NOVEMBER 3, 1977
Dear Thaddeus,
How do you like this card? I bought it on the fifth floor, first-time use of employee discount. I’m having a birthday party Friday, but no presents. Your presence is my present. Bring your lady.
Your humble servant,
Gene
IN COLLEGE BACK IN ANN ARBOR, KIP’S FRIENDS USED TO SAY he looked like Franz Kafka, with his deep, dark witnessing eyes; curvaceous lips; and sunken cheeks. But now the resemblance was less pronounced. He’d put on a bit of weight, his gaze no longer seemed wounded, but mocking. He was two years ahead of Thaddeus in college, a comparative literature major, and now worked as a stockbroker for E.F. Hutton. His life was bicameral. By day, working the phones at his little desk on Worth Street, by night in all kinds of trouble—cocaine trouble, tattoo trouble, blackjack in Chinatown trouble, party until dawn trouble. Even his ostensibly wholesome enthusiasms could lead to disgrace—he was an avid collector of first editions, and had been caught stealing a pristine copy of Glenway Westcott’s The Grandmothers from Bilbo and Tannin’s, escaping arrest by promising never to set foot in the store again.
It was Kip who’d urged Thaddeus to move to New York after graduation. More than anyone else Thaddeus knew—with the possible exception of Grace—Kip believed in his talent as a writer and exuded a certainty that one day Thaddeus would publish and be able to secure for himself a modest reputation among the discerning. “You’ll be poor but admired,” Kip said. Poor but admired? Did those two things even go together anymore? Grace’s theory was either that Kip had a secret source of money or that his job at E.F. Hutton was paying a lot more than he admitted to. In support of this either/or theory Grace noted that the chair Thaddeus so admired was a genuine Eames chair, worth thousands, and had as much to do with Sam Kaufman’s BarcaLounger as a brioche had to do with a wad of Wonder Bread. She also recognized that the threadbare carpet in the living room was a Sarouk, made in Persia before it became Iran, and was also worth thousands. Thaddeus would have liked to own at least one suit like Kip’s, and it fell to Grace to wise him up to the fact that anything from J. Press was out of their range, and shirts and ties from Turnbull & Asser were so far out of their range that he should do himself a favor and stop fondling the fabric.
Kip kept odd hours. He would never firmly state where he would be or when. Work, he said, work work work as if it were a kind of rain, the rain that made the crops grow but soaked you through and through, the rain that could make you or could ruin you, depending on where you pitched your tent. But there seemed something secret, too, something desperate in his dogged, expensive pursuit of altered consciousness, a kind of internal jet-setting. Those amazing wines, that bottomless jar of gnarled marijuana buds, the kind they used as centerfolds in High Times. A jaunty little vial seemed to generate its own coke. Grace found a spent popper in the silverware drawer, along with a postcard from a friend in London showing one of those resplendent Beefeater guards, with the message on the back: He’s mine! “Kip’s a queer,” Grace said. “I’ll bet you a dollar.” Thaddeus did not believe it to be true. He managed to resist giving Grace a lecture on tolerance. Kip made the rounds accompanied by one standard-issue beautiful woman after another, from every aspect of ascendant Manhattan life, bankers and real estate brokers, and all manner of artists. In college, Kip had worn a beret, hair down to his shoulders, had a taste for Stockhausen, Breton, Tristan Tzara. He had worked on his own translations of Mayakovsky, he named his Siamese cat The Cloud in Trousers. He edited the campus literary magazine called My Heart Belongs to Dada. Now in New York, despite his long hours on Wall Street, Kip seemed to know hundreds of people in the arts, his “punk pals.” The Village Voice and the Soho News covered the Wall Street Journal on his coffee table. He hinted at a love affair with Deborah Harry. He introduced Joey Ramone to an investment advisor and when he had the flu Patti Smith brought him soup. The emaciated singer took one look at Thaddeus and Grace and asked, “What are you two doing here?” And for weeks they wondered if she had meant why were they in Kip’s apartment or in New York City. (They finally got themselves some peace of mind by deciding she had meant nothing at all.)
Kip often urged Thaddeus and Grace to accompany him to a performance at some ad hoc gallery in the far West Village, an installation, a concert, a night at the Palladium, a chance to meet Richard Brautigan, a birthday party for Viva at the Chelsea. But the disheveled, slapdash, angry art of New York just then did not appeal to either Grace or Thaddeus. Grace stubbornly admired skill and couldn’t understand why any artist would not want to make beautiful drawings like Ingres, or paint like Lippi, with every detail as perfectly placed as jewels in a crown. Thaddeus, though barely writing, was reading Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cain, and Chandler, and his idea of an avant-garde publication was the Partisan Review. Both of them felt inadequate and superior, defensive, confused. They only felt safe and successful in each other’s company.
Every generation gets its own New York and Thaddeus and Grace’s New York was a city that was loud and dangerous, discouraged and falling apart. It was not a place Fred Astaire would set foot in. It was not a place where F. Scott Fitzgerald or John O’Hara or Mary McCarthy or James Thurber, or anyone else with a light touch and a taste for glamor would feel at home. There was a kind of coarseness to the place: whatever became of savoir faire? Yes, there were still people who drank lovely cocktails and had twinkling views of the skyline, but Thaddeus and Grace could no sooner mix socially with them than they could with Jimmy and Rosalynn.
Thaddeus wanted to write, Grace wanted to make art, but they needed to sleep, shower, shop for food, clean the apartment, and earn a living. What time was left they wanted to spend with each other. To be private, to be enraptured, to feel the drug of it, the exhilaration and the security. So there were a great many things they missed, and people they did not meet. Those their age seemed angry, raw, unprotected, nihilistic, lacking in polish, suspicious of polish, militantly and perhaps somewhat conveniently staked out against polish. Here’s what I think of your well-made sentence and here’s what I make of your lovingly rendered pear, these new artists seemed to say, grabbing their crotch, sneering. Grace thought these so-called punks were just a pack of talentless temper-tossing suburban refugees. Thaddeus thought that all those difficult often indecipherable downtown writers, so full of errors and perversity, were attempting to cover up their own emptiness with a flurry of experimentation and theory. In truth they were both more than a little afraid of the artists their own age, and exhausted and bewildered by New York. But what were they supposed to do? Go back to Chicago with their tails between their legs?
Where was the middle path? How could you live a moral and creative life and still have extremely nice things, plenty of room, those beautiful towels from the Palmer House?
Thaddeus started working on a story about a young girl who dies and comes back to life the next day, but in Shanghai instead of Chicago, and she surprises everyone with her first word: Elvis. Grace asked him if it was sort of about his sister and they had their first fight.
“It’s like me taking your drawing of an orange and trying to squeeze orange juice out of it,” Thaddeus had said.
“Well, I’d be flattered,” Grace answered. They had to whisper; Kip was in the next room, doing his Jane Fonda exercises in front of the Trinitron.
“Well, you’re not supposed to read like that,” he said.
“Sorry,” Grace said, no longer whispering, “I didn’t go to college and no one gave me the rule book about how to fucking read.”
They found an apartment in an old four-story building, on Twenty-Third Street just west of Madison Avenue. The ground floor of the squat, white brick building was occupied by the Health Nuts, where six days a week cashews, pistachios, pecans, and Virginia Old Style peanuts languished beneath heat lamps, and were sold by the eighth of a pound in waxy little white bags. Business was slow at the Health Nuts and the infrequent customers were an odd lot. They seemed emissaries from a different world, pale, thoughtful men in topcoats and fedoras, women who wore snazzy little capes and pillbox hats with veils.
“I think there’s some sort of weird door between dimensions,” Grace said while looking out of their apartment’s only window that didn’t open onto an air shaft. “And I think it opens up right in front of the Health Nuts, and weirdos from the 1940s go in and buy nuts.”
“Why don’t they just buy nuts in the 1940s?” Thaddeus once asked. “Why do they have to come all the way over to 1977 to buy nuts?”
“How the fuck should I know?” Grace answered. And the laughter that ensued, the frenzy of amusement and arousal left them breathless. They couldn’t say what was so funny about her remark, but it was, it was hilarious, another in-joke, another gateway to the mad gasping joy between them.
