the apartment in Gansevoort Street, here in my future. I look around its vastness with the same hidden awe I feel in the museums. A dog yelps somewhere and Holfy climbs over her bed and up the steps to a window. A small black and white creature leaps through from outside and lands panting on the floor, nails scurrying on the rough wooden planks.

—What’s that?

—That is Botero, the love of my life.

—But what is he?

—His breed you mean? He is a full-blooded American Boston terrier. Take a shower.

—I’m fine.

—You smell of rain. I’d hate you to get pneumonia for being a good boy scout.

—I’m fine.

—Irish Catholic, yes? Hah!

—Did anyone ever tell you that you can’t pronounce pneumonia?

—As a matter of fact, yes. A little boy who can’t pronounce his th’s told me. Tanks for dese avocados and dose pears. Well, Irishman, I’m washing the filthy Eastside off me. Amuse yourself.

The sound of jazz from the bathroom. Gentle sound of running water. Flatulent gurgles from pipes. Rush of piss gushing unapologetically into the toilet. Her apartment is a cavern of delights. Open shelving everywhere. I wander down to the living room. Bookshelves reaching up to a sagging ceiling. A wooden stepladder to reach the top has become itself, a temporary bookshelf. The books have the look of having been explored years ago, exhausted. Around the corner is her studio. A desk dense with work. An entire wall is a corkboard for photographs, pinned with careful randomness. Dozens of head shots; faces that exist only in New York. A yard-long panoramic shot of the AIDS flag being carried up Fifth Avenue. A series of nudes; shots of men’s shoulders; legs; bends of elbows; hands in midgesture; backs. Landscapes of suffering. Each shot is taut with grief. A photograph in the corner of the corkboard—a shot that doesn’t fit the others, isolated from the clutter—a close-up of a woman’s hand weary with age spots; hairless. The hand rests on the arm of a chair, a cigarette lazy between the fingertips. And beside the hand; a remote control. The shot is motionless except for a trail of indifferent cigarette smoke. It is the only photograph on the board with a title: Mother.

—Just because there are no doors does not mean it’s yours to explore.

I turn around guiltily but she’s not standing behind me. I look up, foolishly, half expecting her to be crouched on a shelf near the ceiling. No sign of her anywhere.

—Holfy?

—In the bathroom.

I don’t know how I missed her—I see her now through stacks of folded towels. She has had shelving installed in what was once a doorway from the studio to the bathroom. This side of the shelving is walled with glass. She is brushing her hair over the toilet. Pulling tangles out. She must know I’m watching her. She puts a foot on the toilet and is drying her toes. I steal a last glimpse of her and turn back to the photographs.

*   *   *

I am a parade of blunders. Walking around her apartment I should have known it: we were choosing each other. Thirty years of Holfy’s art books. Margins full of tightly scribbled comments. On a book of photographs by Inge Morath, she has pencilled: How can anyone be presented with so much and produce so little? Hundreds of art books. Steiglitz, André Kertész, Ernst Haas, Fulvio Roiter, Juan Gyenes Remenyi, Ouka Lele, Lee Friedlander, Chagall, Franz Marc, Balthus, Agnes Martin, John Sloan, Magritte, Robert Tansey, Max Ernst, František Kupka, Mondrian, Picasso, O’Keefe, Modigliani. Hundreds of art books. Biographies of painters and photographers. No novels.

—You’ve no Dali, I shout back.

—Dali was only for himself. He’s irrelevant.

—And Picasso isn’t?

—Guernica?

The toilet flushes. Guernica? Don’t know what she means by that and ignorance of what my response should be silences me, pushes me on to another question.

—And no Monet?

—Simply a matter of taste. I don’t like him.

—And no novels?

—The other wall. Around the corner for lit-rat-chure.

Some of her paintings are scattered on the walls—painting and photographs mixed randomly. A glowing red painting with flecks of black and white. A noisy painting, impossible to locate the source of its sound. Gansevoort Street. It looks like something she might have done but it’s not her signature: de Kooning. I lift it off its hook. It is a de Kooning. I almost drop it with fright. A separate bookcase; Kant, Camus, Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Plato, Foucault, Chrysippus, Pythagoras, Spike Milligan, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Hegel.

She places a tray of tea things behind me. When I turn she is closer to me than I expect. A chartreuse turban tightly wrapped around her head, the effect making her eyebrows stark, her face stunning.

