[sic] Read online

  •

  I said good-bye to everyone and left the bar and the street was cold now. Her first words—which I heard before I saw her—were (and I’m not making this up), “Hey, handsome—which way is Canal Street?”

  Really? Was I still handsome? I mean if I ever was? I had just heard myself say, “Hey, beautiful. Right over there.” Was she beautiful? Too dark to tell. Plus she was bundled up, a hat, a short black winter coat, a scarf around her head like a keffiyeh. She was Asian, she had a light accent: Japanese, maybe. She was small, smiling, her eyes were direct enough that her glancing around at things didn’t spell nervousness, just curiosity. (As you might tell, this is perhaps the trait I value most in people.) She was looking for a bar on Canal Street, she said, to meet a friend; she wanted a drink: she hadn’t had a drink all night. She’d been dancing with some other friends and had lost track of time. I’ve never known the thrill of closing a deal for a lot of money like my friends in finance, and I’ve never had the institutionally certified thrill of, say, getting into a really good law school or getting that government appointment, but this is a thrill that I know. I doubted, I told her, that her bar would still be open, since it was a few minutes after four. “You’re probably right,” she said. For a moment, we stood there like two schoolchildren on an empty playground. “I could use one drink, just a beer, maybe,” she mused. “Is there a deli around here?”

  There was, and I offered to walk her there and we smoked a cigarette together. On the way, we talked a little. I told her I was a composer and I was in the process of finishing graduate school. She was originally from Seoul and had gone to culinary school in the States and was working as a sous-chef at a restaurant in midtown. We stopped at the deli and she laughed. “I don’t really want a drink anymore. But you were nice to walk me here. Let’s have another cigarette and I’ll walk you home.” I had told her at some point that I lived in the neighborhood. We crossed lower Broadway, narrow and empty, and stood under the awning of my apartment building, a recently built, cheaply built high-rise. “It was nice to meet you,” she said and smiled, and in mock courtesy I shook the slender, cool hand she had so generously ungloved, and I said I agreed it had been nice to meet. I asked her if she needed a cab.

  She didn’t move closer but her voice did. She admitted that what she was about to ask was going to seem absurd, and she couldn’t quite believe she was going to actually ask it; she was afraid I would think her crazy, or drunk, but she wasn’t. She was wondering whether I’d like to have sex with her. She said that we seemed attracted to each other, and she had a maddening desire to have sex, right now; we could just go up to your apartment, she said, and she promised that she would leave right afterward, and that we didn’t even have to exchange names. “I promise you, it’ll be really nice,” she smiled.

  “Sure, fine,” I said, “I’d be delighted.” I wasn’t fucked up enough to not wonder if she was schizophrenic, or a prostitute, but I was fucked up enough to figure maybe the best way to answer that question was to take her upstairs. Plus I felt like I had gotten to know her fairly well over the last ten minutes, she was a good conversationalist and seemed like a nice, honest person.

  We walked into my apartment and I closed the door, and it clicked behind us with a funny sound. I was suddenly self-conscious; but of course when you bring somebody over for the first time, whether a lover or a potential lover or even (or especially) just a friend, you tend to look at your own habitat through the lens of the guest’s eyes. Nowhere more so, perhaps, than in New York, where one’s apartment is one of the few distinguishing signals of status, where everyone is over-educated and overpaid and broke at the same time, and everyone wears basically the same clothes and has a book deal about to go through. People look at their apartments here the way people in Los Angeles look at their, and each others’, cars. Of course opinions can vary widely, apartments being more complex organisms than cars, which can be translated into their cash equivalents with a simple equation, rather than a pretty complex algorithm. I remember my friend Adriane, a childlike actress, remarking, “This is what I always imagined as a grown-up’s New York apartment.” But an ex-girlfriend, a manicured New Jersey Italian blonde, nouveau riche, as she freely would confess, peered around with narrowed eyes as if she’d just gotten off a small plane in the middle of Africa: “Well two things are for sure, you are single, and you’re not gay.”