They were each other’s refuge in a city that overwhelmed them. Thaddeus called it “New Yorkitis.” If they stood at their window, at a certain angle, on certain nights, they could see the swirl of mist around the Metropolitan Life Headquarters, and if they moved a little to the left they could see the lighted tower of the Empire State Building and the moon at the same time, and the thing that was most amazing was that, when it came to glamour, the moon came in second—and seemed to know it. It was Grace who noticed that the moon seemed more confident when it was over Chicago.
They often felt as if they’d been cast into a great production but had not been given an opportunity to learn their lines. The anxiety was epic, especially for Grace. She was used to feeling at odds with her environment, ignored, undiscovered, powerless. It was how she had felt in Eau Claire, and Chicago. But in New York it was worse. She was full of symptoms. The accelerated heart rate, the sweaty palms, the sudden staggering fear of death—not from gunshot or stabbing or botulism or poison or heart attack or cancer or through the criminal carelessness of a drunken driver, or a madman’s rage, but death for death’s sake. It fell to Thaddeus to protect her from her own thoughts. You’re going to be fine, he promised her. Her heart was strong, her body was doing its job, front and center, every corpuscle accounted for. Never mind the tingling scalp, the racing heart. It was merely anxiety. Paranoia. Agoraphobia. He was back to dancing, his arms waving, singing his little tunes.
Kip had helped both of them get jobs. Kip could navigate the waters of Manhattan like a native scout. He pointed Thaddeus in the direction of B. Altman, where he was hired as a junior member of the in-house advertising staff. Able to write about anything the department store sold—suits and ties, books and records, pots and pans, perfume, framed autographs, jewelry—he was praised for his versatility. His own longing for the many things he could not afford gave his copy an extra animation.
For Thaddeus, Manhattan was a crash course in failure, his Ph.D. in pauperhood. He was used to being without money, but he was not accustomed to being around people who seemed to have so much. That afternoon at the Palmer House had affected him like the first drink can seal the fate of a born alcoholic. Those towels! Those sheets! There were people who could enjoy these things and took them for granted. It made what he had seem so sad, depleted, and utilitarian. What was the point of life without access to all the pleasures on earth? Read your Epicurus. Look around you. People were sleeping in better beds, eating tastier food, traveling the world as if the world was theirs, while you and your beloved were holed up like losers in an apartment with virtually no light, drying yourself with towels that just moved the moisture around rather than absorbing it. He experienced his penury as a kind of apartheid, a daily injustice. It might have been easier had they stayed in Chicago, but here in New York all the things he craved were on full display. All you had to do was look through the storefront windows at the cheese wrapped in actual cheesecloth, jackets that made ordinary men look mysterious, and stacks of pastel shirts to make Daisy Buchanan swoon.
If only he could afford just one of those shirts! If only. New York was the world headquarters of If Only. If only you had a couple of thousand dollars. If only you had a closet in your apartment. If only your bedroom got even fifteen minutes of sunlight. Everybody knew you came to New York to go up the ladder, not down. To be celebrated, not ignored. And certainly not to be stuck in a subway car stalled between stations, eyeing your fellow passengers in the flickering light, wondering which one was getting ready to vomit on your shoes. Which happened to him.
Kip’s helpfulness extended to Grace, whom he helped get a job at Periodic Books, which specialized in scientific books. She was trained to work in the production department, where she earned $10,500 a year. It was more than the Palmer House, though the opportunities to engage in a bit of judicious pilfering were more numerous at the hotel. All she could swipe at Periodic were envelopes, pens, paper clips, bottles of Wite-Out, a couple of metal rulers, and, of course, books. But what the job at Periodic gave to her was a kind of proxy association with educated, upwardly mobile people. She now had a marginal membership in the New York media intelligentsia and when asked what she did, Grace could say, “Oh, I’m a book designer over on Forty-First Street.” She thought it was sort of chic to signify her employer through its address, like the Harvard grads who said they’d gone to college in Boston—such noblesse oblige obfuscation!
At work, Grace feared detection and expulsion—not for theft but for lying. She knew it was crazy to worry so much about it, but she had gotten her job under false pretenses, and every day she expected to be called into her boss’s cubicle and informed that they’d checked on her so-called degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the only record the school had of her was two summer classes, one of which had taken an incomplete. And this was New York. This wasn’t the Palmer House, where they just told you to get the heck out. Here she might be forcibly escorted from the office, here she might be frog-walked through the lobby and tossed out onto the street as if into an open grave.
Thaddeus and Grace met after work and walked back to their apartment if the weather was half decent. They liked to stop at a bar called Dugan’s on their way home, and after a few months the bartender and the regulars—a shaky bunch, to be sure—recognized them and even seemed pleased to see them, though from a business point of view it would be hard to think of worse customers. They ordered a Dewar’s on ice with a twist of lemon, and a glass of Guinness and traded their drinks back and forth over the course of half an hour, at which point they left a seventy-five-cent tip and were on their way.
It did not seem exactly like a New York thing to do, but they held hands as they strolled home. “Every time I touch you, I know we are meant to be,” Thaddeus said, and Grace squeezed his fingers and smiled. The more they were together the more she let him do the talking. His declarations were hyperbolic, and though they were touching and sweet they had a way of silencing her. She simply could not think of anything to say that would match his ardor. And what about my art? What do you think of that? Do you worry that I hardly have any time left to draw? I worry all the time about your writing. Do you worry about me in that way? Do you? Do you? Of course she could not say these things. They seemed so small and churlish and needy and lame. But the more she suppressed saying it, the more it was felt.
New York had fallen on such hard times. A cop car was going against traffic, the driver’s-side door badly dented, its windshield cracked. The new centurions bombing around in jalopies!
“Your hand in mine,” Thaddeus said. “It’s everything to me.”
“Thank you,” said Grace.
“Are you okay?” he asked after a while.
“Mary Ellen? Who I guess is my boss? She asked me if I kept up with my school friends.”
“As if it were her business,” said Thaddeus.
“And she just stared at me. I think she knows I didn’t graduate.”
You didn’t even attend, thought Thaddeus. You took a couple of summer courses. He hated himself when he had such thoughts.
“She’s just waiting for me to make a mistake,” Grace said. “It makes me so nervous I can hardly even think straight.”
They passed a wine shop called Park Spirits, where they once went to a pre-auction tasting of some legendary Bordeaux. They had sipped little dark purple splashes of Haut-Brion and Cheval Blanc, parsimoniously poured from bottles that cost as much as either of them earned in a week, and now whenever they passed Park Spirits, Grace said, “They’re in there.”
Near Park Spirits was a jewelry shop called Gina’s Gems. In all the times they had walked past, they’d only entered once. In the chaos of the display window, with its encrusted bracelets and hammered brass pendants and little beige pouches brimming with Mexican and Indian rings, one thing had caught Grace’s eye, and she wanted to try it on—a simple emerald ring. There was not the remotest possibility of their buying such a piece, now or anytime in the foreseeable future, but she wanted to see it on her hand, if only for a minute.
Gina herself had been behind the counter, dressed in a gold-and-black caftan, a large, middle-aged woman, with girlish freckles and curly hair a curious shade of red. She lumbered to the display window, unlocked it with her small, stout hands, slid the store-side panel, and reached in, toppling a display of brightly beaded African earrings in the process. The ring itself was not new and Gina watched with her arms folded over her bosom as Grace held it up to the light and then slipped it onto her finger.
“It’s so green,” Grace said, in an awestruck whisper.
Gina explained that she was handling this emerald ring on consignment from her sister-in-law, who was planning to return to Brooklyn College, where she hoped to get certified to teach in the public schools. “I told her, ‘Doris, schools are closing, belts are tightening, no one’s hiring,’ but Doris wants what Doris wants. And for this she wants four thousand. I don’t know if you know very much about jewelry . . .”
“A bit,” said Grace.
“Well then, you see I mainly deal with jewelry of an artistic sort, from native peoples all over the world. A ring like this would normally go for twice what she is asking. Emeralds! This one comes from Zambia. Four and three-quarter carats, nice cut, and you see the color. Deep, but clear.” She pointed to Grace. “Like your eyes, sweetheart.”
“Thank you,” Grace said, taking the ring off and handing it back to Gina. “It’s out of our range.”
“She can always pick out the one thing,” Thaddeus said. “And it’s always the best.”
“Well, she chose you, right?” Gina said.
“The exception that proves the rule,” said Thaddeus.