—Heard of any of them?

—You didn’t give me the impression you were a reader.

—I forgive you, you’re a man—you make mistakes.

—Wittgenstein lived in Dublin for a while. Used to go to the greenhouse in the Botanical Gardens to work in the winter because his room was too cold. Before I have time to finish the story she kisses me deftly on the lips.

—Don’t get any ideas. They needed to be kissed, is all.

We sit on the sofa drinking a mixture of Assam and Earl Grey tea. She talks about going to Cooper Union in the early sixties. About trying to paint. About fucking as a political statement. She says the word fucking with such ease that it is difficult for me not to show surprise. I feel small in her presence. I know she is not trying to impress me and knowing this, she impresses me all the more. Her gruffness adds to her charm. This is an old self she is talking about, one she has discarded, one I hunger to inhabit, dead and all as it is. She tells me about Mazo and his infamous techniques: Never mark a canvas unless you mean it. She was too naïve to question him.

—He was respected in New York, still is, she says, smiling emptily. Making digital videos now. Made that famous one about the crazy Truman woman and her daughter. I had taken her twenty years to get past that perfection Mazo preached; hence the photography. All the time she is talking, I am wondering what her purpose is; there must be some purpose to her telling me all this. I pour more tea to appear at ease. It comes out thick and cold. I point to the kitchen and she nods. She continues talking, more loudly, while I potter about trying to find things. I interrupt her to ask her where she keeps the sugar.

—In the blue jug. O’Keefe was in her eighties by then and New York was bestowing some or other award on her. I was covering the event for People magazine. They wanted artistic shots for the issue and somehow they got hold of my name. I took stills of paintings back then. I didn’t do this kind of thing but I needed the money. I borrowed a Hasselblad from Roger (she points a finger to the large shot of the Woolworth building peaking through dense clouds) and did the job. My first celebrity shoot. O’Keefe talked to me. I think because I was a female photographer. I changed direction with her. Are you listening?

—No.

Moving about her kitchen, searching for the tea strain, I am courting her.

—There is less responsibility in photography. At least I thought that until I met O’Keefe.

I pour the tea. Holfy has beautiful hands.

—I discovered my cunt at the same time I discovered art. Art is about touching. Constantly touching. We have to create ourselves as art. You know, you always know a bad portrait photographer if he tells you to be yourself. There is no self. A photographer creates the self. She studies me bending with the tray. When I look up from the table it’s as if she is looking for something in me, testing me. She is looking for listening, I think, if she is looking for anything; that’s what people always want. The doorbell rings, a shrill, demanding noise. She ignores it and goes on.

—It has taken me a long time to know. I want nearness from a man. Art is about always touching canvas without meaning—without conscious meaning that is. Meaning is a foregone conclusion. That is what O’Keefe did. I learned that over twenty years ago. I’m only beginning to be able to do it now. But that’s not too bad. De Kooning only began to understand in the eighties and he’s been after it all his life. You know the glaring mistake with all that shit (she waves towards the philosophy)? It’s all written by men. How can we invent ourselves out of a male-only philosophy? I’m not talking about women. I’m talking about people. One should always fuck like the animals in the fields, don’t you think.

De Kooning. The resolute way she said his name.

*   *   *

—You should take a cab. The subway is dangerous after midnight.

—I want you.

—That’s nice. What for?

We stare at each other.

—You smell of marriage. Not attractive. Give it time. Maybe. You can sleep on the downstairs futon.

—I’ll go.

—It’s one in the morning.

—I’ll go.

—You’re not a sulker, are you?

—The worst. Hold grudges too. Forever.

I take the subway out of illogical spite. A black man, dressed like a dishevelled magician, does tricks with doves. The birds flutter up and down the train carriage. As the train grinds to a halt at Forty-second he whistles and the birds fly back to him and into their black box. I got off at Ninety-sixth to catch the local. Workmen are painting the station poles. The heat is stifling.

We don’t see each other for a week. I break and call. She talks about New York and art and photography and her dead husband and her mother screaming at her father on long-distance phone calls. I can’t imagine Holfy as a seven-year-old. I can’t imagine her as a person other than the woman she is in front of me, the woman I have already created in my mind. I am terrified of her and know I will betray Ursula again and I haven’t even touched Holfy. I haven’t left Ursula. There would be no feeling of betrayal if I had really left her.

