YOUR FACE AS UNIVERSAL STANDARD Young, good posture, good grooming, with rudimentary film knowledge, able to follow directions please apply.
"You do have nice skin," Giddle said, looking at me in an a.s.sessing way that made me blush.
"But what is it?"
"Modeling of some kind is my guess," Giddle said.
"You don"t think it"s nude, do you?"
"Would you have a problem with that?"
"I don"t know."
"Well, you shouldn"t," she said. "All kinds of things can happen in people"s lives. You can"t predict and you might as well keep your options open."
She went to take someone"s order.
"Oh, cheer up," she said when she returned. "I was kidding. I don"t think they want you to pose nude. That"s a legitimate film lab. I"ve heard of it."
Giddle offered to help with the good grooming part, and although it was a little condescending of her to presume I needed that sort of help, I was eager for friendship, and it was a next step. She came to my apartment bearing hot rollers, a hair dryer, and a small red vinyl suitcase filled with makeup. We had mostly been on either side of a counter from each other, and suddenly she was leaning over me, so close I could smell her perfume, cuc.u.mber oil that rubbed off on me and infused the whole experience of applying for the job with her smell. She separated portions of my hair with a fine-toothed comb and then rolled each section onto a hot roller and secured it with a metal clip. It felt ticklish and a little erotic to have her touching my scalp with the plastic teeth of her comb. But I think she forgot about me as she was doing this, lost deep in the act of transforming hair. Never mind whose hair, for what purpose. I ended up with a kind of beehive, all the stray hairs plastered like icing around the shape of the hive with aerosol spray. It wasn"t clear why I needed a beehive to apply for a job at a film lab, but that"s how it was with Giddle. She got lost in what she was doing, and practical questions were beside the point and in the wrong spirit.
"You look so gay!" Giddle said when she"d finished my makeup and the final adjustments of my hair. In the word gay I suddenly saw Catherine Deneuve"s bright-colored raincoats and matching little dresses, her sad songs and delicate joy in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
"I"m gay!" I said back. "Oh, so gay!" And I flew through my tiny apartment like a young girl in a French movie running to meet her lover and accidentally broke a cup. I paused to look in the mirror at the new, gay me. Giddle rushed in and drew a beauty mark near my mouth, painted more gloss on my lips with a brush, and blotted my face with a powder puff the size of a rat terrier.
"Rice powder," she said, "just a dusting."
It gave my skin a kind of moon glow, and my lips seemed redder. We looked at me in the mirror. Something had changed in my face, or in what I saw there. It wasn"t that I was prettier, exactly. It was that the whole charade of getting me ready to be looked at by whoever had placed that ad had exposed me to something. In myself. I looked at me as if I were someone else looking at me, and this gave me a weightless feeling, a buoy of nervous energy. I wanted to be looked at. I hadn"t realized until now. I wanted to be looked at. By men. By strangers. Giddle must have known.
"Oh my G.o.d," she said. "Your chin cleft is showing-look, it"s so prominent!"
I had never noticed I had a chin cleft, prominent or not.
"It"s a sign," she said.
"Of what?"
"Luck," she said. "There can"t be better luck."
I looked closer. There was a little depression in the center of my normally rounded chin. I had a chin cleft. It was showing. Maybe it was the powder but I think it was Giddle. She said the right kind of chin cleft was one that came and went, that you didn"t want a permanent cleft. It brought too much luck, and forced a terrible burden of joy on its bearer. Like Robert Mitchum, she said, who navigated a p.u.s.s.y wagon all over northern Mexico and drank paint thinner when he ran out of mezcal, and would be destroyed by his cleft. Too deep, she said. Too strong. Giddle had a cleft like mine, emerging only on certain days and in the right light, as I discovered, once I"d formed the habit of recognizing clefts. Hers was like a shallow thumbprint in dough. Those first few months as we became friends, I"d tell her that her cleft was showing and she"d lean over the chrome sandwich press on the rear counter of the diner to confirm the news, and then run off to buy lottery tickets or play a round of Fascination. If it was the end of her shift she"d throw on a black velvet jumper she kept in her work locker, daub oily swaths of cuc.u.mber scent on wrists and neck, fog her armpits with aerosol deodorant, and head uptown to the Carlyle. I figured Giddle was into businessmen. "Not how I"d put it, exactly," she said, reaching into her bra to adjust each breast. She did have beautiful b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She was pretty, too, with large green eyes and a soft, pillowy mouth, even if her face was often creased with sleeplessness and her teeth were stained from tobacco, as were her fingers. Between her pointer and middle finger on her right hand was a yellow smudge of nicotine residue from her endless smoking.