“I have some beautiful jade,” Gina said. “Which frankly I prefer. I could put it in the exact same setting.”
When they were out on the street again, Grace noticed Thaddeus had a grim expression, and she asked him what was bothering him, though she half-knew.
“You didn’t have to tell her I was too poor to get you the ring you want,” he said.
“You’re too poor? What happened to we’re too poor? Anyhow: we’re young!”
Over the next few weeks, she continued to glance at the window when they walked past, until one day the emerald ring was gone. She wasn’t sure Thaddeus had noticed, but he put his arm around her as they passed the shop, knocked his hip into hers, so she supposed he had.
Lately, knowing that if she and Thaddeus were not careful they would begin to devour each other—Liam had said as much to her in a letter—Grace was pushing herself to meet other artists. But those she managed to meet had little interest in or respect for what she was trying to accomplish, and what had begun as a cheerful, hopeful openness was beginning to turn guarded and even a little sour. Going to galleries she did her best to keep hidden her sense of alarm about the work on display, but the grainy videos of people moping around some filthy apartment seemed incompetent to her. And the physically demanding (and, she thought, demeaning) performance pieces that they would sometimes hear about and be able to attend embarrassed and basically horrified her—she was particularly bothered by a piece called Failure in which the naked artist attempted to climb a wall using a rope and her own negligible strength, and the artist, if that’s what she was, kept falling to the ground, injuring and reinjuring herself, and grabbing on to the rope and trying it again and again, her legs bruised, her shaggy crotch taking on the appearance of the suffering face of an agonized Christ on the cross. Was that the point? Was it about suffering? It was surely about failure—but whose failure? The artist’s? Or the onlookers’ failure to discern that they were nothing more than voyeurs? Or was it Society’s failure? Maybe Art had failed? Most likely the failure had been Shaggy’s parents, who had either underfed or overfed her ego. The entire production made Grace sick with disapproval. She supposed she was a conservative, at least in this.
Thaddeus and Grace were at the opening of Failure not through Kip, but through a work friend of Thaddeus’s, a fellow named Gene Woodard, who worked in men’s furnishings, selling tie clips, cuff links, and shaving sets. Gene was poorly paid and worked long hours on his feet, but he often said, “This suits me to a T.” Thaddeus thought men’s furnishings was perhaps the most depressing part of the store—all those ties, belts, rows and rows, it was like a morgue. And if you wanted to push it a bit, you could even say it was like Bergen-Belsen.
Gene was fanatically devoted to the job. He never missed a day. He twice reported fellow workers for theft. He referred to anyone in a supervisory capacity as Mr. or Miss. He was painfully deferential whenever he came to meet Thaddeus in the room off the mezzanine where the advertising copywriters worked, knocking on the door with one timid knuckle, coming in with an obsequious shuffle and looking around with a sense of wonder at the grim little shared cubicle where Thaddeus worked—two desks, an armchair, and yet another useless window.
Gene was not particularly forthcoming about himself, but even so Thaddeus was able to deduce a history of strife and unhappiness—struggles with alcohol, psychiatric issues serious enough to warrant two brief stays at a hospital called Austen Riggs up in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Thaddeus and Grace were invited to Gene’s twenty-eighth birthday party. Gene’s apartment was on West Twenty-First Street, and that evening the weather was warm, so they could walk from their apartment. The darkness seemed to contain an extra layer. They talked about what would be the best way to describe that shade of blue. Could something so dark even be blue? A wind blew west to east; the last of the fallen leaves, the ghosts of summer, swirled from curb to curb. West of Fifth Avenue the neighborhood looked poorer, mainly tenement-style apartment houses, the windows negated by burglar gates, the bricks crisscrossed with fire escapes.
Grace clasped Thaddeus’s hand and lifted it to her lips and kissed each knuckle.
“Are you happy?” she asked him.
“Right now?” He made a thinking-about-it face. “I guess.”
“I am so insanely happy,” she said. “People settle for so much less than we have. You know that, don’t you?”
“I do.” Less was very vivid to him. “And I wish you were wearing that ring.”
After a silence, Grace said, “Yeah, me too, I guess.”
“You know what else I wish? That we had a kid.” He didn’t look at her when he said it.
“How would I ever be an artist?”
“I don’t know. You just would.”
“Oh my God, Thaddeus. How can you even think about it? We are so lost. Do you really want to pass that on?”
“I’m tired of being a son,” Thaddeus said. “Time to be a father.”
“It would destroy me,” Grace said. “I’d be my mother in no time.”
As they neared Gene’s place, Twenty-First Street turned suddenly lovely, with half of it given over to a Gothic seminary. The bare trees surrounding the red brick building were spaced as neatly as a pattern on a shawl. Gene occupied the garden and first floors of a town house near Tenth Avenue, with a steep fourteen-step porch. Beneath the porch, a homeless man was preparing to go to sleep in a cardboard shelter filled with rags. He wore fingerless gloves and a World War II pilot’s cap. Thaddeus and Grace glanced at him through the spaces between the steps.
“Beneath,” Thaddeus whispered.
“What?”
“I don’t know. There’s always something.” Something elusive but powerful, and impossible to hold on to swept through him like a sudden rain, and then it was gone, leaving nothing in its wake but a kind of confusion.
So it turned out that Gene was rich. The job at Altman’s for a measly hourly wage was a form of penance, the time he spent there a kind of masquerade. Working in tandem, his father and his uncle had sold Gene on the notion that the (supposed) stability of a salesclerk’s existence and a steady diet of quotidian reality, including an alarm clock, a boss, a budget, and a reason to get up in the morning would offer some respite from his alcoholic episodes. “Better than singing the blues to some headshrinker,” his father had said. “And instead of spending ours, you’ll be making yours.”
The door to Gene’s place was painted dark red, with a Hand of Fatima brass knocker. Grace lifted it and let it fall, and a few moments later Gene opened the door. Reeking of irony and mothballs, he wore a tuxedo, a starched shirt, a black bow tie. His trousers were dusty at the knees. He was handsome, with even features, sandy hair, blue eyes; his smile radiated mischievous joy and he was thoroughly drunk.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he said, attempting to glare at Thaddeus while reaching for Grace, grabbing her arm to pull her into the house. “You can stay right there,” he said to Thaddeus. “We’re stealing all the women and there’s no bastards allowed!”
“You didn’t tell me it was formal,” Thaddeus said, indicating with a gesture his own casual garb.
“I didn’t? It doesn’t matter, you’re not the only ones. Some of us were just thinking that with a president in blue jeans and ratty old cardigans it might be time to bring back a bit of tradition.”
“You should have told us,” Grace said.
“Oh nonsense,” Gene said. “You look lovely. You’ll be the loveliest woman here. And this one.” He draped his arm over Thaddeus’s shoulder. “In evening wear this little genius might come off as a headwaiter.”
Thaddeus and Grace followed him into a dark foyer, where several bicycles were haphazardly stored, and into his parlor, with its high ceiling and simple brick hearth, its bare wide-board floors and a Queen Anne sofa upholstered in red. A young man in a kilt playing something mournful on the bagpipes wandered through the parlor on his way somewhere.
“A leftover from the Silver Jubilee,” Gene said, in a confiding, slightly derisive tone. “I believe Elizabeth dispatched him to Singapore and now he’s here.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Thaddeus said.
“You don’t?” Gene clapped Thaddeus’s shoulder. “Well, good for you! We need more of that around here.”
Thaddeus and Grace traded looks as they followed Gene down a metal spiral staircase leading to the garden level.
“I’m twenty-eight years old and completely alone in the world,” Gene called out to them, over his shoulder. He said it as if he had just discovered a hidden hilarity in his situation.
Watching his friend descend the staircase, Thaddeus had the sense of watching someone going down the drain. The lower half of the duplex was filled with guests and books. Shelves went from floor to ceiling and were so overloaded that the boards sagged in the middle. At no point in their many conversations at work did Gene indicate he possessed such an extensive personal library. He spoke of current events, and various intrigues in the men’s furnishings department and throughout the entire store, and now, looking at those hundreds of volumes, Thaddeus was beset by stinging memories of how confidently he himself had held forth about novels and short stories to Gene, giving this personable yet slightly less fortunate man the benefit of his U of M education.
“Nice,” Thaddeus said, waving weakly at the shelves.
