The Exquisite (3 page)

It was a little hard to figure out, once I became a regular at Mr. Kindt’s, why Tulip was spending so much time with him. I mean for starters consider the physical discrepancy: Tulip young, tall, beautiful, with a penchant for tank tops and tight jeans and with long, fresh muscles that seemed to be living their own bright life beneath her simple clothes and the exposed expanses of her skin; old Mr. Kindt was beautiful too, but in the way that exotic mushrooms or worn-out manatees or bacteria formations are beautiful: a focus on certain aspects and angles is required. Of course, given some baseline commonalities and even, at times, without them, New Yorkers have a surprisingly high tolerance for dissimilarity, and I have no doubt that were I to rip the front off any of the buildings in, say, Stuyvesant Town, I would uncover a jaw-dropping proliferation of physical mismatches. So it wasn’t so much that that confused me. It was something else, something about the way they were and
weren’t
together, the way Tulip seemed practically to live there but also not to be there at all, the way Mr. Kindt would stare fixedly at her while seeming simultaneously oblivious to her presence, the way a troubling cocktail of ambivalence and affection seemed to sit at the heart of their interactions. Tulip was almost completely silent on the nature of and motivation for her relationship with our mutual friend. For his part, if asked about Tulip, and even if not asked, Mr. Kindt would offer up bon mots along the lines of: she takes care of me, the darling, or, I would be lost without her, the dear. The second one I wasn’t so sure about, and the first one, despite my imaginings—which had started almost the moment she had told me she did “things” for Mr. Kindt—I quickly decided just wasn’t true. Though she was awfully nice to have breathing in your direction as she sat cross-legged and barefoot in one of Mr. Kindt’s overstuffed couches or armchairs, Tulip didn’t particularly take care of anyone. Just about all she did for Mr. Kindt—at least that I was aware of—was hang around and help out with ambience and, occasionally, down in the little parlor on Orchard where she did some freelance work, give Mr. Kindt a tattoo. He had several, as I was to learn. They were rather intriguing. And certainly fit his general mysteries-and-perishable-properties-of-the-flesh aesthetic. I eventually got one too.

He had tiny blue eyes. He had a small head and a neck that looked like there was something wrong with it. Thick through the midsection, solid or had been, with stubby, hairless legs. So it was the eyes mostly, and it was his hands.

I soak them, he explained. You might consider it.

This was soon after I arrived, that second night. Tulip was there. Mr. Kindt was fully clothed. The heart monitor was sitting in a tangle of wires on a small table in the corner.

Look, he said, and, by way of demonstration, dropped his hands into a silver bowl with some kind of poorly mixed substance in it.

One hour a day, he said. Minimum. That allows the substance to seep in.

What is the substance?

Never mind, it’s extraordinarily beneficial. Tulip, take the bowl away, please, he said.

It’s true that Tulip did sometimes take Mr. Kindt’s bowls away. It occurred to me after I saw her do this for the first time that regardless of whether or not I was witnessing one of the “things” she said she did, I was seeing something worth paying attention to. Believe me, it was far from unpleasing to watch—both as it was occurring and afterward—tall, lovely Tulip uncurl herself, come slowly forward, then walk across the room carrying a silver bowl.

He was a weirdo, basically. He was short and fat and was in the habit of wearing out everyone around him with his talk. He had been a quiver maker or something back in the old country and had had his tough times. A transformation of sorts had allowed him to break with his countrymen and, though it had not been easy, come to the United States. He had landed, still very young, in Cooperstown, upstate, where he had made certain acquaintances, who had helped him to acquire the stake that would transform his fortunes. This, he told me, had involved swimming the considerable length of Cooperstown’s Lake Otsego on a bet.

Just like a fish, he said. An aquatic creature. In the Netherlands, my boy, I could swim all day and, when the weather was fine, all night. The gentlemen who told me I couldn’t do it were afterward obliged to pull significant sums from both their literal and figurative wallets, prompting one of them to cry. They did not, of course, appreciate it when I handed them my handkerchief. It was really most remarkable.

