Slaves of New York (18 page)

"Well, that doesn't sound so bad," I said when I put it down.

"Doesn't sound so bad?" Stash said. He shook his head disbelievingly. "Sometimes you amaze me."

"Well, things could always be worse," I said. "This could be Russia, where they come and knock on your door and take you away and shoot you if they don't like what you do."

"Russian Constructivist art is my favorite," Stash said.

"At least you're getting attention!" I said. "I'd be thrilled if anyone wrote an article about me, even a negative one."

"I don't know if I feel like going to the dinner tonight," Stash said.

A fancy dinner for forty of the world's most famous artists was going to be held at a swank Italian restaurant, to honor the fact that they had agreed to decorate a nightclub. Stash was one of them; they would all be there this evening. My girlfriend had told me that dinner for two, with champagne (one bottle) could cost more than $200 at the restaurant. Luckily, we wouldn't be paying.

"You do, too, feel like going out tonight," I said. All the other artists will envy your appearance in that magazine."

"Do you think?" Stash said. "I don't know."

"First of all, everyone wants publicity," I said. "Secondly, as long as you're an underdog, you can have respect—like Vincent van Gogh. If you get too popular it makes you seem phony and commercial." I probably would have said anything —I really wanted to go to the dinner. It was going to be an event: never had so many diverse and famous artists been collected under one roof. They ranged from people famous for sports illustration to the latest East Village star.

"I was in a good mood until I saw this article," Stash said. "Then when I got home I found you still hadn't defrosted the refrigerator. Not only will I never be able to get the money to buy a loft now, I don't see the point anyway. If we did have a decent place to live, it would always be a complete mess."

"Didn't you ever hear of a self-defrosting refrigerator?" I said. "You were just looking for an excuse. Don't you try and punish me, Stash."

"How am I punishing you?"

"Because you promised me we'd start looking for a bigger space to live in, and now you're going to try and weasel out." One half of me had known all along we would never move— we were too uncomfortable here. Low rent (subsidized housing for artists), and a nice river view—we were used to it. On the other hand, a friend of Stash's was trying to buy a building nearby, and Stash liked the way the deal sounded. He could buy a whole floor and rent out half, thus making his mortgage payments.

I started to get the things out of the refrigerator and put them into the sink. I'd defrost overnight. I felt like clobbering Stash over the head. I was practically thirty years old, unmarried, and my marketability was going downhill fast. My career hadn't taken off the way I had hoped. I had had to quit working on my jewelry full-time in order to take on a job two days a week as copy editor for an East Village newspaper. I also had to be burdened with my lousy personality. If I had been more

outgoing maybe I could have been more successful with my jewelry. That was the way things worked in Manhattan.

Where I grew up, in South Carolina, social graces didn't count. Max, my father, had a mail-order gardening business. We raised peonies, daffodils, daylilies, hyacinths, iris, all kinds of bulbs and perennials. For my fourteenth birthday Max named a new variety of pink camellia after me. I wasn't thrilled —I really wanted a subscription to
Seventeen
—but I kept my mouth shut. Max also taught horticulture at the local university, part-time. When we children came home from school, everyone had a job to do. The stove was full of baked potatoes, and that's what we'd have—baked potatoes with yogurt and goat cheese. My mother raised angora goats, she sold the wool to weavers across the country. My parents had made a choice: they would remain poor but live off the land, in a lifestyle unaffected by the progressively commercial and false world around them. It was taken for granted that we would all work hard. In other words, we didn't have a TV set.

Well, I had also made a choice: I would rebel against my parents and join the rat race. I wanted things, and the things I wanted weren't inexpensive. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line I got sidetracked. For one thing, I had never, in my wackiest dream, imagined that I would grow up to be a poor person. My mother had warned me about New York, but I was prepared to work hard, and I figured eventually I'd make it. I wasn't the only one in my situation. Most of the people I knew were doing one thing but considered themselves to be something else: all the waitresses I knew were really actresses, all the Xeroxers in the Xerox place were really novelists, all the receptionists were artists. There were enough examples of people who had been receptionists who went on to become famous artists that the receptionists felt it was okay to call themselves artists. But if I was going to have to do something like copy edit two or three days a week, I didn't want to lie to myself and say I was a jewelry designer. I figured I should just accept reality and say I was a copy editor.

