The Flamethrowers (15 page)

He wanted to know about me. Not just the usual things, small-town Reno stuff, giving out ribbons at rodeos, growing up with Scott and Andy, Uncle Bobby, who left the three of us, eight, nine, and ten years old, in the back of his car, gave us Cokes and cherry cigarettes to occupy us while he banged an old lady’s box, as he put it. Sandro liked those stories, but he also drew from me, that night in the Italian restaurant, things I hadn’t spoken about to anyone before. What I thought about as a child, the nature of my solitude, the person I was before I went through puberty and became more readably “girl.” The person I was before I became more readably “person.” We seemed to share certain ideas about what happens in childhood, when you have to place yourself under the sign of your own name, your face, your voice, your outward reality. When you become a fixed position, a thing to others and to yourself. There were times, I told him, at the age of five, six, seven, when it was a shock to me that I was trapped in my own body. Suddenly I would feel locked into an identity, trapped inside myself, as if the container of my person were some kind of terrible mistake. My own voice and arms, my name, seemed wrong. As if I were a dispersed set of nodes that had been falsely organized into a form, and I was living
in a nightmare, forced to see from out of this limited and unreal “me.” I wasn’t so sure I occupied one place, one person, and Sandro said this made sense, this instinct of a child, to question the artificial confines of personhood.

I tried to relay to him an almost inexplicable trauma, standing in my mother’s yard, in our tiny house in Reno, being unconvinced I was myself. He understood. He
wanted
to understand. At about that same age, I put short little pieces of string in a bottle. Each New Year’s Day I took one string out of the bottle and let the wind carry it away. If I looked which way it floated off, I would bring myself bad luck. I told Sandro how I used to sit for hours and stare at the kitchen stove, concentrating on the burner knobs, sensing, at a certain point, that I was ready to turn them on with my mind. That I could do it. I was on the verge of doing it, of finally turning on the stove with my mind, waiting for the coils to glow orange, and then I would ask myself, Are you ready for this? Are you ready to have your entire world turned upside down? (Because what happens once you know you can turn on the stove with your mind?) I wasn’t ready. I always pulled back from the brink. I told Sandro about the shortcut from school to home, the man I’d seen. He was standing in the bushes, which had an empty space about waist height, so that his face was hidden behind leaves, but I could see him from the waist down. He was masturbating. We both laughed at the ridiculous geometry of the bush, but then he said, “I really want to hurt the bastard for doing that to you.”

I told him how I ran all the way home, as if I were being pursued, in physical danger. Which of course I wasn’t.

“No,” Sandro said. “You
were
in danger. You absolutely were. It’s okay to let go of innocence. But when you’re ready,” he said. “On your own terms.”

Telling Sandro these things collapsed the layers between me as woman and me as child. Sandro saw both, loved both. He understood they were not the same. It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you. The person you were when you thought a
small cut string could determine the course of a year. You also became the person to whom certain things happened. Who passed into the realm where you no longer questioned the notion of being trapped in one form. You took on that form, that identity, hoped for its recognition from others, hoped someone would love it and you.

We were the last customers to leave the restaurant. Sandro walked me home under the holiday lights of Little Italy, little frosted bulbs glowing white in the cold air. I invited him up.

I didn’t have to be recognizably one thing. Even his touch relayed this. It almost restored some lost innocence.

Sandro’s strong, heavy arm stayed wrapped around me all night. Whenever I stirred, he pulled me closer. Later I saw this gesture, the pawing habit of Sandro’s sleeping limbs, as a blindness, an unconscious registration: body. Body that’s near. But in those first months I thought he was reaching for
me
.

*  *  *

For our third date, Sandro said he wanted to have me over, show me his place.

“What will I find there?” I asked, assuming he’d say dinner.

“Justice,” he said, in that half-joking, half-grave way of his. “I’ve got justice.”