"It"s like what they don"t say in the movie version. I sleep with them, and they give me money, gifts, a.s.sistance with rent. It was supposed to have starred Marilyn, did you know? Marilyn Monroe and not Audrey Hepburn, who apparently would not touch the pastry to her lips in take after take outside of Tiffany"s. Marilyn loves a pastry and so do I, and she would have been a much better fit but it"s too late. It"s Audrey Hepburn who is the iconic thing you don"t name."
"You need the money?" I asked.
"Yes, I need the money. I mean no, I don"t. It can"t be reduced to money. I can"t explain why I do it. It"s a kind of impulse."
At about that same time, I went to see a movie about a Belgian widow turned prost.i.tute. I looked for signs in it of this occasional impulse of Giddle"s, but the film was all claustrophobic domesticity, a woman moving around an oppressively ordered s.p.a.ce, shining her son"s shoes and making coffee in a percolator. Taking things out and putting them away. Opening cupboards. Closing cupboards. Dusting, polishing, whisk whisk whisk with a stiff brush over her son"s black shoes, as she prepared him for each samelike day wherever he vacated himself to, a technical university for vocational training on the other side of a series of metropolis gray zones, half-lit in dawns and dusks. The shoes, shined correctly, would pull them out of this. A situation that, perhaps like Giddle"s situation, didn"t pertain directly or exclusively to money. The bind the woman was in, or wanted to escape from (and never would), was a kind of trouble linked to women and Europe and Jews, not in an obvious way, but it was all there in the film, somehow: history, hatred, cleanliness, and the costs of survival, surviving while drowning, whisk whisk whisk as she shined the shoes. The ring of intimacy tightened after the son exiled himself for the day, and the apartment became the woman"s work s.p.a.ce. She went into her bedroom and put a small threadbare towel over her bed"s coverlet in preparation for the arrival of a customer. A thin terry cloth layer between her two realities. As thin as the difference between a gesture that was dignified and one that was pathetic. Better, I thought, just to have one reality, to put everything on the same surface. To explain to the boy, almost a man, that money came from someplace, that she earned it the hard way, that there was no magical account at the Bank of Belgium. She was sorry there wasn"t, but more important, there wasn"t.
So there I was with my beehive and my rice powder. Giddle grabbed me and steered me toward the front door of my apartment.
"Go go go!" she cried. "You"ve got to go now, while your cleft is out!"
Marvin and Eric both wore welder"s gla.s.ses with thick, greenish prescription lenses, and they both snorted when they laughed. They ran a processing lab, Bowery Film, and after giving me the basic rundown of the job, mostly helping customers, answering the phone, restocking, they steered me to a pile of clothes that made me think of the term sportswear. You saw it on the second and third floors of department stores. It wasn"t clear what it referred to. Not athletics. The dresses Marvin and Eric gave me were knit, with big gold b.u.t.tons. There was a sort of bathing suit made of a fabric that looked as if it were not meant to get wet. More like a baton twirler"s bodice, black velvet and rickrack. There were coffee-colored pantyhose in a plastic egg. They left me alone. I put on the hose and the black velvet bodice, which was the only garment that fit, because the others were all pet.i.te-sized, the shoulders too narrow, the sleeves too short. I stretched out on a white vinyl divan. Eric came in and moved a potted plant behind the divan.
"Look down. Okay, look up. Left. Then right. Sit sideways but face front. Turn your head just slightly toward my hand, here, but follow the camera with your eyes. Yes. Exactly."
I would be looked at, but by people who didn"t know who I was. I would be looked at and remain anonymous.
