At the end of 2001 Frankel bought the building on Hester Street just a few blocks west of Seward Park. Since then, he’d taken out the entire second floor, cut a wide shaft through the other four and installed a glass roof so that daylight could fall all the way to the ground where the party was and where he worked on his largest pieces.
Over the months I spent there, I heard stories—from Malice, from Maja, the Polish woman with the straight scar across her left cheek who ran the bar next door, from a Chinese painter who made flowers into monsters—of Frankel’s persistence, of untimely evictions, of payoffs to expedite his renovations.
I asked him about it at Judy’s one night and he shook his big wolfhound head and looked at me, for the first time, with contempt and disappointment.
“I bought that building not three months after those cocksuckers flew into the towers. How much real estate was being sold back then, Sol? In those days no one wanted to live here. Everyone was terrified. Artists were moving to Hudson, to fucking Idaho. Cowards. But I bought. I hired builders when no one was building. I invested in this city.”
“All right,” I said. “All right.”
I didn’t have the courage to point out that he’d paid peanuts, that one might see the purchase as a kind of profiteering, that the place was now worth ten times what he’d paid. And I didn’t ask what had become of the tenants.
I told myself I was writing about art, not real estate. Really, it was that I never forgot my debt to the man, which was, I’m sure, how he wanted it. I needed him in ways professional and otherwise. I shouldn’t have felt such pride when we left the studio together, his arm around my shoulder, walking at his side as he was greeted every block like a neighborhood mafia don until we crossed Chrystie Street, where suddenly no one noticed. Aside from Lina Klein, I felt more tenderness for him than any person on earth and no matter what he gave me—his cool hand on the back of my head, advice, anecdote, aphorism, theory, history—it wasn’t enough. I was greedy, insatiable, and I think half the reason I returned so often had nothing to do with the profile.
I ignored other details, too. Malice would tell me later that it was Frankel who bought her the Rickenbacker, that he bought many extravagant gifts for her and for the other regulars. In return, she said, he expected a “loyal presence.” It was an ominous phrase I’ve never forgotten. I should have quoted her, I should have pushed him on the building, done more digging, but I was afraid of losing him. Both as subject and friend. I didn’t think so then, or didn’t allow myself to, but he came across as a bit too golden in the end. It would have been better had I been a bit less of a loyal presence myself.
And yet, looking out at Sebastian Light’s empty pasture, I missed the days I’d spent there with all those people, all that life, and more than the embarrassment I felt for writing with such adulation, I was ashamed for having disappeared, for having hidden from him like a child.
My grandmother said, “To be close enough to touch a man like that, to have won his affection, and then you walk away. It’s pathetic.”
She was right, even if she only half-understood my reasons. It was pathetic. I’d been manipulated and I knew. I’d been weak and I couldn’t face him. I didn’t do the work I should have. I let him slide. I made him perfect.
By the morning of the day before the day of Sebastian Light’s Biennale, a hush had fallen over The Coded Garden. No one was in the fields. There was no sound of guitar or laughter as I walked along The Ridge where all the studios appeared to be occupied. I watched Heaven going after a massive canvas with a great deal of sighing and slashing and sweat on the brow. Crystalline’s studio was sealed shut. I resisted the temptation to walk around the back and peer in her window. Theo’s studio remained empty.
I walked on until I found Siddhartha, who seemed annoyed that I’d interrupted his work. I hadn’t seen him since our walk to the wall and now, facing him, I felt exposed in a way I hadn’t anticipated.
“What, Sol, you don’t wait for an invitation?”
“I took your invitation to be implicit.”
“You can stay, but only if you don’t talk.”
He kicked a chair toward me, and I sat in it so that now I was looking up at him. Most of his body was replaced by the back of the canvas he was working on. I could only see his legs from the knees down, his arms from the elbows out, his forehead and his lovely hair. I could feel the hook of the wire noose jabbing against my thigh, but it didn’t bother me. I liked to feel it and I was content to watch him. I liked to see his left hand darting in and out of view. For a moment I was tempted to leap up and come around to see what he had done, but I worried I would find his brush dry, the canvas blank, the whole thing a pantomime.