*   *   *

She is going to Pennsylvania to visit friends—partly because she can’t bear the silence since Kahlo died. I offer to take care of Botero while she is away but she is taking the dog too.

—He doesn’t miss Kahlo at all, treacherous bastard. If you want to be useful you could water the plants and collect the mail?

She spends hours packing and I sense, in her careful movements, she is already with them. I hate these people who make her whistle happily. I want to crawl inside her life. I want to possess her. To know her more fully than she knows herself; to watch her dress in the morning. She takes an age to face the day and I want to see her create herself. I want to watch her buying her hats; watch her ask a shop assistant for this scent and that one; her ease at not feeling the need to make a purchase.

She takes me around the apartment and explains how much each plant needs. As she talks my life comes into focus. I remember when, as children, my cousin Brian and I were pillow fighting. I was getting the upper hand and in a fit of rage Brian threw down his lumpy pillow and leaped on me, screaming. He was stockier and stronger. I remember my eyes closing in pain as he clenched his fleshy fingers about my throat, his thumbs pressing on the Adam’s apple. I knew Brian would strangle me he was so angry. It was my first realiszation that my life could end and in one heave I tossed him over my head and his foot crashed through the bedroom window. I stood rubbing my neck, triumphant and terrified and relieved; such is my relief listening to Holfy. She is explaining about the outdoor plants. I see the years ahead with Ursula; can see what would happen with our lives; can see all the fights over her wanting to have a child, or worse the silence over it, and I don’t want to be responsible for any of it. I love her and can’t live with such suffocating compromises. Holfy is still talking—something about Bela Bartok and flowers—and she catches sight of my mind drifting. I apologise. The fullness of life floods into me. How can I tell this woman, who hardly knows me, whom I hardly know, that I am planning to spend the rest of my life with her. She makes up the futon in the corner of the apartment that overlooks Gansevoort Street. You can sleep in my bed if you find it too noisy, she says. I shake my head that it will be fine right here.

Her phone rings constantly while she is away. She has told me not to answer it. Waking up feels like a sudden transportation into a deserted movie set. Each morning the meat trucks wake me before five. I stare out the window watching the men unload the meat. Then I go and shower.

I go through her books, one by one, fanning the pages, dust taking flight. I wipe down the bookcases and reshelve them, wondering which ones belong to her and which ones belonged—still belong—to Robert. His handwriting in the margins of many of them, little ticks by passages that pleased him. I look for naïveté in his comments, an emptiness in his intellect; find none. We have similar taste and it makes me dislike the ghost of his presence even more.

She has no vacuum cleaner. I find a broom and sweep out the apartment. I try to clean the windows with Windowlene but the grime is too thick. I wash them inside and out with hot soapy water, make tea while they are drying, polish the windows with the radio on the station she listens to, voices that become the voice of New York, more New York than the streets themselves.

The second night I lie in her bed, smell her off the sheets, imagine her sleeping in it with Robert, the conversations they had, the lovemaking. I pick up the book by her nightstand. Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann. I open it on the bookmarked page: I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself. Alexis de Tocqueville. I read the chapter headings. What mind writes such a book? What mind reads it? Would Robert and Holfy have debated over it? I don’t understand why I am so happy here.

When she returns she asks me if the noise disturbed me and I say yes and tell her she should move immediately. I like the meat district. I grew up with screaming, she says. She smiles at the tidiness of the place, asks if I am trying to ingratiate myself. Yes, I say. Her directness is contagious. We agree on six hundred dollars a month, to be reviewed each month by both parties. Window cleaning welcome. Book tidying not.

She drives a blue Saab, and this evening we are driving uptown to visit Barbara’s bar which is not doing so well. This is the evening I realise we have been avoiding the obvious. I have known her a year, been living here six months. We have never touched except to jab each other playfully. She is asking me about the painting job at Bradley’s. Janis Joplin is singing on the car radio. The bar is almost empty when we arrive. Holfy refuses the free drinks. Barbara smiles at me, and her smile is that of a professional politician, a smile that seems to say she knows something about me, something I’m not even aware of myself. In that moment, it strikes me how it looks as if we are a couple.

That night, I go to her bed. She smiles at me and shakes her head. Slink back, she says. I ignore her finger pointing me back to my corner. She sits up and glares at me and I retreat. I sleep on my stomach, on the pain of hard desire.