“Mainly my uncle’s,” Gene said. “I’ve squeezed a couple of my own in there, but those are his books. This is his place and everything in it. Luckily for me, he’s in Thailand, and if you ask me, he’s never coming back. He’s been eaten alive by Buddhism.” He smiled and held up the wine bottle he’d been carrying, two fingers around its dark neck. “I’ve been a bad boy.”
“Who do I see about being a bad girl?” Grace asked.
Gene grinned delightedly and his eyes glittered. “Where did you find this marvelous girl?” he exclaimed.
“Nobody finds me, birthday boy. I find them.” Somehow Gene’s antic nature, his mixture of superiority and sheer goofiness appealed to Grace and made her more forthcoming than Thaddeus had expected.
“I am the birthday boy, aren’t I?” Gene said, grinning, rubbing his hands together. “And there’s something rather marvelous in that, don’t you think?”
There wasn’t much furniture and most of the guests stood, drinking from wineglasses, tumblers, and beer bottles, talking with great animation and volume. Sliding glass doors led to a yard enclosed by an eight-foot wooden fence. The yard was paved in flagstones; terracotta planters held frost-blackened ferns. Japanese paper lanterns swung haphazardly in the breeze.
“What a place,” Thaddeus said.
“You should buy it,” Gene said, with absurd enthusiasm. “Real estate is an excellent investment and I know Uncle Cary would be glad to unload it. The problem is the upstairs tenants, of which there are three. The redoubtable Craig Levitz, a poet, Jeanette Doubleday, no relation to anyone you’d care to be related to, and the inevitable Russian lady with her little dog.”
“Like in Chekhov,” Thaddeus said, instantly embarrassing himself.
“Anyhow,” Gene continued, “New York City housing law makes it difficult to evict tenants. You have to resort to extracurricular methods, such as freezing them out and dressing up as a ghost and jumping out at them when they come home at night. You don’t strike me as the type. Or is he?” This directed at Grace.
“Thaddeus is a gentleman,” Grace said.
“Sure he is,” Gene said. “A gentle man.”
“I don’t think we’ll be buying a brownstone anytime soon,” Thaddeus said.
“Well, up to you. But the city’s going belly-up and that’s always a good time to buy. Say, you know what you two need?” Gene said, pointing at them, first one, then the other. “A trip up the river to Eastwood.”
“Eastwood?” said Thaddeus. “As in Dirty Harry?”
“Not that Eastwood. It’s my family’s place in Leyden, which I call Brigadoon. My sisters have banned me from the place. They accuse me of stealing some soup spoons and putting them up for auction at Doyle.”
“Are your spoons that valuable?” Thaddeus asked.
“God. They’re old and tarnished and taste like a mouth full of dimes. But anything ancestral makes my family extremely tense.”
“Where’s Leyden?” Grace asked. “We’re from Chicago.”
“Ninety-nine point nine miles north of here. Straight up the river.”
“That’s in Windsor County, right?” Thaddeus said. “Where a lot of writers used to be.”
“Oh, it’s the snoozy-boozy land of used-to-be,” Gene said. “I’m sure I’ll be reinstated to everyone’s good graces by Christmas. Ice boating, Pimm’s cup, bridge, and unspeakable food. You have to visit. You must. Come watch the death throes of a way of life. And bring this marvelous girl.”
“I don’t get brung,” Grace said.
Gene made a barking laugh. Loud laughter was everywhere, from the men in tuxedos, and the bare-shouldered women in form-fitting dresses. Laughter! Gaiety! Joy! It had never occurred to Thaddeus that rich people could be so goddamned funny. Gene—who until fifteen minutes ago had seemed like such a lost soul, a hardship case—had somehow inherited all these people along with the key to these luxurious rooms. And a house up the Hudson, like something out of Evelyn Waugh. It would be amazing and illuminating to go—a country weekend with enough witty repartee to choke a horse. With Grace, of course, the two of them getting loaded on those legendary wines, dining on beef Wellington and devils-on-horseback, allowing themselves to be bullied into skating on a pond or shooting skeet, and then repairing to one of a multitude of guest rooms, where they would dissect their hosts’ manners and morals, décor, speech, opinions, and dress, and have to place pillows over their own mouths to muffle their laughter.
Thaddeus worried that at any moment Gene was going to abandon them, but instead he stayed at their elbow, steering them through the crush, making introductions, impossible to keep track of, but okay, because just as they would not remember the names that went with all the new faces, the faces would not remember them. Bryan Noy, Patricia Hubbard, Constantine Covey, Mian Jan, Rip Gallin, Xavier Mendoza, Sanjay Ghosh, one after the next, with the preferred mode of greeting a slight shift of the weight backward, a firm handshake, head tilted, a bemused smile, a furrowed brow—as if each person was almost remembering you. It was as if they had all learned a dance at the same studio.
And lo and behold in the mix of all the unfamiliarity, Kip Woods emerged, also not in formal wear, but looking lithe and stylish in Burberry suit and tie, his five o’clock shadow darker than usual.
“What are you doing here?” Kip said to Thaddeus.
“That’s not very friendly,” Grace said, laughing—but Thaddeus knew she meant it.
“Old friends?” Gene inquired.
“Best friends,” said Kip. He put his arm around Thaddeus. His breath was cold and smelled metallic. Some drug.
He kissed Grace’s hand. “Mmm,” he said. “You always smell so good.”
More often than not, Kip’s evenings were spent with a procession of stunning, long-legged women, most of them with something machine-tooled in their glamour, some promise of heartless, hydraulic sex—but tonight he was accompanied by a small woman in a dark blue pants suit, a frilly white blouse, olive skin, no makeup.
“This is my friend Anahita,” Kip said. “Anahita is from Tehran. Tell them what you were telling me, Ana. I know they’ll be interested. Thaddeus, as you know, comes from a long line of political people.”
If Anahita objected to being prompted, she gave no indication. She wasn’t more than five feet tall and might have relished the extra height afforded by a soapbox. Grace looked at her with open curiosity, as she always did when meeting one of Kip’s women.
“Right now in my home,” Anahita said, “many students and others are on the street making their protest against the criminal Pahlavi.”
“The shah of Iran,” said Kip.
“We are not children playing in the nursery with kings and queens and little fairy princesses,” said Anahita. “Pahlavi and the horrible Farah Diba were given to us by the United States. We were democratic before our country was forcibly taken away. Your country wants us to live like children, but we are an advanced country. The most advanced and historical country in the Middle East. And such beauty. Our markets bursting, the burlap bags filled with bright green vegetables. We have scientists, poets, surgeons, and great thinkers. We do not want to be ruled by the crazy mullahs who are waiting in the shadows, or the so-called shah and his whore.”
“Whoa,” said Thaddeus, out of surprise. She seemed so proper, an emissary from a distant, straitlaced time, and to hear her call her queen a whore startled him.
Anahita smiled. Her teeth were white, but with a pinkish sheen, like freshwater pearls, and her gums were dark, almost purple. She wore a serpent ring on her thumb. “The shah will either abdicate or hang. That much we know. His secret police have exhausted themselves hunting down the Communists. And the students in Azadi Square are only the beginning. We also know this. It will grow. The kingdom of lies will crumble. And the United States will have placed a very costly wager on the wrong person. What will happen in my country will haunt you for years to come. You do not stage a coup d’état, and murder innocent people, and install a tyrant, and plunder a nation and simply walk away as if nothing has happened. Your own Dr. King tried to teach you this lesson. The arc of time bends toward justice. My country will find its way, and we could have been friends—”
“We are friends!” exclaimed Kip.
“I mean our nations,” Anahita said. She shook her head. “This is such a humorous country. It’s what the world loves and despises in you. Your incessant laughter. Why are you laughing? That’s what the brave young people in the square are asking you.”
“We’re brave young people, too,” said Kip.
“Come on, man, stop,” Thaddeus said. His heart was pounding. He wanted to memorize every word Anahita said. She was telling a story he knew was for him, and he didn’t want Kip to annoy her. But she wasn’t annoyed, as it turned out. She shoved Kip playfully.
“What am I going to do with you?” she said, shaking her head like an easygoing aunt. Kip brought that out in people. You had to indulge him. There was no other way to be in his company.
“You’re going to drink with me, my Persian delight,” Kip said, spiriting her away.