I was embittered. It was hard not to live in New York and

be full of rage. I was thinking of all this while I fixed some instant flan—using up all the rest of the milk so it wouldn't go bad being outside the refrigerator overnight. On the side of the box the only ingredient listed was sugar. I felt I should have made Stash flan from scratch.

At that moment he came into the kitchen. "What are you doing?" he said. "You can't even focus on one activity! You're trying to defrost the refrigerator and cook at the same time!"

It was strange how most of the time we got along so well, but then there were these periods when it was a good thing the knives were in the drawer and not out on display. "You're picking on me!" I said. "I do things as I please! Look around you—the junk that's here is yours, not mine. I had to clear off four of my bookshelves and mail my books back to my mother so you could have space to put all that junk from the table— and now the table has new junk on it."

While I yelled, Stash hacked at some of the loose ice in the refrigerator. When he had filled a bowl, he carried it over to the sink. "Where should I put it?" he said. "The sink is full of food—plus the dirty spaghetti pot."

"In the tub."

"I can't throw it in the tub," he said. "I'm going to take a shower."

"Well, run some hot water on it," I said. "The melting point of ice is zero degrees centigrade or 32 degrees Fahrenheit."

He had to restrain himself from throwing the ice at me. "How can I buy a loft when you put too much food in the refrigerator? Why should I go into debt when you're going to turn a new place into the same kind of disaster as here?" he said.

"You lash out at me because you're angry about the article!" I said as he went into the bathroom.

I imagined grabbing my clothing, throwing it in a suitcase, and storming out. This seemed so real to me that when Stash came out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, arms extended toward me, I was surprised.

He clutched me like an orangutan. "Let's be friends," he said.

"Don't pick on me every second of my existence," I said into his ear. "It makes me feel like I'm a fly and you're pulling off my wings."

"Yeah?" Stash said. "Don't give me that wings-being-picked-off business. "

I knew he was afraid of letting me get too sure of myself: this was as much of an apology as I was going to get. He said we could go to the party. Quickly I slurped down a yogurt before we went out. It tasted exactly like cold cream. I was only interested in helping the stomach not to complain, with its little lump of cold cream balanced neatly in the center. At these dinners, food wasn't served until eleven o'clock, or even eleven-thirty.

Even though the dinner was scheduled for ten, we didn't get there until ten-thirty, and most of the other people were just arriving. At the door, we had to sign a release, stating that if our pictures were taken they could be used in publicity.

The restaurant was quite a pretty place. Every table had a mammoth floral display, like complete trees, in the center, and there were little nameplates and gifts at each place. My nameplate said guest of MR. Stosz—I was seated next to the nameplate of stash stosz—and my gift was apparently selected by someone who must have known my situation as well as my vocation: it was a large fake diamond engagement and wedding ring set. Stash got a set of tattoos, water soluble, and a toy motorcycle—Stash had a motorcycle himself—which, when he wound it up, zipped across the table and fell over. Other artists received Etch-a-Sketch kits, voodoo dolls, exploding cigars, wind-up jack-in-the-boxes in the shape of clam shells which contained Botticelli's Venus leaping out to music, and their signatures made into rubber stamps.

