Gone (11 page)

—Holfy?

—In the bathroom.

I don't know how I missed her—I see her now through stacks of folded towels. She has had shelving installed in what was once a doorway from the studio to the bathroom. This side of the shelving is walled with glass. She is brushing her hair over the toilet. Pulling tangles out. She must know I'm watching her. She puts a foot on the toilet and is drying her toes. I steal a last glimpse of her and turn back to the photographs.

*   *   *

I am a parade of blunders. Walking around her apartment I should have known it: we were choosing each other. Thirty years of Holfy's art books. Margins full of tightly scribbled comments. On a book of photographs by Inge Morath, she has pencilled:
How can anyone be presented with so much and produce so little?
Hundreds of art books. Steiglitz, André Kertész, Ernst Haas, Fulvio Roiter, Juan Gyenes Remenyi, Ouka Lele, Lee Friedlander, Chagall, Franz Marc, Balthus, Agnes Martin, John Sloan, Magritte, Robert Tansey, Max Ernst, František Kupka, Mondrian, Picasso, O'Keefe, Modigliani. Hundreds of art books. Biographies of painters and photographers. No novels.

—You've no Dali, I shout back.

—Dali was only for himself. He's irrelevant.

—And Picasso isn't?

—
Guernica?

The toilet flushes. Guernica? Don't know what she means by that and ignorance of what my response should be silences me, pushes me on to another question.

—And no Monet?

—Simply a matter of taste. I don't like him.

—And no novels?

—The other wall. Around the corner for lit-rat-chure.

Some of her paintings are scattered on the walls—painting and photographs mixed randomly. A glowing red painting with flecks of black and white. A noisy painting, impossible to locate the source of its sound.
Gansevoort Street.
It looks like something she might have done but it's not her signature: de Kooning. I lift it off its hook. It
is
a de Kooning. I almost drop it with fright. A separate bookcase; Kant, Camus, Sartre, Bertrand Russell, Plato, Foucault, Chrysippus, Pythagoras, Spike Milligan, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Hegel.

She places a tray of tea things behind me. When I turn she is closer to me than I expect. A chartreuse turban tightly wrapped around her head, the effect making her eyebrows stark, her face stunning.

—Heard of any of them?

—You didn't give me the impression you were a reader.

—I forgive you, you're a man—you make mistakes.

—Wittgenstein lived in Dublin for a while. Used to go to the greenhouse in the Botanical Gardens to work in the winter because his room was too cold. Before I have time to finish the story she kisses me deftly on the lips.

—Don't get any ideas. They needed to be kissed, is all.

We sit on the sofa drinking a mixture of Assam and Earl Grey tea. She talks about going to Cooper Union in the early sixties. About trying to paint. About fucking as a political statement. She says the word
fucking
with such ease that it is difficult for me not to show surprise. I feel small in her presence. I know she is not trying to impress me and knowing this, she impresses me all the more. Her gruffness adds to her charm. This is an old self she is talking about, one she has discarded, one I hunger to inhabit, dead and all as it is. She tells me about Mazo and his infamous techniques:
Never mark a canvas unless you mean it.
She was too naïve to question him.

—He was respected in New York, still is, she says, smiling emptily. Making digital videos now. Made that famous one about the crazy Truman woman and her daughter. I had taken her twenty years to get past that perfection Mazo preached; hence the photography. All the time she is talking, I am wondering what her purpose is; there must be some purpose to her telling me all this. I pour more tea to appear at ease. It comes out thick and cold. I point to the kitchen and she nods. She continues talking, more loudly, while I potter about trying to find things. I interrupt her to ask her where she keeps the sugar.

—In the blue jug. O'Keefe was in her eighties by then and New York was bestowing some or other award on her. I was covering the event for
People
magazine. They wanted
artistic
shots for the issue and somehow they got hold of my name. I took stills of paintings back then. I didn't do this kind of thing but I needed the money. I borrowed a Hasselblad from Roger (she points a finger to the large shot of the Woolworth building peaking through dense clouds) and did the job. My first celebrity shoot. O'Keefe talked to me. I think because I was a female photographer. I changed direction with her. Are you listening?

—No.

