Sandro took off his coat. The chivalrous coat, removed for the second time that day. There was no choice but to try to save this person. "Go call 911," he said.
I ran until I found a pay phone that was not broken and dialed. The operator told me she couldn"t send anyone until I gave her the street address. The address is the Hudson River, I said, Gansevoort and West Streets. A man is drowning. She needed a street address. I repeated myself. She must have alerted someone because I heard sirens, louder and louder. When I got back to the pier, firemen were there. The sound of radios, of heavy coats and boots. The truck"s clattery, loose-valved idle.
"There"s a guy in the water?" one of them asked me in a Staten Island tw.a.n.g, nasal and flat, looking at me from crotch to neck.
Sandro had managed to secure the man to the edge. He"d found a length of wire and had used it to la.s.so the drowning man, but he couldn"t pull him out. The man was wearing so many layers of wet clothing that he weighed about four hundred pounds. Sandro was pulling on the wire around the man"s middle to try to keep him afloat when the firemen and I arrived. They swarmed around to take over. The man looked up at us. In his face I saw confusion and misery, and I understood that we had interrupted him. He"d been trying to kill himself. He looked up, helplessly alive, swaddled in his drenched clothes. He must have been wearing twelve overcoats. It could be that it was necessary to taste the experience of dying to know you wanted to live. Or that you didn"t want to live. The man"s face said he didn"t want to, but he"d had to come this far to learn it.
The firemen had secured a proper rope and were lifting him out, little by little. He dripped like one of those cars they winch from the end of a pier in television police dramas. Drip drip drip.
I picked up Sandro"s jacket.
"Let"s go," I said.
The events of that first date with Sandro, the curious, distant intimacy in a Chinese movie, the almost-drowning, were two bars that crossed to form an X, and the X pinned us to each other. Sandro walked me home, kissed me on the side of the head, and said he was going to stand on Mulberry outside my building until it was time to see me again.
"You can give signals from the window," he said. "Just a hand, a bare arm."
I went upstairs, took a bath to warm myself, watched the light through the windows turn the bleached gray of winter dusk as the radiator, finally repaired by Mr. Pong, clanged and banged and hissed, its steam carrying a curious feeling of safety, of comfort, as well as the complete unknown thrill that love was, these things filling the room through the rattling valve on the radiator. (Later, Giddle"s response when I told her I was in love: "Oh G.o.d, I"m so sorry. Love is awful. It ruins every normal thing, everything but itself. It makes you crazy and for nothing, because it"s so disappointing. But good luck with that.") I let the bath drain while I was still in the tub, a habit I was attached to, the way the receding water pulled at the body, dragged it down while returning its substance, gravity, density, making the body heavier and heavier as the waterline sank. Finally, there was no water, just bones like lead.
Flushed from the hot bath and sleepy, I looked out the window. Two kids leaned against a car, an Italian boy and a Puerto Rican girl who lived in my building, one of the girls who practiced dance routines in the breezeway. She was on roller skates, and as she and the boy talked, she rocked silkily from side to side on her skates. Sandro was gone. I didn"t really expect him to stand there all night, and yet, at twenty-two years old, part of me was buoyant with silly fantasies, capable of disappointment that he had actually gone home.
To be young was to be more closely rooted to the thing that forms you, Sandro said to me on our second date. We were at an Italian restaurant in my neighborhood where he pretended to speak no Italian, p.r.o.nouncing menu items with an accent that sounded like John Wayne, a voice Sandro always used to imitate an American way of speaking. We all sounded like John Wayne to him.
He wanted to know about me. Not just the usual things, small-town Reno stuff, giving out ribbons at rodeos, growing up with Scott and Andy, Uncle Bobby, who left the three of us, eight, nine, and ten years old, in the back of his car, gave us c.o.kes and cherry cigarettes to occupy us while he banged an old lady"s box, as he put it. Sandro liked those stories, but he also drew from me, that night in the Italian restaurant, things I hadn"t spoken about to anyone before. What I thought about as a child, the nature of my solitude, the person I was before I went through p.u.b.erty and became more readably "girl." The person I was before I became more readably "person." We seemed to share certain ideas about what happens in childhood, when you have to place yourself under the sign of your own name, your face, your voice, your outward reality. When you become a fixed position, a thing to others and to yourself. There were times, I told him, at the age of five, six, seven, when it was a shock to me that I was trapped in my own body. Suddenly I would feel locked into an ident.i.ty, trapped inside myself, as if the container of my person were some kind of terrible mistake. My own voice and arms, my name, seemed wrong. As if I were a dispersed set of nodes that had been falsely organized into a form, and I was living in a nightmare, forced to see from out of this limited and unreal "me." I wasn"t so sure I occupied one place, one person, and Sandro said this made sense, this instinct of a child, to question the artificial confines of personhood.