  We stood there, America and Korea, facing each other, like in High Noon. “Take off your clothes,” she ordered. At first I thought she was kidding—a little ironic jest to dispel the awkwardness everybody feels when they’re about to fuck someone they’ve known for ten minutes. But she was serious. “No, I’m serious,” she said. “Take off your clothes.”

  I was a little irritated. “Why don’t you take off your clothes?” Ever think of that? How do you like it now?

  “Okay,” she conceded. “Why don’t we both take off our clothes. One article at a time.”

  “Sure,” I said. I took off my shirt. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and pulled her shirt up over her head, and froze there for a moment, her arms stretched up to the stars, her head wrapped in cloth: Andromeda against the rock, waiting for her sea monster: a statue of Andromeda carved out of green marble. How the Greeks could sculpt fabric! Then with a flourish, applauding the virtuosity of her body, the shirt crumpled and, released into the air, unfolded with a sigh and she looked at me modestly, amused. She was in fact beautiful. She came over and knelt before me and gently tugged down my boxers and took me in her mouth. “This is nice!” She smiled. “Half is already enough.” But somehow it wasn’t ridiculous.

  I picked her up and carried her over to the bed, but she was aghast that I could even conceive of having intercourse without a shower first. “I have, on occasion, had sex without taking a shower immediately before,” I told her.

  “Europeans,” she muttered, incredulous. I knew intuitively that with this epithet she was casting all non-Asians, and perhaps anyone outside of the Korean Peninsula, in the same lot, just as a Cameroonian I knew in Paris told me the word for “white folk” in one of his languages applied equally to a Pakistani as to a Finn.

  The water was scalding hot; I protested and she mocked me, saying I didn’t even know how to bathe. “What’s this?” She had found the hard round silicone disc of the catheter that had been surgically implanted, so shallow, in my chest. “Oh, that’s nothing. I’m taking medicine through that, at the hospital. It puts the medicine right into the jugular vein, so it’s very clever.”

  “What is it—what do you have that’s wrong?”

  “It’s no big deal,” I said.

  “That’s good. What is it, though?”

  I told her. She cried. Like anyone from the Midwest, I get alarmed when I have a life-threatening disease and I tell someone and they cry. “You don’t have to cry,” I said, but she stood there frozen, abandoning her choreography, just enduring the scalding water against her cheek. The water mingled with her tears: very New Asian cinema. That long black hair, plastered against her marble back, matted. I held her, felt her skeleton under her perfect skin and I felt like I was, yes, holding a bird.

  “I’m sorry,” she said; she embraced me, pressed her perfect body against mine. I kissed her, for the first time—I’d been trying to kiss her the whole time, but for some reason she refused. I’d been wondering about this. I’d had a girlfriend in high school who loved to have sex without kissing. One night we had sex like this, outside, in a park (in Milwaukee), under a structure that was briefly the tallest free-standing tower in the world. (I’m not kidding! Milwaukee also boasts the world’s largest four-faced clock; the tower looms over a landscape of factories and marks the division between the city’s north and south sides.) But it turned out that the Korean girl’s reluctance wasn’t a fetish, she was missing an eyetooth: I’d caught her between dentist appointments, between the extraction and the replacement. She was self-conscious about it. I held her tight. What could
be more endearingly apocalyptic? Two war-torn bodies silhouetted against fire.

  With an elegant foot she kicked the faucet’s wand and the water was icy. I jumped, and she twirled us around twice, then shut off the water while grabbing the four towels she had artfully placed just outside the shower curtain and we were shrouded in the warmth of the fabric and of our bodies. “See how nice it is?” she said.

