But one day, Looie wandered into the forest to collect pine cones, having left a gas flame on near a beaker of formic ether. The cabin burned to the ground. Everything was lost, including eighty-nine chapters of automatic writing: “Cacaphonous Desperation Versus the Inherent Glide of Starched Mush.”
He returned to New York via bicycle. It took him five months.
Looie’s loft was on Pearl Street in a part of the city originally laid out with the horse-drawn vehicle in mind and Christo had to jog back and forth on one-way streets. The block was grimy and dismal, a line of vacancy; obsolete workshops of stale-cake brick held together with barbed wire and rusted sheet tin; street pocked with glass, sparkling seeds from which the weeds grew.
Tildy, with narrowed eyes: “Who’d want to live here?”
“You know what they say. Never judge a book by its jacket copy.” He made a modified K turn, nosed up to an enameled green steel door. “Actually, I think you’ll like this part. It has a certain cinematic tang.”
He got out, climbed on a standpipe to press a button high on the wall. The door lifted, revealing a caged freight elevator. Christo pulled the gate and drove them, Fiat and all, aboard, called “All in” up the shaft; they began very slowly to rise. The shakes and shudders gave Tildy the same and she reached for Christo’s hand.
“It’s all right. This thing can hold a cement mixer.”
At last they edged into light. Looie was waiting for them by an already open gate on the third level of this one-time hides and leathers warehouse, a short, thinset being in a velour tracksuit. He had beady black eyes and, except for a small, triangular beard dyed blue, not a hair on his head — this made his prominent nose even more so, like, you could open beer bottles on it. The original-cast album of Bye, Bye Birdie was playing and he lip-synced along.
“We’re going to park in this guy’s living room?”
Christo smiled. “I thought you’d like this part.”
But there was no living room as such. The dividers, panels of pebbled plexiglass on overhead tracks, had been drawn to one side; it was one clear-through space so large that details at its farthest depth — some kind of platform, old machinery — were hard to make out. The floor was sanded white, walls stripped back to the brick, tin floral-imprint ceiling, furniture of chrome and suede, warm earth tones, recessed lighting.
Glossy head tilted appraisingly, Looie helped her out of the car.
“Meet my partner, Tildy Soileau.”
“Enchanté.” His lips skimmed across her knuckles and he embraced Christo, kissing him on both cheeks. “Welcome back. Welcome back to the madhouse without walls.”
“You’re looking good, Chemikazi, got that glow of health and wealth. And I like the blue beard. It looks a lot better than the green.”
“It’s been a tough year, a lot of cruelty and fraud out there — you know — people whizzing around like insects, trying to stay clear of the big boot heel coming down. But I just float through it all and never get hit with the debris. I can’t explain it. It’s a matter of faith…. Now, can I get you anything? Ham salad? Fondue? White wine?”
“Later for that. I say we sample up.” Christo applied the trunk key, opened one of the garbage bags, tore off great fistfuls of the herb, gummy with resin, dropping them onto an unpleated road map. “Pierce tells me they had a very dry growing season down in Colombia and we have here some tops of the bush pickings. El Primo. He says even an old jade like you will be impressed.”
While Christo sat at a butcher-block table rubbing buds through a flour sifter, Looie took Tildy lightly by the arm and showed her around his “barracks.” He pointed out rosewood cabinets he’d installed himself, the hand-cranked dumbwaiter where he stored onions and potatoes, a row of pancakes — blueberry, buttermilk, whole wheat — tacked up intact as instant sculpture. He opened a locker of salvaged skins of bear and fox and stoat and made her feel the brittle age in them with her hand.
“Once when I still had hair I shared a lunch of berries with a young grizzly. Tremendous berries in Oregon. Justly famous.”
He’d saved the best for last, guiding her now to a window centered in one wall, tiers of green, flashing movement behind the glass. How lovely his touch is, she thought, I know his arm is there but it feels weightless.
“My vivarium,” Looie announced. “Not a terrarium or aquarium. It’s sort of a country club for reptiles, you know, like the place where the mobsters go. La Costa.”
The terraced enclosure was high and deep. Mossy outcroppings and sandy pools were surrounded by wooden sticks (for climbing) and broadleaf vegetation. There were perches and hollows, tunnels through the wet black earth, areas of shade and areas of warm yellow spotlight (the same lamps, Looie said, fast-food places use to keep the french fries warm). Heaped mealworms writhed in the feeding dishes and a ventilation unit hummed quietly.
“Some of these types in here are temperamental or frail. I try to keep it at an even eighty-two degrees. I’m afraid they do get institutionalized after a while, you know, roll onto their backs at the first break in routine.”
Tildy indicated two green lumps wedged behind a chunk of lava.
“Korean fire belly toads,” he whispered. “I’m going to isolate them soon for breeding. Extremely difficult to obtain in this country. I’ve been doing some consulting work for a flavors and essences company. They felt they needed help with their mocha and their number-two beef, so I went up to New Rochelle for a week, gave one a few more bass notes and softened the salts in the other. Simple. But it paid for my toads.”
With some prompting he got her to distinguish a speckled salamander with gold chip eyes from the dwarf begonias under which it was curled, and explained how an old girlfriend had smuggled it from Africa inside a steam iron.
“How did you get him out?”
“That’s nothing. Two friends of mine, brothers, attempted to smuggle marijuana from Yucatán in their scuba tanks. It took them all day to pack it in through half-inch air valve holes. But it only took Customs two hours to unpack.”
“Caramba!” Christo displayed a wicked cheroot of Rubio de la Costa, Colombia’s highest octane strain, tightly and quite symmetrically rolled in a sheet of onionskin paper. “Let’s go, boys and girls.”
He lit up with an entire book of matches, paper flaring as he inhaled, face barely visible behind clouds of smoke.
“Nice flavor, very nice. Like incense in a Catholic church.”
The paper was burning too quickly, ash and seed embers dropping to the floor.
“That’s like a taco. You have to do it over something.” Looie brought a cookie sheet.
Collecting smoke in cupped hands, he washed his face with it. “Excellent bouquet. Pungent but not too sharp. Almost camphorous.” He made the delicate pass with Christo, took small puffs, exhaling rapidly through his nose, then one large one which he swirled, shifted back and forth between pouched cheeks like a wine taster. “Good resin content, no doubt about that. A little harsh on the throat.” Lifting a teapot from the table, he sucked cold oolong from the spout. “Any metabolic signs so far?”