PERMANENCE
Heat and anger are the main ingredients in hell.
When September is hotter than August, it feels like betrayal. My partner is cheating on me—with his camera. At 8:00 a.m. on what felt like an otherwise lazy Saturday morning, he filled his bag with a couple of Nikons and firmly said that he’d see me later. I protested, but the only answer I received was the slam of our front door. Apparently, he wanted to be alone with some muse who didn’t appear to be me, and the bruise of jealousy is quite tender. I am pissed off: to be set aside, at my immaturity, at my even being pissed off. It is humiliating to have art as a rival lover. I am not art; he has not once lifted the camera to photograph me.
No reason to sit in the apartment marinating in my petulance and sweat. Instead, I choose “revenge dressing.” Simply, I will burn through my rage by wriggling into the hottest look I own: a tiny knock-off Missoni sundress and that ends slightly south of my ass. If an opportunist looks long enough and I move just so, they might get a good view. In the cupboard, I paw through my shoes. Nice. Platform sandals. Gorgeous. I turn them over in my fingers, admiring their lift, the lilt they will give my steps.
Fuck it.
I pitch them to the back of the cupboard. While I appreciate their potential, those are take-a-taxi shoes. My seethe will only dissipate with distance, so I jam my feet into the rather orthopedic flip-flops I wear every day. New York has a high-heeled reputation, but comfort footwear shops are found throughout the city. Forget the sexy shoes. I accessorize my outfit by slamming the door.
Today I am attention greedy and I know this is patently ridiculous. I can have no fault with my neighbors if they are annoyed by my behavior. Rage vibrates through my synapses and my better self is being thrashed by a sense of entitlement. Entitlement, I guess, to his time, energy, love. No—screw love, I mean straight-on lurid and dirty lust. And artists are natural philanders! Even the chaste ones. There is always something else in their life, if not always someone.
Of all the things you can find in New York City, on this blistering hot day it was evident that I should just go out and find my own damn self. I start down the staircase and head for the tenement’s front door.
I don’t live with him because my place on 78th street is cheap. My mattress has no sheets, I never unpacked the kitchen, and I imagine the place is kind of dusty by now. I store my official life there.
His tenement apartment was last renovated in the 1930s. Our neighbors are a famous comedian and a deadbeat daughter who was born to rent-control in 1947. She can’t manage to hold down the most basic job to pay her $87/month rent; her main occupation is nude sunbathing on her fire escape. Downtown there are poetry readings and kitchen bathtubs, sweet and porky char siu bao on Saturday mornings, nauseating summer trash piles, Chick Correa at our local red sauce place, flamenco in tiny bars, and philoso-porn at the Angelika. I might as well carry binoculars; it’s all a bit like birdwatching, or maybe like reading a brittle newspaper found shoved inside a wall. When I’m downtown, I’m like a prop, like an artist’s new paintbrush, or discarded furniture picked off the street. Or maybe I’m more transient, like a passing evening storm that tosses your spindly $10 sidewalk umbrella into a heap of sticks in the street. Maybe I am just that cheap umbrella.
He’s frank about enjoying a piece of tail thirty years his junior and the doting derision I serve up with it. We accept that our life together is temporary. This all must end in a couple of weeks, or maybe several months, or certainly in a few years. It will be over. I will catch the 6 train uptown, and I won’t come back.
***
My flip-flops smack the worn marble steps, all seventy-eight of them. God it’s awful in here today, fish sauce and decomposition. I know better than to breathe below the second floor. I hold my breath and jog past the garbage cans sitting at the bottom of the stairs. This place is like my high school history class, the part where you learn about tenements and Jacob Riis and the Gilded Age and the Other Half. I steel myself for the hot afternoon sun outside. Wrenching open the battered front door is like opening up the oven and climbing in.
The air is too thick to breathe in the sun. Turning onto Spring Street, I dive for the shady side of the street. The usual smattering of tourists drifts even more slowly down Broadway in this day’s heat. Why do they come here in the summer, anyway? Their gait is stiff with what I imagine to be fear and disappointment. They frantically flip through guidebooks, wondering where they have gone wrong, wondering why the damn book wanted them to come to this neighborhood.
I walk. I am not here to make art. I do not think intellectual musings. I am not old and did not homestead in 1960s SoHo. I’m not rich enough not to care about money. I’m unworthy, perhaps. Barely decorative. I wear a short dress, but I’m no model. I am on display, as any New Yorker is on display, crying in the street without any privacy, yet somehow with total privacy. Sunglasses hide it all.
Shoppers enter and exit stores, freeing cold blasts of air onto the sidewalk. Yes, lemon, please, and a Godsend of a gelato is placed in my hands. New Yorkers slump in café chairs, sliding into Saturday evening on a sluice of alcohol. This neighborhood wasn’t built for sundresses, nor was it built as a neighborhood. I weave around the shoppers and the dog shit. My aggravation keeps me moving. Car tires sizzle as they bump over the Belgian block pavers. I’m thankful I didn’t wear those platforms. I trudge north to Bleecker.
Where to? The point is I’m not going home. Not to his home. Not to my home. If you aren’t happy in New York, you can go find some other reality for a couple of hours. You can impersonate someone else, which is a useful skill if your own persona is bland, annoying, or outright dangerous. If you aren’t any good at that, just pull up a park bench or a barstool and enjoy New York’s other great resource: other people.