  She was right—it really was nice. I gave in. Europeans are barbarians. She seemed to accept my apology. “Now we can have sex!” she exclaimed, with peninsular, wet-rice glee. She raced across the apartment, stopped short, turned on a dime (a small, gleaming silver Mercury, not our mundane, cupro-nickel FDR), flashed me a glance from under a lightly etched eyebrow, and then leapt and dove into the tangled sheets on the bed like a beautiful, bright-green fly. And then it was a series of tasks, of little adventures. First we tried to scale a sheer wall; then we were flying over a miniature city, on a carpet in the air; then we dove down alongside the city’s wall and all at once we were swimming together; then we were testing how long we could float on the surface, without moving; then we sank to the bottom and leapt in the underwater leaps so familiar from dreams, judging our buoyancy. Note to reader: when I was describing the proportion of the Golden Ratio I wasn’t really thinking of chemo number seven, or Debussy, or the Parthenon: I was thinking of a woman’s body and of her body, which was pure and ancient, and of which no part was not a beautiful surface, akin to a piece of music in which there is not a single moment that is not beautiful. That’s a consistency one doesn’t find too often. Or at least we don’t, maybe, in the West; our music, around the time of the Renaissance, uniquely divorced itself from religion and as a consequence had to replace sustained ecstasy with dynamic contrast, meaning that beauty had to be held up against something at least slightly different in order to cue the audience, as if to say, this is beauty. And this situation—somebody onstage suddenly, apostrophically, pointing to “beauty” with a Godlike, outstretched arm, while staring directly at the naked couple (save for fig leaves) in the front row, breaking the fourth wall—this is what we mean by “drama.” The anonymous seventh-century craftsmen of the sustained ecstasy of Gregorian chant wouldn’t have understood any of this stuff, the creases and folds and spasms. But even nowadays you come across traces of it sometimes, that older aesthetic. Mozart, sometimes, maybe. Her body was stretched out like a tightrope strung between two towers. Of course it’s entirely subjective. But then again when enough people find it in a piece by, say, Mozart, then pretty soon you’re dealing with a canonized artist who is different from the real human being and then cultural critics—well, you know the rest, obviously there’s no need to go on about it now.

  Our fucking that night—there was obviously a ritualistic quality to it, but not in our usual sense of the word, which is a pejorative sense, artificiality, mannerisms, as when Anglo-Saxons loutishly deride the French as the “most ritualistic” of European cultures because of French table manners and the French fondness for Angkor Wat and Ancient Egypt. There’s a difference between that sense of “ritualistic” and the kind of wholesale devotion to, and fervent absorption in, a certain praxis that this woman exhibited while we fucked. I hope I did too. I certainly tried. I detest the phrase “good lover” or “great lover”—“she was a marvelous lover” or “he was magnificent in bed” or “he’s great in the sack”—honestly I’ve never even known what that means. If you love someone then you make love with them. And then being a “good lover” is like being a “good breather.” But having said that, there was the sense of engaging in an experiment together, a game on which our minds and bodies were focused in synchrony, which was very conscious and very purposeful—she would talk about things—and at the same time utterly unself-conscious.

  The sky was light and I was exhausted, I fell asleep and she continued quietly to do things for a while and then I fell into a deep sleep for the first time in several weeks. Some time went by. I opened my eyes at one point and noticed that she had tidied up the apartment. Moved some things around, stacked papers into neat piles, that kind of thing. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. Come back to bed, I said. “Really?” she asked. Of course, I said, and she moved over and I grabbed her legs and threw her over me, over a precipice, she fell like Fay Wray falling out of the pterodactyl’s winged fingers down the sheer cliff, plunging down and resurfacing with the glimpse of a bare breast. (That was 1933!) And then I asked her what her name was. “You really want to know?” Of course I did. She told me. I couldn’t quite understand it, but it sounded something like Ilene, so that’s how I put it in my cell phone, the cell phone that quit for good later that afternoon, ushering her, as far as I was concerned, into oblivion—there was, come to think of it, something ghostly about the whole encounter, the way she sort of materialized, like the way a girl did in a Japanese film I saw once, a black-and-white film: she floated out of mist. Or was it smoke? In black and white, mist and smoke are extraordinarily similar things; Orson Welles said the most beautiful thing in the world to film is smoke.