Every movie had what was known as a China girl on the film leader. The first one wasn"t Chinese. None of them were. No one was quite sure why they were called China girls, since they were a printing reference for Caucasian skin, there for the lab technicians, who needed a human face to make color corrections among various shots, stocks, and lighting conditions. If the curtains in a film looked tennis-ball chartreuse and not some paler shade of yellow, it made no difference to the viewer. There was no original set of curtains they needed to resemble. Flesh is different. Flesh needs to resemble flesh. It has a norm, a referent: the China girl. Curtains can be acid-bright but not faces. And if faces look wrong, we question everything. Some of the China girls smiled. Most stared into the camera with a faint, taut bemus.e.m.e.nt just under the surface of their expressions. Who knew I"d be a model? But here I am, modeling flesh tones.
My own face, smiling shyly (who knew I"d be a model?), ended up on many films distributed in the United States and Canada. If the projectionist knew what he was doing, loaded the film properly and wound it past the leader, viewers did not see me. If they did see me, my face strobed past too quickly, leaving only an afterimage, like those pulsing colors that mosey across the retina after you stare at a lightbulb. Me then gone, me then gone. There might have been some unconscious effect, if you believed in that. Giddle often claimed the power of the subliminal. She said a voice whispered, "Do not shoplift. Do not shoplift . . . ," over the PA system in her grocery store on Second Avenue, but so low it was not audible. It wasn"t clear to me how Giddle heard it if it wasn"t audible, except that Giddle was a shoplifter, and like dog whistles were meant for dogs, she was the intended audience.
Most people didn"t know China girls existed. The lab technicians knew. The projectionists knew. They had favorites, faces of obsession, and even if I liked the idea of my own fleeting by, I knew the technicians looked at the frames more closely, and I liked that, too. I was and was not posing for them. Pieces of film leader were collected and traded like baseball cards. Marvin and Eric preferred a polished look. "The problem with the girl-next-door thing," Marvin said, "is that with recent Kodachrome it"s actually the girl next door. Her name is Lauren and we grew up together in Rochester." The girls, mostly secretaries in film labs, weren"t exactly pinups, but the plainer-looking China girls were traded just as heavily. The allure was partly about speed: run through a projector they flashed by so fast they had to be instantly reconstructed in the mind. "The thing suppressed as an intrusion," Eric said, "is almost always worth looking at." Their ordinariness was part of their appeal: real but unreachable women who left no sense of who they were. No clue but a Kodak color bar, which was no clue at all.
Twice in the first few weeks of working at Bowery Film, a waste container of nitrate film spontaneously burst into flames. Marvin said that when nitrate film decayed, it turned into a flammable, viscous jelly, which then solidified into crystals, and finally crumbled to dust. Jelly to crystals to dust. Marvin had been employed for a while by the Technicolor plant on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. His job sometimes involved getting rid of huge quant.i.ties of old and flammable file copies of films the studio had processed and released over the years. They were reference copies, Marvin said, for the studio to have a record of the correct densities and color for prints they had manufactured. All day long, Marvin and two other men took rolls of film out of canisters and mutilated the film rolls with meat cleavers, and then tossed them into a gigantic trash bin behind the studio. Marvin spared a few things from the meat cleavers for his own private collection. A thousand-foot roll of trailers for The Naked Dawn, by Edgar G. Ulmer, one identical copy after another. Pieces of imbibition stock, or IB, which was a different texture than regular film, according to Marvin, thicker, but still pliable. He also got a roll of "scene missing," which was cut into a print to mark a gap.
I learned a lot about film working with Marvin and Eric, and they let me process my own films basically for free, so I was coming in with sixteen-millimeter footage I shot with my Bolex from the film department at UNR, mostly scenes I filmed from the fire escape on Mulberry. The films weren"t all that good, but they did capture something. I made panoramic sweeps of the Sunday morning chauffeurs, one to the next to the next, black limousines and white drivers, their faces on zoom revealing little, just dulled patience, as if nothing could surprise them and nothing did. Did they wait like that out of loyalty? Fear? Good wages? Or was it pride, docility, boredom? Who knew why they waited, I thought, understanding that I, too, had it in me to wait. To expect change to come from outside, to concentrate on the task of meeting it, waiting to meet it, rather than going out and finding it. My camera grazed their faces as they stood at attention, a secret parade on public view, pretending as they waited that time had no value and what a lie. A lie they didn"t mind. They were on the clock, being paid to forsake time"s value by standing under the sun like they had all day.
