Laird Hunt: The Exquisite

She liked the cats, liked to comfort them, to comfort me. She’d had a cat she’d loved dearly during her time in France, and she liked my cats and would smear lavender-scented antiseptic cream into the claw marks on my feet. She would cradle my head in her lap on one of her soft black skirts when it wasn’t too warm, and she would smoke little Mexican rice-paper cigarettes and tell me about the Ardche, where she had spent a summer, and about the mist that hung over the Bois de Boulogne in the early morning after a long night out on the town in “Gay Paree.” Sometimes she would make an enormous salade niçoise with fresh greens and olives and hard-boiled eggs and tuna and green beans and lots of Dijon mustard, and afterward, if the timing was right, if we had heard the sad, chirrupy song making its wobbly-tire way along the block, I would run down to the street and bring her back up a frozen vanilla custard with tangerine sprinkles from the Kustard King.

Then, whammo, one night and the next morning she’d left. Before long, after the phone had been cut off, people started pounding on the door. It would start early in the morning and end late at night. First it was friends. Then it was creditors. Eventually it was my landlord. I had never liked him. His idea of fixing something in a tenant’s apartment, like a hole in the ceiling, was to offer to pay you for doing the work yourself. Then to offer to take it off your rent. Then to ask you what the fuck you were talking about when you brought it up with him. Lately he had started construction of a new building in the vacant lot outside our windows. First they smashed into the ground, really beat the shit out of it with their sledges and steam shovels and endless, deadly serious curses, then slowly, morning by horrible early morning, it began to grow, erasing the white wall as it moved skyward. When I figured I had about a week, a week and a half tops, of unencumbered white-wall viewing and concomitant old-time-tenement imagining before it had blotted out space and sun, I asked my landlord to step over to the window with me, put my hand on his shoulder, and told him he had ten seconds to apologize.

After that I had the place over the comic book store. With the cats, only now there was just one. She used to pull chip crumbs out of the bottom of the bag with her paw. It was a whole business. I’d sit on the bed and watch her. Offer her my foot but she had moved on — to chips and laundry detergent and a big black tom she hissed at through the window. Who was I with then? Can’t remember. I read a lot of comic books and graphic novels, granted. A guy at the Dark Room, where I worked the door for a few weeks, lent me a beat-up copy of De Quincey’s writings. My acquaintance was into the opium eater thing, which gave me shivers and made my head spin, but it was the long essay, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” that grabbed me, that set me to dreaming.

Dreaming, I saw a fire down the block, stood too close to it for too long while they were putting it out, then smelled it on my clothes for days. This smell, though I wasn’t quite sure why, repeatedly put me in mind of my aunt, sitting at home at the kitchen table, where I had last seen her, head down, barely moving. Once, I thought I saw her on the street below my window, and even though I knew there was no way it was her, I leaned out and started yelling. Then I was without lodgings for a time.

I stole a book.

He said to me, dear boy, you are a thief so steal something.

How do you know I’m a thief?

Because it is dark. Because you are in my apartment. Because I did not ask you to come. Because you have confessed to having taken the trouble at least to attempt to monitor my movements. Take something, then, perhaps, knock me down, then come back for dinner tomorrow night and we will talk.

What? I said.

He smiled, stood up with a rustling of plastic-coated wires, and gestured with his head toward all the things, the hundreds of things, that were in the room.

Come back tomorrow night at nine o’clock. I will feed you fish and we will talk.

Fish? I said.

With fine crackers. It doesn’t matter whether you are on time or not.

You want me to come back? I said.

Yes, he said. But not to steal. That’s only tonight.

You’re inviting me to steal something from you.

Yes.

In other words, you’re saying “take something.”

He laughed his little crushed-lightbulb laugh and looked around the room.

All right, take something, Henry, he said. It’s not difficult. The difficult part was walking through my door.

O.K., good, great, I said. I shrugged, and cracked my neck and three fingers to cover the fact that I felt equal parts spooked and intrigued, put my hand into the shadows and picked up the first portable item it touched, walked over and sort of shoved the item’s owner a little on the shoulder so that he fell back with a light oof and a crinkling of wires into his big chair, then made for the door. When I got downstairs and out onto Eighth Street I took the time to confirm that what I had grabbed was a musty old book, which didn’t smell very good. I’m not at all against reading, in fact I read a lot, but not books that smell like something that has spent time in one of New York’s omnipresent mystery puddles. I tossed the book into the trash can next to the entrance to Tompkins Square Park, thought, well, that was pretty crazy, then went down to the Horseshoe, on the corner of Seventh and B and had a couple. Couple more. Thing is I’d done pretty well with a score I had made while I was in the hospital and I still had plenty in my pockets. Going to Mr. Kindt’s had just been gravy and it didn’t matter that I’d left without anything worth keeping. I asked the guy behind the bar — Job was his name — for a shot and told him to help himself.

Thank you, Job said.

You’re welcome, Job.

We drank.

Two more, I suggested.

Job poured two more.

You ever feel spooked and intrigued, Job?

At the same time?

More or less.

I’m not sure.

I told Job about my encounter with Mr. Kindt.

Mr. what? said Job.

I hear you, I said.

Job grinned. He went off to help a couple of customers.

He came back.

What’s your real name, Job? I asked him.

Job’s my real name.

I mean your name before it was Job.

Anthony.

Anthony’s a nice name.

Might be, but it’s not my name.

Fair enough.

Job moved off. I drank some more, then some more, and I thought about Mr. Kindt saying “dear boy,” and I both liked it and I didn’t, and I thought about seeing him naked and bathed in the green light, and wondered what it would be like to have all those wires attached to me. I shivered. For a second, I could remember having had wires attached to me, could remember my aunt leaning close with her roll of tape, her graying hair falling over her face, could remember the flecks of bacon fat on her chin. Actually, I had never had wires attached to me. Remember isn’t the right word. Henry boy, sweet boy, I could “remember” my aunt saying. I shivered. I smelled fish and felt mist, then I was sitting in a booth and someone was whispering in my ear: five hundred dollars.

Sold to the drunk biped in the booth, I whispered back.

There’s a little shop at Forty-eighth and Lex. Doesn’t look like much on the outside. Ask for Mr. Singh. He’ll give you five hundred dollars for it and that’s if you don’t feel like bargaining.

Tulip. Sitting close and spinning. For a second she looked a little like a pale yellow pinwheel, like the retinal afterimage of a fizzing golden firework. Only she was wearing gray and had on one of those aviator’s hats, which completely covered her blond hair and set her eyes to sparking and crackling, so that what I should have been seeing in the money end of my similes was something opalescent, azure, electric blue.