All of them in the slovenly apartment were involved in the arts in some peripheral and materially unsuccessful way. They passed around their part-time jobs the way they might have borrowed each other’s clothes; Molly found work first at a Kinko’s, then at a video store, then as a waitress. They sometimes went, in groups of three or four, up to Columbia for jobs as human subjects — drug experiments and the like. These jobs were so unrelated to who they felt they were that the changes, the hirings and firings, meant nothing. But Molly could meet her measly rent and her one-sixth share of utilities in this way, which was the only accomplishment in which she felt she could afford any interest. Everyone else Molly met took it for granted that she was an artist of some sort herself; she was living the life, she had the demeanor, and after all she had come to the city with no prospects in the first place. But if Molly was involved with creation of any kind it was only to weave herself so seamlessly into this life that she might not stand out from it at all.
Friends introduced her to friends. So many people she met now, men and women, were gay that she couldn’t always anticipate when some friendly figure at a club or a party in someone’s apartment would suddenly try to get over on her. She took up some offers and not others; she did make herself a rule — one which her roommates had long ago discarded — that she wouldn’t sleep with anyone else who lived in the shared apartment; she didn’t want to endanger her spot, since, should she find herself homeless now, she really had no safety net at all. If, in theory, Molly had suddenly changed her mind and decided to have sex with any one of them, she would have known in advance what kind of sounds they tended to make when they came; with the Japanese screens and the temporary walls and the excess of people, there was no privacy to be had at home. No one minded, because you couldn’t overcome the closeness of the quarters in any other way than not minding.
In the end they lost their lease anyway, when James, who had been at NYU film school for something like seven years, got drunk and set fire to his mattress after his dissertation was rejected. Molly and Iggy moved into a tiny one-bedroom on Seventeenth Street; the guy Iggy was sleeping with came over the first weekend they were there and put up a plasterboard wall in the middle of the one bedroom, with a gap cut on one side for a door. This meant that Molly had to walk through Iggy’s room to get to her own bed; but again, the pretense of privacy was best forgotten if you wanted to live sanely in such a situation. The boyfriend was married and he never knew very far in advance when he could sneak away and come over; if Molly walked in on them, he made no attempt to cover himself, and once in a while asked frankly if Molly would care to join them.
“Maybe some other time,” Molly said. Iggy just laughed.
She went to readings, she went to clubs, to gallery openings when there was the prospect of free food. The art that she saw everywhere was an art of personal expression; most of the theatrical productions were monologues or one-man shows, if only for budgetary reasons. This kind of highly confessional art, when it was bad, seemed false, insincere, yet Molly wondered if you could fairly call it inauthentic when the artists themselves (they were usually friends of hers) were sacrificing everything for it — comfort, money, security. Rarely did any kind of failure incline them to question these sacrifices. They would do anything to get their confession on the record.
Every time Molly met a new person, in a social situation, the fourth or fifth question out of their mouths was, What are you working on?
Iggy got a job playing a Mexican hooker on a soap opera, but then the character was killed off and she went on unemployment for a while. She tried to take a job at Starbucks but was fired for cursing out the manager before her training was even completed. Accustomed to such setbacks, Iggy continued going out at night, and refused to admit the possibility of real disaster.
“There’s always whoring,” she’d say brightly, shrugging her shoulders. It became a running joke between them, every time a bill collector would call or the landlord would wait for them on the stoop.
Years were going by. What was she working on?
She had what might be called an artistic temperament, yet she had no inclination toward art itself. Art was communication; she wanted only to be silent. Music, acting, anything that involved getting on a stage was outside the realm of possibility for her. Even writing seemed to her much too demonstrative. It wasn’t fear so much as distaste. In talking about a thing, you automatically forgave yourself for it. She didn’t want to transform her own experience, to pretend it was anything other than what it was.
So she started taking any sort of available job in the film business: as an extra, in craft services, redirecting traffic when directors were shooting on location (legally or otherwise) on the streets of Manhattan. Carrying tape, carrying screens and stands, when it wasn’t a union shoot: offering her labor in the service of someone else’s vision. She didn’t think of it in terms of advancement — only in terms of hopscotching from one job to another, without too much of a nerve-racking break in between. There was a whole society of young people who lived in this way, and their sense of self-importance was tremendous, though, to be fair, most of them went into it with more of an ambition than Molly did.
She did some stupid things, some crazy things, from time to time. This was why she tried to keep her personality tamped down now, because when she didn’t, what tended to emerge was a vengeful sort of self-effacement. Mostly it involved a reluctance to take herself out of the path of dangerous men. Once she and Iggy had to change their phone number; for Iggy, who had that number on the back of countless 8 x 10s sent to casting directors, this was a great inconvenience, but when Molly made her listen to a few of one particular man’s answering machine messages, she said okay. Most of Molly’s sexual experiences were pickup situations, in clubs or at parties, once on the street with an Israeli man who asked her directions to the Circle Line. She gravitated toward (or allowed herself to respond to) the ones who verged on some sort of emotional extremity; but it was no longer about wanting to see what they had to show her. Nights like that were like tearing the veil, like mounting little productions of her opinion of herself. She wanted to see what she would look like having sex with a coked-out Dominican who could only stay hard if he was holding a knife to her face. She wanted to see what she would look like afterward.
She had no news of her family. She had no idea if they wondered where she was, or if they knew. She felt she had forfeited her right to have her curiosity satisfied about these things.
There was never a shortage of men who wanted her. She was beautiful, self-effacing, open in her manner and yet completely unreachable; thus she had become the kind of woman a certain kind of man will want to wreck himself against.