Thaddeus and Grace wandered through scraps of other conversations. There was an interest in hotels, most of them abroad. La Mamounia in Marrakech. Browns in London. After that, Thaddeus lost the thread. The whole point of travel it seemed was to either visit a well-off relation or stay at a proper hotel or get into some insane scrape—break a leg climbing a ruin, come down with malaria in Samoa. The bagpiper was slumped in the corner, his chanter drooping, his plaid bag wrinkled and deflated. Oliver Onions on the stereo singing “Dune Buggy,” the sound track to someone’s fond Italian memory.
“Oh my God,” Grace whispered to him, “these people. And that music.”
“It’s what they listen to in Europe,” Thaddeus said, irritated with her for a moment, as if she were being obstinate, stubborn in the face of new pleasures.
Thaddeus felt amazed and squashed, almost obliterated by the people in this room, but the destruction struck him as somehow necessary—and encouraging. He was being shunned by the right people, by the people who embodied the New York he had long dreamed of, full of ease and privilege and high spirits. He would keep his head high, and learn from these citizens of the city within the city.
Thaddeus and Grace continued to wander the party, made shy by their own neediness. They helped themselves to drinks at a table in the garden, a cruddy old knocked-around wooden table, the kind of table only a rich person would feel okay about displaying in front of his guests, three and a half legs, the veneer stripped off the top. Vagabond ice cubes slid around bottles of Popov vodka and Sutter Home gin, and other cheap brands sharing the perch with pricey bottles of wine in a kind of democracy of booze.
While helping themselves to glasses of Château Beychevelle, one of the guests, deciding that Grace was on her own, descended upon her. His name was James Nichols. He offset his tux with red tennis shoes. Pudgy, moist, with thinning hair and peeling lips, he nonetheless managed to exude self-confidence.
“I’m the kind of person who,” he announced, “when he sees someone lovely he must go and introduce himself.”
“Know thyself,” Grace said, good-naturedly.
“That’s checkmate, right there,” James said. His voice was hoarse. He sounded like someone who had exhausted himself selling something, or trying to convince skeptics of one thing or another. His laugh was something like a cough. “Tell me your name and everything about yourself.”
“Do I have to?”
“Okay, fair enough. My name is James, no one calls me Jim, though my mother called me Jimmy, before I murdered her. Editor at Dodd, Mead. A sleepy old place from which I am planning to decamp. I mainly acquire history but every now and then they allow me to buy a novel. I have a decent salary, and have absolutely no family money, unlike most of the little shits in this room. And if you’re one of them, I’m sorry.”
Thaddeus was counting off the seconds this guy would stand there without acknowledging his presence. He had already reached 140.
“All right. I’m Grace Cornell and I work in publishing, too. At Periodic. And this is my boyfriend, Thaddeus Kaufman.”
“Ah. Thaddeus Kaufman,” Nichols said, as if a missing piece had been supplied. “Gene has talked to me about you.”
“He has?” Thaddeus asked. He was going to answer Has he now, as a kind of push back, but an actual editor having a discussion about him was the main thing on his mind.
“So tell me . . .” Did he just wink in Grace’s direction? “Briefly as possible: what’s your novel about? It is a novel, isn’t it?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“It’s a novel,” Grace said. “And it’s really good.”
“Your accent,” Nichols said, pointing to Grace. His fingernail was chewed, his cuticle livid. “I’m the kind of person who can usually tell straightaway where someone was raised, but . . . I don’t know. Where are you from?”
“I’m trying to keep away from the typical first-novel stuff,” Thaddeus said. “I don’t want to do a bildungsroman.” His heartbeat was beginning to accelerate. He had a vision of himself simply turning away and fleeing that was so vivid it seemed as if it had already happened, that it was not dread but an actual memory.
“Free advice,” said Nichols. “It’s not good business to talk about what you’re not writing.”
“My brother says that free advice is worth what it costs,” Grace said.
“It’s about an old couple in a dying city,” Thaddeus said.
“Like Updike’s first novel?” Nichols said. “To the Poorhouse?”
Thaddeus did not bother to correct Nichols’s botch of the title. It was close enough. And, in fact, Updike had been on Thaddeus’s mind when he began his own book, so Nichols got some credit there. Nichols was probably brilliant, or close to it, like most of the gatekeepers between Thaddeus and the world. Sometimes in his despair he wondered how he would ever get past them, how he would ever be included. What did he have to offer? His main hope was that he would just simply be able to do it, just as he had hoped as a teenager that when it finally was time to have sex he would know what to do. The preparation for actual sex was two years of masturbation, and the preparation for starting a novel was two semesters of creative writing.
“The saddest thing I see?” Nichols proposed. “And this is something I warn all young writers about.”
“How old are you?” Grace interjected.
“Older than I look. I take excellent care of myself. And . . .” He raised a finger, insisting on full attention. “The advice is, do not fall between two stools.”
“Or two stool samples,” said Thaddeus, in spite of himself. Snap! went the mousetrap of social regret. Poof! went the disappearing promise to stop joking around.
Nichols graciously pretended not to have heard. “There are the avowedly and consciously commercial fictions, the romances and the swashbucklers and mysteries and such, and most publishers can usually make them profitable. But I think it was Mr. Knopf who said the thing about publishing is that it’s gone today and here tomorrow.” He made a signifying smile. “Returns. They are our ruination. With reliably commercial fiction we tend not to over print and everyone comes out fine. But then there is literature. And what you must ask yourself is: am I writing straight commercial fiction or am I creating literature? Mailer, Styron, your friend Mr. Updike, and I’ll throw Kurt Vonnegut in there, too—they are clearly creating literature and they are even getting onto the bestseller lists. Listen, all those guys want to work with me. At Dodd, Mead? Or what I call Dead Meat? No way, Jose. I’ll probably end up at Random House and they will be with me there. Mailer, John Gardner, Joe Heller, the lot of them.
“But anyhow: the all-important list. Do you study what’s on the list? You should. Right now, we’ve got old Irwin Shaw, that madman Tolkien, John Fowles—and others who I can stand before you and promise none of us will remember ten years from now, but they’re making a good living right now, not only for themselves but for their publishers. Which brings us back to you. Do you see yourself as becoming part of the inner circle? The next Mailer, the next Styron? Because I’ll tell you, that’s not the feeling I get standing with you. I can smell it.” He touched the side of his nose, and Thaddeus felt a swell of horror and shame.
“You seem just like a regular middle-of-the-road person to me,” Nichols said, “and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s no place for that kind of writing in this world, not anymore.”
“This is ridiculous,” said Grace, drawing closer to Thaddeus. “You’re being a horrible bully.”
“Well, I notice you’re listening,” Nichols said.
“There’s a difference between listening and staring,” said Grace.
George Eliot, thought Thaddeus. It did not take any great feat of memory for him to recognize the phrase from Middlemarch. He and Grace were reading it aloud to each other on the many nights they couldn’t afford to go out.
“I am saving your lives is what I am doing. You are going to look back on this and say, Oh my God, that handsome devil from Dodd, Mead saved our lives. Here’s something I know. A friend of mine, his name is George Atkinson, a bit older than us, great guy. Smart. Talk about smelling something on someone? He’s got the smell of a winner.”
“And what’s that smell like?” Grace asked.
“Difficult to say, but one recognizes it. Anyhow, you know what George is doing next month, out there in Los Angeles? He’s opening a video rental store. Like a pay library, but for movies. Betamax, VHS, whatever you want. Right on Wilshire Boulevard. You walk in, pick a movie you want to see, and bring it home. Do you have any idea what that’s going to do to publishing? Bookstores? All of us? It’s a law of nature, all creatures great and small take the path of least resistance. Even electrons follow this universal law. Faced with the choice of reading a book or lazily watching The Way We Were, I think most people are going to opt for the latter. The only books that are going to get bought are the totally pandering, commercial, easy on the eyes, easy on the brainpan kind, or else some kind of event book. And if you’re not going to be the person who writes that book, and there’s one of them a year, maybe two, then I say get the hell out and find something else to do.”
There was no telling how long this advice would have gone on had one of the guests not entered with a blazing birthday cake—a woman in extremely high heels and a strand of pearls that swayed at waist level as she walked. There were cheers, applause, and soon all the guests were singing “Happy Birthday” to Gene, the singing, even in its collectivity, humorous, as if the familiar lyrics were all in quotation marks. “Who me?” Gene silently mouthed, pointing to himself, turning this way and that so everyone could see how he was reacting to the cake and the song.
