Gone Tomorrow, page 2
Robert sucked salt from the rim of his glass. He leaned back against the padded booth and squared his shoulders, puffing his cigarette with a luxurious air.
“These are rotten times,” he said without elaboration.
“I’ve been trying to reconstruct my memories of Paul. And I run up against the fact that I used to get so goddam drunk with him, my memory’s full of holes.”
Robert swallowed. “I will always remember Paul and the times we had,” he declared. “But I often wish we’d spoken more about inward things, not just to entertain ourselves.” He looked at me over a tasseled menu the color of dried blood. “Maybe we’ll have some little appetizers, sausages or what do you think?”
The waiter was stout and barrel-chested, and his oily black hair was going back. He bared his teeth in a rictus of grim cordiality. We ordered appetizers.
“Can you tell, Robert? Some of the help here really hates waiting on faggots.” I said it lightly, chewing my thumbnail.
“Surely not,” Robert scoffed. “I mean it’s the Chelsea, isn’t it.”
“I’m not oversensitive about that sort of thing. So if I think so, it’s probably true.”
The tables near our booth had filled with middle-aged couples whose outfits suggested the high fashion of an alternative universe. Two women wore fringed dresses with jet beads and tight hats. With them were two men, differently bald, who had hair sprouting from their cuffs and shirt cleavage, everywhere except their heads. I felt the Cuervo rising from my stomach to my brain, making me expansive and theatrical.
“I don’t want to make out that I’m haunted, ” I said. “What actually makes everything hard to reconcile is that the whole . . . finale is so murky. Paul came here in May or June of that year, and then I never saw him again. You had more of a day-to-day relationship with him, maybe it makes more sense to you. I feel certain that it makes more sense to you than to me. I like to think Paul and I were as close as we always said we were—I mean, I’m sure we were, but so often, things would be cranked up to a high nervous pitch. Either he was in transit, or I was, or one of us was somehow always wired. Boats passing in the night. There were times he came to New York, and we’d have dinner, but he’d also have ten other people to see, and business meetings, everything rushed, and you’d end up very concerned about having a ‘perfect moment.’ Then down in Colombia, when we really did have some time, he had to shoot the film. You couldn’t kick back and relax. Down there it was a lot of stress for me, too.” I took one of Robert’s cigarettes. I looked again at my moles. “I feel you get to know certain sides of people in the down time when there’s nothing happening, and there’s no pressure to put up a front. It just makes me wonder sometimes,” I sighed angrily, “if I ever really fucking knew him.”
There is no anger more pointless than that of people left behind. Robert topped off our drinks from the pitcher as a plate of sausages arrived. The waiter positioned it with a thoughtfulness that made me revise my opinion of him.
“Him and me . . .” Robert dipped his finger in the oily sauce, tasted it, nodded approval. “For years we saw each other every day. Played tennis, swam in the Isar, snorted fifty tons of coke together. But in the end . . . even when you’re quite clear about how a person is put together, events throw everything in doubt. Especially when the person’s not around to explain himself.”
“I never saw Paul as somebody who’d go out like that,” I said. “I don’t know why I didn’t. He was very Roman when all’s said and done.”
“Roman, yes. Yes, he was. But how can we ever predict such things?” Robert speared a sausage. He twirled his fork while his eyes probed the chandeliers philosophically. “Chekhov says, ‘Suicide is an undesirable phenomenon.’ It’s certainly true for the survivors.” He chewed a gob of meat and washed it down with his margarita. “Ever since I’m in New York, I drink like there’s no tomorrow.”
The chandeliers reminded me of a male brothel in Barcelona where I had paid a Tunisian mechanic per penetration, as if the boy had been a taxi with its meter running.
“Some days,” Robert was saying, “I want to drink the whole day off and just let everybody go to hell. Life can be such shit, who says we have to live every day of it? You should have days you can pull the blankets over your head and listen to Schubert as if you were dead. This is my philosophy: I’m forty-five, I’ve successfully lived a whole life without ever doing an honest day’s work, and if I want to drink, I’m entitled. If I want to smoke, I’ll smoke. Eat like a pig, fuck like a Turk, fine.”
