Dive From Clausen's Pier (24 page)

Simon was watching me. “Alternate side of the street parking is really a pain when it snows,” he said. He smiled gently, and the fact that snow would come—the fact that time would pass and I might still be here and I might not—made me tense with anxiety.

At Eighth Avenue we headed downtown, past overflowing garbage cans and great stacks of flattened cardboard. There were so many restaurants: Italian, Japanese, Italian-Japanese; Scandinavian and Spanish and Tex-Mex. There were places for hearty casseroles, places for delicate salads and barely cooked fish. A delicious smell of grilled meat drifted from an open door, and I turned and saw a neon sign that said
BUTCH
.

“There’s a place on Ninth called Femme,” Simon said. And then, with a grin: “Just kidding.”

At 19th Street we waited for the light and then crossed. The urgent rumble of a subway train rose through the sidewalk grates, and I realized I was getting used to New York: when I’d first arrived that sound had spooked me.

The gallery was in a storefront on 16th Street. At the door a guy about our age—tall and skinny-pale, with a shaved head—glanced idly but surely at everyone who entered. “An art-world bouncer,” Simon whispered as we waited to go in. “Beware his deadly look of contempt.”

Inside, a few dozen people milled around under hot track lights, not
paying much attention to the pictures. They were photographs, of chairs: kitchen chairs, armchairs, lawn chairs. All in black and white, all composed so the chair was alone in the frame and empty.

We moved along one wall, studied a picture of a bentwood chair with a cane seat, another of a worn-out velvet armchair with a matching ottoman, its nap rubbed away. “These are great, don’t you think?” Simon said. “It’s like they’re waiting for something.”

I liked them, too—how they conjured up rooms, whole worlds—but I couldn’t help thinking of the rehab poster back in Madison, the wheelchair casting its net of shadow onto the polished wood floor.
GET MOVING
.

A couple came up behind us and I looked over my shoulder at them. The woman was tiny, with masses of curly dark hair; she wore a wine-colored dress that looked as if it were made of crumpled paper. Her companion was a tall, ponytailed man wearing a black cashmere sweater tucked into voluminously pleated black wool pants.

He said to her, “There’s an interesting decontextualization going on, don’t you think?” He extended his finger and outlined the shape of the chair. “It’s about forms and negative space—she’s taken the chairness away from the chair and left it purely object.”

Simon dug his elbow into my side, then grabbed me and pulled me across the room. “Don’t you love New York?” he said. “You hear the best things.” He shrugged off his jacket and glanced around. “How do you take the chairness away from a chair?”

“You must have to do it in stages,” I said. “First take the seatness away from the seat and move on from there.”

We stood in a pocket of space near the back of the gallery. The lights were so hot I took my jacket off, too. Voices and laughter bounced off the white walls, and scraps of conversation floated by.
A cunning little Kandinsky … Sort of a cross between Sarah McLachlan and Philip Glass … Do they
still
go to Fire Island?

Near us, a large, auburn-haired woman in a multilayered green dress glanced down at her mixed-metal necklace, saw that the pendant had turned upside down, and quickly righted it with a look around to see if anyone was watching. Everyone looked as if they thought they were being looked at—something self-conscious in the set of the shoulders.

Simon ushered me to the bar and we each got a glass of wine. “Did you see the hors d’oeuvres tray before?” he said. “The shrimp looked good.”

We leaned against the wall. In the center of the room stood a short
woman with a hennaed crewcut, her skin fair and so translucent I could see the vein in her temple, like a light blue twig painted on porcelain.

“The artist,” Simon said.

“How do you know?”

“Can’t you feel the vibe?”

I watched her smile at a portly man with thick white hair, say something close to someone else’s ear, then reach over and touch the sleeve of a wraithlike woman walking past.

“No,” I said.

Simon smiled. “Just kidding. I saw a portrait of her in another show. ‘Photographers on Photographers.’ It was actually kind of funny—in at least half of them you could tell the subjects looked worse in the pictures than they would in real life. Like,
You’re my competitor, so I’m going to dogify you.”

“ ‘Dogify’?” I said.

“Make doglike. You know, with that kind of here’s-the-brutally-honest-photographer-turning-his-unpitying-eye-on-real-life type thing.”

“Was she dogified?”

“Completely,” Simon said. “Houndified. Muttified. The picture was lit from the top, and you could see her scalp between her hairs, like bare ground where someone planted grass from seed.”

