Amor and Psycho: Stories (2 page)

INTERVIEWING LAYA WAS
like being tended to by a friendly, paid person. We sat together in the red room with the sound track to
Last Tango in Paris
piped in like a gas. Ernie brought us cheeseburgers from Burger Heaven, still in their Styrofoam containers, which I resented, although I ate mine. Laya plucked at hers; it was too rare. She told me about Texas and, later, Arkansas, about her one-eyed mother and her generous and encouraging stepfather, about her scarlet fever and teenage rebellion, about her early talent as an artist, about being selected for a local car dealership commercial when she was only thirteen. She sat on her bare feet on the red silk couch and leaned toward me, flirty and confidential.
“Tell me who, you know, who I should get close to. I almost know—I have ESP—but I can’t trust myself because my spirit is so open.”

LATER
, after leaving Bob’s House for the day, I met my roommate, Mira, and her new boyfriend, Amir, at the Russian Tea Room. We ate blini and caviar, and drank ponies of iced vodka and samovars of tea on Amir’s expense account. Afterward, Mira went to the flamboyant penthouse with Amir (they called each other “Amira”); I refused a cab to maintain sobriety and economy, and walked home.

I stayed up all night writing Laya’s “story”—about an ambitious and talented calligrapher with nonthreatening ESP who dreams of becoming an actress and discovers her sexuality at fifteen on a 747 to Rome. In composing, I entered a fugue state. I realized that choice and freedom are not necessarily optimal conditions for work, and that the most confining, restricting and repulsive situations sometimes open themselves up to be investigated, like the terrifying “orifices” within the “figures” of Bacon. From this black hole of desire that yawns within us all, I heard Laya’s small, hopeful voice bubble up and simply wrote down what it said.

When I returned the next day to Bob’s House with my story, I found Laya outside the red room, sitting at the white piano and playing “Baby Elephant Walk” to a swarm of middle-aged men who hoped to screw her. She wore a halter dress short enough to reveal a fresh hematoma on her thigh,
and expensive gold hoops in her ears. Her hair had a metallic sheen. I thought of the way crows are drawn to foil in their bleak winters, and that this flirtation, which might lead to anything, to sex or marriage or death, was not a fantasy for Laya. It was the real life; it was what she did. She used her body the way I hoped to use my imagination—wantonly. She may have known already that the men she was flirting with could not really help her. They were sleazy, salaried men from Mamaroneck or Babylon, for whom the endless stream of young women like Laya—or like me, for that matter—was a job perk; many of them weren’t even straight or single, just curious. Flirting with Laya, or having sex with her, was part of a fantasy or charade, while real life marched on in shadows behind the scenes.

Within a few years, many of these men would be dead of AIDS, caught and frozen in the common imagination by the stigmata of livid sarcomas on their faces and the backs of their hands. It was as if Francis Bacon saw that future waiting, named it in bright colors and abstracted figures, nailed it. Before I saw the Bacon paintings, I’d thought of the barrier between charade and real life as an ironic principle that young, attractive aspirants might transcend without much difficulty, like the velvet rope at the door of a nightclub. Imagine Laya, for example, who got everything she had come for—a small temporary fame made possible by men and her own amenable sexuality. (She became an actress, married a producer, lived for a period on a yacht off Skopelos,
divorced, moved to London, and died at thirty-two, discreetly, of a disease she wouldn’t name.)

That night, I read the tale—the fictobiography she and I had made up together—to Laya and Kathy and Bob. The three of them softened around the mouth as they listened and afterward said how beautiful it was. Bob said, “This is what I do—take a young woman of charm and talent and give her a chance to reach her potential.” Kathy fed a cube of beef to the dogs and said, more pragmatically to Laya, “See what you can get out of it.” (We often boasted of how the first black Miss America had profited handsomely from the exposure our magazine had given her.)

Bob showered Laya and me with scrip to the Copa, and I wantonly imagined the Veracruz snapper I’d command. Impossible to go to the Copa alone; I was more than ready to wait another hour for Laya, who continued to discuss details of the contest with Bob and Kathy and make new connections and arrangements with other men, working with more passion and intensity and for longer hours than I ever did.

While waiting for Laya outside the Roman pool, I flipped through a catalogue from a retrospective of Bacon’s work at the Metropolitan Museum and read about how the artist squandered his time until he knew he could be serious, until he found a subject that could hold his attention. I studied photos of his London studio—the liquor boxes, the knee-high trash, the paint cans and brushes, the broken mirrors, the accumulation of thousands of images Bacon would
pluck from the ankle-deep soup that functioned for him like an unconscious mind. The mess had a willful quality I admired; it excluded everyone but the artist himself, who had to work in self-imposed conditions that nearly rendered work impossible. Bacon’s detritus boasted of his promiscuity, his gambling, the chronic messes he made by seizing every scrap of life that might serve his discipline.

