He attacks the clay. Yes. Yes. Works furiously. Meanwhile this posing is turning her on. The artist ought to be naked too, she says. It’s only fair. He just laughs. An absurd idea. Couldn’t concentrate if. Half an hour. Sweat running down. Tired of posing, she says. Can I stop? They stop. She comes over to him. Leads him on. Put your hand here. And here. Oh. Oh. Oh. Unzipping him. His dong will explode. Quick, on top of me. Oh. Oh, God!
THE BIG CITY
A small apartment. Dozens of his favorite works crammed around everywhere. The famous art critic visiting him. Tall, serious, silver-haired. The artist is tall and serious too. Nineteen. Why should you go to art school, the critic asks? My boy, you are already a master! Paternal hand fondling Hamlin’s shoulder. What you need now is a dealer. With the right sponsorship you could go places. And how young you are. Cheeks still downy. So saying the famous art critic rubs the downy cheek. Staring intently into young artist’s eyes. You could make me the happiest man in the world tonight, says famous art critic in tender tones.
AT THE GALLERY
Little red circles pasted on every label. Sold. Sold. Sold. Sold. An auspicious debut. All the best people buying. The dealer, fat, glorying in flesh, slapping his back. Twenty-two years old. An instant success. Now scene follows scene helter-skelter, one blurring into the next, sometimes two running at once, split-screen.
THE ADVENT OF PSYCHOSCULPTURE
UNREQUITED LOVE
THE SEDUCTIONS OF WEALTH
THE CELEBRATED ACTRESS
ALONE ON THE PINNACLE
THE TORMENTS OF FAME
THE DAY THE MUSEUM BOUGHT EVERYTHING
MEETING HELENE AGAIN, FIFTEEN
YEARS LATER
THE WORLD TRAVELER
KICKING THE HABIT
FOUR’S COMPANY,
FIVE’S A CROWD
MY NAME IS LISSA
And the camera speeding up, running wild.
THE ANTIGONE
THE HEADACHE
THE BREAKDOWN
THE FIRST RAPE
FREAKING OUT ON TERROR
THE QUARREL WITH HIS WIFE
FINISHING ANTIGONE
KNOCKING LISSA DOWNSTAIRS
OUT OF HIS MIND
RAPE UPON RAPE
CAUGHT
CONVICTED
OBLITERATED
AWAKENED
And the sequences jumbled.
ALONE ON THE PINNACLE
AN END TO SUBLIMATION
THE BIG CITY
KICKING THE HABIT
OUT OF HIS MIND
AT THE GALLERY
SOLITARY PLEASURES
THE ARTIST DISCOVERS HIS GIFT
Faster and faster. Names, dates, events, aspirations, swirling in a thick soup of memory, everything merging, all detail lost. Perhaps none of it had ever happened.
—Good night, old buddy.
Lissa was crying softly to herself when he got into bed Tuesday night. He touched her arm and she pulled away from him. Afterward she told him she was sorry for being so unfriendly.
On Wednesday morning, setting out for work, Macy thought he saw one of the Rehab Center minions who Gomez had said would be keeping watch over him. A squat, potbellied man standing at the entrance to the building across the street, holding a newspaper. An awkward exchange of guarded glances. From Macy a nicker of a smile. Me and my shadow. Right hand to left shoulder, hup! Left hand to right shoulder, hup! Hands clasped at back of neck, hup, hup, hup!
That night he suggested that they go downtown to a sniffer palace, but Lissa didn’t want to. A quiet evening at home with Brahms and Shostakovich. Near bedtime Lissa said that she had figured out one way for him to get rid of Hamlin.
“How?”
“You could rape somebody and arrange to get caught. And blame it on him. The authorities would see to it that he was completely erased.”
“He’d kill me if we were taken into custody,” Macy said. A crazy idea. A crazy girl. You could rape somebody and arrange to get caught. Within him Hamlin laughed. Lissa cried again that night, and when Macy asked her if he could help her in any way she made no reply.
