“I haven’t even told my parents yet,” Andrés said in a spookily quiet, solemn voice. It sounded like a whisper in a cavern. “It will break their hearts. They were living through me.”
“Have you told Rutgers yet? Your adviser?” Guy asked.
“Of course not!” Andrés snapped. “When would I have told them?”
“I’m sorry. I forgot.”
“And now with Interpol, this will follow me around the rest of my life. And I’ll never get my degree. Who would hire a criminal anyway? In the past even a criminal could become a grade-school teacher in the Andes or Angola, but now everyplace is interconnected. Should I just kill myself?”
Guy was suddenly energized. “No, you should call this brilliant lawyer who’s an expert in art and immigration. He says maybe he’ll get you out on parole.”
“No, my contact at Drew Fine Arts got two years, and he’s an American citizen — two years and a fine of three thousand dollars, and he wasn’t forging fakes, just selling them.”
“But Lazlo told me the whole Dalí estate is a mess because the master—”
“Yes, but Dalí’s paper was watermarked with an infinity symbol and was from a particular factory that went belly-up in 1980. There are tons of Dalí products out there — shirts, cognac bottles, gilt oyster knives, ashtrays for Air India — but they’re all authorized.”
“How disgusting,” Guy murmured.
Andrés took offense: “He’s a great Catalan artist and I only worked on lithos of his best work. The Great Masturbator, the Bullfight series, Cosmic Warrior, Caesar in Dalivision …”
“Yes, of course,” Guy said, trying to soothe him.
They went together to Lazlo’s office the next morning at ten. And the lawyer seemed charmed by them both, two young men so handsome and appealingly happy, at least on a better day. Lazlo asked them lots of questions and both he and Andrés took copious notes. Guy looked out the window at the crowds surging down Fifth Avenue, and it seemed unreal to him that they were all free and soon Andrés would be behind bars. It seemed an utterly arbitrary thing, that society would care so much about its precious property that it would punish a young man in the flower of his youth for stealing some of it. “Stealing” was a big word, since he was only copying an inferior hack who endlessly plagiarized himself and invited everyone else to join in. Even the experts would trip all over themselves trying to pinpoint the exact crime Andrés had committed. Dalí himself was dead or dying, as waxy as his absurd mustaches, and there were no pockets in the shroud, but if the heirs and lawyers were all that greedy, then Guy could pay them off. Surely no one cared about the integrity of this artist who had made a career of selling himself out. Dalí would probably have even been flattered that such a clever, handsome guy had bothered to copy his images so industriously. A copy of a fake by a fraud was surely a negligible sort of offense.
Lazlo made them cups of espresso. The cups looked none too clean. He said something that suggested he, too, regarded Dalí as a charlatan, and Guy’s passionate young Colombian took offense, predictably. And of course it was immaterial the absolute quality of the work he’d plagiarized. “Victimless crime” were the words stuck in Guy’s head. The room smelled of coffee and Gitanes and Guy suspected the large panes of glass were slick with all these continental fumes.
They hurried home with a new urgency and fell on each other, famished and frightened. Guy could taste the coffee in Andrés’s mouth. He admired his lean, muscled white ass as if he’d never seen it before, the play of muscles across it like summer lightning, except it was something humble and familiar, not cosmic but a companion, a friend, at once familiar and exciting. They were desperate and it occurred to Guy that the police could never come to arrest Andrés if Guy refused to answer the door, if they nailed it shut and fed only on each other, as white as lab mice. They were two solid men, each 150 or 160 pounds, over six feet tall, big beasts; they could afford to fast for days, weeks. Guy wanted to buy them just a month or two; when the police broke down the door they’d find them locked in each other’s arms, forming a rotting crab on the beach of a bed rich in waves of linen. They might be dead.
“What if we just ran away?” Guy said. “There must be some drought-ridden farm near Cartagena where they’d never find us or some village in the Congo where the police would die of malaria. I don’t want to live long — just a while longer with you. And then when the police closed in on our African shack we could set it on fire and go up in flames.”
Andrés started to speak and then sobs overtook him and he cried for half an hour on Guy’s chest. Something about his disarray, his vulnerability, excited Guy. The idea that this lithe, sinewy man was so wracked by sobs turned Guy on as Andrés thrashed from side to side. They wouldn’t even have conjugal rights in prison.
Andrés couldn’t bear not to be lodged inside Guy, sheathed inside Guy’s body; it had nothing to do with being macho, it was just the need to hide, to merge, to infest.
Guy didn’t dare refuse him. He didn’t want to refuse him, but it was hard to get on with their ordinary lives with Andrés’s finger hovering constantly over the pause button. They had to pretend at least they were living a normal life, didn’t they, the unworried, unhurried rhythm of their average days, or else nothing was enjoyable. It was the dailiness of their existence that delighted them, especially when it was slashed through with passion, like burlap erupting into red velvet welts. They had to set the table, scramble the eggs, wash the dishes — they couldn’t just devour each other, could they?
Guy had to visit poor blind Fred in St. Vincent’s, the City of the Dead on the seventh floor of Spellman, small and dirty, all the single rooms converted into doubles. Surprisingly, it was a carnival atmosphere that afternoon — two drags were accompanying Rollerena, and she whizzed by, homely in her black glasses and dusty organdy, a fixed smile on her face, a wand in her hand. She looked like a nerdy high school girl with glasses and acne. Sister Patricia was silently patrolling the halls, her scrubbed face accented with her furry eyebrows, her white hands tucked into her full black sleeves. Fred was asleep. When Guy woke him, he smiled and said, “I wish you’d buy me a Walkman. It’s so fuckin’ boring being blind.”
“A what?”
“You can listen to music with it,” and he mimed earphones.
“Ah! Un Baladeur!”
“Do you people have your own names for everything? What’s a computer?”
“Ordinateur.”
“See — and a hamburger?”
“Merde.”
Fred laughed and sobered up enough to say, “Come tomorrow at one. My lawyer will be able to transfer the deed.”
“One? Is that within visiting hours? Most hospitals—”
“There are no hours up here. Sister Patricia accepts everything — hell, some of these guys even spend the night with their lovers. I’ve even heard they decorate their rooms with photos and blankets and balloons from home, not that that would do a blind man any good. No dogs so far, but that’ll come.”
Guy kissed Fred goodbye on his thin, sour-tasting lips. He worried that if he accepted the Fire Island house he’d get into a legal squabble with Fred’s family. But, merde, if the Anglo Saxons had these crazy laws that allowed you to disinherit your own children, then he, Guy, would have to profit from their cruel, unreasonable rules. Anyway, the “children” were two middle-aged men well launched in their own careers, or so Fred said. Wasn’t one of them a podiatrist? Sore feet surely must be lucrative. Anyway, they neglected Fred and had taken their mother’s side in the divorce.