Don’t remind me. The hood’s gone to shit. It wasn’t like this when I moved — much grittier.
Looked very respectable to me, said Pasha.
Exactly. There used to be bums, whores, syringes. Now it’s bearded collies and NYU baseball caps. He sighed. Where I’m taking you is the real artistic crux. It’s as avant-garde as it gets. I guess we probably should be going. We don’t want to miss the free wine.
They walked under an awry drizzle, getting sprayed in odd spurts. The sky, however, was a flat, far, uniform blue. Air-conditioner piss, Misha explained as Pasha looked up in concern.
Shopping bags knocked against Pasha’s knees. He stepped off the curb into the path of a bicycle. Misha pulled him aside. The cyclist, on a food-delivery mission, swerved and yelled, baring teeth, disappearing into traffic. Evidently, visibility was determined not by air quality but by motion. You could see for miles on end in an open field or on a beach because there was little movement to absorb. In Union Square visibility was never more than an arm’s reach. Misha indicated a turn. They veered into deeper, darker, more substantial avenues. Men on corners demonstrated the hot dog as a two-bite affair. The top of Pasha’s head felt, oddly, lower than his feet.
Misha decided to recruit an artist friend to show them around the galleries, which had only recently colonized the area and weren’t so easy to navigate. The friend was advertised as a character, one of those larger-than-life personalities, a bit of a sociopath — but who isn’t, really? — and a brilliant conceptualist. He’d be perfect for the task, insisted Misha, as if trying to convince Pasha. They stopped at a pay phone, and Misha pulled from his briefcase the fattest most bursting soggy tattered crumbling spine-disintegrating phone book Pasha’d ever seen. And a zip bag of quarters. The artist friend didn’t answer. Misha persisted, trying every pay phone they passed as if the problem were with them. When he finally got through, the conversation lasted ten seconds. The artist was reposing in his country home. Misha walked on, deep in thought. He suddenly had another friend, an art critic, who would do an even better, certainly more thorough job. In this case the conversation lasted past the minute mark, interspersed with several desperate laughs. Alas, it was a no. The art critic was staying true to his title, composing a piece of criticism due last Monday. He’s always behind, said Misha. It’s a mystery how he still gets work. They kept on. Pasha could tell that Misha’s brain kept on, too. The fire escapes, gnarled, rusted, rising, were like the waste of his thoughts. And indeed it wasn’t long before another call was placed, this time without the phone book’s assistance or any information about the man being dialed. Misha looked over both shoulders before being engulfed by the booth. Pasha stood in the center of the sidewalk until a man snagged his arm and yelled a brief phrase that definitely included fuck or fucker or fucking, a word Pasha realized he’d been waiting for. He squeezed against a building. Misha hung up. He said, I had to call back this guy, Gerbil, and he happened to ask what I was doing, so I told him, and now he wants to meet us there. That won’t be a problem, will it?
Pasha shrugged. The next pay phone was his turn.
Esther picked up in her usual way, as if distracted from battling a furious blaze. Pasha asked how she was feeling.
I feel fine, she said, then got angry. How could I possibly feel?
Maybe you need help around the house?
Are you trying to make an old woman laugh? What’s going on? Where’s Misha?
Right here.
So what are you calling for? Enjoy yourself! Have fun! Don’t come back till next week. Give Misha a big hello. Better yet, pass on a kiss.
My mom wants to adopt you, Pasha said as they resumed their trek.
Perfect timing — mine’s just about ready to disown me.
Your mom worships you.
First of all, said Misha, you don’t know. You haven’t seen the woman in ages. She’s down to ninety pounds and comes with a crew of surgeons. She looks like a tiny greased mannequin. But somewhere inside there’s a pea-size gland where all the remaining humanness is concentrated, and this gland wants one thing. A grandchild. That’s all. No substitutions. A goddamn grandchild. She says to me whenever we talk — which, yes, is still daily — that it doesn’t even matter what kind, a girl, a boy, sick, healthy, even a mulatto, anything with a heartbeat and tiny feet at this point.
And is that such a hard thing to provide?
Misha scratched the back of his head. There was this one girl, Lisa, a Spanish translator, not drop-dead, but sexy. Big tits. And smart as shit. Spoke like fifteen languages. We dated. After several months, several outta-this-world months, I must admit, she made the inexplicable move of leaving her husband. Scared the crap out of me. I was young. Zero regard for the average human’s timeline. Later I discovered that a brilliant, sexy, down-to-earth girl in this city — not as common as one might think.
And what about her now, this Eliza?
Lisa — remarried, two kids, lives in a wealthy suburb outside Paris. But maybe it’s for the best. She liked Tolstoy over Dostoevsky and had teeth so large her lips didn’t meet.
They paused on a scorching corner alongside a construction fence and a stretch of road being drilled into. They had arrived. Yes, really. Misha explained that as of recently this was home to all things visually groundbreaking. He pushed his shades up his slippery nose. Now they would make the rounds. Five, or was it fifteen, blocks of galleries, many of which were sure of little but their names.
It was necessary to see only a fraction of Chelsea in order to stop wanting to master it. What had Pasha imagined? That was unclear. In fact, in his disappointment he forgot that he’d imagined nothing, having come with no expectations. What he found were industrial spaces, blinding neon lights, maniacal wall scrawlings preserved with such care it was as if they were from the dawn of time, flashing signs, buttons to press, levers to manipulate, a heap of recyclables, something vaguely totemic, prim girls paired with oversize desks, an upside-down dining table, footstep echoes, a defeated feeling, white, an elephant made from ostrich feathers — but no wine. Misha charged at the desk with hair to ascertain the situation.
Only at the openings, he reported back with a shrug. In the background, a recording of a woman’s staccato shriek played on a loop, as if she were being torn to shreds and eaten alive, which had about as unnerving an effect on them as a pestering fly. Meanwhile no sign of Gerbil. Misha acquired a stricken look.
They stepped outside, letting the sky drop over them like an old quilt. Headaches were like electronics-store flyers — you had one before you realized you had one. Both of them privately wondered whether they could just abort and go home. On such hot days in the city, people were known to walk out on their families, even their jobs, so what was a friend who lived on the other side of the globe?
Misha went around the corner to check for Gerbil, returning solo but with a brilliant idea: the flea market. He’d remembered Pasha’s dedication to the one in Moldavanka, that gathering of useless objects laid out on bedbug-ridden blankets or wobbly tables by Ukrainians who sat on rickety stools, a bottle tucked behind their feet, soggy bread in their fists. Misha had never understood why objects with no inherent value should suddenly acquire it when lumped together, but for Pasha the market had been a passion.
Pasha’s gloom lifted. For two hours he was transfixed by junk, of which he acquired a fair amount. His bags were so heavy that dinner had to be at the diner one block away. Collapsed into a booth, Misha sighed with exhaustion, Pasha with contentment. A miserably thin waitress appeared overhead, prompting menu misunderstandings, what was what, so many pages, each item trailing a baffling list of ingredients, all overlapping. Pasha made a joke that it was like the poems of someone Misha didn’t know, and the waitress disappeared. Hamburgers arrived, deconstructed, plastic-looking tomato and onion slices fanned out on giant plates.