American Spirit: A Novel (10 page)

Ecstasy in Apartment 4-B/C

M
ATTHEW RINGS THE BUZZER
and a female voice without timbre grins through in a thin ribbon of static and says hello and tells him to come in; clicks and buzzes the door open. Matthew leans his shoulder into it when opening it because the brain recalls enough about movies and television to know that the door should be gently shoulder-checked in situations like this; weary and urbane and too tired for congenial conversation, that is how the brain informs the posture here. Up the first flight of stairs with a bit of pain and limp jump; and the head reels up one thousand excuses that would get one out of carrying on. The best of the excuses is probably that you have no idea what the hell you’re doing; this is followed in close second and third by excuses such as this is probably a felony, and
even if there are no jobs in America at the moment, should one at least be applying at other media conglomerates and corporations in the hope that a job would, sooner or later, surface? But the brain recalls sessions with Milton, how he says that we have to move forward even when we’re baffled; that by taking physical steps and keeping moving we would intuitively handle what only hours or minutes ago baffled us. So the steps continue, upward, onward to whatever situation awaits, to whatever situation will be intuitively handled. Therapy has helped, although this is maybe not what it was intended for, but who among us is to say, really? This could be exactly what therapy is for.

At the door, Matthew catches his breath before knocking, pulls his jogging shorts straight a bit, tries to affect whatever face a middle-aged upper-management sort from Connecticut turned friendly low-stakes drug dealer should affect; his face doesn’t change a bit. Convinced he’s perfectly adjusted and presented, he reaches up and knocks. The door is opened and there stands a female customer. Maybe twenty-eight, maybe thirty-eight, maybe immortal, a face completely unacquainted with disappointment, seemingly unaware of the scale of the world and how quickly one can be lifted up gently in halcyon days higher and higher, only to realize the lift was coming from a rogue wave forming and cradling whatever it would, before pummeling one into hard, wet sand after being held aloft like this.
Jesus, lighten up, you’re selling drugs that are supposed to make people happy, so don’t bring everybody down.

She stands there with a slight smile. A pause of about two seconds feels like ten minutes; legs that don’t call it quits until the neck below the Irish lips; a narrow, fresh, and fair-skinned face that’s never been long; cheekbones never fallen disillusioned; black gunpowder brows above eyes blue as sky. She’s one long, tall fuse of cordite to gelignite; the last one thousand sweet dreams left on earth, framed by long, straight black hair and bordered below by medium-small breasts defying gravity and time’s cruel pull. South of that are hips equally able to create life as destroy yours, and all of her covered by the clothes that have seen a solid tailor the rest of us can’t pay, but clothes that nonetheless somehow paint the portrait of an expatriate hippy poetess living in Paris. And the heart instantly deals up the usual corrupt input, telling the head that this is a perfect job; that selling drugs for Hernan is the job people should be looking for if they’re laid off. It goes a bit further to suggest that Matthew has wasted years in the confines of straight and narrow America.

“Oh, I was actually waiting for…”

“Right, no, it’s me. I’m Matthew. I’m, you know.” And with this Matthew slings the pack around the front of him in explanation.

“Ah! I thought you were this guy that just moved in upstairs. Come on in. Tatiana.”

“Matthew.”

“Yes, you…”

“Oh, right, okay.”

Inside, the apartment sprawls clear from the front of the building to the back, littered with the artifacts of a rich quasi bohemian—high-end audio and video equipment stares across the big main room at a huge teak table littered with stacks of Beat paperbacks and half-smoked packs of Canadian cigarettes, the giant kitchen looks like it was carved out of the workings of an old mill or sweatshop; the wood beams reach a peak at the ceiling—an A-frame ceiling in Manhattan, a top-floor rarity. Names and phone numbers written on a beam that intersects with the thick wooden counter by a phone on the wall; some dug in deep with ballpoint pen, others glided on in felt-tip or thumbtacked up with business cards and corners of notebook paper; a big steel refrigerator with a glass door boasts of nothing rotting and forgotten past expiration. Tatiana surrenders to a big couch, legs spidering out, and arms pulling a chair over for Matthew to sit in. Matthew sits down to open the purple canvas pack and do the business of selling. Somehow here and now, selling hallucinogens to a rich girl feels as innocent as fairy tales.