I smiled. “That’s the Wisconsonian in you talking.”

He clapped his hand to his mouth. “I told him to keep quiet tonight.”

We went back to the bar for more wine, then happened onto three separate waiters with hors d’oeuvres trays: huge shrimp, little rounds of potato topped with sour cream and caviar, bits of puff pastry covered with crumbled goat cheese. Minutes later we were standing there wiping our mouths, holding toothpicks we didn’t know what to do with.

“Five more of each of those,” Simon said, “and I’d feel like I’d had dinner.”

We moved toward a picture of a canvas director’s chair, two of its legs sitting in an inch or so of foamy water, the other two pressing into dark, wet-looking sand. The canvas itself was droopy, the impression of someone’s butt and back still there, suggested.

“It’s like he just went in for one last swim,” Simon said.

“God, I was thinking of something completely different.”

He looked at me. “What?”

“That it had been left behind after the summer was over.” I shrugged. “You know, abandoned.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Art as Rorschach test?”

“I guess so.”

Someone tall came and stood behind us—I felt him more than saw him. I was aware of Simon glancing back over his shoulder, then something in the air changed and he was exclaiming, “Oh, Dillon—hi. It’s Simon, Kyle’s friend. Hi, how are you?”

I turned and saw that his cheeks were pink and that he was looking up at a man with beautiful bone structure and extraordinary silver-blue eyes. This was a man from a movie, from a cologne ad—stunning, a bit bored-looking, with a mouth that wasn’t supposed to smile.

He nodded vaguely but didn’t speak.

“Aren’t you Kyle Donohue’s friend?” Simon continued. “I work with him. I’m sorry, I—I think we met.” He was blushing deeply now, his fingers playing with the button on his jacket cuff.

The man just stood there. At last he nodded. “That’s right.”

Simon nodded, too. “So this is Carrie. We were, um, just looking. At the photographs.” He waved his hand in the man’s direction. “This is Dillon,” he said to me.

“Nice to meet you,” Dillon said flatly. He looked at Simon. “Do you know Renata?”

Simon shook his head. Renata was the photographer—Renata Banion. Her name was on the wall in pale gray paint.

“I liked her last show better,” Dillon said.

“Oh, with the old people?”

Dillon lifted a shoulder. “I thought of them more compositionally. They weren’t people so much as forms of shadow and light.”

“Oh, that’s really interesting,” Simon said.

I looked away. What were Mike’s words? Pretentious and jaded. What Simon had found comical before he was dishing out himself now. Or lapping up, anyway. And this guy was clearly an asshole. Gorgeous, but an asshole.

“Speaking of shadow and light,” Simon went on, “have you seen
Spectacular Creatures?”

Spectacular Creatures
was a movie I’d overheard him and his friends talking about a few evenings ago. It had been the subject of at least three newspaper articles I’d read, a low-budget, independent movie that had won prizes at a bunch of film festivals. Apparently the director had gone to Yale—years ahead of Simon and his friends, but they talked about him with a kind of reverential intimacy.

“Apparently the lighting is really interesting,” he said now.

“I saw it last night,” Dillon said.

A look of disappointment passed fleetingly over Simon’s face. “Oh, how was it?”

Dillon looked at his watch, then glanced around the gallery. At last, as if as an afterthought, he looked at Simon again. “OK. I wouldn’t say the
lighting
is really interesting, but the costuming is quite good.”

“Huh,” Simon said.

“It highlights the absence of sexuality in a pretty interesting way. Actually, the whole thing is very anti-sexual—subtextually, of course.”

Simon nodded seriously. “Sort of like his last movie, how drugs took the place of sex.”

“Exactly,” Dillon said. “In twenty years he’ll be the Fellini of abstinence. And Swig Lawlor will be his Marcello Mastroianni.”

Simon smiled. “His Marcello Mastroianni
and
his Giuletta Masina.” Dillon laughed, and Simon said, in a rush, “Hey, maybe we should have a drink sometime.”

There was an awkward silence. “Maybe,” Dillon said doubtfully. “I’m pretty busy.” He glanced around the gallery. “I mean, get my number from Kyle if you want and we’ll see if we can figure something out.” He looked at his watch again and this time feigned surprise. “Oh, I have to get going.”

“Bye,” Simon said, but Dillon was already moving away, that vague look on his face back again, as if to suggest it wasn’t rudeness that kept him from saying goodbye but simply an unavoidable preoccupation with something else.

