Let the Great World Spin (20 page)

There never would have been a way out for them.

Blaine looked over his shoulder and then floored it for an instant until I shouted at him to stop, please stop, please. Nothing more uncluttered than these moments. Our lives in perfect clarity. You must get out. Take responsibility. Walk back to the crash. Give the girl mouth- to- mouth.

Hold her bleeding head. Whisper in her ear. Warm the whites of her feet.

Run to a phone. Save the crushed man.

Blaine pulled over to the side of the FDR and we stepped out. The caw of gulls from the river, breasting the wind. The dapple of light on the water. The surging currents, their spinning motions. Blaine shaded his eyes in the sunlight. He looked like an ancient explorer. A few cars had stopped in the middle of the road and the newspaper truck had come to a sideways halt, but it wasn’t one of those enormous wrecks that you sometimes hear about in rock songs, all blood and fracture and American highway; rather, it was calm with only small sprinklings of jeweled glass across the lanes, a few bundles of newspapers in a havoc on the ground, distant from the body of the young girl, who was expressing herself in a patch of blooming blood. The engine roared and steam poured out of the van. The driver’s foot must still have been on the pedal. It whined incessantly, at its highest pitch. Some doors were opening in the stalled cars behind and already some other drivers were leaning on their horns, the chorus of New York, impatient to get going again, the fuck- you shrill. We were alone, two hundred yards ahead of the clamor. The road was perfectly dry but with patches of puddled heat. Sunlight through the girdings. Gulls out over the water.

McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 118

118

C O L U M M c C A N N

I looked across at Blaine. He wore his worsted jacket and his bow tie.

He looked ridiculous and sad, his hair flopping down over his eyes, all of him frozen to the past.

—Tell me that didn’t happen, he said.

The moment he turned to check the front of the car I recall thinking that we’d never survive it, not so much the crash, or even the death of the young girl—she was so obviously dead, in a bloodied heap on the road—

or the man who was slapped against the steering wheel, almost certainly ruined, his chest jammed up against the dashboard, but the fact that Blaine went around to check on the damage that was done to our car, the smashed headlight, the crumpled fender, like our years together, something broken, while behind us we could hear the sirens already on their way, and he let out a little groan of despair, and I knew it was for the car, and our unsold canvases, and what would happen to us shortly, and I said to him: Come on, let’s go, quick, get in, Blaine, quick, get a move on.

—

in ’ 7 3 bl aine a nd I had swapped our lives in the Village for another life altogether, and we went to live in a cabin in upstate New York. We had been almost a year off the drugs, even a few months off the booze, until the night before the accident. Just a one- night blowout. We’d slept in that morning, in the Chelsea Hotel, and we were returning to the old Grandma notion of sitting on the porch swing and watching the poison disappear from our bodies.

On the way home, silence was all we had. We ducked off the FDR, drove north, over the Willis Avenue Bridge, into the Bronx, off the highway, along the two- lane road, by the lake, down the dirt track toward home. The cabin was an hour and a half from New York City. It was set back in a grove of trees on the edge of a second, smaller lake. A pond, really. Lily pads and river plants. The cabin had been built fifty years before, in the 1920s, out of red cedar. No electricity. Water from a spring well. A woodstove, a rickety outhouse, a gravity- fed shower, a hut we used for a garage. Raspberry bushes grew up and around the back windows. You could lift the sashes to birdsong. The wind made the reeds gossip.

It was the type of place where you could easily learn to forget that we had just seen a girl killed in a highway smash, perhaps a man too—we didn’t k now.

McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 119

L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N

119

Evening was falling when we pulled up. The sun touched the top of the trees. We saw a belted kingfisher bashing a fish upon the dock. It ate its prey and then we sat watching its wheeling flight away—something so beautiful about it. I stepped out and along the dock. Blaine took out the paintings from the backseat, propped them against the side of the hut, pulled open the huge wooden doors where we kept the Pontiac. He parked the car and locked the hut with a padlock and then swept the car tracks with a broom. Halfway through the sweeping, he looked up and gave me a wave that was also a half- shrug, and he set to sweeping again.

After a while, there was no sign that we had even left the cabin.

