Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

They didn’t speak a word to each other on the train. She motioned for the map and he silently took it out, inching away from her as he did so, turning his back to her as she unfolded it.

A young Hispanic couple, the youth with his arm around the girl’s waist, both of them listening to music through their earphones as they rested their heads against each other, watched her reading the map. The boy lifted the earphone away from the girl’s ear and whispered something to her. Bill blushed and turned his body further away.

At the 77th Street stop she got up and he scrambled to follow her. His right hand was held awkwardly against the front pocket of his jeans; every few minutes he would brush it against the pocket, making sure the wallet was still there.

Back at street level, she handed him the map. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘we are tourists.’

Pissy bitch. He deliberately dawdled, letting her walk ahead, but as they crossed into Fifth Avenue his bad mood vanished. He quickened his step and reached for the bottle of water in the pocket of her backpack. ‘Hey,’ he said, smiling, ‘look up.’

They stopped, looking down the avenue, at block after block of stately nineteenth-century facades that disappeared into Harlem. It was a workday, and grim-faced New Yorkers in business suits jostled past them. A middle-aged woman, svelte in a tight black dress, held out her hand for a cab but it whipped past her. ‘Fuck this,’ she drawled, putting her sunglasses back on in one quick graceful movement.

Trina slid her arm through his. ‘Isn’t it the most fabulous city?’

A previous night, in a bar in SoHo, he had been waiting to catch the eye of the bartender when he overheard a man beside him say, ‘God, I hate Midtown, it’s full of tourists.’ He and Trina had just spent the day at the top of the Empire State Building, listening to the audio tour, gazing down at the astonishing city encircling them, so moved he had found his eyes welling with tears. But at the bar, he cringed. The bartender had cocked an impatient eyebrow at him, waiting for him to order, and Bill had been embarrassed by his own accent. He had to repeat the order, the harsh Australian consonants and chopped vowels sounding grotesque to his own ears.

But now, with the valley of the avenue chopped into alternating geometric shapes of light and shade from the sun straight above them, he realised that he loved Midtown, the fantasy of it, the romance of it, the cinematic sweep of it. They were still arm in arm when they reached the Whitney.

There was a queue. Bill went to the front to read the sign on the glass doors and a stout older woman in a dark blue uniform approached him.

‘You can’t go in there, sir.’ She was shaking her head. ‘We don’t open till one today, sir.’

Bill joined Trina at the end of the line.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘She was such an officious bitch,’ he answered. ‘And I just hate how she kept calling me sir in that rude, supercilious way. It’s so fucking false.’

At a minute to the hour the glass doors were still locked and the stern woman guarding the entrance still had her arms crossed. A woman in the middle of the queue had just sighed loudly, Oh for God’s sake , when the guard, as if taking pity on them, pushed open the doors and gestured for the queue to start moving. Even so, they were ignored by three young staff at the front desk, a man and two women; they were laughing and logging on to their computers, refusing to look up. Then, almost in unison, their smiles disappeared and they turned to face the waiting line. To Bill, the young man appeared particularly irritated, as though the visitors were an unnecessary imposition. He hoped they didn’t get him.

But as they moved forward he was the next attendant free. He was handsome, immaculately dressed in a crisply ironed fawn shirt.

Bill had his wallet open and asked, ‘How much for the two of us?’

And then the little prick rolled his eyes and tapped the notice in front of him.

Bill felt sweaty, was sure that there were damp patches under the arms of his T-shirt. He was all too aware that, unlike the other visitors, New Yorkers in smart summer wear, his and Trina’s T-shirts and shorts, her backpack, marked them out as outsiders. Fumbling with the money, Bill handed forty dollars across the counter.

Trina stepped up beside him. ‘There’s a Hopper on display, isn’t there?’

And then the little fucker did it again, rolled his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he answered her, not hiding the contempt in his voice, ‘but we are a museum of contemporary art.’ He drew out the penultimate word as though Trina might never have heard it before.

Bill felt Trina flinch beside him and when the man handed over the two paper tickets, Bill grabbed them out of his hand. The young man’s distant demeanour wavered for a split second, then he recovered and the sneer returned to his face. ‘The Hopper is on the top floor.’ Then a pause. ‘Sir.’

They walked towards the lift, then as they waited there behind an elderly couple, Bill exploded. ‘What a stuck-up black cunt,’ he hissed at Trina.

The old woman turned around, stunned, looked at him and then quickly turned away, taking a step as though recoiling from him. Trina had also shifted away from him and was looking at the floor. In the lift to the top floor, she stood in the corner opposite him, her eyes fixed on the numbers lighting up above the door.

She waited till everyone else had exited and then she turned to him, her eyes furious. ‘You Neanderthal, how dare you?’ He couldn’t answer her, he couldn’t find the words. She almost ran from him and disappeared around a corner. He knew better than to follow her.

For the first few minutes he wasn’t even aware of the canvases on the white walls, the sculptures or the mobiles. As much as he was hiding from his wife, he was also avoiding the elderly couple from the lift. He couldn’t stand seeing their distaste, their revulsion. And he did feel revolting; the shame that was blinding him to the world in front of his eyes seemed impossible to quell. His body felt lumpy and awkward, misshapen and clumsy, as if the insult he had uttered had physically altered him. He felt unclean.

For fuck’s sake , he rebuked himself, thinking of the man’s arrogant dismissal of him and Trina, why didn’t I just call him a spoilt cunt, or a rude cunt, or even a faggot cunt? All of them were inexcusable, but none was as disgraceful — no, as blasphemous —as what he had said.

He turned into a small alcove off the main gallery and that was when he saw the Hopper, a row of tenement shopfronts, the red and yellow pigments bold and earthy at the same time, the blue of the morning sky repeated in a stretch of awning, in the hues of the curtains of the apartments above the shops. The beauty of the painting stilled the chaos inside his head; he forgot about the heat of the day, the insulting behaviour of the young man, the wretched abasement of his own response to it. The melancholy of the painting, the quiet, empty street, the evocation of solitude, made him long to be back home. He had to stop himself reaching out to touch the painting, seeking its solace.

Trina had come up next to him. He smiled at her wide-eyed admiration of the work. He leaned across to her and said softly, ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’

‘I’m not ready to talk to you yet.’

His shame had vanished completely. ‘Fuck off then.’ He didn’t care if he was overheard.

So this is contemporary art. The top level consisted of works in the collection that had been exhibited in biennales over the last forty years. Though Bill was no expert in art, he knew enough to recognise the beauty in the Rothko and the Johns, the Bourgeois and the Kruger. But in the gallery he had just entered, a large flat-topped cubicle took up most of the floor space. Branches and twigs had been arranged around it but seemingly with no attention to line or design. It looked as primitive as the little sculptures his niece brought back from kindergarten; except, at four years of age, his niece already had a more developed aesthetic eye than did the sculptor of the work in front of him. The walls were made of the thinnest chipboard, unpainted and untreated. Bill walked around the cubicle. An unsmiling security guard was standing watch and as he walked past him, Bill playfully rolled his eyes. The man did not blink, continued to look determinedly ahead. He turned around to take a quick peek at the man but the guard’s face remained stony, there was no shift in his straight-backed stance.