City on Fire (76 page)

On the plus side, it was easier here to score pot. There was a store a couple blocks over, it looked like a bodega from the outside, but there was hardly any merchandise on the shelves. Set back into the wall was a padlocked door with a little window, like a castle keep. You walked up and asked for vegetables, and the taciturn Dominican in the shadows back there would look at you really hard to make sure you weren’t a narc and then would slide a pre-rolled joint under the chickenwire. It wasn’t the good stuff per se, but it was good enough. While the record-beating rain beat down outside, Jenny sat at the little desk or table she’d set up as a buffer between her mattress and the tub and spaced out, imagining her apartment as an ark where forsaken fauna, mice and pigeons, bedbugs and silverfish, might shelter two-by-two from the flood. She imagined Mr. and Mrs. Cucaraccia, the couple from under the oven, strolling arm-in-arm up the gangway, the husband lifting his straw boater to her as he reached the top, the wife performing an articulate little curtsey.

Other times, she amused herself by listening to the noise. It was more or less a constant, seeping through walls and ceilings until it was hard to tell exactly which neighbor was producing it. By the end of the first month, she’d developed an entirely aural picture of their lives: feet, large and small, running and walking; cop shows and salsa music; banging on the radiator pipes; a ringing phone; tap practice, sousaphone practice, someone yodeling; people fucking, occasionally; people fighting, constantly; yelling for kids to Come to dinner, goddammit, slamming ovens, banging doors. When she passed her neighbors in the half-lit stairwell, of course, she would pretend to have heard nothing. They would just as lief knife you as say hello. Sometimes she had to almost literally bite her tongue against the urge to congratulate the Ukrainian woman upstairs whose several orgasms had kept her awake the night before, or to offer her sympathies to someone she’d heard sobbing on the phone. The most amazing thing was how much richer their lives were than she’d imagined. These people extravagantly alive in these contexts all around her, while she, a singleton, sat alone.

WHAT WAS NEEDED—to be vulgarly materialist about it—was a job. The seed money her father had placed in her account was dwindling, and would sustain at most another few months of loosies and ramen and rent. But in fall of 1974 there were no jobs, at least not for a philosophy major with a rap sheet. She spent a couple days canvassing for Greenpeace, but found it hard to knock on doors knowing they’d be slammed in her face. Then she temped for a while through an agency. The work involved reading fine print at the bottoms of newspaper ads, hundreds of thousands of them it seemed, that were implicated in a class-action lawsuit against an evil real-estate developer. Jenny’s first paycheck was signed by the evil real-estate developer. As a kind of penance, she blew half of it at a bookstore near Union Square, amassing a pile of volumes by Frankfurt School theoreticians, but it failed to make her feel better, so she just didn’t go to work the next day, staying home instead and getting super-duper high. A good thing, too, because that’s the day the phone rang about a position she hardly remembered applying for, at a small art gallery in SoHo.

The owner was Austrian, with tortoiseshell eyeglasses and a shaved head. If it was possible to look like a less jolly Michel Foucault, then he did. He was obviously homosexual, and preferred, he told her at the interview (watching carefully for her reaction), the company of young people. He was also, she was guessing, filthy rich. But they shared a taste for the conceptual, and he agreed to advance her the first month’s pay and give her meaningful responsibilities right away. She was to be his sole employee, after all.

He showed her to her desk—actually a long dining table he’d placed near the front door, so that anyone looking to steal the art off the walls or floor would have to pass beneath Jenny’s watchful eye. The notion was comical in at least two ways. One: Assuming these were your average thieves—male, burly, whacked on angel dust—how was Jenny, a buck ten in heavy boots, supposed to stop them? And two: Who besides Jenny would really want to steal this art—sculptures fashioned from cigarette butts; homoerotic jello molds; a pile of rags in one corner you might mistake for trash? Bruno had one of the world’s great poker faces, but he liked her cheekiness; she could tell by the way his eyes flashed behind the glasses. “Deterrence, Liebchen. Deterrence.” He knocked on the tabletop once.

