*
It should have been foremost, especially on that in-like-a-lamb evening in March, a month or so after his stroll with Sarah, when Kromer improbably pried Renee and Luna loose from a dull celebration held at a pub just a few blocks from his building (some underdog had passed his orals, on second attempt). Kromer had brought Greta along, and it was she who actually accomplished the trick, keening for Kromer to lead her back to his apartment, where she knew he had a fresh bag of good pot. “Do you want to get high?” Greta, inserting herself beside Kromer, posed this question flatly to Renee and Luna, whom she’d only just met. Greta’s dress, mascara, and mannerisms in this company made her appear a woman garbed as a bat or a cat at a party where no one else was costumed. She was an instinctive corrupter and seducer, guilty of everything ever imputed to Kromer. Yet he’d never have carried off the extraction himself.
The walk couldn’t have been improved, Luna falling in beside Greta, Renee lagging behind with Kromer, the air nearly balmy. Kromer peppered Renee with teasing questions, even dared express surprise at learning of her sister.
“We must have been at school together. If I tried, I’d remember her.”
“Think of me but better looking. She was a model. Now she’s a model’s agent.”
“Really?”
“Not the famous kind. In catalogs for winter gear, under hot lights. She told me you could lose ten pounds in one session, just mopping sweat.”
“Like a starting pitcher, I’ve heard.” He threw a pretend forkball.
“Completely demeaning work.”
“I’m sure,” he said, ignoring the ominous word, failing at that moment to worry about his association with the demeaning work of removing clothes under hot lights rather than piling them on. “You could be one.”
This drew her furrowed laugh. “Look at this profile. I’m a pig, I’m a dog.”
He held up an L of finger and thumb, making the shape of her regal or mournful nose, something he’d practiced alone, imagining fitting his hand to its length. “I’d cast it in gold.” The line came from somewhere, surely, but wasn’t practiced in the least. It startled not only Kromer but Renee, too, enough to spare him the laugh.
“I’ve been wanting to find a way to split you from Luna for so long I can’t say,” he told her. “This little distance of pavement is all I’ve managed.”
Renee watched her feet, and Luna’s and Greta’s, ahead. “There’s always the telephone.”
“I’d heard you two had a party line — was I misinformed?” He hoped the joke wasn’t too antique for her. Their knuckles brushed. Not quite fingers entangling. No one said ouch.
But the walk, that brief elbow of Houston and Ludlow, was done. Their appointment with his baggie of pot commanded they exit the sweet night, in favor of the radiator thud and hiss of his walk-up. The super hadn’t yet adjusted the heat to the season, so Kromer balanced blazing pipes with yawning windows. Air so plush at sidewalk level would be like ice coursing through his fourth-story windows. He’d apologize for luring them into a sauna riven with blasts of cool, nothing else.
*
Did Renee glance at the tapes on the bracket shelves, and the tapes stacked in uneven piles on the floorboards beneath the shelves, and the tapes on the shelf above the closet’s hangers, where Kromer put all their coats? Possibly. Kromer caught Invisible Luna’s glances at them. Yet it was Renee’s containment that Kromer should have taken as a sign. She fell silent, her limbs surrendering their animation. If only the blocks of Ludlow had each been a mile long. Greta sat cross-legged on Kromer’s couch and rolled joints with the crafty intensity and patter of a stage magician, so practiced that she could look away from the trick to meet her audience’s eyes.
“Is all this yours?” Luna said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Kromer seized the opportunity with relief. The tapes had first to be mentioned, so as to be dismissed. “I find it pretty incredible myself,” he said. “My mansion of smut has many doors.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Luna said.
Kromer cut the jokes, opting for efficiency. He described the formulaic nature of the reviews, how he’d become adept enough to write one after slogging fifteen or twenty minutes into a given feature, and the logistical annoyance of the VHS cartons stacking up. “You’d never think they could need so much of it, until you see them in the shop, ravenous for new releases. As if watching the same one twice would be the shameful act.” The pronoun “they” was what he meant to put across, a verbal quarantine on the unseen behaviors dividing customer from clerk.
For a few minutes, the subject went underground. The joint circled the room. Kromer was content to see that as it visited under Renee’s elegant nose she sipped deeply, eyes closed. He couldn’t have predicted that it would be a fuse on a stick of dynamite, a spark sizzling its way to Renee’s lips. Or that she’d go off like Yosemite Sam. Kromer was just dropping the needle onto a Cowboy Junkies LP when Renee screeched, “I feel like I’m sitting inside a copy of Guernica!”
“Sorry?” Kromer said.
“I can’t let my eyes rest anywhere,” Renee said. “It’s like a meat shop — carnage everywhere.”
Greta’s eyes widened, which put them at half-mast. “More like Francis Bacon,” she murmured. Greta had been an art-history major at college. “Really, if you squint, it’s like we’re in a Bosch painting.”
“The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Kromer said. It seemed a calming phrase to utter, akin to saying the words The Peaceable Kingdom or Everything That Rises Must Converge, or like the narcotic tone of the LP, which presently purred, “Heavenly wine and roses seem to whisper to me when you smile …”
“My gender-studies professor did a book of life histories of sex workers,” Renee said. “But it’d take a thousand years to debrief this Aladdin’s cave of contorted bodies.” Renee’s expression was mangled, like her words.
“If these walls could talk, they’d moan,” Greta said.
“I think they might be screaming at me,” Renee said.
“Not everything is … the same as everything else.” Kromer recognized that his generalized protest against equivalences wasn’t going to cut much ice. As it happened, a bookshelf at Sex Machines featured Renee’s professor’s book, a fact Kromer didn’t feel obliged to mention.
Renee bolted upright, putting Kromer on alert for a police raid, or a blouse aflame from a loose ember. Instead she darted at the edifice of porn, coming away with three tapes. These she tossed into Kromer’s lap, poisoned potatoes. “Tell us what’s so different.”
Where could he possibly begin? Kromer flashed on the tapes’ contents, helplessly. Actually, Renee had done well, for a random stab. Two of these three had some redeeming imaginative elements. He lifted the topmost, Bare Miss Apprehension. “These — I mean, Bare Miss Adventure and all the sequels — they’re really just star vehicles for Jocelyn Jeethers. A picaresque structure, but charming. People like them, I mean. There’s a good focus on female autonomy—” Kromer stumbled on the proximity of this word to “anatomy.”