*   *   *

Holfy’s roof is full of large potted flowers, their clay containers cracked and crumbling, life held together with wire and hope. She spends hours here, watering the plants, pruning them, having dinner. Breakfast on a weekend morning on this roof is heaven. She has a coq for cleanly lifting the head off a boiled egg. She has an egg spoon with a serrated edge, perfect for scraping the last morsel out of the thin base of the egg. She has spoons with deeper serrated edges for eating grapefruit. She has glasses that could never be filled with anything but orange juice. Small oval plates to accompany the boiled eggs. Napkins that cover the lap like small, heavy tablecloths.

The roof leaks badly that first summer and Gottleib blames Holfy and the weight of her plants. He threatens to remove everything. We rescue what we can before the roof is refelted. When the work is done she moves her plants back out, despite the warnings of the man who reputedly owns half of the meat district. The next day, when she comes home from work and climbs over the bed to the window she is confronted with a wrought-iron gate the size of a wardrobe, bolted onto the outside wall. Her first reaction is to fight but I suggest another approach. We can call the fire department. The window is the only escape from the building other than the door. But she can’t wait. She asks me to climb up on the roof and remove the gate. I climb up and fidget with the bolts. There are twelve. Some of the nuts are too tight, I lie. The pointing on the bricks looks fragile as if the mortar is crumbling like everything else on the street. I want to wait for the fire department. She asks me to try harder. I start to sing: tryyyy … tryyy … try just a little bit harder so I can lovelovelove … I kneel down, and tar, still wet in the summer heat, oozes from underneath the felt and sticks to my trousers.

—I don’t care how long it’s gonna take … Let’s wait, please.

She nods. Moments later she is beside me on the roof and with one enraged yank she rips the cage off the wall. Fuck him, she pants, wiping her hands on her hips. The twelve bolts lie on the roof like spent cartridges.

That evening we drive across the village to Barbara’s house for dinner. Holfy has a way of pouring wine that enhances its enjoyment before it touches the lips. The glass should always be half full. A full glass of wine is aesthetically vulgar to the eye. I study her hands. They are brown with the fading summer. She is wearing the lapis ring that she and Robert bought years ago in Italy. Although her fingernails are bitten they do not have a pained look about them. Hers are delicate hands. Femininity and femaleness meet in these hands. Beauty is stored here.

As time wears on I begin to question everything, including Holfy. Ah, when the pupil turns the gaze on the teacher. I am painting apartments and working in a catering firm. At night, if I’m free, I assist Holfy at the weddings she is covering. We are both at home at the same time, and it makes it hard to breathe. I suggest making a room in the apartment, a space in a corner that would have room enough for a small desk. But Holfy refuses to build walls. She wants twelve hundred square feet of light. It would ruin the light and nothing mattered more to her in the apartment than light.

I am uneasy working illegally in New York. We should marry, she says, simply to deal with the problem. I am tempted but in my gut know that it is not the answer. It will only compound the problems. I am drowning, drowning in my infatuation with her, frightened of how well we click, and beginning to see how lost and rudderless I am, how much I miss the tedious familiarity of Ursula.

*   *   *

—Darling?

Holfy is looking at me over her spectacle rims. She looks her age tonight. She smiles and it is a smile filled with such affection that I feel sad. I want to tell her I love her but know, even as the words form, that saying them is a selfish act: a pathetic need to reassure myself. She puts her book down and holds her arms out. I stare across at the Judd’s Gym sign flashing in the night.

—I’m farting tonight. Just to let you know the vastness of your love must breathe in the foulest odour.

I laugh and pick up her book. Holfy is reading Rousseau. Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

*   *   *

—After Cooper Union. Never put a line on paper unless you mean it, he said. I froze. I never put a line on paper. So I went to ICP instead. Full of Europeans. Photography is light, the guy there said. I’m from Iceland—there’s nothing he could teach me about light. As soon as I held a camera I knew. This was it. I felt the relationship. The rest was struggling with being artistic. I knew it was nothing to do with art. It was attitude. And Stillness. Light. I didn’t need to be told it was light, light was obvious. If you need to be told that it is already too late. But I was shy then. I said nothing. I made a mistake. For ten, fifteen years, I made a mistake. I hid behind the camera. Dead years. I won all the competitions in the those dead years. An explosion of hate—which was good to release but I didn’t channel it. I directed it at the viewer. I thought I was honest. So did all those judges. Olafsdottir is unflinchingly honest. We were all wrong. I should have been making it the essence of the photograph. Essence. Oops—essence. Time to stop talking.

