Rachel Kushner - The Flamethrowers

Saul Oppler said, “This is like Robert Louis Stevenson meets Tom of Finland. I never would have guessed, Ronnie.”

Ronnie either pretended not to hear or wasn’t interested in responding.

“I asked about the harness,” he said, “and she claimed it was a safety precaution, in case I fell overboard. A memory, the clammy feel of wet leather on my bare skin, came back to me, but I didn’t know if she was telling me the truth. In the photo, she and the commodore weren’t wearing harnesses. ‘You were a minor,’ she said in accounting for this, ‘we were responsible for you.’ There are a lot of unanswered questions. I close my eyes and see either electric blue water and wind-flapped sails, feel a sense of sunny goodness, or I see something else, nights spent with the commodore and his wife, lessons that continued into something I can’t revisit. But I could be making that part up.”

“ That part?” Stanley asked. “And not the whole goddamn thing?”

“They still send me a Christmas greeting every year, those cards that are on color photo stock, with a sprig of holly printed on the white trim of the photo paper. It’s strange. They never get any older in the pictures. I think it’s actually the same picture they’re sending every Christmas, but reprinted with the updated year.”

“How bizarre,” Gloria said. “That’s so odd they would do that. Send the very same Christmas photo every year.”

“You think that’s bizarre?” Stanley said. “What about the fact that Ronnie was in bed with two naked people, for Christ’s sake, yachting around the world as their semiadopted son?”

“But that sounds exactly like something Ronnie would do,” Gloria said, and she got up to begin clearing dinner plates.

I needed to talk to him. That was how I felt as we ate dessert and the subject shifted, Didier poking his smoked-down cigarette into the center of an uneaten chocolate truffle and listening intently to Stanley, who was saying something about the old Indian in fringed deerskin who canoes past offshore oil rigs in that public service announcement on television, which ends with the Indian’s single shed tear when garbage is dumped at his feet from a car window.

“Iron Eyes Cody,” Ronnie said. “Actually Sicilian, but it’s a good ad, this uncaring world of garbage flingers. And their garbage is not even in a bag. It’s actual garbage, crumpled debris that fuck-you’s to a stop at the old chief’s feet. The message is clear.”

“What is the message?” Stanley asked.

“The litterbug is responsible for the genocide of the American Indian.”

* * *

Ronnie was the last to leave that night. I walked him out, said I needed to make sure I’d locked the Moto Valera.

“I plan to work for a bit, but do you want to come over?” he asked. “Keep me company, as they say?”

On the walls of his studio were cut-out images and articles from a magazine called Boy’s Life, all about sailing and what to do if you capsize.

Don’t abandon your boat! It may float

long enough for someone to rescue you.

An empty bucket can work as a flotation device.

Take off your pants and blow air into them.

Tie off the waist and ankles.

On the far wall was a sheet of butcher paper with a long list of phrases. They were titles, Ronnie said.

“For what?”

“My autobiography,” he said.

“Why do you invent?” I asked, scanning the list of titles. “Invent, and tell lies?”

“They aren’t lies,” Ronnie said. “They’re a form of discretion.”

He was organizing his worktable, putting things into piles.

“Ronnie,” I said, “what were you trying to tell me tonight?”

“I wasn’t trying to tell you anything. It was just a story. To entertain those moneyed rubes Erwin brought to dinner.”

“The woman toweling her hair. She… it could have been me and you know it. Tell me the truth.”

“It could have been you, yeah. And then what? You think you want to be with me? Act on some desire you felt long ago, that we both felt?”

I bit my lip.

“Look,” he said, and petted my hair. His expression held something like pity. “I have no problem carrying around a small curiosity about lying down with you again. About more than that, okay? Okay? About looking at your cake-box face and your fucked-up teeth, which make you, frankly, extra-cute. About some kind of project of actually getting to know you. Because I honestly don’t think you know yourself. Which is why you love egotistical jerks. But I’ll tell you something about us, about me and about you, and what happens when two people decide to share some kind of life together. One of them eventually becomes curious about something else, someone else. And where does that leave you?”

My heart was pounding. I felt an ache of sadness spreading through me, down to the ends of my fingers.

“You want another Sandro, and I can just screw whoever I want, to keep myself entertained? Because it wasn’t just Talia that he was gifting himself with. It wasn’t just Giddle, either, who, well, see Giddle is like a piece of furniture, necessary but ultimately insignificant, something to lie down on occasionally. And it wasn’t merely Gloria, who has been Sandro’s leftovers for at least a decade, picked up and discarded when he wants. In fact, gee. Name a woman you have met through Sandro, or that he has met through you, and you’ll find that—”

“Stop it,” I said, tears rolling down my face. “Stop. Why are you doing this?”

“To show you the uselessness of the truth,” he said.

Table for Two for One: An Autobiography

The Other Side of Tender: A Life

Married but Looking: My Story

Manhandled: An Autobiography

Who Ate All the Pussy? One Man’s Journey

Friendly Fire: My Trials and Triumphs

Potato in a Ski Mask: The True Untold Story

They Took the Liquor but Left the Girl: My Life

Partial View, Obstructed: A Memoir

Third Place (Victory Is a Seven-Letter Word)

Hamburger in Paradise: My Adventures

Bars and Stripes: Doing Time

Green Onions: Getting Out Alive

Can a Brother Get a Table Dance? My Life, Uncensored

Still in Love: A Confession

Patent Pending: My Becoming

Too Rich to Be Bothered (The Life of Sandro Valera, as Told to Ronnie Fontaine)

Suicide by Cop: The Path Not Taken

Suds and Duds: Clocking Time with Beer and Laundry

How to Pray and Get Results: The Diaries of Ronnie Fontaine

I Lived (He Died)

You’re Soaking in It: My Secrets

I was alone again, like when I first arrived in New York, but it was a different alone. Things had happened. I’d walked under the plane trees with Sandro in the gardens of the Villa Valera in Bellagio. I’d tried to chew inedible bread under a fresco of drowning popes. I knew what it felt like to be teargassed. I’d been drawn in by three different men, Ronnie, Sandro, Gianni, and one woman, Giddle, and it would seem that I knew nothing about any of them. I owned a motorcycle. I rode it all over town. It wasn’t just transportation, it was an experience. I was a girl on a motorcycle. And I finally discovered what was behind the green door.

* * *

One overcast July evening when the heat and humidity became unbearable in my top-floor walk-up on Kenmare, I filled my tank at the Gulf station on Lafayette under a low and heavy sky and went north, not looking in the windows of the Trust E Coffee Shop, a place I now avoided. I didn’t hate Giddle for sleeping with Sandro. It was one more performance, a performance of betrayal. You couldn’t hate someone who saw the world so differently. And I knew she must suffer. I had never encountered anyone so alone as Giddle. Really alone, no audience to what she was doing, since it was so much like life, and no real friends, since they were merely an audience to her performance.