Basically, he had done well and then better and had come to New York. Here, through hard work, luck, and a certain measure of ruthlessness, he had been able to acquire “many objects, many pretty things.” One of his favorites, which I had a hard time understanding, was a hand-painted ceramic male duck, the green of whose feathers, he assured me, was most convincing. Another favorite, which hung on the wall in the kitchen beside the stove, was a framed daguerreotype of a young nun. The nun was in full nun regalia and was smiling. There was a kind of smudge over her right shoulder, like a messy thumbprint, which had been ascribed certain supernatural qualities of the prophetic variety. The smudge had apparently manifested itself during the developing process. No one had thought anything about it until on the very day the daguerreotype was brought home the young nun had been struck fatally on the right shoulder by a loose ceiling beam. Mr. Kindt told me he had a very handsome certificate somewhere, itself a clever counterfeit, that testified both to the veracity of the story and the authenticity of the daguerreotype. What pleased him most about his nun, he told me, was not the supposed mystical aspect of the image, but rather the early documentary evidence it provided of humankind’s ongoing efforts to harness modern technology to aid and abet the most ancient variety of fraud.

Unchecked, he said, our belief systems eventually overrun everything, blot out the world, at the very least rewrite the map. That these belief systems are most often built on the model of the Indian mound—layer after layer of oyster shells, animal bones, and miscellaneous bric-a-brac: everything plus dirt—which grew, more or less blindly, ever upward and outward, until the people standing on it were either swallowed up or rolled off, seems only to underscore their authority in the minds of the initiated. History, it has been said, Mr. Kindt noted, is but the analysis of the impact of our systems, all of which glow with varying brightness for a time then grow dim.

Mr. Kindt liked to talk about history in this way and more than once offered different models for understanding it. One of my favorites was that history was simply love and destruction intermingled, their twin strands reaching far into the past, where a man or a woman, long since forgotten, inferred only through faint echo, stood grieving over one who had been lost.

Often when we were together we would munch on something. That first evening we munched on crackers and some kind of cold fish paste.

It’s good, isn’t it? he said.

Hmmm, I said.

There is a fine salt-to-oil ratio, is there not?

I thought about it. I didn’t answer.

It is an acquired taste. You will acquire it.

I said I hoped so.

I am strange but you will get used to me, you know.

I looked at him.

Yes, you will get used to me.

I think, I said, I’m already starting to get used to you.

That’s wonderful, my boy. But don’t get used to me too quickly, otherwise you will get bored. So often, you see, they get bored.

They? I said.

A figure of speech, he said. He scooped a little paste out of the jar, daubed it onto a cracker, and handed it to me. My finger, in taking it, touched one of his. It seemed much softer than a finger should have been. When I had shoved his shoulder the previous night it had felt frail but normal. The substance, I thought. I shivered a little. His mouth made itself into a smile.

Contact, he said.

I took a bite of cracker and paste.

I’m not really much of a thief, I said.

Well, it was very nice of you to return that book, but I did really mean for you to keep it. By that of course I mean do what you wished with it. There is an excellent market in New York for such things.

So I heard.

I had brought it in with me and set it back in its place beside a tall cranberry-colored glass on a cluttered desk in a corner of the room. I do not in any way pride myself on maintaining standards of social decorum, but it did seem like pushing it a little to take someone’s property, sell it, then go to his house for dinner. And over the course of the day, dinner with Mr. Kindt and, possibly, you see, with Tulip, had grown to seem quite appealing.

Where’s Tulip?

Oh, she’s around. She likes to wander, or nibble at things in the kitchen, or to lie down in the bedroom. She’s a great one for lying down.

Mr. Kindt smiled.

I smiled.

Mr. Kindt took a bite of his own cracker and looked at me with his pretty little eyes.

She tells me you recently got out of the hospital.

I got hit by a truck. Broke a couple ribs and got banged up pretty nicely. I wasn’t in very good shape to start with. I’m better now.

Tulip tells me you have some stitches.

On my head, you want to see them?

I started to lean forward and part my hair, but Mr. Kindt waved his hand and laughed.

Oh, but that’s depressing, he said. Let’s not look at your scar. I feel like talking. Ask me a question to get me going, ask me a question about history.

From the start, the idea of getting Mr. Kindt going struck me as vaguely alarming, but I try not to be, as a general principle, against alarming things. So with bits of cold paste coating the outer enamel of my teeth, I asked Mr. Kindt how he felt about, say, the purchase by the English of Manhattan from the Indians.

Excellent, Henry, that’s an excellent question. It will allow me to speak about love and fish and history.