—An explosion of hate?

—For my dear parents. Who else can we hate with such devotion?

The fragile and ancient hurt that seeps out of adults when they speak of wronged childhoods.

*   *   *

—I was raised by my mother after they divorced. My father got my brothers. My mother and I went to New York. She wasn’t going to stay in Iceland, and Hungary was out of the question—even if she liked her in-laws. She sold the Icelandic International Travel Agency and we left. I was happy. That smelly room had been responsible for the first time my mother hit me—I asked her why we put International in front of everything. It’s like living in a desert with a bodyguard, I said. Holfy lashes a hand through the air.

—She hit me a lot after that.

—And your father?

—My father. My father is my father. What else to say? I got to admire him a lot—when I had to live alone with my mother. When we all lived together I thought all the arguments were his fault. I thought the divorce was our fault, my brothers and I. Then I thought it was my fault. Years later, I looked at my mother and saw, as they say in America, she was the key player. My therapist—imagine a little village girl from Iceland having a therapist—asked me what is the one thing that sticks with me about my mother. Are you listening. The therapist said yes, and I said no, that was what I remember. Are you listening. I did nothing but listen to my mother.

Her husband.

—Robert was with Lavansky. The aeronautics Lavansky—not the painter. That’s what brought us together. Painting. He called me his chiaroscurist. I thought he was ribbing me when he said he tested helicopters. You mean whether they crash or not? I asked him and he nodded. Do they? I asked. Sometimes, he said. And he was so genuinely nonchalant that I fell for him there and then. Holfy’s face takes on a softness. She loves his memory too much for me ever to grow fond of him. I pour her some fresh coffee, go into the kitchen to wash the dishes. She continues talking through my drying.

—He crashed five times, you know that? Five times and never a scratch.

—What about the sixth?

It’s out before I can help myself.

—You’re a cruel, blue-eyed angel.

—Sorry.

—He was coming home. Midweek. He had been up at Lavansky’s. He was a real man. She blows me a kiss, takes off the purple chinese jacket. Underneath, a pale pink man’s shirt. She waves her hands in front of her reddened face.

—Hot flushes. That stage of life. He was coming in through the Queens tunnel. I never understood that. He always came in on 1. Always. And down the Hudson Parkway. He liked to get a look at the Palisades. He used to say Imagine what it was like when they first came in and saw the Palisades. New York must have been something else then. He liked the snatches he could glimpse of the Empire. He and it were born the same year. It’s why he liked my place so much—he’d stand at the window and say Our precious inch of Empire. He never ceased to be enchanted with New York. A car broke down in the tunnel in front of him. And then, in the other lane, going in the opposite direction, the same thing happened in almost the exact same spot. One in each lane at the same time. They had to reverse in trucks at either end. Traffic backed up in both lanes. When they towed out the car in front of Robert, he didn’t move. He was dead. He had had a heart attack. She laughs at the absurdity.

—A man who risks his life in the sky and dies underground. You have to have a sense of humour, yes?

I stare out the window at the mauve inch of the Empire State. Precious inch. The city seems full of love. The time I went to the top with Ursula when we visited New York. She sneaked up behind me as I leaned against the rail and slipped her arms through mine and brushed her fingers over my chest. Such bliss it was; the view of Manhattan and her. Hot dogs and sticking stamps on postcards and running my hand over his arms. The silence at the top; no horns, no sirens, no whoosh of hot subway train, no screaming miseries; nothing but breeze and dampness of clouds. I was still translating dollars and punts in my head, a tourist. Such a long time ago it seems. My eye catches sight of an ant traipsing up the windowpane; it pauses on the Empire’s tip, peaking over the Village, over all of us. His minuscule legs leading him nowhere. He crawls with vital importance to the top of the glass; reaches the edge; stops; hurries with magnificent urgency to the bottom. He marches up again, and halfway, turns and scurries daintily to the left. Three is such randomness in his movements and he makes decisions with such haste that it’s impossible to imagine there is a rationale behind his decision to turn left and not right. And yet there must be. I consider crushing him with the back of my thumbnail to end his frustration but stop myself: God must watch the world with the same indifference. Ursula. Longing for her overcomes me. The scent of her skin; seeing her laughing in the bed as we read those dreadful review books together.