Moving about her kitchen, searching for the tea strain, I am courting her.

—There is less responsibility in photography. At least I thought that until I met O'Keefe.

I pour the tea. Holfy has beautiful hands.

—I discovered my cunt at the same time I discovered art. Art is about touching. Constantly touching. We have to create ourselves as art. You know, you always know a bad portrait photographer if he tells you to be yourself. There
is
no self. A photographer creates the self. She studies me bending with the tray. When I look up from the table it's as if she is looking for something in me, testing me. She is looking for listening, I think, if she is looking for anything; that's what people always want. The doorbell rings, a shrill, demanding noise. She ignores it and goes on.

—It has taken me a long time to know. I want nearness from a man. Art is about always touching canvas without meaning—without conscious meaning that is. Meaning is a foregone conclusion. That is what O'Keefe did. I learned that over twenty years ago. I'm only beginning to be able to do it now. But that's not too bad. De Kooning only began to understand in the eighties and he's been after it all his life. You know the glaring mistake with all that shit (she waves towards the philosophy)? It's all written by men. How can we invent ourselves out of a male-only philosophy? I'm not talking about women. I'm talking about people. One should always fuck like the animals in the fields, don't you think.

De Kooning.
The resolute way she said his name.

*   *   *

—You should take a cab. The subway is dangerous after midnight.

—I want you.

—That's nice. What for?

We stare at each other.

—You smell of marriage. Not attractive. Give it time. Maybe. You can sleep on the downstairs futon.

—I'll go.

—It's one in the morning.

—I'll go.

—You're not a sulker, are you?

—The worst. Hold grudges too. Forever.

I take the subway out of illogical spite. A black man, dressed like a dishevelled magician, does tricks with doves. The birds flutter up and down the train carriage. As the train grinds to a halt at Forty-second he whistles and the birds fly back to him and into their black box. I got off at Ninety-sixth to catch the local. Workmen are painting the station poles. The heat is stifling.

We don't see each other for a week. I break and call. She talks about New York and art and photography and her dead husband and her mother screaming at her father on long-distance phone calls. I can't imagine Holfy as a seven-year-old. I can't imagine her as a person other than the woman she is in front of me, the woman I have already created in my mind. I am terrified of her and know I will betray Ursula again and I haven't even touched Holfy. I haven't left Ursula. There would be no feeling of betrayal if I had really left her.

*   *   *

She is going to Pennsylvania to visit friends—partly because she can't bear the silence since Kahlo died. I offer to take care of Botero while she is away but she is taking the dog too.

—He doesn't miss Kahlo at all, treacherous bastard. If you want to be useful you could water the plants and collect the mail?

She spends hours packing and I sense, in her careful movements, she is already with them. I hate these people who make her whistle happily. I want to crawl inside her life. I want to possess her. To know her more fully than she knows herself; to watch her dress in the morning. She takes an age to face the day and I want to see her create herself. I want to watch her buying her hats; watch her ask a shop assistant for this scent and that one; her ease at not feeling the need to make a purchase.

She takes me around the apartment and explains how much each plant needs. As she talks my life comes into focus. I remember when, as children, my cousin Brian and I were pillow fighting. I was getting the upper hand and in a fit of rage Brian threw down his lumpy pillow and leaped on me, screaming. He was stockier and stronger. I remember my eyes closing in pain as he clenched his fleshy fingers about my throat, his thumbs pressing on the Adam's apple. I knew Brian would strangle me he was so angry. It was my first realiszation that my life could end and in one heave I tossed him over my head and his foot crashed through the bedroom window. I stood rubbing my neck, triumphant and terrified and relieved; such is my relief listening to Holfy. She is explaining about the outdoor plants. I see the years ahead with Ursula; can see what would happen with our lives; can see all the fights over her wanting to have a child, or worse the silence over it, and I don't want to be responsible for any of it. I love her and can't live with such suffocating compromises. Holfy is still talking—something about Bela Bartok and flowers—and she catches sight of my mind drifting. I apologise. The fullness of life floods into me. How can I tell this woman, who hardly knows me, whom I hardly know, that I am planning to spend the rest of my life with her. She makes up the futon in the corner of the apartment that overlooks Gansevoort Street. You can sleep in my bed if you find it too noisy, she says. I shake my head that it will be fine right here.