The filmed footage of their patient faces reminded me of how I felt that morning after the unnamed friend of Thurman and Nadine"s had departed while I slept, leaving me alone, hungover, bereft.
Marvin and Eric loaned me a projector, and I showed my film to Giddle on the wall of my apartment. She liked it, but said it might be better to get a job as a chauffeur. To have to wait like they did, she said. As a kind of performance. But who would be the audience? I wondered.
"No one," she said. "You"d merge into an environment. Film it and you will never join it. You"ll never understand your subject that way."
This was her own method, I was beginning to understand. Giddle, who was a waitress but also playing the part of one: girl working in a diner, glancing out the windows as she cleaned the counter in small circles with a damp rag. Life, Giddle said, was the thing to treat as art. Once upon a time she had hung around Warhol"s Factory and would have been too cool to speak to me, much less serve me a meal in a hole in the wall with a grease-coated ceiling, handwritten signs ("cheeseburger and fries $1.25"), and humpbacked men and women lurching toward each other in the vinyl booths. "Personne," that Factory crowd had said to one another, a.s.sessing people as they filed into Rudy"s. "No one. Don"t bother." Giddle had been offered a role in one of Warhol"s films, of a girl sleeping on a bed. "How do I prepare?" she"d asked him, and he"d shrugged and said maybe sleep a lot, or don"t sleep much so you"ll be tired. The day her life changed she was in Hoboken, New Jersey, going to thrift stores, looking to find the right outfit for the role, a lace peignoir. Giddle went into an old chrome diner for coffee. It was winter and freezing. She started talking to the waitress. There was something suspicious about this waitress, Giddle told me. She wore gla.s.ses and had a dour and educated New Englandy face. She didn"t seem like someone who would work at a diner in Hoboken.
"So I pressed her," Giddle told me. "And she admitted she was actually not a waitress, but a sociologist, and that she was living for one year on minimum-wage jobs to gather data on how difficult it was to get by in that life, to understand and expose a kind of American ugliness." So it"s like a performance, Giddle had said to the woman. You"re performing the role of a waitress. Giddle was a performer herself, and it was what most interested her. The woman insisted, No, it"s sociology-I don"t care about performing. I infiltrate to study this world.
"But that is performance," Giddle said to me. "She didn"t see that, but I did. She was performing, as a real but not actual waitress. She was rushing from table to table and clipping orders on a little metal wheel that the cooks spun around, and calling out sides of biscuits and gravy and carrying stacked dirty plates one-two-three up the inside of her arm, which I still have not learned to properly do. I can"t quite explain what happened next. I was in a strange mood that day. I was all alone. It was February. The sky was very white. The trees were bare. The diner was warm and humming with a kind of life that seemed new to me. I watched the sociologist smooth her ap.r.o.n and slide a pencil in her hair and share a knowing smile with the cook, who called her by her server number, forty-three. When she came to refill my coffee cup, I said, "I"d like to work here. Are there any openings?" And she said that there would be, because her research was almost finished, and to come back in a week. I had a strange feeling, like I"d decided to go over a waterfall in a barrel. I rented an apartment nearby, a studio with a Murphy bed. It was over an old shoe-repair shop. Neon blinked into my window all night long, startling me from sleep. At first I thought I would hate the neon, but I began to like it, the way it lent this air of tragedy to my so-called life, my performance as a waitress, neon flashing into the room, making me feel as if I were living inside a film about a lonely woman who threw her life away to work in a diner. And I was that woman! But the whole thing was in quotes. I styled my hair in a bouffant, like the white women in the South who responded to civil rights by teasing their hair higher and higher and lacquering it into place. I wore a uniform, not actually required. The other ladies just wore black pants and an ap.r.o.n, but I purchased a pink uniform with a white Peter Pan collar. I thought I was very camp and ironic. The sociologist had finished, although she still came in now and then, sat at a table and did follow-up interviews. She didn"t want to talk to me because I was a downtown hipster and I might screw up her data. She pretended I was invisible since I wasn"t authentic.