As I turn onto 21st Street, I see the bobbing hard hats of workers up on the trestle, the old rusted High Line, ripping out the marauding plant life from between the railroad ties. There’s a rumor some group wants to put a park up there. It used to be a rail line, gouging its way through old factories along the West Side Highway to pick up biscuits and sides of beef. Beyond, I see New Jersey. Maybe I can catch a breeze near the river while I contemplate leaving the city, again.
I pass under the trestle, my eye on the shoreline, when a glass door swings open on my left. On a wave of blessedly frigid air conditioning, a white-haired man with a wide smile and Chuck Taylors steps out in front of me. I stumble to prevent running into him. His arms are outstretched like he is about to break into song.
What fresh hell now, New York? I look at him quizzically. Does he need me to call 911? Or is this the newest way to pick up young women in Chelsea?
“Quick! Come in here!” He holds open the gallery door for me. My bones feel brittle with the heat and there is just no fucking way I am going to turn down that air conditioning. Stepping inside Gagosian, my overheated skin is instantly drenched with condensation from the cool air. It’s like a smack in the face, the kind one used to give the girl in old movies to get her to revive. People mill about the gallery. The breath I draw into my lungs is heavy with cold.
“It feels amazing in here,” I say, giddy at my rescue from the hot afternoon. He smiles. It is almost as if he has been waiting patiently for me to arrive. Maybe I missed the line in my diary where we had penciled in our meeting.
He asks, “Do you like de Kooning?” His hand drifts around the room, again with a sense of Broadway theatrics. Twenty-some canvases line the stark white walls. Watery pools of color luminesce from the polished concrete floor below each painting.
De Kooning. I know his name. His canvases are large and his color is riotous, but that I can tell from standing here in the gallery. I didn’t need a Twentieth Century Art History course in college to tell me that. I know he is dead, after a cursory glance at the introductory signage. Otherwise, I’m completely ignorant. I nod at canvases, the colors explosive under de Kooning’s hand. “Go on. Tell me what I need to know.”
He begins, and I listen. We admire the shape of strokes. We watch de Kooning morph from the 1940s to the 1980s, wondering at the qualities of each canvas. There are pink fields of flesh. Heavy green scrapes. Phthalo green, I think. I took painting in college not because I was an art major, but because I didn’t know anything about the act of painting. Beats me why, but perhaps it was for just this very conversation, to know what a palette knife is and how it feels in your hand as you press pigment suspended in the soft smush of some medium.
Two hours pass in that most New York of spaces. I don’t specifically mean the gallery, but just one of the many spaces on the island of Manhattan that bring two people together. Space in New York is made of time, the people who enter it, and all the other places they have been prior to connecting with you. Forget the sightseeing punch list. Just put on your shoes and drift. It doesn’t really matter where.
***
It’s 8:00 p.m when I drag myself back up the worn marble steps to our apartment. Spread across the table in the sitting room are the prints he picked up at Duggal this morning. He persists in shooting film. When he gets the prints back, he makes detailed notes in a journal about each exposure, then slides it into its own acid-free envelope, stored in gray archival boxes. The photographs are supposed to last longer when stored with care and he spends a lot of money on these containers. The apartment is as much an archive as a living space.
He looks up as I enter and lowers the loupe he holds in his right hand, staring. Liking what he sees, a wide adolescent grin spreads across his face.
“Have a good day?” I ask him. I kick off my rather not-fresh sandals and trudge into the kitchen to scrub the city dust from my feet in the clawfoot tub. He says nothing until I walk back into the sitting room, his head lolling to the side as he considers me.
Finally, he speaks. “Can you promise me one thing, Melly?”
“What’s that?”
“When you finally leave me, please do it for someone younger and more attractive than that guy you were talking to in Gagosian. I hit three galleries over there this afternoon and every time I passed back by, you guys were still in that de Kooning show. It looked like he had a lot to say.” His eyebrows raised as he chuckled. “But, I’ll be honest, if you were walking by in Tyvek coveralls, I’d have a lot to say too.”
Dragging a chair close to his, I sit down and park my bare tired feet on his thigh.
“I don’t even know where to begin with that one,” I say, shaking my head, “I didn’t plan to go in there, but he opened the door, and I thought, sure. Besides, air conditioning.” I wave my hand at the fans spinning in the room. “I know you’d feel the same. Sometimes you just have to check it out.”
He pats my leg, placing it gently on the floor as he rises from his chair and disappears into the bedroom. Suddenly there is a click, a clunk, and then the hum of a compressor.
He peers back into the sitting room, with a look of feigned innocence, hilarious under his wiry white eyebrows. His lips slip into a grin, while I clasp my hands together over my heart in appreciation. Smiling at him, I slip into the kitchen to retrieve our half-full bottle of wine from last night and two glasses.
He’s back to working on the photographs as I enter the room. When I set the bottle on the table, he says, “The air conditioner. It’s for the photographs.”
***
Becky Fifield grew up in rural Maryland and now lives in the Hudson Valley. Her short stories have been featured in Brushfire, The Ignatian, Caveat Lector, and Blue Lake Review. Learn more at rlfifield.net.