“Oy,” Simon said.

“What’s ‘oy’?”

He smiled. “God, you’re goyische. It’s Jewish for ‘Jesus Fucking Christ, that was mortifying.’ ”

“You’re not Jewish,” I said.

“Honorarily,” he said. “Which is all that counts.” He smiled. “Benjamin’s Jewish.” Benjamin was his ex
—permanently
his ex, he’d told me the night I arrived. He took my arm and led me in the opposite direction from the one Dillon had taken. “Did I just make the most gigantic fool of myself? ‘Hey, maybe we should have a drink sometime.’ Like, ‘I’m not sure I’ve revealed the depths of my uncoolness yet—let’s try this.’ ”

“Simon.”

He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. Nearby, the interesting decontextualization guy had a hand over one ear while he bowed his shoulders against the crowd and tried to talk on a cell phone.

“Totally mortifying,” Simon said. “I’m the biggest idiot in the world.”

Across the gallery I saw Dillon in the middle of the crowd, bent close to a blond man with deeply tanned skin.

“Do you want to go?”

“We can’t,” Simon said. “It would look like I was slinking away.”

We turned back to the pictures and continued our tour of the gallery, nabbing hors d’oeuvres when we could. Fifteen or twenty minutes later we were at the door. Dillon had vanished, whether into the crowd or from the gallery, I couldn’t tell. Glumly, Simon put his jacket back on, and I followed suit. I looked outside and saw that it was true dark now.

“My theory,” Simon said, “is that you measure your arrival in New York by when you stop looking at other people and start assuming they’re looking at you.”

I laughed. He wore a gray sweater over twill pants, a virtual uniform for invisibility. I wasn’t much better: black sweater, black pants, silver teardrop earrings—an I-don’t-know-what-to-wear outfit. “You could be visible,” I said. “You just have to cultivate a more flamboyant look.” I grabbed a handful of his plain, zippered black jacket and pulled it stylishly tight.

He shook my hand off. “It’s not clothes, it’s attitude.”

An older woman came in just then, her hair in a perfect gray pageboy, her lips a deep, dark red. She took off her coat and I stared at her velvet dress, slate blue and tied at the side, the hemline angling up in front to reveal a thin, crepey underskirt of the same color. It was gorgeous, set off perfectly by sheer gray-blue stockings and matching thick-heeled, gray-blue suede pumps.

“It’s also clothes,” I said.

C
HAPTER
19

Leather jackets and stretchy pants. Square-toed boots and fedoras. Skinny knits and clear plastic purses. Fashion was everywhere, and I was entranced. Walking around, I got so involved in looking at other women that I began bumping into people stopped at crosswalks. “Excuse me,” I’d say—then I’d check out
their
outfits.

I went to SoHo again and again. That hard blue sky visible between the tops of buildings, cars creeping up and down the narrow streets. I jaywalked between them, the better not to miss a single alluring display window. Everything was presented as if it meant something: a pewter bowl full of pomegranates, a bracelet of frosted amber plastic. “SoHo?” Kilroy said one evening when we were out walking. “It’s Disneyland for grownups. Turning over your platinum AmEx card as heart-stopping thrill.”

I didn’t care. I visited one store where everything was chiffon, another where everything was mauve or black: tiny sweaters with velvet ties, long, droopy skirts, tops with bits of inset lace. I imagined Jamie’s disdain—so
weird
, she’d say. Well, she wasn’t here. I’d been considering calling her, but now I thought I’d wait a while longer. I liked an eight-hundred-dollar pair of wide-leg knit pants with delicate ruffles at the hem, then a twelve-hundred-dollar silk dress with an intricately cut neckline and crinkle-pleated sleeves. They weren’t weird, they were unusual—exquisite. I’d been thinking I could stretch my money thin: sleeping for free in Simon’s alcove, eating honest food with Kilroy—bagels and more
bagels, coffee shop sandwiches, the occasional carton of kung pao prawns. Now I was plagued by doubts. The very existence of something that cost all I had was weirdly tempting. I had an urge to blow my whole nest egg, literally go for broke. Then I thought of Mike, one night back in August.
You loved me
, he’d said.
Now you just feel sorry for me
. He’d been after the same thing, knowledge of what hitting the bottom would feel like, and I understood that he was there now no matter how he’d sounded on the phone: the place where nothing could be worse.