"But the thing is, I became authentic," Giddle told me. "Little by little. My performed life grew roots. I was lonely, and the work was demeaning and hard. I wanted to go get drunk as soon as I was off shift, and so I was always hungover and barely keeping it together. I discovered that being a waitress was not about the uniform, or the cook calling you twenty-six, which at first I thought was cute. I even thought, what if I f.u.c.k the cook and he calls me twenty-six? Hilarious, right? What a riot. I did sleep with him and he called me Patricia, which was what I"d put on my name tag, and it was unpleasant. The next morning I had to face him every five minutes to pick up my orders.
"I moved back to New York a year later. Everyone asked where I"d been. Andy thought it was amusing, or so he claimed, but perhaps he was only making fun of me. Andy preferred the Automat, where there were no waitresses, just clear display windows for meat loaf and pies that slid open when you inserted coins. Never again did he ask me to be in a film, and something in me had changed. I no longer had the drive to make it with that Factory crowd. I told myself I was more extreme than they were, these haughty upper-cla.s.s b.i.t.c.hes who didn"t have to work. There was no risk for them. They could always go home to Mommy and Daddy"s on Park Avenue. One or two pitched themselves off Mommy and Daddy"s Park Avenue balcony, but seriously, anyone can do that."
New York was getting colder. I went to a bar in the Meatpacking District with Giddle one October night, my birthday, actually. There were bagels scattered all over the sidewalk, a heavy and rancid animal smell in the air. We stepped over puddles of lamb"s blood as we crossed the street to the other side, where there were more bagels. Giddle began kicking them like hockey pucks, and so did I. We were on Gansevoort Street, where carca.s.ses were loaded into the meatpacking plants on pulleys. Giddle led us into a bar around the corner on Ninth Avenue, a dive filled with men who probably worked in the meatpacking places and I thought, Why are we here? Giddle opened her purse and tried to buy our drinks with fake money she"d gotten in Chinatown, oversized bills with a denomination of ten thousand. The bouncer came over to speak with her. She insisted her money was good and that it was my birthday, and as she made more of a scene, he escorted us out.
Why is she my only friend? I wondered, this woman who is so alone. I meet no one through her and she thinks I should forget making films and become a Mafia chauffeur.
Giddle herself was considering her next act, another life, a new performance. She was planning to go to mortuary school, she told me. She went to see an autopsy as research and came to my apartment after. She glowed with excitement and stank of formaldehyde. I kept back a certain distance, and asked how it was.
"Difficult to even talk about," she said. "I feel changed. Like, say my mind is a sweater. And a loose thread gets tugged at, pulled and pulled until the sweater unravels and there"s only a big fluffy pile of yarn. You can make something with it, that pile of yarn, but it will never be a sweater again. That"s the state of things."
Winter came early. It was November and the water jeweled itself to a clear, frozen dribble from the fire hydrant in front of my building. Sammy, who had been sleeping outside, was gone. Henri-Jean, with his striped pole and sandals, no longer sat in the park, only hurried along in a ratty peacoat. Once I saw him dart into a building on Mott Street with groceries from the cheap bodega where I also shopped. The Italian kids wore big puffy jackets and blew into their hands to keep warm. I had been in New York four months. I had my job, and I was making films and learning a lot from Marvin and Eric, but I was lonely, eating candy bars for dinner with my coat b.u.t.toned up because my radiator was broken and Mr. Pong did not return calls.
One day Marvin mentioned that there was a guy asking about me. I wondered if it was the unnamed friend. When Marvin saw the pleasure in my face, he rolled his eyes. Marvin and Eric were verging on neuter. They didn"t want girlfriends. They got excited over discontinued Kodachrome stock. Imbibition stock. Scene missing.
"He wants to meet you," Marvin said distractedly as he examined prints for imperfections.
"How does he know who I am?"
"The girl cut into the leader, wouldn"t you say she"s as much a part of the film as its narrative? Her presence there in the margin, her serving to establish and maintain a correct standard of appearance, female appearance. These are aspects of a single question that deserve thought."
"What is that question, Marvin?"
No answer. I went out for my lunch break.
