In Blaine’s and my apartment, there were a few citations for loud music, once an arrest for possession, but it was a police raid that finally stalled us. A crashing through the door. The cops swarming around the place. Get to your feet. One of them bashed my ankle with a nightstick. I was too scared to scream. It was no ordinary raid. Billy was lifted from our couch, kicked to the floor, strip-searched in front of us. He was taken away in cuffs, part of a Federal Bureau of Narcotics sting. We got away with a warning: they were watching us, they said.
Blaine and I crawled around the city looking for a bump. Nobody we knew was selling. Max’s was closed for the night. The tough-eyed queers on Little West Twelfth Street wouldn’t let us into their clubs. There was a haze over Manhattan. We bought a bag on Houston but it turned out to be baking soda. We still stuffed it up our noses in case there was a small remnant of coke. We walked to the Bowery among the plainsong drunks and got smashed against a grocery store grate and robbed at knifepoint by three Filipino kids in lettered jackets.
We ended up in the doorway of an East Side pharmacy. Look what we’ve done to ourselves, said Blaine. Blood all over his shirt front. I couldn’t stop my eye from pulsing. I lay there, the wet of the ground seeping into my bones. Not even enough desire to weep.
An early-morning greaseball threw a quarter at our feet. E pluribus unum.
It was one of those moments from which I knew there would be no return. There comes a point when, tired of losing, you decide to stop failing yourself, or at least to try, or to send up the final flare, one last chance. We sold the loft we owned in SoHo and bought the log cabin so far upstate that it would be a long walk back to Max’s ever again.
What Blaine had wanted was a year or two, maybe more, in the sticks. No distraction. To return to the moment of radical innocence. To paint. To stretch canvas. To find the point of originality. It wasn’t a hippie idea. Both of us had always hated the hippies, their flowers, their poems, their one idea. We were the furthest thing from the hippies. We were the edge, the definers. We developed our idea to live in the twenties, a Scott and Zelda going clean. We kept our antique car, even got it refurbished, the seats re-upholstered, the dashboard buffed. I cut my hair flapper-style. We loaded up on provisions: eggs, flour, milk, sugar, salt, honey, oregano, chili, and racks of cured meat that we hung from a nail in the ceiling. We wiped away the cobwebs and filled the cupboards with rice, grain, jams, marshmallows — we believed we’d eventually be that clean. Blaine had decided it was time to go back to canvas, to paint in the style of Thomas Benton, or John Steuart Curry. He wanted that moment of purity, regionalism. He was sick of the colleagues he’d gone to Cornell with, the Smithsons and the Turleys and the Matta-Clarks. They had done as much as they possibly could, he said, there was no going further for them. Their spiral jetties and split houses and pilfered garbage cans were passé.
Me too — I’d decided that I wanted the pulse of the trees in my work, the journey of grass, some dirt. I thought I might be able to capture water in some new and startling way.
We had painted the new landscapes separately — the pond, the kingfisher, the silence, the moon perched on the saddle of the trees, the slashes of redwings among the leaves. We had kicked the drugs. We had made love. It all went so well, so very very well, until our trip back to Manhattan.
A BLUE DAWN stretched in the room. Blaine lay like a stranded thing, all the way across the bed. Impossible to wake. Grinding his teeth in his sleep. A thinness to him, his cheekbones too pronounced, but he was not unhandsome: there were times he still reminded me of a polo player.
I left him in bed and went out onto the porch. It was just before sunrise and already the heat had burned the night rain off the grass. A light wind riffled across the surface of the lake. I could hear the faintest sounds of traffic from the highway a few miles away, a low gurgle.
A single jet stream cut across the sky, like a line of disappearing coke.
My head was pounding, my throat dry. It took a moment to realize that the previous two days had actually occurred: our trip to Manhattan, the humiliation at Max’s, the car crash, a night of sex. What had been a quiet life had gotten its noise again.
I looked over at the hut where Blaine had hidden the Pontiac. We had forgotten the paintings. Left them out in the rain. We hadn’t even covered them in plastic. They sat, ruined, leaning against the side of the hut, by some old wagon wheels. I bent down and flicked through. A whole year’s work. The water and paint had bled down into the grass. The frames would soon warp. Fabulous irony. All the wasted work. The cutting of canvas. The pulling of hair from brushes. The months and months spent painting.
You clip a van, you watch your life fade away.
I let Blaine be, didn’t tell him, spent the whole day avoiding him. I walked in the woods, around the lake, out onto the dirt roads. Gather all around the things that you love, I thought, and prepare to lose them. I sat, pulling the roots of vines off trees: it felt like the only valuable thing I could do. That night I went to bed while Blaine stared out over the water, licking the very last of the coke from the inside of the plastic baggie.
The following morning, with the paintings still out by the garage, I walked toward town. At a certain stage every single thing can be a sign. Halfway down the road a group of starlings flew up from a pile of discarded car batteries.
THE TROPHY DINER was at the end of Main Street, in the shadow of the bell-tower church. A row of pickup trucks stood outside with empty gun racks in their windows. A few station wagons were parked on the church grounds. Weeds had cracked through the pavement at the door. The bell clanged. The locals on the swivel seats turned to check me out. More of them than usual. Baseball caps and cigarettes. They turned quickly away again, huddled and chatting. It didn’t bother me. They never had much time for me anyway.
I smiled across at the waitress but she didn’t gesture back. I took one of the red booths under a painting of ducks in flight. Some sugar packets, straws, and napkins were scattered on the table. I wiped the formica top clean, made a structure out of toothpicks.
The men along the stools were loud and charged up but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. There was a momentary panic that they somehow knew of the accident, but it seemed beyond the bounds of logic.
Calm down. Sit. Eat breakfast. Watch the world slide by.
The waitress finally came and slid the menu across the table, placed a coffee in front of me without even asking. She usually wore her weariness like an autograph, but there was something jumped-up about her as she hurried back to the counter and settled in once more among the men.
There were small drip marks on the white coffee mug where it hadn’t been washed properly. I scrubbed it with a paper napkin. On the floor beneath me there was a newspaper, folded over and egg-stained. The New York Times. I hadn’t read a paper in almost a year. In the cabin we had a radio with a crank arm that we had to wind up if we wanted to listen to the outside world. I kicked the paper under the far side of the booth. The prospect of news was nothing in the face of the accident and the paintings we had lost as a result. A full year’s work gone. I wondered what might happen when Blaine found out. I could see him rising from bed, tousled, shirtless, scratching himself, the male crotch adjust, walking outside and looking over at the hut, shaking himself awake, running through the long grass, which would rebound behind him.