“Oh yes, I forgot you Americans have a different interpretation for that word.”
“Why don’t you drop the ‘you Americans’ line right now.”
I said this without anger or edge—rather with what I hoped was an ironic smile on my face.
“You are so profoundly direct, Mr. New Yorker. And I must admit that I’ve forgotten your name.”
I told him. Then he said:
“Let me guess? Being a rather serious chappie, you prefer Thomas to Tom or, God forbid, Tommy.”
“Thomas works.”
“Then I shall call you ‘Tommy.’ Or perhaps ‘Tommy Boy,’ just to be contrary. So Tommy Boy, do you smoke?”
“I’m not a Mormon . . . and yes, I roll my own.”
“How John Wayne of you.”
“You really do talk a load of bullshit for an evidently talented man.”
That last part of my statement caught his attention. After lifting the now-boiled kettle, then scalding a large brown porcelain teapot before reaching for a dark green tin, opening it, and heaping three spoonfuls of tea into the pot, he asked:
“What makes you think I have any talent whatsoever?”
“The two canvases on the walls.”
“You want to buy one?”
“If I’m here to inquire about renting a room, I doubt I can afford your prices.”
“How do you know that I’m so expensive?”
“Just a hunch.”
He now poured the boiling water into the pot, covered it, and glanced at his watch.
“It needs four minutes to draw properly . . . unless you are one of those unfortunates who like your tea the color of weak piss.”
“Dark piss will do me fine.”
He tossed me a half-crumpled pack of Gauloises.
“Here, have a proper smoke,” he said.
I caught the pack, helped myself to a Gauloises, lit it up, took a long, deep drag—and had that metallic, exhaust pipe gustatory sensation which always accompanies smoking a Gauloises.
“How much do you think one of these paintings goes for?” Fitzsimons-Ross asked me.
“The art market is something I know nothing about . . . especially the European art market.”
“If this was in the Kirkland Gallery in Belgravia—where I usually exhibit—you’d be paying just under three thousand pounds for the privilege of hanging a Fitzsimons-Ross on one of your walls.”
“That’s serious money.”
“S
emi
-serious. I’m not in the Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud league. Still David Sylvester did once compare me to Rothko. You know Sylvester?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Possibly the most influential postwar art critic in the UK.”
“Bravo to you. And he’s right. There’s a decided
Rothko Goes Greek Island
color spectrum to those two paintings.”
“That’s facile.”
“You don’t like being compared to Rothko?”
“Not when I am completely opposed to everything that Rothko stood for.”
“Which was?”
“Geometric gloom. Fucking portals in every corner of his fucking funereal paintings. All those blood-red earth tones shaded downwards into shadow and somber self-pity.”
“I think I was talking about your use of rectangular shapes and color.”
“And that makes me like cut-my-wrists Mark
Götterdämmerung
Rothko?”
“You’re the first artist I’ve ever met who doesn’t admire him.”
“So you’ve lost your Rothko virginity. Congratulations. I deflowered you.”
“Am I supposed to snicker quietly—or get all offensive—about such a profoundly stupid comment? I mean, I hate to break it to you: your paintings show real talent. Your repartee, on the other hand, is crap.”
Fitzsimons-Ross paused for a moment to stub out his Gauloises and pour the tea. He then opened the small fridge, in which were kept several bottles of wine, several bottles of beer, an open freezer compartment from which protruded a Russian bottle of vodka (or, at least I presumed it vodka, as it had Cyrillic lettering on the label covering its plain glass bottom), and a single bottle of milk. He reached for the milk, pulled out the stopper, and poured such a considerable amount of white liquid into my cup of tea that it suddenly went a particularly pedestrian shade of brown—the color of a street puddle.
“Don’t look horrified,” he said. “This is how tea is meant to be drunk. Sugar?”
I accepted a heaped teaspoon. He pointed to one of the bentwood chairs. I sat down. He fired up another Gauloises, then asked:
“So, let me guess. You write. And you’re here to write the Great American Novel or some such tosh.”
“Yes, I write. But not novels.”
“Oh God, don’t tell me you’re a fucking poet. Met far too many fucking poets in the one year I was at Trinity College Dublin. They all smelled and had bad teeth and sat around pubs like McDaid’s, begrudging the world, telling each other how brilliant they were, berating the editor of some pathetic little magazine for daring to suggest an editorial cut or two, and generally making everyone in earshot never want to read a fucking poem again.”
“Not that you have a strong opinion about such things.”
“Glad you noticed that.”
“Anyway, I’m not a ‘fucking poet.’”
I briefly told him what I did—mentioning the book that was published, and the book that had been commissioned.
“Might I see a copy of this book?” he asked.
“Yes, you might. And you’re from Dublin?”
“Just outside. Wicklow. Ever been there?”
“Once. Powerscourt. Glendalough. Roundwood.”
“That’s my parish, Roundwood.”
“A very beautiful one at that.”
“Roundwood House was the family manse. Classic Anglo-Irish Big House. Before my father lost it all.”
“And how did he do that?”
“The usual Irish way. Drink and debt.”
“That sounds like a good story. Tell me more.”
“Are you going to take all this down afterward and perhaps use it against me?”
“I’m a writer—so, yes, there is that risk. But does that really worry you?”
“Hardly. Then again, who’s going to read what you write?”
“My last book sold eighteen hundred copies—so you do have a point there . . .”
He studied me with care.