*   *   *

I wash and dry the last glass. Holfy is sitting with her coffee, scraping at the wax that had spilled from the candleholders onto the wooden table. I sit down again and look at her. We look fixedly at each other for a long time. Then I stand up, the chair screeching on the tiled floor. I stoop and kiss her. She stands and kisses me back. Her mouth tastes wonderful. Even barefoot she is taller than I am. I pull away from her. I pick up the Eliot poems I’ve been reading and go into the darkroom. She potters around for a while, talks on the telephone.

*   *   *

—What you doing?

—Reading. Bed.

She frowns and shakes her head.

—Ms. Olafsdottir. I didn’t want to presume.

—Excellent pronunciation. Can you fuck too?

She nods her head for me to follow her.

*   *   *

She hands me a towel and tells me to shower. She tells me to hurry. A large curling turd floats in the toilet. Her own sweet smile. When I come out she tells me I am not supposed to get dressed again. Undress, she says. She sits by the fireplace and watches me. She tells me to lie down and to touch myself. I lick my finger and caress the tip of my nose. She tells me I must be serious. She takes straps from her travel case and ties my wrists to the bedposts. I am nervous, excited, fight a smile. She kisses my lips, my chest, my cock. She kisses my toes. She ties my ankles to the bedposts.

—Where did you get the ropes?

—My yoga ropes.

—Yoga ropes.

—Stop talking.

She unbuttons her shirt and looks at me looking at her purple bra. She grins and looks down at herself, grabs her own breasts. Then she pulls on a pair of yellow leather gloves. She lifts her skirt to her hips and gets on top of me. My stomach tenses under her wetness. She slaps me gently. I start to laugh unable to take it seriously. She shakes her head in warning. She holds my cock with her gloved hand, finds her opening, and encloses me. He rises up and down, slaps me hard. My face burns through my smile.

—Tell me when to stop.

She slaps me harder.

—Tell me when.

I look at her, at the world she is entering. She hits me again. My eye closes in pain. Her wetness running down my stomach, turning cold. She hits with both hands now as if swatting flies. The pain seeps into the back of my closed eyes. I am listening to her breathing, to her squelching pleasure. She is holding my ears and kissing my mouth, kissing my mouth and licking my lips, my nose, my eyelids. She licks my ears and says something. She repeats words in what must be Icelandic. She punches me in the face and any sense of the erotic vanishes. In English she tells me to open my mouth. She clears her throat, and spits into my mouth. She thrusts harder and harder until my pelvis bone hurts. She comes and comes, rubbing into me slowly until at last she spreads her heavy body on me and is calm. I am hard, unspent. But she is lost in herself and my excitement wanes. Powerlessness has its own passion, its own relief.

*   *   *

We sleep through the day and fuck and eat and sleep and fuck. Someone rings the doorbell persistently in the early afternoon but goes away. We hear car doors slam throughout the day, laughter from the lunch tables outside Florent. We settle into our own silence. I want to ask her why yellow gloves? If the game goes both ways, if I should hurt her? She is lying on her stomach, reading. I rub her back, move down to her buttocks. She spreads. I wet a finger in my mouth and find her anus. Violation, more than anything, arouses Holfy. I go in behind her. Lovelylovelylovelylovely.

We are whispering to each other in the groggy morning. She is lying on top of me, beached. I ask her is there any advice she remembers her father gave her to carry through life.

—O, yes. Say thank you. My father works for the United States government. He is very polite. Very civilised. She looks at me to check if I am following. I amn’t.

—He was on the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer’s favourite scientist—besides himself. The telephone rings. We lift our heads to see the time. It’s after five in the morning. I think it might be my father calling. I always think an early call is him phoning to give bad news. She answers as if she’s been awake hours. It’s the first conscious realisation I have of disliking something in her: this need to always appear switched on.

—Hi Jay.

Kleinmeyer. An art dealer she had a brief affair with—he was buying some of her husband’s paintings. I met him once at an art dealer’s house on Claremont Avenue. She was so at ease there, drifting between the big money, pointing out Grant’s Tomb across Riverside Drive. It was more an art gallery than a home. She’s loquacious with him. She rolls away from the phone smelling of his power. How could she touch such a pig of a man. Belly vast against his designer shirt. It disgusts me that she let this fatso inside her body. She has told me she would do anything for a man who could do something unexpected. You men are all so fucking predictable.

—He must have had to come in behind you.

She looks at me, baffled, her phone smile fading.