“I’m too high strung,” I said, “to embrace that as a philosophy.”
Robert dabbed his lips. “Perhaps philosophy is a little grand,” he laughed. “I still have moments when I stupidly believe I’m going to live forever, you see, if I play my cards right. It’s then, as a rule, that I embark on some cosmic scheme of self-improvement.”
“If you start too ambitiously, your efforts are doomed to failure.”
“Set your sights low, in other words.”
“Haven’t we?”
A marimba band moved through the restaurant playing “La Paloma.” Since “La Paloma” was the theme music of a film we both had sentimental associations with, we shook our heads in amazement at the changes wrought by passing time. The waiter, whose resemblance to Peter Lorre became more pronounced each time he materialized, unloaded our dinner from a metal trolley.
Robert explained the libel suit that Valentina Vogel—Rudolph Bauer’s film editor, the woman who’d lived with Paul at the end—had recently brought against him. “In Germany, you need only one person to accuse you. That person says that you said such-and-such about them to a third person, who testifies. Probably it’s something left over from Nazi times.”
The third party was an actress I knew only from her movies. As Robert talked, the faces of both women sprayed across the video screen in my head: Valentina’s sinister features, imperious as a Wagnerian demiurge. The actress named Carmen, a decade older, wraith-thin and spaced out, the way she’d looked as a morphine-addicted, Third Reich glamour queen in one of Rudolph’s last movies.
“She’s not unpleasant-looking,” Robert said. “After all, she’s a movie star. But she gives off that dissatisfaction, like a personal smell. She’s like a ferret or a rat, sniffing in mucky corners, prancing on her hind legs for anyone placed a bit higher than herself.
“So I ran right into her at Bochum, outside a screening—there she is, snout poised for opportunity. She’s one of those brittle people one always wants to win over and loosen up. I hate those kinds of people! It brings out my masochist complex. I become a little child begging for approval. Stupidly, I invite her for a brandy, since the theater has a bar. Carmen tells me she’s working on a film that Valentina’s editing, and I say something like, ‘Oh, you better watch out for her, she’s the Angel of Death’—”
“She can’t sue you for that,” I protested, thinking it ironic that none of Paul’s friends, including me, had registered the extent of Valentina’s weirdness until quite recently, when one person talking to another person and then another puzzled out that her version of Paul’s death didn’t really add up.
Robert, wielding a nutcracker, snapped a lobster claw in half.
“By law, yes, she can, defecation of character or whatever it’s called,” he sighed, dipping lobster meat in a cup of butter. “Even if she wins, though, her lawyers will cost her more than she can get from me. Funny, these days you can kill people with no problem. You just have to watch what you say about them.”
“She always was a strange sort of person.” I recalled her voice: a sharp alto given to sudden harsh intakes of breath as if the utterances of other people shocked her. “In Colombia, she kept herself a bit aloof, a little . . . precious is the word that comes to mind.” But very much a player, I thought, remembering: something inside me resisted telling Robert about our games, our little intrigues, during the shooting of that film, but I knew I would spill them out eventually. “I should think bringing this kind of lawsuit would just focus more attention on, uh, the strange fact that she was around when all these people died. There was Rudolph, there was Ray, finally Paul . . .” I ticked them off on my fingers. “Even if she’s not the Black Widow, she’s certainly some kind of death groupie . . .”
Robert waved off the specter of Valentina Vogel.
“Later for her. Tell me about New York.”
We finished dinner in the welcome afterglow of the departed musicians.
“Let’s go to the roof,” Robert said.
We fetched cigarettes from Robert’s room on the fifth floor, and then knocked at a top floor apartment belonging to a social worker he had interviewed for his documentary. The social worker was a nervous woman of fifty with short salt-and-pepper hair. Her apartment was clean, beige, invested-in. She wanted us to look at videotapes of teen gangs in the South Bronx. Several of her friends, residents of the hotel, lounged on modular furniture, smoking grass, watching the tapes. An Eric Dolphy album was playing. Robert focused his charm on the task of boosting two large vodka drinks. Then we went up to the roof.
