Black Elvis (19 page)

I rejoined Tina in the living room. I knew she was worried. "You ought to see the bathroom," I said, placing my wine carefully on the glass coffee table. "One whole wall is see-through." In fact, there wasn't a door in the house, other than the ones leading outside.

"Just imagine trying to sell this place," she said. We talked about real estate a lot. We were in a little over our heads in that respect, having bought a row house two years ago, at the top of the market. Our neighbor, an older guy who'd purchased the rental property next door back in the sixties for ten bucks and a carton of Lucky Strikes, was always looking at me like I was Ed McMahon, come to deliver him his Publishers Clearing House check. But I knew—it would be a long while before anything in the neighborhood sold for near what we'd paid. I could hear the value escaping from our walls like air hissing out of a leaky tire. I was upside down on the store, too, and in general, money was keeping me awake nights.

"You couldn't," I said. "It's too strange."

"Anyone who bought it would have to change who they were to accommodate the house."

I moved with her to the floor next to the enormous fireplace, which was not part of a wall, but away from it, with a black metal chimney that shot up a good twenty feet before meeting the steeply angled roof. All around us, the partiers were happily chattering away. The two other artists held court in the opposite corners, enjoying their celebrity. One was an older guy who taught at a prestigious college someplace and did small paintings that seemed to be scenes from a love affair—a messed-up bed, someone peering through Venetian blinds, a half-finished drink sweating on a desk next to a fan. Then there was this tall kid with hip eyeglasses and a ski hat whose six-foot canvases were staged images of his girlfriend and other people in his life in the aftermath of some violent event, sporting bruises, bloody lips, etc. He'd assured us earlier that no one had actually gotten hurt. It was all just theater.

"Anything?" I asked.

"Nope." It had been a few hours since she'd felt the baby. Tina's hair had grown long and thick over the past months, and was now well past her shoulders. Her full breasts pressed against the flower-print top she'd bought to wear for this trip. Back home, when she wasn't going in to teach at the college, she lived mostly in a pair of stripy pajama bottoms.

"Did you drink water?"

"I drank water. I lay down. I stood back up. I did the jerk. It's like he stepped out for a cigarette break."

"Heartburn?"

"No more than usual."

"I'm going to call the store," I said.

"Go ahead."

After a few rings, Hobey picked up. Between the noise of this party, and the one that seemed to be going on in Baltimore, it was hard to communicate. "You
OK
?" I shouted. A man across the room with a white suit and a pink tie turned to look at me and I smiled.

"Fine!" sang Hobey. I'd taken her on mostly because she was a wizard at changing guitar strings, and it turned out that this was a service I needed to provide the public on a regular basis. I'd bought a little mom-and-pop music store last year from a guy named Edelman, who was now someplace in Florida, supposedly, although I was having a hell of a time contacting him. It turned out that a lot of the stock I'd paid him for—much of it dusty and dating back to at least the eighties—was in fact still the property of various manufacturers who had given up on Edelman years ago, but now, smelling fresh blood in the water, were circling again, sending me letters suggesting litigation, boycott, and ruin. I did most of my business in lessons, strings, and picks. But I got to be around guitars all day, which was something I'd always thought I'd like, and sometimes I imagined little Frick in there with me, crawling around in the dust balls, knocking over music stands.

"You practicing?" I'd told her Hobey and the Lesbians could rehearse in the shop, so long as they kept it down and quit by eleven.

"Yeah!" she shouted. "How's the show?"

I poked Tina, who was sniffing the cookie I'd brought her. "How's the show?"

"So far, so good."

"Good!" I said. This call was beginning to feel pointless. I imagined the scene back there. Hobey and her girlfriend the bass player, her buddies Jason and Jeremy on drums and keys, working their way through a case of National Bohemian. Hobey fully admitted to needing more lesbians in Hobey and the Lesbians, but Jason and Jeremy were filling in for now, and didn't seem fazed by their temporary status. I envied all of them. They were driven by energy and optimism about the future. They had an actual gig upcoming in the spring, at a women's collective in Greektown.

"And Frick?" she shouted.

"Sound asleep," I said.

