Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“No,” I said.

“Right,” he said. “He cheated on you. And right there at the factory, in public… ”

I felt ashamed to be reminded of it.

“I think Sandro Valera is an asshole for doing that,” he said. “You shouldn’t feel any shame about it. He should be ashamed.”

“What were you doing there?” I asked. “Why were you working for her?”

He looked at me. For some reason, we both started to laugh. A strange laughter, airy and heady and off-centering. My face felt red. His wasn’t. He stopped laughing and answered me.

“I was looking after them.”

“Looking after them,” I repeated.

“Keeping tabs.”

Of course he was. And why had I not realized? Even when he brought me into that apartment on the Volsci, the heart of the Movement, as I came to see. Why had I not realized that Gianni would have some actual purpose in working for the Valeras? In hovering near their dinner table chatter. Their poolside conversations. The intimacy of the house.

“That family is going to pay,” he said. “You’ll see. They’ll get their justice.”

Which was the thing Sandro had promised when he had invited me to his loft for the first time. He’d promised justice, and what I found instead was Ronnie Fontaine. Did Sandro know I’d slept with Ronnie? Did he place him there on the couch as a joke of some kind? I doubted it. But I also knew their friendship wasn’t simple. And that when Ronnie chided Sandro about not blocking my way to Monza, it wasn’t really about me. Even as it seemed to be. It was between them, a link between them I didn’t penetrate. Just as Gianni’s threats about the Valera family weren’t about me, either. But I was comforted by them. Did I want Sandro to pay? Sure I did.

* * *

We returned to the apartment. Gianni and Bene fought. I heard only her, just as when I had listened to them have sex, her voice behind a closed bedroom door, this time loud and upset, righteous.

She came out, entered the kitchen, and ranted to the women gathered there, who were soldering radio parts. She called Gianni various names. The women all laughed.

I stood outside the kitchen, awkward, his accomplice, perhaps the reason she was angry. Bene looked at me. Her face broke into a tight, unfriendly smile.

“Go ahead. Just go with him,” she said. “Go on.”

I’d spent a few innocent hours with Gianni, and she was shutting me out.

Bene put her hand out, gesturing in the direction of the bedroom where Gianni was. “Go with him,” she said.

The other women kept soldering. Not a single one looked up at me. I was being shunned because of Bene. Because of Gianni. Because of something that possibly had nothing to do with me.

It seemed ridiculous, a joke, but it wasn’t a joke. They had turned against me in the few hours I was gone.

Bewildered, I walked past the kitchen to the bedroom and opened the door.

Gianni looked up at me.

The rest of it I wish I could erase.

John Dogg and Nadine were quite the couple now. John Dogg was showing with Helen Hellenberger. Helen was wild about him. All the important critics were at his debut opening at her gallery. There were slide projections of blank white light. And patterned light from shallow zinc rectangles of water he’d placed strategically on the floor. He’d aimed film lamps at the rectangular pools, which sent reflections up the gallery wall in veined and fractured shimmers.

John Dogg wore a well-cut linen suit and laughed easily and occupied the role of feted artist with perfected naturalism, no sign of the pushy tactics I’d seen at the Kastles’. He moved through the room confident that he was universally adored, and it seemed that he was. I’d met him the previous September and now it was late April, almost May, and he had been reinvented. This happened in New York, and you could never point to the precise turn of events, the moment when the change in human currency took place, when it surged upward or plummeted. There was only the before and the after. In the after, no one was allowed to say, hey, remember when everyone rolled their eyes about John Dogg? Shunned him, thought he was an idiot? I understood all this now. Sandro disapproved of that kind of ambition, said there was no hurry, but it was a lie, a thing successful people said, having conveniently forgotten that they themselves had been in a rush.

I watched as Didier de Louridier pumped John Dogg’s hand eagerly and congratulated him on the show.

Nadine stood at John Dogg’s side. She, too, was transmitting and receiving on a new frequency. She was sleek and composed, all sheen and stillness. She wore a black, high-collared dress and stiletto heels of black patent leather. Her hair had been cut into one of those waferlike constructions you saw in fashion magazines, a wedge of it, hardened with aerosol lacquer, fanning over one eye. She gleamed like an obelisk, standing next to John Dogg as he shook hands with the people who surrounded them. The concentration of smooth, flattened energy in that wafer of hair, which shaded one eye like an upside-down poker hand. She was nothing like the woman I remembered, sunburned, drunk, crying, something starkly provisional about her enjoyments, Thurman’s goodwill, the sense that she would be on hard luck whenever he was bored with her, done escapading, and wanted to go back to Blossom.

I was at the opening with Gloria and Stanley Kastle. Since my return, two weeks earlier, I had been staying with them, in the same spare room where Burdmoore Model had camped out in his fugitive days. I was their current adoptee, and my photographs from the salt flats, at Gloria’s insistence, went above the shelf where Burdmoore’s sculptures had been displayed. I showed Gloria my short films, which I associated with a naive era, before I’d met Sandro, tracking the row of limousines and drivers on Mulberry Street, a dark walk through neon-lit Chinatown, but Gloria liked them. I was a fresh cause for her and Stanley. They disapproved of how Sandro had treated me. But I understood that they would remain friends with Sandro permanently. I was temporary and Sandro was permanent. They claimed to be angry at him and said if he made an appearance here at John Dogg’s opening they would protect me, but there was no risk of running into Sandro. I still knew him, even after discovering that I didn’t quite know him. He would feel it was beneath him to come to the opening of John Dogg, so recently scorned and ignored.

Spring had arrived and it was a mild, windless night, the pear trees on West Broadway covered with white flossy blossoms as I had parked the bike and waited for the Kastles outside the gallery.

“She’s sleeping with her analyst,” Stanley said to me as they approached.

“The couch is there for a reason, ” Gloria replied. “You are flat, horizontal, frontal. They are vertical. The session can either be inert or it can be activated, in which case, Dr. Butz is active.”

“She pays him,” Stanley said, “a hundred bucks.”

“I pay a negotiated fee of eighty-five, Stanley.”

“Still, she pays him and they do it on the session couch.”

“Listen, Stanley, it is the least he could do for me after seventy years of Freud and his patriarchal bullshit. You know what Freud wrote to his fiancée? Dear darling, while you were scouring the sink, I was solving the riddle of the structure of the brain. Dr. Butz can scour my sink.”

“While the riddle—”

“It’s your money I’m giving him.”

“While the riddle of the brain goes unsolved,” Stanley said to me as we walked into the gallery.

* * *

Sandro wanted me to come home. He said Talia was just a messed-up and confused girl. I didn’t see what her state of mind, her confusion, had to do with anything. Sandro had let me know he was capable of harm, greatly capable of it.