There was a redwood picnic table near an opaque skylight, surrounded by clay pots of ficus and cacti. Robert pointed out a wiry profusion of sensitive plant and ran his fingertip along a frond, causing the leaves to curl. The floodlit tips of the cityscape resembled a painted backdrop. Thin, black clouds bruised the indigo sky.
“In this trial,” I said, “I bet I could testify for you, as a character witness or whatever.”
Robert seemed to consider the effect of me on a witness stand and said he didn’t think it would be necessary. Eric Dolphy riffs swelled pleasantly from below.
“It’s complicated,” he said. He straddled the redwood bench and stared at the Empire State Building. Over the roof’s edge a faint nimbus of night traffic glowed. He lit a small cigar, forgetting not to inhale.
I said, somewhat more dramatically than I intended: “Well? What’s true and what isn’t?”
Robert, choking, waved the cigar like a spunk. His expression said that all truth was relative and the truth of what we were talking about was even more relative than most truth. A thin shell of light from the skylight backlit the picnic table and Robert’s plaid shirt, his brushy hair.
“Valentina can’t afford to lose this lawsuit,” he said, “because Paul’s family is suing her for his property. If I prove in court that she was somehow improperly involved in his death, the parents can use that to dispute this document she has—”
“He left a will?”
“It’s a kind of will. Technically, legally, I don’t know exactly what it’s considered to be. Paul was a lawyer, though, so either it’s valid, or else he was really clever, and it isn’t.”
Robert said that Valentina’s suit against him, though important to her, was frivolous, and would be settled quickly. But the parents’ suit against Valentina might drag on for years.
“Who has the movies,” I asked. “I mean the ones he directed. Who has them right this minute?”
Robert went down for more liquor. He came back with a bottle, tonic, a tumbler of ice, a small dish of lime slices. I exclaimed at the sudden abundance and lit a joint.
“Let me tell you about Colombia,” I offered, wheezing out a lungful of dope.
“Excellent,” Robert said. “This will be the third or fourth version I’ve gotten. The novelist inside me rejoices.”
“We had no idea what fate held in store for anybody,” I said. “You have to picture all this by the way I tell it to you. I mean it was his movie, but it’s kind of my movie too. Bearing us all to the bloody slaughterhouse.”
“Fantasy island,” Robert said, coughing up smoke, splashing vodka over ice.
“The way is slippery, you understand. No flares or impaled natives’ heads to mark the route.” I began to whisper. “Only this bottle of Smirnoff’s and these blinking skyscrapers.” They were starting to inhabit me, all of them: Paul, Irma, Ray, Valentina. And Michael. Yes, especially Michael. “Oh yes, amigo. There we were, playing a hand of Where He Shoves It . . .” Moved by a stoned, mournful, expansive impulse I burst into song: “South of the border, down Mexico way . . .”
“You are bombed, my dear.”
“Just setting up the mood. We want that Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich atmosphere . . .” I stalked around the picnic table, hunching my shoulder like Nosferatu. I had an exalting sense of the Chelsea roof as the recurring center of a cosmic, convoluted narrative. I really did feel myself a tenant in space and time, whisked back to the patio of the Caribe or the Capilla del Mar, flanked by sex-hungry soldiers waving their submachine guns. “You are getting the altitude sickness, señor. And now we are in the bruise-purple clouds that squat bestride the majestic Andes . . . it was a long time ago, amigo . . . Who would believe we would ever be this old this tired-out this hopeless . . . our sagging bellies dewlapped like bulls’ throats, these hanging wallets of flesh . . . and as far as my memory goes, I had him buried as decently as the place would permit . . .”
I took a long hit off the joint and felt the empty air where I thought my head was.
