SoHo Sins (28 page)

“Animal parts, wrecked cars. Right now we don’t get anything past de Kooning.” She sliced the air in a series of Zorro-style slashes. “You know, all those hacked-up women with ugly faces.”

“That’s quite enough, Jessica,” said Mrs. Dorfman. “Very generously, Mr. Wyeth has in fact consented to address the class on postwar art. You may discuss New York School painting with him after his lecture, in February.”

The girls found this prospect hilarious. Melissa separated herself from their laughter and whispers, taking my hand.

“Come on, Uncle Jack,” she said. “Let’s go where we can have an adult conversation.”

We caught a cab that took us across the park to the Upper West Side.

“Your friends seem to think I’m pretty funny,” I said.

“They’re just dorks.”

“High maintenance dorks, I bet.”

“Actually, they all think you’re dreamy, if you want to know the truth.”

“I always want to know the truth. It’s a curse.”

Even in the dimness of the cab, punctuated by occasional bursts of reflected light, I could see Melissa’s eyes roll.

“You’re such a child sometimes,” she said.

Her piano teacher turned out to be a Juilliard student in need of pocket cash, an earnest young man with wire-rim glasses and an ostentatious way of counting in German to keep his pupil on beat. The neat minuscule apartment was lined with books. At least Melissa played fluently, with the kind of feeling that Zhou Dong’s father would have approved.

Back in SoHo, we stopped for dinner at Marc Sans on Sullivan Street. Lights were just coming on in the cloudy fall twilight. The owner gave us a table along the east wall, “where mademoiselle can see and be seen.”

“
Merci bien
,” Melissa said. “
On est toujours à l’aise dans ce bel endroit
.”

Marc, exaggeratedly impressed as always, immediately switched into French, and the two of them bantered away for several minutes about the evening’s menu. At Melissa’s suggestion, I ordered the duck confit.

“You’ve made a new conquest,” I said when the young owner, slim and curly-haired, went back to the kitchen. “I’m very impressed.”

“No, I don’t want more than one
copain
,” Melissa answered gravely.

“That’s not very French of you.”

“I don’t care. I’ve decided to be completely faithful to you. It’s more daring these days, don’t you think?”

“It’s hard for me to say.”

“You’ll see once you get used to it.”

“Get used to what?”

“My devotion.”

“Very cute. No wonder your friends are so entertained all the time.”

“They were laughing because I told them about us.”

“Told them what?”

“That you’re my boyfriend now.”

“Stop it. That’s very silly.”

“Is not.”

“It’s a fun game, Missy, but you have to be careful.”

“Why?”

“Because some very obtuse people might think you’re serious.”

“I am serious.”

“Stop it.”

“It’s not up to you. I get to decide.”

“Not by yourself. Both people have to agree.”

“You do agree, Uncle Jack. You just won’t admit it.”

Melissa was interrupted by the arrival of two mesclun salads and a basket of bread. She looked at the food very carefully. Raising her eyes to me, she said with great deliberation, “I’ve decided to be true to you because I see how the other way just massacres everything.”

“Like what?”

“Like your marriage to Nathalie, like my daddy’s life.” She did not blink or look away.

“Your father made some mistakes, like everybody.”

“And now he’s ended up half crazy, because some sex germ is eating his brain. That’s what Mom says, anyway. She ought to know. She’s kind of slutty herself.”

“Don’t insult your mother, Missy.”

“What do you know about her?”

“That she’s a terrific woman, a good mother. I also know you’re her whole life.”

“Except when she’s off with some guy and forgets all about me. I’m never sure when she leaves the house if it’s really, really for an opening or a studio visit or whatever, or just a hook-up with some horny creep.”

“You’re not being fair to her, Missy.”

“Maybe not. But it’s what I feel. That’s why I want to start fresh with you.”

“I might be the worst choice of all.”

“You might, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t care what you do, honey. I just care what I feel. So I’m going to be true to you until you’re like really old, maybe fifty or something. Then I’ll marry a rich doctor and make him take care of you when you’re all twisted up and can’t walk and stuff.”

“How sweet. Why would you do that?”

“Because you take good care of me now, and no one else does.”