The night was cool. A chill had silenced the insects.

Blaine sat beside me on the dock, kicked off his shoes, dangled his feet out over the water, fished in the pockets of his pleated trousers. The burned- out shadows of his eyes. He still had a three- quarter- full bag of cocaine from the night before. Forty or fifty dollars’ worth. He opened it and shoved the long thin padlock key into the coke, scooped up some powder. He cupped his hands around the key and held it to my nostril. I shook my head no.

—Just a hit, he said. Take the edge off.

It was the first snort since the night before—what we used to call the cure, the healer, the turpentine, the thing that cleaned our brushes. It kicked hard and burned straight through to the back of my throat. Like wading into snow- shocked water. He dipped into the bag and took three long snorts for himself, reared his head back, shook himself side to side, let out a long sigh, put his arm around my shoulder. I could almost smell the crash on my clothes, like I’d just crumpled my fender, sent myself spinning, about to smash into the guardrail.

—Wasn’t our fault, babe, he said.

—She was so young.

—Not our fault, sweetie, you hear me?

—Did you see her on the ground?

—I’m telling you, said Blaine, the idiot hit his brakes. Did you see him? I mean, his brake lights weren’t even working. Nothing I could do.

I mean, shit, what was I supposed to do? He was driving like an idiot.

—Her feet were so white. The bottoms of them.

—Bad luck’s a trip I don’t go on, babe.

—Jesus, Blaine, there was blood everywhere.

McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 120

120

C O L U M M c C A N N

—You’ve gotta forget it.

—She was just lying there.

—You didn’t see a goddamn thing. You listening to me? We saw nothing.

—We’re driving a ’27 Pontiac. You think nobody saw us?

—Wasn’t our fault, he said again. Just forget it. What could we do? He hit his goddamn brakes. I’m telling you, he was driving that thing like it was a goddamn boat.

—D’you think he’s dead too? The driver? You think he’s dead?

—Take a hit, honey.

—What?

—You gotta forget it happened, nothing happened, not a goddamn thing.

He stuffed the small plastic bag into the inside of his jacket pocket and stuck his fingers under the shoulder of his vest. We had both been wearing old- fashioned clothes for the better part of a year. It was part of our back- to- the- twenties kick. It seemed so ridiculous now. Bit players in a bad theater. There’d been two other New York artists, Brett and Delaney, who had gone back to the forties, living the lifestyle and the clothes, and they had made a killing from it, became famous, had even hit the
New
York Times
style pages.

We had gone further than Brett and Delaney, had moved out of the city, kept our prize car—our only concession—and had lived without electricity, read books from another era, finished our paintings in the style of the time, hid ourselves away, saw ourselves as reclusive, cutting-edge, academic. At our core, even we knew we weren’t being original. In Max’s the night before—pumped up on ourselves—we had been stopped by the bouncers, who didn’t recognize who we were. They wouldn’t let us into the back room. A waitress pulled a curtain tight. She took pleasure in her refusal. None of our old friends were around. We spun backward, went up to the bar, the canvases in our arms. Blaine bought a bag of coke from the bartender, the only one to compliment our work. He leaned across the counter and gazed at the canvases, ten seconds, at most. Wow, he said. Wow. That’ll be sixty bucks, man. Wow. If you want some Panama Red, man, I got that too. Some Cheeba Cheeba. Wow. Just say the word. Wow.

—Get rid of the coke, I said to Blaine. Just throw it in the water.

McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 121

L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N

121

—Later, babe.

—Throw it away, please.

—Later, sweetie, okay? I’m chomping now. I mean, that guy, come on! He couldn’t drive. I mean what type of fucking idiot hits the brakes in the middle of the FDR? And you see her? She wasn’t even wearing any clothes. I mean, maybe she was blowing him or something. I bet that’s it.

She was sucking him off.

—She was in a pool of blood, Blaine.

—Not my fault.

—She was all smashed up. And that guy. He was just lying there against the steering wheel.

—You were the one told me to leave the scene. You’re the one said, Let’s go. Don’t forget it, you’re the one, you made the decision!

