Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

* * *

The woman in the handcuff eyeglasses at the gallery that day was Gloria Kastle. Gloria who haughtily said, when I later met her properly through Sandro and mentioned I’d seen her working at Erwin Frame, that she most certainly was not working at Erwin Frame that day. She was merely helping him out, just as she sometimes helped Sandro out, “when it’s useful to him,” she’d said. Sandro had given her a quick, cold look. Their exchange was oblique to me, and I did not try to interpret it beyond assuming she had some proprietary attachment to him, sisterly, perhaps, since she was married to Stanley, who was one of Sandro’s oldest friends. But then again, maybe not sisterly, and yet I knew she was not a threat to me, and that it would be a mistake to consider her one. Not even after I began dating Sandro in a serious way did I worry about Gloria. Not even when I moved in, six months after we began dating, and Sandro left a box by the door for Gloria to pick up, items that were personal — a scarf, some books. I did not care to speculate on their friendship. If there was some complicated dimension to it, that aspect was being ended by Sandro when I moved in. She came to get the box and glared at me like we were two tomcats facing off in an alley. I was replacing her in some way. I didn’t understand quite how but I didn’t need to. I was with Sandro, and our relationship was neither secret nor illicit nor complicated. Whenever I saw Gloria, I smiled and hoped not to get scratched or bitten.

With my permission, Marvin gave Sandro my telephone number. He called. We met. He was beautiful, which I hadn’t expected, with a strange stillness, curiously both present and remote, with those eyes that were blanched of compassion but magnetic all the same.

On our first date, we walked through Chinatown, stopping for lotus paste buns. “Diaphanous,” he said, and had me take a bite of his. It was the closest our two bodies had been, in an afternoon of walking side by side, each careful not to touch the other. The lotus paste had more fragrance than flavor. Later, I was never able to re-create that taste, after visits to bakeries all over Chinatown.

None of it could be re-created. We’d eaten the lotus paste buns on a cold, damp November day, on which the sun shone and rain fell simultaneously, the strange, rosy-gold light of this contradiction intensifying the colors around us as we walked, the fruits and vegetables in vendors’ bins, green bok choys, smooth, sunset-colored mangoes packed into cases, the huge, spiny durian fruits in their nets, crushed ice tinged with fish blood.

As we walked, he kept staring at me. I looked over at him and he continued to stare.

When the rain won out and darkened the sky, he led me into a Chinese movie theater.

The movie careened and clanged along, an old-fashioned opera full of cymbal crashes and agonies, the occasional gong, stringed instruments wearily entangling and detangling. Sandro watched attentively, as if he were riveted by the drama being narrated in thunderous bursts of a language we couldn’t understand. It was subtitled, but the subtitles were Asian characters of some kind. The theater was almost empty. We still had not touched. I kept my arm in my lap instead of putting it on the armrest, to avoid his. But then Sandro reached over and rested his hand on my knee, his gaze fixed on the screen. Just like that, he placed his hand on my knee. The feel of it sent electricity through me. I had been with almost no one — just the nameless friend to whom I gave my Borsalino. This was different. This was a man who wasn’t playing some kind of parlor game, a cat-and-mouse pretend seduction, which, I now understood, was what Thurman and Nadine’s friend had played, and I had been too naively hopeful to understand. It may go without saying that I was the type of person who would call a disconnected number more than once.

While the movie played, Sandro leaned over and whispered to me.

“Do you want to be friends?”

I whispered back that I had a requirement for friendship.

“I’m glad,” he said. “It’s good to have standards. What is it?”

“Sincerity,” I said.

He sighed and squeezed my hand, then put his own back on my knee.

As we continued to watch the movie he began to unbutton my skirt. One button at a time, slowly, methodically, with no hesitation. He knew how to unbutton buttons. There was no fumbling, which was part of why I couldn’t find the courage to say, “Hey, what are you doing?” The other reason I didn’t find the courage to stop him was that I didn’t want him to. No one was in our row, or behind us. My skirt unbuttoned, he took off his coat and placed it over my lap, chivalrous and careful. His hand slipped under the coat that covered me, and found its way through the unbuttoned skirt. He pressed his warm palm firmly against my underwear. I looked at him. He looked straight ahead, his face suggesting only that he was engaged in watching this Chinese movie, in Cantonese or Mandarin, who could say? I tried to watch, too, but was distracted by the warmth of his hand, and the protective sensation of being covered by his coat, denim lined with wool, its unfamiliar scent and feel, which promised a whole world, one I wanted a place in. He concentrated on the film, or seemed to, never looking at me once, as his fingers crept into my underwear. In this manner, both of us watching the film, the act of what he did with his hand was not just erotic but also slightly melancholy, even a little grave. I leaned my neck against the back of the seat and tried to relax, to not be nervous or self-conscious. I focused on the round gold of the gongs, the rice-white faces and wax-red mouths, bleached complexions with artificially rosy cheeks that looked pinched or slapped or scalded. I watched these images in gold and red and white as Sandro’s fingers fluttered and moved.

When my body began to tense, his hand understood and slowed itself down, its rhythm matching mine.

After, he rebuttoned my skirt and moved the coat up over my chest and shoulders, as if to redignify its purpose. We both pretended to be absorbed in the inscrutable opera that flickered on the screen.

* * *

The gold and red crashes, a gratitude to this person, his wolf eyes and confidence and skill, the feel and smell of his chivalrous coat. On that day, nothing could have seemed more romantic to me, no other scenario more like real courtship, than a Chinese movie and a hand job under a coat.

It would have to be late autumn and the coat would have to be Sandro’s. The hand his. The voice his. The movie followed by a walk west, the rain having ceased, the walk led by him. I wanted to be led. To see the city as he wanted me to see it. He had a way of leading, I later understood, by not stating we were going anywhere in particular. By seeming to wander when he wasn’t, we weren’t.

We were on Gansevoort Street, where Giddle and I had kicked bagels. At the end was an old pier building of corrugated metal. Sandro pulled on the doors, which were locked. We walked around to the side of the pier, and Sandro explained that the artist Gordon Matta-Clark had cut holes into the building. Into the floor, the walls, the ceiling, one large half moon on the end facing the river, converting the place into a kind of cathedral of water and light. Sandro said Matta-Clark was clever, that he’d done everything so perfectly, and then someone tried to get a film permit, which tipped off the cops.

“What does it mean to do this kind of thing perfectly?” I asked.

“There was no bravado,” Sandro said. “He didn’t storm in, have a big party, get immediately raided.” Matta-Clark had cased the building quietly and with discipline for weeks before sneaking in and changing the locks, then slowly, stealthily, he’d moved in equipment, power saws, acetylene torches, pulleys, and ropes to make his cuts. He had noted when, if ever, there was security around the pier. When, if ever, the building was in use. He had learned that its only use was for discreet sex acts between men.