She sat down, to get a feel for where she’d be spending her days. There was a phone, of course, and a mimeographed price guide to the work on display, and a small electric typewriter for correspondence, but, given that its surface area must have been twenty square feet, the desk looked positively austere. In this way, it was of a piece with the rest of the gallery, which in a previous life had been an auto body shop. A single panel of reinforced glass had been installed where the garage door had been. Exposed girders framed a skylight. The floors were buffed concrete. Every Austrian, she thought, was a minimalist. (Later, on a fact-finding mission to the Metropolitan Museum, she would be shocked to discover a reproduced Viennese dining room of the nineteenth century, all floral porcelain and elaborate engravery. But of course, the scale of the trauma that had taken place between Bruno’s grandparents’ generation and Bruno’s was incalculable.)

To her surprise, he would say nothing about the mess that came to cover her desk. For one thing, she was practically living at the gallery. Thirty-two hours a week! For another, no one ever entered it, save for a few far-sighted investors who bought only by appointment. Even the openings were dismal affairs, with Bruno and the artists and Jenny standing around drinking boxed wine with the occasional drifter drawn in off the street by the wino’s free-booze ESP. Jenny always insisted on serving them.

The largest part of her job turned out to be ghost-writing grant applications for Bruno’s artists, none of whom, he freely admitted, were ever likely to support themselves on the open market. So how do you expect to make money? she wanted to ask. Bruno’s indifference to the fiscal was part of why she was able to work for him with a cleanish conscience, but now that their fortunes were yoked together, she would have liked to have seen a little more entrepreneurial vim. She herself had, at his urging, begun dressing what he called more professionally. When she checked herself in the mirror in the morning (in a blouse, for God’s sake) she felt like a sellout, but at least now there was some purpose to getting out of bed.

COMPROMISES SNOWBALLED. By her second February, she had joined a dating service. You filled out a questionnaire, you mailed in a Polaroid, and for $12.99 you received a dossier of questionnaires and Polaroids from men whose interests had been matched to yours via punch-card. It was embarrassing—assuming something worked out, how did you explain to friends how you’d met?—but the fact that Jenny didn’t have any friends was why she’d signed up for the service in the first place. The punch-cards, however, proved unreliable. The bachelors in her dossier were Leos and Geminis; turn-ons included theater, dancing, and fondue. She held out for beverage-based meetings, easy to escape. If they went moderately well, she’d invite the men back to her place. She interpreted as an auspicious sign the ability to cross Bowery without bolting for safety.

There weren’t many places to sit in her apartment, if you considered two to be not many, which she did. She’d tried sitting on the bed once, with a Taurus named Frank who’d seemed like a bit of a swinger, but perhaps the ululations of pleasure leaking through from her Ukrainian neighbor put too much pressure on them, because Frank had excused himself after one glass of Cold Duck, never to be heard from again. Then she’d tried drinking too much, in order to facilitate the transition into sex, but that backfired, too. It was as if, in her post-McGillicuddy renunciation of bourgeois courtship and monogamy, she’d forgotten how the game was played. One night, she heard herself explaining to a date, out on Broome Street with the busboys carrying out the night’s first trash and the players at the mah-jongg club raking their tiles together like scrimshanders sorting whalebone, about the seating arrangements at her place, and the possible awkwardness, and how they should probably just move straight to fucking. “Jesus, I sound neurotic, don’t I?” Ben, was the name of that one. Nice guy, really. A Ph.D. candidate in primatology at Columbia, who might have been able to clarify certain enduring puzzles of assortative mating, had he stuck around. But he left a message with her service the following morning saying he couldn’t see her anymore.

She hung up the phone and slumped at her desk, where she’d been editing a Guggenheim application. Chinks in her fortress of papers and books let through the cool morning light of the street. She stared down at the color slides she’d been studying, digging for antecedents for this artist’s punctilious replicas of hotel paintings from the Midwest. It was supposed to be the shift in context, the little jolt of misprision, that made it art. She had just put her head down on her arms when the top half of a stack of catalogues raisonnés levitated in front of her to reveal Bruno’s shaved head, which never changed so much as a whisker from day to day. “Morgen,” he said, before dropping the books again. He steamed across the gallery toward his own tiny office in back, where as far as she knew he sat all day sipping espresso and reading week-old news in the German-language paper he special-ordered through a newsstand on Sixth Avenue. Directly beneath the skylight, though, he stopped. “Something is wrong.”

