Страница 191 из 206
Kitsey as a child. Fine hair straggling in her face. Shut up you goofballs. Cut it out or I’ll tell.
Last but not least—
(my pen hovering over this line)
last but not least I want to tell you how beautiful you looked at the party and how touched I was that you wore my mother’s earrings. She was crazy about Andy—she would have loved you too, and would have loved for us to be together. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. But I do hope things work out for you. Really.
Best love,
Theo
Sealed; addressed; put aside. They’d have stamps at the front desk.
Dear Hobie,
This is a hard letter to write and I’m sorry to be writing it.
Alternate sweats and frosts. I was seeing green spots. My fever was so high the walls seemed to be shrinking.
This isn’t about the bad pieces I’ve sold. I expect you’ll hear soon enough what it’s about.
Nitric acid. Lampblack. Furniture, like all living things, acquired marks and scars over the course of time.
The effects of time, visible and invisible.
and, I don’t quite know how to say this but I guess what I’m thinking about is this sick puppy my mother and I found on the street in Chinatown. She was lying in a space between two garbage cans. She was a baby pit bull. Smelly, dirty. Skin and bones. Too weak to stand up. People just walking by her. And I got upset and my mother promised me that we’d pick her up if she was still there when we finished eating. And when we got out of the restaurant, there she still was. So we hailed a cab, I carried her in my arms, and when we got her home my mother made her a box in the kitchen and she was so happy and licked our faces and drank a ton of water and ate the dog food we bought her and threw it all right back up.
Well to make a long story short, she died. It wasn’t our fault. We felt like it was. We took her in to the vet, and bought her special food, but she only got sicker and sicker. We were both really fond of her by this time. And my mother took her in again, to a specialist at the Animal Medical Center. And the vet said—this dog has a disease, which I forget the name of, and she had it when you found her, and I know this is not what you want to hear but it is going to be a whole lot kinder if you euthanize her right now
My hand had been flying in reckless jerks and starts across the paper. But at the end of the page while reaching for another, I stopped, appalled. What I’d experienced as weightlessness, a sort of sweeping, last-chance glide, was not at all the eloquent and affecting farewell I’d imagined. The handwriting sloped and slopped all over the place and was not intelligent or coherent or even legible. There had to be some much briefer, and simpler, way to thank Hobie and say what I had to say: namely, that he shouldn’t feel bad, he’d always been good to me and done his best to help me, just as my mother and I had done our best to help this baby pit bull, who—it was actually a pertinent point, only I didn’t want to spin the story out too long—for all her sweet-tempered qualities had been incredibly destructive in the days leading to her death, she’d pretty much destroyed the whole apartment and ripped our sofa to pieces.
Maudlin, self-indulgent, tasteless. My throat felt as if the lining had been scraped out with a razor.
Off comes the upholstery. Look here: we have woodworm. We’ll have to treat it with Cuprinol.
The night I’d overdosed in Hobie’s upstairs bathroom, expecting not to wake up and waking up anyway with my cheek on the trippy old hexagonal floor tile, I’d been amazed at exactly how radiant a pre-war bathroom with plain white fittings could be when you were looking at it from the afterlife.
The begi
Fabelhaft. Having the best fun ever.
One thing at a time. Aspirins. Cold water from the minibar. The aspirins rasped and stuck in my chest, like swallowing gravel, and I pounded trying to get them down, the booze had made me feel a whole lot sicker, thirsty, confused, fish hooks in my throat, water trickling absurdly down my cheeks, gasping and wheezing, I’d opened the wine as a treat (supposedly) but it was going down like turpentine, burning and razoring around in my stomach, should I run a bath, should I call down for something hot, something simple, broth or tea? No: the thing was simply to finish the wine or maybe just go right ahead and start in on the vodka; somewhere online I’d read that only two per cent of attempted suicides by overdose were successful, which seemed like an absurdly low number although one unfortunately borne out by previous experience. It aint go
I no longer considered my body my own. It had ceased to belong to me. My hands, moving, felt separate, floating of their own accord, and when I stood it was like operating a marionette, unfolding myself, rising jerkily on strings.
Hobie had told me that when he was a young man he drank Cutty Sark because it was Hart Crane’s whiskey. Cutty Sark means Short Skirt.
Pale green walls in the piano room, palm trees and pistachio ices.
Ice-coated windows. Unheated rooms of Hobie’s childhood.
The Old Masters, they were never wrong.
What did I think, what did I feel?
It hurt to breathe. The packet of heroin was in the night table on the other side of the bed. But though my dad, with his unflagging love for show-biz hell, would have adored the whole set up—dope, dirty ashtray, booze and all—I couldn’t quite bear the thought of being found sprawled out in my complimentary hotel robe like a has-been lounge singer. The thing to do was clean up, shower and shave and put on my suit so I didn’t look too seedy when they found me and only then, at the last, after the night chambermaids were off duty, take the Do Not Disturb sign off the door: better if they found me first thing, I didn’t want them to find me from the smell.
It felt like a lifetime had come and gone since my night with Pippa and I thought how happy I’d been, rushing to meet her in the sharp-edged winter darkness, my elation at spotting her under a streetlamp out in front of Film Forum and how I’d stood on the corner to savor it—the joy of watching her watch for me. Her expectant watching-the-crowd face. Me she was watching for: me. And the heart-shock of believing, for only a moment, that you might just have what could never be yours.
Suit from the closet. Shirts all dirty. Why hadn’t I thought to send one out? My shoes were waterlogged and wrecked which added a final sorry note to the picture—but no (pausing muddled in the middle of the room), was I going to lay myself out fully dressed, shoes and all, like a corpse on a slab? I’d broken out in a cold sweat, shivers and chills again, the whole routine. I needed to sit down. Maybe I was going to have to re-think the whole presentation. Tear up the letters. Make it look like an accident. Much nicer if it looked like I was on my way to some mysterious dress-up party, just having a bump on the way out—sitting on the edge of the bed, little too much, black sparklers and fizz-pops, keeling over deliciously. Whoops.
White wings of tumult. Ru
Then—at a blare of trumpets—I started. The liturgical chant had given way to a burst of inappropriately festive orchestration. Melodic, brassy. A wave of frustration boiled up in me. Nutcracker Suite. All wrong. All wrong. A full-blooded Seasonal Extravaganza wasn’t at all the note to go out on, dashing orchestral number, March of the Something Something, and all at once my stomach heaved, violent pitch right into my throat, it felt like I’d swallowed a quart of lemon juice and the next thing I knew almost before I could lurch for the wastebasket it was all coming up in a clear acid gush, wave after wave after yellowy wave.