You’re not going to give me some advice then ruin my shirt and hurt my eardrums are you? I said after we’d left the others.
No more advice necessary, she said. You heard Cornelius.
Not only had I heard Cornelius, Cornelius had given me two hundred more smackeroos.
I’ll buy, I said.
I was expecting you to.
We took a seat in the back of the comfortably shabby place, with its wooden floors, hammered metal ceiling, and soft Nordic jazz, and Tulip said, that was impressive, very direct, very to the point, how did you come up with it?
I don’t know, I said. I improvised.
Which was true.
I also said, after a minute, and there was this drawing in the lobby. Cornelius and I were checking it out before things got started. All these rings and lines leading into the middle. I guess that made me think I should try something interesting but, as you put it, direct. Plus there were the two, you know, contortionist friends, pushing me forward and rubbing my shoulders and knocking a few shadow punches around, like I was heading into the ring. There was also a poster of the Flatiron building that got me going a little on how history doesn’t so much hate us as blindly devour us, like a growing whale eating plankton, so I must have thought a little, maybe just in the back of my mind, of devouring you.
Which was all also true and, I thought, interesting. But Tulip just said, yeah? The “yeah?” she used when she hadn’t listened to what you had just said.
We drank in silence for a little while, then I tried some flattery.
You looked good in that robe, I said.
She smiled or smirked — it was too dark to tell which — but didn’t say anything.
I thought I’d better try something else.
So you’re involved too, I said.
She shook her head. Not really. Cornelius just asked me to help out tonight.
Did he ask you in French?
No. I don’t parlez franais. Do you?
No. I know a few words. I used to date someone who was fluent. Did he pay you?
She shook her head — it was a favor. That’s why you’re buying. Go buy more.
I went over to the bar and bought us another round.
It seems like a pretty questionable gimmick, I said when I got back to the table. I mean, do they have people who actually want to pay to have that done to them?
Tulip shrugged. It’s the times, she said. It’s in the air. Gloom and doom. New York — style. Aris says it falls under the rubric of the danse macabre.
That’s French.
So is the Statue of Liberty, honey. Not to mention Dior and cognac. Would you like to hear some Latin?
Are you serious?
Spiritus meus attenuabitur, dies mei breviabuntur.
What the fuck does that mean?
“My spirit is corrupt, my breath grows extinct.” It’s from the Bible. I saw it in one of Aris’s books. Ask him to show it to you. It’s mostly a picture book. Full of skeletons and people doing the danse macabre. Mostly the skeletons are doing the dancing. “Ring around the Rosie” is more or less what we’re talking about.
I raised an eyebrow.
“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!” A danse macabre for kids growing up in plague times.
I heard that wasn’t true. That it didn’t have anything to do with the plague.
Whatever. It’s true enough. Can you think of anything?
Dead man’s float, I said, remembering once bobbing facedown in the water at the Hamilton Fish Park pool long enough for the lifeguard to jump in.
Or just playing dead. It’s all the same thing. The closer you think you are to death, even if you haven’t thought about it, the more you …
Danse? I said.
Yeah. And anyway, people pay to have all kinds of bizarre and/or anodyne shit done to them.
Like what?
Like hair implants, collagen injections, liposuction, skin lightening, complexion alteration, extreme makeovers, safaris, Rolfing.
Do you think the knockout …?
The what?
Never mind. It’s stupid. Any idea why Mr. Kindt wants me involved?
Who knows, you never know with Aris. Maybe Cornelius told him he needed a new guy. I understand that pretty boy from last night isn’t going to work out.
You mean Anthony?
Is that what you call him?
Pretty boy? I said.
The knockout? she said.
Tulip did the smile/smirk thing again. I sagged a little into my chair.
Don’t worry, Henry, you’re pretty too, she said.
Yeah? I said, the way I quietly say it when someone has just told me something I’d like to hear again. I leaned back, then forward, then cleared my throat.
But she just shook her head and told me about the blade, that it was a kind of scalpel, once owned by a famous Dutch embalmer, that Mr. Kindt owned the embalmer’s entire set of tools.
It’s an impressive little collection, she said. You should ask Aris to show it to you when you look at the danse macabre book.
Do you think he brought it down with him from Cooperstown?
Maybe, she said. But I was under the impression that he was pretty broke when he hit town. I’m guessing he got it, like most of his stuff, when things started picking up.
Do you really think I’m pretty? I said.
I do, she said.
With that she got up and walked out the door.
I stayed another hour, playing the murder scene over, again and again, comparing it with the mess from the night before. I thought about how I had taken Tulip down not so much onto as into the plush carpet — hard but not too hard — how I had put my forearm against her throat and pulled her forehead back, how she had gasped and grinned madly and looked into my eyes, then passed out. How the knockout and contortionists had emerged for a moment, taken in the scene, then withdrawn.
I’m pretty, I thought. I ended this little colloquy with myself by letting my head fall to my chest, my shoulders droop, and my mouth sag open.
Danse macabre, New York — style, I said.
I repeated this the next day when I went over to Mr. Kindt’s. He did his own version, one that involved shutting his eyes, sucking in his cheeks, and leaning back into his chair. Then he told me that he too liked to play dead, and that once he had had to play dead to stay alive when a business affair he had been involved with had gone “terribly wrong.”
It was so strange, he said, to have a pulse when those around me did not, to have hands and feet and toes I could still wiggle when those around me did not, to be able, after those long minutes, to rise and leave when those around me could not.
I had more or less not stopped playing dead while he spoke. When he had finished, I opened my eyes and looked at him. He was sitting up straight with his arms folded over his chest, looking at me.
The episode I just described did not happen, he said. But I have often imagined such a scenario and it is true that I like to play dead.
And you’ve been murdered before.
He smiled. He suggested we play dead a little longer. While I was still lying there with my eyes shut he put a cracker in my hand and asked if I would like a cup of hot tea.