Her phone rings constantly while she is away. She has told me not to answer it. Waking up feels like a sudden transportation into a deserted movie set. Each morning the meat trucks wake me before five. I stare out the window watching the men unload the meat. Then I go and shower.

I go through her books, one by one, fanning the pages, dust taking flight. I wipe down the bookcases and reshelve them, wondering which ones belong to her and which ones belonged—still belong—to Robert. His handwriting in the margins of many of them, little ticks by passages that pleased him. I look for naïveté in his comments, an emptiness in his intellect; find none. We have similar taste and it makes me dislike the ghost of his presence even more.

She has no vacuum cleaner. I find a broom and sweep out the apartment. I try to clean the windows with Windowlene but the grime is too thick. I wash them inside and out with hot soapy water, make tea while they are drying, polish the windows with the radio on the station she listens to, voices that become the voice of New York, more New York than the streets themselves.

The second night I lie in her bed, smell her off the sheets, imagine her sleeping in it with Robert, the conversations they had, the lovemaking. I pick up the book by her nightstand.
Public Opinion
by Walter Lippmann. I open it on the bookmarked page: I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought the image of democracy itself. Alexis de Tocqueville. I read the chapter headings. What mind writes such a book? What mind reads it? Would Robert and Holfy have debated over it? I don't understand why I am so happy here.

When she returns she asks me if the noise disturbed me and I say yes and tell her she should move immediately. I like the meat district. I grew up with screaming, she says. She smiles at the tidiness of the place, asks if I am trying to ingratiate myself. Yes, I say. Her directness is contagious. We agree on six hundred dollars a month, to be reviewed each month by both parties. Window cleaning welcome. Book tidying not.

She drives a blue Saab, and this evening we are driving uptown to visit Barbara's bar which is not doing so well. This is the evening I realise we have been avoiding the obvious. I have known her a year, been living here six months. We have never touched except to jab each other playfully. She is asking me about the painting job at Bradley's. Janis Joplin is singing on the car radio. The bar is almost empty when we arrive. Holfy refuses the free drinks. Barbara smiles at me, and her smile is that of a professional politician, a smile that seems to say she knows something about me, something I'm not even aware of myself. In that moment, it strikes me how it looks as if we are a couple.

That night, I go to her bed. She smiles at me and shakes her head. Slink back, she says. I ignore her finger pointing me back to my corner. She sits up and glares at me and I retreat. I sleep on my stomach, on the pain of hard desire.

*   *   *

Holfy's roof is full of large potted flowers, their clay containers cracked and crumbling, life held together with wire and hope. She spends hours here, watering the plants, pruning them, having dinner. Breakfast on a weekend morning on this roof is heaven. She has a coq for cleanly lifting the head off a boiled egg. She has an egg spoon with a serrated edge, perfect for scraping the last morsel out of the thin base of the egg. She has spoons with deeper serrated edges for eating grapefruit. She has glasses that could never be filled with anything but orange juice. Small oval plates to accompany the boiled eggs. Napkins that cover the lap like small, heavy tablecloths.

The roof leaks badly that first summer and Gottleib blames Holfy and the weight of her plants. He threatens to remove everything. We rescue what we can before the roof is refelted. When the work is done she moves her plants back out, despite the warnings of the man who reputedly owns half of the meat district. The next day, when she comes home from work and climbs over the bed to the window she is confronted with a wrought-iron gate the size of a wardrobe, bolted onto the outside wall. Her first reaction is to fight but I suggest another approach. We can call the fire department. The window is the only escape from the building other than the door. But she can't wait. She asks me to climb up on the roof and remove the gate. I climb up and fidget with the bolts. There are twelve. Some of the nuts are too tight, I lie. The pointing on the bricks looks fragile as if the mortar is crumbling like everything else on the street. I want to wait for the fire department. She asks me to try harder. I start to sing: tryyyy … tryyy … try just a little bit harder so I can lovelovelove … I kneel down, and tar, still wet in the summer heat, oozes from underneath the felt and sticks to my trousers.