—You know, with that belly of his in the way.

She grimaces. I get up and shower, soaping myself with the soap she uses. The plastic blow-up duck, Newt, nudging my legs. Her slender legs when she showers. One of her hairs on the soap.

I go to Florent for coffee. Reggie is serving. The face of Greta Garbo and the style of Madonna. I have never felt fully at ease with Reggie; I had an erection the first time I saw him dressed as Edith Piaf. Then I learned she was a he.

—Tiff?

He pours me a coffee and pushes the cup forward like a delicate floral arrangement.

—She’s a motherfucker.

—Biscotti?

I nod. Reggie is wearing a silver silk bra with a matching silver miniskirt. His skin is flawless.

—I’d like to get her and—

—Now now, I’m easily shocked Mick. Do let me know when you discover your true orientation. I adore leprechauns.

He blows a kiss and totters off. A black is rooting through a Dumpster across the street. I am as sick of New York as much as I am sick of her. Her eagerness. All that shit about the sixties. Anything is possible. Anything. She comes in. Waves Reggie away. She sits down heavily beside me, pulls the coffee over by its saucer, twirls it, and sips.

—I don’t sleep with him anymore. But I need the business. I have to be smooth with him. He gets off on it. He could give the Maxim’s jobs to anyone.

—You do well enough.

—It’s not a money thing. I want to make it with the photography. Really make it.

—And you need him?

—Him? Everyone.

She’s so full of contradictions. I don’t know where to start.

Andrew Raposa, indignant writer for The Nation, comes in and joins us. I beam at my escape, and stand up.

—Here, Andrew. I’ve been keeping it warm.

—You going so soon?

—No he’s not. We’re having a conversation here Andy, okay?

Andrew holds his hands up and walks backwards away from us. I smile awkwardly at him and he waves an understanding hand. She’ll stay and talk with him about this, and I feel myself close a little more.

*   *   *

She rolls over to my side. Her touch is an apology. I hate her. I turn and kiss her. I smile the smile she likes. We kiss. I caress her between her legs until she moans. I watch her pleasure.

—Turn over.

—Not yet.

Her eyes are closed.

—Turn over.

She gets up and turns. I go in fast and she takes in a breath, steadies herself. I plough as hard as I can into her. My anger bangs against her for all its worth. I am so angry I can’t come. I grip the fat on the sides of her buttocks and keep going, digging my nails into her. The sweat rolls off me and I begin to lose my breath. I think of hitting her hard and that does it—I come—and I pull out of her and sit panting on the bed. She gets up and lights a cigarette.

—Hey, that’s the first time we came together.

I wipe the sweat out of my eyes and give her the finger. No matter how bad it is with her, it is always intoxicating. Such pleasure in taking Holfy without ceremony. Once, just after she’s gone to the toilet. No time to wipe herself. That is the sin. To go further than desire.

She gets Photoworld, Good Gardener, Roof Gardens, J. Crew, Caring, Victoria’s Secret (not for the clothes, she says), Land’s End, L.L. Bean, Tweeds. A dozen catalogues, at least. As many magazines arrive for Robert Dead Husband. Alumni magazine from NYU, Daedalus Books catalogue, Film World, marketing blurb from Lincoln Center. The Time Machine Company catalog. Palladium Numismatics. Pieces of his life.

A Mr. Kutzko telephones looking for RDH:

—He’s not here. He’s dead.

—I’m dreadfully sorry, says Mr. Kutzko.

—You sound it.

—Excuse me?

—You need to update your listings. He died three years ago.

—Is Mrs. Tansey available?

I hang up on his Armani voice. New York never stops selling. Even the New York Observer comes with his name on it. Robert is everywhere. I share Holfy with a dead man.

*   *   *

In summer she does her tai chi on the roof. She started it with Robert the week before he died. Occasionally I look up from the worktop and stare out the window and there she is: arms outstretched, knees bent, the light fabric of her culottes flapping. She has the grace of a swan. When she comes in, I wash the roof tar off her feet with a basin of warm water and rub peppermint lotion into her toes. Bronzed and papery her feet are with age. I rub tiger balm on the pain in her lower back. She is the centre of my happiness.