"He saw you coming in," he said when I returned. "It"s this guy Sandro Valera. Artist. Italian. Lives around here."
It wasn"t the unnamed man. But I knew the name Valera, of course, because of the motorcycles. The unnamed man had mentioned knowing one of them. I didn"t know who Sandro Valera was, but when I asked Giddle, she said, "Oh, for f.u.c.k"s sake. He"s famous. Go to Erwin Frame Gallery-he has a show up right now."
I went to the gallery. The woman behind the counter nodded toward me severely as I came in, glancing up through eyegla.s.s frames that were black and round like little handcuffs. Sandro Valera"s artworks were large aluminum boxes, open on top, empty inside, so bright and gleaming their angles melted together. I knew enough to understand that it was Minimalism, meant to be about the objects themselves, in a room, and not some abstract or illusory thing they represented. The boxes had been made in a factory in Connecticut. As I got to know Sandro, I understood that even if the works were stamped by the factory that produced them, they had little to do with the a.s.sembly line imagery they implied: the factory, Lippincott, only fabricated artists" works, by hand, and very, very carefully. One of the aluminum boxes was being moved by two gallery a.s.sistants in white cotton gloves. I thought of the gloves the boy driver of the Cadillac had worn, too large for his young hands as he worked the giant wheel of that car. The difference was the difference of this warm, quiet, bright place, this sn.o.bbish woman behind the counter. Calm reserve. The creak of old wood floorboards. Art that was four metal objects that shone like liquid silver. The gloves the a.s.sistants wore were not a curious nod to old-fashioned ideas about service and formality. They were to protect the milled aluminum from fingerprints, which, because of the oils on human hands, would be impossible to remove from the delicate finish. The gloves fit the a.s.sistants" hands. They picked up one of the boxes. Moved it a few inches and set it down, stepped back. Looked at it.
Giddle chided me again when I told her I"d seen the show and realized he was a major artist, with work that was subtle, mathematical, grand, and expensive, everything in the gallery sold, the air of the place making me feel like an interloper just being there. I didn"t understand why an older and famous artist was seeking out someone young and invisible. "Hmm. Let"s see. Why is an older man seeking out a younger woman? Who isn"t established in the way he is? Gosh. What a mystery. Oh, for f.u.c.k"s sake once again," Giddle said. "He"s a man. Practically middle-aged, and you"re young."
"You"re saying he"s the type who is into younger women?"
"Sweetheart, that"s all men," she said. "All men are that type."
I might have been proud to be the object of universal attraction, at least according to Giddle, but I only felt irritated for being treated as if I were too naive to understand. Giddle sensed this and added, as if to soften her condescension, that Sandro Valera was hot for a middle-aged man. By the time I met and began dating him, I chose to forget Giddle"s theory. Like all people who fall in love, I took the attraction between me and Sandro as singular and specific, not explainable to types and preferences. Once I asked if he preferred younger women and he said he preferred me. He said he saw me come and go from Bowery Film and I looked so open and lovely that he could not resist. "Could not resist what?" I had asked. "Becoming your boyfriend before someone else did," he said. Which bothered me but I let it go. He had a way of talking about our courtship that presumed there was choice to it. Perhaps this was simply a difference between us. I did not experience love as a choice, "I think I will love this or that person." If there was no imperative, it was not love. But Sandro spoke as if he"d seen me on the street and simply made his selection.
The woman in the handcuff eyegla.s.ses at the gallery that day was Gloria Kastle. Gloria who haughtily said, when I later met her properly through Sandro and mentioned I"d seen her working at Erwin Frame, that she most certainly was not working at Erwin Frame that day. She was merely helping him out, just as she sometimes helped Sandro out, "when it"s useful to him," she"d said. Sandro had given her a quick, cold look. Their exchange was oblique to me, and I did not try to interpret it beyond a.s.suming she had some proprietary attachment to him, sisterly, perhaps, since she was married to Stanley, who was one of Sandro"s oldest friends. But then again, maybe not sisterly, and yet I knew she was not a threat to me, and that it would be a mistake to consider her one. Not even after I began dating Sandro in a serious way did I worry about Gloria. Not even when I moved in, six months after we began dating, and Sandro left a box by the door for Gloria to pick up, items that were personal-a scarf, some books. I did not care to speculate on their friendship. If there was some complicated dimension to it, that aspect was being ended by Sandro when I moved in. She came to get the box and glared at me like we were two tomcats facing off in an alley. I was replacing her in some way. I didn"t understand quite how but I didn"t need to. I was with Sandro, and our relationship was neither secret nor illicit nor complicated. Whenever I saw Gloria, I smiled and hoped not to get scratched or bitten.
