Gone (12 page)

—I don't care how long it's gonna take … Let's wait, please.

She nods. Moments later she is beside me on the roof and with one enraged yank she rips the cage off the wall. Fuck him, she pants, wiping her hands on her hips. The twelve bolts lie on the roof like spent cartridges.

That evening we drive across the village to Barbara's house for dinner. Holfy has a way of pouring wine that enhances its enjoyment before it touches the lips. The glass should always be half full. A full glass of wine is aesthetically vulgar to the eye. I study her hands. They are brown with the fading summer. She is wearing the lapis ring that she and Robert bought years ago in Italy. Although her fingernails are bitten they do not have a pained look about them. Hers are delicate hands. Femininity and femaleness meet in these hands. Beauty is stored here.

As time wears on I begin to question everything, including Holfy. Ah, when the pupil turns the gaze on the teacher. I am painting apartments and working in a catering firm. At night, if I'm free, I assist Holfy at the weddings she is covering. We are both at home at the same time, and it makes it hard to breathe. I suggest making a room in the apartment, a space in a corner that would have room enough for a small desk. But Holfy refuses to build walls. She wants twelve hundred square feet of light. It would ruin the light and nothing mattered more to her in the apartment than light.

I am uneasy working illegally in New York. We should marry, she says, simply to deal with the problem. I am tempted but in my gut know that it is not the answer. It will only compound the problems. I am drowning, drowning in my infatuation with her, frightened of how well we click, and beginning to see how lost and rudderless I am, how much I miss the tedious familiarity of Ursula.

*   *   *

—Darling?

Holfy is looking at me over her spectacle rims. She looks her age tonight. She smiles and it is a smile filled with such affection that I feel sad. I want to tell her I love her but know, even as the words form, that saying them is a selfish act: a pathetic need to reassure myself. She puts her book down and holds her arms out. I stare across at the Judd's Gym sign flashing in the night.

—I'm farting tonight. Just to let you know the vastness of your love must breathe in the foulest odour.

I laugh and pick up her book. Holfy is reading Rousseau.
Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

*   *   *

—After Cooper Union. Never put a line on paper unless you mean it, he said. I froze. I never put a line on paper. So I went to ICP instead. Full of Europeans.
Photography is light,
the guy there said. I'm from Iceland—there's nothing he could teach me about light. As soon as I held a camera I knew. This was it. I felt the relationship. The rest was struggling with being artistic. I knew it was nothing to do with art. It was attitude. And Stillness. Light. I didn't need to be told it was light, light was obvious. If you need to be told that it is already too late. But I was shy then. I said nothing. I made a mistake. For ten, fifteen years, I made a mistake. I hid behind the camera. Dead years. I won all the competitions in the those dead years. An explosion of hate—which was good to release but I didn't channel it. I directed it at the viewer. I thought I was honest. So did all those judges. Olafsdottir is unflinchingly honest. We were all wrong. I should have been making it the essence of the photograph. Essence. Oops—
essence.
Time to stop talking.

—An explosion of hate?

—For my dear parents. Who else can we hate with such devotion?

The fragile and ancient hurt that seeps out of adults when they speak of wronged childhoods.

*   *   *

—I was raised by my mother after they divorced. My father got my brothers. My mother and I went to New York. She wasn't going to stay in Iceland, and Hungary was out of the question—even if she liked her in-laws. She sold the Icelandic International Travel Agency and we left. I was happy. That smelly room had been responsible for the first time my mother hit me—I asked her why we put International in front of everything. It's like living in a desert with a bodyguard, I said. Holfy lashes a hand through the air.

—She hit me a lot after that.

—And your father?

—My father. My father is my father. What else to say? I got to admire him a lot—when I had to live alone with my mother. When we all lived together I thought all the arguments were his fault. I thought the divorce was our fault, my brothers and I. Then I thought it was my fault. Years later, I looked at my mother and saw, as they say in America, she was the key player. My therapist—imagine a little village girl from Iceland having a therapist—asked me what is the one thing that sticks with me about my mother.
Are you listening.
The therapist said yes, and I said no, that was what I remember. Are you listening. I did nothing but listen to my mother.