“How can you say that? Lots of people take care of you. Especially your mother.”

“Sometimes. But I take care of her, too.”

“How so?”

“In a special daughter way. You don’t get to know.”

“Not ever?”

“Only when we get married.”

I had a long drink of wine and tried to laugh Melissa’s fantasy away.

“Don’t kid yourself, Missy,” I said. “Once you’re grown up, you won’t even remember my name.”

“Won’t I?”

“Guaranteed. The first love is never the last. You’ll understand that someday.”

“Do you understand it?”

“No, not really.”

It was too much. I began to look desperately, vainly for a waiter.

“Why are you being so difficult?” Melissa asked.

“Look, you’re a wonderful girl, Missy, but I can’t be a boyfriend for you.”

“Why not?”

“I’m too ancient.”

“You are not. You’re too scared, that’s all.”

“It’s more or less the same thing.”

She pondered for a moment, her right index finger working the edge of the table. “Why do you always talk to me about being old?”

“Because anything else would be a lie.”

“You don’t seem old to me. You seem my age.”

“It’s a trick I learned once.”

“I like it. It’s magic.”

“With you, yes. Not with everyone.”

“See how good I am for you?”

Word about the next
Virgin Sacrifice
taping came directly from Paul, when we ran into each other at Bob Flanagan’s birthday performance at the New Museum.

For several weeks the California artist, who suffered from cystic fibrosis, had been ensconced in a hospital bed in the main gallery. Covers drawn to his chest, he greeted visitors and chatted quietly until the time came to stand up and strip himself naked. Every few hours, completely exposed, he would wrap a rope around his ankles and be winched upside down toward the ceiling. There he hung with arms outstretched in an inverted crucifix position meant to incarnate his art and help clear his lungs of accumulated mucus. But for tonight’s landmark occasion—he had attained the odds-defying age of 42—Flanagan promised something unprecedented.

A large crowd was on hand, milling about among the displays that accompanied the artist’s live-in project. Near the front was an installation duplicating the look of a pediatrician’s waiting room: low tables and chairs, children’s magazines and books, a few toys, a low wall of building blocks. Only on second look did one notice that the toy box was salted with rough-sex implements and the blocks were arranged to obsessively repeat the letters “S” and “M.” Nearby was a black stool crowned with a tapering butt plug. A long text, Flanagan’s memoir and credo, filled one wall, culminating in a catchphrase that, reiterated, encircled the entire exhibition space: “Fight sickness with sickness.”

In the rear gallery stood a scaffold holding half a dozen video monitors suspended in the form of a cross. One showed Bob’s head, others his hands, his feet, and his crotch. The last featured scenes of self-mortification—his penis being bound tightly with black leather thongs, his foreskin probed with needles, a nail driven through his scrotum and into a board. To one side of the scaffold lay an open, flower-bedecked casket with a video clip of the artist’s living face displayed on a monitor propped against a white satin pillow.

Bob himself, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans with a slim oxygen tank strapped to his hip, circulated among the guests. Joking and gesticulating, he breathed with the aid of a clear plastic tube taped just under his nose. He was an excellent host, doing his best to make everyone feel comfortable and entertained.

Behind him, moving when he moved, was Paul Morse. The familiar shoulder-held camera covered the younger man’s pretty face as he shadowed Flanagan. The event was being recorded, in a glare of artificial light, for
PM Videos
.

Once the crowd had filled the room, Bob disappeared behind a curtain. Soon a huge cake in the shape of male genitalia was wheeled out by assistants. Pieces were cut and distributed along with plastic glasses of wine. Finally, Bob reappeared—lying nude on a bed of nails atop a hospital gurney. The overhead track lights revealed a small bead of perspiration on his upper lip, his only sign of discomfort. After a few minutes, he sat up and spoke into a handheld mike, thanking us all for making this birthday such a memorable treat.

An artist I knew vaguely—one of the youth set, with shaved head and Dr. Martens boots—caught my eye and edged closer. He seemed to be screwing up his courage to speak to me, and I hoped it wouldn’t be a come-see-my-work pitch.

“How have you been, sir?” the young man asked.