  I’d already had a crush on my chemo nurse, a lovely, bohemian Brooklynite named (of course) Felicity, a freckled strawberry blonde with brilliant green eyes, and in typical form she had returned my affection by betraying me. Around chemo number four, I think, she’d married the father of her child, her long-term boyfriend who was incidentally (salt into the wound) the son of a prominent jazz musician. The encounter with Ilene, or whatever her name was, made the next session somewhat easier. Felicity was happy that I seemed cheerier; she wondered, I could tell, what was going on. “Still no nausea, no vomiting, no tingling in the hands and feet?” This was a rote question but there was a different inflection behind it. None of that, I told her: not even the loss of a single hair. She looked quizzical: eyes narrowed, angled, the hint of a smile.

  I said, “I feel, really, pretty good—are you sure this stuff is working?”

  “Oh, it’s working,” and now she smiled broadly, and she was wrong.

  II

  Act II

  At any point one may make the division of the two hemispheres.

  —Leonardo, Prophecies

  “What’s disappointing,” the man in the mustache and white coat and bow tie remarked, frowning at the CT scan results, “is the area of uptake.” He sat down next to me, looking away. “With resistant cases, we usually opt for a combined treatment of radiation, a high-dose chemotherapy regime called ICE, and a bone marrow transplant. It’s relatively endurable.”

  The two of us were alone in the small room. Silence, like standing on a plateau, in the wind: I wanted to go inside, but I was already inside, in a small room. Why had I come to this meeting—the crucial post-chemo consultation—alone? I was tired, I suppose, of asking, asking, asking for help, for companionship. Friends offer to help, and they do, but what’s the cost? For they say it’s free but how can it be. What a terrible realization. In other words—how’s my credit in this joint, anyway? No matter the gambit, the house always wins. È finita la cuccagna, Mayor La Guardia might very well have said: there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch, the eminent free-market economist Milton Friedman verifiably, and considerably less eloquently, did say. And TANSTAAFL, the celebrated acronym for the phrase, is anagrammatic with several phrases: my personal three favorites are “fan, at last” (speaking of Japanese black-and-white films); “fatal tans” (speaking of radiation); and “flat Satan” (speaking of certain records which, when played backward, reveal hidden messages).

  But anyway I’d assumed—not irrationally—that the chemo would have worked. Because it does, in around 90 percent of cases. So why drag another friend or lover or family member to yet another wearying waiting-room wait, followed by an unemphatic, anticlimactic confirmation of the expected? Why inflict this on somebody, anybody?

  Or was I just greedy: did I want the feeling of pleasure at finally hearing some good news for myself, undiluted by another’s smile and relief?

 
But of course anyone will tell you not to go to meetings such as this one unaccompanied: if it’s good news, you’re stunned, and can’t listen; and if it’s bad news, you’re stunned, and can’t listen. I knew this. So maybe it was just another posture of defiance. Paul McCartney once said of John Lennon, “He’s really only ever wanted to be James Dean or Marlon Brando.”1

  Although I wasn’t alone, precisely; I’d brought a friend, my journal. While I had been waiting, I’d written the following. The tone is conversational, even affable; even. The penmanship flowing. Full sentences. How supremely innocent, in retrospect. Unself-conscious. Here’s what we have just before the real cutoff:

  Getting the first results of the chemo today: I sit once again under the fluorescent lights of the waiting room, flush with anxiety, discomfort—psychological discomfort. The present is uncomfortable, it has an edge to it that’s thrilling in its sharpness, like wind-chill. Tired, so tired of this feeling: mind bloated from this constant dread. Life, after all, is a process, develops gradually in all its counter-rhythms, but it feels like a series of sharp edges, of sudden cuts.