She drinks vodka gimlets. Any drink that requires a mixer is a good drink in her eyes. I ask her to make me a manhattan. You want to drink New York, she says, without looking up from her negatives. She sits in her Bloomingdale’s underwear most evenings, when she wears underwear. She wears a black bra and no knickers and manages to look both dressed and coordinated. She understands the rippling secrets of fashion. I like the smell of her sweat, her juice, enjoy waiting for Holfy to do her face in the evening. The transformations. Clothes reveal her mood. Surface is everything, she says one night. We are on the roof garden at the Met, watching the orange sun glide between buildings. Surface is everything. One of those irritating catchphrases that she is so good at pluming in front of me. Indeed, I say, watching the sun drop out of sight. She picks up my tone of voice and looks at me like I am a stranger. The distance of years seeping between us. I realise I don’t know her at all. All the talk we share, all the books, the music, is irrelevant in the face of this.

*   *   *

I go into the bathroom, look at myself in the mirror and feel far from home. I sit down on the edge of the bath and stare at the prints on the wall. Lichtenstein and Haring. I never really liked them. I am being unfair to her. She had these a long time, before they were known. There is other art crammed on the wall, most of the artists unknown. I am looking for a reason to dislike her. As if to taunt me I smell her cigarette smoke. She smoked Marlboro when she can’t get Gitanes, smokes with the kind of urbane sophistication that makes me want to start smoking again. I am trying to insert myself into life as if it were some intricate board game.

She comes into the bathroom and stands in front of me. She reaches down and scratches my head and I press the side of my face to her warm stomach. We stroke each other. We kiss and she sits on the edge of the sink. It is not making love. It is not fucking either. Afterwards I ask her what it is and she says she doesn’t know what it is but whatever it is it is not ineffable. She asks me never to use the word ineffable and she asks me to stop looking for truth. Approximate, she says.

*   *   *

Days pass, and then weeks pass and we don’t talk about the future. Her friends say nothing. People are happy that we are happy. And people—at least the people we know—don’t really want to know about my life in Ireland. This is New York City and we live in the present and the edgy excitement of what we might do next weekend is as far as we take ourselves. Approximate. This is all we ever do. There are no facts. Buildings are facts. Trees are facts. But trees and buildings fall and disappear as quickly as love between people disappears.

*   *   *

I am tying Holfy by the wrists and feet to the window gate with the yoga straps. I stand there looking at her moist haunches. The basin between her feet. She is wearing the silver shoes. The skin slack on the underside of her buttocks. Memories chink in my head like glass bottles. Ursula looking at me in disgust. I look at the contraption in my hands and I can’t do it. The pause tells her.

—Don’t worry about it. It’s who you are. Who I am. You’ve discovered a boundary in your life. Hooray. Untie me you scoundrel and let’s go do a New York thing.

It doesn’t deflate the humiliation. I lovehate her for making little of the failure. We go and do the NYT as she calls it and eat Merluza a La Vasca at Café San Martin. We have a bottle of Albarîno. She has strawberries and cream. I eat the natillas. She plucks the ends off the strawberries and flicks them into the ashtray.

—You see, there’s the hull and here’s the strawberry disappearing into my greedy mouth.

—Fuck off.

—O, dear, who knew?

She reminds me about the day in Central Park when we hired a boat and fucked on the secluded rock. Then she rowed off and abandoned me. We laugh at the memory but the evening is gone from us. Another wall discovered. Another loss. Leaves suddenly falling.

*   *   *

The message stuck on the kitchen table: Your father is sick. Go home. Take a taxi for once in your life. Flight at 7. Seats available. If you’re home by 4 you might make it to airport. Sorry. I’ll wait. Will always wait.

Botero jumps on hind legs looking for biscuits. I call Muriel but there’s no answer. The Aidan but no answer there. I scribble on Holfy’s note that I’m going and will call her from the airport. I pick up one of her cameras. I regret not having a photograph of Ruth in her last days. Might as well get one of him. He better be dying.

There’s a long queue to the metal detector. A woman is pleading with security about her pram.

—The pram has to go through.

—But they’re asleep.

—You’ll have to take them out. The pram goes through, Mam.

It’s fun to fly; to watch other people’s distress.

There is a phone in the seat of the airplane. I pull it out and look at it but it needs a credit card to operate. Fumbling, I try and to get it back in the slot. The man next to me taps me and asks if I want to use it, if it’s a short call. Three words. My credit card can spring for three words, he says. I’ll wait, too, I say to her answering machine. Wonder how much it costs to whisper three words into an answering machine flying over the Atlantic Ocean?