“Fine. Just back from the Hamptons. It was all very chic. Guests arriving by helicopter on the front lawn—that sort of thing.”

I enjoyed the little white lie. Bohemian types always assume that SoHo dealers lead gilded lives, and the illusion is good for my brand.

“So,” he said wearily, “are you going anywhere interesting after the show?”

“No,” I replied. “I’m tired of interesting places, aren’t you?”

“Oh, for sure.” His eyes brightened. “Dull stuff is actually much more refined. Like, you know, this new French theorist says that blandness is the essence of Chinese culture.”

“Does he?” I finished my wine. “I wonder if he’s ever had a meal in Sichuan. Or a girlfriend in Shanghai.”

Just then Paul—heaven sent at that moment—eased between us, moving in for a final shot over my shoulder.

“Perfect,” he said as he switched off the camera and lights. “I never get tired of watching Bob.”

Suddenly, with the intense lamps extinguished, everything seemed less important. Paul spoke to me quietly, under the general murmur of resumed chatter.

“We’re taping a new
Sacrifice
in a few days. Are you game?”

“Sure, as long as Sammy makes it worth my while.”

“He will. Is Melissa ready? Does she trust you?”

“Better than that. She’s sweet on me.”

“Righteous, man.” Paul said it firmly, though he looked a bit hurt. “And her mother?”

“Not a clue.”

“They can be real hellcats, you know. Some moms.”

“Angela is busy playing Florence Nightingale to her ex-husband, who’s marooned in Sloan-Kettering.”

“That should keep her distracted.” Paul told me to expect a small group at the Crosby Street building. “What are you going to tell Missy?”

“That we’re off to a fun dance party with Uncle Paul and his friends.”

“Good, I like the way it sets her up.”

“I thought you might.”

Once I agreed to go to the taping session, everything else started to feel slightly irrelevant, a waste of my time. Certainly Angela’s opening proved—to put it kindly—an underwhelming affair. Yet her failure enabled me to put the next part of my plan into motion.

Even though Michael Loomis Fine Arts was not large, too much space separated the few unimportant visitors, most of them Angela’s personal friends. Each looked as lonely as her isolated sculptural figures, and only a little less contorted. No drinks were served. For once, information would be my only intoxicant until the afterparty.

“What should I say to Angela?” I asked Laura, who was sleek and deadly looking that evening in a new Gemma Kahng skirt.

“Tell her the show will be well received critically.”

“She knows what that means.”

“Then make up a smooth story about how recognition builds over time, how Michael will sell things out of the back room for months to come.”

“I’m supposed to be her friend.”

“So be one.” She scowled at my plodding reaction. “Why tell nice people the truth, Jack? Isn’t there enough grief in the world already?”

I looked around the room. “I half expect to see Phil here,” I said, feeling foolish. I was still a long way from accepting my friend’s bleak condition, even though I’d seen some of the devastation for myself. Laura gave me a reality check, reminding me that our former client never left the hospital anymore, could not care for his own daily needs or engage in more than the simplest verbal exchange.

“It’s too strange,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“How they work the same way basically—sex, age, disease.” Laura fingered her glass. “Beyond a certain point, your body just does what it’s going to do.”

I still couldn’t quite grasp it. Philip had been fully cogent at the time I lost Nathalie. Yet the breakdown that began only two and a half years ago with negligibly small slips—writing “soon see you” at the end of his e-mails instead of “see you soon”—worsened at a vicious rate, until now it had ravaged him totally, leaving the former magnate only nominally human. In the past few months, with increasing rapidity, memory loss had invaded his brain like an alien cell-killing substance, spreading wildly until his troubled, once-agile mind was obliterated. His thinking had suddenly passed over into a simpler, more blissful dimension, like Dante stepping through the wall of flame to embrace his lost Beatrice.

No one could say exactly when the last trace of guilt left Philip, when the final synapse gave way—the one that formerly connected the image of a dead woman, his wife, with the emotional oddity we call remorse. At last, irreversibly, he had entered into a pathological beatitude. Philip was far past crime and punishment now, beyond good and evil.

I could have used a little of his oblivion that evening, as the scene grew even more painfully subdued at the loft gathering after Angela’s show.