Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

I called Sandro’s number and got the machine. I hung up, unable to bring myself to leave a message, and went to lie down in the little guest room, the Burdmoore room, as I thought of it, my own photographs, the white on white of the salt flats, on the walls above me. I closed my eyes, but with the noise from the party preparations, the news about Roberto, the jangle of thoughts in my head, I felt like I was trying to rest on a freeway overpass. I tried Sandro again and got the machine. I went out for a walk. I’d seen a FOR RENT sign on a fire escape on Kenmare, near my old apartment.

As I left the Kastles’, I decided to walk over to Sandro’s. Who else knew Roberto? Only me. Sandro never spoke of his brother. He downplayed his family, the company, in every way he could. I rang the bell. No one answered. Gloria had said he was coming to Ronnie’s opening. I would see him in an hour. We’d speak then.

* * *

I had not guessed Ronnie would use the photos he’d taken that night at Rudy’s, of Talia Valera and her friends. I should have. He did. The show was called Match Your Mood . Talia and the other women mugging for the camera with their faces roughed up. They’d gotten drunk, and instead of meeting a stranger in the dark wilderness that lay before them they met themselves, in slaps and punches.

Talia was larger than life, with her bruised, swollen eye. She stared out from the glossy black-and-white image with a look of calm satisfaction, as if Ronnie had revealed her profound nature by asking of her this task, to punch herself, and she had, and look, she was not afraid, she was undamaged, still beautiful. But she was damaged; they all were.

I thought of the pregnant biondina. The biondina told to strip nude, deloused for the camera, and what was the difference? Vincenzo has the baby.

There was no sign yet of Sandro. We would be speaking in front of a huge image of Talia’s battered face. She was just a confused girl, like Sandro said. Roberto was dead and maybe it was time for me to come home.

Helen Hellenberger had not wanted to show the work. Ronnie had left the gallery and was now represented by Erwin Frame, on Mercer Street, which was Sandro’s old gallery. I walked around the show with Gloria, who told me Helen had felt the work was too misogynistic.

Gloria started glancing behind me as we talked. I turned around. Sandro had arrived.

He was with a very young woman, practically a child. She might have been eighteen years old. A friend’s daughter, I thought. Someone’s daughter, petite and delicate, a blonde in a black sliplike dress, tiny shoulder blades like a bird’s wings, a child someone had dressed up for this event. But they were holding hands, she and Sandro. Walking together, her hand in his, and then he pulled her to him and kissed her on the side of the head. It was the girl on layaway. I hadn’t recognized her dressed up, the blonde in the photograph in Ronnie’s studio, who had stood in a cave of noise and smoke and gazed sadly at Ronnie that night at the bar, and no one had noticed her but me.

From that moment I began to drift, to really drift. I felt light and queer and untouchable, by people or things. The huge black-and-white photos of beat-up faces receded and blurred. They were too large, like tribal masks or billboards. Gloria’s hand was on my arm but I could not really feel it, just a vague pressure. “Let’s get you some wine.”

I better leave, I thought. Go to Rudy’s and get drunk with Giddle, as much a stranger as any of these people but she never really professed to be anything more. Go and enter the dark and tangled wilderness, a different one than Giddle’s, each of us tumbling in, in, in.

I was outside, pondering Rudy’s, when Ronnie appeared.

I felt keenly aware that it was the second time in a month he’d done this. Followed me out when I’d left someplace alone. But I knew his game, showing just enough interest to keep me hooked in.

“You’re ditching my opening.”

“Fuck you,” I said. I was unsure where it came from but it seemed appropriate.

He laughed. “You really are growing up. Just come to dinner. Sandro won’t be there.”

“That’s not why I’m leaving,” I lied.

“We both have dead brothers now,” he said. “But no one knows about Tim. You’re the only one I told. You can be my date tonight. What do you say?” He grinned stupidly, showing that broken tooth. He never had explained how it had happened. “Walk with me. It’s my dinner and I want you to come. To be my guest.”

Ronnie held my hand as we walked, and I wondered if he was doing it to console me because Sandro was holding the hand of a child bride, Ronnie’s layaway plan transferred to Sandro. Did a pink owner’s title go with her? The strange competition and sharing of friendship. We both have dead brothers now.

He squeezed my hand. Then he squeezed it again.

“I never understood you,” I said.

* * *

As Ronnie had promised, Sandro and the girl did not come to dinner. I assumed they did not come because he was grieving, but the thought crossed my mind that it was also because he wanted to be affectionate with his date without the censoring element of my presence. The day I had caught him with Talia and left for Rome was only two months earlier, and he was already with someone else. What I had considered an open issue, the question of me and Sandro, was closed. I hadn’t been ready for that. I had forgotten that he was free to move on, that he would seek comfort. A new girlfriend to help bear his sadness about Roberto. Roberto, whose death I felt connected to in a way I would never be able to disclose.

Most of the Larrys whom Ronnie had found so funny bunched together at John Dogg’s opening had been invited to this dinner for Ronnie. And Saul Oppler, who seldom attended these things. And Didier, puffing his Gauloise and taking bites of the fish Gloria served, his plate a mixture of fish and ashes and cigarette butts.

Erwin made a toast to Ronnie. Gallerists needed so badly to believe. They were not allowed the skepticism the rest of us harbored. The photographs were tasteless and mean. They were as questionable as a documentary about a pregnant girl with a fever and no place to lie down. The movie director sleeping with her as a way of offering her a bed. And because Ronnie’s photographs were so obviously tasteless, Erwin talked about their tastefulness and surprising tact, their great humanity, Erwin said, their honesty, an unexpected tenderness—

As he spoke, he searched the table for us to agree with what Ronnie himself would have called bullshit hagiography.

We clinked and sipped.

Ronnie cleared his throat.

We waited quietly for him to speak.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “I was messing around at a construction site and got whacked on the head by a railroad tie.” He looked around. “Have I told any of you this story?”

We shook our heads. Wind came in through the open windows of the Kastles’ loft, and the little candles on their long schoolhouse table dimmed and flickered, as if in anticipation.

“I got whacked so hard I forgot who I was. Twelve years of life, gone. I wandered with a headache, stunned and aimless, for a couple of days, sleeping in public parks, competing with pigeons for old french fries, relieving myself in bushes, drinking from plaza fountains—”

“Ronnie,” Gloria said, “they recycle that water. You’re not supposed to drink from fountains.”

“For crying out loud,” Stanley said, “Ronnie just told us he hit his head and forgot who he was . What does it matter about the water?”

“I came to a small marina,” Ronnie said. “Probably I’d been there before, but everything looked new to me. The ocean flashed and glistened. A salty breeze riffled my hair. The gentle slap of waves against the boats docked in the marina was a voice beckoning me. The sound of the rigging. Of sun-bleached, heavy canvas snapping in the wind. The creak of rope knots—”