"I wish you wouldn't talk to her about us," said Tina, when I hung up. "It feels like bad luck."

The financial advice guy was winding down the speech he was giving to some horsey-set lady who actually had on riding boots, and I could tell he had his eyes on us for next. I'd never been at a party where people wanted to be around me so much.

"I've got a buyer for
The Naked Man
," I told her. "She approached me in the bathroom. That Broccoli woman."

"This is her house."

"I know that."

"In the bathroom?"

"They have the bar set up in there. Don't ask me why."

"What did you tell her?"

"
NFS
. I think she might be related to those movie people, the ones who do all the Bond films."

"That's interesting," said Tina. She didn't like movies. Her paintings were narrative oils depicting imaginary adventures of Marco Polo: as a tourist at a provincial museum full of dusty, strange objects, or being welcomed by beautiful girls to a city that was in fact nothing but a painted set, behind which you could see the crumbling facades of the real buildings. The paintings were about perception and reality, about xenophobia, about appropriation. They took about 150 hours each, and were excruciatingly detailed—she was a big Fra Angelico fan. But the main thing about them was that they were not for sale. In the time we'd been together, she had yet to agree to sell a single one of them. She needed them all so she could try to get into a New York gallery. The irony of this did not escape either of us, although we didn't talk about it much. If she did get a fancy gallery to take her on, and they sold these pieces, it would be years before she'd have enough work for another show. With the kid, maybe longer. Of course, I loved her paintings, even the one with me in it (Marco Polo chooses to scramble off the path I'm walking along rather than confront me, even though the vegetation is all thorns and cacti and there are bees—it was one of her funnier scenes), loved having them hang on our walls when they weren't out at some show. But a commodity is a commodity, I kept telling her. If art is your business, you figure out a way to make it economically viable. You sell your work.

"Did you eat anything? They have a lot of good stuff. Not just those designer hot dogs. There's veggie lasagna."

"I'm not so hungry." She sniffed the cookie again.

"You're always hungry."

"Thank you. Am I supposed to be worried or not? Whatever you say, I'll try for that. But could you try to be consistent?"

"Absolutely," I said. "I'll be consistent."

"So which is it?"

"We're not worrying." I stroked her leg. "Everything's fine."

Maybe it really was the drugs. Back in high school, my friends and I always used to joke about the ridiculous things they wanted you to believe, that
LSD
would screw up your genes (not to mention make you turn into Art Linkletter's daughter and try flying off a roof). Your kids would come out with two heads, or bicycle wheels instead of feet. For whatever reason, I wasn't worried. I was certain that when I decided to have kids, despite my misspent youth, I'd be able to.

But we couldn't, Tina and I. We started trying right after the wedding. It was late for both of us—she was thirty-four, I was forty-three—but I still expected to knock the first pitch right into the stands. Instead, I struck out swinging. We tried different positions. We monitored her temperature, circled days on the calendar, went out for romantic meals followed by elaborate desserts. After a year, we went in for tests. The results were interesting.

Oligospermia. Astenozoospermia. Teratozoospermia. Low count, lousy swimmers, misshapen anyway. This, in spite of the fact that my college girlfriend had hit me up for three hundred dollars for an abortion, something I now considered to have been unlikely to have been related to me. Enter "Brad." "Brad" is what I called him, of course. Cryo-Logic, the company we eventually settled on, called him
N311
. For close to a month, Tina was glued to her computer every night, going through the profiles. Before we'd met, she'd done some computer dating, and she brought all her skills to bear on this new problem. Eye color, education, height, ancestry, religion. It was daunting.

"I sort of want a vegetarian," she said.

"I'm not a vegetarian," I pointed out. "Shouldn't you want someone like me?"

"Of course," she said. "Of course."

For more money, you could get more info. Some places allowed you to see adult photos of the guys, but I drew the line at that. I didn't want her hearing voice clips, either, although that was a possibility with an upgraded membership. What did they sound like? "Hello, my name is Brad. I like walking on the beach, sunsets, and old Billy Joel songs, from before he met Christy Brinkley. I hope you'll choose me."