With my permission, Marvin gave Sandro my telephone number. He called. We met. He was beautiful, which I hadn"t expected, with a strange stillness, curiously both present and remote, with those eyes that were blanched of compa.s.sion but magnetic all the same.
On our first date, we walked through Chinatown, stopping for lotus paste buns. "Diaphanous," he said, and had me take a bite of his. It was the closest our two bodies had been, in an afternoon of walking side by side, each careful not to touch the other. The lotus paste had more fragrance than flavor. Later, I was never able to re-create that taste, after visits to bakeries all over Chinatown.
None of it could be re-created. We"d eaten the lotus paste buns on a cold, damp November day, on which the sun shone and rain fell simultaneously, the strange, rosy-gold light of this contradiction intensifying the colors around us as we walked, the fruits and vegetables in vendors" bins, green bok choys, smooth, sunset-colored mangoes packed into cases, the huge, spiny durian fruits in their nets, crushed ice tinged with fish blood.
As we walked, he kept staring at me. I looked over at him and he continued to stare.
When the rain won out and darkened the sky, he led me into a Chinese movie theater.
The movie careened and clanged along, an old-fashioned opera full of cymbal crashes and agonies, the occasional gong, stringed instruments wearily entangling and detangling. Sandro watched attentively, as if he were riveted by the drama being narrated in thunderous bursts of a language we couldn"t understand. It was subt.i.tled, but the subt.i.tles were Asian characters of some kind. The theater was almost empty. We still had not touched. I kept my arm in my lap instead of putting it on the armrest, to avoid his. But then Sandro reached over and rested his hand on my knee, his gaze fixed on the screen. Just like that, he placed his hand on my knee. The feel of it sent electricity through me. I had been with almost no one-just the nameless friend to whom I gave my Borsalino. This was different. This was a man who wasn"t playing some kind of parlor game, a cat-and-mouse pretend seduction, which, I now understood, was what Thurman and Nadine"s friend had played, and I had been too naively hopeful to understand. It may go without saying that I was the type of person who would call a disconnected number more than once.
While the movie played, Sandro leaned over and whispered to me.
"Do you want to be friends?"
I whispered back that I had a requirement for friendship.
"I"m glad," he said. "It"s good to have standards. What is it?"
"Sincerity," I said.
He sighed and squeezed my hand, then put his own back on my knee.
As we continued to watch the movie he began to unb.u.t.ton my skirt. One b.u.t.ton at a time, slowly, methodically, with no hesitation. He knew how to unb.u.t.ton b.u.t.tons. There was no fumbling, which was part of why I couldn"t find the courage to say, "Hey, what are you doing?" The other reason I didn"t find the courage to stop him was that I didn"t want him to. No one was in our row, or behind us. My skirt unb.u.t.toned, he took off his coat and placed it over my lap, chivalrous and careful. His hand slipped under the coat that covered me, and found its way through the unb.u.t.toned skirt. He pressed his warm palm firmly against my underwear. I looked at him. He looked straight ahead, his face suggesting only that he was engaged in watching this Chinese movie, in Cantonese or Mandarin, who could say? I tried to watch, too, but was distracted by the warmth of his hand, and the protective sensation of being covered by his coat, denim lined with wool, its unfamiliar scent and feel, which promised a whole world, one I wanted a place in. He concentrated on the film, or seemed to, never looking at me once, as his fingers crept into my underwear. In this manner, both of us watching the film, the act of what he did with his hand was not just erotic but also slightly melancholy, even a little grave. I leaned my neck against the back of the seat and tried to relax, to not be nervous or self-conscious. I focused on the round gold of the gongs, the rice-white faces and wax-red mouths, bleached complexions with artificially rosy cheeks that looked pinched or slapped or scalded. I watched these images in gold and red and white as Sandro"s fingers fluttered and moved.
