Gun Church (29 page)

“Same old Kip. At least you’re consistent.”

That cut me, deep. I don’t know what I expected her to say. I told her a lie I knew she would believe and she did, without question. I realized then it was going to take more than her missing me or one embrace to make her see the Kipster was really dead. She did, however, seem to read the hurt in my eyes. I think she apologized. Her mouth was moving and she hung her head slightly, but I was too distracted to hear her. My focus had already shifted elsewhere.

Just like that night at the Algonquin, I heard a noise I thought I recognized.
Jim’s truck
. I was sure I heard Jim’s truck. I’d been in that old pickup nearly every day for four months and knew its idiosyncrasies like I knew my own. Its exhaust system had come loose. Jim had jerry-rigged a clamp by twisting together a few wire hangers, looping the hangers around the pipe leading to the muffler, and then hooking the makeshift clamp over the rear axle. When the truck accelerated quickly, the pipe kind of rattled and scraped against the hangers. I snapped my head around, but the snow was now coming down in blinding, wind-whipped sheets. I caught a glimpse of a taillight disappearing around a corner, the snow turning its glow from red to pink.

Was it Jim’s taillight? Of course not. Just like with the Mabry kid’s death, it was the Kipster’s narcissism rearing its ugly head once more for old times’ sake. Amy and I were right by the Holland Tunnel and even in a snowstorm, thousands of cars poured out of its exits, spilling onto the cobblestoned Tribeca streets. I was already off balance from being with Amy, from holding her again, and I was still reeling from the scare I got from the cop. I didn’t know that I would ever be able to see a cop again without going into full fight or flight, or thinking of Stan Petrovic’s body moldering in a grave somewhere in the backwoods of Brixton.

“Kip, are you all right?” Amy asked, pulling me along.

“I should have worn a hat.”

“Come on, my studio’s only three blocks away.”

But even as we walked towards Amy’s warm, dry studio and all the possibilities it had to offer, I could not help but play Lot’s wife and look behind me.

I hadn’t turned to salt, but in some sense I was still looking behind me.

It was three in the morning and I’d yet to shake the afternoon’s chill. It was a chill not from the cold or the wet of the snow. That chill was gone fifteen minutes after we got to Amy’s studio. No, the chill I carried with me was in my marrow, a feeling that the specter of Stan Petrovic would not be so easily buried as his body. If the day had taught me anything it was to not trust what you think you know. It went beyond imagining the scrape and rattle of Jim’s pickup. It extended all the way from Brixton into Amy’s bed.

When we first met, Amy was just beginning to taste the fruits of success. And that early success was more about critical kudos and good press than paychecks. In those days, she was sharing cramped studio space with a bunch of other painters in the basement of an old factory building. The light sucked and she didn’t really care for some of the people with whom she shared the space. Worse, she despised their work. I bought her the loft studio as an engagement present. It was a stretch then, before I got my big contract, but I was in love. It might have been the first and last selfless thing I’d ever done. Until I met Amy, the concept of love-inspired art of any kind made me gag. Once we were together, I understood it was possible to love someone so much that promises of the moon and the stars weren’t just a load of crap. But I never was a guy to hang the moon or promise the stars; and in Amy’s universe, a spacious loft with natural light was more valuable than all the lofty promises and metaphysical conceits of a thousand ardent poets. Did that love stop me from fucking around? Not for very long, no. To be human was to be a contradiction, and in that way I was more human than most.

Of course, as I sank further and further into living out the myth of the Kipster, the loft became less Amy’s workplace than retreat. Finally, it was where Amy moved when she left me. I think maybe that accounted for some of the discomfort I felt here. Coming here had started well enough. First off, it was dry, warm, and—even ten years removed—familiar. We talked a lot, mostly about how her marriage to Moreland had fallen apart.

“With you, Kip, there was always lust to fall back on. With Peter … ” The shrug of her shoulders as her voice faded was quite eloquent. “We started drifting apart after only a couple of months and we’ve been living fairly separate lives for a long time now. I guess we should have gotten divorced years ago, but neither one of us has felt the urge or had the energy to pursue one.” Again, she didn’t say the words, but the forward lean of her body and the smile in her eyes spoke for her.
Until now
, they said.

We discussed her work and she showed me her latest paintings. Her recent work had taken a turn away from twentieth-century abstraction toward a kind of hyper-realism, which, as Amy explained, was simply another form of abstraction. Looking at those paintings, I think, was when the real discomfort began to set in. She had done a series of
in situ
portraits of us as a couple at different stages of our marriage. She had based the paintings on photographs taken of us by her friends at various parties. Some of the paintings were of posed group shots. Some were candid shots.

In the paintings from early in our marriage, Amy and I were painted in full color, so vivid they almost hurt my eyes. Our features, as were everyone else’s, were so subversively subtle and cruelly perfect that to stare at them too long was to look into the invisible light of an eclipse. In these first portraits, only Amy and I were done in color. Everyone else was done in shades of black, white, and gray. But as the series advanced with our years of marriage, the pattern gradually reversed until only Amy and I were black, white, and gray. In the last in the series, I was nothing more than an outline. To look at them was far more painful than my broken ribs or concussion.

“I can’t bring myself to show these yet.”

“Why not?”

“The series is incomplete,” she said, as if that explained it all. Maybe it did.

It was after Amy showed them to me that I realized she wasn’t all forgiveness and light, that memory hadn’t sanded off all the sharp and bitter edges of our time together. I had done a lot of damage to her. There was a warehouse of residual anger in Amy that couldn’t be wished away into the cornfield. I guess I always understood that much even when I was tilting at the windmills of regaining her respect. What I wondered was, did
she
understand it?