I ripped a photo of Bacon’s studio from the catalogue and laid it on the pile of company scrip. The scrip looked like play money—or like a child’s certificate of achievement. We’d use it all, Laya and I—we’d eat and drink and make a little mess of the evening. With a fuzzy resolution born of several ounces of Russian vodka and a gnawing hunger, I promised the ladies of the multiple tits that one day I’d tell their stories, too. Sometime later, a dry finger touched my face with the slightest threat of a fingernail, as if I’d been chosen at random to play some brutal, competitive sport.

Karim Brazir was an artist and a bohemian—alluring, sexy, passionate in an intense but impersonal way; almost perverse, maybe even borderline somehow. His name rhymed with Karen, and in fact his parents, who interestingly misunderstood the name on a trip to Cairo and Istanbul, during which they conceived him, spelled it that way. He used to call me at night in New York and ask me in a gravelly voice to take a taxi over right away to his loft in a then-disused part of town. Romantic, I presumed. I’d push the brass button next to his name downstairs and he’d buzz me up. Always, I had to knock on the door, which he opened as if I’d come as a mostly pleasant surprise at 2:00 a.m., a minor interruption to his work. He offered me a beer, or a glass of water, or nothing. Then he pounced, direct and disarming, kissed me roughly, removed my clothes and fucked me with the kind of attention and
intensity that he brought to his work, an attention that felt inspiring, even infectious. Karim welcomed my enthusiasm but didn’t consider it necessary. Afterward, to keep me from dozing off, I think, he would feed me cold pasta puttanesca from a Ball jar, or some take-out falafels wrapped in silver paper. He’d stand, leaning against the loft bed in his kitchen, and watch me eat. Then he’d walk me to the street and hail a cab. He’d try to press a five-dollar bill into my hand—not that this would cover the thirty or forty blocks to my apartment. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I told him, waving the bill away, climbing into the taxi. I was a feminist.

Once, when I arrived, he met me in the lobby, and we took the elevator together to the floor beneath his, where he showed me a terrible thing—his downstairs neighbor, a sculptor, crushed by a beam from which part of a large-scale wooden sculpture hung. He’d heard the crash, run downstairs, confronted the damage and called 911. He didn’t know the sculptor well; she’d moved in only a few months before—but Jesus, but still. The paramedics arrived after Karim had been with her body for over an hour. They asked him a few questions, which he answered. Depressed person? Yes. She had no life, no money, no sex, no enemies and no dealer, just this sculpture, which was so-so, maybe—or maybe it was good. He couldn’t say. She drank when she worked, he said. She was drunk now—or had been, before she died. Here was a bottle, here was a glass; they could test her blood alcohol later. The paramedics tried to revive her, but then, without saying much of anything, they moved
her body to a gurney and took it away. (A strip of yellow tape stretched across the locked front door, but Karim had a key.)

When he showed me the death scene, I understood how he must feel. He held me tightly, breathed into my neck. I rocked him in my arms; we did it on a quilted mover’s cloth on the floor, among broken pieces of sculpture. I had my period, but Karim didn’t care, and afterward I found blood on the cloth. Then I noticed blood everywhere; it wasn’t even all my blood.

Karim took me upstairs and let me shower and use his towel. When I came out, dressed in my slutty evening clothes, he gave me a blue enamelware bowl of canned chili. Then he walked me up to Houston Street, hailed a taxi and tried to give me five dollars, which I resisted.

It may seem obvious that a relationship like this wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t care; I wanted to go everywhere. Karim invited me, twice, to meet his parents, to spend a weekend with his family on Hell’s Point, Long Island. It was my first direct experience of architecture—domestic life lived under aesthetic discipline.

THE BRAZIRS
’
HOUSE
in the old summer colony on Hell’s Point was defiantly architectural. Every room occupied a different level, and everybody’s personal property commingled in a shared dressing room on a mezzanine, whose walls and floor were a blue glass that gave off shadows visible
from the living room when you dressed. The house was rigorous and modernist, except for the specially designed item in the dressing room, an altar dedicated to the daily accumulation of clothing and personal effects. The Brazir Tree was (according to the architect, Igor Hermann, who commented on the house in two books, which sat prominently on the Noguchi coffee table in the living room) inspired by the family name, Brazir—actually pronounced
Brajir
. Hermann installed a tree (fabricated, mahogany) at the center of the house, and used its branches as a series of impaling hooks for brassieres and neckties and ticket stubs from Philharmonic concerts. He saw the tree as a kind of metavalet, a sculptural, integrated scrapbook, a changing focal point, a psychic courtyard. Like most architects, Hermann sought to control and direct the gaze. He acknowledged the necessary relationship between the house as a fixed object and the humans who used it—their constant shifting and changing. The house turned inward, rather than outward. It was, for Hermann, a womb—but bright and spare—a blue womb of glass. Natural light poured through clerestory windows into the dressing room, where the Brazir Tree stood silhouetted behind glass, representing nature, or human nature.