I tried to relay to him an almost inexplicable trauma, standing in my mother"s yard, in our tiny house in Reno, being unconvinced I was myself. He understood. He wanted to understand. At about that same age, I put short little pieces of string in a bottle. Each New Year"s Day I took one string out of the bottle and let the wind carry it away. If I looked which way it floated off, I would bring myself bad luck. I told Sandro how I used to sit for hours and stare at the kitchen stove, concentrating on the burner k.n.o.bs, sensing, at a certain point, that I was ready to turn them on with my mind. That I could do it. I was on the verge of doing it, of finally turning on the stove with my mind, waiting for the coils to glow orange, and then I would ask myself, Are you ready for this? Are you ready to have your entire world turned upside down? (Because what happens once you know you can turn on the stove with your mind?) I wasn"t ready. I always pulled back from the brink. I told Sandro about the shortcut from school to home, the man I"d seen. He was standing in the bushes, which had an empty s.p.a.ce about waist height, so that his face was hidden behind leaves, but I could see him from the waist down. He was masturbating. We both laughed at the ridiculous geometry of the bush, but then he said, "I really want to hurt the b.a.s.t.a.r.d for doing that to you."
I told him how I ran all the way home, as if I were being pursued, in physical danger. Which of course I wasn"t.
"No," Sandro said. "You were in danger. You absolutely were. It"s okay to let go of innocence. But when you"re ready," he said. "On your own terms."
Telling Sandro these things collapsed the layers between me as woman and me as child. Sandro saw both, loved both. He understood they were not the same. It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you. The person you were when you thought a small cut string could determine the course of a year. You also became the person to whom certain things happened. Who pa.s.sed into the realm where you no longer questioned the notion of being trapped in one form. You took on that form, that ident.i.ty, hoped for its recognition from others, hoped someone would love it and you.
We were the last customers to leave the restaurant. Sandro walked me home under the holiday lights of Little Italy, little frosted bulbs glowing white in the cold air. I invited him up.
I didn"t have to be recognizably one thing. Even his touch relayed this. It almost restored some lost innocence.
Sandro"s strong, heavy arm stayed wrapped around me all night. Whenever I stirred, he pulled me closer. Later I saw this gesture, the pawing habit of Sandro"s sleeping limbs, as a blindness, an unconscious registration: body. Body that"s near. But in those first months I thought he was reaching for me.
For our third date, Sandro said he wanted to have me over, show me his place.
"What will I find there?" I asked, a.s.suming he"d say dinner.
"Justice," he said, in that half-joking, half-grave way of his. "I"ve got justice."
It was a cold winter day. When I arrived, he had company. A friend just about to leave, who was sitting on a couch in Sandro"s loft, flipping through an art catalogue. He wore a peacoat and scarf, and his hair was darker, from winter light, or because it needed to be washed, but he looked otherwise just the same. Just the same.
Rain began to fall, wet darts. .h.i.tting the windows of the loft. The rain fell harder and harder until the sound rose to an incredible crescendo, like gla.s.s beads pouring down over the front of Sandro"s building. The sky beyond the windows was dense and gray but with the curious b.u.t.tery quality of daytime darkness, as if there were a yellowish light lurking behind the rain clouds. Time had slowed to an operatic present, a pure present.
"My very best friend," Sandro said as he introduced us.
This friend of his stood.
In that strange light, the showering-gla.s.s-beads rain, I felt that I was seeing this person before me in two ways at once. Again-finally. And also for the very first time. His smile was simple and open. If there was the faintest edge of knowingness in it, it was purely of this type: my friend digs you. That was all.
I don"t want to know your name, I"d said to him that night, when he was one of the people with the gun, Nadine and Thurman"s friend.
But now I did know his name: Ronnie Fontaine.
7. THE LITTLE SLAVE GIRL.
The year I turned four, Ronnie and Sandro were shining their flashlights along the planes of a young girl"s face.
