Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“I moved back to New York a year later. Everyone asked where I’d been. Andy thought it was amusing, or so he claimed, but perhaps he was only making fun of me. Andy preferred the Automat, where there were no waitresses, just clear display windows for meat loaf and pies that slid open when you inserted coins. Never again did he ask me to be in a film, and something in me had changed. I no longer had the drive to make it with that Factory crowd. I told myself I was more extreme than they were, these haughty upper-class bitches who didn’t have to work. There was no risk for them. They could always go home to Mommy and Daddy’s on Park Avenue. One or two pitched themselves off Mommy and Daddy’s Park Avenue balcony, but seriously, anyone can do that.”

* * *

New York was getting colder. I went to a bar in the Meatpacking District with Giddle one October night, my birthday, actually. There were bagels scattered all over the sidewalk, a heavy and rancid animal smell in the air. We stepped over puddles of lamb’s blood as we crossed the street to the other side, where there were more bagels. Giddle began kicking them like hockey pucks, and so did I. We were on Gansevoort Street, where carcasses were loaded into the meatpacking plants on pulleys. Giddle led us into a bar around the corner on Ninth Avenue, a dive filled with men who probably worked in the meatpacking places and I thought, Why are we here? Giddle opened her purse and tried to buy our drinks with fake money she’d gotten in Chinatown, oversized bills with a denomination of ten thousand. The bouncer came over to speak with her. She insisted her money was good and that it was my birthday, and as she made more of a scene, he escorted us out.

Why is she my only friend? I wondered, this woman who is so alone. I meet no one through her and she thinks I should forget making films and become a Mafia chauffeur.

Giddle herself was considering her next act, another life, a new performance. She was planning to go to mortuary school, she told me. She went to see an autopsy as research and came to my apartment after. She glowed with excitement and stank of formaldehyde. I kept back a certain distance, and asked how it was.

“Difficult to even talk about,” she said. “I feel changed. Like, say my mind is a sweater. And a loose thread gets tugged at, pulled and pulled until the sweater unravels and there’s only a big fluffy pile of yarn. You can make something with it, that pile of yarn, but it will never be a sweater again. That’s the state of things.”

* * *

Winter came early. It was November and the water jeweled itself to a clear, frozen dribble from the fire hydrant in front of my building. Sammy, who had been sleeping outside, was gone. Henri-Jean, with his striped pole and sandals, no longer sat in the park, only hurried along in a ratty peacoat. Once I saw him dart into a building on Mott Street with groceries from the cheap bodega where I also shopped. The Italian kids wore big puffy jackets and blew into their hands to keep warm. I had been in New York four months. I had my job, and I was making films and learning a lot from Marvin and Eric, but I was lonely, eating candy bars for dinner with my coat buttoned up because my radiator was broken and Mr. Pong did not return calls.

One day Marvin mentioned that there was a guy asking about me. I wondered if it was the unnamed friend. When Marvin saw the pleasure in my face, he rolled his eyes. Marvin and Eric were verging on neuter. They didn’t want girlfriends. They got excited over discontinued Kodachrome stock. Imbibition stock. Scene missing.

“He wants to meet you,” Marvin said distractedly as he examined prints for imperfections.

“How does he know who I am?”

“The girl cut into the leader, wouldn’t you say she’s as much a part of the film as its narrative? Her presence there in the margin, her serving to establish and maintain a correct standard of appearance, female appearance. These are aspects of a single question that deserve thought.”

“What is that question, Marvin?”

No answer. I went out for my lunch break.

“He saw you coming in,” he said when I returned. “It’s this guy Sandro Valera. Artist. Italian. Lives around here.”

It wasn’t the unnamed man. But I knew the name Valera, of course, because of the motorcycles. The unnamed man had mentioned knowing one of them. I didn’t know who Sandro Valera was, but when I asked Giddle, she said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake. He’s famous. Go to Erwin Frame Gallery — he has a show up right now.”

I went to the gallery. The woman behind the counter nodded toward me severely as I came in, glancing up through eyeglass frames that were black and round like little handcuffs. Sandro Valera’s artworks were large aluminum boxes, open on top, empty inside, so bright and gleaming their angles melted together. I knew enough to understand that it was Minimalism, meant to be about the objects themselves, in a room, and not some abstract or illusory thing they represented. The boxes had been made in a factory in Connecticut. As I got to know Sandro, I understood that even if the works were stamped by the factory that produced them, they had little to do with the assembly line imagery they implied: the factory, Lippincott, only fabricated artists’ works, by hand, and very, very carefully. One of the aluminum boxes was being moved by two gallery assistants in white cotton gloves. I thought of the gloves the boy driver of the Cadillac had worn, too large for his young hands as he worked the giant wheel of that car. The difference was the difference of this warm, quiet, bright place, this snobbish woman behind the counter. Calm reserve. The creak of old wood floorboards. Art that was four metal objects that shone like liquid silver. The gloves the assistants wore were not a curious nod to old-fashioned ideas about service and formality. They were to protect the milled aluminum from fingerprints, which, because of the oils on human hands, would be impossible to remove from the delicate finish. The gloves fit the assistants’ hands. They picked up one of the boxes. Moved it a few inches and set it down, stepped back. Looked at it.

Giddle chided me again when I told her I’d seen the show and realized he was a major artist, with work that was subtle, mathematical, grand, and expensive, everything in the gallery sold, the air of the place making me feel like an interloper just being there. I didn’t understand why an older and famous artist was seeking out someone young and invisible. “Hmm. Let’s see. Why is an older man seeking out a younger woman? Who isn’t established in the way he is? Gosh. What a mystery. Oh, for fuck’s sake once again,” Giddle said. “He’s a man . Practically middle-aged, and you’re young.”

“You’re saying he’s the type who is into younger women?”

“Sweetheart, that’s all men,” she said. “All men are that type.”

I might have been proud to be the object of universal attraction, at least according to Giddle, but I only felt irritated for being treated as if I were too naive to understand. Giddle sensed this and added, as if to soften her condescension, that Sandro Valera was hot for a middle-aged man. By the time I met and began dating him, I chose to forget Giddle’s theory. Like all people who fall in love, I took the attraction between me and Sandro as singular and specific, not explainable to types and preferences. Once I asked if he preferred younger women and he said he preferred me. He said he saw me come and go from Bowery Film and I looked so open and lovely that he could not resist. “Could not resist what?” I had asked. “Becoming your boyfriend before someone else did,” he said. Which bothered me but I let it go. He had a way of talking about our courtship that presumed there was choice to it. Perhaps this was simply a difference between us. I did not experience love as a choice, “I think I will love this or that person.” If there was no imperative, it was not love. But Sandro spoke as if he’d seen me on the street and simply made his selection.