He rubbed his hands together, closed his eyes, opened them, and said, first of all, it was not a purchase, it was a loving exchange. Loving,
why?
you will say. What sort of word is
loving
in this context? It is
all wrong
—couldn’t be more awful, or at the very, very least incorrect. But you see
loving
has many meanings. Loving is both the intricacy and the expanse. Loving is the tool that moves accurately through the flesh. Loving is the net that is moving forward and the sea that is contracting, the North Sea. Secondly, he said, leaning toward then away from me, it was the Dutch, not the English, who fucked over in such emphatically loving fashion the Manhattan Indians. It was the Dutch who founded New Amsterdam, who sailed their ships up and down the Noort Rivier, who traded in guilders, who swept patterns into the sand that covered their floors, who pined privately during the long hard winters for their land so far away across and below the sea.

When he finished, we ate some more paste. Tulip had returned. She sat there, legs crossed, the lamplight loving away at her cheekbones.

Now,
you
ask me a question, Tulip, Mr. Kindt said.

Tulip blinked slowly, looked at me, then at Mr. Kindt.

Not just yet, she said.

Any old question, said Mr. Kindt.

We’re still digesting your last answer, Aris, Tulip said.

Is that right, my boy? said Mr. Kindt, looking at me.

I nodded.

It was intricate, I said.

Ah yes, which part?

The part about loving.

Well of course love is intricate, is the
most
intricate, is practically a synonym for intricacy. Of course
intricacy—
and as he said this he looked at Tulip out of the corner of his eye—has other synonyms.

Tulip leaned forward and took a cracker between two long white fingers.

O.K., she said. What do you mean by
intricacy?

Ah, said Mr. Kindt. He grinned. He began to talk. He discussed the patterns followed by weavers, the “sinister” labyrinths of electricity and silicon that compose the microchips our culture “gobbles like salted peanuts.” While he talked he moved around a great deal in his seat and waved his white hands through the air. Tulip looked very steadily in his direction the whole time he was talking, but I couldn’t tell if she was listening or not. I knew I wasn’t listening, at least not for part of it. And not because I didn’t want to: I sort of did, I sort of liked it. It’s just that for a couple of minutes, in between Mr. Kindt’s discussing herring tissue and composite fibers and the putative chemical structure of evil acts, it all started to seem uncomfortably surreal—the paste, the broken-looking little guy who I’d seen naked the night before and who clearly liked to talk too much, the gorgeous woman sitting cross-legged on the couch in front of me, my presence there, possibly the codeine-enhanced painkillers I was still taking for my ribs—in a way that transcended the merely bizarre and actually started a couple of tiny alarm bells going off, and I had to fight back an urge to stand up and walk out of the room.

Which is what I should have done, of course, right then, and might have done, except that for some reason they both laughed and I found myself laughing, even though I wasn’t sure what it was I was laughing about, and the tiny alarm bells stopped.

My dear boy, what would
you
be prepared to do under the aegis of love? said Mr. Kindt.

You mean in the same vein as what the Dutch so lovingly did to the Indians?

I mean it, of course, however you wish to take it.

I shrugged. I picked up something and put it in my mouth. I would do, you know, pretty much anything.

Give us an example of this “anything” you speak of.

You sure? I mean, there are a few different things that come to mind but they’re all pretty elaborate.

We love elaborate, don’t we, Tulip?

Tulip nodded.

O.K., I said. I told them about a scenario I had often entertained as a kid, involving a Jules Verne–type submarine that would take me to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where I would disembark, in a special suit, and enter a grotto then a tunnel down which I would spelunk for miles, overcoming, as I went, multiple traps and numerous multilimbed ferocious-toothed guards, then pick or force the lock on the small iron door behind which my father was supposed to be kept, only he wouldn’t be there. This would mean I would have to find my father’s captor, force him, through awful means, including chopping one of his legs off, to tell me where my father was. He would tell me that my father was now being held on an off-world colony whose location was the highest secret. He would die laughing in my face. I would spend the next several years conducting an investigation that would take me all over the world in search of the secret to my father’s whereabouts. I would finally get the answer in a bar made out of a shipping container on one of Jupiter’s nastier moons. When I found my father, in a detention tower near the Sea of Tranquility, on Earth’s moon, he would put his hand on my cheek and say, I knew you would find me, boy. I would pick him up in my arms. At that moment, my father’s captor, mysteriously resurrected, would spring the trap he had been waiting to spring for years, locking both my father and me up together in the tower’s chamber. There we would sit together and wait with no hope of rescue for certain death. Some dark, end-of-the-galaxy sci-fi music would play in the background. We would be happy though. Together, with our arms wrapped around each other’s shoulders or playing some game like Scrabble.