She was a Greek slave girl carved in marble. She held a dove in her hands that she drew toward her lips, as if she were about to kiss the light little bird. Sandro and Ronnie had studied the girl night after night, tracing her time-softened contours with the directed glow of their flashlight beams. They were night guards at the Metropolitan Museum, eighteen years old, and they spent their evenings roaming the echoing and dark galleries, looking and narrating. The slave girl was a shared object of contemplation and fascination, the thing that marked the birth of their friendship and lifelong conversation.
We went together to see her, running through a downpour, water clattering from every shop awning, splashing us as taxis plowed through lakes of rain and barreled down Fifth Avenue, no one on the steps of the Met, the lobby filled with the echoes of people holding dripping umbrellas. It was our first outing as a threesome. Strangely, there was no awkwardness. I was sure Ronnie had said nothing to Sandro about his one night with me. Nor did I say anything. Ronnie had made it clear, in the purity of his smile that evening in Sandro"s loft, that it was not going to come up. We acted like we"d never met before we met through Sandro. Or as if whether we had or hadn"t was of no relation to the present.
Which gave it, the past, a kind of mystery I couldn"t unknot, a certain meaning. Because if it meant nothing, why could it not be acknowledged? Why did it have to be erased?
We huddled in front her, this slave girl I"d already heard so much about from Sandro. She was a carved marble relief in full body profile. Thick, ancient feet in typical Greek sandals and a draping garment that attached to one shoulder. Ronnie and Sandro took turns speaking about her in serious tones, their voices somehow precisely calibrated to the low lights of the deserted hall where she was displayed. What fascinated them was a pocket of real air that flowed into and around the girl"s mouth and the dove in her hand, the bird"s small beak raised toward the girl"s lips.
Sandro pointed to the little recess between the bird and her mouth.
"This is the only part of the relief that"s three-dimensional. So what about the rest of her? Its flatness holds her away from us. She doesn"t share our s.p.a.ce. She"s from another world, lost forever. Only that promise of the kiss shares our s.p.a.ce."
It was the kiss of life, he said, of energy, somehow activated and eternal, and I looked and wanted to feel that, the life breath of a dead slave that somehow bonded these two men to whom I was also bonded and in ways that didn"t feel exactly simple.
Ronnie said he loved her because she was so . . . modern. She interfered, he said, with the fantasy she was there to create. Slipping between the two, like everything in life worth lingering over. Real and false at once.
I stared at the private s.p.a.ce between her lips and the bird she held. I looked at the cord around her neck, adornment of the most modest sort. Every aspect of her a modesty. All I could think was "This is a young slave."
Later, when I said this to Sandro, he told me not to feel bad about her. Think of all the anonymous slaves in history, he said. This one has been immortalized. She made her way through an unthinkable chasm of time. We are talking about her now, he said, and that in itself was a rare and special kind of emanc.i.p.ation.
I spent a lot of time with them looking at art. My tutors, Giddle said condescendingly. Your tutors are here, she"d say, as Ronnie and Sandro hopped on stools at the counter of the Trust E. They started going there and that was perhaps my influence, making the Trust E into a kind of destination.
Giddle treated them with patient indifference. They ordered hamburgers and coffee, always the same thing, and she attended to them last, gave them lousy service. That was yet another thing I misread, Giddle"s indifference to them. I attributed it to her general feelings in regard to the art world-that part of it where people made art, sold the art, got in return money, fame, recognition. Success was highly overrated, according to Giddle. "Anyone can be a success," she said. "It"s so much more interesting to not want that."
As I started to get to know Sandro and Ronnie and their friends, exactly the group of successful artists Giddle considered most compromised, I had her standards in my head. Not as my own standards, just a voice. The voice of a woman who said the three most cowardly acts were to exhibit ambition, to become famous, or to kill yourself.
By the time Sandro introduced me to Helen h.e.l.lenberger on Spring Street, just before I was set to depart for Reno to pick up the Moto Valera, that voice of Giddle"s, my first friend and New York influence, was as quiet as the trees above me. I wanted to make artworks and show them in a gallery. It was what I"d moved to New York to do.
