The Exquisite (2 page)

I stole a book.

He said to me, dear boy, you are a thief so steal something.

How do you know I’m a thief?

Because it is dark. Because you are in my apartment. Because I did not ask you to come. Because you have confessed to having taken the trouble at least to attempt to monitor my movements. Take something, then, perhaps, knock me down, then come back for dinner tomorrow night and we will talk.

What? I said.

He smiled, stood up with a rustling of plastic-coated wires, and gestured with his head toward all the things, the hundreds of things, that were in the room.

Come back tomorrow night at nine o’clock. I will feed you fish and we will talk.

Fish? I said.

With fine crackers. It doesn’t matter whether you are on time or not.

You want me to come back? I said.

Yes, he said. But not to steal. That’s only tonight.

You’re inviting me to steal something from you.

Yes.

In other words, you’re saying “take something.”

He laughed his little crushed-lightbulb laugh and looked around the room.

All right, take something, Henry, he said. It’s not difficult. The difficult part was walking through my door.

O.K., good, great, I said. I shrugged, and cracked my neck and three fingers to cover the fact that I felt equal parts spooked and intrigued, put my hand into the shadows and picked up the first portable item it touched, walked over and sort of shoved the item’s owner a little on the shoulder so that he fell back with a light
oof
and a crinkling of wires into his big chair, then made for the door. When I got downstairs and out onto Eighth Street I took the time to confirm that what I had grabbed was a musty old book, which didn’t smell very good. I’m not at all against reading, in fact I read a lot, but not books that smell like something that has spent time in one of New York’s omnipresent mystery puddles. I tossed the book into the trash can next to the entrance to Tompkins Square Park, thought, well, that was pretty crazy, then went down to the Horseshoe, on the corner of Seventh and B and had a couple. Couple more. Thing is I’d done pretty well with a score I had made while I was in the hospital and I still had plenty in my pockets. Going to Mr. Kindt’s had just been gravy and it didn’t matter that I’d left without anything worth keeping. I asked the guy behind the bar—Job was his name—for a shot and told him to help himself.

Thank you, Job said.

You’re welcome, Job.

We drank.

Two more, I suggested.

Job poured two more.

You ever feel spooked and intrigued, Job?

At the same time?

More or less.

I’m not sure.

I told Job about my encounter with Mr. Kindt.

Mr. what? said Job.

I hear you, I said.

Job grinned. He went off to help a couple of customers.

He came back.

What’s your real name, Job? I asked him.

Job’s my real name.

I mean your name before it was Job.

Anthony.

Anthony’s a nice name.

Might be, but it’s not my name.

Fair enough.

Job moved off. I drank some more, then some more, and I thought about Mr. Kindt saying “dear boy,” and I both liked it and I didn’t, and I thought about seeing him naked and bathed in the green light, and wondered what it would be like to have all those wires attached to me. I shivered. For a second, I could remember having had wires attached to me, could remember my aunt leaning close with her roll of tape, her graying hair falling over her face, could remember the flecks of bacon fat on her chin. Actually, I had never had wires attached to me.
Remember
isn’t the right word. Henry boy, sweet boy, I could “remember” my aunt saying. I shivered. I smelled fish and felt mist, then I was sitting in a booth and someone was whispering in my ear: five hundred dollars.

Sold to the drunk biped in the booth, I whispered back.

There’s a little shop at Forty-eighth and Lex. Doesn’t look like much on the outside. Ask for Mr. Singh. He’ll give you five hundred dollars for it and that’s if you don’t feel like bargaining.

Tulip. Sitting close and spinning. For a second she looked a little like a pale yellow pinwheel, like the retinal afterimage of a fizzing golden firework. Only she was wearing gray and had on one of those aviator’s hats, which completely covered her blond hair and set her eyes to sparking and crackling, so that what I should have been seeing in the money end of my similes was something opalescent, azure, electric blue.

Tulip, I said. I was just talking to Job.

The bartender? His name’s not Job, said Tulip.

