Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

The night I’d returned, Sandro said, “Did I tell you I’m doing a show with Helen Hellenberger?” He smiled happily.

“You are?”

“I’ve been with Erwin too long. I think it’s time for a change. He doesn’t really get the work anymore. He can’t take me to the next level at this point in my career.”

I sensed he was repeating Helen’s argument to him. I’d seen how persuasive she could be. We were in the kitchen, which always felt like Sandro’s kitchen, because I’d lived there all of five months, in a place that had been his for several years, where he had his own finicky way of arranging things and where all the things were his and I felt more like a guest, one who navigated her domestic surroundings with only partial knowledge. Over the course of the first six months we were dating, the boiler in my building broke and was not fixed. “Why stay there when there is heat and hot water at my place?” Sandro said, and soon I was practically living with him, and then the question was why pay rent on my apartment when legally I probably had a right not to, since the place was overrun by roaches and there wasn’t hot water? Why not just move in with him? It was hard to argue with. Sandro’s place was never homey to me, but it was a lot nicer than mine.

As he and I spoke about his move to Helen’s gallery, my eyes drifted to the sideboard, where two dirty wineglasses and several empty wine bottles stood. I had been gone two weeks, and I assumed he’d had a friend over, Ronnie or Stanley, maybe Morton Feldman. When I’d first walked in, he’d looked directly at the glasses, the empty bottles, and said he’d missed me terribly. Now I understood that Helen had been here.

“I’m really happy about this move,” he said. “I think it’s a bold change. An important one.”

If I had expressed jealousy over him having invited Helen to the loft for drinks, our loft, I sensed he would have become the wise father, attributing jealousy to youth, which was how he spoke of jealousy in others, as a kind of fretting that Sandro, the elder, wouldn’t indulge.

* * *

A couple of days after returning, I’d taken my film to be developed. Sandro had given me part of a huge room to use as my studio, where I spread out photos on a long table. They weren’t at all spectacular. They were the detritus of an experience, ambiguous marks in the white expanse of the salt flats.

Ronnie came over and looked at the photographs. He said I should keep the bike as it was when I crashed it. Wheel it into a gallery and place it in the middle of the room, with the photographs of my tracks on the walls.

I’d rather have the bike, I said, to ride it. And he said that was a choice I’d have to make. I agreed with him that the photographs by themselves were too ephemeral. But I was on, now, to the next thing, what the crash had given way to, which was my new and curious association with the Valera team. They had contacted me through Sandro, and had invited me to come to Italy the next spring for a photo shoot at Monza, Didi and I on the famous racetrack outside of Milan. And after Monza, a publicity tour for the tire company. It was, I felt, way beyond what I’d hoped for with the attempted film on Flip Farmer. I would have total access, and they said I could film and take my own pictures.

Sandro had acted as if it were a ridiculous proposal that I go to Italy under the auspices of his family’s company. And not only that, but to end up reduced to the ignominy, he said, of a calendar girl. He scoffed at the idea that the company actually thought his own girlfriend would agree to such a thing.

“But calendar girls don’t drive race vehicles,” I said. This was something else. I’d actually gone fast enough. And he had to consent that yes, it was true, but promoting his family’s company was too far. I tried to keep my attitude casual. I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to go to Italy and tour with the Valera team, but I didn’t push things with Sandro. I simply knew privately that I was going, and hoped he would eventually see things my way.

I was on the trail of land speed racers, as if everything — my childhood with Scott and Andy, my early attempt to interview Flip Farmer — had all been logical training.

Except I was no kind of racer myself. Flip and Didi were actual racers, with actual talent. And the truth was that in participating in some kind of promotional tour, I would be more like what Sandro said, a calendar girl. But if I were an actual racer it wouldn’t be art. It would be sport. This, the infiltration, as I thought of it, was a way of drawing upon myself, my life, just as Sandro had encouraged. You lived your art if you were serious, according to Giddle.

“Another thing about the majority of China girls,” Marvin had said that afternoon, my first one back at work, as he adjusted a round silver reflector, “is they don’t ride motorcycles. And their portraits don’t suggest trauma. They don’t show up covered with bruises.”

He and Eric were annoyed with me.

“The problem with the bruises is they make you not anonymous,” Eric chimed in.

“You’re not supposed to evoke real life. Just the hermetic world of a smiling woman holding the color chart.”

“Yeah. Anonymous. Friendly. Comely. Various — ly’s.”

Marvin and Eric had me do my hair and makeup and try on outfits as if each of our minor, in-office photo shoots were my one chance to make it in Hollywood, when in reality it didn’t matter what I looked like. Technically they could have used any face. All they needed was a natural skin tone — any living female would do — in contrast to the color chart. But the film industry tradition was that reasonably attractive young women did this work, posing for film leader so the lab technicians could make color corrections. I didn’t just hold up the color chart. I placed it lovingly in my hands like it was the answer to a television game show question. I smiled in a tentative but friendly way, as if some vaguely intimate possibility might exist between me and whoever caught a glimpse of me on film, just the slightest possibility.

* * *

SAVE YOUR FREEDOM FOR A RAINY DAY

It was still there on the wall of the women’s room at Rudy’s.

Also: “Long live the king.”

“Who?”

“Le roi.”

“Roy who?”

“Roy G. Biv.”

“Fucker owes me $$$.”

On another wall: “Looking for an enemy. Tall. Slim. Ruthless. With a sense of humor.”

SO HOW DO WE FIND EACH OTHER? Someone had written underneath in big hasty block letters.

I went to rejoin Giddle and Sandro, who were probably stiffly awaiting my return, having exactly nothing in common but me. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around. It was Ronnie. He was wearing mirrored aviator glasses. He smiled and I saw that his front tooth was chipped.

“What happened to your tooth?”

He ignored the question, which was very Ronnie.

“Ronnie, you look like a Nuremberg defendant in those glasses,” Sandro said, motioning to the waitress. “Could we have four slivovitz? And what happened to your tooth?”

“I was riding a mechanical bull. Oh, shit. Saul is here.”

“You went to Texas,” Giddle said. “Is that what they really do there? Ride mechanical bulls?”

Ronnie ignored her. He and Sandro both had little patience for Giddle, less than she seemed to have for them.

“Skip the bull,” Sandro said. “Ha-ha. Tell us about the trip.”

Ronnie had gone to visit the artist Saul Oppler in Port Arthur.

“It was a disaster. I shouldn’t have gone. But he called me up one night sounding desperate. Three a.m. and he’s complaining bitterly about how much he hates Port Arthur. He’s stuck down there for some kind of family stuff, and whines that he misses his pet rabbits, which he’d left under the care of a New York assistant and blah-blah-blah. ‘Saul,’ I said, ‘do you want me to get those rabbits and bring them down to you? Would you like me to do that?’ ‘Gosh, Ronnie,’ he says, ‘I don’t want to put you out. But the truth is, it would mean so much to me if you were able to do that. You could take my Jaguar.’ I thought, why the hell not?”