Her husband.

—Robert was with Lavansky. The aeronautics Lavansky—not the painter. That's what brought us together. Painting. He called me his chiaroscurist. I thought he was ribbing me when he said he tested helicopters. You mean whether they crash or not? I asked him and he nodded. Do they? I asked. Sometimes, he said. And he was so genuinely nonchalant that I fell for him there and then. Holfy's face takes on a softness. She loves his memory too much for me ever to grow fond of him. I pour her some fresh coffee, go into the kitchen to wash the dishes. She continues talking through my drying.

—He crashed five times, you know that? Five times and never a scratch.

—What about the sixth?

It's out before I can help myself.

—You're a
cruel,
blue-eyed angel.

—Sorry.

—He was coming home. Midweek. He had been up at Lavansky's. He was a real man. She blows me a kiss, takes off the purple chinese jacket. Underneath, a pale pink man's shirt. She waves her hands in front of her reddened face.

—Hot flushes. That stage of life. He was coming in through the Queens tunnel. I never understood that. He always came in on 1. Always. And down the Hudson Parkway. He liked to get a look at the Palisades. He used to say
Imagine what it was like when they first came in and saw the Palisades. New York must have been something else then.
He liked the snatches he could glimpse of the Empire. He and it were born the same year. It's why he liked my place so much—he'd stand at the window and say
Our precious inch of Empire.
He never ceased to be enchanted with New York. A car broke down in the tunnel in front of him. And then, in the other lane, going in the opposite direction, the same thing happened in almost the exact same spot. One in each lane at the same time. They had to reverse in trucks at either end. Traffic backed up in both lanes. When they towed out the car in front of Robert, he didn't move. He was dead. He had had a heart attack. She laughs at the absurdity.

—A man who risks his life in the sky and dies underground. You have to have a sense of humour, yes?

I stare out the window at the mauve inch of the Empire State. Precious inch. The city seems full of love. The time I went to the top with Ursula when we visited New York. She sneaked up behind me as I leaned against the rail and slipped her arms through mine and brushed her fingers over my chest. Such bliss it was; the view of Manhattan and her. Hot dogs and sticking stamps on postcards and running my hand over his arms. The silence at the top; no horns, no sirens, no whoosh of hot subway train, no screaming miseries; nothing but breeze and dampness of clouds. I was still translating dollars and punts in my head, a tourist. Such a long time ago it seems. My eye catches sight of an ant traipsing up the windowpane; it pauses on the Empire's tip, peaking over the Village, over all of us. His minuscule legs leading him nowhere. He crawls with vital importance to the top of the glass; reaches the edge; stops; hurries with magnificent urgency to the bottom. He marches up again, and halfway, turns and scurries daintily to the left. Three is such randomness in his movements and he makes decisions with such haste that it's impossible to imagine there is a rationale behind his decision to turn left and not right. And yet there must be. I consider crushing him with the back of my thumbnail to end his frustration but stop myself: God must watch the world with the same indifference. Ursula. Longing for her overcomes me. The scent of her skin; seeing her laughing in the bed as we read those dreadful review books together.

*   *   *

I wash and dry the last glass. Holfy is sitting with her coffee, scraping at the wax that had spilled from the candleholders onto the wooden table. I sit down again and look at her. We look fixedly at each other for a long time. Then I stand up, the chair screeching on the tiled floor. I stoop and kiss her. She stands and kisses me back. Her mouth tastes wonderful. Even barefoot she is taller than I am. I pull away from her. I pick up the Eliot poems I've been reading and go into the darkroom. She potters around for a while, talks on the telephone.

*   *   *

—What you doing?

—Reading. Bed.

She frowns and shakes her head.

—Ms. Olafsdottir. I didn't want to presume.

—Excellent pronunciation. Can you fuck too?

She nods her head for me to follow her.