The food was really delicious: slices of raw meat, thin as paper; angel-hair pasta speckled with shreds of crab meat and

roasted peppers; little fried fish hot and curling on platters, with their teensy eyes still intact. In one corner of the room a man played the accordion—various haunting tunes—possibly as a special treat in honor of the occasion. Or maybe he was there all the time. For an appetizer I had a plate of slightly sandy mussels in a sauce of vermouth and garlic. Stash had smoked mozzarella with basil and tomatoes. We had agreed to share. But frankly, I couldn't enjoy it as much as I would have liked. For one thing, by eleven-thirty at night my appetite was gone and I was ready to go to sleep, and for another, I only liked to eat alone with Stash. I wanted to relish my food without having to worry about why I wasn't being included in the conversation or whether I was getting food on my chin. This was my sad but minor handicap, not something that revealed a character trait: sometimes food or grease would get on my chin and I couldn't feel it. I had had a minor operation when I was fifteen and the sensation never returned. It wasn't the most glamorous of handicaps to have, but it was mine. The one handicap that really appealed to me as tragic and romantic was the one that Laura had, Laura of
The Glass Menagerie
— she was lame. There aren't too many lame people around these days, nowadays they just limp.

I was seated next to a girl wearing a rubber dress; it looked like a coat of latex paint. The sign in front of her plate said Samantha BINGHAMTON, and every two seconds one of the photographers would come and snap her picture. She had wild black hair (maybe a wig) and a long skinny neck, which was either very elegant or goosey—I couldn't decide. So much for my one fancy evening outfit of sequined top and black velvet skirt—it was nothing compared to what Rubbermaid had on. I could have strangled her. The people across from me pretended I didn't exist. While twirling pasta with my fork, I quizzed Samantha on her life story. She had known her husband—he was seated on her other side—since second grade. He came from a fabulously wealthy family and now had one of the hottest galleries in the world. She used to be a top-notch

agent—she was best friends with Dustin Hoffman and John Huston, and one of her clients was in the movie that swept the Academy Awards last year. But even though she was only twenty-eight years old and close to the height of her profession, she decided she wasn't happy. Since her husband could support her, and she didn't really need to work, she quit two weeks ago to become a rock star. This was what she really wanted to do. So far she hadn't landed a manager, but it seemed likely that this would happen soon.

Maybe I had had a little too much champagne: it certainly was delicious, with large, real, lumps of raspberries stuck in the bottom of every glass. "Isn't it strange," I said, "to be trying to land an agent and a record contract when this is what you used to do for other people?"

"No."

Her best friend, in a feathered tutu, was seated across from us, and when the tutu girl got up to go to the restroom I asked Samantha what her friend did. "She goes out with Fritz," Samantha said. Fritz was a sculptor, famous for his work in lemons and mirrors. "She's only eighteen and a real witch." So much for best friends, I thought.

In the restroom we applied various kinds of makeup from Samantha's handbag. "That guy next to you," she said as she powdered her nose, "you're with him, right?"

"We live together," I said. "That's Stash."

"That's what I was going to ask you," she said. "He's Stash Stosz, right? Who just got a terrible review?"

"Yeah," I said.

She took a joint out of her bag.

"Is he rich?" she said, lighting the joint and handing it to me.

"No," I said.

"Are you?" "No."

"Well, why would you go out with him?" she said.

"I—" I said. I was stunned.

"Come out with us after the dinner," she said. "My husband has a brother who'd love to meet you—we'll go with Fritz to the club."

I smoked some of the joint with her. Maybe she had had too much to drink, too.

Back at the table Stash was having an active argument with a racehorse painter, a man with a goatee and rabbit teeth. "What you're doing, that's not art," the horse painter was saying. He was wearing a cowboy hat of soft and furry felt.

"I've seen your work," I said to him. "My mother bought some paper plates one time, for a cookout, and your paintings were on them."

Everyone had changed places. The photographer was walking around taking candid pictures. One artist, with his long white arms curled around the back of the chair next to him, and his round, bloblike head, resembled an octopus. Another made strange movements with his mouth like a kissing gour-ami. One artist was so famous he refused to sit with the rest of us: he had his own private table on the balcony, where he was seated with a famous French movie actress. The one sitting across from me was quite drunk; he had a red face and a superior attitude. While he was talking to someone he picked up a full ashtray in front of him and emptied it under the table.