She was running her finger across the book I had tossed in the garbage can. It was sitting open on the table and there was a diagram of the interior of an arm. Vein system. Musculature. Old stuff. From back when surgery meant ugly things for everyone except the rats. Looking at it, I thought first of Manhattan and the deep hole that had been punched in it, then of this movie I’d seen in which a king had his arm operated on. He died. There was a long battle for succession. The country was laid to waste. Years passed. Hope began to glimmer in the east. The people prepared themselves. They set off on long marches and learned new songs. Then hope faded and the rats took over. I was guessing this book was about that old. It was written in Greek and Latin. Lots of significant-looking words. I tried to read one. No luck.

So what’s his name? I said.

Anthony.

Good-looking guy.

I put my finger on some delicately articulated vein system, ran it down a leg. There were shadows everywhere. It was like I was back at Mr. Kindt’s.

He was home. I watched him leave, but he was home anyway, Tulip. He was sitting there, naked. He told me to take whatever I wanted.

He’s a little strange that way.

He was also hooked up to a heart monitor. He told me to steal something, then he invited me to dinner.

I know.

How?

Because I was there.

Where? In one of the big jars?

She laughed.

What’s going on, Tulip?

Nothing, I told him about you and he wanted to meet you.

Why?

Because I told him he’d like you.

You set me up.

If you like.

How do you know him?

I just know him. A friend introduced me. She paused. She looked at, I think, something about her fingernails. Sometimes I do things for him, she said.

Things? I said.

She didn’t answer.

I let it go.

Who is he? I asked.

An old guy, lonely, from upstate, but he’s been in the city for years. I don’t know. He’s eccentric, he does some business.

I looked at Tulip. She was not smiling. I was drunk and didn’t feel well. The bar was full of smoke and colored light.

I barely know you, Tulip, I said.

That’s true, Henry.

How did we meet?

We met at a party.

Was it a good party?

We didn’t stay.

We didn’t go home together either.

No, we didn’t.

What does he mean about fish?

He likes fish. Don’t you like fish?

I thought about fish. I thought about the book, with its rotten puddle smell and stained pages and cross sections and strange diagrams.

Mr. Singh? I said.

She nodded, stood up.

I stood up. Or thought I did.

Good-night, Henry, I’m leaving now, she said.

For a time, during this pre–Mr. Kindt period, while I was still presentable, I made inquiries about work. Simple, legitimate jobs. Ones that would have required me to lift or sweep or distribute small multicolored flyers, that would have given me the opportunity, in exchange for miniature paychecks, to don brightly colored clothing and hand food across the counter, or wear a hairnet and wash dishes, or fold freshly laundered clothes, or run a steam press, or wear a billboard advertising Optaline eye salve, but each time I went out my frame of mind quickly soured and I didn’t have any luck.

One day, my mind already as sour as an old so-called SweetTart, I saw Carine as I was coming out of a hole-in-the-wall Indian deli on Roman Street with a day-old onion cake in my hand. I had meant to inquire about the position advertised in the window. Instead I had handed over fifty cents, scowled a little, and accepted the oily cake. Carine was wearing a handsome vintage gray suit and walking with her arm around a young man dressed in fashionably rumpled beige linen pants and a bright green Cockfighter T-shirt. I bit into the awful cake, chewed once or twice, then let it fall out of my mouth. Carine did not see me and I did not call out to her. She and her young man looked nifty together. I went back into the deli, asked about the job, and was immediately told I was “unsuited for the obligations.” Chewing hard on the insides of my cheeks, I asked for my money back for the cake, scooped five gleaming dimes off the counter, then walked over to a lonely patch of wall on Eldridge Street, leaned back, shoved my hands into my pockets, saw a flickering procession of Carines in the handsome gray suit that I had helped her pick out the previous Christmas, and, with the taste of old onion and even older oil in my mouth, pretended, badly I imagine, that the substantial facial moisture that was threatening to bust loose was just something caught in my eye.

I beat someone during this period. Someone standing next to a deep fryer with grease flecks on his cheeks, who told me I smelled like I was dead and that I should get out and that I should not waste his time asking for work. He had a good life and he had worked hard for it and he had a feeling that
hard
and
work
were not words in my vocabulary. He spit in the sink after he said this.