*   *   *

She hands me a towel and tells me to shower. She tells me to hurry. A large curling turd floats in the toilet. Her own sweet smile. When I come out she tells me I am not supposed to get dressed again. Undress, she says. She sits by the fireplace and watches me. She tells me to lie down and to touch myself. I lick my finger and caress the tip of my nose. She tells me I must be serious. She takes straps from her travel case and ties my wrists to the bedposts. I am nervous, excited, fight a smile. She kisses my lips, my chest, my cock. She kisses my toes. She ties my ankles to the bedposts.

—Where did you get the ropes?

—My yoga ropes.

—Yoga ropes.

—Stop talking.

She unbuttons her shirt and looks at me looking at her purple bra. She grins and looks down at herself, grabs her own breasts. Then she pulls on a pair of yellow leather gloves. She lifts her skirt to her hips and gets on top of me. My stomach tenses under her wetness. She slaps me gently. I start to laugh unable to take it seriously. She shakes her head in warning. She holds my cock with her gloved hand, finds her opening, and encloses me. He rises up and down, slaps me hard. My face burns through my smile.

—Tell me when to stop.

She slaps me harder.

—Tell me when.

I look at her, at the world she is entering. She hits me again. My eye closes in pain. Her wetness running down my stomach, turning cold. She hits with both hands now as if swatting flies. The pain seeps into the back of my closed eyes. I am listening to her breathing, to her squelching pleasure. She is holding my ears and kissing my mouth, kissing my mouth and licking my lips, my nose, my eyelids. She licks my ears and says something. She repeats words in what must be Icelandic. She punches me in the face and any sense of the erotic vanishes. In English she tells me to open my mouth. She clears her throat, and spits into my mouth. She thrusts harder and harder until my pelvis bone hurts. She comes and comes, rubbing into me slowly until at last she spreads her heavy body on me and is calm. I am hard, unspent. But she is lost in herself and my excitement wanes. Powerlessness has its own passion, its own relief.

*   *   *

We sleep through the day and fuck and eat and sleep and fuck. Someone rings the doorbell persistently in the early afternoon but goes away. We hear car doors slam throughout the day, laughter from the lunch tables outside Florent. We settle into our own silence. I want to ask her why yellow gloves? If the game goes both ways, if I should hurt her? She is lying on her stomach, reading. I rub her back, move down to her buttocks. She spreads. I wet a finger in my mouth and find her anus. Violation, more than anything, arouses Holfy. I go in behind her. Lovelylovelylovelylovely.

We are whispering to each other in the groggy morning. She is lying on top of me, beached. I ask her is there any advice she remembers her father gave her to carry through life.

—O, yes.
Say thank you.
My father works for the United States government. He is very polite. Very civilised. She looks at me to check if I am following. I amn't.

—He was on the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer's favourite scientist—besides himself. The telephone rings. We lift our heads to see the time. It's after five in the morning. I think it might be my father calling. I always think an early call is him phoning to give bad news. She answers as if she's been awake hours. It's the first conscious realisation I have of disliking something in her: this need to always appear switched on.

—Hi Jay.

Kleinmeyer. An art dealer she had a brief affair with—he was buying some of her husband's paintings. I met him once at an art dealer's house on Claremont Avenue. She was so at ease there, drifting between the big money, pointing out Grant's Tomb across Riverside Drive. It was more an art gallery than a home. She's loquacious with him. She rolls away from the phone smelling of his power. How could she touch such a pig of a man. Belly vast against his designer shirt. It disgusts me that she let this fatso inside her body. She has told me she would do anything for a man who could do something unexpected.
You men are all so fucking predictable.

—He must have had to come in behind you.

She looks at me, baffled, her phone smile fading.

—You know, with that belly of his in the way.

She grimaces. I get up and shower, soaping myself with the soap she uses. The plastic blow-up duck, Newt, nudging my legs. Her slender legs when she showers. One of her hairs on the soap.

I go to Florent for coffee. Reggie is serving. The face of Greta Garbo and the style of Madonna. I have never felt fully at ease with Reggie; I had an erection the first time I saw him dressed as Edith Piaf. Then I learned she was a he.