There wasn’t much for him to do at the network on Thursday—just a half-hour patch job on a story he had taped the week before. He consumed the rest of the day in trying to look busy. Mainly, with another weekend coming up, he tried to think of things that would divert Lissa and perhaps yank her from the mood of withdrawal that was so frequently enveloping her lately.
He sensed that he was losing her. That she was losing’ herself. Slipping away into some tepid shoreless sea blanketed by thick blue fog. She hadn’t left his apartment in three days. He suspected that she stayed in bed until noon, one in the afternoon, then sat around smoking, playing music, turning pages, daydreaming. Drifting. Floating. She seldom spoke any more. Or even answered his questions: just a grunt or two. Last week Macy had felt hemmed in by other people, what with Lissa sharing his apartment and Hamlin sharing his brain; but now Lissa was spinning this cocoon about herself, and Hamlin too was withdrawn and remote. Macy was experienced in solitude but didn’t necessarily like it.
This weekend, he decided, we will explore the wonders of the world beyond my door. Rent a car, drive up into the country, two hundred miles, three hundred, however far one must go to find uncluttered pastures. Picnic on the grass. A bosky dell. Romantic fornications beneath the boughs of murmuring fragrant pine trees. If there are any left. And we’ll go to fine restaurants. I’ll ask Hamlin to suggest a few. Hello, hello, are you there? And Saturday night at a Times Square sniffer palace, all glowlight and tinsel, we will inhale the most modern hallucinogens and enjoy two hours of earthy fantasy. Perhaps we will visit the aquarium so that Lissa can eavesdrop on the ponderous leathery reveries of the walruses and the whales. Oh, a fine zealous weekend! Recreation and invigoration and the restoration of our depleted souls!
But when Macy reached his apartment that evening Lissa wasn’t there. A feeling of déja vu: she did this last Thursday too, didn’t she? A week gone by and nothing altered. But there is a difference this time, as his quick search of the closets reveals. She has taken her belongings with her. Cleared out for good.
The easiest thing now was also the hardest. To sit tight, to forget her, to make a life without her. Nothing but trouble and turmoil, wasn’t she? The steamy feminine complexities, compounded and exponentialized by the inexplicabilities of telepathy. Let her go. Let her go. A high probability that she’ll come back, even as last time. But he couldn’t. Damnation. Must go looking for her. The most logical place. Her apartment.
A sweet soft spring night.
Stars on display beyond the towers’ tips. Peddlers of blurry dreams sauntering in the streets. Down we go into the tube. Whoosh whoosh whoosh. Transfer to East Side line. Double back on tracks. Her exit. The narrow streets, the decaying buildings, survivors of all the cultural upheavals. Scaly erections protruding from the corpus of the abolished past. Which of these houses is hers? They all look alike. Mysterious figures flitting in alleyways. A visit here is like a journey backward in time. A district of shady deeds and unfathomable espionage; an Istanbul, a Lisbon of the mind, embedded in the quivering fabric of New York. This looks like the right place. I’ll go in.
Directory of residents? Don’t make me laugh!
Macy squinted through the Jurassic dimness of the cavernous lobby. He caught sight of a figure far away, bent and distorted, which hobbled toward him as he proceeded warily inward. And then the shock of recognition: himself approaching. What he sees is the image of Paul Macy, reflected in a cracked and warped mirror occupying the nether wall. Laughter. Applause. On six levels of this hostelry holovision sets give forth their offerings with numbing simultaneity. Lissa? Lissa? She lived on the fifth floor, didn’t she? I’ll go up. Knock on her door, if I can find it. Or else ask the neighbors. Miss Moore, the red-haired girl, been away for a week or so? You seen her around here tonight? Not me, man, haven’t seen a thing. Up the stairs. Where else could she have fled but here? Her nest. Her hermitage.