“We should go,” Thaddeus whispered to Grace.
“It’s still early. And there’s a lot of good wine still to be drunk. What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe hang myself?”
Now you know how I feel half the time, thought Grace, but instead of saying it, she kissed him.
When they finally got out of there, a cold mist was falling. Or was it rain? Sleet? Was it snow? It was an undifferentiated stinging wetness. They flipped their collars up, put their heads down, and headed toward home.
“If we see a taxi we’ll take it,” Thaddeus said.
BUT THE NIGHT WAS NOT through with them yet. Every night is a mansion with countless rooms, and the door flew open to the next room. As they walked through the mist, they heard someone calling Thaddeus’s name, shredded by the dark wind and barely recognizable. It was Kip, his head out of the back window of a Checker cab gliding to a stop. One of the taxi’s headlights was out and it gave the boxy old cab a kind of winking, insouciant look.
“Get in here, you serfs, and enjoy the warmth of my troika!” Kip shouted.
They were relieved to be rescued from the weather and from the sense of failure that walking in bad weather can cause. Kip had already unfolded the jump seat that had been nestled into the floor of the taxi and now he sat facing the backseat, where Thaddeus slid in on one side of Anahita and Grace sat on the other. Anahita wore a floor-length quilted down coat. She had taken an orange from Gene’s party and was unpeeling it, releasing a bright citrusy scent and letting the peels fall to the floor. Kip slapped his hands against Thaddeus’s knees as if he were playing a bongo drum.
“We’re going to drop Ana off at her hotel and then you guys come with me, and the fun will really begin once we get rid of sourpuss,” he announced.
“Kip, I’m tired,” Anahita said. “Enough excitement for one night. And tomorrow morning there is a vigil outside the consulate.”
“Oh sure,” Kip said. “Nothing changes history as reliably as a vigil. What about you two? You want to go back to your love cave or accompany old Uncle Kip on his nocturnal adventures?”
Thaddeus looked at Grace, who shrugged, and Kip beat his palms even harder and faster against Thaddeus’s knees. “Oh mama mama mama, we are going to get so fucking high!” he sang in a falsetto.
They dropped Anahita off at her hotel. Kip walked her to the front entrance of the Plaza; a liveried doorman met them halfway, holding a striped umbrella.
“She must have money,” Grace said.
“One day that’ll be us,” Thaddeus said.
“Sure, why not,” said Grace.
“As God is my witness, we’ll never go hungry again!” clowned Thaddeus. He slammed his open hand over his heart, and coughed. It was an old Jerry Lewis routine, the kind he used to do in front of Sam and Libby.
Kip bounded back into the taxi, his hair bejeweled with raindrops. “She is one foxy lady,” he said. “But a very serious Muslim. Did you see how she kissed me good night? Completely without warmth or affection?”
The taxi swung around Columbus Circle, and then onto Central Park West to Ninety-First Street, where it turned west. Kip paid the driver while Thaddeus and Grace stood in front of a shabby narrow brownstone between Amsterdam and Columbus. All but one of the windows were dark. Plastic flowerpots holding dead geraniums were scattered on the steps.
“This will be fast,” Kip said, pressing the buzzer to apartment 4.
“Mind telling us what we’re doing here?” Grace asked.
“I think you know,” Kip said.
A buzzer unlocked the door into a vestibule that was a riot of shopping carts and umbrellas. The odor of cat piss was overpowering. Lit by a flickering circular fluorescent light, the steps rose at an extreme angle, more like a ladder than a staircase.
“Top floor, kids,” Kip said, his voice bright, manic.
They were calling on a man named Luke, who was fresh out of the shower, draped in a Snoopy towel. He looked like an aging Roman senator from the age of the Caesars, though he hadn’t breached thirty. Narrow face, eyes deep-set and guarded. Water dripped from his thinning dark hair, his tufted narrow shoulders, his scrawny legs.
“You’re early,” he said to Kip.
“Actually, I’m late. Can we come in?”
“Just you,” Luke said.
But Kip ushered Thaddeus and Grace ahead of him and Luke offered only mild resistance. His apartment was the source of the cat-piss odor—he had fifteen, perhaps twenty, cats patrolling his apartment, all at different stages of the feline life cycle. He moved a few of them back with a sweep of his leg as he opened the door to Kip and Thaddeus and Grace. The apartment was just two rooms, only one of which had a window. Who do you have to fuck in this town to get a window? Thaddeus thought.
There was a bewildering assortment of chairs, all of them in poor repair, as if every time Luke passed a discarded chair left at the curb for the trash collection he couldn’t resist bringing it home. His small sofa was covered by an Indian bedspread. The glass-topped coffee table was covered by a triple-beam scale, an empty Chablis bottle, and an open copy of Screw magazine, the weekly tabloid in which prostitutes were advertised. A TV set was showing the local access program Midnight Blue, with the sound extremely low.
“Hey, look, it’s Al Goldstein,” Kip said. He took an envelope from the inside pocket of his overcoat and handed it to Luke. “That horny old bastard happens to be sort of a wizard when it comes to picking stocks. One of my buddies over at Cowen is on the phone with him six times a day.”
Luke opened the envelope. “Three grams?”
“Three? Five.”
“Maybe in Bolivia, but not here,” Luke said.
He tried to return the envelope to Kip, but Kip backed away from it, as if he were avoiding being served a summons. Luke kept the money and gave Kip three grams of cocaine, each in its own little origami-like packet. Cats of all colors and sizes paced the perimeter of the room, with sparkling eyes and flicking tails. Kip asked if it would be all right to sample “the item” before they left and Luke made a faux-elegant gesture, inviting them all to sit. There was certainly no lack of choices but it was difficult to tell which chairs were safe.
Thaddeus and Grace rarely used cocaine—too expensive. And they preferred the slow soft languorous forgiving embracing qualities of wine. But Grace was up for it, and Thaddeus, too. He liked the Windex-y astringency in his nasal passages, how his blood charged through the sleeping city of his circulatory system like a Mongol horde, and he vaguely hoped for an extra few hours of wakefulness that he could spend in front of his Olivetti, writing. Night after night, he worked with the diligence of a prisoner trying to dig his way out of his cell with a spoon.
As they were leaning over the dessert plate upon which Luke had portioned out Kip’s gram, Thaddeus became absorbed with the television, where Al Goldstein was interviewing a fleshy man in his late thirties with a drooping lower lip and hooded eyes. On the bottom of the screen was his name, Lou Levine. He wore a leather coat, cowboy hat, and long scarf. The conversation was about Levine’s sex club called Nero’s Fiddle, a mile or so away, at the Marlboro Hotel. The volume on the TV was low and Thaddeus had a hard time making out what they were saying, but it seemed mainly about the club’s strict no alcohol or drugs policy, and the wide array of foods available at the buffet—lasagna, meatballs, potato salad, chicken, ribs, macaroni, and cold cuts. “You could come there just for the nosh,” Goldstein said, with an air of mild contempt.
Luke noticed Thaddeus’s interest in the show. “I’ve been there once. Plenty of stars. I saw Melvin Van Peebles, Richard Dreyfuss. All kinds of people. Some bridge-and-tunnel types, but there’s some hot girls in Jersey.”
“We should go,” Kip said. “It’s close by, right? It’s in that place that used to be a bathhouse for the gay boys, listening to Connie Francis and sitting around in their towels. Not unlike you, old buddy,” he added, patting Luke’s soup-bone knee. “But we could go, right? Like Roman emperors, enjoying pleasures of the flesh once unimaginable to the common man.”
“No single men allowed,” Luke said. “But if you’re really into it, my friend Catherine lives a couple doors down and likes it.”
“Would you do something like that?” Grace asked Thaddeus.
“Would you?” Thaddeus said.
“Go into a room with naked strangers and everyone fucking their brains out?” she asked.
“Would you?” Thaddeus asked again.
“You don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to,” Luke said. “You have to take off your shoes, but that’s it. You can even leave your socks on.” He picked up his phone and started dialing.
“Are you calling your friend?” Kip asked.
“I’ll see if she’s home,” said Luke.