I slapped him once across the face, surprised at how hard it stung my hand. I rose from the dock. The wooden boards creaked. The dock was old and useless, jutting out into the pond like a taunt. I walked over the hard mud, toward the cabin. Up on the porch, I pushed open the door, stood in the middle of the room. It smelled so musty inside. Like months of bad cooking.

This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

We had been happy, Blaine and me, in the cabin over the past year. We had chased the drugs from our bodies. Rose each morning clear- headed.

Worked and painted. Carved out a life in the quiet. That was gone now. It was just an accident, I told myself. We had done the right thing. Sure, we’d left the scene, but maybe they would have searched us, discovered the coke, the weed, maybe they would have set Blaine up, or found out my family name, put it all over the newspapers.

I looked out the window. A thin stream of moonlight skidded on the water. The stars above were little pinpoints of light. The longer I looked the more they seemed like claw marks. Blaine was still on the dock, but stretched out lengthwise, almost a seal shape, cold and black, as if ready to slip away off the dock.

I made my way through the dark to the kerosene lamp. Matches on the table. I flicked the lamp alive. Turned the mirror around. I didn’t want to see my face. The cocaine was still pumping through me. I turned the lamp higher and felt its heat rise. A bead of sweat at my brow. I left the McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 122

122

C O L U M M c C A N N

dress in a puddled heap, stepped to the bed. I fell against the soft mattress, lay facedown, naked, under the sheets.

I could still see her. Most of all it was the bottoms of her feet, I had no idea why, I could see them there, against the dark of the tarmac. What is it that had made them so very white? An old song came back to me, my late grandfather singing about feet of clay. I buried my face further in the pillow.

The latch on the door clicked. I lay still and trembling—it seemed possible to do both at once. Blaine’s footsteps sounded across the floor. His breathing was shallow. I could hear his shoes being tossed near the stove.

He turned the kerosene lamp down. The wick whispered. The edges of the world got a little darker. The flame trembled and righted itself.

—Lara, he said. Sweetie.

—What is it?

—Look, I didn’t mean to shout. Really.

He came to the bed and bent down over me. I could feel his breath against my neck. It felt cool, like the other side of a pillow. I’ve got something for us, he said. He pulled the sheet down to my thighs. I could feel the cocaine being sprinkled on my back. It was what we had done together years ago. I did not move. His chin in the hollow at my low back.

The bristle where he hadn’t shaved. His arm draped against my ribcage and his mouth at the center of my spine. I felt the run of his face down along the back of my body and the very touch of his lips, aloof and root-less. He sprinkled the powder again, a rough line that he licked with his tongue.

He was rampant now and had pulled the sheet fully off me. We hadn’t made love in a few days, not even in the Chelsea Hotel. He turned me over and told me not to sweat, that it would make the cocaine clump.

—Sorry, he said again, sprinkling the coke low on my stomach. I shouldn’t have shouted like that.

I pulled him down by the hair. Beyond his shoulder the faint knots in the ceiling wood looked like keyholes.

Blaine whispered in my ear: Sorry, sorry, sorry.

—

w e h ad or i g ina l l y made our money in New York City, Blaine and me.

In the late sixties he had directed four black- and- white art films. His most McCa_9781400063734_4p_02_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:33 PM Page 123

L E T T H E G R E A T W O R L D S P I N

123

famous film,
Antioch,
was a portrait of an old building being demolished on the waterfront. Beautiful, patient shots of cranes and juggernauts and swinging headache balls caught on

sixteen-

millimeter. It anticipated

much of the art that came behind it—light filtering in through smashed warehouse walls, window frames lying over puddles, new architectural spaces created by fracture. The film was bought by a well- known collector. Afterward Blaine published an essay on the onanism of moviemak-ers: films, he said, created a form of life to which life had to aspire, a desire for themselves only. The essay itself finished in midsentence. It was published in an obscure art journal, but it did get him noticed in the circles where he wanted to be seen. He was a dynamo of ambition. Another film,
Calypso,
had Blaine eating breakfast on the roof of the Clock Tower Building as the clock behind him slowly ticked. On each of the clock hands he had pasted photographs of Vietnam, the second hand holding a burning monk going around and around the face.