And now, Brad had begot Frick, who had somehow managed to grab onto my wife's uterine wall and ontogenically recapitulate phylogeny, moving from tadpole to fish to alien space-being (we'd seen him at the twenty-week ultrasound in all his Kubrick-esque weirdness, bigheaded and dreaming of world domination), to the restless, waiting child who liked to practice Tae Bo in my wife's stomach while she tried to paint.

I walked her into the dining area and we looked at all the food. A platter of cheeses, the lasagna, an enormous bowl full of duck and boar sausages, three kinds of mustard, pasta salad, fruit salad, salad salad. I could see into the kitchen, where the caterer was getting ready an enormous chocolate cake.

A commotion began in the other room. A woman shouted. People drew away and the scene revealed itself. The older painter had the younger one in a headlock from behind. "Worthless little shit," he was saying. They moved together that way, the boy's long frame tilted backward and unbalanced, his eyes tight, his red ski hat riding up on his forehead.

"Do you believe this?" I said. "What idiots."

"Post-ironic?" the older one was shouting. "Post-ironic?"

"This is awful," said Tina, alarmed. "Someone needs to stop them."

I figured it might as well be
The Naked Man
. I pushed through a couple of onlookers and quickly reached the two artists. "Hey!" I shouted at the older one. Bill was his name. I think it was Bill. His shirt had little flamingos all over it. Post-ironic, indeed. I pried his hands from around the kid's neck, then got between them and took a deep breath, hoping to inflate myself a size or two so he wouldn't think of messing with me.

"Ha!" shouted Bill, his eyes lit with delight.

"Ha ha," said the kid, behind me, who had dropped to the floor and was now getting to his feet. "Ho ho. Oh, man."

Bill moved past me, and in a moment he and the kid were embracing like teammates who'd each had part of scoring a winning goal. Bill worked the kid's hat around with a muscular hand. "I love this guy," he said.

"When you come to Atlanta," said the kid, "we're going to roast a pig."

We hung around until about ten, me tossing back the wine and helping myself to the food, Tina making polite conversation with more of the guests. She'd gained twenty-five pounds so far, but I'd gained ten, easy. I thought it was the least I could do. That and making encouraging sounds for Frick, my mouth pressed against Tina's belly, something I'd done morning and night after the transfer, back when we were waiting to see if we'd gotten lucky. There were two embryos; only one had managed to hang in, which was what we'd hoped for. Frack had just been there to load the odds, which might sound kind of hard, but these are things you have to be hard about, and twins would have broken the bank for us, although we'd have sucked it up if we'd had to. I made the noises with my lips those first few days, just a quiet pop-popping, like what I imagined bubbles sounded like underwater. I didn't want to upset him, I just wanted him to feel at home. Lately, I sang classic rock and soul to him.

Norma Broccoli walked us to the door. "It's been such a pleasure," she said. "Your work is magnificent. So controlled. Of course the artist herself is just as impressive."

"You're only glad I didn't stage a fistfight," said Tina, smiling.

"Absolutely. Thank you."

Norma looked at me.

"Sorry," I said. "She won't do it. Although, out of curiosity, I wonder how much you might be willing to pay for
The Naked Man
?"

Tina blushed. "We have to go," she said.

"Ten thousand?" I asked.

"You look wonderful," said Norma Broccoli. "Enjoy this time. It's very special."

The walk to the car was cold and silent. "How could you?" she said, when we were inside and I'd started the engine. "Paintings aren't sold that way. You know that."

"Well, maybe they ought to be." I turned on the fan for the heater and put the car into gear and attempted to figure out where the driveway was. We'd parked in a field, and even though there was a net of bright stars glimmering above us, the night was very dark.

"That was crass. You don't talk money to people. Your gallery does that."

"And takes fifty percent."

"They have bills to pay."

"I can't believe you're worrying about your gallery's bills when you don't even have a gallery yet."

"And I can't believe you would embarrass me like that."

"I just wondered. In my world, everyone
knows
what things are worth. A cheap Mexican Stratocaster costs two to three hundred dollars, period. That kid from Atlanta wants eight thousand bucks for a portrait of his girlfriend with a fake black eye? That should fund a couple of pig roasts. I don't know—" I ran over a big rock, making the whole car bounce up and down. "Sorry."