2
Bogotá, 1984
It was hideously muggy in the airport and no one on the ground spoke anything except Spanish. The air had the cloying dampness of doom-freighted dreams, and as I wandered under the vaulted ceiling of the upper deck, details of the previous night’s dream came back to me. It had involved a restaurant kitchen and an exchange of automobiles and repeatedly thwarted escapes from a setting my brain had manufactured from bits of my hometown outside Rochester, the housing projects near the Fourteenth Street exit of FDR Drive, and the island of Santorini in Greece. The green bag slung over my shoulder had also been with me in the dream.
Unhelpful phrases drifted into my mind from some flight-numb Babel of movie lingo. Las teclas de mando. El cristal opaco. Dispositivo de sincronization. Chaotic crowds surged through the building, marching over the shiny ecru floors and strips of crimson carpeting, up and down stubby escalators. I pictured tropically costumed fire ants gnawing their way through the landscape, bearing off shreds of linoleum, wrought iron, plastic, and plush leatherette in their clacking mandibles. They would leave nothing behind but the building outline, a blueprint of filaments that would stand for a moment like something in a cartoon before it collapsed into smouldering dust.
Loudspeakers layered the confusion. Flights were boarding, flights were departing, flights were delayed. But which flights, at what gates, how soon, how long, it was impossible to tell. Through the massive windows a sky dotted with white pastry clouds. From the density of human traffic it looked as though the entire population had chosen to flee on the same afternoon. Yet there was something inertial and self-defeating in all the excited motion, a feeling that the swarm was really going nowhere, circling boarding lounges and duty-free shops and the incongruous neon cocktail bars like jaded shoppers picking over a depleted mall.
It was the kind of airport where inconvenient political types and luckless bystanders were sometimes mowed down in crossfire. Fear wafted off certain people, rolled through the air of departure gates, pooled around public telephones and ticket counters. Fear laced the ambient chill of souvenir shops and boutiques, and in the sultry open passages that caught the heat of the day, fear led the fearful traveler to anticipate the stench of something large and dead trapped under the glistening floor.
Sound and image peeled apart. In a men’s room mirror I saw a short, narrow man, his face lined by incipient jowls, shaggy black hair turning glossy with sweat. “That’s you,’’ I told myself disgustedly. I had “retired” from acting and now acknowledged my reluctance to commit my postsurgical face to celluloid, tracing the lines of my scars with a finger. Blue sunglasses completed a punky abstraction. I removed the shades and examined my Levi’s, ripped at the knees in advance of the fashion, my hand-stitched shirt wilting in the heat, my clown-white skin. I looked enough like a queer to cause trouble in South America. I hoped the trouble would come later on. At a row of urinals behind me, men pulled their cocks out wearily, as if handling unreliable appliances.
I leaned into my reflection and bared my teeth. My mouth is one of my better features. Somewhere along the gum behind the last of my upper molars, I felt the jagged outcrop of what I concluded was an emerging wisdom tooth. It felt like a tiny chicken bone or metal spoke. The tissue around it was raw, since my finger came out red.
It was easy to lose my identity in a place that was more or less nowhere. If someone had asked my business, I might have pulled Paul’s film script from my bag and pointed out my lines, run through with yellow marker. On the other hand, my link to any film set or indeed to any narrative felt extremely tenuous.
The agent at the Avianca counter had the wary face of a scavenging owl, puce fingernails honed into lethal weapons. With insistent gestures, irritatingly overdrawn for the amusement of people behind me on line, she indicated that connecting flights to Barranquilla Santa Marta Cartagena departed from a different airport. I had missed the 2:30 shuttle. I could get another one. Yes, I could use the same ticket. The bus was outside.
As she enumerated these facts in a brutal parody of Americanese, the agent’s face conveyed disgust at my presence in the airport, and in the country generally. She threw in “have a nice day” as a parting malediction.
I stumbled through automatic doors into the glare of day. A fluttering, fiery wind smelling of gasoline and putrefaction rolled across my face and clattered through the diseased palms along the road divider. On the bus, I pretended not to understand that the driver wanted money for the trip. I waved my ticket, gestured at the receding airport. I emitted a variety of frustrated noises to convey my belief that the ticket included the price of the bus ride.