Everyone in the house used the Brazir Tree; Hermann’s aesthetic discipline prohibited closets or bureaus in the bedrooms. One added a bathing suit or a gauzy dress to the wiry armature of the tree at the end of the day, and plucked one’s nightgown off a limb. Mr. Brazir’s masculine items dangled
among the bras, dandy ties made into a bow, flung shirts from Brooks Brothers worn to a wonderful pulp.

Mrs. Brazir arranged our effects constantly. The picturesque disorder of the tree was a monument to wit, or a witty reference to a monument. You’d find the sleeves of one of his Brooks shirts tied neatly around the waist of Mrs. Brazir’s peignoir, gestures like that. Mrs. Brazir’s elegance seemed habitual, disciplined, expert. She wore a vial of perfume between her breasts, which she uncorked during the second cocktail of the evening, upended against a finger and daubed into her cleavage.

The perfectly black bathroom Karim and I shared had a red light recessed into the ceiling and a half bathtub sunk into the floor that shot jets of water at your body. To bathe there with the door closed was to go out of this world. (Karim and I soaked all afternoon once, while Mr. and Mrs. Brazir had their adjustments at the chiropractor’s.)

The Brazirs dressed up and had cocktails every evening in the living room, where Karim and his mother prevailed upon Mr. Brazir to recite Shakespeare. Or they talked about whether to go see the balanced rock on Sunday or Tuesday. The smallest details mattered. Mornings, we walked down to the beach, a distance of a mile, or sometimes we took bicycles, big lugubrious cruisers that didn’t belong to anyone in particular, and went swimming. We didn’t just lie in the sand and go splash in the water every hour or so, as my people did. We went specifically to swim, and swam
until our arms and legs turned blue. Then we dried off and went home. Intensity was everything to them; they insisted on living intensely in the moment. Sometimes we went to the beach specifically for a picnic, and on those occasions we did not swim. “Let’s have champagne and lobster rolls and chocolate cake!” Mrs. Brazir would suggest, then pack and bring these items in minuscule portions. No matter how many of us went on the “picnic,” she’d bring one half bottle of champagne, one lobster roll (and a plastic knife) and one piece of cake. In this way, the Brazirs shared the burden of a guest. This seemed like an essential lesson—to live eloquently, yet economically.

Mr. Brazir spoke about rebuilding a car, an Alfa Romeo they’d gotten for nothing. (Far from poor, they lacked only ready money.) One wall of the house opened up by means of hinges, and Mr. Brazir had at some point rolled the car inside. We always had cocktails around the car, and the elder Brazirs sometimes had cocktails in the car—a two-seater, of course—while Karim and I lay on the rug like strewn victims. Or if Mrs. Brazir had had too much to drink the night before, she might remain in bed all day and Mr. Brazir would bring her glasses of ginger ale, and explain, “Mummy’s hung.” The particular quality of their air held not the tense, angry caesura you feel in some houses, but a loving silence, like a glow coming out of their bedroom, where she lay, I assumed, in a white gown. (She almost always wore white, like a bride.) Only Mr. Brazir penetrated, bearing glasses of ginger ale. I never heard their voices during this exchange,
as he pressed the glass into her hand, or set it down on the nightstand beside her; I never heard her say thank you, or him ask if she would like an aspirin. Nothing banal ever happened. The rooms swallowed you in silence, and as you sat in one room, you could not hear voices from the other rooms, or so I thought at first. One afternoon, Karim and I sat in the living room with the Alfa Romeo, which was never really worked on—never a hint of tools, grease or gasoline—only extraordinary, useless and admired. Mr. Brazir had disappeared into the bedroom with a glass of ginger ale. I lay on the rug reading
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
in shameless hope that I could join the conversation over cocktails (though it turned out that the incest conversation happened only one time; the subject moved from theme to theme, and preparation proved impossible). Suddenly I heard ice cubes knocking together as she drank. The sound broke the silence like an avalanche; I realized that the Brazirs communicated to each other without words.