I asked him if what he was saying, as someone else had recently said, was that I was “unsuited for the obligations.” That I wasn’t, in essence, up to the shit job he was offering for shit pay in his shit place.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he repeated the thing about how awful I smelled.

You
smell, baby, I said to him as I walked away, as he sat slumped against the refrigerator with his hands, palms up, at his sides.

I realize that divulging this kind of information about myself, whether or not it is true—some people I have told about it have looked at me and laughed, i.e., there may be some blur involved—does not help my position, but I can live with that. I have already, after all, been found guilty and sent here, and it is not my intention in chronicling the eventually unfortunate circumstances of my friendship with dear dead Mr. Kindt to sway public opinion. I was broke, and beat the shit out of someone, some jerk in the kitchen of an eating establishment, or I probably did, then laid low for a while. That’s a fact.

By
laying low
I mean I got sort of swallowed up by certain parts of New York, not to mention certain events, and for quite some time wasn’t presentable at all. The days and nights that compose this period seem now to have been poured into a bucket and tossed into the East River, so that every time I go looking for them it seems as if I am slipping out to sea. I know that at one point, when the gaping hole—in what I heard someone standing outside St. Mark’s Church call “the arm of the city”—was still horrifyingly fresh, and the air was still stinging everyone’s eyes, and you saw people going around like death’s heads with their goggles and respirators on, I slept under some scaffolding on Great Jones Street in company with several others and that these several others didn’t want me there. I also know that for a while I walked around with one eye swollen shut, because I can remember seeing my reflection in a mirror as I passed the shining windows of a Duane Reade. I can also remember, not very long after this, walking down my old street, late at night, looking up at my old apartment, where I could see a light and a little corner of the ceiling, and being overwhelmed by the feeling that I had slipped back into my old life, that Carine, with her gray suit and salade niçoise and soft lap, was upstairs with the cats. The feeling was so strong, or I wasn’t, that I walked over to the door, reached into my pocket, felt for my keys, and was surprised not to find them. It seems to me it was at this juncture, as I reached with great certainty for something that wasn’t there, that I felt the ground going out from under me and became convinced that I was looking for myself in my own pocket and that—this realization increased the size of the wave of disorientation that had swept over me—it was me, not my keys, that had been gone for weeks.

There were other moments—sitting in Battery Park eating the remains of a shrink-wrapped giant cookie, great clouds of smoke wafting out over the harbor, the Statue of Liberty gray instead of green and somehow, at least the way I remember it, lacking a face; or lying on a bench near the Cloisters, the unseasonably hot sun smashing me into a stupor, a man very nearly as unpresentable as I was walking over and pinching my arm.

He had a plan, he said, a wonderful plan that lacked only a partner. If I was interested in being that partner he would let me in on it. I told him I was interested. He said that before he could let me in on the plan he had to test me. I asked him what the test was. He said I had to find someone who looked like me and pinch him on the arm. I then had to tell him I had a plan and ask him if he would like to be my partner and, if he agreed, test him in the same way.

Your plan is to make people who are already dizzy even dizzier, I said.

It’s not really my plan, he said.

All of this would no doubt have continued had I not, one night after I had swiped a bottle from a sleeping colleague and drunk half of it over a couple of Halcion, wandered out in front of a Gentle Fragrance Florists truck. This truck, even though it did little more than clip me, proved to be my ticket out. An ambulance arrived and strong arms put me on a stretcher and bore me away. I could see nothing out the ambulance windows—the world had been reduced to that bouncing over-lit interior and four small panes of dark glass. A man with a bored look on his face presided over my passage. I spoke at some length, but he either chose to ignore me or did not hear me or both.

In the hospital, I was bathed and fed and my dizziness receded. The food was served on flimsy pastel-colored trays and was pretty bland, but it was real and certainly more palatable than anything I had ingested in some time. In the hospital, I began to steal and to sell what I stole. In the hospital, I lay on a firm mattress and things happened.