Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

What I’d done, helping Gianni — it was a secret that lived in me, one I didn’t know quite what to do with. When I thought of Gianni, his brooding authority, the hurried departure, me driving what turned out to be his getaway car, I felt alone in a way that might be permanent. Secrets isolate a person. In that, I understood one thing about Gianni: the fog of his distance, the burden of secrets, the isolation.

Sandro had picked up the repaired Moto Valera, which had been shipped by the dealer in Reno to one in Manhattan. He relayed through Gloria that I could collect it if I wanted it. It was in the ground-floor hall of his building, the pink owner’s title folded and taped to the gas tank, the key in the ignition. When I went up to get my clothes, Sandro was at his big studio table, drawing. I went into our room, which had never felt in any way mine, and packed my clothes into my duffel bag, the same one I had brought here when I moved from Mulberry Street. I thought maybe Sandro would come in while I packed, try to apologize. He didn’t. When I walked past, he looked up. I stopped. Neither of us said anything.

I went down, strapped the duffel to the rear rack of the bike, and rode it over to the Bowery, to the Kastles’. It was my first ride through the streets of New York City, but on a bike I already knew. I had to watch out for potholes, and cabs that came to sudden stops, but crossing Broadway, zooming up Spring Street, passing trucks, hanging a left onto the Bowery, the broadness of the street, the tall buildings in the north distance, the sense of being in, but not of, the city, moving through it with real velocity, wind in my face, were magical. I was separate, gliding, untouchable. A group of winos in front of a Bowery hotel gave me the thumbs-up. At a stoplight, a man in the backseat of a cab, a cigarette hanging from his lips, rolled down his window and complimented the bike. He wasn’t coming on to me. He was envious. He wanted what I had like a man might want something another man has.

There was a performance in riding the Moto Valera through the streets of New York that felt pure. It made the city a stage, my stage, while I was simply getting from one place to the next. Ronnie said that certain women were best viewed from the window of a speeding car, the exaggeration of their makeup and their tight clothes. But maybe women were meant to speed past, just a blur. Like China girls. Flash, and then gone. It was only a motorcycle but it felt like a mode of being.

A week after I took the Moto Valera, Sandro came to the Kastles’. His tactic was sternness. He said I needed to stop acting like a martyr. Gloria and Stanley moved in beside me, told Sandro to give me time. He looked at them, nodded in bitter assent. Yeah, okay. You’re protecting her. I’m the guilty one. He nodded all the way to the freight elevator. Pushed the button, waited for a moment, then took the stairs. It was the last time I’d seen him.

Inside Dogg’s crowded opening, Gloria grabbed Helen Hellenberger by the arm and said she should come over to the loft and see my films. Helen was about to make an excuse. Her mouth opened. Gloria said, “Great. We will see you at our place, next week.”

When you’re young, being with someone else can almost seem like an event. It is an event when you’re young. But it isn’t enough. I was still young, and I wanted something else. I needed a new camera. The Bolex was smashed and I was alone and I wanted my life to happen.

As we moved toward the bar, Stanley said he was terribly thirsty, that he felt like something with rust stains on it.

“That’s because you drank nearly a liter of vodka last night,” Gloria said. “Your habits are going to be a slow killer of you, Stanley.”

“I’m not in a hurry,” Stanley said, and turned to watch a girl who pushed past us. She was wearing pants that had clear plastic stretched over her rear, a window for viewing her two butt cheeks, which slid against each other as she walked.

The Kastles had always been engaged in a low-intensity war with each other, but seeing them day in, day out, was to witness the derangement in a new way. One morning Stanley had been drinking coffee when Gloria came into the kitchen area of their loft holding a page ripped from a magazine.

“Stanley,” she said, “I want to show you something.”

He looked at her fearfully. She held the page in front of him. It was a glossy pictorial of three men and a woman. The men stood over the woman, erect cocks wagged in her face, semen jetting across the image, thick pearls of it on the woman’s open lips.

“Should I get my hair cut like this woman?” Gloria asked. “Do you think that style would work for me? Is it becoming?”

Stanley closed his eyes. He shut them tight and shook his head.

“Are you saying no, Stanley, or are you refusing my question?”

When she realized he wasn’t going to respond, she left the room. Stanley turned to me.

“A little boy and girl, brother and sister, are looking out the window of a train as it rolls to the platform,” Stanley said. “The girl sees a sign on a station door and says, ‘Look, we’re arriving at Gentlemen .’ ‘You dummy,’ the boy says. ‘Can’t you see we’re at Ladies ?’ You see,” Stanley said. “The boy will wander around Ladies, and the girl will venture into Gentlemen . It’s the same place. But they will never realize it.”

While we were in Italy, Gloria had been given a residency at the Kitchen on Wooster Street. She did a one-day performance called Alone . Gloria stood in a small booth with a curtained, pelvis-level opening. A sign invited people to Place Hand in Window. In the window, behind the curtain, was Gloria’s naked pelvis.

Stanley had been too prudish to touch his own wife’s genitals, as Ronnie announced to me. While Ronnie himself had apparently not just put his hand in the window, but kept it there awhile. “I did my volunteer work for the year,” Ronnie said. “I always maintained I wouldn’t turn down public service.” He put his hand in the window, and barely realizing what he was doing, lost in an interior reverie about the construction “to finger,” and how interesting it was that it was gendered, and not reversible, that to finger a man was to pin something on him, a crime, and to finger a woman was to bring her off, and that he was just moving his finger in a kind of unconscious way, back and forth, back and forth, and thinking about those two completely different meanings — not obverses, but maybe not completely unrelated, to finger a man, to pin a crime, to finger a woman… suddenly he feels this shudder from Gloria. Oh my God, he thinks, she just had an orgasm! And if that wasn’t bad enough, she cheated her own formal precept by peeking to see whose hand it was. As he turned to go he heard this muffled voice from behind the curtain whispering his name. He told the story as if Gloria was somehow presumptuous or overreaching, when he’d put his hand in her vagina. But that was of course the joke, the outrageous pretense of innocence. Of passivity.

“I should get one of those T-shirts that says ORGASM DONOR,” he said.

Afterward, Gloria followed him around for a week like a puppy dog. He finally had to tell her she was about twenty years older than his type. “I thought you don’t have a type,” Gloria had said. “You always make a point of that, of not having any type. You don’t have one, and I’m not even that .”

Gloria told me about her residency at the Kitchen, and about Alone, but not what happened with Ronnie.

“It was about the fourth wall,” she said. “It was also about making an assertion. There. Factual. In a sense male . If someone chose to break the fourth wall and place his hand in the box? They brought to the piece any component of sex. They brought it. I offered an object in a box, coldly. If someone placed a hand in the box, it was that person insisting on sensuality, on touching. Not me.”