“I can’t rile you, can I?”
“No doubt you’ll continue to try. A fast question before I even look at the room. And the question is one word: quiet? Though I approve of your taste in music . . . do you blare it all the time?”
“Frequently, yes.”
“Then there’s no real point discussing anything to do with the room, as I won’t be able to live in a place where there’s loud music.”
“A
sensitive artiste,
are we?”
“I need silence when I write, that’s all.”
“And I need the rent money you’ll pay me—so perhaps we can work out an arrangement. Especially as I usually paint in silence.”
“Then why did you say you blare music?”
“Because I felt like being a cunt . . . which I am most of the time.”
“So if I take the room . . . do I have your assurance that, when I’m writing or sleeping . . .”
“There will be quiet.”
Given his prior need to prod and poke at me with his sardonic banter, it surprised me to hear him say this last statement so reassuringly. For all his talk about his big-deal London gallery, money was obviously a problem . . . the mention of his wastrel daddy a further hint that this was a man who might be worried about keeping this roof over his head.
“And how much is the room per month?” I asked.
“Let’s talk about that after you’ve seen it.”
Then putting his cup of tea down, he said, “Ready for an inspection tour?”
We stood up.
“Down here is my realm. The studio, the kitchen, the living area. I sleep in there . . .”
He pointed to a door off a far corner of the studio area. It was open—and I could see a simple double bed, immaculately made, the sheets crisp, ultra bleached.
“You’ve lived in Greece, haven’t you?” I asked.
“Is it that obvious?”
“Absolutely. The white walls. The sky and azure blues of your canvases. What the hell are you doing here, all so cold, so gray . . . with The Wall just yards away?”
“The same thing you’re doing here. Running away. Existing in an affordable place with edge. Oh, Spetses was pretty damn affordable. The year I spent there, it was pretty fucking sublime. But it was also devoid of interest. It was like so many men I slept with there and elsewhere. So beautiful, so empty.”
So there was a fact dropped into the conversation, even though it was one I had already surmised.
“Are all your lovers like Greek Islands?” I asked.
A hard laugh from Fitzsimons-Ross, followed up with a bronchial cough.
“In my dreams,” he said. “But you already know too much. Let’s head upstairs where I can show you where you’ll live.”
“What makes you think I’m moving in?”
“Because you can’t resist the complexity of it all. And because you’re not a squalor junkie, and what I’m offering you here is tidy debauchery.”
“Tidy debauchery,”
I said, trying out the phrase. “I might have to steal that.”
Behind the kitchen was a small spiral staircase that led up to a sort of half-floor, made up of three rooms: a large studio space with a tiny kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom. The kitchen was nominal: a small fridge, a hot plate and tiny oven, a sink. The bathroom was equally minuscule, but still had enough space for a shower stall. There was a simple double bed in one corner of the small bedroom and a wooden wardrobe. But the studio space was enviably large at around four hundred square feet. An old sofa, draped with a cream linen cover. A plain table that would serve more than adequately as a desk. What was most pleasing about this space was the fact that all the furniture had been stripped of its paint and varnished in its natural state. Coupled with the white walls it had an ascetic cleanness. It struck me as an ideal neutral refuge from the disorder that lurked in the streets beyond, let alone in Fitzsimons-Ross’s downstairs lair.
But that was the intriguing thing about my roommate-to-be. On first sight he’d strike the most indifferent of observers as this side of dissolute, with a mouth on him like a leaky latrine. But from the small glimpse I’d had of his living and working spaces—and of the apartment I was to call my own (and which he so evidently designed to mirror his downstairs space)—he was deeply fastidious. Which led me to wonder: was he, like me, someone who understood that there was profound reassurance to be found in the surfaces of things, and that a disciplined approach to housekeeping allowed you to be saturnalian in so many other areas? But again, this insight is not one which I probably had at the time. All I saw was the fact that Fitzsimons-Ross had the air of an Irish Isherwood about him and knew how to demonstrate good taste on a nominal budget.
“Pretty nice,” I said. “I hope I can afford it.”
“You’re staying where right now?”
I told him about the Pension Weisse and how it suited me so well.
“So remain in Savignyplatz and write about your neighbors the merchant bankers. Or the gallery dealer who’s doing a five-million-deutsche-mark turnover per annum. Here, in Kreuzberg, you get to watch junkies shit on the street and Turkish brutes beating their wives. And you get to see me
in flagrante delicto
with whatever rent boy or Finnish depressive I’ve picked up at Die schwarze Ecke.”
“I know that place well. I fell into it last night.”
“And fell out of it with company?”
“How did you guess?”
“Because it’s Die schwarze Ecke—where everyone in Kreuzberg goes to score weed and to pick up whoever’s sitting at the bar that night and doesn’t look too insane. That’s the thing about that kip. We all know it’s toxic. But everyone frequents it for exactly the same reasons. If you want to score some hash, the only guy there to trust is Orhan. A Turkish dwarf—and fat. Looks like he belongs doing a stint as Snow White’s Big Boy. But the hash he peddles . . .
premier cru
.”
He fired up another cigarette. Then:
“So are you taking the place?”
“How much do you want for it? I don’t have much money.”
“You mean, you didn’t grow up in a Park Avenue household with a black maid named Beulah?”
“Home was a small two-bedroom apartment on an unfashionable corner of Second Avenue.”
“Ah, a boy with something to prove.”