Here’s the thing we didn’t think of: one afternoon, Aunt Trish came home from work with a fever. She turned the key in the lock, heard Gladys Knight blasting out of her bedroom, hurried in, and found me manacled to the bed with the skirt of a pink crinoline gown over my head, being slapped by Shelly as Kat photographed us, shouting, ‘Great! Do that again. Freeze. Okay! Beautiful!’ Aunt Trish was standing there, pale, shivering, and horrified, when I turned and saw her.
I moved out that afternoon, while Aunt Trish was sleeping off her flu, having called the police and watched the woman she loved flee her apartment. I couldn’t bear to be there when she woke up; I was too ashamed.
The only person I knew in New York, aside from Aunt Trish, was Jim, the diabetic with the missing toe. His apartment was in a Brooklyn basement with a sizable garden. He stayed there rent free, because his old friend Roy, a drug dealer in his fifties, kept some of his supply stashed in Jim’s broom closet and various other locations in the apartment. Jim also sold drugs for Roy on occasion. Kat had taken me to his place a few times. Jim always doled out shortbread cookies and black coffee, then handed Kat a brown paper bag as she was leaving. This sideline, along with disability checks for his diabetes, enabled Jim to live the life of an artist and man-about-town. Though well below the poverty line, he always had a bit of cash on hand, and he welcomed me to his modest home like a visiting queen.
I had the sense, as I dropped my duffel bag on Jim’s shiny floor painted the color of pomegranates, that I was slipping off the edge of what I had known the world to be and floating in dangerous space. Aunt Trish had been family. Jim was unknown territory, a new life. Suky would go crazy if she knew. My excitement was liberally spiked with guilt. I would call her soon. I would. But for now, I sat at Jim’s kitchen table, sipping strong coffee brewed on a paint-spattered double burner and eating a piece of buttery shortbread. The hot coffee melted the sweet, rich cookie in my mouth. I looked out the glass of his back door, into his tiny garden, walled off by a fence of old painted doors.
Everything in the little apartment had been considered in some way, was either lovely or bizarre or instructive. The shelves were packed with books about everything from cave painting to rocket design: Nuns’ Habits Through the Ages. The Art of Holograms Revealed. I spent hours that first afternoon flipping through books, learning about painters, mostly, from Piero della Francesca to Bonnard, Manet to Pollock. Jim’s work was stacked neatly, facing the wall. Shyly, he turned a piece around to show me. It was a collage made up of countless shreds of paper, movie tickets, newspaper clippings, warning labels, which all cohered to make a landscape. It was obsessively constructed, but the composition reminded me of the paint-by-numbers sets I used to work on when I was a kid. Until I found the little figures hidden in the rocks or the shrubbery – incongruous beer maids peeled off of beer bottles, the man on the Mr Clean bottle, a naked calendar girl. Jim would Xerox the images and shrink them, so they looked like evil elves lurking in a pleasant countryside constructed out of refuse.
Jim rarely sold his work, he had no gallery, but he was ferociously dedicated. He would wake late – eleven or twelve – then perform his elaborate toilette, which included applying a light coat of Elizabeth Arden foundation makeup to his sallow skin and covering his thinning pate with black shoe polish. Only then did he begin to work, sorting through the bins of scrap paper, bits of rag, string, hair – anything to make his landscapes thrum with color and texture. In lieu of rent, I was sent out some mornings to look for material, and I would root around in the garbage, on the street, in magazine racks, for the perfect scarlet, the most acid cerulean.
At three in the afternoon, I went to work. I had found another restaurant, down the street, to hone my serving skills in. When I got off, at nine, Jim was just hitting his stride. I marveled at his ability to work all day, stop to make some inventive pasta dish for the two of us, then go back to his labors for another six or seven hours, finally smoking a joint and hitting the sack at dawn. He would do this for days at a time, then take a few days off and sleep. He was surprised the first night I came home from work bone tired, stood by him as he fitted a torn corner of salmon pink tissue paper onto the rectangle of board on the table, and said, ‘Can I have some?’
‘Have some what?’ he asked.
‘Speed.’ He looked up at me, surprised but smiling. ‘How do you know?’
‘That’s the one I know about,’ I said.
‘How old are you now?’ he asked, crinkling his forehead.
‘Seventeen.’
‘Did you graduate from high school yet?’
‘That’s what I want it for. The test is next Thursday. I have to study.’
‘You can have a little,’ he said. ‘But don’t overdo it. By Thursday you’ll be insane.’ So he gave me a round, white pill that he kept in a misshapen ceramic pinch pot on a shelf next to the sea salt. I swallowed it. The speed hit me hard, like the smell of ammonia. Everything in the room snapped into extreme focus; it all seemed extra clean, and bright. I hadn’t felt so awake, so cheerful, so filled with purpose since the day I swallowed ten of Suky’s finest back in junior high. ‘One thing you can’t do,’ Jim said, ‘is start talking. You start talking on this stuff, you never stop.’ I retreated to my makeshift bedroom – a daybed blocked from the rest of the room by a swath of old pink silk – and read two entire books, one on history, one on math. Hitherto ungraspable concepts glided into my mind like melted butter into pancake batter.
I emerged from my lair to tell Jim how incredibly smart I had become, he said something in response, and we were off. We talked for six hours straight, said things so perceptive and profound that it amazed us no one in the history of the world had yet come up with them. Jim even took notes, our ideas were so brilliant. Finally, we crashed. When we woke, hours later, to read the scrawled notes he had written during our jam session, and found that they contained pearls of wisdom such as ‘flounder are bottom-feeders, hence should never be eaten with carrots or other vegetables which grow underground or you are liable to develop depressions, NUTRITION IS EVERYTHING,’ I was dumbfounded, but Jim just nodded his head with a rueful smile. When I opened the history and math books that I had wolfed down, I recognized next to nothing, except what I had already gone over the old-fashioned, nondrug-induced way, so I went back to my old method of studying. I passed the high school equivalency test.
Surprisingly, Jim had a girlfriend: a Swedish woman named Olla. She was around forty, an artist, very kind to Jim, and she didn’t seem to mind me hanging around. We would go out sometimes, the three of us, to museums or movies. Jim and Olla taught me about painting, the history of it and the point of it. I came to recognize different periods, different artists. I went to the galleries and even started forming my own opinions about the new art.
Jim had reminded me how harmless he was so many times that I figured sex was not a part of his life anymore. He would lounge around the apartment with his socks off, feet up. The smooth gap left by his missing pinkie toe made him seem curiously unreal, like an imperfect doll. But Olla was always kissing him, making much of him, and guiding him gently into his bedroom for an hour or so at a time while I sat in the garden, or did the dishes, or went out on a walk. I liked Olla, and I was determined to seem as nonthreatening as possible. After Mr Brown and Aunt Trish, I didn’t want to wreck anyone’s life, and I didn’t want to end up on the street, either.