Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

“The guy who carries the pole?”

“Yeah,” she said. “And the thing is, I don’t even have a brother and suddenly Burdmoore wants me to start hypnotherapy with this friend of his, a woman who counsels incest survivors. I’m just trying to entertain myself. Keep it light. Have a good time. By which I mean make stuff up and watch how he reacts. He didn’t know how to play the game. And then the thing with the pants, oh God.”

Giddle had brought a pair of white pants into Rudy’s and pinned them up on the wall with an announcement that anyone who fit into them could sleep with her. It turned out the white pants were too small for most of the guys at Rudy’s. The artist John Chamberlain got them up to his knees. Henri-Jean managed to get them on but could not zip them. Didier was next to try them when Burdmoore showed up. Burdmoore snatched the pants out of Didier’s hands. He held them upside down, gripped each pant leg firmly, and ripped the pants by the crotch seam, tore them clean in half.

“If you could have seen his face,” Giddle said. “The guy has a serious anger problem.” She left with Henri-Jean, who shrugged as they passed Burdmoore. A mime’s shrug. Life is sweet, I’m a helpless neuter. Whimsy is the answer to tears. I’m going to fuck your girlfriend here shortly. Shrug.

“Did he use it on you?” Ronnie asked.

“What?”

“That big pole he carries.”

“Ha-ha. He didn’t need to, Ronnie.”

John Dogg led Nadine past us, holding her hand like she was his little girl. She looked down shyly as he spoke to someone about borrowed light. They seemed like one happiness, a partnership. She’d been reinvented in the glow of his sudden success. And her rehabilitation made her into useful and effective arm candy for him. Just as you weren’t supposed to point out that John Dogg had recently been considered a clamoring outsider, one was not meant to approach this gleaming version of Nadine and ask if she remembered pissing in a bathtub, or letting Thurman Johnson rub the barrel of his starter pistol between her legs. It was more unseemly of me to think of these things than it was unseemly for her to have done them.

She and John Dogg had made it into the castle just before the gates shut. And the point was not how they got in, or that they almost didn’t, or to wonder if they deserved to be there. It was, here they are. Welcome. The point was that they were in. They were in.

“I bet you wore a long coat tonight, and took it off when you got here. Is that right?” It was Gloria, accosting the woman with the butt window.

The woman looked quickly at Gloria and then turned away, but before she did, I saw the distress in her face.

“I just wanted to know,” Gloria said to me because I happened to be passing by, as if she would have spoken to anyone passing by and barely registered who that person was, “how committed she is. I wanted a sense of her commitment.

“When the revolution comes it won’t make any difference,” Gloria said. “They’ll have a special guillotine for girls like that. With an even rustier blade for the artists who ogle her. These people here don’t matter. It’s MTA workers who need to see her rosy butt cheeks. But no, she wears a trench coat on the subway and reserves her hot little ass for us people who have already seen any number of hot little asses. Barbara Hodes was making see-through dresses in 1971. Eric Emerson wore chaps and a jockstrap upstairs at Max’s, and Cherry Vanilla only goes topless. It is so done. Done done done.”

But it’s new to her, I should have said but didn’t. She’s on her timeline, Gloria, not yours or anyone else’s.

* * *

After the opening there was a party on the roof of a building around the corner from the gallery, and John Dogg’s band played. That was what he’d wanted, a performance of his own band. It was a way to get a gig, using his newfound popularity in the art world to shoehorn in his music project behind him. Once you wedge the door open, push as much of yourself through as possible. They were called Hookers and Children. Bass, drums, saxophone, and John Dogg playing guitar and singing. They wore suits, and the drummer had a silver-sparkle drum kit like an entertainer from the mezzanine of a midtown hotel. They covered a Donovan song, “Young Girl Blues.” Dogg wasn’t bad. In fact, he was good. He sang like he really meant it, wavering his voice just like Donovan.

It’s Saturday night. It feels like a Sunday in some ways

If you had any sense, you’d maybe go away for a few days

The tender but slightly paternalistic love of whoever was addressing the young girl.

Stanley and Gloria had gone home. I stayed. Partly because Ronnie stayed. But I didn’t hover around him. We were two coordinates on that crowded roof. I was aware of him and I felt his awareness of me even as he mingled with others. It was a clear night, three stars glinting through a suspension of smog and city glow. I recognized a lot of the people on the roof, but because I’d been away, I felt I was watching them from some remove and didn’t have to engage, didn’t have to say hello the way you needed to when you had seen everyone the week before, that hello of having mutually decided you would permanently remain mere acquaintances. I stood back, hands in the pockets of my leather jacket, leaning against the railing. I felt like a balloon, like I could just float off the rooftop. I weighted myself with beer from the keg. Watched Giddle dance with Henri-Jean. Leaned over the railing periodically to be sure the Moto Valera was still there.

I didn’t want to think about Sandro. I didn’t want to think about Gianni.

“The three passions,” Stanley had said to me that morning, “are love, hate, and ignorance. Ignorance is the strongest.”

I had a hard time getting Bene’s face out of my thoughts, her barely concealed smugness, as if to say, he’s all yours .

I had not wondered, why is she passing him over? Why is she letting him go so easily? I had not wondered.

Bene had put her hand out, steering me toward the room where Gianni was. To the right of her, the other women soldering, hoping to repair a transmitter the carabinieri had smashed. When I passed them, Lidia and the others had not looked up from what they were doing and I understood that I had been shut out. I had not done anything wrong, but that was it. Bene had shut me out. What other choice did I have? I had no money. No friends. Gianni had brought me there, and it was to him I turned.

He and I, listening to Bene’s steps on the landing as she departed.

Gianni’s face, unreadable. His distance, which I had interpreted as chivalry, a form of respect. When in fact it was just what it seemed: distance.

“I need to take a trip,” he’d said. “I want you to come. We’ll go together. You want to see the Alps?”

His question confirmed or explained or simply filled the space of tension I’d felt all along with Gianni, from the first moments at the villa.

He took out a cigarette and lit it, in no hurry for my answer. Probably in no hurry because he knew, somehow, that my answer would be yes.

It was a North Pole, the same brand of cigarettes that Giddle smoked. It struck me as funny that Gianni smoked Giddle’s brand, but there was no witness who would understand why this was funny. Giddle and Gianni, from opposite sides of the globe featured on the cigarette packet.

* * *

I had no other world to turn to now but this one, the roof, Dogg’s band, Giddle’s antics.

Hookers and Children filled the night. There was a lot to say on these two subjects.

They were playing their own stuff now. Dogg’s earnest voice, but with more dissonance in the chords.