overheard the little tidbits of verballing that always depressed me. “Did you know November is bike week?” “There’s nothing wrong with her except she’s completely fucked up.” “When they say ‘12
Next to a cluster of StatoilHydro execs, ruddy elongated Norwegians and upper-caste Indians as tall as Norwegians, I spotted Eunice and her sister, Sally, talking to Joshie. As I began to make my way over to them, I passed one of the pieces showing a dead man perched upon the family couch in Omaha, a guy about my age, part Native American by the looks of him, with his face creeping slightly off his skull and the eyes eerily silenced, as if they had just been erased (“an interesting narrative strategy,” someone was saying). The picture was no less harrowing than anything else around me, the guy was mercifully
I want to talk about their clothes. This seems important to me. Joshie was wearing a cashmere sport coat, wool tie, and cotton dress shirt, all JuicyPussy4Men-a slightly more formal approximation of the same clothes Eunice had chosen for me. She was wearing a French-blue two-piece Chanel boucle suit with a faux-pearl center and knee-high leather boots, so that all of her was concealed except for the tiny glow of her sharp kneecaps. She looked less like a woman than a gift. Sally was also overdressed for the occasion, a pinstriped suit and the pinprick of a golden cross around the soft pad of her neck. I noticed the beginnings of two hard-won laugh lines, and a chin dominated by a single disarming dimple. When I approached them, both sisters stopped talking to Joshie and put their hands to their mouths. And then, apropos of nothing, I realized what was bothering me about the picture of the dead guy on the couch in Omaha. At the corner of the work, beyond a scattering of youthful personal effects heavy on string instruments and obsolete laptops, a bitch lay dead, a German shepherd shot point-blank, a lightning bolt of blood spilling across the warped living-room floor. A puppy of negligible weeks, maybe days, had staked its front paws on the dead animal’s exposed stomach, astride her still-swollen teats. You couldn’t see the puppy’s face, but you could tell its ears were alert and its tail was tucked under its rear, from either sadness or fear. Why, of all things, did this worry me so?
I blanked for a second, catching snatches of what Joshie was saying. “I met him through the skater scene…” “I come from a different budgeting culture…” “When you think about it, the capitalist system is more entrenched in America than anywhere else in the world…”
And then his arm was around me and we were walking away from the girls. I cannot recall our exact surroundings when he gave me his speech. We were lost in negative space, his closeness the only thing I could still cling to. He spoke of the seventy years in which he had not known love. How unfair that had been. How much love he had to give; how I had, in some ways, been a recipient of that love. But now he needed something different: intimacy, closeness, youth. When Eunice first walked into his apartment, he
I lost track of where I was, until Joshie brought me back to Eunice and Sally, who were holding hands and staring up into the blue portal of the skylight, as if awaiting deliverance. “Maybe you and Lenny should be alone right now,” he said to Eunice. But she wouldn’t let go of her sister and she would not look into my eyes. They stood together, silent, with their little chests thrust out ahead of them, their eyes quiet and blank, the seemingly endless continuation of their lives stretched out before them into the three dimensions of the Triplex.
Words broke out of me. Stupid words. The worst final words I could have chosen, but words nonetheless. “Silly goose,” I said to Eunice. “You shouldn’t have worn such a warm suit. It’s still autumn. Aren’t you hot? Aren’t you hot, Eunice?”
There was high-pitched yelling from the direction of the vestibule, not far from where we were, and Howard Shu was sprinting ahead like a gorgeous greyhound, shouting things at many people.
The Chinese delegation had arrived. Two giant banners floated into the air, held aloft by an invisible force, as the opening bars of Alphaville’s “Forever Young” (“Let’s dance in style, let’s dance for a while”) blared in the background.
Welcome to America 2.0: A GLOBAL Partnership
A series of loud pops exploded in the air, reminding me of tracer fire during the Rupture. Firecrackers were being launched from the center of the souk-like space and through the enormous skylight above us. As the first batch went off, I saw Sally cringe and raise her arm protectively. Then there was a push to get to the front to see the Chinese. I let the bodies wash over me, the young octogenarians, wearing ironic John Deere T-shirts and trucker’s caps that barely contained their masses of silky new hair. Separated from the people I loved, pushed out of the glass house, I found myself in the winter-cold air, by a phalanx of limousines bearing the insignia of the People’s Capitalist Party, by a row of Triplexes cantilevered over the FDR Drive and the East River. There had once been housing projects here and a street called Avenue D. Media people ran past me as if there was a fire somewhere, as if tall buildings were burning. I was looking south. I should have been thinking about Eunice, mourning Eunice, but it wasn’t happening at the moment.
I wanted to go home. I wanted to go home to the 740 square feet that used to be mine. I wanted to go home to what used to be New York City. I wanted to feel the presence of the mighty Hudson and the angry, besieged East River and the great bay that stretched out from the pediment of Wall Street and made us a part of the world beyond.
I went back to our rooms in the nurses’ dormitory. I sat down on the hard bed and clutched the bedspread, then pressed my pillow into the equivalent softness of my stomach. The central air conditioning was still on, for some reason. The room was freezing. Cold sweat trickled down my chin, and my books felt cold to the touch. The wetness confused me, and I touched my eyes to make sure I wasn’t crying. I thought of the firecrackers going off. I heard their harsh, unnecessary noise. I saw Sally’s arm raised against the phantom punch about to be landed. The look on her face was pleading, but still loving, still believing that it could be different, that at the last moment something would give way, that the fist would fall by his side, and they would be a family.
In the bathroom, Eunice’s allergy medications and tampons and expensive lotions were already gone-Joshie must have sent someone down to take them-but a bottle of Cetaphil Gentle Skin Cleanser remained in the corner of the tub. I turned on the shower, climbed in, and poured the Cetaphil over myself. I rubbed it into my shoulders, my chest, my arms, and my face. And I stood there in the water’s painful heat, my skin at last as gentle and clean as the bottle promised.
27 WELCOME BACK, PA’DNER