Thaddeus and Grace could never agree on the exact sequence of events, and eventually that night’s second half entered into the realm of perpetual silence, beginning with the arrival of Luke’s friend and ending with their slipping wordlessly into their own bed at dawn. Thaddeus would have it that they had allowed themselves to be swept into Kip’s enthusiasm and taste for debauchery, while Grace would never relinquish her own sense of cause and effect and continued to insist that what had gotten Kip going in the first place was Thaddeus’s obvious fascination with Goldstein and Levine chatting away on Midnight Blue. What they both agreed on was that cocaine played a part in it, though it was not as if coke was an hallucinogen like LSD or mushrooms, which would allow them to experience (or at least imagine) a different dimension, a counter-reality. Coke was not a disinhibitor like booze. The most that could be blamed on the coke was that it gave them a kind of outlaw sense of rising above the normal world and diminished their sense of consequence, fostering a view of the world like you can have on an airplane, when cities are but twinkling grids, essentially devoid of meaning. I think I just figured out why people like conceptual art, Grace said at one point. It’s like coke, it’s all mind over matter.
Luke was feeling generous and the next lines were gratis. Two young calico cats got into it, yowling and hissing and clawing at the air, and occasionally each other, which was frightening at first and then hilarious. What made it particularly strange was that all the other cats just sat quietly and watched. Luke’s friend Catherine arrived wearing a burgundy pants suit and a gaudy silver belt. She imported sheepskin jackets from Afghanistan, going to Kabul several times a year and buying dozens of coats for a few dollars each and selling them to boutiques for a 500 percent profit. She was barely five feet tall, but wore platform shoes that brought her up to five three or so. She had a playful voice, and seemed like a person who had gotten herself into and out of numerous predicaments. “I like men and I love sex, but boyfriends . . .” She held out her hand and wobbled it back and forth. “Them I could do without.”
“Are we really going to do this?” Grace asked.
“It’s fun,” Catherine said. “You’ll see. It’s sort of like a dream.”
“No one’s asking you to adopt a new lifestyle,” Kip said. There was something harsh in his voice, as if they had all agreed on something and Grace was going to wreck it.
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” Catherine said. “It’s all very respectful and easy.”
“Let’s get going,” Kip said. “This is going to be fun. This is what living in New York is all about. Let’s just do it!”
“Here,” said Luke, laying out more lines. “May as well.”
“It’s going to be like Rapestock,” Grace said.
“No way, Jose,” said Catherine. “It’s safer for chicks than the subway. The place is women’s lib all the way. Girls approach the guys, they don’t hit on us. They’re not allowed to. Rule. You have to be extremely respectful. But the thing is, you don’t even need the rules. The people there are so friendly, and gentle. No one wants to ruin it.”
“You up for this?” Grace asked Thaddeus again.
“One more snort and I’m up for anything,” he said. And they both knew that he wasn’t being completely honest. It was more curiosity than cocaine. The thought of going into a world where everyone was fucking everyone else . . .
Kip ordered a limo from Haifa Transportation. The driver’s name was Shlomo. One of his ears looked chewed in half. Mahler’s Second Symphony played on the radio, very softly. It reminded Thaddeus of how the music sounded back at his parents’ apartment on Kimbark, shrouded and funereal, always out of pleasure’s grasp. He took Grace’s hand. It was clammy, or his was. The city was still enshrouded in cold mist. Lights from the tall buildings made the fog look like silvery gauze, the buildings themselves all but invisible.
They stood for a moment at the entrance. Across the street was a McDonald’s. A woman in a long black woolen coat and a scarf tied under her chin to cover her hair walked by with a Scottie dog on a leash. Thaddeus’s heart danced, and the dog walker was swallowed by the fog. Hannah Hannah Hannah Hannah, and then she was gone.
“You okay?” Grace asked.
“As well as can be expected,” said Thaddeus, grinning.
Admission was twenty-five dollars a couple and Kip paid. A squared-off man in a ski jacket took Kip’s money and shoved it into his pocket. “You do work here, don’t you?” Kip asked. His normal bantering tone had returned. The harshness that had set in for a few moments when it seemed that Grace might be an impediment was gone, and the aural mask was back in place. He linked his arm through Catherine’s, a legitimate couple descending the steep flight of steps that led to the club.
The first thing: the smell of chlorine and some other odor, sweet and unnatural. A spray? Incense? The darkness that slowly receded into dimness. The music too loud, the speakers full of distortion. Wild Cherry singing “Hot to Trot.” The dance floor, some people fully dressed, men in vests, women in pants suits, people in their underwear, and some wearing nothing, breasts flopping, genitals bobbing up and down like rodents trying to leap out of a cage. Spears of light shot down from the crystal disco ball like thunderbolts. I might be too much for you honey / Do you know what I mean? / I’m just a dancin’ fool / And I’m lookin’ for a struttin’ queen . . .
Grace said, “This is just like some terrible disco but with a few crazy people who’ve taken off their clothes.” Catherine said they should check out the swimming pool, and above all, the mattress room. Thaddeus said the people weren’t very good looking and Kip laughed and told him he was a snob, and then said they would all follow Catherine, who was heading for the buffet. There were people sitting at small tables, eating meatballs and lasagna off paper plates, drinking ginger ale. Mustaches. Big hair.
“‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,’” Thaddeus said into Grace’s ear. She didn’t respond. “Dante,” he said. “The Inferno.”
“Wow,” she shouted over the pounding music. “You’re so literary.”
He failed to heed the warning and pressed on. “This is crazy. Like Paul Newman said, why would I go out for a hamburger when I can have steak at home?”
“That’s so beautiful, Thaddeus,” she yelled. “Unbelievably touching.”
Okay, now he got it. “Hey, none of this is my idea,” he said.
She kissed him, biting his lip, grabbing his hips. There was something weirdly erotic about being here, as unpleasant as it was. The arousal was involuntary. It was like being tickled. Someone can dig their fingertips into your rib cage and you might laugh but that doesn’t mean you’re happy.
“You people are ridiculous,” Catherine mouthed. She grabbed Kip’s hand and led him deeper into the club’s interior.
“There’s got to be better orgies than this,” Thaddeus said to Grace. “For people who are really doing well.”
“Poor us,” said Grace, “invited to the wrong orgy.”
The swimming pool was not quite so deafening. The water blue as antifreeze. Thirty, forty people floating around, penises sticking up like periscopes. Bellies like the shells of Galapagos tortoises. Tits of all nations. A balding guy who looked like a high school teacher was sitting on the edge of the pool, dangling his feet in the water while a woman (who wore a bathing cap to protect her hairdo) treaded water and fellated him.
Kip and Catherine emerged from the locker room, naked. Thaddeus tried not to notice Kip’s body. He was slim and graceful as a greyhound. Catherine was bosomy, thick. She stretched voluptuously, as if here at Nero’s she could finally relax. Kip kept his hands in front of his genitals as he and Catherine approached the pool and the two of them jumped in.
“Still think he’s queer?” Thaddeus asked.
“More than ever,” said Grace. “Are you going to take off your clothes?”
“Are you?”
“Not at the moment.” She looked around. “It’s sort of boring to just stand around.”
“Then you are going to get naked?”
“Did I say that?”
Someone was having an ostentatious orgasm, an almost Alpine yodel, genderless, followed by cheers from bystanders, or byfuckers. Who knew, who cared? Thaddeus heard someone say that Sammy Davis Jr. was here. A man with a high, plaintive voice was looking for someone named Andrea, he called her name over and over as he wandered from the pool to the pool table to the Ping-Pong table to the buffet, where he helped himself to pastrami, but continued to call for her as he chewed.
In college, Thaddeus had been a formidable Ping-Pong player. He was mediocre at every other sport, from basketball to Frisbee, but he was a terror with a paddle, to his own surprise. He hadn’t played since Ann Arbor, but he drifted toward the club’s Ping-Pong table, where a woman in her late thirties wearing skimpy lace underwear was playing an older woman with one breast, who was naked. They were both good players, standing far from the table. The woman with the mastectomy was more of a power player, while the younger woman played a more modest game, based on placement and English. She was, on second glance, more appealing to Thaddeus than she had been at first. His mind was racing, if only to keep up with his heart, which had been in a state of great alertness since the first line of coke and in a state of utter alarm from the moment they had all agreed to come here.
“Can I play the winner?” he asked.
“We’re not keeping score,” the woman in panties said.