“I think I’ll get two things of mushrooms and one of the brownies from you.”

“Okay, so that’s two blue and a yellow, I think.” And the field of poly bags is flicked through and harvested for two and one.

“Oh, goodie, there’s nuts in the brownies again.” A smile, all teeth and eyes, girlish still somehow and free of regret. “The last time there wasn’t and I told Hernan that he should put them back in.”

Some sack or gland on the brain or spine spasms and squeezes out a drip of some potion that weakens Matthew’s arms and knees with the palsy of schoolboy crush and optimism. Goddamn, how could the news be so riddled with so many dire stories when there clearly are no sad times left in this country?

Goods are placed on the table; money is dug from a handbag made to look like the unkempt accessory of the marginalized, but surely still carrying this season’s staggering price tag on Fifth and Fifty-second. Tatiana says to double the order, Matthew rakes the translucent field again, brings to market a second harvest of blue and yellow, cash is handed over, Matthew is green and minor-league to count it.

“Oh, I see, you don’t trust me.”

“Oh, no, I’m not, I think I’m just supposed to… this is kind of my first time, so I thought…” And this is cut short by looking up to see her smiling at him and quietly somehow getting a kick out of this. Inside his head, a foreboding suburban Greek chorus, hollering warning that the girl is probably already high on something dangerous and just moments away from stabbing and hacking her visitor to death.

“Will you have some tea with me? I’ve been in town three days and it’s all been meetings, and tomorrow I’m back to L.A. to work for five weeks.”

“I’m not supposed to stay with…” But she’s already up and off the couch and into the kitchen with the energy Matthew must’ve had at some point around age eight, the year before he realized the world’s spin was really a slow drill
boring into him. He is left to roam the living room for a few minutes.

The brain tries again, tells him to run, that he’s slid into being felonious, that he’s a terrible manager, that he made nothing of the opportunities a good solid job had presented him, that this is what his parents always saw in him. The heart counters the head, says to mill about politely and be aimless and pleasant, to look at the coffee-table books of Helmut Newton and Humphrey Spender and a book of rock photography from some gift shop in some museum. Flipping simultaneously and nervously between the three of them tricks the eyes; Newton’s Amazonian blonde women seem to lounge and lord over horizons of infinity pools and glass houses in Hollywood Hills that somehow look out over a skyline of Spender’s bleak, broken, sadly beautiful, burned-out East End of London, where Radiohead and Keith Richards labor in small studio control rooms or perform on giant stages.

An acoustic guitar leans against a chair and goads Matthew into making the mistake of picking it up, which is to make the mistake of being a middle-aged man quietly producing half-assed discordant hum and buzz on the instrument while the hand’s indecisive fingers tentatively try to peck out a few dumbed-down measures of the intros to old standards like “House of the Rising Sun” or “Stairway to Heaven.” The head hears these attempts and immediately issues common sense; demands that the arms thrust the guitar
away from the abdomen, quickly and quietly back down to where it leaned before being picked up. This is done with perfect timing during the two and a half seconds before Tatiana is back with cups on saucers and a little cup of sliced lemon.

“How do you take your tea?”

“Oh, I just, you know, drink it. Straight. No, you know… spice syrup or… cream, or whatever.”

Tatiana regards Matthew’s answer and demeanor and smiles again, looking at him from over her cup as she sips, and the head is certain she’s making sport of him and that none of this is heartfelt fascination or simple hospitality in action. Matthew picks up his cup and raises a dumb little half-toast gesture and takes a sip.

