Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

His blazer pockets weighted with quarters, Didier turned to Talia Valera. “Are you coming?” He said it somewhat insistently, as if she were obligated to go with him because he alone, among the men, was willing.

“No,” she said, glancing at Ronnie.

Didier shrugged and went up the pink tongue of carpet and into the theater.

Somehow the decision was made to leave Didier there and go down to Rudy’s. We got in another cab. Talia was about to sit on Ronnie’s lap when he leaned forward and flipped up the jump seat for her. It wasn’t that I would have minded if she’d sat on Ronnie’s lap. But I would have noticed it, while Ronnie himself would have been oblivious to the echo, me on his lap. So many women on so many nights, flirting with him and ending up in his lap. Ronnie, who always had lovers and never girlfriends and did not kiss and tell. It could have been for this reason alone that I still felt something for him. And who could say that one reason was more valid than another? Unavailability was a quality, too.

As we rode downtown he was murmuring to Talia quietly in fake Italian, taking an Italian suffix, adding it to every word, and then repeating them. “Andiamo in un taxi-dino a Rudy-miendo’s, con innuendo in un taxi-dino—”

Sandro was telling Burdmoore, who was up front, about my motorcycle crash on the salt flats, and how I’d ended up driving the land speed vehicle that his family sponsored, and I sensed he was framing the story as far-fetched, outlandish, but I could have been projecting, since there was a divide between us on the subject. Burdmoore turned around and looked at me with a certain amusement, not unsexual, but not lustful, either. The facts of the story made him a little curious, that was all. A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them. This should have been amusing to me, the expression on Burdmoore’s face as Sandro recounted the story. But I was focused on Ronnie and Talia, on the way he was making her laugh. Taxi-dino, innuendo. Pointing out a green-and-yellow Blimpie’s sign, “There! One of ours!” Her laughter penetrating his fake sincerity like carbonation.

* * *

Rudy’s was packed. People were arriving in buoyant swells, pushing in and talking loudly, bringing the energy from wherever they’d just been, different groups merging together like weather systems. Talia ran into two friends — girls I had seen around, at art openings, sitting at the Café Borgia or Graffito or Looters, an after-hours club where you had to pound and yell and hammer on the door to be let in. Neither of her friends was as pretty as Talia, which made sense. She got to be the pretty one. And the least compromised, the least dutifully feminine, with her husky voice, her karate pants, her low and complicitous “one of the guys” laugh.

Giddle came toward us and I realized she had been at the bar all those hours since we’d left in the early evening. She shone like something wet, a piece of candy that had been in someone’s mouth. Up close, I realized it was glitter, here and there on her face and arms. It must have rubbed off from someone else. She hugged me in a cloud of cucumber oil. As a rule, the later it got, the more drinks she’d had, the more cucumber oil Giddle applied. It was so cloying and dominant a scent that I’d started to smell it when she wasn’t even around. I smelled it on my own clothes. Even on Sandro’s clothes. It got stuck in my head the way a song might.

After hugging me, Giddle took the drink in her hand and poured its remnants over Sandro’s head. I was shocked, but strangely, Sandro was not. He simply blotted his face with cocktail napkins from the bar. I felt it was my fault for having such an eccentric friend, but Sandro didn’t make a big deal out of it. “She’s drunk,” I said, watching her hug everyone we’d come in with. Ronnie was next. Then Giddle moved on to Burdmoore, seeming not to notice that Burdmoore was someone we didn’t already know. She threw her arms around his neck. He didn’t object. Their lips touched and kept touching. They gripped each other like two people having a reunion in the international terminal at JFK.

We all danced. Sandro, with his hand on my waist and the other on my shoulder, guiding me. “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss),” a mainstay on the Rudy’s jukebox, filled the room.

If he didn’t care for me

I could have never made him mad

But he hit me,

and I was glad.

I responded to dips and twirls too late and felt like I was trying to sing along with a song I didn’t know, mouthing each word just after hearing it sung. I didn’t care. Sandro was a good dancer; it was part of his role as the older man, the teacher.

Henri-Jean wove his way around the edge of the dance crowd, carrying his striped pole, raising it high so he wouldn’t hit anyone. Whenever there was any mass of people in SoHo, at Rudy’s or a loft or an art opening, Henri-Jean made his scheduled appearance. “The sentient automaton,” Ronnie called him, like Chaplin. Sandro said he was nothing like Chaplin.

Smoke collected above our heads, red-lit and infused with a bright, jangly, early sixties girl-group sound, rising toward the ceiling like an evaporating valentine. Rudy didn’t always turn on the red light, softly emitting colored neon tubes arranged in an acrostic that hung from the wall, made by Stanley. Until a year ago, the red light glowed continuously during open hours, but then the bulbs for it were no longer manufactured and had to be handblown by a glassmaking studio in Washington State. Now Rudy only plugged it in on occasion, but it wasn’t clear what the occasions were. “A mood on the street,” Rudy said. “I just know.”

Burdmoore was dancing with Giddle.

“I don’t like the beard!” she shouted over the music.

“Why?” he shouted back.

“Because it’s not you, ” she said. “You never had that beard—”

Burdmoore grinned. “I’ve never not had this beard, sister.”

“You should shave it,” she said, “go back to your old look, you .” She grabbed the lapels of his rumpled blazer and shoved him in an affectionate manner.

“I will shave it,” he said, his face brimming with a kind of amused joy as he held her by the waist to stop her from shoving him again. “I’m going to. Tomorrow.”

More oldies came on. The Marvelettes. The Feminine Complex. Those girl groups would always remind me of Sandro, his light, careful steps, his way of politely overlooking my inability to take cues. He learned to dance at boarding school in Switzerland, where they’d had proper ballroom lessons, each boy taking his turn with the teacher, a Chilean woman whom Sandro had dreamed about for years afterward. He had tried to contact her through the school but she’d disappeared. “Maybe she simply went on to do something else,” I’d said when he’d told me about her, “which isn’t really disappearing. It’s living.” Sandro remembered all the steps. People said Mondrian had been a good dancer. And Yves Klein, too. There was something to it, artists who could dance. To be either a good dancer or a good artist the decisions needed grace and improvisation, an ease of bodies, of matter, in space. Like the old painter who had been a mentor of Sandro’s. An artist he had pilgrimaged to see in New Mexico. She was living in an Airstream trailer and made paintings in an uninsulated outbuilding with no electricity. Got up before first light, worked until dusk, ate food from cans, slept alone. She told Sandro she had gotten the idea for her most important cycle of works when she was walking with her sister on an empty Texas plain one summer evening, a single star in the sky above them. They were teenagers. This was before cars, before World War One. “My sister had a gun and kept throwing bottles up in the air and shooting them,” she had told Sandro. “We walked under the big empty twilight and that star.” There had to be an element of chance. But also precision. An occasional dead-on hit. My sister had a gun.