“Rudy. My husband.”
“Whatever,” said Goz, and she went into a stall and closed the door.
None of the English seemed to be getting sick. This caused much whispering in the Indian villages. “We are dying,” they said. “But they are not. How come?”
And so the chief, weak and ailing, would put on English clothes and go to the Englishmen (picture).
“THIS IS for Seth Billets,” Mamie said, handing the receptionist a large manila envelope. “If he has any questions, he can just phone me. Thanks.” She turned and fled the building, taking the stairs rather than the elevator. She never liked to meet with Seth. He tended to be harried and abstracted, and they worked just as well together on the phone. “Mamie? Great stuff,” he liked to say. “I’m sending the manuscript back with my suggestions. But ignore them.” And always the manuscript arrived three weeks later with comments in the margin like Oh please and No shit.
She bought a paper and walked downtown toward some galleries she knew on Grand Street, stopping at a coffee shop on Lafayette. Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.
“You want something or nothing?” the waitress asked her.
“What?” Startled, Mamie ordered the Slenderella.
“Good choice,” said the waitress, as if it had been a test, and then hurried to the kitchen in a palsied jog.
Mamie spread the paper out at a diagonal and read, the pages stoically full of news of the war in India and, locally, of the women’s bodies dredged up weekly from the Gowanus Canal. Disappeared women, with contusions. Beaten and drowned. Secretaries, students, a Rosie or two.
The Slenderella came with egg salad, and she ate it slowly, dissolving it in her mouth, its moist, mothering yellow. On the obituary page there were different deaths, young men, as in a war, and always the ending: He is survived by his parents.
Leaving the paper on the table as a tip, she spent the rest of the morning wandering in and out of galleries, looking at paintings that seemed much worse to her than Rudy’s. Why these and not her husband’s? Painting pictures was the only thing he had ever wanted to do, but no one was helping him. Age had already grabbed him in the face: His cheeks sagged houndishly, his beard was shot with white. Bristly hairs sprouted like wheat from his ears. She used to go with him to art openings, listening to people say bewildering things like “Syntax? Don’t you just love syntax?” or “Now you know why people are starving in India — we had to wait an hour for our biriyani!” She began to leave early — while he lingered there, dressed in a secondhand pair of black leather pants he looked terrible in, chatting up the dealers, the famous, the successful. He would offer to show them his slides. Or he would go into his rap about Theoretical Disaster Art, how if you can depict atrocities, you can prevent them. “Anticipate, and imitate,” he said. “You can preclude and dispirit a holocaust by depriving it of its originality; enough books and plays and paintings, you can change history by getting there first.”
One East Village dealer looked him heavily in the eye and said, “You know, in a hive, when a bee has something to communicate, it does a dance. But if the bee does not stop dancing, the others sting it to death,” and the dealer then turned and started talking to someone else.
Rudy always walked home alone, slow across the bridge, his life exactly the same as it was. His heart, she knew, was full of that ghetto desire to leap from poor to rich with a single, simple act, that yearning that exhausted the poor — something the city required: an exhausted poor. He would comb the dumpsters for clothes, for artbooks, for pieces of wood to build into frames and stretchers, and in the early hours of the morning he would arrive home with some huge dried flower he had scavenged, a wobbly plant stand, or a small, beveled mirror. At noon, without an apartment to paint, he might go into the city, to the corner of Broadway and Wall, to play his harmonica for coins. Sea chanteys and Dylan. Sometimes passersby would slow down on “Shenandoah,” which he played so mournfully that even what he called “some plagiarist of living,” in a beige all-weather coat, “some guy who wears his asshole on his sleeve,” might stop on his lunch hour to let a part of himself leap up in the hearing, in communion, in reminder of times left behind. But mostly, everyone just sailed past, tense with errands, stubbing their feet on the shoe box Rudy’d placed on the sidewalk for contributions. He did not play badly. And he could look as handsome as an actor. But mad — something there in the eyes. Madmen, in fact, were attracted to him, came bounding up to him like buddies, shouting psychotically, shaking his hand and putting their arms around him while he played.
But people with money wouldn’t give it to a guy with a harmonica. A guy with a harmonica had to be a drinker. To say nothing of a guy with a harmonica wearing a T-shirt that read: Wino Cogito: I Think Therefore I Drink. “I forget sometimes,” said Rudy, unconvincingly. “I forget and wear that shirt.” People with money would spend six dollars on a cocktail for themselves, but not eighty cents toward a draft beer for a guy with a shirt like that. Rudy would return home with enough cash for one new brush, and with that new brush would paint a picture of a bunch of businessmen sodomizing farm animals. “The best thing about figure painting,” he liked to say, “is deciding what everyone will wear.”
On days when he and his friend Marco got apartment-painting work, they would make real money, tax free, and treat themselves to Chinese food. They called their housepainting partnership We Aim for the Wall, and as a gimmick they gave out balloons. On these occasions rich people liked them—“Hey, where’s my balloon, guys?”—until they discovered liquor missing or unfamiliar long-distance calls on their phone bills. As a result, referrals were rare.
And now something was happening to him. At night, even more than before, he would push her, force her, and she was growing afraid of him. I love you, he would murmur. If only you knew how much. He’d grip her painfully at the shoulders, his mouth tight on hers, his body hurting her. In museums and galleries he quietly mocked her opinions. “You don’t know anything about art,” he would say, scornfully shaking his head, if she liked something by someone who wasn’t Rembrandt, someone he felt competitive with, someone his own age, someone who was a woman.
She began going alone, as now, whizzing around the gallery partitions and then stopping, long, in front of a piece she liked, one that pulled her in and danced a little before letting her go. She liked scenes, something with water and a boat, but she rarely found any. Mostly there was only what she called Warning Label art: Like Man, said one. Love Hates, said another.
Or she would go to a movie. A boy with a plate in his head falls in love with a girl who spurns him. He kidnaps her, feeds her, then kills her by opening up her skull to put a plate in there, too. He props her up in a chair and paints watercolors of her in the nude.
On the subway back, in the afternoon, every beggar seemed to her to have Rudy’s face, turning, leering. They would come upon her suddenly, sit next to her and belch, take out a harmonica and play an old folk tune. Or sit far away and just look. She would glance up, and every bum in the car would have his stare, persistent as pain.
She got off at Fourth Avenue and dropped her jar off at the clinic.
“We’ll telemail you the results,” said a young man in a silvery suit, a technician who eyed her warily.