That question or its answer didn’t stop either one of us from fucking our brains out. We both knew where we were headed the second we walked back into her studio. That my subway line back to Brooklyn wasn’t operating because of the snowstorm made it that much easier for us to pretend our first hungry kiss wasn’t inevitable. Both of us orgasmed almost immediately. That was easy. Lust and hunger always are; although, the remainder of the night did not pass blissfully. I know it’s crazy for someone who once fucked everything that wasn’t nailed down to say, but I’d always believed Amy and I, together or apart, were mated for life. It was molecular. From the moment I tasted her again, I felt I was home. Yet, when I moved inside her the second time, I felt a wall between us, not a welcome mat. Even as we came again, Amy seemed as far away from me as she’d been when I was in Brixton, maybe farther. And as the night wore on, with each new clench the distance grew.

That’s why I was standing here in the middle of the night, looking out at the still-falling snow through the arched windows of the loft, the streetlights turning the flakes an eerie pale red. With the subways shut down, street traffic at a standstill, and only the occasional distant rumble of a snow plow, it was as near to silent as Manhattan ever gets. My head was a jumble of love and regret. Remembering how far away Amy felt from me even when I was deep inside her made me think about what I had sacrificed in Renee. Though I knew I would never feel that sense of being mated to her, Renee had opened herself up to me. In bed, neither one of us carried old baggage along nor put up walls. I hadn’t inflicted enough hurt on her to build barriers between us. She couldn’t get enough of me and I couldn’t get enough of her. I thought that if I had only managed the same amount of monogamy for Amy in the beginning as I had for Renee, there wouldn’t be a series of sad portraits in the room keeping me company.

Then I heard something from down in the street and looked to my right. There, coming right up West Broadway, were a man and woman cross-country skiing. You had to love New York. I followed their progress as they glided past the loft building. But as they passed and I turned my head left to follow their progress uptown, I caught sight of a lone, dark figure across the street, half in shadow and partially blocked by the corner building. I cupped my hands around my eyes and pressed them to the glass for a better look. The ambient light, the windblown snow, and the tricks the shaking streetlights played with the shadows made it difficult to focus. By the time my eyes finally locked on to the figure across the street, it was turning away and I caught only a fleeting glimpse of a partial profile and a tuft of blond hair. My heart stopped for a beat.
Renee
.

A snail’s pace would have been an improvement. With a pair of snowshoes, I think I could have made it back to the Avenue H station a lot quicker than the Q train. We were doing okay in the tunnels, but once we hit the above-ground portion of the trip, forget it. The big drifts and deep snow had been cleared away, but the wind was still howling, creating new drifts, blowing downed tree branches across the already slick tracks. All I wanted to do was to get back to my apartment and retreat into the pages of
Gun
Church
. I understood the motives of my characters far better than the reasons for the knot in my gut.

In some sense, of course, I was quite relieved that the subways were running and to have escaped the increasingly claustrophobic atmosphere in Amy’s loft. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed that the fantasy of Kip and Amy, part two, had sprung a leak. Even when I quietly crawled back into bed at around four thirty, I knew Amy was in that same bad place I was in. She was as awake as I was, but feigning sleep. That was okay by me. It saved me from having to be the one to pretend. I passed out eventually and woke up as Amy was closing the door behind her. She hadn’t bothered to leave a note. I was glad of that. What could it have said? I showered and got out of there in less than fifteen minutes. As I walked out the front of Amy’s building, I looked across the street to where I thought I’d seen Renee. She wasn’t there. She had never been there. I wasn’t hallucinating, just projecting: seeing who I wanted to see, hearing what I wanted to hear.

I was losing it. I knew what that felt like. You do as many drugs and consume as much alcohol as I had on a regular basis, you’re going to have episodes when you lose it. Sometimes it blindsides you and you wake up in the psych ward crawling out of your own skin, but then it’s over, like a twenty-four-hour virus, and you move on. It’s far worse when you can feel it coming on, when you’re an impotent witness to your own deconstruction. When you feel the stitches holding the illusion of yourself together begin to stretch and pop, and you can’t sew fast enough to keep the stuffing in. In the end, you just stop trying and let the seams rip. That’s what this was like.

For fuck’s sake, I knew the transition from Brixton back to New York was going to be a difficult proposition under the best of circumstances and these were far from the best of circumstances. I don’t recommend killing a man, even a world-class asshole like Stan Petrovic, the evening before you begin life anew. But that wasn’t all of it, not nearly. Beyond conjuring up the sound of Jim’s truck and hallucinating Renee, there was Amy, and there was me.

Then, as if to put an exclamation point on my tenuous grip on things, a plug-ugly, thick-necked guy got on the train at DeKalb Avenue: Stan Petrovic. Maybe it was the way he hobbled to his seat on bad knees or maybe he really looked like Stan. He sat directly across from me on the near-empty subway car. On closer inspection, as ugly as he was, he didn’t look like Stan all that much. Though his attitude wasn’t far different.

“What the fuck you staring at?” he said to me, menace in his voice.

“Sorry. I was just lost in thought there for a minute.” I walked to the opposite end of the car to wait for my stop.

The entrance to my apartment was around the rear of the house and my landlord was out clearing a path with his snow blower, the whine of its gas motor an unpleasant reminder of the generator we used at the chapel. The blower was shooting out a cloud of already graying snow onto Avenue H. When he saw me coming, he powered down the blower and walked towards me.