It was a cold winter day. When I arrived, he had company. A friend just about to leave, who was sitting on a couch in Sandro’s loft, flipping through an art catalogue. He wore a peacoat and scarf, and his hair was darker, from winter light, or because it needed to be washed, but he looked otherwise just the same. Just the same.

Rain began to fall, wet darts hitting the windows of the loft. The rain fell harder and harder until the sound rose to an incredible crescendo, like glass beads pouring down over the front of Sandro’s building. The sky beyond the windows was dense and gray but with the curious buttery quality of daytime darkness, as if there were a yellowish light lurking behind the rain clouds. Time had slowed to an operatic present, a pure present.

“My very best friend,” Sandro said as he introduced us.

This friend of his stood.

In that strange light, the showering-glass-beads rain, I felt that I was seeing this person before me in two ways at once. Again—finally. And also for the very first time. His smile was simple and open. If there was the faintest edge of knowingness in it, it was purely of this type:
my friend digs you
. That was all.

I don’t want to know your name,
I’d said to him that night, when he was one of the people with the gun, Nadine and Thurman’s friend.

But now I did know his name: Ronnie Fontaine.

T
he year I turned four, Ronnie and Sandro were shining their flashlights along the planes of a young girl’s face.

She was a Greek slave girl carved in marble. She held a dove in her hands that she drew toward her lips, as if she were about to kiss the light little bird. Sandro and Ronnie had studied the girl night after night, tracing her time-softened contours with the directed glow of their flashlight beams. They were night guards at the Metropolitan Museum, eighteen years old, and they spent their evenings roaming the echoing and dark galleries, looking and narrating. The slave girl was a shared object of contemplation and fascination, the thing that marked the birth of their friendship and lifelong conversation.

We went together to see her, running through a downpour, water clattering from every shop awning, splashing us as taxis plowed through lakes of rain and barreled down Fifth Avenue, no one on the steps of the Met, the lobby filled with the echoes of people holding dripping umbrellas. It was our first outing as a threesome. Strangely, there was no awkwardness. I was sure Ronnie had said nothing to Sandro about his one night with me. Nor did I say anything. Ronnie had made it clear, in the purity of his smile that evening in Sandro’s loft, that it was not going to come up. We acted like we’d never met before
we met through Sandro. Or as if whether we had or hadn’t was of no relation to the present.

Which gave it, the past, a kind of mystery I couldn’t unknot, a certain meaning. Because if it meant nothing, why could it not be acknowledged? Why did it have to be erased?

*  *  *

We huddled in front her, this slave girl I’d already heard so much about from Sandro. She was a carved marble relief in full body profile. Thick, ancient feet in typical Greek sandals and a draping garment that attached to one shoulder. Ronnie and Sandro took turns speaking about her in serious tones, their voices somehow precisely calibrated to the low lights of the deserted hall where she was displayed. What fascinated them was a pocket of real air that flowed into and around the girl’s mouth and the dove in her hand, the bird’s small beak raised toward the girl’s lips.

Sandro pointed to the little recess between the bird and her mouth.

“This is the only part of the relief that’s three-dimensional. So what about the rest of her? Its flatness holds her away from us. She doesn’t share our space. She’s from another world, lost forever. Only that promise of the kiss shares our space.”

It was the kiss of life, he said, of energy, somehow activated and eternal, and I looked and wanted to feel that, the life breath of a dead slave that somehow bonded these two men to whom I was also bonded and in ways that didn’t feel exactly simple.

Ronnie said he loved her because she was so . . .
modern
. She interfered, he said, with the fantasy she was there to create. Slipping between the two, like everything in life worth lingering over. Real and false at once.

I stared at the private space between her lips and the bird she held. I looked at the cord around her neck, adornment of the most modest sort. Every aspect of her a modesty. All I could think was “This is a young slave.”

Later, when I said this to Sandro, he told me not to feel bad about
her. Think of all the anonymous slaves in history, he said.
This
one has been immortalized. She made her way through an unthinkable chasm of time. We are talking about her
now,
he said, and that in itself was a rare and special kind of emancipation.

