Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

But then she broke down sobbing, and when she had regained enough composure to speak she told Stanley, with me as witness, that she believed she might be in love with Ronnie, and that the terms of her performance of Alone had not included that possibility, and perhaps she was losing her mind. She sobbed and sobbed, her body convulsing into the arm of the couch.

The three of us sat, Gloria crying, and then Stanley sighed, cleared his throat, and spoke.

“Dear Gloria,” he said, as if he were writing her a letter, “remember how we used to joke about the concept of love? The phrase ‘to be in love’? I would say to you, Darling, I believe I may be in love with the woman who announces the time of day over the telephone. Her voice is so calm, and even, and feminine but not artificially sweet, just measured. And she is always available, always there when I call. I can get a drink of water in the middle of the night, while you’re sound asleep, furtively dial MEridian 7-1212, and she’ll say to me, ‘At the tone, eastern standard time will be 2:53 a.m. exactly .’ I could call her whenever I wanted. She was totally available to me, and yet an enchanting mystery, one not to be solved. I could never make anything advance further. And remember that while I held this fascination for the Time Lady, you one day fell head over heels for the man who answered the suicide hotline? Remember, Gloria? You said to me, ‘Stanley, he listens to me. He listens.’ And I said, ‘Gloria, that is his job.’ And when you were better, when the temptation to hurt yourself had passed out of your mind completely, you forgot all about him. Remember? You didn’t even want to call the man you’d once been in love with, because you no longer were in that frame of mind. Call a suicide hotline? I’m Gloria Kastle, goddamn it — I don’t call hotlines. Hotlines call me.”

Gloria sniffled, blotted her tear-streaked cheeks with a throw pillow from the couch, and smiled weakly.

* * *

“Do you realize how many Larrys are at Dogg’s opening?” Ronnie said, coming toward me in a shirt that said MARRIED BUT LOOKING.

“Larry Zox, Larry Poons, Larry Bell, Larry Clark, Larry Rivers, and Larry Fink. And they’re all talking to one another! This is some kind of historic moment. Reminds me of a story Saul Oppler once told me. He was sitting with Saul Bass and Peter Saul on a rock in Central Park, and they look down from this rock, and below they see Saul Bellow with Saul Steinberg, together, buying hot dogs from a Sabrett cart.”

Nadine and John Dogg posed for someone’s camera. Nadine turned her head just slightly to one side. The light from the flash lapped at her hair and polished complexion, the black, shiny cloth of her dress. She did not blink. I told Ronnie I almost didn’t recognize her. I did recognize her, though. There was no question. I meant to say she seemed changed, altered.

“She looks like a model advertising an expensive timepiece,” Ronnie said. “Funny how they try to make it into a separate category. Not ‘watch’ but ‘timepiece.’ ”

Nadine was close to us now. Ronnie said hello to her.

She said hello to him and then to me, separately, but as if she’d never met me. I didn’t press the matter. We watched her walk away.

“Are you still friends with that photographer?” I was breaking the long silence about that night. What the hell, I thought. She’s here, and Ronnie’s here, and Sandro, Sandro is not here.

“Yeah. Thurman’s wife died recently. People say the stupidest things about his work now. Thurman took a lot of pictures of the sky, and now Didier and his ilk claim that this is a kind of mourning. A great sadness, Thurman unable to face the horizontal world, the low material world, because he’s pining for his wife and thinking only of death and the heavens. This is a man who slept with everyone but his wife. Took pictures of the sky because he was too drunk to get up. Puked in a church donations box in Louisiana — I was with him. He had a bad hangover and had gone in to photograph something, I don’t remember what. He said it was the only time he’d been in a church since he was a child. But now he’s gazing at the heavens, in tribute to Blossom. People and their need to interpret.”

He waved away the subject of Thurman. The subject of that night.

“Hey, listen. I don’t know what you were doing over there in Italy besides having melodramas with Sandro. But the place must suit you or something. You look good.”

“Thanks,” I said, fairly sure I looked no different. I was in cutoffs and knee-high socks, the men’s kind with blue and red stripes around the ribbing at the top. Those socks weren’t allowed when I was with Sandro. “Come on, seriously,” he’d say. “You’ll make me look like your father, like I’m taking you to your basketball game.”

I had on a leather jacket; maybe that was the difference Ronnie noticed. And I had the bike, outside, unseen, but it had become a kind of mental armor.

“Yeah, you look like you’ve grown up a little.” He was looking at me from various angles. “See, now you’re doing that whole smiling-woman thing. That’s good.”

I’d had a fantasy, back at Sandro’s mother’s villa, of saying something to Ronnie, letting him know he was a bastard for giving Talia my hat. But now I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Talia wasn’t here. She didn’t matter. I would make her matter by bringing her up.

* * *

Even while he seemed not to focus on me, I felt Ronnie’s attention at John Dogg’s opening. Even as he spoke to others, performed his Ronnie shtick, I suspected he was secretly performing it for me. Things were shifting. I was no longer his best friend’s lover, but a girl he’d once slept with.

Ronnie told John Dogg’s parents his name was Sergio Valente. To the girl with the see-through pants, he introduced himself as Albert Speer.

“I hearda you,” she said, unimpressed.

Being Albert Speer got Ronnie started on the notion of the uncommon criminal, and then he turned to me and cued himself. What made a criminal common or uncommon? The girl with the see-through pants took the opportunity to wander off. She moved through the room, trapped inside her exhibitionism, unable to pretend she was just another girl at the opening, to get beyond the awkwardness of her nudity.

Ronnie seemed not to notice her exposed butt, even as he stared at it and at her.

“I’m collecting mug shots,” he said to me as his eyes tracked her across the room.

“Did I tell you that? I go down to police records on Centre Street. I’m looking for convicted criminals with my name.”

How many could there be? I asked.

“A few,” he said. Actually, only one so far. But three if you included the Ron Fontana and the Robert Fontaine that Ronnie himself did include. They were doing important work, especially the one with his actual name. The heavy lifting, Ronnie said, the dirty work.

I thought of Ronnie’s brother Tim, the single time I’d met him. Too muscular to be trusted. His clothes too new and too boxy, the clothing of a prisoner just freed. He was talking about a partner, the plans they had. He could have meant a partner on a construction job, but “partner” could mean partner in crime, cell mate, or all three: a guy you met in jail and then doubled up with for construction jobs and burglaries.

“I’m starting to believe this guy up at Rikers is doing his time, pacing his cell, for both of us,” Ronnie said. “Doing our time.”

He’s talking about his brother, I thought.

Giddle showed up. She and Burdmoore were no longer together. He was too sincere, she said. It had started to drive her nuts. He always wanted to get to the bottom of things. Get to the heart of things. “This supposed heart,” Giddle said. The way he talked, assuming it existed, zapped whatever feelings she’d had for him. “This whole ‘let’s take off the masks and hold each other’ thing,” Giddle said. “No thanks. I’m just passing through. I said, ‘If you want to pass through from some other direction and meet and have a good time, fine, but there is no heart and no fundamental thingie.’ He put too much pressure. I started making things up,” she said, “to satisfy him. Like I’d tell him I was sexually abused by my brother and that was why I had low self-esteem, which was what led me to cheat on him with Henri-Jean.”