Then I hoped that it was. It would have taken them such effort, so much choreography. So much vision. It would have been beautiful.
I stared at him for a while, which he didn’t seem to mind at all. The image of this man taken over by fabric and wood and silver staples was magnificent. I don’t know how long I sat watching, but then it was lost as he stepped out from behind the easel and came toward me.
I wondered how much time I’d have to spend with him before the shock of his beauty would subside. I stood up. He pressed his lips to my cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “if I made you feel used.”
I removed the soldier’s head from my pocket and held it before him. “I thought these were very moving,” I said.
“This is from the other night?” He took it from my fingers.
“I don’t know how you got them lit at once, but the timing was impeccable.”
“What are you talking about? I was right there next to you. How could I have done it?”
“You didn’t have to light it for it to be yours.”
“Maybe this place is making you a little crazy. I’m a painter. I don’t do stunts.”
“Let me see your painting, then.”
“Tomorrow at The Biennale.”
“I wish everyone would stop using that word,” I said. “It’s ridiculous enough in Miami. It’s unbearable here.”
He looked for a moment as if he might say something of consequence, but then he only shook his head.
“And I don’t feel used,” I added. For a moment, I thought I saw a look of pity in his eyes.
I left in search of the grassy knoll. I wanted to be certain I hadn’t been drugged, that the burning bush wasn’t a hallucination, but a mighty symbol whose meaning was yet unclear to me. Given the speedy disappearance of the cardboard figures, though, I didn’t really expect to find anything but some disturbed earth.
Yet the tree still was there, the noosed heads, the daggered torsos. It was surprising, this enduring symbol of disorder. Plume had evidently neglected to bring in the cleanup crew. Another indication that the gardeners were under unusual stress.
I kneeled and laid my hands upon the ground. I felt the edge of the tree well where the grass had been newly cut and damp soil surrounded the trunk. I rolled onto my back and summoned the insipid Englishman. I tried to free myself of myself. I tried to watch my thoughts blow past as leaves across a lawn. But Mind GApp was no match for Lina Klein’s eyes.
I tried to see her in the blackness above the tree. Was her decision so complete? Did she really imagine it some last act of art? I tried to conceive of a quality of pain sufficient to generate that kind of courage.
“We are not programmed to imagine pain,” she told me once, “we’re not even built to remember it. We exaggerate the memories of pleasure, of joy, while diminishing those of suffering. How else could we survive? Why else would I sing you so many pretty songs of the Lower East Side? Those days so full of loneliness and violence and desolation.”
I tried harder to imagine what it took to do what she did, and whether her entire life had counted to her as something “quite insanely extraordinary” as it did to me. And that brought me to my mother, who all my life had been telling me that Lina Klein was an egomaniac, a cruel narcissist. Who on the telephone after finding her body said, “Really, I’m not surprised. She never cared about anyone. You were fooled. Don’t be too hard on yourself.”
I thought of the speed with which my mother’s posture had changed, of what had gone from her body, from her eyes. I tried to see my grandmother with some objective mind, or my mother’s mind, to see the sociopath she claimed to see. But aside from her occasional impatience, her fixation on my living according to her strict codes of pleasure and art, her denouncement of poor Charity, I found no cruelty in my grandmother. I could summon no memory of malice.
There was Lina Klein frail on the beach in Santa Monica sitting in the blue shade of our tower wearing her black sunglasses, a bright red cotton sweater and a pair of jeans rolled to her calves, green bruises on her shins, while I, wet from the cold winter ocean, ran toward her in the way I may never in my life run toward anyone again, and I wondered if the utter pain that image caused me was anything like what she felt before undressing for the last time, and I became lightheaded, the ground seemed to be pushing upwards against my back, while lifeless language, ugly phrases, insidious jingles, seemed to swirl and dive all around me like swallows in the evening.