It was through our conversations that I ended up wanting to go to the salt flats, but Sandro had his own ideas about roads and speed and land. He"d written a proposal when he was young, to make paintings by the yard to be laid out over the entire length of the Autostrada del Sole, which connected the north and the south of Italy. Practical and industrial methods in service to something of no use. The autostrada was built by the government with funding and encouragement from the Valera Company. Sandro had a photo of his father and the Italian prime minister standing together to celebrate its inauguration in 1956. Its name, Autostrada del Sole, made it sound hopeful in a fascist kind of way. Anything "of the sun," Sandro said, was code for fascism. "My family helped ruin Italy," he said, "by building this superhighway, Milan to Bologna to Florence to Rome to Naples, but it made us rich." Sandro said highways primed us for a separation from place, from actual life. The autostrada replaced life with road signs and place names. A white background and black lettering. MILANO. A reduction, Sandro said, to nothing but names.
"No different than here," I said. "You might as well deplore all highways."
He conceded it was true, but said America was supposed to be a place ruined and h.o.m.ogenized by highways, that that was its unique character, cra.s.s and vulgar sameness.
"It"s your destiny," he said, smiling, his eyes filling with cold light.
"What"s your destiny?" I replied.
"To become an American citizen, of course."
Sandro had encouraged the general drift of what I was after, doing something in the landscape relating to speed and movement. But when Ronnie suggested that Sandro should come through for me-use his connections to get me a Moto Valera to ride-Sandro"s enthusiasm all but ceased.
The only legitimate way to go to the Bonneville Salt Flats was to ride something truly fast, Ronnie said. "It has to be like she"s testing out a factory bike."
Sandro was annoyed at Ronnie. I quietly hoped Ronnie would keep pressing him. I wanted to do a project at Bonneville, but I needed a bike. I didn"t have the money to buy one, nor did I want to ask Sandro myself. I wasn"t sure if Ronnie was advocating for me out of some old affection or if it was about Sandro, ribbing him. A form of compet.i.tion. Ronnie had Moto Valera calendars tacked up as a kind of joke, the girls with big b.r.e.a.s.t.s straddling gleaming machines, an upholstering of flesh over the entire back wall of his studio. He claimed it was in homage to Sandro, but it was also a kind of mockery, to flaunt imagery that Sandro wanted to forget. Or maybe it was a love of something that Sandro himself could not appreciate in such a dumb and direct way. Which wasn"t heckling, exactly, but something else, to fetishize elements of a friend"s life that the friend could not see-Sandro, who pretended to misp.r.o.nounce Italian dishes on a restaurant menu. Twice I had heard Sandro tell someone he was Romanian when they asked where his accent was from. He felt that Italy was a backwater. He claimed he had almost no connection to it.
When I told him I"d loved Florence, where I had spent my junior year of college, he said, sure, as an American woman it"s fine. But try being an Italian woman. It"s a piggish and abhorrent culture. If a man rapes you but is willing to marry you, the charges are dropped. Rape was not even a criminal offense but merely a "moral" one. He read about the country"s financial woes, some directly relating to Valera, the way my cousins and uncle read the statistics of a baseball team they weren"t rooting for, a team they hoped would lose, reveling in scandals and injuries and poor performances. With Sandro, it was Italy applying for an IMF loan. Inflation, unemployment. Valera getting hit especially hard by the oil crisis. Suffering work stoppages. Sabotage. Wildcat strikes. Sandro claimed that his older brother, Roberto, who ran the tire company, was as unknown to him as any other a.s.shole businessman.
Italy was too provincial, Sandro said, too closed and familiar, almost preordained, for someone like him, from a family like his. He"d been in New York almost twenty years, so long that his Italianness seemed merely a way to be a unique New Yorker, as if he were more that, a New York artist with a faint accent, than he was Italian. His English was perfect, his friends, mostly American. Sandro had left Italy as soon as he could, refused the money that flowed from the faucets of his name, and worked at the Met alongside Ronnie, from whose name no money flowed, since Ronnie came from a working-cla.s.s family and was estranged from them anyhow, having been separated in his childhood in some mysterious way you weren"t supposed to bring up. Apparently he had worked on boats, but he never spoke about it. When I asked Sandro, he was protective of Ronnie, shook his head mildly, changed the subject.