*  *  *

I spent a lot of time with them looking at art. My tutors, Giddle said condescendingly. Your tutors are here, she’d say, as Ronnie and Sandro hopped on stools at the counter of the Trust E. They started going there and that was perhaps my influence, making the Trust E into a kind of destination.

Giddle treated them with patient indifference. They ordered hamburgers and coffee, always the same thing, and she attended to them last, gave them lousy service. That was yet another thing I misread, Giddle’s indifference to them. I attributed it to her general feelings in regard to the art world—that part of it where people made art, sold the art, got in return money, fame, recognition. Success was highly overrated, according to Giddle. “
Anyone
can be a success,” she said. “It’s so much more interesting to
not
want that.”

As I started to get to know Sandro and Ronnie and their friends, exactly the group of successful artists Giddle considered most compromised, I had her standards in my head. Not as my own standards, just a voice. The voice of a woman who said the three most cowardly acts were to exhibit ambition, to become famous, or to kill yourself.

*  *  *

By the time Sandro introduced me to Helen Hellenberger on Spring Street, just before I was set to depart for Reno to pick up the Moto Valera, that voice of Giddle’s, my first friend and New York influence, was as quiet as the trees above me. I wanted to make artworks and show them in a gallery. It was what I’d moved to New York to do.

It was through our conversations that I ended up wanting to go to the salt flats, but Sandro had his own ideas about roads and speed and land. He’d written a proposal when he was young, to make paintings
by the yard to be laid out over the entire length of the Autostrada del Sole, which connected the north and the south of Italy. Practical and industrial methods in service to something of no use. The autostrada was built by the government with funding and encouragement from the Valera Company. Sandro had a photo of his father and the Italian prime minister standing together to celebrate its inauguration in 1956. Its name, Autostrada del Sole, made it sound hopeful in a fascist kind of way. Anything “of the sun,” Sandro said, was code for fascism. “My family helped ruin Italy,” he said, “by building this superhighway, Milan to Bologna to Florence to Rome to Naples, but it made us rich.” Sandro said highways primed us for a separation from place, from actual life. The autostrada replaced life with road signs and place names. A white background and black lettering.
MILANO
. A reduction, Sandro said, to nothing but names.

“No different than here,” I said. “You might as well deplore all highways.”

He conceded it was true, but said America was
supposed
to be a place ruined and homogenized by highways, that that
was
its unique character, crass and vulgar sameness.

“It’s your destiny,” he said, smiling, his eyes filling with cold light.

“What’s your destiny?” I replied.

“To become an American citizen, of course.”

*  *  *

Sandro had encouraged the general drift of what I was after, doing something in the landscape relating to speed and movement. But when Ronnie suggested that Sandro should come through for me—use his connections to get me a Moto Valera to ride—Sandro’s enthusiasm all but ceased.

The only legitimate way to go to the Bonneville Salt Flats was to ride something truly fast, Ronnie said. “It has to be like she’s testing out a factory bike.”

Sandro was annoyed at Ronnie. I quietly hoped Ronnie would keep pressing him. I wanted to do a project at Bonneville, but I needed a
bike. I didn’t have the money to buy one, nor did I want to ask Sandro myself. I wasn’t sure if Ronnie was advocating for me out of some old affection or if it was about Sandro, ribbing him. A form of competition. Ronnie had Moto Valera calendars tacked up as a kind of joke, the girls with big breasts straddling gleaming machines, an upholstering of flesh over the entire back wall of his studio. He claimed it was in homage to Sandro, but it was also a kind of mockery, to flaunt imagery that Sandro wanted to forget. Or maybe it was a love of something that Sandro himself could not appreciate in such a dumb and direct way. Which wasn’t heckling, exactly, but something else, to fetishize elements of a friend’s life that the friend could not see—Sandro, who pretended to mispronounce Italian dishes on a restaurant menu. Twice I had heard Sandro tell someone he was Romanian when they asked where his accent was from. He felt that Italy was a backwater. He claimed he had almost no connection to it.