“Let’s,” said the older woman. She caught the ball out of the air. She suggested that she serve first and the game would be to twenty-one. The younger woman looked tense and took a couple of deep, steadying breaths. It seemed weird to Thaddeus to be nervous about losing a Ping-Pong match while you were all but naked in a sex club. That might make for a good short story. First line: She’d already been laid seven times but all that faded from memory once the Ping-Pong match began. God. Was that the best he had in him? He was starting to think that maybe it was. The world was more interested in the guy who had amassed a gigantic ball of aluminum foil than it was in him and his writing! It galled him to have his nose pressed up against the glass of the culture. Even here in this supposed erotic paradise he was on the outside looking in. Fully clothed, hoping the younger of the two women won the game, though he would have been hard-pressed to explain why which one he played made much of a difference, or any difference at all.
As it happened, the younger woman did not win. She was trounced, twenty-one to eight. But the woman with the mastectomy was joined by her boyfriend (who, for a panicky moment, Thaddeus thought was Frank Zappa) and the two of them headed off to the mattress room, where presumably countless couples were squirming like a bucket full of worms, though at this point Thaddeus had not brought himself to even glance in that direction. The vanquished woman agreed to play with him. She seemed not to mind that he was fully clothed. She told him her name was Becky.
“Are you outrageous?” she asked.
“Not really,” he said.
Becky slapped herself in the rear with her paddle and offered to let him serve first. Back in Ann Arbor he had a tricky serve, but he couldn’t manage it tonight. He kept netting it and was forced to serve up lollipops, which put a look of pure delight on Becky’s face before she sent the ball flying back at Thaddeus at what seemed like 100 miles per hour. Finally, one of her smashes resulted in a lost ball and after a futile search they tried to figure out who to ask for a new one. The guy Thaddeus approached wore a pale blue Speedo and had a silver police whistle nestled into his abundant chest hair. “There’s a hobby shop on Eighty-Sixth Street,” he said. “But they’re closed now.” Thaddeus tried to explain that he didn’t want to buy Ping-Pong balls, but the man interrupted and said, “You’d be a lot happier if you got out of your street clothes, man.” Thaddeus said he thought the club policy was no pressure, and the man said, “I’m not pressuring. I’m inviting you to paradise.” At which point, he wiggled out of his little bathing suit—his genitals were priapic and to see them spilling out was like watching the emptying of a clown car.
“Whoa,” said Becky, backing away. She linked her arm through Thaddeus’s. The gesture was more than intimate, it was tender. “You’re a handsome one,” she said. Thaddeus glanced away, wondering where Grace was, and if she was watching him. She was nowhere in sight and when he turned back toward Becky she kissed him full on the mouth, and his mouth cooperated, softened, opened. He was kissing her back and she took his hand and placed it on her breast and said, “Pinch.” He moved away from the kiss so he could see her face when he pinched her, which he did gently, as if snuffing out a candle. “Are you going to keep your clothes on?” she asked.
It seemed stupid to him, and contrary to the spirit of curiosity, the spirit of adventure, the spirit of self-confidence, the spirit of irony, the spirit of daring, and the spirit of pleasure, to be one of the few clothed people at a swing club. Fuck it! If Emily Dickinson had found herself in Nero’s Fiddle (presupposing that the Belle of Amherst had snorted up several lines of cocaine) she might have decided to go with the flow and stuff her dress and high-collared blouse into one of the club’s little lockers, which was where he was heading.
Past the pool, with its multicolored periscopes. A few conscientious swingers were swimming laps. The Jacuzzi accommodated the several customers who were unconcerned about dipping their bodies into a warm bath with twenty strangers who had just either ejaculated or had been ejaculated into. And now the Mattress Room, which was the size of a cozy restaurant, with dim lighting and wall-to-wall mattresses, where some languidly embraced in postcoital peace, while others frantically fucked. Adios and farewell, you thousands of years of religion and law.
Catherine was on one of the mattresses with a young guy who looked like a cop or a soldier on top of her. She had one arm raised and snapped her fingers in time with his thrusts. Kip was watching, propped on one elbow, pleasing himself with his free hand. And that was when he saw Grace, standing in the corner, naked, as if she had awakened from a dream and found herself there. As Thaddeus watched, a middle-aged couple, the man fussy looking with a bristly mustache and small eyes, the woman like a wrestler, were having sex, and the man reached out to Grace and took her hand. Either he yanked her onto the mattress or she put up very little resistance. But when the bristling mustache tried to mount her, she quickly scrambled to her feet, and saw Thaddeus. She stepped over the writhing bodies, the potbellies and pendulous breasts, the hairy backsides and pink soles, over pageboys and crew cuts, braids and curls, over mouths and cunts and socks and armpits and jugular veins, over the moaners, the laughers, the squealers, and the grunters, until she and Thaddeus were face-to-face.
“What the fuck were you doing?” he asked her.
“Am I doing? What about you?”
“I wasn’t doing anything.”
She gestured toward his state of undress.
“Were you about to have sex with that guy?”
“Thaddeus. Come on. You’re in no position.”
“Can we go?”
“I didn’t want to come here in the first place.”
“Well, you’ve sure made the most of it.”
She made a small gasp after which they were silent on the cab ride home. The streets were still dark, the sky was black and silver, like the back of a mirror.
“The sun’s never going to rise,” Grace said, staring out.
Once in the apartment, Grace hurried into the shower. A few minutes later, Thaddeus joined her, but she rinsed quickly and left him alone. By the time he dried himself off, she was in bed, with their extra pillow over her head.
He wasn’t even close to being able to sleep. He went to the front room, rolled a piece of paper into the carriage of his typewriter. He wrote: This is not the city I thought it was. I had it all wrong. The Olivetti was quiet but it wasn’t silent. He found a pen and a legal pad and began to write a story about Americans in a Gulf state country, embassy people, soldiers, journalists. He called the country Tigris; he called the screenplay Hostages. What would make it interesting? What would make it real, and not just a polemic based on the ten minutes he’d spent with Anahita? The answer came quickly: they’d all be trapped in the embassy, hostages to a young generation of Tigrians who hated the U.S. for supporting their mad despotic sultan. He quickly composed nine pages until exhaustion overcame him. He turned off the lamp. Dawn broke gray and dim, like something oozing out of a container. He hated it here. Crime and filth and crazy people. He took off his clothes but getting into bed naked seemed a bad idea. Had nakedness been ruined? Why did Grace flee as soon as he got into the shower? He put on a pair of pajamas, the same pair he’d brought to Ann Arbor when he entered as a freshman. He slipped into bed as quietly as possible, but his presence awakened her. She pulled the pillow off her head and sat up. Their bed was on a metal frame, without a headboard. “We should go to church,” she said. “The one next door.”
“I’m Jewish,” he whispered.
“I don’t care and God doesn’t care, either.”
“Okay. I can do that,” he said.
She rolled closer to him, draped her leg over his. “That feels nice,” he said, and he thought, How did this happen to me? How did I become one of the lucky ones?
Dear Liam,
Yes, you’re right, it would be totally out of sight if I could have a place to make art. I really appreciate your offer, but right now I think it would be a waste of money. But to have a little work space somewhere that I could call my own? A dream come true.
How great would it be if I found a dealer, a gallery, and sold a bunch of stuff and got us out of here? That’s my dream, anyhow. There are so many creepy people here. And I don’t want to turn into one of them. I want out! Out!
But we’re stuck here and in the meanwhile I’m thinking of taking a drawing class at the Art Students League on Fifty-Seventh Street, which costs very little, so when I screw up and miss a class I won’t feel guilty. All these cool modernists went there but so did one of my secret art crushes, Charles Dana Gibson. (First time I saw his drawing of a Gibson Girl I thought, That’s me!!!) And Isabel Bishop went there, too. Her studio used to be less than ten blocks from where I sit now. That’s the only good thing about NY, just about everyone was here one time or another. But man is it dirty, and is it loud, and is it scary. I don’t tell Thaddeus but every Saturday I buy a lottery ticket. Irish sweepstakes, right? And when I win we’re going to buy an island somewhere just like old Charlie Gibson did. His was off the coast of Maine. I’ve never even been to Maine. We went to a party at this rich guy’s apartment (you should see it, it was amazing) and he invited us up to his family’s mansion just about 100 miles from here. I’d take that just as much as our own island. We could all live there and do our thing and you could maybe stop taking so many chances. I worry about you every day.
Love forever,
Grace