Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“It’s not a nightmare, Ronnie,” Giddle said. “The thing about Coney Island is you have to go with goals in mind. I wanted to win something. A hot-dog-eating contest. A big stuffed purple panda. Once I’d actually won it, I dragged it up and down the boardwalk until it was so dirty it looked like something I’d found in the Holland Tunnel. You have to ride the Skydiver and win a big ugly prize and live on Nathan’s hot dogs or you will never understand Coney Island.”

“Well, I guess it’s my loss,” Ronnie said, but in a distracted way. I could tell he wished she’d shut up. Not that the details Ronnie shared were all that different. There was not enough separation between Giddle’s basic reality and Coney Island. That was the difference. She gave it a patina of irony, but Coney Island was probably the only Europe Giddle could afford, while Ronnie and Sandro did not have those limitations. Sandro because he was a Valera. Ronnie was self-invented, some kind of orphan, but he knew precisely how to make rich people feel at ease. Which was to say, he made them feel slightly insecure and self-doubting. As a result, they wanted something higher than Ronnie’s disdain, for which they were willing to pay a great deal to collect his artwork, and win his approval and even friendship, or what felt to them like friendship.

“Saul,” Ronnie said, as Saul Oppler passed our booth. The great Saul Oppler. I’d never seen him in person. He was not the kind of artist you ran into at Rudy’s. You read about him in magazines, alongside photo-essays on the homes he kept in Nantucket and Greece and Ischia. He was huge and powerful-looking but very old, with strangely smooth, rubbery skin, a deep tan like you saw on people who wintered in Florida, and crisp, sherbet-colored clothing, also like you saw on people who lived in Florida.

Ronnie stood and offered his hand to Saul, but Saul wouldn’t take it. He looked at Ronnie, his gaze bright and sharp and wounded. He was breathing in a labored way.

“Stay away from me,” he said. He turned and moved toward the back of the room.

“Ronnie,” Giddle said, “I thought you ate a chicken together. Patched things. He looks really pissed.”

“Yeah, well, you know what, Giddle? I made that part up.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because people like a happy ending.”

* * *

We left Giddle at the bar and headed for Ronnie’s studio, where he wanted us to stop en route to dinner at Stanley and Gloria Kastle’s. Ronnie lived above a fortune cookie factory on Broome and Wooster. When we turned down his street, I spotted the White Lady up ahead. The White Lady was not always in white, only sometimes, and always at night. A white wig. White makeup. White cotton gloves. There were few lights on Broome, but she stood out.

“She’s a beacon,” Ronnie said after we’d passed her.

Once, Giddle and I had followed her into a grocery store. She bought milk, white bread, a can of hominy, and two jars of mayonnaise. All white products. Giddle had leaned over as we waited behind her. “Oh my God. Guess what perfume she’s wearing?” Giddle had whispered to me. It was White Shoulders.

“The show is going to be called Space, ” Ronnie said as he unlocked his studio to show us his new work. He’d photographed the black-and-white-speckled interior of his oven and then blown up the photographs and titled each “Milky Way (detail).” They really did look like photos of outer space, but knowing they were his oven, the inky background and blurs of light made me think of Sylvia Plath more than of the universe. Sandro loved her poems, which was endearing to me because it was so girlish to love Sylvia Plath.

“What’s this?”

Sandro was looking at a snapshot of a woman staring intently at the camera, young and blond, and clearly smitten with her picture taker.

“That’s not part of my show.”

“Just something for you to look at,” Sandro said.

“Something for me to look at. Pretty in the face, as they say.”

I turned away from the image. He would slip from this young girl’s grasp, of course. The way he treated his lovers bothered me, though whether it was sympathy for the girls or a reminder that I had been one of the discarded, I couldn’t say.

“I’m keeping her on layaway,” Ronnie said, “a layaway plan. She’s on reserve, held for me, and I pay in small increments. Actually, I’m supposed to see her tonight.”

“You’re not coming to dinner?” Sandro asked.

“I’m coming. I’ll see her later.”

“After dinner,” Sandro said.

“Does it matter? I’ll see her later. When I’m through with the other parts of my night.”

He stood next to Sandro and gazed at the photo, angling his head to match Sandro’s, as if Sandro’s perspective might afford Ronnie some alternate or deepened view.

“I don’t know,” Ronnie said. “Could be actual love. I’m starting to think so. Because I’m using all the levers to suppress what puts me off about her.”

Sandro laughed. “If it was love, Ronnie, you wouldn’t be aware you were doing that,” he said, and pulled me toward him.

“I’m always aware,” Ronnie said. “That’s why it never works out.”

I tried not to look at the photo of the girl, who stared at us, meaning to stare at Ronnie, hoping for his pity. Sandro’s warm hand was on my shoulder. How lucky I was, and yet I didn’t want to see the young and hopeful face of the girl on layaway.

Ronnie and his women were a bit like Ronnie and his clothes. That was Sandro’s theory. When Ronnie sold out his first show at Helen Hellenberger’s gallery, Sandro figured Ronnie would quit his job at the Met. Sandro had quit long before. Of course he didn’t need the tiny salary like Ronnie needed it. Sandro had stayed on as long as he had for Ronnie. To engage in a study together. Night guards figuring out the flows of art history and what they themselves were going to do. Ronnie kept his job and spent the money Helen gave him in large all-cash bursts. He hired a Checker cab on retainer. Paid up front for a year’s worth of steak dinners at Rudy’s. A year’s worth of rent on his studio, because he said you never knew when you’d go from big-time asshole to homeless. He went down to Canal Street in his private Checker cab and purchased a hundred pairs of shrink-to-fit Levi’s 501s. Five hundred white T-shirts. Five hundred pairs of underwear and socks and said he was never doing laundry again.

When I had first heard the story, I saw Ronnie balling up his homemade Marsden Hartley T-shirt and lobbing it into the corner of my studio apartment on Mulberry. But I was grafted to Sandro now. We were a project, a becoming, a set of plans. He was invested in what I’d be. But that did not erase an attraction I’d had for Ronnie, on a long night when I never learned his name. I could see now what theater it was, the gesture of balling up the shirt like he would never retrieve it. But of course he had, and with such stealth that he’d sneaked out as I slept, without even saying good-bye.

It was a form of seriality, Sandro said, the clothes, and also the girls. Moving forward in a pattern of almost sameness. But it seemed to me more like a running away. Sandro himself owned precisely two pairs of jeans. Everything was scaled down to simplicity and order. One pair of work boots. One nice jacket. One set of materials (aluminum and Plexi). One girlfriend.

The next image Ronnie showed us was rephotographed from the cover of Time magazine, a woman sitting at her kitchen table, pulling down the waist of her stretch pants to expose her hip, revealing the outlines of a huge bruise, like a cloud was crossing the kitchen ceiling, darkening an area of her body in its shadow.

“Meteorite,” Ronnie said. “Only human ever to be hit by one.”