“So, home is New York?”

“Home is New York about half of the time. Work is kind of everywhere, so I have a place in Los Angeles, and a little place in Paris, too. What about you?”

“New York. Connecticut, really. The… tristate, you know, area. This general region.”

“You’re funny.”

“I’m not, really. I just kind of, you know, when you set the bar for a small-time drug dealer then, yes, I seem funny. I’m funny for a dope peddler in jogging shorts.”

“Well, that’s perfect, because I’m charming for a stable capitalist feeling dangerous for buying lightweight drugs.”

“I had a job. I’m actually normal, just so you know.”

“That is… that’s great. I mean, I don’t know if I’d introduce myself that way in every situation, but, good, good to know.”

“Right, no, I just meant…”

“I’m kidding. Okay, so… you had a job. Let me guess. I’m actually super good at this. Okay, you were… the tall, semi-handsome works-in-advertising guy, and one day the client was trying to describe the look of the guy they wanted for something, then the client said, ‘He should look more like, well, actually, I mean, like you,’ and they used you for something, a catalog job, J.Crew-type of thing. So, thirty-five maybe, a little run-down, a little manned up, you quit the ad agency. You kept doing the modeling, but that’s not what you called it, you just called it working on a former client’s thing. You had three seasons at it, knew you couldn’t bounce to a real modeling gig, but you didn’t want to go back to the agency, so you bit when they offered you a job on the client side, casting the catalog, producing the shoots. You did it for a while, got lucky with women in the same boat, women that were that weird sort of mildly mental pretty, like pretty but they almost look like they have a touch of some kind of syndrome. You thought that was fast living, you got sloppy, went all amateur hour on everybody, snorted a house, a small house, a weekend place upstate. You started missing days, then they cut you loose when the numbers started getting thin.”

“Wow. First of all, there were so many unintentional compliments
in there that I just want to say thank you for the compliments. Close, very close. I basically sold ad space, and I was dismissed for urinating all over my own work area.”

This is apparently something that requires Tatiana to laugh so hard that the girl starts to gag, spits tea into her cupped hands, starts choking, then resumes laughing. Which makes Matthew start laughing, mostly just at what a mess Tatiana has made of laughing at him. It’s all very fun, disgusting, humane; an oddly sort of erotic combination of tears, snot, smiling teeth, eyes, joy, spit, and hair. Composure is regained and there’s a sporting sense of stepping up to the plate from Tatiana’s end: “Pleased to meet you, I am something called a super agent. Which means I am young enough to have managed three young men who have portrayed sexy vampires in a movie. And I’m old enough to have had two of them poached from me by a competitor by the time the sequel came out. I’ve got one left now, and I think he’s going to jump ship before I can get paper on him for part three. So, ask me that question about where home is in about a year and you might be getting a way less-glamorous answer.”

“How come your deal still sounds sexier than my thing, though?”

“Well, you had the part where you’re fired for peeing on your own stuff.”

“Right, well, you almost peed on your own stuff just now. There was snot on your hand, I bet.”

More laughing and then silence comes on for a few
minutes, the kind that comes after heads and stomachs have jerked and heaved too hard in the heat of humor that nobody was expecting from each other.

“Are you scared?” she asks.

“Why? Are you?”

“No, I’m not scared; I’m a super agent, remember? Yes. I am scared. I think you’re the first person I’ve admitted it to.”

“Sometimes I feel like if everyone is scared, there’s nothing to be afraid of. Like if we’re all losing everything, somehow it’s even.”

“But, you’re scared too, right?”

“I don’t know,” Matthew says with his cards pretty close to his chest.

“Just tell me.”

“No. I’m not scared. It’s all just stuff. You can replace stuff.”

“You’re not scared? At all?”

“I don’t, I mean, I don’t think so.”

“It’s not a big deal. I would think a man is lying if he said he wasn’t scared when times get weird like this and everything feels like it’s disappearing.”