He and Ronnie shared something in their longing to reinvent themselves as having no provenance, no Pickwick. I, on the other hand, was known to them as being distinctly and precisely a girl from Reno. I was the girl they expected things of. I was meant to find some way to use my origin in an interesting manner. Not like Smithson"s spoof of the "real authentic West Coast artist," chrome-plating motorcycle parts and refusing to think. I was meant to form a concept that had rigor. I would listen to them, discussing me as if I weren"t present but as a joke, for my amus.e.m.e.nt. "The girl," Sandro said. "You mean Reno," Ronnie replied, as if in direct taunt of the past-see, I can summon it, that"s how little it means. What now, Reno?
Speed Week, when they ran various cars and motorcycles over the salt, was happening in September.
One June morning I woke up to hear Sandro speaking quickly in Italian to someone on the telephone. He"d arranged for me to have a Moto Valera.
"You can thank your friend Ronnie," he said.
8. LIGHTS.
When I crashed, darkness folded around me like thick felt. I"ve been waiting all my life for it, was my thought. For this darkness, an absolute silence.
But then underneath it, the strangest, most curious scene came into view.
I saw glowing yellow spheres. They were moving in an elaborate formation, garlanding their way down a mountain face. It was almost dusk, and alpenglow was tinting the snow-filled glades to blush pink. Stands of evergreens marched up the deep folds between each glade in steep triangular formations. The lights swung over a high peak and down the mountain in zigzag, from one side of an open ski run to the other. As the run split into two runs divided by a rock face, the pills of light became two streams and then three, some going around a clump of trees in one direction, and others in the other direction, streams splitting and spilling in a slow waterfall, the slowness giving the sense that these lights were performers in some kind of show.
Night was verging. A last, thin vein of daylight hovered over the jags of the mountain"s crest. Those lights pouring down over the front of the mountain were brighter now, as the alpenglow disappeared and the snow faded to the blue-pale of moonlight.
They were skiers, I realized. The lights were affixed to ski poles, a search party descending over the high peak.
The hollows on the mountain"s face where trees huddled in their dark vigil had gone black.
When snow slides from an upper branch down the lowers in a great laddered weight-collecting sweep, it"s enough to kill a person.
Now it was dark. A cloud was settling in, blotting the moon and cottoning the mountain in damp. I heard the distant beep of snowcats. They appeared through the mist with their huge rolling paws, golden eyes in binocular movement, crawling up the mountain in rows. Night workers, grooming. Above, strung in steep lines, were chairlifts, empty midair silhouettes with their exact and repeating angled geometry, still lifes on steel cable.
I remember a leather ski glove being rubbed over my frozen face. The sound of rubbing, loud, but no sensation of it. Then I was on the stretcher with the emergency blanket over my ski clothes. They had to get me down a mogul field. The patroller snowplowed right over the mogul"s tops but shunted the stretcher into the groove between them. I closed my eyes as he picked his line. Slide, plant, pivot. Slide, plant, pivot.
I had fallen into the marrow of some other, long-ago emergency. The sensation of movement continued, me in the toboggan, b.u.mping and sliding over hard-packed snow as the patroller took me down the hill. But as we slid, I heard people around me undoing the straps, as though we had come to a stop. I heard a loud zip, and the cutting of thick fabric with scissors. The sliding had ceased but I didn"t know when. Maybe I had stopped sliding a long time ago.
"It might not be broken," someone said.
My body hurt. My eyes were closed, but I"d fallen back into myself with a hard thud.
I heard the rip and tear of engines.
"Hey."
A hand nudging my shoulder.
"Hey, can you hear me? You"ve had an accident."
There were faces above me, backlit in brightness.
My left ankle throbbed, but I could move my fingers and toes. Two men helped me to the side, across the oil line that marked the edge of the course. Race officials picked up pieces of fibergla.s.s bodywork. The beautiful teal fairing. I was mortified to see it cracked and pulverized on the salt, turned to sudden garbage.
The gust, they said, shaking their heads. You can"t fight wind like that. Eighty miles an hour.
But I blamed myself, watching them stack the motorcycle"s fibergla.s.s parts, which looked like cracked insect hulls now, and place them in the bed of a pickup truck.
Staticky communications surged from the race techs" radios. An ambulance siren wailed toward us from the direction of the start.
"I"m okay," I said. "Just a little bruised up." I"d be charged a fortune just to get looked at. Once they get you in the ambulance, it"s too late.
"We"re supposed to have you examined by the medics," one of them said. "It"s standard procedure."