When my body began to tense, his hand understood and slowed itself down, its rhythm matching mine.
After, he reb.u.t.toned my skirt and moved the coat up over my chest and shoulders, as if to redignify its purpose. We both pretended to be absorbed in the inscrutable opera that flickered on the screen.
The gold and red crashes, a grat.i.tude to this person, his wolf eyes and confidence and skill, the feel and smell of his chivalrous coat. On that day, nothing could have seemed more romantic to me, no other scenario more like real courtship, than a Chinese movie and a hand job under a coat.
It would have to be late autumn and the coat would have to be Sandro"s. The hand his. The voice his. The movie followed by a walk west, the rain having ceased, the walk led by him. I wanted to be led. To see the city as he wanted me to see it. He had a way of leading, I later understood, by not stating we were going anywhere in particular. By seeming to wander when he wasn"t, we weren"t.
We were on Gansevoort Street, where Giddle and I had kicked bagels. At the end was an old pier building of corrugated metal. Sandro pulled on the doors, which were locked. We walked around to the side of the pier, and Sandro explained that the artist Gordon Matta-Clark had cut holes into the building. Into the floor, the walls, the ceiling, one large half moon on the end facing the river, converting the place into a kind of cathedral of water and light. Sandro said Matta-Clark was clever, that he"d done everything so perfectly, and then someone tried to get a film permit, which tipped off the cops.
"What does it mean to do this kind of thing perfectly?" I asked.
"There was no bravado," Sandro said. "He didn"t storm in, have a big party, get immediately raided." Matta-Clark had cased the building quietly and with discipline for weeks before sneaking in and changing the locks, then slowly, stealthily, he"d moved in equipment, power saws, acetylene torches, pulleys, and ropes to make his cuts. He had noted when, if ever, there was security around the pier. When, if ever, the building was in use. He had learned that its only use was for discreet s.e.x acts between men.
"If we could get in," Sandro said, "we could see about illicit use."
It was cold, the light waning. I wanted to be someplace warm, and I resented this presumption that I would be willing. I saw how easy everything was for Sandro. I felt it, all at once. That he simply found a girl he liked and incorporated her. And because I was attracted to him, his charisma, his looks, and his knowledge, if I didn"t form an attachment it would be my loss.
We walked down West Street and viewed the building from the side, water slapping up against the pilings.
Sandro said the police tried to arrest Matta-Clark for the cuts he"d made, so Matta-Clark had fled the country, gone to Milan. There he found a recently closed Valera factory and sawed holes in the building, had an illegal show inside. Invited young kids to turn it into a squat. Sandro laughed as he told me about this.
"You don"t care?" I asked. "He"s squatting something that belongs to you?"
"Does it belong to me?" he asked. "More like I belong to it. I think it"s great," he said, "that"s all it means to me. I think it"s great."
We walked along the water, buffeted by wind, an occasional gla.s.s beer bottle rolling past like an escapee. Sandro bent to pick up a piece of paper, wet from the rain, a torn page from a magazine, an image of a picnicking couple, an advertis.e.m.e.nt for something but it wasn"t clear what. He"d give it to his friend Ronnie, he said, and carried the page between two fingers as we walked, absentmindedly waving it dry. Sandro liked to collect images and messages from the sidewalk. Some he gave away, but the best things he kept for himself, like the piece of paper he"d found on Ca.n.a.l Street, an awkwardly worded letter written by someone whose first language was not English, about selling something for a fair price and wiring payment to a sister in Switzerland. The letter was signed Alberto Giacometti.
We watched a huge container ship being towed by a tug. I noticed something in the waves, rising up and down with the sloshing wake of the container ship"s pa.s.sage. The bobbing thing was a person in the water. A man.
"People swim here?" I asked.
"I"m not sure he"s swimming," Sandro said.
Sandro waved his arms over his head stiffly, to get the man"s attention. "He can"t swim," he said.
The man was barely keeping his head above the waterline. Only his face emerged, water rolling over it from the ship"s wake.
"He looks like he"s going to drown."