“No.”

“Come now. I refuse to be lied to. Some young man has wronged you, hasn’t he?” From a person who renounced on principle the possibility of a transcendental morality, she thought, it was an interesting choice of words.

“None of them’s stuck around long enough to wrong me, Bruno.”

He waved a hand dismissively. “Romance is a fiction anyway. A myth to sell greeting cards.” Still, he seemed ready, given a name and address, to go challenge the malefactor, like some feudal-era father defending his daughter’s chastity. This was all in the eyes, of course. The rest of the face stayed perfectly composed. “If you want to know what the problem is, it’s that apartment of yours. They see it and judge you unfairly.”

“Who says they ever see it? You’ve never seen it.”

“Please, darling. I mail your checks. Rivington Street?” He shuddered.

“Look around us, Bruno. It’s not like this neighborhood’s much better.”

“With a public concern, an address downtown sends a certain message, projects a certain vous savez quoi. But I don’t have to carry that into private life. Do you think your beloved Herr Adorno never watched television? I have it on good authority he never missed an episode of Gilligan’s Island. The problem with you Americans is your mania for consistency.” Bruno’s little lectures, she’d decided, were 85 percent ironic. The conceit that she would be under his tutelage provided an almost rueful amusement. “Even now, even in New York, you haven’t learned that consistency won’t protect you. I live uptown, shamelessly. And you should, too. Young men will flock to a woman who appears not to need them.” He seemed to have convinced himself of something. “In fact, I will give you a raise to cover it.”

“Bruno, this is ridiculous. Let’s start over. Good morning.”

“No. I insist.” He held up a hand. His checkbook was out.

“You’re making me feel guilty, like I’ve maneuvered you into something, when I’m just having a crappy morning, is all.”

He thought for a second. “An experiment then. You will come with me this Sunday to dine with an old friend of mine. He has never taken my advice. He lives, that is, in a fantasy world, believing in the same kind of bohemia you cling to. You look in his eyes and decide if this is what you want. If not, we move you uptown.”

“Sunday? Isn’t that the Bicentennial?”

“Do you have plans? Will you be out waving empire’s proud flag? No? I thought not.”

THAT DINNER WAS MISERABLE. She’d assumed Bruno was trying to make a match, and so hadn’t realized, until the artist showed up towing a boyfriend, that he was gay. Instead of hitting it off, she had to watch the three men push and pull with each other for upwards of two hours. It was only as a kind of punishment that she said afterward to her employer, “Fine, I’ll let you move me, but I’m not going north of Twenty-Third. And you can pay for the truck.”

She told herself she wasn’t abandoning the Lower East Side, wasn’t forsaking its proletarian freedoms for the trappings of the middle class. After all, the new building, for all its perks, was hardly a fount of civility. The people in the elevator treated her exactly as the tenants of the old place had. And there wasn’t any less noise to keep her awake at night.

The difference was that it was now all outside: the irascible all-night traffic, the cabs in front of the Ethiopian takeaways, the grinding, saurian garbage trucks. When she awakened in the a.m. into blind-slit shrinking nowhereness, it had all gone disorientingly quiet, and she would imagine for a few seconds she was back there in that mausoleum of a ranch house in the San Fernando Valley. She readied herself for the sound of her father’s wire whisk against the sides of a stainless steel bowl, the brush of his knuckles against her bedroom door. And as the black got light, she wondered what this all meant. Had she left some unfinished business back in California? Or was it simply the way a place lived in long enough imprints itself on the still-soft tissues of the brain? Or, simpler yet, did she miss it, that mouse-quiet house where they’d called her by another name? There’d been a time when she’d believed herself capable of living without the conventional comforts—career, possessions, significant other—but her self-imposed exile was revealing her to be frustratingly human. This didn’t mean she’d given up on the dream that the larger situation might be changed, or at least analyzed. But, by the time she met Richard, she’d begun to accept Bruno’s proposition that if the revolution ever happened, it would be without, or prior to, any alteration to the contours of her own individual existence. Here she was after two years in New York, only just learning to scale her expectations down to the size of her actual life. It was like trying to squeeze toothpaste back into the tube.